Policymakers Should ‘Live the Plan’ — or Stop Pontificating

As the Delta variant fuels surges in COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths, employees and employers are increasingly at odds over back-to-work requirements and conditions. As fall arrives, schools and colleges have been increasingly at the center of these battles, with students and parents seeking in-person education while staff and faculty seek to minimize their personal vulnerability to COVID and the danger of bringing it home to vulnerable family members — those under 12 and those with autoimmune diseases. Administrators, like employers and managers in other fields, struggle with the balance. 

There is a factor in this balancing act, however, which remains largely unspoken, even invisible: the personal situation of those making the decision. Do those who decide live the same plan they create for others? Do they have vulnerable people at home? Do they work in close proximity to numerous other people, or are they relatively isolated in offices, far from those who might carry the disease? Do they need to take mass transit to work, or are they able to drive in alone, protected against the spread of COVID that is inevitable when many people — some vaccinated, some not — are crowded together?

And the same might be asked of those legislating against mask mandates, mandatory vaccinations, and other health measures that experts tell us are necessary to bring this pandemic under control. Do they bear the same risks they thrust upon others through prohibition of mandatory health measures? Are they living the plan?

This distinction between making a plan and living the plan is typical of the decisions that employers, managers, politicians and others commanding power make every day. They create and mandate policies which generate consequences for others that they will not personally suffer themselves. What would it mean if those who mandate in-person work knew their own children and families would bear exactly the same chance as all others of coming down with a disease that has already killed over 600,000 Americans and consigned many, many more to long-term adverse effects, some of which we don’t even understand yet?

This division between making the plan and living the plan is not inevitable or universal. When CEO compensation is tied to profitability of the firm, CEOs are living the plan. When software developers are required to use their product exactly as a customer would (called “dogfooding”), they are living the plan — and are far more likely to discover problems. Hedge fund owner-operators live the plan with at least half of their net worth in the funds, making them relatively more exposed than any of their customers. 

Of course, there are all sorts of logistical problems in having decision-makers actually live the plan. But, given desire, this can be arranged, even in situations that are commonly thought to mandate a split between commanders and commanded, such as workplaces. Workers’ cooperatives, for example, operate by a different logic than capitalist enterprises that assume hierarchy, a division between those who make decisions and those who carry them out. 

At the same time that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis removed local decision-making by banning all mask mandates in Florida public schools (which is now winding its way through the appeal process), an Axios/Momentive poll revealed only 25% of parents in Florida opposed school mask mandates. One local school board member described the reaction among parents and teachers as “panic and chaos.” But in a striking example of living the plan, by the beginning of September school districts containing over half of all public school students in Florida had defied the governor, despite the threat of state funding being withheld, as teachers and parents pressured their local boards to protect them and their children.  

Decision-making should be by (or include those) who will actually live the plan. Let teachers, staff, parents, and students decide the health risks and conditions of in-person education. If you mandate that others must work or study in person, work under the same conditions as everyone else. If you ban mandatory masks in schools, send your children to classrooms in which no one is masked. When decision-making cannot totally incorporate living the plan, the loudest voices should go to those who actually understand what a decision would mean for those who carry it out.  

We should never tolerate the hypocritical pontificating of those who will personally make no sacrifice. It should be obvious: There’s nothing heroic about insisting other people take the risks that benefit your bottom line or political ambitions.

Rob Rosenthal is the John E. Andrus Professor of Sociology, Emeritus at Wesleyan University in Connecticut.