Reading Between the Unemployment Lines
By Sumeye Dalkilinc, Maxwell Carter, Evan Visconti, & Anibal Santiago
Sonia Martinez and her 11-year-old son, Tomas, have slept on her cousin’s living room couch in Revere since she lost her job at the Seaport Hotel in late March.
“I have no option but to live in these conditions because I have no money, no help, no nothing,” said Martinez.
Martinez, 51, has worked at The Seaport Hotel for the past eight years. She was laid off on March 20 after the pandemic pushed Governor Charlie Baker to pass strict measures requiring the closure of non-essential businesses in Massachusetts.
She and her son were sharing a two-bedroom apartment in East Boston with a roommate when she lost her job. They were forced to move out of their home when she could no longer pay the rent. Her cousin’s two-bedroom apartment now houses six people, effectively eliminating recommended social distancing safety precautions.
Sonia has been sharing a room with her son since she came to this country. She said she does not feel the strain of the tightly shared space with him, but highlighted in an interview over the phone the awkwardness she felt in invading the privacy of her cousin’s family due to the pandemic.
The Seaport Hotel continues to postpone Martinez’s return date, originally from April 22nd first by a week, but has now extended the furlough to May 31st. They encouraged her to apply to a janitorial company that has been placing workers at hospitals to assist with disinfectant services, but she has declined the offer. Above all she’s worried about putting her son at risk of contracting the virus from her if she works on the frontline.
“I am stuck between making money to feed my family and protecting my family from this deadly virus that we then won’t be able to afford to treat because we don’t have health insurance or the money to pay the fees,” said Martinez.
More than 3.8 million workers applied for unemployment benefits in the United States last week and the national unemployment rate rapidly climbed to 4.4 percent, according to a report from the Bureau of labor statistics. Roughly 30.3 million people have filed for unemployment relief in the six weeks since the coronavirus outbreak began.
But the national picture obscures the dire nature of situations like Martinez’s. In Massachusetts alone, the unemployment rate has risen from just over 2 percent at the beginning of the year to over thirteen percent as of April 18, according to data from the Department of Labor.
Massachusetts is one of the hardest hit states during this pandemic, but geography is only one half of the equation in Martinez’s situation. As in many of the epicenters across the country, Latinos and African Americans in Boston are being disproportionately impacted by the pandemic both in number of infections, deaths, and secondary consequences like job loss.
Demographic data isn’t reported with employment statistics collected at the state level, but by examining the demographics of employees in the most affected industries we can get a clear picture of which communities are bearing the brunt of the pandemic.
The most impacted industries in Massachusetts are accommodation, food services, construction, arts and recreation, transportation, and retail, according to an April 6 report from the Boston Development and Planning Agency. These industries employed more than half of the cities workforce and almost 50 percent of workers in these industries support their families on incomes below 300 percent of the federal poverty line, compared to just over 35 percent of workers citywide.
“Even before layoffs, furloughs, and reduced hours due to COVID-19, these workers’ earnings were barely enough to keep up with the cost of housing and necessities,” the report’s authors wrote.
By comparing data of where workers in those industries primarily live with demographic data of those neighborhoods, it is easy to see how unevenly the pandemic has affected Black and Latino employment.
East Boston, where Martinez was living before the outbreak, is home to the highest percentage of workers in accommodation, food service, and construction. The local population is also more than 50 percent Latino, compared to 17.5 percent city-wide, according to demographic data published by the Department of Neighborhood Development.
And still these numbers don’t capture the precarity many Latinos currently face. Martinez isn’t included in any of the data laid out so far. She, like thousands of other in the state, is undocumented.
There are no government relief resources designated for undocumented people, despite the vast majority of them being tax-payers, and advocates are scrambling to gather donations for charity funds.
There are also no official statistics on how many Massachusetts residents are undocumented. The PEW Research Center puts the undocumented population at around 250,000 and rising in the state in a 2016 study.
Jose is another one of those left out of the statistics and without any recourse for aid during this crisis. He is an undocumented immigrant as well and asked we only use his first name out of fear of deportation.
Jose emigrated to the United States from El Salvador 15 years ago and has been employed at the same restaurant in Brookline for 12 of those years.
However, during the pandemic, the restaurant owners told him that they were sorry, but there would be no more work for him. Unlike Martinez, Jose wasn’t the only income stream in his home, but soon after he lost his job his wife, Mari, who worked in a bakery and his daughter, who worked as a waitress in a Japanese restaurant, were also added to the growing ranks of unemployed.
“We are all out of work,” said Jose. “We have no income of any kind nor from the government, because we do not have a social security number nor have we even received help from our employers.”
He tried to apply for the unemployment benefit so many of his neighbors were receiving from the government, but he was denied.
“In our home, no one has received any help so far,” said Jose and added: “We have applied but [were] asked for some requirements such as rental agreement, photo ID, a letter from the employer.”
Jose, his wife, and their daughter don’t have the proper documentation because of their citizenship status. He and his family are left with no option but to hope for the increasingly unlikely: the quick passing of the global pandemic. His boss has told him he’ll have a job when they can reopen.
Until then, he said, “I will go home and wait for them to call me.”
