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How Can A Worker Be Both Essential And Low Paid?

think.kera.org 13

Doctors and nurses are rightly celebrated as frontline workers. Also included in that category, though, are many low-wage workers: the people who bag our groceries, deliver our packages and clean our buildings. Bama Athreya, senior specialist for labor and employment rights at the University of Michigan’s Erb Institute and a Fellow at Open Society Foundations, joins host Krys Boyd to talk about laborers who don’t have the luxury of working from home – and about how the pandemic has severely affected the gig economy. Her article “A Pandemic is No Time for Precarious Work” was published on Medium.