With the federal government putting what is essentially temporary UBI (as part of the "CARES Act" stimulus program) in place for those who have lost work or hours due to COVID, this is the best time to flex your labor muscle. If Amazon does not meet their demands, these folks can fall back to unemployment insurance for up to 10 months.

I apologize for the wall of text below, feel free to minimize this comment ([-] sign next to delete above), but it is crucial to demonstrate how broad this support is to the working class.

https://www.nytimes.com/article/coronavirus-stimulus-package... (F.A.Q. on Stimulus Checks, Unemployment and the Coronavirus Plan)

> Benefits will be expanded in an attempt to replace the average worker’s paycheck, explained Andrew Stettner, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, a public policy research group. The average worker earns about $1,000 a week, and unemployment benefits often replace roughly 40 to 45 percent of that. The expansion will pay an extra amount to fill the gap. Under the plan, eligible workers will get an extra $600 per week on top of their state benefit. But some states are more generous than others. According to the Century Foundation, the maximum weekly benefit in Alabama is $275, but it’s $450 in California and $713 in New Jersey.

> Are gig workers, freelancers and independent contractors covered? Yes, self-employed people are newly eligible for unemployment benefits. Self-employed workers will also be eligible for the additional $600 weekly benefit provided by the federal government.

> If you’ve received a diagnosis, are experiencing symptoms or are seeking a diagnosis — and you’re unemployed, partly unemployed or cannot work as a result — you will be covered. The same goes if you must care for a member of your family or household who has received a diagnosis.

> What if my child’s school or day care shut down? If you rely on a school, a day care or another facility to care for a child, elderly parent or another household member so that you can work — and that facility has been shut down because of coronavirus — you are eligible.

> What if I’ve been advised by a health care provider to quarantine myself because of exposure to coronavirus? And what about broader orders to stay home? People who must self-quarantine are covered. The legislation also says that individuals who are unable to get to work because of a quarantine imposed as a result of the outbreak are eligible.

The general public is only going to support strikes to the extent that they look like protests against unacceptable treatment. If the strikers start "flexing their labor muscle" - if it looks like they're exploiting rather than responding to the crisis - the millions of unemployed Americans are going to sour on it very quickly.

We can re-evaluate in a few weeks when the healthcare system and supply chains are failing under extreme load (hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions infected). Why work a terrible job when the federal government will compensate you to remain home in safety? Meet their demands or experience pain. It's not emotional, it's economic cause and effect.

I will admit I'm enjoying the schadenfreude of workers finally having some power due to a Congressional response to a pandemic, much to the chagrin of "but that's how the free market works" apologists.

For better or worse, your schadenfreude will only last as long as the aid package. When the money runs out, the power dynamic reverses, and the economic aftermath may well leave poorer Americans in a worse bargaining position than they were before (as economic downturns often do).

Let's see what the electorate looks like, and its appetite for change is, after 10 months of a raging global pandemic.

We're only a few weeks in, and we've already drastically expanded benefits to those in need (the stimulus bill I mentioned upthread) much more than we would've under normal circumstances. Quite a bit of change can occur in a year, no?

There is that possibility, and while I can understand the desire for a change of administration after all of this, I can't understand why socialists are so positively gleeful. The federal government (not just the administration, but the CDC and the FDA as well) have failed in every conceivable regard in this pandemic response (somehow after 3 global outbreaks including 2 respiratory diseases in recent years, the CDC couldn't be bothered to secure a supply of masks and ventilators, never mind the testing debacle) while private industry and state/local governments are picking up the slack (scaling up testing capacity, innovating on treatments and interventions, lobbying for aid, scaling up supply chains, etc). Maybe the media will take care to spin this as a "failure of capitalism" somehow, but as far as the truth is concerned, it doesn't strike me as favoring more government.

> Maybe the media will take care to spin this as a "failure of capitalism" somehow, but as far as the truth is concerned, it doesn't strike me as favoring more government.

The Fed is predicting 47 million unemployed [1], at a 32% unemployment rate. That's a lot of folks without health insurance. 68k people in the US die every year because of lack of access to healthcare, and 50% of bankruptcies are due to medical debt, under "normal" circumstances. That is a "failure of capitalism" not replicated in other developed countries.

Sometimes, to fix a system, you must break it. This is the "break it" part. [2]

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/30/coronavirus-job-losses-could...

[2] https://reason.com/2020/03/27/pandemic-related-unemployment-...

EDIT: The parent has significantly revised their comment since I replied such that my comment doesn't make sense in the new context.

Right, that's the framing that will make people lose sympathy. "Give us what we want or you'll be in a world of pain" is an obviously sociopathic response to a pandemic; if the organizers took such a stance I honestly think strike-breakers might be resurrected to deal with it.

I think there's a misunderstanding here. "Strikebreakers" aren't people who beat up strikers to make them go back to work; they're people who are hired to replace the strikers after the strikers are fired en masse. (It's generally illegal to break strikes this way, the company must instead negotiate with the people striking.)

I agree it would be terrible to compel anyone to work through violence.

We're not fine with that, which is why Amazon has significantly increased their pay for the duration of the lockdown. If Instacart hasn't I agree they should.

Wages are largely a function of supply and demand. This downturn favors critical workers because the demand increased faster than the supply can increase, so their wages/perks should go up accordingly, but nothing happens over night.

They seem to be working towards making it happen, by pushing on the supply side. Good for them.

Who is "them" and how are they pushing on the supply side? The supply is only increasing insofar as workers from other industries are able/willing to transition, and even for "menial" jobs such as these, there is surely a fair amount of training that must be done. Moreover, corporations will probably prefer to temporarily increase wages for their current workers rather than take on a glut of novice workers and then do layoffs or wait for attrition afterward, so the supply side seems limited in my view.

> if the organizers took such a stance I honestly think strike-breakers might be resurrected to deal with it.

That'll sell well in an election year with states and the federal government overextending themselves already due to a woefully inadequate initial response. We can't even get masks and ventilators manufactured at the necessary rate, and we're going to send force to assist Amazon Fulfillment? We're not even sending in force to assist first responders and medical practitioners.

Amazon workers have options during this, including just going home. That's Amazon's problem, not the country's. No one is entitled to cheap delivered ecommerce services. If Amazon can't make the economics work without coerced labor, good riddance.

We're absolutely sending in force to assist first responders and medical practitioners. The National Guard has been building overflow facilities across the country, and the Navy's landed in LA and New York with hospital ships.

Umm - maybe I'm out of date, but if you quit a job/walk out, you're not eligible for unemployment?

Under business as usual, no.

You’re getting downvoted, but this is absolutely correct. There is no reason at all you would expect the pay of low-skilled workers to increase during a period of increasing unemployment. For every union member that refuses to work without increased benefits, there’ll be a queue of newly unemployed people willing to work for less. The unions have no sway over the supply of labor here, the only thing they can exploit is the threat to temporarily disrupt service during a crisis. Something which won’t go over well with all the country’s unemployed, and everybody who’s going to have to pay the increased prices.

As a counter, low skilled workers absolutely should get a pay increase because their work is more valuable and the hazards they face are more extreme - "professional class" workers should expect a real income pay reduction during this crisis since their labour is relatively lowered in value compared to during a normal world state.

Additionally, we, as a society, should value minimizing the number of people working in these roles and their interactions to ensure they remain healthy and don't become transmission vectors.

It depends on the job. For warehouse employees, they are absolutely necessary since packaging is both hard, tedious work, and also specialized enough that you can’t have customers do it for themselves.

But Instacart is just grocery shopping. At a certain price point, people will go into stores themselves, or self organize to do bulk purchases for a small group. Right now in NYC, some people have started a charity to deliver goods to older residents in apartments for free. Instacart can’t compete with that.

That’s an abstract view of value, based entirely upon your own personal views and opinions. The labor is only worth the equilibrium point between what somebody is willing to pay for it, and what remuneration somebody is willing to accept for it. The truth is that for all of these low skilled industries that are seeking pay rises, there is currently an influx of available labor that could fill those positions. If they are not willing to work for that level of pay, there are most certainly others who would be willing to do so. They do not have the power to prevent people from applying for those roles, should they become available. The only card they have to play is to exploit the threat of a temporary disruption to service. They may have some luck exploiting this, but it can only get them so far. It’s also no different from any of the other price gouging that’s often derided here on HN. When huge portions of the population are facing unemployment, there is no reasonable basis for demanding pay rises, especially in low skilled industries, where the labor can be so easily replaced.

OK I usually agree with this but the elephant in the room is- what if some large number of those let go and also employed drop dead and people perceive it's because of Instacart/Amazon's callous attitude towards their safety?

Serious question, not being combative with you.

Doesn't Amazon have a very real hazard here which could result in burdensome regulation and or customer defection?

As Amazon or any of these other companies aren’t organisations devoted to the study of epidemiology or medical expertise, the only thing they can possibly do is follow the guidelines/regulations imposed on them. I’m not sure what that has to do with compensation though.

You're talking compensation not going up because too many people want the jobs and Amazon employees quit or strike because of COVID-19 working conditions so it's all connected.

I appreciate that you either can't see that or don't buy it so I end my participation here having tried to make the point as clear as I could. That is not a sly way of saying "I'm right, you're wrong" by the way. I am just out of words and ideas and time to re-express the relationship again.

Very best to you.

Your thesis seems to be that the conditions that would lead these workers to strike would be sufficient to also deter all of the millions of newly unemployed people. A proposition which is unfounded and completely defies logic. Your question about how these companies should ensure business continuity with the threat of their workers getting sick is both unrelated to remuneration, and not a question those companies are in a position to answer themselves. That responsibility would fall upon a regulating body.