Labor Day, Essentially

So, as a person who was determined to be essential back in March and worked with only three unpaid days off in more or less same as normal straits and the spouse of a person who was also made essential as a grocery worker who worked for a short while far more than his usual allotment, and the relative of someone who as a nurse contracted COVID on the job and thankfully, all were young and healthy! Let's just say this Labor Day, my thoughts are with all workers who had to keep up with the COVID times, whether you got shafted entirely, had your hours reduced, or found yourself working in dangerous conditions and had to function above and beyond.

There's a kind of bias to the idea of "essential worker"--someone's paying us for our labor, so it must be worth something, whatever it is. And we are worth more than what we do for a living, even if we need work to keep our very lives together, because our jobs constitute something less than the entirety of what we are capable of.  And for those who lost jobs due to the public situation of COVID-19 spread--whose industries were harmed because of the necessary public-facing nature of those industries, nothing about the value of the work you do has changed, only the demand.

Things economically have gone awry in the US in part because of a failure to appreciate that the citizen worker is both the source and consumer of value. I'm not saying I know exactly what to do about that, but I resent when elected leaders talk about jobs in glee about gaining back half of what was precipitously lost in a short while over bad public management of a pandemic there should have been planning for, and with no acknowledgement of the lives that have been lost due to poor planning and privileging the economy over those lives.

They also need to be judged based on the products of their labors. Some may need to be made redundant.