Whose Work is Essential?

And shouldn’t “essential” mean “well-paid”?

The empty streets, the masks, the death reports — the last couple of months have felt apocalyptic. However, thanks to the labour of what we now call “essential workers,” a worse crisis is being averted.

The fear of an actual apocalypse had made what’s important very clear: healthcare, a livable planet, food, shelter, creative exchange, and each other.

Many of the folks standing between humanity and total disaster are in helping professions: teaching, social work, youth work, childcare, policing, personal support work, nursing, firefighting and paramedic services. Does hazard pay thank these guys enough for all that they’re doing? In a lot of cases, it doesn’t even bring them up to what they should have been making before the pandemic. Heck, for some, it doesn’t even bring them up to a living wage.

Culturally, we communicate who is valued by who is compensated well. So shouldn’t “essential” translate to “well-paid”? It should, but the level of how “essential” a job is has never been the metric used for deciding how labour is compensated. If it was, there wouldn’t be such variability in how publicly-funded helping professions are remunerated within and across sectors.

We often talk about the problem of underfunding to explain why some helping jobs pay more than others. A more appropriate framing would be that there are systemic funding discrepancies. For example, policing is the largest single…