Posted by 
Our last post discussed how covid-19 is having differential health impacts across the United States. Blacks, Latinos, native Americans, the poor, the homeless and the incarcerated are all incurring the corona virus and dying from it at much higher rates than the general public. In this post I want to examine the differential economic impact of the virus as well.
A recent Gallup poll showed that poorer Americans have experienced greater economic disruption than richer Americans (see figure below). This should not be surprising because of the way the economic shut-down has affected economic sectors differentially.
Simon Mongey and Alex Weinberg recently published a White Paper entitled, “Characteristics of Workers in Low Work-From-Home and High Personal-Proximity Occupations.” They examined the structure of the labor force in the United States with respect to being able to work from home and working in jobs that require high proximity to the public. Their conclusions are hardly unexpected –”Relative to workers in high work-from-home occupations, workers in low work-from-home occupations are:
- less likely to be white, have a college degree, or have employer provided healthcare
- more likely to be in the bottom half of the income distribution, more likely to be single, more likely to have been unemployed in the last year, and more likely to rent their homes.
- less likely to have access to informal insurance channels and less likely to be born in the United States, less likely to have had stable jobs, less likely to be employed full-time, and less likely to be employed in large firms.”
In other words, being white, relatively prosperous, and educated makes one better able to ride out this epidemic by working from home, thus reducing both one’s health risks and the risk to one’s income. The lower socioeconomic groups are offered a Hobson’s Choice: They can’t afford to give up their income so they must risk their health by continuing to work, sometimes in dangerous environments such as meat-packing plants, prisons, and nursing homes.
As Jim Tackersly writes in The New York Times, “Black and Latino Americans have less ability to withstand a prolonged job loss than whites, because they entered the crisis with lower incomes and less wealth. The typical black household earned three-fifths of what the typical white household earned, and their household income had yet to return to pre-financial-crisis highs. The virus has only exacerbated that inequality, with minorities suffering both higher death rates and more financial harm.
This conflict between being poor and protecting one’s health is being played out in our politics. There is a nascent war on meat packing plants. Among the issues being argued are the right to unemployment benefits if one refuses to work in an unsafe environment and liability if one gets sick in an unsafe workplace. Who is liable?The firm, the government or no one. President Trump has invoked the Defense Protection Act to compel meatpacking plants to remain open in order to protect the nation’s food chain. When workers protested that conditions were unsafe, Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds said, “The reality is that we cannot stop this virus. It will remain in our communities until a vaccine is available. Instead we must learn to live with coronavirus activity without letting it govern our lives.” In an earlier statement, Reynolds warned that workers who did not return to work would be considered a “voluntary quit” and not be eligible for unemployment benefits. This is remarkable. A public official responsible for the safety of the people in her state says in effect, “Meat packing workers must like it or lump it.” “They must learn to live with the coronavirus without letting it govern our lives.” Note she isn’t talking about her life.
“Kim Cordova, president for workers at a JBS Meatpacking Plant in Greeley, Colorado, told The Washington Post, “If these meat plants can’t be held liable, there is no reason for them to take measures to ensure workers are safe. If workers stop showing up, what are they going to do? Enact a draft? This is insane. If these workers are essential, protect them. They are treating workers like fungible widgets instead of human beings.”
At least 20 meatpacking plants have closed in recent weeks because of covid-19 outbreaks, according to an analysis by The Washington Post. The United Food and Commercial Workers, which represents thousands of workers at U.S. meat plants, said Tuesday that at least 17 have died of covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, and at least 5,000 have been directly affected by the virus.
According to the Guardian, by 2010, “the meat industry was becoming predominantly staffed by recent immigrants – many without legal employment status – as a way of pushing production lines to go faster and faster. Undocumented workers, many from Mexico and other parts of Latin America, formed a perfect corporate workforce: thankful for their pay checks, willing to endure harsh working conditions, unlikely to unionize or even complain. ‘They don’t ask for breaks. They don’t ask for raises,’ one worker at the Hormel plant in Fremont said. ‘They just work harder and harder, because they need to work.’”
Covid-19 has spread throughout Blackhawk County where Tyson’s is located. According to Amie Rivers, “Black Hawk County health officials said the county was reporting 622 coronavirus infections as of Thursday April 23, 2020, with the vast majority of them linked to a recently-closed meatpacking plant. Health director Dr. Nafissa Cisse Egbuonye also reported seven deaths countywide from COVID-19. “We really are feeling the impact of COVID-19 in Black Hawk County,” Egbuonye said at Thursday’s briefing. “These numbers are not going down — they’re increasing — and so this is very serious.” “We do know over 90% of our cases are linked to Tyson Fresh Meats in Waterloo, she said without [knowing] an exact number of infections or deaths.”
What to do? A future post will examine the deep policy issues that are raised by our current situation. The coronavirus pandemic has revealed the tremendous societal fault lines that divide this country economically and socially. We can choose to ignore these cracks, hoping they will go away, or we can take full advantage of the opportunity this tragedy provides us, and undertake a full reformation of our institutions while there is still time.