Coronavirus, and May Day, expose America’s working-class struggles

I spend much of my day trying to survive the pandemic, practicing physical distancing and hoping against hope not to get COVID-19. It is a big distraction.

I am also teaching history at the University of Washington Tacoma, but now doing it online. My oral history students are interviewing themselves and others, focusing on the theme of working people in a time of pandemic.

That theme includes most people; they either work, wish they had a job so they could work, or have altered their work to do what is needed now.

We all do the best we can, but the pandemic exposes the glaring failures of our country for those who work. It’s a good theme to address this week following the international workers’ event, May Day.

What are we experiencing and why? Is it just a virus, or is there some other problem as well? Most working people can’t get by without a paycheck or other income. The average American has about $400 in savings. Some have none.

Some 28 million people don’t have health insurance. Many losing their jobs also lose insurance through their employer. While the president refuses to open up the Affordable Care Act to people without insurance, a poorly funded medical system structured to create profits saddles them with catastrophic expenses.

A great multitude of people can’t work from home. Medical, food, service industry, transportation and many other workers have no choice but to go out and risk their lives to work during the epidemic.

African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, recent immigrants doing low-wage work with few benefits, the incarcerated, people in immigrant detention centers, the homeless, and people in nursing homes get hit the hardest.

In the Detroit area where I come from, some 80 percent of the people are black, and most are working-class and poor. The pandemic is killing them at a disastrous rate.

This time of pandemic reveals vast socio-economic and racial inequalities. It also shows how much we need working people to make this country run.

None of us can survive without the home health care and other workers who don’t make enough to live and don’t have health care themselves. All of us need to secure worker union rights and labor rights as human rights.

We have much to learn from this pandemic, even as it reveals things we need to know. But the president has inoculated people from understanding what is happening by telling them to ignore respected news sources as “fake news.”

In his view, we should only listen to him and his outlet, Fox News. Their fatal misinformation clouds this learning moment with misdirection, confusion and blame for others.

This works well for the president; many Americans don’t know that his administration was well briefed and had many warnings about the threat of a global pandemic but did almost nothing about it.

Alongside race, class, and gender divisions, our country divides along lines of information. Do we know what is going on? Many can’t tell the difference between truth and a lie. We are often divided by those who know and those who don’t know.

In which group would we rather be? Our survival depends on the answer. This pandemic may be just the beginning. Global warming and its attendant crises are hard upon us.

How will we survive if we don’t all pull together? Martin Luther King told us: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” It’s true.

This pandemic is a wake-up call. Can we learn from our current experiences and by looking back at our history? Or will we simply remain, as the writer Gore Vidal once said, “the United States of Amnesia”?

The jury on those questions is out. However, Americans specialize in hope. Our history, especially our labor and civil rights history, show that even in the worst of times, it remains possible that we shall overcome.

Michael K. Honey is a professor of humanities at the University of Washington Tacoma. His latest book is “To the Promised Land: Martin Luther King and the Fight for Economic Justice.”

This story was originally published May 2, 2020 at 12:00 PM.