During the COVID-19 pandemic, thousands of workers lost their jobs in sectors from hospitality to transportation, while healthcare and frontline service workers faced a new world of brutal hours in unsafe and even deadly conditions. Yet, as the US economy reopened, workers experienced a rare moment of leverage as demand for labor and government support powered a surge of collective action that allowed working people to seek rights, respect, and power on the job through resignations, walkouts, strikes, and union organizing. The lessons and legacies of this upsurge in organizing continue to shape work, activism, and politics across the nation today.

Nick Juravich and Steve Striffler edit a collection that examines the effects of the pandemic on workers. Sections of the book focus on specific impacts and government efforts to restructure the economy; the dramatic effect of the pandemic on the hospitality industry; educators’ response on behalf of themselves and their students; frontline healthcare workers; and the innovative forms of labor organizing that emerged during and after COVID.

Contributors: Carlos Aramayo, Kathleen Brown, Sandrine Etienne, Ismael García-Colón, Puya Gerami, Maura Hagan, Connor Harney, Devan Hawkins, Leigh Howard, Marian Moser Jones, Doris Joy, Nick Juravich, Eric Larson, Kathryn M. Meyer, Samir Sonti, Steve Striffler, Lia Warner, Andrew B. Wolf, and Jennifer Zelnick

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

1. Work and the Labor Movement during the Pandemic   Nick Juravich and Steve Striffler
2. The Diseases Are the Symptoms: Working-Class Plagues—COVID-19 and Deaths of Despair   Devan Hawkins
3. Sorting Out the Politics of Inflation, Past and Present   Samir Sonti
Part II. Food, Labor, and Hospitality
1. Crises and Essential Workers: The Impact of COVID-19 on Farmworkers and Guest Worker Programs   Ismael García-Colón
2. The Battle of the Shutdown: How Hospitality Workers Confronted Disaster Capitalism during the COVID-19 Pandemic   Carlos Aramayo
Part III. The Education Industry
1. No Cuts—No Cops—No COVID: The Graduate Employees’ Pandemic Strike at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor   Kathleen Brown
2. Disability Justice and the Education Labor Movement during the COVID-19 Pandemic   Kathryn M. Meyer
3. Archival Labor and Labor Power: Using COVID Collections to Rethink History Making and the Labor Movement   Lia Warner
Part IV. The Healthcare Industry
1. COVID, Caregiving, and Coping: Nurses’ Frontline Work through a Pandemic Year   Marian Moser Jones
2. 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
1. Beyond Austerity America: Labor Animates New Coalitions in the Age of COVID-19   Puya Gerami
2. Rediscovering Class: EWOC and Pandemic Labor Activism   Connor Harney
3. The Pandemic Revolt of New York City’s Immigrant “Small Business” Unions   Andrew B. Wolf
4. Cannabis, COVID-19, and Racial Capitalism: Unionization in the Era of Inequality   Eric Larson

Epilogue   Nick Juravich and Steve Striffler
Contributors
Index