Before COVID-19 came along, Jazz Salm had spent most of her adult life working in the service industry. The lifelong Florida resident was good at waiting tables and liked the pace. Since she was also a musician, she relished the flexibility this work gave her to travel and play shows.
Then the pandemic hit. Salm had just moved to Miami to be near her partner’s family and taken a new job at a Chili’s. She had worked precisely one day as a server out of training when everything shut down, which meant she was not eligible for any benefits.
The burden of COVID-19 has not been evenly distributed. Restaurant, retail, and service workers have endured a disproportionate share of the pain.
“I was completely financially just shut off,” Salm recalls in an interview. “We spent all of our money moving. The only connection I had to my family, because we didn’t have Internet yet at our house, was my phone.” Applying for unemployment via phone was a nightmare in itself, because the sheer volume of applications kept crashing Florida’s system. “It took two weeks to get through the application process,” she says.
A $250 grant from the Restaurant Opportunities Center United (ROC United), an advocacy organization for service workers, helped Salm with her phone bill. But her whole world was still turned upside down: “Your entire routine goes to crap. After that, then your mental health goes to crap. Everybody, I’m sure, went through that with the whole lockdown. Everything just completely flipped.”
After her restaurant shut down, Salm applied for work at a nearby Walmart, which was still open and hiring. But a routine temperature check found that she had a fever, and she was told to not come back without a negative COVID-19 test. So she waited in a five-hour line at a COVID-19 test site; she saw three people pass out and helped the third one get up.
“That’s how I didn’t have to wait another three hours for my COVID test,” she says, because the attendants saw her helping and slipped her in alongside the woman who had fainted. But it took fourteen days to get her test results; by that point, Salm was fed up with her home state and what was left of its social safety net and ready to give up on her frayed relationship with her partner. When a friend of hers in Valatie, New York, offered her a place to stay, she packed up her things, got in her car, and drove straight up.
“I was just like, ‘I’m getting out of Florida.’ It was absolutely horrendous,” she relates. “Just everybody was miserable and scared.”
So Salm became a home care worker, looking after her friend’s grandfather-in-law. She’s happy to have landed on her feet, but grieves for her former life. “It’s completely a 180 from what my life used to be.”
The burden of COVID-19 has not been equally distributed. Restaurant, retail, and service workers like Salm have endured a disproportionate share of the pain and illness, on top of the usual stress of making ends meet. Yet their struggles have gotten short shrift in the news compared to the issues facing the at-home workforce.
Now, as headlines about the Great Resignation are being replaced by the inflation bogeyman, it is more important than ever to consider the grief and loss these workers faced: the scrambling for the best of a set of bad options; the pain of leaving behind a job you were good at; the utter upending of people’s lives that happened even if they managed not to get severely ill.
Service workers have, in a way, borne the burden for all of us.
Even the statistics on reported cases and deaths don’t capture the profound way many people have been thrown into ongoing uncertainty. The tipped minimum wage for restaurant workers remains at $2.13 an hour in the United States, though some cities and states have raised or gotten rid of it, and workers receive few benefits—which exacerbated the pain when restaurants shuttered or went takeout-only.
Jim Conway, a longtime restaurant worker from Pennsylvania, noted that without the expanded unemployment benefits in the early days of COVID-19, servers like him would have been unable to pay bills. Because tipped workers take home little in the form of a paycheck, their calculated unemployment benefits are often minimal. The extra money, he says, “was a real lifesaver.”
The few studies that have tracked deaths by occupation—which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention does not do—found that food and agricultural workers were at the highest risk of death from the pandemic, with line cooks being the highest of all. Hanna Raskin, a reporter and editor at The Food Section, culled data showing high numbers of deaths from the virus among Georgia restaurant managers, cooks, and servers. But the lack of good information about deaths left many workers making difficult decisions in the dark.
For Conway, the choice became clear: Keep working and risk your life, or find something else to do. He chose retirement. “For me, as an older person, before the vaccines came out there was no way I was going to go back and work with all these unmasked guests,” says Conway. “And by the time the vaccines came out and everyone was fully vaccinated, I just had no motivation to go back into that.”
Conway’s former coworkers tell him that he picked a good time to get out. There’s an ongoing shortage of cooks, and customers seem ruder and nastier. Tips, never a sure thing, are harder to rely on when COVID-19 waves keep rolling through and shutting down in-person dining. Then there’s just the sheer exhaustion of the job.
“It’s very physical, strenuous, restaurant work,” says Conway, who before the pandemic had been involved with ROC United, fighting for fair wages and benefits for restaurant workers. “When I got up into my sixties, I did not want to be that person who works all day Friday, all day Saturday, all day Sunday. I always say, ‘Use the job. Don’t let the job use you.’ ”
To look at all of the decisions, all of the failures to act, and all of the counterproductive actions taken during the pandemic would necessitate a public, collective conversation—one that acknowledges that the pandemic is still happening, and that truly grapples with the impact it has had across the world.
It’s a conversation that feels terrifying because the entire neoliberal capitalist system is implicated in this disaster—from the conditions that lead to zoonotic diseases in the first place to the political decisions to toss mask mandates and invite the virus to spread.
In talking with frontline workers, I heard again and again: Our bosses don’t care if we die. They don’t care about us. Isabela Burrows, who took a job at a PetSmart store in Michigan because she wanted to be a veterinary technician, has spoken out about the treatment of the animals she was looking after and the way management seemed to not care about illnesses or injuries among the pets being sold. When she came down with COVID-19, she felt the same lack of care turned on her. She was pressured, she said, to come back to work after only a couple of days off, and when she returned, her managers accused her of taking a vacation rather than having been ill.
The worst came, though, when Burrows’s younger brother died of a sudden illness unrelated to COVID-19. When he went into the hospital, she says, her store leader pushed her to come to work; and when she returned to work two days after his death, she says her manager pulled her aside and told her she needed to “get over the fact that he died.”
PetSmart, in a statement to The Progressive, said: “Following the passing of her brother in May 2021, Ms. Burrows was offered time off for bereavement, but declined. The store leader partnered with Human Resources after Ms. Burrows reported she had been exposed to COVID-19. However, we did not receive confirmation of a positive test.” It also says it has “no record of her raising any concerns about policies related to COVID-19.”
Burrows came across a call to action on a Facebook page for PetSmart workers, where she posted a comment saying that the company didn’t care. An organizer with United for Respect reached out to her and asked her if she wanted to help make the company better. She decided to do so. “My little brother was one of the best people you could ever know,” she says. “He was sweet. He helped people. He always wanted to do the right thing. And I knew that if I had an opportunity to at least work on it, and I pushed it aside because I was too upset, that would make him really sad.”
So Burrows has dedicated herself to organizing at PetSmart, where she still works, demanding better conditions for people and animals. Workers and worker organizations everywhere are taking on the arduous task of improving conditions and building a patchwork safety net that continues to fray the longer the pandemic goes on. The top-down push back to “normal” threatens to make us all more cynical, more inured to mass death, and less willing to consider the humanity of others—and that is a change that will be felt most acutely by frontline workers.
June 23, 2022 — A response from Isabela Burrows: "PetSmart has gone on record saying that they have no record of me raising concerns about COVID-related policies, which is untrue. I have worked at two different PetSmart stores during my time with the company, and the store at which I was employed during my brother's passing was not the same as the one I was working at when I was exposed to COVID and ultimately contracted the virus. As a result, they very likely don't have record of my concerns at that first store as they were not an issue until my employment at the second location."