Steep fall in US economy and worse is to come

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/04/16/usec-a16.html






By Nick Beams
16 April 2020

Data from the US Commerce Department and the Fed released yesterday show that the American economy entered a steep decline in March with still worse to come this month.

Retail sales, in seasonally-adjusted terms, fell by 8.7 percent from a month earlier, the biggest such fall since records began in 1992. Sales at clothing stores were down by more than 50 percent.

The percentage decline in spending on motor vehicles, furniture and electronics was in the double digits, the Commerce Department reported.
Figures released by the Fed showed that industrial production, including manufacturing, mining, oil and natural gas production, dropped by a seasonally-adjusted 5.4 percent. This was the biggest monthly decline since 1946 when US industry was switching from war production.

In an indication of the collapse of economic confidence, the National Association of Home Builders reported that its housing market index for April had fallen to 30 from 72 the previous month. A level of 50 indicates neither expansion nor contraction.

The Fed’s “beige book,” based on anecdotal evidence from businesses around the country, said US economic activity had “contracted sharply and abruptly” and companies expected conditions to worsen with further job cuts. Over the past month almost 17 million workers have registered for unemployment benefit.

Any notion there will be a rapid recovery once the immediate effects of the pandemic pass—and there is no indication of that as the US death toll continues to rise—is being dispelled.

The senior economist at Oxford Economics, Lydia Boussour, said the drop in retail sales was “just the beginning of the consumer pull-back.”

“Plummeting consumer confidence, collapsing employment, and lockdown restrictions have compounded into an extraordinary and multi-faceted shock to consumer spending and brought the economy’s main engine to a sudden halt.”

Manufacturing output fell by 6.3 percent. The largest decline was in the production of motor vehicles and parts, which fell 28 percent, while the production of business equipment dropped 8.6 percent.

Oxford Economics issued a note to clients yesterday warning that factory activity would fall even further this month. “We anticipate industrial production will shrink by nearly 15 percent from peak to trough,” it said.

In a further indication that worse is to come, the Empire State manufacturing survey, which measures business confidence in New York, fell to minus 78.2 this month. This far exceeds its previous low of minus 34.3 recorded in February 2009 in the midst of the global financial crisis.

“The message is that it will be a brutal spring quarter for the economy,” Joshua Shapiro, an economist at the consulting firm MFR, told the Financial Times .

He said while there would a bounce back when the economy reopened, “returning to the levels of activity that prevailed pre-crisis is going to take a long time, and indeed probably will be measured in years for the most affected sectors.”

Craig Johnson, the president of the retail consulting firm Customer Growth Partners, told the Wall Street Journal the March decline was “literally unprecedented.” But April would the “cruellest month” because it was only in mid-March that the closure of large retail outlets began.

The International Monetary Fund has warned in its latest economic outlook that the world is entering the most significant contraction since the Great Depression, expected to amount to at least $9 trillion over 2020 and 2021. This is equivalent to the economic output of Germany and Japan combined. It has forecast that the US economy will shrink by 5.9 percent this year.

One of the clearest expressions of the crash now underway in the global economy is the crisis in the oil industry. Despite an agreement earlier this week by major oil producers to cut production by 9.7 million barrels a day, its price has continued to fall.

The executive director of the International Energy Agency (IEA) Fatih Birol, said: “The oil industry is experiencing a shock like no other its history.”

With oil prices now down to as low as $20 a barrel, many firms are facing bankruptcy, particularly in the US.

Whiting Petroleum filed for bankruptcy at the beginning of the month. Many of the US shale-oil producers that sprung up in the last decade, as oil prices rose, are certain to follow.

Rystad Energy has said that at $30 a barrel more than 70 US oil and gas producers would have problems meeting interest payments on their debts this year. At $20 a barrel for crude this would rise to about 140 companies.

In its monthly oil report, the IEA said demand in April would drop by 29 million barrels a day, equivalent to 29 percent of global oil consumption in 2019.

It said the global economy was “under pressure in ways not seen since the Great Depression” as businesses failed and unemployment rose, with activity in the transport sector falling “dramatically almost everywhere.”

One oil trader told the Wall Street Journal that if you bought a cargo today “you are not sure you will ever find a buyer for it because everyone has too much oil.” He expected that in a couple of weeks oil markets would become “dysfunctional.”

But amid the economic devastation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and the misery for billions of workers around the world, there is money to be made… big money.

Earlier this week, the Financial Times reported on a London investment fund that had made a total of $2.6 billion in trades during March. More than $800 million came from trades in derivatives based on market volatility with a further $1.8 billion resulting from trades in share market, gold and credit derivatives.

The richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, has increased his wealth by $24 billion this year, taking his total fortune to more than $138.5 billion.

His former wife MacKenzie Bezos, who was left with a 4 percent share in Amazon as a result of her divorce settlement, has seen her net worth climb by $8.2 billion this year to $45.3 billion.

As a result of the increase in online shopping, shares in Amazon have been rising and jumped by 5.3 percent on Tuesday.

Bloomberg reported that while the wealth of the world’s 500 richest people in its Billionaires Index had taken an initial hit, it had surged by 20 percent since March 23.



The official mantra is “we’re all in this together.” But as one financial analyst told the news agency, the wealth gap “is only going to get wider with what’s going on now.”

As COVID-19 spreads through ranks, Pentagon stages show of force against China

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/04/16/b52s-a16.html






By Bill Van Auken
16 April 2020

The US military staged a show of force this week on its Pacific island territory of Guam with the clear aim of threatening China.

Billions of dollars’ worth of US warplanes were paraded on the tarmac of Guam’s Andersen Air Force Base Monday in what is known as an “elephant walk,” a term used during the Vietnam War to describe the slow-moving lines of B-52 bombers waiting for takeoff for airstrikes that claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese and Cambodians.

Monday’s formation included 14 warplanes, including five nuclear-capable B-52 Stratofortress strategic bombers, six KC-135 Stratotanker aerial refuelers, an MH-60S Knighthawk helicopter, and two unmanned aerial vehicles: an Air Force RQ-4 Global Hawk and a Navy MQ-4C Triton.
These operations are meant to prepare pilots for the launching of fully armed warplanes in a mass attack against a common target. In the case of Andersen Air Force Base, located 1,800 miles east of China, the identity of the target is clear.

The Air Force’s 36th Wing, which is part of the Indo-Pacific Command, issued a statement declaring that “The Elephant Walk showcases the 36th Wing's readiness and ability to generate combat airpower at a moment's notice to ensure regional stability throughout the Indo-Pacific.”

This “showcasing” of the US military’s ability to launch a nuclear war against China at “a moment’s notice” came amid an increasingly virulent anti-China campaign by the Trump administration aimed at diverting growing social anger over the government’s failure to carry out the most basic measures to contain the deadly virus that has now cost 30,000 American lives.

It was also a demonstration of US air power under conditions in which its carrier strike groups, one of the principal instruments for the projection of US imperialism’s military might in Asia and internationally, have been sidelined by the spread of the coronavirus through the close quarters of US Navy ships.

The USS Theodore Roosevelt remains docked in Guam, its crew under quarantine with nearly 600 having tested positive and one of them dying Monday from COVID-19, the second member of the US military killed by the disease. Another of the ship’s five sailors have been hospitalized, one of them in intensive care.

The evacuation of the aircraft carrier’s crew, with the exception of a skeleton force tending to its nuclear reactors and weapon systems, came after a heated controversy triggered by a demand by the ship’s commander, Capt. Brett Crozier, that his crew be taken off the ship and quarantined. After his immediate superiors stonewalled his appeal, Crozier sent a letter to at least 20 senior naval officers in which he stated, “We are not at war. Sailors do not need to die. If we do not act now, we are failing to take care of our most trusted asset — our Sailors."

The letter, which cut across the Trump administration’s attempt to minimize the pandemic’s impact as well as the Pentagon’s determination not to allow the outbreak to interfere with its aggressive worldwide operations, triggered a political firestorm. Acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly relieved Crozier of his command—apparently on the direct orders of Trump—and then flew to Guam to address the Theodore Roosevelt’s crew, denouncing the Captain as “stupid,” “naive" and a traitor, while berating the crew for having staged a demonstration of support for Crozier as he disembarked from the carrier. The tirade was delivered over the ship’s load speakers, without any contact between Modly and the crew. After a recording of it surfaced on social media, Modly himself was compelled to resign.

While the Theodore Roosevelt’s crew remains quarantined in Guam, other aircraft carriers are also paralyzed. The USS Ronald Reagan is docked in Yokosuka, Japan because of COVID-19 cases onboard. The USS Nimitz, meanwhile, has had its crew quarantined in Washington state after infections there. The close quarters of these ships allow for the rapid spread of the disease.

Amid the sidelining of the US military’s carrier strike groups, the Chinese navy sent the Liaoning, its first operational aircraft carrier, together with two guided-missile destroyers, two guided-missile frigates and a supply ship, into waters between Japan’s islands of Miyako and Okinawa and Taiwan’s east coast.

The US Defense Department announced Wednesday that its total number of COVID-19 cases had surpassed 5,000, more than half of them active-duty members of the military. There are increasing incriminations within the US military over what was known about the deadly virus and the failure—as in US society as a whole—to take measures earlier to protect enlisted personnel from it.

The US military command has signaled that no matter how pervasive the spread of the disease within its ranks, it is prepared to order US troops to fight. “I don’t want anyone out there in the world to think that somehow the US military’s readiness is significantly degraded. It is not,” the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley said last week. If needed to defend the interests of US imperialism, it is prepared to send carriers crewed by sick sailors to sea against China. As Milley said of the USS Theodore Roosevelt, “we could get it back out to sea quickly if we had to."

In February, as the coronavirus was spreading throughout the world including within the US and its military, US Defense Secretary Mark Esper told Congress that the “highest priority remains China, as its government continues to use—and misuse—its diplomatic, economic and military strength to attempt to alter the landscape of power and reshape the world in its favor, often at the expense of others.”

This remains Washington’s geostrategic priority. The catastrophe wrought by the coronavirus on the US and the world has not deterred US military aggression in the slightest. Where it can, as in Venezuela and Iran, both blockaded by US sanctions, Washington has sought to employ the disease as a weapon. In the case of China, as the “elephant walk" in Guam demonstrates, the ravages of the disease have only increased the recklessness of US imperialist policy and the threat of world war.



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Outrage grows as Amazon workers die for Bezos’ profits

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/04/16/amaz-a16-1.html






By Nick Barrickman
16 April 2020

Amazon workers across the United States are outraged at news that an Amazon employee working in Hawthorne, California died last month from COVID-19 and that workers only now were being informed of it.

The lives of Amazon, United Parcel Service, United States Postal Service, FedEx and other essential logistics workers are being sacrificed for corporate profit. Nothing demonstrates this more than the news that the personal fortune of Amazon CEO Jeffrey Bezos grew by $24 billion during the first three months of 2020, primarily due to the rush of business the company saw as millions were forced to shelter in place as a pandemic swept the planet.

“This is not surprising, he is capitalizing off of this crisis, INSANE!!,” wrote an Amazon worker to the International Amazon Workers Voice. “To add to this, we are ‘essential’ and that means we are less like trash [to the company]. [Bezos] should be arrested along with his cronies for conspiracy to commit murder... CRIMINAL!!”

The news of Bezos profiting while workers die exposes the lie in his open letter last month when the multi-billionaire boss told his poorly paid workers, “We are in this together.”

“I heard about [the death] but didn’t realize that this had happened so many weeks ago,” said an Amazon worker in Baltimore’s BWI-2 facility. “This corporation benefits its stockholders. It’s not designed for safety. It’s all about product, product, product! Numbers, numbers, numbers!

“The company is adding a third and fourth tier [to its employee pay scale],” the worker added, saying this was a “carrot” to entice workers to believe “it’s not so bad, I’m sweating blood, sweat and tears but it’s alright.”

“Production costs and operation costs do not equal the cost of a human life,” they concluded.

The company informed its BWI-2 employees on Wednesday of a COVID-19 case at the facility. Speaking of previous incidents, the worker said, “About two weeks ago, I came in to work and there was a news crew reporting on site about a suspected case at the facility. Management told us it was a mistake.” A few days later, however, the company admitted that a case had occurred and that workers would be fired for speaking to the press about it.

The company was fearful of more rank-and-file opposition forming at its facilities, because “at this point, the protests on Staten Island were going on,” the worker noted. In New York, these protests against unsafe job conditions resulted in the victimization of Chris Smalls who led a walkout.

Last month, the Amazon CEO caught public backlash after news coverage revealed that the company had set up a coronavirus relief fund for its employees. Bezos, with personal wealth now of $138 billion, donated $25 million, asking the public to donate the rest to meet the healthcare needs of the company’s nearly 800,000 employees.

“How is your company worth over a TRILLION dollars and you want the public to donate to an employee relief fund?! As if Amazon can’t pay their employees themselves,” wrote one poster on Twitter in response to Amazon’s request that the public “make a voluntary donation to the fund.”

Another worker at the CLT4 facility in South Carolina told the International Amazon Workers Voice that three workers tested positive there. Despite that, the worker said, the distribution plant was staying open. Summing up the position of the company, the worker told IAWV that management said, “We know we know we have folks that have tested positive [for the coronavirus] here, but we have asked them and those they worked closely with to stay home. The temperature checks and masks we hand out upon entrance to the facility ensure we’re doing everything to keep our workers safe during this time,” she reported.

Another worker, speaking under the condition of anonymity, explained the miserable state of safety protocols at their facility. “At my location, they have temperature checks, they’ve ended the staff meetings and now they allow cell phones” so workers can check up on their family members and respond to emergencies. “But hand sanitizer, which is difficult to find in large buildings, is just for show. The self-serve dispensers they set up ran out in one day and haven’t been refilled since.”

As for hand washing, “in my building, which has four floors, you have a full-service bathroom on only two of them, while the other two floors have portable hand washing stations set up in different corners.” All of this might sound very convenient and efficient, she said, but there is a catch, “The portable stations have soap and hand towels, but no water.”

“I’ve seen people using their own bottled water to rinse themselves off. Some people bring their soapy hands over to the [drinking] water area, and wash their hands there, with the soap and germs splashing the area” where workers fill up their drinking cups.

In addition to the hand-rinsing going on at drinking fountains, the worker said there was no such thing as social distancing at the two-person portable sinks. “Amazon tells us they’ll fire us if we break social distancing. They break it all the time. We’ve lost some soldiers due to this,” they said.

Last week, CNBC reported that Amazon was informing its employees that if they broke “social distancing rules, they could face disciplinary action,” including termination.

“I spoke Human Resources today and there are no protocols in place for the ‘social distancing patrols’” Amazon now uses to keep workers from congregating too close. “They’re picking and choosing who to write up [so they can] kick out people that rock the boat. They’re now working with their legal department to get something on paper,” because the company is firing people due to infractions, the worker said.

Another worker from Baltimore told the IAWV that they see management “breaking social distancing all the time. The only time it is really enforced is when you are walking through the main area” of the building lobby. “In back, it’s not being enforced,” they said.

“We have a system where workers are being relied on to push out goods to the American people, yet these same workers are risking their lives to do this work with minimal hazard pay, minimum [personal protective gear], etc.” another worker from New Jersey told the IAWV. “Most of [us] have little choice to go in or not because Amazon will not pay for time off unless you are sick with the virus. If that happens you will not have enough money to deal with the costs that come with this virus.”



“This while Bezos, who continues to be praised for donating an extremely small percentage of his wealth to charities helping with this pandemic. He is making record profits, along with his shareholders. Systemic change is required to change the system to benefit workers and not punish them,” the worker concluded.

French President Macron announces a premature end to quarantine in the interests of the financial elite

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/04/16/macr-a16.html






By Alex Lantier
16 April 2020

French president Emmanuel Macron delivered a televised address on Monday night to defend his government’s disastrous response to the coronavirus pandemic. Macron also announced an end date to the nationwide quarantine, without providing any health-based justification for doing so.

Across Europe, governments are compelling workers to return to work in the midst of an epidemic. In Spain and Austria, workers’ anger has erupted on social media in the face of return-to-work orders imposed by the trade unions, even as thousands of new coronavirus cases are reported each day. The British and Spanish governments openly declare that a majority of the population will have to catch the disease, in the hope that the survivors develop an immunity allowing them to continue to work.

Macron had already raised the need to return to the job, which would sustain the hundreds of billions of euros that the central banks and government are pouring into the financial markets. His speech Monday fell within the same basic framework. Without specifying what change in the situation would allow a safe ending of the quarantine, the president ordered a return to work, delaying it until May 11.
Workers cannot trust the “president of the rich” with such a life-and-death question. A general quarantine was adopted in Europe only after a wave of strikes in Italy that spread to France, Spain, Great Britain and beyond. The question is posed of a movement of the working class to impose a rational, planned and scientific response to the pandemic on a global scale.

While an Odoxa poll indicates that 70 percent of the population do not trust the government, and that 88 percent think the quarantine should have begun earlier, Macron began his speech this week with congratulations to his own government. He praised himself for the fact that “the hospitals have been able to treat all those who were presented to them.”

In fact, the hospitals, on which Macron imposed austerity spending cuts immediately prior to the pandemic, were able to treat everyone only because they admitted a fraction of the most serious cases. Most patients were told to treat themselves at home; an unknown number of older patients died in retirement homes. The current 50 percent increase in the mortality rate among French people in their homes appears to reflect the death of non-hospitalized coronavirus patients.

The lack of masks and anti-bacterial gels in France, and of gloves and coats for nurses and healthcare workers, has worsened the pandemic that has killed 119,000 people internationally and over 15,000 in France. More than 6,000 nurses have been infected in France, while seven doctors and nine health staff have died. Hundreds of doctors have filed suit against Prime Minister Édouard Philippe and former Minister of Solidarity and Health Agnès Buzyn, which threatens the two officials with two-year prison sentences.

Macron referred in passing to these disasters before minimizing them as “misfirings.” With breathtaking indifference, the French president added: “We will draw all the necessary lessons in the appropriate time.”

The time to secure the required supplies of medical treatments and equipment is not in the vague future, but in the here and now.

Thousands of people across Europe and elsewhere are dying every day, even as Macron announced the end of the quarantine and the reopening of all schools in less than four weeks’ time, with the return of tertiary students delayed until the summer. He did not explain why elementary and secondary schools, as much key transmission mechanisms for the virus as the universities, should reopen, besides the obvious fact that this would be necessary to allow the students’ parents to get back to work and produce profits for business. Macron said that the reopening of schools would be “prepared with the social partners,” the trade unions.

Nonetheless, Macron indicated that the May 11 return was not assured, criticizing the so-called strategy of “collective immunity” advocated in Berlin and London. Instead of adopting this strategy and coldly allowing a majority of the population to become infected with the disease, Macron proposed betting on a coronavirus vaccine.

“Today, according to preliminary data that will soon be improved,” the president argued, “a very small minority of the French population has contracted COVID-19. This means that we are far from what specialists call collective immunity, the point at which the virus stops spreading of its own accord because enough of us have already contracted it. The most talented researchers in the world are working on this problem now—and France is internationally recognized in this field.”

This raises questions to which Macron gave no answer. He stated that the development of a vaccine would take “many months”—12 to 18, according to scientists. But he was silent on what should be done between May 11 and when that vaccine might be available.

Above all, Macron did not explain his attitude toward the strategy of “collective immunity.” Even assuming a mortality rate of one percent, allowing 70 percent of the population to become infected would lead to half a million deaths in France, and hundreds of millions internationally.

The fear of a social explosion in France and internationally is a decisive factor—although rarely referred to—in Macron’s policy. Terrified by two years of “yellow vest” protests and shaken by stoppages in the automotive industry and at Amazon in Europe and America, he chose for the moment not to adopt openly the same quasi-genocidal policy as elsewhere on the continent.

The risk of having to re-impose a quarantine following a renewed outbreak of the virus—a possibility that he briefly referred to—no doubt played a role. Nonetheless, there is no fundamental difference between the policy of Macron and that of Boris Johnson in Britain or Angela Merkel in Germany. All want to send workers back to work, without safe conditions, in order to boost the profits of the financial elite.

Macron hypocritically sought to soften this brutal class reality, declaring that “Our country depends entirely on men and women that our economy repays so little,” before invoking the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789, “Social distinctions can be founded only on the common good.” “These words,” Macron continued, “are imposed upon us today,” adding into the bargain that a portion of the debt of African countries would be cancelled.

Workers cannot have any confidence in these empty promises. Macron is discredited by years of austerity and war, in addition to his catastrophic response to the coronavirus pandemic. This crisis has demonstrated that social distinctions based on class inequality play a disastrous and even fatal role in the world today. Macron is known as a ruthless and bloody defender of the financial elite. He is now negotiating with the business federation and the unions to impose a slashing of paid leave and unpaid overtime.

The working class must decide the conditions for any end to the quarantine, in complete independence from the parties and unions that collaborate with Macron. Through the formation of independent rank-and-file workplace and neighborhood committees, workers can fight for a safe end to the quarantine, which would necessarily involve no return to work for non-essential production, safe conditions for all workers in industries that are essential to fight the virus and guaranteed protection of all—including prisoners and refugees.



These demands require a struggle for socialism and against capitalism and the European Union, for the bringing down of Macron and the establishment of a workers’ government.

World famous Mayo Clinic cuts pay, furloughs employees amidst COVID-19 pandemic

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/04/16/mayo-a16.html






By Matt Rigel
16 April 2020

The Rochester, Minnesota-based Mayo Clinic, one of America’s leading hospital systems and Minnesota’s largest private employer, has announced pay cuts and furloughs for over 20,000 of its nearly 70,000 employees.

Announcing the pay cuts, Mayo CEO Gianrico Farrugia cited the lack of revenue from elective surgical procedures, which have been delayed across the country to concentrate hospital resources on the spreading COVID-19 crisis. According to the Minnesota Hospital Association, the loss of revenue from elective surgeries will cost hospital systems in Minnesota over $3 billion over the next 3 months.

The cuts expose the real attitude of the capitalist class to the medical professionals, nurses and health care workers who are on the front lines of the struggle to contain the pandemic and save lives, often at great personal risk. While these workers do express the heroism and self-sacrifice of millions of workers who instinctively respond to the crisis in the spirit of social solidarity, the current media praise for the “coronavirus heroes” masks the callous indifference of the corporate elite, which considers them expendable.
As with every other social need, the safety and protection of these workers, not to mention their jobs and income, take a back seat to the drive for profit.

Other hospital systems across the nation have responded in a similar manner to the drain on profits caused by the pandemic and the shutdown of much of the economy. To date, 117 hospitals and hospital chains have imposed cuts of various sorts.
Detroit Medical Center announced that it is furloughing 480 employees who are not involved in COVID-19 treatment.


Trinity Health, based in Livonia, Michigan plans to furlough 2,500 employees.


Allina Health and St. Francis Medical Center in Minnesota are requiring all nonpatient care staff to take a furlough, giving employees the option of using paid time off.


Ephraim McDowell Health, based in Danville, Kentucky, announced that it will furlough 20 percent of its 1,700 employees.


Prisma Health in Greenville, South Carolina announced plans last month to cut hours for 3,900 of its 30,000 employees and impose an undisclosed number of furloughs.

Major hospital systems have also mounted attacks on health care workers who expose to the public the desperate and unsafe conditions in the hospitals. Nurses and other workers have been terminated or punished with disciplinary action for protesting against the lack of personal protective equipment.

Attacks on health care workers’ pay, benefits and working conditions did not begin with the pandemic. Health care workers around the world have entered into struggles against low pay and understaffing, including in Minnesota. Last year, nurses at five major hospital systems in the state were on the verge of a strike but were blocked by the unions. The pushing through of attacks with the aid of the pro-corporate trade unions in recent decades has been rewarded with tremendous pay increases for hospital CEOs. Their pay doubled from 2005 to 2015, while compensation for bedside staff and doctors remained stagnant or decreased due to cuts in benefits.



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Amazon cracks down on rebellious workers as first COVID-19 fatality is reported

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/04/16/mayo-a16.html






By Tom Carter
16 April 2020

On Tuesday, Business Insider reported that the coronavirus claimed the life of an Amazon employee in California. This is first reported death of an Amazon employee from COVID-19.

Over the past week, Amazon has fired three workers who challenged the company’s failure to ensure safe working conditions during the pandemic.

The deceased employee was an operations manager at an Amazon facility in Hawthorne, California. Amazon has revealed few details about the circumstances of his death. He was last at the facility on March 6, falling ill after a vacation that lasted from March 7 to 20. It is unclear how the disease was contracted. While the death occurred on March 31, it was not reported until April 14.
While management claims that workers at the Hawthorne facility were promptly notified, Amazon workers around the country received no notice of the death. There is little doubt that Amazon was concerned the release of the information would encourage further walkouts and job actions by workers.

Around the world, Amazon workers have walked out and protested the company’s reckless indifference to their health in the midst of the pandemic. Workers risking their lives to ship essential goods to people sheltering in their homes have been compelled to work without adequate personal protective equipment and other measures necessary to ensure their safety.

Striking workers have demanding the closure of unsafe facilities, full protective gear and an end to the company’s practice of deliberately concealing from workers information about the infection of their fellow workers.

So far, Amazon workers have fallen ill with the virus at more than 130 warehouses in the US, with some warehouses having over 30 confirmed cases.

Walkouts of Amazon workers have taken place in Detroit, in the New York City boroughs of Staten Island and Queens, at a facility in Chicago, and elsewhere. In addition, strikes have taken place in Italy and Spain.

Workers at the Amazon-owned Whole Foods, along with Instacart, recently walked out in the US to demand protective equipment, hazard pay, and sick pay. Parallel walkouts, strikes, and rebellions have taken place across many of the industries and services designated as “essential” during the pandemic, including meatpacking and public transit and sanitation.

Amazon’s response to the growing insurrection has included providing cosmetic, cheap safety measures that are utterly inadequate in light of the scale of the danger. A worker at the BWI2 warehouse in Baltimore, for example, told the International Amazon Workers’ Voice that one of the new safety measures consists of providing “safety sanitation” wipes, which workers are admonished to use sparingly.

A label on the side of the container reads: “Please use a wipe to sanitize your station at the start of your shift and when changing stations only. We want to ensure that we have enough for all shifts. DO NOT remove these wipes from their designated station.”

In addition to these low-cost, minimal safety measures, Amazon has responded to the growing insurrection by stepping up the already-tyrannical regime in its warehouses. Workers report in particular that the new six-foot “social distancing” rule is being used to bully and harass workers who speak out and break up efforts to organize or hold discussions.

On Friday, April 10, Amazon fired UX (user experience) designers Emily Cunningham and Maren Costa, both of whom had garnered public attention for criticizing the company in relation to climate change and had recently circulated a petition for safer conditions for workers during the pandemic. They had also attempted to set up meetings between tech workers and warehouse workers. The firing took place by telephone.

On Tuesday, Cunningham wrote on twitter: “Amazon fired me and @marencosta. As Mary Oliver wrote, ‘oh! how rich it is to love the world.’ It's a gift to be able to fight for something you love so deeply.”

“Warehouse workers are under real threat right now,” she added. “I’m proud of all the ways they’re standing up for themselves and each other (and the public!). That takes real courage and integrity. If we don’t fight for each other now, when do we?”

The same day, Costa wrote: “@emahlee and I were fired on Good Friday by Amazon for fighting for our colleagues' safety in the time of COVID.”

“Basically, we were fired for trying to make Amazon a better place—for trying to make the world a better place,” she continued.

Both Cunningham and Costa are leaders of Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, which was involved before the pandemic in walkouts of Amazon employees in open defiance of corporate directives, protesting the company’s ties to the US military and ICE terror squads, discrimination, conditions at the warehouses, and complicity in climate change.

Cunningham had worked at Amazon for five years, Costa for 15 years. In January, both Costa and Cunningham appeared in a two-minute video featured on Bernie Sanders’ Senate twitter account. They are scheduled to appear today in an online event with Naomi Klein, a Sanders supporter.

Management claimed: “We terminated these employees for repeatedly violating internal policies.”

The firing of Cunningham and Costa is aimed at intimidating all workers. Despite our differences with their political outlook, the International Amazon Workers Voice unequivocally defends these victimized workers and demands their immediate reinstatement.

Workers should also demand the reinstatement of Bashir Mohamed who was also fired for attempting to organize workers at his warehouse in Minnesota, where he had been demanding more effective safety measures. Amazon’s justification was that Mohamed was “terminated as a result of progressive disciplinary action for inappropriate language, behavior, and violating social distancing guidelines.”

The alleged violation of “social distancing guidelines” was also recently used to target and fire Chris Smalls, who led a walkout at a Staten Island warehouse in New York to protest inadequate safety measures.

Amazon is a trillion-dollar global conglomerate best known for its online shopping and distribution service. Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos, the richest person in the world, has kept the company’s 750,000 workers at their stations during the global pandemic without adequate safety precautions. He told workers that they would have to wait for their “turn” for masks, while of course he did not wait for his “turn” to exploit the opportunity presented by the pandemic to secure an enormous profit for himself. Over the last month, an additional 80,000 warehouse workers were hired.



With millions of people sheltering in their homes during the pandemic, Amazon is experiencing a spike in sales through its online marketplace. Bezos saw an increase in his fortune, which he has previously described as his “Amazon winnings,” by around $24 billion since the start of the year, including $6.8 billion over the last week alone. His personal wealth is now estimated at around $138 billion.

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos cashes in on coronavirus pandemic, adding $24 billion to his fortune

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/04/16/bezo-a16.html






By Jacob Crosse
16 April 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic has sent millions of workers and their families, already scraping to survive, into a financial tailspin from which many will never recover. However, for the world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos, the pandemic has been a financial bonanza, sending Amazon shares, and Bezos’ personal net worth, soaring.

At the close of the trading day on the stock market Wednesday, shares of the online retail giant were trading at $2,307, up from a year-to-date low of $1,676 on March 12, just over a month ago.

While Amazon workers are risking their lives in contaminated factories and protesting against the lack of basic safety equipment (at least 74 Amazon facilities have reported workers infected with the virus), and workers are being fired for speaking out, the market value of Amazon has climbed above $1.1 trillion, slightly below the $1.22 trillion 2019 gross domestic product of Mexico.
For Bezos, this translates into a year-to-date jump of $23.6 billion in his personal net wealth, bringing his fortune to more than $138.5 billion. His ex-wife MacKenzie, with her 4 percent stake in the company, has seen her net worth more than quintuple, from $8.2 billion to $45.3 billion according to Bloomberg.

Bezos is not an aberration. Tesla CEO Elon Musk has added over $10 billion to his personal fortune in the first four months of the year, while Alice, Jim and Rob Walton, owners of mega-retailer Walmart, have profited fabulously from the pandemic, increasing their personal wealth by $2.9 billion, $2.36 billion and $2.42 billion respectively, without stocking a single shelf or retrieving a cart.

The American financial aristocracy is gorging itself in the midst of scenes of mile-long food lines and mass graves. With the passage of Trump’s multi-trillion-dollar corporate bailout last month, which had the virtually unanimous support of Democratic lawmakers, airline industry executives and private equity, hedge fund and real estate investors (such as Donald Trump) are receiving billions of dollars worth of tax breaks, grants and low-interest loans, at taxpayer expense.

The Joint Committee on Taxation (JTC) of the US Congress issued a report this week revealing that tax provisions were included in the corporate bailout legislation (the CARES Act) allowing millionaires and billionaires who own so-called pass-through companies, including hedge funds and real estate investment firms, to offset losses not just from 2020, but from 2019 and 2018 as well. The owners of pass through companies pay income taxes at the individual rather than the corporate tax rate.

The JTC estimated that the total cost in public funds for this boondoggle for the very wealthy will be $170 billion this year. It said that 82 percent of the tax benefit will go to roughly 43,000 taxpayers who make more than $1 million a year. Only three percent will go to taxpayers who earn less than $100,000.

The $170 billion price tag for this handout to the super-rich compares to a measly $100 billion allocated in the legislation for hospitals and $150 billion for state and local governments. Many hospitals are being financially devastated by the impact of the pandemic and an estimated 2,100 cities across the country are facing huge budget deficits due to lost revenues. The result will be a new wave of hospital closures, layoffs and wage cuts, along with brutal cuts in social services and public employee jobs by state and local governments.

The JTC concluded that the average millionaire filer will receive $1.6 million in tax relief this year alone. The Trump Organization includes hundreds of pass-through entities, as do the businesses controlled by Jared Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, allowing the president and his brood to take in millions of dollars by writing off risky investments from up to two years ago.

What these gifts to the oligarchy have to do with the coronavirus pandemic is a mystery no politician or media pundit has sought to explain.

On Tuesday, the government announced it had reached an agreement with the major airlines under which they will receive $25 billion in grants, again at taxpayer expense. The companies will have to pay back only 30 percent of the money. An additional $25 billion in low-cost loans will be provided to the airlines under a separate program. This looting of the US Treasury for the benefit of airline executives and major investors is being cynically presented as a defense of airline employees.

Democratic Rep. Peter DeFazio, chairman of the House Transportation Committee, hailed the bailout. He said, “Even though the process was neither easy nor perfect, it is critically important that in the end there are agreements in place that put workers and families first by keeping hundreds of thousands of airline employees … on the payroll during this extremely tumultuous period for the US economy.”

This is a lie. None of the money in the $50 billion bailout of the airlines will go to the workers. It will be used by the airlines to buy time while they prepare a brutal restructuring of their operations to slash jobs, wages and pensions. Already tens of thousands of airline workers have been furloughed, and the bailout deal allows the airlines to consolidate routes.

The only restrictions on the companies that receive the handouts—at this point a total of 10, including the four giants, American, Delta, United and Southwest—is that they put off layoffs until the end of September and refrain from paying out dividends or buying back their own stock until the end of 2021. But even these minor restraints can be waived by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, a multi-millionaire former investment banker.

DeFazio went on to say, “I strongly believe what Congress laid out in this provision of the CARES Act—to put workers first—should be the model for any industry-specific relief going forward.” This is nothing less than a call for the bailout of more industries.

The airline bailout was strongly promoted by the airline unions, working in lockstep with the companies. Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants, attacked the agreement between the Trump administration and the airlines from the right, denouncing the requirement that the companies pay back 30 percent of the handouts.

Between 2014 and 2019, the four largest US airlines—United, American, Southwest and Delta—spent a combined $45 billion buying back their own stock in order to drive up the share price and enrich the top executives and major investors.



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