Name: Covid-19 Is Pushing 'Essential Workers' To Fight Back
Uploaded: 2020-04-05T02:36:19.000Z
Duration: 8 min 27 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Transition words & phrases

Walking out on Amazon because they lying to us,

We want better equipment, protective gear.

I shouldn't be speaking like this, but I don't care.

In the middle of this coronavirus crisis,

I can just get my work done at home on a laptop

with my tiny coworker, Liam, here, who's four months old.

But obviously there are many, many people in this country

who still have to go to jobs at grocery stores,

It's a little hard to tell exactly how many people

there were as many as 62 million people in those jobs,

and no doubt many of them are still going to work.

And what started to happen in recent days

is since those jobs have become a lot more risky,

some of those workers are starting to strike

In the past couple weeks, we've seen walk-outs

There is this national and global crisis,

which is being experienced in a particularly acute way

in a number of work places that many people in America

have not thought of those places where workers

And some of the calculation that workers make

about whether it's worth confronting the boss,

that calculation is shifted when people have real fears

about it being dangerous to come into work

on Staten Island are staging a walkout today.

They're complaining about the fact that their facility

has not been cleaned out since a worker there

and they want Amazon to close down that distribution center

for a period of time, have it entirely sanitized.

Tell me a little bit more about the Amazon situation.

We've heard about a lot about this Staten Island warehouse,

but I guess there's a couple other locations as well.

There've now been walkouts at Amazon warehouses

in Staten Island, in Chicago, and in Michigan.

In each of these cases, you have workers saying

the company is not doing enough to keep them safe.

what the workers thought was a lack of transparency

about positive COVID cases within their workforce.

and they pass the coronavirus down to your customers,

We need to know that, we want to feel safe while working.

Amazon released a statement on the day of the walkout

saying that the protestors accusations were unfounded,

and saying we have taken extreme measures

to keep people safe, tripling down on deep cleaning,

procuring safety supplies that are available,

and changing processes to ensure that those in our buildings

Amazon also offers an example of one of the challenges

We got people aware, that's what we here for.

They were actually enforcing safety rules,

but that strike leader says he was being punished

The question of what happens to workers who stand up

and whether those protests become inspirations

or cautionary tales about how you can get yourself