Tuesday, June 2, 2020
“The system is suffocating the life out of the working class”
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/06/01/work-j01.html
Autoworkers denounce police murder of George Floyd, express support for protesters
By our reporters
1 June 2020
Autoworkers in Detroit, Michigan and Kokomo, Indiana denounced the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis and expressed support for the tens of thousands of young people of all races who were protesting against police violence across the country. The workers rejected efforts to brand the protesters as “violent” and said the real violence was being perpetrated by police and National Guard troops dispatched by state and local officials and incited by President Trump.
“It’s very upsetting to me that the mainstream media focuses on race, when it is very clear that the demonstrators are black, white, multiracial,” said a worker at Fiat Chrysler’s Sterling Heights Assembly Plant in suburban Detroit. “I was moved to see the video of the Amish people protesting the murder of George Floyd. The media is also focusing on the violence, much of which is caused by police provocateurs and plants. Sure, there are some ordinary people looting, too, but there is a lot be angry about,” he said.
“To see a man suffocated in broad daylight and knowing the video you’re watching was taken by a 17-year-old girl says a lot about America,” he continued. “To give a panoramic view of the situation, as an autoworker I feel like we all have a knee on our necks because we are forced to return to work in the middle of the pandemic. I’m working 10 hours a day, wearing a mask that makes me dizzy. I’m forced to choose between my health and a paycheck. We are treated like cattle. I feel paranoid. Who might have the virus? Is the air conditioning circulating the virus? There were three more confirmed COVID cases at the plant before we all returned. At least four SHAP workers have already died.”
The police murder of Floyd, the worker said, was part of a whole series of measures taken by the Trump administration and the government to deprive workers of their basic rights, including the right to live. “The government and the corporations are oblivious to the safety and lives of workers. The back-to-work order puts profits over life. When I see what has happened to the meatpackers, that to me is the same thing as a cop pressing his knee on George Floyd. The system is suffocating the life out of the working class.
“I feel the same way when I see children being taken from their families. There are immigrants in detention centers, and children covered with aluminum blankets. The way the entire pandemic is being handled is also criminal,” he said.
“It’s like we’re in a Third World country. And what do the Oprah Winfreys and Tyler Perrys have to say? They’re very wealthy, and they say, ‘Calm down.’ It’s not about race, it’s class. I can see why it is that the ruling class sees a threat if the working class in its entirety, globally is united. The ruling class does not want the merging of the working class.”
An autoworker at Fiat Chrysler's Kokomo Transmission plant also spoke in support of the protests and the need for workers to organize a fight for safe working conditions. "I believe George Floyd's murder has ignited something. The protests are happening all over the world now. His name will be remembered in history. Enough is enough. I can't imagine how his family feels. The police have been doing this to people of every skin color. Now it is on video, and we're able to see it. In every situation, police escalate to violence, and nothing ever happens to these cops. People are so sick and tired of the government lying to them.
“Politicians are sharing false information about the coronavirus in order to reopen states. People are not idiots, like the government seems to think we are.
"We need to fight to show the public the conditions in these plants. Neither of the plants I worked at had hot water, and we’d run out of gloves all the time. They made us use recycled gloves, which were sent off somewhere when we were done with them to be cleaned, but they would come back in bad condition. One woman at Chrysler cut herself because a piece of metal
was in the gloves. There is no way that you're ever six feet away from anyone on those lines. You could reach out and touch someone on the sub-assembly line, for example.
"When someone goes into the plants when the virus is going around, that person could bring it home to their loved ones. Chrysler has an abundance of transmissions in their warehouses, so I don't understand the point of putting people in the plants where they risk their lives and their families' lives. They have enough stored up for us not to need to work for at least three months."
On the question of Democratic and Republican politicians across the US deploying the National Guard against protesters, she responded, "Why didn't these governors call the National Guard in when white supremacists with guns protested at the state capitols? Why
were they allowed to act violently and maliciously, but they're going to send the National Guard to shoot protesters who are against violence? If they send troops, they're going to shoot them. Isn't violence the only thing the American government has shown the world? I'm tired of the Democrats and Republicans.”
She continued, "What the union does is criminal. The UAW has divided workers in the
Plants. They take money from us, they do nothing with it but pocket it. Why aren't union safety reps being held accountable? They're spending thousands of dollars to send them to
classes to learn safety and health. And the medical unit at Chrysler is a joke. It's a band-aid clinic, which is just there so OSHA doesn't come in."
The worker responded to the call for workers to build rank-and-file committees to oversee safety and health in the plants and for the working class to advance its own answer to social inequality, police violence and other attacks on democratic and social rights. "It needs to be done. We need to organize to fight and stop what's going on. The plants have always been places where people got hurt and died. People should be able to go to work and not be harassed for speaking out when they see that things are not safe. The economy is going in two ways: either you're rich or you're poor. The people protesting are fighting for humanity, fighting for survival, for us to be one and not be defined by gender or race."
Another SHAP worker added, “The police are riling things up, coming in full blast, guns blazing and firing tear gas at protesters. On social media you can see police moles breaking windows and stirring up things. The police are even firing rubber bullets at reporters, and a whole camera team got arrested in Minneapolis.
“I’ve known about the way the police operate since Rodney King in LA. They do what they want, and feel they can get away with it. Usually after beating or killing someone, they get put on administrative leave and get away with it. But what the cop did to Floyd was caught on video, and everybody is coming together, black and white, to demand justice.
“People are getting together, exchanging numbers, using social media and groups are being created to speak out more than ever. There were protests in England and even in Iran. This is very vast. What the police are doing now, trying to put down a lot of people, is even larger than a single murder. It sheds light on the whole imbalance in society. The working class has to come together, that would be the most powerful way to fight police killings, unemployment and all the issues workers face.”
Autoworkers in Detroit, Michigan and Kokomo, Indiana denounced the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis and expressed support for the tens of thousands of young people of all races who were protesting against police violence across the country. The workers rejected efforts to brand the protesters as “violent” and said the real violence was being perpetrated by police and National Guard troops dispatched by state and local officials and incited by President Trump.
“It’s very upsetting to me that the mainstream media focuses on race, when it is very clear that the demonstrators are black, white, multiracial,” said a worker at Fiat Chrysler’s Sterling Heights Assembly Plant in suburban Detroit. “I was moved to see the video of the Amish people protesting the murder of George Floyd. The media is also focusing on the violence, much of which is caused by police provocateurs and plants. Sure, there are some ordinary people looting, too, but there is a lot be angry about,” he said.
“To see a man suffocated in broad daylight and knowing the video you’re watching was taken by a 17-year-old girl says a lot about America,” he continued. “To give a panoramic view of the situation, as an autoworker I feel like we all have a knee on our necks because we are forced to return to work in the middle of the pandemic. I’m working 10 hours a day, wearing a mask that makes me dizzy. I’m forced to choose between my health and a paycheck. We are treated like cattle. I feel paranoid. Who might have the virus? Is the air conditioning circulating the virus? There were three more confirmed COVID cases at the plant before we all returned. At least four SHAP workers have already died.”
The police murder of Floyd, the worker said, was part of a whole series of measures taken by the Trump administration and the government to deprive workers of their basic rights, including the right to live. “The government and the corporations are oblivious to the safety and lives of workers. The back-to-work order puts profits over life. When I see what has happened to the meatpackers, that to me is the same thing as a cop pressing his knee on George Floyd. The system is suffocating the life out of the working class.
“I feel the same way when I see children being taken from their families. There are immigrants in detention centers, and children covered with aluminum blankets. The way the entire pandemic is being handled is also criminal,” he said.
“It’s like we’re in a Third World country. And what do the Oprah Winfreys and Tyler Perrys have to say? They’re very wealthy, and they say, ‘Calm down.’ It’s not about race, it’s class. I can see why it is that the ruling class sees a threat if the working class in its entirety, globally is united. The ruling class does not want the merging of the working class.”
An autoworker at Fiat Chrysler's Kokomo Transmission plant also spoke in support of the protests and the need for workers to organize a fight for safe working conditions. "I believe George Floyd's murder has ignited something. The protests are happening all over the world now. His name will be remembered in history. Enough is enough. I can't imagine how his family feels. The police have been doing this to people of every skin color. Now it is on video, and we're able to see it. In every situation, police escalate to violence, and nothing ever happens to these cops. People are so sick and tired of the government lying to them.
“Politicians are sharing false information about the coronavirus in order to reopen states. People are not idiots, like the government seems to think we are.
"We need to fight to show the public the conditions in these plants. Neither of the plants I worked at had hot water, and we’d run out of gloves all the time. They made us use recycled gloves, which were sent off somewhere when we were done with them to be cleaned, but they would come back in bad condition. One woman at Chrysler cut herself because a piece of metal
was in the gloves. There is no way that you're ever six feet away from anyone on those lines. You could reach out and touch someone on the sub-assembly line, for example.
"When someone goes into the plants when the virus is going around, that person could bring it home to their loved ones. Chrysler has an abundance of transmissions in their warehouses, so I don't understand the point of putting people in the plants where they risk their lives and their families' lives. They have enough stored up for us not to need to work for at least three months."
On the question of Democratic and Republican politicians across the US deploying the National Guard against protesters, she responded, "Why didn't these governors call the National Guard in when white supremacists with guns protested at the state capitols? Why
were they allowed to act violently and maliciously, but they're going to send the National Guard to shoot protesters who are against violence? If they send troops, they're going to shoot them. Isn't violence the only thing the American government has shown the world? I'm tired of the Democrats and Republicans.”
She continued, "What the union does is criminal. The UAW has divided workers in the
Plants. They take money from us, they do nothing with it but pocket it. Why aren't union safety reps being held accountable? They're spending thousands of dollars to send them to
classes to learn safety and health. And the medical unit at Chrysler is a joke. It's a band-aid clinic, which is just there so OSHA doesn't come in."
The worker responded to the call for workers to build rank-and-file committees to oversee safety and health in the plants and for the working class to advance its own answer to social inequality, police violence and other attacks on democratic and social rights. "It needs to be done. We need to organize to fight and stop what's going on. The plants have always been places where people got hurt and died. People should be able to go to work and not be harassed for speaking out when they see that things are not safe. The economy is going in two ways: either you're rich or you're poor. The people protesting are fighting for humanity, fighting for survival, for us to be one and not be defined by gender or race."
Another SHAP worker added, “The police are riling things up, coming in full blast, guns blazing and firing tear gas at protesters. On social media you can see police moles breaking windows and stirring up things. The police are even firing rubber bullets at reporters, and a whole camera team got arrested in Minneapolis.
“I’ve known about the way the police operate since Rodney King in LA. They do what they want, and feel they can get away with it. Usually after beating or killing someone, they get put on administrative leave and get away with it. But what the cop did to Floyd was caught on video, and everybody is coming together, black and white, to demand justice.
“People are getting together, exchanging numbers, using social media and groups are being created to speak out more than ever. There were protests in England and even in Iran. This is very vast. What the police are doing now, trying to put down a lot of people, is even larger than a single murder. It sheds light on the whole imbalance in society. The working class has to come together, that would be the most powerful way to fight police killings, unemployment and all the issues workers face.”
New COVID-19 infections worldwide hit record levels
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/06/01/coro-j01.html
By Patrick Martin
1 June 2020
June is the fifth month of the global COVID-19 pandemic. The World Health Organization declared the coronavirus a Public Health Emergency of International Concern on January 30.
Over the weekend, the public health and economic disaster continued to deepen, as new infections worldwide hit record levels, approximately 125,000 per day on May 29 and May 30, according to WorldoMeter.
Brazil passed a grim milestone, with 500,000 cases, second in the world to the United States, while approaching 30,000 deaths. Of the 125,000 new cases, Brazil accounted for the most, more than 30,000, and the US ranked second, at nearly 25,000. Other countries contributing to the surge were Russia, India, Peru, Chile and Mexico, with a combined total of more than 30,000. The same seven countries accounted for three quarters of the nearly 4,100 deaths recorded for May 30.
Officially, the first American death from COVID-19 came on February 28 in the Seattle, Washington area. In the 93 days that have passed since then, more than 106,000 people have died of coronavirus in the United States, while the number infected has skyrocketed from a handful to more than 1.8 million people. Even these figures are likely gross underestimates of the real impact of the pandemic.
The United States, the richest country in the world, with vast medical and scientific resources, has lost far more of its people to the coronavirus than any other nation because of the greed, callousness and sheer incompetence of its ruling elite. In the eyes of working people, both within the US and around the world, this is a political and social disgrace from which American capitalism will never recover.
June 1 marks two weeks since the auto industry and other major US employers fully resumed operations at factories, warehouses and offices. These facilities are likely to become new hotspots for the pandemic, following in the footsteps of meatpacking plants, which were never closed down and saw infection rates of well over 50 percent of the workers in some cases.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention projects that between 10,000 and 30,000 more Americans will die from the coronavirus over the next three weeks, an estimate that does not take into account the likely acceleration of community spread because of the large-scale reopening of factories and workplaces, as well as stores, churches and other potential points of transmission of the virus.
There are already disturbing reports, both anecdotal and statistical, of an upsurge of the pandemic in those states that first began reopening, or which never imposed any sort of lockdown. According to the site covidexitstrategy.org, which uses fairly conservative estimates based on CDC guidelines, 22 states, mainly in the South and the Mountain West, show increasing levels of COVID-19.
The 14-day moving average for new coronavirus infections is up 60 percent in Alabama, 40 percent in Arkansas, 15 percent in Florida, 38 percent in South Carolina, 40 percent in North Carolina, 38 percent in Missouri and an astonishing 139 percent in West Virginia (more than doubling in two weeks from a previously low level).
Several of these states were the scenes of notorious violations of social distancing last month, including a pool party in Arkansas attended by dozens of people, and the Lake of the Ozarks resort in southern Missouri, where thousands gathered on the Memorial Day weekend. New COVID-19 cases have been reported in connection with both events.
The most rapid increase in a Midwest state was in Wisconsin. Again, this is associated with the collapse of social distancing after the state Supreme Court overruled lockdown orders issued by the governor, leading to widely publicized scenes of tightly packed crowds gathered in bars and restaurants. The court ruling was issued May 13. Just over two weeks later, COVID-19 cases in the state are up 47 percent.
According to one report, ICU beds are filling up in Minneapolis-St. Paul; Omaha, Nebraska and the state of Rhode Island, a signal of impending crisis. Leavitt Partners, led by former Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt, projected that Hennepin and Ramsey counties, which include Minneapolis and St. Paul, respectively, will have a shortage of dozens of ICU beds in the next three weeks. Ramsey County could have a shortage of overall hospital beds as well. Minnesota saw its largest one-day rise in coronavirus-related ICU bed hospitalizations with 260 on Wednesday.
But that same day, as protests mounted in Minneapolis over the police murder of George Floyd, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz signed an executive order allowing salons and barbershops to reopen and bars and restaurants to begin outdoor dining. State Health Commissioner Jan Malcolm said that the state would not hit its peak coronavirus infection level until late June or July.
The Washington Post reported Sunday: “Two to four weeks after many states began lifting restrictions on restaurants, bars and larger gatherings, cases are rising in areas that had previously dodged the worst of the virus’s impact. Arizona, Mississippi, South Carolina, Utah and Wisconsin all set record highs for new cases reported Friday… In many areas, large gatherings are cited as the center of major outbreaks.”
While some of the previously hardest-hit states have begun to see a decrease in their 14-day moving average, including New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts and Michigan, these are decreases from appalling highs. Even with the “improvement,” these states still account for half of total US deaths and at least a quarter of new deaths.
In California, where Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom has begun the systematic relaxation of the lockdown, hotspots have begun to flare outside of Los Angeles, which has been the center of infection so far. In Alameda County, which includes the city of Oakland, new cases jumped by 30 percent last week, with 107 new cases on Thursday, the most on a single day since the pandemic began.
In practice, every state governor, Democratic or Republican, is carrying out the same policy as the Trump administration and bourgeois governments throughout the world: forcing millions of workers back to work to resume the process of profit and wealth accumulation for the capitalist class, while deliberately encouraging the breakdown of social distancing in order to spread the infection as widely as possible.
The policy of “herd immunity” has no scientific or public health content whatsoever. It is a label that disguises a social policy whose deliberate purpose is to dispose of as much of the most vulnerable population as possible—the elderly, the sick, the immune-compromised, all those who do not produce surplus value and profit for the financial aristocracy.
As the World Socialist Web Site and the Socialist Equality Party have insisted, fighting the pandemic requires the independent mobilization of the working class, advancing a socialist program irreconcilably opposed to the economic interests of the capitalist class and the capitalist system as a whole. Millions of lives are at stake. They can be defended only through an open struggle to end the corporate-financial dictatorship over social policy and redeploy economic resources on the basis of social need.
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