The pandemic brought to the fore a group of workers deemed “essential” – frontline healthcare workers, restaurant employees, slaughterhouse workers, and the like – who often faced a difficult choice between risking their health to work or forgoing income that they couldn’t afford to do without. Often, they had to work even though they couldn’t afford health insurance – or health care themselves if they got sick, another sign of the inadequacy of our health care arrangements. How did the pandemic transform workers and work?  

This week on International Horizons, Professor John Torpey talks to Jamie McCallum from sociology at Middlebury College about the shift in conditions for essential workers across the globe during the pandemic and how that affected the whole world’s labor movement. McCallum discusses the variations of these effects in different regions and how exceptionally the US behaved during the pandemic in terms of labor protection. Finally, the author discusses whether labor unrest can be pushed for larger systemic change.

John Torpey  00:29

The pandemic brought to the fore a group of workers deemed “essential” – frontline health care workers, restaurant employees, slaughterhouse workers, and the like – who often faced a difficult choice between risking their health to work or forgoing income that they couldn’t afford to do without. Often, they had to work even though they couldn’t afford health insurance or health care themselves if they got sick, which is another sign of the inadequacy of our health care arrangements. How did the pandemic transform workers and work?  

John Torpey  01:04

Welcome to International Horizons, a podcast of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies that brings scholarly and diplomatic expertise to bear on our understanding of a wide range of international issues. My name is John Torpey, and I’m director of the Ralph Bunche Institute at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.  We are fortunate to have with us today Jamie McCallum, a Professor of Sociology at Middlebury College in Vermont. He has just published his third book, Essential: How the Pandemic Transformed the Long Fight for Worker Justice (2022). He is also author of Worked Over: How Round-the-Clock Work is Killing the American Dream (2020) and Global Unions, Local Power: The New Spirit of Transnational Labor Organizing (2013). He has a Ph.D in Sociology from the CUNY Graduate Center. Thanks for being with us today, Jamie McCallum.

James McCallum  02:11

Great, thanks for having me.

John Torpey  02:13

Great to have you. So let’s start with your current book, which deals with the effects of the pandemic on work in the labor movement. It mainly addresses how the pandemic played out for workers in the United States, but it also has an international dimension. So tell us what the book is about.

James McCallum  02:31

So I started interviewing workers in Wuhan immediately. At the time, I was teaching the sociology of labor at Middlebury, and the students were wondering what’s going on over there? Is it gonna be an issue? and I answered that it might be. Thus we started talking to people, and it was really interesting to get to find people in China to talk to because I don’t have any direct connections to workers in China that often.

James McCallum  03:03

So I started off talking to people that were mostly delivery drivers, and some health care workers. Then when the when the pandemic spread to Italy, next, mostly in Lombardi. I talked to workers there, again, health care, delivery workers and retail. Eventually, I traced it back to the United States. So originally, the book had actually a much more global scope. But as the pandemic began roiling in the States, I began focusing more in on that. Early on the work from home transition was interesting to me, just because it seemed like I was working from home personally. And it seemed like that was going to be a fairly significant change in the way people work, and it has been. But ultimately, I was drawn to the people who were left to work face to face. In Vermont, where I live, I knew a lot of people who were essential workers on the fire department. So I ended up being on calls with cops and EMS and other health care workers, who were essential at the time. It seemed to make more sense for me to focus in, in on that.

John Torpey  04:20

So the pandemic obviously transformed our relationship to work in the ways that you were starting to talk about. Basically you and I were in a position to work from home, or at least in fairly safe kind of arrangements. However essential workers, sort of by definition, didn’t necessarily have that kind of safety. And, and as I said in the intro, one of the most kind of distressing things was the fact that often people couldn’t even afford health insurance. So they had to go to work and put themselves out obviously at greater risk than you and I had to experience, even though they were among the ranks of those who couldn’t even necessarily afford health insurance. So could you talk a little bit about how this has affected their experience?

James McCallum  05:15

 The health insurance question isreally interesting because the data on May of 2020 showed that only about 2 or 3 million people lost health care when they lost their job. At first, I thought that it is not that many. But then, you consider that 20 million people didn’t already have it because they never had a job where their employer paid it, and they didn’t make enough money to buy it themselves. You had a slew of people who are facing down a deadly virus with no safety net whatsoever.

James McCallum  05:48

Hence the biggest struggles early on in the pandemic were mostly over distancing and PPE. So, around May 2020, I surveyed workers, about 750 workers in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. A lot of workers in hospitals in nursing homes, and retail still didn’t have access to PPE. They were still working with like raincoats on, pull over their mouths and other challenges. And, just really makeshift kind of here.

James McCallum  06:35

The interesting thing I began to hone in on, I suppose, was the the union difference. Unions in healthcare made a real difference whether or not you had access to PPE and whether or not you had access to paid sick leave and paid time off. In the book, I talk about a lot about the ways in which we think of workplace safety as the outcome of a macroeconomic, as in you can quit your job and this would incentivize employers to do right by you, or as a factor of OSHA, where government policy gives us safe workplaces.

James McCallum  07:16

In fact, I think during the pandemic class organizing, class struggle, whatever you want to call it, became essential to people’s health. That was one of the ways that people gained safer work when they organized and pressured for those kinds of things that unions were bringing people. Even workers without unions: a third of the strikes, early in the first year of the pandemic, were led by workers without unions, which basically never happens in good times. It was a remarkable moment of revolt that was really not captured in the official statistics or snapshot of the pandemic. For instance, if you look at BLS data for 2020, there was only eight strikes.

John Torpey  08:04

That’s Bureau of Labor Statistics.

James McCallum  08:08

Yes, Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows there was only eight strikes in 2020. Well, that’s nothing. There’s nothing going on that. But when I began talking to people on the phone, I would call up a slaughterhouse worker, and we were talking about other things. They would say, “Oh, by the way, there was a strike yesterday, or we walked off the job, or we did a sick out, or sit in or whatever it was,” and all this stuff kept happening where these small little moments were percolating up in areas where there just wasn’t that much. You know, you wouldn’t obviously think those were places where people would be organizing. So to me, that became really interesting and that was a larger focus of the book.

John Torpey  08:52

Could you talk about this pandemic proletariat, which I assume it means something more than just that there’s alliteration there. And that this kind of notion brought about a certain transformation in workers consciousness. I am curious if you could expand on that notion, and also talk about the extent to which this is a kind of, particularly an American phenomenon, or how much of this is a global phenomenon?

James McCallum  09:21

The alliteration was a major part of it. But after that there’s a better reason. So what I found that was pretty interesting is that Americans -and this is comparatively – are less typically class conscious than the Europeans or even Latin Americans and South Africans. But during the pandemic, something interesting happeed in North America: workers in different industries, across other kinds of demographic cleavages, race, class, gender, age, status, status, occupation, began to recognize themselves as having a common role to play including keeping the rest of us safe and alive and keeping the economy going, etcetera.

James McCallum  10:19

Thus you had a situation where doctors, nurses, janitors in one hospital, in addition morgue workers, delivery drivers,  retail workers who sold them groceries after their shift, all of them began talking about each other as if they were a part of this common group. So in the book, Ireferred to Benedict Anderson’s imagined community, this kind of a collective us that is larger than this workplace, for example.

James McCallum  10:57

Thus it is the kind of thing that scholars referred to as a class formation process. And that happened in the US, in really significant ways. Typically, like in the in the US, when organized labor surges, it tends to be industries,. For instaance around 2018 and 2019, we have a huge wave of strikes in education, but they were just copycat strikes in one sector. These were sort of percolating around in all these different sectors. To me, that’s a really valuable thing, because you get a sense of “well, this class formation process is wide, and is driving a wide sort of labor organizing search.”

James McCallum  11:05

In Europe, I did comparative research between some essential industries in North America and Germany in the UK. It’s a little bit different, like for example the ways that Germans organize. Unions are, in some ways, far less confrontational and far less adversarial. They’re more powerful, and more numerous, but it’s not as hard to form a union there or to join one. You basically sign up in a lot of ways. So in that environment, unions had access to more PPE, they had access to more immediate resources, but in some ways they were less or less organized to push back or fight back. Amazon workers in North America created  much more of a sort of contentious environment in their warehouses  than they did in many other places.

John Torpey  13:02

Can I intervene there? The story in Germany, as you know, it’s above a certain size of the enterprise, but there are these so called works councils that involve somebody from the enterprise, somebody from the union and somebody from the government. So that creates a kind of body that has to be persuaded that certain policies are acceptable, and that sort of thing. And they’re different perspectives, obviously. I can see how that would, potentially at least, moderate working class hostility, and that’s interesting. Maybe you could talk about how that works as compared to the kind of situation we have. You’ve started to talk about, but I think it’s important for people to understand that there’s this institutional reason for what you’re describing.

James McCallum  14:03

Right. So there’s good things and bad things about a more social democratic, or sort of codetermination model, that some have in Western Europe. Nursing homes in America were the were the epicenter of the pandemic. Then second was probably meatpacking and slaughterhouse and the food processing. Those things were not the same in other places. Germany, for example, Iceland, which I did some research. What’s different is two things. One is that the size of the enterprise matters when it came to COVID and the pandemic. Slaughterhouses are much smaller in Germany and the lines move much slower. Which means that when there was a COVID outbreak in a German, let’s say, slaughterhouse, they were just shut it down and move production somewhere else. Hence they wouldn’t lose as much as they lost in America, where slaughterhouses are basically the size of football stadiums.

James McCallum  15:10

You just can’t shut one down without destroying some of the food supply and a lot of places. Thus that model was one difference. The other one was that American labor law is decent when it comes to workplace safety as it is in some parts of Europe. But the sort of access the law just didn’t exist in a lot of that time. Therefore, workers had to defend some degree of safety in the workplace. Moreover, if you were accustomed to fighting back, you were more successful at that. For instance OSHA, and America’s actually, the laws are okay. But OSHA didn’t do anything during the pandemic, they didn’t inspect any workplaces. So workers had to sort of step up, and refused to work without PPE, or refuse to work without a longer break, or whatever it was. From people I talked to most people in Amazon, for example, like Chris Malls, who was fired from the Amazon warehouse in Staten Island, also had a lot to do with the German Amazon warehouse. And he that said, despite all the problems with organizing workers in America, the American ones were much more organized and militant in a way to defend certain job protections than they were over there.

John Torpey  16:41

Interesting. So I want to pursue this a little bit more, because as you know, Germany is a place I know a little bit about. The other thing that struck me very much during the pandemic was the different policy approaches, particularly to employment and unemployment. So here, basically, people just suddenly lost their jobs, they cut off from a source of income, but also a source of their sense of who they are. Whereas Germany has this program called Kurzarbeit, which means short work. Basically the government says we’ll pay you for full time, even though you’re only working 20 hours a week, or maybe even nothing, but maintain the connection to that workplace. I think that makes a huge difference to people to feel that they are somebody where, if they’re suddenly thrown out of work, and have no connection to that place where they used to go all the time, it’s very disorienting and demoralizing. So I wonder if you could talk about that or sort of policy differences that made a difference?

James McCallum  17:51

Yeah. So the one you’re talking about we call it work sharing in America. The difference there was phenomenally significant. So as you said, American companies laid off workers and fired them so they basically lost their connection to their job. Europe, largely furloughed them. That is important for two reasons. The one you’re talking about, which is the kind of subjective or affective connection to your life, your co-workers, your place of employment, where you make a living, all that stuff is important.

James McCallum  18:28

The other reason it matters a lot is when all of a sudden six months later, you want to rehire 20 million people. Well, it’s easier if you’ve just furloughed them, you can just hire them back. However if you fired a couple 10s of millions of people, then they’re all applying for new jobs at the same time. So you have what economists call it a reallocation for problem. So some of the labor shortage in late 2020 was a result of people looking for other work. They were not sure if their jobs will come back their jobs. Sometimes their jobs didn’t come back, they couldn’t easily transition back into them. Thus that incredible reshuffling was a really significant difference.

James McCallum  19:16

The other thing is that the United States doesn’t really have unemployment insurance. We have a patchwork of programs -without being cynical at all about it –  where part of their impetus is to deny on insurance claims for unemployed workers. When they do pay, it’s more of a pittance. There are some states, mostly red states where Florida, Arizona, Missouri are the bottom three, which pay 20% of their unemployed workers unemployment insurance. Of the people who apply, about 20% are qualified. So during the pandemic, this was awful. The, the thing that saved it was the pandemic unemployment insurance program (PUA I guess, Trump called it and then Biden extended). Actually, it was really good. It really reformed the unemployment insurance system, and people began to get checks who needed them. They were enough. It’s a kind of program where people were shocked that it was happening, and it’s the kind of thing that probably should have stuck around, or we gonna at least learn something from that program.

James McCallum  20:42

You might know a little bit more than I did, but the CARES Act rivaled any European social safety net program, it was huge and had an incredible influx of money. Some of that money early on, a lot of it was dedicated to unemployment insurance. It was really, from the way we typically compare it to Western Europe, the PUA, was a much better situation.

John Torpey  21:10

Right. As you say in the book, there were enormous amounts of money spent during the pandemic by the federal government to sort of cushion the shock of all this, not necessarily all of its spent in ideal ways. And, of course, there’s a big debate about how much this has to do with the contemporary inflation issue. But the inflation problem is essentially a global problem. So it’s not clear that what we did during the pandemic is the cause of the current inflation problem. But I think the big one that has gotten a lot of attention was the extended Child Tax Credit, which based on some research out of Columbia suggests that child poverty declined by something between 40% or 25%, whatever it was, it seems to have been at quite big numbers.  

John Torpey  22:03

In any case, back to the labor movement. It strikes me, as somebody who doesn’t study this, that labor is kind of having a moment right now. And I don’t know if you would agree with that, but it seems to me as a kind of reader of the newspaper on these kinds of issues that the strikes at Amazon, the union, mobilizations at Starbucks, things like that are getting people’s attention and that the labor movement is in better (I don’t want to say odor)… But you know, what? Yeah, it’s got a better reputation sort of now than it did. Additionally, if Biden –I think you’ve talked about this in the book as well– has presented himself as this kind of pro-union President, then what’s going on there? And, again,  how much is this happening in outside the United States as well?

James McCallum  23:02

Yeah. So I think what happened in 2020, because essential workers had such an incredible public profile, like it was clear to most people that our lives depended on them. And not just healthcare workers, but retail clerks and drug delivery drivers and food processors, and all these other folks, teachers after a couple of months. So, I think that gave the American working class a little bit of a facelift. In addition, the answers to problems the American workplace were dealt with by organized labor, or were dealt with by by disorganized labor in bad ways. So I think unions became an answer to a problem where people like myself have long thought they were the answer, and all of a sudden, it became a popular answer.

James McCallum  24:05

That was one of the reasons that we’re seeing a surge. The other reason is just the resentment, frustration, anger, hostility to working through the pandemic, without much lasting change to your job. You know, there was a pressure valve released in 2021. Probably, that kicked off a surge. So yes, labor is definitely having a moment. Petitions to file union elections are up, I think 65% from the year before the pandemic, which is an enormous thing. The only word of caution there is at the 250 Starbucks cafes that have never voted to unionize or more, nobody has a contract. Nobody has a contract to Amazon. Nobody has a contract. At some of the white collar, some online media places that have organized, they’re working without a contract.

James McCallum  25:04

So in some ways, employers have been saying: “look, vote for a union fine, but nothing changes. You know, go ahead.” Actually, Amazon labor union has lost a few votes since they wanted JFK and Staten Island. So I think there’s a moment and there’s reasons for cautious optimism. But at the same time, if you think labor history, it doesn’t really compare. It’s like the upsurge in the 30s, it doesn’t really compare to the strike wave in the 70s. It relates in relation to what it was like five years ago, things are now looking pretty good. But there’s still obviously major inroads to go. Biden was pretty good. He was probably the most pro-union president for like a year that we’ve had in a maybe in my lifetime. But it’s a low bar in the United States. It’s a pretty low bar.

James McCallum  26:00

So in the international comparison, there has been trying to get to places I know. There was actually a surge in labor unrest or labor organizing in China. I don’t know if you’ve seen that following that news. But sort of Apple factories, other tech factory workers (may not be tech workers, but like, people who produce that stuff in factories) have been forming a wave of militant strikes there, It’s pretty different than here, because unions are very much illegal in most places. But I don’t think there’s been a similar take off, like a grassroots take off in parts of Western Europe, largely because there’s not typically that even in good times. That’s, again, not totally the way workers organized in large parts of Western Europe. There is a movement afoot to begin organizing Amazon globally, which is really interesting because the Amazon labor unions are pretty new and fairly under resourced. Nonetheless, there’s a sort of an idea among those folks that organizing this company, wherever it is, is should be on the agenda. And so there’s probably some of that coming down the pike.

John Torpey  27:34

Right. So as a last question. You sort of used as an epigraph or epigram, I cannot remember which one it is. But this famous quotation of Antonio Gramsci that says, “we’re in this kind of moment when the old is dying, and the new one has not yet been born.” And it’s not entirely clear what the new is supposed to be, although we probably know what Gramsci wanted it to be. But let’s leave the soothsaying out of it, and tell us like what’s dying? The quotation goes on, and you title your last chapter about morbid symptoms, but what’s what’s dying? what do you think?

James McCallum  28:19

Well, who knows? I mean, what we thought was dying, and what may still be dying, I think, is like, a notion that we can survive and thrive while treating workers like human garbage, basically, which is essentially what we do. Laborers are disposable in many parts of the United States. I think that we learned some small lesson that this is probably bad for all of us. The other slogan, I guess, is like an injury to one is an injury to all. This became almost statistically clear or true in a way during the pandemic, that if you were in a nursing home where workers worked multiple jobs, they spread COVID throughout the nursing home, workers themselves did. So the same people that were tasked with saving people’s lives were also spreading the virus.

James McCallum  29:24

And I think the thing that is dying is that system that we have a general cultural understanding that it’s pretty bad, and that’s dire. The what has yet to be born? I think the other part of the quotation is what is the answer to the problem, what can we do about it? In other words, some inching towards a more socialist or social democratic political economy. There’s that old saying like during the crisis everyone is a socialist, and that’s not true necessarily, But I think the crisis did yield a lot of people who were willing to rethink in radical ways the way our economy is organized.

James McCallum  30:13

And the public supports unions at a historic rate, and is against large corporations at a historic rate on public opinion polls. That kind of sentiment, bottom up, represents a cultural shift that is happening. The real question is what can we do about it? How can we make good on it and solidify some of that in real gains? There’s some reasons to think about it. And both, like I say at the end of the book at one point, that what’s most shocking in some ways is what hasn’t changed? Like, we we’re still fighting the railroad unions over paid sick days. That’s all they want, right? And you’d think by now, we would have learned that lesson, and a lot of people want them to have paid sick days. But, played people in both parties are arguing against that. So I think there’s still an open question about whether or not we can really use the labor unrest that is happening to push for larger systemic change.

John Torpey  31:22

Right. I’m struck by the fact that, you know, there are positive developments out there of the kind that you’ve talked about sort of labour having a moment. There’s also clearly morbid symptoms. But in the end, I’m not to be a ‘party pooper’ but it sort of reminded that Gramsci wrote those words from a fastest fascist prison in 1930. And if you look at what happened in Brazil, for example the other day, it’s a little on the discouraging side?

James McCallum  31:57

You mean the January 8  pro Bolsonaro thing? There’s always reasons to be discouraged when it comes to labor. It’s never a super happy story. When I talked to workers from the beginning of my book, a year later, when I was finishing it up, they would say (they always said),  “Look, we were last year as heroes, this year heroes, but people forgot about us.” And that totally happened. The question is there a lingering moment in organized labor that’s trying to sort of keep the thread alive. And I think there is like, we’re gonna see this year, UPS might strike. FedEx might strike. You know, if a 10,000, Starbucks shut down tomorrow, they go on strike, you and I won’t get our frappuccinos for a couple of days, but whatever. When UPS goes on strike and shuts down the logistics sector, well that’s different. That’s that kind of stuff is in the air right now. So I think that it’s not totally a downer story. There’s no reason if you sort of know where to look. So look for things that might provide an interesting kind of future picture.

John Torpey  33:10

Right. So on that promising note, we want to bring this to a close. Thanks very much for a fascinating conversation. That’s it for today’s episode. I want to thank Jamie McCallum of Middlebury College and once of the CUNY Graduate Center for sharing his insights about the labor movement today. In the post pandemic, sort of we think post pandemic period. Look for us on the new books network and remember to subscribe and rate international horizons on Spotify and Apple podcasts. I want to thank Oswaldo Mena Aguilar for his technical assistance and to acknowledge Duncan Mackay for sharing his song International Horizons as the theme music for the show. This is John Torpey, saying thanks for joining us, and we look forward to having you with us for the next episode of international horizons.

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