Season 1 Ep. 7 - Whatever Happened To “Essential” Workers?

Charlotte Tate
From the Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs at Middlebury College, this is New Frontiers. I’m Charlotte Tate, associate director of the Rohatyn Center. New Frontiers podcasts highlight research undertaken by Middlebury scholars and others, on matters of international and global concern.  Everything is fair game—from big tech, environmental conservation and global security—to religion, culture, and changing work patterns.

In this episode, Mark Williams talks with labor sociologist Jamie McCallum about the research he conducted on the COVID pandemic’s impact on American workers, the US labor movement, and what this research tells us about the state of American labor and our public health system today.  

Mark Williams
Jamie McCallum is the associate professor of sociology at Middlebury College. During the COVID pandemic, he spent a lot of time interviewing essential workers and researching issues in public health. The fruit of that research is a new book. It will be published this year by Basic Books, and it’s titled “Essential: How the pandemic transformed the long struggle for worker justice.”  Jamie McCallum, it’s a pleasure to have you visit us here on New Frontiers.

Jamie McCallum
Thanks for having me.

Mark Williams
Good to have you here. Now, your book is all about the COVID pandemic’s impact on American labor. And so right off the bat, I was struck by two things about the book’s title. And the first thing that struck me was that the title implies that workers’ struggle for justice changed somehow as a result of the pandemic. And if that’s the case, then can you give us a quick synopsis or a tease about how things changed and about how great the change was. And then we’ll circle back later on for a deeper dive.

Jamie McCallum
Yeah, thanks for that question. It’s great. So the best way I think I can say it is that there were different phases of struggle or protest or worker activism, whatever you want to call it, that characterized early parts in the later parts of the pandemic. The biggest part that changed I think is that we saw a much larger increase in sort of spontaneous or less organized by official uniondom-type protests. During the first year and a half of the pandemic, about a third of the workplace protest strikes, walkouts, and whatever were by non-union workers, which is pretty atypical. And that’s one thing that happened. Another thing that happened, I think, is the sort of outcome that we’re seeing now, which is a revival of, in some ways, very traditional types of sort of workplace militancy, bottom up workplace militancy characterized by Starbucks workers and Amazon workers who are now organizing unions like gangbusters. And to some extent, some of that bottom-up frustration that happened during the    pandemic ended up in this new sort of form of labor struggle.

Mark Williams
Okay, great. Thanks. Well, we’ll come back to this later on and we’ll go into it in more detail. Now, the second thing that struck me about your book’s title is the phrase essential workers and you know, your book is really all about essential workers. Could you remind our listeners what an essential worker is?

Jamie McCallum
So, the first time most people heard the phrase essential workers was during the pandemic, obviously, and that mostly referred to people who had to work in person March 2020, until whenever. You could break it down and say those were frontline workers, and that there were certain industries that were considered essential to our survival. And therefore, anyone in those industries was essential, whether they worked in person or not. So for example, administrators at hospitals sometimes did not come into the hospital every day, but they would be characterized as essential by certain people. In the book, I basically use essential and frontline interchangeably to mean people who worked face to face in person during the pandemic.

Mark Williams
Okay. Now, who made the determination as to who was classified as essential and who wasn’t? Was this a policy? Was it a regulation?

Jamie McCallum
That is a great, great question. And I think it’s not that easy to figure out. So there were obviously certain industries like healthcare, computing, certain parts of finance, certain parts of food production, certain parts of like maintenance of things that were necessary for our daily survival that were deemed essential by the federal government. However, states varied widely as to who also fell into that category. So sometimes a welder in Massachusetts was deemed essential and in Pennsylvania they were not, or certain kinds of convenience stores were deemed essential in certain places, but a county away those same services were not. And then sometimes businesses themselves lobbied to be considered essential and were allowed to operate on the basis that they sold hand sanitizer or tissues or whatever it was. You know, I interviewed people who said that their stores just simply started stocking quote unquote essential items just to stay open even long after those items were sold out. So it was a very convoluted process and one that I think is much more confusing than we typically thought.

Mark Williams
Okay. Okay, thank you. Well, let’s get into the meat of your book and we’ll start off with “the why.” Why study essential workers during the pandemic? Was there something particularly important or useful about that time period, analytically?

Jamie McCallum
Yeah. Well, so I’m a labor sociologist. So when the pandemic started, that’s what I looked toward.  I was teaching the sociology of labor at Middlebury when the pandemic happened and my students were like, do you think this is going to affect anything? And I was like, that’s interesting. You know, I don’t know. So we started talking about it and I started interviewing workers mostly in healthcare and grocery stores right away. Sort of from my own curiosity. But what I think became quickly apparent to me is that the news cycle and our everyday lives pretty quickly determined—by the ability of us to access certain goods and services and to some extent, our ability to do that was predicated on essential workers doing those jobs. And so people who were formerly invisible or on the margins of society, all of a sudden had this huge sort of vaunted place in American life. The news media focused on essential workers. The government was talking about essential workers. They were at the heart of matters of national security and public safety. And so it seemed appropriate to place them sort of at the center of a story about the pandemic. The book is essentially the story of the pandemic from the standpoint of essential workers. And so it sort of places them as the epicenter of a society wide problem.

Mark Williams
And these are workers, I think you mentioned, who were more or less out of sight in terms of being that prominent. Not that they weren’t playing important roles in the economy or in industry, but they were not those who were typically talked about.

Jamie McCallum
Yeah. The extent to which anyone cared about grocery clerks or nursing home aids or delivery drivers, it’s apparent simply, you know, our society treats them with wild disregard. And for the most part, our policy makers have ways of shifting the cards around so that it never really comes around to them. At a certain point that did begin to change; in our social imagination and in a reality, you know, they were our heroes, right? I mean, New Yorkers, banging pots and pans every evening. That didn’t happen before, and it actually hasn’t happened very much since. But for a moment they occupied this extraordinary social place.

Mark Williams
I can recall seeing homemade signs in people’s front yards, thanking essential workers. Right. For staying on the job. Right. Can you tell us a bit about how labor and essential workers therefore responded to the pandemic? And here I’m talking about in terms of organizing and activism, what were the workers doing and during the pandemic and what did those efforts accomplished?

Jamie McCallum
Immediately as the pandemic started by April, we started seeing,

Mark Williams
April 2020?

Jamie McCallum
April 2020. We started seeing workers push back mostly about workplace safety and low wages and variable schedules. The scheduling thing was obvious long before the pandemic schedules of American workers began to fluctuate wildly. During the pandemic, some days you had 14-hour days, next day, you had two-hour days, you were sent home in the middle of it. You weren’t paid for that time, et cetera. So that was an issue. And then workplace safety became front and center. So you had walkouts, workers at Amazon and strikes by gig economy, workers, delivery drivers mostly. You had walkouts by garbage collectors, food workers, meat packing workers. And so we saw this, which is pretty odd and unusual in American society, sort of an outpouring of spontaneous activism, revolt, whatever you want to call it. It wasn’t actually on that large of a scale. Like if you look at a typical year, 2020 registered fewer large strikes than previous years. But you know, first of all, only a fraction of the workforce was going to work. And second of all, the barriers to organizing something like that were extraordinary. But what we did see was all this nontraditional sort of new kind of experimenting. Some of it, to the rest of your question, amounted to a lot. I mean, workers won higher wages, better healthcare, paid sick time, childcare, free transportation to work in COVID-safe environments. And then very often they also won nothing. The difference depends to some extent on if you’re in a workplace that has strong unions, that was one of the key differences, I think. Like for example, meat packing workers who did an incredibly important and dangerous job during the pandemic won very little. Nursing home workers who work in a similar environment had a much greater time winning material benefits—raises time off, et cetera.   

Mark Williams
And is that because there were unions present in one and not in the other?

Jamie McCallum
No, actually, I mean, there’s unions present in, in meat packing actually, they’re just really weak. Nursing homes were the epicenter of the pandemic. Their unions were comparably strong. So I did some research with other—actually political scientist Adam Dean, who used to work at Middlebury, led a research team of myself and two medical doctors. And we did research on nursing homes that showed, for example, that unionized nursing homes had much lower levels of mortality of residents and much lower levels of infections by staff than did non-union homes. For example, it’s possible that unionized nursing homes had better access to PPE. They had better paid-sick leave. They had higher wages, so that nursing home workers didn’t have to moonlight at various homes spreading the disease place to place. There were benefits like that, that were not only workplace specific, but also sort of society wide that I think workers helped win.

Mark Williams
In terms of the amount of activism that was going on during the pandemic, was there any indication that there was more activism just in smaller groups as opposed to larger unions going on strike?

Jamie McCallum
So, there is some indication of that. So the Cornell labor center did a cool project where they ended up tracking labor unrest during that time. And they found, as I sort of mentioned before, an explosion of protests, whatever you want to call it, among non-unionized workers. Some of the larger unions, I think personally missed an opportunity to organize more large-scale strikes, walkouts, protests, and so you don’t register some of those as much. The exception probably was in nursing. Of the eight major strikes in 2020, in other words, thousand workers or more, half of them were in hospitals, by nurses. The longest strike of the pandemic, I believe, was led by nurses in Worcester, Massachusetts, So those people were the forefront or the trenches, whatever.  Whatever you want to say.

Mark Williams
Right. Okay. Well, one of the things that you say in your book and here I’ll quote is “the pandemic has profoundly impacted the way we work and with it, the working class.” Now I wonder if you could elaborate a bit on those points.

Jamie McCallum
So part of the book is trying to understand the process by which some sort of essential working class came to cohere or not during the pandemic. In other words, we typically think of class in America as essentially an income bracket. If you’re in the bottom quintile, you’re poor. If you’re in the next one up you’re working class or whatever it is. And then you have the rich on top. There was a moment during the pandemic when grocery clerks, teachers, nurses, nursing home workers, meat packers, all these different kinds of people who make different amounts of money or sort of exist in different cultural spheres and are in vastly different occupations with different levels of education and yet came to sort of see themselves as having a common identity or a common cause or something.

Mark Williams
They were all classified as essential.

Jamie McCallum
They’re all classified as essential workers. And the most important factors is that they all were in close proximity to serious risk. That was a main defining thing. It’s like what do these people working from home risk? Nothing, right? We’re in a different situation. And so that was a compelling and powerful narrative that workers came to understand. And so part of the book is understanding that process, which would be what social scientists referred to as class formation—something like that, how classes really come together and form. And then of course, as the pandemic wore on and Biden extended unemployment benefits, and more people could stay home longer. And people began to say, why doesn’t anyone want to work anymore? Cause there’s a labor shortage. Some of the coherence around that essential working class began to unravel and they turned against each other, and they turned against the unemployed, and all those things. And so there was this process by which this sort of organization of workers cohered and then unraveled. And I sort of wanted to trace that process.

Mark Williams
If I understand what you’re saying, a type of sort of proto class that formed and then disintegrated.

Jamie McCallum
I think that’s right. I mean there was no march for essential workers on the DC mall. No one really came together to say, you know, this is who we are. But in a million of Facebook groups and online chat centers and here and there protests …   through interviews I did when I talked to people in May, June, July of 2020 people said, “look, us essential workers. We’re all in this together.”

Mark Williams
At that point, the commonalities between them were very, very striking and they could see them. They were all in the same boat. 

Jamie McCallum
Exactly. They had a certain sense of solidarity with each other. I met people who said they routinely gave other essential workers free groceries at the store. And you know, there was all kinds of stuff like that that was happening.  Almost like sort of micro level acts of solidarity. And then later on, people began to say, well, why do they get to stay home? Right? Why do they get an unemployment check that is larger than my wage, which was true. And there was some sense of sacrifice by certain groups of people—who knows how many of them had died in their industries. And that I think sort of tended to fracture that sense of solidarity.

Mark Williams
Could you clarify for me who, who was it that was staying home, receiving these unemployment checks that were larger than the wages.

Jamie McCallum
If you were unemployed, let’s say from a restaurant or a hospitality, some of the sectors most largely impacted during the first year. And you made, you know, 11, 12 dollars an hour at your hotel job or your restaurant job with tips, then some of Trump’s and even Biden’s unemployment insurance was significant. It was better. I mean, some of the Cares Act checks and then the American Rescue Plan checks were significant. And there’s some evidence that was keeping people home. I don’t think there was any evidence that it was totally driving the labor shortage, which I also talk about in the book. But I do think that after working for however many months through the pandemic, people did want to stay home. And so when those checks came out, a lot of people took advantage of that stuff to find a new career or spend time with their family or take care of loved ones or whatever it was. But there was that tension.

Mark Williams
So there were people who one might have classified as essential workers who were unemployed at home, receiving unemployment checks while others who were classified as essential workers were at the till at the grocery store, checking people out. Is that what you’re saying?

Jamie McCallum
Right. I interviewed a nurse who said, “we’re out here working our butts off and they’re at home sitting on them.” And she was referring not to, you know, people like me who worked at college, but like other nurses who had said, you know what, like I’m not doing this anymore. So I think that those unemployment benefits were extremely valuable and extraordinarily important, probably saved lives, but also ended up sort of affecting the composition of this working class sort-of status.

Mark Williams
Okay. I see. Thank you.

Mark Williams
Well, let’s shift gears a bit, given your research, do you think that there’s some kind of relationship between what we might broadly call the public health on the one hand and class struggle on the other?

Jamie McCallum
Yeah. Why do we have relatively safe workplaces, let’ say?  And I think most people assume that market competition forces employers to do the right thing here and there. And that government regulations like OSHA and other regulatory bodies like that give us some protections as well. And there’s of course, probably some truth to that. My perspective was that essentially workplace safety is the outcome of class struggle. Well if you had a union during the pandemic, like all the research shows that you had greater access to PPE, you had a more consistent schedule, you had greater paid sick leave, and you made more money. And those things did translate into safer workplaces and therefore into safer places for the rest of us. So I looked at healthcare, education, and meat packing. So in healthcare, the research I did with Adam Dean was fairly shocking. As I said before, unionized nursing homes basically saved lives. There were, I think, 10 percent lower resident mortality in union homes than there were non-union homes, looking at every nursing home in the continental United States, which is a significant drop. So if you can imagine industrywide unionization, if the whole nursing home industry was unionized, that would be associated with about 8,000 fewer deaths. That’s a lot. And if you imagine all those people have family and grandkids or whatever, it’s like the ripple effect is enormous. In education, I found that in Chicago, L.A., Philly, New York, there were a lot of places where teacher protests and pushback against the return to school orders resulted in more mask mandate, better ventilation in classrooms, smaller classrooms, whatever it was that teachers wanted, they pushed for and got it.

Mark Williams     
The relationship then between public health and class struggle, what would that equation look like if you were to sort of verbalize it?

Jamie McCallum
More struggle, more health. Greater forms of worker, organization, higher levels of unionization, especially lead to better health outcomes. So if you can imagine a situation like in a hospital, if you’re a unionized nurse, you have the right to bargain in your contract over all kinds of stipulations related to your personal health. That personal health easily translates into better health outcomes for patients in the general public. So that equation was interesting to me during the pandemic.

Mark Williams
And your data bears that out, you see this happening again and again.

Jamie McCallum
Yeah. I mean, there’s both the quantitative data that we have about nursing homes to some extent schools. And then if you talk to meat packing workers, where they have incredible levels of death and sickness and illness and whatever, and their unions are incredibly weak. Their unions were essentially incapable of struggling in a way that that could get them what they needed.

Mark Williams
I see. I’d like to circle back to something we briefly touched on at the beginning of our chat. Earlier, I asked about how workers’ struggle for justice had changed as a result of the pandemic. And I’m wondering, could you expand some more on what you said earlier?

Jamie McCallum
So July 2022. We’re seeing an extraordinary moment in which working class activism is sort of taking shape like it hasn’t in a long time. I think union elections are up 60 percent this year than they were in previous years. And there is I think, a renewed interest, especially among young people and among workers of color about what workplace struggle and especially union struggle can do for us. That being said, there has been also a parallel movement generally in society where the sort of vaunted position that essential workers occupied during the pandemic has more or less disappeared. I went to a protest of nurses about a year ago now, and they had a banner outside the hospital that said, “last year’s heroes, this year’s zeroes.” And everyone I interviewed said the same thing. They said where’s the pots and pans now—that kind of thing. And I think what, to me, that exposes is the thin and superficial nature of some of that support early on in the pandemic when it was essential to our absolute physical survival. Yes. We cared about people in those positions. And when vaccines sort of a return to normal, a certain degree of the COVID recession more or less ended, then people began to return to a world in which we treat essential workers like they’re servants. And so that quick turnaround was also shocking to me. I sort of optimistically expected some of that, you know, essential workers being able to sort of cash in on some of that good will and power social power that they earned during the pandemic. And it’s been scarce lately.

Mark Williams
Do you think that there was a moment, perhaps a prolonged moment in which workers in various sectors had an unparalleled opportunity to organize in the context of that pandemic and the upheaval that might have passed at this point?

Jamie McCallum
There was a moment in the fall of 2021, what people dubbed “Striketober” during October. There was an explosion of strikes that basically paralleled the labor shortage—however you want to define the labor shortage, be it, some of it was fictitious, some of it was real. That provided an opportunity and workers stepped through that window and unions followed them in many ways. And that was really great. There was also a time when if we needed nurses to show up and nurses went on strike, well, very often they got what they wanted quickly. But not always. So nurses at tenant hospitals in Massachusetts struck for, I think 300 days. Just imagine being the owner of a hospital and having hundreds of nurses not being able to work and then keeping them out for most of the year. I mean it’s almost insane. And so yes, there were these sort of structural opportunities during the pandemic, but in many ways, I think what we’re seeing now, especially the Starbucks campaigns and the sort of historic union victory at Amazon, the Amazon warehouse in Staten Island, is some sort of full circle organizing. So for example, the leader of the Staten Island Amazon union was more or less the first profiled person to be fired for leading a workplace safety protest in 2020. And he has basically risen to be the star of the labor movement. And so I think that people tried to take advantage when they could during the pandemic, but the chaos of it all did sort of interrupt some of that. And as there has been some return to business as usual, whatever workers have said “okay, now is the time.” It’s been interesting to see how that has dovetailed with certain kinds of public support or certain kinds of political support from the Biden administration, but ultimately probably not enough.

Mark Williams
Okay. Thank you. I read something in your book that I’d like to explore a bit more. You say that during the pandemic’s first year, so this would be 2020 and here I’m going to quote again, “the U.S. has only 4 percent of the global population but suffered about 22 percent of COVID 19 deaths.” And then you go on to say, and again, I’ll quote “by 2022, the share of Americans who had died of coronavirus was at least 63 percent higher than in our peer countries.”  I’m wondering, what do you see as the most important factor or factors behind these really alarming stats?

Jamie McCallum
I wish that I was an epidemiologist right now, and I could give a real holistic answer to that. So I, first of all, don’t know fully why that is the case. I do think there’s a lot of evidence that during the very early part of the pandemic workplace transmission was driving the spread. COVID was a workplace hazard, essentially. We did almost nothing politically to mitigate that spread. In other words, OSHA made almost no investigations at workplace transmissions. Where there were incidents of workplace malfeasance where workers died when they shouldn’t have died, OSHA barely levied fines. There was just very little we did. There was some evidence early on that countries with greater levels of respect for labor rights had lower levels of COVID transmission. I did some investigating that and found that it was just, it’s just too simplistic of a story. Like the factors that led to the American explosion of COVID compared to peer countries is very obviously complicated. And I don’t know the full picture of it. One thing I will say, and this again is related to the workplace is that years of deregulation of healthcare probably had something to do with it. So for example, when COVID hit, we had almost no surge capacity in hospitals. Many countries, South Korea being a really notable one, had large surge capacity in hospitals that they could soak up people during an influx or a crisis. Why we had almost none was essentially because of years of private deregulation of healthcare, which maximized the capacity of hospitals. Nurses’ unions routinely pushed for a surge capacity. They routinely pushed for excess beds in hospitals and nursing homes, and they often lost those battles. So again, one example, I think, where workplace struggle, dynamics, whatever you want to call it, class struggles had some relationship to public health outcomes.

Mark Williams
Looking back, how well do you think the official response to the pandemic was? And I asked that because as an outside observer, it would seem that a lot of the confusion and outright denial of the importance, the significance of the pandemic coming from official circles probably played a part in those statistics.

Jamie McCallum
I think that the Trump administration was essentially a death cult. And I think that the willingness to let so many people die without significant emergency response was world historic and devastating. The link that I found in my research that would relate to that, I think again, is this thing about our inability to recognize COVID as a workplace illness. We had a much better record of guarding against a workplace spread of Ebola, workplace spread of HIV, even workplace spread of swine flu. And our response to this disease, we still have no federal guidelines that protect workers against airborne illness. That to me is something that going forward, if you think about like what is to be done, that would be something.

Mark Williams
Well, that almost leads into the next question that I had. Given the experience that essential workers had during the COVID pandemic, do you think that labor has anything to teach us about how to prepare for the next pandemic?

Jamie McCallum
To some extent, you know, as a society, we are only as healthy as the people who deliver our goods and services, essentially. Thinking about average working-class people, not as the bottom of a social hierarchy, but the foundation of sort of a healthy population and a democracy is important. I don’t think we’ve learned that lesson.

Mark Williams
I think there was a period during the pandemic where we came very close to learning that.

Jamie McCallum
When was it?

Mark Williams
It was when I saw all of those signs. Out on people’s front yards and plastered on the sides of buildings, thanking essential workers. While most people are locked down and if you did venture out into the highways, they’re virtually deserted.

Jamie McCallum
Right, right.

Mark Williams
People are really sheltering in place. And they’re critically dependent upon people who are risking their lives to sell food to them, to serve them.

Jamie McCallum
Yeah, yeah, no doubt. I remember talking to grocery store workers who were like, the people that come through the line are calling me by first name and thanking me and this and that, that kind of thing. I think what is curious is why that public support did not translate into something lasting and meaningful. So for example, if it is the case that workers having a voice on the job, more power at work, et cetera, is important. Why do we not pass legislation that makes it easier for workers to do that? Right. The protecting the right to organize act would be the first legislation in 90 years to update labor law. And we don’t do it. When I was writing, I was cautious about overestimating the significance of that public support, because it didn’t translate into material, political gains for people. And I think that is a tragedy.

Mark Williams
It’s almost like you’re talking about the difference between short term political calculations and longer term what we might call statesmanship. Where you see the, the big picture, you are adopting policy for the good of society as a whole over the long term. So you have very long time horizons in terms of the policy versus what’s in it for me now. What, what are my basic interests at this moment in time, political interests I’m talking about. And then basing your calculations and therefore your actions upon, upon short time horizons.

Jamie McCallum
Right. I mean, Biden came in against all odds. Biden’s spent his whole career being, not Bernie Sanders, essentially. Right.  He was not austerity guy. He was in neoliberal for decades. And all of a sudden he comes in and he is like, let’s, let’s talk to organizing workers. Let’s raise the floor. Let’s blah, blah, blah. And it, unfortunately didn’t happen. He’s not the only one to blame, but there was a moment, as you said, when large swaths of the American people, democrats, republicans, all across the income spectrum were like, these people deserve our everlasting respect. And it’s like, we didn’t raise the minimum wage. We didn’t make significant adjustments to labor law. That to me is an indication that we just didn’t learn the lesson well enough. So when there’s another pandemic, it seems likely that we will force people to work in unsafe situations. And they will have to take responsibility to fight for the things that they need to do their job safely, which will likely translate into things that make our lives better. I mean, in some ways, this is the point of my book, whether or not you hold crummy, rotten, lousy jobs, people that do hold them, the better those jobs are the less rotten and crummy and poorly paid they are, the better off the rest of us are. During the pandemic, that was very clear. If people around you have COVID, you’re more likely to get COVID. you know, if workers around you are sick, your grocery store will close or you’ll get COVID that way or whatever. If your nursing home is run by profiteers and a private equity firm, then your loved ones are more likely to get sick. So I think those lessons were clear. We just have done a poor job of sort of translating them into real political gains.

Mark Williams
Thanks very much, you know, almost everywhere I go these days, I see signs and those signs say things like “Now hiring. Apply now.” And I’m wondering, do you have any thoughts on what people have called “the big quit?”

Jamie McCallum
So, on the one hand, it was totally inexplicable. On the other hand, it makes perfect sense. So the labor shortage began as a ruse. Capitalist societies like ours have an easy solution to labor shortage that is just to pay people more money. If you have a shortage of, let’s say nurses, which we do, and you offer nurses a million dollars, you’d all of a sudden, overnight have more nurses. Is a million dollars too much? Well, how much is the right number then? Right? And so, but we didn’t really do that for a while. And sure wages rose, they rose a little bit more, but they never rose enough. So there was on the one hand, a movement of people, especially on the right, who just simply called a labor shortage. They called it a labor shortage and it was really a surplus of bad jobs. And that lasted for a couple months, and then the labor shortage persisted in certain industries. And then it became more interesting. And people began to say, well, people have a bad work ethic, or they’re not Protestant enough, or what have you. And I think there’s two responses to that. The first is that a cataclysmic reorganization of the economy like happened in March and April 2020 is simply hard to quickly rebound. Like in Europe, they didn’t lay everyone off. They didn’t fire everyone. They just furloughed people. So when the pandemic was quote unquote over, or it was time to come back to work, you just assumed your job again. Right. That didn’t happen here. Millions of people were fired, and they had to find new jobs. That reshuffling led to a fair amount of economic instability and people took new jobs and found new things to do, and did not want to work in certain industries. Certain industries never rebounded, like hospitality is still pretty low. The other way, however, the labor shortage is totally explicable is that we have the census and the census every week asks people why they didn’t work this last week. And all you have to do is look on that census and look at what people say. And so for the….

Mark Williams
What are some of the results?

Jamie McCallum
So during the 18 months of May 2020, till early 2022, the main reason people give for not working that week are caregiving responsibilities—so, caring for kids who were still at that time out of daycare or out of school, caring for elderly people who were either taken out of nursing homes, couldn’t go to hospitals, had COVID, had something else, whatever, were taking care of themselves. The percentage of people who applied “I did not want to work last week” was comparably small. So I think that “the big quit” was a little bit overblown. It really wasn’t a big quit. It was really a big, get a better job. I mean, everyone that quit looked for a better job. They weren’t like anarchists shutting the paid labor market, as some people I think tried to paint it as.

Mark Williams
Well, what one heard, at least what I heard is that this is a result of the unemployment checks. There are people who are comfortable not working because they are receiving these checks. Do you put any credence into that?

Jamie McCallum
Yeah. So people on the left don’t like that, I’m on the left. People on the left don’t like that explanation because it feeds into the narrative of lazy workers on unemployment or whatever that the right always tends to put out there. But it’s clear that there were people who did not go back to bad jobs when they could earn more on unemployment, even when they could earn sometimes a little bit less. And to me, that was the whole point of those unemployment checks was to keep people who didn’t want to work or didn’t have to work, not working. And it was a policy instrument that I think was brilliant. I think should probably become a much more permanent feature of our economy, which would tighten the labor market and raise wages almost instantly. And puts us much more in line with advanced welfare states, which have much more generous unemployment programs. Our unemployment system is essentially broken or anachronistic and designed to keep people from getting unemployment checks. During the pandemic, it was much better. Like the pandemic unemployment assistance, the PUA program, was an incredible program. Millions of people benefited from it. It was substantial. I mean, Trump, right, Trump was to some extent, I mean, his administration helped to design that program. Since the pandemic has waned, we’ve gone back to our previous program which is essentially insufficient and flawed. But yes, there was a moment when those unemployment checks were doing that. As I said, I think there were other reasons also, which were probably more significant that was driving people to stay home.

Mark Williams
One of the interesting things that I observed is that there was a push to end the maintenance programs. The argument being that, precisely, it was perpetuating idleness on the part of otherwise productive workers. And so those programs were ended in various states. They were ended, but the labor shortage persists. “The big quit” persists.

Jamie McCallum   
Right. I mean, we had almost a natural experiment on, on a nationwide scale, which I’m sure there are a million dissertations being written on that moment right now because half the states, the red ones, ended unemployment checks. For six more months, the labor shortage persisted in those states. Right. It was almost equivalent to the blue states. And it was confusing. It was like, well, we have long had a welfare state that punishes people and puts people back to work with low welfare checks. Why did it not work this time? And I think to some extent, the best answer was that jobs were so bad, risks were so significant, and caregiving responsibilities were very real. Even if people did want to go back, they couldn’t. At the time that those red states ended those unemployment benefits, schools were closed, daycare centers are closed, nursing homes were emptying. What were people supposed to do? They can’t work full time out of the house when you have kids without childcare. So it was sort of, there’s some explanations that are about that. But the degree to which they took the opportunity to try to paint people as, you know, morally backward or lazy or whatever just … I think it backfired.

Mark Williams
You don’t think it holds up to close scrutiny? That explanation.

Jamie McCallum
No. I mean, it never does. Even though good times it doesn’t. And it certainly doesn’t now. I mean, my last book was basically all about this, right? Why people work so much. And one of the reasons is that welfare policy forces people to work in order to get benefits. But during the pandemic, I think that forcing didn’t work as much and therefore the ideological stuff that comes with it backfired.

Mark Williams
Well, Jamie, this has really been a fascinating discussion. Thank you very much for helping us understand what’s clearly an incredibly important period for American labor. And I always like to ask my guests what they’re working on next. So how about you? Are you going to be doing some more work on the pandemic and workers, or are you going to be going onto something new?

Jamie McCallum
As a labor sociologist, I’m always interested in these questions. I do have essentially a project brewing that came out of this research that focuses on nurses in particular, which sort of dovetails what we were just talking about. There is an incredible and long-standing nursing shortage in America, although there’s sort of not. Like we have one seventh of all the nurses on the planet in America, and yet we can’t employ them because jobs are so bad and people are leaving bedside jobs left and right. The explosion of traveling nurses is backfiring. So like what will be the future of the caregiving occupations, post pandemic. More people work in healthcare now than in any other industry in America. That is only going to grow. And so part of that research project will be sort of the future of healthcare work post 2022, post pandemic.

Mark Williams
Well, I really look forward to reading that it it’s an important topic.

Jamie McCallum
Thanks. Well, in 2027, we, we can talk about that again or something.

Mark Williams
So very good. We’ve been talking about how the COVID pandemic has affected American workers and more broadly about the state of organized labor and US capitalism today. Our guest has been Jamie McCallum. Jamie’s written a new book called “Essential: How the Pandemic Transformed the Long Struggle for Worker Justice.” It’s a great read and I hope that you’ll pick up a copy and check it out for yourself. Jamie, thanks so much for stopping by and chatting with us here on New Frontiers.

Jamie McCallum
Thanks for having me.

Jonah Roberts (Middlebury ’23)
A native of Bethlehem, PA, Professor Jamie McCallum now lives in Weybridge, Vermont. He serves on the local school board there, and during the pandemic he joined the Weybridge Fire Department to become a first responder. He enjoys hiking the Trail that encircles Middlebury’s Vermont campus and—when not teaching courses or on the trail—he can often be found in town at the Haymakers restaurant—where he jokingly claims to keep a running tab and hold office hours.

Mark Williams
This episode of New Frontiers was produced by Margaret DeFoor and me, Mark Williams.  Music is by Ketsa.  If you like the show give us a rating, a review on Amazon, Spotify, Apple Podcast or where ever you get your podcast. This can help others to find us too.  We’ll be back with another episode soon.  Thanks a lot.

SHOW NOTES:

For more information on this and other podcasts go to the Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs at Middlebury College website https://www.middlebury.edu/office/rohatyn

Essential by Jamie K. McCallum (Basic Books Nov 2022)

Music Credits
Forte by Ketsa - Summer with Sound Album
Soul Zone by Ketsa - Light Rising Album
Edited by Jonah Roberts (Middlebury ’23)