African home-based workers are at the bottom of craft supply chains. Through an increased understanding of those supply chains they could overcome some of the challenges they are facing and improve their livelihoods.
Les rapports sinistres sur les systèmes de santé débordés d’ici et d’autres parties de l’Europe, ainsi que de l’Amérique du Nord, ont dominé la couverture de la COVID-19 dans une grande partie des médias d’information influents du monde. Mais l’attention a commencé à se déplacer vers l’histoire tout aussi dévastatrice des pays du Sud.
Grim reports of overwhelmed health systems from here and other parts of Europe, as well as North America, have dominated COVID-19 coverage in much of the world’s influential news media. But the focus has begun to shift to an equally devastating story from the Global South. That story is one of longstanding structural deficits in a global economy that limit people’s ability to cope under crisis conditions.
Social distancing and staying home are real possibilities for middle-class office workers covered by social security. They are much less achievable for unprotected informal workers who fall between the cracks, excluded from formal work-related protections as well as from state social assistance programmes that target the very poor and those outside the labour market.
“I am afraid of the coronavirus,” said an informal worker in Mexico, “but I am more afraid of dying of hunger if there is no work.”
« Aplatir la courbe » est devenu un mantra de la pandémie COVID-19, mais les appels à l'auto-isolement et à la distanciation sociale ont accentué de manière frappante les inégalités dans notre société, y compris celles qui existent parmi les travailleuse·eur·s.
“Aplanar la curva” se ha convertido en el mantra de la pandemia del COVID-19, pero los pedidos de autoaislamiento y de distanciamiento social han profundizado drásticamente las desigualdades en nuestra sociedad, incluso entre la clase trabajadora.
