Let’s talk about essential workers. But first, let’s take a look back. A few weeks ago, I wrote about how wages get assigned in the capitalist system. The short version? Capitalism assigns wages to people according to, roughly, the ‘social worth’ it assigns to them. Society makes certain judgments about the acceptable standard of living for certain people. Or, in Marxist terms, the accepted value of their labor power. By contrast, the value workers add has nothing to do with wages.
What’s that got to do with essential workers? Glad you asked.
Essential Workers…
In the U.S., we live in a rather confusing society. The federal government issues guidelines as to which workers count as ‘essential’ or ‘key.’ In fact, the Department of Homeland Security issues them. Interesting, right? However, this being the U.S., the states control most of it. The National Conference of State Legislatures curates the various state guidelines.
They break the list of essential workers into various categories. Most of these categories relate to the production of key goods – agriculture, building trades, transportation, water, et al. Some relate to social services such as child care and housing. Of course, they also include education, emergency services, and health care.
They don’t really offer a definition for ‘essential workers.’ At least not a definition as such. Rather, they assume we know what it means and instead offer checklists.
…and Wages/Value
This raises for us the question: what are ‘essential workers,’ exactly? Sure, they’re people who work in certain industries. But what do they have in common? The Center for Economic and Policy Research took a survey of people with the label. What did it find? Essential workers: usually don’t hold a college degree, tend to be black or Latinx, and earn low wages.
Here I think we arrive at something informative. Essential workers add value. Lots of it. Especially when we look at the agricultural and building sectors. But they earn low wages. This tells us, again, that capitalism doesn’t assign wages according to whether people add value. Companies don’t tally how much value people add and then pay them for it. That’s not how wages work.
And so, what is an essential worker? I’ll take a shot at a definition. Essential workers are workers who add value, i.e., produce something people want, provide services people need and want, but whose labor power has low value, i.e., society judges that they deserve a low standard of living. I think this accords well with what we already know about how society treats, e.g., meatpacking workers, ambulance drivers, and so on.
Perhaps most interesting to the left? States increasingly assign the label ‘essential’ to teachers. This matches the broader trend toward the proletarianization of the teaching profession. Books like No Shortcuts point out why unions need teachers to build the future of the union movement. And teachers took center stage in some of the biggest recent strike waves.
