I really wonder about our official death numbers. That study putting us closer to a million really makes sense given a lot of the labor upheaval despite no real support from the government in the US. There's a book by Walter Scheidel called The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century where he talks about the "4 horsemen" of leveling inequality; mass-mobilization warfare, transformative revolutions, state collapse, and catastrophic plagues. And what we're seeing now is pretty much straight out of his chapter on the rise of labor power after the black death even to the point of them attempting legislation to reign in labor power.
June 1349, the crown passed the Ordinance of Laborers:
Since a great part of the population, and especially workers and employees (“servants”), has now died in this pestilence many people, observing the needs of masters and the shortage of employees, are refusing to work unless they are paid an excessive salary. . . . We have ordained that every man or woman in our realm of England, whether freeor unfree, who is physically fit and below the age of sixty, not living by trade and exercising a particular craft, andnothaving private means of land of their own upon which they need to work, andnot working for someone else, shall, if offered employment consonant with their status, be obliged to accept the employment offered, and they should be paid only the fees, liveries, payments or salaries which were usually paid in the part of the country where they are working in the twentieth yearof our reign [1346] orinsome other appropriate year five or six years ago. . . . Noone should pay or promise wages, liveries, payments or salaries greater than those defined above under pain of paying twice whatever he paid or promised to anyone who feels himself harmed by it. . . . Artisans and labourers ought notto receive for their labour and craft more money than they could have expected to receive in the said twentieth yearor other appropriate year, in the place where they happen to be working; and if anyone takes more, let him be committed to gaol.
I really don't think we would be seeing all this if our deaths were mostly just old retirees, we must've lost a lot of frontline workers over this past year.
I think part of what we're seeing is office workers organizing for their right to work from home, or for better conditions than the pandemic imposed crunch they've been under. It's just happening informally and so it's invisiblized to people outside that milieu.
The other thing that occurs to me is that most older workers can't fully retire and so there's a lot of overlap between covid vulnerable people and front line workers.
I really wonder about our official death numbers. That study putting us closer to a million really makes sense given a lot of the labor upheaval despite no real support from the government in the US.
I really wonder about our official death numbers. That study putting us closer to a million really makes sense given a lot of the labor upheaval despite no real support from the government in the US. There's a book by Walter Scheidel called The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century where he talks about the "4 horsemen" of leveling inequality; mass-mobilization warfare, transformative revolutions, state collapse, and catastrophic plagues. And what we're seeing now is pretty much straight out of his chapter on the rise of labor power after the black death even to the point of them attempting legislation to reign in labor power.
June 1349, the crown passed the Ordinance of Laborers:
Since a great part of the population, and especially workers and employees (“servants”), has now died in this pestilence many people, observing the needs of masters and the shortage of employees, are refusing to work unless they are paid an excessive salary. . . . We have ordained that every man or woman in our realm of England, whether free or unfree, who is physically fit and below the age of sixty, not living by trade and exercising a particular craft, and not having private means of land of their own upon which they need to work, and not working for someone else, shall, if offered employment consonant with their status, be obliged to accept the employment offered, and they should be paid only the fees, liveries, payments or salaries which were usually paid in the part of the country where they are working in the twentieth year of our reign [1346] or in some other appropriate year five or six years ago. . . . No one should pay or promise wages, liveries, payments or salaries greater than those defined above under pain of paying twice whatever he paid or promised to anyone who feels himself harmed by it. . . . Artisans and labourers ought not to receive for their labour and craft more money than they could have expected to receive in the said twentieth year or other appropriate year, in the place where they happen to be working; and if anyone takes more, let him be committed to gaol.I really don't think we would be seeing all this if our deaths were mostly just old retirees, we must've lost a lot of frontline workers over this past year.
I think part of what we're seeing is office workers organizing for their right to work from home, or for better conditions than the pandemic imposed crunch they've been under. It's just happening informally and so it's invisiblized to people outside that milieu.
Agreed, but there's also way more pushback on the fast food workers front than I think people can afford.
The other thing that occurs to me is that most older workers can't fully retire and so there's a lot of overlap between covid vulnerable people and front line workers.
I was actually thinking of old walmart workers as I was writing retirees there at the end.
100% agree with you.