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
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