Essential worker Tonya Allen (second from right) leads a meeting at Hamilton Families, a shelter for unhoused families in the Tenderloin on Wednesday, July 1, 2020 in San Francisco, California. | Gabrielle Lurie / San Francisco Chronicle
San Francisco Chronicle • Jul. 19, 2020 • Story by Ryan Kost • Video by Erika Carlos • Photos by Gabrielle Lurie
Search 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 stay-at-home 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 Merriam-Webster 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 lowest-paid 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 hardest-hit in San Francisco, very likely, in part, because Latinos hold a disproportionate percentage of service-worker (and therefore essential-worker) 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 T-shirts 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 full-time minimum-wage worker cannot afford a one-bedroom 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.