The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) confusing, widely panned (and widely mocked) shift from 10 days of quarantine after a positive COVID-19 test to five days for asymptomatic cases was seen by many as a gift to employers eager to keep workers on the job no matter what—an interpretation quickly confirmed by CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, who said the shift was intended to “keep the critical functions of society open and operating.” Maybe so, if the critical function she meant was simply corporate profit. The latest: Walmart has slashed its paid leave for workers with COVID-19 from two weeks to one.

Since Walmart is the largest private employer in the U.S., the company’s change in policy will directly affect a significant number of workers and could lead other major employers to change their policies. At the same time, Walmart is telling corporate employees to continue working remotely for longer than previously announced. It’s not that the company thinks the threat of COVID-19 has abated, in other words. It just figures the CDC gave it permission to cut a benefit for its low-paid hourly workers.

Walmart isn’t the first employer trying to push people back to work when they may still be infectious. The CEO of Delta Airlines had called on the CDC to shorten the isolation period to five days, and when the agency did so, Delta quickly embraced the change. New York City is also urging teachers back on the job even with mild symptoms—though they’re told to isolate themselves outside of those six hours a day in a room with potentially dozens of people.

Many public health experts sharply criticized the CDC’s five-day guideline for omitting a requirement that people test to be sure they’re no longer likely to spread virus before going back out in public.

Sadly, the Biden administration may be less crass about it, but like the Trump administration, it is treating the pandemic very much as a labor market problem these days. With the rise of omicron, that means that a top priority is finding ways to keep people working despite virus levels higher than at any previous time in the pandemic. Trump didn’t care if people died. Biden does—but he figures that if they’re vaccinated, they won’t die, and that’s about as far as he’s willing to go, at least given the strong forces (translation: capitalism) pushing him to privilege employers over workers.

COVID-19 is now so widespread that the only way for businesses and schools and fire departments and other public services to stay open is to change the rules for how soon people can work after testing positive, and then to tell them they must work that soon. Meanwhile, highly paid workers at investment banks and law firms are told not to come back to the office yet out of a concern for safety.

That concern for safety is all too lacking when it comes to lower-paid workers, including the very same ones deemed “essential” in the beginning (though that designation, too, was a way to pressure them to stay in dangerous workplaces). Again and again, the pandemic has highlighted—and reinforced—our society’s existing hierarchies, with the people at the bottom expected and pressured to risk their health while those at the top are protected. It’s horrifying to see the ostensibly science-based CDC effectively writing that into federal public health policy.