Welcome to Pushback. I'm Aaron Mate. I'm joined today by Noam Chomsky. Noam, always an honor to speak to you.

Glad to be with you.

On Friday, International Workers Day, May Day, there are going to be some strikes at major corporations by frontline workers, including Amazon

and Whole Foods, Target, Instacart. Having lived through the Great Depression, having witnessed how

people coped and struggled and resisted, what can labor actions like this mean for a movement,

a mass movement that could be formed to respond

to the coronavirus crisis and to address all of the failings

of the health and economic system that it's shown us?

Well, throughout modern history, labor action has been at the forefront of general activism

and protest. During the 1930s, my childhood, I recall very well seeing the workers' picketing

factories. That's the labor movement had been virtually crushed in the 1920s, revived in the 30s, became quite militant,

moved on, even as far as sit-down strikes, which are a major threat to private capital,

because a sit-down strike is just one step before saying we can run this plant

ourselves, so we don't need the bosses.

So let's get rid of them and take it over.

Now that led the reaction.

There was a sympathetic administration.

And a labor historian, Eric Loomis,

very important work, has reviewed a long series of cases and shown that labor militancy and other activism

have succeeded when there was a more or less sympathetic or

at least tolerant administration, not when there was one that was Roxelle opposed

to the, and we've seen the crushing of the labor movement again during the neoliberal period since Reagan,

...