Fintan O’Toole: We are learning how much we rely on low-paid workers

“You’ll end up sweeping the streets.” Or: “You’ll only be good for stacking shelves.” These were the warnings against idleness flung at generations of youths by teachers and parents. They meant: you’ll amount to nothing.

The jobs they invoked were synonyms for uselessness and failure. In the natural order of things, such contemptible tasks are unworthy of either esteem or reward.

But here we are, with the natural order of things upended. Keeping the streets clean is rather more important than designing handbags. Keeping the shelves stacked in the supermarket is of greater value than being a football galactico.

The most powerful ideas are not the ones we argue about but the ones we take for granted. They are “only natural”. It is only natural in our deeply unequal societies that some people should earn huge amounts of money and others should struggle to make ends meet.

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It is only natural that some social roles should carry great prestige while others should be dismissed as menial and “unskilled”. It takes an existential crisis to bring home to us the realisation that these are merely arbitrary choices sanctified by power and prejudice.

We also look to people who are otherwise taken for granted or barely visible

Who do we look to in this crisis? To some extent, indeed, we do look to people who have the kind of social prestige that gets you a high salary: doctors, pharmacists, public health experts, government ministers, public service managers. But we also look to people who are otherwise taken for granted or barely visible: nurses, carers, cleaners, food producers, bin men, gardaí, soldiers, drivers, supermarket workers. When the Government defines the “necessary” jobs that must continue to be done even in the most extreme of circumstances, most of them are in these categories.

Even the most valued of these people are starkly undervalued. If we take a TD’s salary of €96,189 (leaving aside the very generous allowances) as a benchmark for the sense of importance in our society, a senior staff nurse is paid €48,736: almost exactly half.

A garda with eight years’ experience is paid pretty much the same. The community gardaí who are putting themselves at risk by going around to visit vulnerable people in their areas get an extra allowance of €30 a week.

An emergency medical technician earns €39,069 – at the top of the scale, reached after 10 years. The carers we depend on to wash and dress and feed people, and who cannot hide from the virus, earn, if they are in the public health system, between €28,131 and €35,193.

Or think of food. Beef farmers have been getting about €3.70 for a kilo of their product. It sells for anywhere between €6 and €28 a kilo, depending on the cut. Their labour is obviously priced rather cheaply.

The women and men who are keeping the supermarkets going most probably make about €13 an hour – that’s €487 an hour less than a Dublin commercial lawyer. The bin collectors who have to expose themselves to our potentially toxic waste may be doing so for as little as €12 an hour. The driver who brings food to the door of a person in self-isolation may be earning €15 an hour.

The soldiers who may well end up having to perform the most awful but vital tasks are abysmally paid. A three-star private gets €549.74 a week (€28,685 a year). A sergeant gets €794.93 a week (€41,479 pa). Even an army medical commandant, who could end up running a field hospital, earns €85,886. *

What the great and the good say is: we get paid what the market for our talents dictates

The coronavirus crisis makes this natural order of things strange and unnatural. We are suddenly forced to ask ourselves, not what we really, really want, but what we really, really need. And the answers are obvious: food, water, shelter, medical treatment, public order and security, hygiene and sanitation.

A simple thought experiment suggests itself. Suppose the people who provide these things were now to follow what the very highly paid have laid down in recent decades as an immutable principle. What the great and the good say is: we get paid what the market for our talents dictates; otherwise we would be “disincentivised” and left feeling deeply disrespected.

So what if the supermarket worker or the cleaner or the carer or the bin man or the community garda were now to say, the market for my services just got a whole lot more lucrative? What would we now pay for a nurse if there were no nurses? What would we think an army medical commandant is now “worth”?

Should the financial reward for a supermarket delivery driver rise for every day that the quarantined customer has been without food? If he or she is worth €15 an hour on the first hungry day, does that become €150 an hour on the third day of no dinner because that’s what the market will bear?

These workers will never make such threats, of course. They will get on with their jobs, however grim their tasks may become, however great the risk to themselves. That’s what the vast majority of people do in times like these. They don’t think about “incentives” – they think about duty.

But by the time we get to the other side of the grim terrain we are now beginning to traverse, we will all have a heightened awareness of how desperately we depend, not just on people with expertise and authority and prestige, but on ordinary public servants and on low-paid, supposedly unskilled people in the private sector too.

This experience will surely make us think differently about the dignity of labour and about what it demands – a living wage, for a start. We have constructed a social system in which, if there is any relationship between the real value of a job and the way it is valued financially, it is an inverse one.

Socially harmful trades – manipulating financial derivatives, for example – are the top. Feeding people, keeping them safe and killing germs are at the bottom.

We will learn the hard way to be deeply grateful to the people who keep us from death's door

Maybe we will even immunise ourselves against the toxic notion of incentivisation that reduces human motives to nothing but greed. Hundreds of thousands of ordinary people are about to disprove it by giving everything they have – in some cases maybe even their lives – for the sake of others.

The Taoiseach rightly reminded us that not all superheroes wear capes and that some of them wear scrubs. But they also wear shop coats and blue and green uniforms and boiler suits and overalls and T-shirts with company logos on the breast pocket.

We will learn the hard way to be deeply grateful to the people who keep us from death’s door. We should not forget that lesson when we come to rebuild our economies and societies.

* This article was amended on April 2nd, 202o