For the second time in less than two decades, the United States is facing a devastating economic recession. Unlike the Great Recession 12 years ago, prompted by the implosion of an inflated housing market, the one ahead is emerging from the death of service-sector jobs — the jobs responsible for nearly 80% of all U.S. private-sector employment.
More than 20 million people lost employment in April, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the vast majority of them in the leisure, hospitality and restaurant industries. The unemployment rate leaped more than 10% that month, the largest one-month jump since the bureau began tracking monthly rates in 1948. Many of these are lower-wage jobs. Forty percent of Americans make less than $15 an hour, but their labor is the backbone of our consumer-based economy, so much so that the collapse now threatens our nation’s fundamental systems, including energy, food and health care.
The response to the crisis has amplified the irony in our labor system, a system in which low-wage fieldworkers, many of whom are not even eligible for relief funds, are considered essential workers doing critical work.
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Meat processors are considered so vital that the highest office in the land ordered them to keep working for the good of the country, but they are paid on average about $12 an hour, to work in grueling conditions with limited protections against the pandemic.
The coronavirus may have been the spark, but the powder keg has been generations, even centuries, in the making, said Dennis Parker, director of the National Center for Law and Economic Justice based in New York. The center advocates for and litigates on behalf of low-income and economically disadvantaged people, aims to shape policy that helps people move out of poverty, and defends the rights of workers.
Before joining the center, Parker was the director of the Racial Justice Program of the American Civil Liberties Union, leading its efforts in combating discrimination against communities of color, including racial bias in the criminal justice system, housing discrimination, economic justice issues and digital discrimination. Before that, he headed up the New York State Attorney General’s Civil Rights Bureau and worked for 14 years litigating and directing the educational work of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.
Street Roots talked to Parker about what the state of our economy teaches us about how our nation values workers and where it expects sacrifice and about what we can do to guard against a similar workforce catastrophe in the future.
Joanne Zuhl: Low wages are not just a struggle for the worker trying to survive on them. With this pandemic, it seems the fallout is revealing a more systemic problem that affects all of us. They are both being hit hardest by the virus and the pending recession, and their vulnerability is threatening basic supply chain systems in our economy. What does this extraordinary time, socially and economically, teach us about the larger society-wide problems to our structural inequalities?
Dennis Parker: It tells us something about who are the greatest contributors to our society, who are most important in terms of day-to-day survival, and how badly we treat many of those people. The food supply is kept going by workers who are notoriously underpaid, who work in very hostile working conditions, and in many cases are immigrant workers who are being denied the opportunity to get any of the relief that is coming out of the federal government now.
It is this ironic situation of these people who were so important, but we don’t show that importance in the ways that we should in terms of guaranteeing them a right to living wage, a right to medical care, and protection in the jobs that they do. This has been really exposed. In the example of the president designating meat processing as a mandatory activity, we see the facilities that people are working in, massive numbers of people being diagnosed as having COVID-19, but you don’t hear an emphasis on ensuring their safety, on ensuring they are being treated well and justly compensated — that they’re not asked to risk their lives so that the rest of us can have bacon.
Zuhl: What are the roots of this devaluation, despite their critical role in our economy?
Parker: It is so deeply ingrained in American society that it’s sort of hard to get to the ends of the roots. This is not a new phenomenon, in terms of not acknowledging the value of certain occupations. Many times I think that undervaluation comes from racial discrimination or ethnic discrimination, and we see that’s still what’s going on now.
If you look at the history of the Social Security Act and OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Act), which were passed at a time that in many ways is similar to what we’re going through now, in a time when there were sea changes in the economy because of the Great Depression (in the case of Social Security). Even then, there were certain categories that were excluded from Social Security: Agricultural workers, people who worked in the home, servants were specifically excluded, and they were excluded for racially discriminatory reasons. In order to get Southern Democratic members of Congress to vote for the Social Security Act, they had to exclude the jobs that most black people in the South were holding. So from the beginning, we have not completely gotten away from the roots of so much of our system being based in slavery and what followed slavery.
Now, so much of the animus toward people in particular categories — you see people using COVID-19 as an excuse to talk about immigration laws and to try to restrict people coming in from certain countries. And very often, that is very thinly disguised discrimination against particularly Central and South American workers.
This is not new, but it is being pointed out really dramatically now, in terms of who is getting sick and who is dying and who is losing their jobs and who is being asked to put their health at risk in order to continue to do things that enable the economy to continue.
Zuhl: How do we fix this? What are other opportunities for reform? Not just responsive to the current need, but to correct the inequality across our economic system?
Parker: This crisis has created an opportunity to understand structural and institutional discrimination and inequality in a way that seemed theoretical before and now seems particularly actual. I don’t want to concentrate too much on what needs to be done now, except that it illustrates some of the problems that we have to overcome.
For example, the massive unemployment could have been avoided in a couple of ways. One is if we had an accurate system of testing. Had we been prepared for this, we would have been in a better position to deal with the rising numbers of people who are getting the disease. We could have come up with systems rather than doing it on the fly. Putting them in place before that would slow the spread and make it possible to guarantee the safety of workers so that you wouldn’t have the situation that you are having now and will be having more of in the future as we open up the economy.
Also, our response to the potential loss of jobs was both ineffective and really avoided things that are happening in other countries that are more effective. They were largely ineffective in that the relief in the CARES Act and similar legislation ended up benefiting too often people who least need the money — the large corporations, the Shake Shacks of the country and large organizations like it — and they clearly have not been as effective as they need to be in decreasing the amount of unemployment that we see, which is just astronomical.
Zuhl: What did other countries do with their relief packages that worked where we failed?
Parker: The Netherlands and other Scandinavian countries guaranteed that you would get either your current compensation or something close to it, as long as the current company guaranteed that you would not be laid off for the duration of the illness. It’s more expensive, but it kept the economy going; it prevents the problem that we have now of so many people wondering how they’re going to pay their rent and meet all their other expenses. Was it expensive? Yes. But did it shield the workers and ultimately the economy? Yes. We brag about how much we’re paying in these programs, which too often, as I mentioned, benefit the people who have the most already but seem to have sidestepped the people who are losing their jobs on a daily basis, who had been living from month to month before and are now in a worse situation.
Zuhl: So returning to the question of how do we fix this?
Parker: It is good that there were steps made to deal with unemployment, increasing the benefits, increasing the amount of time you can receive the benefits. But again, that may have been prevented if there had been a more aggressive policy early on to keep people in their jobs. But the other problem, even with the increase and the extended period, is what we’re seeing all over the country, that the states are so backed up that people have applied for unemployment and have not heard a word or not been able to get through to the office to apply or get the information they need to make the application.
There are things that can be done immediately. I mentioned the people who are denied access some of these programs, including documented workers who are on work visas. They should be eligible for receiving the benefits. All of those things will have to happen now.
But if this virus disappeared today, which it’s not going to, we would still be left with a system in which access to health care, to a large extent, depends on whether you are employed. Not only do people have to worry about whether they can make the rent, but they have to worry about what happens if they get sick. Very often those are the people who will have just lost their health care. We are seeing people who feel that they are in a situation where even if their jobs are not safe, that they have to keep them up just to survive. And that’s going to be a problem. There has to be steps taken to make sure that a person can be justified to refuse to work in an unsafe environment and not be discharged. There have to be legal protections.
The idea that people can work really difficult full-time jobs and still be making less than minimum wage — even minimum wage itself is not always sustainable — that has to be reexamined.
I think we need a new New Deal, one that looks at safe working places, that looks at livable wages, that looks at medical care for everyone. Those are things that if we go through this again and don’t make changes, we’ll be setting us up for the inevitable future problems.
Zuhl: Statistics are showing that people of color are disproportionately affected by COVID-19, being hospitalized and dying from the virus. Seeing these inequalities playing out on a national level, what should be done to specifically target communities of color?
Parker: What we’re seeing is part of the result of past deprivation that these communities have suffered. I know here in New York the medical facilities within particular neighborhoods have been closing for a number of years. These are in communities that have always been underserved, but now that has deadly consequences. There is still deep-seated discrimination in the way medical services are provided. There’s a huge amount of anecdotal evidence of people of color being turned away and told you should be at home rather than being admitted to the hospital.
Zuhl: That’s not a question of access to health care; that’s all things being equal, the person of color gets turned away, correct?
Parker: Right. And that is not something that we’ve just become aware of now. There have been studies for years showing that doctors tend to under-diagnose serious problems particularly for black people and are more likely to send them home and tell them to rest and take two aspirins rather than send them to hospitals. And that’s continuing now.
There’s one horrible story here of a woman who actually worked in a hospital and tried to get admitted to the hospital where she worked in New York City and was told, “You’re not in serious enough condition to be admitted.” She died shortly thereafter — and she was a hospital worker. It’s an anecdote, a single incidence, but it really illustrates a broader problem.
All of that past discrimination is having a continuing effect. The other thing is that part of that discriminatory effect, that as Nikole Hannah-Jones (Pulitzer Prize winner for The New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project) pointed out, the only time you heard people blaming victims when they are sick with coronavirus is when they’re talking about why black people are affected. You didn’t hear “if it weren’t for your diet” or these other things — many of which are themselves an expression of entrenched discrimination — but that wasn’t even mentioned until it became clear that these diseases were having an impact on communities of color. And part of the reason it was having that impact is a question of where you live and what health care you have access to, whether you have access to a healthy diet, whether you have access to a doctor, whether you can have the luxury of working from home. These are all things that are still allocated in a racially and ethnically discriminatory way and in a way that guarantees that certain communities will be more harshly affected than other communities.
Zuhl: So this is a matter of not just changing policies, but changing attitudes that are overriding policy, is that the case?
Parker: It is, and it’s going to be difficult because some things don’t, on the surface, appear to be related but are. Some of the things involving voting and voter suppression have had the impact of trying to prevent the people who are most affected from having access to the ballot box and having the power to change politics. The state of Florida had a vote where the majority of the people voted in favor of ending the restrictions on voting by people who’ve been convicted of crimes, and the state massively pushed back because it knows that it will tip the ballots in favor of people of color.
There are efforts nationwide to suppress the vote. There is an attempt to hold on to those things that have given rise to the problems we’ve been talking about that will continue to perpetuate the inequality, that will continue to dole out medical care in a way that is discriminatory, that will continue to grant benefits of citizenship more to the people who need them least.
Education is another example. I’ve been hearing of problems of remote access for particular students, either because they don’t have the equipment or they don’t have the internet connections or they live in housing where there’s no quiet space for them to learn. All of these things have an impact going forward, and all of them need to be addressed.
There are Indian reservations where there is no internet. That’s not a problem that’s new, because even before COVID-19, students were not getting the kind of education that they needed to survive in the 21st century, but that’s become more clear.
Zuhl: We have massive, global corporations like Amazon and Walmart that seem to control the strings to our economy. How should we change our approach to these types of companies to bring about more equity in our labor system?
Parker: That is a hard thing. You see how much they push back against efforts to organize by their workers. We all have the obligation to step up and make sure we don’t support companies that have those practices. But again, there are so many ways that the response is the opposite of what it should be, where there is less oversight, where there should be more oversight. This (Trump) administration has been pushing to have less oversight of the way the banking and lending industry works, in spite of the fact that 12 years ago, that industry contributed to, or was the cause of, this massive economic problem. We need to elect people who are responsive and require that they be responsive and make these companies answerable.
Zuhl: What is your organization doing to seize this moment?
Parker: We’re doing a number of things. One is that we’re making sure people know what the alternatives are. A lot of what makes a difference is how much information you have, whether you have a lawyer, basically, and what we’re trying to do is make people aware of all the different programs and making it clear what they can qualify for. We have traditionally done a lot of work about access to government benefit programs and so we are working on cases involving insurance that there are fair processes, and that people can get access to programs and get them quickly.
We’ve been working with a number of groups on the question of debt collection. What we’re seeing all over the country is that the debt collectors are actually stepping up their activities, they’re garnishing wages, they’re hassling people, so we are urging that states pass legislation that will end debt collection during this period.
We’re working on behalf on groups of workers, immigrant, migrant farmworkers, home health care attendants, people who are very vulnerable to make sure that they are not penalized by having to do this important work in conditions that are unsafe. We’re lobbying for legislation that will make sure they are fairly compensated for the work that they do.
We have a case in New York involving environmental quality in New York City public housing and the reduction of mold, and in those cases, we have two seemingly competing interests: One is the residents of this housing who are now, even more, required to live in conditions that are unhealthy and unsafe and that affect the respiratory system and all of those areas that make you vulnerable to coronavirus. The other is that you also have the people who are intended to remediate that, and we want to make sure they can do that vital work in a way that is safe for them and for the residents.
The other thing we are involved in dealing with is disabilities, both in terms of the ability to access programs that currently exist but also future programs. And, in the immediate time, making sure that health care is not allocated in a way that discriminates against people against disabilities. We’re part of a coalition that’s preparing to look at potential litigation on how medical resources are allocated. If you have a limit on the number of ventilators, how do you decide who gets a ventilator? You want to make sure that isn’t done in a way that undervalues people with disabilities and their right to survive.
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