People who can work from home generally earn far more than “essential” workers who had to show up despite risks from the COVID-19 pandemic—or those who couldn’t work at all.
That’s the conclusion of a study by the Illinois Economic Policy Institute and a labor researcher at the University of Illinois. Though it may tilt a little to the political left, the bottom line seems quite believable.
Using U.S. Census and Bureau of Labor Statistics data, the study found that just over half of the state’s workers, or 3.1 million people, were deemed “essential” and stayed on the job through the stay-home order. Included were medical personnel, first responders, construction workers and delivery workers.
Another 1.7 million, 27 percent of the state’s total, work in face-to-face sectors that generally were closed under Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s order. Many of them are out of work, and they disproportionately are women and people of color, say the authors, institute Policy Director Frank Manzo IV and Robert Bruno, a professor of labor and employment relations at the U of I at Urbana-Champaign who heads the school’s Project for Middle Class Renewal.
That leaves 1.4 million workers, 22 percent, in jobs that largely could be performed from home, such as those in management, finance, law and (often) journalism. They tended to live in the higher-cost city of Chicago proper, but the authors say they adjusted the figures to account for that.
The “essentials” earned an average of $27 an hour. The face-to-face folks made significantly less, $20 an hour. But the at-home group made much more, $35 an hour, a good three-quarters more than the face-to-face workers, and a third more than the essentials.
The breakdown has some strong racial and ethnic characteristics. Latinos and African-Americans comprise 35.1 percent of the relatively low paid face-to-face group, but just 18.7 percent of the much higher paid remote-workers group. Those trends tend to be more extreme for some subsectors; for instance, 30 percent of those engaged in animal slaughter are immigrants, most of them people of color.
Not everyone is going to sign on to the author’s list of recommendations about what to do about this. They suggest enacting a statewide sick-pay law, mandating hazard pay for essential front-line and face-to-face workers, fast-tracking the $15 minimum wage and strengthening rights to unionize.
But assuming the data is accurate, it’s hard to disagree with their conclusion. And while other factors come in to play, it's consistent with city health data showing that African-Americans and Latinos have been hit harder by COVID than whites.
“The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed a range of structural economic and public health inequities. The lowest paid workers . . . are at the highest risk of COVID19,” the report says, and the highest-paid workers “have the lowest risk of job loss and the lowest risk of exposure.”
UPDATE:
Meanwhile, another report from a group on the right side of the political spectrum, the Illinois Policy Institute, comes to a similar conclusion. It finds black and Latino women were most likely to lose their jobs as a result of the shutdown because their jobs were not deemed "essential."
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COVID most heavily hurts low-paid workers, many of them minority: study - Crain's Chicago Business
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