Thread by @doctorow

Once upon a time, a terrible disease swept the lands, prompting a great wave of resignations as low-waged workers walked off the job, rejecting offers of pay raises that would have been unthinkably lavish just a few years earlier. Their bosses went nuts. 1/

If you'd like an unrolled version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

pluralistic.net/2021/11/29/ord… 2/

The former employers of these workers slammed them as lazy and greedy, and called upon their fellow bougies to take up "unskilled" labor and scab those proles back into the workplace. When that didn't work, they passed laws that banned desperate bosses from bidding up wages. 3/

That didn't work either, so new crimes were put on the books that made it easier to slam unemployed people in notoriously cruel prisons. That failed, too, prompting cuts to the already grossly inadequate welfare system, trying to starve workers back into their jobs. 4/

That also failed. In the end, the situation led to a mass redistribution of wealth and a period of unheralded pluralism and opportunity for workers whose families had been stuck in low-waged, dead-end work for generations. 5/

This isn't a covid story. It's the story of the post-Black Death labor markets in England, where desperate noblemen passed the country's first labor law, the 1349 Ordinance of Labourers. 6/

Chroniclers of the day urged "knights and churchmen" to get into the fields and shame their social inferiors back into harness.

sourcebooks.fordham.edu/seth/ordinance… 7/

This threat didn't get the peasants back into the fields, so the law threatened out-of-work people with prison, capped wages at pre-Black Death levels, and banned begging at funerals ("practically the only form of social welfare available"). 8/

The failure to force workers back into the fields left landholders unable to profit from their lands, prompting sell-offs that created the middle class. Real incomes doubled. 9/

This is a pattern that follows every pandemic, according to an NBER paper that found that after every pandemic, wages shoot up and the return on capital tanks:

nber.org/system/files/w… 10/

I learned about all this from @ddayen's brilliant longread for @theprospect, "The Great Escape," featuring the voices of workers who have - or are thinking of - walking off the job.

prospect.org/labor/great-es… 11/

As Dayen points out, the great resignation includes workers in all kinds of jobs, not just low-waged ones, but resignations are concentrated at the bottom of the wage-scale. 12/

It's not hard to see why: Dayen recounts the stories of workers in national chains that were bought out by private equity looters whose much-vaunted "efficiencies" boil down to slashing wages and imposing cruel and dangerous conditions on workers. 13/

There's Caroline Potts of Murfreesboro, TN, who loves dogs and was excited to get at job as a groomer at Petsmart. It seemed like a dream-job, but Potts learned she was expected to meet impossible quotas, working at a rate made the experience traumatic for dogs. 14/

She also learned that Petsmart management was only paying lip-service to its policy of excluding dogs with seizure disorders or problems with stressful environments. She worried that she was going to preside over the death of one of these dogs. 15/

To make things worse, her customers were routinely abusive to her and her employer did nothing to shield her from their bad conduct. 16/

Potts was locked into a two-year noncompete contract and was only able to quit for a rival company by begging her manager to release her from it. 17/

Needless to say, many workers in noncompetes won't be so lucky - and fast-food restaurants lead the nation in the use of noncompete agreements. 18/

Zella Roberts worked in fast food - she was a Sonic carhop in Asheville, NC. When Sonic got scooped up by Roark Capital, the new owners switched to exclusive app- and credit-card-based ordering, with no facility to tip employees. 19/

But Roberts was being paid $5/hr, a "tipped minimum wage" premised on the worker being able to make up the difference from tips. It's illegal to pay tipped minimum wage to workers who can't collect tips, but that didn't stop Sonic. 20/

It's not just fast-food and pets. Ed Gadomski was a 32-year veteran of the IT department in CT's Waterbury Hospital. 21/

When Leonard Green & Partners bought the hospital, they laid him off and then offered him his old job at $13.46/h, a third of his former wage, with no pension or health-care (at a hospital!). 22/

Predictably, regular large-business abuses are sinking to the level of private equity. Reina Abrahamson of Salem, OR was a Wells Fargo customer rep working from home. 23/

She was put on minimum salary for *six months* while Wells processed a request to supply her with a 100 foot Ethernet cable that would reach from her home router to her computer (she supplemented her wages driving for Doordash). 24/

Amazon is a leader in labor abuses. At Stephanie Haynes's job at an Amazon warehouse in Joliet, IL, she was given tasks that were literally impossible to perform while maintaining six feet of social distance - like lifting a pallet with a co-worker. 25/

Haynes lost her fiance to covid and decided it wasn't worth risking her own life to help Jeff Bezos grow his fortune, so she walked off the job from March to July 2020. 26/

We know only a fraction of what goes on at Amazon warehouses, and that's by design. Monica Moody was fired from her Amazon warehouse in Charlotte, NC for talking to the press about her labor conditions. 27/

The "essential workers" of the pandemic died in droves - a study found that the highest covid mortality among working-aged people was among cooks, warehouse workers, construction workers, bakers, etc:

medrxiv.org/content/10.110… 28/

Dayen writes that as intolerable and dangerous as these workers' jobs were during lockdown, they got worse afterward, when stir-crazy, traumatized, short-tempered customers screamed at them and even assaulted them as they tried to enforce mask and vaccine requirements. 29/

No wonder workers are quitting. But they're not just quitting - they're also striking, with or without a union. America has experienced a vast, wildly under-reported wave of wildcat strikes. 30/

Take the Jack in the Box franchise in Sacramento where un-unionized workers struck *twice*. As Leticia Reyes - a worker who took part in both strikes - tells it, the first strike was prompted by management's refusal to fix the AC during a 109' heat wave. 31/

"The first time, she wouldn’t listen to us, she ignored us. The second time, she told us it wasn’t high temperatures, it was us workers going through menopause."

The workers got the AC fixed...and their manager got fired. 32/

And then the workers struck again, in protest of wage theft (they weren't getting their mandatory paid breaks and overtime). The owner and his cronies crossed the picket line and tried to do the workers' jobs...and couldn't. After three days, management caved. 33/

Says Reyes: "I am no longer scared to speak up. Big companies need us as workers and we should not be afraid to speak up." 34/

Practically the only place you'll learn about stories like this one is in @PaydayReport ("Covering Labor in News Deserts"), a crowdfunded site that has chronicled 1,600 walkouts throughout the pandemic:

paydayreport.com 35/

Viral phenomena like #QuitMyJob and photos of handwritten "We all quit" signs hint at the true scale of the great resignation, and they inspire others to do the same. 36/

There's good indications that employers are finally responding with better pay, benefits and conditions, but there's no reason to think they've had a true change of heart. If the labor market changes, they'll claw back those gains in a heartbeat. 37/

But as with the 14th century post-plague labor markets, our workforce's unwillingness to go back has proved remarkably sturdy. 38/

For example, red states that canceled covid relief early in a bid to starve workers back into dangerous, degrading, underpaid jobs are experiencing the same shortages of low-waged workers as blue states where benefits continued without interruption. 39/

Part of that might be due to a genuine worker shortage - 2m workers took early retirement during the pandemic, and a legacy of Trump's ethnic cleansing policy has starved many sectors of precarious and desperate workers. 40/

Cementing these gains over the long term will require institutional shifts: the threshold for a wildcat strike is very high, but labor action gets easier as labor gets organized. 41/

New unions are popping up across the country, and existing unions are finding unsuspected reserves of militancy. 1.3m Teamsters have new leaders who are committed to organizing grocery stores and Amazon warehouses:

pluralistic.net/2021/11/19/hof… 42/

And striking nurses and Teamsters, and workers at factories from Kellogg's to John Deere, are pushing to eliminate the disastrous "two-tier" contracts that destroy union solidarity, rendering unions toothless:

pluralistic.net/2021/11/25/str… 43/

Companies that seemed immune to unionization, from Amazon to Dollar General to Starbucks, are now fighting battles against their workers using tactics that grow less credible by the day, as @iamjohnoliver documents with scathing hilarity:

44/

Provisions in the #BuildBackBetter bill don't go as far as the #PROAct, but they will still add to the union movement's tailwind.

But it's workers, not law, who ultimately control the outcome. 45/

I'll give the last word to Christine Johnson, a historian at Washington U in St Louis, whose work on the Ordinance of Labourers is cited by Dayen: 46/

"If you don’t actually change the structures of power, and you don’t actually enact some changes in the labor and social hierarchies, it’s not going to produce lasting improvement in conditions of labor." 47/