In 2020, several governments declared specific occupations essential for maintaining the functioning of society in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. A current question in the public debate on fair pay is whether essential workers are sufficiently remunerated. Using data from the Netherlands, I analyze the wages of essential workers relative to other workers before and during the Covid-19 pandemic. Wage decompositions indicate that, between 2006 and 2019, essential workers earned less compared to other workers within higher-paid strata, while they earned more within lower-paid strata of the occupational structure in the Netherlands. These wage differentials are shaped by sex composition and sectoral employment. In addition, I employ a difference-in-differences design based on quarterly data 2017–2022 to assess whether the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic reduced an existing average wage gap in response to an increasing public appreciation of essential work. The results indicate that the collective experience of the Covid-19 pandemic has not benefited essential workers in the short term.

Wage inequality, occupations, social stratification, gender inequality, essential workers
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© 2025 European Sociological Association. Published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) license.
2025
European Sociological Association. Published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) license.
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the use is non-commercial and the original work is properly cited. For a full description of the license, please visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/legalcode.

Supplementary data

euso_a_00020-suppl- pdf file