San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
WHAT IS ENOUGH?:
HOW WE HONOR OUR ESSENTIAL WORKERS
SSearch inquiries for the word “essential” began to trend on Google the week of March 8. Seven days later they hit their peak. Same for phrases like “essential work” and “essential worker.” Then the inquiries dropped just as fast as they rose. The trend lines look something like a sharp mountain surrounded by plains. Something like this: ____/\____ ¶ This was the same time the Bay Area and (shortly after) the state of California issued the nation’s first stayathome orders — March 16 and March 20, respectively — and told residents to shelter in place while making an exception for “essential” work. Doctors and nurses couldn’t stay at home in the midst of a pandemic. That seemed clear. But neither could grocery store cashiers or farmworkers or food processors or social workers — and on and on the list went. ¶ Their work, which doesn’t get noticed much, was suddenly essential. Or, as MerriamWebster might put it: “of the utmost importance.” ¶ This was, for me (and I imagine millions of others), a surreal moment. ¶ Immediately, I thought of my mom and all the years she spent checking groceries so that we could afford our own.
Certain jobs come with certain risks. A firefighter, for instance, might expect that one day she’ll have to run into a burning building. But before the novel coronavirus began to spread in China, before it had claimed more than half a million lives worldwide, I doubt most people thought they might serve on the front lines of a pandemic. Definitely not those with some of our lowestpaid and most-ignored jobs.
There have been many attempts to crunch the numbers and find out who, exactly, we’re talking about when we talk about essential workers. The percentages vary, but the baseline is always the same. Women are more likely than men to be essential workers — and people of color make up far more of the essential workforce than they do the workforce as a whole. It’s no surprise, then, that these workers “of the utmost importance” tend to make less money, too. In California, according to a study by Business.org, essential workers make 14% less than the average worker. Nationwide the disparity is closer to 18%.
Now, not only do essential workers make the least, they’re also asked to risk the most. Infections have ripped through meatpacking plants, garment factories, homeless shelters, grocery stores — and, as a result, communities of color, too. The Mission’s Latino community was one of the hardesthit in San Francisco, very likely, in part, because Latinos hold a disproportionate percentage of service-worker (and therefore essentialworker) jobs. (Latinos are also more likely to live in multigenerational housing.)
My mom’s first job was at the grocery store her father managed. This was a position held proudly, a sort of proof the American Dream was real. He’d started as the son of farmer immigrants, tending fields of sugar beets — white roots made tan by the dirt they grow in — that look a bit like fat carrots.
Over the years, my mom would work her way up to a management position, too. But after my parents divorced, she went back to checking. There was more flexibility in it for a single mother of two. So, when I was young — young enough that I still needed help packing my lunch and getting to school — my mom would slice apples and cut crusts and walk me to the bus stop. Usually, she’d wait there until I’d found a seat, the doors had closed and I was far enough away that I couldn’t see her anymore. Then, she’d walk home, probably fix another cup of coffee, set curls in her hair, make her eyelashes thick with mascara and head to work at the supermarket. She’d spend all day on her feet, sliding items over the scanner and bagging groceries if there wasn’t a bagger to help.
I remember asking her how she could type so quickly on an adding machine. Her fingers were so, so fast. She hardly
paid attention, almost never made a mistake. “I do this all day,” she said.
For a while, from March to May or maybe even June, people all around the Bay Area (and the country) clapped as the sun set and shouted out their living room windows in honor of essential workers. Together, we called them “brave” and offered our sincere and abashed thanks. San Francisco Mayor London Breed dedicated a week in June to their labor, while Whole Foods gave employees Tshirts that read “hero” on the front and “hardcore” on the back. Some companies issued hazard pay, an extra dollar or two an hour, to their employees.
But those extras are already drying up at drugstores and supermarkets and Amazon dot com. (Though, to be fair, Amazon followed up with a $500 bonus.)
So, forget the money and the cheering. What might be enough?
Enough might include a livable wage. San Francisco’s minimum wage is higher than most at $16.07 an hour. That still falls short of the $20.82 an hour suggested for San Francisco by the Living Wage Calculator. (That’s just for one person without a child; a single mother of two would need $46.74 an hour.) Nationwide, the minimum wage — $7.25 an hour — hasn’t changed in more than a decade. That means, a fulltime minimumwage worker cannot afford a onebedroom rental in 95% of U.S. counties, according to a recent report by the National Low Income Housing Coalition in Washington D.C.
Enough might include a national program of robust health care and paid time off. For the farmworkers tending the fields at Del Bosque Farm — a farm about two hours southeast of San Francisco in Firebaugh (Fresno County) that specializes in melons — enough might include a path toward legal status. “If they’re essential, they should have legal status in this country,” Joe Del Bosque, the farm’s owner, told me one warm morning. “They’re not asking for the moon.”
He kept on: “For a while, they were being called heroes. Now I think they’re forgotten again. But they’re still here.”
Sometimes “enough” is harder to define. For the past couple months I’ve spent hours talking to people whose jobs were suddenly deemed essential. I’ve watched as they’ve worked and moved through their days. I’ve asked each of them what it might look like to honor their work even as the applause and the thanks fade away.
“We joke ‘Oh now we’re important,’ ” says Tonya Allen, the operations manager for a family homeless shelter in the Tenderloin. “We have more essential workers than we thought we did.”
Her shelter, on Golden Gate Avenue, has had only one case of the coronavirus in 4½ months. When she found out that she had been exposed to the virus, she could have been afraid or mad or resentful. All three might have made sense; she’s a cancer patient on the tail end of treatment. Mostly, though, she was annoyed — annoyed to be at home. She wanted to be at work. Her job is important, she says. She takes care of the most vulnerable the same way doctors take care of the sick. If people saw her and her work and the people she helps in that light, that would make all the difference.
Briana Sidney is a worker/owner at Mandela Grocery Cooperative in Oakland. She remembers the first day of the shelterinplace order because she stayed a few more hours to help after a long line had formed outside the market and wound up with a parking ticket. She’s been called “brave” a lot since then. So many earnest thankyous, too. Now, she says, she just hopes people won’t forget that they once saw the value in her work.
“Essential workers are human,” Sidney says. “Hopefully now (this moment) has opened up everybody’s mind. This is a real job like any job.”
Muni gave Shaun Reeves the option to stay home when all this began and bus routes were cut throughout the city. He thought about taking the transit agency up on the offer. Then he thought about all the other essential workers. “How are they going to get to work? ... We’re the veins of the city.” Wasn’t long before he volunteered to drive a special bus route for those potentially sick with COVID19. He’d dress up in a white, paperthin bunny suit and pull on his N95 mask. Sheets of notquiteclear plastic separated him from his passengers. “That’s when it really hit me,” he says. “That’s when I really felt like I was doing something.”
If people want to honor his work, Reeves says, they can just be kind when they catch a ride on his bus. Last week, three people said “thankyou” as he cut south through Market Street on the No. 9 route. He seemed surprised.
“I guess this is a pretty good day today,” he said. “Got people thanking me. Traffic was good.”
I never talked much to my friends about what my mom did to keep my brother and me housed and fed. Their parents were lawyers and pilots and commodity traders. (I didn’t know what the last one meant exactly, but I knew it meant money.)
It’s not that I was embarrassed by my mom’s work. I knew it was hard work. I knew that she found joy in her work. There’s still a hazy sketch of a memory from when she switched departments and started splitting her time between the cash register and product display. She’d come home and tell me what she’d done to an endcap (the display at the end of an aisle) to make it pop. Still, I had a distinct awareness (even then) that most people didn’t think much of the work she did, if they even stopped to notice at all.
Last week, I woke up early to watch a long string of big trucks pull up to Canyon Market and drop off plasticwrapped pallets full of every kind of grocery — soda water and chips and sausage and yogurt and milk and bright orange fish fillets. I watched as workers sorted and shelved it all, bringing the store back to life after a weekend of being picked over and left bare. And then I watched the women (only women) at the cash registers scan and bag groceries, then wipe everything down with disinfectant. Again, I thought about my mom.
I was never embarrassed by what my mom did. I just knew she deserved better. I knew she deserved to have her work valued.
“We joke ‘Oh now we’re important.’ We have more essential workers than we thought we did.” TONYA ALLEN, operations manager for a family homeless shelter in the Tenderloin