"Essential" workers will strike across America for May Day
On Friday, a coalition of low-waged “essential” workers across America are staging a walkout. They work for Amazon, Instacart, Whole Foods, Walmart, Target, and FedEx.
It’s an unprecedented labor action that comes at an unprecedented moment: a time in which the work of the historically disposable and easily replaced workers has become both essential and irreplaceable.
The companies that employ these workers have been slow to get the memo. Even as they’ve added billions to their balance sheets (Bezos is $24B richer since the start of the pandemic), they’ve offered no/small-dollar hazard pay and no/inadequate PPE to their workers.
And things are getting worse, not better: Amazon just announced that “it was ending its policy of unlimited, unpaid time off on April 30.” That means that workers with underlying conditions who cannot expose themselves to risk in Amazon warehouses will lose their jobs.
Workers report that their managers are sympathetic to their demands for more protection, but that the corporate HQ will not bend. Whole Foods has experienced at least 249 cases in at least 131 stores.
The workers are reinventing May Day, a traditional workers’ holiday, for the pandemic era. Despite decades of prohibitions on labor unions and organizing, they are bargaining from a position of strength, at a moment of utmost urgency.
