Yet Kate Bronfenbrenner, director of labour education research and a senior lecturer at Cornell University, US, notes that while Covid-19 has been a major propellant, the current anti-work movement has deeper roots that predate the last two years. “Workers have had an amazing threshold for tolerating the abuse that employers have put on them,” says Bronfenbrenner. “But when that abuse went so far as to risk their lives, that crossed the line; in the context of Covid, where employers were asking them to work harder than ever and employers were making huge profits.”