Why might there be hundreds of thousands of fewer people in the workforce post-COVID? Must be laziness caused by all those thousands of free dollars people are still riding high on! No other explanation I can think of!

  • JoeByeThen [he/him, they/them]
    ·
    1 year ago

    Don't mind me, I just repost this every few months when relevant.

    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.