Why everyone’s a socialist when there’s a global pandemic
COMMENTARY similar promise of compensation.
Trader Joe’s also says it will cover for time off for the virus. Several tech giants said they would continue to pay their hourly employees who cannot work during the outbreak, and Amazon said it won’t dock warehouse workers for missing shifts. Orlando-based Darden Restaurants, which runs several restaurant chains, including Olive Garden, said that its 170,000 hourly workers would now get paid sick leave.
It wasn’t just sick leave. Overnight, workplaces across the country were transformed into Scandinavian Edens of flexibility. Can’t make it to the office because your kid has to unexpectedly stay home from school? Last week, it sucked to be you. This week: What are you even doing asking? Go home, be with your kid!
Then politicians got into the act. The Trump administration — last seen proposing to slash a pay raise for federal workers and endorsing a family leave policy that doesn’t actually pay for family leave — is now singing the praises of universal sick pay. “When we tell people, ‘If you’re sick, stay home,’ the president has tasked the team with developing economic policies that will make it very, very clear that we’re going to stand by those hardworking
Americans,” Vice President Mike Pence said on Monday.
And wasn’t it almost funny how everyone and their doctor was suddenly extolling the benefits of government-funded health care for all? When the Trump administration told Congress that it was considering reimbursing hospitals for treating uninsured Americans who contracted COVID-19, Republicans who had long opposed this sort of “socialized medicine” were now conceding that, well, of course, they didn’t mean it quite so absolutely.
“You can look at it as socialized medicine,” Rep. Ted Yoho, R-Fla., told HuffPost. “But in the face of an outbreak, a pandemic, what’s your options?”
As I said, it’s almost funny: Everyone’s a socialist in a pandemic. But the laugh catches in your throat, because the only joke here is the sick one American society plays on workers every day.
The truth is that we’re nowhere near turning into Denmark. Many of the newly announced worker-protection policies, like sick leave and flexibility, are limited, applying only to the effects of this coronavirus (the exception is Darden’s new sick-leave plan, which the company says is permanent). Republicans’ interest in universal health care is ephemeral. Call it Medicare For All But Just For This One Disease.
But there’s an even deeper tragedy at play, beyond the meagerness of the new benefits. The true embarrassment is that it took a possible pandemic for leaders to realize that the health of the American work force is important to the strength of the nation.
It is not yet clear how well the American system will respond, but the early signs are far from encouraging. What we’re learning is that our society might be far more brittle than we had once imagined.
There may be a silver lining here: What if the virus forces Americans and their elected representatives to recognize the strength of a collectivist ethos?
I would like to imagine this bright future. But I’ll confess I’m not optimistic. More than a decade ago, America stumbled through the Great Recession without imposing many significant fixes for the excesses of our financial system. The titans of Wall Street were protected and working people were left with scraps.
The coronavirus might teach us all to value a robust safety net — but there’s a good chance we’ll forget the lesson, because this is America, and forgetting working people is just what we do.