https://socialistaction.org/2020/04/11/layoffs-skyrocket-virus-deaths-soar-opposition-grows/
Layoffs skyrocket, Virus deaths soar, Opposition grows
Socialist Action / 2 days ago
Amazon workers in Staten Island strike on March 30, 2020 (Photo: Angela
Weiss/AFP/Getty Images)
By JAMES FORTIN
At a news conference on April 9, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell
said the economy was deteriorating “with alarming speed” – not
particularly newsworthy to the already-informed ranks of the recently
unemployed, now numbering over 17 million. The same words also
tragically apply to the ongoing spread of COVID-19 through the U.S. and
the rest of the world.
The U.S. economy is in shambles not experienced by working people since
the Great Depression of the 1930s. Millions of workers, thrown into an
economic morass not of their making, are beginning to witness – with
many participating in – actions, picket lines, and strikes most
everywhere for health protections, wage increases, insurance coverage
and for control literally over their own lives. They are publicly
questioning why they are bearing the brunt of the economic collapse and
why more is not being done – and not being done quickly enough – to help
them.
At the same time, we are exposed to the daily scenes of exhausted nurses
and other medical personnel, many holding back tears, everywhere
pleading for the ventilators and personal protective gear they lack to
save patients and themselves from COVID-19. As of April 11, the U.S. has
topped a half million infected by the virus, with more than 20,000 dead.
The contagion is rapidly spreading to new hot-spot death zones in
Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, New Orleans and to countless additional
places in between. Health care workers, too, are taking their demands
public in labor actions coast to coast.
These protests by segments of the working class have a context. Working
people have been the target of austerity measures taken by Democratic
and Republican administrations alike over the past 40 years. These twin
parties of U.S. capitalism have been ardent enablers of the ruling class
globalizing its economic system in the name of profit, thereby exporting
work to lower-paying overseas markets, while eliminating jobs, cutting
wages and decimating all manner of retirement and health care benefits
domestically. Simultaneously, the social safety net in the U.S. has been
shrunken with food programs slashed, public housing privatized, and
hospitals closed. The greatest migration of wealth in history from
workers to the ruling rich has transpired, making the working class
today less secure, more impoverished, and sicker than it was when Jimmy
Carter was president, more than 40 years ago. The current financial
“stimulus” package passed by Congress is accelerating this process, with
massive sums of swaddling made available to the companies and banks of
the ruling rich, while pacifiers are given to everyone else.
In the package passed unanimously by Democrats and Republicans,
individuals are scheduled to get a one-time payment of $1200. On the
other hand, aircraft manufacturer Boeing, the creator of the faulty 737
MAX 8 jet that has taken hundreds of lives in crashes, will get $17
billion. Airlines will get $58 billion, even though they are flush with
cash from 10 years of record profits.
Ultimately, to the detriment of all workers, large corporations will get
$500 billion in cash plus massive tax cuts. Banks, now salivating over
their stimulus drinking trough, will get trillions of dollars’ worth of
credit and loan performance guarantees from the Federal Reserve Bank –
all of this while workers’ payments are delayed, food banks that they
have been forced to rely on go empty, and Trump threatens of send
workers back to work before COVID-19 has been tamed.
No, your nose works ok – this entire ruling class bailout smells foul.
“People are undertaking these sacrifices [their layoffs] for the common
good,” states Fed Chairman Powell. “We need to make them whole. We
should be doing that, as a society. They didn’t cause this. Their
[small] business isn’t closed because of anything they did wrong. They
[workers] didn’t lose their job because of anything they did wrong.” The
politicians in Washington are too busy helping the ruling rich to care.
Safety issues have been the spark. Fearing for their safety, about a
hundred Amazon workers at its Staten Island, New York warehousing
operation walked off their jobs on March 30, demanding that the company
clean and sanitize the warehouse after workers there tested positive for
COVID-19. At another Amazon facility in Chicago, workers picketed on
April 4 demanding the same while a long line of protestors in cars,
blaring their horns and featuring homemade demand signs, drove by the
main gates of the distribution warehouse. Similarly, in Memphis,
Tennessee, at about the same time, half the workers at a Kroger
warehouse walked out from work demanding company action to prevent the
virus’s spread when a co-worker was found to have the coronavirus.
Although involving fairly small numbers in each action, coronavirus
safety concerns prompted union sanitation workers in Pittsburgh to
follow suit, as well as non-union poultry workers in Georgia, bus
drivers in Detroit and Birmingham, Chrysler auto workers in Michigan,
and shipyard workers in Maine. But the largest job action to date
involved 17,000 carpenters and painters in the Boston area who were told
on April 6 not to come into work by their unions, to protest lack of
protection gear and the inability of workers to engage in social
distancing on the job.
The lack of workplace safety measures to fend off the coronavirus has
accelerated union organizing campaigns in a number of companies,
including Trader Joe’s. In other cases, such as at the GE aviation
division, workers have demanded that GE bring back laid off workers to
make ventilators to fight the pandemic. Clearly, not only is there
growing awareness of the threat that COVID-19 presents to many workers
on the job, but also a new militancy is developing to protest and to
demand action to stop bosses who insist that they work through the pandemic.
An April 8 CNN poll indicates that 55% of the American people now
believe the government has not done a good job at fighting the COVID-19
contagion, with 52% disapproving specifically of Trump’s pandemic
performance. This stems in large measure from the highly publicized
plight of health care professionals on the front lines of the pandemic,
decrying the lack of necessary test kits, masks, gowns, hospital beds,
ventilators and adequately trained personnel.
As working people throughout the economy are beginning to realize that
the system is stacked against them, health care employees are learning a
deadly lesson as well – that the personal protective equipment (PPE) and
respirators needed to save lives are just commodities to the capitalist
class, produced by private enterprise whose goal is profit, not saving
lives. Living by the economic mantra of “just in time” manufacturing
developed in in the 1980s, it was not profitable for these companies to
make and stockpile such commodities in volume, so it simply was not
done. And the public health and safety of its citizens was nowhere near
a priority for the capitalist government protecting these enterprises,
so it did not order or stockpile adequate medical equipment or supplies
either.
In the health industry, workers are insisting that PPE be provided to
keep them safe while working with COVID-19 patients and demanding that
hospital management and the government step up to provide these items.
National Nurses United, which has 150,000 members and represents the
10,000 nurses at HCA Healthcare, the country’s largest and wealthiest
for-profit hospital conglomerate, held picket lines and speak-outs in
front of 15 HCA hospitals across seven states earlier this month.
Over the past decade HCA made a profit of $23 billion. Yet, in a recent
survey only 7% of nurses at the health care chain say they have enough
PPE to protect staff and patients during these times. Sixty-five percent
of those polled said they did not have access to N95 respirator masks,
perhaps the most significant items needed when treating COVID-19
patients. “For the wealthiest hospital corporation in the United States
to show such disregard for the health and safety of its caregivers, is
disgraceful and unconscionable,” said Jean Ross, President of National
Nurses United and a registered nurse.
While engaging in safe ways to prevent negative impacts to their
patients, health care workers around the country are speaking out.
Nurses at Harlem Hospital in New York demonstrated in front of the
hospital after their management limited their access to personal
protective equipment, including N95 masks. “This is a story about the
fight for our lives,” said one nurse needing the mask. And at Chicago’s
Cook County Hospital, health care workers are staging mini-sit downs,
telling management to “come find me in the break room when you have
PPE,” according to a report from Labor Notes.
At Detroit Medical Center, Sinai-Grace Hospital emergency room nurses
were told by management to leave the hospital after the group protested
working conditions that jeopardized their health as well as their
patients. Jamie Brown, President of the Michigan Nurses Association,
responded in support of the workers, saying they have “a tipping point …
The best thing any RN can do for their patients, their families, and
their coworkers is to speak out rather than remain silent.”
Edward Smith, Executive Director of the District of Columbia Nurses
Association, slammed hospitals there. “It is hard to fathom that nurses
who have been exposed to patients with the virus are not tested for the
virus, are being told to re-use protective gear, and are assigned care
to COVID-19 patients without proper protections … I find it blatantly
irresponsible and a dangerous practice. We see what is happening in
other areas of the nation when doctors and nurses contract the disease
and are unable to care for patients.” Similar comments were echoed by
Stacy Chamberlain, International Vice President of American Federation
of State, County and Municipal Workers in Portland, Oregon.
Objections to working under dangerous COVID-19 conditions are now
evident from health and pharmacy workers, grocery workers, postal
workers, transit workers, home aides, truck drivers, sanitation workers,
and farm workers – all while offering absolutely essential services to
the economy. Increasingly the nation is becoming a virtual war zone.
It’s nurses and doctors and EMTs skirmishing with the established health
response system, particularly the Trump failures to stockpile PPE and
virus test kits. It’s Amazon workers, and retail employees, and the
unemployed and oppressed minorities against their employers and the
system, demanding change and testing the resolve of their opposing
class. Pick an occupation and there is concern for safety. But there is
more than just a whiff of change in the air.
As a society we are on new turf, but on a comparable trajectory
evidenced during an important time in our recent past when meaningful
victories were won. An ever-expanding number of Americans now know
someone or a family who has been infected, who has died, or who is
struggling to survive financially. The American people surely and
increasingly are being impacted by events not seen on such a scale since
the late 1960s and early 1970s period of the Vietnam War, when the
impact of 50,000 U.S troops dying overseas personally affected millions
at home. Tens of millions were moved into action. The deaths from
coronavirus and the economic incapacitation of millions today are not
dissimilar in scale. New movements and struggles for economic and social
justice will come from this, the character of which is yet to be seen.
Our involvement as socialists in these new struggles, however, will help
to shape the victories yet to come.
For that reason, join us. Join Socialist Action.
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April 11, 2020 in Uncategorized.
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Thomas Paine
“One good schoolmaster is of more use than a hundred priests.”
― Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason
