Who Is Essential?

Millions of Americans are staying home from work because they're not deemed essential.

In Minnesota the people still going to work include doctors, nurses, police, and firefighters. But also emergency shelters, child care providers, grocery stores, take-out restaurants, farmers, agricultural workers, news organizations, power, gas and water services, wastewater treatments, sanitation, public works, critical manufacturing, transportation and logistics, construction, and financial services.

What are non-essential services? Stadiums, theaters, hotels, resorts, cruise lines, printers, auto dealers, furniture stores, lawn and garden supplies, shoe stores, jewelry stores, florists, administrative serves and advertising.

That means garbage men, nannies, stock boys, janitors, truck drivers, pilots, flight attendants, cashiers, cooks, electricians, construction workers, reporters, linemen, cable installers, iron miners, etc., are all essential to keep the country running.

It must really suck for Trump that a TV network like CNN is essential, but his hotels and golf resorts are not. It must also suck for him that undocumented farm workers, the people he won the presidency trashing, are deemed essential but real estate tycoons like him are not.

Times like these really put things in perspective.

Most of the people who are absolutely essential for this country to continue functioning get paid very little. You can run a country without any golf courses or fancy five-star hotels and casinos. But you can't run a country without the people who butcher chickens and cows, plant crops and harvest them, prepare the food, transport the packaged food, stock it in the markets and sell it to customers. And you need the janitors, truck drivers, construction and utility workers, etc., that those people need to keep their workplaces functioning.

So why do the people we absolutely need the most constantly get the shaft? They don't get vacations, they don't get sick leave and they make little more than minimum wage. If all the golf course owners, luxury hotel magnates, real estate tycoons and reality show hosts died of the coronavirus no one would bat an eye lash. If all the farm workers died we'd all starve.

Worse, as these essential workers continue to show up on the job they are risking their lives for us: they're constantly being exposed to the virus.

It should be obvious to even someone as dense as Donald Trump that these people should be compensated according to their worth to society. Wages for these people should all be raised to a living wage -- and for a family of four that's something around $30 an hour in a place like Minnesota, and even more for New York and California.

They should also get paid sick leave, and their employers should require them to stay home when they're sick, because we don't them working when they're contagious. Laws should be passed that permanently require this for all companies, instead of the bogus temporary law Trump signed that exempts companies with more than 500 employees.

Those wage increases don't have to increase prices by all that much. Management and owners of companies like Walmart take a huge portion of the profits and stick it in their own pockets. In the past 40 to 50 years management salaries have gone up almost 1000%, and employee salaries have been flat. Companies took the money from Trump's give-away tax cuts and bought their own stock back, driving the stock market into what they thought would be an ever-increasing spiral.

Now the market has crashed, and all the gains made since Trump's election and the infamous tax cuts have been lost. And Trump frittered away all the gains Obama made since 2008. All the "Trump gains" were fairy dust and unicorn farts, immediately lost when Trump's lies and spin met with the harsh reality of a pandemic.

Conservatives love to wax nostalgic about the good old days of the 1950s. Let's return CEO pay back to what it was in the 1950s and give their bloated compensations packages to the people who need and really deserve them: American workers.