The Pandemic and the Working Class: How Us Labor Navigated Covid-19

During the COVID-19 pandemic, thousands of workers lost their jobs in sectors from hospitality to transportation, while healthcare and frontline service workers faced a new world of brutal hours in unsafe and even deadly conditions. Yet, as the US economy reopened, workers experienced a rare moment of leverage as demand for labor and government support powered a surge of collective action that allowed working people to seek rights, respect, and power on the job through resignations, walkouts, strikes, and union organizing. The lessons and legacies of this upsurge in organizing continue to shape work, activism, and politics across the nation today.

Nick Juravich and Steve Striffler edit a collection that examines the effects of the pandemic on workers. Sections of the book focus on specific impacts and government efforts to restructure the economy; the dramatic effect of the pandemic on the hospitality industry; educators’ response on behalf of themselves and their students; frontline healthcare workers; and the innovative forms of labor organizing that emerged during and after COVID.

Contributors: Carlos Aramayo, Kathleen Brown, Sandrine Etienne, Ismael García-Colón, Puya Gerami, Maura Hagan, Connor Harney, Devan Hawkins, Leigh Howard, Marian Moser Jones, Doris Joy, Nick Juravich, Eric Larson, Kathryn M. Meyer, Samir Sonti, Steve Striffler, Lia Warner, Andrew B. Wolf, and Jennifer Zelnick

Nick Juravich is an assistant professor of history and labor studies and the associate director of the Labor Resource Center at UMass Boston. He is the author of Para Power: How Paraprofessional Labor Changed Education. Steve Striffler is the director of the Labor Resource Center at UMass Boston. He is the coeditor of Organizing for Power: Building a Twenty-First Century Labor Movement in Boston.