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Essential: How the Pandemic Transformed the Long Fight for Worker Justice
How essential workers’ fight for better jobs during the pandemic revolutionized US labor politics
Throughout the coronavirus pandemic, essential workers lashed out against low wages, long hours, and safety risks, attracting a level of support unseen in decades. This explosion of labor unrest seemed sudden to many. But Essential reveals that American workers had simmered in discontent long before their anger boiled over.
Decades of austerity, sociologist Jamie K. McCallum shows, have left frontline workers vulnerable to employer abuse, lacking government protections, and increasingly furious. Through firsthand research conducted as the pandemic unfolded, McCallum traces the evolution of workers’ militancy, showing how their struggles for safer workplaces, better pay and health care, and the right to unionize have benefitted all Americans and spurred a radical new phase of the labor movement. This is essential reading for understanding the past, present, and future of the working class.
Throughout the coronavirus pandemic, essential workers lashed out against low wages, long hours, and safety risks, attracting a level of support unseen in decades. This explosion of labor unrest seemed sudden to many. But Essential reveals that American workers had simmered in discontent long before their anger boiled over.
Decades of austerity, sociologist Jamie K. McCallum shows, have left frontline workers vulnerable to employer abuse, lacking government protections, and increasingly furious. Through firsthand research conducted as the pandemic unfolded, McCallum traces the evolution of workers’ militancy, showing how their struggles for safer workplaces, better pay and health care, and the right to unionize have benefitted all Americans and spurred a radical new phase of the labor movement. This is essential reading for understanding the past, present, and future of the working class.
320 pages, Hardcover
Published November 15, 2022
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170 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
May 25, 2023
Very good. You should read it.
December 24, 2024
I’m buying a gun
October 21, 2023
This book includes some great personal stories of essential workers who dealt heavily with the impact of Coronavirus. Highly recommend for anyone who's staunchly anti-capitalist because this research perfectly frames the way our current system favors financial gain over human well-being.
December 17, 2022
I haven't read very many nonfiction books about the pandemic yet - but I have commented to friends that I'll be especially curious to see what academic research comes out of this period (my intereset was particularly around long-term academic and social development of children during and after the pandemic!). This is a meticulously researched and impassioned work on the critical topic of labor rights for essential workers. I think this book comes at a perfect time: as vaccines are becoming widespread and conditions seem to have returned "back to normal," it's easy to forget the truly horrifying and literally life-or-death decisions that low-wage workers were faced in 2020. Importantly, McCallum tells these stories through the lives of real people, helping the reader connect with what they went through, the choices they had to make, and the diversity of different employees' experiences.
The book covers three topics I think are particularly notable. First, McCallum dedicates space to workers who were laid off and their immediate thrust into precarity - with only sporadic or short-term eviction moratoria, paltry government support, and few jobs available, these people were truly put into impossible situations. He tells a particularly powerful story of a woman who was laid off, evicted from her home, and was forced to move her three young children into her car. Even after getting a job at Sweetgreen, the thing that saved her was a GoFundMe started by one of her coworkers.
Secondly, McCallum spends the most time on "essential workers" of all types - nurses, teachers, fast food workers, grocery clerks, nursing home employees, and many others. He explains their lack of options, the horrible wages and working conditions they had to put up with, the conflicting and confusing information they received on the hazards they were facing, and much more. His focus is on unions, unions, unions. He shows the clear correlation between higher union representation and better working conditions and pay, and importantly traces the decades-long erosion of unions and labor organizing in the US, which contributed to the uneven, shaky, and piecemeal success of organizing efforts during the pandemic.
Third and finally, he spends a lot of time on the so-called "labor shortage" that many business owners, consumers, politicians, and other pundits decried in later stages of the pandemic. How many of us have heard the phrase, "Nobody wants to work anymore"? He applies a metaphor that is extremely apt: "If you want a yacht but you are only willing to pay $5000 for one, it doesn't mean there's a yacht shortage. There's just a shortage of yachts at that price." He clearly explains that the labor shortage is "a surplus of bad jobs" - that employers have "become dependent on a low-wage nation, and we must break their habit."
The only downside to this book was that it felt quite academic at points. It is an extremely important and relevant book that I think everyone should pick up, but readers should be aware that it's dense reading material that goes deep on history, sociology, policy, and other hefty topics. Thank you to the publisher for the ARC via Netgalley!
The book covers three topics I think are particularly notable. First, McCallum dedicates space to workers who were laid off and their immediate thrust into precarity - with only sporadic or short-term eviction moratoria, paltry government support, and few jobs available, these people were truly put into impossible situations. He tells a particularly powerful story of a woman who was laid off, evicted from her home, and was forced to move her three young children into her car. Even after getting a job at Sweetgreen, the thing that saved her was a GoFundMe started by one of her coworkers.
Secondly, McCallum spends the most time on "essential workers" of all types - nurses, teachers, fast food workers, grocery clerks, nursing home employees, and many others. He explains their lack of options, the horrible wages and working conditions they had to put up with, the conflicting and confusing information they received on the hazards they were facing, and much more. His focus is on unions, unions, unions. He shows the clear correlation between higher union representation and better working conditions and pay, and importantly traces the decades-long erosion of unions and labor organizing in the US, which contributed to the uneven, shaky, and piecemeal success of organizing efforts during the pandemic.
Third and finally, he spends a lot of time on the so-called "labor shortage" that many business owners, consumers, politicians, and other pundits decried in later stages of the pandemic. How many of us have heard the phrase, "Nobody wants to work anymore"? He applies a metaphor that is extremely apt: "If you want a yacht but you are only willing to pay $5000 for one, it doesn't mean there's a yacht shortage. There's just a shortage of yachts at that price." He clearly explains that the labor shortage is "a surplus of bad jobs" - that employers have "become dependent on a low-wage nation, and we must break their habit."
The only downside to this book was that it felt quite academic at points. It is an extremely important and relevant book that I think everyone should pick up, but readers should be aware that it's dense reading material that goes deep on history, sociology, policy, and other hefty topics. Thank you to the publisher for the ARC via Netgalley!
June 18, 2022
Review coming up
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews