"Incredibly Important...Largely Invisible"

All photos here are from recent deliveries

“An unprecedented coalition of workers from some of America’s largest companies will strike on Friday. Workers from Amazon, Instacart, Whole Foods, Walmart, Target, and FedEx are slated to walk out on work, citing what they say is their employers’ record profits at the expense of workers’ health and safety during the coronavirus pandemic.”

                                                                                         The Intercept April 28, 2020

When police officers, firefighters, paramedics, and military personnel sign on, they know it is a reasonable expectation that they will face danger and death.  Doctors and nurses in Emergency Departments also know that they will be dealing with extreme health crises that make them vulnerable to physical and emotional distress, and in the case of COVID-19, to critical illness and death.

When a person commits to delivering groceries, prepared food, packages of necessities and medicines, the risk to life and limb seem remote and negligible, but the coronavirus has changed all that.

In this new stay-at-home paradigm, many people are opting to have things delivered rather than venturing out in masks and gloves and standing in long lines.  Since these so-called gig economy workers are taking a risk performing these errands and could, conceivably become sick and even die, is it ethical to ask another person to take such dangerous measures to bring back our required items?

The virus does not discriminate; given the opportunity, it will infect everyone.  Whether or not it kills or just makes someone sick is not predictable.  Healthy people who are in good shape die as well as those with underlying conditions and co-morbidities.  Some people experience relatively minor symptoms while others might have one particular symptom, like trouble breathing or blinding headaches or loss of smell and taste.  Everyone seems to suffer from fever.  But the virus is not uniform in its impact, that much we know.

How the outbreak is managed does reveal discrimination.  Wealth, of course, brings better treatments, faster testing, and options like delivery of supplies, medications and necessities.  Money allows a more secure quarantine, better isolation, and options like technology infrastructure to facilitate working from home and accessing the internet.  The poor may have no internet access for children to attend school or parents to work remotely.  Many people in this situation are essential workers and must go to work every day, regardless if they have child care or not.  There is no money to hire others to shop and pick up necessities.  They must venture out and risk infection to obtain food and medicine.  There is, clearly, an impact on a specific economic class and this influences the way rich and poor experience COVID-19.

People with underlying health conditions simply must use these services because they are at greater risk of dying if they become infected.  So for those who have the resources to hire someone to deliver goods, is it ethical to pay a person to do these errands?  Yes, but the salary and tip amount must at least acknowledge the risk even if it can in no way fully compensate them for exposing themselves to danger.

The problem is in what way and how much to compensate them.  As stated above in the opening of The Intercept article, this is the issue with Amazon employees, grocery store personnel, delivery drivers, etc.  They are not being compensated for risking their health, and they are not given personal protection equipment to minimize the danger.  “These workers have been exploited so shamelessly for so long by these companies while performing incredibly important but largely invisible labor,” said Stephen Brier, a labor historian and professor at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies who is cited in the article.  “All of a sudden, they’re deemed essential workers in a pandemic…”  That is the part that is not ethical.  We would not ask a police officer to try to stop a crime without a gun, badge and radio; we would not ask a firefighter to go into a burning building without an oxygen tank strapped to his back.  How can we ask the delivery person, one who is barely getting along in this new gig economy, to risk life and limb to bring us our food and medicine without personal protection equipment or fair compensation?

There are a range of jobs that are dangerous in addition to those mentioned at the start of this piece.  In a capitalist society, how much do we pay for services that might threaten the life of the worker providing them?  This goes to the heart of recent ethical discussions about the manufacture of Apple products in China and the health of migrant farmworkers in California.  Certainly, Amazon can afford to pay employees more, even give them hazard pay, and at least provide them with the equipment necessary to protect themselves on the job.  This goes for any job where a person puts herself in close contact with others to provide services.

In the push to reopen the country, lives are at stake.  When Trump says that business leaders are pleading with him to end the restrictions, they see workers as cogs in the machine.  They cannot be thinking how best to keep their employees safe.  That should be the first, most human priority.  When workers become links in a great chain of supply and demand, we cannot continue to use the current model of work them until they drop and then replace them with another and carry on.

The consequences of not treating those on the frontlines of the pandemic with care and compensation will lead to what is now beginning to happen:  shutdowns of essential services like the factories that process and prepare food supplies.  What will we do if we cannot hire people to pick up our groceries because there are no groceries available, or worse, no people left to bring them?  What if every employee in the factory or the lettuce field becomes ill and cannot work?  Employers must protect their employees in these essential businesses—pay them better, give them protection equipment, and manage them to keep them healthy and on the job.  Those utilizing the services must tip abundantly and graciously to show appreciation for the risks taken.  This will take not only an ethical commitment to do what is right, but a financial commitment as well, but in the new COVID-19 reality, that is what must be done.