744: Essential

Chana Joffe-Walt

From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Chana Joffe-Walt, sitting in for Ira Glass. I've been talking to people lately about their jobs. Something is going on with jobs right now. People are leaving them, they want to leave them, where we do our jobs is changing, what we do. And I've been especially interested in people who are designated essential workers. I think for the stay at home types, people like me, our jobs changed in very obvious ways. But for people who continued to go to work in person, their jobs changed too, but those changes were sometimes less visible.

For example, Kerry Breen. He's a carpenter, works for the New York City Department of Education fixing things in schools. Spring last year when all the schools shut down for COVID, Kerry wasn't sure what that meant for him until he heard no, no, no, he should still come in, report to work.

Chana Joffe-Walt

It's not like he was a doctor or a grocery store worker.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Kerry is practical in this way. Kerry has been a carpenter for 35 years. He's also a volunteer firefighter, Irish, talks about his kids a lot. So he's going to work, and they're getting a lot done, because there's no kids around.

Chana Joffe-Walt

And then April, a couple of weeks after the schools closed, Kerry goes in for his team meeting where they tell everyone what they're working on next.

Chana Joffe-Walt

He repeated it. We'll be building coffins for the city of New York.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Monday morning, Kerry goes to work.

Chana Joffe-Walt

It's a simple box, standing on its end where a person's feet would be. And it's open. The cover isn't attached yet, it's just leaning against the box. In the background, you can see a scoreboard, a basketball net, and a championship banner.

Very quickly, the gym became a workshop. They set up cut stations and assembly stations. Electricians came in to install ventilation fans for all the sawdust. And about 10 carpenters got to work.

I asked Kerry, did they know where the coffins were going? No. Did the carpenters talk about what the boxes were for? No. We just kept working.

Chana Joffe-Walt

In the end, Kerry's team built 415 coffins. There were carpenters in other schools too. All together, they built 1,400. As I've been talking to people about their jobs, people in lots of different jobs that were deemed essential over these last 17 months, I will very regularly find myself saying something like this.

Chana Joffe-Walt

415 coffins. Mark it down. That happened. A year and a half ago, we asked more than 50 million Americans to continue going to work, because they had essential jobs. And they did. Nurses and doctors and also mail carriers and waitresses and construction workers, child care workers, garbage collectors all worked through this once in a century emergency.

And now, we're kind of used to it. We're focused on what's next. But do we even know what just happened? I remember calling to check in on someone early in the pandemic. She works in customs at the airport, and she told me they hadn't gotten any PPE yet, and they were nervous. They all sat right next to each other in desks in this office. So they took cardboard boxes and put them up between their desks. And then they cut holes in the boxes, so they could talk to each other.

I had the same feeling hearing that as I did with the coffins. Do people know that happened? Shouldn't we be marking that in some way? 415 coffins, that happened. And 22 jerry-rigged cardboard partitions in JFK airport, that happened too.

Today's show, I'd like to attempt to do a kind of accounting, not of how many people died or how many are unemployed, but a different kind of national accounting of all the smaller private moments that unfolded in people's jobs all across the country-- Maine, Arizona, Michigan, New York City, specifically, essential workers. We're going to hear the stories only they know, moments that changed the way people thought about their jobs, changed the choices they'll make next, and will affect the economy in ways we are only just beginning to see. That's today's show. Stay with us.

Because today's show is a kind of audit, each act name will include a number. So our first number for our ledger here is the number 3.

Chana Joffe-Walt

This act is called "Three Bottles of Joy." That'll make sense in a second. So here's a small thing you would have no way of knowing what's happening underground during the pandemic. Station agents in New York City's subway system, the people who sit in booths and sell you tickets or give you directions, they were still going to work every day.

But most of the public stopped riding the trains, so it got really quiet down there. And as the weeks went on, station agents began bringing items from home into their booths to sit with them during the day-- bibles, spiritual aphorisms.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Moneta Lewis.

Chana Joffe-Walt

She's a station agent for the MTA--

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--New York City transit. She saw workers bringing in all sorts of things into their booths.

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Moneta says, we needed that. Made us feel less alone.

Over time, the bottles of Joy, they started to be a marker for Moneta of how their work was changing. Moneta's job is to be lunch relief for other station agents. That means she travels to a station, the agent on duty goes on lunch, and Moneta sits in their booth for 30 minutes, then travels to the next station. So she sees the inside of a lot of booths. And Moneta's an observer. Black woman, cat-eye glasses. She can talk to anyone, and she does.

She goes from South Ferry station to Rector to Chambers. She gets a bagel from the corner store at 10:30 AM. She eats it for six minutes by the window as she narrates the traffic at the four-way intersection outside. With an eye on the unmarked cop car that is always parked there waiting, she says, four or five tickets daily.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Then it's underground. Moneta waves me into the subway through the gate. Come on, you're with the MTA lady.

Chana Joffe-Walt

March 2020, when the pandemic shut down New York City, Moneta brought word of the virus from booth to booth. At one booth, the agent would say, do you think we should be wearing masks? And at the next booth, oh, I heard we're not supposed to. Management doesn't want us scaring the customers. Another booth, what customers? Moneta says all the agents at every booth were talking about the disappearing customers.

Chana Joffe-Walt

And they did. Transit workers began to get sick in large numbers. And they began to die in large numbers-- first a subway conductor and a bus driver, then a track worker. The MTA suffered more COVID deaths than any other agency in New York City, 171 deaths. COVID was surging, and New York City was the epicenter. It was like a plague struck this one specific agency.

A bus driver I spoke with told me, when you lose someone in the transit system, you notice. Because what transit is is a time schedule. That train pulls out at 4:31 every day. That bus passes with the same bus driver at 8:22 every morning. That person buys chips from the same vending machine in the break room at exactly 5:12. When someone dies, their absence is immediately visible.

Moneta told me she felt like suddenly work was a battle and she was a soldier trying to stay alive. A lot of transit workers felt this way. But they are not soldiers. So I would ask people, how do you make that switch? How does a person go from driving a train every day to going into work thinking you might die doing this job?

Chana Joffe-Walt

Christopher Gonsalves drives the number 7 train. He's a conductor, suddenly an essential conductor, which he spoke about like he was being conscripted into an army just as the war was heating up.

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Chris said his mom told him, no, no, no, do it now while we're on the phone. And then she waited until she could hear him taking his vitamins.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Moneta told me it was around this time when you'd hear about people dying daily that station agents started bringing in the bottles of Joy dish soap into their booths.

Transit workers were essential. But they were also alone. Station agents are supposed to be the eyes and ears of the subway system. But there were so few people.

Transit took away cash purchases-- fear of transmission. So subway fares were all taken on machines. Moneta was by herself sitting in the booths, looking at all the hopeful items people brought, in the bottles of Joy, and just hanging on until we got to the other side. And now, here we are, kind of at the other side? Is there another side?

Things have definitely changed underground. They're better. But Moneta's job is not the same. The people have not returned. They're not riding the trains like before. And the cash hasn't returned either. Station agents still are not allowed to take cash purchases.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Especially because recently, the MTA has proposed eliminating her position, the position of lunch relief for station agents. The union sued, and the MTA backed down. But looking forward, without cash purchases, the job of a station agent does seem much less essential. What if Moneta survived the war only to be laid off in peacetime?

I asked her recently if the bottles of Joy are still in the booths. She said nah, people took them away. You're not allowed to bring extra stuff into the booth. You could get away with it before, when we were left alone down there.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Act 2. Moneta's job changed pretty dramatically, in ways she did not like. But most jobs didn't actually change that much. In fact, one of the strangest aspects of working through the pandemic for a lot of people was how much did not change in their jobs. That is the case with this next story. So we're going to add another number to our list. If you picture our ledger here, we've got 415 coffins, 3 bottles of joy. I feel like the next number here should have stars drawn around it or something, sparkly pen aspirational stars, like a goals list.

The number is 25. Act 2 is called "The $25 Tip." It took Shelly Ortiz a decade in the restaurant business to work up to a $25 tip. She started when she was 15 years old, got her first job as a cashier at a Five Guys in Phoenix. And Shelly walks in bubbly, ready to go. Her nickname growing up was Smiley, and you can hear it in her voice.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Shelly describes herself as an all-in type person. And she threw herself into restaurants, all through college, her 20s. There was Five Guys, then a French bistro, a sandwich shop, a food court. And eventually, fine dining, where she finally got her first $25 tip, which was huge. She was only making $9 an hour. Shelly picked up on the routines of each place she worked easily. She loves a routine. And she loved restaurants. Shelly got rude customers all the time, people who would say things about her body, her personality, how much she was checking on the table.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Shelly got it. This too was routine. It came along with the $25 tips.

Chana Joffe-Walt

She honed this skill to disassociate. She could shake off whatever was thrown at her. Shelly would collect the cash from the table and move on.

The mayor of Phoenix declared a state of emergency on March 17, 2020. Shelly's restaurant closed briefly. But soon after, restaurants were declared essential services in Arizona and reopened for takeout and delivery.

But Shelly hung back. Her dad was sick, recovering from a heart attack. And her mom is a nurse who was treating patients with COVID. Shelly was too scared. She told me she didn't want to apply for unemployment, because she's Puerto Rican, and she just had a sense that that kind of thing never happened for people like her. By May, restaurants in Arizona were serving people in person, and Shelly had to go back. She was still very nervous.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Meanwhile, she still had her routines. She was doing all the things she'd done thousands of times before. Welcome the customer, explain the specials, carry the plates, deliver the drinks.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Something I heard from a lot of people I talked to about working through a pandemic, people in all sorts of jobs, they said they felt like they were in a movie, that one of the strangest parts was how much did not change. It was uncanny, the way good science fiction is uncanny. It looks like normal life, but something big is off. And the parts of the job that have not changed just make the parts that feel off stand out even more.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Why couldn't she? Shelly spent so much time on this question. Why couldn't she disassociate as she'd done for years when a customer slapped her hand or yelled or talked about her body? Her coworkers were going out to karaoke after work. Her customers were out with friends and family catching up.

Chana Joffe-Walt

What is essential about restaurants? Sure, they provide jobs, food, but so do grocery stores. This was a health crisis. Doctors, nurses-- sure, essential. But what is essential about an Asian fusion place in downtown Phoenix? All these things we suddenly started calling essential services, this wasn't some long-held, agreed-upon category. We just made all this up very recently. And even then, it was pretty random.

There was federal guidance on what services should be essential, but most states didn't follow the guidance. They either came up with their own list of essential services, or they had no guidance. So if you had a liquor store in Pennsylvania, you were not essential. But in New Jersey, you were. Construction workers, that was a controversial one in a number of states. Essential or not essential?

And then there are the ones that have a particularly local flavor, like flower shops. They were essential in Delaware. And in Arizona, golf courses, essential-- also restaurants. So Shelly's restaurant was open, and millions of restaurant workers performed their normal daily routines through a pandemic. Why? What essential service did they provide? Was this it? Restaurants were essential because they helped make things feel normal?

Once Shelly thought about her job this way-- she was to continue doing all the things she'd always done, she was essential so that other people could feel normal-- it was too much for her. The tradeoff she'd been making in her head, $25 tips in exchange for some long hours, some crap from customers, that tradeoff fell apart. She didn't want to be paid for the fantasy anymore. A few weeks later, a coworker was exposed to COVID, and Shelly walked out of the restaurant.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Shelly got unemployment, then picked up some film jobs, went back to school for film. She told me now she doesn't think she could ever go back to serving, even after the pandemic.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Here's the image I have in my mind hearing Shelly talk about where she's at right now. I picture all the governors and mayors and council members sitting down to make their lists of essential services-- hospitals, grocery stores, restaurants, golf courses. And I picture Shelly doing the same. She's making her own list of all the things she considers essential-- her life, her health, her self-worth. And she's crossing off an item at the very bottom of her list, a $25 tip.

Coming up, quitters and the people who love them. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.

It's This American Life. I'm Chana Joffe-Walt, sitting in for Ira Glass. This week's show, we are talking to essential workers about what happened inside their jobs over the last year and a half, things nobody else knows. And we are marking these experiences down for posterity. So that as we move into the bright and quickly darkening future, we will do so with a shared understanding of what we have just been through.

So far, we have 415 coffins, 3 bottles of Joy, and a $25 tip. We're going to be adding more to that list. And we will see what happens when people take stock one by one and wind up making some choices they never expected to make. That's what the second half of the show is about, quitters and the people they quit on. A record number of people are quitting their jobs, and they are all quitting on Miss Jordyn Rossingol.

Chana Joffe-Walt

That's how it feels to her, anyway, which brings us to our next act, Teacher Number Four. Miss Jordyn's Child Development Center in northern Maine has lost 23 teachers since the pandemic began. 23. Most years, Miss Jordyn told me herself, maybe one or two teachers leave. So that's our next number for our ledger, 23. 23 disappearing teachers. Miss Jordyn says the first teacher, she left right away, March 2020. She was scared of germy kids. Then another went in April, a third in May. They left for other jobs.

And then in June, Miss Jordyn says, was teacher number 4.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Finding good teachers and then keeping them-- this has always been a problem in early childhood education. It's one of those areas that was already a bruise, and the pandemic came and just stomped on it until the bone was broken too. For Miss Jordan, teacher number 4, Shania Bell, that felt like the break. She can't get over it.

And she's not joking about how much time she can spend lamenting this particular loss. Shania's ideas were fresh, she tells me. Her discipline was fair. Her lesson plans were thought-out. She was reliable, she was a fun coworker.

Chana Joffe-Walt

See what I mean? When Miss Jordyn conceived of her early childhood center in her hometown, babies to kindergarten, she could picture it in her mind. But she says it wasn't until Shania showed up a couple of years ago, and she got to see her in a real classroom, that's when Miss Jordyn felt like, this is going to work.

Shania told me for her, when she walked into Miss Jordyn's center, 21 years old, she was nervous in a way she had not been before. Because she felt like, this is it. This is the job I actually care about, and I don't want to mess it up. And she did love the job. But then--

Chana Joffe-Walt

There was the time the owner, Miss Jordyn, asked everyone to hold off on getting paid, and their paychecks came in late. And the time Shania was pretty sure her paycheck came from Miss Jordyn's personal bank account. Shania began to feel like, wait, is there no cushion in this business? She'd never really thought about the business side of things before. But once she started to, she started to have some doubts. When a friend posted about a job at the local hardware store, Shania applied. Then she had to tell Miss Jordan.

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This is Miss Jordyn again.

Chana Joffe-Walt

This is obvious, but deserves saying anyway. So many of the people we call essential workers do not make a lot of money. They're overwhelmingly low-wage workers. About half the people in this country who make less than $15 an hour work in fields we now call essential. So you can be the very best at running the grill or cleaning the office building or managing rude customers at the restaurant, you can be the star teacher, teacher number 4, Shania, and still only make an average of $11 or $12 an hour-- and no health care.

Miss Jordyn barely makes enough from tuition to cover her expenses. But she's reluctant to raise rates on families, because she knows many parents can't afford to pay. And she knows from experience that if she goes too high, families are going to pull their kids all together. When Shania talked to Miss Jordyn-- and when she talked to me-- about leaving her job, she could not bring herself to say the word quit. She told Miss Jordyn, I have to get done.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Miss Jordyn did do all those things. She pleaded, we'll figure something out. Just give me more time. And she tried a technique that I think is maybe only applicable in a small town. When Shania said where she was going, Miss Jordyn shook her head.

Chana Joffe-Walt

So Shania left, and Miss Jordyn waited for her to return. In the early child care world, there were two somewhat distinct phases of the pandemic. There was the beginning, in which child care centers lost money, even as their work became labeled essential. And then there's this moment now, where what was already a chronic problem of teacher turnover has become so much worse, because the industry can't compete.

Places like Walmart, Home Depot, FedEx, grocery store chains like Kroger kept making money over the pandemic. Amazon made record profits. Child care centers did not. So teachers are leaving for jobs at Amazon or Dunkin' Donuts or grocery stores that can pay them more and sometimes give them health benefits. A woman in Ohio who owns a child care center told me, even the amusement parks can pay better than we can right now.

When Miss Jordyn lost Shania, teacher number 4 of 23, she allowed a thought that has been sitting uncomfortably to the forefront ever since. What if I can never keep someone like Shania? What if no one ever believes this is valuable?

Chana Joffe-Walt

Why is it that essential workers happen to be some of the lowest paid workers in the country? How could a job that is so valuable be paid so little? There are some standard explanations you will hear. Many essential jobs do not require extra credentials or a lot of education. There's a lot of available labor to do these jobs. In other words, they are low-paid because they are, quote, "low-skilled" jobs.

But also, one thing that unites this broad category of low-paid essential jobs, and almost everyone you've heard from in this show, is not the kind of work they're doing, but who is doing it-- Black people, Latino people, immigrants, women, and all the people who cover more than one of those categories. 95% of child care workers are women-- white women, like Shania and Miss Jordyn, and many women of color. Almost half of child care workers are people of color. The field is much more racially and linguistically diverse than K through 12 teachers. And the people in it make much less money.

The pandemic gave child care an official stamp of essentialness in this singular moment in history when it is more clear than it has ever been and may ever be again that schools and child care are essential to the functioning of literally everything. But Miss Jordyn's work and the people doing that work may never be valued enough for her to secure more funding or for her to get Shania back.

Miss Jordyn and Shania live in a town of 8,000 people. So when Shania left, she went all the way to a job across the street. She parks in the same spot she did when she worked at Miss Jordyn's. Miss Jordyn told me, I see her all the time.

Chana Joffe-Walt

One thing economists will say about economic moments like this, when a lot of people are quitting their jobs, they'll say, it's a good thing. High quits numbers equals optimism. People are going back to school, they're going for that dream job. People feel secure enough to look around a little for what they really want to do.

This is obviously not an example of that. This is an example of a market that does not work. This is an example of a talented person who's drawn to a job that is essential that she's not doing, because it does not pay enough.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Act 4. There are people who are quitting who are happy about it. There are people who are mad, confused about what they want. Of course, there's the whole range. One thing I found interesting is that for many people, there was often one moment that set things in motion for them a while back, some symbol of something just being off in their job. And then it's like, these symbols just sat next to them for months, kind of haunting them until they could not deal anymore.

They found themselves doing something they never planned to do. Sometimes that was quitting, but there were some other approaches as well. So for our last story, I want to tell you about some of those symbols and then what happened next. Our last number-- it's also our biggest number in the whole show-- 12 million. Act 4, 12 Million Thank You Meals. This one I heard about from a guy in Flint, Michigan.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Flato is 61 years old. He's a Black man, wakes up every morning at 4:00 AM, walks to work, McDonald's, opens the store, cooks sausage, eggs, pancakes. He's in the back on his own, sometimes for many hours. He doesn't mind. He enjoys working alone. When he's at home, Flato will spend a lot of time helping out neighbors, removing snow, cutting grass. He enjoys that too, although he did mention he's a person who sometimes has a hard time saying no.

When I asked Flato what the pandemic was like for him, that's when he started telling me about how last spring, McDonald's began offering free food, Egg McMuffins.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Remember this? I realized watching a bunch of these commercials, I'd somehow forgotten how completely everyone threw themselves in to breathlessly praising essential workers, two words most of us had never heard used together before. All of a sudden, they were everywhere. It's like we invented this category of worker to thank them.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Anyway, Flato saw that commercial and was like, oh, that'll be me serving you.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Now, I thought Flato was sharing this as a moment of pride, being part of this. But no. This moment, handing out free Thank You Meals, it was the start of something for him.

Chana Joffe-Walt

McDonald's gave away 12 million Thank You Meals to frontline workers. After two weeks, they stopped, but not without putting out one more commercial.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Business went back to normal, but Flato kept returning to the experience in his mind. How much did that cost? All of a sudden, they have so much money for that?

Chana Joffe-Walt

Flato talked a lot about the shareholders for McDonald's, the big corporation, and also about the franchise owner, the people who own his McDonald's and about a dozen or so other stores. He says he barely saw them during the pandemic. The higher-ups, they rarely came to the store. He'd always noticed it. But handing out the Thank You Meals for health care workers, he noticed it more.

Chana Joffe-Walt

I thought that was such a fitting way to describe something I'd heard from a lot of people who worked through the pandemic, a feeling that while they had no choice to come to work, the people who were making all the choices-- if they had to work, how much they'd get paid, how safe they'd be-- those people appeared completely indifferent-- callous, even, like a relative who won't speak to you. A server at a pizza restaurant in Texas, Ashley Baker, told me the owner used to come in all the time. And then he vanished.

Chana Joffe-Walt

When he showed back up months later, they were all relieved to have someone in charge, to answer their questions.

Chana Joffe-Walt

For Flato, it was the 12 million Thank You Meals. That was the symbol for him, now glowing neon. It put all the other parts of his job in a less-acceptable light. For Ashley, it was the Corvette. For employees at a McDonald's in California, perhaps it was when they raised concerns about the lack of PPE. And they say their bosses told them to use coffee filters and doggie diapers for masks.

For a guy I met outside an Amazon warehouse, it was when he says he was fired four times for having COVID. Four times. This was a thing, apparently, at Amazon. People would tell their bosses they had COVID, or they got exposed to COVID, and then they'd get fired. Later, they would hear it was an HR mistake, and they were welcome to appeal, get their job back, but not always the weeks or sometimes months of lost wages.

And for Ashley's manager at the pizza place, a woman named Soliris Morales, the Corvette pissed her off. But the real sign for her was when the restaurant cut back her hours, and she became eligible for unemployment.

These things just sat nearby as they did their jobs, nagging-- a Corvette, being fired four times, $7.25 an hour. Flato at McDonald's, he was handing out those Thank You Meals more than a year ago. He's still mad about it. He's mad about a lot of things-- that they never got hazard pay, sick pay, paid time off, health care.

The owner-operator of Flato's McDonald's says he showed his appreciation by raising wages during the pandemic. But Flato's wage is another thing that just makes him angry. He went from $11 to $12 an hour. He wants more. But the one thing Flato talked about more than any other was the fact that the franchise owner, and the people who work with him, did not come by. And when they did, they did not appear to actually see them.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Ashley and Solaris at the pizza restaurant, they quit. The guy I met at the Amazon warehouse, he was being pitched on a union. A group of current and former employees are now trying to organize one at the Staten Island warehouse. And Flato did something he has never done his entire working career. Recently, when his coworkers started talking about striking, he joined. It felt like not him.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Flato doesn't want to quit. The McDonald's is close to his house-- he has no transportation. He can walk to work. He likes the people he works with, some of them he's worked with for many years. And he likes the work. He doesn't want to change. He wants the job to change. He wants it to be less thankless.

So many of the industries we deemed essential now seem to be in some sort of chaos. Restaurants are open now but not for dinner, because there's not enough staff. Health care workers are quitting their jobs, election officials are bailing, and school superintendents from America's three largest school systems have all quit. And things that never really worked that great before seem to be truly breaking down. I called JetBlue the other day to change a reservation, and the recording said, the current wait time is 299 minutes. Some food chains are actually raising wages-- Chipotle, Olive Garden. McDonald's is raising wages at its corporate stores-- to a small share of actual McDonald's stores, but still. Support for labor unions is the highest it's been in years.

Every week or so lately, I see a picture online posted outside a store or restaurant announcing that no one works there anymore. Like this one scotch-taped to the door that reads, "Attention Chipotle customers. We're overworked, understaffed, and underappreciated. Almost the entire staff and management have walked out of here until further notice." Or another, "we are closed indefinitely, because Dollar General doesn't pay a living wage or treat their employees with respect." I've never seen anything like it. Each sign, it seems like a whole group of employees just spontaneously and collectively decided they were done.

But you know something happened at some point before now. Some shift started with, say, a Corvette, or with 12 million Thank You Meals. One sign posted on a McDonald's drive-through menu reads, "We are short-staffed. Please be patient with the staff that did show up. No one wants to work anymore." Or another, also from a different McDonald's, with a different perspective. It reads, "We are closed because I am quitting, and I hate this job."

People quit jobs for all sorts of reasons, and there are a lot of people debating why so many are doing it right now. So I'd like to just make sure this one possibility is on the table alongside all the others. That a good number of people worked through a life-threatening pandemic feeling unseen by the very people who are supposed to care for them, feeling, as Flato did, like they have a relative who will not speak to them.

My favorite sign is from a Wendy's in North Carolina. It reads, "We all quit. CLOSED." in capital letters. And then in the corner of the sign, someone scrawled, "Bye, Alisa" with a smiley face next to it.

[MUSIC - "WORK TO DO" BY THE ISLEY BROTHERS]

Chana Joffe-Walt

Today's show was produced by Bim Adewunmi and edited by our Executive Editor, Emanuele Berry. The people who put our show together today include Susan Burton, Aviva DeKorngeld, Tobin Low, Miki Meek, Lina Mitsitzis, Stowe Nelson, Katherine Rae Mondo, Alyssa Shipp, Laura Starcheski, Lilly Sullivan, Christopher Swetala, Matt Tierney, Nancy Updike, Chloee Weiner, and Diane Wu. Our Managing Editor is Sara Abdurrahman, Senior Editor, David Kestenbaum.

Special thanks today to Rachel Lissy, Jennifer Klein, Diana Ramirez at One Fair Wage, Kate Wells, Zoe Clark, Lea Austin and Penelope Whitney, Darrick Hamilton, Robert Williams, Anne Helen Peterson, Zoé Samudzi, Gina Ginn, Tonya Breslow, Betsey Stevenson, and all the other people who spoke to me about their essential jobs. And also thanks to the excellent reporters who have focused on them in their stories, especially Eliza Shapiro, Heather Long, and Annie Lowry.

Our website, thisamericanlife.org, where you can stream our archive of over 700 episodes for absolutely free. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks to my boss, Ira Glass. He has this special way of testing a microphone, always the same for the last 25 years doing the show. Puh, puh, puh, puh, puh, puh, puh, puh.

We'll be back next week with more stories of This American Life.

[MUSIC - "WORK TO DO" BY THE ISLEY BROTHERS]