This is a pulmonary infectious disease. Meaning that the virus is airborne.
If you are infected, then every breath you exhale, every laugh or word you speak, every sneeze or cough you make, can transmit the virus into the air, inside the room that you are in. And it may take 3 hours before the virus particles settle on the ground.
And you don’t know who is infected.
The only way to be safe, and conduct some sort of normal transactions in public, is if everyone wears a mask while in public, and maintain some distance between each other. That way, the mask keeps the virus relatively contained to yourself, while providing some minimal barrier of protection from others.
The reason why the CDC does not recommend this, is because of the mask shortage. They want to keep enough available to the health care workers. Which I understand, but if the public also uses a mask, then it would also minimize or slow down the infection rate.
If you are working in public, or even if you are doing grocery shopping for yourself, then I highly advise to protect yourself, to take this issue seriously, and wear a mask.
Nobody is "sending in" gig workers. Isnt the whole point of gig work that the worker can choose whether to pick up a gig and go in or not?
Some but not most:
https://laborunionreport.com/2019/04/23/eight-of-the-top-10-...
> Nobody is "sending in" gig workers. Isnt the whole point of gig work that the worker can choose whether to pick up a gig and go in or not?
Oh yes, the US economy, in its majestic equality, allows the rich as well as the poor to expose themselves to a dangerous, novel virus in exchange for low wage work.
It's a strong grocers union, but does not cover Instacart and other gig workers.
Wishing them the best of luck.
That's unfortunate that they don't cover gig workers. A good chunk of our employment is now in "gig work".
For my side, I guess I could point to the fact that Walmart workers as a whole have never been able to unionize, mostly due to the intervention of Walmart. (https://populardemocracy.org/news/how-walmart-persuades-its-...)
The actual cost of living (food, utilities, and home maintenance) is quite low compared to the amount that just gets funneled upwards as rent. This rent treadmill has been created by decades of artificially low interest rates, an explicit government policy.
Sadly most of this surplus doesn't even go to Scrooge Mcducks swimming in vaults of wealth, but rather gets wasted in a distributed fashion on fake office jobs.
“Lol”- these gig workers don’t have the same choices your typical google or Facebook or even Fortune 500 IT guy have.
In fact I would suspect many have been pushed to the margins of society and are only “choosing” gig work because the only other option is that their families face hunger, homelessness, or worse.
I'm pro gig work. I've done it for about eight years and it made it possible for me to have earned income at all under enormously difficult circumstances (while ill and homeless).
But I'm also aware that it only works that way when the system is designed to allow for that. Many platforms aren't designed that way.