1.1 The pandemic and work in retail and healthcare

The direct and indirect consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic have had a profound effect on working life, and have posed particular challenges for many key workers, for whom options such as working from home have been impossible. While some of these workers have long been identified as critical public servants – notably, healthcare workers – this is less the case with other vital front-line jobs – such as supermarket retail. Challenges faced by workers in these and comparable industries during the pandemic include work intensification, substantial new health and safety hazards, and the psychological consequences of continuing to work in in fraught public-facing roles during a major public health crisis.

Before turning to our empirical investigation, we review existing research which addresses the employment challenges of COVID-19 – with particular focus on retail and healthcare – identifying issues for which worker protest is one potential response. We also consider from a more theoretical perspective how we might expect workers to respond to these issues, including the under-researched topic of worker protest. Comments from the ILO’s supervisory system for the year 2020 provide important context on our two sectors.1 In both retail and healthcare, the ILO noted problems of occupational segregation and pay gaps in many countries. Indeed, while gender discrimination does not feature in our quantitative findings as an explicit cause of protest, issues of gender inequality form vital context for much protest activity in these sectors; as the qualitative vignettes presented below make clear. Retail has also been subject to commentary about child labour in some countries though these issues did not appear to feature as important causes of protest in our dataset. In healthcare, through the supervision of the implementation of the Nursing Personnel Convention, 1977 (No. 177) the ILO has sought to catalyse the development of training, resourcing, and social dialogue standards for specific groups of healthcare workers in numerous countries. It also specifically noted the deficiency of PPE provision for healthcare workers in specific countries.2 This last issue, as we shall see, is a widespread problem which has motivated a large volume of protest in both retail and healthcare.

1.2 Retail

Retail work has long presented significant challenges from the perspective of workers’ rights and representation. In many countries, retail work remains weakly unionised, and dominated by extremely large employers who often have a track record of opposing union recognition (of which US giants such as Wal-Mart are emblematic: Lichtenstein, 2016; Hocquelet, 2016). Retail work is typically low-paid, with few opportunities for career advancement (McKie et al, 2009; Winton, 2021), and is often precarious, with weak institutional worker voice (Bailey et al, 2015; Mrozowicki et al, 2018). It is also a relatively feminised workforce (Brydges and Hanlon, 2020). In this context, pressures of the pandemic have greatly amplified already-formidable problems facing workers, including their gendered effects.

In understanding the effects of the pandemic on retail work we must start by acknowledging variation within the sector. Some types of retail work were considered critical or essential by most governments and continued to operate during successive lockdowns (most obviously supermarket food retail) and others were not (such as luxury goods). The picture in retail is therefore uneven. Overall, the retail industry was highly vulnerable to job loss due to lockdowns (Lemieux et al, 2020; Qian and Fuller, 2020). Indeed, a large part of the highly gendered employment effects of lockdown globally stems from the fact that job losses were concentrated in comparatively feminised work forces including sections of retail (Lee et al, 2021; Albanesi and Kim, 2021; Alon et al, 2021; Rivera and Castro, 2021). However, there were also spikes in demand for labour in critical retail operations (such as food retail), driven even higher by limits on mobility which reduced the availability of migrant workers (Burgos and Ivanov, 2021). Before 2020 there had been a long running trend in food consumption patterns, which had been shifting away from supermarket retail and towards restaurant and take-away businesses, but lockdowns sent this process into reverse overnight (Goddard et al, 2020; see also Leone et al, 2020; Burgos and Ivanov, 2021) while exerting new demands on grocery and cooked meal delivery services. Nevertheless, rising demand for labour in food retail should not be overstated or taken for granted, since it must be counterbalanced with trends towards automation that have also been accelerated during the pandemic (Lemieux et al, 2020; Albanesi and Kim, 2021).

In this context, particularly in supermarkets, retail workers who retained their jobs found themselves positioned as vital service providers on the front-line of public health battles. Major retail workplaces became prominent sites of COVID-19 transmission, and consequently became targets of new health and safety measures in many countries (Shahbaz et al, 2020; Goddard et al, 2020). Policymakers and businesses to some degree recognised that new training interventions would be necessary to enable retail workers to meet the demands of new pandemic-prevention measures (Sulaiman et al, 2020). However, this imperative clashed with the pre-pandemic context. Evidence from the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland suggests that the long-standing weakness of training and career pathways in many retail operations meant this pandemic-driven prospect of upskilling was often a false promise (Winton, 2021). Moreover, in many countries retail employers and governments have failed to provide adequate new protections for workers, for instance in terms of personal protective equipment (PPE) or strengthened rights to sick leave- though of course retail is by no means unique in this respect (De Matteis, 2021).

As such, retail workers faced severe pressures greatly increasing the stress and difficulty of their work, stemming from multiple sources: danger of infection, difficult relations with customers and a lack of meaningful power – often taking on new safety-related rule enforcement responsibilities, but without influence in shaping the nature of those rules, or any corresponding career progression (Elnahla and Neilson, 2021). Voorhees et al (2020) characterise pandemic-era frontline service industry workers, including in retail, as a neglected and overlooked group, facing anxiety and burnout, abusive customers, and unprecedented new demands for health and safety issues with often inadequate training provision. Evidence from Italy underlines that retail workers were particularly vulnerable to COVID-19 transmission due to their proximity to large volumes of customers (Barbieri et al, 2021). In the pandemic, women in retail work were more pessimistic about their futures than men, evidence from Spain suggests (Rubio-Valdehita et al, 2021).

However, the pandemic may also have prompted more empowering change for retail workers. As Mejia et al (2021) argue, the public narrative around retail shifted rapidly. While retail work had previously been denigrated in public discourse as low-skilled and low-paid, COVID-19 saw retail workers re-imagined as “heroes”. The social importance of their work became more prominent and indisputable, while the responsibilities and pressures placed on them mounted up. It is too early to say whether this discursive and ideological shift will endure in years to come. Nonetheless, when combined with increased demand for labour in food retail (though not across retail as a whole), we may surely ask: are we likely to see a more assertive retail workforce in the wake of COVID-19, which is more conscious of its own value, and if so, how may this be manifested?

It is too early to answer these questions definitively, though our data presented below provide an initial understanding. Classic tensions between “voice”, “loyalty”, and “exit” are relevant here. Where retail workers’ expectations and demands are raised and then disappointed, one likely response may be to leave the sector to seek employment where conditions are better. While there is limited pandemic-era evidence on turnover rates specifically in retail, studies of comparable occupations such as restaurant work (De Souza Meira, 2020) and hotel employees (Jung et al, 2021) suggest an uptick in voluntary quits.

The relative weakness of union representation, and high levels of casualisation, in retail may lead us to expect “voice” (including forms of protest) to be less common than “exit” (turnover) as a response to poor working conditions. At present, data does not exist that enables us to gauge and compare the relative frequencies of these phenomena. While some studies find evidence of a new propensity to protest among retail workers during the pandemic, these focus on identifying particular cases rather than evaluating wider global trends. In a somewhat polemical piece, Orleck (2020) describes protest actions by retail workers in the United States during the pandemic. What is notable in Orleck’s account is the variety of problems addressed through protest. Archetypal COVID-19 problems including PPE provision and demands for better social protection feature prominently as causes of protest, but so do concerns such as pay. It is possible that workers are capitalising on a strengthened sense of their own value to demand improved conditions, rather than simply responding defensively to acute and urgent deficits in health and safety procedures. Moreover, labour protest could be manifested through “traditional” means such as trade union organising and strikes but is not necessarily limited to this. The concentrated power of employers in retail makes this risky, however, and evidence is emerging of protest organisers in US retail being targeted for reprisals (Mejia et al, 2021:7). Thus, while the pandemic may have catalysed potentially important changes in retail worker interest representation, existing research does not enable us to say for certain, since there is so far no systematic data setting pandemic-era protest in a global perspective.

1.3 Health care work

Health care work has some similarities with retail in the pandemic, since it is another sector in which frontline workers were placed at risk while providing vital services. However, the industrial context is very different. The problems of insecure work are not as prevalent as in retail, and in many countries institutional voice is stronger. Healthcare work often requires more specific training or skills requirements than retail and has more clearly-structured career pathways. On this basis, we may anticipate healthcare workers are more likely than retail workers to exercise voice rather than exit in response to problems they face at work.

Nonetheless, in the period prior to the pandemic, healthcare workers were facing significant industrial relations challenges in many countries. Often, these were linked to budget pressures which reduced pay and staffing rates, potentially leading to work intensification, alongside shifts towards increased market competition in many healthcare systems (Krachler et al, 2021). The latter may carry consequences for workers’ material conditions as well as the risk of hospital closures and may also lead to qualitative shifts in the nature of healthcare work that conflict with workers’ own conceptions of how to do their jobs (Greer and Umney, 2022). Hence, while healthcare workers may historically have been relatively unlikely to strike and protest over working conditions, evidence from some countries suggests this has been changing over the last decade, including in France and the United Kingdom (Umney and Coderre-LaPalme, 2017), and Germany (Greer, 2008).

The pandemic has greatly intensified problems facing healthcare staff at work. Most obvious were concerns about safety, as poignantly underlined in Treston’s (2021) personal reflection on life as a nurse during the pandemic. Infection is a serious risk facing hospital workers, and evidence from Italy suggests the most common source of infection was not patients but other healthcare workers (Mandic-Rajcevic et al, 2020). As with retail staff (and many other essential workers), risk of infection was exacerbated by deficiencies in PPE provision; powerfully underlined by the experience in the United States (Razzak et al, 2020). Long hours, intense work and isolated living conditions became a more prominent problem for healthcare workers, as evidence from China shows (Cao et al, 2020). Healthcare workers’ safety is of course vital, but they also need a voice in establishing how changes to their workplaces are managed, to ensure wellbeing is front-and-centre (Dennerlein et al, 2020). In the pandemic this has often been lacking.

Aside from the risk of infection, the pandemic also imposed psychological strains on health workers, which are widely documented across many countries (Wanigasooriya et al, 2021; Romero et al, 2020; Mattila et al, 2021). Evidence from Spain suggests that this includes a rising prevalence of suicidal thoughts (Mortier et al, 2021). Evidence from China suggests the fear of infection was a source of stress among healthcare workers, particularly frontline nursing staff (Wang et al, 2020). Incidences of stress, depression and anxiety among healthcare workers appear to vary internationally, for instance being identified as proportionately a more severe problem in Italy (Lasalvia, 2021) than in China (Wang et al, 2020). As in retail, the effects of this strain were gendered. Research in Egypt found women were more likely to experience negative psychological effects than male counterparts (Elkholy et al, 2021), as did research from Chongqing (Xiaoming et al, 2020).

The literature therefore offers much evidence of the strains faced by healthcare staff during the pandemic. However, there has been much less focus on how they responded to this. Historically, there is evidence that healthcare workers are often reluctant to contest the terms of work, owing to their valuing of their caregiving role; though some researchers question whether this was already changing in the years immediately before COVID-19, owing to restructuring and marketisation in healthcare (Umney and Coderre-LaPalme, 2017). As with retail, we can distinguish between evidence which underlines the dangers of healthcare staff exiting their jobs in response to these problems (e.g., Jang et al, 2021), versus literature emphasising ‘voice’ in the form of protest. The latter is highly scattered and limited to case studies of particular protests – including a number of studies from Mexico (Torres-Hernandez et al, 2021; Navarro and Santillan, 2020) – with seemingly no quantitative data to-date.

1.4 Worker protest in the pandemic

Reviewing pandemic-era literature on retail and healthcare raises some important questions. Most prominently: how would workers respond to the challenges they faced? While literature is emerging which underlines turnover (or turnover intention), there is much less examination of cases where workers contested the terms of work (i.e., exercising voice rather than exit). Have workers been contesting the terms of work during the pandemic, and if so, how? Relatedly, while many of the problems we have identified appear across many countries, we also need to recognise the possibility of wide variation between countries: not only because of a long-standing comparative literature emphasising how different institutional contexts condition patterns of industrial relations (e.g., Hall and Soskice, 2001; Lansbury et al, 2020), but also because of the uneven impact of the pandemic itself. Thus, while it is common to find studies emphasising the disproportionate loss of women’s jobs, this effect is not universal and may be very different depending on national conditions (Ikkaracan and Memis, 2021; Reichelt et al, 2021). More generally, countries with more flexibilised labour markets appear to have been those where employment effects of COVID-19 were most severe, suggesting the crisis is highly nationally-patterned and is exacerbating inequalities in countries with already weak labour protections (Fana et al, 2020).

Hence a global perspective on the extent of labour protest in these sectors, which seeks to identify national variation, is an important unanswered empirical question. The literature surveyed so far underlines the prominence of a particular set of concerns which have been greatly amplified by the pandemic: including, health and safety concerns; new pandemic-prevention responsibilities, often without adequate support or training; and severe work intensification. Moreover, while we have cited evidence of workers protesting over these issues, we also noted that issues such as pay have featured in pandemic-era protest. Hence while it may be true that essential workers are to some extent victims of neglectful governments and employers (De Matteis, 2021) and are responding through protest to acute life-threatening health and safety problems, they may also be asserting demands for more progress on “bread-and-butter” issues like pay. Yet, no studies to date systematically investigate the causes and triggers of labour protest during COVID-19.

As well as the causes or triggers of protest, there is a need for a better understanding of the forms protest takes. Industrial relations scholarship has tended to focus on institutional functions such as collective bargaining and within that context, the use of strikes to advance demands at the bargaining table. For the purposes of this paper, however, we focus on “protest”; a broader and more diffuse term referring to any collective action launched by workers, designed to mobilise support for their claims. This category would certainly include strikes, but also includes demonstrations, boycotts, social media campaigning, and other methods. Furthermore, while established trade unions may be vital in launching protest initiatives, protest may be much more informal than the actors typically involved in institutional industrial relations; including workers cooperatives, new insurgent trade unions, and entirely informal groups of workers without any formalised organisational structure at all.

This broader conceptualisation of protest, while rarely examined systematically in industrial relations literature, is likely to be important in the pandemic context, for several reasons. First, the pandemic has imposed sudden and intense pressures in contexts where, in many countries, trade unions have a weak presence, creating new grounds for contestation where opportunities for institutional voice are limited. Second, where workers have a deep awareness of their importance as critical workers in a public health emergency, there may be great affective and normative barriers to taking strike action, necessitating other methods of protest. Third, social distancing measures make typical strike practices such as picketing more problematic, which may lead in turn to innovation. So, we expect protest activities among retail and healthcare workers to exhibit a diverse set of practices during pandemic conditions.

The significance of other forms of protest are not simply a consequence of the pandemic, however. Some forms of protest may be becoming more important in industrial relations as established institutional voice mechanisms decline. Some trade unions, for instance, have adopted more protest-oriented approaches in some countries, reconfiguring themselves as social movements. This may be driven by both the decline in established institutional power resources, as well as a genuine desire to influence a wider policy agenda by shifts towards “social movement unionism”. There is some evidence of this already in the hospital sector. Greer’s (2008) study of the hospital system in Hamburg, for instance, shows unions moving towards more social movement-oriented tactics as institutional resources are closed off.

Consequently, we also draw on insights from social movement research. As Della Porta and Diani (2015: 3) explain, “social movement studies […] stand apart as a field because of their attention to the practices through which actors express their stances in a broad range of social and political conflicts”. A key strength of social movement research is its commitment to understanding changing forms of protest – that is, shifts in the way that grievances are expressed (ibid.; Alimi 2015; Millward and Takhar 2019; Tarrow 2015; Wang and Sole 2012). By contrast, industrial relations research has tended to apply standardised measures across different historical and institutional settings: measures such as official strike data, union membership, collective bargaining coverage, and so on. While this approach brings benefits in terms of consistency and comparability, it also carries disadvantages, which become especially clear when trying to understand forms of worker contestation that fall outside these conventional, institutional forms. Nevertheless, there clearly are many examples of work stoppages by key workers, and it is therefore important to try and develop methods for capturing the broad range of protest events. Social movement research thus provides vital insights, drawing attention to the need to understand workers’ protest not just work stoppages related to collective bargaining, but a wider multiplicity of protests, sometimes of the most informal kinds. Moreover, it encourages us to think about the dovetailing between formal and informal activities, including where trade unions support, or draw support from, broader protest movements.

3.1 Causes of protest

Protest events can occur for more than one reason (hence, the number of protests listed by cause is higher than the number of actual protest events). If we look at the causes of protest action, pay is the most common in both sectors, followed by PPE and related issues. In healthcare, 28.9 per cent of protests were stimulated by pay demands, and 41.4 per cent in retail. Concerns over PPE and other health and safety measures accounted for 24.5 per cent of all protests in healthcare, and 32 per cent of those in retail. Relatedly, in healthcare, concerns over staff and patient safety were causes for protests (8.9 per cent and 6.7 per cent respectively), which paints a concerning picture of the situation in hospitals during the pandemic. In many countries, healthcare prior to the pandemic had been going through periods of budget restraint and market-centred restructuring, reflecting a wider neoliberal policy trend in public service provision; which has in many cases involved pressures to limit expenditure on healthcare workforces and reduce capacity in healthcare systems (Klenk, 2016; André and Hermann, 2009; Krachler et al, 2021). These pre-existing pressures may have laid the groundwork for substantial waves of protest over staffing and resources during the pandemic – an argument we will develop further with reference to the French case study below. Nonetheless, the pre-eminence of pay as a concern in both sectors also requires note. It suggests that while issues of health and safety and resourcing assumed an obvious and urgent prominence, workers’ protest in the pandemic goes far beyond these acute problems.

In this context, work intensity and working hours were also high up the agenda for protest (7.3 per cent in healthcare, 4 per cent in retail for work intensity; 2.1 per cent in healthcare and 6.2 per cent in retail for working hours). Violence and abuse in the workplace led to protest in 4 per cent of cases: 236 in healthcare and in 256 in retail. Abuse was directed at workers from various sources, including patients, relatives of patients, police or authorities, management, colleagues, among others. In Nigeria, for example, doctors went on strike citing abuse from police on their way to work, stating: “We want to send a clear message to the police authority that they cannot continue to flout the presidential order on medical and health workers’ free access of movement to and from their places of work, and until the matter is adequately resolved, we remain on strike indefinitely.”4 According to the World Health Organization (WHO), pre-pandemic, up to 38 per cent of healthcare workers had already suffered physical violence at some point in their career.5 According to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), in the first six months of the pandemic, 600 cases of violence were committed against healthcare workers.6 Our data show a broader range of grievances causing protests over abuse, from discontent with management, misconduct by superiors and colleagues – including bullying and harassment – abuse by patients and relatives, to more general grievances such as racism. Interestingly, some of the reasons for protest among those included in our “other” category express general protest over deteriorating economic conditions. In some countries with high numbers of protest events – such as Argentina – unions organised support structures for workers against deteriorating economic conditions, like soup kitchens (Ferrero 2020).

Table 4: Distribution of causes for protests across all countries

The dominant causes for protest varied across regions. For the healthcare sector, while pay was the most dominant reason for protest globally, the lack of PPE and other health and safety measures were more often a cause for protest in Africa and South America. Thus, 28.2 per cent of all protests in Africa were motivated by health and safety concerns, as were 40.3 per cent of protests in South America. Lack of staff was disproportionately likely to be a reason for protest in Europe and North America. This likely does not reflect lower rates of staffing in Europe and North America (since these countries tend to perform comparatively well on this metric according to OECD data7). Rather, it may instead reflect perceptions among staff of the longer-running degradation of work and reductions in capacity, as our commentary on the French case shows (below). Work intensity was disproportionately a cause of protest in North America and Oceania. Patient safety was more often than elsewhere a cause for protest in Oceania. Abuse at the workplace was a more widespread cause in the Arab States.

For the retail sector, pay (in 41.4 per cent of protest events) and PPE/health and safety (in 32 per cent of protest events) were also the most common causes of protest action, although with quite high regional differences. In Africa, pay was a cause in 63.6 per cent of retail worker protests, while in South America it accounted for only 20 per cent of the cases. As a cause of protests, PPE was slightly lower in Africa, Asia and Oceania but slightly higher in Europe, North America and South America. Working hours and shifts was a more common cause of protest action in South America (18 per cent) and Oceania (14.3 per cent) compared to the average of 6.2 per cent. Violence and abuse at work was slightly higher in South America (10 per cent) compared to the average (6.7 per cent). Dismissal was the most common cause of protest in Asia, where every fifth case of protest was caused by it. Dismissal also caused a tenth of retail worker protest in Africa.

Demands for collective voice or training caused few protests across both sectors and all countries. Regulatory issues did not account for many protest events and were often linked to pay where they did occur. For example, in Argentina, which had the highest number of protests stemming from regulatory issues, these were often linked to a law regulating the working and remuneration of healthcare workers.

3.2 Forms of protest action

Looking at how workers voiced their discontent, we observed four types of action were most common: demonstrations, strikes, strike announcements, and leverage tactics. These results are most interesting because they show that strike action was involved in only around 20 per cent of cases in both sectors. In some 80 per cent of cases, workers choose other means. An announcement of the intention to strike was referred to in 10.5 per cent and 14.4 per cent of cases in healthcare and retail respectively. However, the most common form of protests overall were public demonstrations in the healthcare sector, and leverage tactics in retail. The prominence of demonstrations is interesting, since the “social distancing” and on-off lockdown context might ostensibly be thought to obstruct the use of demonstrations, but this appears not to have been the case. We might also assume that key workers – especially in healthcare, which accounted for most of our cases – may have been less willing to take strike action during a health emergency, especially in hospitals. The widespread use of leverage tactics is less surprising, given this context.

Table 9: Type of action in retail and healthcare

Once more, the picture in different regions is one of variation. In healthcare, strike action was the first choice of action in the Arab States, as in Asia, and Europe. In North America, South America, and Oceania the first choice has been demonstrations, and leverage tactics in Africa. Strikes were not widespread in South America, only comprising 14.9 per cent of protest cases. In retail, strikes have been part of on average 22.7 per cent of protest events, but much more often in Africa and Oceania where it was the preferred method in 38.8 per cent and 40.9 per cent of cases respectively.

The low number of strikes in South America contrasts with an unusually high number of demonstrations: 62.2 per cent in healthcare compared to the average of 35.1 per cent, and 41.2 per cent compared to the average of 25.8 per cent in retail.

3.3 Discussion of main quantitative findings

The descriptive statistics presented here are only a first step in understanding protest in retail and healthcare work during COVID19. Limitations of the dataset – particularly reliance on news reports, the absence of comparable pre-pandemic data and the need for more in-depth qualitative analysis – mean conclusions must be tentative. One particularly clear finding is that, during the period we examined, protest in healthcare greatly outweighed protest in critical retail. We are not able to explain this difference without additional research, but possible reasons can be tentatively identified, subject to further examination. As noted in the discussion of previous research, frontline service sector work may require few qualifications and may be highly precarious, and therefore may have experienced relatively high rates of staff turnover during the pandemic: that is, retail may have seen a tendency toward exit rather than voice. While there is little data on turnover in retail, studies of other types of frontline service work suggest a spike in voluntary quits (e.g., De Souza Meira, 2021; Jung et al, 2021). By contrast, healthcare work features specialised career and progression routes, making it more likely that healthcare workers would exercise voice rather than exit. This effect is likely to be strengthened by the higher prevalence of unions in healthcare compared to retail.

The overall dataset also reveals interesting findings about the causes and reported triggers of worker protest. Unsurprisingly, concerns around PPE and other health and safety concerns are prominent. These acute issues became pre-eminent grievances for workers as the pandemic took hold. These findings are deeply poignant, in that they illustrate the desperate situation many workers faced as they battled to keep services running while being undersupplied by governments and employers. However, while this is a vital part of the story, it is not all of it. The prevalence of pay as a cause of protest suggests that, in many cases, workers were not responding defensively only to immediate threats to their health from the dangers of COVID19 transmission. Rather, we suggest that the new prominence given to these key workers in the public eye, combined with the extraordinary demands placed upon them, may have in some cases generated greater assertiveness and confidence in pushing for wider progress over pay and conditions of work. Indeed, in some cases, as we will show, this was an explicit objective. At this stage, we cannot generalise from this data about worker protest in these sectors on a global scale. However, our commentaries on individual countries will add some corroboration to this analysis.

Finally, the dataset reveals significant variation between countries and regions. Political, economic, and institutional contexts clearly matter in shaping patterns of protest. Nevertheless, over-generalisation about the role of national institutional factors should be resisted, given the huge differences we found within countries. For example, a comparatively large volume of protest were identified in healthcare in India but very little in retail, and the same can be said of Nigeria; we therefore examine reports from these country cases in more detail below. Moreover, among the handful of countries reporting no protests, there is no consistent economic or institutional profile. Hence, we suggest that spikes in protest in particular sectors and countries are likely to reflect not only the national institutional context, but also contingent factors and strategic decisions made by the actors involved. To illustrate this point, we examine in more detail reports from the five countries with the highest levels of protest in the two sectors: France, India and Nigeria for healthcare, and the United States and Argentina for retail.

3.4 Healthcare in France

Why is France, by some distance, the country where healthcare workers have protested the most frequently during the COVID-19 pandemic? The uniquely high volume of protest in French healthcare during the pandemic period reflects various distinct but interrelated factors, including contextual factors which predate the pandemic (the marketisation of French healthcare), and, importantly, strategic decisions made by French unions as the pandemic gained pace.

First, it is important to understand that, in the period immediately preceding the pandemic, protest action among healthcare workers in France had been increasing. Several years of budget pressure in the healthcare sector in France had led to reductions in staffing levels and the closure of numerous local hospitals. In addition, these budget restraints were also accompanied by various market-centric reforms to hospital governance and financing systems, which had led many healthcare workers and their unions to identify a shift to a more “business-facing” hospital, and to which many in the sector strongly objected (Umney and Coderre-LaPalme, 2017; 2021). Hence, even days before the scale of the pandemic became apparent and lockdowns began, there were instances of protests including strikes demanding more recruitment to reduce workload in Nantes8, and demonstrations against job losses in Carcassonne9.

However, just as much as institutional and economic context, the approaches and decisions of key union leaders in France are relevant in explaining workers’ responses to the pandemic. Phillippe Martinez, General Secretary of the CGT, made the following statement in February 202110, reflecting the union’s approach:

“This Thursday, we affirm, at the national and interprofessional level, that it is impossible to set to one side current struggles for jobs and the improvement of working conditions in the name of a pseudo-national unity against COVID-19… Bruno LeMaire tells us that it’s not the time for a Social Spring. On the contrary!”

Hence as the crisis developed, key unions decided to maintain pressure over their existing objectives rather than making concessions. They had been mobilizing around issues of inadequate resources and staffing levels and COVID-19 exacerbated these concerns.11 Some resisted various emergency Covid-related measures which they felt undermined job security and proper career training; for example, protesting against the reallocation of nurses on placement to the frontline in Montauban.12 In Libourne, Force Ouvrière argued that COVID-19 was being used as a pretext for reorganisation and changes to working hours that were detrimental to workers.13. Unions also claimed that French authorities were trying to handle the pandemic while holding firm to their pre-existing budget restraint priorities, which workers and unions saw as a major obstacle to providing proper care as well as a threat to jobs.14

Consequently, in the news reporting on French protest, we observe healthcare workers and their unions seeking to bring together emerging Covid-related concerns (such as the drain on hospital resources and need for more equipment) with pre-existing concerns over jobs and working conditions in the framing of their disputes.15 Unions and other campaigners argued specifically and repeatedly that the pandemic was exposing existing problems whose root causes were government policy long predating Covid, pushing the sector towards the “hôpital-entreprise” model. The use of this framing in mobilising workers is a near-constant in the news reporting on many protest events, as shown in accounts of protest from early in the pandemic in Paris16, Bourdeaux17, Creuse-Gueret18, Creteil19, Lyon,20 and Saint-Brieuc21, to name but a few of many examples, as well as in national-level calls for action.22 This framing appears to have been applied across many different professional and occupational groups within healthcare, including a strike by hospital human resource administrators in Dreux, who argued that the pandemic has exposed the need for more staffing to reduce excessive workload.23

The strains placed on healthcare staff during the pandemic underlined union demands, providing them with a strong moral force which could be invoked to support their longer-standing claims. The CGT, for instance, sought to link problems which became particularly acute during the pandemic (such as aggressive patients), to a wider narrative about the deterioration of working conditions.24 Unions argued that the measures introduced to mitigate Covid-related pressures were unable to make up for the damage caused by previous decisions.25 Interestingly, in a few minor cases, the deterioration of social dialogue within hospital management structures was cited as another pre-existing problem, exacerbated by emergency COVID-19 measures (protests in Creuse26 and Caussade27). As other research has shown (Greer and Umney, 2022), weakness of social dialogue and accountability have been associated with marketisation and outsourcing, particularly in hospitals. Workers continued to protest against this even in cases where relevant articles make little reference to the pandemic itself; as in protest by outsourced cleaning workers in Parisian hospitals.28

Hence a vital part of the picture in France is the decision of unions to continue to mobilise, and wherever possible, draw links between acute COVID-19-related issues and the longer-term deterioration of working conditions in healthcare. As such, many of the articles reporting protests frame demands as a bundled of concerns, particularly resources, pay, jobs and work intensification. It is interesting that specific COVID-19 related concerns for healthcare and other workers during 2020 – 2021, such as the provision of PPE and other safety measures, are virtually never mentioned as primary triggers of protests in France. The strategy appears to have been to broaden the scope protests by linking COVID-19 specific demands with other issues.

Pay, in particular, is of vital importance given its prevalence in the quantitative protest data, and speaks to an increasing assertiveness in demanding the reversal of deteriorating working conditions and pay stagnation; given the new moral and discursive force of the image of healthcare staff as frontline workers putting themselves at risk.29 However, one reason that so many protest events are reported around pay in France during the pandemic lies in unions’ responses to one particular government intervention: the Ségur de la Santé was a consultation running from May - July 2020 to discuss resources and organisation of healthcare in the pandemic. It resulted in some pay increases for selected healthcare staff to acknowledge their service during the pandemic. However, the scale of these were disappointing for many, and so reaction against this central intervention catalysed a large number of protest events. More protest events are reported in France relating to this one policy alone, than the total for many other countries. These were either motivated by a belief that the extra payments were inadequate given the scale of the problem30; or, even more frequently, reflect protests by specific groups of healthcare workers that were excluded from these additional payments such as psychiatric practitioners and midwives.31 This also included private healthcare workers who felt unjustly underpaid compared to public counterparts and who were excluded for the Ségur de la Santé pay increases, as exemplified by protests in Lyon32 and Wissembourg33. The number of articles describing protests on this specific issue is vast. Relatedly, a centrally-developed special subsidy scheme also prompted large amounts of protest, since it prioritised hospitals in regions that had been hardest-hit by Covid and was perceived as unjust and exclusionary by some.34 Perceived inequalities in these central interventions exacerbated the sense that certain professions (such as that of midwives) where undervalued by public authorities.35

Some other themes emerge which, while not present in the majority of cases, nevertheless deserve mention. While precarity is not as widespread in French healthcare work as in many other industries or countries, a number of sources suggest it as a source of protest.36 The use of fixed-term contracts, again, is a pre-existing issue which had been a source of contention pre-pandemic in the context of hospital budget cuts and attempts to weaken the status of civil servants in healthcare. However, issues related to the precarity of atypical employment were also likely exacerbated by the pandemic. One dispute in Drôme, for instance, related to a hospital’s attempt to terminate workers who had been hired at the start of the pandemic to make up emergency shortfalls in staffing.37 Disputes over working time were notable, given how working time is enshrined in national-level regulations. For instance, strikes in Corsica ensued after a local hospital appeared to delay the implementation of a central government decree granting staff payment for leave that had not been taken38.

Finally, the potential for a high number of reported protest events also reflected the willingness of French unions and campaigners to engage in collective action, including on a national scale. National days of action were organised by unions and non-union campaigning organisations and led to many smaller events across the country. Again, these typically took a broad focus, framing many different concerns as part of a wider narrative about deterioration of working conditions in healthcare, and at different times accentuating the issues of different occupational/professional groups. These various days of action generated a large volume of protest activity across many French regions.39

In summary, the volume of protest in healthcare in France reveals was triggered by a range of highly context-dependent factors. First, conflict had been developing in the years immediately preceding the pandemic as a result of longer-term restructuring. Second, rather than seeing the pandemic as a reason to put these concerns on hold, trade unions instead emphasised the importance of, and sacrifices by, healthcare workers, and used this as an opportunity to push back against these long-standing issues. Through national days of action in particular, they were successful in galvanising significant support for protests. We should also see this in the context of French industrial relations more generally. In France, strikes are often relatively short, but relatively frequent, and unlike many other countries, may target government policy (see Den Butter and Koppes, 2003). This context, combined with the other factors described so far, proved to be a potent catalyst during the pandemic.

3.5 Healthcare in India

There is a extensive reporting of labour protests in healthcare in India, not least because of the size and diversity of the country itself. A relatively wide range of issues are involved, the great majority of which are highly localised, involving (often quite short) disputes between individual hospitals or regional authorities, but national-level policy has also triggered significant protests by medical workers.

Many of the issues involved are similar to what is observed in other countries. From early in the pandemic, different medical occupational groups in different regions began called for better PPE provision, and related Covid-prevention measures. The forms of protest used varied. For example, early 2020 saw protest action by nurses in Chikalthana40; brief work stoppages in Shatabdi41; and further protests in Mumbai42, Ghaziabad43, Berhampur44, and elsewhere45. While there have been many short-term work stoppages, there has also been a large amount of symbolic protests, including measures like wearing black armbands46; or when doctors in one hospital sat outside in the rain to perform their duties, to draw attention to inadequate ventilation of the building.47 Frequently, reporting on these events makes little mention of unions, suggesting more informal organisation among workers.

While the majority of the incidents reported are localised, there was also a number of national-level initiatives, which were more likely to involve established unions and professional associations representing medical staff. National-level activity in most cases appeared to involve symbolic protest actions seeking to leverage public opinion or gain the attention of policymakers: for instance through legal complaints and social media activism48 in support of better PPE and other equipment (including inadequate maintenance of ventilators)49. The Doctors Association of India also called for a “white alert” protest, involving symbolic gestures like the lighting of a white candle, in support of improved protections for medical staff.50 Similarly, symbolic protests (with black badges) were used by nurses to demand better provision for quarantine days to prevent Covid infections.51 The United Nurses Association describes “knocking on the door” of the Supreme Court to seek a legal judgement on the provision of proper equipment.52

Aside from more symbolic protest activity, strikes have also been widely reported as a means to try to secure better Covid protections for healthcare staff. Again, this activity is mostly reported at local level, though there have been coordinated national-level strikes, particularly later in the pandemic, which will be discussed below. The strikes reported nearly always tend to be very short, and the phrase “flash strikes” is employed frequently in reporting. Again, the names of unions are very often absent from reporting, suggesting a strong reliance on small-scale informal organising or enterprise unions. For example, a short strike in Noida sought wider testing for medical workers.53Another impromptu “flash strike” (again, with no mentioned of a trade union) took place in Gujarat, by doctors demanding PPE.54 There was another small-scale stoppage among outsourced medial staff in Dhanbad55, and a strike of less than a day by nurses over working hours in Mumbai, June 202056. Calls for indefinite strikes were also reported, for example by Nurses in Delhi over safety and conditions.57 However, the vast majority of healthcare worker strikes seem to be very short work stoppages of less than a day - sometimes only a couple of hours.

Aside from concerns about protection against infection, healthcare workers also sought pay improvement in response to the pandemic. As in other countries, this sometimes involved appeals for additional pay to reward additional efforts conducted in dangerous circumstances. Over 200 outsourced nursing staff at the Gandhi Hospital in Hyderabad protested to demand “incentive pay” at a large COVID-19 isolation facility in April 2020.58 As with actions over health and safety, there was frequent use of symbolic actions such as candle-light protests59, wearing of black armbands60, and open letters of protest61. Again, unions are often not mentioned in reports, but they are sometimes more prominent. The ATGDA in Tripura, for instance, lobbied for a regional incentive pay during the pandemic.62 A strike involving 200 nurses in Pune over pay and working time was organised by two unions including the national United Nurses Association.63 Nurses staged short stoppages and protest marches in support of wage claims in Kalyan.64 The pursuit of improvement in pay was, as in other countries, bolstered by the moral claims of healthcare workers. For example, nurses in Chandigarh invoked their status as “corona warriors” to argue for higher salaries, in May 2020; a phrase which crops up repeatedly in news reports concerning healthcare workers.65

One similarity with the case of Nigeria (discussed below), but a sharp contrast with France, is the prevalence of unpaid wages as a grievance for workers. This is frequently cited in reports on Indian healthcare worker protest, and many different regional and individual hospital authorities, at different times, are accused of failing to pay staff salaries owed. For example, 250 cleaning and refuse workers went on another short strike over unpaid wages in Nagpur in May 2020.66 Doctors residents in Karnataka called an indefinite strike in protest at 16 months’ unpaid stipends.67 Sometimes protests over unpaid wages took quite distinctive forms; for instance, a mass tendering of notice by Resident Doctors at Katsurba hospital in July 202068; symbolic methods such as wearing black badges69; and social media campaigns70. Often dharnas are reported - a form of peaceful protest, involving sitting peacefully at - or outside the door of - the target of a protest, typically to draw attention to a debt or injustice. Hence this type of protest is particularly apposite to grievances over unpaid wages.71 Some protests over unpaid wages took more troubling forms reflecting desperation, as with “around half a dozen” workers at a quarantine centre in Noida threatened to jump off the building’s roof.72

The Hindu Rao hospital in North Delhi is a prominent example of protests over unpaid wages73 and alleged failure to honour agreements over bonuses74. In this case, workers used a wide range of actions including writing letters, drawing press attention to staff resignations, and engaging in short strikes75. Hindu Rao workers sought to link up with other hospitals in the area where unpaid wages were also an issue, to coordinate joint strike action76, also garnering wider expressions of solidarity from other practitioners as the issue gained public visibility77. Workers at Hindu Rao also initiated mass requests for leave78 and threatened to engage in a hunger strike79. In October 2020 an agreement with authorities defused these activities, but they appear to have recommenced using the same tactics and over the same issues in late 2021.80 In Surat Civil Hospital in Gujarat, another strike and dharna over unpaid wages were reported to have resulted in emergency services being shut down for the first time in the institution’s history.81

There are also some grievances which appear to be particularly salient in India - more so than in other countries. First is the issue of adequately resourced facilities, which appears as a primary trigger for protest on various occasions. Members of the APMEU (100 workers) protested inadequate quarantine facilities at an ENT hospital in Visakhapatnam in June 2020.82 Local flash strikes were called in some areas to protest inadequate facilities.83 Workers in some cases complained about being required to share accommodation, which was seen as infection hazard.84 In early 2021, “flash strikes” involving 300 people were called over inadequate of staffing arrangements at Pune’s Sassoon General Hospital. Other protests over inadequate facilities have also been reported.85

The issue of outsourced and casualised work in healthcare, while a small but notable issue in France, is much more prominent as a trigger of labour protest in India. A large volume of protests express demands to regularise the contractual status of casualised hospital staff.86 This sometimes took dramatic forms. In one case, workers reportedly protested against alleged extortion by intermediaries, and the sudden dismissal and threats made to contract workers, at a dedicated Covid facility.87 Indeed, there were some very large protest events reported, such as a threatened strike involving 12000 workers across Jharkhand state in support of regularisation.88

An additional theme reported on Indian protest events concerned staff responses to attacks by patients and their families. These could be a major source of distress for workers, and some very troubling incidences of assaults are reported.89 Tensions in medical staff’s relations with patients, leading to protest by staff and demands for better protections, were frequently reported.90 One of the largest examples was a strike of 3500 doctors across Madhya Pradesh, in support of a doctor whose license had been revoked in response to complaints from a deceased patient’s family (the doctors’ view apparently being that the relevant authorities had bowed unfairly to pressure from patients and attributed blame to their colleague where it was not warranted).91 In some cases attacks on doctors were used as a frame to bolster claims for more effective handling of COVID-19 cases.92

Finally, some protests reportedly targeted government policy, both at regional and national levels. In various cases this involved challenging decisions about the use of resources. Staff went on strike to demand the resumption of non-Covid services at Gandhi hospital in Hyderabad in November 202093, and also in Karnataka94. There were strikes protesting the alleged failures of the regional administration in building medical infrastructure in Nagpur.95 A small number of events attracting wider coverage as they challenged the current administration itself. The Indian Medical Association organised nationwide short demonstrations followed by a 12-hour strike, to protest against the government’s promotion of Ayurveda medical methods, which medical representatives described as “a regressive step and is a throwback to medieval ages”.96 The same organisation is reported to have initiated nationwide symbolic protests against the influence of Yoga Guru Baba Ramdev97, who is close to the current administration and a sceptic of modern medical practice. There were also a small number of reported protests against brutal police treatment of doctors in the light of restrictions on movement, for example in Srinagar.98.

There were also reports of action taken against protesters. In New Delhi, for example, a private hospital dismissed 12 nurses for protesting unsanitary working conditions.99 Striking Covid lab technicians in Bokaro were also threatened with dismissal by local officials.100

3.6 Healthcare in Nigeria

There has been a high frequency of strikes reported in the healthcare sector in Nigeria during the pandemic. Interestingly, particularly in the early months of the pandemic, reference in such reports to Covid were sparce, suggesting longer-term underlying issues. Strikes are nearly always local or regional events, involving a wide multiplicity of unions and other actors.

While strikes by healthcare workers in India were usually very short, in Nigeria, they could be more protracted. For example, in Enugu state in March 2020, ARD ESUT-TH launched a lengthy intermittent strike over pay and related issues, arguing that action was needed to stem the flow of quits by doctors 101 In March 2020, doctors in Anambra began an indefinite strike over pay.102 Doctors in Abuja went on strike just as the Coronavirus crisis was emerging, in response to unpaid wages.103 As in India, the non-payment of wages seems to be a constant demand in reported protests pre-dating and continuing right through the pandemic, across different occupations within the health system, ranging from doctors to outsourced cleaning and security contractors.104 This may reflect the severe financial constraints facing municipalities and institutions.

While, as noted, most strikes are local, there are also nation-wide examples. For instance, a national strike was reported in September 2020 organised by JOHESU (which represents multiple categories of healthcare workers) over bonus payments and repairs needed for hospitals.105 Many of these concerns pre-dated Covid and continued throughout the pandemic. However, as the pandemic accelerated, in some cases workers moderated strike plans, as in local action by the Association of Resident Doctors in Benue over redundancies.106

Pay is the most commonly cited grievance in these disputes, but strikes were also used to address many other concerns, some only tangentially related to the pandemic. A strike by the Medical and Dental Consultants’ Association of Nigeria targeted new requirements to make obtainment of a PhD compulsory for consultants lecturing in medical colleges (though this was a withdrawal of their college teaching rather than hospital work).107 Nurses went on strike in Delta State in December 2020 over issues relating to staff shortages and career progression.108 Moreover, numerous strikes were reported related to concerns with security. For example, following the kidnapping of a union members’ wife, workers took industrial action to demand more effective protection from law enforcement109 and there are multiple cases of abductions of medical colleagues themselves110. In one case healthcare workers took industrial action after masked gunmen invaded their workplace and stole equipment.111 Doctors in Ebonyi were reported to go on strike over the abuse of staff by a patients’ relatives.112 Indeed, industrial action over assaults on doctors by patients was frequently reported during the period.113

Despite these distinctive incidents, as the pandemic accelerated in Nigeria, more instantly-recognisable and universal problems come to the fore. Once again, these were usually, but not always, local incidents. Nurses in Enugu released a viral video and public statements protesting the lack of PPE.114 The Association of Resident Doctors at the teaching hospital in Oghara initiated a dispute over PPE, failure to close certain services as a precautionary measure, lack of life insurance, and lack of additional compensatory payments, in response to COVID-19.115 Similar issues were also evident in various other localities.116 These often involved a multiplicity of unions and professional associations, such as in a strike in Lafia in June 2020 which involved various actors in tandem.117 Most of these cases involved strikes, but some incidents also involved smaller-scale “confrontations” of unspecified type, as with nurses in Abuja in April 2020.118 There was also some national-level action. The Nigerian Medical Association advocated at national level for provisions such as life insurance for medical workers leading to a protracted and intermittent dispute.119 Moreover, the National Association of Resident Doctors launched an indefinite national strike over PPE in June 2020.120 Persistent issues of non-payment of wages dovetailed other issues, such as non-payment of promised COVID-19 bonuses; as in a 14-day strike called by the national Association of Resident Doctors in May 2020.121and the national umbrella union Medical and Health Workers Union of Nigeria in August 2020122. In other cases, hospital administrative and technical staff protested their exclusion from these schemes.123

The most wide-ranging national protest by healthcare workers in Nigeria examined took place in April 2021: a large nationwide strike calling for salary improvements, additional allowances and improved working conditions124, which was called by the Association of Resident Doctors. It, and ensuing related actions (including another large strike in August 2021), continued intermittently throughout 2021, before being called off after apparent progress in October 2021.125

One of the triggers of protests, catalysed by the pandemic, concerned lockdown policies and police enforcement of these. Medical staff were exempt from restrictions on movement as part of lockdowns. However, there appear to have been numerous incidents where police reportedly did not respect this exemption, resulting in protests among healthcare workers. For example, protests over alleged police brutality against medical staff were reported in A’lbom126 and in Ondo127, where medical workers have been prevented from going about their business. The ARD in Asaba launched an indefinite strike over the enforcement by police of movement restrictions in April 2020.128 In this case, doctors’ representatives argued: “It is a common law of nature that before you save somebody, your safety should be guaranteed first”. There were also regional protests against local government economic responses to COVID-19-driven economic pressures, as in Kogi, where government imposed a pay cut on doctors129, as well as other regions130.

Finally, there were reports that government took action against protesters. For example, the Governor of Ondo State reportedly dismissed nurses who had protested over back pay.131 In the Enugu strike mentioned above, it was reported that the relevant local authorities did not honour previous agreements, exacerbating conflicts.132 There were instances in which regional governments were reportedly threatened striking staff, as when Kaduna state officials threatened to fire staff taking industrial action in response to a 25% pay cut in May 2020.133 In Nasarawa, reported retaliatory action by hospital managers against protesting staff included the removal of training provisions, further worsening relations with workers.134

3.7 Retail in the United States

The context in retail in the United States contrasts greatly with the situation in healthcare. Retail workers in the United States, like in many other countries, are weakly organised and represented, and more often on precarious contracts with little career stability or opportunity for advancement. There have been reports of anti-union sentiments among some large retailers.135 While there is a large volume of protest incidents, these are often very small scale. Nonetheless, as the pandemic continued, there is a suggestion that workers increased the scale and ambition of their actions. Moreover, the very extensive presence of one particular union (the UFCW) in a large proportion of protest events, underlines the point also made in relation to France: alongside more “structural” or institutional factors, union strategy and leadership matters greatly in explaining dynamics of pandemic-era protests.

A systematic qualitative reading of news reporting in the United States on pandemic-era retail protest reveals that protest coalesced around a much more narrowly defined range of grievances. Specifically, unions and non-union campaign groups in retail in the United States organised multiple events demanding hazard pay and better workplace protections against COVID-19 transmission. Interestingly, while individual protest events were often very small (for instance, involving a handful of workers walking off the job for short periods), they were often coordinated across many locations nationally. While in some cases they were targeted at large individual employers, such as Jewel, CVS or Amazon136, in others they engaged with multiple employers simultaneously137, but typically around a rather constant and defined set of grievances. The UFCW appears to have played an important role in organising these events, which appear in many different locations, and take different forms ranging from strikes to coordinated health and safety complaints.138

The salience of hazard pay was increased by specific developments, which underline the importance of large retail companies in explaining the volume of protests. A national wave of protest at many different sites was reportedly triggered by one large firm’s (Kroger’s) decision to end an emergency $2 raise instituted early in the pandemic.139 A similar incident occurred involving UFCW and Stop & Shop.140 Hazard pay-related protests were triggered in Los Angeles when Kroger reportedly closed stores in response to local authorities mandating a hazard pay raise.141 These kinds of triggers were also reported elsewhere. For example, an Amazon employee who had organised protests was dismissed, which some campaigners reportedly argued was a reprisal for his activism. This was triggered other events142. While these were often small events, they set off a series of events which gained momentum as the pandemic wore on (with one newspaper commenting on the “altering of the labor landscape” by Spring 2021).143 For instance, by May 2021, retail worker activists were organising events targeting multiple large retailers simultaneously, for instance to tie-in with Essential Workers’ Day (which itself ties in with International Workers’ Day).144 While in most cases these are spearheaded by the UFCW or a connected campaign group, United for Respect145, there are cases of other company-specific groups emerging, such as Whole Worker, at Whole Foods146. The forms employed in these initiatives varies greatly: some cases protest events are simply petitions to the press or public authorities expressing dissatisfaction; or else getting union-sympathetic politicians to speak on their behalf.147 In other cases there are small scale walkouts, and particular press attention has been given to coordinated “sick outs”.148

While this wave of multiple coordinated but small-scale events characterises most of the retail protest in the data examined in the United States, there are other factors which deserve mention. The visibility of the Black Lives Matters movement during 2020-2021 appears to have dovetailed with pandemic-era labour protest. A number of reports referred to protests by workers who wanted to wear facemasks displaying support for BLM but were forbidden to do so by employers.149 Protests in some cases were catalysed by the diversity of state-level (or even city-level) legislatures, particularly where those states leaned towards populist positions which questioned pandemic prevention measures. The vocal opposition to vaccine and mask mandates by the Governor of Texas, for instance, was compared unfavourably by retail workers to counterparts in other states, leading to state-level protests.150 We should also note that emerging protests in the platform economy overlap with retail protests, as exemplified by experiences at Shipt, where platform workers protested against changes to pay systems imposed by the company in response to huge spikes in demand for grocery delivery due to the pandemic.151

The pandemic period has also seen ambitious new projects by unions which are not necessarily directly COVID-19-related: most notably, initial attempts to organise Amazon warehouses, including but not limited to the widely-discussed site at Bessemer, Alabama152 (where workers eventually voted against unionisation). While unsuccessful, these suggest the US labour movement is setting itself new targets for the future. At this stage, we can only speculate on the relationship between COVID-19-era protest and these ambitions. Nonetheless, Jaffe (2021) argues explicitly that some of the tactics used in these unionisation drives were learnt in the wave of pandemic-driven organising.

3.8 Retail in Argentina

In Argentina, supermarket retailers were classed as a critical service. In numerous cases workers reportedly protested against the lack of protective equipment as well as a lack of safety procedures imposed on customers when entering shops.153 They reportedly called for the availability of a range of equipment, including not just PPE but items like thermometers to check customers’ temperature.154

Trade unions supported these efforts, for instance by setting up hotlines for workers to report violations of health and safety procedures.155 For example, early in the pandemic, the Union of Commercial Employees conducted a survey of health and safety violations by the multinational Carrefour, leading to a legal complaint made to local police offices. In this case workers’ action appeared to lead to better provisions by the company.156 Another regional union gained newspaper coverage by calling for a reduction in opening hours for supermarkets to mitigate the spread of infection.157

Pay was another major source of protest; particularly the pursuit of additional payments and bonus schemes to compensate for the strains of working throughout the pandemic. Various actors called for solidarity payments to key workers including those in retail. These have been advanced through various channels including communiques by trade unions and proposed legislation from politicians sympathetic to unions and workers’ causes.158 In some cases these payments appear to have been agreed but companies reportedly pulled back from them, citing financial troubles due to reduced sales.159 For example, Carrefour again saw public demonstrations by workers after allegations they had reneged on a pandemic bonus scheme.160

As in the United States, in protests by retail workers, there is a strong and recurrent emphasis given in reports to the moral claims workers make. By emphasising the risks they take, and the importance of their jobs, workers drew on this ‘moral power’ to give their arguments a weight to compensate for the relative weakness of organised industrial power. As the preceding discussion has shown, workers have relied on methods such as demonstrations and legal complaints, rather than strikes. Unions are often cited as spokespeople in these events or as the actors initiating legal complaints, but rarely as organisers of industrial action. Workers were reportedly at risk and some supermarket workers disseminated videos calling attention to poor company practices, for instance, and have also cited examples of violent repercussions for those who have spoken out.161 Workers at the same company (Coto) published an open letter citing over 300 infections and identifying 56 branches as being in a state of “complete sanitary abandonment”- in some cases directly criticising unions they feel have inadequately represented their concerns.162

While overwhelmingly complaints coalesced around safety provisions and bonus payments, it is interesting to note that long-standing complaints over job insecurity, workload and dismissals without justification have not gone away in retail work during the pandemic.163