As the coronavirus ravages communities around the world, essential workers continue risking their lives to perform the services that sustain our very lives. They clean our streets, keep us fed, and nurse us back to health. Praised by politicians, glorified by CEOs, and celebrated by celebrities and consumers alike, essential workers have been likened to heroes throughout the pandemic. Such recognition is rhetoric alone. Institutions have flouted guidelines set by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention even as workers demand reasonable protections that are in line with those very guidelines. Essential workers, and particularly low-wage workers, continue to be exploited by an extractive capitalist system that prioritizes profits over health and safety.
At Harvard, this hypocrisy becomes exceptionally clear. While Harvard administrators have publicly lauded the efforts of its essential workers — custodians, dining workers, and clerical and technical staff — they have continually and systematically undermined workers’ rights, putting them at disproportionate risk for contracting the coronavirus. By romanticizing its essential workers while refusing to ensure their safety or provide benefits, Harvard is engaging in a dangerous and irresponsible deflecting tactic to divert attention from its own failures. Its actions serve as an example of a larger phenomenon involving corporate hypocrisy and government inadequacy.
Harvard’s Hypocrisy
Throughout the pandemic, official communications from university administrators have praised the dedication of essential workers. In an email to the Harvard community, President Lawrence Bacow wrote, “To our staff, I understand that we are expecting you to go above and beyond in your efforts to support our important mission of teaching and scholarship. We do this because we know we can rely on your creativity, flexibility, and judgment through these challenging times.” Various administrators have commented on Harvard’s “talented staff” and their role in “keeping the University up and running.”
Despite these proclamations, Harvard has treated its workers poorly. At the onset of the pandemic, university administrators proposed just 30 days of paid leave for dining hall staff and custodians whose facilities had closed. Afterward, they would be forced to file for unemployment or find another source of income. For a workforce whose labor and pay already diminish significantly during summer break, 30 days of paid leave is simply not enough for workers to support themselves and their families. This proposal only marked the beginning of Harvard’s anti-labor attitude; in the following weeks, university administrators continued to prioritize their budget over their employees.
One striking example was Harvard’s failure to provide workers, and especially custodians, with adequate personal protective equipment. Doris Reina-Landaverde, a custodian, shop steward for SEIU 32BJ, the union that represents custodial workers, and organizer with the Harvard Temporary Protected Status Coalition, contracted COVID-19 on the job. In an interview with the HPR, she spoke to Harvard’s initial reluctance to provide workers with sufficient PPE: “The job we do is hard. We need masks to protect us from the virus and from the chemicals we use [to clean]. Sometimes more than 10 workers are working on the same floor. In the beginning, when we asked for masks, [management] wouldn’t give them to us. There are maybe 380-400 custodial workers at Harvard, and out of those, 50-60 got sick [with COVID-19].” Other custodians reported that managers gave them just “one disinfectant wipe” and “one disposable mask” to do their job.
Importantly, custodial staff were not the only workers to be adversely affected by Harvard’s actions. Management left many of Harvard’s workers in the dark about the full impact of the coronavirus. Edward Childs, a labor organizer with UNITE HERE Local 26, the union that represents dining workers, spoke of Harvard’s lack of transparency: “In Quincy Hall, we had two [workers] and one student get [COVID-19], but management didn’t tell us. We were never notified. Then we found out that management was walking around from hall to hall spreading the virus.” Soon after, Quincy House dining employees stopped reporting to work in protest.
These instances of university neglect are not anecdotal. They affect all of Harvard’s essential workers and were compounded by compensation policies instituted by the Office of Campus Services throughout the evolution of the pandemic. One such policy placed high-risk workers — those with underlying conditions or those who had dependents with underlying conditions — into sick-time debt by forcing them to use their own sick-time or personal leave. Once that time ran out, they would go unpaid until the end of the semester. Genevieve Lechat, a member of the Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers, voiced her concerns in an interview with the HPR: “[The COVID-19 pandemic] has been a time of uncertainty and sacrifice for all workers. It seems completely unsympathetic for Harvard to make its Black and Brown workers pick up the slack, especially in the aftermath of the recent police killings.” The majority of Harvard’s custodial and dining workers are Black and Brown.
The culmination of these blatantly anti-labor practices came in the form of layoff threats. According to Reina-Landaverde, management “threatened to layoff 60% of our workers because they think everything will be online in the fall. We don’t know what the future will look like. As a shop steward, it really hurts to tell people to go home. They have families to take care of. Some don’t have savings.” Although these layoffs were not ultimately implemented due to the organizing efforts of a cross-union coalition, it is clear that despite Harvard’s praise of essential workers, the university failed its community in a time of crisis.
The Illusion of Heroism
Worker exploitation extends beyond Harvard. In New York City, the chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, Pat Foye, has repeatedly praised the agency’s “brave employees who are moving New York’s medical professionals, childcare workers, first responders and essential personnel during this challenging time.” Yet, more than 100 transit workers have died from the coronavirus. Workers are given cheaply made masks and an insufficient number of sanitizing wipes. Some have literally stumbled over dead bodies on the subway.
In addition to government agencies, corporations across the country have adopted a similar approach. Walmart, for example, voiced its appreciation for its workers, referring to its associates as “#TeamWalmart” in an attempt to cultivate an perception of unity among workers and management. Despite this posturing, the climbing rate of infections and deaths at Walmart, as well as the corporation’s lack of transparency, prompted workers to launch their own COVID-19 tracker. These trackers are meant to track infections and monitor store conditions to assure the safety of employees, customers and the community. Workers are taking matters into their own hands to keep themselves safe.
What do these institutions have in common? They are using romanticization as a diversionary tactic, praising essential workers to distract from the denial of their rights and benefits. This strategy is not limited to rhetorical moves: The federal government has spent excessive amounts of money to demonstrate its goodwill instead of mandating hazard pay or better distributing PPE. In late April, for example, two teams of fighter jets belonging to the Air Force and Navy aerial demonstration teams, the Thunderbirds and the Blue Angels, flew over New York and Philadelphia. According to Brian Kesselring, the commander of the Blue Angels, the flights were meant to “salute those working on the frontline of the COVID-19 response.” Instead of a raise or benefits, the Trump administration has prioritized grandiose, but ultimately meaningless, symbolic gestures to appease our essential workers.
Ultimately, the rhetoric of governments and corporations affects the general public’s view of essential workers, from the daily 7 p.m. rounds of applause for essential workers in New York City to historical plaques commemorating their service. Of course, these workers deserve all our praise, especially since their jobs have traditionally been undervalued. However, calling them heroes without fully understanding their struggles allows those of us who are privileged enough to stay at home to imagine their work as a noble choice rather than a brutal reality. Harvard custodians, Walmart associates and MTA transit workers did not sign up to sacrifice themselves. They were forced into this choice by the conceits of capitalism and an inept federal government that does not protect them.
Calling workers heroes renders them invisible and justifies their exploitation. Heroes are supposed to die for the public, their deaths akin to martyrdom. Heroism, then, erases the humanity and vulnerability of essential workers. It draws attention away from the reality that many essential workers are not paid a living wage, do not have access to affordable healthcare, and work in industries that deny them meaningful rights and protections. Heroism is a convenient illusion.
Real Problems Require Real Solutions
At Harvard, a coalition of custodial workers, dining hall workers, and clerical and technical workers have articulated a set of demands that include adequate PPE and hazard pay for all essential workers, “extra sick time off to all who need it,” an end to sick-time debt, a fair contract with the Harvard Graduate Students Union and a promise not to layoff workers. Community organizers have rallied around them, and as a result, some have been partially met by administration.
Early on in the crisis, for example, the Labor and Employment Action Project at Harvard Law School and the Student Labor Action Movement circulated a petition that gained close to 8,000 signatures calling on Harvard to extend the amount of paid leave for all workers to the end of the semester. Ultimately, Harvard acceded to this demand. Similarly, administrators retracted their threats of laying off custodial workers after students, workers and supporters gathered in protest. In an interview with the HPR, Jeremy Stepansky ‘23, an organizer with SLAM, spoke of the power of solidarity: “Student-worker solidarity and recognition of the indispensable leadership of especially Black, Brown and undocumented workers is essential for building collective power against institutions that value profits over the well-being of our communities.”
Essential workers around the country share similar demands to those of our own university community. Employee activism at corporations like Amazon, Target and InstaCart are on the rise; workers from these companies, among others, organized a strike on May Day to call on their employers to meet their demands for safety and security. Instead of well-meaning platitudes, institutions should take these demands seriously and ensure the health and well-being of their employees.
As for the people who have the privilege to avoid the front-lines, it is crucial that we understand the reality that essential workers face and our responsibility to confront it. We should recognize that essential workers have kept us healthy and safe. However, we must also realize the dangers of calling essential workers heroes, while their demands for justice remain unmet. We must hold our own institutions accountable for their harm by standing in solidarity with their workers.
Image Credit: Photo by the United Nations is used under the Unsplash license.