ESSENTIAL

A sociologist shows how the pandemic has changed the world of work irrevocably, but there’s more to be done.

“Work is a scam. We spend far too much time doing it, and most people aren’t paid anything close to the amount of value their labor creates.” So writes McCallum in this timely follow-up to Worked Over: How Round-the-Clock Work Is Killing the American Dream. Meanwhile, the rich profit from that scam—one reason, notes the author, is that they have been working so vigorously to create a narrative by which working-class Americans aren’t working hard enough. That’s not at all the case, McCallum insists. With the pandemic and its unfair demands on those classified as “essential workers”—health care workers, to be sure, but also truck drivers and meat packers—the result was a “Great Reassessment” that became a “Great Resignation” that “helped fuel the Great Discontent,” with its rejection of low-wage jobs on the part of those who were able to search for something better. Much of that essential work, especially that which involved caregiving, has barely been valued at all, considered unskilled and compensated accordingly; given demographics, that caregiving work is only going to expand. “As the so-called invisible hand of the market attempts to push us off an ecological cliff,” writes McCallum, “it’s the invisible hands of the behind-the-scenes care workers that are propping up our care infrastructure.” Reasonably enough, the author calls for a revised Green New Deal package of programs that considers care workers to be essential workers indeed—and that includes a Medicare-for-all component to boot. Meanwhile, he notes, the capitalists aren’t sitting still. While some have accepted that in order to rebuild the labor market, they’ll have to pay more, others are pushing the “gig economy,” hiring scabs, and otherwise attempting to shore up an old, utterly broken status quo.

A thoughtful consideration of work and the workaday world that brings the class struggle to the fore.