Pandemic crushes global supply chains, workers at both ends

In her last weeks working the freight shift at the local J.C. Penney store, Alexandra Orozco took out her phone and hit record. The 22-year-old shot videos as she and her co-workers slid down a metal shoot (technically meant for empty boxes) in the store room, their heads falling back laughing, and posted them on TikTok. Another, uploaded on 13th October, shows the giant black-and-red “Everything Must go!” posters hanging from ceiling to floor, and an eerily half-empty basement section.

“Slowing losing my job,” she wrote in the caption, days before the store in Delano, California shut for good, just one of 156 J.C. Penneys across the United States to close since June this year.

Orozco began working part-time at J.C. Penney when she was 18, and in nearly four years rose through the ranks from cashier to freight team associate, unloading trucks stuffed with new stock and doing inventory. Four days a week, she arrived at the store by four or five a.m. The early mornings suited her; she loved her job but crowds made her anxious. Now, since being laid off, she’s stressed. She’s applied for a couple of jobs - one counselling kids, the other delivering flowers - but has yet to hear back from either.

“It’s so sad,” she explains over the phone from her home, noise from a T.V. playing softly in the background. “I never thought this would happen. And Delano is a small place. There’s not that many stores. It’s hard to find jobs here.”

Halfway across the world, Matefo Litali experienced upheaval, too. A skilled sewer, the 53-year-old has worked in garment factories for the past 14 years across Lesotho, a small mountainous country entirely surrounded by South Africa. Tzicc Clothing, which makes apparel for U.S-based giants J.C. Penney and Walmart, employed the seamstress for two months before nationwide...