Unions to Organize Mass Walkouts in ‘Strike for Black Lives’

A coalition of unions plans to lead walkouts in more than 25 U.S. cities July 20, demanding that companies change internal policies to combat racial inequities.

The “Strike for Black Lives” demonstrations—organized by the Service Employees International Union, the Teamsters, the American Federation of Teachers, the United Farm Workers, and others—will include job walkoffs for eight minutes and 46 seconds to represent the amount of time a white Minneapolis police officer held down George Floyd, who was Black, by pushing a knee to his neck. Floyd was pronounced dead shortly afterward.

The unions said they will demand that employers and governments “dismantle racist policies” by raising wages, expanding union access, and expanding health care to workers who lost their jobs because of the Covid-19 pandemic.

“We cannot achieve racial justice without economic justice,” SEIU President Mary Kay Henry said in an interview. “From our nation’s founding, White supremacy and economic exploitation have been inextricably linked. Today, in this national moment of reckoning, working people are demanding fundamental changes to America’s broken system. They’re coming together in the Strike for Black Lives to declare that until Black people can thrive, none of our communities can thrive.”

The demonstrations, first reported by The Associated Press, will include gig workers who in most cases are considered independent contractors and don’t have the right to form a union. In Los Angeles, Uber, Lyft, and Postmates drivers will join a car caravan with nursing home and janitorial workers to the University of Southern California, where they will demand that the school stop using city police on campus.

In Detroit, fast-food workers will walk off the job to “call out the industry’s failure to protect its largely Black workforce during the Covid-19 pandemic and respect workers for the essential work they perform.” And in Minneapolis, airport workers will protest for $15 an hour and a plan to safely resume air travel.