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Title: Coronavirus Stories Author: Adam Weaver Date: March 26, 2020 Language: en Topics: COVID-19, United States, mutual aid, Black Rose Anarchist Federation Source: Retrieved on 2020-02-29 from https://blackrosefed.org/coronavirus-stories-crisis-response-resistance/
We include here personal accounts from members and allies of Black
Rose/Rosa Negra across the U.S. speaking on the direct impacts and
responses to the coronavirus crisis underway. Some have been directly
affected as healthcare workers, laid off service workers, or having to
undergo self-quarantine. Others are on front the lines of the responses
through organizing tenants or mutual-aid efforts.
---
So far five of the dozen neighborhood based chapters of the Los Angeles
Tenants Union (LATU), including the Vermont Beverly chapter that I
organize with, have endorsed a list of demands which includes an
immediate moratorium on evictions, an immediate suspension of rent
collection, demand for housing to the unhoused, and suspension of ICE
enforcement. The demands originated last week when the Hollywood chapter
drafting a statement responding to the situation with other chapters
signing on and suggesting amendments.
Local chapters are assessing the current and projected impact on members
and community, such employment, evictions, food, medical care access,
isolations, and general well being. In my chapter each organizer is
following up with the tenant associations and members that they’ve
worked with.
I work in an auto parts plant that’s organized with the UAW or United
Auto Workers union and I’m a former steward and last year was active
with the strike auto worker at my plant. Last week the governor ordered
that 50–75% of the workforce needed to stay home and the day the plant
manager sent out a letter saying our plant would stay open until the
27^(th) [of March]. I was at home self-quarantining because I had
recently travelled abroad so I started posting in our plant’s Facebook
group about taking action and I posted articles about wildcat walks out
that were happening in other UAW plants. On other union Facebook pages I
saw that whole departments were announcing they were walking out.
People were of course pissed and started commenting in the Facebook
group while on shift. We also started calling local media and
politicians to see if that might add the pressure. Management rolled
over and announced the plant closure within three hours!
I work in a restaurant at one of the local hotels. Before each shift,
the managers hold a meeting with staff to give us information about the
night’s food and drink specials and reservations. When panic around the
coronavirus started escalating, upper management attended one of these
meetings and let us know that at the end of the week, the hotel was
going to be closing until early April. They were having meetings with
our union reps (HERE) and had come to an agreement that we would get
paid for the first week off, since the schedule was already posted but
everything else was up in the air.
The next day, my wife was discussing with other tenants in the laundry
room all of our losses of income and how that would affect our ability
to pay rent and other bills. She had looked up our house on Zillow and
found that the rent our landlord collects in one year is more than the
total cost of what he paid for the house in 2013. So in the seven years
he’s owned this property, he has collected 9 times what he paid for it
through our rent and the value of the home has increased by more than
$150,000. He definitely hasn’t put that much money into repairs and we
are responsible for raking the leaves, cutting the grass and shoveling
the snow. We are working on a plan to petition him with the other folks
who live in our house, and possibly working out a strategy to speak with
other people who rent from this same landlord to see if they’d be
interested in joining us.
A few days later, we got word that the union had negotiated with hotel
management that we would be continuing to get paid based on the hours we
normally worked, pre-shut down. This is an amazing victory for the
union! There’s still a lot of work to be done though, so I’m going to
continue to keep in touch with our reps and to build relationships with
my coworkers. There’s always work to be done to build stronger and more
militant unions.
So far, I’ve been organizing locally for mutual aid with my neighbors on
my block and in my wider neighborhood. We’re taking a “neighborhood
pods” approach. We’ve shared a document with info and a flier template.
We also started a Durham citywide public Facebook group for mutual aid
organizing here. Within less than a day, we already had over 300 members
and active discussions going. Since then we’ve formed a dozen
neighborhood committees, or pods, that are surveying residents using
google forms and organizing responses.
It’s been crazy in our hospital since everything happened with the
coronavirus. Our hospital removed all surgical and N-95 masks [a higher
level mask used in healthcare] from the floor. We used to easily have
access near “contact rooms” [rooms where infected patients are isolated]
and a supply room. But now they are all gone and we can only request
them when we have what’s called a “droplet” or “airborne” patient –
meaning they are actively infected and have respiratory issues. Because
of shortages they are making us enter contact rooms without any masks
which is part of the protective equipment we typically use.
But yesterday at work we have a possibly COVID-19 infected patient in
isolation but he was sent home before getting his full lab results from
the CDC test kit. And then they were sending in another patient showing
symptoms into the same room with them. Several nurses confronted the
infection control doctors about this.
Many of the workers are pressuring management to give them masks but
only a few have been successful.
I help run a non-profit community science lab called Indie Lab which is
being used for sterilization of materials before they go out to people.
We’re working on getting things like mass produced face masks,
ventilators, oxygen concentrator etc. We printed our first prototype 3D
printed masks and got resources centralized to get them to medical
personal in different parts of the state. We are also doing support work
to help with the development of a COVID19 rapid test through performing
testing validations.
I’m also part of an international collaborative research team of
scientists and coders which includes high level scientists, including
from MIT. There are hundreds in different working groups creating open
source technology around designing face masks, creating test kits and
following all the data and information on the outbreak. One thing is
clear is that Trump has been intentionally holding back on the supply of
testing as a way to suppress the numbers of confirmed cases.
I started coming down with a cough and shortness of breath two weeks
ago. I still don’t know if I was actually exposed to COVID-19 but my
symptoms aligned. I do have insurance through the Affordable Care Act
but since testing isn’t available I decided to stay at home and self
quarantine. I mostly relied on friends dropping off groceries because my
quarantine started ahead of the forming mutual aid networks but now I’m
getting plugged in and hoping to help from home and then eventually do
more direct service delivery.
It’s been over 15 days and I’ve recovered, but all the uncertainty
around information and how slow the state responded was hard. The most
difficult part though was feeling useless while being quarantined but
also knowing the ethics of potentially exposing someone. I had the
ability to to stay home to protect others, so I did.
Working in the building trades I have a lot of experience filing for
unemployment when jobs come to an end as it did for me right before the
outbreak of Coronavirus. So I made my focus on helping neighbors file
for unemployment via the newly formed mutual aid network. What’s been
interesting with this work is I’m connecting with tenants of large
landlords who can’t and won’t pay rent on April 1^(st). I really think
mutual aid work that reaches outside left activists and non-profit staff
could help build resistance and organization if we go into it with that
mindset and intent.
The network seems to have been set up largely by local Non-Profit
Industrial Complex staff. There will be lots to challenge within the
network but I think it makes sense. Already I’ve seen the non-profit
staff folks in the network kind of “blank stare” me when I asked who is
taking on housing issues. The local movement just went through about 5
years of pushing for municipal and state policy to slow down
displacement of tenants. They focused lots of energy on this, and from
what I could tell, also largely stepped back from building tenant
organizing in favor of recruiting “ally” volunteers to help them lobby.
But guess what? They lost. Only in the last year or so have there been
some more grassroots attempts to build tenant power. We could have been
doing that all along but now we can do it in the middle of a pandemic.
---
Adam Weaver is member of Black Rose/Rosa Negra in Miami, FL.