Morry Gash/AP Photo
A worker leaving a municipal building in Milwaukee last month
This article is part of our symposium on “The Future of Labor.”
It’s in times of great crisis that the world has broken open, and today’s pandemic has created just such a moment for American workers. Their future depends on whether the workers’ movement—both existing and emerging—can compel the forging of a new social compact, building on the public’s new appreciation of its working class and on the surge in worker protests. Through two decades of creative experimentation, elements of the movement have already developed many of the answers it needs to build worker power in the post-pandemic era. But will labor act quickly and boldly enough to build on and implement these solutions?
The pandemic will likely hasten some trends already under way in the workers’ movement—the range of unions, worker centers, and new class-based coalitions and campaigns that are fighting for labor rights. The organizations that will thrive are those that are nimble and resilient, and that have been building new models and strategies to meet a shifting capitalism. The pandemic will likely hasten the demise of those organizations that go into a defensive crouch to protect only their members.
Successful worker organizations will build on the now deepened public demand for a more universal social safety net. The pandemic has made it dramatically clear why we need a better one. After the last enormous crisis in capitalism, the New Deal created the nation’s first national social safety net, but it didn’t just arrive out of the blue. It was based on decades of experimentation and worker protest, often at the state and local level. Massachusetts enacted the nation’s first minimum wage after the Lawrence textile strike in 1912, for example, and workers won a short-term right to collective bargaining through the War Labor Board during World War I because they showed they were willing to strike to win that right. Worker action was also key during the Great Depression: Massive strikes in 1934 pushed Congress to enact and Franklin D. Roosevelt to sign the 1935 Wagner Act, which guaranteed workers’ right to join and form unions.
We’ve been in a similar period of innovation and ferment in recent years, beginning with the great teacher uprisings of 2018. That militance has been on display during the current crisis, in the more than 100 pandemic-related strikes since March.
In the post-pandemic period, there will be new attention paid to Bargaining for the Common Good (BCG), an innovative strategy that reinvents collective bargaining as a platform to fight for both workers’ issues and larger community concerns. Under BCG, unions work with community groups to help shape their demands, even bringing allies to the negotiating table. This process has won solutions not just for the workers’ on-the-job issues, but also policies that patch the holes in the social safety net. Teachers in St. Paul in 2015 called for no foreclosures on families with school-age children during the school year, for example, and that same year Oregon university workers demanded a tuition freeze. Chicago teachers’ two-week strike last October won a commitment from the city to hire staff to support the more than 17,000 homeless students in Chicago’s schools. As the pandemic began to take hold, teachers in Los Angeles, Boston, and Chicago all called for school closings to slow the spread of the disease. As employers make fresh demands for austerity during the pandemic, many unions and allies are likely to try out Bargaining for the Common Good tactics to ensure the physical and economic health of workers and communities.
The workers’ movement can also sketch the blueprints for a new universal social contract based on local and state-level labor legislation it has won in recent years. For starters, COVID-19 has opened political space to campaign for federal, universal paid sick leave; no one can now dispute that we’re all more vulnerable when some of us must go to work sick. Coalitions of unions, worker centers, and community groups have spent the last 15 years winning paid sick leave in 10 states, plus the District of Columbia, as well as in 20 cities, but haven’t yet won federal legislation. Some workers, however, just got their first-ever federal guarantee of paid sick leave in the Families First Coronavirus Response Act (FFCRA). The benefit is temporary, and covers too few workers, but historically, even limited new rights set new expectations and precedents. Now is the time to wage the sick-leave fight at the national level.
Similarly, a new health care solution must become a centerpiece of the workers’ movement’s post-coronavirus vision. Some 35 million people may lose their employer-provided health care during the crisis, at the very time when they need it more than ever. Many worker organizations may decide that they cannot credibly claim to be leaders for the nation’s working class without now leading the charge for universal health care. If there was ever a moment for unions to shake themselves free from America’s broken employer-provided health care system, this is it.
A new health care solution must become a centerpiece of the workers’ movement’s post-coronavirus vision.
Unions became linchpins in the U.S. health care model after World War II. After they had lobbied unsuccessfully for universal health care coverage, they then pushed instead for employer-provided health care and retirement plans in labor contracts. Over the decades, unions came to fight for and administer entire portions of the employer-provided social safety net. As a result, many union leaders today find themselves defending a system that their predecessors never wanted in the first place. We saw this play out in February when leaders of Culinary Union Local 226 in Las Vegas refused to endorse Bernie Sanders’s Medicare for All program unless the plan carved out an exception to protect the union’s hard-won health benefits. Labor leaders in many industries—including manufacturing, transportation, communications, and construction—may find that many of their currently laid-off workers have lost their health coverage. It is time for these leaders to make the difficult choice they have long avoided. Will they hunker down to defend the current system in the post-pandemic era, or instead step up to lead the nation’s transition to universal health care?
The pandemic has also exacerbated the problems with our broken child and elder care systems. Caregiving disproportionately falls on women’s shoulders, and women are scrambling for coverage—especially now that one in three jobs held by women have been deemed essential. At the same time, many restricted-to-home employees are literally balancing a laptop and a baby. The public discourse about universal child and elder care is heating up, even more than it did during the recent presidential primaries. This creates an opening for organizations like Caring Across Generations, which have been pushing for universal family care, and even, in some states, for new long-term care benefits. Worker organizations that have not historically made family care a core issue will need to scramble to catch up.
In any campaign to build a post-pandemic social safety net, the workers’ movement must lead the charge to make sure racial and gender structural inequalities aren’t baked into the new system. The New Deal–era social compact left out millions of women and people of color, who were the most likely to hold the household, tipped, and farm jobs that were exempt from coverage. Women and people of color still hold the majority of the nation’s low-wage, part-time jobs, and many work in occupations that remain unregulated by basic labor laws. Immigrants are often excluded entirely from social programs. In order to build a system that is race- and gender-neutral, the workers’ movement will have to fight to ensure that any new benefits are available to all people, regardless of their employment or immigration status.
The time may also finally be ripe for fundamental improvements in labor law, including shoring up workers’ freedom to form unions and extending coverage to independent contractors and others in noncovered jobs. There was an outpouring of outrage when Amazon fired Chris Smalls, a warehouse worker who organized co-workers to protest unsafe working conditions. Clearly, there’s a new opening to educate the public about how employers routinely fire, harass, and threaten workers who organize, and even to discuss whether employers should be required to have a good cause to fire workers at all. The expansive solutions explored in Harvard’s Clean Slate for Worker Power project are a good start, and include recommendations to strengthen workers’ rights to organize and strike, broaden the scope of bargaining, and boost workers’ voice on the job. The workers’ movement can build on the precedent set by the recent CARES Act, which included independent contractors in expanded unemployment coverage during the pandemic. If freelancers count as workers in some government programs, they deserve the government’s full worker protections.
Finally, there’s nothing like a global pandemic to teach us that we’re all in this together. Even as the Trump administration shuts down immigration, workers’ organizations across the world may forge new ties and seek out new class-based solutions across continents. Global corporate supply chains are incredibly fragile right now, and targeted strikes by essential workers in multiple countries would send a very strong message about the need all such workers have for safety on the job and wages that support them and their families.
The workers’ movement has the tools it needs to build a better post-pandemic world, but it will need to put them into action quickly, before corporate and elected elites begin to impose a new version of disaster capitalism. Though the elections will be crucial, the worker crisis is happening now, and solutions can’t wait until November. This is a rare historical moment when decisive action can build a better world.
