The Pandemic Workplace (comment)
Ilana Gershon’s new book begins in a wrenching reminder of the horrors of the COVID-19 pandemic as it moved across the United States. One reads her opening pages with clenched teeth. It repays us to join Gershon in revisiting those early days when the general public could have no idea that what lay ahead was a terrifying game of prisoner’s dilemma on a national scale. The Pandemic Workplace – based on over two hundred ethnographic interviews by telephone – captures the first year of the pandemic. That year began with scattered closures of schools, sports events and other gathering places in March, 2020, and then slid into the depths of displacement and despair as the disease became a wildfire of contagion and death in the U.S. and around the world.
The administration left the states to work out their own public health policies and medical supply problems, a situation that exacerbated disparate conditions across the states and fused the health crisis to political contests across the U.S. “Freedom” became a slogan targeting the NIH and CDC – ultimately leaving individuals on their own to decide how best to protect themselves and their families. In showing us how a leadership failure at the federal level yielded a cascade of doubt that overtook myriad institutions and even individuals in their own skin, Gershon’s book offers powerful insight. In particular, she shows us the turbulence of scale entailed in the multifaceted relationship of government and subjectivity – a valuable theoretical implication of the work.
If this was freedom, there seems to have been no joy in it. Left essentially to their own devices – and this is Gershon’s main thesis — the idea of a social contract became a touchstone. Sometimes her interlocutors’ references to a contract were literal, as an employment contract. Sometimes they were figurative, crystallized from a pervasive sense of what people owe each other. Over the timeframe of the study, some contracts held while others were shredded. Gershon takes up the contract as her ethnographic object, making visible the precarity of mutual obligation and expectation at work as the pandemic deepened. Wisely, she does not insist on a distinction between paper contracts and metaphorical ones, as she shows that both are actual and each bears the hallmarks of the other under the conditions she is exploring – another valuable theoretical point in this work.
The main text of Gershon’s book consists of three chapters on the themes (respectively) of workplace governance, risk and workplace organization. The throughline is Gershon’s observation that workplaces are where Americans acquire their political imaginations, and as such are central to questions of American democracy. Her interlocutors evoke a heavy sense of the burdens that were imposed on workers over the course of the pandemic – but not only then, as the pandemic did not always impose new challenges so much as it made former solutions less reliable (see Hyvönen 2020).
What emerges is a refrain of stark isolation, frustration, disruption of workplace hierarchies and routines, and navigational difficulties with respect to essentially improvised codes of safety, discipline and self-sufficiency. When things went well at work, Gershon tells us, it was often because a “good boss” had given clear guidelines, sought worker feedback, and acted on that feedback. For Gershon, these are the hallmarks of democracy in “private government” (Anderson 2017) – a concept Gershon engages to good effect. But there were bad bosses, too – ones who were inconsistent, or prepared to make only private deals, or who performed an interest in feedback but then disregarded it. Under bad bosses, Gershon shows us, democracy falters. In those settings, decision-making might include more voices but without any increase of consensus or certainty. Although her emphasis is on the prospects for widening democracy in the workplace, she also suggests that democracy can never entirely exclude authoritarian forms of management, perhaps especially in times of crisis.
The book’s conclusion lingers provocatively with the vagaries of authoritarianism in private government and the frailty of workplace democracy. Gershon’s final chapter then widens the scope of that conclusion to consider how and why it is that in the breach, some workers saw autocracy as preferable to democracy (see Hunter-Pazzara 2023). This leads Gershon to observe that from at least some of her interlocutors’ perspectives, workplace democracy is not inherently valuable – nor, perhaps, is it familiar, to the extent that “the vast majority of American workplaces function not as democracies, but as dictatorships” (Bowie 2021: 162). Gershon draws a suggestive connection between her interlocutors’ democratic experience (or lack of it) to the extensive popular support for Donald Trump in the current (2024) electoral cycle, despite (or because of) his stated readiness to deploy autocratic means in a future presidency.
While Trump’s abdication of responsibility in the pandemic was well known in real time, Gershon’s book shows us that responsibility did not flow just one way. As people were left on their own to salvage what they could of their own safety, their encounters with co-workers involved intense negotiations over responsibility. Some of those negotiations up-ended previous relationships, leaving bruises. The pandemic is often described as a time of isolation, and the time since then as isolation’s long shadow. Gershon’s analysis suggests something more complex: that the shadow was due not just to the effects of isolation but also to the toxic residue of new forms of interpersonal conflict at work. That brittleness remains part of the civic landscape in the U.S. today – or at least is still recognizable today – long after COVID has ceased to be daily news.
The Pandemic Workplace is the latest of Ilana Gershon’s richly creative ethnographies dealing with novel forms of intimacy and the high stakes of virtual relationships in various settings. In this case, it is the virtualization of formerly face-to-face relationships at work that is the heart of the matter – a heart that still aches.
References
Anderson, Elizabeth 2017 Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk About It). Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Bowie, Nikolas 2021 Comments: Antidemocracy. Harvard Law Review 135(1): 160-219.
Hunter-Pazzara, Brandon 2023 Trump as Benevolent/Authoritarian Boss in Goldstein and Drybread, eds. Corruption and Illiberal Politics in the Trump Era. Pp. 249-270. Oxford and New York: Routledge University Press.
Hyvönen, Ari-Elmeri 2020 Labor as Action: The Human Condition in the Anthropocene. Research in Phenomenology 50: 240-260.
