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Read, Debate: Engage.
| topic: | Economic Fairness |
|---|---|
| located: | USA |
| editor: | Yair Oded |
This coming Friday, a strike of historic proportions will take place in the U.S. as workers protest their mistreatment and neglect by companies during the coronavirus pandemic. While protests, sickouts, and walkouts have been taking place at facilities, stores, and factories over the past few weeks, Friday’s strike will be the first nation-wide, united effort by workers to fight for their rights since the outbreak of the pandemic.
In different states across the country, frontline workers employed by some of the largest companies in the U.S., including Amazon, Whole Foods (an Amazon company), Instacart, Walmart, FedEx, and Target, will call in sick on 1 May or walk out of their shifts. In some cases, workers are expected to be joined by members of workers’ unions and together stage protests outside of the workplaces.
Shelter-in orders across the country have constituted a boon for major retailers like Amazon and delivery companies like FedEx and Instacart, and the rapidly increasing demand of their services translated into record-breaking profits. Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos reportedly increased his wealth by $24 billion as a result of the disease.
Alas, most of these companies chose to cut back on urgently needed protections for their workers and declined to support them as they risked their lives while performing their jobs. Across the country, corporations have refused their workers paid sick leave; they also failed to provide workers with adequate protective equipment, conduct thorough cleanings of their facilities, institute social distancing guidelines in a timely manner, and transparently report the number of infections at their offices and warehouses.
Amazon has been particularly unscrupulous in its conduct throughout the pandemic. Not only did the company fail to properly sanitise its facilities and provide its workers appropriate protective gear, it also actively downplayed the scope of infections at its warehouses and refused to provide pay to employees who chose to stay home out of fear for their health. In an interview for The Intercept, an Amazon warehouse worker from Detroit with underlying health conditions stated that, “You either come to work or take an unpaid leave of absence… If I miss one paycheck, it would mean I lose my vehicle, I lose my place to live. I lose everything.”
Amazon has also been retaliatory towards employees who dare to speak out against their policies or encourage other workers to stand up for themselves. Christian Smalls, a former Assistant Manager at a Staten Island, NY Amazon warehouse that employs 5,000 people, was fired after he called on his colleagues to leave the building due to rapid spread of the virus at the facility. “Close this building down. It’s too many coronavirus cases. They’re not telling the employees. They’re not taking care of us. We’re not safe. We got a lot of people that’s home right now unpaid. It’s not right. It’s not fair to us,” Smalls told reporter Meagan Day.
Smalls’ case sparked a sense of urgency among frontline workers and union members from across the country, and a coalition of them was formed to plan a coordinated strike on Worker’s Day.
Although the demands of workers change depending on their physical location and specific circumstances, they ultimately outline the same basic problems regarding their mistreatment and conditions. The strikers on Friday will call on companies to grant them retroactive compensation for their unpaid sick leave since the beginning of the pandemic, provide them protective gear and adequate cleaning supplies, and report with complete transparency about the rate of infections at their facilities - The Intercept reported.
These companies’ behaviour hardly comes as a surprise, as it results from decades of a corrosive, unbridled free market ideology that dominates the United States – shaping its laws, crippling its government, and depriving its lower-middle and working classes of basic protections and rights. The Trump administration’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and its record-breaking bailout of major industries, constitutes yet another example of how government policy in the U.S. incentivises and facilitates corporate plundering and oppression of workers.
If you’re in the U.S., you may support the workers' struggle by refraining from shopping this coming Friday (1 May). But it doesn’t end there; as Vanessa Bain, an Instacart worker and co-founder of the Gig Workers Collective told The Intercept, “May Day is not just a one-time symbolic action, but also about building real, vast, and broad sweeping networks of power.”
Image by Revise_D
