McCallum, Jamie K. Essential: How the Pandemic Transformed the Long Fight for Worker Justice. Basic Books, 2022.
In the fall of 2023, a mini-wave of COVID-19 infections and hospitalizations is gaining strength, and the Food and Drug Administration has authorized a new vaccine booster. But aside from these reminders of the lingering pandemic, the political and business establishment has successfully flushed COVID-19 down the “memory hole”. The U.S. is back to “normal,” conveniently ignoring the fact that COVID-19 continues to be the third highest cause of death in the country.
If it did nothing else but combat this manufactured amnesia about the crisis that gripped the world only three years ago, Jamie K. McCallum’s Essential: How the Pandemic Transformed the Long Fight for Worker Justice would make for (pardon the pun) essential reading. But McCallum’s book is much more than that. It’s a history and analysis of the pandemic from the point of view of the working class. And it doesn’t shy away from drawing socialist conclusions.
It’s not often that you read a passage like this in a mainstream publisher’s book:
If the pandemic has shown us anything, it’s that we need an alternative. The real antidote to the deadly failings of capitalism is socialism. To get there, workers will need to create a crisis for capital. The insurgent workers’ movements of the 1930s offer a glimpse of what this could look like. Large and unruly strikes swept through the country’s basic industries, challenging the authority of our most powerful capitalists. Strikes shut down production in automobile factories, steel mills, coal mines, and transportation hubs, forcing employers to negotiate and, eventually, Roosevelt to intervene. . .. The unrest during the pandemic was inspiring but fell far short of what is needed to force real change. History holds lessons for charting labor’s future.
To tell the story, McCallum weaves together oral testimonies of essential workers he and a research team collected, statistics, and even short historical digressions on such topics as the history of the 1960s-70s movement for occupational safety and health, into a compelling, and jargon-free narrative. McCallum’s passion and empathy for his subjects is reminiscent of the activist journalism of Jonathan Kozol.
As the chapters unfold, McCallum sheds light on one section of the working class or one issue of working-class politics after another. His first focus is on the tens of millions of workers who lost their jobs in March and April of 2020. Pandemic emergency government programs, from suspension of evictions to increased unemployment insurance helped cushion the blow for many—but far from all unemployed workers.
He then turns to “essential” workers, people forced to work in vital services such as health care and food processing and delivery, who developed a “class consciousness” of being a section of the working class with particular interests and goals. His interviews recall the early days of the pandemic when ordinary people celebrated essential workers with pot-banging gestures of solidarity. But to the essential workers McCallum interviewed, these gestures wore thin after a few weeks.
Miguel, a New York hospital janitor that McCallum’s team interviewed, put it this way: “I hope my son can get a better job than me…. Those people clapping outside? They’re not doing it for us. They’re doing it because they’re happy they’re not in here too. They know how lucky they are. And when I hear it, it makes me sick.” McCallum notes that the early “we’re all in this together” sentiment gave way to resentment. Essential workers had to battle employers for the most basic safety provisions, while right-wing politicians stoked envy against those who were being “paid not to work.” Later in 2020 and 2021, white collar workers who could work at home pressed for in-person learning in schools, while teachers and essential worker parents, worried about their own or their kids’ safety, resisted the “back to school” movement.
While McCallum doesn’t sugar-coat the real tensions inside the working class, he always draws the lens back to show how the employers and government were ultimately responsible for the situation in which workers found themselves. Decades of neoliberal cutbacks and government underinvestment left the public health infrastructure in a near state of collapse, unable even to provide “personal protective equipment” (PPE) to health care workers who were risking their lives. The U.S. has the same ratio of hospital beds to population as does Turkey. Profit-driven hospital management has systematically understaffed nurses for decades, leading to a “nursing shortage” that didn’t just arise with COVID. In fact, the U.S. employs one-seventh of the world’s nurses. But its health care system degrades nurses’ work so much that hundreds of thousands of them have left the field.
A decades’ long corporate “risk shift” in health care coverage means that even for workers who have health insurance, copays or restrictions make it too expensive to use. Workplace safety regulations and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) have gutted to the point that OSHA conducted 40 percent fewer workplace inspections in 2020—in the middle of pandemic rendering all sorts of workplaces unsafe—than in 2019. “The companies aren’t afraid of OSHA,” a Nebraska meatpacking local union president tells McCallum. “OSHA’s afraid of them.” The COVID body count of workers in meatpacking plants, nursing homes and hospitals was the predictable result.
Amidst all this misery, McCallum also documents significant, and sometimes heroic, working-class resistance. Workers in the Alameda County, Calif., public health system conducted a strike that succeeded not only in winning their own demands on pay and working conditions, but also stopped the county’s plans for privatizing the public hospital. Autoworkers in Ford and GM plants came off the unemployment line to produce ventilators. Workers in the Braskem petrochemical plant in Pennsylvania occupied their workplace in March 2020 for a month while they produced tons of materials for use in producing facemasks. Hundreds of smaller, and largely unheralded, actions of working-class self-defense took place, especially in the first year of the pandemic.
He notes that unionized workplaces in “care” work (schools, nursing homes, hospitals) had better COVID outcomes (fewer deaths of workers and clients) and better access to PPE than workers in informal, or non-union work situations. Unfortunately, as McCallum notes in multiple places, too few workers in the U.S. are organized. And in too many cases, the existing unions neither fight nor provide any sort of political lead—even when the pandemic was making clear to all who wanted to know the disaster that capitalism had created. On political questions that roiled some unions—for example, some unions’ opposition to vaccine mandates—McCallum, a former union organizer, doesn’t shy away:
“Teacher and healthcare union opposition to vaccine mandates rests on a liberal idea of individual bodily autonomy. That works for abortion but is inappropriately applied to infectious diseases that affect the health of the larger society. More importantly, it’s a political stance typically opposed by unions, which view public health and workplace safety as social goods that require collective action to achieve.”
He’s also critical of some of the perspectives on the left that emerged in the crucible of the pandemic. While he certainly praises the efforts of ordinary people to fill holes in the social safety net—the book includes a fascinating account of the pandemic’s earliest examples of “mutual aid” in China—he does not see those efforts as a solution or a strategy:
“From a social reproduction perspective, mutual aid cannot be the horizon of our caring capacity. Voluntarism is no substitute for government action, just as GoFundMe is not health insurance. We should instead develop a robust social system from the very principle of mutual aid. It is, after all, as Kropotkin argued, ‘the necessary foundation of everyday life.’”
McCallum’s book well illustrates how the pandemic revealed what Gramsci called capitalism’s “morbid symptoms” (a phrase McCallum borrows). But Essential is equally a cautionary tale about how capitalists can shift the cost of their crises onto workers if workers aren’t strong enough to resist. “For all the tumult of 2020,” McCallum writes, “the interlocking crises of the pandemic, labor, racism, climate change, and challenged election results, perhaps what’s most shocking of all is how little the pandemic fundamentally changed the way we live and work.” Winning that fundamental change remains a challenge to labor and the left.
Lance Selfa
Lance Selfa is the author of The Democrats: A Critical History (Haymarket, 2012) and editor of U.S. Politics in an Age of Uncertainty: Essays on a New Reality (Haymarket, 2017).
