![]() For the past several years, a subset of taxi-drivers known as owner-drivers have been trapped in a kind of modern-day debt slavery, struggling to make payments on loans that they took out to buy medallions-the permits required to operate a cab. And they are yet another group whose struggles preceded COVID. In total, they speak a hundred and twenty different languages. More than ninety per cent are immigrants. No matter how many rideshare apps that New Yorkers download, the yellow taxi will always be iconic: cabdrivers represent an especially vital strain of the city’s culture. (The strike is ongoing.)īut perhaps the year’s most intense and longest-brewing labor drama, which transfixed New York this past summer and fall, was the battle fought by the city’s twenty thousand yellow-cab drivers. A few weeks ago, the student workers received an e-mail from Columbia’s human-resources department, threatening to replace them if they continued to strike. The city is also home to the largest active strike in the country: this past October, some of the more than three thousand unionized student workers at Columbia University marched into the classroom of the university’s president, Lee Bollinger, demanding better pay, dental care, and job security. ![]() In January of 2021, after six workers at the enormous Hunts Point Produce Market, in the Bronx, had died of COVID-19-and after another estimated three hundred employees had contracted the virus-market employees went on strike, ultimately winning their biggest pay increase in thirty years. Demonstrations began in 2020, after COVID hit, but ratcheted up in year two of the pandemic, as employees protested about months-and sometimes years-of indignities. Although the city is no longer a factory-dense place, it is full of underpaid essential workers. New York City had its own versions of these battles. “If someone is not allowed to take a paid sick day when they’ve got COVID, that’s not just their problem. “The pandemic made it clear that this is not an individual problem people have with their employers-it’s a collective problem,” Luce said. While this assistance, too, was not entirely new, Luce said that, for many members of the public, COVID-19 provided a wake-up call about the country’s weak labor laws. Money poured into online “strike funds,” and Redditors flooded the Kellogg’s job portal with fake applications. For a lot of people, that was it.”Īlso notable, according to Luce, was the outpouring of public sympathy: everyone from President Joe Biden to Danny DeVito voiced support for the striking workers, and that encouraged the workers to hold strong, while also putting additional pressure on managers to bend. Management’s not coming in-they’re in their second homes, while I’m here risking my life. Luce explained the mindset of many employees this year: “They’re thinking, This company is making millions-billions-during a pandemic. (In both cases, employees allege that they were not allowed to leave work before the storms hit.) Meanwhile, corporate profits have continued to roll in. Earlier this month, six people died at an Amazon warehouse, in Illinois, and another eight workers were killed at a candle factory, in Kentucky, after the facilities were hit by a tornado. Health-care and manufacturing workers found themselves ordered to work double shifts in dangerous conditions. “Wages have been mostly stagnant since the economic crash of 2008,” Luce said, adding, “People have been seeing the quality of their jobs deteriorate.” Then came the virus, and, all of a sudden, a dismal situation became life-threatening. What was happening? Stephanie Luce, a labor scholar at CUNY, explained that COVID-19 appears to have lit a match beneath at least a decade’s worth of late-stage-capitalist tinder. (The energy even found its way to this very publication, where, this summer, newly unionized employees reached a deal after two and a half years of negotiations.) Employees walked out of John Deere plants in Illinois, Kellogg’s cereal plants in Michigan, Kaiser Permanente health-care clinics in California, and Nabisco and Frito-Lay snack factories in Oregon and Kansas. Workers at corporate behemoths like Amazon and Starbucks attempted to form unions, with mixed results, and workers who were already unionized went on strike in order to demand better wages and working conditions. population broke out in hives of labor activism. Amid continued mass demonstrations against lockdown measures, and worldwide civil unrest, the U.S. During the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic, the social side effects of the virus started to become more apparent.
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