Crisis Conversations: Living with layoffs of pandemic proportions

Caleb had high hopes when he graduated from college in his home state of Louisiana in December. He’d find a job in a law firm, he thought, get some experience and save money before heading off to law school and, hopefully, a career in politics, “working for the little guy,” and, he hoped, a ticket into the economic certainty of the middle class.

Then the coronavirus pandemic hit. Now Caleb, like an unprecedented 22 million other workers in America, is out of a job as stores, restaurants, schools and businesses close their doors in a massive effort to create social distance and prevent the easy spread of the often deadly virus. Hardest hit are low-wage retail and service sector workers, where women and people of color are overrepresented. Caleb had been working two different jobs in retail, making about $9 an hour, to make ends meet while he looked for a good job. When the mall shut down and openings for white collar positions dried up in the area, he, like millions of others, put his hopes in his state unemployment insurance system to keep him afloat through the crisis.

Navigating that system was the first problem. “The website is a hot mess,” he said. “It was an incredible hassle” to try to figure out what to do. Eventually he got someone on the phone who helped with his application and told him he qualified--for $51 a week. (The most Louisiana pays out in unemployment insurance is $247 a week. The average in in the United States is about $385 a week.) But $51 is nowhere near what he needs to cover his rent, his bills, and to begin to pay down the $14,000 he owes in student loan debt.

Now, the problem is timing. He’s hoping he’ll qualify for the additional $600 per week the federal government promised unemployed workers in the recently passed $2 trillion CARES Act. He just doesn’t know when he’ll get it. “So I’m still living on money from my last paycheck,” he said, “using as little as possible for gas and food.”

Violet, who has worked for the past two years in the beauty retail industry in Texas, is also out of a job because of the pandemic. She had wanted to go to college, like Caleb, but couldn’t afford it. She’d planned to make her livelihood and career in retail – something that was difficult if not impossible to do with a part-time job that paid $13 an hour with no benefits. (She repeatedly sought full-time hours, she said, but, like many retail workers, was repeatedly turned down by her employer.)

Because her employer doesn’t offer benefits like health insurance to part-time workers, and because she has an underlying thyroid condition, Violet often finds herself in the ER for treatment. Already, she owes more than $10,000 in unpaid medical bills. And now that her store has closed down, she’s been trying to apply for unemployment benefits until she can find another job. But unlike Caleb, Violet can never get past the first few computer screens before it tells her to call a human being. And when she calls, no human ever picks up the phone. One day, she decided to count how many times she’d called. She stopped when she got to 400. “It feels like I have a job,” she said, “calling the unemployment office.”

“It’s mentally exhausting calling so much. You just feel like you want to give up,” she said on a recent episode of Crisis Conversation – Live from the Better Life Lab. The Better Life Lab has been hosting weekly interactive live conversations for people to come together to share stories and hear from experts on how the pandemic is changing the way we work and live. She qualified for SNAP food assistance, but was turned down by Medicaid. So she helps her brother deliver take-out food.

Rachel Deutsch, supervising attorney for worker justice at the Center for Popular Democracy, said stories like Caleb’s and Violet’s are all too familiar right now, with shockingly high numbers of unemployed workers – the sharpest increase since the Department of Labor began keeping records in 1967 -- flooding ancient application systems and state agencies that have been underfunded for years. “We’re in for a very, very bumpy period,” she said, all because of policy choices that have been made over the years.”

Those policy choices have not only led to poorly functioning state systems that are now scrambling to meet this record demand, but also led to the creation of the poorly paid precarious jobs that Violet and Caleb and millions of others now out of work had in the first place.

And it’s not just workers in low-wage jobs who need a better system. Sara, a highly educated professional, joined the call to explain how her company expected her to continue remote working apace, even after her children’s child care center closed and, with a husband overseas, she had to become the full-time caregiver to a one and three-year-old, too. When she asked for emergency paid family leave – which she should have qualified for under the Families First Coronavirus Response Act – the company instead decided to let her go. “I’ve never felt punished, ever, for being a mother. But this felt punishing,” she said. “For the first time, I felt that if I didn’t have kids, I’d still have a job right now.”

Sara, too, has applied for unemployment, hoping to cover rent, bills and high student loan debt, but hasn’t heard if she qualifies.

If, as historian Patrick Wyman said, “crises like these reveal what is already broken or in the process of breaking,” then what the pandemic is making crystal clear is how broken the way we work is, that the safety net is full of holes, and how impossible it is for millions of people and families to survive, much less thrive.

And while a number of other countries are using public funds to continue to pay workers’ salaries, to keep them attached to their employers without the stress and uncertainty of unemployment, Deutsch said, because so many American jobs are so bad, that’s actually not a good option for workers and families.

So what needs to change when we make it to the other side of the pandemic? How, with all the talk of jobs disappearing and automation and the future of work, do we create good jobs, decent and dignified work, where no one has to pay $5,000 for a test for strep throat at the ER because they have no health insurance, like Violet did; or where no one has to teeter on the edge of bankruptcy like Sara because there is no paid family leave or no paid sick days to cushion them through a hard patch; and where no one has to beg for enough predictable hours and a living wage just to cover the basics, like Caleb did.

Deutsch laid out a roadmap – one very much aligned with the Better Life Lab - to create a health care system not tied to one’s employer (which is an artifact of World War II): Real support for workers, families and caregivers with national, universal paid sick days and paid family and medical leave policies like other wealthy nations ensure; a living wage standard (Congress hasn’t raised the $7.25 minimum wage in more than a decade); stable and predictable schedules (which research shows are good not only for workers, but for businesses); companies that give frontline workers a voice in how work is designed and companies run (instead of spending millions to bust unions).

Getting these ideas out into the national discussion, sharing real stories of workers and families struggling to combine work and care, not just in the pandemic, but before the pandemic, is impetus behind these Crisis Conversations. The hope is, as some historians say, the crisis may be a “once in a generation opportunity” to raise expectations, reshape the American myth that we are somehow better off going it alone, and that, even in these dark days of isolation, sickness, fear and uncertainty, we can push to remake work and the frayed safety net systems we’ve been forced to accept, and recreate American systems so that they no longer put shareholder profits over care and human thriving.

In the next session, we’ll chat with healthcare workers on the frontlines about how the pandemic is impacting their lives. RSVP to join the community conversation.

To hear more of this episode including stories and questions from callers, click here. You can also find this episode wherever you listen to your podcasts. The video and transcript of the conversation are down below.