Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) continued to call for workers to strike during a web-event with the Democratic Socialists of America as states begin to reopen amid the ongoing Wuhan coronavirus outbreak.
States across the country have been following the guidelines set forth by the White House in order to allow other businesses to reopen and prevent anyone else from being added to the staggeringly high unemployment numbers that were the result of the "stay-at-home" orders.
"There's a lot of people saying, 'Call for a general strike, call for a general strike.' The majority of Americans don't know what a general strike is and so our responsibility is to talk about it, expand consciousness about it, and to actually create the conditions in which working people can generate and, really, exercise their own power, the power they already have for themselves," Ocasio-Cortez said.
Ocasio-Cortez first expressed her support for a nationwide strike during an interview with Vice's "SEAT AT THE TABLE," saying that "only in America when the president tweets about 'liberation' does he mean, 'go back to work.'"
"When we, you know, have this discussion about going back or reopening, I think a lot of people should just say, 'No. We're not going back to that. We're not going back to working 70 hour weeks just so that we can put food on the table and not even feel any semblance of security in our lives,'" she said.
Ocasio-Cortez was heavily criticized after she responded to the news of oil futures trading in the negative since the demand for the commodity has reached new lows with, "You absolutely love to see it."