Essential, and No Longer Disposable

The greatest irony of the coronavirus pandemic may be that many of the American workers now considered the most essential were among those treated as the most disposable before the outbreak began.

Meatpackers, farmworkers, grocery-store cashiers, warehouse clerks, janitors, nursing-home and home-health-care aides—all of these positions offer some of the lowest pay, flimsiest benefits, and least job security of any occupation in America.

By highlighting how much society depends on workers who have been compensated modestly at best, the outbreak has produced a kind of inversion of status. More consequentially, there are signs that this newfound respect could increase political pressure to construct a sturdier floor of pay and benefits below workers in any industry.

“I think this will accelerate the day when we raise the minimum wage; I think it will accelerate the time when [paid] family and medical leave comes,” Larry Summers, the Treasury secretary under Bill Clinton and the director of the National Economic Council for Barack Obama, told me during a live-streamed event this week. “I think this will push us in the direction of more social protection.”