“They are killing people to save money”

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/22/auto-a22.html

Fiat Chrysler, UAW conspire to keep workers on the job after exposure to coronavirus

By Shannon Jones
22 August 2020

Workers at Detroit area auto plants report that the Fiat Chrysler management and the United Auto Workers union are forcing workers to stay on the job after exposure to coronavirus.

According to multiple accounts by autoworkers, both on social media and reported separately to the World Socialist Web Site Autoworker Newsletter, the union and management are refusing to inform workers that coworkers are infected with the virus or to send workers into quarantine after exposure, as prescribed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Workers have even been told not to report illness to coworkers.
The abandonment of COVID-19 protections in auto plants takes place as the Trump administration and Democratic governors across the United States are working together to force a deadly reopening of schools. On Tuesday the Department of Homeland Security issued guidelines declaring teachers “critical infrastructure,” enabling states to force teachers that have been exposed to the deadly virus to continue work, potentially infecting others.

Democratic governors in New York, Michigan and other states have encouraged public schools to reopen despite mounting resistance on the part of teachers and parents.

At Jefferson North Assembly Plant (JNAP), according to Facebook posts and confirmed by workers in the plant, management refused to ask a plant worker to self-quarantine even though she was exposed to another worker on her team who tested positive for COVID-19.

A worker at FCA’s Toledo Jeep plant reported that no less than three workers on their team had tested positive for coronavirus, but management failed to inform the rest of the team, much less ask them to self-quarantine. “There should be a lawsuit. This is beyond inexcusable,” the worker said.

A worker at the FCA Sterling Heights Assembly Plant north of Detroit told the WSWS Autoworker Newsletter: “Last week they sent a whole line home that was supposed to be exposed, but before they left they trained their replacements. They are not following guidelines.

“They are bringing us back without even testing us. We may or may not have the virus. If you say you have no symptoms they send you back.

“I think the UAW is on the side of management. All they care about is lining their pockets. What’s happening is that if someone has come into contact with someone else (with COVID), they are asking you not to tell anyone; the union rep is telling us not to tell anyone. What happens to those people they came into contact with?”

Fiat Chrysler is winding down even the limited and inadequate safety protocols implemented after the restart of production in May. This week, JNAP’s labor relations department announced that the extra five minutes added to breaks for cleaning and social distancing in the lunchroom and break areas will be eliminated as of September 1. Similar memos have reportedly been sent to workers at other FCA factories.

A younger worker at JNAP told the WSWS Autoworker Newsletter that workers were in an uproar about the elimination of the extra five minutes for breaks. “That extra five minutes added to a 12 minute break is life changing. Going to the bathroom was at least five minutes, that only left you 7 minutes. You didn’t even have time to go to a vending machine.

“Almost all the protocols are now gone. It seems odd, because COVID is not gone. The first week we came back we had 20 minutes to clean our work areas before the shift. They gave us special gloves. They are now doing away with anything that hurts productivity. We even had to fight to get the cleaning supplies back. I wish they would just be honest and come out and say that their money is more important than our lives.”

In response to the latest revelations, the Jefferson North Assembly Plant Rank-and-File Safety Committee, established by autoworkers in June after wildcat strikes against safety conditions briefly shut production at the plant for the second time this year, issued the following statement:

“The Jefferson North Assembly Plant Rank-and-File Safety Committee wants to bring to light the misrepresentation from the UAW and FCA about the handling of COVID cases and exposure of employees. Most of the processes they earlier implemented in the case of exposure to COVID have been eliminated.

“Even as it stands the safety measures in place are totally inadequate. Since the return to work management and the UAW have been covering up the real extent of the spread of COVID in the plants even though timely notification of all COVID infections is critical for maintaining workers health and safety.

“Now workers have been told by plant safety that while they were potentially exposed to the virus by other team members, the company will not send them out to self quarantine for 14 days as previously required or clean their work area. This is unacceptable!

“Slowly but surely FCA is returning to the procedures that were in effect before workers stopped production in March. As of September 1 management is eliminating the extra five minutes added to each break to give employees time to get to restrooms and social distance as well as find lunch tables.

“It’s been rumored the company has made changes because employees aren’t cleaning, but what isn’t being said is that for weeks the company hasn’t supplied cleaning products and have empty bottles at work areas. We deem this unacceptable and demand both the UAW and FCA follow the protocols they set in place to get workers back into the factory. If this is not met workers will have to take appropriate action because it’s apparent the safety of workers and their families mean nothing to them.”

The JNAP Rank-and-File Safety Committee has since joined with Safety Committees at several other plants throughout the country to form the Autoworkers Rank-and-File Safety Committee Network.

FCA is also seeking to intimidate workers from keeping each other informed of the spread of the virus on social media. On August 10, FCA management sent a letter to salaried and hourly employees warning that workers could be disciplined and even terminated for social media posts that violated a long list of regulations including the exposure of “confidential company information”—in plain language, unsafe management practices.

However, this situation is hardly unique to FCA. From the beginning, management, at all the Detroit-based automakers, have suppressed the real extent of the pandemic in the auto plants. They have done so with the collusion of the UAW, which has been revealed by federal indictments and a lawsuit between General Motors and FCA to have accepted tens of millions in corporate bribes. Even COVID deaths are being covered up. The UAW and management failed to inform workers of the death of a young Ford contract worker at the Van Dyke transmission plant who succumbed to COVID last month.

A veteran Detroit area Ford worker said that cases were being covered up at their factory.

“I think the UAW and the company are telling people not to tell others if they have COVID.

“It doesn’t matter if we are exposed, they don’t care—they are not quarantining everyone who is exposed. At the end of the day it is a gain if some of us legacy workers die. There goes your pension, there goes your insurance, there goes your Social Security, there goes your Medicare. They know that. Our lives don’t matter. There is no other reason they won’t tell us. Look at the billions they are saving by workers dying. They are killing people to save money.”

The attack on elementary safety measures demands an urgent response from autoworkers. Autoworkers must develop safety committees joining workers together at plants across North America, and link up their struggles with teachers, Amazon workers and other sections of the working class to demand that workers lives take precedence over corporate profits.

The Biden campaign and the attempt to “rescue” American hegemony

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/22/pers-a22.html

22 August 2020

Over the past week, the American public was subjected to an eight-hour infomercial, officially termed by the Democratic Party a “convention,” in which the long-time political reactionary Joe Biden was packaged simultaneously as the great American everyman and a miracle cure for America’s problems.

Amid celebrity cameos, empty platitudes, and unconvincing “personal” anecdotes, the vast majority of this week’s telethon was devoid of any actual discussion of program and policies. Behind the hoopla, however, there are significant conflicts within the ruling class, centered primarily on issues of foreign policy.

These conflicts were partially revealed on Tuesday night, when the convention aired a pre-recorded segment featuring a group of seven military, intelligence and diplomatic officials who claimed that the Trump administration was not fighting the US wars in the Middle East and pursuing its conflicts with Russia and China aggressively enough.

Commenting on Trump’s Middle East policy, Brett McGurk, in charge of the US operations in the Middle East under Obama, said, “Our military had a policy to maintain our presence in Syria,” which Trump went on to “abandon.” He concluded, “It’s shameful.”

Rose Gottemoeller, former Deputy Secretary General of NATO, concluded that Trump “hasn’t been standing up” to Russia and China “at all.” Another State Department official added, “Thanks to Donald Trump, our adversaries are stronger, and bolder.”

Following the segment, General Colin Powell added that Biden “will make it his job to know when anyone dares to threaten us, he will stand up to our adversaries with strength and experience. They will know he means business.” The “business” for which Powell is best known is the destruction of Iraq and the death of one million of its inhabitants, based on false claims about “weapons of mass destruction.”

These themes were expanded upon in a letter published Friday by a group of 72 high-level intelligence and military officials—and war criminals—headed by former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden, declaring their support for Biden.

The first of the letter’s ten bullet points states that Trump “has called NATO ‘obsolete,’ branded Europe a ‘foe,’ mocked the leaders of America’s closest friends, and threatened to terminate longstanding US alliances.” As a result, the letter concludes, “ Donald Trump has gravely damaged America’s role as a world leader.”

In other words, the present administration has undermined the fundamental geostrategic aims that have led the United States into three decades of war: The effort to control the Eurasian landmass, including the Middle East.

In the four years since Trump became the Republican nominee, a ferocious conflict has been raging within the ruling class, centered on differences over foreign policy, and in particular the “hot war” being waged between the Ukrainian government and pro-Russian forces in its Eastern regions after the US-backed coup in 2014.

Instead of focusing on the conflict with Russia that has been the preeminent concern of much of the foreign policy establishment, the Trump administration has been preoccupied with stunting the economic growth of China while building up US military capabilities to fight a war in the Pacific.

But here, too, the military and intelligence figures aligned with the Biden campaign feel that the White House has been ineffective. As two of the letter’s signatories wrote in an article in Foreign Policy magazine, “Trump has confronted China by starting trade wars with everyone else” rather than involving other imperialist states. “Major democratic powers including Japan, France, and Canada are desperate to work with the United States to blunt China’s predatory technology policies.”

From the standpoint of the ruling class, it is primarily these differences over foreign policy, not domestic policy, that are being fought out in the election. Facing the greatest social and economic crisis since the Great Depression, domestic policy has been conducted on a largely bipartisan basis. The CARES Act, which sanctioned the multi-trillion-dollar bailout of Wall Street while starving testing and contact tracing, passed unanimously in the Senate and by an unrecorded voice vote in the House.

The latest issue of Foreign Affairs, one of the main journals of US geopolitics, lays out some of the concerns of the dominant factions of the state. “After nearly four years of turbulence,” the lead editorial states, “the country’s enemies are stronger, its friends are weaker, and the United States itself is increasingly isolated and prostrate.”

Its concern is that Trump has proven an unreliable steward of the interests of the ruling class abroad. “Dragging his party and the executive branch along, the president has reshaped national policy in his own image: focused on short-term advantage, obsessed with money, and uninterested in everything else.”

The magazine’s lead story declares that Trump’s unstable and erratic foreign policy has resulted in a situation in which “China is wealthier and stronger, North Korea has more nuclear weapons and better missiles… and Nicolás Maduro is more entrenched in Venezuela, as is Bashar al-Assad in Syria.”

From the standpoint of the Biden campaign, the solution to all of these crises is to reassert American dominance and “leadership” over its traditional allies in Europe and Japan in order to pursue a more aggressive US policy against Russia and China. The United States must again be the world hegemon.

The central focus of the new administration will be “reclaiming America’s place in the world” through the reassertion of “American exceptionalism,” stated Joe Biden adviser Jake Sullivan in the Atlantic .

Earlier this year, Biden published an article entitled “Rescuing U.S. Foreign Policy After Trump” in the March/April issue of Foreign Affairs. In that article, he declares, that “to counter Russian aggression, we must keep the alliance’s military capabilities sharp.” At the same time, the United States needs to “get tough with China.” The “most effective way to meet that challenge is to build a united front of U.S. allies and partners to confront China.”

But while the latest issue of Foreign Affairs may be titled “The World Trump Made,” the geopolitical debacle facing the United States did not spring from Trump’s head. Trump did not make the “world.” Rather, the “world”—and, specifically, the crisis of American imperialism—made Trump.

The decline in the hegemonic position of the United States extends over a period of decades and was already evident prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990-91. The dissolution of American imperialism’s Cold War adversary was seized on by the strategists of the American ruling class to declare a “unipolar moment.” The United States could utilize its unrivaled military power to counter its declining economic position through force.

The endless series of wars launched by the United States over the past three decades have destroyed entire societies—in Iraq, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Ukraine, and Yemen, among others. But they have failed to reverse US imperialism’s fortunes. Moreover, they have profoundly distorted and brutalized American society itself: a process of which the fascistic Trump administration is an expression.

Even prior to Trump’s inauguration, there were growing tensions between the US and its erstwhile allies in Europe. The coronavirus pandemic and the disastrous response of the ruling class to it—a policy that has been bipartisan—has further eroded the global position of American capitalism.

American imperialism confronts intractable problems, and first among them is the growth of social opposition within the United States itself. Among the considerations motivating support for the Biden campaign within the ruling class is the hope that it can somehow establish a broader base for imperialist aggression abroad. The promotion of identity politics is aimed at further integrating privileged sections of the upper middle class behind the project of global domination. This is what Kamala Harris represents.

A Biden/Harris administration will not inaugurate a new dawn of American hegemony. Rather, the attempt to assert this hegemony will be through unprecedented violence. If it is brought to power—with the support of the assemblage of reactionaries responsible for the worst crimes of the 21st century—it will be committed to a vast expansion of war. Trump and Pompeo are barreling headlong toward a conflict with China. Biden’s critique of this disastrous course is that the United States needs to get “tough,” whether against Russia, China, Afghanistan, Syria, or everywhere in between.

The American ruling class, moreover, confronts in the growth of the class struggle the most serious threat to its geopolitical ambitions.

Whichever course is ultimately determined by the election, US imperialism has, as the World Socialist Web Site warned in the run-up to the Iraq war, a “rendezvous with disaster.” All factions of the US state are united on a course of action that will lead to the deaths of countless millions. The struggle against war will not go forward through the selection of either Trump or Biden, but through the independent struggle of the working class.

Andre Damon

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEl9gUOgvZQ

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Don't Clap For Kamala. "Did Obama's Blackness Stop Him From Giving 95% Gains To Top 1%?"

 

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