Work

Published in Solidarity 562:

A TUC report, Dying on the job: racism and risk at work, has revealed the deep-seated racism that underlies the higher impact of Covid-19 on black and minority ethnic (BME) people, but its proposals fall well short of what is needed.

In the early days of the pandemic, it became clear that BME people were dying at a significantly greater rate. Compared with white people, black people are more than four times as likely to die from Covid-19, Bangladeshi and Pakistani people more than one-and-a-half times as likely.

Britain needs pickers
We have a picking drought
Particularly since we’ve kicked our usual pickers out

So pick yourself up
and dust yourself down
Pick up a lift heading out of your town

Here’s your harvest
basket – fill it!
Harnessing the wartime spirit!

Dig for Britain
saw us through
Let’s pick to fight off Covid too!

I'm Janine Booth. I'm autistic, and I write and deliver training courses to trade unionists and others about autism and neurodiversity. As part of the courses, we look at real-life case studies of neurodivergent workers' experiences. It is important to use up-to-date case studies, so I am interested in hearing your story.

Teachers say:
Let Daily Mail writers be heroes

Let them walk naked through war zones
Let them battle with an invisible enemy

Let them fall on the battlefield
in even greater numbers than they already have

Safe in the knowledge that they will be
lionised at the Daily Briefing

And that Matt Hancock may
issue a badge in their honour

This is a poem to tell you your rights,
if you find yourself working at dangerous sites
So please brush up your knowledge and uphold the law –
know that workers at risk have the right to withdraw

So if you’re facing danger that’s imminent and serious,
working conditions that seem deleterious
Call up your boss and then step right away –
you can not get in trouble, they can’t stop your pay

personal protective equipment
proves particularly effective
preventing pandemic excretion
polluting public environments

profit pursuers expect
priority, private enterprise
prevails: purchasing essentials
proves prohibitively expensive

production postponed, exhausted
public protectors endangered
political patent expired
pay packets empty

Also on the RMT London Calling website here.

Disabled transport workers are a significant and valuable part of the workforce that delivers transport to millions of passengers and freight consignments every day. Many of us are also particularly vulnerable during the current Covid-19 pandemic.

You have no skills – you’re just a carer,
a labourer, an apron-wearer,
You smear on cream and dish out pills –
you don’t have skills.

You have no skills, you just wipe arses,
the underside of the underclasses,
You wipe up drool, make tea and chat –
Where’s the skill in that?!