What Can the Coronavirus Teach Us?

By Bill McKibben, The New Yorker

07 March 20

 

here’s nothing good about the novel coronavirus—it’s killing many people, and shutting millions more inside, with fear as their main companion. However, if we’re fated to go through this passage, we may as well learn something from it, and it does strike me that there are a few insights that are applicable to the climate crisis that shadows all of our lives.

Some of these lessons are obvious: giant cruise ships are climate killers and, it turns out, can become floating sick wards. Other ideas evaporate once you think about them: China is producing far less carbon dioxide, for the moment, but, completely apart from the human toll, economic disruption is not a politically viable way to deal with global warming in the long term, and it also undercuts the engines of innovation that bring us, say, cheap solar panels.

Still, it’s worth noting how nimbly millions of people seem to have learned new patterns. Companies, for instance, are scrambling to stay productive, even with many people working from home. The idea that we need to travel each day to a central location to do our work may often be the result of inertia, more than anything else. Faced with a real need to commute by mouse, instead of by car, perhaps we’ll see that the benefits of workplace flexibility extend to everything from gasoline consumption to the need for sprawling office parks.

Of course, that’s a lesson that can be learned in reverse as well. The best excuse for an office is people bouncing ideas off one another, and the best excuse for a society is just people bouncing off one another, something that’s getting harder right now, as events start cancelling. But the “social distancing” that epidemiologists now demand of us to stop the spread of infectious diseases is actually already too familiar to lots of Americans. Living lives of comparative, suburban isolation, we already have fewer close friends than we used to. (Health-care authorities warned, on Thursday, of a serious epidemic of loneliness, which older Americans are more vulnerable to. The research shows that, when controlling for all other variables, older Americans who reported being lonely are twice as likely to die prematurely than those who aren’t.) But the patterns that produce this solitude in our culture are so ingrained that we’ve come to take them for granted. Perhaps, in an odd way, the prospect of forced isolation may lead us to embrace a bit more gregariousness when the virus relents. I can’t imagine what it’s like to be penned up in a Wuhan apartment; I can guess, though, that liberation will feel sweet when it comes, not only because people presumably will be safe but because they can be social. A certain kind of environmentalist has long hoped that we’ll learn to substitute human contact for endless consumption; maybe this is the kind of shock that might open a few eyes. (Also, strained global supply chains are a good reminder that local agriculture has very practical benefits.)

This might also be the moment when we decide to fully embrace the idea that science, you know, works. My grandfather was, for many decades, doctor to the tiny town of Kirkland, Washington, now a suburb filled with software execs, which has turned into an American coronavirus ground zero. So I’m thinking frequently of the brave nurses and paramedics carrying out front-line care, and also the researchers who have scrambled with remarkable speed to produce prototype vaccines. Élites seem a little better when they come bearing cures. And that should probably carry over to other realms: Americans, polling shows, are wary of Trump’s cavalier disregard for reality when it comes to global warming; now he’s claiming that the virus is a hoax, as well. Given his contention that maybe a “miracle” might make it “disappear,” I’d expect that skepticism to keep growing.

And one would also expect a growing awareness that what happens elsewhere matters—that there’s no real way to shut out the rest of the planet. That’s true for the virus, which seems to have seeped through most of the world’s borders in a matter of days. It’s even truer, of course, for the CO₂ molecule. Not even a guy in a hazmat suit, clutching a temperature gun, can slow down the warm air cascading up to the Arctic, or the hurricane headed across the Atlantic. So maybe it’s a moment when we remember that coöperation with the rest of the world is a boon, not a trap.

Above all, I think, a physical shock like COVID-19 is a reminder that the world is a physical place. That’s easy to forget when we apprehend it mostly through screens, or through the cozy, contained environments that make up most of our lives. We seem to have a great deal of control, right until the moment that we don’t have any. Things can go very, very wrong, and very, very quickly. That’s precisely what scientists have been telling us for decades now about the climate crisis, and it’s what people have learned, from Australia to California, Puerto Rico, and everywhere that flood and fire has broken out. That planets get sick slightly slower than populations do—over a few decades, not a few weeks—doesn’t change the basic calculation. Biology doesn’t really care what we think of it, any more than physics or chemistry does. Reality is capable of biting, and biting hard.

Passing the Mic

Jerome Foster II just finished Week 57 of climate-striking, every Friday, in front of the White House. The high-school senior has become a force—just last month, the Audubon Naturalist Society gave him its Youth Environmental Champion award (and, since youth are now driving the environmental movement, this is no niche prize). This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

What’s the essential message that young people would like to get across to older people about climate change—what do you think older generations are not understanding correctly?

Two things. In order for substantive progress to take place to stymie the climate crisis, humanity needs to operate from a standpoint of intergovernmental solidarity, empathy, equity, and moral clarity. These should be the pillars on which we forge the pathway to a sustainable future. Also, what older generations are not understanding is the meaning of the Native American proverb, “We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children.”

What was it like to walk in that crowd in Washington, D.C., last September, during the Global Climate Strike, and realize: I helped make this happen?

I felt a great sense of optimism, community, and belonging, but I also felt mad, because we invited our elected officials to speak and none of them could provide us a real plan to get us out of this crisis. What I hoped for was not just for fifteen thousand people or twenty thousand people to show up. I wanted a real policy announcement from our national representatives, saying that we have your back and we will make sure to hold the fossil-fuel industry accountable.

Tell me about OneMillionOfUs, which you helped start last March.

It is a national nonprofit youth voting and advocacy organization, which is working to educate, empower, and mobilize a million young people to register and turn out to vote in the upcoming 2020 elections and after. So far, OneMillionOfUs has partnered with the Climate Strike Movement to facilitate mass voter registration on April 24th, the third day of planned Earth Day climate strikes, from April 22nd (a.k.a. Earth Day) to April 24th. Also, we have partnered with March for Our Lives, the Women’s March Youth Empower, 350.org, March for Science, Black Lives Matter, and many more to create a plethora of events before November. To find out how you can start a OneMillionOfUs chapter at your high school, college, or community center, go to www.onemillionof.us.

Where are you headed next year for school?

I don’t know yet. I haven’t heard back from any colleges. :-(

Climate School

Thinking twice about touching that subway pole? A new study details just how much worse it is for the climate to hop in an Uber or a Lyft: about sixty-nine per cent worse than the average emissions of the ride it replaces, including driving your own car, taking mass transit, walking, and, charmingly, “simply staying put.” That’s largely because the ride-sharing-app driver is “deadheading,” which includes circling while waiting for the next fare.

Media Matters for America reported that broadcast coverage of climate change on the evening news and Sunday-morning news shows increased sixty-eight per cent over the previous year. This means, in practice, that climate-change coverage occupied 0.7 per cent of the news hole, or two hundred and thirty-eight total minutes of the news year this past year on NBC, ABC, CBS, and Fox. And that, actually, was slightly less than in 2017. Someday, historians will look back on these numbers in wonder.

The Financial Times covered, in real depth, one of the sadder sagas of the moment: the shale revolution is producing vast quantities of natural gas, which, as we are increasingly coming to understand, we don’t want to burn in power plants (or even in kitchens). So now the industry has decided to use all of that gas to create new mountains of cheap plastic, even though “doubts are emerging about the wisdom of a huge expansion in capacity that will leave the world awash in products that can take hundreds of years to decay,” according to F.T. Perhaps wise public policy would involve just leaving it in the ground. An in-depth essay in Rolling Stone this week brought home the scale of the problem—you’ll have a visceral sense when you look at the picture that accompanies it.

Scoreboard

There was a big win on the infrastructure front, as environmentalists, many of them in upstate New York, forced an end to the Constitution Pipeline, which would have carried fracked natural gas from Pennsylvania. Their eight-year battle persuaded the Oklahoma-based company that was backing the project to throw in the towel, because the return on the investment “had diminished in such a way that further development is no longer supported.” The win came too late for one family in Pennsylvania: to make way for the pipeline, work crews had already cut down five hundred and fifty trees on its land, including the family sugar bush.

In the U.K., a court quashed plans for a third runway at Heathrow Airport. Campaigners have fought this plan for many years, and their victory was all the sweeter because the judges explicitly cited climate change as the reasoning behind the ruling. The government, the judges said, had failed to consider the obligations imposed on them by joining the Paris climate accord, a first major ruling for any court in the world, and one that, the Guardian reported, “may have an impact both in the UK and around the globe by inspiring challenges against other high-carbon projects.”

On the divestment front, Britain’s Jesuits and psychiatrists chose the same day to announce that they were selling off their stock in fossil-fuel companies. As one psychiatrist pointed out, “Greenhouse gas emissions are driving us towards a future that looks terrifyingly bleak, with children’s mental health and well-being a major casualty.”

A very scary study, reminding us how much we’ve already screwed up the planet’s workings, looked at the effects of an unprecedented “blob” of hot water that hung off the West Coast, for seven hundred days, beginning around the middle of the last decade. The hot Pacific altered everything: millions of seabirds died—an “off the charts” event, ornithologists said—and species from cod to sea lions and humpback whales took big hits, too. At the moment, there are signs that the hot-water patch is reappearing off the coast of California.

And Elizabeth Warren did it again, breaking new ground with a plan to use the Dodd-Frank Act, oversight legislation drawn up in the wake of the mortgage crisis, to try to limit financial institutions in their support of fossil fuels. It’s a smart policy, because the “carbon bubble” now inflating is larger than the housing bubble that brought us low in 2008—and if we don’t pop it, we pop the planet. Perhaps she could run some sort of permanent Presidential campaign, because it seems to yield remarkable ideas on an almost daily basis.

Congratulations to Bob Weighton, from Yorkshire, who has become the oldest living man, at a hundred and eleven. He is described by the Daily Mirror as a “climate change warrior,” and he told its reporter, “All power to Greta Thunberg.” He spends some of his time building tiny wooden windmills.

Warming Up

I don’t know many activists who get more done than Emily Johnston, a Seattle-based poet who has helped gather kayaktivists to fight Shell in the Arctic and turned the valve off on a tar-sands pipeline. She wrote to me and recommended a daily listen to Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes singing “Wake Up Everybody,” so it’s probably a good prescription.

The Insanity of Making Sick People Work

By Mark Bergfeld, Jacobin

07 March 20

Coronavirus is putting extra burdens on workers, from health professionals to low-paid cleaning staff at the front line of combating infection. Yet many of these same workers don’t even have the right to sick pay — meaning they’ll feel compelled to work even if it risks spreading the virus.

fter the evacuation of its coronavirus-hit passengers, the Princess Diamond cruise ship needed thorough cleaning. An Australian contractor won the tender and duly sent its cleaners a text message offering a “great opportunity” for a week’s work. The workers in question were school cleaners, inexperienced in dealing with such hazardous conditions. But given their low wages, the promised $5,000 to $6,000 for a week was bound to appeal.

Fortunately, the United Workers Union wasn’t ready to stand for management’s careless attitude. They held protests at company headquarters and urged cleaners not to accept the job. The working hours and working conditions remained anything but transparent — and the cleaners hadn’t received specific training. The workers hadn’t even been screened for their own preexisting health conditions, which could have left them particularly vulnerable.

This dispute over the Princess Diamond encapsulated a big problem with how media usually present the coronavirus crisis. There’s been lots of coverage about how governments and businesses have sought to cope with the outbreak. Rather less attention is paid to how it is reshaping the world of work — and the burden placed on workers themselves. But it really is making a difference, and not only for health professionals.

From low-wage service workers to delivery drivers in Wuhan keeping a quarantined population fed, it is workers who are having to deal with the effects of the crisis — and who are often put in most danger. Indeed, cleaners and janitors will, in many cases, be the first line of defense against the spread of the virus. This strikingly illustrates how absurd it is that they often count among the worst-paid workers.

Faced with this situation — and mounting changes to how even the lowest-wage jobs operate — we shouldn’t just treat coronavirus as some sort of natural disaster. It urgently poses the need for unions to organize to protect workers’ safety — and make sure that those on the front line have both the remuneration they deserve and the protections they need.

“Presenteeism” Is Dangerous

Bosses will always decry absenteeism among their workers. However, in times of coronavirus, we should be more worried about the opposite — “presenteeism,” by those who ought to be resting or getting medical treatment but who feel forced to show up for work.

Take food service workers, who often earn so little that missing a day’s work will leave them in the lurch. As one Twitter user commented, if such workers don’t have sick pay, they’ll continue showing up — possibly meaning they’ll help spread the virus. Only 46 percent of service workers received sick-leave benefits in 2017, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

In Britain, meanwhile, paid sick days often start after the third day missed. Nonetheless, the pub chain JD Wetherspoon — which counts more than 45,000 employees — has said that it will treat coronavirus like any other illness, meaning that ill workers who stay at home for fear of spreading the virus will be left out of pocket. The pub chain’s part-time workforce will be hit particularly hard — workers in Britain are only entitled to sick pay at all if they earn at least £118 a week.

In China, the scene of the first mass outbreak, private-sector companies have cut workers’ wages or delayed payments. In many cases, workers have been forced to use their vacation days and prepare for unpaid leave. At Apple supplier Foxconn, workers are returning to work on a third of their wages after returning from quarantine. Restaurant workers, meanwhile, find themselves unemployed as clients stay away.

Some employers are making changes. London’s Financial Times is advising white-collar professionals on the etiquette of working at home, and argues that the much-vaunted advent of remote working, outside the office, is finally becoming a reality. Traditional businesses are now moving toward smart and agile working, once exclusively performed in Silicon Valley and the tech industry, in order to prevent their employees from catching the virus and losing more working days. Oil company Chevron has asked its 300-odd London-based staff to work from home.

But these white-collar workers moving to remote working will make a tiny impact on the overall spread of the pandemic, for millions of service and manufacturing workers need to be present at the workplace to perform their jobs. Have workers turn up to work sick, and you risk infecting customers and clients; have them stay at home, and you might have to shut down your business altogether.

The problem is, the culture of “presenteeism” places the burden of the decision on workers — often meaning they’ll turn up to work when they should be staying home. The balance of forces in the workplace — the tyranny of the boss and the worker’s need for wages — thus imposes an irrational decision that endangers society as a whole. If showing up regardless counts as “loyalty to your job,” it’s not actually any good for your coworkers — or for customers.

The Jobs, They Are A-Changing

Yet not only white-collar work cultures are changing. It is also changing workers’ job content — and what our employment looks like. This is particularly the case for those who work in industries that might contribute to disease prevention, such as cleaners and health-care workers; medical staff that can remedy the worst effects of the virus; as well as others who could potentially spread it.

In Nigeria, where the first coronavirus patient was identified this weekend, security guards are being mobilized to distribute sanitizer to people entering buildings. Using some of the lowest-paid workers to prevent an outbreak ought to go hand in hand with added benefits for risky work and, indeed, the right to sick leave so that they can actually do their job effectively. Sadly, this is far from necessarily the case — with the most under-pressure workers instead burdened with more responsibilities but not more remuneration.

This was brought to my attention at a recent museum visit in Brussels, where museum staff ended up having to sanitize visitors’ audio guides. While this seems like a small task, workers rarely receive adequate training for these impromptu tasks that suddenly become part of their job. Even more rarely are they paid anything extra for these additional tasks: it’s all just “part of the job,” bosses insist. Anyone working in these customer-facing service jobs knows only too well how such little tasks and activities quickly pile up to become unmanageable. This is especially the case as sickness exacerbates staff shortages.

In the cleaning industry, coronavirus is intensifying the work regimen, with the introduction of standardized work processes. These are set by standardization bodies dominated by companies that will often codify their own working methods to gain a competitive advantage in the market. But workers don’t have any say in these standards — nor is it scientifically proven that these standards actually produce better outcomes.

Health-care workers tasked with remedying the situation are no better off. A whistleblower at the US Department of Health and Human Services has revealed that the department didn’t equip workers with sufficient protective gear. The lack of protective gear is only getting worse, as the general population is bulk-buying face masks. Thus, even the US Surgeon General has asked the public to refrain from buying the masks, so that health-care professionals who actually need them can contain the coronavirus and treat workers without getting infected themselves.

The Chinese outbreak strikingly illustrates how overburdening hospital workers undermines the entire effort to combat the virus. Here, more than 3,000 Chinese health-care workers have caught the coronavirus, with eight having died. In one case, a patient admitted to a hospital in Wuhan infected at least ten medical workers. The shortage of medical supplies, the increasingly high number of patients, and the high communicability of the virus twinned with stress, long hours, and understaffed hospitals are creating a vicious cycle for those who are meant to manage the crisis.

As coronavirus travels from country to country, there’s little doubt that more workers are going to be responsible for dealing with its effects. What remains in doubt is if this extra burden will mean more remuneration, additional training and improved occupational health and safety. But all this is imperative if those on the front lines are going to be able to maintain basic dignity at work — and do the job they’re meant to be doing.

The End of the Gig Economy?

Workers in the gig economy are at particularly high risk of catching the virus — yet they have among the lowest workplace protections. In China and elsewhere, food delivery drivers might be at the forefront of keeping self-quarantined people fed. Yet they have no knowledge of whether the person ordering food is sick or not.

While tourism is slowing down, service workers who come into regular contact with tourists have been catching coronavirus, with sometimes deadly consequences. In Taiwan, a taxi driver who had picked up passengers from mainland China and Hong Kong died in February. As tourism has slowed, cab drivers in Thailand have had their livelihoods destroyed as their daily wages have fallen from $30 to $10 a day.

Those who feel ill have often resorted to using taxis or ridesharing apps rather than calling ambulances. In London, a coronavirus patient didn’t call an ambulance when she fell ill but instead took an Uber to the closest emergency room, where she walked through the door and presented herself to reception staff. It was a short ride, and the driver didn’t catch the virus. However, these stories highlight the dangers that gig workers are exposed to.

Independent contractors working in the gig economy have no right to sick leave or health-care benefits. The Washington Post has reported that drivers have been scrubbing their cars. Of course, these drivers are not being paid for the time spent on cleaning. Unlike Lyft, Uber sent their drivers an in-app message detailing precautions they should be taking. This only underlines the reality that they are its employees — and should be treated as such.

The employment models of these companies, and their algorithmic management and control over workers, are unsustainable in times of coronavirus. The lack of transparency or basic workers’ rights — with employers doing nothing to protect workers against the spread of the virus —  is meanwhile contributing to anti-Asian racism, as some drivers refuse to pick up Asian-looking passengers.

Workers’ Demands, Unions’ Responses

At present, it looks like coronavirus will continue to exacerbate existing labor-market inequalities. But the labor movement shouldn’t let employers off the hook, as if they were just victims of the situation. Companies should be providing protective gear, offering more working from home, and providing additional paid sick days and health-care benefits.

Britain’s Trades Union Congress (TUC) is leading by example, as it argues for a change to sick pay. For the TUC, workers below the current £118-a-week threshold should be given sick pay — starting from the first day they fall ill. Such a legal change would benefit nearly 2 million workers. On March 3, prime minister Boris Johnson told the House of Commons that statutory sick pay (£94.25 a week) would be extended to the first day off, but he refused to answer Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s question on whether this would apply to part-timers.

Meanwhile, airport security workers at Frankfurt Airport in Germany have demanded that they be allowed to wear face masks. While face masks don’t necessarily stop the virus from spreading, unions certainly should be demanding increased health and safety measures for workers on the front line.

Moreover, unions could demand more days of “home office” or remote working — a popular demand among today’s workforce. While there are issues with working from at home, such as effectively working longer hours, this would particularly benefit women workers — who are more likely to have to balance caring for their children and/or parents.

Without doubt, the coronavirus crisis is bound to bring many changes to the world of work. But, as with any crisis, the question is who is going to foot the bill. For working people, one option is fatalism — just accepting bosses’ claims that dealing with this is now “part of the job.” Or, we can insist that employers take responsibility — and implement the changes needed to keep us and the general public safe.