Coronavirus: There were two quite different Covid-19 blocks in New Zealand

New Zealand joined together to fight Covid-19, we were told. Actually, there were two versions of confinement: while the working class kept the country safe and orderly, white-collar kiwis easily slipped into their offices. Andy Fyers, Carmen Parahi and Steve Kilgallon report.

Rose Kavapalu is proud to be a cleaner.

He has two jobs and registers 65 hours a week, Monday through Friday. God and his family give him the strength to continue working long hours, she says.

At 7.30 in the morning, he leaves his rental house in Māngere to drive to the wealthy suburb of Auckland, Mt Eden.

She spends eight hours cleaning St Cuthbert’s College, one of the most prestigious private boarding schools for girls in the country.

When he is finished, Kavapalu drives south to the ātāhuhu Police Station to start his second job at 5pm. She cleans for another five hours to finally return home around 10:30 p.m.

“It is always a blessing for me to help,” says Kavapalu. “The police want to take care and keep the peace if they can in the community.

“If that’s the case, I have a role to play in helping your health and safety through cleaning.”

On April 22, Kavapalu received special recognition as an essential services worker from Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.

At the time of the announcement, she was cleaning at the police station.

“Suddenly a couple of guys were running, I said” Wow, where are you going? “They were saying, ‘Rose, you are famous.’ I thought they were joking. They all came and congratulated me, and then I realized it was true.”

Kavapalu seized the opportunity presented by care to issue a plea for every worker to receive at least a living wage and for social imperatives to be incorporated into government service contracts.

“There are people worse than me,” says Kavapalu.

“Many are working multiple jobs, so they have to travel to two, three, and sometimes four different workplaces. They need help, food, money for basic needs.

“Please help. It’s us. This is our situation. We are Kiwis, how can you help us? We need help.”

THE OTHER LOCK

The reality of blocking for people like Rose Kavapalu is quite different from the version we’ve heard a lot about.

White-collar workers relaxed weeks after the office figuring out how to navigate a Zoom call and organize their work day around the 1pm Covid-19 press conference. Working from home was an adjustment, but staying still was at least one option.

For many manual workers, staying home day after day was simply impossible.

Cell phone tower data analyzed by Things confirms the different blocking realities between the best and the worst New Zealanders. In virtually all communities, movement was significantly reduced compared to a normal day before closing.

But low-income areas tend to slow down by less than high-income areas.

On average, mobility decreased by 48 percent in the country’s richest 20 percent during the level 4 block, compared to a typical week. In the poorest 20%, mobility decreased by 38%.

In Auckland, the most uneven city in New Zealand, there was a clear disparity between rich and poor.

For the richest 20%, mobility was cut in half. For the poorest 20%, it was closer to 25%.

The maps above show the proportional change in mobility for each neighborhood compared to the period before Covid-19 began to affect people’s movements.

Mobility is measured by looking at daily variation in a neighborhood population. More people leaving or entering an area increase that variation. For this reason, it is not wise to read too much about mobility change for a given neighborhood. Any small area showing an increase may be home to supermarkets or a park where people from other neighborhoods come to shop or exercise during the closing.

It is the larger image that matters. And it shows higher-income areas capable of reducing a greater proportion of its movement during blocking. Both rich and poor areas have pockets with a small increase in mobility, and both still reduced their movement significantly overall.

ESSENTIAL WORK, LITTLE REWARD

E Tū union organizer Fala Haulangi says the data reflects how workers like Rose Kavapalu continued to work, move and risk their families’ health through the closure.

The union has the largest membership in the country with 54,000 members made up of hospital staff, ordinances, cleaners, security guards, home support workers, manufacturing workers, and food factories.

Most of its union membership in Auckland comes from South Auckland, close to manufacturing, the airport and hospitals. But many travel throughout Auckland to work for different organizations, including the Auckland Council.

Haulangi believes ThingsThe analysis shows that these were primarily low-wage workers, Pacific workers, and migrants who moved because they had no choice but to continue working, despite the risk.

“The jobs these people do are the invisible workers in our community [whom] many of our people look down.

“However, they are the lowest paid workers in our community. We really don’t respect these workers. It really shows in what they get paid. “

She said it was revealing that during the shutdown the government considered these people “essential service workers.”

“The sad thing is that they risked going to work, cleaning, and looking after ourselves while we all work from home.”

Population specialist Professor Tahu Kukutai says that variation in movement began to emerge before the closing, when people who had the resources to work from home were able to start settling down.

“That has a definite socioeconomic gradient,” she says. “The extent to which people can exercise options varies significantly by socioeconomic status.”

While hesitating to make generalized interpretations of the data, she says that, based on other knowledge and research already undertaken, she is not surprised by the mobility of those in Auckland, particularly in the lower socio-economic communities.

“There are a wide variety of people who are not in high-status jobs without much visibility who often don’t pay an adequate salary to live a life of comfort. They have very few options but to move.”

Kukutai says the data may lead some people to draw harmful conclusions and stigmatize groups that already face discrimination.

“You can get a narrative about deviant behavior, noncompliance, community behavior patterns, or not following the rules. That kind of negative narrative that can be gleaned might not contextualize the data. I would be concerned about those kinds of interpretations.

“My basic point is that those with more resources have more options. Those with fewer resources have fewer options. “

DOING WORK

When the shutdown was announced, the 27-year-old builder Kiko Hibbs knew that his work on a residential renovation in the Remuera suburbs would come to a complete halt.

For Hibbs, “there was a degree of panic … I think everyone was afraid of what might happen.”

Her colleague Claire’s marketing job was also sold out, so she was “practically on the phone as soon as they made that announcement, just trying to figure out where to get some work.”

Fortunately, a friend’s father owned the New World supermarket in Victoria Park in downtown Auckland. And so a night job began, replenishing the shelves from 10 p.m. at 6.30 a.m., powered by Red Bull and music on their headphones.

“I’ll be honest, it was difficult, the first few days trying to adjust to sleep patterns, and staying awake for the full eight hours was the difficult part,” he says. “The work was fine, but there wasn’t too much thought involved.”

Hibbs is a perfect illustration of our data, although his hours were somewhat unusual. He drove the 26 km from his home in Manurewa, South Auckland at 9.30 p.m., then returned at 6.30 a.m. every day.

“For the first week, there was nobody on the roads,” he says, “and then I guess people were starting to find work because the more locked up we were, the more cars were on the road.

He gave up on the New World when it became clear that level 3 was coming, only to restore his sleep patterns and spend time with his partner and their 2-year-old daughter.

While working at night, he had tried to sleep from 10 a.m. at 6 p.m., so you can have dinner and see your daughter before bed.

“When I was awake, they were asleep and vice versa.”

Hibbs re-used the tools as soon as he reopened his site.

“It makes you appreciate your work. The next time I think it’s a bit boring, I’ll think about having to spend a night at New World. “

The coronavirus is impacting different parts of the community in very different ways, says Paul Spoonley, distinguished professor of humanities and social sciences at Massey University.

“We tend to homogenize it, to assume that working from home is the new norm. No, it is not, it is only for those who can afford it and whose jobs allow it. “

Spoonley, like Kukutai, says that blocking inequality has been a function of choice. White-collar workers often had the option and flexibility to work remotely, while those in the public service sector, who often lived in poorer areas, did not.

According to the statistics of the EE. USA And the United Kingdom showing that minority ethnic groups fall ill and die from coronaviruses at much higher rates than white populations, Spoonley had predicted that Maori and Pasifika would become disproportionately high. He is happy that the contrary is proven. But if we had had a community broadcast at a high speed, they would have.

People in the most vulnerable communities were the same overrepresented people on the infection front: as supermarket workers, garbage collectors, and care workers (one in three of whom are here on migrant work visas) while classes stockings were at home at Zoom meetings

The lock mobility image provided by ThingsThe analysis is not the same across the country. In some places, such as downtown Wellington and Dunedin, there was little difference between rich and poor areas.

Student areas are the low-income parts of Wellington and Dunedin, which may explain why low-income areas reduced movement more than high-income areas. Many students returned to their homes in other parts of the country during the shutdown, while campuses in the heart of these areas would have seen mobility halt with universities forced to close.

Spoonley suggests that the narrow gap in Wellington may reflect the large number of civil service employees in and around the capital, many of whom would have been mobile, working to tackle the pandemic.

He’s intrigued by how the mobility patterns of the top 20 percent and bottom 20 percent mirror each other; He suspects that we still retain some of our shopping and leisure patterns even in closing.

But for E Tū’s assistant national secretary, Rachel Mackintosh, the data says one important thing. It paints a picture of underpaid and underpaid workers doing the essential work and risking keeping our country going.

“It has almost become a cliche. But they just don’t need applause at the end of people’s tickets; they need a decent pay. They need security, they need protection. They need to be able to participate in decisions about their own work.”

Rose Kavapalu, 52, has been cleaning police stations since 2005.

Her family moved to New Zealand from Tonga when she was 16 years old after her father, a skilled builder, got a job with Fletcher in Penrose. As the firstborn, she wanted to help her father support his family. She trained as a caregiver and received her ESOL certificate to start working at age 17.

“The body is getting old,” she says.

If the cleaners did not continue to clean and disinfect workplaces, including hospitals, nursing homes and police stations opened during the Covid-19 shutdown, he says, people would have been left in dirty and potentially unsafe environments.

“If we choose not to work, who will take care of the others?

“In a way, it makes me feel good to do my part. I can work, but I have to play it safe. “

* * The mobility measurement used for this analysis is based on a methodology developed by Data companies. Analyze how much neighborhood populations vary each day. The variations are then aggregated by quintile of median personal income and compared to the variation on a typical day.

If neighborhood populations vary greatly within a given day, that indicates that people are moving in and / or out of that area, more mobility. If populations are relatively static throughout the day, that indicates that people stay where they are, less mobility.

Data is based on aggregate populations and does not track individuals.