The majority of health-care workers are in working families without significant resources. Many earn near-minimum-wage salaries. Nurses are often mothers who are also working to manage households. If the health-care staff needed to stay home to care for their children and families, it would be a major problem. By definition, the intensity of the health issues driving the closing of the schools would be creating unprecedented demand on the local health-care system.
The same situation was presented for many of the essential workers. Police, firefighters, truck drivers, blue-collar workers operating vital systems—how did they take care of their children who would now be home?
That was the riddle that we had to solve. Where could we find large-scale childcare facilities to provide for the children of essential workers so we were sure they would show up for work? If we were going to close the schools immediately, we would need to set up large-scale childcare operations for the children of these essential workers. To do that, some schools would need to serve as safe childcare centers, and some teachers would have to staff them. In some cases, we would bring childcare workers to hospitals, so workers didn’t have to go out of their way to drop their children off. We would need to open them on a regional basis and make sure the essential workers in that region understood their availability and were comfortable with the arrangement before we could actually close the schools. This all had to happen very quickly.
The teachers’ and health-care unions have great reach and credibility with their members. If I could fashion a solution with them, they could quickly communicate to the membership and serve as credible validators of the system’s safety. Many of the other essential workers also were members of powerful unions. As always, relationships matter. There would be no contracts or documentation, this would all have to be done on a handshake. We would need to understand that the situation would change going forward, that issues would pop up that we did not anticipate, and that we must deal with one another in good faith.
Sometimes, but not often, there is an advantage to being old. I had worked with the leadership of the major unions for many years. We knew one another well and trusted one another on a personal level. And this would have to be personal. Normally, a small change in work rules would be negotiated for weeks. In this case we would be setting up an entirely new system overnight. The relevant teachers’ unions are run by Randi Weingarten, Andy Pallotta, and Michael Mulgrew. The main health-care union is 1199 and is run by George Gresham. I had worked with all of them on many issues. Recently, we had all gone to Puerto Rico to volunteer to help the island deal with Hurricane Maria.
I had a series of frantic phone calls over two days, most ending with the same phrase: “Don’t worry, we will figure it out.” As a result, New York State had a new system of childcare facilities managed by teachers and day-care providers that could provide for the children of classified “essential workers.” In a normal situation, what we did could take literally years to complete; we did it in three days.
People can rise to the occasion. If they understand the issue and the consequences, they can step up. We tend to assume people will be self-interested, exploitive, selfish, and difficult. Maybe it doesn’t have to be that way. If one person lets their guard down first, it makes it easier for others to respond in kind. Maybe we can establish a precedent in which each of us operates from a place of decency and mutuality.
Two weeks after I started doing my daily briefings, with three COVID deaths, on March 15, we announced the closing of schools in New York City and Westchester, Nassau, and Suffolk counties. The following day, we announced the closing of schools in the entire state. Even though the action was highly disruptive, people accepted it because they had been following the information I’d been sharing every morning. Many of the districts’ officials did not want to close, and they did not appreciate my newfound control over them. But the people of the state understood the necessity and supported my decision. I also ordered nonessential New York State workers to work from home. As with the closing of colleges, government action would set a precedent for policies that I hoped private companies would follow.
Never in modern history has government ordered businesses, schools, and private institutions to close. State government has never issued stay-at-home orders, not even during the 1918 flu pandemic, when schools and theaters were allowed to stay open. With each state determining its own path, the inevitable incongruous decisions would lead only to confusion and decreased support from the people. If the federal government established a national standard, it could ease the burden on state leadership and increase popular support. The federal mandate could have easily set an infection rate, hospitalization rate, or death rate by percentage of population that would’ve triggered a state to shut down. The federal government has the expertise in global health pandemics. State and local health departments do not.
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WE CONTINUED TO watch what was going on in California and Seattle, and what we saw was disturbing. Even
