Friends,
This
article triggered a flashback. After 9/11 Phil Berrigan and other
political prisoners were locked up incognito. Elizabeth McAlister had no
contact with him for at least a week. Phil was imprisoned for his
participation in The Plowshares vs. Depleted Uranium disarmament action at
Warfield Air National Guard base in Essex,
Maryland. While in jail, he read an article in, I believe, FELLOWSHIP
MAGAZINE about Gandhi organizing a National Strike.
When he got out of prison, December 14, 2001, he started writing
and trying to organize a National Strike. I went with him to the
Philadelphia Catholic Worker to promote the Strike. His last
demonstration was at the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland, and
at the time he was suffering from pain in his hip. When he asked me to
join him in a trip to Wisconsin to promote the Strike, I said sure.
However, he would go into the hospital for a hip replacement. Then later
he was diagnosed with liver cancer, and would pass away on December 6,
2002.
So his last great action did not take place. However, if
the masses start recognizing the need for a National Strike, I will join
in and smile away knowing that Phil would be very pleased.
Kagiso, Max
Amid Pandemic, Workers Walk Out, Building Momentum Toward
General Strike
Amazon employees
hold a protest and walkout over conditions at the company's Staten Island
distribution facility on March 30, 2020, in New York City. SPENCER PLATT /
GETTY IMAGES
April
2, 2020
Essential workers at Instacart, Whole Foods, Amazon and General
Electric are staging protests and walking off the job in droves across the
U.S., demanding increased protections and pay as they continue to face
disproportionate risks and increasingly perilous working conditions amid the
COVID-19 pandemic.
Thousands of workers for the San Francisco-based Instacart, a
popular U.S. grocery delivery service app, went on strike Monday for better pay
and health protections as they face soaring demand to deliver groceries and
other essentials to people on lockdown amid shelter-in-place orders.
As Instacart orders in many parts of the country are backed up
by as much as a week as demand has spiked, many of the company’s full-service
shoppers — who are classified as independent contractors — say they are not
being provided with adequate paid sick measures, hazard pay or supplies to meet
challenging delivery schedules while staying safe.
The strike is “not coming from a place of greed, or even wanting
to stick it to the company at this point. It has everything to do with wanting
our health and well-being to be valued,” says Robin Pape, an Instacart shopper
with the group organizing the strike effort, Gig Workers Collective.
Even before the pandemic, Pape told Truthout that
longtime Instacart shoppers were struggling with larger and larger and
increasingly combined orders. As the pandemic bore down, workers faced
increased delays as grocery store supplies dwindled, and they had to correspond
with customers regarding substitutions for certain items.
“When you’re shopping for three different customers and each of
them has 15 items out of stock, it becomes far more time-consuming, so our
hourly rates go down because it’s taking us much longer to complete a shop than
it would have if we weren’t waiting for customers to respond and having to send
pictures of what’s available,” Pape says.
On top of that, Instacart gig workers face increased risk of
exposure to COVID-19 on the job, touching frequently used carts in grocery
stores that may not have implemented any physical distancing guidelines. Worse
still, shoppers fear they could be passing contaminated items like plastic bags
and food items on to their customers. It’s why Instacart workers have also
demanded supplies of hand sanitizers and disinfectant wipes from the company.
In fact, according to the Gig Workers Collective, Instacart is
already quietly informing shoppers that some workers have already been infected
with COVID-19. Instacart corporate sent one shopper in Cambridge, Massachusetts, an email regarding a
confirmed case of an Instacart worker with COVID-19 at a grocery store there.
In the weeks before the strike, Instacart did institute 14 days
of paid time off for shoppers who test positive for COVID-19 or are placed
under mandatory quarantine, but Gig Workers Collective wants to see that
expanded beyond 14 days and not be contingent upon a positive test.
Additionally, the company is also offering a new bonus based on shoppers’
performance.
Instacart executives said in a statement that the strike of its
contractors had “absolutely no impact to Instacart’s operations,” and that the
company had hired 40 percent more shoppers on Monday than the platform had
hired last Monday, and sold more groceries over the weekend than ever before.
The company plans to hire 300,000 gig workers in the coming weeks to meet its increased
demand.
Pape said that while the company agreed to meet workers’ demands
for hand sanitizer, many workers have been unable to receive a bottle after
requesting one. She says the company hasn’t met with the Gig Workers Collective
or even acknowledged the walkout until it happened.
Pape stresses that the company will need its veteran shoppers to
help orient the new gig workers it is planning to bring on, and that, even
while the company’s profits have soared, its level of complaints on public and
private platforms have skyrocketed in tandem. Many longtime shoppers, including
Pape herself, are already planning on moving to other platforms.
“They may be able to replace some of us, but the quality of the
shops is going to go down considerably, and customers are going to be
increasingly dissatisfied with what they’re getting,” Pape told Truthout.
The group has been pushing for better pay and basic benefits
like health care even before the COVID-19 pandemic struck, saying Instacart
workers have been wrongly categorized as independent contractors. A San Diego
judge issued a preliminary injunction in
February, ruling that Instacart’s California-based
shoppers should likely be categorized as employees under the state’s Assembly
Bill 5.
Presidential candidates Sen. Bernie Sanders and former Vice
President Joe Biden have expressed support for Instacart workers online,
with Sanders encouraging the company to meet workers’ demands in full.
Instacart workers were joined by up to 50 Amazon workers at a
warehouse in Staten Island, New York, who also walked off the job Monday in
protest of the company’s paid sick leave policies and its decision to keep the
warehouse open even after one employee there was diagnosed with COVID-19. The
company has reported that employees in at least 19 Amazon warehouse and shipping facilities across the U.S.
have tested positive for COVID-19.
The company said it fired an employee, Chris Smalls, who helped
organize the strike, alleging that he violated his employment by leaving a paid
quarantine to participate in the action. In response, New York’s attorney
general issued a statement calling the firing “disgraceful,” asking the
National Labor Relations Board to investigate while saying her office was
“considering all legal options.”
Smalls fired back at Amazon in a statement saying, “I’m going to keep
speaking up. My colleagues in New York and all around the country are going to
keep speaking up. We won’t stop until Amazon provides real protections for our
health and safety.”
Meanwhile, Amazon-owned Whole Foods workers have also joined the
fray this week, staging a national “sickout” on Tuesday calling for increased
pay, including hazard pay, as well as increased paid sick leave, and better
sanitation efforts and health protections — including free COVID-19 testing for
employees.
The campaign is being led by a grassroots group of Whole Foods
workers called Whole Worker, which organized an online petition with 10,000
signatures Monday night. Like Instacart, Whole Foods has only promised its
workers two weeks of sick leave with proof of a positive COVID-19 test, and has
offered a $2 hourly wage increase through April. In January, the company cut health care benefits for 1,900 of its part-time workers.
But workers aren’t just protesting for better pay and working
conditions. Some are demanding that companies better utilize their resources to
help the national effort to combat the pandemic. Workers at two separate
General Electric (GE) factories want the company to convert its jet engine factories to instead make ventilators as
medical workers face dire shortages. The company’s health care division is
already one of the largest manufacturers of ventilators in the nation.
The demands were launched at GE’s Lynn, Massachusetts, aviation
facility and its Boston headquarters, where union members with the Industrial
Division of the Communication Workers of America (IUE-CWA) protested while
standing or marching six feet apart.
The protests came after the company announced it plans to lay
off 10 percent of its domestic aviation workforce, firing nearly 2,600 workers,
along with a “temporary” layoff of 50 percent of its maintenance workers.
IUE-CWA President Carl Kennebrew told Truthout that
the union’s shops have already been hit hard by layoffs and closures prior to
the pandemic. “All of our facilities have this base capacity to make these
ventilators, and that’s what we’re asking. It would be easy for GE to … work
in-house,” Kennebrew said.
Kennebrew and Jerry Carney, who is IUE-CWA’s GE conference board
chairman, told Truthout that President Trump wouldn’t even
need to invoke the Defense Production Act to compel companies to produce
much-needed medical supplies if companies like GE and others took it upon
themselves to step up production capacity in the first place. Trump recently
called on General Motors to produce ventilators and could similarly call on GE to
increase its production.
Carney criticized GE’s contracts with outside producers, saying
the company wasted time in drawing up confidentiality clauses and other legal
measures in contracts when it could have just forged ahead with producing
supplies at its own factories weeks ago. “We could be doing that work right
now, right in the United States, and take back what we used to have in
manufacturing for the world.”
Congress’s $2 trillion economic stimulus bill includes $17 billion for assistance to companies deemed crucial to national
security, including potentially GE. The company is set to receive even more
assistance from the corporate bailout, which also dedicates at least $50
billion to the aerospace industry and another $25 billion in loans and tax
cuts. Carney, however, noted that the bill doesn’t include protections or
assistance for GE workers who need to stay home with children as schools and
daycares remain closed.
The company told VICE that while it has already
ramped up ventilator production in its Madison, Wisconsin, factory, it must
consider the needs of its other clients, including the U.S. military, before
changing production at particular factories. The company told VICE in
a statement that it is continuing “to explore additional opportunities to
support the fight against COVID-19, while continuing to support
mission-critical work for our customers as well.”
Workers at Instacart, Whole Foods, Amazon and GE join other mass
labor actions that have touched off since the start of the pandemic, including
a walkout of a Perdue chicken plant; a strike by bus drivers in Birmingham, Alabama; a walkout by workers at a Fiat-Chrysler plant in Sterling Falls,
Michigan; a threatened walkout by longshore workers in the Bay Area; grievances filed as
well as a letter sent to the Pennsylvania governor by UPS workers in Philadelphia; and protests by city sanitation workers in Pittsburgh.
Unions and workers are winning some of these battles. United
Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) announced a deal Wednesday with Kroger to
increase pay and benefits, including a $2 per hour wage increase, additional
emergency paid leave and new workplace safety measures, for the company’s more
than 460,000 workers across the country.
“[Wednesday’s] increase in pay and benefits is a good first step
in our ongoing conversations with Kroger to keep customers and workers safe in
stores during this crisis,” said UFCW International President Marc Perrone.
This week’s strike wave echoes the historic mass labor actions
that took place just over 100 years ago after another pandemic — known then as
“Spanish flu” — ravaged the U.S. economy and the world. As millions died
between 1918 and 1920, workers organized strikes across major industries,
including the nationwide 1919 Steel Strike and a coal miners’ strike in
Seattle, Washington, that captured the city for a week. That year, 4 million
workers walked off the job in the U.S.
Calls for a new massive general strike are again surfacing as
workers recognize the need to force corporations and state and federal
governments to implement sweeping changes, including wealth redistribution and
a guaranteed right to health care, housing and jobs.
This week’s mass labor actions add to that momentum,
underscoring not only the increasing precarity of the gig economy, but also how
workers who have long been under-valued in the economy are now proving critical
even as the nation’s unemployment rate has been projected to rise as high as 20
percent as the pandemic’s grip tightens.
“Right now, we’re being touted as ‘household heroes’ and the one
thing that’s allowing so many people to socially isolate, since they have all
these workers who are willing to take on the risk for them,” Gig Workers
Collective’s Pape says. “Laborers who have been performing these jobs with no
recognition, no thank you, no respect for the positions they’ve chosen to fill
or have had to fill, are finally fed up.”
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center,
431 Notre Dame Lane, Apt. 206, Baltimore, MD 21212. Ph: 410-323-1607;
Email: mobuszewski2001 [at] comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the
subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to
gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and
everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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