This is probably the strangest Labor Day in decades, perhaps ever. Tens of millions of workers remain unemployed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Many of those who are still working are adapting to working from home. Those who are back at their workplace, or never left, are coping with an array of new safety protocols.
Those who work in the right industries – like the NBA – may get tested regularly but most workers have to figure out for themselves when to quarantine and when to get tested. For many workers, such as health care workers, people of color, and workers with underlying health issues, going to work is literally a life-or-death calculation.
No wonder that experts, like Dr. David B. Agus, are calling for companies
to have Chief Health Officers.
Labor Day was originally intended to celebrate the
labor movement, but these days labor unions don’t have much to celebrate. Only around 10%
of U.S. workers belong to a labor union; both the number and the percent of
unionized workers has been in steady
decline over the past few decades.
Now Labor Day is mainly an extra day off for most, the unofficial end to summer, and, this year, possibly the springboard to a new surge in COVID-19 cases, due to holiday celebrations. Dr. Anthony Fauci warned:
We don’t want to see a repeat of the surges that we have seen following other holiday weekends. We don’t want to see a surge under any circumstances, but particularly as we go on the other side of Labor Day and enter into the fall.
Eleanor Murray, an assistant professor of epidemiology at the Boston University School of Public Health, explained to The New York Times:
People are getting tired of taking these precautions and of having their lives upended. They’re missing their friends and family, and everyone wishes things were back to normal. That’s totally understandable, but unfortunately we don’t get a say, really.
It doesn’t help that
many schools have reopened, with colleges and universities already
seeing mass outbreaks. One
estimate found at least 25,000 such cases, in 37 states. Labor Day parties and gatherings could send
that number soaring. No one is going to
be surprised by photos of swarms of beachgoers, pool parties, and crowded bars,
and no one can be surprised if this fall sees the consequences of that in more COVID-19
cases, hospitalizations, and deaths. 
Las Vegas Labor Day party
Many wonder if the
nature of work will change as a result of the pandemic. Most companies have been pleasantly surprised
to find that productivity hasn’t suffered by work from home. A
survey by Mercer found that 94% of employers said productivity was the same
(67%) or even higher – and 73% said they expected at least a quarter of their
workforce would remain working remotely.
Workers are generally
happy too. For one thing, they’re saving
the equivalent of “billions”
of dollars in avoided commuting time, not to mention actual costs such as
gasoline, parking, and mileage. Some see
“digital
nomads” as the future. A June
PwC survey found that, even post-pandemic, 83% of office workers wanted to
work at least one day a week from home, and 55% of employers thought most of
their workers might do so.
Not everyone is a fan of
remote work. Reed Hastings, founder and
co-CEO of Netflix, called
it a “pure negative,” citing the benefits of getting together in person. Still, even he concedes the new balance might
be four days in the office, one day virtual.
Mr. Hastings is not
alone in his concerns about the benefits of in-person interactions, the
so-called “water cooler” or “hallway” effect – serendipitous encounters that have
been linked to creative thinking. “These
ties are critical to our well-being because they end up giving us the
opportunity to vent, confide, brainstorm, and discuss things that we think are
important,” says
Mario Luis Small, a Harvard sociology professor.
Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom are also trying
to do the same, as are less well known companies like Hallway, Miro,
Qube, Sidekick,
and Spatial.
.
We need to be thinking bigger. As Dr. Agus said in a May
interview with Salesforce:
I want companies to have
a program where they think about their employees’ productivity and health every
day. And, then, if they're customer-facing, how do they convey that same
message to the individual customer? We have to think differently in that way.
Some companies and other organizations are starting to
take Dr. Agus’s suggestion seriously, such as Bowling
Green State University. Cambridge
Health advisors, which aims at retailers and restaurants, urges:
“New C-level leadership, a chief health officer, is needed to establish a
vision for chainwide public health and to ensure store level initiatives are
executed timely and effectively.”
Adam Aron, CEO of AMC Theaters, says frankly:
The single biggest issue facing businesses in the United States is how do we manage our way through the coronavirus crisis. The CEO of every major company in the country is going to have to make public health the single top vision of the company.”
Imagine that.
It shouldn’t have taken a pandemic to greatly increase
remote work. It shouldn’t have taken a
pandemic for companies to think about their employees’ productivity and health
every day (and to weigh those at least equally). It shouldn’t have taken a pandemic to make
public health top-of-mind for CEOs of every major company. But it has, and, even now, it’s not clear how
many companies will actually change long term.
It’s been about six months now since the restrictions/quarantines/lockdowns
started, with the resulting job losses and economic havoc. We’ve learned a lot, at a terrible cost, but
it’s anyone’s guess about what the next six months will bring (especially as
flu season is about to start).
So, let’s celebrate Labor Day – responsibly! – and hope
that we’ve learned the right lessons.
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