Portside

Some Instacart and Amazon warehouse workers have walked off the job to demand greater safeguards against the coronavirus, even as both companies are speed-hiring hundreds of thousands of new workers to handle a surge in delivery orders.

GE workers who normally make jet engines say their facilities are sitting idle while the country faces a dire ventilator shortage.

As the coronavirus has shuttered swaths of America’s offices, many workers in corporate call centers say they are still expected to work, risking their own health.

The catastrophe demonstrates the results when public health is subordinate to private profit and to a governmental apparatus that adulates the superiority of private over public administration.

Flight attendants are aviation’s first responders. We have now become frontline workers during a global pandemic. For many of us, however, the immediate threat of the COVID-19 virus is not our top concern.

Joe Biden has racked up endorsements from four of the largest — and most politically influential — unions in the past 10 days, a show of force that has bolstered his standing as the de facto Democratic nominee for president.

In some countries, workers will have 90 percent of lost wages covered. In others, residents fear eviction. Nation to nation, rescue plans reflect conflicting ideas of government’s role in a crisis.

Sara Nelson is working overtime to help craft a relief package for the teetering airline industry that keeps all employees on the payroll—a model she says can be “a template” for a national bill to give relief to all workers.

This is an edited version of a piece by Leopoldo Tartaglia of the international department of the CGIL, Italy’s largest union federation. Thanks to Peter Olney for the translation.

When things get dire enough, the working class fights back. In dealing with the outbreak of the coronavirus, people across the United States have organized at their workplaces, and also won major reforms in the housing sector.