text: Natasha Grey has worked as a cashier in the same Toronto grocery store since she was eighteen. She can still tell you the day she started: December 23, 1998. Grey grew up in Malvern, the neighbourhood where the store is located, and even after she got married, moved to nearby Pickering, and began to work full-time at CIBC, she never quit. She stays, quite simply, because she cares about her community; good food is at the centre of everything. Plus, her parents and her sister still live in the vibrant neighbourhood, tucked into the northeast corner of the city, bordering Highway 401 and the Toronto Zoo. If you were to stroll along a tree-studded street there, or peruse a low-slung strip mall, you might hear a chorus of Urdu, Tamil, English, Cantonese, and Tagalog. Many of the customers at Grey's big box store are regulars, people who've offered her a kind smile for years, who've watched her become an adult, who always ask after her family. As March bred panic about the pandemic, Grey bought masks, gloves, and Lysol wipes, but she still stayed. She wanted to help her co-workers and the customers she cared about. "At the end of the day," she said, "it all falls back into one thing. We need the grocery store to be open."
  
  Once CIBC allowed her to work from home on her own time, Grey moved her grocery store shifts to early in the morning. Six days a week, she arrived at the store before sunrise and drove home just after lunch. Then, she'd quickly eat a meal and work her second job until 11 p.m., get up exhausted, and do it all over again. She didn't even have time to watch the weather forecast on TV. At her store, all nine lanes were open and the stream of customers was relentless. In the beginning, before the store taped arrows and queues, the lines stretched out through the aisles and around the building's interior. Tensions ran higher than people's fear-built mountains of toilet paper, cleaning products, and canned goods. Grey saw gratitude, but she also witnessed angry jostling, fist fights, and a whole lot of yelling. People bristled at the idea of social distancing. Sometimes, when Grey ventured into the aisles, marvelling at how the store looked like it had been robbed, a customer would tap her on the shoulder: "Excuse me." Grey would take two steps back and warmly ask how she could help. Some customers didn't like that either. They'd bark, "I don't have COVID!" But she couldn't know that. Anybody could have it.
  
  In spring 2020, for Canadians, the grocery store became both a symbol and the real-life pinpoint of our pandemic anxiety. Fear, cruelty, humanity, kindness, impatience, anger—every emotion of the unknown converged as we wondered how long this would last, if we would go without. The uncertainty created its own sort of virus, catching and spreading. We turned into zombies, ravenous, unreasonable, all buying unearthly amounts of tuna. We turned bitter. The grocery store was the only place many of us could go, and it was so different and so out of our control that we hated it. We hated waiting in line, we hated wearing masks, we hated how crushing it was to buy a singular box of pasta when suddenly you absolutely needed two. Even Grey, who felt nervous watching people hoard, started to buy more food than she could eat. Her sister would see her dump rattling boxes of macaroni-and-cheese into a cart and give her a Look. "Don't worry," her sister tried to soothe. "Everything will be okay." But in those early weeks, Grey wasn't so sure. Nothing was in stock at any of the other grocery stores she visited either. She even checked Walmart, a place she doesn't like because it isn't unionized, and it was empty, too. Every morning, she'd wake up and pray, "God, help me today—and always."
  
  She tried to focus on the good moments: the regulars who, after the store put up Plexiglass barriers to protect workers, gave her "air hugs"; a disabled woman who thanked Grey sincerely and profusely after she helped pack her bags, even though to do so was against store policy; another woman who was similarly grateful after Grey gave her a Lysol wipe—that's it, just a Lysol wipe, more precious than gold; her colleagues who joked around and tried to make things seem normal even when nothing was. Some days were harder than others. On one of the hardest, Grey's husband had come to pick her up from work. She was leaving the store when she heard an earsplitting BAM! She turned and saw two men fighting over the last roll of toilet paper. Grey ran over, flabbergasted. If you'd told her in January that only two months later she'd be breaking up a fist fight over Royale or Charmin, she would have laughed. "It's like the pandemic turned certain people into monsters," she said. And every day, there she was: at the gate, her only weapons a kind word, good service, and a smile that nobody could see behind her mask.
  
  Collectively, we spent millions of dollars more on groceries than we usually do in March and April, driven by a mixture of scarcity fear, a dash of boredom, and, understandably, a mass yearning for salt, fat, and sugar. Stress-baking alone drove flour sales up 200 per cent. Workers in the 1300s used their sudden power advantage during the Black Death to end medieval serfdom. With so much of the population cleaved, there were not enough peasants to work the land, and serfs gained unexpected bargaining room. Where they were once legally bound to work the fields with little reward, they now persuaded lords to let them rent plots, with a chance to turn their own profit. It was either that or let the fields rot. These ambitious farmers ushered in an era of better treatment, a fledgling middle class, and a new economic model—a turning point now referred to as the birth of agrarian capitalism. While it seems unlikely that today's essential workers were thinking of the centuries-gone serf system in March and April 2020, their position is remarkably comparable. Many are underpaid and undervalued. In particular, those who work in non-unionized grocery stores, processing plants, distribution centres, farms, and factories often have little job security and therefore scant ability to speak up about mistreatment or unfair practices. And yet, like the lords and ladies of old, the millionaires and billionaires who employ them are arguably raking it in.
  
  As we descended upon grocery stores across the country, COVID-19 handed workers on the front lines of the food and packaging industries their own bleakly fortuitous bargaining chip. Everybody needed them to work. As both customer numbers and COVID-19 case counts surged, thousands of essential workers were unable to stay at home, safely cocooned in a virus-free environment. As a should-be-predictable consequence, many got sick. Some died. Each punch of the clock was a possible death knell, for themselves and their families. Many of them couldn't afford to quit their newly dangerous jobs; some did anyway. As one union president put it, "Who in their right mind would risk contracting COVID…for $11.32 an hour?" Companies scrambled to hire new workers and keep the ones they still had. Those who stayed were able to use their newfound "hero" status to rightfully push for hazard pay. Bowing to public pressure, most grocery store chains, including Loblaws, Sobeys, and Metro, as well as some processing plants, such as Maple Leaf Foods, tacked on an extra two dollars to employees' hourly wages. Michael Medline, CEO of Empire, which owns Sobeys, IGA, and Safeway, crowed in late March that such raises, along with other support programs, were "simply the right things to do."
  
  And they were. The pandemic created a new class of frontline workers, expanding the conventional definition of emergency care to people who were never trained for it—people who, quite frankly, had never signed up for it and weren't being compensated for it. Some got relatively lucky, like Grey—despite the extraordinary stress of the job, she said both her union and her employer supported workers. Or, at least they supported them the best they could. Others didn't. It wasn't just that workers were getting sick, although many did; by early May, Loblaws had reported more than 130 cases across its stores, and other large chains reported similar numbers. It was the stress. The knowing that any customer could have the virus, could pass it to you, and leave you to pass it on to everyone you love. It was watching customers hem and haw over whether to get zesty Doritos or cool ranch. Knowing that you were there risking your life every day, working longer hours, being yelled at, and receiving what felt like the world's frustration piled on your shoulders, all so people could get a bag of Oreos. Then you'd hear about the Oshawa department manager who died, the Vaughan distribution centre worker, the Walmart employee. How could you not be afraid? "It takes the energy right out of you," said one Toronto woman, a manager who works at two stores owned by the same chain. "You put all the strength that you have to make it through the day, to be able to do your job, to execute your daily functions. And by the time you get home, you've just got nothing in the tank."
  
  The "right thing" lasted until June. Loblaws, which said it had spent $180 million on extra wages, clawed back its pandemic pay first, then sent its rivals a so-called courtesy email informing them of this step. Everyone else followed. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the move was a bitter pill for many essential workers. One Hamilton, Ontario, grocery store baker who spoke out explained that the wage hike had allowed her to put away savings for the first time since she'd been off maternity leave. Plus, the pandemic, clearly, was still happening. "We're being called essential workers," she said. "Well, you can't take away essential." As cities and other jurisdictions passed mandatory mask bylaws, many workers experienced daily verbal, and even physical, harassment. Videos of hyper-privileged customers berating workers who had politely asked them to wear a mask went viral. Speaking at the time, Medline echoed his earlier language, albeit in a considerably less rah-rah moment: "Should this terrible virus rear its ugly head to the degree that…we experienced in March and April, we will put hero pay back into our company stores in those regions or cities," he said. "That would be the right thing to do." (And, in late November 2020, Sobeys did reinstate some form of "hero pay" in three of Canada's hardest-hit regions: Winnipeg, Toronto, and Peel.) In response to the cuts, senior executives from three major chains were called to speak before a parliamentary committee, their testimony timed like snug dominoes, but little came of it. In late August, eleven Loblaw-owned grocery stores in Newfoundland went on strike over the pandemic-pay cut. That same week, a Loblaws distribution centre in Surrey, B.C., announced a new outbreak. So much for The Birth of Fair Wages.