A Funder-Backed Project Explores Why COVID-19 Adversely Impacts Low-Wage Workers

Akil Mitchell and his son, Akil Mitchell II inside of Ego’s Gentlemen’s Spa, where the father is a co-owner, in New Orleans, USA, August 20, 2020. Thomson Reuters Foundation / L. Kasimu Harris

Akil Mitchell and his son, Akil Mitchell II inside of Ego’s Gentlemen’s Spa, where the father is a co-owner, in New Orleans, USA, August 20, 2020. Thomson Reuters Foundation / L. Kasimu Harris

Photojournalist L. Kasimu Harris recently visited New Orleans to understand the pandemic’s effect on the city’s small business owners.

New Orleans was one of the early hotspots for COVID-19. At one point, its death rate was twice as high as that of New York City. Doctors, Harris explained, attributed this statistic to residents’ high rates of obesity, diabetes and hypertension, particularly in the Black community, which makes up nearly 60% of the city’s population.

Harris spoke with Steve Elloie, the third-generation owner of Sportman’s Corner, a bar located in the working-class Black neighborhood of Central City. Elloie wasn’t sure the bar would survive. The pandemic, Elloie said, is “really no comparison to Katrina. It’s actually 10 times worse, and Katrina was pretty devastating.”

Harris’ photo shows Elloie sitting at the empty bar and staring into the camera. It’s a profoundly haunting shot, imbued with grief with and loss—Harris informs us that Elloie’s mother succumbed to COVID-19 in the spring. He didn’t get the chance to see or talk to her after she was hospitalized.

Harris’ work appeared on the Thomson Reuters Foundation’s website to coincide with the launch of “COVID-19: The Bigger Picture,” a project that uses “the power of photography and journalism to bring to the world’s attention stories of how those most vulnerable to the pandemic are being impacted.” The Omidyar Network, which has recently emerged as one of the few funders willing to back causes like worker power and financial sector reform, is a project co-partner.

“By combining the storytelling capabilities of the Thomson Reuters Foundation with photos from people whose lives have been upended by the pandemic, we will not only see the impacts on everyday life, but also the systemic inequalities that brought us to this dire moment,” said CEO Mike Kubzansky. “Omidyar Network is deeply committed to rebuilding these broken systems by empowering individuals and working collectively to achieve structural change.”

Exposing “Demographic and Financial Disparities”

“The Bigger Picture” consists of two components. The first is its Photojournalism Award, which is open to anyone with “an ability to capture the most powerful images of the pandemic’s impact on everyday people,” according to the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

The project is currently accepting submissions here. Winners will receive a series of “photojournalism masterclasses” led by foundation staff, plus the opportunity to work alongside the foundation’s news team on a story that will be shared via the foundation’s global distribution network.

The second component is a series of five photo essays, which the project began publishing on August 17. They include Harris’ work in New Orleans, plus photo essays exploring the pandemic’s effect on child care workers in North Carolina, hotel and theme park workers in California, gig workers in Washington, D.C., and elderly care workers in Florida.

The latter photo essay finds Zachary Fagenson and Lynsey Weatherspoon following certified nursing assistant Elonda English as she works an overnight shift at a nursing home, sprays her sneakers with disinfectant before getting back into her car, and finds comfort in a printout of Psalm 91 on her front door.

But Fagenson and Weatherspoon dig deeper, addressing how the pandemic “laid bare the demographic and financial disparities in the ranks of nursing home employees, many of whom are poorly paid Black workers working multiple jobs with few benefits.” We learn that nurses like English make between $11 and $12 per hour, while many refuse health insurance due to the high cost of premiums and deductibles.

Fagenson and Weatherspoon also explore how private equity firms’ investments in nursing home companies led to cost-cutting and diminished care, exacerbating the pandemic’s impact on the state’s large elderly population. “The bottom line took precedence over care and quality, and across Florida, they scaled back on the one thing that costs them so much, and that’s the labor costs,” said Brian Fox, head of the national nursing home watchdog group Families For Better Care.

Reimagining Capitalism

The project’s holistic approach in exploring why COVID-19 disproportionately impacted vulnerable populations and low-wage workers dovetails with the Omidyar Network’s increasingly muscular efforts to build worker power.

In April, the network announced the $1.5 million Omidyar Network COVID-19 Economic Response Advocacy Fund to support local advocacy and organizing efforts aimed at passing economic stimulus to "address the immediate toll of the COVID-19 pandemic on working people while reshaping our economic structure to ensure they are less vulnerable in the future,” according to the funder’s press release. 

A month later, the network announced a three-year $35 million investment toward its Reimagining Capitalism focus area, representing one of the strongest recent overtures to back labor advocacy by philanthropy. The fact that the funding came from eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and his wife Pam was all the more striking. While tech donors like to consider themselves philanthropic mavericks, few have been willing to challenge the economic system that made them billionaires in the first place.

COVID-19 didn’t prompt Omidyar’s investment, but it did increase the network’s sense of urgency, said Lubzansky. “We believe fundamentally in markets and capitalism, but they need to be completely reimagined to meet today’s challenges. These failures were readily apparent when we set this course for ourselves in 2018, and the COVID-19 crisis makes this blindingly obvious for everybody.”

In late May, the network announced eight winners in its initial round of Economic Response Advocacy Fund support. Grants ranged from $75,000 to $150,000. A notable theme was how the pandemic amplified the digital divide. Jessica J. Gonzalez, the co-CEO of Free Press Action Fund, said her organization would use the funding to “work to pass the most progressive broadband policy in history through the House of Representatives—with policies that will put money in the hands of low-income families and people out of work, connect schools and prevent utility shut-offs.”

In late July, the network announced the final round of investments as part of its Economic Response Advocacy Fund. (Check out my colleague Philip Rojc’s recent piece on the Omidyar Network’s efforts to support financial reform as part of its Reimagining Capitalism work.)

Helping Reporters Navigate the Pandemic

Thomson Reuters Foundation is a London-based charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, the Canadian news conglomerate. As an independent charity registered in the U.K. and the U.S., the foundation has three focus areas: advancing media freedom, fostering inclusive economies, and promoting human rights. “We believe there is a symbiotic relationship between our three focus areas,” the foundation’s site says, “and that one cannot thrive independently of the others.”

The pandemic found the foundation leveraging what it called its “unique blend of journalism and legal skills to strengthen the global response” to the crisis. In late March, it launched the COVID-19 Crisis Reporting Hub for Journalists in the Global South, an initiative to help journalists report the global pandemic. In April, it launched its COVID-19 Crisis Reporting Hub, a “virtual training, knowledge-sharing and network-building platform for journalists covering the global pandemic.” A month later, it convened leading civil society organizations and expert law firms for a virtual working group on protecting data and digital rights during the pandemic.