The Pandemic Workplace: How We Learned to Be Citizens in the Office

By Ilana Gershon

A provocative book arguing that the workplace is where we learn to live democratically.

In The Pandemic Workplace, anthropologist Ilana Gershon turns her attention to the US workplace and how it changed—and changed us—during the pandemic. She argues that the unprecedented organizational challenges of the pandemic forced us to radically reexamine our attitudes about work and to think more deeply about how values clash in the workplace. These changes also led us as workers to engage more with the contracts that bind us as we rethought when and how we allow others to tell us what to do.

Based on over two hundred interviews, Gershon’s book reveals how negotiating these tensions during the pandemic made the workplace into a laboratory for democratic living—the key place where Americans are learning how to develop effective political strategies and think about the common good. Exploring the explicit and unspoken ways we are governed (and govern others) at work, this accessible book shows how the workplace teaches us to be democratic citizens.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: May 15, 2024
• ISBN: 9780226832623

Book preview

Cover Page for The Pandemic Workplace

The Pandemic Workplace

The Pandemic Workplace

How We Learned to Be Citizens in the Office

Ilana Gershon

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2024 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2024

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-83261-6 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-83263-0 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-83262-3 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226832623.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Gershon, Ilana, author.

Title: The pandemic workplace : how we learned to be citizens in the office / Ilana Gershon.

Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2024. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023039950 | ISBN 9780226832616 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226832630 (paperback) | ISBN 9780226832623 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Work environment—United States. | COVID-19 Pandemic, 2020– —Influence. | Work environment—United States—Public opinion. | Organizational change—Social aspects—United States—Public opinion. | Employees—United States—Attitudes. | Industrial hygiene—United States. | Organizational justice—United States. | Industrial relations—United States.

Classification: LCC HD7654 .G465 2024 | DDC 363.110973—dc23/eng/20230926

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023039950

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For Stewart Macaulay, who taught me about the contract in contractual sociality,

and for Marilyn Strathern, who taught me about the sociality

Contents

Introduction

1  Agreeing to Have a Boss

2  Being Governed, Governing Others at Work

3  Risking Workplaces

4  Organizing Work in a Pandemic

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Notes

References

Index

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.

In the pandemic, workplaces brought together groups of people with different and often contrasting understandings of risk. In the United States, not everyone agreed that there was a pandemic in the first place, or that masks or other regulations might be effective at halting the spread of the virus. Even when everyone in a given workplace saw the pandemic as a serious threat, some felt that ventilation was the most crucial safety measure, while others felt that social distancing should take priority. At a fundamental level, people had starkly different expectations of what would make them feel safe at work. They had different models of risk and different understandings of the consequences of the risks they were taking. Some felt that being around others put them at grave risk. But more commonly, people would tell me that they weren’t as worried about themselves as they were about exposing those with whom they lived, or their elderly relatives.

No workplace I knew of had widespread and instantaneous shared agreement about how to approach and understand pandemic risks. There was always a period of negotiation and deliberation that involved different perspectives and approaches. Because of the way the COVID-19 virus spreads, the workplace was forced to provide explicit regulations about how to govern all sorts of interactions that had previously been shaped by unspoken expectations of appropriate behavior. People had to change their daily practices and adjust minute details in the daily rhythms of their tasks and social interactions, and workplaces had to create systems of enforcement when people failed to comply with these new regulations.

As a result, the pandemic meant that people were thinking consciously about how they governed and were governed by other people in workplaces, and because of the nature of pandemic risk, the stakes of how workplaces were governed felt much higher than they had felt before. In many of my interviews, people talked about how problems that had existed in their workplaces before the pandemic were now being magnified. Before, being governed badly at work might make your day, week, or year miserable. Now, being governed badly meant that you might be catching and spreading COVID-19.

Everyone’s pandemically charged awareness about work meant that, as an anthropologist, I could find insight into a problem that had been nagging at me for years. I have long wanted to figure out where US Americans are finding their political imaginations these days. Every year or so, I teach Tocqueville’s take on civil society, and I have begun to wonder how his insights about the United States have weathered over time. In the early 1830s, the fairly impoverished French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United States on an exploratory research trip. He began by studying prisons. Then, in a move familiar to almost every anthropologist, and true even of this book, after he began talking to a wide range of US Americans, he jettisoned his initial project, and ended up writing about how everyday citizens were learning to be democratic. He believed that people are naturally self-interested or invested in their family’s well-being, but that to become democratic they have to learn how to think in terms of the common good. They have to learn how to make decisions that are good for the community as a whole even when those same decisions aren’t necessarily in their own self-interest—something aristocrats don’t really have to do, according to Tocqueville. After talking to US Americans from all walks of life, Tocqueville argued that they learned how to be democratic via their civic associations. Civil society inculcates a democratic sensibility because, he held, civic organizations bring people with different views together—people who then must learn how to cooperate so that the organization itself can flourish. In the 1830s, US Americans belonged to many associations. This argument—that citizens learn how to be democratic primarily via their civic associations—has been so influential that it is one reason why even today so much foreign aid is poured into supporting civic associations around the world, from theater troupes to food banks.

The 1830s, however, were a long time ago. Since 1995, when Robert Putnam published Bowling Alone, scholars have been talking about how few US Americans are participating in civic associations anymore. Theda Skocpol has argued that US civic associations have changed; people used to belong to associations that mimicked city and federal government structures, but no longer. Joining available associations, then, has stopped offering US citizens the same insights into government (Skocpol 2003). And Nina Eliasoph wrote Avoiding Politics: How Americans Produce Apathy in their Everyday Lives, a beautiful ethnography about what US Americans actually say and do in civic associations when they do bother to join them. She found that they are not in fact learning how to be citizens who can publicly articulate a vision of the common good. In the town she studied, participants who were activists felt obliged publicly to explain that they were advocating for change only in their family’s best interests, even though they thought that caring for the environment helped both their family and their local community. They were learning in their civic associations to downplay their commitments to the common good and publicly focus on their private concerns—exactly the opposite of what Tocqueville found in the 1830s. Moreover, in civic associations that were resolutely not about social change, such as country-western dance clubs, people would say that they didn’t know enough about what was going on in the world to have a political opinion. If people are not developing their political imaginations in civic associations, then where are they figuring out their political takes on the world?

My answer is the workplace. I first knew that this was my argument—a true aha moment—reading Evan Osnos’s article about the insurrectionists at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, for the New Yorker. Throughout the article, they describe their logic for rebelling in terms of the workplace. Osnos opens with a quote from Sharon Krahn, who insists she and everyone else at the protest were acting as an employer scolding an employee: Whose house is this? This is the house of ‘We the People.’ If you do a bad job, your boss tells you about it, Krahn said. She nodded toward the Senate, where the elected officials had already evacuated to safety: We’re not happy with the job you’ve done. Later in the article, Krahn turns to another aspect of work, bureaucratic accountability: Because, if this was fair, if this was a legitimate election, then we should be above reproach. Just like when the I.R.S. comes in and audits my books, I don’t worry about it (Osnos 2021).¹ Reading this piece, I suddenly put together what my interviewees had been telling me—that they were using the workplace as a lens for understanding politics.

I had earlier noticed the reverse—plenty of people in my interviews compared their bosses to then-president Trump. Many also thought that people’s political affiliations strongly shaped how they acted in the workplace. I have a different question in this book: I am exploring how people’s ideas about the ways that political decisions are made turn out to be shaped by people’s workplace experiences. People aren’t using congressional decision-making as a model for what should happen in the workplace. But they do often draw on their experiences in the workplace to try to make sense of their own niche in the political universe, and of how they want local, state, and federal governments to be run.

It isn’t enough simply to say that Americans are now learning what it means to govern and be governed from their experiences at work. What exactly are US Americans learning at work? What are the implications of grounding your political imagination in an organization whose primary objective is often making a profit? Furthermore, since not all workplaces are the same, do people learn different ways to think about governing depending on where they work, whether in a family-run business or an employee-owned association? Interviewing over two hundred people from all over the United States about their experiences working in person during the pandemic gave me a useful set of insights into this question—in part because of how the pandemic encouraged people to reevaluate what they owed their employers, what they owed each other as fellow workers, and what their employers owed them.

Many of the people I interviewed reflected on the bargains they had made with their employers, bargains that resembled the social contracts that Enlightenment thinkers such as Locke, Hobbes, and Rousseau described. When they wrote their influential works, these thinkers were trying to understand why anyone would agree to be part of a hierarchical society and abide by society’s rules. They decided that people were consciously making this bargain, that people acquiesced to social rules in order to be safe and to receive protection from a wide range of dangers. Workers I spoke to described their decisions in ways that resonated with these arguments. They were giving up a certain degree of autonomy in exchange for security, which in the workplace takes the form of a salary and, in the US, often health insurance.

Yet the pandemic made them question what kind of security their employer gave them, what protection from risks they were actually getting. As I mentioned earlier, I tried to speak to people who were working in person during the pandemic, not only virtually. Not everyone was pressured to go back to work; some did so voluntarily. When people were pressured, sometimes it was because the nature of the work meant they had to be there in person. Sometimes their employers insisted, yet the workers didn’t know why their employers thought their in-person presence was so important. Those who were pressured to be at the workplace in person often found themselves asking about the bargain they had entered into by accepting a job. Some told me that they wondered if their employers cared whether they lived or died. Not surprisingly, people who were happier with their employers felt that the business was doing all it could to ensure their safety while they were at work. Many still described being anxious going to work, worried that despite all the precautions, they might still become sick and possibly infect those they loved.

Working in person during a pandemic provided the occasion to think about age-old questions in a new way: questions about the bargains people make to keep a community functioning (the community in this case being a workplace), about how to balance individual rights with what a community requires to function well, about how worthwhile the exchange of freedom for security is when the quality of the security has become questionable, and about what sacrifices people are willing to make for a common good (especially when the common good is understood to be what is good for a workplace, a not-always-welcome conflation).

Many of the questions that social-contract thinkers have posed about governments were also questions raised by the people I interviewed. This commonality led me to start thinking with Elizabeth Anderson and Stewart Macaulay about how workplaces have often been forms of private government. The pandemic made visible in a highly charged way how questions of private government are also always questions of well-being—although not always of the same kind of well-being.

Throughout this book, I argue that workplaces are instances of private government that have become what US Americans now use as a springboard for their political imagination. I follow Anderson’s claim that workplaces are sites of government because these are places in which one person can tell another what