Workers protest racial inequality on day of strike

NEW YORK — Workers from the service industry, fast-food chains and the gig economy rallied with organized labor Monday to protest systemic racism and economic inequality, staging demonstrations across the U.S. and around the world seeking better treatment of Black Americans in the workplace.

Organizers said tens of thousands of workers in 160 cities walked off the job for strikes inspired by the racial reckoning that followed the deaths of several Black men and women who died at the hands of police. Visible support came largely in the form of protests that drew people whose jobs in health care, transportation and construction do not allow them to work from home during the coronavirus pandemic.

“What the protesters are saying, that if we want to be concerned — and we should be — about police violence and people getting killed by the police … we have to also be concerned about the people who are dying and being put into lethal situations through economic exploitation all over the country,” the Rev. William Barber II, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, one of the organizations that partnered to support the strike, told The Associated Press.

Barber said Monday’s turnout showed the importance of the issue to the people who are willing to come out during a pandemic to make their voices heard.

“Sadly, if they’re not in the streets, the political systems don’t move because when you just send an email or a tweet. They ignore it,” he said.

The “Strike for Black Lives” was organized or supported by more than 60 labor unions and social and racial justice organizations, which held a range of events in more than two dozen cities. Support swelled well beyond expectations, organizers said, although a precise participation tally was not available.

Where work stoppages were not possible for a full day, participants picketed during a lunch break or observed moments of silence while kneeling to honor police brutality victims including George Floyd, a Black man killed in Minneapolis police custody in late May.

In San Francisco, 1,500 janitors walked off their jobs and marched to City Hall.

McDonald’s cooks and cashiers in Los Angeles and nursing home workers in St. Paul, Minnesota, also went on strike, organizers said.

At one McDonald’s location in Los Angeles, workers blocked the drive-through for 8 minutes and 46 seconds, about the amount of time that prosecutors say a white police officer held his knee on Floyd’s neck as he pleaded for air.

Glen Brown, a 48-yearold wheelchair agent at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport for nearly five years, said his job does not give him the option of social distancing. Brown and fellow workers called for a $15 minimum wage during an event in St. Paul, and he said workers were “seizing our moment” to seek change.