Chapter 10 of Capital, on the working day, is one of the more well-known chapters, so I've been looking forward to reading it. In the latter part of the chapter Marx spills a lot of ink going over the history of the "normal working day" in England, viz. the struggle between the worker and capitalist classes over how much time workers can be required to spend working each day.
Marx recounts how English capitalists, who were insisting that they absolutely HAD to be able to make children work for more than 10 hours a day for the survival of their businesses, claimed that workers actually WANTED to work more:
But if the manufacturers did not succeed in making the workpeople speak as they wished, they themselves shrieked all the louder in press and Parliament in the name of the workpeople. They denounced the Factory Inspectors as a kind of revolutionary commissioners like those of the French National Convention ruthlessly sacrificing the unhappy factory workers to their humanitarian crotchet.
Reading this I was struck by how similar this rhetorical move from the 1800s is to many of the claims being made today during the COVID-19 pandemic (surging as I write this). Everywhere "small business owners" claim that they cannot close to protect public health; they must be allowed to remain open for the sake of their poor workers who won't be able to survive without their shifts. These arguments are repeated breathlessly on US propaganda networks. Here's Eric Adams, ex-NYPD pig and newly inaugurated mayor of New York City, exhorting businesses to remain open:
My low-skilled workers, my cooks, my dishwashers, my messengers, my shoe-shine people, those who work at Dunkin Donuts, they cannot — they don't have the academic skills to sit in a corner office. They need this! We are in this together.
Adams was perhaps too busy shitting on undervalued workers to explain why the best way to 'support' them is to facilitate the spread of a virus that could kill or disable them.
Likewise, the CDC, after revising their isolation guidance so that workers who test positive for COVID-19 can be required to return to work after 5 days as long as their symptoms are 'improving', have spun their capital-friendly guidance as supporting workers. Rochelle Walensky, Butcher-in-Chief at the CDC, told CNN that the guidelines "really had a lot to do with what we thought people would be able to tolerate". The implication here is that workers were ignoring the isolation rules, so they had to be loosened. But if workers are ignoring isolation rules, it's not because they seek to get or spread COVID-19. It's because their employer, explicitly or implicitly, is requiring them to work while sick. Rather than rebuking capitalists for sending their workers into danger and spreading disease, or recommending governments provide financial support, paid sick days, etc. for workers who cannot go to work safely, this guideline change sanctions capitalists' predatory and antisocial behaviour.
If anyone reporting on these stories in US propaganda outlets bothered to actually talk to these workers, and asked them if they want to be forced to work when infectious, they'd likely find, as the English inspectorate did, that what the capitalist class claims workers want is not what they actually want:
Factory Inspector Leonard Horner conducted in his own person, and through his sub-inspectors, many examinations of witnesses in the factories of Lancashire. About 70% of the workpeople examined declared in favour of 10 hours, a much smaller percentage in favour of 11, and an altogether insignificant minority for the old 12 hours.
In fact a quick look at /r/teachers makes it clear that workers on the ground are seeing this for what it is. Here's a quote from a high-school English teacher from the Midwest:
They all but admitted it’s to keep workers at work. The Delta CEO asked the CDC to shorten isolation time for positive cases because they were losing money on cancelled flights due to lack of staff, and the CDC did it. It’s the same reason they changed the distancing right before school last year from 6 feet to 3 feet. It’s changing the “science” to match up with the goal. What the CDC is doing right now is what we’ve done with SROs [ed. note: this stands for "school resource officers", i.e. putting pigs in schools] in the past, except instead of a pointless data collection exercise in trying to control teachers, it’s making sure the oligarchy can keep making money.
As it was in the 1800s, so it is today: the absurd arguments of the capitalist class and its defenders are a mask for their real goal: continuing to extract surplus value from the workers they employ. To the capitalist, workers are not people; they are not human beings; they are a resource to be exploited, and an ongoing pandemic is no reason for them to give that up.
I'll let Marx play us out — he says it far better than I could:
[I]n its blind unrestrainable passion, its were-wolf hunger for surplus-labour, capital oversteps not only the moral, but even the merely physical maximum bounds of the working-day. It usurps the time for growth, development, and healthy maintenance of the body. It steals the time required for the consumption of fresh air and sunlight. It higgles over a meal-time, incorporating it where possible with the process of production itself, so that food is given to the labourer as to a mere means of production, as coal is supplied to the boiler, grease and oil to the machinery. It reduces the sound sleep needed for the restoration, reparation, refreshment of the bodily powers to just so many hours of torpor as the revival of an organism, absolutely exhausted, renders essential. It is not the normal maintenance of the labour-power which is to determine the limits of the working-day; it is the greatest possible daily expenditure of labour-power, no matter how diseased, compulsory, and painful it may be, which is to determine the limits of the labourers’ period of repose. Capital cares nothing for the length of life of labour-power. All that concerns it is simply and solely the maximum of labour-power, that can be rendered fluent in a working-day. It attains this end by shortening the extent of the labourer’s life, as a greedy farmer snatches increased produce from the soil by robbing it of its fertility.