When we think of frontliners, they’re usually people like nurses and teachers, but as we are now all aware, they do also include people on checkouts and shelf stockers at supermarkets, cleaners and delivery persons. These people are keeping the show on the road, but they include some of the lowest status and lowest paid people in our community. For example, there has been some good television coverage of delivery people who drive interstate trucks who were, for a period, unable even to get a decent meal when they stopped at remote country towns.
However, it is my own recent experience that has taught me to think about frontliners with an entirely new respect. We have a man who cleans our house and helps with the garden once a week because, being old, we find cleaning the floor and weeding on our knees is now beyond our capacity. Of course, we agreed during the severest shut-down period to forgo his services and we found it hard to manage. It was not just the anxiety about the dirt in a period when we were supposed to be extra clean, but the mess in our confining environment that made us feel depressed. We have now welcomed him back to his usual weekly time slot but with an important difference.
These days we pay him considerably more per hour because we have come to appreciate his amazing frontliner skills. When we thought about his capacity to judge how to put our dishes away, which cleaning process worked best for our cramped kitchen floor, how to induce our compost to work better, where to put the pile of CDs that had fallen down and which part of the house required his most intensive attention, we realised that the skill of a anyone who cleans our house is considerable and deserves greater respect. It is one of timing, of a subtle understanding of how a space works for its residents, and an ability to prioritise complex tasks.
It made me think of my own experience of project management, policy writing, backgrounding for speakers and editing for publication. I’ve so enjoyed it and, at the same time, I’ve received far more pay than most frontliners. How does doing well and having great fun in a tertiary degree, and then a bit of thinking, writing and persuading from mostly a comfortable chair with liberal coffee breaks qualify me to receive