The sudden closure of workplaces due to COVID-19 early last year cost more than 33 million people their jobs over a seven-week period. Governments have rushed to try to help, in part by funneling money to keep countless households afloat, but the damage has been severe, especially for non-white workers and those already in the city. lower end of the income spectrum. Even now, as jobs return, the pain continues for people with higher personal debts, deferred rent payments, and other financial problems.

Sadly, this financial crisis was the second time in just over a decade that millions of people have been made redundant. These economic shocks have highlighted how precarious some jobs can be, especially in a consumer-driven economy. Yet, for better or for worse, we are stuck with our capitalist system. But that doesn’t mean we can’t find ways to make it work more fairly for everyone, especially those most vulnerable to layoffs and financial hardship.

As the income equality gap has widened over the past decades – and held back social mobility – it has become imperative that we find ways to shore up the fortunes of those who benefit least, or only sporadically, of our economic system. Notably, the people who lose their jobs during a recession are often the same people who do not fully share the wealth generated during the recoveries. Jobs and careers and the ability to accumulate wealth are part of a complex set of relationships weighted by class, race, gender, geographic regions, levels of education and access to capital.

It is no coincidence that income inequality worsened as union membership and power declined under evolving federal protections, the spread of “right to work†laws across the country. South and Midwest, concerted anti-union efforts by employers, and the economy’s transition away from manufacturing. to benefits. California is a relatively strong labor state with protections for collective bargaining and other workers’ rights raising federal standards under the National Depression-era Labor Relations Act, but membership unions here, led by the public sector, still represent around 15% of the workforce. – higher than the national average by around 10%, but well below the peak of 70 years ago. while about a third of the nation’s non-farm workforce was unionized. Yet two-thirds of workers support unions.

We can do more to consolidate collective bargaining and reimagine the role played by unions, which have historically been a democratizing force for workers and a counterweight to the cultural deification of CEOs. Our union system is company-based – unions organize workers for a specific company. In Europe, bargaining is often done by sector, so unions are able to negotiate basic contractual conditions in an industry, a holistic approach.

Federal law recognizes the right of workers to organize unions, but laws and regulations governing how this is done stack up in favor of companies. Employees active in organizing campaigns are often fired or fired for pretext reasons, and then find themselves with an often lengthy legal battle to right the wrong. The fear of being made redundant is a palpable thing and an obstacle in trying to persuade workers to come together to fight for their own interests. The need for strong unions is more pronounced in workplaces where work abuse is more common and retaliation more likely. We need much stronger protections and faster decisions – with real penalties for employers – for workers trying to exercise their right to collective bargaining.

But unions also face cultural headwinds. Relatively few people understand the history of work and its role in shaping the contours of working life, even for non-union workers, including the standards of an eight-hour day and a two-weekend weekend. days. Strengthening this knowledge could help improve the image of trade unions.

Many unions have also largely aligned themselves with liberal political positions beyond labor issues, putting them at odds with much of their membership. Many have also become mini-bureaucracies tasked with negotiating contracts and enforcing rules (with their own internal battles) who may lose sight of the fundamental role of empowering workers themselves. Unions need to do a better job of defending their own (meaningful) relevance.

There are ways to improve union support. Under the Ghent system (named after the Belgian city where it started), unions provide some work-related government services, such as processing unemployment claims and benefits, giving unions a source of income as entrepreneurs while improving their image with workers. A related concept: economic democracy, expanding business and workplace decision-making to include workers and communities with seats for workers on boards of directors. And union profit-sharing.

Beyond strengthening unionization, our economic system must better respond to the needs of workers who lose their jobs and seek new ones. Before the pandemic hit, the economy had reached what economists call “full employment,” but that’s a misnomer for the slack in the labor market needed to keep wage growth from overheating. By definition, “full employment” means 5 to 6 million unemployed people at any given time, a number which does not include those who are underemployed. It also does not measure those who work for poverty wages.

Clearly we need to explore better approaches, including reviving New Deal-type government employment programs to provide employment for people working part-time for lack of full-time opportunities and for those whose jobs have completely gone. disappeared, while also providing a continuous link to working life for those who face long-term unemployment or who have simply given up looking.

Another model: Many states, including California, have adopted “work-sharing†programs inspired by European initiatives in which the government guarantees temporary wage losses resulting from short-term reductions in paid working hours. This allows businesses to reduce labor costs during a recession without the trauma of laying off workers, putting the business in semi-hibernation until things pick up. It’s a good cushion for workers as well as employers, who are then in a better position to deal with downturns without the expense associated with severance packages and the hiring and eventual training of new workers. (Disclosure: The Times used the California work-sharing program to avoid layoffs of employees represented by NewsGuild from mid-May 2020 to the end of July).

Of course, not all layoffs are temporary. What happens when a layoff becomes permanent – when there is no more job to return to? In a robust economic sector, lateral movements are possible. But when an entire industry collapses, workers need help making the transition to new careers, a problem the country has faced – often unsuccessfully – in previous recessions that saw the collapse of markets. steel and automotive industries.

We are seeing something similar happening now in the retail industry as more customers shop online, and in the oil and gas industry as future demand for fossil fuels decreases and the market for fossil fuels decreases. need for renewable energy sources will increase. Retail salespeople and oil rig workers tend not to have the skills to get started, for example, in building solar or wind farms, a rapidly growing sector of the economy. So we need a flexible and reliable system to help workers make the transition to another area of ​​work, like stronger training and apprenticeship programs.

Many jobs and careers are fluid. The median time workers spent with their current employer before the pandemic was 4.6 years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but this varied widely by age. For workers aged 55 to 64, the median tenure was 10.1 years; for workers aged 25 to 34, the median was 2.8 years. Union contracts tend to protect the seniority of long-tenured workers during layoffs, leaving workers who have less seniority and who are often younger, at greater risk of being made redundant. Young workers have more time to recover financially from a job loss, even if they risk derailing their career path. Older laid-off workers often struggle to land a comparable new job at a time in their life when they should be maximizing their earnings and saving for retirement. We need to find ways to both keep young workers on an upward trajectory and help older workers stay in the workforce, while strengthening retirement income options for all.

Will we be willing to make these and other changes? To create a safety net that is more favorable to workers and businesses, for more flexibility in when and where the work is done? The pandemic and the resulting economic upheaval were disastrous, but also illuminating. As a society, we should take this opportunity to improve the way we do things and put our own silver lining on this particular dark cloud.