The COVID-19 pandemic has put all the damaged parts of our society in the spotlight. An example? Paid on a health license, or without a license.
It deserves to be obvious that everyone’s fitness is whether everyone can be paid to stay home if they are sick. Do we want other people with coronavirus to cook our food or empty the buildings we share because they want a salary? Of course not.
But, as with many other benefits for the rich, this is simply not a truth for many low-income workers. The Pew Research Center found in March that about a quarter of the country’s population, or 33.6 million people, had not paid sick leave.
One of them is Martha Otero, a mother of 3 children from Nicaragua who arrived in California last year to apply for asylum. He is now quarantined in his Mission District department after testing positive for coronavirus this month. Fortunately, a new city program, the Right to Healing, will pay you $1,285 for two weeks so you can stay home and not go bankrupt.
“I feel like Array is under pressure and worried,” she said on the phone in Spanish through an interpreter. “I feel depressed. I’m lonely. I feel desperate.
But she said the cash would mean she could pay her rent and pay the pahires to whom she lent them cash when she thought she had no choice. His depression is not as severe as he would have been otherwise.
Otero felt so terrible, suffering from pain, dizziness, nausea, fever and uncontrollable tremors, that he had to pass to San Francisco General Hospital to get tested. But many low-wage employees in San Francisco aren’t evaluated because they’re too afraid of how they might do it financially if they have bad news.
In response, the city will pay the minimum wage of two weeks to anyone who is positive and wants a source of income for isolation. This is just the latest example in San Francisco doing the right thing when so many cities, states and indeed our federal government don’t. Fox News would possibly mock San Francisco’s values, but if you believe in science and pay those in poor health while they stay home, they’re on this list, they’ll let me know.
Otero is one of the first beneficiaries of the right to money. She ran away from an abusive husband who, she said, tried to kill her several times. She has lived in the Mission since August and works as a housekeeper in the city’s personal homes.
She said she had been careful to avoid the virus, but that she had eaten with her nephew and friend, and the friend later discovered that she was positive despite her asymptomatic.
Otero told his 16-year-old daughter, Karla, to stay with his aunt, Otero’s sister, in East Bay while quarantined. Another woman separated from her at the border because she is 20 years old and not underage, Otero said, and lately is in Mexico. Her eldest daughter, 22, remained in Nicaragua.
Otero said he had a hearing scheduled for next month in immigration court, but without the correct documents, he is not eligible for unemployment or other government assistance. When you clean houses, you can earn up to $700 a week, but now you have no income. She learned through the Women’s Collective, a branch of the San Francisco Day Work Program that seeks to locate smart jobs for housewives and nannies, who will get $1,285 under the Right to Recovery program and said it would be “a substantial help.”
Guillermina Castellanos founded the Women’s Collective about 20 years ago for domestic staff to locate “worthy and well-paid” jobs. Some are undocumented and some are not. Castellanos said there were 65 existing members of the collective. Six have already recovered from the virus, and some already have it.
She told a woman about the virus while caring for a baby whose parents were going to a party and taking the virus home. (Really, people? Who’s going on vacation now?)
“Many members of the Women’s Collective said they didn’t have to be checked because even though the city worked so hard to release the check, they can’t take a positive check and run out of work,” Castellanos said in Spanish through an interpreter. “We’re looking to motivate women to review them by saying, “Look, it’s not you. It’s about all of us. This is our public health. »»
That’s exactly what it is. The COVID-19 pandemic shows that all our destinies are strongly intertwined and that one of us’s fitness is ours. Unfortunately, the apparent classes we are learning are not to replace policies as temporarily as they should.
Castellanos said another concern is that many women in the collective have relatives at home, mainly in Guatemala, El Salvador and Mexico, who have died of coronavirus. Mothers, fathers and siblings have been lost to the fatal plague.
And wasting the source of income at home means that many women feel much more compelled to make money here and send it back to their remaining circle of relatives.
“People in my network have something,” she says. “The little we get is enough.”
All this has become apparent to Dr. Diane Havlir of UCSF, who conducted a primary coronavirus test in the Mission District in the spring. In 4 days, another 4000 people in a census domain were evaluated for anti-coronavirus antibodies. He discovered that the virus was tearing up The paintings of Latinos because its members are more likely to paint as essential frontline staff and live in crowded housing. But some other people didn’t need to get tested because they couldn’t be positive, Havlir said.
“Social coverage as well as the right to recovery is the answer,” Havlir said.
That’s why the Department of Public Health is calling all the other people who test positive and live in San Francisco to ask if they want monetary assistance for their recovery.
Those who want will contact a social employee to achieve it. They can get $1,285 to cover two weeks of the city’s minimum wage and claim another $1,285 if they haven’t recanoated after two weeks. Many staff members will earn less program cash than if they worked because they earn more than the minimum wage or can earn overtime, however, that’s much higher than nothing.
The cash, $2 million in total, enough to cover just over 1,500 more people, comes from the city’s Give2SF fund, a philanthropic effort to help others in difficulty during the pandemic. Supervisor Hillary Ronen, who drove for the program, said she was looking to raise more cash to help others who tested positive, as the initial $2 million will likely last only a few months.
“In every aspect of our society, COVID has highlighted the vast inequality in this city and in our country,” she said.
On the one hand, there are massive strips of higher source of income that the Franciscans know that if they have a poor health permit, they are there if they wish and would not hesitate to get tested for the worry of wasting their source of income while they recover.
“And then there’s this other total component of San Francisco that doesn’t even need to know if they’re positive,” Ronen said. “Talk about the story of two cities.”
That’s a euphemism. 2018 Census data showed that families with the 5 percent most sensitive income in San Francisco earn $808,105 a year and those with the poorest 20% $16184.
The fact is that our federal government ensures that all Americans can safely succeed over the pandemic.
But at least we can be convinced that it’s true, at least for now, that if you live in San Francisco and your check is positive, there’s a paycheck for you.
San Francisco Chronicle columnist Heather Knight looks like Sundays and Tuesdays. Email: [email protected] Twitter: @hknightsf
Heather Knight is a columnist who shows up at City Hall and covers everything from politics and homelessness to the family circle and the quirks of living in one of the world’s most desirable cities. She believes that politicians should be responsible for their decisions or often their absence, and tell the stories of other genuine people and their struggles.