COVID-19 cases spike across the United States

Jacob Crosse

The United States has surged past 2 million confirmed cases of COVID-19, according to the lateset data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.

This figure represents over a quarter of the 7.4 million cases confirmed worldwide, and over 114,000 people have died from the disease in the United States.

The abandonment of social distancing guidelines, coinciding with the “back to work drive” initiated after the Memorial Day weekend holiday, May 24–26, has led to a dramatic spike in cases across the country.

Twelve US states—Oregon, Idaho, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Michigan, Arkansas, Florida, South Carolina, Delaware and Hawaii—have all seen a 25 percent or more spike in average cases within the last week. Arizona in particular, which opened up casinos even before Las Vegas did on June 4, has seen the largest increase of any US state, with a 49 percent increase in average cases in the last seven days. Since officially reopening on May 15, the amount of patients on ventilators has increased 400 percent, with 1,412 new cases and 32 deaths reported on Thursday alone.

Nyasha Sarju sits as a Seattle Fire Department paramedic prepares to take a nasal swab sample to test for coronavirus at a testing site, Monday, June 8, 2020, in Seattle. (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson)

In Georgia, which reported 993 cases on Thursday, the most in over a month and a 37 percent increase over the previous seven-day average, Republican Governor Brian Kemp went ahead with two executive orders. The first of these removed shelter-in-place orders for persons age 65 and older. The second, effective June 16, allows gatherings of up to 50 people “if they remain six feet apart.” Guidelines for maintaining seating distance and the number of patrons per square foot are also being lifted.

Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida is similarly moving ahead with plans to reopen schools, announcing a three-step reopening process that aims to have fully open campuses by August. These plans are being made despite the fact that the state set a new record for confirmed cases, 1,698, surpassing the previous high of 1,419 new cases set last week on June 4.

Ignoring these worrying and deadly trends, governors across the country, driven by material economic interests, are continuing to move forward with “phased re-openings” of states and businesses, forcing workers back into dangerous and socially unnecessary settings such as casinos, bars, restaurants and movie theaters.

The virus has continued to spread unchecked in giant factories and work locations, which companies and government regulators falsely claim are “safe.” Thousands of workers are affected, including immigrants, among meatpacking employees, farmers, transportation workers and Amazon and logistics workers who are deemed “essential” but treated as expendable.

Fruit-packing and agriculture workers in Yakima County, Washington, who have engaged in a series of strikes since May demanding personal protective equipment and a hazard pay increase, have continued to fall ill, putting themselves, their families and the US fruit and vegetable supply in jeopardy.

According to data gathered by Reuters , by the end of May there were 600 cases of COVID-19 among agriculture workers in the county. As of June 10, Yakima County had 4,834 known cases, the highest per capita infection rate on the West Coast.

The rising number of infections, along with absenteeism among workers not willing to needlessly risk their lives, prompted rumblings from the Trump administration last month to invoke the Defense Production Act.

Alabama set a record for the number of positive cases in a single day on Thursday, with 848 new cases, a 93 percent increase over the previous seven-day average. The state has reported 22,474 cases and 750 deaths so far. However these numbers, as all US figures, should be considered drastic undercounts due to the lack of effective testing and reporting, as covered previously by the WSWS.

Neither big business party is entertaining the possibility of another shutdown to halt the dangerous spread.

Speaking to the New York Times, Dr. Howard Markel, University of Michigan professor and policy adviser during the George W. Bush administration, plainly stated what is evident from the silence of leading Democrats and Republicans: “They have made a conscious decision that we are moving on.”

From the time the World Health Organization declared that COVID-19 was a “public health emergency of international concern” on January 30, the supreme priority of the US ruling class, like all the capitalist governments of the world, was to safeguard the wealth of the oligarchy.

Far from leveling off, the pandemic is intensifying worldwide. Globally, it took 62 days, from the January 30 alert by the WHO of a global health emergency, for the virus to infect 1 million people. However, it only took 13 days for that number to double. Another million cases were added approximately every 12 days until the total reached 4 million cases in early May. Since then, the number of cases has accelerated, passing 5 million cases 11 days later, 6 million 10 days after that, and 7 million cases only 8 days after that.

Despite these staggering figures, which will lead to thousands of unnecessary and preventable deaths, there have been no calls for the implementation of another lockdown from within the political establishment. This is because while the lockdown proved to be the only effective method of slowing the spread of the virus—absent a vaccine and an effective testing and tracing program—another shutdown would cripple Wall Street earnings projections, sending stockholders’ and business executives’ portfolios into the tank.

Despite the best efforts of the US Congress to shower these parasites with unlimited sums of money through the bipartisan CARES Act, which made available trillions of dollars to corporate America, reality has now reasserted itself. On Thursday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped over 1,800 points, the worst decline in three months, as worrisome data on rising infection rates continued to be reported.

The determination of the US government to “move on” is shared by capitalist governments around the world.

In South America, Brazil continues to lead the continent and the world in daily new confirmed cases, with 32,913 more cases reported Thursday. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, like his US counterpart Trump and UK partner Boris Johnson, has advocated infecting the whole population despite the absence of scientific evidence that antibodies gained from overcoming COVID-19 will last for any extended period of time.

Across sub-Saharan Africa, there are now over 200,000 confirmed cases. The Washington Post is reporting that Pierre Nkurunziza, the president of Burundi, who died on Tuesday, was the first world leader to die of COVID-19. However, government officials have stated that the cause of death was cardiac arrest.

In Pakistan, cases have surged, according to WHO officials. They have urged the entire country to resume lockdown after more than 100 deaths were reported on Tuesday. Overall, the country has over 108,000 confirmed cases and a death toll approaching 2,500, as of this writing.

Pandemic intensifies growing mental health crisis in Australia

Margaret Rees

The Australian government last month unveiled a National Mental Health and Wellbeing Pandemic Response Plan, supposedly addressing the rising mental ill health and suicides resulting from the social and economic impact of COVID-19.

In reality, the pitiful $48.1 million outlay announced by Prime Minister Scott Morrison amounts to more window dressing in the face of a worsening mental health crisis and the lack of essential services over decades. Even before the pandemic, one in four young Australian was affected by a mental health illness every year.

Contrasted with the hundreds of billions of dollars allocated for business rescue packages, the small promised spending displays the contempt of the ruling elite for the millions of working people being financially and psychologically devastated by mass unemployment and under-employment.

Little of the planned outlay is for frontline services. It consists of $7.3 million for research and data collection, $29.5 million for “outreach” to vulnerable communities such as the elderly and $11.3 million for public relations, including an advertising campaign called, “It’s OK not to be OK.”

The government said the package built on about $500 million for mental health announced since late January, including for suicide prevention, preventative services and telehealth consultations. But these sums, promised to be spent over several years, are woefully inadequate.

Warning of the fallout from the pandemic, the Brain and Mind Centre (BMC) at the University of Sydney modelled the possibility of an extra 750 to 1,500 more suicides per year. The latter “worst-case scenario” was based on an unemployment rate of 15.9 percent and youth unemployment of 35 percent.

BMC co-director of health and policy Professor Ian Hickie commented: “Public awareness campaigns, helplines and more entry systems that do not connect with specialised care are of little value.”

Hickie said the government had outlined no investment or timetable to provide the badly-needed “big ticket items.” These were “more specialised care outside of hospitals, aftercare of those who have self-harmed and information-technology based coordination and delivery of care.” Hickie concluded: “As decisive and timely actions are not yet on the agenda, many are left to ask: if not now, when?”

There is a deepening underlying crisis in mental health, made worse by what Hickie called a “highly dysfunctional” system, where treatment is mainly accessed through hospital emergency departments or community-based clinics.

Over the past decade, since the global financial breakdown of 2008–09 and the subsequent bailout of the banks and big business at the expense of the jobs and conditions of workers, there has been a rise in mental illness.

By 2016, the BMC warned of a “national emergency.” It pointed to areas with high numbers of job losses and economic insecurity as among the worst hit by suicides. By 2018, there were 2,046 deaths by suicide, or 12.1 per 100,000 people. For every death, as many as 30 suicide attempts were made—approximately 65,000 per year.

There is a long history of governments, both federal and state, severely under-funding mental health services. In 1983, a state Labor Party government in New South Wales spearheaded “deinstitutionalisation.” Cynically exploiting the poor conditions in under-funded psychiatric hospitals, governments shut down these institutions, falsely claiming they would be replaced by more humane forms of community-based care.

Despite windfall funds from the sale of the lands of the former psychiatric hospitals, Labor and Liberal-National governments alike made ongoing spending cuts to mental health. By 1993, the Human Rights and Mental Illness Report by Brian Burdekin proved that thousands of displaced psychiatric patients had become homeless, been relegated to squalid boarded houses or imprisoned.

Regardless of repeated five-year national mental health plans, this immense social problem has intensified. The crisis is reflected in a 68 percent increase in mental health-related presentations to already over-stretched hospital emergency departments, from 2008–09 to 2017–18, when the total reached 286,985.

On average, 90 percent of all emergency department patients left within seven hours, but for mental health patients the figure was 11.5 hours. This wait could be unendurable for many. In 2016–17, 6,827 people with mental illness left emergency departments before finishing treatment. They were categorised as “Left at Own Risk.” That is, they left with their ill-health untreated.

This is only the tip of the iceberg. Homelessness, substance abuse or ending up in the hands of police can cause people to fall through a huge gap. Among young people, only 31 percent of young women and 13 percent of young men with mental health problems access professional help.

Now, amid ever-more glaring social inequality and the impact of increasingly casualised jobs in the “gig economy,” and with the trade unions working hand-in-glove with the government and employers to further restructure working conditions, the mental ill-health toll will grow.

At the same time, the threat of war is rising, with the Australian government committed to the provocative US campaign against China, casting a pall over the lives of workers and young people.

To create a mentally well society—to tackle unemployment, housing insecurity and financial distress—what is required is the fight for a socialist program, that is a society based on human need, not the dictates of corporate profit and the accumulation of private wealth.

Report finds European lockdowns saved millions of lives, ending it threatens millions

Thomas Scripps

Lockdowns in Europe have saved millions of lives, according to a report modelling the expected progress of the disease in the absence of the measure in 11 countries.

A team from Imperial College London’s MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis, Jameel Institute (J-IDEA), and Department of Mathematics published its research in Nature, Monday. Their study also estimates that only a small percentage of the population of these countries—Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom—has been infected with coronavirus.

The report is an indictment of governments’ initial delays in implementing public health measures, which caused tens of thousands of needless deaths under the pseudo-scientific pretext of achieving “herd immunity.” Yesterday, Professor Neil Ferguson, an author on the study and formerly a leading adviser to the government, told the House of Commons Science Committee that going into lockdown just a week earlier would have halved the UK’s coronavirus death toll.

Above all, the report is also a warning of the terrible consequences of the return to business as usual now being universally pursued.

By analysing reported deaths, the authors calculated the changes in the reproduction number (or “R value”) between the start of the epidemic and May 4, when lockdowns started to be lifted. The R value indicates how many people on average each infected person is expected to transmit the virus on to. An R of 1 or above means the virus can spread rapidly.

The authors used reported deaths as a more accurate measure than reported cases, since large numbers of infections are known to be unreported. This is in large part due to the continued failures of government testing procedures. As the report notes, “Most countries initially only had capacity to test a small proportion of suspected cases, reserving tests for severely ill patients or for high-risk groups (e.g. contacts of cases).”

Even the reported death totals, though more reliable, significantly undercount the number of coronavirus-related fatalities. Nick Stripe, head of life events at the Office for National Statistics in the UK, told the Financial Times last week, “COVID-related death registrations are running 31 percent higher than the daily numbers reported at the time.”

The Imperial College study bases itself on the official statistics collected by the European Centre for Disease Control. Using deaths to estimate the R value in the early stages of the pandemic, prior to the implementation of lockdowns, researchers modeled the predicted spread of the virus along that trajectory counterposed to a model based on the spread actually observed following the lockdowns. The results are stark:

“We find that, across 11 countries, since the beginning of the epidemic, 3,100,000 [2,800,000- 3,500,000] deaths have been averted…”

This includes an estimated 690,000 deaths in France; 630,000 in Italy; 560,000 in Germany; 470,000 in the UK; 450,000 in Spain and 110,000 in Belgium, plus tens of thousands in each of the other five countries—only up to May 4.

These figures assume no change in the population’s behaviour during the pandemic. The authors note that people taking independent action to protect themselves would likely reduce the R value. But it is highly questionable how far they would be able to do so while forced to work, send their children to school and travel on public transport.

Far more significantly, the figures “do not consider the impact… of an overwhelmed health system in which patients may not be able to access critical care facilities.” This would dramatically increase the number of predicted deaths.

Even with lockdowns belatedly introduced, hospitals in Britain, Italy, Spain and France reported being stretched past breaking point, with several having to refuse patients or treatment, declaring emergency shortages of vital medical supplies, or having to close entirely. These countries and others kept just within health care capacity only by abandoning tens of thousands of elderly residents in care homes and keeping thousands more desperately ill people out of hospital.

Only yesterday, Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) reported that its waiting list for treatment—including for cancer, strokes and heart disease—is expected to more than double to 10 million by the end of the year. The health service is currently working at 60 percent of capacity due to infection control measures. Had the coronavirus been allowed to spread freely, the NHS and other health services in Europe would have collapsed.

The authors conclude: “Our results show that major non-pharmaceutical interventions and lockdown in particular have had a large effect on reducing transmission.” Specifically, the research finds that these interventions have reduced the R value by between 75 and 87 percent across the 11 countries studied.

Refuting the early attempts made by politicians to blame their own inaction and negligence on the public, the report notes, “Modern understanding of infectious disease with a global publicized response [which, we would add, has depended on social and independent media against the public statements of governments] has meant that nationwide interventions could be implemented with widespread adherence and support.”

As a result of the population’s efforts, the numbers infected with coronavirus to date have been substantially suppressed. The Imperial College model for the progress of the disease with no lockdowns suggests that the UK, for example, would by now have seen 70 percent of people infected, whereas the real figure is estimated at 5.1 percent. Across the 11 countries, the rate of people so far infected is put at between 3.2 and 4 percent. The highest rate of estimated total infections is in Belgium, at around 8 percent, and the next highest in Spain, at just 5.5 percent—an average of 4 percent across the 11 states.

The report concludes that “populations in Europe are not close to herd immunity.” There is therefore no natural barrier to a renewed rapid spread of the disease. The researchers advise, “Continued intervention should be considered to keep transmission of SARS-CoV-2 under control.”

These conclusions are supported by another recent report, also published in Nature, which produced similar results for a study of China, South Korea, Iran, France and the United States. Carried out by a team at the University of California, Berkeley, the research estimated that 530 million infections had been prevented in these countries by lockdown measures.

The political implications of these studies are immense.

Governments were forced to put lockdowns in place because they felt unprepared to confront the massive popular opposition in the working class to the policy of “herd immunity.” Those lockdowns, despite the failure to provide sufficient care for either the infected or the isolated population, have significantly restricted the spread of the virus and saved millions of lives.

But as it stands, the loss of these lives has not been averted, only postponed. The ruling class’ intention was not to use the lockdown to prepare a public health infrastructure to control and eventually eliminate the virus, but to give themselves time to plan how to force a largely unchanged agenda of “herd immunity” on the population.

Hundreds of thousands of families have already suffered the consequences of this policy. But the present figure for deaths is the result of an infection rate of just 4 percent. Had the disease run its course, this figure would have been over 3 million in just 11 European countries, with an infection rate of 70 percent. Now that the lockdown is ending, and with health care systems in a worse state than ever, a European and global death toll in the millions is likely.

Millions of Ukrainian migrant workers forced to search for employment in Europe under unsafe conditions

Jason Melanovski

Millions of Ukrainian migrant workers who returned to their native country at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic are now searching for opportunities to return to Europe in search of much needed work as quarantine measures are relaxed both in Ukraine and across Europe.

Ukrainian migrants are a huge source of labor across Europe, making up the largest group of migrant workers on the continent.

According to estimates from the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, “up to 9 million Ukrainians out of a total population of 42 million annually work abroad for some part of the year, and 3.2 million have regular full-time work outside the country.” The working age population in Ukraine comprises 28.5 million people, out of which 12.5 million are officially employed. Thus, about a third of Ukrainian workers work abroad for at least part of the year.

Farm workers from Ukraine in the Czech Republic

The main reason for these staggering levels of labor migration is the devastating impact of capitalist restoration on Ukraine, which has been compounded by decades of austerity on behalf of the Ukrainian oligarchy and imperialism. Since the US- and EU-backed far-right coup in Kiev in February 2014, living conditions have deteriorated particularly sharply. Minimum wages in Ukraine are now below those of Thailand, Morocco or South Africa. Approximately 60 percent of the population lived beneath the subsistence level before the coronavirus crisis hit.

These conditions have forced a large portion of the working age population to seek employment abroad, where their desperate situation is brutally exploited by major European corporations. Ukraine’s migrant workers, many of whom look for work through recruiting firms, are primarily working in low-wage manufacturing construction jobs and on farms picking fruit and produce.

Approximately 2 million Ukrainian migrant workers reside in nearby Poland where they account for 2.5 percent of the country’s GDP. Large numbers also work in Italy, the Czech Republic, Finland and Germany.

In March, just prior to the beginning of the coronavirus crisis, Germany adopted the so-called Skilled Immigration Act that will significantly ease the way for Ukraine’s migrant workers to find jobs in Germany. The act will place German companies in direct competition with Polish corporations for Ukraine’s migrant workers. In 2019, polls of Ukrainian migrant workers found that Germany was their preferred final destination for work and they would leave their current work country for Germany if offered the opportunity.

The labor of Ukrainian migrant workers also serves as a large source of income for the Ukrainian government. In 2019, remittances from Ukrainian migrant workers were the highest in Europe: with $16 billion they accounted for 11 percent of the country’s entire GDP.

As the coronavirus pandemic spread across Europe in March, the Ukrainian government urged its migrant workers to return home before borders were shut down for an indeterminable period of time. Approximately 2 million Ukrainian workers returned home rather than risk finding themselves stranded in a foreign country without a job and no social or legal protections.

However, as soon as they returned, these workers found themselves out of work within Ukraine, Europe’s poorest country. On top of these millions of migrant workers, up to 2 million workers have already lost their jobs as a result of the coronavirus crisis and salaries average approximately $200 per month.

The government of President Volodymyr Zelensky, who made recruiting Ukrainian workers back to the country one of his main presidential goals when first elected in April 2019, is now struggling to keep workers within its borders. As contract migrant workers, they can earn approximately ten times more in Europe than in Ukraine.

Despite the huge amount of remittances Ukrainian workers send home, their absence has a created a shortage of labor within the country with small businesses often unable to find workers and rural areas depopulated of workers during harvest season. In 2018, the then foreign minister of Ukraine, Pavel Klimkin, admitted that approximately 100,000 people were leaving the country per month and that the situation was creating a massive demographic crisis for the country.

In December of last year Zelensky’s government announced a program of a business-friendly incentives intended to attract young migrant workers back to Ukraine, such as low-interest loans for small and medium-sized businesses and funding for construction jobs.

These measures have done little to stem the exodus of workers and while the coronavirus pandemic has returned a sizable number of workers to the country, there is little evidence they will stay once quarantine measures are even further relaxed.

According to Politico, Ukraine’s Gremi Personal, a recruitment agency which sends Ukrainians to work in Poland, found that 67 percent of Ukrainian migrant workers who returned to Ukraine as a result of the coronavirus already want to leave the country in search of work in Europe.

In April the Ukrainian government attempted to stop charter flights leaving for Finland and the United Kingdom. Due to widespread outcry over the lack of work within the country and the inability of workers to leave the country, the Zelensky government announced it would allow workers to leave only with a guaranteed three-month minimum contract, health insurance covering coronavirus, housing and transportation to their work country and back.

President Zelensky also commented that he would honor diplomatic requests for workers from Ukraine’s backers in the EU, primarily Germany and Poland, stating, “When we get diplomatic requests, we let everyone out. When they show us a copy of the [labor] contract, according to which a person will be hired for at least three months—good luck! There is no slavery in Ukraine.”

In a written statement to Politico, the deputy minister’s Office for European and Euro-Atlantic Integration fraudulently attempted to pose as a protector of Ukrainian workers: “No one is prohibiting the departure of seasonal workers from Ukraine, but the government seeks to protect both workers themselves and citizens who will come in contact with them upon their return.”

In reality, the Zelensky government is concerned about the ability of companies in Ukraine, both foreign and domestic, to exploit the working class. In recent months, it has introduced a range of labor reforms on behalf of major corporations that will limit Ukrainian workers’ rights and their ability to receive benefits and unemployment insurance. During the coronavirus crisis medical workers were left without personal protective equipment and were infected themselves, with many engaging in walkouts.

The coronavirus crisis, which has been exploited by the Ukrainian oligarchy to implement further assaults on the Ukrainian working class, is aggravating the already severe demographic crisis in the country. Many of the workers who are now trying to leave will likely never return.

Meanwhile, in Europe, they will be faced with dangerous working and living conditions as the bourgeoisie across the continent has pushed for a premature reopening of the economy, under conditions where the virus is still spreading and workers are not offered adequate protection at their workplaces. Migrant workers from Ukraine and other countries, who often lack medical insurance and are forced to live under cramped and squalid conditions, will be among those hardest hit by the further spread of the virus.

More cases of US police brutality emerge as protests continue against murder of George Floyd

Meenakshi Jagadeesan

Even as nationwide protests against police brutality extend into their third week, new reports of homicidal violence by US police continue to emerge.

Last week, police in Albuquerque, New Mexico, shot and critically injured Max Mitnick after responding to a “welfare check” call from the victim’s father. This is not the first time a call to the Albuquerque Police Department (APD) from a concerned family member has had deadly consequences. Two months ago, an APD officer shot and killed 52-year-old Valente Acosta-Bustillos after responding to a welfare check call from his daughter. Both Mitnick and Acosta-Bustillos struggled with mental health issues.

This latest report of police violence seems particularly egregious since there was no criminal complaint. According to the APD’s own press release, the officers responded to a call last Thursday from Mitnick’s father. Mitnick, a young man in his mid-20s, had been diagnosed with a mental health condition and, according to his father, had expressed a desire to be taken to the hospital for fear that he might injure his parents.

When the officers arrived at the suburban house, Mitnick met them in the yard and informed them that he would like to be taken to the hospital by his parents. The officers claim that after he walked back into the house they heard a woman scream, “Help, he’s got a knife.” On entering the house, they saw Mitnick come out of a bathroom towards them and shot him.

At a press conference last Thursday, APD Deputy Chief Harold Medina insisted that the officers on the scene had been trained in crisis intervention, without providing any details about the names of the officers involved in the shooting or whether they had been placed on administrative leave.

In the fatal police shooting two months ago of Acosta-Bustillos, lapel cameras released by the APD show what seems to be a pleasant conversation between one of the officers on the scene, Edgar Sandoval, and Acosta-Bustillos rapidly deteriorate, leading the latter to run back into the house and brandish a shovel he had been using for yard work. Sandoval responds by shooting and killing Acosta-Bustillos.

Predictably, the APD blamed the victim, claiming he threatened the officer’s life. Police noted that Acosta-Bustillos had an outstanding felony charge and had been arrested in December 2019 while suffering meth-induced paranoia.

At of this writing, neither of the two officers involved in the shooting has been placed on administrative leave.

The APD drew the attention of the Department of Justice (DOJ) in 2014 for its use of excessive force after the well-publicized killings of people with mental disorders in the years prior. In 2010, Albuquerque police shot and killed Kenneth Ellis, a 25-year-old veteran who suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. In March 2014, two officers shot and killed James Boyd, a homeless man who had been diagnosed as having a schizo-affective disorder.

The latest incident demonstrates that the settlement arrived at between the DOJ and the APD is virtually meaningless.

Earlier this week, the New Jersey State Attorney’s office released audio and video clips related to another tragic police encounter that led to the shooting death of 28-year-old Maurice Gordon. The New York Times reports that the fatal encounter, which took place two days before the May 25 killing of George Floyd, was Gordon’s fourth encounter with the police within 30 hours, after a friend called 911 expressing concerns about his well-being and whereabouts.

A still from police footage of Maurice Gordon, who was shot and killed by police in New Jersey on May 23, 2020. (Image: New Jersey Attorney General’s Office)

Gordon, a Jamaican who moved to the US to work and study, was stopped in the early morning hours by New Jersey State Trooper Sgt. Randall Wetzel, after Gordon was caught driving southbound at 110 miles per hour on the Garden State Parkway. The footage shows what seems to be a calm, reasonable conversation between the two men about problems with Gordon’s car, with the officer asking him to move to the police vehicle as they wait for a tow truck.

Gordon, who was frisked for weapons, sat in the cruiser for 21 minutes before getting out. Sgt. Wetzel claimed after the shooting that Gordon tried to grab his gun and get into the police vehicle, which led to a struggle and the eventual killing. There were no other witnesses to the killing.

The Austin, Texas, Police Department released new video footage this week related to the murder of Javier Ambler in March 2019. The police initially pursued Ambler because he had not dimmed the lights on his Honda. After being chased for 20 minutes, Ambler stopped and exited the vehicle. According to the official account, he “did not immediately comply with the deputy’s verbal command.” This led two of the deputies to use their tasers to ensure compliance. Ambler’s arrest was being filmed for the A&E reality show, Live PD.

As reported in Vox, the Texas attorney general’s office euphemistically describes what unfolded as follows: “Once in custody, deputies noticed the driver was unresponsive. Deputies were unable to locate a pulse and began chest compressions until EMS arrived and took over life saving interventions.” The reality is far more grotesque.

The recently released video footage shows an apparently sober and unarmed Ambler on his stomach as officers try to handcuff him. Repeatedly calling the officers “sir,” Ambler can be heard telling them that he has congestive heart failure and that he is not resisting arrest.

One of the officers can be heard remarking, “I am pretty sure I just broke his finger,” as they place the handcuffs. Ambler can be heard repeating, “I can’t breathe.” The medical examiner later found that Ambler died because of “extensive restraint,” along with congestive heart failure and hypertensive cardiovascular disease.

Growing anger among US workers as COVID-19 rips through workplaces

Tom Hall & Jerry White

Manufacturing facilities, warehouses and other large workplaces in the United States continue to be major vectors for the spread of COVID-19, with the number of infections and hospitalizations rising sharply in many areas of the country. In their reckless rush to reopen the economy and restart the flow of corporate profits, the Trump administration and state and local authorities from both parties have all but abandoned any public health measures to contain the virus.

Driven by the premature back-to-work push by US corporations, a mood of anger and opposition is taking hold within the working class in the United States. This is merging with outrage over the police murder of George Floyd, massive levels of unemployment and economic insecurity, and demands by corporations, including many that received government bailouts, for wage and benefit cuts. In recent days, health care workers have joined the demonstrations, aiding injured protesters. Public transit workers in New York City—where 139 co-workers have died of COVID-19—and other cities have refused to transport cops and protesters arrested by the police.

The strikes, job actions and other protests by workers in the US are part of a growing international wave of struggles, from German meatpacking workers and Polish coal miners in Silesia—who make up 10 percent of the country’s COVID-19 cases—to Bridgestone tire workers in Brazil and Panamanian workers who struck against the reopening of the economy.

Workers in a Hog Slaughter and Processing Plant (Wikipedia Commons)

Meatpacking workers

Hundreds of meatpacking workers in Logan, Utah demonstrated Wednesday afternoon to demand the closure of their facility, operated by Brazilian conglomerate JBS. The workers are also demanding that they be compensated for time off during the shutdown.

At least 287 at the facility, or more than 20 percent of the total workforce, tested positive during a screening held on the weekend of May 30. This is possibly the largest single outbreak in the state, according to the Salt Lake Tribune.

Meatpacking plants, where highly exploited workers are crowded onto often unsanitary assembly lines with no chance of social distancing, have been transmission points for the spread of the virus from major industrial centers to more rural or sparsely populated areas. There are over 20,400 cases in 33 states tied to meatpacking plants, with at least 74 deaths, according to the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting.

Because many meatpacking workers are undocumented immigrants fearful of being deported, many cases in the industry likely go unreported. The Trump administration has intervened to force meatpacking plants to remain open during the pandemic, while several states have moved to protect meat processing and other companies from legal liability for sickening and killing workers.

To date, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the federal agency tasked with overseeing workplace safety, has issued only one citation for COVID-19-related violations even though thousands of workers around the country have filed camplaints about unsafe working conditions. Even meat inspectors from the US Department of Agriculture, hundreds of whom have contracted the virus and at least one who has died, are reportedly terrified of entering the country’s meatpacking plants, where even minimal social distancing measures have not been taken.

Sanitation workers

Hundreds of Philadelphia sanitation workers protested in front of City Hall Tuesday morning to demand protective equipment, access to regular testing for COVID-19 and hazard pay bonuses.

Nearly 60 Philadelphia sanitation workers have tested positive for COVID-19 and another 50 have self-quarantined after being exposed, according to local union officials. The city’s 1,100 sanitation workers, whose median salary is $36,000, face the constant threat of infection as they collect trash from the hundreds of thousands of households and businesses in the city of 1.5 million.

“Our conditions are real bad,” Durrell Rothwell, a sanitation worker who contracted the disease from a coworker and then passed it on to his own son, told the rally. “They haven’t given us the proper tools to protect ourselves. We have to get our own masks, our own gloves, our own everything. For them to not give us hazard pay at least during this pandemic is ridiculous,” Rothwell said, according to local media.

Workers are also angered by Democratic Mayor Jim Kenney’s proposed budget, which includes cuts of $18.5 million to the Streets Department. Prior to the rally, Streets Commissioner Carlton Williams sent out a letter to sanitation workers threatening them with dismissal if they did not show up for work. “[U]nauthorized absences,” the letter read, “will result in disciplinary action, up to and including termination.”

Many sanitation workers carried signs reading “PPE, not PPD [Philadelphia Police Department],” drawing a connection between the endangerment of workers on the job by the government and the police riots against demonstrations protesting police brutality.

The Philadelphia protest was only the latest in a string of actions by sanitation workers throughout the country. Over the last several days, a small group of sanitation workers in Tuskegee, Alabama have been protesting daily outside City Hall during their regular work hours to demand pay increases and PPE. Workers for waste disposal contractors in the city of New Orleans struck over the same demands. The city responded by replacing them with prison laborers earning less than minimum wage.

Autoworkers

After wildcat strikes forced a halt to production in mid-March, the automakers prepared a return to work with a media blitz, fully supported by the United Auto Workers union, which touted the wholly inadequate safety measures being adopted after over two dozen autoworkers died.

Reports of new infections in the plants began as soon as production reopened on May 18. Management at the Elon Musk-owned electric carmaker Tesla, which defied local lockdown orders to reopen its massive plant in northern California last month, has admitted to workers that there have already been several confirmed cases at multiple facilities. Industry outlet Automotive News admitted this week that testing by the companies has not been on a scale sufficient to identify new infections.

Hundreds of workers on every shift are calling off due to concerns about contracting the disease, compounded by underlying health conditions and the unbearable heat, which makes it even more difficult to work with a mask on. A worker at the Sterling Heights Assembly Plant in Detroit told the WSWS, “They are working our butts off and want more overtime. The safety measures are being abandoned. They are acting like everything is back to normal.

“They are trying to get as much out of us as they can. There are a lot of workers out due to COVID, so they keep coming back and asking us to do overtime. If you dangle time-and-a-half, double time or even triple time on Sunday, a lot of workers who are hard up are going to take it. But they are taking our lives away from us. We create more value for them than the crazy rise on the stock market.”

A worker who wrote in to the WSWS Autoworker Newsletter, said, “Jeep plant in Toledo has confirmed cases and they’re still working. I thought I had it, had all the symptoms so got tested and it was negative, but I'm still scared to go to work. I have no immune system and other medical issues. Also have a pacemaker so yeah, I'm scared to death. It’s hot, we have no fans and we have to wear a mask all day even at break tables. It’s ridiculous. Something needs to be done.”

Among auto parts workers, who earn even less than their counterparts in the assembly plants, the situation is even more dire. Workers at a Detroit facility of parts supplier Flex-N-Gate told the WSWS that half of the day shift walked out of the plant Wednesday due to the unbearble heat. Fans in the plant have been shut off to prevent airborne transmission of the virus, and many workers passed out on the line.

Autoworkers, teachers and other workers have also joined the mass protests against police violence.

Health care workers

Hundreds of workers in the East Bay region of northern California at hospital chain Kaiser Permanente took part in demonstrations Wednesday. They are among the thousands of health care workers who have protested and also cared for protesters brutalized by police. This has made health care workers targets for law enforcement, who have been caught on camera destroying their first aid tents.

Health care workers are also being driven into struggle by the coronavirus pandemic, which has savaged their profession. Over 70,000 health care workers in the United States have been infected and nearly 600 have died. Many more have been laid off due to declining revenue, exposing the irrationality of for-profit medicine.

Significantly, the Kaiser Permanente workers who demonstrated this week had voted overwhelmingly for strike action last fall, after working without a contract for more than a year. A strike, originally scheduled to begin during the nationwide strike at General Motors, was prevented at the last second through a sellout deal imposed by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU).

Workers at a nursing facility in nearby Sacramento also voted overwhelmingly to strike this week, after several nurses had clocked in but refused to work in protest over a lack of proper PPE.

Throughout the country, hospital management and the political establishment have used ritual phrases about “heroic” health care workers to cover for budget cuts and shortages, which risk both nurses’ and patients’ lives. Seventy-nine percent of nurses are being told by management to reuse PPE, according to the American Nurses Association, and many nurses and doctors have resorted to wearing trash bags and other makeshift protective clothing while on the job.

One New Jersey nurse expressed her anger on social media, declaring, “I am a nurse! Stop calling me a hero to justify working us like slaves. It’s worse now than ever before. [We have] 8 to 12 patients every damn day! How the hell do you work like that for 4 12 hour shifts straight in a row and have a life outside of work? We see the exhaustion in our faces. It’s gotten worse with COVID and it will stay like this long time if nurses don’t speak up. We all need to band together and say! ‘NO MORE!’”

The protection of workers’ health and safety will not be carried out by the corporate-controlled unions and federal and state agencies like OSHA. In opposition to the demands of management for greater production and profit, workers should elect rank-and-file safety committees to control working hours and line speed, guarantee PPE and safe and comfortable working conditions, regular testing, universal health care and guaranteed income, and the full distribution of information and opposition to retaliation.

The struggle against police brutality and in defense of democratic rights must be fused with the growing opposition of the working class against deadly working conditions, social inequality and austerity and transformed into a conscious political struggle against the capitalist system.

There’s a Crisis in US Capitalism

Richard Wolff

Capitalism has always had business cycles. The capitalist enterprises that produce goods and services are distinctively organized around the conflicted relationship of employer and employees and the competitive relationship of markets. These central relationships of capitalism together generate cyclical instability. Wherever capitalism became a society’s economic system over the last three centuries, business cycles recurred every four to seven years. Capitalism has mechanisms to survive its cycles, but they are painful, especially when employers fire employees. Widespread pain (unemployment, bankruptcies, disrupted public finances, etc.) brought the label “crisis” to capitalism’s cyclical downturns. Only on special occasions, and rarely, did the cyclical crises in capitalism become crises of capitalism as a system. That has usually required other non-economic problems (political, cultural, and/or natural) to reach crescendo peaks around the same time as a cyclical economic downturn. Today is a time of crisis both in and of U.S. capitalism.

U.S. economic policy now focuses on what is already the worst business cycle downturn since the 1929 crash. As data accumulate, it may well prove to be the worst in global capitalism’s entire history. Forty million jobless U.S. workers find incomes lost, savings disappearing and over-indebted family finances worsening.

Today’s mass unemployment also threatens those still employed, the remaining 120 million members of the U.S. labor force. Mass unemployment always invites employers to cut wages, benefits and working conditions. If any of their employees quit, many among the millions of unemployed will accept those abandoned jobs. Knowing that, most employees accept their employers’ cuts. Employers will justify them as required by “the pandemic” or by what they say are its effects on their profits.

Led by Trump and the Republicans and tolerated by the Democrats’ leaders, U.S. employers are intensifying class war against workers. That is what mass joblessness accomplishes. On one hand, Washington bails out employers with trillions of dollars. On the other, Washington enables (by funding) a mass joblessness that directly undermines the entire working class. Germany and France, for example, could not allow such joblessness because of their labor movements’ and socialist parties’ social influences. In sharp contrast, the predictable results of mass joblessness in the U.S. are deepening social divisions, renewed racism, social protests, and government repression (often violent).

A desperate president fears electoral losses because his government failed to prepare for or prevent (1) a bad virus or (2) a capitalist business cycle downturn or (3) their catastrophic combination. White supremacy, police brutality, mass media control, and so on serve Trump’s efforts to mobilize his political base. So do his attacks on foreign scapegoats aimed to distract blame from his government and from system failures. These include immigrants, China, the WHO, Iran, former European allies, etc.

All these tactical maneuvers by the Trump/GOP regime provoke oppositions. However, they remain dispersed and unorganized politically. Instead of mobilizing and coordinating them, the Democratic Party leadership does the reverse. It undermined the Bernie Sanders movement, especially by splitting it from a large part of the middle-income African American community. By thereby blocking, if only temporarily, a powerful emerging opposition, Democratic Party leaders deterred mass opposition to bailouts, unemployment, minimal COVID-19 testing, and all the government’s other failures. They just want to win the November 2020 election. Biden’s vague “return to normal” promises are offered as soothing antidotes to the Trump/GOP’s crisis-wracked, fear-mongering divisiveness. Trump plunges ahead with a radically pro-capitalist agenda coupled with reactionary cultural and political warfare against civil rights and liberties. It is the old GOP strategy but a much more extreme version. The Democrats counter with reactionary responses: a revived Cold War (against Russia and/or China) and a domestic safety less shredded than what the GOP plans. Culture wars are perhaps the only realm where Democrats sense some votes in not caving further to right-wing pressures.

Alternating Democratic and Republican governments produced today’s impasse. Global isolation accompanies the U.S.’s declining economic and political footprints. Its technological supremacy is increasingly challenged globally and especially in and by China. Efforts to break that challenge have not succeeded and will not likely do better in the future. Further China-bashing—pursued by both major parties—will only slow global economic growth just when many circumstances converge to make that the least desirable future. Record-breaking levels of government, corporate and household debt make the U.S. economy exceptionally vulnerable to future shocks and cyclical downturns.

The U.S. population below 40 years of age struggles increasingly with unsustainable debts. The jobs and incomes it faces have already undermined access to the “American Dream” they were promised as children. Nor have they much hope for the future as today’s pandemic-cum-crash imposes more hardships on them. That protests surge, provoked further by government repression, should surprise no one.

Repeated polls where half the young “prefer socialism over capitalism” reflect growing antipathy to their deteriorating capitalist reality. In the Cold War-shaped U.S. school system since the late 1940s, socialism’s substantive theories and practices were not seriously taught. Debates among socialists over how socialism was changing or should change remain largely unknown. Today’s growing interests in critiques of capitalism and in socialism’s varieties reflect young peoples’ rejection of Cold War taboos as well as a capitalism that has failed them.

No “return to normal” after the combined systemic shocks of the COVID-19 pandemic and capitalist depression is likely. Many want no such return because they believe that that normal led to both the pandemic and the economic crash. They also believe that the managers of that old normal—corporate CEOs in both their private and governmental positions—should face tough public scrutiny and opposition because of where that normal led and where it will likely lead again.

Those managers are not solving the problems they helped to create: utterly inadequate testing for the virus, bigger-than-ever bailouts for the biggest banks and corporations, mass unemployment, and deepening wealth and income inequalities.

Why then keep those managers in power? We should not expect different results from them now than when conditions were “normal.”

Of course protests flared up in and around African American communities. Beyond their long history of suffering social and employment discrimination and police oppression, it is important to remember that those communities suffered worst in the Great Recession of 2008-2009. Their unemployment then shot up, they lost homes disproportionately to foreclosures, etc. They have died from the coronavirus significantly more than white communities. Because of disproportionate reliance on low-paid service sector jobs, they have once again suffered disproportionately in 2020’s crash of U.S. capitalism. When a president then blatantly panders to white supremacy and white supremacists, while making and repeating racist comments, the ingredients are in place to provoke protests. However useful for Trump/GOP electoral campaigns, social protests and oppressive police responses add sharp social conflicts to the already disastrous combination of viral pandemic and economic crash.

Trump is a product and sign of U.S. capitalism’s exhaustion. The long, cozy governmental alternation between GOP and Democrats after the trauma of the 1930s Great Depression had achieved its purpose. It had undone FDR’s redistribution of wealth from the top to the middle and the bottom. It had “fixed” that problem by reversing the redistribution of wealth and income. The ideological cover for that “fix” was bipartisan demonization of domestic socialism combined with bipartisan pursuit of Cold War with the USSR. The major GOP vs. Democratic Party dispute concerned the modes and extents of governmental support for private capitalism (as in Keynes vs. Friedman, etc.). That minor squabble got raised to the status of “the major issue” for politicians, journalists, and academics to debate because they caved to the taboo on debates over capitalism vs. socialism.

Capitalism has so extremely redistributed wealth and income to the top 1 percent, so mired the vast majority in overwork and excess debt, and so extinguished “good jobs” (via relocating them abroad and automation) that the system itself draws ever-deeper disaffection, criticism, and opposition. At first, deepening social divisions expressed the system’s disintegration. Now open street protests take the U.S. a step closer to a full-on crisis of the system.

Trump subordinated the old managers of capitalism by politically threatening them with aroused, angry small businesses and middle-income workers. Trump promises the latter a return to what they had before the upwards redistribution of wealth hurt them. He tells the old managers that he and his base alone can secure their social positions atop an upwardly redistributed contemporary capitalism. They will save the old managers from Bernie, “progressivism” and “socialism.” The Democratic Party’s old, “centrist” leadership offers weak, partial opposition, hoping Trump goes too far and implodes the GOP.

In the wake of the pandemic and the massive unemployment used to “manage” it, wages and benefits will take major hits in the months and years ahead. Wealth will be further redistributed upward. Social divisions will deepen and so will social protests. This crisis in capitalism is also a crisis of capitalism.

Locusts Wreck Havoc On Farms In India Amidst COVID Pandemic

Ayushi Verma

Amid a nationwide Coronavirus Pandemic induced lockdown, a massive strike by locusts threatens crops in western and northern India. India is experiencing the worst locusts attack in 30 years. Over the last few days, swarms of desert locust have reached the urban areas of Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra. They invaded India via Pakistan, leaving a trail of destruction in their wake. In December 2019, when the parts of Gujarat were invaded by locust, they had destroyed crops spread over 25,000 hectares of land. This time, the attack is additionally widespread. Locust swarms entered India from Pakistan where they flew in from Iran last year. From Rajasthan, locusts entered Madhya Pradesh via Neemuch and have advanced to Ujjain and Dewas. The locust swarms have also made their way to Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra. Due to the proximity with Pakistan as well as the rest of the affected areas, Punjab has also put its farmers on alert. In Rajasthan, locust attack has reached residential colonies of Jaipur. Unable to find crops to feed on, the locusts have started destroying trees.

Locust Swarms are insects that travel in large swarms. Depending upon the wind speed, they can travel up to 150 kilometers in a day. They can destroy crops and cause major agricultural damage, which can lead to famine and starvation. Locusts devour leaves, flowers, fruits, seeds, bark and growing points, and conjointly destroy plants by their sheer weight as they descend on them in huge numbers. A small swarm of the desert locust eats on a mean the maximum amount of food in the future as regarding ten elephants, 25 camels, or 2,500 people. But swarms don’t seem to be continually tiny. In 1875, the North American nation reported a swarm calculable to be 1,98,000 sq. miles or 5,12,817 sq. kilometers in size. Delhi-NCR is just 1500 sq. kilometers, for comparison. A swarm, the dimensions of Delhi could consume an identical quantity of food in the future as each denizen in Rajasthan or Madhya Pradesh in the future.

Several Indian media rumored that regarding 123,500 acres of cropland had already been destroyed in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh states. The crop harm comes as several farmers were already fighting the impact of India’s two months long coronavirus lockdown, that left them mostly while not the employees to tend to their crops. The double crisis may create a significant threat to India’s food security within the coming months.

As per the UN agency, the locust infestation is probably going to induce severe by next month. The desert locust invasion is anticipated to maneuver from Africa to India and Pakistan next month and could be accompanied by other swarms.

Why Desert Locusts in Non-Desert Lands?

Desert Locusts(Schistocerca gregaria), which belong to the family of grasshoppers normally, live and breed in semi-arid or desert regions. For laying eggs, they require bare ground, which is rarely found in areas with dense vegetation. So, they can breed in Rajasthan but not in the Indo-Gangetic plains or the Godavari or Cauvery delta. But green vegetation is required for hopper development. Hopper is the stage between a nymph that is hatched from the egg and the winged adult moth. Such cover isn’t widespread enough in the deserts to allow the growth of a large population of locusts.

The large scale breeding and swarm formation are due to favorable conditions i.e. desert and semi-arid regions. The outbreak started after warm waters in the western Indian Ocean in late 2019 fueled heavy amounts of rains over East Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. Heavy rain triggers the growth of vegetation in arid areas where desert locusts can then grow and breed. The large scale movement of the swarm is also because of the strong westerly winds from cyclone Amphan in the Bay of Bengal.

Locust attacks are not new

Although 2020 seems to be the worst year and full of catastrophes, these locust attacks are not new. It has been mentioned in all ancient texts like the Bible, Koran, etc. The  trouble that stricken pharaohs, King Ashoka, and King Solomon remain a menace in today’s age, Within recorded history numerous locust plagues upsurges since 1812.

What damage have they caused?

According to the officials, 43 districts of five states have been severally affected by the attack of locust swarms in May 2020. This includes 23 districts of Rajasthan, 16 of Madhya Pradesh, Banaskantha and Kutch in Gujarat, Fazilka in Punjab, and Jhansi in Uttar Pradesh.

Up until now, not much damage has been caused by the Locust Swarms, since the rabi crop has already been harvested. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has predicted that there will be several successive waves of invasions until July in Rajasthan and then across northern India right up to Bihar and Odisha. After July, due to Southwest Monsoon winds, they would return to Rajasthan.

The danger is once they start breeding. One gregarious female locust can lay 60-80 eggs 3 times during its average life cycle of 90 days. If their breeding is coterminous thereupon of the Kharif crop, we could well have a situation like what maize, sorghum, and wheat farmers of Kenya, Ethiopia, and Somalia experienced in March-April.

How can these pests be controlled?

Locust Swarms can be controlled by spraying of organophosphate pesticides on the night resting places of the Locusts. The Indian Institute of Sugarcane Research, Lucknow has advised farmers to spray chemicals like lambda-cyhalothrin, deltamethrin, fipronil, chlorpyriphos, or malathion to control the swarms. Government advised people to make a loud noise so that instead of settling they keep flying.

India’s agriculture ministry is hoping to regulate the invasion before monsoon season hits north India at the tip of June when locusts mature and breed. If the infestation isn’t controlled, it should threaten summer crops like rice, maize, and sorghum.

Child Labour – A Gruesome Issue

Zeeshan Rasool Khan

United Nations defines child labour as work, which deprives children of their childhood, their dignity, and potential, and that is harmful to their physical and mental health. It refers to the work that interferes with the schooling of the children and becomes a drag on their overall development.

Child labour started with the onset of the Industrial Revolution in Britain in the late 18th century as it led to a rapid increase in the industrial exploitation of labour, including child labour. The immigration of Irish immigrants to the United States due to Irish potato famine of 1845, also called the great hunger multiplied it. Lot has changed since then but the Child Labour is still extant in the world as a menace. It is detrimental not only to a particular family but to the entire country. Today’s children are tomorrow’s future. Country’s progress and development rely on them. But the Child labour exposes them to an environment that inflicts sufferings on their physical and mental health. The difficulty of tasks, working conditions, and maltreatment from bosses creates a plethora of problems such as premature aging, malnutrition, depression, drug dependency, physical and sexual violence, etc apart from stripping them of educational rights – that makes the foundation of a progressive nation. All these are having negative implications for the whole nation. Also, it is a brazen violation of their rights. It denies them the opportunity to reach their full potential and is a total wastage of human resources. It can heighten illiteracy, unemployment, and trigger many other social problems.

The murder of child Zohra Shah in Pakistan and the death of Indian girl – Jamlo Makdam underscored the agony that Child Labour usually brings. 8-year old domestic worker Zohra Shah was tortured to death by the couple for mistakenly freeing expensive parrots from the cage. Jamlo Makdam, a 12 yrs old Indian farm worker died during a 100 Km trek home following the coronavirus lockdown. She died of dehydration and exhaustion on her way home. It is different from other migrant deaths because the girl was a child, not a migrant worker and child labour claimed her life.

According to estimates from the International labour Organization (ILO) there are 152 million children in child labour and about 72 million of which are in hazardous work worldwide.

Even though India and Pakistan made encouraging progress in recent years in curbing this problem, child labour is still a gruesome reality. There are many areas where children are being employed as labours. In the subcontinent, children used to work entirely on farms but they are now moving to non-farm jobs. The garment industry, brick kilns, sugarcane, tobacco industries, etc now see a huge number of child workers.

Child Labour is the outcome of many other socio-economic issues. These are poverty, illiteracy, and trafficking, to mention but a few.

Due to poverty coupled with illiteracy, parents force their children to work instead of enrolling them in schools. In quest of increasing family income, parents encourage child labour. Out of ignorance, they believe educating children means consuming money and making them work means earning income. But, least they understand, that Child labour does not reduce but amplifies the poverty because the children who are forced to sacrifice education for work are doomed to low-wage jobs throughout their lives, insufficient to raise the standard of living. Child right activist and noble laureate Kailash Satyarthi rightly points out that ‘Child labour perpetuates poverty’. We cannot close eyes to the reality that poverty and child labour are interconnected but the latter is not the solution of the former.

Trafficking is another major problem responsible for Child labour. According to the Trafficking Protocol, child trafficking is the recruitment, transportation, harboring, transfer, or receipt of children for exploitation. According to ILO estimation, about 1.2 million children are trafficked yearly for sexual exploitation and child labour. India has a high volume of child trafficking. As per the National Crime Records Bureau, as many as one child disappears every eight minutes. These children are mainly trafficked for begging, sexual exploitation, and Child labour.

Sometimes many reasons are given to vindicate Child labour but frankly speaking, there can be no excuse for it and no reason can justify it.

In every country, laws have been laid down. However, due to one or the other reasons, Child labour has not minimized as expected. Experts are of the view that loopholes in the Indian labour law resulted in its failure as it approves and allows children under 14 to work in “family enterprises,’’ which is now abused under different names. And in some parts of the world like Pakistan, laws are completely ignored.

Therefore, to break the spine of this problem, a multi-pronged approach is required. The onus lies on higher authorities to make sure that poverty must not be a compelling factor behind child labour. Fatherless children are left with no choice other than working to bring home the bacon. Proper care of them is necessary to stop them from ruination. NGO’s and responsible citizens have vital role here.

Stringent laws should be passed. Ensuring their effective implementation is the need of the hour. In reality, this is essential for long-lasting social change and the tool to nip this evil in the bud.

Creating awareness about child rights and the importance of education is must. Prime targets should be parents. Educating less-educated or illiterate parents about the drawbacks of child labour can be productive in fighting this scourge. Motivating parents to send more children to school can bring the menace of Child labour under control. Last but not least, activists, media persons, civil societies, non-government organizations, in fact, people from all walks of life need to unite against the issue so that our children can have a prosperous life. Let us vow on this world day against child labour (12 June) to strive at individual level for protection of child rights.