The last six weeks have cost 33 million Americans their jobs – up from 22 million just a fortnight ago. More than half of those who remain on the front lines are women, many of them from ethnic minorities. Yet although the pandemic has affected black and Latino populations disproportionately, President Trump has agreed to treat meat production as part of America’s “critical infrastructure.” In contrast to his laissez-faire attitude to states deciding when to ‘open up’ he assured meat companies that federal agencies would compel a mainly Latino, Black and Asian workforce to resume production despite strong evidence of their vulnerability.
Across the Atlantic, the Bank of England forecasts a 14 percent drop in annual gross domestic product, and a 25 percent dip in the second quarter of this year. If these predictions are correct, it will be the worst economic downturn since the United Kingdom was formed by acts of parliament more than 300 years ago. As the crisis deepens, politicians of all stripes have begun to consider radical reforms. Few believe that their citizens will accept a return to the status quo after months of the ‘new normal’. So, despite misgivings that the government’s job-retention scheme has become too costly, Tory chancellor Rishi Sunak has reassured British trade unions that relief payments will continue past June. That indicates a shifting stance towards the value of labour, especially since the lockdown has forced much of Britain’s middle-class to revalue chronically neglected and underpaid work such as nursing and childcare.
In the UK, official statistics show that more than 40 percent of childcare providers aged 25 and above earn less than a minimum wage and more than 60 percent of carers for the elderly work on contracts that offer neither a basic income nor a regular schedule. With non-essential workers receiving up to £2,500 a month while furloughed, it is no longer morally or politically acceptable to tolerate the appalling wages and working conditions imposed on many essential workers for decades. As Labour peer Ruth Lister, chair of the UK Compass group, has written, the current crisis has been like “a barium meal, revealing painfully depleted public services and social security benefits after a decade of austerity and exposing the unfairness of the unequal structure of rewards.”
If the crisis is a sign of the shifts and shocks that further climate change will bring, there is no better moment for radical change. Guardian columnist George Monbiot notes that a similar opportunity, in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, was “spectacularly squandered” when ‘[v]ast amounts of public money were spent reassembling the filthy old economy, while ensuring that wealth remained in the hands of the rich.” Today, despite a decade lost to austerity and underdevelopment, many governments look set to repeat the error, unless they are pushed towards sensible and compassionate reforms.
“There are many visions of the good society,” wrote the great liberal economist J.K. Galbraith, “the treadmill is not one of them.” If ever there was a moment for ambitious policies which address the need for a decent standard of living, this is it. In Spain, for instance, the left-leaning coalition government has pledged state payments to its poorest citizens; the prime minister of Finland has proposed shortening the work week, to allow Finns “to spend more time with their families, loved ones, hobbies and other aspects of life, such as culture’. In dozens of other countries, government and civil society are debating how best to move beyond the old paradigm of having millions of citizens subsist in thankless, underpaid, repetitive labour. Likewise it is a moment for developing nations to focus on similar problems. As the world’s strongest economies overhaul their governing assumptions, Latin America and the Caribbean should do so too.
