Life on the Frontlines: COVID-19 Through the Eyes of Women Workers
By Carmen Rios
Some call it “warrior gear.” Some call it “armor.” No matter the name, nurses like Laura López are now racing to put it on as fast as possible.
“It starts with shoe covers,” López, a 39-year-old ICU nurse at a New Mexico hospital, explained on a call. “[Then you] wash your hands, put on a gown, put on a pair of gloves, put on another pair of gloves, put on a hair bonnet, and then, on top of that, a face shield or eyeglasses—and then your N-95 mask.”
When López’s unit began serving COVID-19 patients, increased urgency around personal protective equipment (PPE) was just one way in which her job began to change. “We have to remind each other: There is no emergency in a pandemic,” López stressed. “When someone starts crashing, we can’t just run in there and save them. We have to protect ourselves first, and we’ve gotten good at putting it on pretty quickly, but the urge to run into a room to help somebody who is possibly passing away or is in trouble—it almost goes against our nurse’s will.”
The urge to rush back to her family is also complicated by the pandemic. “I literally have a pair of shoes that I wear to work and from work, and that’s it, and when I come home, they stay outside of the house,” López said. (She also has a pair of scrubs she wears only to and from work.) “I spray them down with bleach or whatever I have, and I go back in and I take another shower. This is before I strip down, take off my scrubs—even though I didn’t wear them that day, they were still in the hospital with me—throw those straight into the washer, and then go and take another shower before I can see, hug, and kiss my kids.”
Dondi Banks is also adjusting to a new daily routine shaped by the constraints and demands of COVID-19. “I keep my boots in a plastic container now in my truck,” the 45-year-old sanitation worker from Washington state said in a phone interview. “My grandkids know that grandma just goes straight to the bathroom, and I put my work clothes in a separate laundry basket and shower, and I come back down and I’m clean, and then everything can be normal.”
Banks drives a garbage truck, so taking safety seriously has always been a part of her job. But now, the hours are longer, the workload is (literally) heavier, and it’s harder for her to find an open restroom on her route, even if traffic is a breeze. “I get up at 3:00 AM—today I probably won’t get home until maybe 5 or 5:30, and I’ve been out here since 4:45 AM,” Banks explained. “I expect to come to work not knowing what time you get off...I always tell my kids: ‘I know what time I’m coming to work, but I don’t know what time I’m going to be off.’ They always have the expectation that I’ll be off late.” That expectation is now a safe assumption: “I would say [before COVID], I was anywhere from 38 to 42 hours a week,” Banks said, “and now I’m almost close to 50.”
Although Carolina Rodriguez, a California school teacher, didn’t have to worry about new safety precautions at work, she has had to adjust to new working conditions—she’s now teaching her eighth grade science classes online, instead of in her classroom.
“Prior to the social distancing, I would wake up at five in the morning and arrive at school around six to do some planning and prepare my classroom, start the official school day at 8:00 AM, and be teaching until 3:30 PM and staying an hour or two after school with office hours or clubs,” the 29-year-old explained by phone from home, where she is quarantined with her mother. “Now, my work schedule is very similar, but I usually get up around 7:00 AM and I do some grading and just updates on what my day is going to look like—and then starts a series of Zoom calls. I’m either Zooming with coworkers, with admin, with students doing live lessons, contacting parents, I’m recording videos, all types of stuff.”
Lydia Nakiberu, a 42-year-old domestic worker who immigrated from Uganda and now lives in Massachusetts with her husband and two children, continued commuting on public transit, despite the pandemic’s spread, to care for her 86-year-old client at home—although she did begin wearing masks and gloves on her way there and back. “When I got into the house, there were really no precautions—because all of them [his family], they never went outside,” she recalled over the phone. “It was only me coming in, and I just had my mask on.”
After two weeks of sheltering-in-place, Nakiberu got a call from her client’s wife. “I worked on Thursday, and I left the house knowing that I’m coming back on Monday—and then, Friday passed, Saturday, then Sunday. That’s when they made that call that ‘I think you should stop coming.’ That’s how it ended.”
None of these women are alone in their new normal. In fact, they’re in familiar company: One in three jobs now designated as “essential” are also held by women, not counting teachers, and women now make up four out of every five workers in an economy shaped by the losses and pauses of COVID-19. Women are now nearly 80 percent of all health care and social workers, more than two-thirds of grocery store and food service employees, and eight in 10 home health care aides. They also make up nearly three-quarters of the U.S. health care workers who have become infected by the virus.
Women of color form the largest share of these workers, and the most vulnerable among them. People of color make up half of the 5.8 million people in healthcare positions that earn less than $30,000 a year, of which women also make up 83 percent. Close to one-third of all nursing assistant and home health aids are Black, and half are women of color. Forty percent of childcare workers are women of color.
Mothers with children are also increasingly at the forefront: They make up 19 percent of janitors, maids and housekeepers; 29.6 percent of personal care and home health aides; 34.8 percent of nurses; and 27.7 percent of childcare workers.
“More domestic workers are working overtime,” Nakiberu explained, telling stories of other women she met through the Matahari Women Workers’ Center in Boston and the National Domestic Workers Alliance who are facing transit shortages and outages because of lockdowns, scraping by on cut hours, and confronting a lack of PPE. “[Their employers are] asking them to do live-in jobs...because they don’t want them to be going outside and then coming in.”
Many domestic workers also face Nakiberu’s fate. According to data collected in March by the National Domestic Workers Alliance and the Economic Policy Institute, 68 percent of domestic workers lost their jobs in the pandemic; 84 percent said they couldn’t afford groceries, and more than half didn’t know how they would make rent. For the 80 percent of domestic workers who are breadwinners, these hardships reverberate through their families.
“I’m struggling,” Nakiberu admitted. “It’s putting a toll on my family. I’m not taking care of them like I used to take care of them because right now I’m prioritizing what I have to pay for, what I have to buy in the grocery store.”
Rodriguez is also now facing new economic anxieties. “I have become the sole provider for our household recently, and for me, that’s opening up a lot of concerns,” she confided. “I’m the sole provider for my household and living in the Bay Area, which is known to be one of the most expensive places to live in the country.”
López and her husband are both still working— but Patrick, who is not resuming his job as a contractor until the pandemic slows, has taken on a new role as a “Stay-at-Home-Pat.” “We pulled my daughters out of daycare,” López explained. “Until we have a vaccine of some sort, I don’t feel comfortable with [Pat] going back to work, and I don’t feel comfortable allowing the girls to go back to school.”
Banks, who lives with her four children and two grandchildren, enlisted their help at home as well. “I put them to work,” she said. “I expect the floor swept.”
These women’s stories also aren’t without precedent: their changing economic circumstances echo the experiences of the women workers who formed a frontline during the 1918 Spanish Flu—which took American lives at home and abroad, where troops were fighting in WWI. Young men disproportionately suffered during the outbreak, pushing women into the workforce to fill subsequent gaps in traditionally male occupations. By the time WWI came to a close, the number of women in the workforce had increased by 25 percent; by 1920, women made up 21 percent of all employed persons in the country.
Hundreds of nurses died caring for the sick overseas and abroad during the 1918 flu; demand for their care even pushed the Red Cross to dispatch Black women into the field for the first time. Teamster women like Banks were also on the front lines—some kept cities clean like she does, while others made critical deliveries. “These women would go to farms and drop off the medicine, or a doctor or a nurse, at a farm,” Teamster historian Karin Jones explained. “They’d help do the chores on the farm, they’d get back in their truck and drive to the next farm and do the whole thing all over again.”
Women workers now are just as unstoppable. “I just want to push forward,” Jones declared. “I think we’ll be okay in the end, and it would be nice for everything to get back to normal. I think people are getting a little anxious, and for me, things won’t change as far as my safety and my health for the job that I do.”
That doesn’t mean that they don’t feel fear, but “Nurses are tough.” López explained. “We feel like we have to put on this brave face—and we do. We show up. We’re brave. At the same time, for me personally, I have to admit to myself: This is scary and I’m scared for my family.”
Nakiberu admitted the same. “Just the fact that I was using public transportation was the most scary part of it,” she said. “I was scared of bringing in the virus to my employer and also bringing the virus home to my kids, my family; I was very, very scared and worried about even myself getting sick.”
If she hadn’t been let go, Nakiberu insists that she would have continued risking the commute; in fact, she’s even currently looking for a new job. “The only thing I would do is take more precautions—get myself gowns, get myself masks, get myself whatever I needed,” Nakiberu said. “If somebody needs to be taken care of, that’s within me. That’s what I love doing.”
In order to continue showing up for her patients, López focused on what she could control—keeping her team safe at work. Her hospital never ran out of PPE, but horror stories of nurses and doctors across the country wearing garbage bags to work and wearing disposable masks for an entire shift spurred her into action. She reached out to friends about donating goggles, N95 masks, and face shields— and when she found out about “aerosol boxes,” which limit the spread of respiratory droplets during intubation, she asked her husband to put one together. López ended up furnishing two boxes for her hospital and shipping more to other states.
Much like nurses who wrote back from the frontlines in 1918, awed by their own significance during a national crisis, women workers now have also embraced their new designation as essential, which has earned them some celebration. “We’re kind of the absent worker out here, and nobody notices you until their garbage is not picked up,” Banks said. “Now, we have a bunch of thank yous in the windows. We have sidewalk chalk thanking all of the essential workers.”
But in addition to lip service from lawmakers and gestures of gratitude from their neighbors, they want more. They want the “new normal” on the other side of the COVID-19 pandemic to provide tangible rewards for their sacrifices—and grant them the respect they deserve.
“We don’t need flyovers,” López declared. “We don’t need superficial things. What we do need is to be protected so that we can protect.”
Nakiberu echoed her demand. “When everybody was in a lockdown, asking, begging people to stay home, domestic workers were out there going out to save lives,” she said. “I’m glad that they’ve started to recognize the work we do that they never did before—and I’m hoping that since we are essential, the government can now also protect us.”
Making this moment into a movement was one reason Rodriguez and her colleagues formed South Bay Educators United, a union organized exclusively during COVID-19 and inspired, in large part, by its fallout.
“For me, the turning point was when we were presented [with] the question: Are we going to start the petition this academic year, or wait until the fall?” Rodriguez shared. “Because there were so many, and still are, a lot of question marks about what fall will look like, for our students and for teachers, we wanted to guarantee that we had a voice in those high-stakes decisions.”
The campaign began over email, after administrators decided not to renew a devoted colleague’s contract—a moment Rodriguez recognizes as “the seed” that gave long standing conversations about unionizing new urgency among teachers. They began meeting over Zoom once a week, learned organizing basics from a CTA representative, and asked colleagues to drop off petitions of support via socially distant “curbside pickups.”
“We’re being seen, which is good, but I really want that to be motivation to change things in a real way for teachers and other essential workers,” Rodriguez said. “The union is where the long-term thanks comes around: saying, thank you, and here’s a voice; thank you, and we’re going to compensate you adequately; thank you, and we’re going to give you the resources you need to do your job well. That’s really what I’m hoping to come about from this.”
Carmen Rios is a feminist writer and broadcaster who has spent the last decade telling feminist stories. Her work has been published by platforms including Ms., Autostraddle, BuzzFeed, Bitch, CityLab, DAME, Everyday Feminism, Feministing, GirlBoss, SIGNS and the Women’s Media Center. Follow her at @carmenriosss.