The working class and coronavirus (Part II): Pandemic throws inequality into sharp relief

I've been trying to write a nicely composed post on this topic for weeks now, but I'm giving up and providing just headlines, links, and brief excerpts, with featured stories arranged in chronological order. 

One of the earliest inequality stories by the national media was this one under the headline, "‘White-Collar Quarantine’ Over Virus Spotlights Class Divide, by Noam Scheiber, Nelson D. Schwartz and Tiffany Hsu, published on March 27, 2020 in the New York Times. Among the places featured was Brownsville, Texas, in the Rio Grande Valley. Here's an excerpt:

In some respects, the pandemic is an equalizer: It can afflict princes and paupers alike, and no one who hopes to stay healthy is exempt from the strictures of social distancing. But the American response to the virus is laying bare class divides that are often camouflaged — in access to health care, child care, education, living space, even internet bandwidth.

And across the country, there is a creeping consciousness that despite talk of national unity, not everyone is equal in times of emergency.

“This is a white-collar quarantine,” said Howard Barbanel, a Miami-based entrepreneur who owns a wine company. “Average working people are bagging and delivering goods, driving trucks, working for local government.”

Another early story focused on inequality played up the distinction between "essential workers" and the typically more privileged who are working from home.  "Location Data Says it All:  Staying Home During Coronavirus Is a Luxury."  Jennifer Jennifer Valentino-DeVries, Denise Lu and Gabriel J.X. Dance reported for the New York Times on April 3, 2020.  The lede follows:

It has been about two weeks since the Illinois governor ordered residents to stay at home, but nothing has changed about Adarra Benjamin’s responsibilities. She gets on a bus nearly every morning in Chicago, traveling 20 miles round trip some days to cook, clean and shop for her clients, who are older or have health problems that make such tasks difficult. 

Ms. Benjamin knows the dangers, but she needs her job, which pays about $13 an hour. She also cannot imagine leaving her clients to fend for themselves. “They’ve become my family,” she said. 

In cities across America, many lower-income workers continue to move around, while those who make more money are staying home and limiting their exposure to the coronavirus, according to smartphone location data analyzed by The New York Times.

Charles Blow, New York Times columnist, observed on April 5, 2020, that "Social Distancing is a Privilege."  There he writes:

People like to say that the coronavirus is no respecter of race, class or country, that the disease Covid-19 is mindless and will infect anybody it can. 

In theory, that is true. But, in practice, in the real world, this virus behaves like others, screeching like a heat-seeking missile toward the most vulnerable in society. And this happens not because it prefers them, but because they are more exposed, more fragile and more ill. 

What the vulnerable portion of society looks like varies from country to country, but in America, that vulnerability is highly intersected with race and poverty.

From April 9, an op-ed in the New York Times by Walter Scheidel was titled, "Why the Wealthy Fear Pandemics."  He writes of the aftermath of the Bubonic Plague:

Because of this “destructive plague which devastated nations and caused populations to vanish,” the Arab historian Ibn Khaldun wrote, “the entire inhabited world changed.” 

The wealthy found some of these changes alarming. In the words of an anonymous English chronicler, “Such a shortage of laborers ensued that the humble turned up their noses at employment, and could scarcely be persuaded to serve the eminent for triple wages.” Influential employers, such as large landowners, lobbied the English crown to pass the Ordinance of Laborers, which informed workers that they were “obliged to accept the employment offered” for the same measly wages as before.

But as successive waves of plague shrank the work force, hired hands and tenants “took no notice of the king’s command,” as the Augustinian clergyman Henry Knighton complained. “If anyone wanted to hire them he had to submit to their demands, for either his fruit and standing corn would be lost or he had to pander to the arrogance and greed of the workers.”

As a result of this shift in the balance between labor and capital, we now know, thanks to painstaking research by economic historians, that real incomes of unskilled workers doubled across much of Europe within a few decades.

This is sounding ominous for the wealthy, but only if government responds appropriately to what is happening.  Scheidel is a professor of history at Stanford University.

This data driven story is one that launched the "The America We Need" series on April 9, from the New York Times.  It was published on April 10, by David Leonhardt and Yaryna Serkez.  The headline is, "America Will Struggle after the Coronavirus.  These Charts Show Why."  Here's an excerpt:

Inequality didn’t cause the coronavirus crisis. But it is making the crisis much worse, having created an economy in which many Americans are struggling to get by, and are vulnerable to any interruption of work or income and any illness. 

On this page, we present dozens of ways to look at American life that together provide a more meaningful picture than G.D.P. There is reason to expect that many of these indicators are already beginning to look worse, as the country grapples with both a pandemic and a recession. Together, they also help show the areas in which Americans will struggle to recover from this crisis.

Jason DeParle of the New York Times reports on "The Coronavirus Class Divide:  Space and Privacy," on April 12, 2020.  The dateline is Robesonia, Pennsylvania, and the initial subject is Mark Stokes, a student at Kutztown University, who shares a house with 10 other people:

Housemates come and go to jobs in fast food and a chocolate factory, sharing a single shower. Dirty dishes crowd the kitchen that no one cleans. Lacking a bed, Mr. Stokes, a freshman at Kutztown University, sleeps on the floor in the room of a friend who took him in when the dorms closed.

No stranger to hardship, Mr. Stokes, who spent part of high school living in a car, worries that the crowded conditions will expose him to coronavirus. But like many poor Americans, he says the sanctioned solution — six feet of physical space — is a luxury he cannot afford.

DeParle quotes Stokes regarding his current living situation: 

It’s just so many people in the house and there’s nothing I can do about it — it’s not my house.  You can’t be six feet apart when you have to rely on other people’s space.

Stokes is sleeping on the floor of his friend's room in the house.  His friend sleeps on the bed with her child.  Stokes talks of sitting in his car to get some privacy, and also of reciting affirmations to calm himself. 

DeParle quotes Stefanie DeLuca, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins: 

The pandemic is a reminder that privacy is at a premium among the poor — hard to find and extremely valuable.  Living in crowded conditions not only increases the risk of infection but can also impose serious emotional and mental health costs. The ability to retreat into one’s own space is a way to cope with conflict, tension and anxiety.

This is a deeply reported and powerful story that also features a recovering heroin addict living in a one-room trailer, along with several family members, in Oklahoma and several homeless folks living together on Whidbey Island, Washington.  I highly recommend the entire story.

From Patricia Cohen of the New York Times on April 16, 2020, "Struggling in a Good Economy, and Now Struggling in a Crisis."  Here's the lede:

An indelible image from the Great Depression features a well-dressed family seated with their dog in a comfy car, smiling down from an oversize billboard on weary souls standing in line at a relief agency. “World’s highest standard of living,” the billboard boasts, followed by a tagline: “There’s no way like the American Way.” 

The economic shutdown caused by the coronavirus pandemic has suddenly hurled the country back to that dislocating moment captured in 1937 by the photographer Margaret Bourke-White. In the updated 2020 version, lines of cars stretch for miles to pick up groceries from a food pantry; jobless workers spend days trying to file for unemployment benefits; renters and homeowners plead with landlords and mortgage bankers for extensions; and outside hospitals, ill patients line up overnight to wait for virus testing.

Damon Winter, a photographer on assignment to the Opinion section of the New York Times, contributed this photo essay (text also by Winter), which was published o April 20, 2020.  It's titled "The Great American Divide" and features photos from central New York, Ithaca (home to Cornell) and Syracuse.  This is part of the New York Times "The America We Need" series.

This April 23, 2020  New York Times Upshot piece is framed in terms of "Who Has Enough Cash to get through the Coronavirus Crisis?"  Alissa Quart and Yaryna Serkez report that just 47% of Americans say they have enough savings to get through three months of unemployment:

Even before Covid-19, many Americans were living check to check, because of the costs of housing and child care, student debt payments, medical bills and the rest. Despite the cheery insistence of people like President Trump and personal finance gurus, the economic growth of the last decade had not brought wealth or security to most Americans. Fewer than half of American adults — just 47 percent — say that they have enough emergency funds to cover three months of expenses, according to a survey conducted this month by the Pew Research Center. 

In the coronavirus’s wake, those without savings may also be losing their jobs, leaving them with little to support their families other than the CARES Act relief from the government, help from charitable groups or GoFundMe or Venmo tip jar campaigns. This won’t be enough to save many families from ruin.

Lastly, here's a story from The Economist on April 27, 2020, which offers a global perspective on how the coronavirus is aggravating inequality.  It's one of a number of stories I've seen that highlights the likelihood of dramatic food shortages around the world. The headline is "Closing schools for covid-19 does lifelong harm and widens inequality," and it contrasts quarantined kids in Amsterdam and Paris with those in Dakar.

The working class and coronavirus (Part I): Higher education

Uneven access to higher education has been a persistent theme in media coverage since colleges and universities began to close down a month ago and, in so doing, sending their students "home," whatever that means.  This phenomenon is closely related to a long-time theme of my research and a personal obsession:  access to higher education and what keeps low-income students from achieving it.  And let me be clear at the outset:  while this blog generally focuses on working-class whites, this post is about the wider working class.   

There is so much to say on this topic, so I'm primarily going to collect sources, beginning with some early stories about what was happening with the elite higher education sector.  The first story that crossed my radar screen was this one by the Harvard Crimson published on March 11, 2020.  An excerpt follows:

Dean of the College Rakesh Khurana wrote to Barton and more than 6,000 other undergraduates on Tuesday morning that campus would not reopen after spring break, which stretches from March 14 to 22. 

Within hours, the email sent students scrambling to pack up all their belongings and make plans to vacate. But Barton and others say it hit one group of undergraduates particularly hard: first-generation and low-income students, many of whom depend upon Harvard for food, housing, and stability. 

“They've been evicted from their stability, they've been evicted from their homes, they’ve been evicted from their ability to live comfortably and safely,” Barton, who is an FGLI [First Generation Low Income] student, said. “There's already enough concern, and now they're concerned about being able to get home and have stable housing and food.” 

Some students must ship or store their on-campus belongings without financial support from Harvard. Others who planned to stay on campus must now book unexpected flights home and accrue additional costs. And those who rely on term-time employment must confront additional financial concerns as they lose their primary sources of income. 

Nicholas T. “Nick” Wyville ’20 called the College’s announcement “outrageous,” adding that he believes it will weigh most heavily on him and his fellow FGLI students. 

“Harvard prides itself on having a massive student body that is a large percentage on financial aid,” Wyville said. “I think that they forget that those are the same students who often come from home situations that are uncomfortable.” 

This Harvard Crimson story is rare in that it does mention rural folks and their relative lack of access to technology, especially broadband: 

Wyville — who hails from Anniston, Ala. — said online courses are not feasible for him and some of his peers from rural or low-income areas, where many homes do not have internet access. 

“It's not as if we can just like up and go to the library or the coffee shop every day,” he said.

Even before that Crimson story came this, on March 9,  from the Washington Post.  The headline was "Amherst College switches to online learning, as universities nationally scramble to respond to covid-19 outbreak."  Susan Svrluga and Nick Anderson report:

The announcement was a dramatic stroke from a small but nationally renowned school: A growing number of colleges and universities have announced temporary shifts to virtual classes in recent days in response to the uncertainty and rapid pace of changes with the covid-19 outbreak. Amherst took especially decisive action.

They quote Amherst president Biddy Martin:

We know that many people will travel widely during spring break, no matter how hard we try to discourage it.  The risk of having hundreds of people return from their travels to the campus is too great. The best time to act in ways that slow the spread of the virus is now. Let me make our decisions clear.

* * * 

It will be hard to give up, even temporarily, the close colloquy and individual attention that defines Amherst College.  ... Our goal is to keep members of our community as safe as we possibly can while ensuring that students can complete their coursework for the semester and the daily operations of the institution can continue.

The story reports on many other posh campuses, including Vanderbilt, Princeton, NYU, Columbia, Stanford shutting down early that week, well ahead of many other prestigious institutions and also some that are less so (e.g., University of Washington).

Next I saw this piece in the Washington Post on March 11 which, like the Crimson piece, made the point that these shut downs are a hardship on poor students who don't have much of a place to go--especially if scholarships are paying for their room and board. The piece is actually an op-ed by two Amherst students, and here's a salient quote:

These residential colleges are also undermining much of their own rationale for existing. They are meant to be havens for young people, home-like places with established routines and networks meant to foster learning. They are also sanctuaries for low-income and marginalized students who might not have stable homes to return to on short notice. Students without computers or broadband will be unable to access online courses once they begin. Perhaps worst of all, some international Amherst students may be unable to return to campus, when it eventually reopens, because of the Trump administration’s recently expanded travel ban.

To its credit, Amherst’s administration has set up a petition process for students to ask to stay on campus, and the student government is trying to reimburse some fees to help pay for travel. But the default is eviction. Communications from the school this week indicate that refunding the cost of room and board — but not tuition — is being considered.

Many similar stories have run in the last few weeks.  Here's one about the particular disappointment for first generation college graduates who won't get to have their live commencement ceremonies:

Administrators and college presidents are scrambling to figure out what to do about graduation this year. How can they acknowledge students' hard work and success, while still maintaining social distancing amid the outbreak of coronavirus? 

Many colleges across the country have outright cancelled graduations, others, such as Harvard and Miami University in Ohio, have scheduled virtual ceremonies. Some students have taken things into their own hands and created their own ceremonies — on a reconstructed campus — through Minecraft.

* * *

Celebrating graduation wasn't really about her, says Monica Ferrufino, who's finishing up at California State University, Los Angeles. It was really going to be for her parents. 

"When they cancelled graduation, it was exactly 60 days prior to our scheduled commencement," she explains. She knows that because her mother and father kept track, counting down the days, crossing each one off on their calendar. When she told them it was off, her mom cried. "My parents didn't get to finish high school," she says, "so for them, seeing their daughter graduating college was just beyond their dreams."

And finally, here's one from the New York Times early this week suggesting that college was the great "leveler" or "equalizer" before coronavirus.  Let me begin by challenging that starting proposition, which seems absurd in light of my own research into higher education access and books like Suzanne Mettler's.  Here's an excerpt from her 2014 editorial, "College, the Great Unleveler."

Something else began to happen around 1980. College graduation rates kept soaring for the affluent, but for those in the bottom half, a four-year degree is scarcely more attainable today than it was in the 1970s. And because some colleges actually hinder social mobility, what increasingly matters is not just whether you go to college but where. 

The demise of opportunity through higher education is, fundamentally, a political failure. Our landmark higher education policies have ceased to function effectively, and lawmakers — consumed by partisan polarization and plutocracy — have neglected to maintain and update them.

Ah, so elitism in the higher education sector is an extremely important part of the big story here.  And that reminds me of this important NYT story from nearly a decade ago.

But/and let's return to the New York Times story suggesting the contrary, that college is a great leveler.  Here's an excerpt, which is just a teaser to get you to read the rest of Nicholas Casey's story, which speaks to extreme socioeconomic (dis) advantage, race/ethnicity, (dis)ability and a range of other issues salient to an authentic intersectionality:

The political science class was called “Forced Migration and Refugees.” Students read accounts of migrants fleeing broken economies and seeking better futures, of life plans drastically altered and the political forces that made it all seem necessary. 

Then suddenly, the subject matter became personal: Haverford College shut down and evicted most students from the dormitories as the coronavirus spread through Pennsylvania. 

Like many college courses around the country, the class soldiered on. The syllabus was revised. The students reconvened on a videoconferencing app. 

But as each logged in, not everyone’s new reality looked the same. 

One student sat at a vacation home on the coast of Maine. Another struggled to keep her mother’s Puerto Rican food truck running while meat vanished from Florida grocery shelves. As one young woman’s father, a private equity executive, urged the family to decamp to a country where infections were falling, another student’s mother in Russia couldn’t afford the plane ticket to bring her daughter home.

Bottom line:  much as so many in the United States resist this reality, class matters profoundly with respect to higher education access, as with respect to everything else.  And it's consequences are enduring, far beyond the Zoom-enabled classroom.

Oh, and something I learned from Nicholas Casey's story is about the existence of Questbridge, which helps low-income students connect with elite colleges.  Don't think that service was around back in the day I was making college application decisions.

Here's a story from April 6 in the Washington Post about student attitudes toward the widespread move to pass-fail grading. 

Postscript from Politico on April 12, 2020:  "'We're on the edge of the precipice': How the pandemic could shatter college dreams," by Bianca Quilantan.

Postscript from the Daily Yonder on April 13, 2020.

Postscript from Anemona Hartocollis of the New York Times on April 15, 2020, "After Coronavirus, Colleges Worry:  Will Students Come Back?"

And from the Los Angles Times on April 16, 2020, a story about coronavirus's $558 million impact on the University of California system.

Postscript from the The Atlantic on April 24, 2020, "What if Colleges Don't Re-Open until 2021?," by Adam Harris.

Postscript from Christina Paxson, President of Brown University, "College Campuses Must Re-open in the Fall.  Here's How We Do It," a guest editorial in the New York Times.

Postscript from The New Yorker on April 28, 2020, "How the Coronavirus Pandemic Has Shattered the Myth of College in America," by Masha Gessen.

More to follow in this series on socioeconomic class and coronavirus.