Saturday, April 25, 2020
South Korea: no new deaths from coronavirus; 3 months since the country’s first infection, new cases are now in single digits.
This week, South Korea reported no new deaths from coronavirus. Three months since the country’s first reported infection, new cases per day are now in single digits.
Remarkably, South Korea has not resorted to a strict lockdown to tame the pandemic. Instead, it has rigorously followed three guiding principles: test, trace and contain.
The UK has, belatedly, adopted a similar strategy. But for it to work, the government needs to massively scale up testing – which has been beset by flaws and delays.
We made headlines earlier this week when we reported on how the UK’s coronavirus tests have some serious problems.
Alarmingly, the Department of Health and Social Care responded to our story by attempting to discredit it on social media, even though our reporting was backed by a leaked document from Public Health England. Health Minister Helen Whately herself later admitted that the tests were “not up to scratch”.
Following up yesterday, we reported that leading researchers had been warning that the tests were inferior for almost two months.
The news comes as the UK is falling far short of the 100,000 tests pledged by the end of April.
We believe that holding the government to account on this issue is vital. Which is why we were pleased to see the exact same story, based on the same leaked document, lead the Telegraph front page two days later. But less so that it was billed as the Telegraph’s own exclusive story(!)
Unlike the Telegraph, we don’t have billionaire proprietors, or a paywall. We are not-for-profit – and we rely on the generosity of our readers to keep going.
If you think that vital public interest journalism should be free to access for everyone – and that the journalists who do the hard work get credited – please consider supporting us today.
And if you’d like to discuss how the pandemic is affecting human rights, sign up for our webinar here.
Here’s how we reopen the country (links to articles)
We interviewed experts and front-line officials from Italy, Germany, Spain, Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea about how to safely get society moving again. The biggest takeaway: They say not a single state is ready. We compiled the seven things America’s governors need to do before they reopen their states.
The wisdom of experts around the world won’t help America’s governors if they don’t read it. Help us out: Send the memo directly to your governor.
And watch out for people who ignore the advice. Just this week we uncovered two events with huge crowds that proceeded in March even though organizers knew the coronavirus could be spreading in the area: A pro soccer game in Seattle and the Houston Rodeo.
Inside nursing homes
Reporter Jan Ransom’s father was the fourth resident of his nursing home to get COVID-19. Nobody told her about the first, so she couldn’t move him before he got sick. “I think that’s very unfair,” her father told her a week before he died.
There have been disgusting violations of basic health standards in nursing homes, allowing the virus to explode. In one case, an inspector watched a nursing assistant help change a resident’s soiled briefs, then remove her gloves, revealing a second layer of gloves, and feed the resident without washing her hands, according to federal nursing home inspection reports we obtained.
Why batteries can give us insight into the coronavirus response
The IRS has had trouble getting money to low-income Americans. That’s because millions pay for their tax preparation through a baroque system of middlemen.
Don’t forget to check out our tax guide; it includes everything you need to know about filing taxes for free, those stimulus checks and more.
On a personal note, today marks the seventh Saturday I (and so many of us) have been social distancing. It’s been an extraordinarily uncertain and difficult time, and it’s a long way from being over. But if you'd told me at the beginning how much solidarity, neighborly care, uniquely creative virtual socializing and remote gestures of familial love there would be, I may not have believed you. We’ve come a long way. The beat goes on, my friends.
Yours in isolation, Karim Doumar Assistant Editor, Audience
WHAT ELSE WE PUBLISHED THIS WEEK
Life and Death, But No Trash Pickup: Diary of a Young COVID-19 Nurse
Despite all the talk about appreciating health care workers, one California nurse caring for the sickest patients felt she needed more support.
by Ryan Gabrielson
Millions of People Face Stimulus Check Delays for a Strange Reason: They Are Poor
The IRS has had trouble getting money to people quickly because millions of Americans pay for their tax preparation through a baroque system of middlemen.
by Paul Kiel , Justin Elliott and Will Young
How We Used FOIA to Track Ventilator and Hospital Bed Availability in Illinois
Early data released by the Illinois Department of Public Health wasn’t granular enough for an accurate picture of the coronavirus’ impact on Chicago hospitals versus hospitals in areas with fewer cases. Here’s how we pushed for specifics.
by Ash Ngu
How Often Do Schools Use Seclusion and Restraint? The Federal Government Isn’t Properly Tracking the Data, According to a New Report
A new report from the Government Accountability Office found the U.S. Department of Education’s attempts to determine how often schools use seclusion and restraint were “largely ineffective or do not exist.” That could put children at risk.
by Jodi S. Cohen, ProPublica Illinois, and Jennifer Smith Richards, Chicago Tribune
This Hospital Has Only 8 Nurses. They Are Also the Janitors.
Eight nurses are the overwhelming majority of employees who remain at Haskell County Community Hospital in Oklahoma. The future of the 25-bed hospital, which has been whittled down to operating only an emergency room since 2019, is increasingly grim.
by Brianna Bailey, The Frontier
Coronavirus Put Her Out of Work, Then Debt Collectors Froze Her Savings Account
Kim Boatswain’s tax refund could have helped her get through the coronavirus slowdown. But debt collectors seized it. There are few options for Texans like Boatswain whose money was taken just before the state temporarily banned such garnishments.
by Kiah Collier and Ren Larson
How Jared Kushner Is Tackling the White House’s Coronavirus Response — Without Any Evident Experience
The president’s son-in-law and adviser has added the emergency-response supply chain to his extensive list of duties. He views himself as a disrupter — but that’s not always a good thing.
by Andrea Bernstein, WNYC
NYC Mayor and Health Officials Misled Public About Plans to Move COVID-19 Patients Into Nursing Home, Advocates Say
Lawmakers have also written that they are “deeply concerned” about the situation at a Roosevelt Island facility and the possibility that the coronavirus may be spreading from COVID-19 patients to long-time nursing home residents.
by A.C. Thompson
ICE Has Access to DACA Recipients’ Personal Information Despite Promises Suggesting Otherwise, Internal Emails Show
Trump promised that information from DACA applications would not be sent to deportation agents. But internal emails show that ICE can access databases where that information is kept — and DHS decided not to tell Congress.
by Dara Lind
Leaked Recordings Reveal Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot Firmly in Charge and City Alderman Left Largely on the Sidelines
Combative and, at times, dismissive, Chicago’s first-term mayor gathers power as she leads the city’s fight against the coronavirus.
by Mick Dumke
Medical Staffing Companies Cut Doctors’ Pay While Spending Millions on Political Ads
While cutting benefits for emergency room doctors and other medical workers, TeamHealth and Envision have spent millions on ads meant to pressure politicians working on legislation to cap out-of-network costs for Americans.
by Isaac Arnsdorf
Most Illinois School Districts Did Not Have Approved E-learning Plans Before the Pandemic
Despite encouragement from Illinois education officials to have remote e-learning plans, many school districts scrambled to design them before the coronavirus pandemic forced schools to close.
by Jodi S. Cohen, ProPublica Illinois, and Jennifer Smith Richards, Chicago Tribune
Minnesota meatpacking plant closes after two dozen workers test positive for COVID-19
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/04/25/meat-a25.html
By Christopher Davion
25 April 2020
JBS USA, one of the largest meat producing companies in the United States, announced Monday that it would be indefinitely closing its pork processing plant in Worthington, Minnesota after 33 employees and six of their relatives tested positive for COVID-19. The 2,000 workers at the plant will be laid off as a result.
Last Friday, the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 663 announced it had confirmed 19 cases of COVID-19 at the plant. But the plant remained open for two additional days for limited operations, endangering the health and safety of workers and the surrounding community.
Throughout the United States, meatpacking facilities have become epicenters for the spread of the pandemic. In South Dakota, more than 800 cases, or 40 percent of the state’s current total, have been connected to a Smithfield Foods pork plant in Sioux Falls. An outbreak at a Tyson Foods plant in Dougherty County, Georgia contributed to 1,500 cases and over 100 deaths out of a population of 90,000 people, making the rural county one of the regional epicenters of the virus.
Nobles County, located in the southwestern corner of the state and the site of the JBS pork plant’s operations, presently has the highest COVID-19 outbreak per capita in Minnesota state with 4.6 positive coronavirus cases per 1,000 residents in a county population of 22,000.
JBS USA Holdings is the food processing subsidiary of the Brazilian multinational JBS SA, the largest global processor of pork and beef products, which employs 78,000 employees internationally.
The JBS Worthington plant is the largest pork production facility in Minnesota and is tied for third-largest nationally among all meat processing facilities, with its workers processing 20,000 hogs per day. In wake of the COVID-19 epidemic and corresponding closures and temporary suspensions in operations, US meat processing is down 10% nationally as of the week of the plant closure.
Like many meatpacking facilities across the United States, significant sections of the workforce is composed of immigrant and undocumented workers. This particularly oppressed section of the population is acutely vulnerable under conditions of the current pandemic.
Undocumented immigrants are much less likely to report injuries and contracted illness for fear of deportation or employer reprisal. In 2006, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raided the Worthington plant, then owned by Swift & Company, in the largest workplace immigration raid in American history.
Many undocumented immigrants have avoided state-provided testing programs for fear of detention or deportation, according to state Health Commissioner Jan Malcom. Language barriers also play a significant role. More than 40 languages are spoken in the Worthington plant, including many first generation immigrants with limited spoken and written English skills. Because of this, the true number of infections in meatpacking facilities is undoubtedly far larger than has been reported.
With the plant closed, Many of these undocumented workers lack the means to collect any unemployment or supplemental assistance due to their immigration status. But the UFCW, in the face of overwhelming opposition among workers, has negotiated only for paltry bonuses and temporary raises, effectively forcing workers to remain in unsafe conditions.
On April 10, JBS suspended operations of its meat production facility in Greely, Colorado after 50 workers tested positive for COVID-19. Three workers later died, including a 69-year-old Hispanic man. In spite of the workforce-wide testing the company claimed it would enact over the weekend following the closure, some workers did not end up receiving tests before the Greely facility was reopened April 24.
Even though the virus has yet to peak in Minnesota, the state is one of many which is moving towards a rapid reopening of the economy. During his daily briefing last Thursday, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz announced he would be signing an executive order to allow non-customer-facing, non-essential businesses to reopen Monday. This one full week before the governor’s own stay-at-home order is set to end on May 4. Governor Walz estimated that as the result of the order, between 80,000 to 100,000 residents of the state would return to work.
US elderly care devastated by the profit system
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/04/25/nurs-a25.html
By Isaac Finn
25 April 2020
The COVID-19 pandemic has further exposed the failure of the American health care system, and the inability of the wealthiest country on Earth to take care of its elderly and infirm. Over the past month numerous incidents have shocked the public from the admission that 800 patients and staff at the Brighton Rehabilitation and Wellness Center in Pennsylvania have likely been infected with the virus to the gruesome discovery of 17 corpses piled up in a New Jersey nursing home.
It is now estimated that over 10,000 individuals in long-term care facilities, including nursing homes, have died from complications due to a coronavirus infection. The Washington Post has recently compiled a list—which is admittedly incomplete—of 1,300 nursing homes that have experienced a coronavirus related death. Nearly 1 in 10 nursing homes in the US have a publicly reported case of the virus. All these numbers are expected to rise as cases continue to be reported to officials, and new cases are expected to increase as the US begins to “reopen” the economy.
While the COVID-19 pandemic is the most recent and deadly disaster impacting residents at long-term care facilities, it is far from the first. Over the past few years virtually no natural disaster has hit without directly impacting, and often killing some section of the roughly 1.5 million residents of nursing homes and long-term care facilities. Incidents of senior citizens dying in sweltering heat, left to sit in filthy water, or abandoned by staff as wildfires approach have been widely reported over the past few years.
History of regulation and deregulation
The development of nursing homes in the US by some accounts date back to the early 17th century with settlers from England establishing almshouses—care facilities that would provide basic food and shelter for the elderly individuals, orphans and the mentally ill. The federal government first became involved in nursing homes as a result of the Social Security Act of 1935, which also established the Old Age Assistance (OAA) program. The legislation in its initial form specified that funds would not be given to residents of public institutions, a stipulation that encouraged the rapid growth of a private nursing homes. An amendment to the act was added in 1950 to allow payment to individuals in public institutions.
Unlike hospitals, most state governments did not provide licenses to nursing homes until after 1950. A study in 1955 by the Council of State Governments also reported that the majority of these facilities provided a poor quality of care and relied on relatively untrained personnel.
In 1965 federal funding was greatly expanded for long-term care services as part of the newly established Medicare and Medicaid programs. The programs, even in their initial proposal, were widely attacked by Republican legislators.
While the legislation did pass and provide the US Department of Health, Education and Welfare with an authority to implement certain regulations, demands for certain standards in long-term care facilities continued to be fought over into the 1970s. Almost immediately the Medicaid program—which was used to pay for skilled nursing services—abandoned using Medicare’s standards for an “extended care facility.”
Under Republican President Ronald Reagan a number of reforms that had been implemented in the last year of the Carter administration were overturned. In 1987 the Nursing Home Reform Act was passed providing some bare minimum standards for nursing homes. This included a requirement for each nursing home to have a registered professional nurse on site for at least eight consecutive hours a day every day of the week, and “sufficient” nursing staff to meet the resident’s needs.
Conditions have been impacted by continued cuts to Medicaid, which is used to cover care for most nursing home residents. Early proposals for the Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as Obamacare, to include a buy-in option for Medicaid was ultimately rejected, while the Obama administration proposed cuts to the program.
The Trump administration has since implemented a restructuring of Medicaid, including a proposal to cap payments to poor adults without children. Trump has also cut fines for nursing homes that injure or endanger residents, resulting in the average fine dropping from $41,260 under Obama’s last year in office to $28,405.
Quality and cost
In the US, access to health care is widely understood to be split along class lines. While certain luxurious nursing homes and assisted living facilities exist, the situation facing most patients resembles either direct abuse or criminal negligence as a handful of nurses and certified nursing assistants (CNA) are tasked with caring for over a dozen elderly individuals, each with multiple health complications.
While some states have specific laws requiring lower patient-to-nurse ratios and patient-to-CNA ratios, many states allow management to overwhelm staff with patients. According to Nurse.org, in Ohio there was a ratio of 32 residents per nurse and 16 per CNA, and in Georgia 50 residents per nurse and 30 per CNA.
In 2018, Kaiser Health News released a report on staffing levels based on payroll records provided by Medicare. The publication determined that seven out of 10 of the 14,000 nursing homes had lower staffing ratios than previously admitted. At that time, the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services replied by threatening to lower the rankings of facilities that had violated the rules.
Many nursing homes and other long-term care facilities have faced difficulties finding enough CNA’s as the job is both demanding and offers relatively low pay. According to a report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics in May 2019, the average wage for a nursing assistant was $14.77 per hour or just $2.63 more than a retail salesperson. Nineteen states require only 75 hours of CNA training for certification, and no state requires more than 180 hours of training.
Toby Edelman, a senior policy attorney for the Centers for Medicare in Washington D.C., in a 2018 interview, stated, “Most of the bad outcomes [at nursing homes] are the result of insufficient staffing, and insufficiently trained staff. It’s pretty much a universal problem.”
Staffing issues in nursing homes can cause serious problems as it can put certain patients in jeopardy of malnutrition and dehydration. Some patients can also develop pressure ulcers, also known as bedsores, if they are not regularly moved. If gone untreated bedsores can result in fatal complications.
The cost for nursing homes and assisted living is exorbitant. According to Genworth, a life insurance company, a nursing home in the US costs on average $8,365 per month, or $275 a day, for a private room and $7,441 per month for a semi-private room. This cost is growing by 3 to 6 percent per year on average. Fidelity Investment estimates that a couple retiring at age 65 will spend $280,000 on health care.
Roughly 7 million seniors rely on Medicaid for essential care to help cover long-term costs of medical treatment, since payouts of Medicare stop after a hundred days. While over 80 percent of nursing homes accept Medicaid, it is also known that many strongly prefer private payers since they are able to pay more out of pocket for care.
Senate Majority Leader McConnell calls for states to declare bankruptcy and gut pensions
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/04/25/mcco-a25.html
By Barry Grey
25 April 2020
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Wednesday called for state governments facing mounting deficits linked to the coronavirus crisis to file for bankruptcy instead of receiving financial aid from the federal government.
Specifically targeting public sector workers’ pensions, the Kentucky Republican told right-wing radio host Hugh Hewitt: “I think this whole business of additional assistance for state and local governments needs to be thoroughly evaluated. There’s not going to be any desire on the Republican side to bail out state pensions by borrowing money from future generations.”
States currently have no legal right to declare bankruptcy, but McConnell suggested a law to permit it, saying, “I would certainly be in favor of allowing states to use the bankruptcy route.” He added, “We have governors regardless of party who would love to have free money.”
McConnell’s office on Wednesday released a statement titled “Stopping [Democratic-led] Blue State Bailouts.”
Declaring bankruptcy would allow state governments to override laws and even state constitutional provisions that guarantee the pension benefits of retired public workers. On Wednesday, Forbes published a commentary titled “Kiss Your State Pension Goodbye.” It noted: “This is hardly the first time letting states file for bankruptcy to escape trillions of dollars in promised retirement benefits has been proposed.”
The author cited a 2011 column by former Florida Governor Jeb Bush and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich in the Los Angeles Times calling for change in federal bankruptcy laws to allow states to “reorganize their finances.”
Neither McConnell nor the Democrats have any problem giving free money—in unlimited amounts—to Wall Street. The Senate majority leader’s statement came one day after the Senate voted by unanimous consent for a new $484 billion bill that will funnel money disproportionately to large businesses, in the guise of aiding small businesses and their employees. The bipartisan bill was approved by the House of Representatives on Thursday, with only one dissenting Democratic vote, and signed into law Friday by President Donald Trump.
The new legislation includes an additional $310 billion for the so-called “Paycheck Protection Program” (PPP) enacted last month as part of the $2.2 trillion CARES Act corporate bailout. The Democrats dropped their demands that the new legislation include money to aid state and local governments and additional funding for food stamps. They claimed that aid to the states and localities facing collapsing tax revenues would be forthcoming in a new bailout bill to be negotiated with the White House and congressional Republicans.
Trump reiterated at his Thursday White House briefing that he was open to discussing aid to the states as part of the next bailout bill, but he added that “a lot of people” were sympathetic to McConnell’s position, and he singled out for attack “blue” states, naming Illinois. The White House is seeking to use the fiscal crisis of state and local governments and the possibility of federal aid as leverage to force them to reopen their economies more rapidly.
The Democrats voted to top up the PPP, which exhausted its $349 billion funding in less than two weeks, even though multiple reports had emerged that the vast majority of family-owned businesses had been shut out of the loan program while scores of large publicly traded companies had received millions of dollars in forgivable loans, and the Wall Street banks assigned to handle the Small Business Administration financing had made $10 billion in fees.
In saying it would be preferable to allow states and cities to go bankrupt rather than provide them with a small fraction of the trillions doled out by the Treasury and the Federal Reserve to corporations and banks, McConnell was expressing the outlook of the corporate-financial oligarchy that runs America. Working through both of its political parties, it has responded to the deadly pandemic by opposing any diversion of resources from its private wealth to save lives and contain the virus, and instead orchestrated the unlimited transfer of taxpayer money to prop up the stock market and make itself even richer.
Now it is moving to use the crisis to lay waste to what remains of social services and benefits on which hundreds of millions of working class people depend. This too is, in all essentials, a bipartisan policy.
The Democratic-aligned Washington Post, owned by Amazon’s billionaire CEO Jeff Bezos, published an editorial Friday that chastised McConnell and called for aid to states and cities. At the same time, it lined up behind’s McConnell’s attack on pensions, denouncing the call by the Illinois Senate president, a Democrat, for $10 billion in federal aid to stave off the collapse of the state’s pension system. It declared that the federal government should not aid pension systems whose problems are “self-inflicted.”
The National Governors Association has requested $500 billion in federal aid, a fraction of the trillions injected into the financial markets, to avert a collapse of basic social services, from education and health care to sanitation and firefighting, and the destruction of hundreds of thousands of public-sector jobs, as well as the wages and pensions of state and municipal workers.
State and local officials of both parties fear a social explosion as the ruling class demands that workers return to work without any protection from infection, unemployment reaches Depression-era levels, millions of laid off workers are blocked from applying for benefits as a result of antiquated and overwhelmed state benefit systems, and outrage grows over the callous indifference of the political establishment to massive human suffering and death.
McConnell’s statement has intensified tensions between the states and the federal government. Trump has rejected calls by governors for federal money and coordination to ramp up coronavirus testing. Last month he suggested that New York State be quarantined, provoking Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo to call it a “civil war measure.” Earlier this month Trump declared that he had “absolute authority” to force the states to reopen their economies on his timeline.
Democratic governors, in particular, have denounced McConnell’s proposal. On Thursday, Cuomo called the bankruptcy suggestion “one of the saddest, really dumb comments of all time.” On Friday he denounced it as “un-American.”
Some Republicans have joined in. New York Congressman Peter King called McConnell’s remarks “shameful and indefensible,” and dubbed him the “Marie Antoinette of the Senate.”
However, none of them have pointed to the contrast between the senator’s attitude to providing money to maintain social services and pensions and his avid support for bailing out Wall Street. That is because the Democratic Party, no less than the Republicans, supports the multi-trillion-dollar bailout of the oligarchy.
Even as Democratic governors and mayors criticize Trump and the Republicans for withholding federal aid, they are preparing massive budget cuts. Not one has even proposed raising taxes on corporations and the wealthy to avoid the destruction of vital services and the impoverishment of working class families.
Moody’s Analytics has warned that states may face combined deficits of $158 billion to $203 billion through the 2021 fiscal year. More than 2,100 cities across the country expect budget deficits this year.
New Jersey’s Democratic governor, Phil Murphy, has frozen more than $1 billion in spending and cut property tax rebates for homeowners. Responding to McConnell’s bankruptcy proposal, Murphy said Wednesday that without federal support his state would not go bankrupt. Instead, he declared, “We will just cut, cut, cut and cut.”
Virginia Governor Ralph Northam, a Democrat, is seeking to freeze $2.3 billion in new spending, scuttling a program for free tuition at community colleges and canceling an increase in the state minimum wage.
Washington State Governor Jay Inslee, also a Democrat, this month vetoed budget items projected to cost $445 million over three years, including a plan to hire 370 school guidance counselors.
New York’s Democratic mayor, Bill de Blasio, announced last week that he would slash over $2 billion in city services over the next year. He plans to close public pools, reduce sanitation pickups, suspend the summer youth employment program and impose a hiring freeze.
Michigan may have a deficit as high as $7 billion over the next 18 months. Detroit’s Democratic mayor, Mike Duggan, has threatened to throw the city back into bankruptcy and bring in an emergency financial manager to impose new cuts in social services, pensions and jobs.
Whatever their policy differences, the two parties are united in ruling out any challenge to the capitalist profit system and the entrenched wealth of a parasitic ruling elite. They all agree that the full burden of the pandemic crisis must be borne by working people.
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As US passes 50,000 deaths, workers strike against back-to-work campaign
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/04/25/work-a25.html
By Shannon Jones and Andre Damon
25 April 2020
The US death toll from COVID-19 soared past the grim milestone of 50,000 Friday. Despite having just five percent of the world’s population, the United Sates now accounts for one quarter of the world’s COVID-19 deaths.
Just one month ago, the total death toll in the United States was under 1,000. Over the past two weeks, an average of approximately 2,000 people have died every day. The US death toll has doubled over ten days.
The number of people killed by the coronavirus, according to official figures, is now greater than the number of combat deaths during the American Revolutionary War, the Vietnam War and the Korean War. Within a matter of days, it will eclipse the number of US deaths in World War II.
There is no indication that the pandemic is contained in the United States. On Friday, the country had the highest number of new cases ever, at 38,000, despite constant claims that the United States is “bending the curve.”
Despite the fact that the United States lacks testing, contact tracing, and quarantine systems necessary to combat the spread of the pandemic, governors, with the encouragement of the Trump administration, are recklessly reopening businesses in states throughout the country.
Georgia allowed barbershops, gyms, nail salons and tattoo parlors to reopen yesterday. The state will allow restaurants to open for sit-down service on Monday.
Florida began to reopen its beaches last Friday, and South Carolina began to reopen businesses Monday. Oklahoma permitted some retailers to reopen Friday. Texas and Tennessee have likewise announced they would ease restrictions on business, with Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick declaring there are “more important things than living.”
None of these states meet federal guidelines for reopening, which specify two weeks of declines in the number of positive tests for the disease. But the moves by governors are consistent with a campaign waged by US President Donald Trump for businesses to reopen with a “big bang,” irrespective of the degree to which the disease is actually contained.
Workplaces have been a major source of transmission of COVID-19. A Tyson Foods plant in Iowa has sickened hundreds of workers. One hundred more have been sickened at a Tyson plant in Washington, and another hundred at a plant in Georgia.
In the United States, the Detroit-based auto companies have targeted early May to restart production, with Fiat Chrysler and Toyota telling workers to be prepared to report May 4. General Motors has asked workers to report April 27 on a voluntary basis and to prepare to restart production as early as May 4.
With more than 26 million workers made jobless over the course of the past month, companies are using the threat of firing workers, which would make them ineligible for unemployment benefits, to force them back on the line.
“US workers who refuse to return to their jobs because they are worried about catching the coronavirus should not count on getting unemployment benefits,” Reuters reported yesterday.
Labor experts noted that denying workers unemployment is a major driver of state-wide back to work orders. “I think that one of the big drivers of this decision by [Georgia governor] Tom Kemp is to get people off unemployment rolls and having the private sector keeping these people afloat,” employment lawyer James Radford told Reuters.
The Wall Street Journal, which has been in the forefront of demands that lives be sacrificed for the sake of the stock market, has demanded that businesses be indemnified from lawsuits by employees who contract COVID-19 at work.
“Plaintiff firms are also targeting employers if they reopen for business and workers or customers get sick,” the newspaper stated. “The virus can spread easily among workers in confined spaces, and infections have forced some meatpacking plants and food facilities to close… States need to grant them legal protection.”
In response to demands by employers that they return to work under unsafe conditions, workers in the United States and around the world are demanding their rights to a safe workplace.
On Friday, at least 300 workers at 50 Amazon facilities called in sick to protest the lack of safety protections at warehouses. The company has maintained operations throughout the pandemic. In recent weeks, Amazon has fired six workers who have called for better safety protections for workers.
Hundreds of graduate students at Columbia University have gone on strike to demand the suspension of rent and the remission of tuition for all students during the pandemic.
Also on Friday, 130 workers at the St. Monica Center for Rehabilitation & Healthcare nursing home in South Philadelphia voted to strike, demanding an end to the unsafe conditions that have led COVID-19 to ravage the facility.
An FCA worker at the Jefferson North Assembly Plant in Detroit told the World Socialist Web Site, “I am not opposed to going back to work, but I want to be safe when I go. I have a husband, I have children. I don’t want to bring them anything.
“You will have the tables looking like cell block B in the prison. We are still going to be elbow to elbow. Someone will be coughing in your face.
Referring to the automakers, she added, “They don’t give a damn about killing us. They think, ‘We have paid out enough money for unemployment, it’s time to get them back to work.’”
Aircraft maker Boeing restarted production this week at its US factories in what is being viewed as a test case for the resumption of industrial production. A significant number of Boeing workers boycotted the return to work this week.
Hundreds of people participated in a rolling protest Friday before the Georgia governor’s mansion, with signs including, “Stay home! It's not time to open!” and “It is too soon to open Georgia!” Over the course of the past week, nurses and other health care workers in Arizona, Virginia and other states confronted far-right demonstrators demanding an unsafe return to work.
These developments are taking place around the world.
Resistance to the restart of nonessential production is continuing in Mexico, with strikes this week by auto parts workers in Ciudad Juarez. This included hundreds of workers at plants operated by Electrical Components International who are demanding to be sent home to quarantine with full pay.
In France, teachers have filed an official strike notice, demanding that the Macron government implement a series of safety measures before the planned reopening of schools in May.
In Britain, National Health Service workers in Leeds are refusing to work shifts after not being provided adequate personal protective equipment on mental health wards. A 46-year-old Leeds mental health nurse, Khulisani Nkala, died from coronavirus last week. One nurse told the Yorkshire Post “The government are making out that wearing surgical masks is protective against contracting the virus. It’s not. I might as well just have a tissue over my face.”
From the beginning, the Trump administration, speaking for the financial oligarchy, has had only one concern regarding the COVID-19 pandemic: The preservation and expansion of stock market values and the profit margins of major corporations.
The resistance of workers to the demands by the Trump administration and employers for an unsafe return to work converge with statements from leading scientists and healthcare providers, who have made clear that it is irresponsible to reopen businesses under conditions where the disease is nowhere near contained.
The struggle to defend the lives and livelihoods of workers and the population as a whole is inseparable from the struggle against the capitalist system and the socialist transformation of society.
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