Today is Labor Day Monday, September 5, 2022. In honor of Labor Day, I wanted to report on an op-ed in today’s Daily News written by a commercial cleaner in Lower Manhattan and member of 32BJ Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Dulce Martinez, who writes about the conditions facing workers in a post-COVID New York City. (The SEIU comprises about 2 million members in healthcare, the public sector, and property services.) The guest column is titled “Work from home and service employees’ future.” She writes about how service employees like herself have been impacted by corporate initiatives to keep their employees at home instead of requiring them to come into the office. She indicates that “daily office occupancy has just barely passed 40% (down from 70% pre-COVID).”

This phenomenon has a large impact on the city’s economic recovery, she points out. While the rest of the country has regained most of its pre-COVID jobs, New York City lags behind, with the unemployment rate double the national average. The recovery has been disproportionately worse for workers like herself and especially high for Latino and Black workers.

Martinez was fortunate in that she was able to work during the pandemic as a cleaner at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) headquarters. She kept her job all throughout the phases of the pandemic. She mentions that her mother and father, who were also office cleaners, were not so lucky. Her father was laid off for a brief time, while her mother was laid off for many months. This happened when tenants sent home their employees without knowing when their workers would return to work.

After Martinez’s father was recalled, he contracted COVID, Martinez tragically recounts, and eventually succumbed to the virus after being hospitalized with it for a few weeks. His own daughter was not able to see him because of the strict guidelines then in place with respect to COVID patients.

Her statement here is particularly poignant and bears repeating as people’s memory of this devastating pandemic begins to fade and we start to take things for granted once more – until the next pandemic rolls around to beat us into submission anon. She writes about her father’s death to COVID early on in the pandemic, “He was just one of thousands of frontline, working-class, mostly Black and Brown workers who died in the early months of the pandemic in New York, putting their lives on the line to keep this city running.”

In looking around and seeing all of the empty buildings that companies have yet to fill with staff, Martinez wonders when company executives will include workers like herself in the decision making process to bring their employees back into these empty offices. It’s service workers, she avers, who run food carts, maintain airports and clean and guard office buildings, who deserve a voice in these conversations to keep buildings occupied. She says, “Building reopenings directly affect our ability to care for our families.”

Martinez acknowledges the work that her union has done to “stave off the impacts of these job losses” on the rank and file. Through the ministrations of the union, employers kept paying laid-off workers’ health care and extended recall rights to more than two years. However, Martinez’s fellow employees’ livelihoods will still depend on whether tenants return to their offices.

In conclusion, Martinez wishes that companies consider what she and other workers have done to keep the city running during a very dark time in the city’s history and realize their decisions have an important impact on communities like the ones she resides in and the city’s overall economic recovery. A fact to bear in mind: “We are the ones who are here every day keeping spaces safe.”

So there you have a worker’s unique perspective on her job on this particular Labor Day. I included this piece as an antidote to the usual commercial clamor that you get on this holiday weekend, which cheapens the true meaning of the observance, I think. But you can say this about many other three-day holiday weekends, whose real meaning has been obscured by commercial appeals to consumers to shop, shop, shop, until they drop.

I hope everyone had a nice Labor Day then. Tomorrow marks the first day that teachers return to the classroom. Students return on Thursday, September 8. Teachers have only two days to get their classrooms in shape for the kiddies. I wish them luck in achieving this aim and a productive and safe school year.

It’s getting late here. Elliot and I began watching a film on Hulu that I hadn’t heard of before: Fear of Rain, a 2021 psychological thriller that mixes real mental illness issues with elements of a thriller and starring Katherine Heigl, Harry Connick, Jr., and Madison Iseman as the principal character who suffers from early onset schizophrenia following a psychotic episode in which she imagines she is being pursued by a stranger in some woods at night. It sounds like a light bit of fluff, don’t you think? I never finished it, as Elliot went into the bedroom to call it a night. I’ll decide if I want to pursue watching it until the bitter end.

Stay safe and be well.