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Many workers in sometimes thankless essential jobs are worried they could get family members sick with COVID-19, a new poll suggests.
Almost six in 10 Americans (58%) who are still going in to work amid widespread stay-at-home restrictions say they’re concerned about exposing household members to COVID-19 after being exposed at work, according to a new Washington Post/Ipsos survey.
Hispanic workers (72%), black workers (68%), women (64%) and Democrat-leaning respondents (66%) were all more likely to express that concern, according to the survey of 8,086 U.S. adults conducted April 27 to May 4, which also found that 82% of those leaving home for their jobs considered their work essential to their community or society.
Workers on the front lines of the pandemic are overwhelmingly women and people of color, according to a recent Associated Press analysis of U.S. Census data, and are “more likely to be immigrants.”
More than half of employed people said they had continued going in to work at least once a week, according to the Ipsos survey. Among workers leaving home to go to work, 36% said it was likely they had been exposed to the coronavirus at work, and 17% said that to the best of their knowledge, someone in their workplace had been diagnosed with COVID-19.
More than a third, meanwhile, said they or someone in their household had a serious chronic condition.
On the bright side, almost eight in 10 people going in to work said their employer had done enough to ensure employees’ safety. Some 85% said their employer had encouraged workers to stay home when they feel sick, and 59% said their employer had reduced the number of workers required to physically commute.
As for access to personal protective equipment and hand-hygiene resources on the job, majorities of employees leaving home for work said their employer had provided them with access to soap and water for handwashing (91%), hand sanitizer (82%) and face masks (71%).
Thirty-five percent said they wore a mask “at all times” while at work; 24% said they wore it “sometimes,” 15% “occasionally” and 26% “never.” Women were more likely than men to say they always wore a mask at work, according to the survey, tracking with previous research on gender differences in mask-wearing.
Meanwhile, 71% of workers leaving home for work reported feeling appreciated for the work they performed, with 22% saying the people with whom they interacted on the job were more friendly than before COVID-19. More than half said someone had thanked them for their work since the outbreak began.
