SUDDENLY ESSENTIAL

Warehouse, grocery, social service and other workers join list of key jobs in pandemic

RohanTrevon Brown works for the state Department of Social Services, deciding who gets medical, supplemental food and other benefits. “I've always been told that we're not essential,” Brown said. “You're not essential, you're — for better choice of words — ‘less-than.’ After a while, I hate to say, but you become used to that. So I put myself in the ‘less-than’ category.” Things changed in March. “Immediately at the beginning of this pandemic, I expected to be less-than. But overnight, within the blink of an eye, I'm now being told that ‘hey, you're essential,’” he said, “I’m like, ‘OK, what does that mean? How does that change?’ I didn't have a say in the matter, of course.”

Both federal and state governments have issued lists of so-called “essential” services and industries. Gov. Ned Lamont in March defined 11 “essential” industries, including health care, infrastructure, manufacturing, retail, food and agriculture and general services, among others.

But the ongoing health crisis and resulting lockdown has shown, some leaders say, that our definition of an “essential” worker needs to change. “It used to be considered that people like firefighters, police, corrections officers, that those were the essential workers. Pretty much everyone would give you the same list,” said Sal Luciano, president of the Connecticut AFL-CIO. “Essential workers have also been bus drivers, the people who clean the bathrooms, they’re the child care workers who take care of the firefighters’ children. They’re the CNAs in the convalescent homes.”

Brown would agree. Speaking as a representative of his own union, Council 4 AFSCME, he said his workload has only increased since the health crisis began.

“Some people work in the back of the house. I work in the front of the house. So, every day Monday through Friday, I'm the one that opens that door, closes it, and there's always people coming in, always going out,” he said. “I'm stationed in Stamford, Fairfield County, one of the richest counties in the United States. And my office is never empty.”

Communities of color

Black people in Connecticut are contracting and dying from the coronavirus at a higher rate than people of other ethnicities, based on the latest data shared by the state Department of Public Health.

One reason, according to David McGuire, executive director for the ACLU of Connecticut, is that “The burden of the virus is falling heavily on black and Latino workers who do not have the ability to stay home.”

“The low-wage, often no-benefit jobs deemed essential, like grocery store clerk, warehouse work, and home health aids, are the jobs that black and brown people disproportionately fill,” McGuire said.

Luciano said something similar: “Minorities, in these jobs, tend to be the majority of the workers,” Luciano said.

That’s why, according to Lorenzo Jones, people like Brown — who provide social services to the communities where those workers live — need to be considered essential. “I’m talking about neighborhood leaders, block club captains, building tenant association leadership, church leadership,” Jones said. “The people who actually, who I had not considered [essential] prior to the global pandemic, were literally the people who fight for, track and make sure that public policy is correct.”

Jones, co-founder of the Katal Center for Health Equity and Justice, said that when internet access is necessary for children to attend school, or when access to health care is necessary to keep people healthy, it’s the advocates who make those things possible for the most vulnerable who are essential.

“This is why the legal aid folks and the Civil Liberties Union and all these people who are tracking this stuff have become essential workers because that's the stuff that's slipping through the cracks,” he said.

And, considering how much harder the coronavirus is hitting African Americans, Jones said the focus needs to be on services that impact those communities.

“It's one thing to put people in categories around class and caste systems, right? But what's happening here, the thing that COVID is forcing everybody to look at is how that's different for black people,” Jones said.

Brown, whose job it is to help people obtain social services, said the disparity comes down to resource availability. “African American, Latino, Asian, these different minority groups, prior to this pandemic, they didn't have the resources that should be afforded to every American living here,” he said. “A lot of them did not have access to health care.”

‘Say your prayers’

Mary Jane Massimino was on the list of essential workers from the very beginning. She just wasn’t prepared for it.

She’s an assistant deli manager at Stop & Shop in Branford, and said she’s scared to go to work. “We, ourselves, didn't sign up for this, being in the middle of the pandemic, having to come to work,” Massimino said. “I understand a doctor, a nurse, they sign up to be with sick people. We didn’t.”

“You go home at night and say your prayers and hope you get up feeling all right to start all over again,” she said.

As an active member of the union, Brown said he had to fight for safety protocols, including masks and gloves and working remotely, when it became clear the social services offices would remain open. But he said he’s noticed there’s not much difference between himself and his clients. “A lot of times, we like to say that we’re on either side of the glass,” he said. “We always said that we're one paycheck away from being on the other side of the glass.”

Some of his coworkers have moved to the other side of the glass. “When you see your coworker that you've worked with for several years now be that person that might need additional food supplement ... it paints a bleak picture and it forces us to humble ourselves,” he said.