Workers at Amazon, Whole Foods, Instacart, FedEx, Target, and Walmart join together in striking on May 1, demanding better workplace safety conditions
Demands include better cleaning services and 14-day shutdowns at affected locations — On May 1st, workers from Amazon, Whole Foods …
The VergeRussell Brandom
Context & Ripple Effects
May Day is the escalation point of a spring-long arc: Instacart shoppers first threatened a nationwide strike in late March over hazard pay, sanitizer, and paid leave, and weeks later Amazon faced its first open revolt when roughly 60 workers staged a walkout at the Staten Island fulfillment center. What was previously one company, one site, now spans six employers — Amazon, Whole Foods, Instacart, FedEx, Target, and Walmart — acting on the same day.
The shared demands — better cleaning services and 14-day shutdowns of affected locations — matter because they target the operational core of the companies that kept the economy running during lockdowns, turning pandemic-era 'essential worker' status into labor leverage.
First-order effects
Six major employers face simultaneous disruption across warehouses, stores, and delivery routes on the same day, forcing each to respond publicly to safety demands rather than handling isolated complaints site by site.
Instacart, whose March strike threat over hazard pay and protections set the template, now sees its gig workforce aligned with employed warehouse and retail staff, widening the pressure beyond any single bargaining unit.
Second-order effects
Companies that concede cleaning upgrades or paid shutdowns at struck locations set a de facto safety benchmark that unstruck competitors must match to avoid becoming the next target.
Coordinated action across rival firms reduces each company's ability to absorb striking workers' volume elsewhere, since Amazon, Target, and Walmart compete for the same delivery and fulfillment demand.
Third-order effects
If cross-employer coordination holds, essential-sector labor organizing shifts from workplace-specific grievances toward industry-wide standards for pandemic safety — a pattern that recurs months later when thousands of Amazon workers across 15 countries stage coordinated Black Friday protests, suggesting the May Day coalition was a rehearsal for international scale.
The trend: Essential-workforce labor action is scaling from single-site walkouts to coordinated strikes spanning multiple competing employers, with pandemic safety as the organizing demand.
Today on May Day, frontline workers from Amazon, Instacart, Target, FedEx are striking. Here they explain in their own words why: https://www.vice.com/... “I'm a number on a body bag. They don't care if I live or die working this job.” https://twitter.com/...
“Because of certain elements of Instacart being hacked by third party bots or an overhiring, I have basically been rendered unemployed” https://www.vice.com/... https://twitter.com/...
Workers at some of America's largest companies will join in a May 1 strike at Amazon, Instacart, Whole Foods, Walmart, Target, and more. Show your support for these workers. #MayDay2020 https://theintercept.com/...
This is true. “@Amazon has treated its workers brutally, bullied competitors, dodged taxes, and generally been a bad civic actor, ” writes @bcmerchant It's past time to look for alternatives, like http://bookshop.org/ #CSR https://onezero.medium.com/...
Most news stories cite this tweet from a labor reporter. But many of the replies say, I work at X and I haven't heard anything about it. Seems odd. https://twitter.com/...
I've seen a lot of reporting about Amazon/Walmart/Instacart strikes today (e.g. Intercept, WaPo, VICE, Fox) but most seem to be citing flyers circulating on social media. I thought I'd see more tweets / FB posts today from workers, but finding very few if any. What gives?
“This is what we should remember about Amazon whenever the pandemic recedes: It punished concerned workers for trying to support each other, it left them exposed to a deadly virus, and it withheld easily provided crucial support” - @bcmerchant https://onezero.medium.com/...
Amazon had an opportunity to be a hero instead of just a greedy profiteer in this pandemic. They blew it. And people died because of it. https://twitter.com/...
“Crises provide inflection points for change — we can use this one to rethink our relationship to the company that is exploiting disaster to further entrench itself in our lives, at unknowable cost to our peers ... Amazon is bad for all of us.” https://onezero.medium.com/...
In this pandemic, there's been no worse corporate actor than Amazon. It has knowingly endangered workers' lives and fired those who dared to speak up—all to maximize profits and enrich executives during a crisis. If it wasn't clear before, it is now: https://onezero.medium.com/..…
“Crises like this show us what our institutions are made of. No company has failed the test as badly as Amazon. It could easily have delivered truly essential services while keeping its workers safe. Instead, it's waged war on them.” By @bcmerchant https://onezero.medium.com/...
Please listen to Maren Costa. She worked at Amazon for 15 years before she was fired for speaking up on behalf of vulnerable workers. https://twitter.com/...
.@bcmerchant was a smart young thing when he was @TreeHugger and my, how he has grown, his latest on Amazon is just devastating. https://onezero.medium.com/...
Perhaps hard to accept while we're quarantined at home, but incredibly important, now more than ever - read this from @bcmerchant: https://twitter.com/...