Like 102 years ago, this wave of the pandemic will almost certainly disproportionately punish the poor—not only by arresting the long recovery since the Great Recession, but also by specifically targeting industries where workers are most vulnerable and have the least protection.

“One month could wipe out 10 years of progress,” in the fight against inequality, Mark Muro, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said. “A huge service-sector recession is coming, and we’re talking about more than 10 million jobs at risk that are often low-wage, low-benefit, or tip-based.”

from left: Bill Pugliano/Getty; Robert Alexander/Getty

Ground zero for the pandemic’s threat to the labor force are the face-to-face services and leisure economy, much of which have been forcibly shut down by governments to prevent the spread of the virus. Online reservations for restaurants in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., have declined to zero. The largest hotel in New York City, the Hilton Midtown on Sixth Avenue, is closing its 1,878 rooms indefinitely, for the first time ever. Disneyland is empty, and the casinos that had always lit the Las Vegas strip have gone dark.

The workers in these sectors—salespeople, waiters, hotel desk clerks, groundskeepers, maids, and entertainment attendants—have a few things in common: First, their average annual wages are less than $30,000, including tips, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. (The typical annual wage for a full-time worker in the U.S. is about $47,000.) Second, they have the fewest labor protections, such as paid sick leave, and in many cases their tips don’t count as income when they apply for unemployment insurance. Third, they can’t do their work from home. Remote work is the labor market’s only remedy against the virus while Americans are in mass lockdown.

There is still so much we don’t know, including exactly how many people will lose their jobs in the next few months. Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, has said that 18 percent of the labor force is at “high-risk”—more than 25 million jobs. That might sound extreme, but a recent NPR/PBS poll found that by March 14, exactly 18 percent of respondents said they had already been let go or had their hours reduced. For Americans making less than $50,000, the number spiked to 25 percent.

Laura Buckman/Bloomberg/Getty

What seems more certain is that the effects of the pandemic will remain with the U.S. for generations. It may supercharge inequality in the short term. Eventually, however, the pandemic may give birth to a new kind of socialized thinking in America that demands universal insurance and sick leave for all, not just the white-collar remote-work class. For example, Muro believes that national paid leave, if it becomes law, will likely be expanded, because offering paid leave to coronavirus patients in 2020 only to yank it away from cancer patients in 2021 would be too incongruous.

When the 1918 influenza pandemic returned for its second and third waves, it didn’t target low-income workers anymore. It simply killed everyone—laborers and bosses, men and women. In the long run, a virus does not discriminate between the rich and the poor. At some point, then, the question must be asked of America’s political leaders: Why do we?