Cases appear to be dropping. Finger crossed, it appears we are nearing the end of the pandemic. At the very least, the period of lockdowns and emergency measures is subsiding and we appear to be drifting toward the promised land: the return to normalcy.
However, as people return to offices slowly and we begin to reassemble the world we left in the beginning of 2020, the wreckage is immense. The countless lives lost and the deepened political tensions over vaccines and masks are going to leave a lasting mark. In a way, there is no putting the genie back in the bottle.
I was lucky during COVID-19, to some degree. I had parents I could move in with when my college campus kicked us out in March 2020. I filed for unemployment. When the unemployment money arrived, I was elated.
I spent the months receiving unemployment paying off a number of debts I had accrued and actually getting money in my savings account for the first time in years. There was a sense that the welfare state was serving its function. I was able to finally catch up. For people in more desperate situations, this unemployment insurance prevented evictions and kept them making payments on their debts. It was a lifesaver. It was also bizarre. I received more money in unemployment insurance than I did at my job.
And that’s where things went wrong. Around the end of 2020 and beginning of 2021, various states began sending out letters informing recipients of unemployment insurance that they had been overpayed, and that they needed to repay the difference. It’s difficult to keep track of exactly how this played out in various states. For me, I moved from college, to my parents, to a new apartment pretty rapidly and didn’t seem to be receiving these letters until recently. At this point, I was being asked to pay back almost all of the unemployment I received. I’m not alone in this. At least from social media, I’ve gathered that this has been happening to a number of people.
Then there’s the labor crisis. I spent another year in the service industry after the summer of 2020, working first at a Walmart and then at a bookstore, before deciding that I was not willing to do that form of labor anymore and reaching out to a temp agency to get something stable that paid a living wage. The Walmart and the bookstore are understaffed, in part, because of people like me who got a taste of a livable wage in the summer of 2020 and couldn’t turn back. Those who received benefits got to feel their feet heal from the chronic pain of fast paced service work and standing for eight hours or more a day. Those who received benefits got a taste of control over their life for a moment.
Of course, not all were this lucky. Many stayed in the service sector during the pandemic and dealt with the nightmarish conditions. The medical sector was hit similarly. Many quit. There’s the unnerving potential factor that the labor pool might have been depleted from infection and death, although there hasn’t been any recent data to suggest this explicitly.
Perhaps it’s laziness. Perhaps the work ethic has gone away. From my personal experience, I find that to be a rather insufficient explanation for the depleted labor pool. At least in my scenario, I am working, but I changed sectors because I couldn’t handle my treatment in the service sector anymore.
Still, we’re trying to return to normalcy. Student loan payments were frozen for a bit and some debts were able to be paid with unemployment. Leaving normalcy was, for some, a moment of escape. The measures taken to address the pandemic revealed just how bad everything was and just how well you can breathe if, for a second, the boot gets taken off your throat. Now the debt is back. The collectors are reminding me that the freeze is going to be over soon, and workforce development is calculating exactly how much I owe them for that summer away from normalcy.
Debt. That’s what I keep coming back to here. It’s the animating force of life in America now. There are very few people without debt. It’s endless and unpayable. The brief moment of a functioning welfare state ended in a few months, and austerity and capitalist work ethics want those months reimbursed, heaping more debt onto the indebted. Unpayable debt.
Normalcy is back, but I don’t think it’s back for long. This thing is about to pop.