The Coronavirus pandemic and the economic depression accompanying it are already engendering new movements of both employed and unemployed workers. In some ways these resemble the worker and unemployed movements that emerged in the first years of the Great Depression; in other ways they are very different.

In a fiery October 10 speech, Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign CEO, said that at 10 or 11 o’clock November 3 Trump is going to walk into the Oval Office “having won Ohio, and being up in Pennsylvania and Florida,” and he’s going to say, “Hey, game’s over.”

Photo: Corazon Aquino swears in as President of the Philippines at Club Filipino, San Juan on February 25, 1986 Wikimedia Commons.

Even before the 2016 election, Donald Trump hinted that if he lost he might not accept the outcome. Now, far behind in the polls, Trump is taking action to disrupt the 2020 election and laying obvious groundwork for refusing to leave office if he loses.

While the number of trade union strikes this year are lower than previous years, there have so far been hundreds of wildcat strikes without union authorization, primarily in the fight for worker safety amid COVID and racial justice. The Strike for Black Lives, which took place on July 20, 2020 is one such example.

In response to COVID-19 and the COVID-19 Depression, workers have developed unique strategies and forms of organization to protect their lives and livelihoods. We saw in “Fighting the Great Depression — from Below” how in the early years of the Great Depression conventional trade union strikes became a rarity, but workers organized themselves in community-based, “horizontal” ways to fight for their survival. This commentary and the next describe the emergence of strikes for protection against COVID-19. This series will conclude with an evaluation of the prospects of “people power” in the Coronavirus Depression.

In the early years of the Great Depression of the 1930s, unemployed and impoverished workers turned to dramatic forms of self-help to survive. Anti-eviction “riots” led by organizations of the unemployed made it possible to protect hundreds of thousands of families from being evicted from their homes and ultimately forced government in many cities to halt evictions.

Forty million people or more have lost their jobs since the beginning of March. Including those not actively looking for work, nearly half of adults are jobless. While some of those initially laid off have returned to work, others who thought their layoffs were temporary have been reclassified as fired permanently.

The United States has entered the deepest economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. This commentary describes the grassroots movements of the early years of the Great Depression in order to learn something about the dynamics of popular response to depression conditions. These early unemployed, self-help, labor, and other movements helped lay the groundwork for the New Deal and the massive labor struggles of the later 1930s.

Black people are two-and-a-half times as likely as White people to catch COVID-19 and substantially more likely to be unemployed as a result of the pandemic. George Floyd, in addition to being murdered by racist police, was infected by COVID-19 and lost his job when the restaurant he worked for closed because of the pandemic.