Good morning, Quartz readers!
If you’re reading this from a Western country in lockdown against the coronavirus pandemic, you’ve possibly had a conversation with your partner, family, or friends about the extent to which you can continue supporting the people who help you live your best life.
You may have discussed how long you can continue to pay your cleaner, if you have one, and wondered how dependent they are on your income. As long as you can afford it, it’s arguably a moral imperative to continue to support others. But should you give your hairdresser the equivalent of a few haircuts? What about your dog walker, babysitter, the kid’s piano teacher, your yoga instructor? You might have wondered, when does the line end?
You’re having to consider the financial and emotional lives of your help in ways that you might never have had to before. But in countries with even more dire inequality, that calculation has long been part of daily life. Now, coronavirus has upped the stakes in unimaginable ways.
Middle- and upper-class families from South Africa to India, Nigeria to Singapore, support an army of helpers, who depend on their jobs to sustain their extended families and communities. Sometimes, that relationship becomes so intertwined that employees become part of the family in ways that are often fraught. Empathetic employers may set up savings funds, pay for homes and children’s education, cover medical emergencies, get pulled into disputes. But the dynamic is built on extreme inequality, and ripe for abuse.
Now with the global economy in a tailspin, the question for many employers helping the poorest of the poor is, without exaggeration, one of life and death. Facing your own economic challenges, but knowing that cutting off help could push people to the absolute brink, what would you do?
In wealthy countries, and under normal circumstances, you might have been able to assuage your guilt over firing someone for bad service with the knowledge that their fall would be cushioned by a social safety net and other employment opportunities. Until now, this has allowed individualism to reign. But in places without those means, collectivism is often the order of the day.
No government bailout or charitable giving at this moment can stop the sudden awakening that none of us are siloed from the people we pay to help us. The West is starting to realize what many people in more unequal countries already know: that when we fall, we fall together. Survival is a collective exercise. —Jackie Bischof
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QUARTZ MEMBERSHIP
Everything you need to know about working from home. We’ve been covering remote work even more than usual, for obvious reasons. And we’ve created a reading list for Quartz members with our top tips and resources—from how to unplug at the end of the day to why it might be ok to occasionally work from your bed.
FIVE THINGS ELSEWHERE THAT MADE US SMARTER
Learning from the last crisis. We’re still coming to grips with everything in the $2 trillion coronavirus relief bill passed by the US Congress. At least compared to the 2008 bailout of banks and automakers in the financial crisis, the government has picked up a few lessons. The Wall Street Journal outlines how the rescue avoids past mistakes by going big from the outset, targeting aid to workers, and imposing stricter rules on companies. Now we just have to find all the new mistakes. —Tim Fernholz, senior reporter
How the pandemic will end. The Atlantic’s Ed Yong offers up tough truths that preserve in amber the uncertainties and realities of this strange moment. Though the onset of this crisis may have seemed fast, particularly in the US, pulling ourselves out of it will likely be anything but. Americans are reminded of the sobering fact that our system has failed in most of the ways that count, shattering the illusion of our superiority. —Alexandra Ossola, special projects editor
The race for a vaccine. Away from the trenches of ER departments and ICUs, the war against Covid-19 has another frontline: research. In the Guardian, Samanth Subramanian details a Cambridge professor’s work to find a vaccine, offering a fascinating window into the process. He also takes us through the science of vaccines, including the advancements that make it possible to have new ones ready to test just weeks after a new disease appears—compared to decades previously. —Annalisa Merelli, geopolitics reporter
There are problems in housing, too. Americans collectively hold over $100 trillion in wealth, much of which is in the form of homeownership. So any economic shock—including the current one—that causes people to not pay their mortgages can lead to a new financial crisis. For Bloomberg, Matt Levine explains what lessons the Federal Reserve learned from the last housing crisis, and what’s different about this time. —Max Lockie, deputy news editor
We know little about the virosphere. Yes, the coronavirus that causes Covid-19 has already been identified, genetically sequenced, and given a name (SARS-CoV-2). But don’t let that fool you: For all our scientific progress, we remain woefully ignorant about the many, many viruses out there, as Carl Zimmer explains in the New York Times. Consider: There are fewer than 7,000 named species of virus, but possibly trillions waiting to be found. —Steve Mollman, weekend editor
Our best wishes for a relaxing but thought-filled weekend. Please send any news, comments, virus taxonomies, and work-from-home strategies to hi@qz.com. Get the most out of Quartz by downloading our app and becoming a member. Today’s Weekend Brief was brought to you by Steve Mollman and Kira Bindrim.