L
ate last month, a photo circulated of
delivery drivers
crowding around Carbone, a Michelin-starred Greenwich Village
restaurant, waiting to pick up $32 rigatoni and bring it to people who
were safely ensconced in their apartment. A police officer, attempting
to spread out the crowd,
reportedly said,
“I know you guys are just out here trying to make money. I personally
don’t give a shit!” The poor got socially close, it seems, so that the
rich could socially distance.
My inboxes have filled up with outcries from workers at big-box
retailers, grocery stores, and shipping giants who say their companies
are not protecting them. They say people are being sent into work
despite having been in contact with people infected with the virus. They
say the company
promised to pay
for their quarantine leave, but the payment has been delayed for weeks
and they are running out of money. Or the company denied their medical
leave because they don’t have proof of a nearly impossible-to-get
COVID-19 test. Or the company doesn’t offer paid medical leave at all,
and they’re wondering how they’ll pay for gas once they recover from the
disease.
Masks are in short supply nationwide, and some managers
have resisted
allowing workers to wear them, fearing it will disrupt the appearance
of normalcy. Some companies have rolled out “hazard pay” for employees,
but in many cases it amounts to about $2 more an hour. The Amazon
employees I’ve spoken with largely work fewer than 30 hours a week, and
the company does not
provide them with health insurance. One Walmart employee
used up
all his attendance “points” while sick with the virus, and was fired
upon his return to work. (Walmart did not comment on his situation for
my story.)
At least 41
grocery-store workers have already died from the virus. “I make $14.60
an hour and don’t qualify for health care yet,” one grocery-store
employee in New Mexico wrote to me. “I am freaked out.”
Meanwhile, many white-collar workers have no “points” system. Many
such jobs offer as much paid time off as an employee and her manager
agree to—a concept far beyond even the most generous policies at grocery
stores. Many PR specialists, programmers, and other white-collar
workers are doing their exact same job, except from the comfort of their
home. Some are at risk of being laid off. But for the most part, they
are not putting their lives in danger, except by choice.
Wealthier people also
have fewer
underlying health conditions that exacerbate COVID-19. And they are
more likely to be practicing social distancing effectively, according to
Gallup. Perhaps this is because they don’t need to leave the house as
much for their livelihood: Gallup
also found
that 71 percent of people making more than $180,000 can work from home
during the pandemic, compared with just 41 percent of those making less
than $24,000. According to a recent analysis by
The New York Times,
the well-off are staying home the most, especially during the workweek,
and they also began practicing social distancing earlier than
low-income workers did.
E
pidemics and other natural disasters tend
to both illuminate and reinforce existing schisms. “The division in our
society between those of us who can keep our jobs and work from home
and others who are losing their jobs or confronting the dangers of the
virus … I think there’s a real chance that it could become more
intense,” says Peter Hall, a government professor at Harvard.
Some service workers have
taken to Twitter
and private messaging groups to lament the fact that while they’re
getting coughed on by strangers, their corporate bosses have retreated
to their summer houses.
Amazon,
Instacart, and
Whole Foods
workers have already gone on strike to protest their working
conditions. This in itself is fairly extraordinary, because American
workers
rarely strike. In 2017, there were
just seven
major work stoppages. In a particularly Gilded Age twist, Amazon’s
lawyer described one of the walkout leaders, Christian Smalls, as “not
smart or articulate” in a leaked memo
obtained by Vice News.
To find out how these rifts might escalate, I spoke with 15 experts on
the sociology and politics of class. When the dust settles, there’s of
course a chance that low-income workers might end up just as powerless
as they were before. But history offers a precedent for plagues being,
perversely, good for workers. Collective anger at low wages and poor
working protections can produce lasting social change, and people tend
to be more supportive of government benefits during periods of high
unemployment. One study
that looked at 15 major pandemics found that they increased wages for
three decades afterward. The Plague of Justinian, in 541, led to worker incomes doubling. After the Black Death demolished Europe in the 1300s, textile workers in northern France received three raises in a year. Old rules were upended: Workers started wearing red, a color previously associated with nobility.
The U.S. has long been the sole holdout
among rich nations when it comes to paid sick leave and other job
protections. Now that some workers are getting these benefits for the
coronavirus, they might be hard for businesses to claw back. If your
boss let you stay home with pay when you had COVID-19, is he really
going to make you come in when you have the flu? “Is this going to be an
inflection point where Americans begin to realize that we need
government, we need each other, we need social solidarity, we are not
all cowboys, who knew?” said Joan Williams, a law professor at UC
Hastings and the author of White Working Class.
Many experts said one likely result
of this outbreak will be an increase in populist sentiment. But it is
not yet clear whether it will be leftist populism, in the style of
Senator Bernie Sanders, or conservative populism, in the style of
President Donald Trump. Leftist populism will likely emphasize the
common struggle of the laid off, the low-paid, and the workers derided
by their bosses as expendable. Meanwhile, “right populism will ask white
working-class people to be in race solidarity with rich white
Americans,” Betsy Leondar-Wright, a sociologist at Lasell University,
said. It will perhaps lead to the scapegoating of Chinese people and
other foreigners.
Which path we go down depends, first, on whom
workers brand as the “elites.” Will it be the corporate CEOs who have
put them in that position, or the middle-class account coordinators who
have had envious quarantines by comparison? If workers’ ire is aimed at
companies, they may be forced to change corporate policies accordingly.
But if America’s working class decides the enemy is the professional
class—the $50,000-a-year Bushwick bloggers—we may see more misplaced
bitterness toward “elites” who really aren’t.
A few months from
now, the path we take will also depend on whether voters ultimately
blame Trump for the pandemic and the ensuing economic collapse, and on
whether Democrats are able to create a coherent narrative out of the
calls for better worker protections. And in a year, it will depend on
how severe the death toll turns out to be among service workers, and how
well they’re able to organize in response. But if past epidemics are a
guide, the workers may win out in the end.
A similar phenomenon happened when cholera struck Hamburg in 1892. The
city, a large seaport in northern Germany, was then semiautonomous, and
it was controlled by merchants who valued trade above all else. These
businessmen did not consider public health to be a sound investment.
Cholera is transmitted through tainted water, but unlike the rest of
Germany, Hamburg’s authorities did not install a filtration system in
the municipal water supply.
The local government in Hamburg at first played down the epidemic and resisted imposing a quarantine on the city. Much like
President Trump in recent weeks, they seemed to be asking themselves, “
Which interest do we put first, the economy, or peoples’ lives?” Richard Evans, author of
Death in Hamburg, said. “By the time they got around to admitting it was there, it was too late.”
That August was unusually hot and dry; the city’s canals ran low. These were ideal conditions for
Vibrio cholerae
to creep into the water supply. Because the disease spread through
human waste, people with their own bathrooms were less likely to
contract it. Survivors recalled having servants scrub their houses and
boil their water before they used it. The servants themselves could
afford no such luxury. And much of the town’s poor population worked
near the harbor, where the water was filthy and teeming with cholera
bacteria. Within six weeks, up to 10,000 people had died, and the death
rate among the poor was much higher than that among the rich. Through
their labor, the poor sacrificed so the wealthy could survive.
That
disparity seemed to galvanize the entire city. The following year,
left-leaning Social Democrats won all three of Hamburg’s seats in the
national Parliament. Later came an expansion of voting rights, housing
reform, and, finally, the installment of a treatment system for the
city’s water. Cholera killed thousands in Hamburg, but in its aftermath,
the working class was given new life. In 2021, the American working
class might seize their moment,
Read more at: Coronavirus Class Conflict Is Coming - The Atlantic
