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Throughout human history, pandemics have shaped how work is understood, carried out, and organized. For example, historians have suggested that following the Black Plague in 1350, laws and attitudes regarding labor and compensation changed across Western Europe (Cohn, 2007). Similarly, in the midst of the 1918 flu pandemic, which disproportionately affected working-age adults, labor uprisings in the United States resulted in hundreds of thousands of workers walking off their jobs in protest of working conditions (Clay, 2020; Freeman, 2020). Following the 1918 pandemic, workers saw improvements in health and safety protections, including the advent of employer-sponsored health insurance schemes (Spinney, 2020). More recently, the SARS pandemic of 2003 had demonstrable effects on the health and well-being of essential workers in “systems-relevant” occupations, with between 18% and 57% of frontline healthcare workers reporting experiencing high levels of emotional distress while managing this crisis (Maunder etal., 2006).
Since the World Health Organization (WHO, 2020) declared the novel coronavirus COVID-19 as a global pandemic crisis on March 11, 2020, there have been over 4.2 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 in 177 countries (approximately one third or 33% of confirmed cases have occurred in the United States alone) and over 289,000 associated deaths, worldwide (n.b., statistics as of May 12, 2020; see Wu etal., 2020). Apart from immediate health consequences and mortality, it is still too soon to know the scope of the psychological, social, economic, and cultural impact of COVID-19. However, as in the historical examples offered above, there are already tangible global effects of COVID-19 on work-related processes. In the United States, jobless rates have skyrocketed to levels never before seen, with 3.3 million new unemployment claims posted in the week of March 23, 2020 alone, which doubled to 6.6 million the following week, up to a total of 16.78 million total claims in the week of April 6 (n.b., the highest rate of new claims ever previously recorded was 695,000 in October 1982; Cox, 2020a, 2020b). As of May 7, one in five American workers had filed for unemployment benefits (totaling approximately 33.5 million claims over 7 weeks; Tappe, 2020).
Similar patterns have been observed globally; however, they are buffered to some extent by more proactive and progressive state-supported social and economic policies. For example, as...