Remember when flight attendants helped end Trump’s government shutdown early last year by threatening to strike? At the time, Sara Nelson, president of the flight attendants’ union, noted that if the shutdown grounded the air traffic controllers, private business would try to take over this part of the industry. Capitalists would be happy to have this work done poorly — for example, they’d probably shorten the training time required for the air traffic controllers — and thus let many of us die. “Unions are the last check against that kind of greed,” Nelson told Jacobin at the time. “And we are also there for the public good, because we are the public.”

During the coronavirus health crisis, Nelson’s analysis has held up. Union members have been fighting for their own lives, as they should be, but also for all of us, whether or not we are union members. If not for their efforts, many more people would surely be dying.

Nurses all around the country are some of the people most at risk of catching the coronavirus, for obvious reasons. Equally obviously, our whole society urgently needs nurses and all hospital workers to stay healthy right now. With public and private hospitals emerging from the double wreckage of austerity and profit-making, nurses have been in a political battle for their lives, fighting for adequate personal protective equipment (PPE) and many other safety measures. National Nurses United even held a socially-distanced protest at the White House on Tuesday demanding PPE, and they’ve held similar protests at hospitals throughout New York City.