How to Strike During a Pandemic
As the world wrestles with an unprecedented public health crisis sparked by Covid-19, a spotlight is being shed on an old fight: the struggle for workers’ rights. On March 25th, “General Strike” became a trending topic on Twitter. Last week, workers at Amazon, Instacart and Whole Foods began striking for better protections amid the pandemic. The renewed interest in labor rights comes as corporations refuse to provide basic needs, like hazard pay, paid sick leave and personal protective equipment (PPE), to employees. In the effort to have their demands met, more workers are using strikes as means to an end, leading many to wonder if now is the time for a general strike in America.
A mass strike, or the work stoppage of a community’s entire labor force, can be a useful tool for workers who seek to improve their condition, but it requires extensive planning. The idea of a general strike is attractive because it provides an opportunity for workers to wield the full extent of their power by shutting down production across different economic sectors. Strikes, however, are often met with harsh retaliations from employers who retain a great deal of leverage in their ability to fire employees with little chance of backfire. In 1981, the Reagan Administration fired over 11,000 air traffic control workers who refused to return to work until conditions were improved. By 2006, only 850 of the terminated employees had been reinstated. With nearly 10 million Americans filing for unemployment benefits in the last two weeks, it’s unclear what consequences, if any, employers would face for firing workers who go on strike. In a worst-case scenario for workers, thousands could strike, only to be swiftly replaced by recently unemployed people desperate for wages.
For a general strike to achieve the aim of providing basic needs for workers during a pandemic, participants will need to create a situation in which their communities are provided for throughout the strike. Simultaneously, workers must harness the media to reveal their employers’ wrongdoing to a great enough extent that they are forced into negotiating. The former is possible through carefully coordinated mutual aid efforts while the latter has been historically much more difficult to achieve.
In the wake of World War I and the Spanish Flu pandemic, more than 60,000 workers in Seattle participated in a general strike that shut down the city for nearly a week. While city operations were put on hold, a cooperative body of organizers called the General Strike Committee ensured that hospitals and firehouses remained open, garbage was collected and food was delivered, allowing the community to carry on living without the need to return to work. Ultimately, the strike ended after five days due to heavy dissemination of anti-left propaganda from the Seattle mayor’s office. The General Strike Committee’s ability to organize the community highlights the capacity of workers to sustain one another absent of their employer, but without support from the media, strikers were unable to stop red scare tactics that put the future of labor movement in serious jeopardy. Last week’s Amazon strike, however, show that the tides may yet be turning in the worker’s favor.
On March 30th, a group of Amazon warehouse workers led by Chris Smalls walked off the job in Staten Island after learning that a coworker tested positive for Covid-19 and that Amazon would keep the warehouse open without providing additional protection for workers. Smalls was fired just hours later for what Amazon claimed was a violation of quarantine safety rules. Cutting off the head of the snake is an ordinarily effective way of quelling any further dissent from workers, but Smalls’ platform instead exploded onto the public consciousness: The firing has garnered international media attention with government officials promising an inquiry into the termination, forcing Amazon to start making concessions with respect to workers’ safety. Such responses may signal that there is enough fervor to organize future strikes that are large enough in scope to cause significant disruptions to Amazon’s operations. This would have major implications for communities across the country, as many confined to their homes have grown dependent on Amazon deliveries for the goods they need.
Unlike the unions who participated in the Seattle General Strike, the recent strikers are having moderate success disseminating their message through the media, but this didn’t happen by accident. In addition to the widespread attention that Smalls and Amazon workers are receiving, workers at Instacart, a grocery delivery service, have also gained a national audience. Instacart employees have been planning for a major strike since 2016 and have built a social media presence through Twitter and Instagram that allowed their message to reach journalists and consumers with relative ease before the strike even began. Through these efforts, the workers behind the strike were able to make their voices heard outside the company, possibly preventing Instacart from responding harshly under the pressure of public opinion. During a period of social distancing, too, social media is proving to be an effective alternative means of communication for workers unable to organize and strike in person.
At the same time, the constrictions of social distancing create new obstacles for providing badly needed mutual aid. In ordinary circumstances, workers engaged in a general strike would need to make sure vital resources like food and healthcare are available for their communities. That’s still true now, only it comes with the added difficulty of maintaining safe distances from other people. Delivering things like food and medicine to those in need will require those making the deliveries to wear masks. In another world, strikers might host a food bank. Today, that could have deadly consequences if any one attendee were carrying the virus.
The current health risks create a logistical complexity that is critical to consider, but not impossible to navigate. National organizing efforts are increasingly sourcing PPE for essential workers, which can be used during a strike, and allow workers to provide resources to the elderly and immunocompromised, thus reducing their need to leave home so they can be better protected against the virus. As people work toward the same goal, they become interdependent, fostering the need and conditions for even more collective action. Workers at a General Electric factory that manufactures jet engines, for example, recently walked off the job, demanding that GE allow them to instead produce ventilators urgently needed by Covid-19 patients. This kind of effort would let workers continue to do their jobs while providing much needed assistance to hospitals; thus addressing the public health crisis while simultaneously supporting the economy.
With economic conditions now rivaling and potentially surpassing that of the Great Depression, it is more important now than ever that workers and labor organizers across the country consider the implications of a general strike. With uncertainty comes opportunity, but in a capitalist system that seems adaptable to any circumstances, no matter how dire, American workers need to be able to wield their power in local communities and the media if they hope to make meaningful and lasting strides in the labor movement. General strikes have produced mixed results in American history, but with today’s extraordinary circumstances, workers who strike may finally reap the fruits of their labor.
