If you’re a home health aide, you spend your days making sure sick and elderly people are taking their medicines; you help them bathe and get dressed and exercise; you probably change their sheets and help them use the bathroom. In the coronavirus lockdown, there is a good chance you are one of the only human beings they see.

And yet, if you’re earning the average wage in your profession, you make about $12 an hour before taxes. If you live in, say, Ohio and make the average wage, you earn less than $11.

Perhaps on the way to work, you hear on the radio that someone known as the “Senate parliamentarian” decided that the proposal to raise the minimum wage to $15 per hour could not go into the economic stimulus bill Congress is considering. For reasons even few political junkies actually understand, the parliamentarian has just stopped you from getting a 25 percent raise, a promise Joe Biden and Democrats all over the country campaigned on. In fact, the parliamentarian prevented thirty million workers from getting a raise, roughly 19 percent of US workers who earn under $15 an hour.