Middlebury college and has work has been featured in the new york times, new yorker, washington post, jacobin, dissent and, numerous scholarly journals. Jamie is also an elected School Board Representative in vermont and a volunteer. He is joined in conversation tonight by Daniel Schneider the Malcolm Weiner professor of social policy at the Harvard Kennedy and professor of sociology at harvard university. His focuses on precarious work, demography and inequality air tonight. Jamie presenting his new book, a central how the pandemic transformed the long fight for worker justice through firsthand Research Conducted as the pandemic unfolded. Jamie traces the evolution of militancy, showing how their struggles for safer workplaces, pay and health care and the right to unionize benefited all americans and spurred a radical new phase of the Labor Movement. Throughout the coronavirus pandemic essential workers lashed out against low, 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 American Workers had simmered discontent long before their anger boiled over. Chris smalls, president and founder of the Amazon Labor Union called essential a call to action, adding that we need increased workplace militancy to challenge capitalism as workers our labor and our ability withhold. It is our power. And according to nancy mclain, the author of democracy in chains, Jamie Mccallum explains how we reached this moment. Union popularity and new organizing and what the future could hold. An invigorating, urgent book that is, to borrow its title essential. We are so pleased host this event here at Harvard Bookstore tonight. Please join me in welcoming Jamie Mccallum and Daniel SchneiderDaniel Schneider. Thank you. All right, grandpa. All right. Thanks so much. Will you give me a little hand signal when we should Start Talking to everyone else can talk. Great. Okay, great. Well, thanks so much, everyone for being here. Jamie, great to see you. Its fun to be in conversation. You know, its been, what, almost three years of the pandemic now, a wild time in American Labor history. We saw some of the sharpest downturns in, employment in modern American History in the early months of the pandemic. Back in 2020, we saw a historic social safety net response cash payments, almost all american families, a child tax that cut poverty by half. When we saw a surprisingly tight labor market with rising labor market power, apparently wages increasing and then a sort of effort to fight inflation by cutting back on this labor market. When you started book, you didnt know what was coming. Why did you decide to write it . How did you keep a pace of these events which the so nicely captures that you really this thing on . Hold on a second. Got it. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Hi, everyone. Thank so much for coming. And thanks to the Harvard Bookstore hosting. Im so excited to be able present this work in person. I wrote another book two years ago that came out the middle of the pandemic and it was nothing. There was no way to share that work with people. So its really a to be able to do that tonight and to be able to talk with danny as always. So i started writing this book as soon as the pandemic left china. Essentially. And i love interviewing workers. Its what its a its fun it sort of helps deal with my curiosity about whats going on. And so i just began talking to people and i wasnt even writing a book, but id written another one, as i said. And that book sort of seemed to go like when the pandemic hit, it sort of seemed like ask more questions than it answered in a way. And i was curious and unsatisfied with what had happened with that. So i started interviewing people and talking to people. And before before long it became clear that whatever there was of a social safety net, whatever there was of. However much, our economy had already been dominated by bad jobs that had been exacerbated ten times over. And it seemed to me like it was that accounts are way i labor organizing was was going to happen to the to respond to some sort of the sort of the covid that was really early in the pandemic and so finding people became really important. The book starts new york city. Ill just a little bit about this at the beginning. Is that okay . Yeah. So the book starts in new york city. One of the first people i interviewed is one of the first people in the book. And you know, i not live in new york or a big city at. All so theres nothing like this happening where i live. You know, she was walking work when people it was the time sort of the pots and pans when people were banging on things and shouting cheers out the windows, out of cabs and on sidewalks to Health Care Workers and delivery drivers and grocery clerks and and janitors and these kinds of folks who were going to work. And she, you know, reminded me of what this felt like a certain sense of pride and a sense of resentment, a sense of frustration and a sense of helplessness, a sense of sort of hopefully ness and defeatism. And so that kind of contradiction is interesting when an interviewer and so from then on, i just began talking to whomever i could and eventually, you know, i interviewed about 100 folks from a lot of essential industries, mostly health care, Food Processing delivery, logistics, education, some of those places retail and talked to them sometimes their friends and family and began crafting began crafting a book. Yeah. While were out there actually talking to people i was trying to survey them through the chef project we were running of workers at some of the same big that you were, you know, interviewing people at and at a high level. We were finding that workers were, you know, kind of, you know, still these precarious jobs, jobs with wages, unstable schedules, not enough paid sick time, not ppe. In the early days of the pandemic. And in increasing like disrespect and bullying and harassment from on the job, what were you hearing in a more nuanced way from workers have long been precarious jobs. These are jobs where weve seen the risky side of the risk shift, where workers have been left holding bag. And in shareholder capitalism. What was it different during the pandemic, these folks . Yeah. Right. So danny and his colleagues at the shift project did a lot of Early Research that people like me ended up using, like some of the first surveys that showed who had ppe, who didnt, who had, you know, workable, healthy schedules, who did those kinds of things. And it was really important to people very early on. So when i theres different ways to do those of research and you get certain data from that kind of research and certain data from this and so, you know, one thing that became interesting is that everyone i talked to or, most people i talked to, we would talk for a while and then they would say, oh, and, you know, there was a walkout a couple of days ago or there was a protest or there was a sit in or people stopped coming to work the other day without without calling in sick or everyone called sick. And there was always weird things were, these small little incidences of like workplace resistance, organizing or protest or whatever, began percolating up from the bottom. And by the time year was over when you could read through the official statistics statistics, they didnt show almost any unrest at all, like the number of large strikes in 2020. There eight, i think, and four of them were led by nurses. Two were in boston and so but when you talk to people, you hear about all this other stuff that sort of gets lost that goes under the radar or gets lost in the official stats. And some of those stories are. Very equal parts, you know, heartbreaking, inspiring. I talked a lot of oakland who i just met tonight, who i to her you probably what, two and a half years ago. What is mom was greeter at walmart in, the boston area. Who who of covid and early on the massachusetts jobs with justice chapter where i first heard your moms story you talked about the sort of the insanity suppose of keeping greeters at walmart all of them not having, you know, adequate protections, basic like paid sick leave. I think was she used up her Vacation Time to take take time off yet had to go back. Right. And so there were these stories and i heard, you know, not to say they werent special in their own way, but i heard a lot of them. And and then you also heard ones were more, um, um, you know, people saw the pandemic as an opportunity. There was a crisis, the state a crisis for capital, a crisis in and there was a window of opportunity by which some people workers, labor organizers, unions, activists sought to try to take advantage of it and to step into the breach, make change that could that could change some of the things as we look back was remarkable in some ways is how little actually changed. Given that given the depth, the crisis and how little weve learned overall. Um, nonetheless, no one likes that story. Its not its not good story to end with. So i think in the beginning but and there is certainly things that came out of it, but nonetheless, i think know early on, especially in 2020, some of those those were some of the stories. Do you mean like you know, you talk about the sort of how acute the precarious conditions became during the pandemic life. Death matter is on the line for jobs that were long, precarious and that you know. So that changed. You also talked about this rhetorical where, you know, people are banging pots and pans thats both affirming, but also its like a profound cognitive dissonance for workers. Are these the things that give rise to this class consciousness that you describe . Whats the whats the secret that gives workers who long alienated this cohesion . Yeah. Yeah. So so during so in the book, i describe sort of a process by which essential worker, essential workers become the essential working class like at one point we look out and we see, um, we see o some Health Care Workers and teachers, drivers and logistics people and whatever and theyre, theyre numbers on a spreadsheet or whatever. And fairly quickly, uh from interviews and talking to people, it became clear that people would get gamed, became to understand themselves as being part of an essential working class or a frontline working class whatever you want to call it. And that was largely defined by their proximity to risk. So we typically think of class American Society either as a just economic divide. The divide, the economy of the quintiles, and some are rich and some are poor or whatever. Or we think of it as people coming to understanding their their, you know, their understanding of themselves in relation to an employer. And this was there was part of that. But i think what really drove it was the understanding that some people risk their lives and other people did not and made the difference. So you get sense of which which almost never happens. Janitors, nurses, lpm and doctors at a similar hospital all of a sudden have all the things in common. They also have in common with the who drive supplies to the hospital, or sometimes the drivers who drive them home or. You know, you name it. There is a way in which these people began to understand as as connected. So when were protests . Um early on in april or march, april, may. There was a lot sporadic protests, especially in the bigger cities. And always said, look, you know, were nurses standing for teachers or were drivers standing up for Food Processors or retail clerks in solidarity with daycare providers or whatever it was. And so that kind of mix began to kind of bubble up. It was a pretty amazing, you know, a pretty interesting phenomena, i guess. You know, ive heard you talk about how that set of labor were all sort of like originals or, de novo against, you know. What we more often see to the extent we see any labor action which is, you know, you know teacher strike in the city. Until then, teacher strike in a similar way in this next city. Right, right. Was an unusual thing to see this sort of innovation. In a sense, yeah. So i think so. You know, you can imagine a couple of years ago there was a major strike way of 2018, 2019 of teachers. There basically copycat strikes. They rocked the nation. It was amazing. Pretty powerful, you know, really important. But it was one industry. And what i think was important about this pandemic of working class is they drew from all these different essential industries and therefore movements that came out of them sort of crosspollinate each other inside the workplace, outside the workplace. So you had black matter talking about, you know, the strike for black lives, like using the language of labor and the pandemic working class itself was so black and brown and female that those sort of concerns about Racial Justice and gender justice began in the within unions in ways doesnt always happen. And so there, uh, you know, worker unrest, um, sort of in a wave but not siloed in industry. So at least in that first year, first 18 months. And i think that was like the strike tober thing, thats what happened to the fall of 2021 because it was you had john deere people out you had symphony musicians our whiskey makers, our adjunct professors. Health care workers. Teachers threatening to strike all Different Things happening in different parts. And i think that sort of that you know diversity of activism was a pretty interesting development. I came out of it. And to extent, you know, we see of that stuff. How would you say it sort of animating whats happening today . Know you know, we think about you in the classic words of one of our colleagues, what unions do we often think about them as providing higher pay or Better Benefits or maybe a lofty sense of voice what will workers after in this . Is that what these essential this, you know, class in the making in these in these actions . Or was it something more fundamental of like safety or even the rights of others . Mm hmm. Mm hmm. So, yeah this is a great question. So you you know, we typically of unions as providing benefits their members and they do union people make more money they have better care, better jobs, better stability. Its all to figure out. However, during the pandemic, there was other stuff going and there were other sort of like union premiums that accrued not just to Union Members, not just their immediate people. But i think the society at large. So ill talk a little bit about that, um, the epicenter of the pandemic was in Nursing Homes um for for weird reasons ive been obsessed with unionized Nursing Homes for like 25 years. I used to be a Union Nursing Home organizer briefly. I was a home care worker before that and uh, so i started, i joined with a group of people who were studying unionized homes. The or in Nursing Homes in general here in the pandemic. So the, the take away or the quick shot from that is that if you were a if you or your Family Member or a loved one were in a nursing home that had a union, they were about 11 less likely to die of in 2020 and 2021 than if there wasnt a union. If you were a worker in a nursing, you were far less likely get covid unionize as worker. Workers in Nursing Homes routinely spread virus from home to home. They spread their own Family Members. They spread it to people they worked for. Like every nursing home worker i talked to and there was a lot like routinely lamented the fact that they knew they were bringing covid to their patients who died it because their jobs were so bad that they had to work in two homes or they had to work in three homes or a multiple jobs. A union limits that possibility a little bit. It also gives you a voice on the job to be able to say just to speak up to say like hey we need x more ppe more protections. Unionized workers get paid time to get vaccinated. They have greater paid sick leave. All these kinds things that just kept people alive. Um, so theres that in health care and education it was similar. Um, uh, teachers unions are some them or teachers or some of the probably the most organized unionized labor force in the country. Um, some place the unions are very strong. So i talked to folks in chicago, l. A. Philly, atlanta, and what they all said was like, look, if, you know, if the school or whoever wanted us to go back early, we pushed for a later start date. If denied as the mask mandate. We pushed a mask mandate and we won. They pushed for their students, their families to get priority unvaccinated and less. Um, in other all these sort of things that not just to Union Workers but to the rest of us. So to speak, what people call bargaining for the common good, like a way to use your leverage as a union, as someone with a labor contract to sort of negotiate goods or services for others. It doesnt always work. Its really hard. But there was a time during the pandemic when seemed obvious to a lot of people and when in some ways worked a little bit better than it otherwise did. The the cautionary tale to this stories is like meatpacking, where i talked workers, everyone who knew three workers who died. I to Family Members who who had lost multiple Family Members in the same in the same family. Um. And their unions are weak and theyre ineffectual and theyre disorganized and theyd been busted for 34, 35 years and you dont have the same power. You dont have the same strength. And i think difference was very clear. And so you have you know, people are talking about the Union Difference like a wage premium. There was sort of a Health Premium that acc