Melissa Harris-Perry: This is The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. In the earliest days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when health risks and isolation protocol felt ever changing, there was one nightly routine New Yorkers could rely on.

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Melissa: The shouts of New York residents cheering for essential workers, the nurses, healthcare professionals or grocery store employees who risk their own health to keep critical operations running for everybody else. The banging of pots and pans, the applause.

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Melissa: What was the sound of recognition for a labor force often overlooked. The deadly circumstances that essential workers faced on a daily basis reimagined the ways that we view the conditions of labor itself. Jamie McCallum, professor of sociology at Middlebury College, unpacks the pandemic's effect on labor rights in his new book.

Jamie McCallum: Essential: How the Pandemic Transformed the Long Fight for Worker Justice. In short, the pandemic revealed the extent to which our lives are intertwined with their jobs. Essential workers jeopardize their own health, safety and security for the greater it good. Yet the pernicious conditions they worked under and the obstacles they face to improving their jobs undermine not only their personal health, but also our collective wellbeing. By short changing essential workers, we performed the collective ouroboros, the ancient symbol of a snake devouring its own tail.

Melissa: I spoke with Jamie about the intersection of labor and racial justice movements, rising inflation and policy surrounding workers' rights. I wanted to understand how does the recent pandemic era labor movement compare to worker justice movements that we've seen in our past?

Jamie: Basically, I think the pandemic had an important and transformative effect on the way average working class folks work and organize. During the pandemic, this frontline class emerged of essential workers from the ranks of the old working class who are usually siloed in their industries and occupations. This time in 2020, workplace organizing and social justice struggles outside the workplace began to cross-pollinate each other. Half of the mass strikes in 2020 were led by nurses, but their picket lines, for example, attracted all kinds of other essential workers and from doctors to delivery drivers to retail clerks, et cetera.

I met these people when they were out on strike. Then you had social justice movements like Black Lives Matter, talking about the strike for Black lives, using the language and tactics of labor to talk about racial justice. It was a pretty interesting time for when these two worlds came together in a way they typically don't. The other thing that I think was really important was that workers really took matters into their own hands. If you're used to hearing about traditional labor organizing before the pandemic, it was the case that large unions largely drove the campaigns.

In 2020, workers, even those without unions, began to take action. Walking out, sticking out, slowing down, going on strike even without support of their unions. I think this bottom-up approach that we now see taking hold most visibly in places like the Amazon campaigns and the Starbucks Union campaigns.

Melissa: I'm going to zero in a bit on this intersection between workers justice and racial justice. I hear you on the one hand, that we think of those as perhaps cousin movements, but not necessarily happening together. Yet A. Philip Randolph was one of the organizers of the March on Washington, in fact made the initial call for it. Randolph was of course as much a labor organizer as a race organizer. Again, that 1963 march was the March on Washington for Jobs and Justice. I wonder if it's how we tell the story of our labor movement or if it's genuinely that our labor movements have been in certain ways separated from our racial justice movements?

Jamie: This is a really critical point. Labor historians often look back and recognize that the labor officialdom of the 20th century missed a historic opportunity to really organize alongside the Black Freedom Movement and the Civil Rights Movement. During the pandemic, I think something interesting happened. The essential working class was so Black and brown. It was disproportionately workers of color and women who were in essential jobs. Their industries that were most impacted were really diverse occupations. Racial justice concerns and concerns about workplace safety and wages and healthcare et cetera, all became co-terminous and really began to influence each other.

I think it was a really important time where those issues, to some extent were brought together. Some of the leaders of those pandemic labor movements like Chris Smalls, for example, from the Amazon warehouse in Staten Island was also a leader within Black Lives Matter. There was a lot of way those two things came together.

Melissa: Let's talk a little bit about these essential frontline workers. Again, folks who maybe hadn't ever even used that language to talk about themselves or had been spoken about by either their employers or by the larger economy in that way. Who are we talking about here?

Jamie: The term essential workers refers to people who are critical to our health and safety. What was really interesting early on in 2020 is that what actually defined essential workers sometimes was quite capricious. Like employers really fought to have themselves designated as essential, even when it was clear that there was no obvious reason why they should be. We get a hodgepodge of people who are clearly necessary, like healthcare workers or education workers and logistics people and retail clerks and grocery store workers. I also interviewed people who worked at beauty salons and who were greeters at Walmart and who worked at convenience stores that didn't sell any essential items and that were clearly put in harm's way for no obvious reason.

I think the classification of what an essential worker was or is, was oftentimes a big point of discussion or struggle for workers themselves. Those who were clearly designated as essential workers could use that status as a badge of honor, as power when they went about fighting for better conditions on the job. Those that didn't have that status had less ability to do so.

Melissa: It's early on in the first chapter when you talk about or you first introduce this idea of Walmart greeters. Not the folks who were actually staffing or supplying the shelves at Walmart. I think we really do understand why they would constitute essential workers at a time, again, initially just trying to get enough toilet paper and paper towels and soap in our homes. Help me to understand from a business perspective, why would it be in Walmart's interest as an employer to have its greeters designated as essential workers?

Jamie: I don't think it is in their interests. I think they made a mistake. some of those workers died as a result. I met family members of Walmart greeters who died and who caused massive outpourings of public resentment of frustration toward the company. I think they thought that keeping business as usual and their ordinary cultural landscape of the way they operate was really critical. I think that was ultimately a poorer calculation. I think as a pandemic waxed and waned and changed, different businesses made different calculations as to what kinds of workers they needed to bring back or to leave off. I think that decision early on by a lot of companies to bring in as many people as they could was a poor calculation.

Melissa: You write pretty clearly here, "The real antidote to the deadly feelings of capitalism is socialism and to get there workers will need to create a crisis for capital." In what ways did the pandemic allow workers the capacity to create that crisis for capital?

Jamie: As a labor activist I think about labor's future, I obviously look ahead, but as a scholar I look back in history. It's pretty clear that the times when workers have been most successful at getting what they want or fighting for what they want is when they were most unruly. When they stepped out of the boundaries of typical, relatively orderly, organized labor activism and created a crisis. In other words, a moment where corporate America had to really decide. I think the striketober in the fall of 2021, where a wave of strikes in so many different industries just kept happening in the middle of a historic labor shortage, was a time when workers really seized the moment of opportunity. Stepped through that window and said, "We're going to go on the offensive."

Some of those strikes had the outcome of winning wage increases and health and safety increases and winning people's jobs back and these other things that really made a pretty big difference at a time when the pandemic was still raging. I think that there were moments when those things did happen. In the end, I would say that those moments when workers create a crisis large enough to really win deep transformation are rare and it didn't happen during the pandemic. It hasn't happened. It may still happen, but unions and organized labor will literally have to seize the opportunity in a way, create that opportunity that they haven't done yet.

Melissa: Walk me through this a bit. For years I reported on the fight for 15 and the ways that low wage workers were really pushing for the point at which it starts to actually move. 15's hardly even a living wage, but it becomes some basic floor. Then it felt as though the pandemic, through the creation of a labor shortage, in part through the health crisis, but also because of the crisis of childcare that pushed women out of the workforce and all of that creates a tight labor market. Suddenly this thing that workers had been pushing for, for so long starts to come to the fore. We see wages increase. Help me to understand, is that a result of labor organizing either before or during the pandemic or is that just the invisible hand of the market, tight labor market, lower wages go up?

Jamie: That's a great question and it's a great way to historisize it. The fight for 15, when it first began, people thought that those workers were out of their minds. They thought, "They want to double the minimum wage in a low wage industry like fast food? That's crazy." Yet they did it. State after state, place after place, employers began raising the wage. Now, as you said, even $15 is in many places almost a poverty wage. It's really, we should be thinking about the fight for 25, the fight for 30 these days. However, I think that the thing about market forces or these kinds of things driving up standards and conditions, there was some of that.

In the fallout from the economic catastrophe in 2020, the Cares Act and then the American Rescue Plan did a lot to actually put money into people's pockets. That really matters and, as we've studied, we now know that poverty declined pretty significantly over the last few years. Workers still have some pandemic unemployment money and pandemic funds sloshing around in their banking accounts. I think the thing to be really cognizant of though is that those things can go away at the drop of a hat. Inflation rises and falls, market forces ebb and flow and with it workers fortunes.

I think there was a lot of activity that really created the conditions for a tight labor market that were really subjective, that really reflected workers' agency either by choosing to stay home when it was important to stay home or by just striking or protest or walking out or whatever it was to create those kinds of little mini crises here and there. It's real that we can attribute some of those good fortunes that workers to some extent have right now to that activism activity.

Melissa: Then the thing that all conservatives had been telling me for years, what happened, happened. Inflation increased. For years I'd had progressive economists say, "No. When wages go up, it won't have that effect." Here we are facing an election where the question of inflation is, over and over again, the top issue for voters. I'm wondering, were progressives telling me something wrong that whole time or is there a different way to understand what's happening with our economy on the other side of these increased wages?

Jamie: There's important research done by economists. I am not economists, but there's important research done by economists that show that there's a certain degree or percentage of inflationary pressure that is the result of companies simply holding us hostage, that is simply holding back supplies to drive up prices. I think that pandemic profiteering was a real problem. Despite the Cares Act and the ARP after it giving us some really good social protections, we increased our number of billionaires and we increased the billions that other billionaires already had. I think that what we're seeing now, the inflationary pressures we're seeing now, are to some extent an extension of that general profiteering process that began an earnest in 2020.

Melissa: What do you see as the current agenda for labor, particularly as we move to the other side of the 2022 midterms, which means basically by the end of the week we'll be into the 2024 presidential election cycle. What do you see as the political agenda, the economic agenda of this broad, diverse intersectional labor movement?

Jamie: That is the question on everyone's mind. It's great to talk about. I think there's a few things. One, I think that labor really has to celebrate its victories and what it did during the pandemic. I think sometimes it has been unable to capture the public's imagination with some of that and that really is that unions saved lives during the pandemic. I mean that in the sense that, for example, I did research with other co-authors that showed that unionized nursing homes had a much lower percentage of deaths among residents and lower levels of infection among workers for COVID during the pandemic compared to non-union homes.

In schools, unions helped pressure to win mask mandates where even conservative governments didn't institute them and we know those were really serious ways to contain the virus. I think that unions to, to some extent they need a public relations facelift and to really make it clear what kinds of things people did during the pandemic. I think that doing so will help them build toward certain signature policy goals that they want. The most important one that we should all hope to God we get soon is the protecting the Right to Organize Act or the Pro Act. the Pro Act, it passed the vote in the house last year and is awaiting to vote going forward.

It would basically amend our current labor law to create a fairer playing field when workers organize unions. Union elections are up 60% in 2021. That's crazy. An incredible high explosion of interest in people wanting to join unions and yet managements across the country are fighting them tooth and nail. We need the Pro Act to limit management interference so that workers can get what they want. The general public who also supports unions at record high rates also gets what they want. I think that politically that will be one short term goal that labor should push for.

Melissa: Are you feeling optimistic about this next phase?

Jamie: It's hard for people who study the labor world to feel optimistic that often because the deck really is stacked pretty hard against workers. When I think about this question, you have to know where to look. The thing that most people I think forget is that unions and labor activity doesn't happen because people are upset or resentful or frustrated. Sometimes, but mostly it happens because they hope. They have optimism that taking these large risks of walking out of your job and forming a union, et cetera, et cetera, is worth it and it will make a big difference. Hundreds of thousands of people made that choice during some of the worst years of our lives with incredible risks to themselves. I think it's that heroism, not just the heroism of going to your job every day but of standing up and trying to make your job better, which has ripple effects for all of us. I think that kind of work gives me some optimism and it gives me a leg to stand on and say people did not abandon this because even in their darkness days. Whatever happens after the midterms, labor will have to fight. There's a lot of people in the labor movement right now who have been really preparing for that fight over the last few years and I have some degree of optimism of hope that they're well positioned for a long and tough battle.

Melissa: I want to make one more request of you. One of the things we often like to do when we're producing segments that are emerging from a book is to have the author read just a small portion of it, either the PDF or the physical book in front of you. It's just a very short paragraph from the introduction that I was going to ask you to read.

Jamie: There's so much to say about but I'll read this now. In short, the pandemic revealed the extent to which our lives are intertwined with their jobs. Essential workers jeopardize their own health, safety and security for the greater good yet the pernicious conditions they worked under and the obstacles they face to improving their jobs undermine not only their personal health but also our collective wellbeing. By short changing essential of workers, we performed the collective orouroboros, the ancient symbol of a snake devouring its own tale.

Melissa: Thank you so much for that. Is there anything final that I've missed that you would want to be sure we touch on in this conversation?

Jamie: I guess the only thing I would say that is interesting is really to that point that I find really important is, I'll just say that I think the pandemic illuminated why we should all care about bad labor conditions and worker rights even if we don't hold those jobs ourselves. An economy like ours that's filled with bad jobs is a huge liability and low pay for nursing home workers meant that workers had to work two jobs and they spread the virus from place to place as they went. Delivery drivers working long hours are more prone to deadly accidents. The flip side is also true that when workers have a voice, we all do better.

Union workers in essential industries had more access to PPE and other equipment that help make those work places safer for everyone. Basically, their working conditions are our living conditions and I think the pandemic drove home that point in a really important way.

Melissa: Jamie McCallum is author of Essential: How the Pandemic Transformed the Long Fight for Worker Justice. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Jamie: Thank you so much for having me.

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