Workers at Amazon, Whole Foods, Instacart, FedEx, Target, and Walmart join together in striking on May 1, demanding better workplace safety conditions
not now, not ever. https://onezero.medium.com/... @munchies : “I'm a number on a body bag. They don't care if I live or die working this job. There are more people who can replace me.”—anonymous Shipt worker. https://www.vice.com/... Laura Wagner / @laurawags : “I am striking because Amazon's work environment is hard mentally, physically and emotionally. It's sad we had to wait for a pandemic to get to this point, but I'm hoping this changes the work environment and labor as a whole for the future.” https://www.vice.com/... Joseph Cox / @josephfcox : “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/... Joseph Cox / @josephfcox : “We die moving packages for FedEx” https://www.vice.com/... https://twitter.com/... @350 : 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/... Jeremy Scahill / @jeremyscahill : MAY DAY: As Amazon, Walmart, Instacart, Target and others record record profit amid coronavirus crisis, their essential workers plan unprecedented strike today: https://theintercept.com/... @marcgunther : 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/... OneZero / @ozm : Amazon's actions during the coronavirus crisis should be a wake-up call. http://read.medium.com/5r5a5zd Corin Faife / @corintxt : 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/... Corin Faife / @corintxt : 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? P-O Desbiens / @pioldes : don't shop at any of these places at least today thanks https://twitter.com/... @marencosta : 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/... Sarah Emerson / @sarahnemerson : “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/... Jay Owens / @hautepop : “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/... Brian Merchant / @bcmerchant : 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/... Lloyd Alter / @lloydalter : .@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/... Yasmin Tayag / @yeahyeahyasmin : Perhaps hard to accept while we're quarantined at home, but incredibly important, now more than ever - read this from @bcmerchant: https://twitter.com/... Joanne Mcneil / @jomc : “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/... Brian Merchant / @bcmerchant : 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/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This strike is the escalation of a spring-long pressure campaign rather than a one-off: Instacart workers first announced a nationwide strike in late March over hazard pay, sanitizer, and paid leave, and weeks later around 60 Amazon employees walked out at the Staten Island fulfillment center over its COVID-19 response.
What changed on May 1 is coordination across employers — Amazon, Whole Foods, Instacart, FedEx, Target, and Walmart workers striking the same day — turning separate warehouse and gig complaints into a single cross-company safety demand.
First-order effects
- Each named employer faces simultaneous work stoppages across warehouses, stores, and delivery routes on the same day, making it harder to absorb disruptions by shifting volume between facilities than the earlier single-site actions allowed.
- Instacart, whose March demands went unmet before the strike, now confronts shopper walkouts alongside retail and logistics rivals rather than alone.
Second-order effects
- Companies that previously treated safety concessions as per-firm decisions face a shared benchmark: hazard pay and protective equipment granted by one employer become the reference demand at the others, compressing their room to differentiate on labor terms.
- Gig platforms like Instacart and Shipt, where workers describe being replaceable 'numbers,' face reputational spillover onto retailer partners who depend on their fulfillment capacity.
Third-order effects
- If cross-employer coordination holds, essential-workforce organizing shifts from site-by-site walkouts toward sector-wide action timed to peak moments — a trajectory the corpus already shows continuing with thousands of Amazon workers joining coordinated protests across 15 countries on Black Friday.
- Pandemic-era safety demands could harden into standing labor standards for warehouse and gig work, forcing retailers and platforms to budget protections as recurring operating costs rather than crisis responses.
The trend: Essential-economy labor action is consolidating from isolated workplace protests into coordinated, cross-company campaigns that target the largest retailers and gig platforms simultaneously.