When governments implemented lockdowns and social distancing measures to curb the spread of COVID-19, many workers were deemed ‘essential’ and were required to continue working as normal. These workers included grocery store staff, healthcare workers, farm laborers and many others. Read More
Essential workers risked their health to keep societies running, and many even lost their lives. To make matters worse, most jobs that were deemed ‘essential’ are known to be precarious, poorly paid, and generally unsafe. Supermarket cashiers, farm laborers and professional carers, for example, are typically poorly paid and their indispensable societal contributions are often overlooked.
Though much gratitude and respect for these workers emerged during the pandemic, the fact that countless people in precarious jobs were expected to keep working for poverty wages while risking their lives highlights the huge disparities that still exist in Western societies.
Dr. Ellen Scully-Russ and her colleagues at the George Washington University recently explored the possibility of whether this new-found respect could inspire a transformation, leading to fair wages, benefits, and job security for essential workers.
They devised a conceptual framework that could help to improve working conditions for essential workers. Their framework incorporates three elements, which can be summarized as ‘distributive justice’, ‘learning’, and ‘everyday ethics’.
Distributive justice describes the equitable distribution of resources, opportunities, and vulnerability in society. Today, many middle-class professionals can work from home, receive high salaries and benefits, and have greater professional freedom. In contrast, most essential workers have low wages, long working hours, limited benefits, and no control over their professional duties.
These inequalities are systemic in nature, meaning that they are the result of a long-standing structural order in society that needs to be repaired for equity to be truly achieved. As they are rooted in how work was organized for decades, interventions aimed at changing the current situation will need to target long-established social structures.
The second element of the framework, ‘learning’, opens up questions about what can be learned in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, but also who we should learn from. Essential workers should be given the opportunity to highlight issues they experience and propose solutions for achieving greater equality.
Finally, the team’s framework emphasizes the need to surface the ethics underpinning economic activities and how they impact inequities in the distribution of resources. For instance, how are we valuing and caring for all workers, especially those who contribute most to society?
The team’s recent work is part of a broader project aimed at sparking constructive conversations among frontline workers, frontline worker advocates, industry leaders and other stakeholders about the need to justly reward essential workers for their valuable contribution to society.
Dr. Scully-Russ and her colleagues have been exploring the processes through which new values and morals can emerge, propagate, and ultimately catalyze societal transformation. They hope that their work will invite essential workers, activists, and others to share their views about how to mend long-standing inequities in the USA.
