Leave no one behind. A slogan that governments, both state and the Canary Islands, never stop repeating and that in these days of health and social crisis, out of solidarity, but also for pure survival, forces us to take forceful measures to make it a reality.
We know where we come from, our recent history of more than a decade of cuts in the health and social sphere has left us with this panorama of enormous difficulties to address with adequate responses - sufficient material and human resources - a crisis in which our lives are literally at stake.
Together with the professional groups who, despite the precariousness and lack of resources, are giving their all to care for us from the front line (health personnel in hospitals and health centers, socio-health personnel in residences for the elderly, minors, or dependent people, workers in food stores, pharmacies and other essential services) there is another, historically invisible, who, even though they are developing an essential job for the sustenance of life and care in the domestic sphere, incomprehensibly and tremendously unfairly, continue to be denied basic rights recognized to the rest of the working class, a group that is mostly made up of women, thus adding more discrimination to those they already suffer for being so.
Today is precisely the International Day of Domestic Workers, unfortunately nothing to celebrate and much to demand until we achieve the minimum, the equal rights of these workers in this situation and forever: the right to protocols and protective equipment against COVID-19, the right, like all other workers, not to be dismissed due to the coronavirus crisis, the right to minimum benefits regardless of administrative status, and the right to unemployment benefits for all workers who contribute to Social Security, now and forever.
We cannot say that we are not going to leave anyone behind while there are cracks in our system through which exceptions shamefully creep in that legally allow the exclusion of especially vulnerable groups and people.
For years we have been reflecting on these cracks, on how minimum rights, the most basic ones, are still not guaranteed for everyone, not even the benefits aimed at combating social exclusion reach all the people who need them.
And it is that "social exclusion", even "poverty", for the purposes of social rights, are categories in which not everyone, nor all assumptions, are included, they leave out numerous exceptions, groups of people located in the peripheries of the peripheries, in the margins of the margins, spaces whose existence is consented to and perpetuated legally or illegally, but in any case immoral, and that reflects the most sordid and hypocritical of our societies, the darkest side that we do not want to look at, because it would imply taking measures that perhaps would force us to collect and redistribute our taxes in another way.
Leaving no one behind without touching our pockets, those of everyone, is impossible.
We have to give urgent answers, and we have to give them now, therefore, while the Canary Islands Citizen Income Law is being launched, it seems absolutely necessary to us to take measures such as the recent proposal of the Councilor for Social Rights of a temporary emergency citizen income that covers many families who are in the peripheries of the peripheries and who currently do not receive any income in the Canary Islands.
We have plenty of reasons, and we have tools, we only lack the will that allows us to make the necessary shift in how and in what we invest our resources and public money, and if we really believe in our slogans, and we consider that we will only get out of this crisis together, we have no choice but to, even if it is out of pure selfishness, be in solidarity.
Leave no one behind.
For you, for me, for them, for you.
Because as José Mujica recently said "you are not us, but we are you".
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María del Río Sánchez
President of the Sí Podemos Canarias Parliamentary Group
Secretary of Feminisms, Equality and LGTBI of Podemos Canarias
