What is an essential worker? What does it truly mean to be viewed as “essential?”

The concept of the “essential worker,” while not new by any means, rose in popularity in 2020 with the occurrence of the COVID-19 pandemic. It came to signify those on the frontlines of the pandemic, holding up our social and economic infrastructure as the rest of the world fell to a standstill.

With this categorization came a tentative flood of support; in the earliest days of the pandemic, we saw parades, signs, and events, all in the name of those putting their lives on the line. However, this romance surrounding essential workers created a harmful dissonance in the public consciousness, both in terms of who we tend to perceive as essential and the everyday reality of what it means to be essential.

The “Essential Critical Infrastructure Worker” list released by the California State Public Health Office in 2020 includes a multitude of jobs many would conventionally consider essential. For example, jobs in “Health and Public Health” and “Emergency Services” tend to take center stage in our minds when we picture an essential worker. This is for good reason, as reported by PBS, “Nearly half of U.S. health care workers – 46 percent of those surveyed – said they often felt burned out in 2022, the CDC report found, marking an increase of 14 percentage points since 2018.”

While the importance of healthcare workers during the pandemic cannot be overstated, the State Public Health Office listed several hundreds of other jobs, many of which went overlooked. In “Food and Agriculture,” jobs such as farm workers and factory workers were marked as essential, professions that, while not typically associated with the idea of essential, are fundamental to the basis of our everyday lives.

A disproportionate number of the jobs on the list are low-paying jobs traditionally undervalued within society, performed by already marginalized individuals. In 2020, the Center for Economic and Policy Research found that, “nearly two-thirds (64.4 percent) of frontline workers are women ... just over four-in-ten [41.2 percent] frontline workers are Black, Hispanic, Asian-American/Pacific Islander, or some category other than white ... [and] more than one-third of workers in many frontline industries live in low-income families.” This pattern of traditionally low-income professions being occupied most regularly by marginalized groups creates a vacuum of even more potent risks facing those deemed “essential.”

This designation, rather than providing them the support and resources, heightened pre-existing power imbalances between employers and employees, as workers feel compelled to continue to work amidst exploitation out of fear of losing their jobs. By being portrayed as willingly selfless, heroically working despite the conditions, the marginalized reality of essential workers is obscured. As found by a study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, “... portraying essential workers as heroes led to lower levels of perceived injustice, sympathy and outrage, compared with acknowledging essential workers as victims of inadequate support.”

As Manuel Pastor, director of USC’s Equity Research Institute in 2021, notes that COVID-19 “demonstrated how a bevy of low-paid employees — agricultural and factory laborers, truck drivers, janitors and health care workers among them — are essential to the nation’s overall vitality. Their work holds together our society, he notes, yet they’re not rewarded with dignity, respect and pay.” This was especially apparent during the pandemic, and it seems to be a trend that continues today.

Directly following the pandemic in 2023, wages actually rose for low-income workers. CBS reported that “the lowest-paid saw their real income grow 9%, according to a new analysis from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI). Even accounting for inflation, income for workers in the bottom 10% grew faster than in any recovery since 1979.”

CBS attributed this increase to two key factors. The first aspect noted was government assistance: “government support in the form of unemployment benefits, enhanced tax credits, eviction bans, and rent assistance helped keep millions of lower-income Americans financially afloat.” The second factor was the mass layoffs that low-income workers saw at the beginning of the pandemic. While that seems counterintuitive, CBS reported that those layoffs were found to have actually motivated workers “to find other, better, jobs.”

However, this increase in wages and push in the labor market for low-income workers slowed in the years following the pandemic, eventually coming to a screeching halt by 2025. An article by USA Today from earlier this year lays out the reality, “ ... lower-paid workers are no longer catching up. And it appears they're falling behind again.”

With the world’s slow return to normalcy came a resurgence and rebalancing of the labor market as people went back to work, coupled with the repeal of pandemic-era government assistance. While this was a relief for mid to high-income jobs, low-income workers were the ones who benefitted most from both the pandemic’s labor storage and added assistance, so “they had further to fall.” USA Today reported that, “In November, pay in professional services was up 5.1% annually, versus 3.8% at restaurants and 1.7% at hotels. Wages fell 2.2% at barber shops and beauty salons.”

This rebound was unfortunately very predictable. While low-income workers saw some improvements in wages and quality of life, those advancements were supported by short-term, easily eroded “solutions” that were only meant to alleviate some of the overwhelming economic pressure of the pandemic. Stimulus checks and rent assistance were mere flimsy band-aids meant to keep heads above water, not provide long-term solutions to long-standing socioeconomic issues in how society treats the most valuable and vulnerable yet undersupported people in our workforce.

If being deemed “essential” is functionally a performative expression, how do we start supporting and uplifting low-income workers in ways that generate substantial change?

The Center on Budget and Policy suggests “expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit and raising the minimum wage,” an idealistic, if a bit obvious, solution. Another effective approach would be a greater focus on expanding and bolstering the services most used/needed by low-income workers. This could include food, health, and housing assistance, but as the CBP also notes, “increasing access to affordable child care” and “[helping] people prepare for and enter the workforce by promoting proven training programs and by funding subsidized employment/registered apprenticeships.” Providing workers with a greater ability to advocate and push back for themselves is yet another solution we should be considering, “[supporting] collective bargaining rights so workers have the opportunity and power needed to press for better wages and benefits.”

By focusing on these long-term solutions, we can reverse the paradox of the “essential” worker, ensuring that those most fundamental in our workforce and vulnerable are treated with the respect and given the resources they deserve.