Vaga grevista nos EUA?

A epidemia da Covid-19 tem vindo acompanhada de uma onda de greves, muitas delas ilegais e/ou à margem dos aparelhos sindicais.

When Working Means Deadly Risk, Backlash Brews, por Josh Eidelson, na Bloomberg:

The coronavirus worker rebellion, inchoate as it is, is remarkable precisely because the U.S. in so many ways is set up to prevent such things from happening. Congress in 1935 passed a law guaranteeing workers the right to collectively bargain, strike, and protest, but riddled it with loopholes and limitations that, combined with a slew of economic transformations, technological innovations, corporate strategies, court rulings, and hostile laws, have rendered it a pretty empty promise. Workers who try to unionize can legally be forced to attend meetings where managers issue ominous “predictions” about what will ensue if they do. Workers who try to strike can often legally be “permanently replaced.” Usually, the most that managers have to fear if they fire an employee for organizing is perhaps having to reinstate that person eventually with back pay, and without having to pay punitive damages or accept personal liability.

The coronavirus hasn’t swept away workers’ fears that protesting could get them fired. But for a growing number, it’s helped to overcome them. At Instacart, where delivery workers are classified as independent contractors explicitly excluded from labor protections, the fear that refusing work could get you denied future shifts has kept many workers from participating in past protests, says strike leader Vanessa Bain. But the pandemic has changed the calculation: “It’s a lot easier for somebody to decide, ‘I can’t continue to shop, because if I get sick, my grandparents are going to get sick.’”

The crisis is emboldening workers in other ways, too. It’s trained a spotlight on the companies that still get to operate while everything else shuts down, and the workers that allow them to. That means harsher scrutiny from the public, politicians, and the press on businesses that seem to fall short of their duty, and a widespread valorization of the “essential” service and logistics workers who are often ignored. In periods like this, says University of California at Santa Barbara historian Nelson Lichtenstein, “they demand recognition, and society is giving it to them—and why isn’t their employer?”