Essential Workers

All too often, it takes a crisis to cut through the socialized propaganda that we consider reality and help us better understand the actual reality in which we are living.

For example, in the US we had an understanding of our safety and security, built up by years of educational and media propaganda, prior to 9/11 that was drastically altered by 9/11. Reality itself didn’t change. We were not less safe on 9/12 than we were on 9/10. But the event shook loose some of the built up layers of our misunderstanding of reality.

So, with COVID-19, have the false fortifications of who and what is important for our functioning society and economy been shaken and dislodged. The term Essential Workers has grown from being rarely heard outside of the disaster response field to being ubiquitous. and our understanding of who is essential has undergone a significant transformation.

This should move us to a concerted examination of how we fulfill our needs in a modern society and an explosion of assessment, criticism, and the rise of alternative structures and methods of organization in order to fulfill our needs. But the existing system has such an inherent powerful capacity to resist change, that this will happen, as usual, only on the margins.

But what has broken past those margins, thanks to the crisis, is a truer understanding of who are the essential workers in our economy.

Humans need food, clothing, and shelter as the most basic needs to survive, and, of course, much more than that to sustain us socially and intellectually, but we will start with the basics. Who provides these things in a modern society? The capitalist myth that is part of the great facade cracked by the Covid-19 crisis is that we each provide these things for ourselves. Through the falsehood described often as rugged individualism, we individually procure the means (money) of obtaining our basic needs through the market. The market, the propaganda continues, is built upon the principles of fairness and competition. This is bullshit.

Every type of economy is an interdependent series of cooperative interactions. Some roles in each economy are more essential for the fulfillment of basic human needs than others. So, we have learned a bit better that the food producers, food preparers, and food transporters are among the most important, or most essential workers in our modern society. These are things that the vast majority of people no longer do for themselves and, as such, are fully reliant on other people’s work in order to survive. Having peeked behind the facade, we now see and cannot unsee (though the propaganda will continue to resist acknowledging the reality) that farmers and fieldworkers, food processors and transporters, and people working at the point of sale, be it grocery stores, convenience stores, restaurants or online, are essential workers. They cannot stop their work without the great risk of many people suffering. This understanding is a breakthrough. These workers, commonly among the least well compensated and most marginalized, are as important to the function of society as the workers who provide and maintain water, electricity, and communications infrastructure.

It is long past time we recognize this essential work and compensate it accordingly.