This is medieval death trip for Tuesday, June 7, 2022.
Episode 91 concerning wage warfare after the plague.
Hello, and welcome to medieval Death Trip, the show where we explore the wit and weirdness of medieval texts.
I'm your host, Patrick Lane.
In our previous episode, I mentioned the idea that one reason the itinerant laborer Thomas Fuller might have been eager to take up with a stranger whose driving sheep, stolen sheep.
It turns out, unbeknownst to Thomas, Thomas might have done this out of some anxiety about being charged with vagrancy if he were perceived as wandering around unemployed.
Now, I tried to research this and wasn't able to get a clear answer on just how draconian the vagrancy laws were in England in the late 15th century.
But I was led to some interesting laws and statutes from the mid 14th century that have a particular resonance with a very current problem.
So right now, as I record this, we're basically two and a half years into the global Covid-19 pandemic.
And though new variants continue to emerge and public health policy proceeds cautiously, it feels fairly safe to say, knock on wood, that we are at last coming out on the other side of this pandemic, and an end, or at least a low grade new normal, is in sight.
But even though case numbers are dropping and hospital burdens are lightening, were still very much feeling the larger social and economic effects of nearly two years of pandemic.
One of those things is a rather striking change in the workforce and the labor supply, namely that theres a labor shortage.
The fundamental causes of this shortage remain a matter of debate.
I just saw one newspaper article on 13 possible causes of the labor shortage.
A person from the future, looking back at this pandemic, much like we might look back at the black death, might assume that a post pandemic labor shortage would naturally be explained by the death toll among the labor pool caused by a deadly disease.
But thats not really the case with Covid-19.
The more popular theory is that pandemic lockdowns and layoffs worked to alter perceptions about the value of certain kinds of jobs or the ways in which people ought to work.
The shortage is not that there are more jobs than we have bodies to fill them, it's that we have a lot of people who are uninterested in returning to the kinds of jobs, pay, and conditions they had before the pandemic.
Now, in the case of the Black Death, the labor shortage was indeed primarily due to having more land to cultivate and more jobs to fill than there were surviving laborers there was a labor shortage because a lot of the labor had died.
But there is nonetheless a similarity, I think, with our present moment in that in this shortage, the laborers, the workforce became aware that they now had more leverage over their employers and more power and agency in society.