Plumbers, carpenters, nurses, police, etc DON'T work from home!

I keep noticing the same mantra being repeated during our current pandemic of Covid-19.

Work from home. Distance yourself. Work from home.

If you're a plumber, a hotel chambermaid, a cook at the diner, or anything similar, you cannot work from home.
There doesn't seem to be any understanding in the media I see online that a huge number of people cannot work from home. They never could and they never will.

I'd really like to see the garage mechanic who can work from home, with his complete set of equipment and hydraulic lifts.

It just feels so short-sighted and unthinking of the reality of plenty of people's work lives.

This is very true, and they are also the people who are going to struggle financially when everything gets shut down. Still, even if a third of the population can work from home (admittedly that is a very high figure that I just plucked out of the air) then the spread of the virus is going to slow significantly.

As for chambermaid's and cooks, my relatives who were visiting from Las Vegas say that several of the big hotels have closed, so that will mean a lot of chambermaids and cooks can stay home, but pay may be non existent for them.

ClareBroommaker's picture

We were out of town for a while to meet the new grandchild. Stayed in a motel where there appeared to be only five other guests most of a week. We feared the place would throw us out so they could close down. My son and DIL live in lower income area and it was obvious that most residents were not going to work, as cars were wedged bumper to bumper curbside.

I have two children working in the hospitality industry and the near future is not looking great for them.. one of them works at a golf club whose clientele is mainly the over-60s, and the other works at a cafe next to a hospital which people are staying away from in droves in case of contagion from the hospital staff who get their coffees there..