It’s winter where I live, in the northeast corner of the United States, and for the past few weeks, most of the streets have been bracketed by high snowbanks. The plows have made the roads passable, but the same cannot be said for the sidewalks, which on many mornings freeze into something resembling a luge run with lumps. For those of us who walk, this presents a stark choice: risk a broken ankle, or walk on the street and take our chances with the cars.
Among other things, Covid-19 curtailed our addiction to driving. People worked from home and didn’t go out as much. This resulted in a steep reduction in the total miles Americans drove in 2020 and 2Car021, and could have been a silver lining to all of this. One might expect to see a corresponding decrease in road deaths – but in fact, the opposite happened. People drove less, but the number of car crash deaths went up.
Why? What’s going on here?
The statistics are particularly grim for pedestrians and cyclists, the most vulnerable users of our public roads. One theory blames the super-sizing of American vehicles. Hummers and behemoth pickup trucks may give the driver a feeling of tank-like invincibility, but they can wipe out a pedestrian like a cargo ship running down a sailboat. The hoods of some of these vehicles are as high as the heads of the people crossing the street in front of them. A person in a wheelchair is practically invisible.
Combine that with the still-prevalent roads-are-for-cars get-out-of-my-way attitude of too many drivers, and the overall disintegration of civility in our public discourse, and you have a recipe for disaster.
It’s not just drivers who are acting out. Every day we read about fights on airplanes, assaults on health care workers, screaming school board meetings.
Is it really surprising that some drivers might vent their pandemic frustrations by driving too fast and too aggressively on less-crowded roads? Decades of macho automobile advertising have marginalized non-drivers, and taught generations of drivers to view pedestrians and cyclists as at best nuisances and at worst collateral damage. Government and business have piled on with practices that favor drivers: free parking, lack of walking city centers and communities, anemic public transportation, and poor sidewalk maintenance.
To be fair, drivers have legitimate concerns. It IS hard to see a dark-clad pedestrian at night, and it IS easier to keep a well-traveled roadway clear of ice than a sidewalk. Potholes ARE a problem and need to be fixed. But those of us on foot and bicycle help pay for the roads with our tax dollars, too, and we are coequal users of this public resource. It is high time for public policy and public behavior to reflect this.
I started this blog nearly seven years ago, and gave up owning a car eight years before that. But in a sense, I started it back in the 20th century, as a kid from Maine stuck in a middle-aged body in Southern California.
“This is no way to live,” I muttered to myself almost every day, often when mired in a traffic jam on a four-lane freeway. There was plenty to do in San Diego, but you had to be willing to sit in traffic for almost any of it, because there were always a thousand people trying to do the same thing, and we were all trying to do it in cars.
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I’d like to address the canard that employers can’t find employees because “nobody wants to work.”
Most people want to work. And most able-bodied, non-juvenile, non-elderly people do work, whether they have full-time or part-time jobs, a small or solo business, or periodic gigs for which they get paid.
But Covid-19 changed a lot of things. Of necessity, many of us started working from home. We drove less, took fewer bus rides, and spent less money going to movies and concerts and restaurants and bars. Parents spent more time with their children. Teachers and students learned remote technologies together.
As a college professor, I prefer a live, in-person classroom. But even before the pandemic, I was teaching a good percentage of my classes on-line. I find group Zoom meetings tedious, but I’ve also found Zoom extremely useful for one-on-one student conferences. I used it that way before Covid-19, and will continue to do so.
Not all jobs are as flexible. Performers, restaurateurs, event organizers – anyone whose livelihood depends on gathering people in public – were all hurt by Covid-19. This was a big reason that stimulus checks went out and unemployment benefits were extended – not because people “don’t want to work.”
But I’m going to tell you a story, followed by a couple of observations.
About 20 years ago I found myself between jobs, and filled out an application at a big discount store opening in Belfast, Maine, where I lived at the time. I was hired, along with about 20 other people, on a month-long probationary basis before the store opened to the public. The work was easy, mostly assembling and stocking shelves. The pay was lousy, but hey, it was work.
Everyone had different schedules, and each person’s schedule changed from week to week. The workweek was 25 to 29 hours, but those hours were set by the employer and assigned at the end of each week for the next week. I might work from 8 to 2 on some days, noon to six on others, and 3 to 9 on others. You never knew what your hours were going to be from week to week. This made it impossible to take another part-time job to augment the paltry wages we were making there.
Since the job didn’t require a whole lot of thinking, we had conversations. This was allowed and even encouraged. People talked about birthdays and baby showers and trips to Disney World. I made one friend there. We talked about books and Bob Dylan. We did our jobs like everyone else, but at the end of the probationary period, she and I were both let go. No reason was given. The boss told us only that we were “not a match” for the company, and refused to explain further.
Neither of us “didn’t want to work.” We were there because we needed the money. We showed up on time and did everything we were asked to do. And we were fired anyway.
I think employers have been so accustomed for so long to having their way with employees that many of them can’t reconcile a system under which the employee has any negotiating power whatsoever. Hence the ongoing effort to weaken unions, and the backlash against benefits for the suddenly unemployed.
Too, the nine-to-five commuter model is perhaps outdated in the electronic age. Many jobs can be done at least partially away from the workplace. There’s a lot to be said for interpersonal interaction at the office, but it’s not a one-size-fits-all model.
But it goes deeper than that. At a recent (small, outdoor) gathering of friends, someone suggested that Covid-19 has forced people to rethink priorities. Maybe they don’t need that second car to get someone in the household to a job that, after daycare and the cost of owning a vehicle, would not bring home enough income to justify the added expense. Perhaps people are discovering that they don’t need to go out to eat two or three times a week, or take a cruise (the most god-awful wasteful industry on the planet), or buy the latest electronic toy. Does a little bit of money at the cost of a lot of time improve one’s quality of life? Honest people are confronting that question, and sometimes they come up with an answer that inflexible employers don’t want to hear.
Then there is the toxic workplace environment. How many stories have I heard lately of service workers being abused by unhappy customers? Sometimes the verbal berating turns into physical assault. An employer should back up a worker in such situations, but it doesn’t always happen. People want to work, but they also want to be treated like human beings.
And this I blame squarely on the defeated former president, who normalized belligerence across the culture. It wasn’t just “mean tweets.” When the president of the United States acts like a belligerent bully on the world stage, it encourages everyday citizens to act that way, too.
To speak of a “labor shortage” is to reduce it to a commodity. But labor is made of human beings, individually pursuing their own versions of happiness. Pay people well, treat them decently (and insist that your customers do the same), be aware that they have lives away from work that they occasionally prioritize over the job, and you’ll have employees who want to work.
