BOBVID-19
There’s a good piece on the difference between furloughs and layoffs in the Philly Inquirer today. The lines are fuzzy at best.
Furloughed workers ‘maybe’ will be brought back, but laid off employees get told the same thing. Furloughed workers have access to paid time off, sick leave, and benefits–except when companies frequently block those attempts (which should be illegal in Philly now wrt sick leave but no one’s enforcing it?). Laid off people can buy COBRA of course, but that’s prohibitively expensive.
The whole thing reminds me of the film Office Space where the Bobs interview every employee to see who can be fired. Except now the Bobs are a virus—or at least can use the occasion of the virus to lower their costs by not hiring people back.
There’s a larger capitalist question here. Firms look out for firms, period. That’s how neoclassical economics works.
Labor (aka diverse working class, aka most people and their families) is only an expense to a firm, like other pieces of infrastructure, unless the capitalist in charge has a ‘heart’. This is what Marx meant when he said that labor is part of the means of production along with land, money, etc. Our labor is just something capitalists pay for along with their rent and supplies. If we have to be cut, we get cut.
In this production crisis, I’m getting the sense that labor-as-means will be one of the outstanding features of the recovery. Unless something like a government or labor union keeps labor in mind, firms won’t. And the production crisis being like the Bobs reveals that ruthless fact about the US’s low-road capitalism, and capitalism in general.
The other option of course is if the working class gets its shit together together and fights back, which a good number (though not enough) are doing.