The Rust Belt’s New Working Class Is Just as Exploited as the Old One
In the Rust Belt, heavy industry has been replaced by health care. But even though the working class has changed, exploitation at the hands of their bosses haven’t.
A view of the sprawling Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, part of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. (KitAy / Flickr)
No institution endured as much catastrophe throughout the coronavirus pandemic as nursing homes, whose patients and workers accounted for around 40 percent of all COVID-19 deaths in the United States. The crisis was years in the making and required far more than a novel pathogen alone to happen: a largely for-profit industry that cut every corner it could find, a woefully exploited marginalized workforce that shuffled between employers, profoundly sick patients warehoused together to tap into economies of scale, and a piecemeal financing system dominated by the austerity logic of Medicaid.
The women and people of color who overwhelmingly occupy the growing bottom rung of the health care industry were dubbed “essential workers,” but they often lacked personal protective equipment and usually made less than $15 per hour.
After the first wave of infections subsided, research revealed just how connected their plight was to their patients’: while nursing homes owned by private equity firms had 10 percent higher mortality rates, unionized facilities experienced 30 percent less mortality than their unorganized counterparts.
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