Organizing in the Age of Coronavirus | Building Civic Power in the Covid-19 Crisis

As the COVID-19 pandemic and economic collapse continue to ravage the country, it is increasingly clear that this crisis is not just a public health and economic crisis. America’s worst-in-the-world outbreak reflects a crisis of democracy. At every step of the way, failures of governance have magnified the devastation. The Trump administration has consistently failed to respond forcefully and effectively, from the delays in invoking the Defense Production Act (DPA) to accelerate production of urgently needed medical equipment to the failures to heed early warnings about the impending pandemic. These moves are not unique; Trump has made a practice of gutting the federal bureaucracy and undermined the role of science in shaping administrative policies. These policy failures have fueled a call for a “return” to government that puts scientific experts like COVID-19 advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci in charge. It is true that, if there is a new administration after November, it will not only have to listen to experts but rebuild the federal civil service to ramp up a more effective response. 

Yet the failures of government in this crisis are not just failures of an overridden technocracy. The failures are also fundamentally failures of democratic accountability. Big business has continued to lobby successfully for exemptions to legislation in Congress offering critical protections for workers. We know that these economic and public health policy failures are directly driving devastating sickness, death, and economic calamity among Black and brown communities in particular, magnifying existing economic inequities in our public policy. As we consider amid this calamity what a more effective government might look like, it is critical that we look not just to restoring civil service expertise but also to building new forms of accountability and civic power that ensures federal agencies are responsive to communities bearing the brunt of America’s poverty, dislocation, and, now, disease – especially for working families, women, and Black and brown communities. 

First, that means we need to expand investments in grassroots civil society organizations that are key to magnifying the voices of workers and frontline communities to better ensure greater democratic accountability. Such grassroots power is key. Whose voices are not being heard in Washington or in state houses right now? It is the voices of those who make up the hardest hit constituencies in this crisis. The mortality rates in the Black community are a devastating indictment of the systemic racism shaping the impact of the crisis. In Milwaukee, for example, ProPublica reports that Black Americans make up over 80% of fatalities from COVID-19, despite accounting for a quarter of the county population. All workers in certain jobs are vulnerable, but many of these riskier jobs, populated by women and people of color, are especially vulnerable. These are the “essential workers” who are the delivery workers, grocery store workers, healthcare workers, and domestic workers who not only often lack fair wages and access to healthcare but are also most at risk in the face of this pandemic. For many of these workers, social distancing is a luxury they cannot afford.

In response, workers are quickly mobilizing to organize in new ways. Coworker.org, a platform for organizing non-union workers, has seen dramatic increases in workers using the platform to organize, demanding basic health and safety protections from their employers. From Whole Foods and Amazon to Instacart, workers are striking for hazard pay, better health protections, and sick leave and benefits for part-time workers. Redressing this disparity in political voice requires resourcing the work of these membership-based grassroots communities. 

Second, this increase in organized demands by the most affected communities needs to be met with structural changes to how our government functions in order to create greater voice, influence, and, ultimately, accountability to these frontline communities. Imagine how different the policy response to COVID-19 and the economic collapse underway would look if our bureaucracies – from HHS to Treasury to the CDC – were run by more decision-makers who feel primarily answerable to these communities. Or how different policy debates would be if frontline communities had a seat at the table within these agencies, able to demand greater accountability and bring their experiences and urgent needs to the forefront. Across the country, we have a range of models for this kind of more inclusive governance, such as cities using participatory budgeting to allocate public spending dollars to state and local governments creating labor boards that include representatives from labor to set worker safety policies.

As we have argued in our book and in these pages: What we need is an approach to reforming government that focuses on shifting power to frontline communities.

What does this look like?

Institutional design is central, particularly in creating visible targets for mobilization, advocacy, and participation. American governance is highly fragmented: political authority is divided vertically, between federal, state, and local bodies as well as horizontally between legislative, executive, and judicial branches – and then further fragmented across a confusing multiplicity of different regulatory and enforcement agencies. This makes it extremely difficult for constituencies, even well-organized and durable ones, to participate and exercise political influence. By contrast, creating highly visible institutions can significantly overcome this opacity and fragmentation, making it clear where to go for making particular claims. A good example is the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. At its height, the CFPB not only created a strong federal agency that moved aggressively to combat disparities of economic power in consumer finance (for example, by working to curb predatory lending practices and forced arbitration clauses in consumer contracts); it also provided a more visible focal point for grassroots groups and consumer advocates to bring claims and express grievances. 

These governmental institutions must combine authority and accountability. The issue of the scope of institutional authority is closely related to the question of its scope of jurisdiction. Where institutions lack the actual authority and capacity to shape social or economic conditions, they are less useful levers through which interests and constituencies can exercise power. This authority and state capacity is a critical complement to visibility condition; if constituencies have a visible target to bring claims but that target lacks the power and capacity to actually do something about the issues raised, then the result is a weak form of participation and accountability. To return to the CFPB case, a big part of what made the CFPB successful in the Obama era was its combination of presenting a clear target for bringing claims of consumer misconduct with strong authority and capacity to actually do something about the issues raised. Stated another way, the promise of influence over state power creates powerful incentives for participation. This facilitates the capacity of constituencies, especially Black and brown communities, to mobilize, organize, and exercise power. 

Third, this authority must be complemented by institutionalized points of leverage that assure the accountability and responsiveness of policymakers, whether in the form of dedicated representation as described above, or in the form of more participatory processes. Without points of real leverage, it is difficult for community groups to force policymakers to respond. 

Fourth, these mechanisms of participation and leverage need to be systematized, rather than ad hoc. Part of demonstrating that the community’s participation is being taken seriously must involve moving from pilot, ad hoc programs to structured, sustained institutional processes that can be relied upon by communities as ongoing spaces for dialogue and contestation. Creating legitimacy and buy-in from communities themselves requires efforts by government officials to show what government can do – and to show that the community’s participation is being taken seriously. This in turn makes participation more worthwhile and legitimate within the bureaucracy as a real and important part of policymaking, rather than merely an extra layer of work.

Fifth, we suggest a radically different way to approach the internal organization and culture of bureaucracies. If participation and civic power are taken seriously, democracy reforms must move beyond the focus on expertise, efficiency, and conventional understandings of improving and modernizing government. A truly democratic institutional ecosystem requires governmental bodies that do more than simply provide services efficiently. They must also create meaningful points of leverage and mechanisms for participation through which communities can exercise a share of decision-making power. The restructuring of government agencies that these approaches require is not cosmetic. These changes require significant investments of staffing resources and internal capacity, which will be more challenging than ever post COVID-19. Therefore, engagement must be viewed as integral to the core functioning and goals of governance.

Finally, this approach to participation necessarily requires personnel who view themselves as not only efficiently delivering public services, but also as enthusiastically applying new methods of governance, from digital tools to ethnography to civic engagement and organizing. This reorientation requires a very different approach to recruiting, training, and retraining personnel. Much more can and must be done to train and invest in existing staff while creatively bringing in a crop of new public servants. Outreach to traditionally marginalized communities – for example, through developing dedicated training and recruitment programs, moving staff from unpaid to paid internships, and creating more diverse “on-ramps” to government service – will be crucial. 

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The next administration will need to quickly restore government and reinvent public service that is more reflective of the most affected communities and more responsive to all of us. This requires moving beyond the trappings of technocratic bureaucracy. Expertise is critical, especially in a public health emergency. But experts alone cannot resolve the failures we have seen. These are failures not just of expertise, but of values, arising from a woefully unequal distribution of political and economic power. We need an inclusive democracy where frontline communities not only can organize and make demands but have the civic power to shape the actions of their government.