As Amazon, Walmart workers hold COVID-19 May Day strike, a look back at labor actions during Spanish flu
The ongoing coronavirus pandemic has resulted in over 3,257,660 confirmed COVID-19 infected cases and over 233,405 deaths as of May 1. However, there are other statistics involved which make the disease the worst disaster in the 21st century.
In the United States alone, more than 30 million people have filed for unemployment benefits since the onset of the pandemic, and during the ongoing crisis, employers are taking advantage of their workers to ensure maximum profits
Take the e-commerce conglomerate, Amazon, for example. While its CEO, Jeff Bezos, further added to his worth by $24 billion, the retail giant's workers have resorted to strikes to demand fair wages and protections. Two employees allegedly got fired over their involvement in organizing one of the strikes.
This Friday, May 1, on the occasion of International Workers' Day, Amazon workers along with those from Instacart, Walmart, FedEx, Target, and Amazon's subsidiary, Whole Foods, plan to go on an unprecedented strike in the United States to protest what they say are unsafe working conditions amid the coronavirus pandemic, according to a report by The Intercept.
According to the report, the employees of the above companies will call out sick or walk off the job during their lunch break and in some locations, rank-and-file union members will join workers outside their warehouses and storefronts to support the demonstrations.
These strikes are not the only ones that have spurred during the coronavirus crisis. Workers across various sectors including health, sanitation, logistics, transport, food, and shipping have gone on strikes across the world, from Hong Kong to Australia and the United Kingdom to name a few.
Labor strikes during crises are not uncommon. The 1918 Spanish flu pandemic claimed somewhere between 17 million and 50 million lives when it infected roughly 500 million people, approximately one-third of the world's population at the time.
What followed in 1919 was a series of labor strikes, spurred on by the pandemic and the end of World War I, when low wages combined with rising prices made life difficult for many.
In Seattle, shipyard workers went on a general strike and shut down the city for a week, while in Boston, policemen went on strike. Broadway actors went on strike in New York, and a few blocks away, the workers in the clothing industry went on strike in the Garment District.
In September 1919, some 300,000 workers walked off their jobs in the first national steel strike, taking on the most powerful corporations in the country. In November, nearly 400,000 coal miners struck, defying a plea from President Woodrow Wilson and a federal court injunction.
The 1919 strikes are rarely connected with the events that preceded them — but they brought about many changes in the labor industry — and this was not the first time. After the Black Death in the 14th century came the Peasants' Revolt of 1381. Between 1350 and 1400, some landlords cut their rents by more than half while wages for agricultural workers rose by roughly 50 percent for men and 100 percent for women.
In the period after the Spanish flu pandemic, people demanded change as public health innovations occurred. The strikes of 1919 resulted in the construction of a welfare state across the world, which led to Sweden's social democrats bringing in ambitious reforms in the 1930s. These reforms brought about housing, child benefits, pensions, and other social security measures.
Unlike the situation in 1919, however, the current pandemic's unemployment could overtake that during the Great Depression that followed the First World War, when one in four American people were unemployed. In such a situation, employers can often be negligent with respect to workers' rights and needs, offering reduced wages and poor working conditions.
Many are already calling for a change in the world's economic order, in part to deal with the negative effects of the pandemic, but also to fight climate change and change the capitalistic ways that put climate change mitigation measures on the back burner for many countries.
Changes in the 20th century, of course, came from a mass labor movement and it is quite likely to be repeated this time around, should the strikes by the workers of Amazon, Walmart, and other companies be emulated across different industries and occur in various countries. After all, these essential workers need more than just applause and Google Doodles, they need to be recognized and renumerated just as effectively.