It sounds like the premise for a dystopian sci-fi novel, yet the lead paragraph of this must-read New York Times story captures a central conflict of the coronavirus crisis in the United States: “Efforts to quickly restart economic activity risk further dividing Americans into two major groups along socioeconomic lines: one that has the power to control its exposure to the coronavirus outbreak and another that is forced to choose between potential sickness or financial devastation.”
And as if with so much of our American story, this is a schism where race is key, with the Times noting that:
[this] push is likely to exacerbate longstanding inequalities, with workers are college educated, relatively affluent and primarily white able to continue working from home and minimizing outdoor excursions to reduce the risk of contracting the virus.
Those who are lower paid, less educated and employed in jobs where teleworking is not an option would face a bleak choice if states lift restrictive orders and employers order them back to work: expose themselves to the pandemic or lose their jobs.
That disempowered group is heavily black and Latino, though it includes lower-income white workers as well.
As Donald Trump pushes to re-open the economy, and governors from both parties begin implementing re-opening measures, this basic disparity in the resulting risk — between rich and poor, between whites and minorities — is something all Americans need to reckon with it, at least if we still aspire to be a just and moral society. Lower-wage and minority workers have already been disproportionately affected by the economic fallout of the coronavirus, as well as by the disease itself, and would clearly benefit from a reopening. Yet these groups would in turn face the highest health risks as businesses are allowed to reopen and they return to work.
Of course, states that are beginning to re-open are urging caution and self-protection for workers — but such precautions crash into two harsh realities. First, states still lack the necessary testing and contact tracing ability to ensure that the virus does not begin to flare up again. Second, the U.S. remains far short of adequate personal protective equipment for workers who need it. Without these measures, which would represent the states and federal government doing everything possible to protect returning workers, we are simply asking them to take avoidable and thus unnecessary risks. Ignoring the disproportionate effect on groups who have less power to influence such decision-making should set off alarms for all fair-minded Americans.
It’s bad enough that government at the state and federal levels would fail to acknowledge the disparate impacts on Americans by race and class that will result from re-opening measures. But such willful blindness becomes simply malignant as we see various states insisting that workers who refuse to return to re-opened businesses will have their unemployment benefits cut off. The Washington Post reports that Iowa, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and other states have issued such warnings, and that they have been most prominently issued by Republican politicians. Officials specifically point to concerns that workers may prefer to continue receiving jobless benefits more generous than their wages; in voicing such fears, they draw on decades worth of right-wing propaganda that American workers are fundamentally lazy and will always seek to unduly exploit benefits like unemployment insurance. But bringing up such – as of now, totally unfounded – concerns gives the game away, as the far more likely reason Americans would prefer not to return to work is that they fear for their lives.
Under these circumstances, it’s more important than ever for Republicans to paint a picture of workers — particularly lower-wage employees — as recalcitrant, child-like, and in need of goading to make them do an honest day’s work. And when you stop to consider that the employees at whom these warnings are directed are disproportionately minorities, the racist undercurrent become undeniable and grotesque. Adding insult to injury, such authorities are pro-actively scapegoating relatively powerless workers for America’s economic challenges under coronavirus: the underlying message is that if they don’t do their duty and go back to work, any continued economic problems will be their fault.
To admit otherwise — that all workers are free to make their own informed assessment as to risks and rewards, and that their decisions deserve the respect of their fellow Americans — would severely undercut the moral authority of state governments to pose such a harsh dilemma for millions of citizens. As one AFL-CIO official put it, “These states are offering people the choice to endanger your life or starve.” The fact that states are already issuing such harsh warnings offers support to those who suspect that in seeking a balance between public health and the economy, many states have opted in favor of the latter.
It's neither just nor tenable for one enormous swathe of Americans to be treated as ungrateful, disposable, and lacking choice, as meanwhile vast segments of the white-collar work force are able to rise above the awful dilemma of choosing between work and health. Such a split has long plagued American society, but the threat of coronavirus has made the terms immediate and unmistakable. Workers like myself can remain safely at home, able to telecommute to our heart’s content, and with varying degrees of assurance that our employers will not prematurely require us to work in the office. This is partly due to the nature of jobs that can be done on a computer, but it also speaks to the relative power of white-collar workers vis-à-vis their employers. I’m quite certain that at many thousands of firms, an order to return to work that white-collar employees felt endangered them would be met with mass resistance, if not outright resignations. I can only imagine the mix of anger, helplessness, and fear I’d be feeling right now if I were a blue collar worker being asked by, say, the Iowa governor to wrap a bandana around my face, cross my fingers, and return to a meatpacking line. If returning to work is not a choice that you would freely make, then it’s not a choice that your fellow workers should be asked to make, either.
In some ways, the frantic maneuvering by government and business to force employees to put themselves at risk is aggravated by the behavior of another grouping of Americans over which they have no such control: the consumers who are supposed to start frequenting all those re-opened businesses. As many astute observers are pointing out, why on earth should consumers feel safe going to businesses that aren’t able to assure the health of their employees?
Our collective ability to consider the immorality of the trade-off faced by many Americans who might be able to work only at the cost of risking their lives has been undercut by the president’s desperate efforts to drive the conversation, and to prod states into re-opening businesses as soon as possible. In a grotesque inversion, we are to believe that it is the economy that is in mortal risk, not actual human lives, and that it can only be saved by sending in Americans to staunch the bleeding. But this is a false choice. We are being told that as a nation, we can’t afford for states to maintain lockdown orders for, say, another month to give time for infection rates to go down, and to allow more time to get the testing and contact tracing infrastructure in place, not to mention to manufacture the many millions of masks workers will need in order to safeguard their health.
This is clearly a lie. The United States could easily afford to pay every American unable to work remotely to stay home for another month, and support the businesses that are impacted; but this is not happening because the Republican Party has indicated this is a non-starter, and because not enough Democrats are refusing to dig in and fight for it. It was heartening to at least see one of our Oregon senators, Ron Wyden, taking a stand on this issue. Wyden told the Post that the issue of workers getting their unemployment cut off was due to GOP governors “casting public health aside and forcing their states to reopen” and that “pretending the crisis is over when it’s not over will make it much harder to contain the virus and for workers to keep food on the table and a roof over their heads.”
Indeed, attempting to push around working-class and minority Americans isn’t only reprehensible in and of itself, but pretty much guaranteed to prolong our health and financial crisis. If workers are not protected, then they’ll simply vector the coronavirus into their customer base. It’s hard not to conclude that the president’s re-election panic has combined with the GOP’s latent white supremacism to result in a deeply flawed, premature vision of re-opening America, with the most vulnerable, disproportionately minority workers as sacrificial pawns. This is brutal, appalling stuff, and every American will need to choose between solidarity or tacit endorsement of this self-defeating and murderous strategy.