“Workers are faced with an impossible task”: COVID-19 pandemic reveals limits of Pennsylvania’s weakened social services
by C.M. Lewis
Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf (D) at a Department of Health Services press conference.
Source: PA Commonwealth
The global coronavirus pandemic has caused a social crisis on a nearly unprecedented scale, with the economy and society shuttered, the global economy ground to a halt, and sweeping restrictions on public life. The Keystone State is no exception.
In Pennsylvania, COVID-19 cases have steadily risen since the first cases were reported in Philadelphia’s suburbs on March 6th. As the virus has spread across the Commonwealth, Democratic Governor Tom Wolf has ordered increasingly wide restrictions, initially issuing stay-at-home orders on a county-by-county basis until finally issuing a statewide stay-at-home order beginning April 1st. As a result, Pennsylvania has one of the highest rates of unemployment claims in the country, surpassing larger states like New York and Texas and running second only to California.
Pennsylvania’s public sector workers are feeling the pinch. State funding has been a focal point of political fights for years; after his election in 2010, Republican Governor Tom Corbett introduced sweeping spending cuts as the state recovered from the Great Recession. Governor Wolf, first elected in 2014, has spent most of his two terms fighting a Republican-led legislature to increase education and state funding. But even with Wolf’s proposed increases, state agencies often have to do without needed money. According to Steve Catanese, President of SEIU Local 668—a 20,000 member local that mostly represents Commonwealth workers in social services—COVID-19 is a shock to a system that has strained under years of budget cuts, especially the unemployment system.
The issue with underinvestment in state agencies, and specifically in unemployment, isn’t new. In 2016, far-right ex-Senator Scott Wagner—who ran for Governor in 2018 and was defeated in a landslide by Wolf—launched a high-profile fight to slash funding for the unemployment compensation system, with call center closures leading to a projected 500 layoffs. According to Catanese, SEIU 668 and political allies managed to fight back against the cuts and bring back many of the laid off workers, but two call centers remained closed. Long phone wait times to check on unemployment claims—even when there isn’t a pandemic—are commonplace.
Even outside of the unemployment system, the mixed response by public agencies indicates that some are not adequately prioritizing worker safety or security. In the wake of the initial closures of state agencies with the exception of essential personnel, the Wolf administration moved to reclassify wide numbers of Department of Health Services (DHS) workers as “essential,” requiring them to continue reporting to work in unsafe conditions. DHS has continued to be a flashpoint; SEIU 668 released a blistering statement in late March highlighting the Pennsylvania Department of Health Services failure to implement CDC-compliant safety guidelines, demanding immediate action.
The fights over the budget have had clear implications for state agencies and public sector workers and their ability to handle the crisis. According to Catanese, workers have been “trained and taught to be thankful when there’s a budget that has minimal cuts and minor budget increases under the rate of inflation and no revenue increases.” The result, according to Catanese, is at least in part deliberate. “When you do this over a decade straight, you create a dysfunctional system . . . It’s a clear process that’s meant to drive toward that conclusion, and as you drive to that conclusion and say ‘Government doesn’t work,’ well—yeah, you broke it.”
To Catanese and to others, the COVID-19 pandemic is exposing how social services have been undermined by years of cuts and austerity budget allocations. The process is having clear consequences for the public struggling to deal with the pandemic’s impact, according to Catanese: “[If] you have a house, and you have a foundation, and there’s four legs holding it up and you chop three away and a flood comes, what do you expect that last leg to do?”
“Right now, the workers are faced with an impossible task.”
A solution is uncertain—many unions are facing uphill battles simply protecting workers facing layoffs, to say nothing of fighting for longer-term solutions. But longer term solutions are necessary, and the disinvestment in public agencies has both implications for workers in those agencies and elsewhere. According to Catanese, the lack of stable funding for those who operate the unemployment system is a key example of how the safety net has frayed, and a long-term commitment to strengthening it is crucial. “People rely on their social security, people rely on their Medicare when they retire, people should be able to rely on a well-funded unemployment system so if you lose your job, you don’t have to worry about when your next paycheck comes in until you find your next job.”
The safety net Catanese and other union leaders—including the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO—want isn’t just for their workers, or even just for Pennsylvania workers; there has been a chorus of calls for expansion of unemployment compensation across the United States. In Colorado, the Executive Director of the Colorado AFL-CIO criticized the “porous social safety net” in the United States, alleging that the country will be hit harder than any other first-world nation. Union leaders are seeing disinvestment in the social safety net as a key part of the bigger picture of hardship faced by record numbers of American workers currently laid off and facing uncertain futures. How they’ll navigate that now—and what it will result in when the pandemic ends—remains to be seen.
But for Catanese, at least, the question isn’t just a question of representing SEIU 668’s members—it’s a question of justice and protecting all workers from circumstances beyond their control. “Of the over six million people who have had to file for unemployment over the past few weeks, which of them was at fault for a pandemic?”
C.M. Lewis is an editor of Strikewave and a union activist in Pennsylvania.