Pandemic and the Working Class

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.

“By covering various industries and time periods, this comprehensive collection provides us with an essential guide for exploring the significance of the pandemic to the working class.”--Jamie McCallum, author of Essential: How the Pandemic Transformed the Long Fight for Worker Justice

• Introduction   Nick Juravich and Steve StrifflerPart I. Opening Interventions Work and the Labor Movement during the Pandemic   Nick Juravich and Steve StrifflerThe Diseases Are the Symptoms: Working-Class Plagues-COVID-19 and Deaths of Despair   Devan HawkinsSorting Out the Politics of Inflation, Past and Present   Samir SontiPart II. Food, Labor, and Hospitality Crises and Essential Workers: The Impact of COVID-19 on Farmworkers and Guest Worker Programs   Ismael GarcÍa-ColÓnThe Battle of the Shutdown: How Hospitality Workers Confronted Disaster Capitalism during the COVID-19 Pandemic   Carlos AramayoPart III. The Education Industry No Cuts-No Cops-No COVID: The Graduate Employees’ Pandemic Strike at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor   Kathleen BrownDisability Justice and the Education Labor Movement during the COVID-19 Pandemic   Kathryn M. MeyerArchival Labor and Labor Power: Using COVID Collections to Rethink History Making and the Labor Movement   Lia WarnerPart IV. The Healthcare Industry COVID, Caregiving, and Coping: Nurses’ Frontline Work through a Pandemic Year   Marian Moser JonesHealthcare Social Workers on the Front Lines of the COVID-19 Pandemic: Cracks, Flaws, and a Vision for Social Healthcare   Jennifer Zelnick, Leigh Howard, Doris Joy, Maura Hagan, and Sandrine EtiennePart V. “New” Forms of Organizing Beyond Austerity America: Labor Animates New Coalitions in the Age of COVID-19   Puya GeramiRediscovering Class: EWOC and Pandemic Labor Activism   Connor HarneyThe Pandemic Revolt of New York City’s Immigrant “Small Business” Unions   Andrew B. WolfCannabis, COVID-19, and Racial Capitalism: Unionization in the Era of Inequality   Eric LarsonEpilogue   Nick Juravich and Steve StrifflerContributorsIndex