Who are the essential and frontline workers?

Abstract

Identifying essential and frontline workers and understanding their characteristics is useful for policymakers and researchers in targeting social insurance and safety net policies in response to the COVID-19 crisis and allocating scarce resources like personal protective equipment (PPE) and vaccines. We develop a working definition and provide data on the demographic and labor market composition of these workers. We first apply the official industry guidelines issued by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in March 2020 to microdata from the 2018 and 2019 American Community Survey to identify essential workers regardless of actual operation status of their industry. We then use the feasibility of work from home in the worker’s occupation group (Dingel and Neiman 2020 ) to identify those most likely to be frontline workers who worked in-person early in the COVID-19 crisis in March/April 2020. In a third step, we exclude industries that were shut down or running under limited demand at that time (Vavra 2020 ). We find that the broader group of essential workers comprises a large share of the labor force and tends to mirror its demographic and labor market characteristics. In contrast, the narrower category of frontline workers is, on average, less educated, has lower wages, and has a higher representation of men, disadvantaged minorities, especially Hispanics, and immigrants. These results hold even when excluding industries that were shut down or operating at a limited level. Results for essential and frontline workers are similar when accounting for changes in the federal guidelines over time by using the December 2020 guidelines which include a few additional groups of workers, including the education sector.

COVID-19 mortality across occupations and secondary risks for elderly individuals in the household: A population register-based study

“…We applied three different measures related to occupation. Using the Swedish occupational registers, we constructed occupational groups that are widely considered to be frontline and/or essential occupations (6,18) and in particular in the case of Sweden (6): care workers, police officers and security guards, service sector personnel, delivery workers, taxi-and bus drivers, teachers, meat packers, and cleaners. We compared the COVID-19 mortality risk of these workers (or the older individuals who live with them) to skilled workers in IT, economics, or administration, which are a large group of workers who are not considered frontline, as well as to all other occupations combined.…”

Occupation and COVID-19 diagnosis, hospitalisation and ICU admission among foreign-born and Swedish-born employees: a register-based study

“…[12][13][14][15][16] In many Western countries, foreign-born individuals are overrepresented in less well paid essential occupations that are often characterised by poor working conditions and elevated risk of infection. [17][18][19] Analysing occupational risk of COVID-19 among the foreign-born population could shed further light on both the determinants of the infection and the right groups to target in working to reduce COVID-19 cases and associated deaths. However, the contribution of occupation to the risk of COVID-19 among foreign-born individuals in Sweden has not been studied.…”

Trucking in the Era of COVID-19

“…From a workforce perspective, essential workers faced disproportionate impacts related to a lack of protection from health risks by employers and loss of work related to business shutdowns and shelter-in-place orders ( Grusky et al, 2021 ). Truck drivers are essential workers that could not work remotely during the pandemic ( Blau et al, 2020 ). The pandemic increased both health and economic risks for essential workers due to (1) their employers not protecting them from health risks, and (2) their employers or government officials not protecting them from the economic risks of COVID-19, especially as mandated business shutdowns and shelter-in-place orders disproportionately affected them ( Grusky et al, 2021 ).…”