We are entering week 8 of the Wuhan virus lockdown. Here in the US, we have 1,188,870 cases of infection with 68,606 deaths and 178,594 officially recovered.
We also have 30 million unemployed. And rising.
Who are those paying the price for our forced closures of “non-essential” businesses? Not Silicon Valley in its California and various other iterations in high-tech areas around the country. They are all working from home. Not any salaried office employee with a laptop, a mobile phone, and high-speed internet. Likewise, we are all working from home too. And because we are salaried, we are getting paid in full. No loss of income due to reduced hours. We don’t get paid by the hour. We are on salary.
No, the ones bearing the burden of trillion-dollar losses in the economy are those who can least afford it. Service employees. Hospitality workers. Retail workers. Small business owners and those they employ. Many of these businesses will never reopen, particularly restaurants, a challenging business even in good times. Businesses that require physical contact? Barbers, hairdressers, nail salons, tattoo artists, spas – these might be the last to reopen. What are these folks doing for income in the meantime? Many, if not most, are considered independent contractors so they can’t even collect unemployment. Even the comparatively few who are still working are working less, as those businesses still allowed to open have been forced to cut back on their hours. They are not on salary. Less hours = less pay.
If we end up with 100,000 total deaths, which has been put forward as a positive goal, we have put 300 people out of work for each death. Put slightly differently, if the estimate of >1,000,000 deaths without a lockdown was accurate, which who knows, we have put 30 people out of work for each life saved. What’s even worse is these 30 million have absolutely no say in the matter and if they protest their loss of livelihood, they are branded by the media as fools and rednecks. Those would be the same media members who are also working from home and collecting their salaries.
So those of us who, like me, are fortunate enough to merely be stuck at home with no loss of income should thank all those people standing in lines at the food banks for our continued safety. They are the ones paying the bill.
