Strikes during the COVID-19 pandemic
industrial action relating to the emergency
Strikes occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic due to many factors including: hazard pay or low pay, unsafe working conditions (due to poor social distancing or a lack of personal protective equipment), inability to pay rent. These strikes are separate from the various protests that occurred over responses to the pandemic.
Overview of strikes
The COVID-19 pandemic in the United States has led to the highest number of total infections and deaths of any country, although per capita it is not the highest. The pandemic caused the unemployment rate to temporarily rise from roughly 2 percent to nearly 18 percent of the workforce, higher than the Great Recession of 2008, but lower than the peak of the Great Depression in 1933. Many employers for non-essential work shifted to teleworking to avoid infections in office environments at the suggestion of the Center for Disease Control (CDC) and by the end of March 2020, all 50 states in the U.S. had confirmed cases and deaths and had initiated stay-at-home orders. As a result of the high unemployment rates and social injustices that were laid bare during the pandemic, people began to strike for various reasons including rent strikes, prison strikes, university strikes, and worker strikes.
Prison system strikes
During the COVID-19 pandemic an array of social inequalities were exposed including the flaws of the prison system in the US that faltered under the public health emergency. As a result of mass incarceration in the US and unhealthy living conditions within the prisons, the incarcerated population is five times more likely to contract the COVID-19 virus. At least 392,595 incarcerated people have tested positive for COVID-19 and at least 2,516 people in prison have died from complications related to the virus. The US has the highest incarceration rate in the world, and often has crowded and unsanitary conditions causing difficulty in following CDC guidelines such as social distancing and hand sanitizing as hand sanitizers are often banned or limited in correctional facilities.
The public source identifies “Strikes during the COVID-19 pandemic” as industrial action relating to the emergency. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Strikes, during and COVID-19.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q89065286. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2008, 1933 and 2020.
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This entry incorporates text from “Strikes during the COVID-19 pandemic” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.