The 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.

Introduction   Nick Juravich and Steve Striffler
Part I. Opening Interventions



Work and the Labor Movement during the Pandemic   Nick Juravich and Steve Striffler
The Diseases Are the Symptoms: Working-Class Plagues—COVID-19 and Deaths of Despair   Devan Hawkins
Sorting Out the Politics of Inflation, Past and Present   Samir Sonti

Part II. Food, Labor, and Hospitality

Crises and Essential Workers: The Impact of COVID-19 on Farmworkers and Guest Worker Programs   Ismael García-Colón
The Battle of the Shutdown: How Hospitality Workers Confronted Disaster Capitalism during the COVID-19 Pandemic   Carlos Aramayo

Part III. The Education Industry

No Cuts—No Cops—No COVID: The Graduate Employees’ Pandemic Strike at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor   Kathleen Brown
Disability Justice and the Education Labor Movement during the COVID-19 Pandemic   Kathryn M. Meyer
Archival Labor and Labor Power: Using COVID Collections to Rethink History Making and the Labor Movement   Lia Warner

Part IV. The Healthcare Industry

COVID, Caregiving, and Coping: Nurses’ Frontline Work through a Pandemic Year   Marian Moser Jones
Healthcare 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 Etienne

Part V. “New” Forms of Organizing

Beyond Austerity America: Labor Animates New Coalitions in the Age of COVID-19   Puya Gerami
Rediscovering Class: EWOC and Pandemic Labor Activism   Connor Harney
The Pandemic Revolt of New York City’s Immigrant “Small Business” Unions   Andrew B. Wolf
Cannabis, COVID-19, and Racial Capitalism: Unionization in the Era of Inequality   Eric Larson

Epilogue   Nick Juravich and Steve Striffler
Contributors
Index