Facebook Publication Date: 4/16/2020 16:04

Notes from the Coronavirus cubicle.

Ok. Here are my thoughts on this.

The worker featured in the short is dedicated; 17 years at a world famous store, which, stipulated has low margins, as does every grocery store. If he does get infected, will Zabar’s pay for his treatment? If he develops symptoms, but is not confirmed to have COVID-19, will his employer step up and pay for his necessary time away, or is he on his own? If one of the angry customers assaults him, then what? Is he getting hazard pay? He has a family. If he gets a sore throat, will he still come in so his only family gets fed?

A lot of my life has been spent in social services, where workers were expected to deal with modest pay, but were said to have otherwise been compensated with ‘do-good dollars’; that the personal satisfaction we got from serving made up for a living wage.

That’s not true in social services, and it certainly is not true for grocery workers, now considered essential, but without the protections and the respect, other than a ‘thank you’ as they stock shelves or ring us up.

What will a ‘thank you’ that means something actually look like later as we look back on this crisis?

According to the workers, Zabar’s has lost an employee to the virus. The General Manager didn’t mention it; didn’t see fit to honor the ultimate sacrifice to insure that people got what they needed. All his platitudes and his long face crumble in the face of that.

So what does this mean for us, who have more power than we like to say we have?

It may mean that we pay a bit more for food, in order to insure that the people who take care of us also get taken care of. It may mean that we see health care as essential as we say the workers are. It may mean that we give something other than lip service to the ‘heroic’ nature of jobs some of us look down upon.

It may mean that we think really hard about the sacrifices undertaken on all of our behalf, and figure out our responsibility, our culpability, in our part of the transaction–asking more, not just of big box stores, but also specialty retailers like Zabar’s and Trader Joes, neither of which are unionized, neither of which have made more than corporate mewings about the welfare of the workers they, and we, depend upon.

We need to tell ourselves the truth about who actually makes the lives we live possible.

The curtain that has been drawn back on just how the sausage is made in terms of that cannot be shut. This is who we are. But this is not how we have to stay.

An essential worker takes us inside the changed universe of his grocery store.

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