Largest General Strike

As many as 180 million workers in India went on strike September 2 to protest greater privatization of the economy and the breakdown of minimum wage negotiations. I'm just now noticing any mention of the strike since U.S. media generally doesn't cover historic labor actions. Vijay Prashad reports:

680 million Indians live in deprivation. These people – half the Indian population – are deprived of the basics of life such as food, energy, housing, drinking water, sanitation, health care, education and social security. Most of India's workers and peasants count amongst the deprived. Ninety per cent of India’s workers are in the informal sector, where protections at the workplace are minimal and their rights to form unions virtually non-existent.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi ... did not pay heed to these workers. His goal is to increase India’s growth rate, which ... can be accomplished by a cannibal like attitude towards workers’ rights and the livelihood of the poor. Selling off state assets, giving hugely lucrative deals to private business and opening the doors of India’s economy to Foreign Direct Investment are the mechanisms to increase the growth rate. None of these strategies, as even the International Monetary Fund acknowledges, will lead to social equality. This growth trajectory leads to greater inequality, to less power for workers and more deprivation.

Update (December 15, 2020):  Alex Henderson reports on strikes in India involving as many as 250 million farmers and workers.

Update (December 22, 2020):  Sonali Kolhatkar explains the issues behind the Indian farmers' strike.

About half of India’s workers depend on the agricultural industry, and the government has long had in place regulations to protect farmworkers, acting as a middleman between farmers and buyers of their produce. Now those protections have been upended. In September 2020, [Prime Minister Narendra] Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) pushed three deregulatory bills through Parliament amid chaos and even some opposition from within his own party.