International Solidarity for Nuclear Security: Lessons from a Pandemic

Manpreet Sethi

In his September 2019 UN General Assembly speech, President Trump said, “The future does not belong to globalists… the future belongs to sovereign and individual nations who protect their citizens…” Less than six months later, the president found himself confronting a global emergency where no “sovereign and individual nation” could hope to exclusively protect its citizens, unless others did so, too. Ironically, therefore, human security is more globalised than ever before, as each state’s ability to fight COVID-19 is equally dependent other states being able to fight it just as effectively. The cover of Time magazine captured this reality well– “Apart, Not Alone.” Indeed, the fight against the novel Coronavirus has unambiguously highlighted the need for international solidarity.

As the battle against COVID-19 rages across the globe in as many as 185 countries, these efforts are largely being carried out at discrete national levels, with broad guidance from the WHO. None of the commonly thought of great powers—the P-5—have shown any attempt at collective leadership on the matter. Rather, at least two of them, the US and China, are caught up in mutual accusations on the virus’ origins. While the leadership in Washington has displayed arrogance and hyper-nationalism, in Beijing, it has resorted to non-transparency.

Owing to these sets of behaviour, international solidarity looks out of reach at this moment. But, there is an inherent limitation to handling a pandemic at only national levels. As it stands, most states have resorted to lockdowns and social distancing as their primary tools. These strategies make every individual’s health reliant on the behaviour of the other. Any person who defies the requirements could become a weak link and pose a risk to the safety of many. Similarly, at the international level, any state that does not effectively enforce measures to check the virus could become a weak link and fuel the crisis once global travel normalises. The health security of an individual, and that of a state, is globalised. Laxity in rigour, carelessness of action, or hiding of information in any one state could become a global threat in no time given the highly contagious nature of this virus.

Even more scary is the prospect of use of the virus by non-state actors (NSA) for the purpose of bio-terrorism. UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres drew attention to this fact on 10 April when he issued a warning on the possibility of NSAs gaining access to virulent strains. He said, “the weakness and lack of preparedness exposed by this pandemic provide a window onto how a bio-terrorist attack might unfold.”

While the current crisis has brought a focus to the risk of bio-terrorism, the international community cannot afford to take its eyes off the challenge of nuclear and radiological terrorism either. In fact, nuclear security requires a similar level of solidarity as is being considered necessary in handling the current health emergency. All states, irrespective of whether they have nuclear holdings or not, need to understand and share the burden of collective action to ensure no leakage of nuclear and radiological material, technology, or equipment takes place.

Nuclear security, like bio-security, must be premised on the ethic of global cooperation, which is anchored in good nuclear governance. Just as the handling of this pandemic COVID requires robust national surveillance to detect, isolate, and treat, so also nuclear security. Such cooperation should ideally be facilitated by an international institution that is seen to be impartial, effective, and quick at sharing real-time intelligence and best practices. In the case of nuclear security, the IAEA is at the centre. The IAEA would do well to learn from the current experience of the WHO.  One of the most evident lesson relates to the public credibility of an international institution and how that is linked to funding and related loyalties, as also its enforcement ability. The WHO has suffered on all these fronts—and these are areas that require attention from the perspective of nuclear security, too.

The IAEA was built largely for the purpose of implementing safeguards to check horizontal nuclear proliferation. Subsequently, nuclear safety was added to its responsibilities. It has no regular budgetary provisions for nuclear security and can offer only an advisory, recommendatory role on the matter. These handicaps could seriously jeopardise its ability to demand and enforce national nuclear security commitments. The situation can be remedied only when addressed collectively by the wider nuclear security community. Preventing the risk of nuclear terrorism requires a comprehensive plan—at both national and international levels. These need to be developed and implemented as a whole-of-government effort at the national level, and adopted as an all-states approach at the international level. Every stakeholder has to recognise the criticality of their role.

COVID-19 exposes our common fragility as individuals and states and how open it is to exploitation if we remain narrowly concerned with only our own security. The reality is that security in the case of bio and nuclear threats is indivisible. The security of every unit—person or state—is contingent on others’ good behaviour and acceptance of rules. Important lessons for nuclear security can be learnt from the ongoing efforts to address this pandemic—the most important being the need to accept our shared sense of vulnerability, and assume a shared commitment to responsibility.

Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) Fellowship Programme 2020 for Member Countries

Application Deadline: 31st July 2020 9:59:00 PM

Eligible Countries: FAO Member countries.

To Be Taken At (Country): FAO Regional, Sub-regional, Country Offices or Headquarters

About the Award: The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) leads international efforts to defeat hunger and to support development in member countries in the areas of agriculture, fisheries and forestry. FAO’s mandate is to raise levels of nutrition, improve agricultural productivity, better the lives of rural populations and contribute to the growth of the world economy.
The Fellowship Programme is designed to attract fellows, typically PhD students, researchers and professors, who have an advanced level of relevant technical knowledge and experience in any field of the Organization. They are willing to fulfil their specialized learning objectives and at the same time, contribute their technical expertise and knowledge through time-bound arrangements with FAO. Assignments should be in line with FAO Strategic Objectives and UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Type: Fellowship

Eligibility:

• Graduate or post-graduate degree (Master’s or PhD) or be enrolled in a PhD programme.
• Working knowledge of at least one FAO language (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian or Spanish). Knowledge of a second FAO language will be considered an asset. Only language proficiency certificates from UN accredited external providers and/or FAO language official examinations (LPE, ILE and LRT) will be accepted as proof of the level of knowledge of languages indicated in the online applications.
• Be nationals of FAO Member Nations
• Age: no age limits.
• Candidates should be able to adapt to an international multicultural environment and have good communication skills.
• Candidates with family members (defined as brother, sister, mother, father, son or daughter) employed by FAO under any type of contractual arrangement are not be eligible for the Fellows Programme.
• Candidates should have appropriate residence or immigration status in the country of assignment.

Selection Criteria: Candidates may be assigned in a field relevant to the mission and work of FAO.

Number of Awards: Numerous

Duration of Program: According to time bound agreement with hiring office

How to Apply: 

• To apply, visit the recruitment website Jobs at FAO  at FAO and complete your online profile. Incomplete applications will not be considered. Only applications received through the recruitment portal will be considered.
• Candidates are requested to attach to their application a research proposal, copy of their academic qualifications and copies of their language proficiency certificates.

Visit Program Webpage for Details

Important Notes: 

• Qualified female applicants and qualified nationals of non- and under-represented member countries are encouraged to apply.
• Persons with disabilities are equally encouraged to apply.
• All applications will be treated with the strictest confidence.
• FAO strongly encourages candidates from the Global South and Indigenous Peoples to apply to this Call for Expression of Interest

Canadian government sends military into care homes as it pushes for a premature return to work

Roger Jordan & Keith Jones

Canada’s two most populous provinces, Ontario and Quebec, have requested that the military be mobilized to help deal with the catastrophic conditions in longterm care facilities. Quebec has requested 1,000 troops, in addition to the 150 Canadian Armed Forces personnel already deployed there. Ontario is asking for the military’s support at five especially hard-hit care homes.

The appeals for military intervention are being made even as the Quebec and Ontario governments, their counterparts across the country, and Canada’s corporate elite are mounting an increasingly aggressive campaign for a premature return to work and the “reopening” of nonessential services and businesses. 

During the past week, this campaign has shifted into high gear, while total coronavirus cases surged to more than 43,500, and COVID-19 deaths rose to 2,294. Residents of long-term care facilities account for more than half of the total deaths.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s and Quebec Premier Francois Legault’s pleas for military intervention are a tacit admission of the deplorable state of health and social care systems, which are on the verge of breakdown after decades of austerity. But regardless of the extent of the help provided by the armed forces, the ruling elite is not mobilizing the military with the aim of saving lives. Rather, it is part of a political offensive aimed at creating the impression that the governments are bringing the situation under control, so that the reckless back-to-work campaign, which risks the lives of hundreds of thousands of workers and their families and the total collapse of the health care system, can proceed in the face of mass opposition.

Although Ford formally announced Thursday that “nonessential” services in Ontario will remain closed until May 6, and a state of emergency will remain in force until May 12, huge swathes of the manufacturing sector that are deemed “essential” are preparing to reopen. Toyota and Fiat-Chrysler auto plants and Magna auto parts plants, which employ tens of thousands of workers combined, are set to reopen during the week of May 4. Other production facilities were never even closed due to the Ford government’s lax definition of what constitutes an “essential service.”

Governments push to reopen economy as pandemic rages unchecked

In neighbouring Quebec, Legault has already lifted a ban on residential construction work, which was only imposed after widespread worker protests. The right-wing populist premier has pledged to announce next week a comprehensive strategy to lift the remainder of the restrictions.

Similar conditions prevail in Alberta, where the oil and gas sectors have been allowed to continue operating unhindered inspite of the fact that large groups of workers live and work in close quarters.

In Saskatchewan, where important industries like oil and potash mining never closed down, the hard-right government of Scott Moe became the first provincial government Thursday to present a formal plan for reopening the economy. Some shuttered businesses will be allowed to open their doors on May 4 in a five-stage plan that Moe justified by saying that Saskatchewan has successfully “flattened the curve.” 

In a cynical attempt to provide his government’s criminal policy with some cover, Moe sought to portray his strategy as careful and restrained, stating, “If we move too quickly, we risk increasing the spread of COVID-19. If we move too slowly, we risk permanent damage to the livelihoods of thousands of Saskatchewan people.”

This is a false set of alternatives, motivated by the ruling elite’s determination to begin extracting profits from working people as soon as possible without any regard for human life. It is not the ongoing lockdown that threatens the livelihoods of thousands of workers and small business owners in Saskatchewan and millions more across Canada. Rather, it is the policies of the ruling class. It failed to make any preparations for the pandemic. And since North America became the epicentre of the COVID-19 pandemic in March, its political hirelings have focused on bailing out the banks and big business to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars.

The criminally irresponsible drive to reopen the economy under conditions in which virtually nothing has been done to strengthen Canada’s dilapidated health care system, the inadequate levels of testing and contact-tracing represent a still greater threat to the livelihoods and well being of workers and their families. 

This week Dr. Theresa Tam, the federal government’s chief medical officer, stated that Canada’s coronavirus testing capacity would need to be tripled to 60,000 tests per day in order to reopen the economy safely. Even such levels of testing, which the provinces show no signs of achieving, would mean that just 1.8 million Canadians, or a mere five percent of the population, could be tested each month.

Meanwhile, throughout the health care and longterm care sectors, brave and committed nurses, doctors, and other personnel are being forced to risk their lives due to the lack of basic personal protective equipment.

The disastrous health consequences that await millions of workers if they are forced back to their jobs under conditions of few to no health and safety protections can be seen at facilities where the virus has already spread. At the Cargill meatpacking plant near High River, Alberta, 440 employees have been infected, with a further 140 cases connected to the outbreak. A 60-year-old female worker has died, and her husband is in a serious condition in hospital.

At the JBS meat packing plant in Brooks, Alberta, 96 cases have been recorded, leading the company to reduce production to one shift. Two deaths have been linked to the outbreak.

At the Kerl Lake oil tar-sands work camp north of Fort McMurray, Alberta, at least 12 workers have contracted the disease. Major outbreaks of the virus have also been recorded at two poultry plants in British Columbia, among transit workers in Ontario, grocery store workers across the country, and health care workers.

Canada’s ruling elite embraces “herd immunity”

Even as the virus runs rampant through a growing number of work sites that continue to operate, the ruling elite is pushing full steam ahead with a plan that will inevitably produce an explosion in the number of coronavirus cases as workers begin congregating in factories, offices, and crammed public transit across the country.

This amounts to a policy of “herd immunity.” Workers are being ordered to accept mass infection and even death as a part of “normal” daily life. As Legault put it Thursday, “It may sound frightening, but once Quebecers understand the concept of herd immunity, they will see it is the best way out of the current pandemic. The concept of natural immunization does not mean we are going to use children as guinea pigs. What we are saying is people who are less at risk, people who are under 60, can get a natural immunization and impede the wave.” 

This is all lies. For one thing, every government that has openly pursued the “herd immunity” strategy, most notably Boris Johnson’s in Britain, was forced to retreat in the face of widespread opposition from experts and skyrocketing death tolls. Moreover, there is not yet any firm scientific proof that people infected with COVID-19 obtain immunity. Even if they do, nobody knows how long it would last. Legault is thus effectively gambling with the lives of millions of workers and their families based on a hunch and a desire to ramp up corporate profits once again.

From the outset of the pandemic, the chief focus of Canada’s ruling elite has been to safeguard the wealth and profits of the superrich while placing workers and the health care system on rations. While the federal Trudeau government and Bank of Canada proved able to collectively funnel over $650 billion into the coffers of the big banks and corporations in a matter of days to prop up the financial markets and salvage investors, Ottawa criminally squandered two months before taking any action to support hospitals and medical staff. Only on March 10 did the federal government even write to the provinces to ask them about their medical supply needs.

No less striking is the contrast between the Trudeau government’s support for big business and investors and the paltry and inadequate assistance being offered workers who have lost their jobs or are unable to work due to the pandemic. Under the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB) they will receive the taxable sum of $2,000 per month for a maximum of four months. Underscoring the economic devastation experienced by millions across the country, over 7.1 million people have applied for CERB to date.

Unions seek to smother rising working class opposition

The problem the ruling elite confronts in enforcing its reckless return to work agenda is that it is opposed by the vast majority of working people. In a poll in late March, 90 percent of respondents said lockdown measures should stay in place until either a medical solution for the coronavirus, such as a vaccine, is available (44 percent), or the health care system is able to manage a patient surge (46 percent). Needless to say, neither of these conditions is even remotely close at this point in time.

Worker protests have also increased, with a series of work stoppages in Ontario being launched by transit workers, postal workers, and autoworkers to demand safe working practices. This is part of an international trend, with transit workers, and workers at Amazon and other delivery services in the US and Europe protesting the refusal of their employers to provide basic protections from the virus even as they accelerate production.

This necessary assertion of the most basic class interests of working people will only continue and strengthen if it is mounted in political opposition to the procapitalist unions and the NDP, which have responded to the pandemic by strengthening their corporatist alliance with the Liberal government and big business. 

This week, the Ontario Secondary School Teachers Federation became the last of the four provincial teacher unions to conclude a sellout three-year deal with the right-wing Ford government. The deal includes the real wage cut demanded by Ford in the form of pay hikes below the inflation rate in each of the next three years, and enshrines many of the government’s education cuts. The four unions are in the final stages of sabotaging a months-long struggle by teachers and their supporters that saw the largest teacher strike in the province since the 1990s, and that could have become the spearhead of a mass working class challenge to the hated Ford government and the ruling elite and capitalist austerity as a whole.

The capitulation of the teacher unions has strengthened the hand of Ford. The hard-right premier is being lauded in the corporate media as a steady pair of hands during the coronavirus crisis. Even the “liberal” Toronto Star headlined a recent column, “Doug Ford has risen to the coronavirus challenge.” The ruling elite hopes that he can use this political capital to force workers back to their jobs, despite the risk to their lives this poses.

Unifor, like the United Auto Workers in the US, is working hand in glove with the giant automakers to reopen their facilities as quickly as possible. “We will give the green light at the end of the day if our local union leadership feels comfortable with that,” Unifor President Jerry Dias told Automotive News Canada on Thursday. “(A)s of now, we haven’t heard this big outcry saying, ‘Don’t do it, it’s too early.’ We haven’t heard any of that.”

The unions’ shameless collaboration with capitalist politicians and bosses to risk the lives of working people underscores the urgent necessity of the working class intervening to fight for its own demands to deal with the pandemic and its economic fallout. These must include: mass testing and contact tracing to bring the pandemic under control; the shutdown of all nonessential industries with full pay for all workers affected; and the provision of protective equipment and care to all workers in essential sectors. Instead of being made to pay for the crisis with their health and even their lives due to the ruling elite’s criminal back-to-work policy, workers must initiate a political offensive for a workers’ government and the transformation of the banks and major corporations into publicly-owned utilities under workers’ control so that society’s vast resources can serve human need, not private profit.

Food delivery workers in Brazil join international strikes against unsafe conditions

Tomas Castanheira

Over the past few days, food delivery workers have carried out strikes in several countries demanding safe working conditions in the face of the coronavirus pandemic and an increase in delivery rates to ensure the workers a livable income.

In São Paulo, the largest city in Brazil, workers went on strike last Friday, April 17, and resumed their action on Monday. Also on April 17, hundreds of delivery workers in Teresina, Piauí, in the northeast of the country, protested for security—against the constant robberies they suffer during work, for which they receive no compensation from companies.

Delivery workers protest in the streets of São Paulo, Brazil [Credit: Facebook/Treta no Trampo]

These actions took place just one day after the workers protested in Spain, denouncing the same precarious conditions faced by Brazilians. Like the Spanish, Brazilian workers drove down the main avenues of their cities, honking the horns of their motorcycles.

On Wednesday, new demonstrations took place in other countries, after an international delivery workers’ strike call was circulated. In Argentina there were protests in Buenos Aires and Cordoba. In Quito, Ecuador, dozens of employees of Glovo demonstrated in the streets and in front of the office of the Spain-based company.

Everywhere these workers are subjected to brutal exploitation by the same transnational companies, such as Uber, Rappi, iFood and Glovo. Governments of several countries have defined their work as an essential service during the pandemic, without the companies, however, being forced to provide the basic conditions for the preservation of workers’ health.

Workers protest in front of Glovo office in Quito, Ecuador [Source: Twitter]

Workers protesting on Paulista Avenue, in downtown São Paulo, denounced the conditions that they confront: “We are in the front line and we don’t have the support of even a hand sanitizer, we don’t receive a mask, we don’t receive anything,” said one of them.

Another declared: “Nobody takes a stand in the media. iFood does not take a stand... There is no representative from our class. We are here, working hard every day and if a biker falls, he is on his own. We want a stand [from the company].”

The workers say that the delivery rates given by the companies are getting lower and lower. “I risk my life to earn 2, 3, 4 reais (less than one dollar). It becomes impossible to work like this,” said a handicapped worker, who delivers food on his wheelchair.

While workers have their income increasingly squeezed and are forced to work endless hours to guarantee starvation wages, the transnational corporations are fiercely competing among themselves, eager for ever larger slices of the global market.

Food delivery workers protest in the streets of São Paulo, Brazil [Credit: Facebook/Treta no Trampo]

The São Paulo-based iFood, with operations in other Latin American countries, announced this month that it will merge with Domicilios.com to create one of the largest delivery companies in Colombia. Controlled by shareholders such as Jorge Paulo Lemann, the wealthiest man in Brazil, iFood is fighting for the Latin American market directly against Rappi, which is based in Colombia and last year received an investment of US$1 billion from the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank.

In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, the number of orders for the food delivery Apps has increased in Brazil, as restaurants have been closed in the country’s main cities. But the number of delivery workers has grown even more steeply. Rappi registered a 300 percent growth in the number of registrations. And iFood received 175,000 new registrations in March, compared to 85,000 in February.

Behind this explosion in the number of delivery workers is the growing social desperation of the masses of unemployed and underemployed people in Brazil, as well as those who had their wages cut or were laid off during the pandemic. Most of these workers are not able to access the meagre R$ 600, about half a minimum wage, decreed as emergency aid by the Brazilian government.

Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s far-right president, is carrying out a campaign to sabotage any measures to contain the coronavirus, and has announced that he will reopen his civic-military schools early next week, as a means of forcing general reopening of schools and workplaces in the country. Asked about the explosion of deaths from COVID-19 in Brazil, he answered, “I am not a gravedigger.”

With the same indifference to the piling up of corpses, the heads of Brazilian states and municipalities are already announcing a reopening of the economy. The state of São Paulo is the main epicenter of the disease in the country, accounting for more than a third of all deaths and with an increasing mortality rate. Despite this, Governor João Doria of the Brazilian Social Democratic Party (PSDB), who has been exalted by the media and the pseudo-left as a “reasonable” politician in comparison to Bolsonaro, announced that a “gradual” resumption of activities in the state will start on May 11.

Brazilian politicians are pursuing the same course as bourgeois governments across the planet, forcing a premature return to work in order to guarantee the flows of profits to the capitalist oligarchy.

The food delivery workers’ strikes, on the other hand, express the growing resistance of the world working class to the capitalist class’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. In Brazil, they join a wave of strikes and protests against unsafe working conditions, from the March call center workers’ rebellion to the recent nurses’ strikes and protests, which began last week.

This movement must develop an ever-closer coordination between the struggles of workers from different countries, adopting a socialist and internationalist program. The fortunes of transnational corporations and their shareholders must be expropriated and redirected to benefit the interests of the majority of the world’s population, first and foremost to combat the pandemic, guarantee the incomes of the working class and save lives.

Coronavirus sweeps through Russian medical facilities

Andrea Peters

Numerous medical facilities across Russia are under quarantine, as the coronavirus spreads among physicians, nurses and patients alike. A deficit of masks and personal protective equipment (PPE) in hospitals and clinics in Saint Petersburg, Moscow and other cities has caused health care workers to contract COVID-19 from those they are treating. Sick staff are now struggling to care for themselves, their colleagues and patients in institutions under lockdown. Coronavirus infections in Russia continue to rise unabated, with nearly 70,000 officially diagnosed, a seven-fold increase compared to two weeks ago.

At the Vreden Institute of Trauma and Orthopedics in Saint Petersburg, several hundred people have been in quarantine for half a month, with workers inside reporting that most are infected. Once the virus was detected at the facility, the staff decided who would remain to care for the patients and who would leave and place themselves under home quarantine. Despite attempts to wall off areas with plastic sheeting, medical workers who stayed were unable to effectively isolate coronavirus victims within the building. The institution turned into a hot spot.

Explaining his work treating patients despite himself being ill, one doctor told the news outlet Meduza, “What else were we to do? There was no choice.” Staff who have recovered and tested negative for COVID-19 are now returning to aid their colleagues.

At the Luberetsky regional hospital outside of Moscow, more than 50 medical workers in the neurology ward have gotten coronavirus. Similar numbers have been infected at the hospital in Zlatoust, a city of about 175,000 west of Chelyabinsk in Siberia. In Vladivostok, a city in Russia’s far east, 42 people at the local hospital have COVID-19, of whom 17 are employees. At an eye clinic in Krasnoyarsk, 89 people, including 13 doctors, are sick.

The fact that medical facilities that are not directly involved in the treatment of coronavirus have become incubators of the disease is an indication of the absence of basic diagnostic and infection-control resources at these facilities.

Employees at the Luberetsky hospital are demanding an investigation of the institution’s administration, which they blame for causing the outbreak. Workers only received low-quality PPE a month after COVID-19 was detected there. “The suits are transparent, easily torn, the material is like cotton, 30 masks were given out; apparently we will have to wash them,” one physician told Gazeta.ru. He added, “We still have no respirators. We were given very little disinfectant, and it was explained that this would be until mid-June.”

The Kremlin has acknowledged that “some” regional governments are short on supplies but insists that regional health ministries must address the situation. In an effort to direct social anger away from the federal government, at a meeting with local officials this week, Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin declared that oblast representatives had not properly submitted their requests to a 33-billion-ruble fund intended to increase the supply of hospital beds, PPE, and ventilators. As a result, much of the fund went unused.

Even as Russia’s infections rise, the Kremlin’s health minister has declared the coronavirus situation to be “under control.” Different branches of the federal government have given conflicting indications of when the virus peak is supposed to hit—from early to mid-May. The quarantine measures currently in place throughout the country are expected to last until at least May 9.

In Moscow, movement is controlled through passes that grant an individual permission to travel within the city for essential purposes. The initial result of the pass system was long lines that violated social distancing rules in the capital’s metro stations, as police checked individuals’ documents. Moscow mayor Sergei Sobyanin called this week for these measures to be extended throughout Russia.

As the closure of clinics and hospitals because of COVID-19 outbreaks causes a larger health crisis, economic hardships in Russia intensify. In addition to laying off workers, many companies keeping employees on the books are failing to pay them.

Official data put out by the Ministry of Labor claim that there have been just 44,000 layoffs since the start of the year, bringing the total number of unemployed workers in the country to 735,000. Rosstat, the federal statistical service, says that 3.4 million Russians are out of work, which puts the jobless rate at about 4.6 percent. The Ministry of Labor’s data is based on unemployment filings, whereas Rosstat uses a survey to gather its information.

Economists, however, argue that both sets of data are a vast undercount. When broader standards are applied for calculating who is unemployed, the real number of people in need of work is about 4 million. The Institute for Economic Growth estimates that if the quarantine remains in place for another two to three months, a further 4.5 million people will be laid off. If it continues for another six months, the number will rise to 14 million.

When the Kremlin initiated the countrywide quarantine weeks ago, President Vladimir Putin declared that the month of April would be a “paid holiday” for Russia’s workers. However, it issued no direct payments to the population and made no funds available to employers to offset their costs, such that most companies ignored the decree. By the middle of the month, the country’s prime minister announced the creation of a 150-billion-ruble fund to support wage payments. However, it is widely understood that this is not enough to secure the incomes of millions affected by the crisis.

This week, the Sberbank head German Gref insisted that the Russian government could not give money directly to the population because, unlike elsewhere in the world, the country does not have a mechanism by which to do so. Meanwhile, banks are freezing credit lines for consumers. Putin appealed to financial institutions on Thursday to not stop lending money to the population but outlined no concrete measures to address the situation.

Although there are widespread news reports of rising prices for basic consumer goods—such as sugar, eggs, buckwheat, potatoes, tomatoes, and lemons—the government said this week that it would not impose price controls. It insists that the collapsing value of the Russian ruble, which is trading at around 74 to the dollar, as compared to 60 to the dollar before the COVID-19 crisis hit, is driving up costs for producers. Limiting what they can charge customers for their products will drive them out of business, says the government.

The unprecedented fall in global oil prices is unleashing a massive revenue crisis for the Russian government. In order to comfortably meet its planned expenditures and avoid drawing on the National Welfare Fund (NWF), a multibillion-dollar emergency reserve, the country’s main export needs to trade at around $40 a barrel. Currently, that number stands at $8 a barrel.

Demand for the commodity has cratered due to the pandemic, leading to a glut on the market. The deal recently reached between Russia and Saudi Arabia, after weeks of conflict over production levels, has failed to arrest the price drop. Russia’s natural gas revenues are also falling.

Finance Minister Anton Siluanov reported that with a price of $20 a barrel, the state will spend two trillion rubles a week from the NWF, draining the fund entirely by 2024, six to ten years earlier than anticipated. Ultimately, the state will have to respond with the imposition of severe austerity measures.

Social anger is building in Russia over the combined health and social crisis. On April 20, 1500 protesters gathered in Vladikavkaz, a city in north Ossetia, to demand government aid for those being left destitute by the crisis.

COVID-19 pandemic pushes UK charity sector into crisis

Ben Trent

“They [the English bourgeoisie] who have founded philanthropic institutions, such as no other country can boast of . ... As though you rendered the proletarians a service in first sucking out their very life-blood and then practising your self-complacent, Pharisaic philanthropy upon them, placing yourselves before the world as mighty benefactors of humanity when you give back to the plundered victims the hundredth part of what belongs to them! Charity which degrades him who gives more than him who takes; charity which treads the downtrodden still deeper in the dust, which demands that the degraded, the pariah cast out by society, shall first surrender the last that remains to him ... shall first beg for mercy before your mercy deigns to press, in the shape of an alms, the brand of degradation upon his brow.”

Frederick Engels, 1845, The Condition of the Working Class in England.

One hundred and seventy-five years after Friedrich Engels, the cofounder of scientific socialism alongside Karl Marx, wrote these lines, the charity sector is a multibillion pound industry. According to the National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO), the UK currently has 166,000 charities, with an annual turnover of £48 billion.

The Daily Mail and the Sun reported in 2019 that charities, including Macmillan Cancer Support, World Wildlife Fund and Marie Stopes, had been awarding senior leaders five figure bonuses, reaching a peak of £200,000.

The coronavirus pandemic, however, has caused the charitable sector an unprecedented challenge. Estimated figures see charities set to lose up to £4 billion over a 12-week period. A survey conducted by the Institute of Fundraising, NCVO and the Charity Finance group found that hundreds of large charities expect to see their income fall by nearly a third in the coming year due to the pandemic.

At the end of March, the WSWS reported that in the nine days preceding March 24, 470,000 people applied for assistance through Universal Credit, more than eight times the average. With a 700 percent spike on March 27, things look set to get worse. We noted, “the Nomura investment bank predicted further surges in the unemployment rate to eight percent in the April-June quarter, rising to 8.5 percent in the next three months,” amounting to a figure of 2.75 million people unemployed.

The coalescence of an economic crisis and the spread of the deadly coronavirus, almost unchecked by the UK government, has seen a devastating increase in the use of food banks along with a host of other charitable services. Numerous charities have also had to step in to staunch the overflow of the pandemic, which the National Health Service has been unable to cope with due to a decade of being gutted of resources.

During the government (1979-1991) of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, the watchword of the day was that there was “no such thing as society.” This clarion call heralded an offensive to break up the welfare state, the social victories secured by the working class in the aftermath of the Second World War granted in order to avert the threat of socialist revolution. Thatcher’s neoliberal agenda saw 18 years of Tory rollbacks. Moreover, the Labour Party’s victory of 1997 saw this continue under the premiership of Tony Blair.

Without having to tackle issues such as massive unemployment, Blair was able to continue the Thatcherite agenda of rolling back welfare provisions and carrying out privatisation by stealth. Blair and Gordon Brown’s governments saw significant groundwork in the privatisation of the NHS, with the introduction of “independent sector treatment centres” (ISTCs) and the opening up of the National Health Service (NHS) “internal market” to “any qualified provider” (AQP), under Brown in 2009.

The 2008 financial crash, along with the election in 2010 of the viciously right-wing Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition led by David Cameron, saw a dramatic escalation of the attack on state provision. Social welfare and services were slashed, with local authorities forced to make monumental savings year on year, all with no genuine opposition from the Labour Party.

The past decade saw a massive increase in poverty and social hardship. According to Cameron, charities could fill the gulf left behind by the destruction of all social and health care services by the welfare state. His “big society” would see a whole host of philanthropic NGOs (non-governmental organisations) take on the challenges previously met by the state.

This myth is now crumbling in the face of the escalating social crisis. “Charities will have planned on raising millions of pounds which is going to be irrevocably lost because of the impact of coronavirus,” stated Peter Lewis, chief executive of the Institute of Fundraising. “The cancellation of high profile events, such as the London Marathon, as well as thousands of smaller events run by local charities across the country, closure of shops, and a halt on public fundraising activity have already caused huge problems for charities who quite simply can’t plug the gap in such a short time.”

On March 31, the Financial Times rang the alarm bells for the UK government . In an article titled, “Charities need a lifeline to respond to coronavirus—and rebuild society afterwards,” the FT warned that many charities will face liquidation due to a projected reduction of income by 48 percent, as detailed by figures released by the Institute of Fundraising. The article insisted, however, “After the immediate crisis has passed, charities will play a critical role in rebuilding society,” making clear that there will be no possibility of the state resuming any social responsibility that might cut into the sacred profit margins of big business.

The FT’s message was heard loud and clear. Within barely two weeks Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak made great fanfare of a pledge of a measly £750 million to charities, a pittance compared to the £350 billion that has been made available for banks and giant corporations to squander. Nevertheless, it provided a lifeline in the short-term to keep the charity sector alive, albeit barely breathing, to justify far bigger cuts in social provision to come.

The pledge sees almost half (£360 million) going to charities to shore up key services, such as St. John’s Ambulance and hospices, which aid the NHS. Further it will go to victims’ charities and vulnerable children’s charities to alleviate local authorities as well as the Citizen’s Advice Bureau.

A further £370 million will be made available to small- and medium-sized charities.

Echoing the language of the FT, Sunak stated that the pledge “will ensure our key charities can continue to deliver the services that millions of people up and down the country rely on,” as well as acknowledging that “our charities are playing a crucial role in the national fight against coronavirus, supporting those who are most in need.”

Health Secretary Matt Hancock proclaimed that the “entire charity sector has stepped up as part of our national effort to tackle coronavirus, from helping our NHS heroes to ensuring the most vulnerable among us are cared for properly.”

This “national effort,” much like Cameron’s “big society,” is used to obfuscate the class issues at stake. While the super-rich have hightailed to their luxurious country estates, workers across Europe are being corralled back to work in a complete disregard for their health. Big business is being bailed out by the UK government, while Conservative think-tanks have workers’ pensions in their sights, a taste of austerity to come.

For the charities which are not able to claim this grant, and for those still going to fall short despite the grant, the meagre services they provide must now be cut to the bone.

As Sunak himself declared, with barely disguised contempt, “I can’t stand here and say I can save every single job, protect every single business or indeed every single charity. That’s just simply not possible.”

Scottish National Party spearheads UK-wide return to work campaign

Robert Stevens

Scottish National Party (SNP) First Minister Nicola Sturgeon’s mapping out of a Scottish exit from the lockdown and return to work has been embraced by Britain’s ruling elite and its media.

Boris Johnson’s Conservative government has been fatally compromised by the horrific consequences of its de facto herd immunity policy and failure to protect the working population—that has officially led to almost 20,000 deaths and far more in reality.

Under these conditions, Sturgeon’s supposed “progressive” credentials, backed in Scotland, England and Wales by the Labour Party and the trade unions, offer an avenue for big business and banks to engineer a political shift towards a return to work.

This takes place under conditions in which people are dying daily in the hundreds and in which no systematic COVID-19 testing of the population has been carried out. Yesterday, a further 768 were reported dead, with Britain set to pass the grim milestone of 20,000 deaths today. The newly opened website for key workers showing symptoms of COVID-19 crashed due to unmet demand after 16,000 people secured either a test at a drive-in centre or a home test kit.

Sturgeon insisted, “What we will be seeking to do is find a new normal—a way of living alongside this virus.”

She declared, “It may be that certain businesses in certain sectors can reopen” with “employees and customers two metres distant from each other.” The Scottish population had to prepare for multiple lockdowns, “with little notice” because the “horrendous reality” was that everyone must get ready for repeated cycles of infection.

Sturgeon’s speech accompanied the release of a 26-page document by the Scottish government, “COVID-19—A Framework for Decision Making.” It states in more explicit terms than Sturgeon did publicly that the lockdown had to end in order to “do everything possible to avoid permanent, structural damage to our economy.”

The foreword states, “It is clear that we cannot immediately return to how things were just over 100 days ago. But it is equally clear we cannot stay in complete lockdown indefinitely, because we know that this brings damaging consequences of its own. So we must adapt to a new reality.”

The report details how “Our plans to respond and recover must take account of the possibility of a cycle of lifting and re-imposing restrictions. The steps we take to rebuild our economy or restore some degree of normality in society must recognise the possibility of restrictions being re-imposed quickly. That will require fundamental change to how all sectors of society organise themselves.”

The SNP government does not try to pretend that any of this is based on a scientific approach. Instead, it glorifies a reckless suck-it-and-see policy that will see many die. It states: “If, after easing any restrictions, the evidence tells us we are unable to contain the transmission of the virus, then we will have to reimpose them, possibly returning to lockdown with little notice. While we will do our best to avoid this, it is possible that such a cycle may happen more than once until we reach a point when we have in place an effective vaccine.”

The trade unions are intimately involved in enforcing a return to work. The document states, “We have already begun the conversation on how to respond, re-set, restart and recover with our business community and our trade unions.”

Without explaining how reopening the economy will facilitate a declared aim of “Stopping a resurgence of the pandemic,” the report states this “will allow us to work with our partners in business, trade unions, local government, the voluntary sector and in broader society to redesign workplaces, education settings and other premises so they are places where spread is minimised—allowing people to get back to work, children to return to school, and our young people to continue their education through our colleges or universities …”

The SNP’s initiative was welcomed by leading forces in the Tory government demanding a return to work—including former conservative leader Ian Duncan Smith and David Davis. Duncan Smith has said getting schools to reopen, in particular primary schools, is “key to unlocking labour.”

These layers are already in an alliance with newly elected Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer and powerful sections of business in championing a “back-to-work” strategy.

A right-wing media campaign is underway in the push for a return to work. The Daily Mail published a piece Thursday including photos of people queuing outside newly opened stores of DIY chain B&Q and a Five Guys burger chain outlet in Edinburgh, headlined, “Britain votes with its feet.”

On Friday, Rupert Murdoch’s the Sun editorialised, “We must end lockdown as soon as it’s safely possible before our economy is completely destroyed,” while Murdoch’s Times ran an editorial headlined, “Back to Work.”

Jaguar Land Rover will resume production gradually at its Solihull plant and at its engine manufacturing operation in Wolverhampton from May 18. Aston Martin Lagonda will reopen its new plant in South Wales even earlier, on May 5. Construction conglomerate Taylor Wimpey resume work on some sites on May 4. The Vistry Group—formerly Bovis Homes—will recommence operations at 90 percent of partnership sites and a significant number of its housing sites from next Monday.

A timetable is being laid down, with the weekend to be used by the ruling elite to mount a propaganda campaign for a return to work. BBC Political Editor Laura Kuenssberg, who has intimate connections to the Tories, said Friday, “One interesting thing I think we might see more of before we actually get a big announcement [regarding dates for a mass lockdown exit] from the Westminster Government is more of what has been described to me as ‘prodding.’”

The Daily Telegraph, under a front-page emblazoned with “Johnson back at the controls Monday,” declared that the prime minister, who nearly died of COVID-19 and required seven days of treatment in hospital, “is planning to return to No 10 as early as Monday to take back control of the coronavirus crisis amid Cabinet concerns the lockdown has gone too far.”

Johnson is held up as the man who can seize the rudder of state and end the “prevarication” of those ministers who have been deputised in his absence.

The ruling class is set on a head-on confrontation with the working class. The constant references in daily Downing Street briefings to “flattening the curve” confirm that the government continues to pursue its herd immunity strategy. With an enforced return to work, this will open the way to another wave of the pandemic, likely worse than the first.

Many workers will have no jobs to go back to and those who remain in a job will confront demands for wage cuts and speedups in workplaces with little or nothing in the way of safety measures. Such are the explosive consequences that the Times felt it necessary to caution, “Protections should be put in place for employees who believe they are being pressurised to return to work in unsafe conditions … it is hard to see how they could reopen otherwise, since if staff didn’t feel safe many would refuse to turn up for work.”

Macron government uses more lies to push May 11 return to work

Will Morrow

The administration of French President Emmanuel Macron is aggressively promoting a full reopening of the economy on May 11 that will directly lead to thousands of additional coronavirus deaths. The government is relying on the trade unions to suppress widespread opposition in the working class to the end of confinement and force workers back to their jobs.

The government has announced that it will provide more details about its plan for an end to confinement early next week, most likely on Tuesday. Last Thursday, in a call with local elected officials across the country, Macron clarified that the reopening of schools on May 11 would not be obligatory for all, but would be “done voluntarily,” with parents given the choice of keeping their children at home.

This only ensures that those who return their children to school come mainly from the working class and the poorest segments of the population, who will not have the choice to work from home beginning on May 11, or conduct homeschooling or of otherwise minding their children. The government is cynically exploiting the fact that thousands of families depend on 1-euro subsidized lunch programs provided by school cafeterias to feed their children. They will have little choice but to send them back to school to eat.

Over the past week, the government has stepped up its propaganda agitating for a reopening of schools. Macron’s Health Minister Olivier Véran gave an interview on France Inter ’s morning program yesterday that was remarkable only for the number of lies he was able to fit into a 10-minute segment.

Although the role of children as asymptomatic carriers of the virus remains undetermined by scientists, Veran downplayed the potential impact of reopening classes. “There is the question of whether children are contagious or not,” he said. “This question has been asked often for many weeks. Here too there are arguments both for and against (emphasis added). The latest scientific arguments that have come to me say that for children under 10 transmit the virus less than adults. ... That is why we are working with measures that are very operational, which will permit us to provide for safe teaching of the students.”

When the journalist asked him to specify the measures he was referring to, Veran refused, declaring instead that “children must return to the school. … At a certain point, they will have to return progressively to a school setting.” At another point in the interview, he argued that small children were very good at learning social distancing measures. He added that, in any case, reopening schools was necessary to “combat inequality,” with first priority for a return to classes for “those children in difficulty, those in trouble at home, and we have to provide the means, and … pose the conditions that would permit children to return to school.”

Veran said that while it would be many months before a vaccine could be created and reliably mass produced, “In the meantime, we will have to live with the virus.”

In other words, the virus and its deadly toll must come to be seen as a part of daily life. The maintenance of confinement “is a complicated question,” he continued. “We cannot confine half the planet for six months or a year, until there is a vaccine; and since we are not sure that a confinement would stop the spread of the virus. … We are obliged at each step to measure what we are doing in order to have a major positive health impact for France, but without having too much of an impact on the other side.”

Veran had directly contradicted his own claim that a prolonged confinement may not stop or severely limit the spread of the virus, earlier in the same interview, when he said he accepted a new model released by a mathematical team in France this week, estimating that at least 60,000 additional lives in the country had been saved due to the confinement.

However, his comment that a confinement may have “too much of an impact on the other side” means, in plain language, that although tens of thousands of lives would be saved, these must be weighed against the potential damage to French corporate profits due to a prolonged shutdown of the economy.

As for Veran’s statement that nonessential production could not be stopped until a vaccine is produced, this is simply based on the premise that capitalist property and the financial elite’s monopolization of social resources must remain inviolable. The wealth of the 40 wealthiest individuals in France on Forbes’ 2019 rich list totaled over 288 billion euros—more than 10 times the amount allocated by the Macron administration toward limited unemployment payments in the past three months.

Veran admitted that the government had no clear idea of the number of cases in France, which means that it has no idea how quickly the virus will spread with the end of the confinement. “I do not know exactly how many French people are infected,” he said. “We have models, we have studies, but I’ve learned with this virus to remain extremely cautious towards data that isn’t set in stone.”

Anger is growing in the working class over the criminal policies of the Macron administration. Yesterday, the weekly Le Canard Enchaîné cited a letter written April 18 by Georges-François Leclerc, the police prefect of Seine-Saint-Denis north of Paris, stating that 15,000-20,000 workers were unable to feed themselves properly due to the administration’s refusal to provide adequate support throughout the lockdown, with children and students who rely on school programs most at risk. Leclerc reportedly warned of mass riots and a social explosion, warning: “What was achievable in a month of confinement cannot be maintained for two.”

This week has already seen the eruption of protests and unrest in the impoverished suburbs around Paris and other major cities against police violence and social inequality.

The Macron administration is depending upon its close collaboration with the trade unions to suppress the opposition in the working class and force workers back to work.

While making empty criticisms of the return to work, the CGT is supporting it in practice and closely collaborating with Macron. Yesterday, CGT President Philippe Martinez gave an interview with Sud Radio in which he declared that he believed schools should not be opened until September because it would be unsafe for teachers because of the propagation of the virus.

Asked by radio host Patrick Roger if he would therefore call on teachers to refuse to open schools, Martinez scoffed and replied, “No, no, I think I have already explained it clearly: We are calling on people to work insofar as the conditions are safe.” The CGT is already overseeing the return to work of autoworkers, with Toyota reopening one of its assembly lines in Onnaing on Thursday.

Calling for further collaboration with Macron, Martinez said that “even though during this period we have had a bit more contact with the government, in any case I hope that after this crisis the government and the president of the republic will consider that the trade unions are useful.”

The fight against a return to work cannot be conducted through the trade unions, which are the allies of the government and the employers against the working class. Workers need their own organizations, independent action committees, to organize an industrial and political offensive against any return to work in industries that are nonessential for the fight against the virus. This must be connected to a socialist program for a workers government, the expropriation of the capitalist class and devotion of society’s resources toward the fight against the pandemic, including the guarantee of decent living conditions to all workers and safe working conditions in essential industries.

Spain: Podemos Labour Ministry accepts that hundreds of thousands will die from COVID-19

Alejandro López

An extraordinary leaked document from the Spanish Labour Ministry, led by Podemos minister Yolanda Díaz, states that the Spanish government accepts that 70 percent of the population will become infected with COVID-19, with one third of employees infected at each workplace. That is, the Spanish government is basing its policies, including its forcing of millions of nonessential workers back to work, on its willingness to accept millions of infections and hundreds of thousands of deaths in Spain.

On Wednesday, the private Spanish wire serve Europa Press reported on a leaked contract from the Public State Employment Service, an agency of the Labour Ministry, with Quirón Prevención, an occupational risk prevention company. The state service was hiring Quirón Prevención to test its employees doing essential work related to COVID-19’s economic impact, like processing unemployment claims and temporary redundancies. The department has experienced a number of sick leaves due to COVID-19 in the past month.

To justify applying for the emergency contract, the agency stated: “[T]he experience accumulated in recent weeks shows that the appearance of a case among the staff who provide minimum services may indicate contagion to other workers. This makes it necessary to take measures to find out, on a voluntary basis, whether or not those in contact with our staff are infected or not in order to prevent their return to work, or to do so in a safe way so they don’t transmit the virus.”

It continued, stressing that COVID-19 testing is necessary “given that almost all workplaces will present a case, the transmission ratio is approximately 1 to 3 and the health authorities’ forecast is that around 70 percent of the population will be infected in the coming months.”

This is the first public acknowledgment of the infection forecasts being made by Spain’s Socialist Party (PSOE)-Podemos government. These estimates signify that around 70 percent of Spain’s population of 47 million, or 33 million people, will be infected. Based on the 3.4 percent case fatality rate for COVID-19 estimated by the World Health Organization (WHO), this means the PSOE and Podemos accept that around 1.1 million people would die.

By way of historical comparison, current estimates are that the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) led to approximately 500,000 deaths from all causes: deaths in combat, bombings and executions, as well as disease, famine and other causes. About 3.3 percent of the Spanish population died in the war, with another 7.5 percent being injured.

Such a massive and horrific death toll irrevocably marked the consciousness of the working class. Eighty years later, Spain still remembers the suffering provoked by the military-fascist coup that sparked the war. Countless paintings, statutes, memorials and songs commemorate this historical event. It is estimated that 20,000 books have been written on the civil war.

Now, however, the Spanish government is accepting—in the fine print of a contract for an agency most Spaniards have never heard of—that over twice the number of victims of the Spanish Civil War could die.

This response exposes the bankruptcy and criminality of the capitalist system. The key measures to halt the spread of the virus are lockdown, mass testing, and isolation and treatment of the sick. Workers in essential industries who must continue working need personal protective equipment like face protection (masks, goggles and face-shields), gloves, gowns or other clothing. However, the ruling class systematically pushes to run business as usual, risking millions of lives in order to railroad workers back to work to produce profits for the banks and major corporations.

In particular, the Labour Ministry’s revelations about the PSOE-Podemos government’s infection projections make clear the political criminality of the government’s back-to-work order issued on April 13. Millions of construction workers, metalworkers, builders, cleaners, factory and shipyard workers, sanitation and security employees, autoworkers and other workers at nonessential jobs returned to work, after factories and construction sites had closed for a two-week shelter-at-home period.

This policy, advanced by the government in collaboration with the social-democratic General Union of Labour (UGT) and the Stalinist Workers Commissions (CCOO) unions, is needlessly and recklessly exposing millions to infection. Now it is clear that the government bases this policy on a staggering indifference to human life: it is willing to accept the deaths of hundreds of thousands of workers.

To a remarkable extent, this explosive story has been buried in Spanish media. There has been barely any coverage except for few right-wing newspapers—La Razón, El Confidencial and ABC—which posted back-page coverage, buried amid their right-wing criticisms of the government over the pandemic. While these papers downplayed the story, pro-government papers like El País and eldiario.org kept silent, as they all support the government’s back-to-work policy. All agree that workers must be forced back to work so profits can be extracted, placing profits over lives.

The fact that this policy is acknowledged by the Ministry of Labour, which is under a Podemos minister, underscores the vicious hostility of anti-Marxist populist parties to the working class. Podemos’ Greek ally, Syriza, took power and imposed billions of euros in cuts to spending on basic social programmes including pensions, health care and education, shredding basic labour rights and building concentration camps for refugees. Podemos, now that it is in government, is deliberately sending millions of workers to be infected by a deadly virus.

On Wednesday evening, the ministry said the percentage that it had cited in its contract was “inaccurate” and a “misunderstanding.” Trying to explain away the “inaccuracy,” it said that it did not have a forecast for the number of infections in Spain. Instead, “transmission rates and also the incidence of cases in the Spanish population will be determined by Spanish health authorities as a result of epidemiological studies that they are realizing,” and that are in fact slated to start on Monday.

This reply is astonishing and strains credulity. If one is to believe the Ministry of Labour, however, three months after the WHO mission to China reported human-to-human transmission, and seven weeks since the WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic, one of the countries hardest hit by the virus, with over 22,000 deaths, has still made no forecast of how the pandemic would unfold. Such an argument beggars belief, and strongly suggests that top state officials are simply lying to the public.

If it were to be true, however, it would underscore that the government’s back-to-work policy was not based on any scientific assessment or attempt to protect the workforce—but simply a blind demand for workers to go back to work and risk their lives to create profits for the capitalist class.