Workers, we’ll get through this.
And hopefully we’ll remember our value as everyone else forgets.
I saw another post asking for feedback from grocery store workers who “are working on the frontlines of this pandemic.” It pissed me off. While it’s valuable to uplift marginalized (and often degraded) voices, the surge for content seems focused on beating a drum that makes us temporary heroes, forgetting our worth once this is all over.
Even amid the surge there’s still the occasional Karen who mocks the despair of grocery work with something like “So what? Nurses and doctors are suffering too!” Obviously these comments ignore a big issue: Grocery store workers didn’t get this job to save the world. We got the job because it’s a job. We didn’t go to school for 6–8 years to master bagging groceries or facing product. We don’t have protective gear and, unlike hospital workers, many of us don’t have health insurance (n.b., I’m on unpaid medical leave because I have a history of respiratory illness and no health insurance). More importantly, though, it speaks to what’s to come. Everyone is eager to return to Life As It Was. That includes seeing low wage workers as less than.
The fact of the matter is we are heroes every day. We take jobs that don’t pay a living wage, straining our bodies to do the work, and put up with customers who think we’re somehow less than them because they’re in the store to buy fancy cheese and we’re in the store because we have to be. We toil and grind just to survive, not for anything more fulfilling. We exist separate from the economics of choice: We do the work because we need to survive. While many of us will work in a grocery store as our career, no one aspires to work in a grocery store — or any low wage job — for the rest of our lives. Our heroism is seated in the fact that we have to sacrifice our dreams, our comfort, ourselves to pay our bills. That’s a sacrifice workers have made for generations, and it will continue long after this moment in time.
What’s important now is that we use this opportunity of the hero narrative to bolster our individual sense of collective power. We always provide a valuable service even when it’s not seen as such. We always struggle to get by even when it’s not a pandemic. We always are forced to show up and do the work and get through it even when our minds and bodies are begging us to stop. We’ll get through this.
My hope is we’ll remember how valuable we are once the customers and media forget. I hope they don’t, but you know how customers are.
