The government’s decision this week to throw open the country for business on the same day the schools close seemed almost too clownish to be true. But even as women across England threw their hands in the air in appalled despair – again – it felt like a familiar bruise was being pressed.
In eighteen months of pandemic living, women have felt multiple blows of decisions that don’t see them. Women disproportionately shouldered hours of unpaid toil, were highly represented in industries hit hardest by the economic impact of Covid and were most in need of investment in sectors abandoned by government, such as childcare. Our lack of political representation is a clear and pressing problem. But as we roll up our sleeves to campaign yet again for “women’s issues” (yuck) like social infrastructure funding it’s becoming clear that it’s not just the number of men we’re up against that’s the problem. It’s their attitudes to work.
In sum: The issue is not just that women’s lives are screwed up by powerful men. It’s that they are screwed up by men whose idea of work is as outdated and damaging as it is dull - and who are mates with a lot of other (business) men with the same values.
The Prime Minister commented in March this year that people should really get back to the office because we’d all had enough “days off.” The Chancellor said office working was vital to restore a culture of “riffing off each other.” (This is the same person whose big plan for tackling the pain of the services industry was to hop on a Zoom call with celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay.) These are the men who cracked jokes in the House of Commons about the closure of the 28-billion-pound-a year beauty industry that employs 300,000 women and who doubtless nod appreciatively when someone like WeWork CEO Sandeep Mathrani suggests you can spot top employees because: “They’re the ones who want to come back to the office. The least engaged are the ones who are most comfortable working from home.”
We seem to be governed by the same men who talk over us in meetings, ignore our ideas and ask us to pour the coffee during a break. By the same men who would never dream of leaving early to pick the kids up from school, make bad jokes about paternity leave and tolerate International Women’s Day so long as it comes with a side order of cupcakes and bottom-patting.
So listen. It’s time for a work rebellion. All of the noise above? It’s the panic of wealthy capitalists trying to put the genie back in the bottle. They want us back in offices because they want us to back to a ‘normal’ that is their normal: white male corporate working; presenteeism; power that sits in the C-suite in a suit and buys its lunch from its mates’ sandwich and sushi bars. They want this now and fast because they know that at the heart of lockdown was its biggest contradiction: while we were banned from moving the world changed faster than we’ve ever seen. Age-old political “Facts” were turned on their heads: “Low-skilled” workers were in fact our most precious assets; the “magic money tree” of state spending did exist. Home working was not just possible but productive.
And much of what kept us all afloat during the pandemic was the manner of women’s response: the focus on care, community, co-operative work and activism. Women had to organise for ourselves because we’ve always been on the outside of decision-making. Isolation connected many of us more closely than free movement. We started by clapping for carers but many of us ended up organising help for the vulnerable and elderly, supporting the women experiencing domestic violence, delivering parcels to the migrant families denied recourse to state aid and campaigning for those forced out of their homes by job losses. We know our neighbours much better now. We can start to make a plan with each other about what we want from our lives
If we want something new from the cracks in the old order we have to grab for it right now. The last time a great injustice was done to women we took to the streets. The Women’s March, the #MeToo movement – remember the power of protest? The electricity of standing shoulder to shoulder to stand up to injustice and build a world that works for women? It’s time to take it to the world of work.
Let’s be Rebel Workers. Let’s breathe meaning into shallow cant about ‘levelling up’ and ‘building back’. Let’s define work for ourselves; find our purpose; ask for what we need and determine work that matters. It’s time to change the world by changing our work. Because none of us are equal at work until all of us are.