Undervalued and unseen: Australia's COVID-19 frontline workforce

The Covid-19 virus has exposed the weaknesses in every social and economic system it has touched. In today’s analysis, Leonora Risse (@Leonora_Risse) of RMIT (@RMIT) and the Women and Public Policy Program at Kennedy School (@wapppHKS) provides a 2-part analysis of what’s going wrong for women right now and how it could be addressed. Today’s Part 1 provides an overview of how women are differentially impacted by their employment and unpaid work. Part 2 provides thoughts on how these inequalities can be addressed.

As governments worldwide focus on identifying the essential services we need to keep society's heartbeat pulsing, the COVID-19 pandemic is shining a spotlight on the workers we are depending on for our health, safety and survival. 

Even in ordinary circumstances, we wouldn't hesitate to list nurses, doctors and ambulance workers among the essential workers whose job it is to protect our health and safety. In the midst of the pandemic, it's dawning on us that we must add another layer of critical workers who are keeping society glued together. Cleaners, checkout operators, shelf fillers, rubbish collectors and delivery drivers. Workers who we probably take for granted in our everyday lives, yet who are critical to keeping us safe, healthy, clean and fed right now.

The fact that all these workers must come in direct contact with the public to fulfil their roles – putting their own health and safety at risk – makes them the frontline heroes of this pandemic.

Tragic accounts of healthcare workers and other frontline workers, such as bus drivers, contracting and dying from COVID-19 in the course of their performing their job justifies the emotional and psychological stress these workers are experiencing. The risks confronting these workers extend to the fear of endangering their own families when they return home at the end of their shifts.

If we consider that many of these frontline workers didn't train for these risky circumstances, and that their wage rates and industrial conditions weren't necessarily designed to factor in life-and-death hazards, these workers are truly going above and beyond their job description to serve the community.

Rather than squabbling over the last roll of toilet paper on the supermarket shelf, spare a thought for the thousands of workers putting their own health and safety at risk to serve you and keep society functioning.

Who are Australia's COVID-19 frontline workforce?

To gain a picture of this frontline workforce, we can use Census data collected by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, most recently conducted in 2016.

While there has been some ambiguity in Australia concerning who is an "essential worker" in the context of this pandemic, I've taken a subset of occupations whose purpose is to provide basic physiological human needs and who have to come into direct contact with the public to perform their role. This list is not meant be exhaustive nor dismiss the value of the many other jobs that are not on this list: it is simply designed to recognise some of the key occupations on whom many of us are relying on at this time. With governments deciding to keep schools and early education and childcare centres open in Australia during the pandemic, I have added these occupations to this list too.

Around 90% of Australia's nurses on the frontline of our fight against COVID-19 are women. Women also make up the majority of our checkout operators, childcare workers, early childhood educators, school teachers, aged care and personal care workers, social workers and counsellors, and pharmacists.

Men make up the majority of our rubbish collectors, delivery drivers, bus drivers, security guards, police and emergency workers, shelf fillers and storepersons. Australia's medical practitioners are more evenly balanced in gender, comprised of 54% male and 46% female.

We are heavily reliant on the young population to serve us at the checkout, prepare our takeaway meals, and restack the rolls of toilet paper that we've desperately whisked off the supermarket shelves. 40% of Australia's checkout operators are still merely in their teens – all the more reason for shoppers to contain their own frustrations and demonstrate maturity, compassion, empathy and gratitude towards these young workers.

Many of these frontline roles are performed by older workers, who are at higher risk of dying from COVID-19. 30% of bus drivers, 17% of cleaners, 15% of delivery drivers and 14% of rubbish collectors are aged 60 years and older. 18% of childcare workers and 24% of early childcare educators are aged 50 years and older.

How much do these frontline workers earn?

The bulk of Australia's nurses (75%) earn between $1000 to $2000 weekly – the lowest paid of the healthcare professions on the list.

Many of these frontline occupations sit at the lower end of the income spectrum. As a benchmark, if we look at workers who take home less than $800 per week for full-time hours (equivalent to $20 or less per hour), 18% of Australia's total workforce fall into this low income bracket.

Women are on the pandemic frontline, providing essential services, yet a salary analysis indicates these roles are underpaid. Photo by Ani Kolleshi on Unsplash

Now compare this to our list of frontline workers: 60% of food preparation assistants, 59% of checkout operators, 52% of childcare workers, 45% of cleaners, 23% of rubbish collectors and 30% of shelf fillers, store persons, delivery drivers, couriers, postal deliverers and freight handlers, fall into this low income bracket earning less than $800 per week.

At the upper end of the income spectrum, 20% of the overall Australian workforce makes a weekly income of $2000 or more. Medical practitioners, ambulance workers, pharmacists, police and other emergency workers match or exceed this proportion, yet only 16% of bus drivers, 12% of school teachers, 10% of nurses and 8% of social workers and counsellors fall into this upper wage bracket. All other frontline workers on this list barely feature.

These comparisons must prompt us to re-evaluate whether our current society truly appreciates the value of these workers – reflected not only in the wages they take home and the conditions they work in, but also in terms of the level of respect and status that they are afforded in society.

Behind the scenes, the invisible economy is still very much alive

When we talk about the slowdown in economy activity, an important factor to keep in mind is that official job numbers only refer to jobs that involve formal employment arrangements in the paid labour market. That is, jobs that involve a customer buying a product or service from a seller in the form of a monetary exchange.

It's inaccurate to measure the slowdown in production simply in terms of lost income and jobs in the formal labour market. Such an assessment is based on the judgement that economic activity only counts if it involves a formal monetary transaction.

Behind the scenes right now, there are still millions of hours of unpaid and voluntary work taking place within our homes and communities. People are still caring for children, caring for elderly family members and people with disabilities, checking on neighbours, looking after sick family members, cleaning their homes, doing the washing, preparing meals, stepping in as substitute teachers for their children, and providing emotional support to one another.

Let’s not forget that the word ‘economics’ has it etymological roots in the Greek word oikonomikos, meaning ‘managing the household’. This is not just an fun fact for your next trivia night – this fact is critical to acknowledging that, amid the pandemic, there remains a huge need for this form of domestic economic activity to take place.

But because these tasks don't involve a monetary exchange in the paid economy, this activity won’t turn up in official GDP or job figures. Not because this activity isn't important – it's clear these activities are vital to sustaining life – but because the statisticians who designed our national accounting system chose not to count any activity that takes place in the domestic sphere.

With much of the activity of the paid market economy now being compressed into the safe confines of the family home, this “invisible” part of the economy is still roaring along. Many of these domestic tasks are activities that we previously outsourced to the market economy because it was more efficient than, or preferable to, doing it ourselves. Many of these tasks – such as cleaning the house, caring for others and nursing sick family members – we are probably now doing at higher volumes due to the pandemic.

Time use surveys clearly show that, in aggregate, the "invisible work" undertaken at home is mostly done by women. With all family members now squeezing into their domestic quarters during this pandemic, it's possible we'll see an uptick in the share of this invisible work undertaken by men, as they witness firsthand what needs to be done and come to appreciate just how much time and effort these household management tasks actually entail. The question will be just how long might this uptick last?

A further dimension to the realm of invisible domestic work is to consider where it fits into the chain of economic activity. Mainstream economics focuses on production as the heart of economic activity: the use of inputs (resources) to generate output (goods and services) which then get distributed in the market for final consumption by a buyer. But if we think more deeply about the nature of the daily activities that take place within the household, they constitute something more fundamental than production. Much of what we do in everyday domestic life is for the purpose of nurturing, replenishing and sustaining the resources needed to generate production. It's us, human beings, who are the resource being replenished.

Recognising the importance of caring for and replenishing resources as part of the overall economic system also applies to the way that we extract resources from the natural environment. Much of the critique of mainstream economic thinking and policy-making points out how the value of care – caring for humans as well as for our planet – has been sidelined and ignored. The "care economy" is generally treated as marginal issue for the field of feminist economics while environmental issues are generally positioned as a market failure case study that pops up at the end chapters of microeconomic textbooks – neither are regarded as core elements of the macroeconomic picture. Indications that COVID-19 emerged as a result of humans encroaching too far into the natural environment, coupled with the increasing severity of the natural disasters we are experiencing as a result of human-made climate change, illustrates how failing to respect and care for the environment is coming back to bite us, and the economy, hard.

And it's no coincidence that vast bulk of all forms of care – caring occupations in the paid workforce, unpaid domestic work undertaken at home, and volunteer service offered in communities – is done by women. The undervaluation of care is a major factor driving gender inequalities in economic and social outcomes. Based on the way our society has been engineered, altruism, generosity, compassion and community-mindedness do not neatly equate to wealth, power, authority and status – despite being the invisible glue holding society together.

NOTE: This article contains my professional view as an economist and is not intended to offer assessment of public health policy, which is the domain of experienced public health experts.

This post is part of the Women's Policy Action Tank initiative to analyse government policy using a gendered lens. View our other policy analysis pieces here.

Posted by @SusanMaury @GoodAdvocacy