Grocery delivery: both less and more than just a job

Last week we ordered groceries from Costco, delivered by an Instacart "shopper." (I guess that label is better, more accurate, than calling a worker an "associate," but cloying euphemisms about people doing work under arrangements with lousy or no benefits still annoy me.) We've ordered several times since the lockdown. I figured out that I was suspicious of Instacart a couple of years ago, so I feel uneasy about this. I was lucky enough to have been raised in a moment in U.S. history -- the aftermath of the Great Depression and World War II -- when even middle class white people thought you did your dirty and dreary work for yourselves. But here we are and ordering groceries if we can afford to has become a public health practice.

So what kind of business is Instacart and the many analogous services? According to the Washington Post, these gig jobs are a booming business.

Instacart, founded in 2012, more than doubled its workforce in two months, thanks in part to Facebook ads with the coronavirus-sensitive slogan “Make money without passengers.” ... In interviews with 20 people who signed up for these jobs since the coronavirus crisis hit two months ago, workers said the barrier to entry was low, requiring little more than a background check, driver’s license and car insurance. But many found a steep learning curve in navigating company policies that shape pay and hours. Nearly all recruits said the availability of work and pay dropped off after a few weeks. ...

... Instacart’s algorithm organizes grocery orders into “batches,” which can include up to three different customers. Workers then select gigs from a Twitter-like feed, which shows earnings per batch in one lump sum, including tips.

So workers are essentially competing with each other, online, for what look like the best "batches." And then what is actually paid can change if some items turn out to be out-of-stock or if the customer changes the percentage of tip after the worker takes on their project. The default tip in the Instacart app is 5 percent of the cost of the groceries. Decent people bump it up; no tip is required from cheapskates. It's not clear what compensation "shoppers" receive beyond the tips -- varies by locality and their costs of doing the work such as gas. Maybe $10 to 15 an hour according to forums. There seems to be no promise of any particular wage from Instacart.

And then workers carry the inherent risk of encountering the coronavirus while in the stores or (less likely) at doors.

Some of Instacart's many new hires during the pandemic are happy with their role. Fox Business found an Instacart enthusiast to interview.

Sarah Hlad has been an Instacart shopper since early April, and already she’s earned almost $3,000.

“The first week I did it, I paid off my whole credit card,” she told FOX Business.

... On an average day, Hlad said she makes between $100 and $120, doing about three to four batches a day.

Ms. Hlad seems to be single, without dependents -- and seems to be doing the gig as a temporary fill-in until the pandemic threat wanes. This might not look so good to workers driven by greater needs.

For some "shoppers," the promise of delivering groceries has turned sour. According to CNET, part of how Instacart has been attracting hundreds of thousands of new workers is by promising sick pay if they catch COVID. But it seems the company seldom -- or maybe never -- honors that promise.

Like hundreds of thousands of other people across the country, Rachel worried she'd contracted COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. Her doctor recommended a test for the respiratory illness and told her to quarantine as she waited for the results, which could take a couple of weeks. Unable to work, Rachel sent Instacart a letter from her doctor. She asked for the sick pay that the company said it was offering workers during the pandemic.

"We carefully reviewed the documentation and, unfortunately, we were unable to confirm this claim at this time," Instacart responded 14 days later in an email seen by CNET.  To get approved, the company said Rachel would have to provide either a positive COVID-19 test or get a "mandatory quarantine order by [a] public health agency." A doctor's letter wasn't enough.

Dozens of other Instacart shoppers say they've also had doctor's notes turned down and were told to get a letter from a public health agency, according to advocacy group Gig Workers Collective. They say Instacart's sick leave policy creates a catch-22 because it's nearly impossible to get that documentation. Of the group's 17,000 members who are Instacart shoppers, only one is known to have gotten paid leave.

"Apart from that particular shopper, I don't know of a single other person," said Vanessa Bain, an organizer for Gig Workers Collective. "It's literally designed to keep people from being able to access it."

Some benefit.

And yet -- and yet -- the explosion of gig work delivering groceries during the pandemic also has evoked for some who've taken it on that wonderful experience we all wish existed more often in whatever we do to bring in our necessary sustenance. They are proud and fulfilled to be doing something that seems needed and worthwhile. This lovely video (not about Instacart but one of its analogues) reminds us what "work" might be and can be. Take the time to view. This guy cares.
If only this proud emotion were not so often exploited to turn a profit for others whose motives are entirely to make money for themselves.

A visualization

That makes for one hell of a Memorial Day.

Here's the deal ...

Those Aussies don't hesitate to tell it like it is.

H/t my friend Ronni's wise blog where she too tells it how it is.

Digital creativity for 2020

There's been an awful lot of Democratic political consultant hand wringing that President Trump's online campaign -- which never stopped working after November 2016 -- was miles ahead of anything that a Democratic candidate could put out there. And then came the virus and effective digital outreach became all that much more vital.

I get it. But I also have suspected that the apparent Democratic disadvantage might turn into new ways of campaigning.

People who've made careers in winning elections can get set in their ways. They tend to think that, with enough polling and focus groups, they can devise the perfect message. Their project then becomes getting the candidate, and the staff, and organizers, and volunteers saying the right things -- and only the right things. This is not completely crazy. Polling said voters were worried that Republicans would take away their health care in 2018 and it was appropriate to remind them. And it seemed to work. But anyone who actually talked with voters heard many other concerns and capable canvassers learned to listen. Listening is good; voters like it.

Meanwhile, consultants get paid for delivering their preferred messages via TV (they get a cut of ad spending) and mail (which they produce for a fee.) I'm not saying their relationship to a candidacy is entirely mercenary, but it can lend itself to formulaic thinking.

Digital messaging that works is something else again. It's imaginative; it's a little anarchic; it's sometimes transgressive. And it most likely is going to happen outside the regular campaign structures. And in this moment, maybe that's what Joe Biden needs, an assault on the Orangeman from 1000 directions. The creative juice is there. Don't try to tell me that people who want decent lives -- want peace, justice, fairness and just to get along -- can't win a culture war.

Take this, for example, created by Kylie Scott on the TikTok platform.

@kyscottt

ur doing great sweetie ##antibiotics ##covid19 ##covid ##quarantine ##intheclub ##drunkwords ##trump

♬ original sound - iampeterchao

Not perhaps how I'd deliver the message that we have to depose this dangerous clown who might kill us -- but I'm not the target. The digital artists' role is to deliver their art. The campaign's role is to figure out how to turn people who will look and listen to it -- and who want to express themselves also -- into voters.

The 2020 campaign will likely see unprecedented creativity, because it must. I will try to chronicle the stuff folks come up with as I see it.

Friday cat blogging

Too lovely not to post, despite ongoing mourning for Morty. Yes, that's a cat leash. If such a lovely animal every deigned to live with me, I'd keep it in on a leash too. Encountered while Walking San Francisco.

As alternatives emerge ...

Looks like we're entering the "You Are All on Your Own" phase of how to live with coronavirus risk.

As ever, there's zero effective guidance from the Feds -- Trump has quit even pretending to lead against illness and death, wishfully celebrating a non-existent normalcy.

Many states and cities, including California and San Francisco, have done rather more during the lock-down phase of living with COVID, issuing fairly clear rules and enjoying wide-spread cooperation. But now any unified official guidance is splintering.

“You have 50 different governors doing 50 different things,” said Andrew Noymer, an associate professor of public health at the University of California, Irvine. ...

“Everyone wants us to talk about policy, but in fact personal behavior still matters a lot here,” said Kent Smetters, the faculty director at the Penn Wharton Budget Model.

New York Times

As we try to pick up the threads of our lives, we again face choices.

I think I know the limits for myself: lock-down has not been difficult for me. I've been tiptoeing around the edges of the restrictions, visiting widely spaced areas of this city while Walking San Francisco, running in empty streets at dawn, but avoiding all close contact with other people from outside our household except for grocery shopping. I wear scarves and masks. I can live much like this for a long time. I feel absurdly lucky. One of these days I'll write a post about what I yearn for that's no longer available. But this is okay for now.

But, underlying it all, COVID has made it abundantly clear that I have to think of myself as an elder at 72. In the early days of the shut-down when younger friends checked in on us, we were pleasantly amused. But they were right to do so and we learn to gladly accept it.

I think the next phase is likely to be confusing for a lot of old people. The San Francisco Chronicle took up this topic yesterday.

Those who are 65 years and older account for 80% of coronavirus-related deaths in the United States. That’s not just a matter of hypertension — though the chances of having a comorbidity increase with age.

“Aging itself affects virtually every organ system in our body,” said Laura Carstensen, the founding director of Stanford University’s Center on Longevity. “We don’t regulate temperature as well as we get older. Our lungs don’t function quite as well as we get older. They’re considered ‘normal changes’ with age. . . . But normal, by definition, means it happens to virtually all people.”

... Still, a 65-year-old is no more like a 90-year-old than they are a 45-year-old. “If you look at the curve anywhere, the risk is not equally distributed,” [Louise Aronson, a professor of medicine at UCSF] said. “The death rate starts going up in the 50s. It goes up more in the 60s. It gets pretty bad in the 70s. It looks god-awful after 80. So we’re sort of lumping them. But more importantly than that is we’re stripping them of their agency.”

Aronson seems to lean toward the risk-taking end of the curve. She describes an 85 year old friend whose sheltering-in-place behavior sounds a lot like mine: that women has been taking advantage of the early morning hours when streets are empty to go outside.

“The same guidelines,” Aronson said, “the same restrictions should apply to everybody who is a competent adult.”

I think I agree. But I also appreciate that smart research scientists are trying to give us some parameters to help us make the many choices we'll all face in what looks to be another year of pandemic living.

Good news we could easily miss ...

The University of California announced Tuesday that it has fully divested from all fossil fuels, the nation’s largest educational institution to do so as campaigns to fight climate change through investment strategies proliferate at campuses across the country.

The UC milestone capped a five-year effort to move the public research university system’s $126-billion portfolio into more environmentally sustainable investments, such as wind and solar energy. UC officials say their strategy is grounded in concerns about the planet’s future and in what makes financial sense.

“As long-term investors, we believe the university and its stakeholders are much better served by investing in promising opportunities in the alternative energy field rather than gambling on oil and gas,” Richard Sherman, chair of the UC Board of Regents’ investments committee, said in a statement.

Teresa Watanabe, Los Angeles Times

The article goes on to discuss quite thoroughly the long history of activism to force public institutions out of thrall to dirty energy giants. Hampshire College, a prestigious though precarious, institution led the way as far back as 2011. Other prestigious universities such as Harvard and Stanford seem on a path to follow. But U.C. is the big fish setting a path for academia.

University divestment signals that our best minds and scientists know that fossil fuels are a dead end. That matters.

Some of these bristlecone pines have survived over 4000 years. We can try to let them live another millennium by preserving the harsh habitat in the White Mountains where they thrive.

RIP Norma McCorvey

We don't get FX, but eventually I do intend to watch this. I had not realized that she was a lesbian. Or understood what she came out of.

Out and about San Francisco

Last week I did something I don't do often. I signed on to an advocacy organization's letter to an official. Walk San Francisco has called out what is all too obvious as our city's shelter-in-place condition wanes: this was a calmer, safer place with 60 percent less traffic. That's not going to last forever, but it seems worthwhile to remember how much we liked it and encourage measures to make extra-vehicular travel as viable as possible.

Vehicle traffic is starting to rise as some restrictions are lifted. And traffic could ultimately far exceed previous levels as fewer people use public transportation, according to a recent Vanderbilt University study. Meanwhile more people than ever are walking and biking to get around, as well as to get exercise.

This means that without immediate action by the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, we will soon see a tragic surge in severe and fatal traffic crashes in San Francisco, especially among our most vulnerable. And the City’s Vision Zero goal [for ending pedestrian deaths and injuries] will slip out of sight.

Walking the city's streets is about to become even more fraught than it was before the lockdown. For a while now, I've usually worn a yellow vest when wandering about, hoping to make my pedestrian body more visible to drivers.

Walk San Francisco offers an extensive menu of traffic calming policies that could help.

Meanwhile, Chronicle columnist Heather Knight has come up with a fine idea based the experience of the last two months. Why not keep one lane of the Great Highway along the ocean closed and let it become a broad walkway for runners, skaters, cyclists, and the fellow I saw today practicing with his hockey puck?

... keep the southbound side by the beach the way it is. Call it the Great Walkway.

Meanwhile, I'm still Walking San Francisco -- friend Britta Shoot writes about two women currently crazy enough to be covering the whole city on foot at Hoodline.

Preview of November election hotspots

This turned up in a Texas Dems campaign fundraising pitch. It deserves pondering and internalizing for all of us bent on evicting the Orange catastrophe next fall.

I think I'm glad they are at least claiming to put Texas into the mix of battleground states. It's terribly expensive to contest -- but the electorate there is the country's future.

The states with crosshatches, uniquely, award some of their electoral votes based on which party wins in each Congressional district. Barack Obama picked up one in the most liberal district in Nebraska; we could lose one in northern Maine if the Congressional contest goes badly there.

The states with asterisks are some of the ones with Senate contests. Dems need every Senate seat we can possibly turn. By pundit consensus, the most likely are Arizona, Colorado, North Carolina and Maine, followed by Georgia, Iowa and Montana. South Carolina, Kansas and Texas are very, very long shots at the Senate level.

Click on the map to enlarge. Not sure where we'll be in the fall, but we'll be working for change somewhere indicated by this map.

Caption contest

Two dim looking men. One Sharpie. What's he up to?

From my clutter: brief items, sadly all COVID related

A terrible warning
The people of this Canadian church thought they were doing everything right -- limiting numbers at a birthday celebration, practicing distancing, washing their hands. It didn't work.

Despite that, 24 of the 41 people at the party ended up infected. Two of them died.

This is a cautionary tale I wouldn't want to live.

Must the 90,000 dead be unmarked?
Micki McElya, a historian of how our society mourns asks why we treat COVID deaths as entirely private griefs.

There have been no political funerals for the pandemic dead. In the absence of official national mourning, we’ve not seen many spontaneous memorials or vigils at all. Instead, plenty of flag-waving demonstrations to end stay-at-home orders and reopen businesses pop up all over the country. We’ve seen American Patriot Rally protesters armed with rifles in the Michigan State House as legislators debated whether to approve the governor’s request to extend the shutdown in that state. We’ve seen pandemic-fatigued New Yorkers rush to parks on the first warm day, barely distanced and some unmasked. But we’ve seen no comparable mass action for the dead.

... China recently observed a National Day of Mourning, and Spain plans to have a period of mourning when its lockdown eases. In the United States, we have not had so much as a collective moment of silence, even as the number of COVID-19 deaths exceeded the number of Americans killed in the Vietnam War. The American flag still flies high atop the White House. Instead, every reference to the costs of the pandemic seems to refer to individual losses and pain, the private grieving that is now rampant. ... Minneapolis Star Tribune

Obviously the last thing we want are well-attended public gatherings, but we ought to have the ingenuity to offer something unifying in response to 90,000 individual tragedies. And that's despite our lack of leadership ...

California is not really having success at stopping the coronavirus
It's easy, sheltering in place comfortably in San Francisco, to get the impression that the state is really doing quite well. Hardly anyone I know has been infected by the virus; those who have been sick have recovered. Most of us who can have accommodated ourselves to considerably constrained lives of infrequent excursions wearing masks and perhaps some boredom. But Kelsey Piper carefully explains that any impression that we're through the worst of this is simply unfounded. We're going to be living in some version of this for a long time ...

California is in limbo and is making very little progress toward an exit strategy. Case numbers aren’t falling, despite the lockdown. Testing is increasing, but too slowly. The state can’t meet its goals for contact tracing and isolating exposed people. The state’s guidelines for when to reopen look reasonable, but it’s not clear when (or if) they’ll actually be met.

This is bad news. It’s also jarring, because California has more resources, more public cooperation, and in many respects better leadership than most states. If all those advantages have nonetheless left the state with no real path to reopen, it seems as though most states should expect even worse. California’s experience illustrates just how vexing the coronavirus has been to deal with — and just how steep the challenge is for the country as a whole as it inches its way to a reopening that it hasn’t yet earned.

I want this to be wrong, but I find this exposition both informed and convincing. We need to adjust our expectations and hopes to accept a long, precarious siege of ill health, accompanied by awful economic pain. Read it all.

Saturday scenery: masked city

We not only wear masks ourselves around here; our icons wear them. If your cultural competence needs a prompt as much as mine, that's Tony Bennet belting out "I Left My Heart in San Francisco" in front of the Fairmont Hotel.

Most of us believe the science. And many of us would happily inconvenience ourselves to follow where it leads us.

Wearing masks is really important for reducing coronavirus transmission. A study by a team of five researchers out of Hong Kong and several European universities calculates that if 80 percent of a population can be persuaded to don masks, that would cut transmission levels to one-twelfth of what you’d have in a mask-less society. Widespread use of masks is likely part of the reason Japan’s coronavirus outbreak has been mild thus far, and grassroots mobilization starting with masks is almost universally seen as part of the Hong Kong success story.

For the broad population, the key fact is that while wearing a mask does little to protect the wearer from the risk of getting infected, it does a lot to prevent the risk that the wearer spreads the virus to other people. Consequently, an interdisciplinary Yale team featuring biologists, medical doctors, economists, and public health specialists calculates that “the benefits of each additional cloth mask worn by the public are conservatively in the $3,000-$6,000 range due to their impact in slowing the spread of the virus.” And the benefits of professional-grade masks for health care workers may be even higher.

Matthew Yglesias, Vox

Rogue street artists who have had a field day decorating our boarded up storefronts offer their own cultural commentary. Their ambiguous tribute seems fitting now that masks have become a symbol of partisan division. Trump thinks he might be un-manned by wearing a mask. Not so; he's a pathetic specimen with or without one.

Wearing a mask when you’re among other people isn’t about being afraid. It’s about being considerate. You’re reducing the risk to the people around you.

Not wearing a mask isn’t brave, it’s rude and selfish.

— Darcy Burner (@DarcyBurner) May 16, 2020

Marni Sweetland photo

I wear a buff when running, pulling it up when I see other runners coming. If the parks remain as crowded as they are now, I'll become used to breathing through it. I wear a mask when Walking San Francisco unless there is no one in sight. I guess I'll be wearing a mask for the next 18 months.

A tale of two turfs

San Francisco continues its foot-dragging failure to improve conditions for its unhoused tent residents crowding the Civic Center and Tenderloin neighborhoods. Mission Local reports:

Although the Tenderloin plan calls for safe sleeping sites “in and outside of the Tenderloin” it did not list any specific locations, but it listed Tenderloin parking lots, sidewalks, and blocked off streets as possible safe sleeping sites.

[Pratibha] Tekkey, the director of community organizing at the Central City SRO Collaborative, said the parking lots listed in the plan, such as the vacant lots at 180 Jones and on Hyde and Turk, are “extremely small” and can only have up to 15 tents to be able to follow social distancing protocols.

“It doesn’t make sense to have 10 tents in each parking lot,” she said. “You’re still not changing what the problem is.”

That is, hundreds of homeless people in a dense neighborhood alongside 25,000 housed residents who also do not feel safe leaving their homes and going to essential businesses during the pandemic, Tekkey said.

Meanwhile in the far southeast of the city, there's this:

Tuesday, May 12, 2020

According to a San Francisco Examiner account, Bayview neighborhood non-profits got tired of waiting for action from the city.

Bayview homeless advocates and nonprofits have set up a tent encampment at Bayview Park in reaction to The City’s slow action to find shelter for the neighborhood’s unhoused residents during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Community organizers from the United Council of Human Services, also known as Mother Brown’s, and Beds 4 Bayview, established the camp in the park near the closed Martin Luther King Jr. pool with 40 tents arranged to allow for social distancing. Encampment residents have access to restroom facilities on site, and are being supplied with water, food, security and other services by the organizations.

It looked like a big improvement on city center conditions or even the doorways on Valencia Street to me. Though of course unhoused people are just as much attached to their accustomed neighborhoods as the rest of us ...

Who feels welcome on public lands?

Runner and advocate Faith E. Briggs used to run through the streets of Brooklyn every morning. Now, she’s running 150 miles through three U.S. National Monuments ... She's claiming what's ours and therefore hers.

National Monuments say "what do we care about." ... Being a 'public land owner' gives me a huge sense of responsibility.

This is beautiful and makes the trail runner in me totally jealous.

For the record: Trump is a quitter ...

and we, the people, are screwed. Because the administration has not used the two month shelter-in-place period to get a tough testing, tracing, and quarantining program in place, we have both wider spread of deadly COVID-19 infections and a trashed economy. And we are going to live with this until there's a vaccine or perhaps until 70% or so of us catch the murderous virus, resulting in an estimated million-plus deaths. That's what achieving "herd immunity" means. Meanwhile our feckless president burbles on:

... the Trump administration still has no plan for dealing with the global pandemic or its fallout. The president has cast doubt on the need for a vaccine or expanded testing. He has no evident plan for contact tracing. He has no treatment ideas beyond the drug remdesivir, since Trump’s marketing campaign for hydroxychloroquine ended in disaster. And, facing the worst economy since the Great Depression, the White House has no plan for that, either, beyond a quixotic hope that consumer demand will snap back as soon as businesses reopen.

Echoing his breezy language in the earliest days of the pandemic, Trump has in recent days returned to a blithe faith that the disease will simply disappear of its own accord, without a major government response.

“I feel about vaccines like I feel about tests: This is going to go away without a vaccine,” Trump said Friday. “It’s going to go away, and we’re not going to see it again, hopefully, after a period of time.”

David Graham, The Atlantic

This catastrophe was preventable.

We will live with -- and too many will die on account of -- this lazy, ignorant man in the White House. He can't do the job and he won't get out of the way for people who could because the only thing he values is being the center of attention. He's just a lazy, egotistical quitter.

Image by David Lawrence Hawkins.

Laid off workers support a longer shut down

It was particularly striking in the story of the Chinese American neighborhood which largely escaped infection by coronavirus that workers in the Chinese groceries both pushed to close their stores as COVID spread and understood when it might be safe(r) to reopen.

Maybe our governing authorities should pay attention to what many people who have lost their jobs want from their governments. Seventy-nine percent believe their well-being would be best served by staying locked down.

That’s a remarkable number — and it’s one that suggests these people are taking a longer-term approach to getting back to work than Trump does. It seems they believe the best way to actually get back to work and stay there is to no longer have to deal with the outbreak, which makes complete logical sense. Perhaps they also fear that going back to work could mean their own exposure to the virus, given that many of them come from service industries.

Washington Post poll

Chinese immigrants knew what to do

Thanks to a tip from TPM, I've learned that some Chinese immigrant communities realized very early on that an infectious virus was on bearing down on us all. Unlike most of us, they brought vivid experience of SARS and other influenza diseases and they had relatives in the old country who conveyed the horror of what was happening in China as soon as that government locked down Wuhan. Streetsblog reports that in hard hit New York City, poor Asian American communities have only a small number of cases of COVID-19.

It was muscle memory — and WeChat.

Asian-Americans, who comprise 14 percent of the city population, have suffered just 7 percent of the COVID-19 deaths, the lowest share, according to state data broken down by race and ethnicity. Additionally, the ZIP codes of Chinatown in Manhattan, 10009 and 10003, have some of the lowest confirmed COVID-19 cases and death rates in the city.

By comparison, whites, who comprise 32 percent of the population, account for 27 percent of the deaths. African-Americans, who are 22 percent of the population, have suffered 28 percent of the deaths. ...

Ann Choi and Josefa Velasquez provide more detail in The City, describing what amounts to a natural experiment that proves that early action in a Chinese community has saved much suffering and many lives. In the borough of Queens, the neighborhoods of Flushing Meadows and Corona Park are located next to each other, the former home to many Chinese immigrants, the latter to a predominantly Latinx population.

Both are high-density areas with similar socioeconomic profiles. They’re linked by the usually crowded No. 7 train.

Nearly half of workers in both neighborhoods are employed in food service, construction, cleaning and transportation — jobs that New York State has deemed essential through the pandemic.

Residents of both places typically have household income below the Queens median and a similar share of people who lack health insurance, as measured by the U.S. Census Bureau. And almost half of apartments and houses in both areas have more than one occupant per room, the Census definition of crowded.

But Chinese immigrants knew what to do about the menace over the horizon.

“I was very aware when the virus first started in China,” said a Flushing nurse, originally from China, who spoke with THE CITY on the condition of anonymity. “I knew we’d be hit hard if America didn’t prepare,” she said.

... By mid-March, Crystal, who did not want her last name published, and her 67-year old mother had already gotten into the habit of wearing masks and gloves whenever they left their Flushing apartment.

They had already stocked up on Lysol and had a disinfectant routine. The pair even purchased alcohol to make their own hand sanitizer.

... Although New York deems grocery stores are essential businesses, allowing them to stay open during the shutdown, Chinese grocery stores in Flushing closed their doors in late March.

Seeing the destruction COVID-19 was wreaking in China, Flushing grocery store managers were already taking precautions by February to protect employees and shoppers by distributing masks at the front of the store or requiring mask wearing, said Peter Tu, the executive director of the Flushing Chinese Business Association.

Stores installed Plexiglass sheets at cash registers to protect workers from aerated germs.

But that wasn’t enough for workers.

“Because the supermarket is so busy, they have to always come in contact with the customer a lot,” Tu said.

“The supermarkets, they don’t want to close. But their employees — they don’t want to work,” said Tu. “So the owner has no choice but to close because people are scared.”

Stores are only now beginning to reopen. It would be hard to find a clearer proof that communication, leadership, and listening to informed workers is likely to be the best way to mitigate galloping spread of infections. Too bad those advantages are so lacking in so much of this country.

I took the photo of the street sweeper that heads this post in San Francisco Chinatown on February 1 while Walking San Francisco. I liked the image, but didn't want to post it because mask wearing has been a negative stereotype for Chinese American communities. Well, I guess that's over ... at least it should be.

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.

Mother's Day

Martha Roberts Sidway, age 11, 1919

In photos later in her long life, she assumed that fixed stare whenever she was aware of the camera. This was how she wanted to be seen -- solid, determined, strong.

As her daughter, I didn't always see her that way. I was frustrated by what I saw as her accommodations to social dictates for feminine behavior that signaled less self-confidence, less self-assertion. These seemed at odds with a tough core.

We came up in different times. I have to give it to her that she seemed to trust that however I was negotiating a way in a very different world, I was all right.

I remember asking whether she had any memory of the influenza epidemic of 1918. She didn't much: perhaps the family had kept the children inside without explanation? Buffalo suffered a major wave of infections that autumn, leading to a month long closure order. It was just one more terrible thing that happened in a world whose horrors she chose not to look away from.

The sailor suit in this picture seems odd. She liked boats and all things naval, including naval officers, but this doesn't seem quite characteristic. Perhaps the photographer supplied children brought for portraits with costumes?

Saturday scenery: a San Francisco treat

When the peace parade is finished, where to park your missile? It's a conundrum.

Perhaps next to a crumbling greenhouse in San Francisco's Portola district, in the southeastern reaches of the city.

Warmongers past are here.

While the monster du jour occupies the rump of the projectile.

Encountered while Walking San Francisco.

A new "don't ask don't tell" policy?

A long distance friend and I were comparing notes about living in lockdown today and realized that we share a difference from many of our acquaintances. She lived in lower Manhattan and I lived in San Francisco in the early 1980s. We've lived through the early phase of a terrible epidemic all around us before -- a new affliction whose origin and transmission was barely understood; a potent stew of information and misinformation that roused fears and irrational hopes ; and too many deaths. That was AIDS/HIV for a subset of the U.S. population.

And our institutions failed that crisis badly for years. We've seen that before too.

So when I run across a crazy story along these lines, it fits in an existing mental file:

Coronavirus survivors banned from joining the military A past COVID-19 diagnosis is a no-go for processing, according to a recently released MEPCOM memo circulating on Twitter.

“During the medical history interview or examination, a history of COVID-19, confirmed by either a laboratory test or a clinician diagnosis, is permanently disqualifying ...” the memo reads.

Military Times

One day later, a confusing update seemed to step back from setting a blanket policy. Only recruits who had been hospitalized (no clear definition) with a COVID-19 diagnosis were to be excluded.

Adam Weinstein observes that this bit of biased fancy footwork is guaranteed to produce further harm to people looking for a job in the military.

the military is providing volunteers with a powerful incentive not to get tested for exposure to the coronavirus. According to the guidance, if an enlistee shows up at MEPS with Covid-19 symptoms, “but without confirmation by either a laboratory test or a clinician diagnosis,” they “will be allowed to return to the MEPS to continue processing” after a 14-day quarantine. ...

Just before its coronavirus-ban memo came to light, in fact, the military proudly unveiled its first Space Force recruiting commercial. “Some people look to the stars and ask: ‘What if?’” the ad’s narrator says. “Our job is to have an answer.” For now, if you’ve tested positive for the novel coronavirus, the answer is “No.”

I'm no fan of anyone joining the military, but given that young people are entering the workforce in a time of unparalleled unemployment, the notion that the military would set up an entrance hurdle which has no basis but prejudice seems grossly unfair. And stupid. And self-defeating. Anyone who has seen how poorly the U.S. government has treated its own in this emergency is likely to think twice about signing on for more. They might even know what happened to Navy Captain Crozier and his infected aircraft carrier crew.

Way to go San Francisco

Went out Walking San Francisco this afternoon in a neighborhood plastered with these notices about free testing for the coronavirus. Erudite Partner reports that these were also all over Valencia Street and Noe Valley. But the flyers I saw were probably more usefully placed: they were all over Silver Terrace on the edge of the Bayview, as working class a neighborhood as we still have in this glittering city. Good work, whoever organized the distribution.

Campaign tactic from a basement office

Joe Biden was not who I had in mind for a Democratic presidential candidate. Far from it. But he (or his campaign) in doing a pretty good job of truth telling via Twitter in this situation when he's reduced to campaigning like Calvin Coolidge -- locked up in his home. Twitter is only one medium, but Biden's contributions are pithy. I encourage following @Joe Biden

Real presidents lead. Reality TV presidents don’t. pic.twitter.com/2lMwnRXLcG

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) May 7, 2020

The virus comes for California Pacific Islanders

The Mission district mass COVID-19 tests I wrote about yesterday turned up that 5 percent among the infected slice of my neighbors are "Asian or Pacific Islander." I'm always curious what actual ethnic or country origins are hidden under that sweeping but uninformative label.

Reporting by CalMatters presents one possible answer. The arrival of coronavirus has shown that, within the omnibus category, too many Pacific Islanders in California reside in a "public health blind spot."

As of Sunday, the novel coronavirus had infected Pacific Islanders at a rate more than twice that of the state as a whole — and killed them at a rate 2.6 times higher, the highest rates of any racial or ethnic group.

While the numbers are still small — California reported 416 known cases and 20 deaths among Pacific Islanders — they reveal a growing threat in a community that suffers disproportionately high rates of chronic illness, accustomed to living in multigenerational households and work higher-risk jobs such as food service, transportation and health care that can’t be done from home.

Activist leaders have been asking for better counting and more educational focus on this small community for a long time -- without notable success.

“Given the spread like fire of this pandemic, the urgency has been magnified,” [Natalie] Ah Soon [of the Regional Pacific Islander Task Force] said.

Statewide, only a handful of counties disaggregate Pacific Islander data. Many don’t report race or ethnicity at all. For example, Santa Clara combines data for Pacific Islanders with Asians. In Sacramento County, Pacific Islanders are counted as “Other.”

“We are not currently tailoring any outreach to this community because of the very small percentage it makes up of the population and impact,” said Sacramento spokeswoman Janna Haynes. Pacific Islanders comprise 1.7% of the county population.

These days, the community has a champion who has been there himself. Dr. Raynald Samoa is an endocrinologist at a cancer research hospital in Los Angeles. In late March, he fell ill with COVID19. Having recovered, he is seeking to educate his community, especially traditionalists for whom social distancing violates habits and customs.

"Jesus sent me to medical school to tell you to stay home."

Let's pitch in for 1800 hand washing stations in rural Nicaragua

For thirty years, El Porvenir has been helping Nicaraguans help themselves dig communal wells, build sustainable latrines, and teach sanitation and health in schools. Who might be better placed to provide the materials and support for home hand washing facilities in the midst of the pandemic?

We've all learned that frequent hand washing can help keep us safe. Let's aid Nicaraguan families with the buckets and soap they need to do the same. This is cheap, easy, and a little goes a long way.

We've partnered with One Days Wages to match some of the costs. You can contribute at that link -- or directly through El Porvenir.

Close to home ... I try to grasp what the data means

Parts of the Mission neighborhood, my home, have just become one of the more thoroughly coronavirus-tested spots in the country. The full results aren't published yet, but UC San Francisco has summarized initial results from two days work to test a little over 4000 residents. The Chron has the story here. Mission Local has what I find the clearest account.

Of the people tested, 1.8 percent (73 individuals) showed the markers of a current infection with the virus; over half of those, 53 percent, had no symptoms of disease -- and very likely didn't know they had it and might be spreading it. Ninety-five percent of those with the infection were Latinx, though Latinx people were only 44 percent of the tested population. No whites or Blacks tested positive though these groups together amounted to 40 percent of the sample. The remaining 5 percent of positive cases are called "Asian" -- perhaps Filipinos?

Starkly, seventy-five percent of those currently infected were male.

It seems pretty clear: at present in San Francisco, those getting COVID-19 are men going out of necessity every day to earn a living. The Mission has many old multi-flat buildings within which rooms are rented out to single laborers, sometimes several guys jammed together. These rooms come with padlocks for each door and shared bathrooms, minimal kitchen facilities. These facilities are just a small step above living on the street; they house people who do the dirtiest work of the city. And these folks are getting infected.

What about families? Are less women currently infected because they've been needed to stop work outside the home to care for children no longer in school, leaving the bread-winning to the men? I don't know.

At the moment, San Francisco seems a largely safe harbor from the virus if you don't have to go out to encounter significant numbers of other residents every day.

There's so much we don't know yet about the patterns of life that underlie the infection data. We may learn more later this month when the information derived from blood taken in the testing has been analyzed. Maybe even more significant numbers of Mission residents will show antibodies that reveal they were infected six weeks ago and have passed through and out of the infection storm. Not terribly likely, but possible. That's what shelter-in-place is all about.

And someday, soon-ish, more people will start going out again. We aren't going to stay away from each other forever. We just won't. Trump's protesting goons are fools tempting Darwinian retribution, but a broader community life will resume. And then there will be more opportunities for everyone who emerges from sheltering to encounter the virus. In history, societies have restored themselves after plagues when most people had developed some immunity the hard way. I sure hope we get a vaccine, and soon. But it is sinking in that this is just one phase and we have a long way, and very likely a lot more sickness, to go.

For the record: there's mourning in America

The Lincoln Project is a bunch of Republican campaign consultants funded by a few big money former GOPers who don't think the country can survive four more years of Donald Trump. They certainly are doing a good job of making their point. If you haven't seen this, do run the one-minute ad.

It's an historical truism that when societies are falling to fascist rule, disunity among the opponents of the thugs makes the success of the bad guys more likely. People who neither like nor trust each other have to work together to save a semi-decent, quasi-democratic polity.

A couple of years ago, I laid out some bottom lines for who I could imagine working alongside against the Trump regime. I think they have held up pretty well:

• Allies in the struggle both have to be able to say that white supremacy, white entitlement, Eurocentric racism has been a defining reality throughout the history of this country. We needn't agree on exactly how that works, and what we must do about it, but we have to allow the premise and live from there.

• Allies have to be able to say that an unregulated free market is a prescription for individual and planetary death. Again, we don't have to agree on exactly what curbs are needed, but we both have to acknowledge some are.

The work of the Lincoln Project seems to me to meet that criteria.

All together now: let's kick the GOPer clowns into the dustbin of history in November.

Wuhan is not a virus

"Instead of only remembering my hometown as the 'the place where COVID originated', I want people to respect Wuhan as a city with beautiful history, culture, and people."

San Francisco artist Laura Gao

That sure looks tasty. Yum.

Prescient? Wishful thinking?

Observed on the windows of an apparently unoccupied office tower on a deserted street in this moment of sheltering in place.

For the record: We're Number One!

“Our death totals,” Trump said Thursday, “our numbers, per million people, are really very, very strong. We’re very proud of the job we’ve done.”

Not to be forgotten.

It turns out that East Africa may be a coronavirus success story!

This was not what I expected to discover when I indulged my curiosity about how the pandemic was playing out in Africa. Though at opposite ends of the continent, Egypt and South Africa have major outbreaks of COVID-19, some of the countries in between are succeeding in keeping the pandemic under control.

Edward Carpenter and Charli Carpenter suggest in the Washington Post that East Africa might have "a few things to teach the United States." Yes, much of this area suffers from wide-spread poverty, few medical resources, civil wars, and weak governments -- but also, these societies been here before, struggling to contain cholera, Ebola, and HIV. They know what to do when the enemy is disease.

These writers (a U.S. military officer and a U. Mass-Amherst political scientist) lay out several strands in East Africa's successful pandemic preparedness. Governments took advantage of the warning time watching Chinese, European, and U.S. stumbles, implementing science-based planning, and putting out popularly intelligible explanations of what needed to be done.

[T]heir governments took early preventive measures. ... the presidents of South Sudan, Kenya and Uganda issued detailed proclamations and decreed strong measures to delay the arrival of it and suppress its spread — in most cases before any cases had been detected.

Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni was particularly eloquent and detail-oriented, explaining what the virus was, how it was transmitted and who was at risk, before laying out a plan to systematically close schools, churches and borders, to begin social distancing, and to put a hold on weddings and funerals. ... Notably, all of these measures were rolled out in a controlled manner without political posturing, and with reasonable time built in to set the guidelines in motion. ...

Closed borders, cessation of international air traffic, and shutting down big public gatherings destroyed the tourist trade, but governments successfully made the case that health was more to be prized than the economies.

According to the two Carpenters, past experience with pandemics sunk in deeply.

The United States has also had its share of pandemics: yellow fever, the 1918 flu, HIV-AIDS and SARS. The difference may be a willingness to put lessons learned into action. ...

In this country, we've shown ourselves all too willing to forget, underfund, and rush on to the next new thing.

One of the lessons learned in East Africa from past pandemics has been that international cooperation matters.

These countries make up the membership of the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD). The organization met March 30 by video-teleconference and resolved to jointly formulate a regional response, establish an emergency fund and mobilize support from the global community and from IGAD medical professionals in the diaspora.

The crisis has even caused some prominent local leaders to double down on a global approach to economic policy, with Museveni saying: “I have warned our people to stop talking like the selfish foreigners by trying to stop the little we have being exported to other African countries. We can keep a bit for ourselves, but we shall share with the others whatever we have.”

Whether all this preparedness will continue to moderate the impact of COVID-19 remains to be seen.

A friend who lives in the region very much concurs with this picture of the impact. She sees a government which has plenty of problems nonetheless doing what has to be done.

The outreach is very widespread re masks etc. and there are loudspeakers on vehicles going up and down the streets lecturing people about distancing. I think they are using a Cuban-designed house to house method in the urban areas with clusters. They also have special hospitals set up. I think Ebola preparedness has made a difference.

These are emerging nations which can still get things done, even amid very difficult pre-existing challenges.

It does seem worth asking, how did the U.S. lose that get-up-and-go capacity? The answers, and there are certainly many, pre-date Trump though he's very good at making the bad much worse. Might this be what happens as empire decays? So it seems.

Campaign mechanics: how candidates got it done without public appearances

Watching Joe Biden cooped up in his basement studio this campaign season has been demoralizing -- but it did remind me that aspirants running for president didn't always trot around the country tooting their horns. The modern campaign with its rallies and "press availabilities" is a 20th century invention. For the previous 120 some years of the United States, aspiring presidents were expected to hole up and hope their party was doing the work of turning out the vote for them. That was being "presidential."

Happily, Dr. Jon Grinspan, curator of political history at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, has written How to Run for President in the Middle of a Pandemic which vividly describes the evolution that got us to today. It's informative and fun. He points out that until national sanitation conditions improved considerably after 1900, wading into crowds to shake hands was dangerous. Interacting with constituents, or anyone, could be lethal:

Every chief executive elected in the 1840s most likely died of a communicable disease within that decade: William Henry Harrison from typhoid in 1841, James K. Polk from cholera in 1849, Zachary Taylor from viral gastroenteritis in 1850.

Yet candidates did seek elective office and they counted on mobilized citizens to win for them.

The fundamental question of campaigning is who performs the labor. In the 19th century, ordinary citizens did incredible amounts of work for their parties, while nominees sat idle. ...

As it happens, I'm well aware of this because I have a couple of artifacts from 19th century campaigns that exemplify the story. Two of my great grandfathers (unrelated to each other) were early enthusiasts of the new anti-slavery, pro-industrial development Republican Party in the 1850s. And both were ardent boosters of Abraham Lincoln's 1860 campaign for the presidency. What did that mean? It meant they worked to bring out his vote in their own cities, speaking and writing and lining up support from voters. And what was Lincoln doing, the summer and fall of 1860? Writing hundreds of letters to his supporters all around the country, helping them with messages, suggesting how to consolidate support, and thanking them for their efforts.

Two of these missives have come down in the family. One (not pictured) concerns how to describe the prohibition of slavery in the Northwest Territory (Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin) in 1787 accurately in advocacy speeches. In the copy of a letter pictured here, written to a Buffalo businessman who later was elected to Congress, Lincoln approves the recipient's efforts to consolidate support within a fractious party. This apparently required some shoring up.

The more conditions change, the more some campaign fundamentals remain the same.