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When the pandemic finally ends, there's a danger that some modified version of this new system of labor exploitation might prove too profitable for employers to abandon. (Photo: Giles Clarke/Getty Images)
In two weeks, my partner and I were supposed to leave San Francisco for Reno, Nevada, where we'd be spending the next three months focused on the 2020 presidential election. As we did in 2018, we'd be working with UNITE-HERE, the hospitality industry union, only this time on the campaign to drive Donald Trump from office.
Now, however, we're not so sure we ought to go. According to information prepared for the White House Coronavirus Task Force, Nevada is among the states in the "red zone" when it comes to both confirmed cases of, and positive tests for, Covid-19. I'm 68. My partner's five years older, with a history of pneumonia. We're both active and fit (when I'm not tripping over curbs), but our ages make us more likely, if we catch the coronavirus, to get seriously ill or even die. That gives a person pause.
Then there's the fact that Joe Biden seems to have a double-digit lead over Trump nationally and at least an eight-point lead in Nevada, according to the latest polls. If things looked closer, I would cheerfully take some serious risks to dislodge that man in the White House. But does it make sense to do so if Biden is already likely to win there? Or, to put it in coronavirus-speak, would our work be essential to dumping Trump?
Essential Work?
This minor personal conundrum got me thinking about how the pandemic has exposed certain deep and unexamined assumptions about the nature and value of work in the United States.
In the ethics classes I teach undergraduates at a college here in San Francisco, we often talk about work. Ethics is, after all, about how we ought to live our lives -- and work, paid or unpaid, constitutes a big part of most of those lives. Inevitably, the conversation comes around to compensation: How much do people deserve for different kinds of work? Students tend to measure fair compensation on two scales. How many years of training and/or dollars of tuition did a worker have to invest to become "qualified" for the job? And how important is that worker's labor to the rest of society?
Even before the coronavirus hit, students would often settle on medical doctors as belonging at the top of either scale. Physicians' work is the most important, they'd argue, because they keep us alive. "Hmm..." I'd say. "How many of you went to the doctor today?" Usually not a hand would be raised. "How many of you ate something today?" All hands would go up, as students looked around the room at one another. "Maybe," I'd suggest, "a functioning society depends more on the farmworkers who plant and harvest food than on the doctors you normally might see for a checkup once a year. Not to mention the people who process and pack what we eat."
I'd also point out that the workers who pick or process our food are not really unskilled. Their work, like a surgeon's, depends on deft, quick hand movements, honed through years of practice.
Sometimes, in these discussions, I'd propose a different metric for compensation: maybe we should reserve the highest pay for people whose jobs are both essential and dangerous. Before the pandemic, that category would not have included many healthcare workers and certainly not most doctors. Even then, however, it would have encompassed farmworkers and people laboring in meat processing plants. As we've seen, in these months it is precisely such people -- often immigrants, documented or otherwise -- who have also borne some of the worst risks of virus exposure at work.
By the end of April, when it was already clear that meatpacking plants were major sites of Covid-19 infection, the president invoked the Defense Production Act to keep them open anyway. This not only meant that workers afraid to enter them could not file for unemployment payments, but that even if the owners of such dangerous workplaces wanted to shut them down, they were forbidden to do so. By mid-June, more than 24,000 meatpackers had tested positive for the virus. And just how much do these essential and deeply endangered workers earn? According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, about $28,450 a year -- better than minimum wage, that is, but hardly living high on the hog (even when that's what they're handling).
You might think that farmworkers would be more protected from the virus than meatpackers, perhaps because they work outdoors. But as the New York Times has reported: "Fruit and vegetable pickers toil close to each other in fields, ride buses shoulder-to-shoulder, and sleep in cramped apartments or trailers with other laborers or several generations of their families."
Not surprisingly, then, the coronavirus has, as the Times report puts it, "ravaged" migrant farm worker communities in Florida and is starting to do the same across the country all the way to eastern Oregon. Those workers, who risk their lives through exposure not only to a pandemic but to more ordinary dangers like herbicides and pesticides so we can eat, make even less than meatpackers: on average, under $26,000 a year.
When the president uses the Defense Production Act to ensure that food workers remain in their jobs, it reveals just how important their labor truly is to the rest of us. Similarly, as shutdown orders have kept home those who can afford to stay in, or who have no choice because they no longer have jobs to go to, the pandemic has revealed the crucial nature of the labor of a large group of workers already at home (or in other people's homes or eldercare facilities): those who care for children and those who look after older people and people with disabilities who need the assistance of health aides.
This work, historically done by women, has generally been unpaid when the worker is a family member and poorly paid when done by a professional. Childcare workers, for example, earn less than $24,000 a year on average; home healthcare aides, just over that amount.
Women's Work
Speaking of women's work, I suspect that the coronavirus and the attendant economic crisis are likely to affect women's lives in ways that will last at least a generation, if not beyond.
Middle-class feminists of the 1970s came of age in a United States where it was expected that they would marry and spend their days caring for a house, a husband, and their children. Men were the makers. Women were the "homemakers." Their work was considered -- even by Marxist economists -- "non-productive," because it did not seem to contribute to the real economy, the place where myriad widgets are produced, transported, and sold. It was seldom recognized how essential this unpaid labor in the realm of social reproduction was to a functioning economy. Without it, paid workers would not have been fed, cared for, and emotionally repaired so that they could return to another day of widget-making. Future workers would not be socialized for a life of production or reproduction, as their gender dictated.
Today, with so many women in the paid workforce, much of this work of social reproduction has been outsourced by those who can afford it to nannies, day-care workers, healthcare aides, house cleaners, or the workers who measure and pack the ingredients for meal kits to be prepared by other working women when they get home.
We didn't know it at the time, but the post-World War II period, when boomers like me grew up, was unique in U.S. history. For a brief quarter-century, even working-class families could aspire to an arrangement in which men went to work and women kept house. A combination of strong unions, a post-war economic boom, and a so-called breadwinner minimum wage kept salaries high enough to support families with only one adult in the paid labor force. Returning soldiers went to college and bought houses through the 1944 Servicemen's Readjustment Act, also known as the G.I. Bill. New Deal programs like social security and unemployment insurance helped pad out home economies.
By the mid-1970s, however, this golden age for men, if not women, was fading. (Of course, for many African Americans and other marginalized groups, it had always only been an age of fool's gold.) Real wages stagnated and began their long, steady decline. Today's federal minimum wage, at $7.25 per hour, has remained unchanged since 2009 (something that can hardly be said about the wealth of the 1%). Far from supporting a family of four, in most parts of the country, it won't even keep a single person afloat.
Elected president in 1980, Ronald Reagan announced in his first inaugural address, "Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem." He then set about dismantling President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty programs, attacking the unions that had been the underpinning for white working-class prosperity, and generally starving the beast of government. We're still living with the legacies of that credo in, for example, the housing crisis he first touched off by deregulating savings and loan institutions and disempowering the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
It's no accident that, just as real wages were falling, presidential administrations of both parties began touting the virtues of paid work for women -- at least if those women had children and no husband. Aid to Families with Dependent Children ("welfare") was another New Deal program, originally designed to provide cash assistance to widowed women raising kids on their own at a time when little paid employment was available to white women.
In the 1960s, groups like the National Welfare Rights Organization began advocating that similar benefits be extended to Black women raising children. (As a welfare rights advocate once asked me, "Why is it fine for a woman to look to a man to help her children, but not to The Man?") Not surprisingly, it wasn't until Black and Latina women began receiving the same entitlements as their white sisters that welfare became a "problem" in need of "reform."
By the mid-1990s, the fact that some Black women were receiving money from the government while not doing paid labor for an employer had been successfully reframed as a national crisis. Under Democratic President Bill Clinton, Congress passed the Personal Responsibility and Work Reconciliation Act of 1996, a bill that then was called "welfare reform." After that, if women wanted help from The Man, they had to work for it - not by taking care of their own children, but by taking care of their children and holding down minimum-wage jobs.
Are the Kids All Right?
It's more than a little ironic, then, that the granddaughters of feminists who argued that women should have a choice about whether or not to pursue a career came to confront an economy in which women, at least ones not from wealthy families, had little choice about working for pay.
The pandemic may change that, however -- and not in a good way. One of the unfulfilled demands of liberal 1970s feminism was universal free childcare. An impossible dream, right? How could any country afford such a thing?
Wait a minute, though. What about Sweden? They have universal free childcare. That's why a Swedish friend of mine, a human rights lawyer, and her American husband who had a rare tenure track university job in San Francisco, chose to take their two children back to Sweden. Raising children is so much easier there. In the early days of second-wave feminism, some big employers even built daycare centers for their employees with children. Those days, sadly, are long gone.
Now, in the Covid-19 moment, employers are beginning to recognize the non-pandemic benefits of having employees work at home. (Why not make workers provide their own office furniture? It's a lot easier to justify if they're working at home. And why pay rent on all that real estate when so many fewer people are in the office?) While companies will profit from reduced infrastructure costs and in some cases possibly even reduced pay for employees who relocate to cheaper areas, workers with children are going to face a dilemma. With no childcare available in the foreseeable future and school re-openings dicey propositions (no matter what the president threatens), someone is going to have to watch the kids. Someone -- probably in the case of heterosexual couples, the person who is already earning less -- is going to be under pressure to reduce or give up paid labor to do the age-old unpaid (but essential) work of raising the next generation. I wonder who that someone is going to be and, without those paychecks, I also wonder how much families are going to suffer economically in increasingly tough times.
Grateful to Have a Job?
Recently, in yet another Zoom meeting, a fellow university instructor (who'd just been interrupted to help a child find a crucial toy) was discussing the administration's efforts to squeeze concessions out of faculty and staff. I was startled to hear her add, "Of course, I'm grateful they gave me the job." This got me thinking about jobs and gratitude -- and which direction thankfulness ought to flow. It seems to me that the pandemic and the epidemic of unemployment following in its wake have reinforced a common but false belief shared by many workers: the idea that we should be grateful to our employers for giving us jobs.
We're so often told that corporations and the great men behind them are Job Creators. From the fountain of their beneficence flows the dignity of work and all the benefits a job confers. Indeed, as this fairy tale goes, businesses don't primarily produce widgets or apps or even returns for shareholders. Their real product is jobs. Like many of capitalism's lies, the idea that workers should thank their employers reverses the real story: without workers, there would be no apps, no widgets, no shareholder returns. It's our effort, our skill, our diligence that gives work its dignity. It may be an old saying, but no less true for that: labor creates all wealth. Wealth does not create anything -- neither widgets, nor jobs.
I'm grateful to the universe that I have work that allows me to talk with young people about their deepest values at a moment in their lives when they're just figuring out what they value, but I am not grateful to my university employer for my underpaid, undervalued job. The gratitude should run in the other direction. Without faculty, staff, and students there would be no university. It's our labor that creates wealth, in this case a (minor) wealth of knowledge.
As of July 16th, in the midst of the Covid-19 crisis, 32 million Americans are receiving some kind of unemployment benefit. That number doesn't even reflect the people involuntarily working reduced hours, or those who haven't been able to apply for benefits. One thing is easy enough to predict: employers will take advantage of people's desperate need for money to demand ever more labor for ever less pay. Until an effective vaccine for the coronavirus becomes available, expect to see the emergence of a three-tier system of worker immiseration: low-paid essential workers who must leave home to do their jobs, putting themselves in significant danger in the process, while we all depend on them for sustenance; better paid people who toil at home, but whose employers will expect their hours of availability to expand to fill the waking day; and low-paid or unpaid domestic laborers, most of them women, who keep everyone else fed, clothed, and comforted.
Even when the pandemic finally ends, there's a danger that some modified version of this new system of labor exploitation might prove too profitable for employers to abandon. On the other hand, hitting the national pause button, however painfully, could give the rest of us a chance to rethink a lot of things, including the place of work, paid and unpaid, in our lives.
So, will my partner and I head for Reno in a couple of weeks? Certainly, the job of ousting Donald Trump is essential. I'm just not sure that a couple of old white ladies are essential workers in the time of Covid-19.
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In two weeks, my partner and I were supposed to leave San Francisco for Reno, Nevada, where we'd be spending the next three months focused on the 2020 presidential election. As we did in 2018, we'd be working with UNITE-HERE, the hospitality industry union, only this time on the campaign to drive Donald Trump from office.
Now, however, we're not so sure we ought to go. According to information prepared for the White House Coronavirus Task Force, Nevada is among the states in the "red zone" when it comes to both confirmed cases of, and positive tests for, Covid-19. I'm 68. My partner's five years older, with a history of pneumonia. We're both active and fit (when I'm not tripping over curbs), but our ages make us more likely, if we catch the coronavirus, to get seriously ill or even die. That gives a person pause.
Then there's the fact that Joe Biden seems to have a double-digit lead over Trump nationally and at least an eight-point lead in Nevada, according to the latest polls. If things looked closer, I would cheerfully take some serious risks to dislodge that man in the White House. But does it make sense to do so if Biden is already likely to win there? Or, to put it in coronavirus-speak, would our work be essential to dumping Trump?
Essential Work?
This minor personal conundrum got me thinking about how the pandemic has exposed certain deep and unexamined assumptions about the nature and value of work in the United States.
In the ethics classes I teach undergraduates at a college here in San Francisco, we often talk about work. Ethics is, after all, about how we ought to live our lives -- and work, paid or unpaid, constitutes a big part of most of those lives. Inevitably, the conversation comes around to compensation: How much do people deserve for different kinds of work? Students tend to measure fair compensation on two scales. How many years of training and/or dollars of tuition did a worker have to invest to become "qualified" for the job? And how important is that worker's labor to the rest of society?
Even before the coronavirus hit, students would often settle on medical doctors as belonging at the top of either scale. Physicians' work is the most important, they'd argue, because they keep us alive. "Hmm..." I'd say. "How many of you went to the doctor today?" Usually not a hand would be raised. "How many of you ate something today?" All hands would go up, as students looked around the room at one another. "Maybe," I'd suggest, "a functioning society depends more on the farmworkers who plant and harvest food than on the doctors you normally might see for a checkup once a year. Not to mention the people who process and pack what we eat."
I'd also point out that the workers who pick or process our food are not really unskilled. Their work, like a surgeon's, depends on deft, quick hand movements, honed through years of practice.
Sometimes, in these discussions, I'd propose a different metric for compensation: maybe we should reserve the highest pay for people whose jobs are both essential and dangerous. Before the pandemic, that category would not have included many healthcare workers and certainly not most doctors. Even then, however, it would have encompassed farmworkers and people laboring in meat processing plants. As we've seen, in these months it is precisely such people -- often immigrants, documented or otherwise -- who have also borne some of the worst risks of virus exposure at work.
By the end of April, when it was already clear that meatpacking plants were major sites of Covid-19 infection, the president invoked the Defense Production Act to keep them open anyway. This not only meant that workers afraid to enter them could not file for unemployment payments, but that even if the owners of such dangerous workplaces wanted to shut them down, they were forbidden to do so. By mid-June, more than 24,000 meatpackers had tested positive for the virus. And just how much do these essential and deeply endangered workers earn? According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, about $28,450 a year -- better than minimum wage, that is, but hardly living high on the hog (even when that's what they're handling).
You might think that farmworkers would be more protected from the virus than meatpackers, perhaps because they work outdoors. But as the New York Times has reported: "Fruit and vegetable pickers toil close to each other in fields, ride buses shoulder-to-shoulder, and sleep in cramped apartments or trailers with other laborers or several generations of their families."
Not surprisingly, then, the coronavirus has, as the Times report puts it, "ravaged" migrant farm worker communities in Florida and is starting to do the same across the country all the way to eastern Oregon. Those workers, who risk their lives through exposure not only to a pandemic but to more ordinary dangers like herbicides and pesticides so we can eat, make even less than meatpackers: on average, under $26,000 a year.
When the president uses the Defense Production Act to ensure that food workers remain in their jobs, it reveals just how important their labor truly is to the rest of us. Similarly, as shutdown orders have kept home those who can afford to stay in, or who have no choice because they no longer have jobs to go to, the pandemic has revealed the crucial nature of the labor of a large group of workers already at home (or in other people's homes or eldercare facilities): those who care for children and those who look after older people and people with disabilities who need the assistance of health aides.
This work, historically done by women, has generally been unpaid when the worker is a family member and poorly paid when done by a professional. Childcare workers, for example, earn less than $24,000 a year on average; home healthcare aides, just over that amount.
Women's Work
Speaking of women's work, I suspect that the coronavirus and the attendant economic crisis are likely to affect women's lives in ways that will last at least a generation, if not beyond.
Middle-class feminists of the 1970s came of age in a United States where it was expected that they would marry and spend their days caring for a house, a husband, and their children. Men were the makers. Women were the "homemakers." Their work was considered -- even by Marxist economists -- "non-productive," because it did not seem to contribute to the real economy, the place where myriad widgets are produced, transported, and sold. It was seldom recognized how essential this unpaid labor in the realm of social reproduction was to a functioning economy. Without it, paid workers would not have been fed, cared for, and emotionally repaired so that they could return to another day of widget-making. Future workers would not be socialized for a life of production or reproduction, as their gender dictated.
Today, with so many women in the paid workforce, much of this work of social reproduction has been outsourced by those who can afford it to nannies, day-care workers, healthcare aides, house cleaners, or the workers who measure and pack the ingredients for meal kits to be prepared by other working women when they get home.
We didn't know it at the time, but the post-World War II period, when boomers like me grew up, was unique in U.S. history. For a brief quarter-century, even working-class families could aspire to an arrangement in which men went to work and women kept house. A combination of strong unions, a post-war economic boom, and a so-called breadwinner minimum wage kept salaries high enough to support families with only one adult in the paid labor force. Returning soldiers went to college and bought houses through the 1944 Servicemen's Readjustment Act, also known as the G.I. Bill. New Deal programs like social security and unemployment insurance helped pad out home economies.
By the mid-1970s, however, this golden age for men, if not women, was fading. (Of course, for many African Americans and other marginalized groups, it had always only been an age of fool's gold.) Real wages stagnated and began their long, steady decline. Today's federal minimum wage, at $7.25 per hour, has remained unchanged since 2009 (something that can hardly be said about the wealth of the 1%). Far from supporting a family of four, in most parts of the country, it won't even keep a single person afloat.
Elected president in 1980, Ronald Reagan announced in his first inaugural address, "Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem." He then set about dismantling President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty programs, attacking the unions that had been the underpinning for white working-class prosperity, and generally starving the beast of government. We're still living with the legacies of that credo in, for example, the housing crisis he first touched off by deregulating savings and loan institutions and disempowering the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
It's no accident that, just as real wages were falling, presidential administrations of both parties began touting the virtues of paid work for women -- at least if those women had children and no husband. Aid to Families with Dependent Children ("welfare") was another New Deal program, originally designed to provide cash assistance to widowed women raising kids on their own at a time when little paid employment was available to white women.
In the 1960s, groups like the National Welfare Rights Organization began advocating that similar benefits be extended to Black women raising children. (As a welfare rights advocate once asked me, "Why is it fine for a woman to look to a man to help her children, but not to The Man?") Not surprisingly, it wasn't until Black and Latina women began receiving the same entitlements as their white sisters that welfare became a "problem" in need of "reform."
By the mid-1990s, the fact that some Black women were receiving money from the government while not doing paid labor for an employer had been successfully reframed as a national crisis. Under Democratic President Bill Clinton, Congress passed the Personal Responsibility and Work Reconciliation Act of 1996, a bill that then was called "welfare reform." After that, if women wanted help from The Man, they had to work for it - not by taking care of their own children, but by taking care of their children and holding down minimum-wage jobs.
Are the Kids All Right?
It's more than a little ironic, then, that the granddaughters of feminists who argued that women should have a choice about whether or not to pursue a career came to confront an economy in which women, at least ones not from wealthy families, had little choice about working for pay.
The pandemic may change that, however -- and not in a good way. One of the unfulfilled demands of liberal 1970s feminism was universal free childcare. An impossible dream, right? How could any country afford such a thing?
Wait a minute, though. What about Sweden? They have universal free childcare. That's why a Swedish friend of mine, a human rights lawyer, and her American husband who had a rare tenure track university job in San Francisco, chose to take their two children back to Sweden. Raising children is so much easier there. In the early days of second-wave feminism, some big employers even built daycare centers for their employees with children. Those days, sadly, are long gone.
Now, in the Covid-19 moment, employers are beginning to recognize the non-pandemic benefits of having employees work at home. (Why not make workers provide their own office furniture? It's a lot easier to justify if they're working at home. And why pay rent on all that real estate when so many fewer people are in the office?) While companies will profit from reduced infrastructure costs and in some cases possibly even reduced pay for employees who relocate to cheaper areas, workers with children are going to face a dilemma. With no childcare available in the foreseeable future and school re-openings dicey propositions (no matter what the president threatens), someone is going to have to watch the kids. Someone -- probably in the case of heterosexual couples, the person who is already earning less -- is going to be under pressure to reduce or give up paid labor to do the age-old unpaid (but essential) work of raising the next generation. I wonder who that someone is going to be and, without those paychecks, I also wonder how much families are going to suffer economically in increasingly tough times.
Grateful to Have a Job?
Recently, in yet another Zoom meeting, a fellow university instructor (who'd just been interrupted to help a child find a crucial toy) was discussing the administration's efforts to squeeze concessions out of faculty and staff. I was startled to hear her add, "Of course, I'm grateful they gave me the job." This got me thinking about jobs and gratitude -- and which direction thankfulness ought to flow. It seems to me that the pandemic and the epidemic of unemployment following in its wake have reinforced a common but false belief shared by many workers: the idea that we should be grateful to our employers for giving us jobs.
We're so often told that corporations and the great men behind them are Job Creators. From the fountain of their beneficence flows the dignity of work and all the benefits a job confers. Indeed, as this fairy tale goes, businesses don't primarily produce widgets or apps or even returns for shareholders. Their real product is jobs. Like many of capitalism's lies, the idea that workers should thank their employers reverses the real story: without workers, there would be no apps, no widgets, no shareholder returns. It's our effort, our skill, our diligence that gives work its dignity. It may be an old saying, but no less true for that: labor creates all wealth. Wealth does not create anything -- neither widgets, nor jobs.
I'm grateful to the universe that I have work that allows me to talk with young people about their deepest values at a moment in their lives when they're just figuring out what they value, but I am not grateful to my university employer for my underpaid, undervalued job. The gratitude should run in the other direction. Without faculty, staff, and students there would be no university. It's our labor that creates wealth, in this case a (minor) wealth of knowledge.
As of July 16th, in the midst of the Covid-19 crisis, 32 million Americans are receiving some kind of unemployment benefit. That number doesn't even reflect the people involuntarily working reduced hours, or those who haven't been able to apply for benefits. One thing is easy enough to predict: employers will take advantage of people's desperate need for money to demand ever more labor for ever less pay. Until an effective vaccine for the coronavirus becomes available, expect to see the emergence of a three-tier system of worker immiseration: low-paid essential workers who must leave home to do their jobs, putting themselves in significant danger in the process, while we all depend on them for sustenance; better paid people who toil at home, but whose employers will expect their hours of availability to expand to fill the waking day; and low-paid or unpaid domestic laborers, most of them women, who keep everyone else fed, clothed, and comforted.
Even when the pandemic finally ends, there's a danger that some modified version of this new system of labor exploitation might prove too profitable for employers to abandon. On the other hand, hitting the national pause button, however painfully, could give the rest of us a chance to rethink a lot of things, including the place of work, paid and unpaid, in our lives.
So, will my partner and I head for Reno in a couple of weeks? Certainly, the job of ousting Donald Trump is essential. I'm just not sure that a couple of old white ladies are essential workers in the time of Covid-19.
In two weeks, my partner and I were supposed to leave San Francisco for Reno, Nevada, where we'd be spending the next three months focused on the 2020 presidential election. As we did in 2018, we'd be working with UNITE-HERE, the hospitality industry union, only this time on the campaign to drive Donald Trump from office.
Now, however, we're not so sure we ought to go. According to information prepared for the White House Coronavirus Task Force, Nevada is among the states in the "red zone" when it comes to both confirmed cases of, and positive tests for, Covid-19. I'm 68. My partner's five years older, with a history of pneumonia. We're both active and fit (when I'm not tripping over curbs), but our ages make us more likely, if we catch the coronavirus, to get seriously ill or even die. That gives a person pause.
Then there's the fact that Joe Biden seems to have a double-digit lead over Trump nationally and at least an eight-point lead in Nevada, according to the latest polls. If things looked closer, I would cheerfully take some serious risks to dislodge that man in the White House. But does it make sense to do so if Biden is already likely to win there? Or, to put it in coronavirus-speak, would our work be essential to dumping Trump?
Essential Work?
This minor personal conundrum got me thinking about how the pandemic has exposed certain deep and unexamined assumptions about the nature and value of work in the United States.
In the ethics classes I teach undergraduates at a college here in San Francisco, we often talk about work. Ethics is, after all, about how we ought to live our lives -- and work, paid or unpaid, constitutes a big part of most of those lives. Inevitably, the conversation comes around to compensation: How much do people deserve for different kinds of work? Students tend to measure fair compensation on two scales. How many years of training and/or dollars of tuition did a worker have to invest to become "qualified" for the job? And how important is that worker's labor to the rest of society?
Even before the coronavirus hit, students would often settle on medical doctors as belonging at the top of either scale. Physicians' work is the most important, they'd argue, because they keep us alive. "Hmm..." I'd say. "How many of you went to the doctor today?" Usually not a hand would be raised. "How many of you ate something today?" All hands would go up, as students looked around the room at one another. "Maybe," I'd suggest, "a functioning society depends more on the farmworkers who plant and harvest food than on the doctors you normally might see for a checkup once a year. Not to mention the people who process and pack what we eat."
I'd also point out that the workers who pick or process our food are not really unskilled. Their work, like a surgeon's, depends on deft, quick hand movements, honed through years of practice.
Sometimes, in these discussions, I'd propose a different metric for compensation: maybe we should reserve the highest pay for people whose jobs are both essential and dangerous. Before the pandemic, that category would not have included many healthcare workers and certainly not most doctors. Even then, however, it would have encompassed farmworkers and people laboring in meat processing plants. As we've seen, in these months it is precisely such people -- often immigrants, documented or otherwise -- who have also borne some of the worst risks of virus exposure at work.
By the end of April, when it was already clear that meatpacking plants were major sites of Covid-19 infection, the president invoked the Defense Production Act to keep them open anyway. This not only meant that workers afraid to enter them could not file for unemployment payments, but that even if the owners of such dangerous workplaces wanted to shut them down, they were forbidden to do so. By mid-June, more than 24,000 meatpackers had tested positive for the virus. And just how much do these essential and deeply endangered workers earn? According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, about $28,450 a year -- better than minimum wage, that is, but hardly living high on the hog (even when that's what they're handling).
You might think that farmworkers would be more protected from the virus than meatpackers, perhaps because they work outdoors. But as the New York Times has reported: "Fruit and vegetable pickers toil close to each other in fields, ride buses shoulder-to-shoulder, and sleep in cramped apartments or trailers with other laborers or several generations of their families."
Not surprisingly, then, the coronavirus has, as the Times report puts it, "ravaged" migrant farm worker communities in Florida and is starting to do the same across the country all the way to eastern Oregon. Those workers, who risk their lives through exposure not only to a pandemic but to more ordinary dangers like herbicides and pesticides so we can eat, make even less than meatpackers: on average, under $26,000 a year.
When the president uses the Defense Production Act to ensure that food workers remain in their jobs, it reveals just how important their labor truly is to the rest of us. Similarly, as shutdown orders have kept home those who can afford to stay in, or who have no choice because they no longer have jobs to go to, the pandemic has revealed the crucial nature of the labor of a large group of workers already at home (or in other people's homes or eldercare facilities): those who care for children and those who look after older people and people with disabilities who need the assistance of health aides.
This work, historically done by women, has generally been unpaid when the worker is a family member and poorly paid when done by a professional. Childcare workers, for example, earn less than $24,000 a year on average; home healthcare aides, just over that amount.
Women's Work
Speaking of women's work, I suspect that the coronavirus and the attendant economic crisis are likely to affect women's lives in ways that will last at least a generation, if not beyond.
Middle-class feminists of the 1970s came of age in a United States where it was expected that they would marry and spend their days caring for a house, a husband, and their children. Men were the makers. Women were the "homemakers." Their work was considered -- even by Marxist economists -- "non-productive," because it did not seem to contribute to the real economy, the place where myriad widgets are produced, transported, and sold. It was seldom recognized how essential this unpaid labor in the realm of social reproduction was to a functioning economy. Without it, paid workers would not have been fed, cared for, and emotionally repaired so that they could return to another day of widget-making. Future workers would not be socialized for a life of production or reproduction, as their gender dictated.
Today, with so many women in the paid workforce, much of this work of social reproduction has been outsourced by those who can afford it to nannies, day-care workers, healthcare aides, house cleaners, or the workers who measure and pack the ingredients for meal kits to be prepared by other working women when they get home.
We didn't know it at the time, but the post-World War II period, when boomers like me grew up, was unique in U.S. history. For a brief quarter-century, even working-class families could aspire to an arrangement in which men went to work and women kept house. A combination of strong unions, a post-war economic boom, and a so-called breadwinner minimum wage kept salaries high enough to support families with only one adult in the paid labor force. Returning soldiers went to college and bought houses through the 1944 Servicemen's Readjustment Act, also known as the G.I. Bill. New Deal programs like social security and unemployment insurance helped pad out home economies.
By the mid-1970s, however, this golden age for men, if not women, was fading. (Of course, for many African Americans and other marginalized groups, it had always only been an age of fool's gold.) Real wages stagnated and began their long, steady decline. Today's federal minimum wage, at $7.25 per hour, has remained unchanged since 2009 (something that can hardly be said about the wealth of the 1%). Far from supporting a family of four, in most parts of the country, it won't even keep a single person afloat.
Elected president in 1980, Ronald Reagan announced in his first inaugural address, "Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem." He then set about dismantling President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty programs, attacking the unions that had been the underpinning for white working-class prosperity, and generally starving the beast of government. We're still living with the legacies of that credo in, for example, the housing crisis he first touched off by deregulating savings and loan institutions and disempowering the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
It's no accident that, just as real wages were falling, presidential administrations of both parties began touting the virtues of paid work for women -- at least if those women had children and no husband. Aid to Families with Dependent Children ("welfare") was another New Deal program, originally designed to provide cash assistance to widowed women raising kids on their own at a time when little paid employment was available to white women.
In the 1960s, groups like the National Welfare Rights Organization began advocating that similar benefits be extended to Black women raising children. (As a welfare rights advocate once asked me, "Why is it fine for a woman to look to a man to help her children, but not to The Man?") Not surprisingly, it wasn't until Black and Latina women began receiving the same entitlements as their white sisters that welfare became a "problem" in need of "reform."
By the mid-1990s, the fact that some Black women were receiving money from the government while not doing paid labor for an employer had been successfully reframed as a national crisis. Under Democratic President Bill Clinton, Congress passed the Personal Responsibility and Work Reconciliation Act of 1996, a bill that then was called "welfare reform." After that, if women wanted help from The Man, they had to work for it - not by taking care of their own children, but by taking care of their children and holding down minimum-wage jobs.
Are the Kids All Right?
It's more than a little ironic, then, that the granddaughters of feminists who argued that women should have a choice about whether or not to pursue a career came to confront an economy in which women, at least ones not from wealthy families, had little choice about working for pay.
The pandemic may change that, however -- and not in a good way. One of the unfulfilled demands of liberal 1970s feminism was universal free childcare. An impossible dream, right? How could any country afford such a thing?
Wait a minute, though. What about Sweden? They have universal free childcare. That's why a Swedish friend of mine, a human rights lawyer, and her American husband who had a rare tenure track university job in San Francisco, chose to take their two children back to Sweden. Raising children is so much easier there. In the early days of second-wave feminism, some big employers even built daycare centers for their employees with children. Those days, sadly, are long gone.
Now, in the Covid-19 moment, employers are beginning to recognize the non-pandemic benefits of having employees work at home. (Why not make workers provide their own office furniture? It's a lot easier to justify if they're working at home. And why pay rent on all that real estate when so many fewer people are in the office?) While companies will profit from reduced infrastructure costs and in some cases possibly even reduced pay for employees who relocate to cheaper areas, workers with children are going to face a dilemma. With no childcare available in the foreseeable future and school re-openings dicey propositions (no matter what the president threatens), someone is going to have to watch the kids. Someone -- probably in the case of heterosexual couples, the person who is already earning less -- is going to be under pressure to reduce or give up paid labor to do the age-old unpaid (but essential) work of raising the next generation. I wonder who that someone is going to be and, without those paychecks, I also wonder how much families are going to suffer economically in increasingly tough times.
Grateful to Have a Job?
Recently, in yet another Zoom meeting, a fellow university instructor (who'd just been interrupted to help a child find a crucial toy) was discussing the administration's efforts to squeeze concessions out of faculty and staff. I was startled to hear her add, "Of course, I'm grateful they gave me the job." This got me thinking about jobs and gratitude -- and which direction thankfulness ought to flow. It seems to me that the pandemic and the epidemic of unemployment following in its wake have reinforced a common but false belief shared by many workers: the idea that we should be grateful to our employers for giving us jobs.
We're so often told that corporations and the great men behind them are Job Creators. From the fountain of their beneficence flows the dignity of work and all the benefits a job confers. Indeed, as this fairy tale goes, businesses don't primarily produce widgets or apps or even returns for shareholders. Their real product is jobs. Like many of capitalism's lies, the idea that workers should thank their employers reverses the real story: without workers, there would be no apps, no widgets, no shareholder returns. It's our effort, our skill, our diligence that gives work its dignity. It may be an old saying, but no less true for that: labor creates all wealth. Wealth does not create anything -- neither widgets, nor jobs.
I'm grateful to the universe that I have work that allows me to talk with young people about their deepest values at a moment in their lives when they're just figuring out what they value, but I am not grateful to my university employer for my underpaid, undervalued job. The gratitude should run in the other direction. Without faculty, staff, and students there would be no university. It's our labor that creates wealth, in this case a (minor) wealth of knowledge.
As of July 16th, in the midst of the Covid-19 crisis, 32 million Americans are receiving some kind of unemployment benefit. That number doesn't even reflect the people involuntarily working reduced hours, or those who haven't been able to apply for benefits. One thing is easy enough to predict: employers will take advantage of people's desperate need for money to demand ever more labor for ever less pay. Until an effective vaccine for the coronavirus becomes available, expect to see the emergence of a three-tier system of worker immiseration: low-paid essential workers who must leave home to do their jobs, putting themselves in significant danger in the process, while we all depend on them for sustenance; better paid people who toil at home, but whose employers will expect their hours of availability to expand to fill the waking day; and low-paid or unpaid domestic laborers, most of them women, who keep everyone else fed, clothed, and comforted.
Even when the pandemic finally ends, there's a danger that some modified version of this new system of labor exploitation might prove too profitable for employers to abandon. On the other hand, hitting the national pause button, however painfully, could give the rest of us a chance to rethink a lot of things, including the place of work, paid and unpaid, in our lives.
So, will my partner and I head for Reno in a couple of weeks? Certainly, the job of ousting Donald Trump is essential. I'm just not sure that a couple of old white ladies are essential workers in the time of Covid-19.
"A just transition is not a luxury or a campaign to be used for greenwashing; it's a matter of survival and securing our future," said a movement member in the host country.
The Fridays for Future movement announced this week that it is planning the next Global Climate Strike for November 14, the first Friday during the upcoming United Nations Climate Change Conference in Belém, Brazil.
The movement began in 2018, with then-teenage Greta Thunberg's solo protest at the Swedish parliament, which inspired millions of people to hold similar school strikes for climate action around the world.
The U.N. summit, COP30, is set to run from November 10-21. Brazil's website for the conference states that "the main challenges include aligning the commitments of developed and developing countries in relation to climate finance, ensuring that emission reduction targets are compatible with climate science, and dealing with the socio-economic impacts of climate change on vulnerable populations."
On November 14, "under the banner #JustTransitionNow, young people around the world will mobilize to demand urgent, justice-centered action to phase out fossil fuels and build a sustainable future for all," according to a Monday statement from Fridays for Future.
"Global leaders must stop listening to fossil fuel lobbyists... It's time they start listening to science, to young people, and to traditional communities on the frontlines of the climate crisis."
According to the movement, the upcoming global strike will highlight the urgent need to:
"Global leaders must stop listening to fossil fuel lobbyists or seeking alliances with groups like OPEC+," said Daniel Holanda of Fridays for Future Brazil, referring to the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and other leading oil exporters.
"It's time they start listening to science, to young people, and to traditional communities on the frontlines of the climate crisis," Holanda added. "A just transition is not a luxury or a campaign to be used for greenwashing; it's a matter of survival and securing our future."
The movement's announcement of the next strike follows last week's landmark advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice (ICJ)—the U.N.'s primary judicial organ—that countries have a legal obligation to take cooperative action against the "urgent and existential threat" of human-caused planetary heating.
"We now have a common foundation based on the rule of law, releasing us from the limitations of individual nations' political interests that have dominated climate action," said Ralph Regenvanu, a minister in Vanuatu, which introduced the U.N. General Assembly resolution that led to the opinion. "This moment will drive stronger action and accountability to protect our planet and peoples."
Plans for the strike also come as U.S. President Donald Trump's administration and congressional Republicans work to undo the limited progress that the United States has made in terms of taking accountability for being the biggest historical contributor to climate pollution.
In addition to the United States ditching the Paris agreement, again, Trump's return to power has meant the elimination of the State Department's Office of Global Change. The latter move, CNN reported Tuesday, "leaves the world's largest historical polluter with no official presence" at COP30.
"While Trump's tariffs continue to cause economic upheaval, corporations are exploiting the chaos and working families are left to foot the bill," said one analyst.
The effects of U.S. President Donald Trump's tariffs are winding their way through the American economy, and a new piece of analysis claims that corporate America is using them as "cover" to further jack up prices.
Progressive advocacy group Groundwork Collaborative issued a new report on Tuesday that uses corporate executives' own words to show how many firms are taking advantage of the tariff situation by using it as an all-purpose justification for price increases. The report found many of these executives' admissions through quarterly earnings calls in which they discussed plans to increase costs even if their inputs were not being significantly affected by the tariffs.
Among others, the report cited a statement made earlier this year by Aaron Jagdfeld, the CEO of power generation products manufacturer Generac Power Systems, who said on an earnings call that "even if we have metals that weren't impacted directly by tariffs, the indirect effect of tariffs is that it gives steel producers and the mills and other fabricators... great cover for increased pricing in some cases."
Another executive quoted in the report was Matthew Stevenson, the CEO of auto parts manufacturer Holley, who said that "in the marketplace we have seen price increases well in excess of what we put out into the market" and added that "we've seen increases as high as 30% or more on some categories from some competitors."
Thomas Robertson, the CFO of footwear company Rocky Brands, flat-out said during an earnings call that his company planned to raise prices even as Trump had backed off his most strident trade-war threats with China.
"We certainly welcome a reduction in the Chinese tariffs, but we'll be announcing a price increase here regardless of any changes of the Chinese tariffs over the next week or two to go into effect in June," he said.
While the report names and shames corporations for price increases, Groundwork Collaborative executive director Lindsay Owens did not absolve Trump of responsibility for the situation.
"President Trump's turbulent trade policy has created a perfect storm of market chaos, giving corporations a golden opportunity to jack up prices, pad profit margins, and fleece Americans simply because they can," said Owens. "While Trump's tariffs continue to cause economic upheaval, corporations are exploiting the chaos and working families are left to foot the bill."
The Groundwork Collaborative report was released on the same day that consumer goods giant Procter & Gamble announced that it would be raising prices on roughly one-quarter of its products due to Trump's tariffs. As reported by CNBC, the company said during its quarterly earnings call that it expects "mid-single-digit price increases" on a wide range of products over the next quarter to help offset what it projects to be a $1 billion hit from the tariffs levied against major trading partners such as Canada and China.
A report by the Tax Foundation on Monday estimated that the Trump tariffs would affect 75% of all food imported from other countries, which would add even more burden to American consumers. What's particularly troubling about the food tariffs, the Tax Foundation explained, is that they will fall on products such as bananas and coffee that are simply not capable of being grown on a mass scale in the United States.
"In 2024, the U.S. imported about $221 billion in food products, 74% of which ($163 billion) faced the Trump tariffs," wrote the Tax Foundation. "While these imports currently face tariff rates ranging from 10% to 30%, they will exceed 30% for some countries if the reciprocal tariffs go into effect on August 1. The top five exporters of food products to the U.S., in order, are Mexico, Canada, the E.U., Brazil, and China, accounting for 62% of total U.S. food imports."
"An entirely man-made famine," said one United Nations expert. "The threshold of famine has been reached with widespread starvation and malnutrition across the war-torn enclave including among children."
The latest alert on Gaza from the world's leading authority on starvation and malnutrition is not a warning of what could come in the besieged enclave, where Israel is still blocking nearly all humanitarian aid, but of the "worst-case scenario" that has already taken hold.
"Famine is currently playing out in the Gaza Strip," said the Integrated Phase Food Security Classification (IPC), which ranks food security levels on a scale of 1 to 5, in its Tuesday analysis.
Since the IPC's analysis in May, in which it projected that half a million Palestinians in Gaza would reach Phase 5—Catastrophe, defined as an "extreme lack of food"—by September, Israel's bombardments and ground operations have intensified, and people's access to food across the enclave has continued to be "alarmingly erratic and extremely perilous," said the IPC, with more than 1,000 people killed while trying to access food and humanitarian aid.
Between May and July, the proportion of households facing extreme hunger has doubled in Gaza, said the IPC, and the food consumption threshold for famine "has already been passed for most areas of the Gaza Strip." One in three people in Gaza are now going days at a time without consuming any food.
At least 147 people have died from starvation, according to Gaza's Health Ministry.
In May, the IPC projected that malnutrition would soon reach critical levels in the governorates of North Gaza, Gaza, and Rafah, with more than 70,000 children under age 5 and 17,000 pregnant and breastfeeding women facing acute malnutrition—and said all of Gaza was facing "a risk of famine."
Tuesday's report, said the International Rescue Committee, was "a devastating but entirely predictable confirmation of what the IRC and the wider humanitarian community have long warned: Israel's restrictions on aid have created the conditions for famine, and the window to prevent mass death is rapidly closing."
More than 20,000 children have been admitted to health centers for treatment for acute malnutrition, with more than 3,000 facing severe malnourishment—the effects of which, said the IRC, can be "lifelong and irreversible" in children who survive.
At least 16 children under 5 have died from starvation since July 17, said the IPC—representing a "rapid increase" in hunger-related deaths that is unlikely to slow down without an end to Israel's blockade and a major ramp-up in the distribution of humanitarian aid—which is currently sitting in thousands of trucks just outside the enclave, as the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) said Tuesday.
"The worst-case scenario of famine is now happening in Gaza according to the leading world experts," said Philippe Lazzarini, the UNRWA commissioner-general, whose agency has provided aid and services to Palestinians in Gaza for decades. "An entirely man-made famine. The threshold of famine has been reached with widespread starvation and malnutrition across the war-torn enclave including among children. More than 100 people have died due to hunger in the past few weeks alone. The only way to reverse this catastrophe is to flood Gaza with a massive scale up of aid."
An estimated 62,000 metric tons of staple food—not including fresh foods like vegetables and meat—is required to enter Gaza each month to cover the basic needs of the population. In May and June, only 19,900-37,800 metric tons of food entered the enclave. That includes food provided by the U.S.- and Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, where Israeli soldiers have reported that they were directed to shoot at Palestinian civilians trying to access aid.
"People are starving not because food is unavailable, but because access is blocked, local agrifood systems have collapsed, and families can no longer sustain even the most basic livelihoods," said U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization Director-General Qu Dongyu. "We urgently need safe and sustained humanitarian access and immediate support to restore local food production and livelihoods—this is the only way to prevent further loss of life. The right to food is a basic human right."
As international outrage has grown over the images of starving Palestinians in recent days—with even the U.S. corporate media and Democratic establishment finally speaking out against Israel's blocking of humanitarian aid—Israel has paused some fighting and allowed airdrops of food, which aid groups have condemned as a "grotesque distraction" that will provide nowhere near the aid that's needed.
"Israel's genocide has thrown Gaza into the final chaotic stages of a full-blown human catastrophe," said Bushra Khalidi, policy lead for Oxfam in the occupied Palestinian territories. "Airdrops, and brief pauses for relative crumbs of aid, is nowhere near enough to prevent human death at an unimaginable scale. We need urgent forceful diplomacy and whatever restrictive measures are necessary in order to achieve an immediate and unconditional cease-fire, break Israel's siege, and allow humanitarian aid to flow freely and safely throughout Gaza."
As Common Dreams reported Monday, Republican leaders in the U.S. including President Donald Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) have shown no signs that they will act on the new data in the IPC report; both continued to dismiss the international condemnation of Israel's blockade in Gaza, repeating debunked claims that Hamas is to blame for the starvation of Palestinians.
The U.S. has continued to provide the Israel Defense Forces with support despite its own laws stating that the U.S. cannot send military aid to countries that block humanitarian aid.
Khalidi said the IPC's new warning of "an unfolding famine—one created entirely by Israel's murderous siege—must finally rouse the international community to act with a clarity and resolve that has so far been beyond it."
"World leaders have been variously divided, complicit, uncaring, and collectively ineffectual in stopping Israel's campaign of erasure," said Khalidi. "In failing to protect the Palestinian people, they have no more excuses left. Ending Israel's genocide of Gaza is a test not only of our world order but of our collective humanity."