The Great Resignation as part of the pandemic’s portal
I’d like to channel the spirit of Arundhati Roy’s beautiful poem “The Pandemic is a Portal” into support and applause for all the workers taking part in “the Great Resignation” of the last few months, and the recent, widespread labor unrest dubbed “Striketober.” God bless you all, you courageous quitters and strikers, and good luck to you.
As Roy told us, “Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.”
Guided by the light of Roy’s poem about the transformative changes the pandemic will require, “the Great Resignation” can be seen as healthy responses to premature attempts to force workers back into some pre-pandemic normal without doing the hard, transformative work that society needs to do. Simply restarting jobs that include overwork, low pay, lack of benefits, hostile customers and lack of respect by supervisors will no longer do. Having survived a pandemic, workers are no longer willing to put up with what used to be considered “normal,” and are walking away. Bravo!
As Roy warned us over a year ago, “[C]orona virus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to “normality,” trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality.”
After 18 long months of dealing with sickness and death, and now trying to repair disrupted careers and mend stressed relationships with partners, parents, spouses and children — we, workers, have changed. We are tougher, more self-reliant and less tolerant of nonsense. After so many of us lost loved ones, we have and continue to rethink our priorities in life, as well as “the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves.” We yearn for a kinder, healthier and more equitable world, and many of us have been finding ways to help build it.
This is why the “Great Resignation” of the last few months and the recent “Striketober” should be celebrated. These are unmistakable signals that workers are raising the bar of working conditions they find acceptable and demanding more social support than is currently available, so their children or aging parents can get the attention they need while they are at work. We workers have been doing the hard, transformative work of the pandemic’s portal on an individual and household level, and have been waiting for employers and government support to catch up.
As Roy told us about the portal, “We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”
After so many months of navigating the twists and turns of an on-again/off- again economy, the pandemic has changed a lot us into square pegs that no longer fit in the round, pre-pandemic employment holes we used to. Nor are a lot of us particularly anxious to change back into shapes that will fit.
Despite the ever-so-slow increases in vaccination rates and a sense of light at the end of a long tunnel, it seems the half-recovered economy currently on offer is less than many of us are willing to settle for. We want and need more. We want what a large majority of us voted for in the last presidential election - for an economy that works for all us and a government that will help.