On this day, 26 April 2020, workers at the Amazon fulfilment centre in Shakopee, Minnesota, walked out on strike in protest at a colleague being fired for staying home during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Workers claimed that over 50 members of the predominantly Somali workforce participated in the spontaneous work stoppage after the company sacked a worker called Faiza Osman who stayed home in order to protect her two children from the novel coronavirus, despite the fact that Amazon had informed workers they were allowed to stay home. Amazon claimed that fewer than 25 out of 1,000 workers took part.
Strikers were also protesting against Amazon’s decision to terminate its unlimited unpaid leave policy, despite coronavirus cases being reported at over half of its 110 warehouses.
Following the walkout, Osman was reinstated by the company. https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1973436299508177/?type=3
“Have not prisons — which kill all will and force of character in man, which enclose within their walls more vices than are met with on any other spot of the globe — always been universities of crime?”
— Peter Kropotkin, Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Ideal (via philosophybits)
