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Readers of print newspapers will have already noticed that something’s up with the Sunday funnies. As the AP reported:
“More than 70 comic strips and panels — ranging from Garry Trudeau’s ‘Doonesbury’ to Jim Toomey’s ‘Sherman’s Lagoon’ and Jeff Keane’s ‘Family Circus’ — will each have six symbols hidden in the artwork to honor workers on the frontlines of the coronavirus pandemic.
“Look closely and you’ll find a mask for medical workers and caregivers, a steering wheel for delivery workers, a shopping cart for grocery workers, an apple for teachers, a fork for food service workers and a microscope for medical researchers.”
It’s a lovely tribute, but something’s been gnawing at me about these sorts of efforts to “honor the frontline workers” that I’ve been struggling to put my finger on.
Grocery workers, food service workers, and delivery workers are deemed to be “essential” workers, and presumed to have high risk of contracting Covid-19, though, to the best of my knowledge, there are no firm statistics on the degree to which those occupations place these workers at higher risk (vs. drawing from demographic groups at higher risk for other reasons, such as living in large households).
The use of the term “frontline” connotes that they are on the front line of the battle against coronavirus, much as soldiers in the thick of the battle, though, surprisingly, the label “frontline” actually was in use well before the pandemic as a way to describe customer-facing and other low-paid workers doing such tasks as burger-flipping, hotel bathroom-cleaning, call-center answering, and more.
And among these workers, in this odd world we inhabit now, in a wholly-arbitrary manner,
- some lower-skill, manual-labor/working-class/”frontline” workers lost their jobs entirely and were more-than-made-whole due to bonus unemployment benefits,
- others were kept on payroll due to Paycheck Protection Program benefits, other bailout benefits, or their employers’ available cashflow, without needing to clock in,
- yet others lost jobs/hours but, due to individual states’ inability to process claims and/or their place in line, were left completely without resources,
- and alongside all of these were workers who were deemed “essential workers” and continued to work at their jobs — in some cases, relieved to have work; in others, worried about risks (and, again, though there are no statistics — that I can find, anyway — quantifying the degree to which these jobs ended up resulting in greater contagion risk, either before or after protective policies became established, the worry is real) to themselves or family members, or struggling to figure out how to clock in every day when children are home from school or daycare. Among these jobs are those which are unarguably “essential” as well as those which are deemed reasonably safe but nonetheless come by their classification as something of a loophole (yes, here I’m thinking of lawn service workers being deemed “essential” in Illinois because they were classified as “agricultural” workers).
- Plus, in addition, more jobs were added — not nearly to the same degree as jobs were lost, but supermarkets needed more workers to disinfect, grocery delivery services saw added customers, warehouses needed more fulfillment workers. Some workers — but only some — saw pay boosts at the same time as others were thrust into financial crisis.
A worker at Target
TGT
KSS
Is it fair?
No, of course not — but neither is it unfair. “Fair” just isn’t the right word to use here to express the unavoidable arbitrariness to the situation. (Yes, Congress could have avoided the issue of more-than-100% unemployment benefits, but so many other elements are simply inevitable.)
And it seems to me that our inability to truly accept this arbitrariness, as a part of the arbitrariness of life in so many other ways, has produced the holding out of these workers as not merely “essential business employees” but “heroes.” Is the woman who rings up your groceries making a heroic choice to serve the public, because she cares about the well-being of her community and knows they depend on her? Maybe, but it’s more likely that she simply needs the income. She may be afraid of becoming infected, she may judge the risk fairly small (and, again, her actual risk hasn’t yet been quantified), she may be jealous of her friends whiling away the time at home collecting unemployment, she may be grateful she is collecting a paycheck — any or all of these may be true but we ease our discomfort at this reality by calling these workers “heroes.”
So why does this matter? Why not do this small thing of applauding people whose economic struggles often seem to go unnoticed by middle-class folk working at home?
I ask myself why it irritates me. In part, it seems to shrug off the struggles of those in other life circumstances, in particular, parents who must work at home but do not qualify for the “emergency child care” (such as is offered in Illinois only to the children of those deemed “essential workers”), as well as, of course, the legion of unemployed.
But it also seems to me that we, as Americans in the twenty-first century, are lacking in our ability to put this all into some sort of reasonable perspective.
Consider, after all, that yesterday was the 76th anniversary of D-Day. We celebrate the men who landed on the beaches of Normandy as heroes, and indeed, some of these men volunteered for particularly dangerous duties, or volunteered for military service even prior to the draft. But others were, after all, draftees, assigned to Omaha Beach and to the first wave by happenstance.*
Or consider the subsequent generation of soldiers serving when the U.S. was attacked on September 11, 2001. They had enlisted at a time when the country was at peace — the army, after all, had for two decades been using the recruiting slogan “Be All That You Can Be” to promise enlistees that career and personal development, rather than battlefields, awaited them. Some rose to the occasion, but others objected to being deployed — in a different way, it was again happenstance that they happened to be serving at this point in time.
What I’m trying to get at is this: just as your dad told you when your older sister got to stay up later than you, life isn’t fair. And that’s an issue that’s at the center of social insurance policy every bit as much as the question of frontline workers during a pandemic.
The government can try to remedy some of this unfairness through programs such as Social Security, unemployment compensation, Medicare and Medicaid, or what goes by the general label of “social insurance” among policy experts in the U.S. and more broadly outside the U.S. where social insurance programs are more extensive. (See my earlier explainer on the topic.)
How far should the federal government go, in the form of providing “hazard pay” or bonuses for customer-facing workers, or sick/unemployment benefits for anyone who expresses worry about Covid-19, or falls into a high-risk health classification?
There is no simple answer — because fundamentally the government cannot simply undo all the unfairness of life. Attempts to do so can end up with unintended consequences, whether we like it or not. Even those countries with social insurance systems that would appear to be models of generosity, discover along the way that they need to be reformed because they become too generous and costly — to take one example, the Dutch equivalent of Social Security Disability Insurance has historically provided extensive benefits, beginning benefits at the onset of disability/sickness rather than requiring SSDI’s ordeal of qualifying for benefits and replacing pay at a much more generous level. But it was so easy to qualify for such generous benefits that in the mid-1990s, the Netherlands spent 6 – 8 times as much on its program as the U.S., and has been engaged in reforms since that point precisely to reduce costs.
It is fundamentally the social insurance equivalent of the Serenity Prayer:
“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, and Wisdom to know the difference.”
It isn’t fair that present circumstances for “frontline” workers are so varied. It isn’t fair that, even among workers who work with equal determination and diligence, some are better off financially than others. It isn’t fair that, at retirement, some workers have greater retirement incomes (or income-replacement rates) than others, even if they have all done the best they could to save for their proverbial rainy day. To what extent can we change this? Accept the unchangeable? And does our use of the label “hero” prevent us from knowing the difference?
*I’m happy to stand corrected if I’m wrong on this.
As always, you’re invited to comment at JaneTheActuary.com!