Cheyenne, Wyoming Correspondent — The word arrived in March and meant one thing: you don’t get to stay home.

It came with no wage, no benefit, and no protection. It was a permission slip pointed the wrong direction.

I keep books for a freight and energy firm and our drivers never stopped. Nobody sent them anything. There was a period in April when people put signs in windows, and the signs came down about the time the hazard pay did.

Will it survive? The word will. The pay didn’t survive past May at most of the large employers, and that tells you what the word was worth.

Las Vegas, Nevada Correspondent — This town got the reverse designation, which is its own answer.

We were the opposite of essential. The floors closed, seventy-odd days, and a hundred thousand people in this valley found out that the work they’d done for twenty years was the first thing a country stops doing.

Then when we reopened, the same people who were non-essential in April were expected to clean rooms that strangers had slept in, and nobody called them anything at all.

So my answer is that the year didn’t produce a new category. It produced a sorting, and the sorting was mostly about whether your work could be done from a house. Everything else was vocabulary.

My mother cleaned rooms in this town. There was never a year when anybody called that essential, and there won’t be one.

Wheeling, West Virginia Correspondent — I spent thirty years on the union side of industrial safety, so let me say what “essential” actually functioned as.

It was a determination that a plant stays open. In April the President signed an order under the production act to keep meat plants running after outbreaks had closed several of them. That order didn’t confer anything on the people inside. It removed a reason to stop.

That’s the whole history of the word in industrial relations. The work is called essential at the moment somebody wants it to continue, and the designation attaches to the output rather than to the worker.

Will it survive? It’ll survive exactly as long as it’s useful, which is what happened to every previous version of it.

Jacksonville, Florida Correspondent — The port never stopped. Not for a day.

What I’d say is that a lot of people learned something in 2020 that the people doing the work already knew, which is that the supply chain is people. Boxes don’t move themselves. When there was a shortage of anything, it traced back to a shift that couldn’t be staffed.

Whether the recognition survives — I doubt it. Recognition isn’t a wage. We had a period where longshoremen were on the evening news and a period where nobody could find toilet paper, and both ended, and the pay scale is what it was.

The one thing that might stick is inside companies rather than in public. A few boards now understand which of their people can’t be replaced by software, and boards remember what costs them money.

Dayton, Ohio Correspondent — Manufacturing was declared essential and we ran the whole time, so I’ve had a year to think about what it meant.

It meant the risk was distributed by job function. Our engineering and purchasing staff worked from home. Everyone who touched a machine came in. Those two groups have different educations and different incomes, and the pandemic sorted them accordingly.

I don’t think that was anybody’s decision. It’s just what the work is. But it happened in every plant in the country simultaneously, and it’s the clearest illustration I’ve seen of something we usually manage not to look at.

Does it survive? The sorting will, because it’s a fact about the work rather than a policy. Whether anybody does anything about it is a different question and I’d bet against.

Bismarck, North Dakota Correspondent — Meat processing is where this got real here and in South Dakota, and it wasn’t abstract.

A plant in Sioux Falls became one of the largest outbreaks in the country in April. Those are workers who are heavily immigrant, frequently on the lowest wage in the building, and who were told the plant was essential.

I’d want people to notice something specific about that. The essential designation and the workforce it applied to weren’t a coincidence. The work that couldn’t be done remotely and couldn’t be paused was disproportionately done by people with the least ability to refuse it.

Whether it changes anything: agriculture has had a hundred years to think about who does the hardest work in it and hasn’t reached a conclusion yet.

Novi, Michigan Correspondent — Automotive shut down for about eight weeks and then came back, and the coming-back is the part that answers your question.

The restart protocols were negotiated between the manufacturers and the union, in detail, and they held. Screening, spacing, cleaning between shifts. It worked because both parties had to sign it.

That’s the version of “essential” I’d want to survive, and it’s not about a word. It’s about the fact that when the work genuinely had to continue, the people doing it had a mechanism to set the terms.

Most essential workers in this country don’t have one, and that’s the difference between our restart and the meat plants’.

Myrtle Beach Correspondent — Service work here was essential and non-essential in the same week depending on which category the order used.

A restaurant was closed, then takeout-only, then open at half capacity, and the same server was in all three categories in two months while the virus did whatever it was doing.

What that taught people in my industry isn’t that they’re essential. It’s that the designation is administrative and has nothing to do with them.

I’ll say the harder part too. The people who got the loudest public gratitude were nurses and grocery clerks, which is right, and the people in hospitality got a hazard the whole time and no version of the sign in the window. Serving somebody a meal indoors was the specific activity everybody said was dangerous, and it was being done by a nineteen-year-old for a tip.