While the economic future is a bit unpredictable even in normal times, there are plenty of indications that American workers will be facing unemployment at historic levels for many months or even years to come.

On March 19, New York activist and student Erik Forman wrote, “I spent some of today doing deliveries with a volunteer crew of unemployed Uber drivers, mostly to elderly people living in public housing developments.” He asked for a small amount of funds to continue this work and scale it up, and “build momentum for emergency funds to pay for home delivery of meals as a public utility in the crisis.”

The coronavirus pandemic threatens all of us. People are scared, and rightly so. But when we look to our government officials and employers, whose responsibility it is to provide protection in an emergency, what do we find? In the words of the National Nurses United – a union whose members are risking their lives every day on the frontlines of the coronavirus pandemic — “Federal, state, local, and employer efforts to fight the coronavirus” are “outrageous” and “ineffective.”

In May 2019, Greta Thunberg and 46 other youth climate activists from around the world issued a call for adults to join the youth climate strikes. They demanded that governments “immediately provide a safe pathway to stay below 1.5 degrees of warming.” Emissions must drop rapidly “so that by the time we will be in our mid- and late-20s we are living in a completely transformed world.”

This is the fourth in a series of commentaries on the Future of Climate Strikes. It describes how the determined action of one young woman – and the determination of millions of other youth to act on climate — led within a year to a Global Strike for Climate with more than seven million participants.

By Jeremy Brecher,LNS Research and Policy Director It isn’t easy for unions to strike to protect the climate. U.S. labor law doesn’t make it easy to strike over anything except wages, hours, and working conditions – even over things like climate change...

By Jeremy Brecher,LNS Research and Policy Director This is the first, introductory commentary of “Strike!: Jeremy Brecher’s Corner.” It asks, is there any way we can deliver ourselves from mutual destruction by climate change and/or nuclear holocaust? A listing of...

By Jeremy Brecher,LNS Research and Policy Director This is the first in a series of commentaries on the Future of Climate Strikes. This introductory commentary asks whether strikes and forms of mass direct action “people power” might help halt climate...

By Jeremy Brecher,LNS Research and Policy Director This commentary maintains that the power of the powerful depends on the cooperation and acquiescence of other people. If enough of those others refuse to go along, they can undermine the “pillars of...