“MA Women Workers Rising: One Year of the Pandemic” event on 3/26/2021
By Tyler Rivera, Intern, Massachusetts Jobs with Justice
On March 26th, Massachusetts Jobs with Justice (Mass JwJ) collaborated with Matahari Women Workers' Center and One Fair Wage MA on a panel discussion titled “MA Women Workers Rising: One Year of the Pandemic”. The event brought together a powerhouse panel of Black and Brown essential workers, elected officials, community organizers, and business leaders in honor of the essential work women carry out all over the state commemorating Women's History Month and marking the one year anniversary since the start of the pandemic.
Over the last year, women in particular, have lost jobs disproportionately due to the health and economic impacts of the COVID-19 crisis. Before the pandemic, black women and women of color already encountered severe wage disparities, were more likely to live in poverty than men, were denied paid family medical leave, and were overrepresented in low-wage jobs paying less than $12 an hour. These long-standing structural inequalities are fueled by racism, sexism, xenophobia, and other forms of biases and have only been brought to light and exacerbated by COVID-19. Women of color have been facing these disparities at higher rates since women have entered the workforce. They deal with and face daily job loss, food insecurity, housing instability, and mental health concerns compared with other demographic groups. Considering the majority of Black, Latinx, and Indigenous mothers are either primary or co-breadwinners for their families, these harms undoubtedly extend far beyond the individual women directly impacted and result in very real collateral consequences.
Black women, women of color and immigrant women have also been at the forefront of the response to the COVID-19 health and economic crises. On farms, in factories, hospitals, restaurants, public transit, grocery stores, schools and in our homes, women - who make up nearly two-thirds of essential workers - have taken care of us and kept our communities safe throughout the pandemic. Women of color are disproportionately represented within these frontline roles, comprising more than half of the workers in essential jobs such as housekeepers, home health aides, and nursing assistants.
Mass JwJ, Matahari, and One Fair Wage MA’s panel discussion celebrated the invaluable contributions of women essential workers to our communities and economy during the COVID-19 pandemic, while also underscoring the vital importance of passing legislation to raise the subminimum wage and guarantee fair scheduling practices for these essential workers here in Massachusetts.
The event opened with remarks from Angella Foster, an Organizing Fellow with the Massachusetts Service Alliance and a member-leader at Matahari. She highlighted the particular importance of centering the stories and experiences of women during the month of March stating, “March is Women’s History Month, and it’s important our voices are amplified.”. She also said, “This is a defining moment for us” and that resonated with me.
All the guest panelists were women leading in government, business, and their communities. One of the speakers was State Representative Brandy Fluker-Oakley, who represents the 12th Suffolk District. She emphasized the unequal impacts of the subminimum wage on women working in the retail, restaurant, and hospitality sectors. “The subminimum wage is not only a travesty for providing a living wage to our restaurant workers,” she said, “but also widens the gender wage gap and contributes to the racial wage gap here in Boston.” Tipped workers - seventy percent of whom are women - receive just $2.13/hour at the federal level, a figure which hasn’t increased since 1991. That’s thirty years of wage stagnation that has kept tipped workers and their families living in poverty. In Massachusetts, tipped workers earn $5.55 an hour, nearly $8 an hour less than minimum wage workers.
We also heard from Boston City Councilor Lydia Edwards, who represents Charlestown, East Boston, and the North End bringing attention to the need and benefits to abolishing the subminimum wage, specifically addressing the racist and sexist origins of the tipping as a legacy of slavery that disproportionately affects women and people of color. Tipping in the US started after the Civil War, when white business owners embraced tipping as a way to profit from newly emancipated Black labor by replacing guaranteed wages with optional tips. “It’s not about paying people a bit more, its about ending the legacy of slavery,” Councilor Edwards said.
Ali Fong, chef and co-founder of Boston-based Bon Me, shared the perspective as a business-owner who voluntarily pays her employees a living wage. She stated, “We cannot and should not expect individual business owners to do the right thing without the support of our government”. This is where An Act Requiring One Fair Wage comes in: if passed, the Act would gradually raise the subminimum wage to the prevailing minimum wage and eliminate the wage gap between tipped and non-tipped workers. By abandoning the racist and sexist subminimum wage, we could lift thousands of workers in Massachusetts out of poverty, reduce sexual harassment in the workplace, and decrease the racial and gender wage gaps.
After Ali Fong’s remarks, Jamila Ruiz, Communications Director for One Fair Wage, shared a number of sobering statistics on the impact of the subminimum wage here in Massachusetts. Here, tipped workers are more than three times as likely to live in poverty and more than two times as likely to rely on Medicaid and food stamps compared to the rest of the state workforce. These inequities particularly burden people of color and women, who are overrepresented in tipped service positions. Perhaps the most shocking statistic Jamila mentioned was that, with a wage gap of $7.79 between Black women and white men working in the restaurant industry, Massachusetts has the second highest race and gender wage gap in the country for restaurant workers, trailing only Alabama.
Closing out the event and drawing on her own experience working in the hospitality industry for six years, Congresswoman and former Boston City Councilor Ayanna Pressley gave a powerful speech highlighting the importance of fighting to uplift the dignity and humanity of all workers. As a co-sponsor for the Essential Workers Bill of Rights, she is pushing at the federal level to provide essential workers on the frontlines of the COVID-19 response with guaranteed paid sick leave, hazard pay, adequate health and safety equipment, and other basic protections. Beyond the immediate response needed to get through this crisis, Congresswoman Pressley also recognized that it is going to take a mass movement of everyday people to “replace systems of oppression with systems of liberation.” She also stated, “The power of the people has always been greater than the people in power”.
After attending this panel discussion and hearing from so many passionate, inspiring women, I can’t help but feel the people power that Congresswoman Pressley pointed to. Fighting against the National Restaurant Association (the other NRA) and other powerful business interests opposed to raising the subminimum wage is a tall order, particularly when they spend millions annually funding the campaigns of anti-worker candidates and lobbying against any minimum wage hikes. With so many powerful women of color and immigrant women leading this movement from the restaurant floor to the halls of congress, we cannot be defeated.
To learn more about our work to pass the One Fair Wage Act and other workers’ rights campaigns, please visit our website here. Additionally, Mass JwJ is able to host events like this thanks to the support we receive from our communities and supporters. To support the work we are doing, please consider becoming a monthly sustainer. You can also make a one-time donation to Mass JwJ here.
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