They are behind the counters at pharmacies, stocking shelves in grocery store aisles or ringing in your milk at a local convenience shop or big-box store. And many of these workers have been carrying out those essential duties throughout the pandemic, with little fanfare or recognition.
When COVID-19 began to spread around the world almost two years ago, it quickly became clear how much people appreciated those working in essential services, such as health care, shipping and infrastructure maintenance. Workers were often cheered and widely praised for doing their jobs and providing much-needed support.
Others on the front lines, however, received less attention despite facing similar risks that sometimes carry complex consequences.
Front-line retail workers (FRWs) have been dealing directly with customers since the World Health Organization declared SARS-CoV-2 a pandemic in March 2020. Many were called on to carry out the responsibilities of their jobs, while trying to ensure their safety and the safety of their families.
Haorui Wu, a Canada Research Chair in Resilience and an assistant professor in Dalhousie’s School of Social Work, is exploring that stressful balancing act by examining FRWs individual-work-family challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic and how that has affected their well-being.
“Current research has revealed that non-health-care front-line workers in customer-facing roles were five times more likely to be asymptomatically positive, much more likely to be admitted to hospital and suffer severe illness,” he says.
“Yet, the existing research has rarely examined the coping capacity of these front-line workers in dealing with the multiple challenges associated with their private and public obligations.”
Shedding light on an understudied sector
Dr. Wu and a colleague at the University of Calgary are doing a Canada-wide online survey with roughly 1,000 FRWs to examine the coronavirus-specific challenges they confront in the workplace, while trying to protect themselves and their families. They will be asked how they have protected themselves against COVID-19, what challenges they faced in doing so, how they have protected their families, how their work environment affected their health and what could be done to better support them.
They hope to recruit participants from British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec and Nova Scotia. Women and ethnic minorities will comprise at least 60 per cent and 40 per cent respectively based on gender and ethnicity distributions among FRWs.
The researchers will also look at other socio-demographic characteristics, such as age, education background, immigration status, geography and annual income.
Dr. Wu is hoping the work will shed light on the strains borne out by a sector that has had to take on more responsibility for much of the pandemic, but has not been widely studied. The closure of restaurants, cafes, food trucks and other food-related services has forced more people into grocery stores, according to Statistics Canada, which found that grocery sales in 2020 increased 38 per cent over the previous year.
“FRWs, who must be in close, frequent physical proximity to customers and colleagues and possibly face exposure to the virus should be a priority for policymakers concerned with physical and economic security,” says Dr. Wu.
“Given this virus, its variants, its rapid transmissibility and holiday shopping season, we need to understand their challenges, which are inextricably linked to the interplay between their public and private lives.”
He hopes the data and consultations with industry, public health officials and policy makers, will lead to improved workplace conditions for these essential workers, better emergency response plans and the identification of ways to support them in the current and future crises.
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