Don’t Blame Econ 101 for the Plight of Essential Workers

Who holds these kinds of jobs matters too: Low-wage jobs are more likely to be held by women, people of color, and immigrants, all of whom have less political capital than their paler male peers. “Economic power is saying, if I’ve got wealth, ‘Hell no, I’m not coming into work in a pandemic,’” Hamilton of Ohio State said. “Political power is saying, ‘We won’t tolerate certain people in certain sectors having to put themselves at risk. We just won’t tolerate it.’ The combination of political and economic insecurity makes certain people more vulnerable than others.”

Women are disproportionate holders of both minimum-wage and essential jobs. Many of these roles are poorly compensated because women hold them, economists think. The force of discrimination has tended to make obtaining high-wage, white-collar jobs more difficult for women; high-wage, white-collar jobs have not tended to offer the flexible work that many women want. Plus, care work is undervalued, given the societal expectation that women provide it for free. “It’s not an accident that two-thirds of all minimum-wage workers are women,” Ai-jen Poo, a co-founder of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, told me. “Women are disproportionately concentrated in positions of vulnerability within our economy.”

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Similarly, black and Latino workers get shunted into risky, low-wage professions, through educational discrimination, occupational segregation, and hiring prejudice. “We don’t dignify these jobs, but there’s an irony in that,” Hamilton said. “When we don’t have a pandemic, we look down on them; we stick our nose up at those types of jobs and don’t recognize the value that they generate.”

A third demographic group that tends to hold bad-but-essential jobs, immigrants, has fewer labor protections than native-born workers. Many are in the country on exploitative visas or do not have a documented status, which makes it difficult for them to protest dangerous working conditions.

How can America make these essential jobs good jobs? Any number of straightforward, tried and tested policy measures would better align workers’ social value with their economic value. Higher minimum wages and federal mandates for sick leave and family leave would drive billions of dollars into lower-wage workers’ pockets, and would help close the gap between the poor and the middle class. Expanding labor regulations to cover the informal, contingent, and gig workforce would ensure that nannies and Uber drivers have the same protections as office employees and construction workers. Encouraging unionization and allowing bargaining by sector would boost the power of the essential workforce too.

We made these essential jobs bad jobs. The burden is on us to make them good ones.

Annie Lowrey is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where she covers economic policy.