The workers who sustain us during the coronavirus crisis deserve Florida’s respect | Editorial

We take them for granted, those grocery store clerks who scan and bag our purchases. Same with with the workers who stock the shelves and slice meat behind the deli counter.

Today, we should feel a far deeper appreciation for them, along with the truckers who haul food to grocery stores and the factory workers who package the products and the farmworkers who labor in the fields.

This coronavirus is a daily reminder of how we’ve undervalued these and other American workers, the ones who are showing up every day to ensure shoppers can buy what they need during an upheaval like we’ve never witnessed before.

Thanks to advances in technology, much of the workforce has the luxury of working from home (which is how this editorial was written), isolated from the public and largely safe from the immediate health threat. That’s the responsible thing to do right now for those who can.

Some people don’t have that option. Their jobs don’t allow it, which means they’re facing danger every day.

Like the people staffing grocery stores so we can eat.

Like the day-care employees who remain on the job, looking after children so people who must go to work still can.

Like the custodians who clean buildings so they’re sanitary and safe for others who work inside.

Like the people who work in nursing homes every day, changing soiled bedding, cleaning the patients, feeding those who can’t feed themselves, and providing human contact while loved ones are kept away by the coronavirus.

Like the garbage haulers who continue the backbreaking work of collecting our trash.

None of those jobs pays well. Lots of them don’t provide sick leave or health-care benefits or a pension or a 401(k).

Look at us now -- where would we be without them?

We can make it through this crisis just fine without the help of wealthy professional basketball players or movie stars or yacht brokers or social media influencers.

But when we emerge from this -- and we will -- there needs to be a reckoning about our priorities.

We’ve built a rigged economy, particularly in Florida, where people in this ongoing crisis are among the most essential workers, alongside police and firefighters and doctors and nurses.

How has this state treated them before now?

Our lawmakers have been dead-set against a meaningful increase in the minimum wage, prompting a successful campaign to get a $15 an hour minimum wage on the ballot this fall.

They refused to do anything about businesses failing to offer paid sick leave, and then passed a law that stopped communities like Orange County from doing something on their own.

Over the course of a decade, they skimmed nearly $2 billion from a fund that was supposed to provide money for affordable housing.

In 2011, urged on by then Gov. Rick Scott, they stacked the deck against workers trying to collect unemployment benefits. The Legislature cut the number of weeks unemployed workers were eligible for unemployment -- to as low as just 12 weeks, depending on the unemployment rate -- and made it easier for employers to deny benefits. All this while keeping one of the worst weekly benefits in the nation -- $275 max. A Republican state senator at he time, Nancy Detert, said she wanted to be rid of “slackers and malingerers.”

And year after year the state turned away billions in federal money that would have extended Medicaid health care to hundreds of thousands of low-income Floridians.

It’s a record packed with neglect and disdain for the very people who are helping hold things together now. People who are risking infection of themselves and their families. We understand many do it because they need the income, but that doesn’t make their contribution any less valuable.

We throw words around too carelessly these days, but the collective efforts of people the people who are showing up every day so that society can continue functioning amount to a collective act of heroism.

We need to thank them when we see them, and acknowledge what they’re doing for us.

Then, in our post-coronavirus world, the people we elect to make laws should stop treating these workers like slackers and malingerers and start treating them with the respect every Floridian deserves.

This editorial first appeared in The Orlando Sentinel.

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