When Plagues Pass: Slower Growth, Social Unrest
& Labor Gets The Upper Hand
Thu, 04/09/2020 - 06:30
"As the Black Death scythed through Europe in 1348 and 1349, workers across the continent discovered that they had power for the first time in their lives.
Textile workers in St. Omer in northern France asked for and received three successive wage rises within a year of the Great Plague’s passing. Many workers’ guilds struck for higher pay and shorter hours. When the French government tried to cap these demands in 1351, it still allowed pay rises of as much as a third more than their pre-plague level. By 1352, the English Parliament — which in 1349 had passed a law limiting pay to no more than its pre-plague level — was taking action against employers who had instead doubled or tripled workers’ pay.
These numbers come from the historian Barbara Tuchman’s, “A Distant Mirror,” a masterwork on the miseries of Europe in the 14th century. Published in 1978, when she thought it reflected the contemporary miseries of the 1970s, it has surged up the Amazon ratings as scholars from all disciplines search the history of pandemics to understand the post-coronavirus future that awaits us.
Pandemics, we discover, have shaped civilization, and there are even arguments that they have ushered in positive change. The Black Death, which came as the Catholic Church was riven by a papal schism, changed attitudes toward religion, leaving Europeans more reluctant to submit to authority. As Tuchman put it, “the Black Death may have been the unrecognized beginning of modern man” — even if the Renaissance, Reformation and Enlightenment were all centuries in the future.
One of the clearest lessons: labor gains in power at the expense of capital. This might seem too big an extrapolation from one of history’s truly extreme events. The Black Death cut Europe’s population by some 40% in less than two years. Naturally that strengthened the hand of the surviving workers. No other epidemic has had so great an impact, and neither will this one.
But research just published by the San Francisco Federal Reserve suggests that less damaging pandemics have similar effects. They looked at a dozen epidemics, from the Black Death through to the H1N1 flu of 2009, which claimed at least 100,000 lives. The final death toll of several of these outbreaks was much lower than the current estimates for Covid-19 — although they tended to attack the working-age population more directly. The academics also re-ran their data excluding the Black Death (by far the most lethal) and the Spanish flu of 1918 (because the Great Depression following barely a decade later might have skewed results) and found the same picture. In the decades after a pandemic, real wages in Europe (for which there is the best continuous data) invariably increase"
moar:
https://www.zerohedge.com/health/when-plagues-pass-slower-growth-social-unrest-labor-gets-upper-hand