COVID-19 and The Future of Work
By 
One thing that the virus is doing is making people question the relationship between work and society. I’ve always been a pretty strong pro-work person, in the sense that I think productive labor is central to human existence, however we define it. Did I mention I grew up Lutheran? Anyway, there’s not much place for the Protestant work ethic in a time of pandemic, when we need to not be working, at least in the same way we always have. Sarah Jaffe has a piece in The New Republic about this issue and I was able to provide some historical context, including an incredibly rare reference, for me anyway, to 14th century Europe!
Globalized capitalism doesn’t really have any analogous experiences to the thing we are currently surviving, said labor historian Erik Loomis, author of A History of America in Ten Strikes. The influenza epidemic of 1918 didn’t result in this level of economic shutdown. But the layoffs and changes to people’s working lives we’ve already felt have surpassed anything in our previous understanding. Though Loomis cautions it’s too far in the past to be comparable, the Bubonic Plague, because of the sheer number of deaths, did leave workers with more leverage than they’d had. “It freaked out the classes that had dominated workers,” he said, and they moved to pass laws restricting movement and compelling people to labor.
A more recent comparison, though the causes are very different, is the Great Depression. Before the crash, Loomis noted, the American labor movement had been nearly crushed—not too far off from its precarious position today. It was galvanized by the Depression, but only over a period of years. Before the surge in worker organizing, though, there was widespread desperation, and the kind of uprisings that come with it. “People don’t know what to do. They’ve been told these lies about capitalism,” Loomis said. The early organizing, then, was as much about rent strikes and rallying the unemployed—both movements backed by the Communist Party—as it was about the workplace. These movements laid the groundwork for the rise in labor organizing and, importantly, for Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal.
It was the interaction between legislation passed to alleviate suffering—which included what was, at first, “a throwaway line” in the National Industrial Recovery Act giving workers the right to unionize—and the growing militancy among tens of thousands of people who realized that their unemployment was not their fault, that made the change. And then workers managed to organize despite high unemployment, coming up with new tactics like the sit-down strikes that were designed for the moment.
What will those tactics look like in the time of the coronavirus? As Loomis pointed out, fewer workers are in massive factories where hundreds or even thousands can down their tools together. Yet the distributed nature of the workforce—and, of course, the nature of the pandemic—has made the sick-out powerful once again, as Amazon workers showed with an all-day digital action accompanying sick-outs by workers up and down the company’s supply chain.
The grassroots movements in the Depression era, Loomis said, were often about “just keeping somebody in a home and saving their life.” Life-saving action is even more relevant in a pandemic, even if social distancing requires new tactics (and ironically allows the protesters who scorn the need for social distance to look as though their movements are bigger than those who respect the need not to spread the virus). And workers who might look to refuse to work now have the moral high ground in a new and unexpected way.
As in the Depression era, we have mass unemployment at the moment, but the desperation for work is mitigated both by (limited, though still important) government action in expanding unemployment benefits and, importantly, the very real risk to health and safety by returning to work. Congressional Democrats have even acknowledged the latter by floating the idea of a “Heroes Fund” for hazard pay for essential workers. Those health and safety fears mean, Loomis noted, that “the person who has been the waiter or the hairdresser or the personal trainer—they’re not thinking really, in a serious way about moving into a meatpacking plant.” Food-processing work has been for years—think back to Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle—some of the most unpleasant, dangerous work out there, and is even more so now, as the shoulder-to-shoulder conditions of many meatpacking workers make spreading the virus nearly certain. And it remains some of the lowest paid—even before Trump’s proposal to lower pay even further. Workers with any better options, even staying home, were unlikely to choose to take those jobs even before a potentially deadly virus hit.
Those meatpacking workers, then, have tremendous leverage even as they face unprecedented risk. The food supply chain is fragile. (A Tyson executive warning that it was “breaking” this week was not being entirely hyperbolic.) Yet these food plants have relied upon undocumented workers, whom they could doubly oppress, and the rock-bottom wages they were able to get away with paying. If those workers begin to refuse to work in those conditions, what would those plants have to do to convince other people to pick up the slack or for those workers to return to the production line? Actually provide hygienic conditions and decent pay, perhaps?
There are some relevant historical analogies to this and in some ways, we are in uncharted territory.