Let's Value Our Essential Workers All The Time, Not Just During Pandemics

Free market capitalism exists to glorify, extol, venerate and reward entrepreneurs, creators and innovators with experience, education and a relentless hunger for innovation. But it seems to exist just as much to punish people without experience and educations, namely unskilled workers or kids just starting out. 

I suspect that part of the reason so many people seem positively apoplectic about the prospect of raising the minimum wage to fifteen dollars is because a lot of people on the right, and on the left as well, believe, consciously or unconsciously, that people who make what our society deems the absolute legal minimum should be punished for not being further up the socioeconomic ladder rather than rewarded for doing meaningful, valuable labor that just so happens to not require a college education or degree. 

The thinking seems to go that if we reward people who mop floors at hospitals or flip burgers at McDonald’s or stock shelves at Wal-Mart with living wages, benefits and, god forbid, vacation time and generous paternity and maternity leave policies then that would bankrupt businesses founded and led by the entrepreneurs, creators and innovators whose lives we value so much more than their employees. 

Jokes on them! This lady gets 50 dollars every time she’s used in a mocking meme; she’s a millionaire now.

Alternately, a lot of Conservatives seem to be of the mindset that paying unskilled, uneducated workers a living wage would constitute an unforgivable insult to the police officers, soldiers and nurses who are constantly invoked as “real Americans” with “real jobs” who make a “real contribution” to society. 

On the Facebook accounts of Trump supporters, a curious dichotomy exists: you can either take care of veterans and police officers and active-duty soldiers and other folks deemed heroes or you can pay laborers a decent wage but you most assuredly cannot do both in what is only the richest, most powerful country in the world. It never seems to occur to these people that you can do both because this bullshit dichotomy encourages poor people to see other poor people and underclass progress as their real enemy instead of CEOs who get 30 million dollar bonuses even after laying off thousands of workers. 

Second-generation evangelical monster and hypocrite Jerry Falwell Jr., an ostensible man of the lord and advocate for Jesus, summarized this contempt for the poor when he notoriously insisted, “Think about it. Why have Americans been able to do more to help people in need around the world than any other country in history? It’s because of free enterprise, freedom, ingenuity, entrepreneurism and wealth. A poor person never gave anyone a job. A poor person never gave anybody charity, not of any real volume. It’s just common sense to me.”

Falwell Jr. does not go on to say “fuck the poor and praise the rich” but that’s clearly the message. It’s free enterprise, freedom, ingenuity, entrepreneurism and wealth that are the heroes that must never be questioned and the stupid, useless poor who must be shunned by people of the Lord and sinners alike.

So one of the unexpected upsides of this awful pandemic has been seeing a society that otherwise goes out of its way to de-value laborers, to deride and mock them as losers and idiots and white trash who should be grateful for the crumbs their societal betters see fit to give them suddenly valued as the everyday heroes that make our society run. 

It’s been fascinating seeing people who stock shelves and man the kitchen at fast food restaurants and clean up at hospitals or at the post office honored as “essential” to a culture that previously heaped scorn and derision on them instead of praise. 

We’re seeing who is truly essential in this economy and who is not, and it’s marketing executives or chief financial officers: it’s everyday people who get up every morning and do jobs that do not pay well, and oftentimes do not carry benefits or engender much in the way of respect when there’s not a crisis threatening our future and our way of life. 

I usually fast-forward through ads but I made an exception for a Wal-Mart ad recently lionizing Wal-Mart employees as heroes willing to risk their lives to keep our society functioning for low wages and job hazards that include getting the disease at work and dying.

It was nice seeing workers praised instead of bosses but I couldn’t help but notice that the commercial was narrated by the CEO of Wal-Mart, who probably makes tens of millions of dollars a year while his employees struggle to make enough to pay the rent. 

I just hope that this newfangled appreciation of workers continues after the pandemic is over, and that we don’t go back to vilifying and mocking people we finally have to come to realize are essential all the time, not just when things are very bad, the way they are now.

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