The Once and Future Mass-Resignation

What it means for working people

Once upon a time, a terrible disease swept the lands, prompting a great wave of resignations as low-waged workers walked off the job, rejecting offers of pay raises that would have been unthinkably lavish just a few years earlier. Their bosses went nuts.

The former employers of these workers slammed them as lazy and greedy, and called upon their fellow bougies to take up “unskilled” labor and scab those proles back into the workplace. When that didn’t work, they passed laws that banned desperate bosses from bidding up wages. That didn’t work either, so new crimes were put on the books that made it easier to slam unemployed people in notoriously cruel prisons. That failed, too, prompting cuts to the already grossly inadequate welfare system, trying to starve workers back into their jobs.

That also failed. In the end, the situation led to a mass redistribution of wealth and a period of unheralded pluralism and opportunity for workers whose families had been stuck in low-wage, dead-end work for generations.

This isn’t a covid story. It’s the story of the post-Black Death labor markets in England, where desperate noblemen passed the country’s first labor law, the 1349 Ordinance of Labourers. Chroniclers of the day urged “knights and churchmen” to get into…