AP PHOTOS: Global May Day celebrations muted amid lockdowns

ATHENS, Greece (AP) — Trapped between fear of an invisible enemy and looming economic ruin and hunger, millions of workers worldwide marked international labor day Friday with vastly muted celebrations amid the coronavirus pandemic.

With lockdown restrictions still in place across the globe, there were only a handful of countries that saw actual May Day demonstrations on the streets. Even then, they looked vastly different to anything that has gone before.

Organizers of a Greek Communist Party-affiliated union were out with tape measures and colored stickers to mark the exact places the masked and gloved demonstrators could stand for their rally — two meters apart, to maintain social distancing. They waved banners and flags calling for more workers’ rights, but didn’t march through the streets as they normally would have.

Delivery workers held their own demonstration, riding their motorcycles and scooters through the streets of the Greek capital, where lockdown measures are to start being relaxed from Monday.

In France, unions called for people to sing on their balconies or out of their windows at midday in a collective shout of protest for more worker protections. Some protesters who took to the streets despite the lockdown were arrested.

Turkey saw police detaining several demonstrators in face masks too, bundling them into police vans in Istanbul during an attempted march toward the city’s main Taksim Square in defiance of the government-imposed lockdown.

In hard-hit Italy, where deaths are approaching 30,000 and businesses have been shuttered for weeks, some entrepreneurs resorted to a dramatically visual though silent gesture to mark May Day and draw attention to their employees’ plight. Some cafes used dressed mannequins in place of customers in their empty businesses, as if they were buying...