Essential by Jamie K McCallum

Author:Jamie K McCallum [K, Jamie McCallum]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2022-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

This history has perhaps never mattered more than during the fall of 2021, given that the ongoing labor shortage was accompanied by another anomalous curiosity of the pandemic economy—a strike wave. By January 2021, six workers at the Hunts Point Produce Market had died of COVID. Described as the “nerve center” of New York City’s food supply, the market supplies more than half of the fresh produce that New Yorkers consume. To compensate for the risks associated with working through the pandemic, employees launched the first strike in the pandemic’s second year. They wanted an extra dollar per hour and more PPE. Some strikers said that although they worked to put food on the tables of the city’s residents, their own kids sometimes went hungry. After a week of raucous pickets that drew major support from the Left, they settled on a $.70 raise, their largest in thirty years.36

Small walkouts and protests erupted throughout 2021. But most establishment labor leaders seemed focused on what Biden would be able to do to help unions, or on convincing Joe Manchin to switch sides on the filibuster debate. Neither plan was destined to win.

In the meantime, militant action was brewing among the rank and file. In the fall of 2021, workers went on offense. Ten thousand workers walked off the job at John Deere plants across Illinois and Iowa. They joined the monthslong strike at Warrior Met Coal in Alabama and the nurses’ strike at Saint Vincent’s in Worcester, led by Marlena, whom we met in Chapter 3. Food workers at Frito-Lay, Nabisco, and Kellogg’s were on strike over long hours, bad conditions, and low pay. There were graduate student workers on strike at Harvard University, as well as symphony musicians in San Antonio and whiskey makers in Kentucky, shutting down orchestras and bourbon production. By the end of October 2021, taxi drivers in New York City were on the second week of an indefinite hunger strike in the wake of nine driver suicides. Almost sixty thousand camera crew workers in Hollywood had authorized a strike, as well as thirty-seven thousand healthcare workers at Kaiser.

What was going on? As we saw in Chapter 2, there was a conflict between essential workers and their unemployed brethren, whom they saw as unfairly safe from the virus while the rest of them were risking everything to keep society running. As vaccines became more common, and the general public more accustomed to mingling, proximity to risk slowly became less important to the development of essential worker class consciousness. So, perhaps, did politics, the other stumbling block to working-class consciousness, as men in MAGA hats joined younger workers from Bernie’s movement on some of the major picket lines.

As we saw in Chapter 3, large strikes weren’t common during the first year of the pandemic, yet that year was punctuated by diverse labor actions, many by nonunion workers, or seemingly spontaneous walkouts, known as “wildcat strikes” because they weren’t officially sanctioned by workers’ unions. There was a lull in the action after the economy began reopening.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.