Thursday, July 9, 2020
Jeffrey Epstein’s confidante Ghislaine Maxwell relocated to federal jail in New York City
[Wonder if her guards are sleepy?]
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/07/08/maxw-j08.html
By Kevin Reed
8 July 2020
Ghislaine Maxwell, the longtime partner of convicted sex offender and wealthy New Yorker Jeffrey Epstein, has been relocated to a federal jail in Brooklyn where she will appear via remote video before a Manhattan judge on July 14.
Federal Bureau of Prison officials disclosed on Monday that Maxwell was transferred from Merrimack County Jail in New Hampshire to the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn but did not say on what day she was relocated. Prosecutors have indicated that Maxwell is a flight risk and any request for bail will be denied.
On July 2, US Department of Justice officials announced that Maxwell had been arrested and charged on four counts of enticing minors to engage in illegal sexual activity and two counts of perjury, in connection with her role in grooming girls as young as 14 for abuse by Epstein and to be trafficked in his international sex ring during the 1990s.
Last year, Jeffrey Epstein was awaiting trial on multiple counts of sex trafficking and abuse of minors when he was found dead in his jail cell in the Manhattan Correction Center on August 10. Although the New York City medical examiner determined that Epstein committed suicide by hanging, the circumstances at the prison indicated and the opinion of other medical experts was that he had been strangled to death.
Although authorities, including Attorney General William Barr, claimed at the time that a vigorous investigation of Epstein’s sexual abuse of young girls would be continued, it took nearly eleven months for Maxwell to be arrested
One of the reasons given for the delay was that authorities were uncertain where Maxwell was or if she was even in the United States. However, more than twenty armed agents and police reportedly raided her million-dollar mansion called Tucked Away on a 156-acre property in rural Bradford, New Hampshire on July 2, breaking down the front door and bringing Maxwell out in handcuffs.
According to the unsealed indictment, between 1994 and 1997, Maxwell and Epstein, “enticed and caused minor victims to travel to Epstein’s residences in different states, which Maxwell knew and intended would result in their grooming for and subjection to sexual abuse. Moreover, in an effort to conceal her crimes, Maxwell repeatedly lied when questioned about her conduct, including in relation to some of the minors described herein, when providing testimony under oath in 2016.”
Ghislaine Maxwell, 58, is the youngest daughter of the British media baron Robert Maxwell, who owned the Mirror Group Newspapers before he drowned under suspicious circumstances near his yacht called Lady Ghislaine in the North Atlantic off the coast of the Canary Islands in 1991.
Shortly after Robert’s death, Ghislaine moved to New York City and met the investment advisor, multimillionaire and well-connected socialite Jeffrey Epstein with whom she developed a close relationship.
Over the next two decades, Maxwell and Epstein—with her connections to European royalty and wealthy elite and with his connections to US celebrities and the financial and political elite—established a social network through lavish parties and get-togethers at Epstein’s residences in Palm Beach, Manhattan, New Mexico and his private island in the US Virgin Islands that involved sex with young girls.
A measure of the connections that Epstein had was revealed on Tuesday when the New York State Department of Financial Services announced that Deutsche Bank has agreed to pay $150 million in fines to settle allegations that it “inexcusably failed to detect or prevent millions of dollars of suspicious transactions,” despite knowing Epstein’s “terrible criminal history.”
According to a report in the Washington Post, “The German bank’s ties to Epstein began in 2013, years after the billionaire pleaded guilty to two prostitution charges in Florida, according to the consent decree filed by the New York regulator. Deutsche Bank knew about Epstein’s past, classifying him as a ‘high-risk’ client, but also considered the relationship potentially lucrative—$100 million to $300 million in revenue over time.”
In 2014, the report says, bank officials met with Epstein at his New York City mansion after reports emerged about his activities. “The bank ultimately decided to continue doing business with Epstein but established new safeguards, which were largely ignored, according to the consent decree.” The bank processed more than $7 million in settlement payments that Epstein made to alleged coconspirators.
Clearly, the role of Deutsche Bank is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to corporate, financial and government participation in facilitating and covering up Epstein’s criminal activities. In 2008, after dozens of young girls had given statements to Palm Beach law enforcement officials that Epstein had both sexually abused them and also paid them to help recruit a network of teenagers for his trafficking operation, the federal government intervened and blocked the local case from going forward.
At that time, US Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, Alex Acosta, worked out a plea deal with Epstein’s legal team that included a “non-prosecution agreement” stipulating that Epstein and none of his coconspirators could be charged in the future for any crimes related to his guilt in “procuring a minor for prostitution.” Ghislaine Maxwell was named as one of his coconspirators in that agreement.
Spanish unions isolate Nissan workers’ struggle
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/07/08/niss-j08.html
By Alice Summers
8 July 2020
Hundreds of Nissan autoworkers have demonstrated outside the company’s Cantabria factory in protest at the planned closure of its Barcelona plant. The closure will lead to the loss of more than 2,500 jobs at the factory, with at least 20,000 more indirectly threatened.
Around 300 autoworkers and their families from the Barcelona factory travelled to the town of Los Corrales de Buelna in the northern Spanish region of Cantabria for a multi-day demonstration beginning Tuesday June 30. Workers also travelled to the Cantabrian regional capital of Santander on Thursday July 2 to continue their protest. The more than 500 workers at the Los Corrales plant produce vehicle parts for factories in the Nissan-Renault Alliance across Europe.
This was the latest in a series of token actions organized by the unions, designed to allow workers to let off steam amid mounting opposition to Nissan’s attacks on jobs, and to hide their own complicity in pushing through wage and job cuts. The unions aim to isolate and wear down the indefinite strike called by autoworkers on May 4, when Nissan demanded the resumption of production in Spain. Workers at the Barcelona plant remain on strike after more than two months in opposition to the planned plant closures.
The trade unions are trying to sow illusions that negotiations with Nissan remain open, and that workers can win an isolated, national struggle against the international Nissan-Renault Alliance. They have isolated the struggle of Nissan workers even within Spain, limiting the strike to just the Barcelona plant and leaving workers at the company’s two other Spanish factories, in Cantabria and Ávila, to continue production.
While the Cantabria protest was organised by the Barcelona factory committee, run by the Podemos-linked Workers Commissions (CCOO) and pro-PSOE (Socialist Party) General Union of Labour (UGT) unions, to “strengthen our collaboration” with the Cantabria factory and “show the necessary solidarity,” union representatives in Los Corrales could barely conceal their hostility to the mobilization of workers.
Seeking to divide workers from the two Nissan factories, a spokesperson for the factory committee at the Cantabria plant, Eduardo Seco (UGT), claimed workers there were “very unhappy” about the demonstration and that the inhabitants of Los Corrales are “quite uneasy” about it. The plant would run at its “normal pace,” stated Seco, with the factory committee having taken measures to ensure that the protest affected the Cantabria plant “as little as possible.”
The CCOO representative in the committee, José Ángel de la Peña, also tried to distance himself from the protesters, saying that they had come to Cantabria of “their own accord.” There is “not much point protesting in front of the Cantabrian plant,” said de la Peña, because “it is not going to do damage to Renault like they [the Barcelona workers] claim.”
Meanwhile, Ángel Anibarro, the president of the Cantabria factory committee, which is dominated by the CCOO, claimed to support the protest, but only “as long as everything goes ahead peacefully.” Protesters responded with hostility to this slanderous suggestion that they were intent on violence, shouting “Get out!” and “That was out of order!”
Despite claims from union officials that Nissan workers and the wider population of Los Corrales were hostile to the protest by Barcelona autoworkers, the delegation was met with applause and raised fists by assembled inhabitants as they entered the town. Workers leaving the Cantabria factory at the 2 p.m. shift change also applauded and thanked the Barcelona protesters, with many coming to greet them and show their solidarity.
Under the pretence of concern over the impact of the protest on the spread of COVID-19, the PSOE regional government delegate for Cantabria, Ainoa Quiñones, mobilised a massive police presence to the small town. In addition to local police, Quiñones brought in an extra 40 police force members from outside the region, including from the anti-riot GRS division of the paramilitary Guardia Civil.
Riot police lined the streets near the Los Corrales factory, with a police helicopter also seen circling overhead in an obvious attempt to intimidate protesters. Shouts of “We are workers, not terrorists!” were heard in response to this massive display of state force.
Whatever the rhetoric of low-level bureaucrats in factory committees, the unions have made it clear that they intend to block any attempts to organise a coordinated struggle against Nissan’s attacks on pay and terms. Workers from Nissan’s Spanish plants are being set against each other in order to drive down conditions for all autoworkers.
At the end of June, union representatives at the Los Corrales de Buelna factory came to a sell-out agreement with Nissan to keep the plant open, using the threat of the factory closure in Barcelona to force workers into accepting worse pay and conditions.
The so-called “ultra-competitiveness” agreement will see workers’ hours slashed by 5 percent as of January 2021, with a corresponding reduction in wages. Pay will be frozen at this lower level for the duration of the 2021-23 plan. This will be accompanied by a massive production-line speed-up, aiming to reduce costs per part by as much as 28 percent.
The 2021-23 plan also proposes to invest €40 million into the plant which would, among other things, apparently be used to finance new technologies to increase speed and output
The viability of the Cantabria factory remains unclear: 90 percent of the parts manufactured there are for vehicles put together in the Zona Franca industrial region of Barcelona, where the soon-to-be-closed Nissan factory is located, according to CCOO representative José Ángel de la Peña.
The jobs massacre planned at Renault-Nissan is only an initial indication of the brutal assault on the working class being planned by Spanish businesses and government, in conjunction with the unions.
According to a study by financial consultancy firm KPMG, 60 percent of Spanish companies will cut or freeze worker pay in the next six months, with only 4 percent indicating that salaries could increase. Twenty-seven percent of companies plan to modify workers’ terms and conditions, 18 percent will rescind contracts of outsourced workers and 34 percent will cancel new hires and promotions.
Thousands of job cuts have already been planned across Spain, including nearly 900 at Airbus and over 200 at the Siemens Gamesa renewable energy plant in Navarra. More than 500 jobs will be slashed by aluminium manufacturer Alcoa from their San Cibrao factory in north-western Spain. Engineering company SENER is also planning on laying off over 100 workers from Las Arenas, Madrid and Barcelona.
Nearly 4 million (3,862,883) Spaniards are already unemployed as of the end of June, the highest figure since 2016. This does not include the 1.8 million workers still furloughed under the PSOE-Podemos government’s ERTE scheme, many of whom will find themselves added to the unemployment rolls when the program ends in September. Youth unemployment in Spain reached a staggering 32.9 percent in May.
The fight against this assault on jobs and working conditions cannot be carried out through the bankrupt national framework of the trade unions, but requires the construction of an international movement of the working class. Workers at Nissan and elsewhere in Spain must join their struggles with those of workers across Europe and internationally, in a cross-border fight against the transnational corporations, which shift production from one country to another to maximise profits.
This requires building rank-and-file committees of action independent of the nationalist and pro-capitalist trade unions.
French bus driver left brain-dead after asking passengers to wear masks
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/07/08/fran-j08.html
By Will Morrow
8 July 2020
A bus driver in the southern French city of Bayonne has been left brain-dead from a brutal assault, after he ordered a group of passengers to either wear masks or get off the bus, on Sunday evening.
According to police accounts, the driver, Philippe Monguillot, 59 years old, was attacked by one or multiple passengers at a stop. He had told one passenger attempting to get on the bus that he would not be allowed on without wearing a coronavirus mask, which is required by law on public transport. At the same stop he reportedly told three other passengers on the bus that they would have to get off if they did not put on masks.
After the assault, Monguillot was transported unconscious to a hospital and placed on life support, but was declared brain-dead. He has a wife and three adult daughters. On Sunday, a 34-year-old man was placed under arrest and remains in police custody. Four other men were arrested on Monday, one of whom is a minor and has subsequently been released. The prosecutor reported last night that two men would be charged with intentional murder.
On Monday, the bus drivers at Chronoplus, where Monguillot worked, announced that they were on strike until after Monguillot’s funeral service. Chronoplus serves bus routes in Bayonne, Anglet and Biarritz, a sea-side resort on the south-west Atlantic coast of France. Routes in all three areas were stopped on yesterday. The drivers are demanding greater protection.
The bus unions met with Chronoplus management on Monday evening, and are seeking to reach a deal to end the strike and return drivers to work.
Yesterday Macron administration’s minister for transport, Jean-Baptiste Djebbari, travelled to Bayonne and spoke with drivers, cynically proclaiming the government’s grief at the tragic incident.
These crocodile tears will not make anyone forget that the Macron administration’s policies are directly responsible for tens of thousands of deaths throughout the pandemic.
At the beginning of the pandemic, while telling lies to the population that the virus was unlikely to reach France, the government refused to organize any large-scale testing. Because it had organized no testing infrastructure, it insisted that testing was unnecessary. Those who presented with symptoms to their local doctor were told they probably had the virus should go home and self-isolate.
The government declared that wearing masks was unnecessary, trying to cover up the fact that it had destroyed its stock of masks over the previous decade in order to cut health care costs. Government spokeswoman Sibeth Ndiaye contemptuously announced on March 20, “You know what? I don’t know how to use a mask.”
The ending of the lock-down on May 11, the restarting of public transport, and the full reopening of the economy, has been determined by the economic demands of the capitalists for a resumption of profit-making activities.
Whatever protective measures existed for workers in the immediate aftermath of the lock-down have since been ended. On June 24, Labor Minister Muriel Pénicaud released a new set of guidelines for employers, no longer requiring a four square-meter surface area allocation for each employee. This has been replaced with a non-binding “guide” recommending one meter of separation, with the requirement of wearing a mask if even this cannot be maintained.
At the same time, schools, restaurants and bars have all been reopened.
The trade unions and the government maintain no central list of the number of bus drivers or public transport workers who have been infected or died from the coronavirus. But between March and April the Paris-area public transport operator (RATP) had confirmed four deaths in that region alone. On May 12, the head of RATP Catherine Gouillouard admitted that nine RATP employees had died from the coronavirus. Bus drivers reported receiving no masks at all, and only one pair of gloves per shift.
Between June 30 and July 3, three coronavirus infections were detected among RATP maintenance workers in workshops in Javel, located in Paris’ 15th district. The site employs more than 70 workers.
Responsibility for this situation lies above all with the General Confederation of Labor (CGT) and the other trade unions. They have worked to suppress workers’ anger over the lack of protective equipment and safe conditions for bus and public transport workers.
UK meat processing factories involved in COVID-19 outbreak back up and running
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/07/08/meat-j08.html
By Tony Robson
8 July 2020
The 2 Sisters Food Group (2SFG) chicken factory on the island of Anglesey, North Wales is the last of three meat processing companies involved in the largest industrial outbreak of COVID-19 in the UK to restart production.
The multi-millionaire owner of 2SFG, Ranjit Boparan, now portrays himself as a responsible owner, and the decision to suspend production for a fortnight ending July 3 as a grand gesture and an “opportunity to supplement our existing control measures.”
The implication is that the previous safety measures were insufficient, rather than essentially non-existent. But the company knows it will not face any legal action or be forced to implement any safety measures that might impede its efforts to maximise profit.
The first reported case of COVID-19 at the chicken factory was on May 28. It spread unchecked before the factory was finally forced to close on June 18 after the number of infections had reached 58. Subsequent testing has seen the total climb to 216—nearly half the workforce.
Employees told Wales Live they had been forced to work in a climate of fear before the decision was belatedly taken to suspend production. “We could see people around us catching it and going off ill, and we had to carry on, scared to breathe at times, knowing it was in the air around us,” one said.
Another said they felt like “cannon fodder.” While 2 metre social distancing applied to corridors and the canteen it did not apply to the factory floor. Protective visors had holes cut into them to prevent them steaming up.
The outbreak constituted a far wider threat to the whole island, with a population of 70,000 people. The Welsh government’s planned reopening of schools announced for June 29 had to be cancelled locally. However, any further lockdowns have been resisted in Anglesey, as in all other areas hit by an outbreak of the virus in the meat processing industry.
All the agencies tasked with responding to the emergency—local health bodies, councils, the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) and the trade unions—have instead worked to conceal the criminality of the corporations so it does not interfere with the premature re-opening of the economy by the Johnson government.
The HSE’s monitoring of the situation and new safety measures implemented at the 2 Sisters site, even as production is ramped up, are no guarantee of workers’ safety. Hundreds of workers have been infected without the HSE serving a single prohibition notice.
According to media reports, the company has implemented 30 additional safety measures which include full “opposite” and “side-by-side” screening, teams managed in “bubbles”, and CCTV surveillance of potential high traffic areas. But there has been no suggestion of a re-engineering of the ventilation system, which has been identified as a distributor of the virus in cold and damp factory settings. Neither is there any reference to the controlling of line speeds to ensure social distancing.
Another significant factor identified in the spread of the virus was the overcrowded housing of predominantly migrant workers who work in the meat processing plants. The recommendations drawn up for the meat processing industry by the Welsh Labour government—together with the unions—did not propose rehousing these workers in decent accommodation. Rather it suggested that workers’ living arrangements should conform to their “working cohort” within the factory.
The promise by the Unite union that “no stone would be left unturned” over safety improvements has proved to be a fraud. The union has instead provided 2 Sisters with a clean bill of health. “The company have recognised that they need the help of their staff in getting back to business,” said Paddy McNaught, Unite’s regional organiser. “They’ve been honest and open with us as we worked to put new procedures in place.”
On the local community based Facebook page, “Anglesey Mon News,” the announcement of the reopening of the 2 Sisters site received many angry responses from locals, including: “As usual ££££££ comes first”, “Owners are greedy, they don’t give a toss about the staff. They are only a number,” and “Time to get out of Anglesey, before it kicks off again.”
The pleas and entreaties by Unite for a new era of corporate responsibility are directed against a growing recognition among workers that their interests are incompatible with the profit drive of the corporations.
At Rowan Foods in Wrexham—the other meat processing plant in North Wales where the virus has swept through the workforce—talks between Unite and the company have broken down.
The company has refused even to pay any more than the weekly Statutory Sick Pay of £95 per week for workers having to self-isolate, and there are reports that workers have continued to work while awaiting their tests results. A petition circulating to demand the temporary closure of the site states:
“Management are plucking people off the lines as they get notifications of positive results, but everyone is still working alongside these people until they are removed. So even staff that were tested Monday that came back negative have still been in contact with people who have tested positive later in the week.”
The latest figure on the total number of COVID-19 infections at Rowan Foods is 283, around a fifth of the workforce. In its defence, Rowan Foods was able to cite an HSE statement of early March that the safety measures it had in place were “successful”, Public Health Wales’s agreement that there is no evidence the workplace is the source of the outbreak, and the Welsh government’s decision not to use its powers to close the plant. “We have no serious issues which need addressing and we continue to comply with the law,” a company spokesman said.
The lack of enforcement is mirrored at the Kepak pork plant in Merthyr Tydfil, South Wales. The company has one in eight of its workforce infected based on recent testing, a total of 130. It has continued operating, stating that it is cooperating with the HSE. The Welsh government has not introduced any local lockdown measures even though the town has a weekly infection rate of 179 per 100,000 people. This is higher than Leicester in England, which has 141 per 100,000, where local lockdown measures are in place. Merthyr, the former mining town, is second in Wales for COVID-19 death rates, with 108 per 100,000 people.
In England, a further outbreak of COVID-19 has been reported at another meat processing plant owned by the major supermarket chain, Asda. On July 2, Forza Foods confirmed that 17 workers had tested positive for the virus at its site in Normanton, West Yorkshire, which supplies sliced and cooked meat. Asda was at the centre of the original outbreak in meat processing plants with its Kober plant in nearby Cleckheaton, which was temporarily closed, with 165 reported cases.
No action has been taken to close the Normanton site on the pretext that the confirmed cases were from the same shift. Around 300 employees have been offered tests or the option to self-isolate at home out of a workforce of 1,200. This is with the seal of approval of the local authority and the HSE.
The past few weeks have demonstrated that further outbreaks are inevitable in the meat processing industry and that they will invariably be followed by cover-ups. This is an international phenomenon, proving that the most significant “super-spreaders” of the virus are the brutal methods of exploitation employed by the corporations. The fight against the pandemic requires a root and branch transformation of society, based upon the mobilisation of the working class and the fight for socialism.
UK: Coronavirus exposes Leicester’s sweatshops and government hypocrisy
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/07/08/leic-j08.html
By Thomas Scripps
8 July 2020
The lockdown imposed on the East Midlands city of Leicester after an outbreak of COVID-19 has been linked to garment factory sweatshops. This has forced government ministers to strike a pose of outrage at a situation they have not only ignored for years, but also intend to replicate across the country.
Last Wednesday, the day after a local public health lockdown of Leicester was ordered by the Boris Johnson government, campaign group Labour Behind the Label (LBL) published a report, “Boohoo & COVID-19: The people behind the profit.” The group has been informed of multiple Leicester factories where no social distancing has been implemented and no masks have been provided.
Workers were told to come into work while sick or be sacked. In several factories of up to 100 people, workers were forced to carry on working while known to be infected with coronavirus or while living in households known to be infected. Factories continued running as normal throughout the national lockdown.
On Sunday, the Times published an undercover investigation carried out earlier that week, while Leicester was formally under local lockdown. Their reporter spent two days working at a garment factory, where he was told by another worker to expect to be paid between £3.50 and £4 an hour. A foreman explained, “Anywhere in Leicester you will only find textile factories that pay up to £4 an hour.” This is less than half of the already pitifully low national minimum wage. There were no gloves, health warning signs or social distancing measures and only a few workers wore masks.
Conservative Health Secretary Matt Hancock and Home Secretary Priti Patel feigned surprise. Hancock told Sky News, “There are some quite significant concerns about some of the employment practices in some of the clothing factories in Leicester,” putting on a stern face to tell such supposedly maverick businesses, “We’re not just asking nicely.”
Patel outdid herself in a customary display of cynicism, referring to the “abhorrent practices” uncovered by the Times report and declaring, “These allegations are truly appalling.” She directed the National Crime Agency to investigate modern slavery in Leicester’s clothes factories and said in Parliament, “Let this be a warning to those who are exploiting people in sweatshops like these for their own commercial gain. This is just the start. What you are doing is illegal, it will not be tolerated, and we are coming after you.”
This is like Al Capone threatening to clean up the Mafia. The Tories and the entire ruling class have knowingly presided over Leicester’s sweatshops for years. In 2015, the Ethical Trading Initiative commissioned research by the University of Leicester into the city’s garment industry. “New Industry on a Skewed Playing Field: Supply Chain Relations and Working Conditions in UK Garment Manufacturing” found that “the majority of garment workers are paid way below the National Minimum Wage, do not have employment contracts, and are subject to intense and arbitrary work practices.” It uncovered “work practices that result in health problems [and] inadequate health and safety standards…”
This research was presented to Parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights, who then produced a report, “Human Rights and Business 2017: Promoting responsibility and ensuring accountability,” which found that “labour rights abuses are endemic in the Leicester garment industry.”
In January 2017, Channel 4’s “Dispatches” produced, “Undercover: Britain’s Cheap Clothes.” A reporter worked at three Leicester factories producing clothes for brands like River Island, New Look, Boohoo and Misguided. He was paid between £3 and £3.50 an hour. In one factory, the fire exits were blocked, and a worker was smoking on the factory floor.
A Financial Times investigation in 2018, “Dark factories: Labour exploitation in Britain’s garment industry,” found average wages of £4.25 an hour and significant fire safety hazards. The reporter explained, “The enforcement agencies can hardly claim to be unaware of what is happening. Representatives from UK Visas and Immigration, the Health & Safety Executive (HSE) and the Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority all attended a meeting hosted by Leicester mayor Sir Peter Soulsby last October, where the problems were discussed in detail. But a comb through of freedom-of-information requests, MPs questions and public records does not reveal a state that has done much to sort this out.”
In 2019, the government rejected every recommendation by the Environmental Audit Committee’s “Fixing Fashion Report: Clothing Consumption and Sustainability,” which noted, “we were told it is an open secret that some garment factories in places like Leicester are not paying the minimum wage.”
This January, Tory MP for North West Leicestershire Andrew Bridgen raised the “miserable conditions” in Leicester’s factories and requested a meeting with the business secretary. In April, Conservative politicians led by Baroness Verma sent an email to Leicester’s Labour councillors and mayor raising concerns about factories operating illegally and asking if the Labour Party was reporting these activities to the police and trading standards.
But neither the Tory government, nor the Labour Party, has lifted a finger to address this criminal exploitation. HMRC announced in January that in the last six years just six factories in Leicester had been fined for failing to pay the minimum wage. As for lethal safety failings, LBL report that workers’ complaints to the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) have been ignored. Nationally, the HSE has not issued a single prohibition notice shutting down a factory since the pandemic began and only two improvement notices.
No action has been or will be taken because Leicester’s sweatshops—and those elsewhere—form an integral part of Britain’s fashion industry, earning huge profits. The onset of globalisation in the 1970s and 1980s prompted the collapse of the UK’s apparel manufacturing industry, as companies moved to cheap labour platforms in the Far East. Following the 2008 financial crash, however, and the expansion of “fast fashion,” new retailers have used local labour forces (largely composed of migrant workers) and a network of small, outsourced, unregulated suppliers to produce new clothing lines at even lower costs.
This business model has flourished during the pandemic. Boohoo’s sales surged 45 percent in the quarter to the end of May this year, taking the company’s valuation to £5.3 billion. Its owners and CEO are in line for £50 million payouts if Boohoo continues to grow.
More important still, far from being outraged by these practices the government consider them a model for the future. Prime Minister Johnson’s Brexiteer cabinet is built around the ideologues of Britannia Unchained, an ultra-free market Thatcherite screed written by Patel, Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab, International Trade Secretary Liz Truss, Minister of State for Business Kwasi Kwarteng and Tory MP Chris Skidmore.
Britannia Unchained attacks the UK’s “bloated state, high taxes and excessive regulation” and “unproductive” workers, described as “among the worst idlers in the world.” Its advocates call for a completion of the “Thatcher revolution,” in the words of her former Chancellor Nigel Lawson, to secure the profitability of British business through massive tax cuts and deregulation.
The coronavirus pandemic is bringing the terrible social consequences of such unbridled capitalist exploitation into sharp relief. While Leicester represents one of the worst and most advanced cases, this is a danger that confronts the whole working class. Food processing workers suffer under nearly identical conditions, while warehouse, postal, transport, health and social care workers are being forced to risk their lives in unsafe conditions for minimal wages.
No resistance has been offered by the trade union bureaucrats and nor will they ever do so. Workers must organise their own independent rank-and-file committees to secure genuinely safe conditions and liveable pay in a common struggle across all sectors, as part of the struggle for a socialist transformation of society.
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