What happens when the jobs just go away?

For about six weeks, I've been very gradually reading Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present, and Future of American Labor by Steven Greenhouse. Greenhouse was the labor reporter for the New York Times for 31 years. He knows what he is talking about.

What you get is an extremely well-reported journalistic tour of U.S. labor history including the epic struggles of needle workers, autoworkers, miners and thousands more industrial workers who won a framework of positive union labor law during the Great Depression; capital's successful clawback of hard won worker rights and victories beginning in the Reagan era; the rapid loss of union legitimacy when too much of labor became more a somnolent bureaucratic institution rather than a justice movement in the mid-20th century; and workers' inventive initiatives to find new organizational forms for fairness and empowerment in the last 20 years. Greenhouse has interviewed the people whose lives tell the story and they are all here.

I enjoyed this book and would heartily recommend it as an introductory history of the apparently endless struggle between owners who exploit and their workers who resist, often tenaciously, imaginatively, and bravely.

But as I finished the book I realized -- the economy within which Greenhouse wrote this book is gone.

In the time it took me to read his story, the pandemic and the public health response had obliterated the context in which he wrote. Twenty-five percent or so of people who used to have jobs don't. And even if some of them were called back to their jobs soon, many will be terrified to return, while employers may not be able to operate in the reduced circumstances.

Many of the drivers of an economy based in consumption may not come back for years: mass entertainment, travel, transportation, restaurants, bars, services, much retail ... what-all we don't know, but will find out.

The medical/industrial complex is being turned upside down and throwing off some workers -- nurses, the staffs of small rural hospitals, doctors in private practices -- while major medical centers are reorganized for massive surges of infectious disease.

Corporate management is getting a good look at whether it needs all that office space. Can "knowledge workers" be kept on call online 24/7 in their own residences without being brought physically together?

Can higher education survive without collecting students on campus -- and do students need to interact in person at all? How much can schools charge for online instruction?

States and cities are about to be broke, unable to pay the employees needed deliver what passes for local governance and a safety net.

Garrett Graff carefully explicates all this:

At every turn, the scale of the disaster is almost unfathomable. Forget the Great Recession or the Crash of ’87. It’s easy to imagine a scenario in which, if we escape a crisis “only” on the scale of the Great Depression, we might be lucky.

Where's labor in all this? Delivery workers and grocery clerks -- currently in great demand in hazardous jobs -- have already tried to push back against exploitation and for health protections. They don't consider themselves disposable. Such rebellions aren't going away; can organized labor rise to helping make something more durable out of this kind of desperation?

Trump's attempt to pretend all's well without doing anything via the federal government to mitigate the pandemic looks to be extended to re-animating the economy. That is, he wants to bet re-election on ceasing to make even feeble efforts to shore up workers and small proprietors who are being wiped out. For the GOPers, the play seems to be to force desperate people to risk their lives to prop up corporate profits. Can organized labor find a role protesting such forced work in unsafe workplaces?

Is the pandemic going to lead to Hunger Marches on Washington to be dispersed by troops and tear gas? That's what happened last time things got this bad.

Professor Betsey Stevenson projects a rocky ride even if the economy does regain some kind of footing. She projects that Trump will get some of what Trump wants, an impression that the job statistics are getting better. But the reality will be less sound or happy.

The first few months in which the data show job growth, we’ll simply be learning which jobs were never really lost in the first place. It’s then that we’ll be able to see which industries have shrunk, which businesses reduced their output or shuttered entirely, and which workers need to find new employers or a different kind of work.

... If businesses that open see only a handful of customers return then they will likely conclude that they need fewer employees, ultimately leading to more permanent job destruction.

If, instead, states wait to reopen until they have built better public health plans that inspire more confidence, businesses will likely see a sharper increase in demand when they ultimately reopen.

This is the economic reality we've entered over the last two months. It's not much like any of the contexts in which Steven Greenhouse tells the story of labor. But what runs across his book is that however ignored and suppressed people may be, they will search out new ways to fight for themselves, their families, their communities. They will in this time too.