We Must Protect Essential Workers

By SETH SANDRONSKY

The 1% is using the pandemic to increase its income and wealth, and placing our health at risk. How? One way is to spend less money to protect workers. That raises their risk of infection and death, and ours. To push the Senate to increase workplace safety, in mid-July advocates released a short but sweet video available on YouTube now.

Michael Leon Guerrero is the executive director of the Labor Network for Sustainability. “Essential workers are keeping us alive,” he said in a statement. “But we’re not doing enough to keep them alive.”

The video is titled “In Memoriam” from the words of the late labor leader Mother Jones: “Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living.”

A young man eulogizes his immigrant father, an occupational therapist, who died from COVID-19 contracted at work. A widow describes her deceased husband. He lost his life as a postal worker on the job.

We depend on these essential workers. Some are in unions. Largely union-free, farmworkers harvest the food that we cook and eat. Their risky working conditions in the fields without proper protective gear, sanitary facilities and social distancing endanger consumers’ lives.

A similar equation applies to healthcare workers. We see them when we are ill. Their safety is ours, too. This is a social relationship.

The marketplace of prices and profits hides that relationship. Marx called this process the fetishism of the commodity, when it disappears people’s labor. The pandemic reveals this labor process, hammering home the links between producers of goods and services and the consumers of those commodities. This is not quantum physics.

Demands to help essential workers to labor safely are straightforward. Adequate funding for personal protective equipment; paid sick leave; full health care coverage and for the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration to enact an infectious disease standard. (OSHA has been missing in action during the pandemic.)

In May, the Democrat-controlled House passed the HEROES Act bill. It aimed to help the working majority struggling to make ends meet on and off the job, but omitted Medicare for All and a Universal Basic Income.

On July 20, the GOP-majority Senate was to return to session, and it may take up its version of that House bill. In the “In Memoriam” video, labor and safety advocates such as Jessica Martinez, co-executive director of the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health, asked for us to call the Senate to demand vital workplace protections in the HEROES Act.

Against that backdrop, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) instead prioritized liability protection from virus-related damages for businesses, hospitals and schools. At nearly the same time, pandemic unemployment checks of $600 weekly were set to end on July 31. Losing that help would harm working families struggling with losses of income, health insurance and rent and mortgage payments. At press time, 35 million workers were receiving regular or pandemic unemployment checks, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

Jane Fonda, the Academy Award-winning actor and longtime social justice activist, helped to produce the video. English and Spanish translations of the “In Memoriam” video are on MoveOn’s YouTube channel. A reliable source of information about essential workers is , which contains a link to the video.

Seth Sandronsky lives and works in Sacramento. He is a journalist and member of the Pacific Media Workers Guild. Email sethsandronsky@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, August 15, 2020

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