Two deadly mutant virus variants rampaging across the country. Schools in disarray. Kent morphed into a giant lorry park. The hours ticking down to a chaotic Brexit that could snap the supply chains delivering food to our shelves. Were Labour running what other countries now call Plague Island, the right’s politicians and press would be bellowing about Another Winter of Discontent. With Boris Johnson in charge, however, the response is a numb anxiety.
Yet even as the headlines chronicle a national system being tested to destruction, the reporting rarely features people who can show from their own lives how the system actually works – or doesn’t. People like Erika.
Erika doesn’t mind publishing her full name, but you’ll see later why I think it’s wiser not to. A glance wouldn’t give you the 22-year-old’s story. She has fine, brown hair framing a delicate face and flowing over the collar of a tartan check jacket. Nothing that stands out. Perfectly invisible.
Any big city depends on its invisibles: the men and women who drive the buses, guard the office foyers, wheel the sick through hospital corridors. Often from ethnic minorities, their names are unknown to almost all those depending on them, and their pay is often a fraction of that of the people they serve. They get neither claps on the doorstep nor rainbow posters in the window, but they help make our society work.
From Ecuador via Spain, Erika is part of that invisible army. Soon after she moved to London last year she started working two jobs a day. The first was at a pricey restaurant, where she washed pots and plates from 5pm until 3am: more hours than her rota acknowledged and more hours than she was paid for – but the hours her bosses expected. “I practically killed myself for that job,” she says of the chemicals and scalding hot water that by the end of a long night would turn her hands purple and white. Then she would set off to clean a smart office block from 5.30am until 7.30am.
Twelve hours a day of exhaustion, five days a week, just to pay rent and bills. For all Johnson sloganeers about levelling up the north, the prime minister never addresses the grinding reality of poverty-pay, exorbitant-rent London – an economy that grew while he was its mayor. When his erstwhile colleague George Osborne boasted as chancellor about the jobs he was creating, what he really meant was the kind of work Erika did.
Today Erika’s precarious system for getting by has fallen apart. First the restaurant shut, leaving her with just the cleaning shift. When the pandemic struck, office staff worked from home and Erika didn’t work at all, but was put on furlough. Finally, early in October, soon after the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, announced the end of the furlough scheme, her cleaning agency made her redundant. This key worker is now surplus to requirements.
Erika’s story undermines the myth-making around Sunak. “He’s played a blinder!” chirrup the chancellor’s cheerleaders. “He’s taken steps predecessors wouldn’t have dared.” But he has had to be dragged down that path by his cashmere hoodie. Time and again, he has underestimated both the scale and the duration of the pandemic, hemming and hawing before finally doing the right thing. Three weeks after Erika’s redundancy, the chancellor extended the furlough scheme to March, before pushing it out again until April. Too late for her.
When Erika and I met, just over a couple of weeks ago, her eyes had deep bags that told of long nights of worry. She broke down crying five times in the afternoon we spent together. And there was something else: her tummy had a small bump. Her first baby is due in February.
Until this year her partner had also worked at a restaurant in London’s West End but because Luis doesn’t have the documents to stay in the UK and work, he is not entitled to any benefits. The right enjoy hounding undocumented immigrants rather more than they care to tackle the employers who exploit their illegal status with low pay and less protection. As it is, over the past few months alone I have spoken to men and women in the same situation as Luis who build homes, make the food that ends up in our shops and care for elderly people.
The couple share one small room, with just enough space for a bed, a baby crib and a mini-fridge. For that they pay £680 in rent and bills a month, leaving £179 of her universal credit for each month’s food. Before, it was her furlough of £352 a month that enabled them to eat. Now she walks nearly everywhere, and some days they have only one meal. What she’s had so far today? A cup of camomile tea and some boiled plantain. It is nearly four in the afternoon, and she is seven months pregnant. I think again about the smallness of that bump.
She knows it’s not enough, knows about the possible harm to the life inside her. It’s what she always asks her doctors: is the child’s weight OK? Already pregnancy has made her so sick that she was kept in hospital for a week this summer. She wants to bring up her baby in a flat, but even the tiniest place she has seen in south London would cost nearly her entire universal credit. Other landlords clock that she’s pregnant and refuse even to grant her a viewing. As it’s December, I mention another couple with a child on the way from 2,000 years ago. “It’s true! Nobody wanted to give Mary a place to stay,” she says. “People say that this country has contracts [for work and housing] and it’s for everybody. But we didn’t have the same opportunity as everybody.”
In a letter to Erika, Key Enviro Solutions explained that it was making her redundant because her status as a temporary worker meant she should never have been on furlough – even though the government’s guidance states: “You can be on any type of employment contact.”
Next, managers switched arguments, claiming in the letter that they “are not able to sustain the additional costs associated with the furlough scheme”. Yet because Erika’s cleaning wages are low, the costs to her employers of keeping her on furlough are tiny. Her trade union, the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain, calculates the cleaning agency need pay only £11 a month (this is before maternity pay, but at the time Key Enviro Solutions began Erika’s redundancy it had yet to be informed of her pregnancy). When I put this point and other questions to the agency, it didn’t respond.
Nothing about Erika’s situation is extraordinary; rather, what’s shocking is how common it is. IWGB officials calculate that one in five of the cases at its branch for cleaners is to do with employers refusing to furlough staff. Erika knows other migrant workers who have abandoned London and its high rents this year for family support in Spain, part of a trend now showing up in the labour market figures.
Yet in all those think-pieces about the post-Covid city, I rarely see mention of Erika or others like her. The smartly dressed Somali driving that Uber, the white-shirted Pole frothing up lattes, the Filipino hotel porter: I never saw their faces on the marketing for the capital, but they were integral to its long boom. Like the migrants who came before them, it is their sweat and homesickness and tears that helped fuel London’s growth. Until this March, their work was essential, yet now the they are treated as disposable.
What will Erika do for Christmas? “Nothing,” she says. “Without much food, without family, to be alone in this country … well, it’s sad.”
Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist
