Who are the Essential and Frontline Workers?

Francine Blau, Josefine Koebe () and Pamela Meyerhofer ()
Additional contact information
Josefine Koebe: University of Hamburg
Pamela Meyerhofer: Montana State University

No 13650, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Identifying essential and frontline workers and understanding their characteristics is useful for policymakers and researchers in targeting social insurance and safety net policies in response to the COVID-19 crisis. We develop a working definition that may inform additional research and policy discussion and provide data on the demographic and labor market composition of these workers. In a three-step approach, we first apply the official industry guidelines issued by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to microdata from the 2017 and 2018 American Community Survey to identify essential workers regardless of actual operation status of their industry. We then use data on the feasibility of work from home in the worker's occupation group (Dingel and Neiman 2020) to identify those most likely to be frontline workers who worked in-person early in the COVID-19 crisis in March/April 2020. In a third step we exclude industries that were shutdown or running under limited demand at that time (Vavra, 2020). We find that the broader group of essential workers comprises a large share of the labor force and tends to mirror its demographic and labor market characteristics. In contrast, the narrower category of frontline workers is, on average, less educated, has lower wages, and has a higher representation of men, disadvantaged minorities, especially Hispanics, and immigrants. These results hold even when excluding industries that were shutdown or operating at a limited level.

Keywords: race differences; gender; frontline workers; essential workers; COVID-19; hispanics; immigrants (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J15 J16 J21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 13 pages
Date: 2020-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ltv
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (18)

Published - published in: Business Economics, 2021, 56, 168–178

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp13650.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Who are the essential and frontline workers? (2021)
Working Paper: Who Are the Essential and Frontline Workers? (2020)
Working Paper: Who are the Essential and Frontline Workers? (2020)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp13650

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().