It is sometimes said that there are decades in which not much changes and years in which an entire decade’s worth of sociopolitical tumult occurs. The so-called COVID year, March 2020 until the vaccine rollout of the following year, is an example of the latter. The COVID year markedly reduced average American life expectancy, nurtured extremist politics and conspiracy-minded cynicism, frayed communities, and eroded trust in institutions.
For workers who, in the words of Nick Juravich and Steve Striffler, were briefly “elevated from disposable to ‘essential,’” the period led to an uptick in worker self-organizing, new wage demands and concessions on work-from-home flexibility, some successful union organizing, and a nearly impossible amount of worker protest to fully quantify, including “quiet” and actual quitting. “Not in nearly a century had so many people felt the failure of government and indifference of the bosses so quickly and so deeply, on a scale and with an intensity that was difficult to ignore.”
Juravich and Striffler’s new edited volume, The Pandemic and the Working Class: How US Labor Navigated COVID-19, is a collection of fourteen essays exploring the workplace dynamics of the COVID year in industries like health care, education, food production, and hospitality. It is a worthy early attempt to capture some of the experience many would sooner forget while memories are still fresh. Juravich is an assistant professor at UMass Boston whose first book, Para Power: How Paraprofessional Labor Changed Education (2024) (from the same publisher), came out an impressively short six months ago. His coeditor, Striffler, director of UMass Boston’s labor extension center, recently coedited a Haymarket Press book, Organizing for Power: Building a Twenty-First-Century Labor Movement in Boston (2021), offering “the only comprehensive analysis of labor and popular mobilizing in Boston today.” Not surprisingly, although Pandemic and the Working Class is tagged as a comprehensive survey of US labor, most of the case studies focus on Massachusetts unions.
Kathryn M. Meyer’s contribution profiles the efforts of the Boston Teachers Union (BTU) to balance the demands of an often illiberal and anti-union power structure to reopen schools in the fall of 2020 with teachers’ own concerns about ventilation, masking, and sick time, which Meyer calls a “both/and approach to protecting workers and students [that] did not just extend to rallies and protests.” The author focused her research on Boston Globe coverage of the 2020-21 negotiations, so she misses an opportunity to contrast the BTU’s coalition-based efforts around COVID-19 with its not-long-ago reputation for prioritizing teachers’ working issues over student achievement in an adversarial manner, or, as The New York Times once put it (through cherry-picked teacher gripes), “defending the weakest members” through “obstructionist and kvetching” methods.
UNITE HERE Local 26 fought for, and frequently won, enhanced severance packages, layoff protections, and recall rights from Boston-area hotels, while jumping on opportunities to organize non-union hotel workers at properties that historically mocked parity with the union contract but crucially lacked new protections for the unforeseen circumstances of the pandemic. Author Carlos Aramayo, the president of Local 26, contributes a refreshingly frank postmortem. It should be noted that the hotel workers’ international union traces its organizing renaissance of recent decades to formative experiences organizing cafeteria workers (and, later, clerical, maintenance, and graduate student employees) at Yale University. One by-product is that UNITE HERE officers and staff often take an intellectual approach to evaluating organizing wins and losses, and even share their findings with the academic community—a scholarly openness that often puts the teachers’ unions to shame.
Another of the chapters to venture out of Massachusetts is Lia Warner’s look at archival work during New York-based efforts to preserve physical relics of the pandemic, not unlike how archivists in the city needed to contend with the missing posters and makeshift shrines that sprang up after September 11, 2001. This essay might require a bit of unpacking for readers (such as myself) who think of archives as resources to draw on in historical research, but the chapter is not (or at least not only) about what was collected and how but about the work of archivists as a job and the way that job was affected by COVID. Like the 9/11 archival projects, the COVID archive had archive workers laboring, uncomfortably, “at the intersection of grief and history.”
The most disturbing chapters to read, unsurprisingly, focus on health-care workers, who, of course, were literally applauded for their heroic and essential work. Many did, eventually, get rewarded with higher pay and appropriate protective gear, but the long-term damage to morale leaves us in something of a preparedness crisis for the next health crisis. The heart of Marian Moser Jones’s study is diaries kept by six registered nurses from Massachusetts and five other Northern states during the one-year period ending in April 2021. These include harrowing stories of limited N95 masks being reused, recycled, rationed, and simply prioritized for doctors and hospital executives over frontline nurses. These nurses clearly have long-term trauma from providing end-of-life care for patients who were left lonely and alone during the darkest days of the pandemic and continued guilt over treatment protocols involving intubation and CPR—revised as hospitals gained more clinical experience with the virus—that in some cases tormented patients’ last moments while providing little life-saving potential. These “deep emotional wounds,” Jones writes, “have been termed ‘moral injuries.’” The World Health Organization estimates that COVID-19 killed 115,000 health-care workers by May 2021, exacerbating a staffing crisis in the health-care system. This will clearly be made worse by “moral injuries,” which, like post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) obscuring the full extent of wartime casualties, will affect safe staffing ratios and preparedness for the next pandemic. Burnout also comes from life outside the hospitals, when limited time spent at home in their communities was infected with spreading distrust of the virus, its causes, and the utility of masking. A chapter on hospital social workers, with support from SEIU 1199, reveals similar moral injuries for those workers, with less “essential” lip service.
Health care and education are heavily unionized industries, while most workplaces are totally non-union. One of the most invigorating developments during the pandemic was the creation of the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC, pronounced phonetically like the fuzzy Return of the Jedi aliens). Connor Harney profiles and evaluates this joint project of the independent United Electrical union and Democratic Socialists of America. The volunteer organization mass-texted Bernie Sanders’s supporters in the early lockdown days, offering resources for workers who wanted to organize their jobs. Over 3,231 reached out, and by now more than a thousand have had a first organizing conversation “intake call.” A total of 405 workers went through a six-session organizing training in 2021 alone. “Ultimately,” Harney writes, “the goal is to make EWOC into a massive virtual worker center on a national level.”
EWOC has created a kind of reserve army of rank-and-file organizers that would have been helpful to have during the labor movement’s 1995-2012 “organize or die” era, when millions more dollars than today were being invested by unions in workplace organizing. I’ll endorse the optimistic note on which Juravich and Striffler end Pandemic and the Working Class: “The further we get from the initial shock of 2020, the clearer it is that workers across many sectors and experiences not only demand rights and respect at work but also believe in the power of organizing to deliver them.” That “initial shock” has now been replaced by daily shocks of a fascist assault upon our workplaces, communities, and the institutions we used to rely on to protect us. There is much to learn from these chapters, and that “initial shock,” to navigate our ongoing crisis.
[This article originally appeared at H-Sci-Med-Tech.]