Bill Berkowitz: During Coronavirus Pandemic Essential Workers Essentially Getting The Shaft

June 26th 2020

Postal services remain vigilant during COVID-19 (photo by Senior Airman Jovante Johnson)

By Bill Berkowitz 

In addition to revealing that the Trump administration’s utter mismanagement of  providing leadership during the coronavirus pandemic, the pandemic has exacerbated social and economic inequities. During the pandemic, workers deemed essential are performing a wide array of jobs as grocery store clerks, truck drivers, postal carriers, security guards, hospital orderlies, home health aides, death-care workers, farmworkers, meatpacking plant workers, nurses, bus drivers, firefighters and more. While low-wage workers may be personally thanked by those they are serving and celebrated as heroes in television advertisements, but, their health care needs have all too often been disregarded or inadequately addressed. For many essential workers, the social safety net has always been in need of repair, and in the age of the pandemic, it is in tatters, forcing many workers to depend on government programs just to feed their families. In far too many cases guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) have been disregarded. 

“Workers in the service sector, many of whom were already in an economically precarious position before the pandemic when the economy was booming, were among the hardest hit,” The Shift Project’s Daniel Schneider and Kristen Harknett wrote in a recent report titled “Essential Changes Needed for Essential Workers: Job Quality for California’s Service Sector”. 

“Many of these workers experienced layoffs or furloughs, while others, particularly in grocery, pharmacy, and delivery sectors, were deemed essential workers. These essential workers are not able to work from home and shelter in place, but rather continue to report for work and risk exposure to coronavirus throughout the pandemic. Workers of color were disproportionately affected by layoffs, and are also at heightened risk of serious complications or death from coronavirus,” the report pointed out. 

Governors in most states issued executive orders identifying which workers were providing essential services during the pandemic, however, “despite being categorized as essential, many workers … are not receiving the most basic health and safety measures to combat the spread of the coronavirus. Essential workers are dying as a result. While the Trump administration has failed to provide essential workers basic protections, working people are taking action. Some are walking off the job in protest over unsafe conditions and demanding personal protective equipment (PPE), and unions are fighting to ensure workers are receiving adequate workplace protections,” according to a report by the Economic Policy Institute titled “Who are essential workers? A comprehensive look at their wages, demographics, and unionization rates”.

According to EPI:

“a majority of essential workers … are employed in health care (30%), food and agriculture (20%), and the industrial, commercial, residential facilities and services industry (12%). 

“Women make up the majority of essential workers in health care (76%) and government and community-based services (73%).

“Men make up the vast majority of essential workers in the energy sector (96%), water and wastewater management (91%), and critical manufacturing (88%).

“People of color make up the majority of essential workers in food and agriculture (50%) and in industrial, commercial, residential facilities and services (53%).

“Nearly 70% of essential workers do not have a college degree. Three in 10 essential workers have some college (30%) or a high school diploma (29%). One in 10 have less than a high school diploma.

“One in eight (12%) essential workers are covered by a union contract, with the biggest share working in emergency services (51%). Strikingly, some of the most high-risk industries have the lowest unionization rates, such as health care (10%) and food and agriculture (8%).”

The Brookings Institution’s Molly Kinder and Tiffany Ford recently reported, “Black essential workers shoulder more of the burden and risks of work that is critical to keeping the country functioning during the pandemic. … While the U.S. government does not systematically report COVID-19 deaths by occupation … many of the worst outbreaks and deaths have occurred in occupations that employ a disproportionate number of Black workers. These include jobs in public transit, the meatpacking industry, and nursing homes and long-term care facilities”.

In May, the Shift Project’s Daniel Schneider and Kristen Harknett reported that “In the absence of strong government-mandated standards, the safety and wellbeing of workers and the general public are left to the discretion of employers. And yet, we find that many employers in frontline industries have been slow to act, and that workers remain underequipped in such vital areas as grocery, fulfillment, food service, and pharmacy.”

“A new Center for American Progress [CAP] analysis shows that workers in essential roles are also more likely to have needed federal assistance such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) to get by; more than 5.5 million essential workers relied on the program at some point in 2018, according to 2018 American Community Survey (ACS) data.”

The CAP report noted that “More than 5.5 million, or 13.36 percent, of people who worked in jobs that would be deemed essential during the pandemic needed SNAP benefits at some point during 2018, while only 7.8 percent of workers in jobs that weren’t deemed essential utilized the program that year.”

The Trump administration has long had the SNAP program in its crosshairs but in early April, faced with a growing pandemic, paused its efforts to implement stricter work requirements, which would have eliminated 700,000 from the program. However, as of late May “The U.S. Department of Agriculture…said it is appealing a court ruling that blocked the Trump administration from imposing additional work requirements…”  Ironically, expansion of direct aid programs such as SNAP could actually serve as a rapid and direct stimulus to the economy in the face of the pandemic induced recession.  

When the pandemic finally eases, will the economy be retooled to provide for the health and well being of those that have been deemed essential? Schneider and Kristen Harknett ask in “Essential Changes Needed for Essential Workers: “Will workers continue to bear the lion’s share of the risk from the uncertainties in service sector business? Or will the recognition of the essential work provided by workers in the service sector finally compel policymakers and employers to recognize the value of these workers?”