Essential Workers and a Minimum Wage
By Albert B. Kelly
I was flipping through the dial recently when I came across a program segment about that new category of employee known as the “essential worker”. The person being interviewed was making the point that prior to the global pandemic, the idea of the “essential worker” was not part of the culture. Thinking about this, I had to concede the point. Prior to 2020, if we did think about “essential workers”, it was usually in the context of a snowstorm and who might have reason to be out driving around in it.
Pre-pandemic, our idea of who qualified as “essential” was formed by time and task. So long as it was a snow storm, flood, blackout, or similar event that had a shelf life of hours or days, we could narrow “essential” down to those tasked with cleaning up the mess and maintaining order so that we could get back to our normal lives.
But along came 2020 and with it a global pandemic that caused us to rethink everything. The pandemic is first and foremost a medical crisis of biblical proportions so naturally anyone in the medical field was deemed essential and so they are. Walk into any hospital in the country and take a look in the ICU and you know you’re on the front lines.
Blessings to all those in the world of medicine and particularly those involved with patient care, because they are the ones who form the tip of the essential worker sword. At a time when we knew precious little about Covid-19, amidst a shortage of all manner of PPE, when authorities were lining up freezer trucks to handle the expected dead, they left their families and came to their tasks each day to deal with something the rest of shielded our eyes from seeing. It doesn’t get more essential than that.
But the very idea of what constituted “essential” changed with the pandemic because with its arrival, we were no longer talking about something with a shelf life of hours, days or even weeks, but a shelf life of years. In addition to the time involved, the pandemic is global and it touches everything and everyone. Because it did and because it does still, everything people did and continue to do in their daily lives now carries a degree of risk that was previously confined to certain jobs and industries and then only in certain locations.
The global-ness and deadliness of the pandemic is how we get to a place where we have “critical retail” and how the people bagging our groceries, busing our tables or serving us a McMuffin become “essential”. They might not have been essential in the public safety sense, but they were essential in the “we-can’t-possibly-function-in-our daily-lives-without-them” sort of way and the range of those considered essential is vast.
The thing is, if we’re now going to sing the praises of these “essential workers” for being on the “front lines” in what we’ve now classified as “critical retail” when we were previously content to dismiss the jobs as nonskilled entry level and the people who held them as losers, now paying them a solid minimum wage is the least we can do. While the praise is nice, it won’t pay the rent that is about to come do when the moratoriums expire.
As far as “premium pay” they’ll take it if that’s all there is, but it’s what you give when you want to throw someone a bone that you can take away as soon as we’re out of the woods. For years, we’ve heard the dire warnings about how setting a minimum wage that kept pace with inflation and let folks live a smidge above the poverty line would be the undoing of our economy. If our economy can survive a global pandemic, then our economy can handle paying a solid minimum wage.
Like all issues these days, this issue will become politicized if it hasn’t already. We get silly over masks and go absolutely bonkers over vaccines, so it’s hard to imagine that this discussion would be any less politicized but it shouldn’t be. If there’s a lesson to learn from this pandemic, and there are many, it’s that we’re connected and dependent on one another in multiple ways and the economy in no small part depends on those we previously considered the least among us who are now “essential workers”. Let’s pay them accordingly.