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**DECEMBER 8, 2020**

Meyerson on TAP

Where to Find Essential Workers

The discussion of who should receive the first tranche of COVID-19
inoculations has raised the question of who, exactly, are essential
workers. Nurses and teachers, of course; supermarket and packing house
and farmworkers, certainly; bus drivers and letter carriers, natch; and
so on down the line.

But where, exactly, are such workers to be found? The answer,
disproportionately, is states that voted for Donald Trump.

An article
in
Sunday's

**New York Times**included a table entitled "Share of Workers in
Essential and Frontline Jobs, by State," which put states with the
highest percentage of such workers at the top and those with the lowest
share at the bottom.

The state with the highest share? Mississippi, at 75 percent. Numbers
two through 12, in order, were Arkansas, West Virginia, Kentucky,
Tennessee, Indiana, Alabama, Ohio, Iowa, Wyoming, Oklahoma, and South
Carolina. All were clustered at roughly the same share; number 12 South
Carolina logged in at 73 percent.

The bottom dozen saw New York with the lowest percentage (66 percent),
and working upward on the chain came Nevada, Colorado, Hawaii, Florida,
Utah, Massachusetts, Maryland, California, Washington, and Oregon. That
is, states with high shares of workers with college or advanced degrees,
or workers clustered in industries like banking, tech, and tourism that
either have higher shares of workers who can perform their labors at
home or are heavily unemployed (tourism).

The

**Times**piece didn't correlate this list to how states voted last
month, but the list clearly reflects the education and occupation gap
that figures so prominently in contemporary American politics. It also
reflects the rural-urban gap, which significantly overlaps that between
education levels. Below New York came the District of Columbia, whose
share of essential workers (53 percent) was far below that of any state,
though I suspect was representative of many major cities. (Lobbying, it
turns out, is not essential work.)

By occupation, then, the Americans most likely to be at risk from the
coronavirus live in red states. The lower population density of most of
those states, however, tends to diminish those risks. Still, the Trump
administration's failure to ensure that frontline and essential
workers have been protected from the pandemic has particularly
endangered many of its strongest supporters-though its lies about the
pandemic (and about much else) have helped keep them in the Republican
column.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter

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