Got a sick child you need to take care of? Take an unpaid leave. Worried you might be sick? Drag your potentially contagious ass to a clinic filled with other potentially contagious patients and get yourself a doctor's note. Think your boss isn't handling health and safety well? Join the H&S committee, ask for additional supplies and get shot down by management because they don't want to pay for it. Didn't get paid for your OT? Call your labour board, get fired, maybe get a tiny payout in two years. Need help dealing with rising racism? You’re overreacting. Ask to share in some of those massive profits your boss off panicking people? Get laughed at.

These problems are more obvious now, with COVID-19 heightening everyone's awareness of how work conditions affect everyone's health. And some of these very common things I listed have changed at some stores due to public pressure, but let's be honest—as soon as the media's scrutiny moves on, as soon as social media posts exposing certain employers stop going viral, does anyone believe things will stay better? Not to mention that the federal government’s emergency funds and EI have such strict requirements that many workers, especially part-timers, I know have already been iced out. Besides, living off 55% or less of your current income is hardly doable when you’re already making less than a living wage.

Somehow the surrealist part of this experience has been the flood of appreciation for our labour coming from customers who just a month ago would have yelled at their cashier because the manager under-staffed the registers. It’s been a lovely change. But it made me think.

Retail store owners have a really great scheme going. They can pay us a minimum wage that’s the same value as it was in the ‘70s, conveniently forget to pay us OT, give us 40+ hour work weeks while categorizing us as part-time workers, change our schedules with no warning, and that's normal. And if we dare to talk openly about this, or do something about it, Canadians of nearly every political stripe will drop what they're doing to explain to us that we are unskilled, lazy, disposable teenagers who don't deserve better conditions. Really, I've had customers say that to my face.

But when the chips are down and a crisis reminds everyone that most of them can't get food in this country without grocery stores, and grocery stores don't work without workers, everyone suddenly trips over themselves to thank their cashier and tweet their appreciation for our hard work in the face of dangerous conditions. It feels like we are less disposable, but in reality we’re working harder jobs at greater risk for the same pay.

Things can really only get worse from here for retail workers—if we let it. We are underpaid, micromanaged, and disdained. And when this crisis is over, that won’t change unless we change it ourselves. That has to start with a strong union. Make a fresh one or join one of the better existing ones (no minimum wage, tiered contract bullshit—I’m looking at you, UFCW). We want to support ourselves and our families, we want job security, we want a say in how health and safety policies that literally affect our livelihoods are decided. We want everyone to have their groceries and coffee, but we don’t want to die or kill our immunocompromised or elderly family members doing it. If companies—and capitalist society as a whole—didn’t by nature prioritize profits over us, we wouldn’t have to make that choice.