ABSTRACT
When COVID-19 entered the world stage, there was not a single facet of society it did not touch. Everything from education, to work, to housing was disrupted by this event. To make matters worse, some of America’s most vulnerable people were left to defend themselves in an unpredictable economic disaster. What this autoethnography addresses is a personal look at the lives of unpaid employees, while simultaneously discussing the gross mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this chapter, the author discusses literature on society’s most vulnerable, misconceptions about essential workers and students, and concludes with the harsh feelings of the lived reality of being of low socio-economic status in the “richest country on Earth.”
