Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor Highlight

Delivery drivers, retail workers, warehouse workers, sanitation workers, and agricultural workers were among the millions thrust onto the front lines of a terrifying plague, and were certainly some of the worst protected. “Those people, not only do they not have a safety net, but no matter what is going on, they have to continue to put their bodies and lives on the line,” Veena Dubal, a law professor at the University of California, Hastings, and a fierce advocate for marginalized workers, told me. “There’s some great tragic irony that it’s these ‘essential workers’ who are the most dispossessed: the people who are carved out of all [labor] protections, the people who do the most dangerous work, and the people whose life spans are the shortest as a result.”