Friday, July 3, 2020
“The company is taking risks with the lives of 5,000 workers”
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/07/02/lead-j02.html
By Jerry White
2 July 2020
With COVID-19 infections and deaths surging across the United States, workers in auto, meatpacking and other industries are demanding protection from the deadly disease and the release of information about its spread in factories and workplaces.
Last week, thousands of workers at two Detroit-area Fiat Chrysler (FCA) assembly plants downed their tools and halted production after several workers became ill and were forced to leave work. Anger erupted after FCA management and the United Auto Workers union refused to release any information about the potential COVID-19 cases.
Afterwards, workers at the two assembly plants—Jefferson North and Sterling Heights—set up rank-and-file safety committees, independent of the UAW, whose demands included: “Workers must be immediately notified of any cases of COVID-19 and what areas were affected. This information cannot be kept secret from workers.”
GM Arlington plant (Source: GM Authority)With infections and deaths spiking this week in the Dallas-Ft. Worth, Texas area, workers at the General Motors Arlington Assembly Plant called for the shutting down of the sprawling plant, which employs nearly 5,000 workers on three shifts. The demands are so widespread that local union officials felt compelled to call on GM to close the plant “until the curve is flattened.”
Tarrant County, where the GM plant is located, has confirmed a total of 12,344 COVID-19 cases and 228 deaths. On Tuesday, county officials reported a single-day high of 605 new cases and three more deaths, including two Arlington residents. The number of hospitalizations has reached all-time highs and the county’s intensive care units—currently at 75 percent of capacity—could reach their limit in less than three weeks, public health experts warn.
Acknowledging that “No one wants to be here,” local union officials nevertheless bowed to GM, saying lamely that “the decisions are made above us, so we must all try to stay safe for our families inside and outside of GM.”
GM rejected the appeal, making it clear there would be no slowdown in the production of its highly profitable Chevrolet Tahoe, GMC Yukon and Cadillac Escalade large sport-utility vehicles. “There’s no need to interrupt production,” GM spokesman Jim Cain said, claiming that there were “multiple layers of protection in the plant to prevent a spread of the virus.”
A spokesman for the national union leadership in Detroit said it was up to corporate management to decide whether or not to close the plant.
“The virus is spreading throughout Texas and there have been cases at our plant,” Jennifer, a veteran worker at the plant, told the World Socialist Web Site. “Every day we are taking risks with the lives of 5,000 workers and their families. We need to shut this plant down, but GM and the union say a lot of these trucks have already been ordered so we have to keep up production, no matter how many lives are lost. We’re already working six days a week and they want to push it to seven.
“The corporation and the UAW are sharing the same bread together, and we’re the ones who are getting hurt. I’d like to get my remaining years in and retire, if I live that long.”
Workers in Arlington plant (Source: GM Media)James, a worker with five years at the plant, added, “We know there are cases, but we’re not getting any information about who, where and when. Management and the union claim there are privacy laws that prevent them from giving us details. This act like this is above Top Secret and God will strike us down if we know anything.
“There are some precautions in the plant, like masks and temperature checks, but nobody knows whether we are really safe. You can be asymptomatic and still spread it. Everybody from the government on down is lying to us.
“Right now, we’re only at half production. What is going to happen when we ramp up to full production after the July 4 weekend? After the holiday, you are going to have more cases of the virus with seven-day production, and we are going to see a spike of cases and other people falling out from lack of oxygen because they are wearing masks in the heat.
“Should we shut this plant down? Absolutely. All the big corporations care about is how can they squeeze more out of us to pay their shareholders and executives. As for the politicians, they come from big business, go into government and look after big business, and then when they leave office, they go back to big business. All the arguing between Trump and the Democrats is nothing more than a family feud.
“We never hear about it, but it doesn’t surprise me that the Chrysler workers in Detroit and the Mexican workers are striking to protect themselves from the pandemic. We’re not slaves and we’re not going to put up with this.”
These sentiments are shared by autoworkers and other workers across the country and around the world. A Fiat Chrysler worker at the company’s Tipton Transmission plant just outside of Kokomo, Indiana told the WSWS, “Greed means more than human life. Positive cases are blowing up everywhere. Somebody needs to get this information out there because nobody should be going back now. They think they can treat workers like farm animals.”
It is the official policy of many corporations and local officials to conceal information about cases of infection in order to prevent disruptions to the reckless back-to-work campaign spearheaded by President Trump and supported by state and local Democrats and Republicans.
The giant online retailer and logistics company Amazon is one of those companies, with its top officials claiming that the collection of such information, let alone its release, is “not particularly helpful.” Based on her review of reported cases, former Amazon worker Jana Jumpp estimates that at least 1,600 workers have been infected and 10 have died.
Bloomberg News recently wrote that Amazon “has a sophisticated tracking regime that occurs out of public view,” contradicting the company’s public claims that it does not collect data on infections and deaths. The tracking system, according to Bloomberg, includes where sick employees live, whether they’re apartment-dwellers or live in a freestanding house, what shifts they typically work and what tasks they perform inside the warehouses.
According to an internal memo reviewed by Bloomberg, a recent outbreak of COVID-19 cases at Amazon’s warehouse in Shakopee, Minnesota, near Minneapolis, exceeded by at least four times the infection rate of surrounding communities. This directly contradicted statements on CBS News’ “60 Minutes” program by Dave Clark, Amazon’s senior vice president for worldwide operations, that cases were “popping up at roughly a rate generally just under what the actual community infection rates are.”
As of mid-May, Amazon was aware of 45 cases at its MSP1 facility in Shakopee, enough for an infection rate of 1.7 percent, according to the memo. That was higher than the rate for the rural county that surrounds the warehouse, and roughly four times higher than any county in the nearby Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area.
According to Bloomberg, the internal memo “acknowledges workers’ appetite for more transparency, saying that two-thirds of safety-related comments on white boards set up inside the facility called for more information about infections.” Amazon addressed the comments with notices posted to the same boards and verbal communications with workers, the authors wrote. At other warehouses, such communications have primarily consisted of reassurances about the adequacy of Amazon’s cleaning protocols.
Concealing the spread of infections is also the modus operandi of the meatpacking industry and many state and local governments in areas where the giant corporations dominate. More than 36,000 meat processing and farm workers have tested positive and at least 116 have died, according to the Food and Environment Reporting Network, which acknowledges that the real figure is likely higher.
Citing the outbreak of cases at a Case Farms poultry processing plant in North Carolina, the Guardian newspaper reported that on June 8, Burke County health officials reported 136 new COVID-19 cases, a 25 percent increase in its total caseload, “yet neither the company, county officials nor the North Carolina department of health and human services would confirm whether those cases were connected to Case Farms.”
As of last week, there were 2,772 confirmed cases of infections in 28 meat processing plant “clusters” around the state, the North Carolina Department of Health acknowledged, without specifying further. As for Burke County, local spokeswoman Lisa Moore told the newspaper, “We know where [the cases] are, but we are not a county that can divulge every place where they are.”
In Iowa, Dickson Industries, a company that has long made garments for meatpacking workers, has donated 500 body bags to the state government as the state prepares for a spike that will likely overwhelm local hospitals. The Iowa Department of Public Health has not released data on the number of meatpacking workers who have died from COVID-19.
The inequality pandemic: How American capitalism puts profits over lives
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/07/02/pers-j02.html
2 July 2020
The United States is in the midst of a devastating resurgence of the COVID-19 pandemic. On Tuesday, a record 50,701 people tested positive for the coronavirus, the highest daily total ever. There have been seven consecutive days in which the US had more than 40,000 new cases, and daily cases this week are twice as high as they were in the beginning of this month.
The death toll now stands at 130,000. This is approximately equal to the combined total of US combat fatalities in World War I, the Vietnam War and the Korean War. With the disease spreading at its present pace, the United States could well reach 100,000 daily cases by the end of this month. By the end of summer, a quarter million people could well be dead.
In the innumerable hours of television commentary and in the countless newspaper columns that have been devoted to the pandemic, there has been no examination of the economic interests that underlie this disaster.
Kensington Capital Acquisition Corp. executives ring the NYSE closing bell on June 26, 2020. (New York Stock Exchange via AP Images)The truth is that the resurgence of the pandemic is the outcome of a conscious policy, led by the Trump administration but supported by the entire political and media establishment, of subordinating society’s needs to the economic interests of the financial oligarchy.
Over the past three months, more than 115,000 Americans have died from COVID-19 and 45.5 million have become unemployed amid an unprecedented medical, social and economic disaster.
But the story has been very different for the stock market and the American financial oligarchy. In the midst of what the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development calls the worst peacetime economic crisis in a century, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has staged its largest rally in three decades.
The Dow surged 18 percent in the second quarter of this year, its biggest quarterly gain since 1987. The Nasdaq grew even faster, rising 30.6 percent and leaving the index up by 12 percent since the beginning of the year.
The massive growth in stock values has led to an expansion in the wealth of America’s financial oligarchy. Since March 18, the wealth of US billionaires has increased by 20 percent, or $484 billion, according to the Institute for Policy Studies. Between March 18 and June 17, the total net worth of the 640-plus US billionaires jumped from $2.948 trillion to $3.531 trillion.
As a result of the stock market rally, the wealth of the five richest men in America—Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Warren Buffett and Larry Ellison—grew by a total of $101.7 billion, or 26 percent.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk, the world’ highest paid CEO, has had his personal fortune double over the course of the past year.
This week, Tesla overtook Toyota to become the world’s most valuable carmaker by market value. Tesla’s shares have increased five-fold over the past 12 months, growing from $230 to $1,100 this week.
Commenting on this development, the Financial Times wrote:
If the company breaks even in the quarter to June, it will be the first time the business has been in the black for four straight quarters.
While Toyota’s shares trade on a multiple that values the business at 16 times its earnings, Tesla’s shares trade on a multiple of almost 220 times the company’s profits, far above any other auto business and close to double the multiples seen by tech giants such as Amazon.
Such obscene stock valuations are the result of a massive government intervention in financial markets, which have pushed share prices to astronomical heights even as the real economy collapses.
Starting with the first outbreak of COVID-19, every action taken by the US government was aimed at protecting and expanding the wealth of the financial oligarchy. In January and February, as public health experts both inside and outside the government tried to sound the alarm, the Trump administration downplayed the dangers posed by the pandemic, while the media simply ignored it.
In March, when the inundation of hospitals made it impossible to simply ignore the pandemic, the ruling class responded not with an emergency surge of public health spending, but with a massive bailout of the financial oligarchy.
The Federal Reserve responded to the economic crisis triggered by the pandemic with approximately $4 trillion in emergency lending to banks and major financial institutions, backed by the near-unanimous action of Congress in passing the so-called CARES Act.
As an article in Foreign Affairs noted: “During March and the first half of April, the Fed pumped more than $2 trillion into the economy, an intervention almost twice as vigorous as it delivered in the six weeks after the fall of Lehman Brothers. Meanwhile, market economists project that the central bank will buy more than $5 trillion of additional debt by the end of 2021, dwarfing its combined purchases from 2008 to 2015.”
As another article in the same issue noted: “This level of spending has no precedent in history—not even close. Not in war. Not in peacetime. Not ever.”
Once the bailout of Wall Street was secured, the turn of the entire political and media establishment was to the demand for a return to work. The declaration of New York Times’ columnist Thomas Friedman—that the “cure” of closing businesses to prevent the spread of COVID-19 was “worse than the disease”—became government policy, spearheaded by Trump and implemented by Democrats and Republicans throughout the country.
All substantive measures to contain the pandemic have been abandoned, with workers in every industry, in every state, compelled to either return to work in workplaces that are hotbeds for the disease or forego unemployment benefits.
During the period of restricted economic activity, nothing was done to build up health care infrastructure. Federal funding for testing and contact tracing, the only measures known to contain the pandemic, stands at less than one percent of total federal spending on the pandemic response. And the results show it. Nationwide, there are just 28,000 contact tracers, less than one-tenth of the number called for by former Centers for Disease Control Director Tom Frieden.
The testing situation is even worse. According to one survey conducted by National Public Radio and Harvard, the country needs to have twice its current testing capacity just to keep the pandemic at bay, and eight times more testing capacity to suppress and eradicate the disease.
Corporations have been allowed to hide COVID-19 outbreaks from workers and federal health officials alike, while the Occupational Safety and Health Administration has issued just a single workplace citation related to COVID-19, despite receiving thousands of complaints.
To make matters worse, in just three weeks, the $600 weekly federal unemployment supplement passed as part of the CARES Act is set to expire, throwing tens of millions of unemployed workers into poverty overnight.
In recent weeks, the media has been endlessly preoccupied with promoting racial divisions. While the Trump administration, with the support for the Democrats, has focused on blaming China, the Democrats are escalating their militarist rhetoric against Russia.
In the real world, however, social policy is determined by class interests. The failure of the United States to contain COVID-19 is the direct result of the fact that it is ruled by a financial oligarchy to whose interests all policy is subordinated.
While the first six months of the year have been dominated by the policies of the ruling class and the unmitigated spread of the pandemic, there are many signs that the working class is beginning to respond to the crisis with its own demands.
Fiat Chrysler workers in Detroit have carried out work stoppages and formed rank-and-file safety committees to defend their interests, while hundreds of nurses in Riverside, California have gone on strike. They are joined by Amazon workers in Germany demanding safe workplaces, nurses in Zimbabwe demanding a living wage, and workers in Turkey opposing the Erdogan government’s attack on unemployment benefits.
The fight against the pandemic must be waged not only on the medical front, but on the political front as well. The mounting global working class struggles must be unified and armed with the political program of reorganizing society on a socialist basis.
Andre Damon
Thursday, July 2, 2020
In the U.S., the Second Wave Is Already Here
While Europe and Asia track down three-digit infection spikes at worst, the U.S. is dealing with over 40,000 a day.
By John Feffer, July 1, 2020
https://fpif.org/in-the-u-s-the-second-wave-is-already-here/
If the United States had quick-thinking and efficient leadership, the pandemic would have infected about 100,000 people and killed only a couple thousand. That’s the experience of South Korea, times seven to account for the difference in population.
If the United States had overwhelmed but reasonably sensible leadership, the coronavirus pandemic would have racked up somewhere near a million infections at this point and killed about 36,000 people. That’s what would have happened here if we’d had a German-style response.
Instead, as of the beginning of July, the infection rate in the United States is a world-leading 2.6 million and the death toll has topped 126,000. There are countries with worse death rates per million people, but with a couple exceptions they’re either small (like Belgium) or presided over by leaders (like Boris Johnson in the UK) as idiotic as ours.
That is tragic enough. But now comes Act Two.
If the United States had practically any administrative team other than the Trump-Pence clown show, it would have at least flattened the curve at this point, no matter how many infections and deaths had occurred during the first wave of the outbreak. Americans would then be cautiously enjoying their summers, bracing for a second wave of infections that most epidemiologists have predicted for the fall.
Instead, while Europe and much of Asia are tracking down and containing small pockets of infection that reach at most into three digits, the United States is dealing with its highest daily number of infections yet — over 40,000 a day.
Remember those early statistics about how many more tests South Korea was conducting per day compared to what the United States was doing in a week? We are currently suffering the consequences of that disparity. Every day, the United States is now adding three times the number of infections that South Korea has had during its entire outbreak.
The Trump administration’s response to the threat of a second wave is: why wait?
American Lunacy
Donald Trump doesn’t like masks. He has refused to wear them. He has ignored the advice of health officials, members of his administration, and his congressional enablers. Trump is such an outlier on the mask issue that even Dick Cheney has consented to being photographed wearing facial protection.
Astonishingly, the president said, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, that some people are wearing masks “to signal disapproval of him.” To the extent that people associate Trump with Death itself or are wearing masks so that they can live long enough to vote the Grim Reaper out of office, the president is right. The pandemic in America has indeed become all about Trump: his appalling ineptitude and sociopathic cruelty.
Masks are just the tip of the iceberg toward which the president is steering Titanic America. Trump was warned multiple times that an indoor campaign rally in the middle of a pandemic was not a good idea. A group of Tulsa citizens and businesses launched a legal effort to stop the event from happening on the grounds that it would only contribute to the ongoing spike in infections. The Oklahoma Supreme Court put the kibosh on the legal challenge.
Trump not only went ahead with the rally last month, he seemed to do everything possible to ensure that it would be a public health hazard. His advance team had eight people who tested positive with the disease. His organizers removed stickers from seats that were designed to maintain a modicum of distance between audience members. In the end, the 6,000 people who showed up were all crowded together like sardine superspreaders. Most followed their leader by not wearing masks.
Tulsa subsequently experienced a new uptick in COVID-19 cases, though it’s not clear how many can be traced back to the rally. That’s because Oklahoma has an inadequate contact tracing system.
Not content to help boost the numbers for the coronavirus in Oklahoma, Trump then went on to Arizona, where he stopped at a megachurch for a rally with student supporters. Such churches have been the epicenters of new outbreaks in Oregon, West Virginia, and Texas. At the Arizona event, neither Trump nor many of his young worshippers wore masks. Trump told them several times that the United States was “at the end of the pandemic.”
Trump has done just about everything to distract Americans from the second wave of infections engulfing us. He has deployed racism (“kung flu”) to defect responsibility. He has studiously avoided the topic of the pandemic. He has claimed that the numbers are up because of more testing (wrong).
Even the Trump administration doesn’t have Trump’s back on this one. The vice president now wears a mask and urges others to do so as well. The health and human services secretary, Alex Azar, is not reassuring in the least: “The window is closing, we have to act, and people as individuals have to act responsibility,” he said recently. “We need to social distance, we need to wear our face coverings where we can’t social distance, particularly in these hot zones.”
Meanwhile, many governors are demonstrating that idiocy is not the monopoly of the president.
Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, refuses to mandate the use of masks. Houston’s spike in COVID-19 hospitalizations has maxed out the capacity of the intensive care units at city hospitals. Republican Governor Greg Abbott’s response? He told the hospitals to stop reporting that particular statistic because it was generating negative headlines. Peekaboo: if we close our eyes, the pandemic will magically be over.
Of course, if people didn’t listen to Trump or their death-defying governors and simply stayed home, they could collectively flatten the curve. But no, many Americans have flocked to beaches, bars, churches, and dance clubs. They’ve been egged on by cheerleaders for a fast economic recovery who are either genuinely concerned about unemployment and widespread bankruptcies or fear that Trump can’t win reelection without a rapid rebound.
In some cases, the cheerleaders themselves have become victims of their own heedlessness. The head of Reopen Maryland, Tim Walters, came down with the coronavirus last week. It was not, alas, a Saul-on-the-way-to-Damascus moment: he hasn’t changed his views on reopening, wearing masks, or sharing contact information with government tracers.
Instead of getting the message, too many people are going after the messengers. The Washington Post reports that attacks on public health officials who counsel safe behavior have been particularly intense in Ohio, California, Georgia, and Pennsylvania. In Colorado, according to the executive director of the Colrado Association of Local Public Health Officials, “80 percent of members had reported being threatened and more than that were at risk of termination or lost funding.”
Keep Out Americans
It is any wonder that the European Union, when contemplating the opening of borders to travelers and tourists, decided to continue to ban Americans?
This week, Europe will welcome visitors from around the world. With a few exceptions, those will not be American visitors. Who gets in instead? Rwandans, Tunisians, Uruguayans, Serbians, Moroccans, Japanese, South Koreans. Oh, and just in case you think there’s a North American bias, Canadians are welcome as well. And if China lifts its ban on European visitors, then Chinese will soon be taking their summer holidays in Paris and Rome.
If America manages to get this second wave of infections under control, Europe will reconsider. But why should Europe reconsider?
I’m reminded of those pictures of people you see posted at convenience stores — shoplifters, scam artists, stolen credit card users. Those photos are a reminder to the scofflaws not to return to the scene of the crime. Europe has posted an American flag at the passport control booths at its airports. Americans are the world’s scofflaws.
Too many Americans have proven themselves to be entirely irresponsible when it comes to the health of the community. That goes for too many public officials as well, from mayors to governors to the president himself.
So, it makes sense for the world to keep its distance, not just six feet but an entire ocean if possible. The entire country should be quarantined until we stop electing public health risks to office and, as a citizenry, start acting like adults instead of kindergartners who feel compelled to eat every marshmallow in sight rather than postpone gratification until it’s safe to indulge.
It’s not just America, of course. The virus continues to rage in Brazil, India, and South Africa. The head of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, points out that “although many countries have made some progress, globally, the pandemic is actually speeding up. We all want this to be over. We all want to get on with our lives, but the hard reality is that this is not even close to being over.”
In the good old days, like four years ago, the United States for all its flaws would have been at the forefront of addressing this public health emergency.
Let’s face it: we are now the public health emergency.
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