This May Day, honor labor by compensating it. onesarahjones writes
Photo: LightRocket via Getty Images When Kenya Slaughter took a job at Dollar General, she “never planned to become a worker on the front line of a pandemic,” she wrote in the New York Times. To keep her income, she must now risk her health — maybe even her life. In grocery stores and Amazon fulfillment centers, nursing homes and meatpacking plants, millions of workers now find themselves in similar straits: To the corporations that pay them, their work is essential. But their lives are not.
Instead, of economic justice, workers have received concessions from their employers that are ad hoc, contingent, and mostly temporary. Walmart handed out cash bonuses, and Amazon associates received a $2 raise through May 16. Instacart workers, meanwhile, still need hazard pay. Amazon ends its unlimited unpaid leave policy today. Not only does it restore meaning to May Day, it tells a truth that corporations prefer to bury.
Thousands more frontline workers are sick, and public officials are beginning to notice. In New Jersey, local health department inspectors concluded that conditions in two Amazon fulfillment centers put associates at high risk of infection. The specifics of the company’s negligence are familiar by now: Amazon didn’t protect its workers and made it hard for workers to protect themselves.
As grocery store worker Karleigh Frisbie Brogan put it in a piece for The Atlantic, the word “hero,” as applied to essential workers, is “a pernicious label perpetuated by those who wish to gain something — money, goods, a clean conscience — from my jeopardization.” We honor heroes with medals and parades and discounts at Applebee’s. But tokens of appreciation are just that: tokens, which signal nothing deeper than gratitude. That doesn’t pay anyone’s rent.
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