What’s ‘Striketober’ and why are American workers fed up?
- Tens of thousands of US workers are either on strike or close to it
- Contagion of work stoppages has lead some to dub this month ‘Striketober’
Exhausted after working long hours during the coronavirus pandemic and resentful that their bosses are not sharing sometimes huge profits, tens of thousands of nurses, factory workers and other labourers are going on strike across the United States.
Some 31,000 employees of the Kaiser Permanente health care group in the western states of California and Oregon were poised to strike soon.
Since Thursday, 10,000 employees of the John Deere farm equipment company have been on strike, while 1,400 workers walked off the job at the Kellogg’s cereal company on October 5. And more than 2,000 employees of Mercy Hospital in Buffalo, New York, began striking October 1.
In Hollywood a planned strike by tens of thousands of cinematographers, hairdressers, makeup artists, sound editors and other film crew members that threatened to paralyse the US movie industry from Monday was narrowly averted over the weekend when the union reached a tentative three-year deal with producers.
But despite the Tinseltown agreement, the sudden rash of strikes this month has been so pronounced as to lead some to coin the word “Striketober”, a neologism since embraced on social media even by prominent progressive Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
During the pandemic, workers say, they often had to bear extra burdens to make up for others who were staying home.