The coronavirus is causing a major global social and economic crisis. In the United States, the government’s response to this crisis has been disastrous, and employers are showing, as usual, that they have no qualms about putting their own profits above the health and safety of their workers and of the public.

Strikes and other forms of on-the-job organizing have kicked off all over the country. But workplace militancy on a much greater scale will be required to force a humane pandemic response from corporate owners and policymakers, both to win the kind of measures we need to fight the disease, like Medicare for All, and to slow the disease’s spread.

The labor movement has a key role to play in this. Unfortunately, labor’s strength is at a historic low. The percentage of workers in unions was 10.1 percent in 2019, the lowest rate since 1983 (when the Bureau of Labor Statistics began collecting data). There was a revival of strikes in 2018, with the most workers going on strike since 1986. But that number is mostly confined to public education and still way below the historic heights of the Great Depression and World War II era, or even the 1960s and 1970s, when public-sector strikes kicked off in large numbers.