My mom works for a grocery – I need her safe

Anonymous

For the past year my mom has proudly worked in a grocery store. It is the first job she has been able to hold down for more than a month in the past six years. Having struggled with mental illness her whole adult life, holding a stable job for an extended period of time has been hard. But working in a grocery store has been different - as a unionized worker, my mom has been able to access resources for disabled workers and gain protections that ensure her job stability. Her mental health has improved significantly as a result - she has a stable income, she has quality health insurance, and she gets to have a fulfilling job that provides families with food. 

But, as is the case for many people, the Coronavirus pandemic has put enormous stresses on both my mom’s work and mental health. At her grocery store they are working people to the brink of exhaustion with longer hours and numerous extra responsibilities to keep things sanitized. Despite doing essential work and putting themselves at higher risk for exposure, the employees have not received additional pay.

It is rumored that at least one of my mom’s fellow employees has tested positive for Coronavirus, but management has been playing coy and will not give the staff definitive answers. No one knows if they have been in direct contact with the virus and are therefore unable to self-isolate as is recommended by the CDC. 

This uncertainty and additional stress at work has sent my mom into a tailspin. The pressure has ratcheted up her anxiety and paranoia, making it impossible for her to continue working. My mom is convinced she has Coronavirus, that everyone she loves is going to die from it, and that the police will arrest her if she leaves the house. Her manager contacted my sister and made it clear that my mom could not continue working during this period.

Thanks to the union, my mom’s work has granted her a leave of absence, but this means during this period she will not receive pay and will instead have to rely on savings and handouts from my family who are also stretched thin by this crisis. In some ways being laid off would have been superior since she could have at least collected unemployment, but it would have also meant she would be unemployed once she recovered mentally. There seems to be no outcome that supports her mental health AND pays the rent. 

In the meantime my sister and I call my mom daily. We wake her up, we talk her through cooking every meal she eats, we make sure she takes her medications, we help her navigate the complicated process of getting an approval for her leave of absence, and mostly we listen to her worries and fears. Often when my mom is ill it is easy for me to dismiss her worries, but in this situation it is hard for me to deny the impending doom she is forecasting. The system of capitalism is so woefully unprepared and unable to solve a crisis like this. Rather than providing medical care that people need through medicare for all, ensuring workers on the front line get hazard pay and paid sick leave, and giving people who are unable to work (like my mom) a monthly check, the democrats and republicans are busy bailing out Wall Street to the tune of $1 trillion a day. That is the only plan they can agree on. 

Capitalism cannot provide for my mom even in the best of times. She has never been able to afford the medical care she deserves or maintain job security, and as a result has been denied the dignity of a healthy and stable life. This has been the case for many, if not most downwardly mobile and working class people since before the Coronavirus, but this crisis has thrown this reality into even starker relief. Capitalism was not a system built to last and the Coronavirus will only accelerate its decay. We need a new system that prioritizes the health of workers and our planet over Wall Street’s profits.

So when my mom calls and asks what I am doing to protect myself against Coronavirus, I tell her I am fighting for a new system, because the system of capitalism is sick and we need socialism to fix it.