Who do you class as essential workers?

[Pheasantplucker2]

I was thinking about this in the middle of the night when I couldn't sleep. Obviously the NHS/emergency services are. But then, where is the line drawn?

• we need food shops/supermarkets to stay open - are the workers classed as essential?
• what about the people who pack the food to supply the supermarkets?
• what about the factory workers who make the hand sanitiser we're all so short of, the toilet roll, the pasta?
• what about the lorry drivers and supply hub workers who need to get the supplies to where we can buy them?
• farmers?

• what about refuse collection and street cleaning? If we stop that, then germs will spread

• what about banks/financial institutions who are needing to deal with mortgage holidays/loan defaults

• what about HMRC who have had to set up dedicated helplines to deal with all the people who are struggling with a disastrous and unexpected drop in income?

I'm sure that there are many more I haven't thought of.

And all of these people potentially have children who need looking after.

I think Boris and his government are making a complete mess of this, but if I was in charge (thank fuck I'm not) where would you draw the line?

Myriad. Retail, services, advertising etc could be seen as non essential - but they're tax paying businesses who help pay for the rest. Society is so complex and automated now. This is the reason the UK is attempting to keep most people in work. Even Vodafone/BT/Sky/Netflix/Spotify/Radio/TV/Skype etc will prove essential in terms of keeping people in their homes for months.

All of those and a lot more.
People I know of who have gotten much busier include those organising to get thousands of people home from countries that are closing their borders, IT support workers who support those WFH, bike sales and repairs to help essential workers who want to avoid public transport. Supermarkets in Ireland are hiring extra people to stack shelves, sanitise trolleys and baskets and keep way more check outs open so people can queue at a distance more easily.

But so far in Ireland there are 140,000 redundancies in hospitality and childcare.

My local authority are focussing their resources on social care, cleansing services and education, health workers are obvious dealt with under nhs.

At my work we are still in as usual. Train drivers. Also the platform staff, ticket office staff, train cleaners, maintenance people etc.

Also the network rail track people and signallers will all still have to be in.

I think some of our office staff can WFH but not many.

In the uk right now given the situation

NHS staff including cleaners, post, banks, social care, grocery retail, pharmacies, dentists at least on emergency cases, delivery drivers/couriers and probably more that haven't occurred to me yet

Repairs teams in Social Housing Associations

Bin men? We'll still produce rubbish

Veterinarians & animal welfare people

Abortion care providers are essential and people forget that

Anyone who doesn’t sit on a computer in an office, basically. That’s quite a significant proportion of the population though. It doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be working but I do think this is work that can be done remotely.

Teachers/childcare providers, so that others can keep working?

Security guards

• social workers
• social care for adults and children
• emergency gas repairs
• health visitors and midwives
• anyone involved in the food chain from drivers to production and slaughter houses
• farmers
• animal rescue centres and vets
• public transport

So many professions are necessary to keep things going!

People who work in petrol stations, those delivery drivers have to fill up somewhere. Just about anyone who works in Logistics, mechanics and engineers, anyone who works on maintaining utilities. People working in food production and processing.

I'd quite like all the people making drug precursors, drug formulators, and vaccination / protein researchers to keep working.

DH is a HGV driver for a large supermarket. His job could be regarded as pretty important now despite the low opinion lots have of lorry drivers.

I am pretty worried about food banks running out of food with the extra knock on effect of zero hour workers in hospitality and non food retail not getting paid. Doesn’t affect me or mine thankfully but made an extra donation this morning.

I suppose what I was thinking was that most people's jobs can be defined as essential. We are all little cogs in a big wheel and all need to keep turning to support the obvious essential workers.

It's great for the people who can WFH, but how many of us are there who can't. And is it ok for the people who WFH to have their children at home with them now, as there's no-one else to look after them?

DH is in work, half of his team is WFH and they will swap with DH and his other colleague next week so they never come into contact with each other. They have to have multiple screens and recorded lines due to regulations in the industry.

He's in a bank, financial markets, has billions maturing today, if people like him can't work (lots of regs the figures having to be checked and paper trails) then the economy will be in a worse state than if possible now. He was more worried last night than during the financial crisis.

I agree that many jobs are essential that someone does them to some extent - but a lot of the things listed are in areas where you could easily keep a reasonable basic level of service going if you didn't have the people who are parents of young children and just had to make do with the staff members who have no children, or whose children are over the age of 12ish and can be reasonably left home alone.

Nurses and doctors in front line roles dealing with Covid patients yes, paramedics yes. We need all hands on deck for these roles.

All the other jobs listed - not sufficiently "essential" to mean that you shouldn't stop work and stay home with your kids. SOME teachers need to keep working, to teach the kids of Nurses and Doctors who are essential - but the teachers who stay on can be the ones without young kids, or who have a spouse/partner/coparent who isn't essential.

Likewise factory workers, lorry drivers and supermarket shelf stackers - there will be enough people to fill these roles from the population of people who are not the parents of young children. The lorry drivers who normally deliver steel to car factories or pallets of bricks and timber to building sites can be diverted to help supply supermarkets, the job may need to be done but there is no reason why someone who is the sole parent of a young child needs to do it. The few school places kept open for essential workers are not for the children of such as these.

In the event that any of these important roles do find themselves understaffed with all the sole carers of young children staying at home, well they can recruit from the huge number of unemployed people who aren't parents. For the sake of the whole country, and to save thousands of lives, everyone who is a parent and whose employment isn't directly and immediately saving people's lives needs to prioritise keeping their child at home to reduce the possibility of infection spreading, and only do work that is compatible with also keeping their child at home, and leave the other essential jobs which are merely facilitating keeping the country functional to the people who don't have children.