Late 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.
Epidemics 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
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.
Epidemics 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
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