Amazon, Whole Foods, and Instacart workers around the nation staged strikes on Monday, in protest of the companies’ refusal to offer adequate safety measures and health benefits amid the COVID-19 outbreak. Yahoo! Finance’s Akiko Fujita joins The Final Round to discuss the latest.

Video Transcript

MYLES UDLAND: All right, well, while we're all working at home, and we talk so much about the rise of at home work, remote work, is this the new future, there are still hundreds of millions of workers out there, on the front lines, putting their health at risk, to deliver packages to us here in our apartments, many of you at home.

Akiko Fujita joins us now for a conversation. Akiko, I think about where these workers are seeing things going and the protections that they want to see for themselves. And I think it's kind of outrageous that we haven't yet seen companies like Amazon and Instacart step up yet to protect their workers who are, again, putting themselves in a lot more danger than we are here at home.

AKIKO FUJITA: Yeah, Myles, and what you're seeing is increasingly growing discontent coming from these workers. You talk about what happened with Instacart car tonight, a walkout nationally with demands of more safety measures to be put in place, as well as hazard pay. The gig workers collective, which is the one that arranged or organized the walkout today, is asking for an additional $5 per order among other requests they have put out.

And then of course, we had that strike over at Amazon's Staten Island facility. As far as we know, it was a smaller strike, nearly 100 people, in a facility that has thousands. But what they are demanding is that the plant be shut down altogether, because there was an employee that tested positive for coronavirus last week.

They want the entire place sanitized, but also they want Amazon to pay for these workers while that factory is shut down. Now, there's one other strike that we're going to be looking to, and that's the one from Whole Foods, a sickout reportedly planned for tomorrow.

And what I think this all says is that, you know, a lot of these workers have been organizing, these gig workers, particularly, over the last several years, to increase their benefits and their pay. But they do feel like they have leverage now, given the huge demand that the coronavirus outbreak and all these stay at home measures have created.

Now I should point out, I just got a statement, or an updated statement from Instacart, as it relates to what happened today, saying that we saw absolutely no impact to Instacart's operations. Today, we saw 40% more shoppers on the platform, compared to the same day and time last week. And the company goes on to say, over the last 72 hours, more groceries were sold on our platform than ever before.

And so the company feels like they are in a strong position. But it is worth noting that with that threat of the walkout, the company did come out yesterday in saying, yes, we're going to go ahead and add additional safety measures, one of them being creating hand sanitizers or providing hand sanitizers that are now reportedly being developed with the help of a third party. They're also extending sick pay for part time workers, which is something they didn't have before.

MYLES UDLAND: Yeah, I mean, I know PR does what PR does. The point is that you had a record number of shoppers. But you weren't doing anything to protect your employees, as they continued to get more orders. And one imagines, they'll get more orders in the days ahead.