We also think too little about unions. Unions were once powerful entities that could check the exploits of big business. Now, in our so-called “gig economy,” where company loyalty is secondary, workers find themselves alone and vulnerable to the rapacious whims of rarely seen managers, shareholders, and venture capitalists.

That said, labor is not dead. The USA has seen over one hundred labor actions so far in this pandemic—a number higher than all of 2019.[5] Mike Elk, Clarissa León, and Kat Callahan of Payday Report have been tracking all of them.[6] 

What they report is that when Amazon workers ask for extra pay or extra equipment to meet the demand for extra labor in unsafe conditions, Amazon resists anyway it can—a true exemplar of the American corporation’s “moral decay,” according to one observer.[7] The strikes in the meat-packing industry continue as Smithfield tries to blame its immigrant labor for outbreaks.[8] Autoworkers successfully lobbied GM, Chrysler, and Ford to delay opening when assembly lines couldn’t be made safe.[9] Workers in nursing homes, are also threatening to walk out if management refuses to help keep them safe and provide hazard pay.[10] Ω Even workers at the LSL Healthcare, a PPE manufacturing plant in the western suburbs of Chicago, are presenting demands to management after they learned that one of their own was ill with COVID. Management knew but kept it from workers.[11]  It’s as if an American armaments manufacturer tried to shirk out on paying or protecting its workers in the middle of a war. Oh wait, that has happened before.[12]

This is just another point in a trend. Workers in jobs deemed essential, many of whom who are people of color and immigrants, stand in the firing lines against this virus, are paid very little for it, and often must fend for themselves. This does not include the now over 6 million people who have lost their jobs. Many of the newly unemployed and their families face eviction and homelessness in a housing system that was already collapsing. It almost seems like these employers are saying the lives of the people in this group don’t matter.

Essential workers in the clinics, nursing homes, and grocery stores, in the post offices and at the Amazon warehouses, have been working this whole time, desperately trying to do their jobs and not get sick. They are joined now by the delivery truck drivers, contractors, landscapers, manufacturers and retail assistants who have been ordered back to work amidst the “re-opening,” regardless of whether it is safe. If school boards decide to open schools when August rolls around, we will add the teachers to this list of essential workers.

Today, the image that comes to me is that of the African American man grabbing dozens of chickens off the feces-covered chicken pen floor outside of Demopolis, Alabama. And the Mexican American worker on the sweaty slaughterhouse line in Sioux Falls, Iowa. And the poor white woman running the mask-making machine in Chicago. And the Puerto Rican woman delivering groceries to an apartment door in Philadelphia. All of them put their health on the line and in doing so contribute to public health and individual thriving of those quarantined at home on Zoom all workday. Nearly all of us are all invisible cogs in some commercial machine. But the machine churns up some cogs faster than others.

A new time of relaxing government restrictions is now coming upon us. But the whole point of “flattening the curve” by having so many of us stay in our homes was to allow for test development and contact tracing. The United States federal government already dropped the ball in February; now it looks as if March was lost as well.[13] The experience of essential workers through the month of April, however, seems to demonstrate that April was another lost month. While many of us sat home—binging Tiger King, doomscrolling through images of bodies piled in refrigerated tractor-trailers in Queens, raging over every insipid presidential tweetstorm, drooling over cooking shows, mewling over at home manicures—too few tests were deployed, too few procedures put in place, and too few workers were hired to help get us back to any kind of normal. Even if the East Coast megapolis is beginning to look better, 75% of the country’s population spread over 90% of its continental land mass are beginning May in the same place they ended February—misinformed and unprepared.

“May Day” can mean advocating for laborers. But it’s also the urgent call of a pilot whose plane is going down.

Notes

[1] Lily Rothman, “The Bloody Story of How May Day Became a Holiday for Workers,” Time, May 1, 2015, https://time.com/3836834/may-day-labor-history/.

[2] David Semenske, “1886: The Bay View Massacre,” Libcom.org, July 24, 2007, http://libcom.org/history/1886-bay-view-massacre.

[3] Amy McKeever, “Labor Day’s Surprisingly Radical Origins,” National Geographic, September 4, 2020, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/reference/holidays/history-labor-day/.

[4] Jenny Gross, “McGuire or Maguire? A Tussle Over Who Founded Labor Day,” The New York Times, September 5, 2020, sec. U.S., https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/05/us/labor-day-founder.html; Karen Zraick, “What Is Labor Day? A History of the Workers’ Holiday,” The New York Times, September 1, 2018, sec. U.S., https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/01/us/what-is-labor-day.html.

[5] Janine Jackson, “‘This Many Strikes Says That Something Fundamentally Is Changing in the Country,’” Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, April 16, 2020, https://fair.org/home/this-many-strikes-says-that-something-fundamentally-is-changing-in-the-country/.

[6] Mike Elk, “COVID-19 Strike Wave Interactive Map,” Payday Report, 2020, https://paydayreport.com/covid-19-strike-wave-interactive-map/.

[7] Ross Barkan, “There Is No Greater Illustration of Corporate America’s Moral Decay than Amazon,” The Guardian, April 1, 2020, sec. Opinion, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/01/amazon-coronavirus-new-york-chris-smalls-dismissed.

[8] Walter Einenkel, “Smithfield Pork Executives Deflect Blame for the South Dakota COVID-19 Outbreak on Immigrant Workers,” Alternet.org, April 22, 2020, https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/smithfield-pork-executives-deflect-blame-for-the-south-dakota-covid-19-outbreak-on-immigrant-workers/.

[9] Mike Elk, “With 23 UAW Members Dead, UAW Halts Big 3 Reopening Next Week – Payday Report,” Payday Report (blog), April 24, 2020, https://paydayreport.com/with-23-uaw-members-dead-uaw-halts-automakers-reopening-next-week/.

[10] Chip Mitchell, “Nursing Home Workers in Illinois Move Toward Strike as Deadly Virus Spreads,” WBEZ Chicago, April 27, 2020, https://www.wbez.org/stories/nursing-home-workers-in-illinois-move-toward-strike-as-deadly-virus-spreads/5c5e983c-fe3f-4e76-8855-8551ee3a97a2.

[11] Arise Chicago, “LSL Healthcare Production Workers Deliver Demand Letter,” Facebook, May 1, 2020, https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?v=1549147601927303&notif_id=1588348475106617&notif_t=live_video.

[12] Wisconsin Historical Society, “Register of the Harold R. Christoffel Papers, circa 1937-1990,” Archival Resources in Wisconsin: Descriptive Finding Aids, accessed May 1, 2020, http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi/f/findaid/findaid-idx?c=wiarchives;view=reslist;subview=standard;didno=uw-whs-mss01046;focusrgn=bioghist;cc=wiarchives;byte=380412756.

[13] Michael D. Shear et al., “The Lost Month: How a Failure to Test Blinded the U.S. to Covid-19,” The New York Times, March 28, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/28/us/testing-coronavirus-pandemic.html.