Saturday, May 16, 2020

“Obamagate” is the new birtherism

Delegitimizing Obama is one of the core political objectives of the Trump administration.
By Zack Beauchampzack@vox.com  

Trump in shadow.
 Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images
The past week has seen President Trump, desperate to distract from the coronavirus, turn his attention to the promotion of a new conspiracy theory: “Obamagate.”
This theory posits the prosecution of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn was part of a broader scheme against the Trump presidency, masterminded by former President Barack Obama. It’s not at all clear how this is supposed to come together; Trump could not explain it when asked a press conference, saying that “some terrible things happened” and that “the crime is very obvious to everybody.”
But while Obamagate may not make very much sense on the merits, it makes complete sense as an ideological totem. It is eerily reminiscent of the conspiracy theory Trump rode to political prominence a decade ago: birtherism.
The notion that Obama was not born in the United States was never even remotely plausible. But it served a particular ideological function: It otherized America’s first black president, claiming that he was not American-born at all, and that therefore he and his election were illegitimate. It took the popular conservative idea that Obama was ideologically foreign to the country (remember his “Kenyan, anti-colonial” worldview?) and turned it literal.
That Trump played a major role in popularizing birtherism, and then rode a wave of white resentment to the White House, is not an accident. Birtherism was proof of concept that a more vulgar politics of white backlash could find a real audience in the GOP, evidence that the party was waiting to be captured by Trump’s longstanding brand of racial demagoguery.
Trump eventually admitted, grudgingly, during his 2016 campaign that Obama was born in America. But the spirit of birtherism has infused his administration. Throughout his presidency, Trump has positioned his predecessor as a nefarious plotter working to undermine the quest to Make America Great Again. From Trump’s absurd 2017 claim that the 44th president “wiretapped” him to his new demand that the Senate make Obama testify about “Obamagate,” he has painted Obama’s presidency as illegitimate and fundamentally criminal.
Delegitimizing Obama is one of the core political objectives of the Trump administration. The question today is how much he’s willing to corrupt the justice system in pursuit of it.

Obamagate and birtherism reveal the real heart of Trumpism

Birtherism tapped into a very particular kind of racialized critique of Obama: a free-floating sense that something about him was not truly American. You saw in the right-wing media habit of always using his middle name — Barack Hussein Obama. You saw it in the accusation that when he and his wife fist-bumped during the 2008 campaign, it was a “terrorist fist jab.” You saw in the allegation, which some still believe, that he is secretly Muslim.
These arguments, while not explicitly framed in terms of Obama’s skin color, reflect the way America’s racial caste system operates in polite society. Everyone knows using the n-word is unacceptable, but describing black people through stereotypes in media and everyday life remains commonplace. Though formal discrimination in hiring is outlawed, careful studies have established that black applicants are significantly less likely to be hired than white ones.
The idea of Obama’s foreignness was always a way of saying that his race made him ineligible for high office, just in this coded language. Trump’s advocacy for birtherism, a theory he promoted relentlessly in media appearances and on Twitter in Obama’s first term, took this abstract idea and turned it into a concrete rallying cry. Obama doesn’t just think in a foreign way, the idea posits; he’s a literal foreigner who is ineligible for his office, an un-American interloper who occupies the presidency unlawfully.
The move takes a generically coded racist attack and turns it into an actual attack on presidential legitimacy.
A leader’s legitimacy is an essential component of effective governance in a liberal democracy. It is the idea that political authorities have been properly authorized by the people and the law to exercise authority, and thus are entitled to wield power. Democratic legitimacy allows citizens to accept the rule of people they disagree with; you may not like how they wield power, but at very least you accept that election results mean they have the right to do it.
Birtherism was the idea that Obama was not entitled to this legitimacy in a very literal sense. Because foreign-born individuals are not legally eligible for the presidency, it claimed, Obama’s victory was unlawful: The people were duped by a fake American. It gives reason for people afflicted by generalized racial panic to justify their belief that Obama did not deserve to be in the Oval Office — and thus, did not deserve the respect or authority they’ve conferred on his white predecessors.
Obamagate operates in essentially the same fashion. It argues that Obama was not a legitimate leader because he broke the law (somehow). He masterminded a conspiracy to undermine Trump, who is the people’s “authentic” representative, and illegally coordinated the “deep state” in its counterattack on the duly elected president.
The racial politics are, similarly, just barely below the surface. In labeling Obama “foreign,” Trump positioned a black president as alien to the rightful and correct order of things in the United States. In labeling Obama “criminal,” he’s drawing on centuries of stereotyping of black people as criminals who need to be reined in by white authority figures.
Obamagate, like birtherism, directly embodies the grievances many whites have with recent challenges to white dominance. It signals to them that Trump could not stand the fact of this man’s presence in the office: the political equivalent of describing Obama as a “thug.”
Conspiracy theories are by their nature impossible to disprove. After Obama released his “longform” birth certificate from Hawaii, Trump repeatedly insisted that it was forged. The absence of evidence for the claim that Obama persecuted Flynn — a man who, to be clear, pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI — is no obstacle to Trump pursuing it.
This allows the crusade to go on as long as it’s useful. Whenever Trump needs to rally the political faithful, to gin up his most hardcore supporters, he can dial up the racism dial to 11 by seizing on some anti-Obama conspiracy theory. Just by making these wild allegations, Trump force serious coverage of them by credulous reporters — allegedly balanced reporting that just aims to teach the controversy, as it were.
Birtherism was the first iteration of this Trumpian move. Obamagate, while the most recent, might not be the last.
In a recent essay on birtherism, the Atlantic’s Adam Serwer describes it as not a sideshow to the Trump phenomenon but the center of it:
Birtherism was a statement of values, a way to express allegiance to a particular notion of American identity, one that became the central theme of the Trump campaign itself: To Make America Great Again, to turn back the clock to an era where white political and cultural hegemony was unthreatened by black people, by immigrants, by people of a different faith. By people like Barack Obama. The calls to disavow birtherism missed the point: Trump’s entire campaign was birtherism...
You could call birtherism a conspiracy theory, sure. But in 2020, looking at the Trump administration’s efforts to diminish the power of minority voters, imprison child migrants, ban Muslim travelers from entering the country, and criminalize his political opposition, it could be more accurately described as the governing ideology of the United States.
The more Trump pursues Obamagate, the harder this point will be to deny.
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America risks doing too little, not too much, to save the economy

Two months into the thick of the coronavirus crisis, Washington haggles as the economy craters.

By Emily Stewart emily.stewart@vox.com May 15, 2020


The coronavirus pandemic is ravaging America. More than 80,000 people have lost their lives, and thousands more are expected to follow. Tens of millions of people have lost their jobs, and unemployment is at its highest level since the Great Depression. The country has no plan.

And yet, two months into the thick of it, Washington haggles as the economy craters.

Conservatives in Congress are worrying about being too nice to the unemployed and demanding protections for businesses that could be held liable for sickening or killing their workers. Millions of living people are without stimulus checks, but the IRS is trying to figure out how to get back checks that were accidentally sent to the dead.

Some Republicans have suddenly rediscovered their deep passion for guarding the deficit — you know, the one they gave up for that giant corporate tax cut in 2017. Oh, and by the way, those corporations that got the tax windfall? They need a $500 billion bailout. How could they have been expected to save up in anticipation of a pandemic?

But the low-paid essential workers and the people suddenly finding themselves out of a job? Well, that’s just a lesson for them on the importance of having a rainy-day fund. The same goes for the states and cities now in dire straits, or the small businesses that struggled to get loans and are already starting to worry about how to pay them back.

The country is facing an unprecedented crisis, and many legislators, policymakers, and people in power are now offering a tepid reaction. Congress has provided about $2.9 trillion in fiscal support, according to the Federal Reserve, and is going to need to do more in order to salvage the economy. But the White House has suggested a pause on further legislative stimulus, and as Democrats put forth a new proposal for a major legislative package, key Republicans aren’t eager to move ahead.

It’s not a time to test the waters, it’s a time to dive in. In a conversation in March as the gravity of the economic crisis set in, former Obama economist Betsey Stevenson issued a warning: “The risk of doing too little is much greater than the risk of doing too much.”


That’s playing out right now in real time.
This is an extraordinary moment that necessitates extraordinary measures

Things, they are bad. Unprecedentedly and extremely bad. The US leads the world in the number of confirmed coronavirus cases after having failed to get the virus under control. Tens of thousands of people have died, and thousands of daily deaths are expected into the summer.

Meanwhile, the economy, which government officials have put on pause to try to stop the spread of the disease, has plummeted. GDP shrank in the first quarter at its fastest rate since the Great Recession, and projections indicate that the worst is yet to come.

In April, the unemployment rate jumped to 14.7 percent, but even the Bureau of Labor Statistics has acknowledged that it’s likely closer to 20 percent.

More than 36 million people have filed new jobless claims in two months, and each week, millions of people are filing more. By comparison, during the last recession, 8.7 million total jobs were lost over the course of many months, and the highest week of losses was about 600,000.



Tomorrow's @nytimes cover shifts its typical format to illustrate today's record weekly initial unemployment claims pic.twitter.com/IFxaNb43vF— Downtown Josh Brown (@ReformedBroker) March 27, 2020

“Our base case is that you don’t return to normal for a while and that we will see unemployment peak at over 20 percent, and then as you start to get to the end of 2021, you’re down to about 9 percent,” Bob Michele, chief investment officer at JPMorgan, told Bloomberg in a recent radio interview. Unemployment peaked at 10 percent during the Great Recession, and remember how bad that was. “There’s a lot of hardship ahead,” he warned.

Meanwhile, states and cities are sounding the alarm about billions of dollars in budget shortfalls they’re facing. Their expenses have skyrocketed due to the health crisis while their revenue sources have dissipated. States can’t run deficits; if the federal government doesn’t step in, they’ll be forced to make deep cuts to their spending, which will only harm the economy more. “The last recession felt like running down a hill,” Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego recently told me. “This one feels like falling off a cliff, it happened so quickly.”
The government can and should do more, and fast

In a speech at the Peterson Institute for International Economics on Wednesday, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell highlighted the actions that Congress and the Fed have taken to try to uplift the economy during the pandemic. Congress has provided nearly $3 trillion in fiscal support to households, businesses, health care providers, and state and local governments. The Fed has taken extraordinary actions as well; it’s cut interest rates to near-zero and announced a series of sweeping measures to boost the economy and ensure liquidity in the markets.

And still, he emphasized, there’s a need for more, and a grave risk to underreacting.

“The record shows that deeper and longer recessions can leave behind lasting damage to the productive capacity of the economy,” Powell said. Debt, unemployment, and shuttered businesses can weigh on the economy for years.

“At the Fed, we will continue to use our tools to their fullest until the crisis has passed and the economic recovery is well under way,” Powell said, though he cautioned the central bank can only do so much. “Additional fiscal support could be costly, but worth it if it helps avoid long-term economic damage and leaves us with a stronger recovery. This trade-off is one for our elected representatives, who wield powers of taxation and spending.”

Congress has thus far enacted three sweeping coronavirus-related packages, the last one being the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, or the CARES Act, a $2.2 trillion stimulus package that President Donald Trump signed into law in March. Lawmakers have rolled out a variety of proposals and plans for potential legislation, and on Tuesday, House Democrats revealed their proposal for a fourth package, the $3 trillion HEROES Act, which will go to a vote on Friday. As Vox’s Ella Nilsen and Li Zhou explained, this is just an opening salvo from Democrats — some Republicans have signaled they don’t plan to spend more without making cuts elsewhere.


RELATED
The Paycheck Security Act, a Senate plan to cover payrolls, explained

But is now really the time to worry about the deficit, especially when interest rates are low and the economy is in such disarray? As Vox’s Matt Yglesias laid out, one huge way to boost the economy right now is to “just spend the damn money.”

It will be worth it in the long run if Congress sends money to people who need it, gives full support to the states, and shores up small businesses. Officials have to think beyond the liquidity problem — the actions taken to keep the economy afloat now — and make sure the country doesn’t have a sustained solvency problem, where demand is so diminished it can’t bounce back.
The risk of inaction is bigger than the risk of overreaction

Charlie Anderson, an adviser to Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO), worried on Twitter that “we’re about to watch a slow-motion train wreck” in the country. “From up close, it feels like we are sleepwalking toward a gut-wrenching, painful failure,” he wrote. “Many are really trying to shake the system awake. But inertia feels like it’s taking us inevitably toward a half-hearted, incoherent response.”


The country has seen what happens when government response falls short — now and in recent history.

As Vox’s Ezra Klein recently wrote, 60 days into the coronavirus crisis, the US has no coordinated plan of action, or even a stated goal. “It is not that the president is doing the wrong thing — he is doing basically nothing,” Klein wrote. “But he has combined a substantive passivity with a showman’s desire to dominate the narrative and a political street fighter’s obsession with settling scores, so he is making the job of governors and mayors harder, neither giving them what they need to beat the virus nor leaving them to make their own decisions free from his interference and criticism.”

Some states have begun to gradually reopen, but their economies aren’t bouncing back. It turns out people are not eager to crowd into restaurants and hop on planes while a deadly disease circulates. In other words, just ignoring the crisis and hoping for the best doesn’t fix it.

The current inaction has led to a flailing economy and a deadly pandemic with no end in sight.

And after the global financial crisis and Great Recession, America experienced how long and terrible a slow recovery can be. It took years for unemployment to get to where it was pre-recession, and even then, wages remained stagnant. State funding for higher education, K-12 education, and local aid was still down even years later.

The worse off the economy is allowed to become during the current crisis, the slower the recovery will be if and when it ends. Jobless workers and closed businesses will drag everything down. Congress can do a lot to try to soften the blow, the question is whether it will, or if instead the country is doomed to spiral even more.
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The Trump administration is using the pandemic as an excuse to target immigrants and asylum seekers

Nativist scapegoating and racist restrictions in the name of public health are nothing new. But this time, anti-migrant policy could have devastating effects.
By John Washington  
A basic tenet of immunology is that we are all safer if we are all safe. That should be a basic tenet for politics as well. And yet, our empathy too often runs up against border walls and dies out.
Migrants are decidedly not to blame for the pandemic. To blame are international travel, the interconnectedness of global capital, grossly ill-equipped national health systems, and leisure tourism. As the United States continues its immigration detention and deportation programs, we can now add anti-immigration policies to that list.
Foisting culpability for disease and contagion on migrants and asylum seekers remains a common cliché, one that has a long and vile history. Covid-19 has been a boon to the anti-immigrant agenda that President Trump — along with other nativist leaders — has been aching to implement since he took office: wielding extraordinary executive powers to temporarily shutter the refugee resettlement program, lock down the US-Mexico border, suspend asylum processing, and push children fleeing danger back into Mexico. Invoking what he has allegedly called his “magical authority,” Trump’s latest move, after threatening to stop all immigration, was a 60-day suspension of visa issuances, with some broad exceptions for health care workers, investors, plus spouses or young children of citizens or green card holders.
It’s not hard to imagine the administration making excuses, even after we begin to recover, for extending or even expanding the lockdowns and turning a temporary state of exception into a lasting status quo. The administration is already moving to extend the suspension indefinitely. Such authority is “magical”— or effectual at solving our current health or economic crises — as much as smoke and mirrors are able to delude and distract.
But while the government is willing to suspend immigration laws meant to protect or welcome people arriving to the country, it is not willing to suspend ones that keep people dangerously locked up in detention centers, where, as the coronavirus begins to creep in, it is almost certain to devastate. These detention centers are bad enough without the virus; in recent years, detainees have suffered outbreaks of measles and received dangerously substandard medical care, while the centers have been the sites of mass suicide attempts, ongoing waves of hunger strikes, rampant sexual assault from guards, and a host of other abuses including generally unhealthy, inhumane, and sometimes torturous conditions.
Nor has the government suspended its expensive wall-building or, most dangerous of all, deportation policies. Deporting people from the United States, the global epicenter of the coronavirus crisis, is another gust of wind to a raging wildfire. Hundreds of people deported to Guatemala and Haiti have tested positive for the virus. In Guatemala, some of the returned migrants are even facing discrimination, accused of bringing the virus with them.
Baseless reproach, nativist scapegoating, and racist restrictions are nothing new when it comes to the intersection of immigration and disease. Amid a series of cholera outbreaks in the 19th century, Americans pointed the finger at Irish immigrants, even referring to the virus as the “Irish disease.” In the 1880s, Chinese immigrants were accused of bringing smallpox and the plague, among other diseases, to California — an accusation that bolstered the movement behind the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, one of the early and trend-setting pieces of racist and anti-immigrant legislation.
A decade later, the US suspended immigration for two weeks after “German authorities had blamed Russian Jews en route to America for a severe cholera outbreak in Hamburg,” as Tara Zahra writes in The Great Departure. It was the same year that Ellis Island was opened, not as a munificent welcome ramp to the United States — as it is sometimes memorialized — but as a bustling medical inspection center that eventually turned into a squalid detention center.
The misconception that migrants brought communicable diseases to the United States came up again in the 1930s in the Southwest, where Border Patrol agents subjected Mexican migrants who crossed the border to “gasoline baths,” spraying them with DDT and other noxious chemicals, including Zyklon B, the same poison the Nazis later used as their preferred killing agent during the Holocaust. As David Dorado Romo writes in Ringside Seat to a Revolution, “The fumigation was carried out in an area of the building that American officials called, ominously enough, ‘the gas chambers.’”
As recently as 1979, journalist Daniel Denvir points out in his recent book All-American Nativism, the Los Angeles Times wrote that “hundreds of thousands of Third World immigrants entering California and the rest of the United States are bringing with them a panoply of communicable diseases that could, according to health experts, move the country back toward nineteenth-century standards of public health.” Despite the lack of evidence, anti-immigrant diehards continue to latch onto that fear; arch-conservative talk radio host Michael Savage, for example, wrote a 2016 book called Diseases Without Borders, foisting blame on Obama’s “open borders policy” for America being “invaded by deadly viruses.”
The Trump administration is using these same false flags and racist fears to deport and expel more migrants, more quickly. The New York Times reported recently that White House senior adviser and anti-immigration zealot Stephen Miller has repeatedly tried to use health concerns as an excuse to lock down the border and bar immigrants. According to an unnamed official, invoking public health “had been on a ‘wish list’ of about 50 ideas to curtail immigration” that Miller had written years before Covid-19. He has been digging for any evidence of a connection between immigration and disease, eagerly primed for a crisis to hit to unleash the new policies. The fact that immigration has nothing to do with the pandemic hasn’t stymied him.
Antiquated, unscientific, and anti-immigrant invective has been repurposed not only against Mexicans and Central Americans, but especially against Muslims as Europe’s influx of refugees has grown. Hungary’s populist leader Viktor Orbán, a nativist homophobe who is one of Europe’s most outspoken anti-immigrant soapboxers, has led the charge on conflating the pandemic with illegal immigration: “We are fighting a two-front war, one front is called migration, and the other one belongs to the coronavirus, there is a logical connection between the two, as both spread with movement.”
Likewise, former Polish prime minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski began claiming, in 2015, that the Muslim migrants arriving to Europe were carrying diseases (a sentiment echoed by Trump when he declared that migrants bring “large scale crime and disease” into the country). Both Polish xenophobes and Donald Trump, however, are wrong. Migrants have been shown to be generally healthier than native populations, at least before they are marginalized and blocked from accessing standard medical care. As Sonia Shah, author of Pandemic and the forthcoming The Next Great Migration, told me, “The reflexive solution to contagion — border closures, isolation, immobility — is in fact antithetical to biological resilience on a changing planet.”
Anti-immigration policy is actually the more pressing health danger — from regulations scaring away immigrants from accessing health care to disease-incubating detention centers. I reported from the migrant camps hastily raised in Tijuana in the fall of 2018: They were overcrowded and unsanitary — migrants had no bathrooms, no access to water, were hounded by Mexican officials, and were turned away or sprayed with tear gas by US border guards. Currently, there are around 2,500 people forced into a makeshift refugee camp in Matamoros, just across the river from Brownsville, Texas. The Mexican border city “has only 10 ventilators and 40 hospital beds for intensive care,” Foreign Policy reports.
As poet Carolyn Forché recently told me, “The contagion of lack of empathy is going to be more harmful to us in the long run than anything else, because it will have no bounds.” Even as we remain on lockdown or in quarantine, we cannot let the Trump administration take advantage of a crisis, levy scurrilous and racist claims against some of the world’s most marginalized populations, and deport and deny migrants and refugees. Doing so will not inoculate us from the virus, but, in fact, infect us with something even worse.
John Washington is a translator and writer covering immigration and border politics, as well as criminal justice and literature. His first book, The Dispossessed: A Story of Asylum at the US-Mexico Border and Beyond, is out in May 2020 from Verso Books.

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USA
Essential workers are losing their hazard pay even though the hazard isn’t over
Kroger and other companies provided “hero pay” to employees as the pandemic ratcheted up the risk to their safety. For many, it will end this month.


By Anna North May 16, 2020

A grocery worker unpacks boxes of food outside of a Brooklyn grocery store on April 23. Spencer Platt/Getty Images

At Megan McHonie’s job, social distancing is all but impossible.

A floral clerk at a King Soopers grocery store in Colorado Springs, Colorado, she comes into close contact with shoppers every day. “When I’m outside watering the plants, the customers don’t keep within six feet of me at all,” she told Vox. “They’re actually within touching distance.”

McHonie has been anxious about coming to work during the pandemic, but one thing she appreciated was the $2-an-hour “hero bonus” that King Soopers’ parent company, Kroger, gave essential workers like her starting at the end of March.

But Kroger’s “hero bonus” raises are scheduled to end on May 16, even as coronavirus cases continue to rise across the country. The grocer isn’t alone — other companies that instituted some form of additional pay for workers earlier this year in recognition of their position on the front lines are now rolling back those increases, even though the danger is far from gone. Starbucks, for example, is planning to end a $3-per-hour raise for workers at the end of May, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Meanwhile, some companies that employ essential workers right now have seen increased sales and boosted executive pay in recent months. Kroger, for example, saw same-store sales increase 30 percent in March as customers stocked up on groceries, according to Winsight Grocery Business. And Kroger CEO Rodney McMullen received a 21 percent increase in compensation last year, boosting his income to more than $14 million. The company has not responded to Vox’s requests for comment.

Many essential workers, by contrast, are making less than a living wage even with the increase in pay. And they urgently need more money both to pay their bills and to stay safe during the pandemic, says Molly Kinder, a fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies hazard pay. For example, many low-wage workers can’t afford cars, meaning they risk exposure to the virus on public transit during their commutes to work. Millions of essential workers also lack health insurance, jeopardizing their ability to seek treatment and making any illness potentially financially devastating for them and their families. “When your employer gives you low wages,” Kinder said, “those low wages make you less resilient to the disease.”


Democrats in Congress have proposed a plan to give essential workers a pay raise higher than the small amounts companies have been offering, and to extend it through the end of the coronavirus crisis. Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) has put forth a plan to give workers a similar raise, though for a shorter period. Neither is likely to move forward without the support of more Republicans in Congress.

Meanwhile, workers like McHonie continue to put themselves at risk while their CEOs make millions. “For him to line his pockets while we’re suffering on the front lines is not okay,” she said of McMullen. “It’s selfish and it’s evil.”
Hazard pay used to be associated with the military. The pandemic changed that.

Before the pandemic, hazard pay was often something military or government employees got when they took on dangerous assignments, Kinder said. But now, people who never thought they were taking a dangerous job, such as grocery store workers, are facing daily exposure to a deadly virus. And overwhelmingly, they’re asking for a raise.

In her interviews with dozens of essential workers in recent weeks, Kinder said, “Everyone brought up the issue of hazard pay.”

Several large companies did institute some form of additional pay for essential workers. Like Kroger and Starbucks, for example, Amazon and Target gave workers a $2-per-hour raise. Walmart paid bonuses of $300 to full-time workers and $150 to part-timers in April, and plans to do so again in June.
“WHEN YOUR EMPLOYER GIVES YOU LOW WAGES, THOSE LOW WAGES MAKE YOU LESS RESILIENT TO THE DISEASE”

Some workers, however, say such amounts are a drop in the bucket when it comes to compensating them for what they’re facing. Kevin Smith, a meat department manager at a King Soopers store in Longmont, Colorado, says customers aren’t following social distancing guidelines in his store.

“The other day I had a customer that kept stepping toward me,” he said. “I would take a step back, trying to keep some distance between us, and I accidentally bumped into a customer behind me.”


Smith has been sleeping in a separate bedroom from his wife, who has a congenital heart defect, to avoid exposing her to the virus. “I worry about being exposed to all these people and bringing it home,” he said. “I don’t think I’d ever get over it if something happened to her.”

For him, an extra $2 an hour “is not going to make a difference,” he said, adding that for many part-time workers, that works out to only about $40 a week.

And now, even that small increase is in jeopardy, with Kroger’s “hero bonus” raises slated to end on May 16. After pressure from workers unions, the company said in a statement to Supermarket News on May 8 that it was evaluating compensation.

“Our temporary ‘hero bonus’ is scheduled to end in mid-May. In the coming months, we know that our associates’ needs will continue to evolve and change as our country recovers,” the statement read. “Our commitment is that we will continue to listen and be responsive, empowering us to make decisions that advance the needs of our associates, customers, communities and business. We continuously evaluate employee compensation and benefits packages.”

But it’s not clear whether the “hero bonus” will be extended, and Smith isn’t optimistic. “I really don’t count on this company to always do the right thing,” he said.

With the pay bump set to expire, Smith said, “A lot of the workers feel so disrespected. We’re beginning to call it ‘zero pay.’”
There are proposals in Congress to extend hazard pay, but their future is uncertain

Outside of Kroger, many other workers are set to lose their pay increases as well. At Target, Amazon, and Starbucks, extra compensation is scheduled to expire at the end of May. Dollar Tree and Chipotle also instituted hazard pay for workers but similarly plan to roll it back this month, according to the business watchdog group Just Capital. Of all the companies Just is tracking, only the cable operator Charter Communications has made its hazard pay permanent.

Meanwhile, coronavirus cases continue to multiply. And with states beginning to reopen, and Americans moving around more, essential workers could face more exposure to the virus. “There’s nothing to suggest that these jobs are safer now than they were even two weeks ago,” Kinder said. “In fact, as coronavirus is further spread throughout the population, it’s likely that these workers are even more at risk.”
“THERE’S NOTHING TO SUGGEST THAT THESE JOBS ARE SAFER NOW THAN THEY WERE EVEN TWO WEEKS AGO”

Many never got hazard pay in the first place. The raises were concentrated at large corporations, such as grocery store chains, that saw a spike in demand during the pandemic and needed to hire new employees, Kinder said. Many workers in the health care industry — including those who make low wages, such as cooks in nursing homes and home health aides have seen no jump in wages even though they face very high risk, Kinder explained.

The HEROES Act, House Democrats’ proposal for the next pandemic stimulus package, includes a Heroes Fund that would provide many essential workers — including health care workers and grocery store employees — with a raise of $13 an hour, far more than what most chains have offered. And the raises would last through the end of coronavirus crisis, rather than expiring this month. Senate Democrats have introduced a similar proposal.

Romney, meanwhile, on May 1 put forth a proposal he calls Patriot Pay to give essential workers up to an additional $12 an hour. His plan would last only through July and, unlike Democrats’ proposals, calls for cost-sharing between the federal government and employers.


But so far, he is the only congressional Republican to express interest in hazard pay, Kinder said. And Democrats will need the support of Senate Republicans if they hope to secure additional pay for essential workers.

These workers are in dire need of more money. Even before the crisis hit, many were struggling to make ends meet. One in three essential workers lives in a household making less than $40,000 a year, as Annie Lowrey reports at the Atlantic. One in seven has no health insurance, and millions rely on food stamps.

And the pandemic has made living in poverty more dangerous than ever. Many low-wage workers have to get to work on crowded public transit, Kinder said — she recently spoke to one worker who makes five transfers as part of his commute. Many are also living in multigenerational households, where they risk spreading coronavirus to children or older relatives. One worker, a housekeeper at a nursing facility, told Kinder that if her wages were increased, she could afford to live apart from her son, a cancer survivor who has asthma and is at especially high risk.

“Every single worker that I’ve talked to is so much more worried about what this means for their loved ones than themselves,” Kinder said.

Meanwhile, even in the midst of an economic crisis, some of the companies that are planning to roll back hazard pay are watching sales soar.

Around Mother’s Day, McHonie’s King Soopers store “crushed our sales goals,” she said. In the floral department, “I sold out of product for two days.”

“I think I deserve a pay raise,” she said.
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