In The Pandemic Workplace, anthropologist Ilana Gershon turns her attention to the US workplace and how it changed—and changed us—during the pandemic. In this excerpt, we share a snippet from the book’s introduction.

Introduction

At some point in the week of March 9, 2020, people’s daily lives in the United States changed dramatically—throughout the country, governors and mayors began to recommend or order schools and businesses to stop meeting in person.

Many people already knew that COVID-19 was spreading globally. Workers in call centers, factories, and hospitals told me that their friends in China, Korea, or France had already warned them that the virus was quite dangerous. Since January or February, relatives in Asia had been shipping masks to their families in the United States, and avid news followers had started to stock up on canned goods and toilet paper.

Not everyone was responding to the threat before March. Some wanted to remain optimistic, remembering earlier diseases that stayed mainly on others’ shores—the bird flu, H1N1, Ebola, Zika, and so on. But for most US Americans, the week of March 9 was a turning point, and they realized much was about to change. Maybe it was March 11, the day that movie star Tom Hanks announced that he was infected, and the day that the NBA suspended its season. Or maybe it was March 13, when many schools and universities shut down indefinitely, some promising to reopen after an extended spring break, others deciding then and there to go online until the fall. This was the week in which the United States started a grand social experiment that would continue for several years thereafter—changing how US Americans worked and lived side by side, as so many tried, collectively, to stop the spread of the COVID-19 virus.

One of the most significant things the pandemic changed was how US Americans experienced work—not only their own workplaces, but also the stores, schools, and hospitals that were other people’s workplaces. For this book, I talked to over two hundred US Americans about their experiences working during the pandemic. My interviewees included people working for larger corporations, for small family-owned businesses, for government, for nonprofits, and some who were self-employed. They described how the practice of going to work had changed; the hours they worked now were often different than they had been before the pandemic. If they traveled to get to work, rather than working from home—and I tried largely to talk to people who had to go to work in person—how often they went in to work changed, as did their means of transit. I talked to a New Yorker who biked to work from Brooklyn to the Upper West Side to avoid the subway. I talked to people who moved to cheaper or prettier cities because their work had become entirely virtual.

The people I interviewed described how who they saw at work changed, sometimes dramatically—if they worked entirely in virtual spaces, they only saw those who attended the same online meetings. Those who went physically to their workplaces were sometimes more confined in where they were allowed to go, or sometimes some workers only went in the mornings, while others went in the afternoons, or only on Tuesdays and Thursdays, while others went in on Mondays and Wednesdays. How they took breaks at work changed—the break room, if there was one at all, now had strict limits on the number of people who could occupy it at any moment. Relationships with clients or customers often changed as rules about distance and masking were put in place to reduce exposures. Means of communication changed—emails, chatrooms, newsletters, and video conferencing became the primary ways people learned what was going on at work.

These changes did not happen smoothly. Deciding what to do was complicated, and then ensuring that everyone involved actually followed the new sets of rules was equally complicated. The pandemic made in-person interaction deeply fraught, and it forced people to rethink work practices that they had taken for granted. They consciously had to make decisions about myriad small aspects of work—does a court stenographer have to be physically present at every meeting or can they be present by video conference? Can teachers teach half their students in person and the other half by video at the same time? How much virtual participation does a student have to perform to be counted as present for that day? But they also had to think about larger questions and make important judgments—does my employer value my safety? Is the bargain I have struck at my job worth it—that is, trading the freedom to do whatever I want with my time, my thoughts, and my body in exchange for a paycheck and (often) benefits?

Throughout 2020, the US federal government (unlike that of many other countries) did not provide any clear mandates for how to respond to COVID-19, and so it fell to states and businesses to create a set of enforceable rules. President Donald Trump decided early on that the federal government should play a limited role in responding to the pandemic. Trump publicly downplayed the danger of COVID-19, claiming the Chinese or federal government had it under control and making statements in February and March of 2020 along the lines of what he said in a February 10 rally in New Hampshire: “Looks like by April, you know in theory when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away” (Keith 2020). The federal government could have invoked the Defense Production Act to allow the federal government to coordinate and lead business efforts to respond to the pandemic. Or, once supply-chain issues had been resolved, Trump could have instituted a mask mandate. Instead, the Trump administration refused either step.

On March 20, Jared Kushner, speaking for the Trump administration, asserted in a private task force meeting that “the federal government is not going to lead this response. It’s up to the states to figure out what they want to do.” This decision was political: at the time Kushner (and Trump) made this decision, the majority of COVID cases were in states that typically voted for a Democratic president and governor. The Trump administration wanted Democratic governors to be blamed for responses to the pandemic that were bound to be inadequate without federal help (Eban 2020). After all, 2020 was an election year, and many political decisions were being made with an eye to the upcoming elections.

In practice, the lack of federal guidelines meant that fifty-six different US states and territories were each now carrying out their own individual experiments around how best to respond to the pandemic. When many states refused to issue clear guidelines, businesses often had to step into this void, turning many CEOs into amateur epidemiologists forced to make decisions about public health. This book is about what happened in 2020 when businesses had to take on the public-health tasks that might otherwise have been performed by federal or state governments.

Ilana Gershon is professor of anthropology at Rice University. She is the author of several books, including Down and Out in the New Economy, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

The Pandemic Workplace: How We Learned to Be Citizens in the Office is available now on our website or wherever good books are sold.