By Joseph A. McCartin
Prior to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, concern about “the future of work” abounded. Seemingly everywhere, urgent discussions among academicians, policymakers, and business leaders focused on that phrase.
The nation’s biggest consulting firms, including Deloitte, McKinsey, and Catalant, competed to show that they would be able and ready to guide their clients through the challenging world that lay ahead in the reorganization of work. The business press, too, embraced the phrase, as outlets including Fortune, Forbes, and The Economist created beats to monitor the future of work. Think tanks and philanthropies—from the Aspen Institute to the Ford and Rockefeller foundations— sponsored studies of the future of work.
Governments and international organizations at all levels were also becoming increasingly concerned about the future of work prior to the pandemic. The California State Assembly hosted a “Future of Work Summit” in 2017, the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) created a “Future of Work Fellowship Scheme,” and the International Labor Organization (ILO) focused on the future of work as it marked the centennial of its founding in 1919. The World Economic Forum (WEF), whose annual gathering attracts the world’s financial and political titans to Davos, Switzerland, held numerous discussions about the future of work.
Driving this wave of attention to the methods and means of work was a growing sense that we stood on the cusp of a radical reorganization of work to be ushered in by the spread of artificial intelligence, increasing automation, and the proliferation of new technologies. That transformation, many feared, would lead to a jobless future. That fear in turn drove rising interest in the idea of a Universal Basic Income (UBI) that would provide an income floor to people, whether employed or not, an idea that attracted many adherents from Andrew Yang to the founder of Tesla, Elon Musk, who argued that a UBI would eventually be necessary, because there will be “fewer and fewer jobs that a robot cannot do better than a human.”
Then the pandemic hit.
In some ways the impact of COVID-19 and our responses to it confirmed the prediction that work was on the cusp of a rapid transformation. We saw this in our own colleges and universities, as so much instruction in 2020-21 took place virtually, in online formats. Zoom and similar platforms, once little-used add-ons, became indispensable instructional tools and many of our classes became both distant and asynchronous. But for those of us who had the luxury to fall back on new technologies to do our work remotely, work did not diminish. New technologies did not lead to broad elimination of jobs. For many, work time increased and the boundaries between work and nonwork blurred.
For those who had to continue to leave home to work—especially those who worked on the front lines in healthcare, foodservice, grocery stores, post offices, delivery vehicles, and a host of other jobs—there was little sign that a brave new world of automated work by smart machines was in the offing. It turned out that what we came to call “essential work” included very few jobs indeed “that a robot cannot do better than a human.”
For a brief time during the pandemic, the human beings who toiled at essential work were celebrated. A wave of gratitude poured forth from those of us who relied on such workers to help get us through the pandemic. In cities around the world a spontaneous custom arose in which people threw open their windows at an appointed time, banging pots, clapping, making rough music in honor of those whose labors were pulling them through the worst of the contagion. Some grocery chains offered bonus pay; and some localities passed ordinances forcing large grocery chains to pay bonuses of $4 to $5 per hour.
Yet none of that lasted long. Two months into the pandemic, the nation’s largest grocery chain, Kroger, ended its $2-an-hour hazard pay raise. By 2021, many essential workers were hurting. One union’s survey of its membership of 36,000 hourly grocery workers in the Western states found that 42% relied on borrowing money to pay for basic needs during 2021, one-third said they cut out calories or skipped meals because they couldn’t afford food. More than 10% said they were unhoused.
Stimulus checks and the extra $300 a week in payments that were added to unemployment checks during COVID helped. But these dried up by September 2021. In fact, governors in 25 states opted to block the $300 unemployment bonus payments early in an effort to push workers back into the labor market.
Workers at our own institutions of Jesuit higher education did not escape the pain caused by the pandemic and its attendant economic dislocations. Pay freezes, pay and benefit cuts, and layoffs, including even tenured faculty in some instances, were common. These measures were all the more painful on campuses where resistance to faculty and graduate assistant unionization had been fiercest in the years before the pandemic. For the first time in the history of U.S. Jesuit higher education, activists on several campuses formed an organization—the Coalition of Jesuit Higher Ed Workers and Students—that challenged the economic priorities of their campuses and circulated a petition demanding reforms.
In response to austerity-driven measures such as pay freezes, benefit cuts, furloughs, and layoffs at Jesuit institutions of higher education during the severe period of the pandemic, student, staff, and faculty activists at various Jesuit colleges and universities organized to form an affinity group now known as the Jesuit Higher Education Labor Coalition, to advocate for reform. Photo courtesy of Zack Miller and Loyola Phoenix, the Official Student Newspaper of Loyola University Chicago.
Both the nation and our campuses began to recover over the summer of 2021 thanks to federal bailouts and the deployment of effective vaccines, the appearance of the Delta and later the Omicron variants notwithstanding. Unemployment began dropping nationally more precipitously than ever before, a return to pre-pandemic “normalcy” briefly seemed plausible.
Yet a return to the status quo ante has still yet to happen, and indeed is becoming increasingly unlikely. During the second half of 2021 and the first quarter of 2022, it became clear that the pandemic had dramatically changed things for workers, and there is no way to put the toothpaste back in that tube. Like the World Wars of the 20th century, each of which also spawned a wave of worker activism, the pandemic disrupted old patterns, reminded workers of how important their labor actually is to their employers and the nation, and also made clear to them how undervalued much of that labor is. In short, the pandemic prompted many workers to rethink their relationship to their jobs for the first time in their working lives.
Evidence of the extent of the resulting disruption started to become clear in the late summer of 2021, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics measured an explosive growth in the rate of workers quitting their jobs. In August, 2.9% of workers quit—the highest monthly figure on record to that point. Quit numbers continued to rise over successive months. Nor did they slow much as we entered the second quarter of 2022. Yet it wasn’t only that workers began quitting the jobs they had in search of better ones, or to spend more time tending to their families.
Workers’ restiveness also expressed itself in the form of a significant uptick in private sector strikes, after years of declining strike numbers. Walkouts in the fall by John Deere and Nabisco workers led to talk of “Striketober.” And, by early 2022, growing interest in unionization was also detectable as Starbucks and Amazon workers staged attention-grabbing organizing drives, breaking through fierce resistance and establishing the first union beachheads in those antiunion companies. As unemployment hit 3.6% in March 2022, nearly matching its pre-pandemic low, workers’ confidence in their market power seemed to grow week by week.
If questions about the “future of work” attracted attention prior to the pandemic, now it is the “future of workers” that is emerging as the most pertinent labor question. Robots and artificial intelligence are not haunting today’s workplaces as much as is a deep, and apparently growing, level of worker dissatisfaction with the state of their jobs. Complicating matters further in 2022 is the gnawing bite of inflation on workers’ incomes. While getting a job is easier today than it has been in years, finding one that pays a living wage amid soaring costs—especially for housing—is becoming more challenging, especially those in the lower half of income earners.
This building wave of dissatisfaction follows decades of worker disempowerment and changes in the organization of work that have made workers’ lives harder and our economy increasingly unequal in the distribution of its fruits.
As the economist David Weil documented in his landmark 2014 book The Fissured Workplace, since the 1970s the U.S. labor market has been increasingly fragmented by lengthening supply chains, rampant subcontracting, and, most recently, the development of a “platform” economy that has led to precarity for the Uber drivers and others who make their living from cellphone apps. The financialization of the economy, which began during the economic restructuring in the 1970s, has both driven these transformations and ensured that the wealthy have benefited most from them. According to Americans for Tax Fairness, this nation’s 15 richest people saw their wealth balloon by 62% during the pandemic.
These developments highlight how deeply broken the U.S. system of labor relations is. Workers’ rights in private sector employment are governed by a law—the Wagner Act—that is now almost 90 years old, and which was last significantly amended 75 years ago—by the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947. Since 1965, multiple efforts to update that law in response to a changing economy and increasing employer resistance have been attempted only to be filibustered to death in the U.S. Senate. Nor is there much hope that that logjam will be cleared anytime soon. All of this suggests how much the future of workers has become shrouded in uncertainty, albeit due to forces quite different from those anticipated in pre-pandemic “Future of Work” discussions.
The precarious condition of so many workers in this transitional moment both mirrors and exacerbates the weakened state of our democracy in the 2020s. Thirty-three years ago, in 1989, as communism was unraveling and a global order premised on free trade was taking shape, Francis Fukuyama’s famous essay, “The End of History?” struck a triumphalist tone, heralding “the unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism” and the “total exhaustion of viable systemic alternatives” to the world order that the U.S. was then shaping.
Democracy and capitalism seemed to many at that moment to be not only triumphant but mutually reinforcing. Events since then have called that assumption into question, as forms of authoritarian-minded, populist nationalism have gained ground, even in economically advanced liberal democracies like the United States. As was the case during the Great Depression, many of these political tendencies have fed off the economic anxieties of working people who feel increasingly insecure about their and their children’s futures.
This present state of affairs raises important questions for Jesuit higher education.
“Are our institutions resisting or replicating the yawning inequalities that characterize work in the 2020s? Are we alleviating or perpetuating the precarity of our own essential workers? Are we preparing graduates to reform or profit from the trends that have made work less secure and rewarding for the many?”
In 2000, Rev. Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, S.J., called on us to make social justice the hallmark of Jesuit higher education, to “take conscious responsibility for being … a force for faith and justice.” That summons is all the more pertinent—and challenging—today in light of the economic transformations we’ve witnessed since he issued it. Inequality has grown and work has become more vulnerable to the vicissitudes of market forces.
It is clearer now that our responsibility to create and maintain institutions that seek justice cannot stop with a concern for the poor and the unemployed, although their welfare must continue to be our priority. It must extend as well to all those who work in conditions that degrade their humanity and deny them a voice in determining the circumstances in which they work, whether they are beyond or within our campus gates.
Fortunately, we can draw inspiration and guidance from a conversation that began within the Catholic church prior to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In May 2016, a conference called “Sustainable Development and the Future of Work in the Context of the Jubilee of Mercy,” convened in Rome and began developing a strategic road map toward the creation of “decent work,” a future of work in accord with the vision animating Pope Francis’s 2015 encyclical, Laudato Sì. An international network came together around a project called “The Future of Work After Laudato Sì” or FOWLS. Inspired by the encyclical’s call for “a correct understanding of work” that sees in “every form of work a concept of the relationship which we can and must have with what is other than ourselves” (LS, n. 124-125), FOWLS believes that the future of work is not “already written or predetermined,” but that it “will be what we, as humankind, want and are able to build. It will not depend only on formal laws or impersonal and anonymous forces, but on concrete collective choices, on the way we structure our society and economy.”
In December 2020, FOWLS produced a report based on regional consultations with affiliated researchers from around the world, informed by the impact that the pandemic was having on workers everywhere, especially those on the front lines whose work was to care for others. That report, Care is Work, Work is Care, offered a refreshingly challenging way to think about the future of work that puts the welfare of people at its center. Drawing on the experience of care work during the pandemic, it conceived of all of the ways in which good work of any kind is, ultimately, a form of care.
Such a vision should resonate deeply throughout U.S. Jesuit higher education.
The work of education is self-evidently care work, after all. Yet a candid assessment of our institutions suggests that we continue to fail to see and valorize the care work and the workers who perform it. Our institutions have responded admirably to the ecological vision of Laudato Sì while eliding the integral dimensions of Francis’s vision. While sustainability programs and research initiatives grow on our campuses, we have yet to embrace, as a community, Francis’s call for a “correct understanding of work.” Most of our institutions have yet to commit in writing to just employment policies that ensure that all of the full-time workers on our campuses, whether directly employed or subcontracted, earn a living wage. Many continue to resist their workers’ demands that we recognize their rights to unionize, a right deeply embedded in Catholic social thought and reaffirmed by the U.S. Catholic bishops’ 1986 pastoral letter, which made clear that “All church institutions must also fully recognize the rights of employees to organize and bargain collectively with the institution through whatever association or organization they freely choose” (Economic Justice for All, n. 353).
As we look toward a post-pandemic future, the time has come to address our persistent failings in this area. Only by doing so can we hope to shape a future in which the worker—not the methods and means of work—becomes our central concern. If we hope to build a more just and sustainable social order, we must begin to lead the way forward.
Joseph A. McCartin is professor of History and executive director of the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University.
The featured cover photo (above) is courtesy of Simon Abrams via Unsplash.