You may not agree with everything author and labor expert Jamie K. McCallum has to say in his new book, “Essential: How the Pandemic Transformed the Long Fight for Worker Justice,” but you should listen to his views about the state of labor in the United States.
McCallum, a sociology professor at Middlebury College in Vermont, has strong views on the American capitalist system and how it treats its workers, and he uses the much-too-recent pandemic to tell that story. He will discuss his book at the East Lansing Public Library 7:30 p.m. Thursday (April 20), co-sponsored by the library and the Our Daily Work, Our Daily Lives program at Michigan State University.
The author has written two other books on the national and international worker movement, in which he makes the case that employees should have more control over their workplaces.
“All private businesses should be worker-owned cooperatives,” he contended in an interview. “My general thesis is that when workers have more power and more voice, we all benefit.”
His new book, as the title suggests, revolves around the concept of “essential” or “frontline” workers, who evolved during the pandemic into a powerful force in attaining new worker rights and the growth of unionization across the country.
“I started thinking about a book as soon as the pandemic hit, and at first, my focus was going to be on healthcare workers, but it soon broadened,” he said. “I soon began doing interviews across the world and did more than 100 interviews with workers, educators and employees in ‘essential jobs.’”
For most of us, the faces of healthcare workers, lined with temporary scarring from PPE, are indelible markers of the pandemic.
“The pandemic changed our perceptions about how we thought about workers and their importance,” McCallum said. “There was a public embrace of the working class and a new knowledge of working conditions and attitudes.”
He believes that as a result, the country saw massive support for labor that it hadn’t seen since the New Deal.
“The New Deal system eroded over time and was attacked, resulting in workers being more on their own, working for less money and working longer hours,” he said.
In his book, he points to organizing at Amazon warehouses and Starbucks as well as right here in Lansing, when the members of the Michigan Nurses Association led a walkout at Sparrow Hospital.
“I was pretty surprised by how much labor organizing was going on during the pandemic. The fact that anything happened was interesting,” he said.
He also details how the pandemic revealed the soft underbelly of healthcare. He writes: “Hospitals intentionally understaff nurses to maximize profits. This problem affects all of us. Understaffing means worse patient outcomes, including higher death rates.”
The issue of nurses leaving the profession didn’t start with the pandemic but “made it more acute,” he writes.
For those who doubt the impact of the pandemic on workers, he backs up everything he says with statistics. In one section, he points out that by April 2020, about one-third of U.S. workers were designated as essential.
Essential workers included healthcare professionals, maids, delivery drivers, fast-food workers, grocery clerks, Walmart greeters and even Montana’s fly-fishing guides. Two-thirds of frontline workers were women, and 75 % of frontline workers earned wages below the national average. McCallum also points out that a high number of “essential” jobs were held by Black and brown workers, which put them at an even greater risk of getting sick and dying.
He quotes one worker at an Amazon warehouse who was fired after organizing a protest over workplace COVID mitigation as saying, “But all of us essentials, we were just used. Like human shields.”
McCallum said one of the hardest things about writing the book was making sure it would continue to be relevant after the pandemic.
“It’s hard to write a book about current events and still have it be useful five years from now,” he said.
As an example, he cites how medical science continually evolved during the pandemic and how healthcare workers learned about things like treatment regimens on the job.
“It’s easy now to forget the pure uncertainty of what they were going through,” he said.
McCallum is already onto his next book, which will look at the state of caregivers across the United States. This is especially important due to the large aging population.
“It is the largest growing sector of new jobs,” he said.
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