Essential workers

In this episode we explore how those deemed as ‘essential workers’ are often treated as if they’re of no value at all

Tell me: who are the true essential workers, the people who really run the world? Is it the hyper-rich, the Wall Street folks, the ‘one-percent’? The politicians, the supposed ‘great leaders’ and the like? The business-moguls, like Jeff Bezos, Rupert Murdoch or Elon Musk?

If that’s where your thoughts would first go, then I’d suggest to start instead with something more mundane - such as the weekly garbage pickup from the side of the road.

The simple test to identify whether some role is truly essential, is to ask “Can we do without it?” So let’s apply that test to those examples above.

So, can we do without the hyper-rich, the Wall Street folks, the ‘one-percent’? In a money-based possession-economy, we know that the only way to get to become hyper-rich is by stealing vast amounts from everyone else, unintentionally or otherwise, either in the past, the present or elsewhen; or else inherited the money from someone who did the same stealing at some point in the further past. So are they really essential to the workings of the world? Short-answer: in most cases, a very definite no.

Can we do without the politicians, the ‘supposed ‘great leaders’ and the like? The reality seems to be that most don’t lead at all, but instead ‘lead’ from the rear, obsessed with themselves, and claiming all the credit for others’ hard work. So are they really essential to the workings of the world? Short answer: in most cases, probably a very definite no.

What about the great business moguls? The reality, sadly, is that most got to where they are by huge over-emphasis on self-promotion, an awful lot of Dunning-Kruger linked to high skill at taking credit from others and blaming others for their own failings, and in many cases flat-out stealing ideas and more from ‘their’ employees (the ‘great innovator’ Edison being a particularly infamous example). So are they really essential to the workings of the world? Short answer: in most cases, questionable at best, but most likely no.

So many other groups about whom the same might said. The ‘great artists’? - these days an artist’s most important skills are self-promotion and the ability to gain grants-funding. Managers? - yeah, a few good ones, but an awful lot who got there by the Peter Principle, by Dunning-Kruger again, and by following the bad advice of mainstream MBAs still trying to maintain some form of feudalism five hundred years after the end of the its use-by date. Are they essential? Short-answer: in so many cases, probably not.

Oh well.

But in which case, who are the real ‘essential workers’ - the ones we really can’t do without? It turns out that we got some solid hard-data on that question during the COVID pandemic, so we do now know the answer. And it ain’t the ‘one-percent’, the great moguls, the self-styled ‘great leaders’, the ‘top managers’ and all the rest: in practice, in terms keeping the real-world running, turns out that most of those ones are more often a hindrance than a help. Instead, the ones we really need, the ones who really are essential to the running of the world, are right at the opposite end of the social spectrum: those who do the front-line work, such as parents, carers, cleaners, nurses, workers in food production and in retail, the ones who keep the trains running, the ones who drive the ambulances, the delivery-trucks, the garbage-trucks. We can’t do without them. Not at all. Or not for long, anyway.

Yet there’s a weird twist here. In a money-based possession-economy, the ones who turn out to be least essential get paid the most, whilst the ones who are identified as most essential get paid the least, and full-time parents - in some ways the most essential of all - get paid nothing at all.

Something a bit back to front there?

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And that back-to-front-ness isn’t just unfair, it has real-world consequences. A lot of those less-essential workers can basically work anywhere, as we again discovered during the pandemic. But that isn’t true for most essential-workers: their work takes place at a specific place, and they need to be there if they’re to do that so-essential work.

Not just ‘be there’, though - they also need to be able to get there. Which, if there’s no easy way to get there, means they also need to live near there. And given the back-to-front-ness of the pay-scales, it needs to be cheap enough that they can live there, too.

Which is exactly what isn’t happening in larger cities now.

Take the real example of a junior nurse whose place of work is a hospital in the centre of the city. There’s no doubt at all that she’s an essential-worker: people will die if she’s not there. And she’s spent several years training for the job, so she’ll still have huge education-bills to pay off somehow; yet it’s a job that pays little more than minimum-wage. On that kind of income, she has no chance of getting a mortgage, so she’ll have to find somewhere to rent. But she can’t live anywhere nearby, because in the centre of the city the probable rent for a single night is more than she earns in a week; so she’ll have to live further out, away from her work. Depending on the rents, that may be a long way from work, maybe tens of miles away, in some cities - and more-profitable short-term rentals such as AirBnB have made it much harder to find anywhere to live longer-term at all. If she’s further out, she’ll need some way to get to work; there’ll be no way she can afford a car, and even if she could, there’ll be nowhere to park it anyway, anywhere near to her work. With luck, there might perhaps be some public transport somewhere near enough to make it feasible at all; yet even if there is any public-transport, it may not run in the middle of the night, which is what she’ll need for all those late-night shifts. Whichever way she does it, the commute will likely be abysmal, often measured in hours each way at least; so she’ll already be exhausted even before she gets to work. Which in turn makes it more likely that she’ll make mistakes at work; which then puts her patients more at risk.

No-one wins from a mess like that.

Except, of course, for the parasites who profit from all those exorbitant rents and insane real-estate rates.

Yet the reality is even worse than that. As prices keep rising, but wages stay the same, our nurse gets pushed further and further out; public-transport becomes less and less accessible; commute-times rise and rise; and as the cost of living rises too, the cheaper shops can only be reached by car, which she can’t afford to have. Eventually it reaches the point where she can’t do the job at all; can’t afford it, in almost any sense. So she has to quit; and there’s no-one available to take on her job, because they can’t afford it, either. So the workload will keep on increasing for the fewer and fewer nurses who can somehow still afford to keep working there; until, as we also saw during the pandemic, it all gets to be too much to bear, and they hit burnout, and become unable to work any more.

And it’s not just nurses: the same is becoming true for most of those under-paid essential-workers, especially so in larger cities almost anywhere around the world: it was already bad in London more than a decade ago, even before than the pandemic, and it’s a lot worse now. Yet it’s now the same even smaller cities: a newspaper report I saw last week that said that, for Melbourne, there was now nowhere in or near the city where any junior nurse could afford to live. Which meant that the city hospitals were becoming unable to recruit new nurses. Which meant that they were already having to cancel some of their more urgent operations. Oops…

Sure, all of this is a natural outcome of a possession-economy and its money-driven ‘market’, in which personal profit is far more important than practical need. But if the result is that essential workers can no longer do their work, then we’re heading fast towards a system-wide collapse where nothing works at all. Not A Good Idea…

The only way now to avoid that kind of full-on failure is to scrap the entire money-system, and start again from scratch with a system built on actual need. However challenging the fact might be, the blunt reality is that possession-economics is not a viable option any more, for anyone; and every day we keep clinging on to it gives us less and less time in which to make that change - yet failing to make that change in time would end up killing us all. Our choice, of course…

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