What's Happening.

 

By no means was the Covid-19 pandemic anything like the Black Death that hit 14th Century Europe and wiped out between one-third and one-half of the entire population.

Relatively speaking our recent plague was a minor blip in the ongoing cataclysm that is life on earth. But still, over one-million Americans are thought to have died, roughly three people per thousand. About as many people as were killed in the Civil War, World War II and World War I combined. Or twenty times the number of Americans who were killed during the Vietnam war.

Since I read Stanford professor Walter Scheidel's book "The Great Leveler," a historical survey of income inequality (and well worth the effort) I've been wondering how the power relationship between capital and labor would shift in response to our recent pandemic. As Newton pointed out, for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. And the upset to the employment market caused by Covid-19 surely has sent shockwaves through America's economy.

First, as there were labor shortages and people refused to work, it appeared labor (that's you and me) had gained the upper-hand.

As soon as shops started closing, workers got more rights (like the right to work at home), minimum wages started rising, reactionary backlash struck. Immediately there was an offensive led by the forces of capital excoriating workers. "No one wants to work anymore." "People are lazy." And so on and so forth. If your memory extends back beyond what you had for breakfast, you might recall some of the shrill noise about all this.

Now, more and more companies are mandating that employees return to the office. I don't necessarily think it's wrong to have to work onsite. But I get the feeling it's being mandated by many in an attempt to reassert the control capital once enjoyed over labor.

In all the squeeze about returning to the office, no large corporation is spending money on making offices a nice place to work. I don't hear anything about having actual doors, a private space for meetings, and a limit on the after-hours, always-on work arrangements so many of us are afflicted by. 

I also don't hear about any giant companies who employ thousands putting pressure on governments to improve public mass-transit. No, that would involve taxes and those giant companies don't pay any.

Instead, I think back 700 years when the rulers of Merrie Olde enacted "Medieval Poor Laws." Those laws, "An Ordinance of Labourers" enacted by King Eddie III, were passed because 30-40-percent of labor died. 

The survivors were in great demand.

Great demand (unless you work for an oligopoly which controls and limits wages) usually leads to increased earnings. The landowners, think Mark Read in tight pantaloons, didn't want to pay employees more. And they didn't want to let their land lay fallow.

So, they had their government pass laws that said if you can work, you must. Further, they set wages and prices at pre-plague levels. Finally, if a worker left a farm for another, presumably better farm, that is, if he escaped from his servitude, he could have, as they said in Middle English, "He hath hith pupicke cutteth offeth, forsoothe."

That's what's happening, Ladies and Germs. 

Labor got a little muscle and capital got nervous.

Ouch.