A Raise? In This Economy?!

A Raise? In This Economy?!

By Bennett Sherry, WHP Team
Maine, USA

There’s a myth about this pandemic. You might have heard news anchors or politicians mention that COVID-19 is “the great leveler,” that it makes no distinction between rich and poor. But that’s nonsense. Evidence suggests that the poor are more likely to catch COVID-19, and they’re more likely to die of it. In the United States, people of color suffer disproportionately from this disease. Disasters are not “levelers,” but they do highlight systemic inequality.

By highlighting these inequalities, crises reshape our ideas about what’s possible. As millions of people lose their jobs and governments struggle to protect economies while saving lives, everything seems up for grabs. Millions of minimum-wage workers in the service industry have suddenly found out that they are “essential.” Others are finding that they can work from home. In the aftermath of our current crisis, how might these revelations reshape ideas about work? Will this crisis decrease inequality or make it worse? And if you’re a high school student looking toward university or the job market, you’re probably anxious about what this all means for your future career.

History cannot predict the future. Yet, we can use history to better understand our present and prepare for the future. There is historical evidence to suggest that pandemics can transform society and even decrease inequality. For an example, let’s turn to the fourteenth-century outbreak of the bubonic plague called the Black Death. The plague devastated Afro-Eurasia. In Western Europe, it reshaped how people understood the value of their work and their place in the social hierarchy.

When the Black Death struck Europe in the mid-fourteenth century, most people were peasants living under the feudal system. Many were serfs—peasants bound to the land, bought and sold by their lords, landowning nobility. Serfs served nobles in exchange for a home and protection. Before the plague, peasants all over Europe were expected to “know their place” and accept the authority of their lord, the king, and the Catholic Church.

 Peasants harvesting wheat, c. 1310. Public domain.

The Black Death upended the social order. Millions died. Some regions lost half their population. This meant that there were fewer workers. Without enough workers, crops rotted in the fields. The nobility lost fortunes. Peasants found that their labor was now more valuable and they could demand more money for it. One English chronicler wrote that there were so few workers that the poor “turned up their noses at employment and could [hardly] be persuaded to serve the [wealthy] for triple wages.” Many rural peasants moved to cities, where high mortality rates meant there were plenty of jobs to be had.

By the end of the fourteenth century, the structures of feudalism were crumbling in Western Europe. Ambitious peasants earned higher wages, owned land, and broke free of their lords. Wages doubled and tripled from pre-plague levels. Standards of living increased. Working people ate more meat, drank more beer, and bought luxury goods. We know this because prices for these things rose. Sumptuary laws provide further evidence. These laws sought to limit what a person could eat and wear according to their social class. They were intended to stop peasants from wearing fancy clothes and eating good food, which might give them ideas above their station. The nobles were getting nervous.


Time to share, m’lord. Left: Peasants enjoying a meal of bread. Right: French nobility feasting while wearing fur hats and fine clothes. Fur hats were one type of clothing often forbidden to peasants. Public domain.

Elites all over Afro-Eurasia responded to the plague in different ways. In Eastern Europe and the Islamic world, mortality was lower, but still as high as a third of the population. Eastern European nobility expanded serfdom and used violence to force workers back into the fields. In some parts of the Islamic world, wages rose as workers pushed for better conditions. In some places, like Mamluk Egypt, the ruling class maintained a united front against their peasants, refusing to lower rents or raise wages.

Nobles in Western Europe didn’t just accept peasant demands either. They tried to use violence and laws to suppress revolts and force people to work. In 1349, King Edward III of England issued the Ordinance of Labourers, the first of several laws that tried to freeze wages and require work. And yet, all over England, workers rejected these rules. And unlike the Mamluks, the English nobility did not act in solidarity. One after another, individual lords gave in and paid higher wages, fearful of losing their crops and fortunes.

Some nobles reacted to the increased rights of peasants by seeking other types of labor. In Barcelona, they stopped hiring peasant women as wet nurses (women employed to breastfeed another woman’s child) and started buying enslaved women to fill that role. By the end of the thirteenth century, most wet nurses in Barcelona were enslaved women.

Peasants didn’t take this lying down. Across Europe and the Middle East, they revolted again and again. In 1381, English peasants rebelled against labor laws and serfdom. The nobility repressed the revolt and executed the leaders, but not before the rebels forced some concessions out of the teenage king, Richard II.

 King Richard II meets with the rebels during the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. Public domain.

The Black Death reshaped Western Europe…for a while. By the sixteenth century, populations had recovered, and wages returned to pre-plague levels. Inequality rose. Yet, the plague had some lasting effects. Many English landowners stopped growing wheat, which required many workers, and turned their land to sheep pasture, which required fewer. This helped begin enclosure, the practice of turning public land into private property. Though peasant wages eventually fell, the crisis created a permanent middle class with more wealth and social aspirations. These middle classes were more likely to challenge the authority of king and church in the coming centuries.

What can the Black Death teach us about inequality today and the future of work tomorrow? COVID-19 isn’t the Black Death. It’s not going to kill half the population, but its impact will be serious and long-lasting. What does that mean for the future of our communities? What does it mean for your future?

If the history of crises teaches us anything, it’s that the transformations that follow crises are unpredictable. This pandemic has certainly accelerated some trends and shifted the conversation around work and economic inequality. Even conservative politicians and news outlets have come out in support of some form of universal basic income (UBI). Will UBI become the norm in some countries? Will a financial crisis destroy traditional jobs and send more people into the “gig” economy? Will this crisis alert workers to their vulnerability and spur a growth in labor unions as happened the Great Depression of the twentieth century? Will minimum-wage workers capitalize on their designation as “essential workers” to demand higher pay?

Maybe.

History provides plenty of evidence that crises can highlight inequality and offer opportunities for progressive change. But those opportunities are uncertain, and they do not last forever.

Sources

Clark, Gregory. "Microbes and Markets: Was the Black Death an Economic Revolution?" Journal of Demographic Economics 82, no. 2 (2016): 139-165.

Cohn, Samuel. "After the Black Death: Labour Legislation and Attitudes Towards Labour in Late-Medieval Western Europe." The Economic History Review 60, no. 3 (2007): 457-485.

Fisher, Max and Emma Bubola. "As Coronavirus Deepens Inequality, Inequality Worsens its Spread: The Interpreter." New York Times. March 15, 2020.

Haddock, David D and Lynne Kiesling. "The Black Death and Property Rights." The Journal of Legal Studies 31, no. S2 (2002): 545-587.

James, Tom. “Black Death: The Lasting Impact.” BBC History. February 17, 2011. http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/middle_ages/black_impact_01.shtml

Pamuk, Şevket and Maya Shatzmiller. "Plagues, Wages, and Economic Change in the Islamic Middle East, 700–1500." The Journal of Economic History 74, no. 1 (2014): 196-229.

Routt, David. “The Economic Impact of the Black Death.” EH.net. https://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-economic-impact-of-the-black-death/

Scheidel, Walter. The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017).

Scheidel, Walter. "Why the Wealthy Fear Pandemics." New York Times. April 9, 2020.

Winer, Rebecca Lynn. "The Enslaved Wet Nurse as Nanny: The Transition from Free to Slave Labor in Childcare in Barcelona After the Black Death (1348)." Slavery & Abolition 38, no. 2 (2017): 303-319.


About the author: Bennett Sherry holds a PhD in History from the University of Pittsburgh and has undergraduate teaching experience in world history, human rights, and the Middle East at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Maine at Augusta. Additionally, he is a Research Associate at Pitt's World History Center. Bennett writes about refugees and international organizations in the twentieth century.

Cover image: Detail of a fresco by an anonymous painter depicting ‘The Triumph of Death’, Death as a skeleton rides a skeletal horse and picks off his victims. Italy. 1445. Sicily. © Photo by Werner Forman/Universal Images Group/Getty Images.

Anonymous
  • One of the best aspects of this article is when the issue of uncertainty is raised with one word "maybe".  I've been trying to use the "yes, no, maybe" approach to critical questions my students discuss to emphasize that a key skill we practice in analyzing the past is accepting that we're not likely to know everything and have to make educated conclusions based on the evidence that is available.  For example, last week my students responded to the question "Did the US make a mistake in not recognizing the Chinese Communists after they won the Chinese Civil War?"  Adding the "maybe" choice resulted in more students responding with multiple interpretations rather than just finding the "answer".