Six Weeks To Sick Arms Series Of Pandemic

As we discuss below, we found that essential workers earning between 15 and 20 an hour share many of the same safety, stress, and household hazards.

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In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic it is now apparent that these disposable workers are essential.

We needed food, postal delivery, firefighters, warehouse workers, and hospital cleaning staff before the pandemic.

What also became clear during the pandemic is the fundamental class divide between those who could work from home and those who could not.

Sheltering at home is a luxury reserved primarily for those with secure incomes and white collar jobs.

For the society to continue, many workers had to go to work in order to feed and protect the rest of us.

We draw from new survey data on the experiences at work and at home of the workers who stayed on the job, taking care of the rest of us.

These data come from just one stateMassachusetts but are instructive for how we should be thinking about policy responses in general, particularly after the pandemic passes.

One thing we can be pretty sure about is that whatever is happening to essential workers in Massachusetts, it is probably worse in many other states.

Because we can see how poorly essential workers are faring in Massachusetts during the pandemic, we can also conclude that even being a very good state is not good enough to ensure that essential workers are treated as integral parts of our society and not disposable cogs in our low wage, precarious economy.

In part one we put the lives of low wage essential workers in Massachusetts into the national context, where most states have more low wage work, less insurance coverage, and more people who must work even if they get sick.

In the second part, we document the working and home lives of essential workers during the pandemic.

We discover a grim picture of heightened stress, incomplete protection, surly customers and household distress.

Finally, we discuss the policy responses that must happen next to protect all workers from the high risk labor market that has developed across the U.S.

To produce a resilient, respectful society we need to fundamentally adjust how we provide health care and insure workers and families against both extraordinary and normal fluctuations in the economy.

Six Weeks To Sick Arms Series Of Pandemic

We outline a series of pandemic emergency policy fixes, followed by more fundamental shifts in the U.S.

Some essential workers do not have access to masks (15), hand sanitizer (15), regular hand washing (10), and roughly one in three have not received training on preventing COVID-19 transmission (31).

Workers report rudeness and aggression from some customers when trying to implement social distancing and other COVID-19 store policies.

African American and Latino low wage workers are the most at risk.

These disturbing patterns are consistently worse for African American and Latino workers.

Both corporate leadership and workers and their organizations need to be part of COVID-19 safety planning, paid sick days, and hazard pay for essential workers.

Paid sick and family medical leave need to be generous and universal, unemployment insurance coverage rates need to rise to at least 60 of prior earnings, health insurance needs to be decoupled from employment, and families need to be made secure with a universal minimum incomes policy.

This may seem shockingly high until you compare it to the national rate40 of all jobs in the U.S.

In much of the deep South, as well as Idaho and Montana, more than half of all jobs pay less than 15 an hour.

Six Weeks To Sick Arms Pdf