https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5MMVAbdmYI
Saturday, September 12, 2020
Headlines: September 11, 2020
https://www.risingupwithsonali.com/2020/09/11/headlines-september-11-2020/
As fires continue to rage across the Western coast of the United States, a record breaking 3 million acres have now burned across California. The Los Angeles Times reports that, “On Thursday, the August Complex — the product of 37 fires in and around Tehama County — became the largest ever recorded in California at 471,000 acres.” At least 23 people have died across California, Oregon, and Washington. In Oregon, at least half a million people are under evacuation orders. Gov. Kate Brown warned, “We have never seen this amount of uncontained fire across our state,” adding, “If you’re advised to evacuate, do so immediately. You may not get a second chance.” Several small towns including Phoenix, Talent, Detroit and Blue River in Oregon were nearly destroyed. Walden, Washington, and Berry Creek, California are also devastated. Meanwhile rumors began spreading on social media platforms about anti-fascist activist setting off fires as authorities quickly moved to quash them declaring them false. While scientists are in agreement that catastrophic climate change is to blame for the fires, the issue has hardly been raised during the presidential campaigns of the two major party candidates, less than two months ahead of the election.
In other news, Friday marks the 19th anniversary of the September 11th 2001 attacks—an issue that both candidates are only too thrilled to raise as part of their campaigns. President Donald Trump traveled to Shanksville, Pennsylvania where the passengers of Flight 93 fought back against their hijackers before their plane crashed. Democratic Nominee Joe Biden traveled to New York where the Twin Towers were destroyed nearly 2 decades ago and then headed to Pennsylvania as well. Neither men acknowledged the mass death and displacement on the other side of the world that the post 9-11 U.S. wars brought in the decades since.
In news from the election trail, the Trump campaign has pulled back from spending on television ads as its coffers are dangerously low. The move has worried many in the Republican Party that have thrown their lot behind Trump. Trump rallied in Freeland, Michigan on Thursday evening as thousands of red MAGA hat wearing Trump supporters thronged with no social distancing and very few masks. One New York Times reporter Kathy Gray, who tweeted about the lack of masks was tracked down by Trump’s security and kicked out of the rally after she posted her photos. A government official, Francis Collins, the Director of the National Institutes of Health said he was “puzzled” and “disheartened” by the lack of safety measures at Trump’s rally. During his lengthy speech, Trump railed against his usual enemies and whipped up a frenzy among his supporters about “taking back the country.” The message was a strange echo of his campaign slogan from 4 years ago considering that the nation has been under Trump’s rule for nearly 4 years and it was unclear whether he meant to fix the problems he had created.
As Americans marked the grim anniversary of the September 11th attacks, some pointed out that the Coronavirus death toll of nearly 200,000 was akin to dozens of terrorist attacks of the same scale. On Thursday cases of infection in the U.S. rose for the third consecutive day even as Trump continued to face political fallout from the revelation that he lied to the American people about the severity of the virus. When an ABC reporter asked Trump at a Thursday press conference, why, as per journalist Bob Woodward’s book, did he lie, the President tore into him. In fact, Trump repeatedly said in public that the virus was not as dangerous as the flu that it would simply disappear one day. His claim that he held back from telling the truth in order to not cause panic was met with derision from critics who pointed out that Trump has never held back from causing baseless fear and panic over immigrants, anti-fascist activists, mail-in voting, and more. Well known historian Allan Lichtman pointed out that Trump’s lying about the virus would be poorly judged in the future and said it was, “the greatest dereliction of duty in the history of the U.S. presidency.”
Meanwhile the federal government has just charged a Russian national of attempting to thwart the U.S. presidential election. Associated Press pointed out that the charges, “reflect a dichotomy in the administration with officials taking aim at Russian interference in the political process even as President Donald Trump expresses doubt about Russian meddling.” And a Ukrainian lawmaker with ties to Russia named Andrii Derkach was sanctioned over an attempt to hurt Joe Biden’s campaign using the same smear that Trump and his Fox News allies have touted. In fact, Derkach had been working directly with Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani. And, the tech company Microsoft has accused hackers from Russia and China of digital spying on the campaigns of both major party presidential nominees. The governments of both nations have denied any involvement.
As the Republican dominated Senate on Thursday failed to pass legislation offering economic relief for ordinary Americans, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) in a speech on the Senate floor railed against the failure to help ordinary Americans and demanded austerity for the wealthiest Americans.
AMERICA’S CURRENT JOBS ‘GREAT DEPRESSION’
By Jack Rasmus.September 11, 2020
https://popularresistance.org/americas-current-jobs-great-depression/
“Two well-known and highly respected mainstream economists, Carmen Reinhart, a chief economist for the World Bank, and Vincent Reinhart, chief economist for Morgan Stanley bank, have recently published an article in the widely read capitalist source, Foreign Affairs, entitled ‘The Pandemic Depression’. Arguing primarily from a global perspective, the economists have concluded the US economy as of the 3rd quarter 2020 is not merely now experiencing a ‘great recession’ but now qualifies as another Great Depression.
There is another perspective, however, from which to also argue the US economy is in a bona fide Great Depression. It is from the perspective of the US Labor Market. For as of the late 3rd quarter 2020 the US economy suffers from an unemployment rate of no less than 25%–i.e. the same rate during the worst years and quarters of 1932-33, the depths of the 1930s Great Depression. Yet what we hear from the media and politicians of both wings of the Corporate Party of America—aka the Republicans and Democrats—is that unemployment is only 8.4%! That’s barely one-third of 25%.
Republicans and Trump have used the low-balled number of 8.4% as the main excuse to prevent the passage by Congress of any further economic stimulus. The Democrats have voiced no effective rebuttal since they too have accepted the 8.4%. So what is it? 8.4% and not even a great recession any longer? Or 25% and the possibility the ranks of unemployed are about to grow even further?
What follows is a debunking of the 8.4% unemployment rate and a quantitative explanation why that rate is 25%–as well as a statement of the forces that will likely result in an even further deterioration in the unemployment rate in the 2020-21 period ahead.
25% & 40 Million Still Unemployed
After the massive job implosion last spring, a weak rebound in jobs has occurred as the economy reopened over the early summer. But that jobs rebound has shown clear signs of faltering by late July and has clearly deteriorated by late August as unemployment claims have risen in recent weeks. Even more ominous, as that has near term condition of jobs has worsened, parallel indications show the emergence of a second, more permanent phase of job loss on the horizon. Since early March 2020, more than 55m workers have filed for, and received, unemployment insurance benefits.
According to official government data, as of the end of August, 29.5 million US workers were still getting benefits. That 29.5m reflects 18.4% workers clearly unemployed. But it’s also a subset of the total jobless, since millions haven’t been able to get benefits. So the actual number of jobless as of labor day 2020 is north of 29.5m and 18.4% Nevertheless, the statistic we hear is 8.4% unemployment rate and 13.4 million unemployed. What gives?
Some of the 55 million who received benefits at some point over the course of the last six months of the pandemic began returning to work starting in May. The number returning grew in June, but then began slowing once again in July and August as the rebound in jobs began to falter in July-August.
Others of the 55 million have simply exhausted their benefits. Many are still unemployed but no longer part of the 29.5 million that remain on benefits.
In addition, millions more workers since March have entered the labor force for the first time but they too have not been eligible to receive benefits due to lack of prior work history as first time job seekers—which precludes them from receiving unemployment benefits. Like those having exhausted their benefits, they too are unemployed but not part of the 29.5m still getting benefits at the end of August.
Joining the ranks of those unemployed but not receiving benefits are the millions who never got benefits because they simply gave up looking for work for various reasons and dropped out of the labor force—which puts them in a category in which, according to US labor department methodology, they aren’t counted as unemployed. They may be out of work, but given the oxymoronic way the US defines unemployed they aren’t considered unemployed for purposes of calculating the unemployment rate!
Finally, there are the additional millions more who never were able to get benefits since March even though they tried, due to various bureaucratic reasons.
Whether having exhausted their benefits, or first time entrants to the labor force not eligible for benefits, or whether they’ve dropped out of the labor force, or were denied benefits for bureaucratic reasons—all these groups are nonetheless part of the unemployed, even though they are not counted among the 29.5m still getting unemployment benefits.
In short, the 55m who got benefits at some point since March, and the 29.5m who are still getting them, are in both cases just a subset of a much larger number of jobless. There are millions more unemployed who never got on the unemployment benefits rolls since March and still not able to get benefits. There’s at least 10-15 million more jobless but without benefits. That means an unemployment rate, at minimum, of 25%–not the 8.4% peddled by the media apologists for Wall St. and the politicians of the Corporate Party of America (aka Trumpublicans and Democrat wings of that party).
Last April 2020 perhaps as much as 50% of the total US labor force of 160 million workers was jobless for approximately two months. As of today, Labor Day 2020, at minimum a fourth, or 25%, still remains so.
That 25% is about the same jobless rate as occurred during the worst years of the 1930s Great Depression, 1932-33!
Here’s why it’s 25% at minimum today, Labor Day, and quite possibly even more:
Dissecting The Government’s Low-Ball U-3/8.4% Unemployment Rate
Despite an actual 25% unemployment rate (i.e. 40 million still jobless) what we hear from the media and politicians is that the unemployment rate is only 8.4%. And thus the total unemployed is only 13.4 million. (When 8.4% is calculated on the 160 million total US labor force, the number unemployed comes to 13.4 million).
The official government statistic of 8.4% jobless is repeated ad nauseam in the media. It’s then picked up by politicians, commentators, and even progressives who should know better and parroted back to the public. But 8.4% is nonsense. A purposely low-balled, cherry-picked number for public consumption. Here’s why:
To begin with, the 8.4% is the government’s official U-3 unemployment rate. The problem with U-3, however, is that it represents only full time workers who became unemployed. But there are at least 50 million workers in the US economy who are not ‘full time’, but part time, discouraged and what the government calls the ‘missing labor force’. The government adds these groups to its U-3 and 8.4%. That raises the unemployment rate in August to 14.2%–not 8.4%. And that translates to a total unemployed of 22.7 million—not 13.4 million.
The 14.2%/22.7 million numbers are carefully avoided in media reporting. One almost never hears the 14.2% and virtually always only the 8.4%, regardless that both are official government statistics.
But even that 14.2%/22.7m is grossly under-estimating the total unemployed. Remember that other government statistic, i.e. those receiving unemployment benefits? Workers receiving benefits as of late August was 29.5 million. And that represents a 18.4% jobless rate. Obviously, if a worker is getting benefits, he/she must be unemployed, right? But you’ll hear 29.5 million and 18.4% in the media even less than the 14.2% and 22.7 million.
In the case of the 29.5 million, moreover, we have another example of ‘low-balling’ and cherry-picking a statistic –not unlike cherry-picking the U-3 stat instead of the U-6. The media reports the number of workers getting benefits at only 16 or 17 million, not 29.5 million!
But here’s what they don’t explain when citing only 16-17 million getting benefits: That number accounts only for workers receiving unemployment benefits under the traditional State Unemployment Benefits system. The 16-17 million excludes independent contract workers, gig, freelance, and others getting benefits under the supplemental Pandemic Unemployment Insurance (PUC) program created last March as part of the Cares Act. In other words, there’s two unemployment benefits systems and the media typically chooses to report only the one when indicating workers getting benefits. There’s the traditional State Unemployment Benefits system and the new Supplemental PUC system that for the first time ever has provided benefits for the 50m non-traditional workers who were before March never eligible for benefits but are now and will continue to be eligible at least through December 2020 when that PUC system expires. Once again, it’s media cherry-picking and number low-balling time.
The State system and the PUC system together comprise the 29.5 million workers still getting unemployment benefits. 29.5m receiving benefits is certainly more than 22.7m (U-6) and even more so than 13.4m. It’s not that the government job statistics consciously lie (although in some cases they come quite close). It’s just that the government produces low ball numbers for the media to pick up, which they do and pound away at. And then commentators, politicians, business sources play their role of spreading the low ball numbers and conveniently ignoring other data.
How then did the US economy get to 29.5 million and 18.4%? Here’s the trajectory: In April more than 6 million workers filed for benefits every week for two weeks, followed by 3-5 million more for several more weeks thereafter! The weekly new benefits filing rate declined as the economy began to reopen in May. However, after May new State unemployment benefit claims still averaged 1 to 2 million every week through July; In addition, the number of PUC initial benefit claims per week also exceeded 1 million a week, every week, through July as well.
The combined totals of the two programs—State and PUC— thus never fell below 2 million initial filings a week throughout the period of the reopening of the economy, from May through July. It has also remained a combined more than 1.5m/week throughout August. That’s 6 million new unemployment filing claims—i.e. 6 million newly unemployed—in just the last month of August. Bringing the total on unemployment benefits to the 29.5 million.
But wait! The 29.5m represents only unemployed workers who were able to get benefits. There’s many more workers who became jobless but were unable to successfully get benefits; or who gave up even trying in the first place and simply dropped out of the labor force altogether. Who are they? And how great are their numbers?
Their numbers are well north of even the 29.5 million and 18.4% unemployment rate. The true total jobless includes their numbers plus the 29.5 million.
For the 29.5m receiving benefits as of Labor Day 2020 excludes those jobless who were unable to get benefits in the first place, who filed unsuccessfully for benefits, who got lost in the bureaucratic process of filing and never got benefits, or who just couldn’t figure out how to file and were not helped and gave up. The 29.5m also represents those having exhausted benefits during the last six months. And those who chose not to file even though unemployed. Finally, the 29.5m excludes new entrants to the labor force over the past six months who weren’t eligible for benefits but haven’t been able nonetheless to find work given the collapse of the economy! All these categories of jobless workers represent the unemployed as much as those receiving benefits include the obviously unemployed. So the number of jobless is actually much higher than even 29.5 million. The 29.5m is therefore just a subset of the true total unemployed.
So how many more are jobless but not getting benefits as of Labor Day 2020?
Estimating The Actual Jobless—With & Without Benefits
You won’t get an accurate number from the government of the total unemployed who didn’t get benefits but have been, and remain, nonetheless jobless since February 2020.
However, private research surveys do give us an idea. MarketWatch, a business research and media company, published an interesting feature story in Fidelity.com this past week, based on its survey of the Philadephia/Mid-Atlantic region of the economy. That case example survey provides a reasonable estimate of the magnitude of those jobless since March 2020 but not among the 29.5m that succeeded in obtaining unemployment benefits.
Of the total number of workers in the Philadelphia, Mid-Atlantic US region who lost their jobs since February, MarketWatch reports that only 87% actually filed successfully for benefits. And of that 87%, only 65% who bothered to file actually ended up getting benefits. That means only 52%, or roughly half of the unemployed in the Philadelphia area, actually got unemployment benefits. The other 48% were just as much out of work, but without benefits.
If Philadelphia represents a microcosm and relatively accurate sample of the entire US economy labor market, simple extrapolation means that the 55 million who successfully got benefits since March 2020 may represent barely half of the total of those who have been unemployed since March!
That means the 29.5 million still getting benefits may represent barely half of all those still unemployed. There may therefore be between 40 and 50 million workers in America still jobless—those still getting benefits (the 29.5m) and those without benefits (10m to 20m).
Thus, the oft-reported official US numbers of 8.4% unemployment rate and 13.4 million total out of work is dwarfed not only by the government’s own alternative U-6 data, as well as by its own data showing 29.5 million jobless getting benefits, but also by the fact the total jobless without benefits may be nearly as large as those with benefits.
Assuming the low-end estimate of 10 million still jobless but without benefits, and adding that to the government data that shows 29.5 million still on benefits, a total jobless of at least 40 million is the result. And that’s the low end assumption. It may be well over 40 million as of end of August 2020.
40 million is 25% of the labor force. And it’s far greater than the 8.4% and 13.4 million that the media and politicians keep drumming into our ears. What the media and politicians are telling us is only one-third of the total unemployed!
Corroborating this estimate of at least 25% unemployed today is yet another government statistic called the labor force participation rate, or LFPR. It represents workers who have dropped out of the labor force altogether. It’s in addition to the 29.5m and 18.4% rate since, by government guidelines and definitions, those who drop out of the labor force cannot receive benefits.
Labor Force Participation Rate Suggests 5.5 Million Dropped Out
The Labor Force Participation Rate (LFPR) is the percent of working age Americans who have left the Labor Force. They are neither working nor actively looking for work. But they are jobless nonetheless and should be considered among the unemployed. The LFPR was 63.4% of the 164.5 million civilian labor force in February 2020. By August the LFPR dropped to 61.7% out of a 160 million labor force. The difference translates into approximately 5.5 million workers who dropped out of the labor force since February 2020. Having dropped out they are not actively looking for work and therefore not considered unemployed by the government for purposes of calculating unemployment rates. Nor are they eligible to receive benefits since, as drop outs, they are not actively looking for work. However they are nevertheless unemployed and their 5.5 million are additional to the 13.4 million U-3 and 22.7 million U-6 unemployed or the 29.5 million getting benefits. They are among the ‘other’ 10-20 million jobless but not counted by the U-3/U-6 or included in those receiving benefits. Their number strongly corroborates that there are many millions more unemployed—not getting benefits or ignored by the government’s official monthly jobless numbers.
Let’s look at the latest of those government monthly employment numbers. Once again what appears is a fudging and manipulation of the numbers in yet other ways as well.
August 2020 Government Employment Report
The first thing to know about the August Employment Report is that it isn’t for the month of August. It is only for the first two weeks of the month (and the last two weeks of July). The data cuts off around the 12th of the month. So what we’re looking at in an August report is really July 13 to August 12 jobs data—i.e. before unemployment claims began to rise again in late August.
Second, it’s important to understand that the August jobs numbers are not the actual number of jobs created July 13-August 12. It is not the raw data of actual jobs created or lost that’s reported—for August or for any month in the Labor Dept. jobs reports.
The government takes the actual raw data and performs various statistical operations on that raw jobs data and reports that adjusted statistic as the actual number of jobs, even though it isn’t. But that’s what all statistics are—an operation and adjustment on the actual raw data. Moreover, the August raw data itself may be over-stated as well, not just altered by the statistical operation(s).
Raw (actual) jobs data comes from several sources: Large businesses report to the government changes in employment, layoffs, hires, etc. (called the Establishment Survey) The government also surveys a sample of households monthly (called the Population Survey). But there’s a third, more questionable source, based on data from the creation and destruction of small businesses, called the (net) New Business Development survey (NBD). That NBD data, however, represents businesses destroyed or created 6 to 9 months before the month in question—i.e. in this case August. So we get six to nine month old data integrated with current data from the Establishment and Population surveys. Mixing such older data with more recent is a questionable statistical practice. It means adding positive net new business development pre-March and Covid, in January-February, to current jobs data. That has the effect of dampening the actual numbers of August jobs unemployment. That is, it adds to and over-estimates the number of jobs created in August. If net business development for July were used—not January/February—it would mean integrating massive small business destruction that has occurred under Covid since March. That would have the opposite effect: it would dampen job creation numbers in August and increase unemployment numbers.
That’s just one example how ‘statistical operations’ on data can serve to exaggerate job growth and under-estimate unemployment.
Another sometimes questionable statistical operation is called the Seasonality adjustment. The seasonality statistical adjustment in August reduced the number of new filings for unemployment benefits in just the last week of August by 130,000. The government then reported a ‘seasonally adjusted’ 881,000 new unemployment claims for the week ending August 29, when the actual number was 1,011,000.
Similarly, in August there were 9,118,000 reported as unemployed in August when the actual data, not seasonally adjusted, for August showed 9,286,000 actually unemployed—i.e. a difference of 168,000. Put another way, there were 168,000 more jobless in actuality than reported as unemployed. 168,000 were artificially reduced from the unemployed ranks due to statistical operations involving just seasonality alone!
The statistical models assume more return to work at the end of summer than, say for instance, at the end of spring. But the point is these models are based on assumptions developed in normal times under normal conditions. Since Covid neither times or conditions are ‘normal’. Yet the government continues to use the same assumptions, models, and statistical operations to change the actual data, the actual number of employed and unemployed, to the statistical representations of the actual numbers!
The latest August official Labor Dept. job data report says 1.37m new jobs were created. This is the statistic. But the actual data, for above reasons, is far fewer new jobs and far more unemployed.
The August Report is biased in yet another way. It purports to show the condition of the US private sector economy. But 238,000 new US census workers were hired in August who’ll be gone by October. Take away the seasonality adjustment of 168,000 jobs and the 238,000 very temporary government Census workers, and the private sector actual job gain in August was roughly 964,000 not 1.37m. Even without the deduction of seasonality, the private job report company, ADP, often cited as a check on government job reports, reported only 428,000 net jobs growth in August—i.e. less than half of the government’s August jobs report.
1.37m new jobs reported, minus the 168,000 seasonal upward adjustment and minus the 238,000 Census workers, and the difference is 964,000 actual net private sector jobs created in August, or about half a million fewer than in July. The job creation monthly is an accelerating downward trend.
Even accepting the government’s own inflated monthly jobs numbers, the rate of monthly job growth has been slowing rapidly since May 2020: In May 3.4 million new jobs were reported as created. In June, as the economy reopened virtually everywhere, 4.7 million new jobs. But in July, as the economic rebound began to fade, only 1.5 million, and now as of August 12, only 1.37m. In short, even questionable statistical operations cannot total cover up the obvious downward trend.
Perhaps a better indicator of this downward trend post-August 12, is the more than 4 million workers who have newly filed for unemployment benefits the last three weeks, and undoubtedly hundreds of thousands more were also newly jobless but who were not able to get benefits or just dropped out of the labor force giving up searching for a job in today’s deeply depressed labor market.
And yet we read and hear from the media and politicians that the job market is healing rapidly and job recovery is accelerating—even as data show it is in fact deteriorating. We hear unemployment is declining fast when in fact it has begun to rise once again.
Summing Up Jobs: March Through August 2020
To Sum Up The Bigger True Picture Of Jobless During The First Six Months Of The Covid Era:
55 million filed for benefits, state and PUC, since last February, out of 160m labor force
• Tens of millions more failed to file or filed unsuccessfully and didn’t get benefits
• 29+ million are still getting benefits as of September Labor Day 2020
• 10-20 million still unemployed but not getting benefits as of Labor Day 2020
• 1.5 million are continuing to file first time for benefits weekly as of early September
• 8.4%/13.4m official U-3 jobless rate is the preferred ‘cherry picked’ media number
• 14.2%/22.7m is government’s alternative data (U-6) yet ignored by media & politicians
• 13.4 or 22.7m still falls far short of the 29.5m/18.4% actually still getting benefits
• At least 5.5m dropped out of labor force the past 6 mo. but not considered unemployed
• The actual unemployment rate is 25% and 40 million are still jobless, at minimum
• Even government monthly stats show a sharp slowing of new jobs added each month
As bad as the picture looks for Phase 1 (March-to Labor Day 2020) of the current crisis, future prospects for jobs for American workers after Labor Day 2020 appear even bleaker.
2nd Wave Of Restructuring & Permanent Job Loss
The Covid virus did not cause the current economic crisis—i.e. the 2nd Great Recession. It did precipitate and accelerate and deepen that crisis, however. The US economy was weakening steadily throughout 2019, with the important sectors of business investment and manufacturing actually contracting throughout the year. Should the virus therefore disappear overnight, the deep wounds to the US economy will remain. Many of the 40 million furloughed starting in March and still jobless will not soon be recalled to their prior work—if at all. Entire industries like travel, entertainment, food & lodging, and others will not return to the ‘old normal’ of pre-Covid. A new normal will occur, but it will be one based on a much reduced output in various industries and companies and therefore employment.
Many major corporations have already announced thousands—and in some cases tens of thousands—of permanent layoffs that will take effect in the coming months. These layoffs will be permanent. They represent the leading edge of a coming second wave of job loss.
Industries deepest affected by the growing permanent restructuring and downsizing include Airlines, surface transportation, cruise lines, resorts and hotels, casinos, malls and retail services, education services, local food services, and many sectors of manufacturing that support all these industries with products and maintenance services. This is a large swath of the US economy, in both GDP and employment terms. A clearer picture of which industries, and how deeply impacted, will be clearer after September 30 when the government publishes its quarterly industry-specific statistics for the second quarter 2020.
In the meantime, announcements of thousands of planned layoffs are being announced weekly by United, American, and other airlines; by Boeing and other aerospace suppliers; by big box mall-based retail companies like JC Penneys, Kohls, Nieman Marcus and others; Movie Theater chains AMC and Cinemark; oil drilling and fracking companies; hospitals’ non-Covid related services health workers; beverage suppliers to hotels and restaurants like Coca Cola—to mention just those making front business page news in recent weeks. Tech companies are all restructuring despite healthy profits performance, shifting to remote employment on a major scale that reduces employment costs via layoffs. They will require therefore fewer building support and operations employees. Many other businesses may also shift to remote activity, with the result that urban office buildings will become less employment populated and much of the local city support services for the office building sector will dramatically downsize in employment as well.
The Federal Reserve Bank’s latest ‘Beige Book’ summary of the US economy warned that millions of workers temporarily furloughed since March may have been permanently laid off by August and more may become so. This shift of temporary laid off to permanent layoff status is corroborated by a survey that showed 3.4 million workers believe they won’t be recalled because their companies have either permanently closed or said they planned to close.
Added to this leading edge of the next wave of layoffs due to business restructuring and downsizing is the likelihood of millions more public sector state and local government layoffs. More than a million government workers have been already laid off since March. Budget and deficit problems accelerating rapidly for state and local governments due to the Covid pandemic (i.e. more expenses amidst collapsing tax revenues) will result in still more public employee layoffs. It’s been estimated these governments will need between $500 billion and $940 billion in bailout rescue in a new stimulus bill from Congress to avoid the mass layoffs. However, it appears extremely unlikely they’ll get much, if anything, in a next Congressional stimulus bill in 2020. Layoffs are therefore inevitable and in some of the larger states and cities they will be significant and forthcoming before 2020 year end.
Small business failures and permanent closures are already rising significantly. As small businesses close, jobs associated with them will disappear. And the numbers could easily amount in the millions by the end of 2020.
There are roughly 30 million small businesses in the US economy. Millions of those temporarily closed since March will fail to reopen. And the worse may be yet to come. The National Federation of Independent Businesses, an industry trade group for small business, forecasts 21% will likely fail within another six months. That’s one-fifth of the 30 million or about 6 million. Even if a high end estimate is not likely, the number is still unprecedented. At the low end is the US Census ‘Business Pulse’ survey that predicts a 5% small business job loss. That’s 1.5 million closures. Whether 6 or 1.5 million, it’s a large number with an even larger number of employees thrown out of work as the businesses close in coming months.
Other forces driving a second wave of layoffs are more difficult to estimate but no less likely. Among them include the Covid related requirement that K-12 schools implement home remote school education services. Many working class households are two-parent wage earners. They lack resources to pay for babysitters or nannies. Those with K-6 year old children in particular will be forced to have one parent quit and stay at home to ensure home schooling. These ‘quits’ will not show up as unemployed, since the parent is ‘out of work’ but not actively ‘looking for work’. They will show up as labor force drop outs. But they will be unemployed nonetheless! It’s uncertain how wide spread the remote K-8 education services will be this fall, or how long it will last. One recent estimate, however, by Brevan Howard Asset Management to its investors, concluded no fewer than 4.3 million US workers could stay home given lack of child care arrangements. A resurgence of Covid may mean millions more may have to quit their jobs and choose unemployment in order to provide their young children education via remote learning.
Another development that for now is difficult to estimate as well is the impact on employment of the lack of a necessary fiscal stimulus for households. The elimination of the $600 supplement pandemic unemployment benefit at the end of July has resulted in a reduction of no less than $65 billion in consumption spending per month starting this past August. Evictions and mortgage foreclosures will also have a negative impact on consumer household spending, which is nearly 70% of the economy and US GDP. Already the loss of the $600 benefit, combined with rising evictions, is having a major effect on consumer confidence which in August began falling again sharply. This could be exacerbated by an inadequate stimulus bill in September. Reduced working class benefits and household incomes will have an impact on consumer demand for products and services in the economy across the board, affecting nearly all sectors of businesses. And as that demand drops, it will almost certainly lead in turn to less consumer spending and in turn to more layoffs.
The preceding five forces—i.e. large corporate restructurings and permanent downsizing, a sharp rise in public sector layoffs, unprecedented business closures, remote schooling requirements of two working parent families, and general demand reduction due to inadequate next stimulus—all translate into a second wave of layoffs now emerging.
These longer term job reduction forces mean the recent tepid rebound in jobs during May-July will likely give way to a relapse in the US labor markets in coming months and a rise in unemployment. The trend may already be appearing as of late August as first time claims for unemployment benefits have begun to rise once again.
And then there are still the ‘known unknowns’ that could exacerbate conditions further: the increasingly likelihood of a historic political crisis surrounding the November 3 elections. That will breed massive uncertainty and potentially an even worse economic crisis and associated layoffs. Or the Covid virus could resurge significantly once again as winter sets in, as many fear will happen. That too will lead to more shutdowns and furloughing of jobs once again. Even further down the road is the 2021 ‘black swan’ event of another financial crisis, as businesses, households, and local governments begin to default on their debts and precipitate another financial crisis similar to 2008-09.
Six Months Into the Pandemic, Transit Workers Are Still Dying—With No End in Sight
Though they’ve kept working in some of the most dangerous jobs, they’re now facing the prospect of furloughs and layoffs if there’s no more federal funding for transit.
September 11, 2020 Marcia Brown THE AMERICAN PROSPECT
https://portside.org/2020-09-11/six-months-pandemic-transit-workers-are-still-dying-no-end-sight
Since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, public-transit workers have been called “essential” and “heroes.” Yard signs plaster suburbia with “Thank you essential workers” and “Essential workers are heroes.” City apartment windows boast similar signs. And every day, these transit workers show up to work, exposed to hundreds of people a day, and transport other frontline essential workers to their jobs as nurses, grocery clerks, and other jobs we can’t do without.
But their work has come at an appalling cost. Hundreds of these transit workers have died as a result of their exposure to the virus while at work. Nearly 100 members of Transit Workers Union Local 100 in New York City alone have died. Every time there’s a hot spot around the country, labor leaders told me, transit workers in that region contract COVID-19 and some die. “As soon as I see a hot spot, I’m like ‘Oh no,’ because there’s the buses,” said John Costa, international president of the Amalgamated Transit Union.
As of last Friday, at least 87 ATU members have died. TWU has lost at least 150 members, and no fewer than 10,000 members have tested positive or been in quarantine. But for the most part, states and agencies aren’t tracking COVID deaths of transit workers. According to ATU Local 192 president Yvonne Williams in Oakland, California, AC Transit officials claim that workers for bus system serving parts of Alameda and Contra Costa counties, contracted the disease outside the workplace. As of September 3, 37 of her members have contracted the disease and two have died.
Since the pandemic began, ridership has fallen precipitously as Americans who could began working from home. As ridership declined, so did revenues. City budgets, another essential pillar of transit agencies’ budgets, also crashed. The CARES Act helped alleviate some of the immediate budget woes, but without further federal funding, many transit agencies are on the verge of collapse.
The $25 billion provided by the CARES Act covers the $16 billion in fare revenues that agencies take in during a typical year, but fares are just one source of their revenues, explained Paul Lewis, vice president of policy and finance at the Eno Center for Transportation. Some agencies rely more heavily on fare revenues than others, Lewis said. For example, 75 percent of San Francisco’s BART system’s operating expenses are covered by fares, but in Los Angeles, fares account for just 18 percent of that agency’s budget.
And as revenues collapse, transit agencies are asking the unions that represent their workers to come to the table for concessionary bargaining—that is, for austerity budgets, for furloughs, and for possible layoffs.
THE VAST MAJORITY of transit riders take buses—more than 50 percent, according to Lewis. Most transit agencies in the U.S. are just bus agencies, and most agencies collect just 20 percent of their total operating revenues in fares. Buses are also more dangerous for workers than trains, given that a bus operator often shares the same ventilation system as the passengers, whereas a train operator is usually cordoned off from the passengers. Now that the farebox recovery ratio—the percentage of operating funds that are recouped through passenger fares—has fallen precipitously, some agencies have cut services, which often leads to more crowding on buses and trains.
TWU’s international president John Samuelsen blamed the “budgetary disasters” on an overreliance on the farebox system. He says it’s a vestige of the practices of the private companies that ran public transit 100 years ago. “That system ended because this vital public service could not be run as a for-profit enterprise,” he said.
Even as agencies’ budgets crash, however, they are incurring more expenses, such as personal protective equipment (PPE) for workers and increased expenses for sanitation. PPE also has a shelf life, so it must be cycled out, explained Adie Tomer, a fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program.
OSHA in this administration sucks; this president doesn’t want safety.
Traditionally, the federal government has funded transit agencies only for capital expenses, such as new buses, train cars, or track maintenance. (Whether PPE falls into this category remains “fuzzy,” Tomer explained.) Nonetheless, the CARES Act funding in March bolstered agencies’ operating budgets and included coverage of PPE expenses.
Jack Clark, executive director of the Transportation Learning Center, said that unlike other industries, transit funding has broader support than one might think, because federal funding guidelines stipulate that the equipment be made in the United States. For example, he said, a major plant that makes buses is located in the California congressional district of Republican House leader Kevin McCarthy—a key ally on federal legislation.
A complicating factor in the federal funding of transit, however, is that one in every two transit passengers in the United States is in metro New York, Lewis explained, but Congress can’t offer federal aid just to New York—and thousands of other agencies need support, too. Across the nation’s agencies, there isn’t consistency on PPE or social-distancing guidelines—partly because of the void left by OSHA, which affects all industries, not just transit.
“OSHA in this administration sucks; this president doesn’t want safety,” Costa said. And despite knowing what’s necessary to keep workers safe six months into the pandemic, not all agencies are following best practices. As the Prospect reported, the airflow on buses is dangerous, but proper filters and ventilation can prevent the spread of the virus. CDC guidelines, Costa said, aren’t enough. Instead, workers must make demands for the changes they need to be safe. “It’s the only recourse we have that we can do legally without taking a strike,” Costa added.
According to Costa, while members do have access to PPE, they can’t get the recommended N95 masks because they just aren’t there. “The administration … they don’t think this is a problem.” Costa continued, “The rich and famous can work from home, but minorities and the poor have to be out there with everybody—and they’re dying.”
Most bus agencies have implemented social-distancing guidelines such as rear-door boarding, protective plastic shields for bus operators, and blocking off the front half of the bus. Most also require passengers to wear a mask, and some even provide masks to passengers who don’t have one. But passengers’ mask and social-distancing compliance has become another tension point for operators across the country.
Lewis says that agencies need more guidelines on the compliance issue. “In a pandemic that’s spread through the air, yelling at certain passengers only escalates the situation and makes it more dangerous,” he said.
“It’s absolutely a horrifically stressful time to be a transit worker in America,” Samuelsen said, noting that three transit workers were assaulted in 24 hours in New York last week. His members and passengers generally both fear the pandemic and are stressed by “not knowing how they’re going to pay their rent, their mortgage, or put food on the table.”
In Washington, D.C., labor and management for the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority were beginning to figure out how to work together better just before the pandemic hit, said Clark. Now, however, “they’re looking at massive cuts in service and layoffs.” Clark added, “It will get very ugly very quickly. And it quickly becomes a racial-justice issue, because look who’s doing the work and look who’s riding the buses.”
Costa said that six months into the pandemic, ATU still has concerns. “The agencies are now reopening and starting to go backwards on social distancing,” he said. Several union leaders told the Prospect that they are not only worried about social distancing, but also that agencies will become complacent as the pandemic is normalized. “Our guard is going down, and I have a fear that we’re going to lose more members to this COVID,” Costa said.
For that reason, Samuelsen fears that “we’ll have to fight these fights all over again.” The subway system, he added, is the canary in the coal mine for the second wave of the virus.
EVER SINCE THE pandemic began ravaging transit workers, their union leaders have scrambled to figure out how best to support their members. Every other week, ATU’s Costa holds a tele-town hall with local union leadership to give an update on the pandemic, share information about layoffs and furloughs, and recount what victories and successes his union has achieved. At the end, he takes questions. Costa said that navigating a pandemic was not in the playbook when he was elected, and that leadership is learning new communications skills as it goes along. The union has done Zoom training for local leaders, too. Ironically, such changes may prove to strengthen unions: “Quite honestly, I think it might have saved the labor movement, in that we had to change our ways on how we do business,” he added. In fact, his union’s membership has actually had a bump during the pandemic.
The agencies are now reopening and starting to go backwards on social distancing.
But ATU Local 192 president Williams makes clear that union leaders are still figuring out what works. Members still need more direct communication and more communication in the workplace, she said. AC Transit has said that it plans to do layoffs only by attrition, but Williams, who has been an ATU member since 1980, said that given her experience, there may still be layoffs.
Costa says that if Congress doesn’t act to fund state budgets and transit budget deficits, the toll will be drastic. “We’re going to have a depression,” he said.
Samuelsen noted that older workers remain terrified of becoming ill, and younger workers wonder if they’ll have a job the next day. In New York, Mayor Bill de Blasio has already raised the prospect of laying off 400 paramedics, and Samuelsen worries that transit workers are next—despite the possibility of a second wave in the winter.
TWU will continue to lobby for more federal money, Samuelsen said. If there are layoffs, a strike is possible, added Samuelsen, a former president of the hard-hit TWU Local 100. “Does anybody really believe, do the bosses or politicians really believe, that after more than 100 Local 100 members are dead that they’re going to be able to announce layoffs and there won’t be a massive rank-and-file rebellion?” he asked.
Transit workers, Williams asserted, fear the indifference of their bosses. “The company managers who are by and large sitting at home and sending us to the streets do not think we’re essential workers,” she said. “They think we’re expendable.”
University of California, San Diego students, staff and faculty issue open letter opposing reckless reopening plan
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/09/11/cali-s11.html
By Peter Ross
11 September 2020
Nearly 500 students and staff and more than 100 professors at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) have signed an open letter calling on the university to cancel in-person classes, limit campus housing to those with no other viable options and cancel layoffs and furloughs.
The letter, published three weeks in advance of the fall quarter, opposes the university’s “Return to Learn” plan, under which 12 percent of courses would take place at least partially in person. The university has announced that at least 47 students, 21 staff and 184 health care workers have so far tested positive for COVID-19, even before the fall quarter begins on September 28. Thousands of students have continued to live on campus over the summer.
As the letter notes, some 14,000 students would be brought back to campus under the plan, including about 7,500 undergraduates who would stay in dormitories. The university has attempted to justify the return-to-campus plan by proposing a series of half measures, including mandatory face coverings, daily screenings and testing every 16 days. Class sizes would be limited to fewer than 50 students and no more than 25 percent of classroom capacity, and students living in dormitories would be assigned to “residential pods.” The details of the plan’s testing program have not been made public, and no plans are in place to make information about outbreaks in dormitories publicly available.
The open letter correctly states that these measures are completely insufficient to prevent a devastating spread of the virus and references the recent outbreaks at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Alabama and the University of Notre Dame, where thousands of students were infected after those campuses were reopened under similar policies.
At the University of North Carolina, dorms were held at 60 percent capacity and classroom seats at 30 percent, but within a week of reopening, the university’s testing positivity rate had jumped by over 10 percent and as many as 48 new infections were reported in a single day. Nationwide, 51,000 positive cases have been documented on college campuses, with 35,000 cases in the last three weeks. As the open letter notes, “To imagine that UCSD will be an exception to this rule is both arrogant and negligent.”
Danny Heinz, a doctoral student who co-authored the letter, told the San Diego Union-Tribune, “I am concerned that there will be an outbreak that could spread beyond campus to the community and that it could sacrifice the education of children, shut down business and affect the public’s health.”
The International Youth and Students for Social Equality commends the brave stand taken by the letter signatories in opposing the university’s reckless reopening plan. Students and workers are responding to a very real situation, and rightly stress that the community spread which will result from the premature reopening of the campus threatens to do “irreparable harm both to the UCSD community and to the San Diego community at large.”
The same dangers face students and educators at schools and universities reopening throughout the country. Even as the national death toll approaches 200,000—with more than 1 in 50 people in the country infected—teachers and students are being marshaled into primary school classrooms in order to pressure parents to return to work. In California, the Democratic Party administration is granting waivers to school districts that permit elementary schools to reopen once case rates fall under 200 per 100,000 people, twenty times more than what the CDC defines as a low incidence.
Colleges and universities have been even more unwilling to move to remote instruction, and to the extent that they have done so, it has largely been in response to state mandates. According to the College Crisis Initiative at Davidson College, less than 7 percent of the four-year colleges and universities surveyed nationwide plan to have their Fall 2020 semesters fully online.
The nearly universal institution of “partial re-openings” and “hybrid classes” is partly driven by the need to resume the collection of tuition and housing money, and provide a justification for maintaining student fees at their pre-COVID levels. At UCSD, student fees for the 2020–2021 school year total $17,355 for California residents and $34,457 for non-residents, up from last year despite the drastically reduced services.
Under conditions in which the state government has cut $300 million (8.1 percent) in funding for the University of California, as part of a $54 billion budget cut for the 2020–2021 fiscal year, the state’s public universities are under enormous pressure to remain financially solvent.
The open letter notes that the university’s actions indicate that it is “being run as a business rather than as a community” and references the moves by the UC system to increase undergraduate enrollment without adequately covering the costs of education or hiring enough new faculty. UCSD has also dramatically increased the number and compensation of administrators. According to a faculty report on UCSD finances, expenditures on annual salaries for the Chancellor’s and Vice-Chancellors’ offices more than doubled between 2012 and 2018.
Nevertheless, the university has temporarily laid off 200 workers during the summer, cut $24 million from its hospital budget, and is instituting wage cuts, layoffs and furloughs for housing and dining workers. In opposition to the administration’s cynical justification that the Return to Learn plan is necessary to provide campus employment, the letter’s statement that “workers should not have to choose between employment and health” is highly significant.
As the letter states, “The university’s decision to pursue Return to Learn at all costs shows how the needs of the institution are being given more weight than the needs of its stakeholders.” More fundamentally, it is the needs of the financial oligarchy, which seeks to offload trillions of dollars in education costs onto working people, which are paramount.
Enormous opposition exists among students, educators and workers to the unsafe opening of schools and universities. In August, students and faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Georgia staged “die-in” protests in opposition to unsafe reopening plans, and at least 700 students at the University of Iowa participated in a “sick-out” protest in early September. Students and faculty at Texas A&M, Pennsylvania State University, Kutztown University, Northwestern University, Boston University and numerous other colleges have written their own open letters and garnered support from hundreds of students.
Starting Tuesday, over 1,000 graduate student instructors went on strike at the University of Michigan, after the Graduate Employee Organization (GEO) voted overwhelmingly to stage a walkout. Prior to the strike, over 1,800 graduate students signed an open letter outlining the GEO’s demands, which include completely online instruction, robust testing and contact tracing, a universal right to work remotely without documentation, rent freezes, emergency funds for students and the demilitarization of the campus.
Students voted to strike after administrators rejected the demands as not “financially feasible.” The strike immediately gathered strong support from students, staff and faculty—and typically thuggish threats of retaliation from the university administration. Yesterday, students voted to reject a sellout contract which met none of the demands in the open letter, but was nonetheless pushed by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), with which the GEO is associated.
The situation at the University of Michigan reveals some of the challenges students face at universities across the country. The genuine opposition expressed by those who signed the open letter is at risk of being suppressed if it stays within the framework of the unions. AFSCME, the UC’s largest employee union, and the UAW, which represents student employees, have thoroughly exposed themselves as arms of management which will never fight for the interests of student workers. AFSCME has routinely negotiated poverty wages for its UC workers, kept workers on the job without a contract, allowed jobs to be subcontracted to outside companies to drive down wages and shut down strikes over the votes of its membership.
This spring, when graduate students at the UC Santa Cruz waged a nearly fourth-month wildcat strike demanding a cost of living adjustment (COLA), the UAW refused to come to the defense of fired graduate student workers, continued to enforce an anti-democratic no-strike clause and billed an Unfair Labor Practices (ULP) suit while biding time to shut down the strike. Seizing on the opportunity provided by the pandemic, the UAW bargaining team voted in June against even taking a vote on the ULP, in a cynical and contemptuous disregard for the democratic rights of the thousands who went on strike.
Students and workers must learn the lessons of these betrayals and take the fight against unsafe reopenings into their own hands. This mean, above all, building organizations which are answerable only to students, teachers and staff and capable of advancing their demands on the basis of genuine, independent scientific knowledge. A struggle for life or death will be lost by conciliatory appeals to the administrators and unions that answer to their masters in Sacramento and Washington D.C.
Working people must resist any pressure to adapt themselves to the racialist politics of the Democratic Party and its academic hangers-on. The UCSD open letter notes the “hugely disproportionate toll on people of color, migrants, and the incarcerated,” but casts these issues in academic, racialist terms, and makes no reference to the fundamental cause of these conditions, which is the oppression and exploitation of the working class under capitalism.
The struggle against school reopenings must not be isolated. The issues faced by students in San Diego are the same as those faced by their counterparts around the world. Workers and young people must link up with struggles at other universities, schools and workplaces, and direct the reopening of schools on a safe, scientific and genuinely democratic basis through the formation of independent rank-and-file safety committees.
The author also recommends:
University of Michigan grad students reject administration offer, continue strike against unsafe conditions
[10 September 2020]
Form independent rank-and-file safety committees of educators, parents and students!
[15 August 2020]
The lessons of the University of California grad student strike
[30 April 2020]
11 September 2020
Nearly 500 students and staff and more than 100 professors at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) have signed an open letter calling on the university to cancel in-person classes, limit campus housing to those with no other viable options and cancel layoffs and furloughs.
The letter, published three weeks in advance of the fall quarter, opposes the university’s “Return to Learn” plan, under which 12 percent of courses would take place at least partially in person. The university has announced that at least 47 students, 21 staff and 184 health care workers have so far tested positive for COVID-19, even before the fall quarter begins on September 28. Thousands of students have continued to live on campus over the summer.
As the letter notes, some 14,000 students would be brought back to campus under the plan, including about 7,500 undergraduates who would stay in dormitories. The university has attempted to justify the return-to-campus plan by proposing a series of half measures, including mandatory face coverings, daily screenings and testing every 16 days. Class sizes would be limited to fewer than 50 students and no more than 25 percent of classroom capacity, and students living in dormitories would be assigned to “residential pods.” The details of the plan’s testing program have not been made public, and no plans are in place to make information about outbreaks in dormitories publicly available.
The open letter correctly states that these measures are completely insufficient to prevent a devastating spread of the virus and references the recent outbreaks at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Alabama and the University of Notre Dame, where thousands of students were infected after those campuses were reopened under similar policies.
At the University of North Carolina, dorms were held at 60 percent capacity and classroom seats at 30 percent, but within a week of reopening, the university’s testing positivity rate had jumped by over 10 percent and as many as 48 new infections were reported in a single day. Nationwide, 51,000 positive cases have been documented on college campuses, with 35,000 cases in the last three weeks. As the open letter notes, “To imagine that UCSD will be an exception to this rule is both arrogant and negligent.”
Danny Heinz, a doctoral student who co-authored the letter, told the San Diego Union-Tribune, “I am concerned that there will be an outbreak that could spread beyond campus to the community and that it could sacrifice the education of children, shut down business and affect the public’s health.”
The International Youth and Students for Social Equality commends the brave stand taken by the letter signatories in opposing the university’s reckless reopening plan. Students and workers are responding to a very real situation, and rightly stress that the community spread which will result from the premature reopening of the campus threatens to do “irreparable harm both to the UCSD community and to the San Diego community at large.”
The same dangers face students and educators at schools and universities reopening throughout the country. Even as the national death toll approaches 200,000—with more than 1 in 50 people in the country infected—teachers and students are being marshaled into primary school classrooms in order to pressure parents to return to work. In California, the Democratic Party administration is granting waivers to school districts that permit elementary schools to reopen once case rates fall under 200 per 100,000 people, twenty times more than what the CDC defines as a low incidence.
Colleges and universities have been even more unwilling to move to remote instruction, and to the extent that they have done so, it has largely been in response to state mandates. According to the College Crisis Initiative at Davidson College, less than 7 percent of the four-year colleges and universities surveyed nationwide plan to have their Fall 2020 semesters fully online.
The nearly universal institution of “partial re-openings” and “hybrid classes” is partly driven by the need to resume the collection of tuition and housing money, and provide a justification for maintaining student fees at their pre-COVID levels. At UCSD, student fees for the 2020–2021 school year total $17,355 for California residents and $34,457 for non-residents, up from last year despite the drastically reduced services.
Under conditions in which the state government has cut $300 million (8.1 percent) in funding for the University of California, as part of a $54 billion budget cut for the 2020–2021 fiscal year, the state’s public universities are under enormous pressure to remain financially solvent.
The open letter notes that the university’s actions indicate that it is “being run as a business rather than as a community” and references the moves by the UC system to increase undergraduate enrollment without adequately covering the costs of education or hiring enough new faculty. UCSD has also dramatically increased the number and compensation of administrators. According to a faculty report on UCSD finances, expenditures on annual salaries for the Chancellor’s and Vice-Chancellors’ offices more than doubled between 2012 and 2018.
Nevertheless, the university has temporarily laid off 200 workers during the summer, cut $24 million from its hospital budget, and is instituting wage cuts, layoffs and furloughs for housing and dining workers. In opposition to the administration’s cynical justification that the Return to Learn plan is necessary to provide campus employment, the letter’s statement that “workers should not have to choose between employment and health” is highly significant.
As the letter states, “The university’s decision to pursue Return to Learn at all costs shows how the needs of the institution are being given more weight than the needs of its stakeholders.” More fundamentally, it is the needs of the financial oligarchy, which seeks to offload trillions of dollars in education costs onto working people, which are paramount.
Enormous opposition exists among students, educators and workers to the unsafe opening of schools and universities. In August, students and faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Georgia staged “die-in” protests in opposition to unsafe reopening plans, and at least 700 students at the University of Iowa participated in a “sick-out” protest in early September. Students and faculty at Texas A&M, Pennsylvania State University, Kutztown University, Northwestern University, Boston University and numerous other colleges have written their own open letters and garnered support from hundreds of students.
Starting Tuesday, over 1,000 graduate student instructors went on strike at the University of Michigan, after the Graduate Employee Organization (GEO) voted overwhelmingly to stage a walkout. Prior to the strike, over 1,800 graduate students signed an open letter outlining the GEO’s demands, which include completely online instruction, robust testing and contact tracing, a universal right to work remotely without documentation, rent freezes, emergency funds for students and the demilitarization of the campus.
Students voted to strike after administrators rejected the demands as not “financially feasible.” The strike immediately gathered strong support from students, staff and faculty—and typically thuggish threats of retaliation from the university administration. Yesterday, students voted to reject a sellout contract which met none of the demands in the open letter, but was nonetheless pushed by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), with which the GEO is associated.
The situation at the University of Michigan reveals some of the challenges students face at universities across the country. The genuine opposition expressed by those who signed the open letter is at risk of being suppressed if it stays within the framework of the unions. AFSCME, the UC’s largest employee union, and the UAW, which represents student employees, have thoroughly exposed themselves as arms of management which will never fight for the interests of student workers. AFSCME has routinely negotiated poverty wages for its UC workers, kept workers on the job without a contract, allowed jobs to be subcontracted to outside companies to drive down wages and shut down strikes over the votes of its membership.
This spring, when graduate students at the UC Santa Cruz waged a nearly fourth-month wildcat strike demanding a cost of living adjustment (COLA), the UAW refused to come to the defense of fired graduate student workers, continued to enforce an anti-democratic no-strike clause and billed an Unfair Labor Practices (ULP) suit while biding time to shut down the strike. Seizing on the opportunity provided by the pandemic, the UAW bargaining team voted in June against even taking a vote on the ULP, in a cynical and contemptuous disregard for the democratic rights of the thousands who went on strike.
Students and workers must learn the lessons of these betrayals and take the fight against unsafe reopenings into their own hands. This mean, above all, building organizations which are answerable only to students, teachers and staff and capable of advancing their demands on the basis of genuine, independent scientific knowledge. A struggle for life or death will be lost by conciliatory appeals to the administrators and unions that answer to their masters in Sacramento and Washington D.C.
Working people must resist any pressure to adapt themselves to the racialist politics of the Democratic Party and its academic hangers-on. The UCSD open letter notes the “hugely disproportionate toll on people of color, migrants, and the incarcerated,” but casts these issues in academic, racialist terms, and makes no reference to the fundamental cause of these conditions, which is the oppression and exploitation of the working class under capitalism.
The struggle against school reopenings must not be isolated. The issues faced by students in San Diego are the same as those faced by their counterparts around the world. Workers and young people must link up with struggles at other universities, schools and workplaces, and direct the reopening of schools on a safe, scientific and genuinely democratic basis through the formation of independent rank-and-file safety committees.
The author also recommends:
University of Michigan grad students reject administration offer, continue strike against unsafe conditions
[10 September 2020]
Form independent rank-and-file safety committees of educators, parents and students!
[15 August 2020]
The lessons of the University of California grad student strike
[30 April 2020]
The killing of Michael Reinoehl: A state murder
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/09/07/rein-s07.html
By Niles Niemuth
7 September 2020
On September 3, Michael Forest Reinoehl, 48, was shot and killed by a federal fugitive task force led by the US Marshals Service outside an apartment complex in Lacey, Washington.
Reinoehl’s killing came several hours after he had been charged with the murder of Aaron “Jay” Danielson, a Trump supporter and right-wing vigilante, at a protest in Portland, Oregon, on August 29.
Reinoehl’s death was a state-sanctioned killing, carried out with the support of the Justice Department and the White House. Just minutes before Reinoehl’s death was announced, President Donald Trump tweeted a demand that the police take action to apprehend Danielson’s killer. “Do your job, and do it fast. Everybody knows who this thug is,” Trump declared.
While the precise circumstances leading to Reinoehl’s death remain murky, statements by police investigators, the US Marshals and Attorney General William Barr make clear there was no attempt to arrest him alive. His death was the intended outcome of an operation meant to intimidate others opposed to police violence and set a precedent for violent state attacks on workers coming into struggle against mass unemployment and the ruling class’s homicidal back-to-work and back-to school drives in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.
The most chilling statement came from Attorney General William Barr, who said in a press release posted on the Justice Department’s website that the killing of an “admitted Antifa member” was “a significant accomplishment in the ongoing effort to restore law and order.”
Barr justified Reinoehl’s extrajudicial killing by declaring that he had “attempted to escape arrest and produced a firearm.” This is a well-known formulation that has often been used to justify police assassinations since the Supreme Court gave law enforcement a green light to shoot criminal suspects based on the claim that they were fleeing and posed a threat to the public or police.
Such claims have been used to whitewash the killing of political opponents, including the FBI’s efforts to destroy the left-wing Black Panther Party in the 1960s and 1970s. Bobby Hutton, the treasurer of the Black Panthers, was killed in a shootout with the Oakland, California, police in 1968. Stripped to his pants and attempting to surrender, the 17-year-old Hutton was shot and killed by police who claimed he had attempted to flee.
Historian Edward B. Westermann notes that under Germany’s Nazi regime as well as the preceding Weimar Republic, the phrase “shot while trying to escape” was frequently used “to describe the killing of the regime’s putative political and racial enemies…” He explains that “in many cases, the phrase normalized the act of murder by providing a veneer of procedural legality that served as both a euphemism and a justification for murder.”
The murder of Reinoehl occurred the same week that Jeremy Logan, co-chair of the Spokane, Washington, chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, was kidnapped and placed in an unmarked van, then detained for more than a day by federal agents.
The methods used by the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile—snatch squads, disappearances and extrajudicial murders of political opponents—are appearing in the United States.
Reinoehl had been active in nightly protests against police violence in Portland. He had expressed committed opposition to racism and fascism and sympathy for Antifa, but had made clear that he was not a member of any such organization.
During an interview broadcast by VICE News the same day that he was killed, Reinoehl admitted that he had shot Danielson, but he insisted that it was in self-defense. “I had no choice,” he said. “I mean, I had a choice. I could have sat there and watched them kill a friend of mine of color. But I wasn’t going to do that.”
Records unsealed on Friday show that Danielson, a member of the far-right Patriot Prayer organization, had been armed with a can of bear mace, a retractable metal baton and a hand gun in a holster on his hip when he was shot. The killing took place in the context of a provocation by pro-Trump elements, who drove pickup trucks through downtown Portland and shot paintballs and pepper spray and engaged in fistfights with anti-police violence protesters.
In his interview with VICE News, Reinoehl said that he had not turned himself in to the police because he believed they were working with far-right groups, and that he would not be safe in their custody. “They’re out hunting me,” he said. “There’s nightly posts of the hunt and where they’re going to be hunting. They made a post saying the deer are going to feel lucky this year because it’s open season on Michael right now.”
According to a statement by the Thurston County Sheriff’s Department, which is investigating the killing of Reinoehl, the suspect was shot as he ran from the task force. “During the attempt to apprehend him, shots were fired at the suspect in the vehicle and he fled from the vehicle on foot,” the department said in a statement. “Additional shots were fired at the suspect and he was pronounced deceased at the location.”
The murder of Reinoehl contrasts sharply with the treatment of 17-year-old Trump supporter and far-right militia member Kyle Rittenhouse, who shot and killed two protesters and wounded a third in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on August 25. Rittenhouse, armed with a semi-automatic weapon, was allowed to cross police lines and return to his home in Antioch, Illinois, before being arrested on murder charges by local police. He is currently being held in a juvenile detention facility in Illinois awaiting extradition to Wisconsin.
Right-wing forces, including Fox News commentators, have declared Rittenhouse a hero. They have raised more than $1 million for his legal defense. Republican Congressman Thomas Massie hailed his “incredible restraint,” while President Trump argued that he had acted in self-defense.
The mainstream “liberal” press and the Democratic Party have been largely silent on the police murder of Reinoehl, as well as the murder of two protesters in Kenosha by Rittenhouse. As of this writing, there have been no calls for an investigation into the killing of Reinoehl by any Democratic politician, major media outlet or the American Civil Liberties Union.
Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and his running mate Senator Kamala Harris have said nothing about Reinoehl, and Biden avoided saying anything about Rittenhouse’s victims when he was in Kenosha last week. Instead, Biden has launched a law-and-order campaign, denouncing looters and anarchists, while promoting racial identity politics as a solution to police brutality. Democratic officials at every level across the country have deployed riot police and the National Guard against peaceful protesters demanding an end to police violence and racism.
The killing of Reinoehl, robbed of his democratic right to the presumption of innocence and a jury trial, and the silence of the Democratic Party are a serious warning to the working class. These are milestones in the criminalization of left-wing dissent and state support for violent fascist vigilantes.
The Democrats will do nothing to defend the rights and lives of young people and workers who oppose the policies of the government and the daily violence and death meted out by the police agencies of the ruling elite. The basic social and democratic rights of the working class—the vast majority of the population—can be defended only through the independent mobilization of the working class in a conscious struggle to put an end to capitalism, the source of inequality, war and dictatorship, and establish socialism.
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