All it took was a pandemic of potentially unprecedented scale and severity and suddenly it's like we're turning into Denmark over here.The safe bet is that Manjoo's question - "What if?" - will remain a mere thought exercise for op-ed columnists. Nothing will be seriously considered or implemented. How bad would things have to get before a majority of Americans voted (selfishly) for what would benefit them and their families the most?
In the last few days, a parade of American companies that had long resisted providing humane and necessary benefits to their workers abruptly changed their minds, announcing plans to pay and protect even their lowest-rung employees harmed by the ravages of the coronavirus.
Uber and Lyft — which are currently fighting state efforts to force them to pay benefits to drivers and other "gig" workers — announced that, actually, a form of paid sick leave wasn't such a bad idea after all. Drivers who contract the new virus or who are placed in quarantine will get paid for up to two weeks, Uber said. Lyft offered a similar promise of compensation.
Trader Joe's also says it will cover for time off for the virus. Several tech giants said they would continue to pay their hourly employees who cannot work during the outbreak, and Amazon said it won't dock warehouse workers for missing shifts.
And after the journalist Judd Legum pointed out its long history of fighting sick-leave policies, Darden Restaurants, which runs several restaurant chains, including Olive Garden, said that its 170,000 hourly workers would now get paid sick leave.
It wasn't just sick leave. Overnight, workplaces across the country were transformed into Scandinavian Edens of flexibility. Can't make it to the office because your kid has to unexpectedly stay home from school? Last week, it sucked to be you. This week: What are you even doing asking? Go home, be with your kid!
Then politicians got into the act. The Trump administration — last seen proposing to slash a pay raise for federal workers and endorsing a family leave policy that doesn't actually pay for family leave — is now singing the praises of universal sick pay.
"When we tell people, 'If you're sick, stay home,' the president has tasked the team with developing economic policies that will make it very, very clear that we're going to stand by those hard-working Americans," Vice President Mike Pence said on Monday, offering the sort of rhetoric that wouldn't be out of place on the pages of Jacobin.
And wasn't it almost funny how everyone and their doctor was suddenly extolling the benefits of government-funded health care for all? When the Trump administration told Congress that it was considering reimbursing hospitals for treating uninsured Americans who contracted Covid-19, Republicans who had long opposed this sort of "socialized medicine" were now conceding that, well, of course, they didn't mean it quite so absolutely.
"You can look at it as socialized medicine," Representative Ted Yoho, a Republican from Florida, told HuffPost. "But in the face of an outbreak, a pandemic, what's your options?"
As I said, it's almost funny: Everyone's a socialist in a pandemic. But the laugh catches in your throat, because the only joke here is the sick one American society plays on workers every day.
The truth is that we're nowhere near turning into Denmark. Many of the newly announced worker-protection policies, like sick leave and flexibility, are limited, applying only to the effects of this coronavirus (the exception is Darden's new sick-leave plan, which the company says is permanent). The administration's proposed relief plan could well be vaporware. And Republicans' interest in universal health care is ephemeral. Call it Medicare For All But Just For This One Disease.
But there's an even deeper tragedy at play, beyond the meagerness of the new benefits. The true embarrassment is that it took a pandemic for leaders to realize that the health of the American work force is important to the strength of the nation. ...
Much of the danger we face now grows out of America's tattered social safety net — the biting cost and outright lack of health care and child care and elder care, the corporate war on paid leave, and the plagues of homelessness and hunger. As the virus gains a foothold on our shores, many Americans are only now waking up to the ways these flaws in the safety net cascade into one another. ...
There may be a silver lining here: What if the virus forces Americans and their elected representatives to recognize the strength of a collectivist ethos? ... [W]hat if we used this illness as an excuse to really, permanently protect the least among us? ...
The coronavirus might teach us all to value a robust safety net — but there's a good chance we'll forget the lesson, because this is America, and forgetting working people is just what we do.
The choice: Medicare for All or Coronavirus for All?
New research (pdf) published by the Imperial College of London states that, in the absence of drastic and coordinated government action, the coronavirus could kill as many as 2.2 million people in the United States alone. Suppression - the preferred policy option - could take last 18 months or more.
Unfortunately, the US government is still far away from taking drastic and coordinated action. It has taken two long months for the Trump administration even to grudgingly admit in public that a crisis exists. Trump's lies continued as usual yesterday, as he laughingly claimed "nobody ever thought about" the coronavirus threat a month ago.
Harvard University epidemiology professor Marc Lipsitch said the crisis "was foreseeable, and foreseen, weeks and months ago". Indeed, Trump himself was told about the threat even before the US had its first confirmed case in January. But The Chosen One decided to downplay the threat (keeping the number of cases low) because his only concern is his re-election chances. Now, while he continues to lie and cover his ass, he is also saying things like: "This is bad in the sense that it's so contagious. It's just so contagious. Sort of, record-setting-type contagion."
It's comments like that one that made CNN portray Trump as a manly man and amazing leader, at long last. Dana Bash called Trump's performance on Monday "remarkable" and said he was acting like "the kind of leader that people ... need and want and yearn for in times of crisis and uncertainty."
Those gushing (and, admittedly, bizarre) comments might have been a bit premature, because during the same press conference, Trump "claimed the WHO tests [that he rejected in January] were not up to FDA standards". It turns out the truth is the exact opposite (see also).
Eoin Higgins, Common Dreams, March 17, 2020:
In a troubling sign of the damage already done by the coronavirus outbreak on the U.S. economy, nearly one out of five Americans in a NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll released Tuesday reported themselves or someone in their household having their hours reduced or losing their jobs as a result of the public health crisis. ...This is only the beginning.
The poll (pdf) showed that 18% of respondents have already seen the economic effects of the crisis hit their jobs. ...
The polling data indicates that those making under $50,000 a year are seeing the effects more than those in higher income brackets, with 25% of the lower income workers reporting cut hours or lost jobs.
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