US isn’t protecting blue-collar workers

My son Nick lives in New Zealand, which has done a remarkable job fighting the coronavirus. As of April 24, the nation of 4.8 million people had 1,456 confirmed cases and only 17 deaths. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s government is now talking about not just containing the virus but eliminating it.
It helps that New Zealand is an island nation that can seal itself off from the rest of the world. It also helps that it has a centralised national health system. But as Nick explained to me the other day, Ardern has also imposed a lockdown unlike anything in the US.
New Zealanders aren’t allowed to drive except in emergencies and can only be out of the house for an hour a day, to get exercise or to buy essentials. (The police are enforcing the one-hour limit, Nick says.) At the pharmacy, only one customer is allowed in at a time, and clerks retrieve the goods from the shelf and put it in a bag, so customers never touch anything until they return home. The wait to get in the grocery store is usually around an hour, and if customers don’t have mask and gloves, they don’t get in.
Here’s what truly caught my attention. When I asked Nick how often he ordered take-out food, he said never. Every restaurant is closed. So is every shop aside from grocery stores and drugstores. There are no deliveries. E-commerce has been halted. Food-processing companies still operate, but virtually every other form of blue-collar work is shut down. (Citizens are surviving financially with emergency checks from the government.)
To put it another way, essential workers in New Zealand are truly essential. Although there are Covid-19 clusters in New Zealand — a church; a rest home; a wedding party — workplaces have largely been virus-free.
Compare that with the US. At a Smithfield pork plant in South Dakota, more than 700 workers have been infected. Dozens of other US meat-packing plants also have high rates of infection, according to an investigation by USA Today. The Boeing Co, which shut down for a month, is calling back 27,000 workers to its Puget Sound facility in Washington — even though the state’s stay-at-home order will remain in place for at least two more weeks. As of early April, 135 Boeing workers had tested positive for the virus.
General Dynamics owns the Bath Iron Works, a Naval shipbuilder in Maine. In early April, the union asked the company to shut it down after a worker tested positive for Covid-19. The company says it can’t do so because the US Navy is insisting that it stay open.
Indeed, according to Defense One, a website that covers the defense industry, the Pentagon has been so insistent that military contractors stay open that executives are worried that the government is forcing them to “choose between sending employees to factories or defaulting on contracts.” They’ve largely decided to send employees to factories: Bloomberg News reports that only 86 of the 10,509 defense industry sites have closed because of the virus.

—Bloomberg