British government reimposes welfare benefits sanctions as pandemic continues and unemployment rockets

Simon Whelan

In March, the Johnson government announced that those receiving welfare benefits including Universal Credit (UC) would not be sanctioned as they normally would if they failed to look for work or otherwise fulfilled their benefit conditionality.

Under pandemic lockdown conditions there was zero employment to find. Hundreds of thousands of workers were losing their jobs, becoming unemployed and themselves making claims. By June, the number of job center claimants had risen by 126 percent since the start of the pandemic, to 2.8 million.

With job centres closed for one-to-one meetings with “work coaches”, the system of “claimant conditionality” was suspended. This included the set of draconian rules that require among other things claimants to agree to carry out endless job search activities as a condition of receiving benefits. The minimum sanction period is four weeks—the loss of around £300—and the maximum 6 months. It was only reduced from a maximum three-year sanction in 2019.

Claimant conditionality involves the requirement that those claiming Universal Credit must demonstrate they are actively and constantly seeking work. A minor failure to adhere or an arbitrary infringement of the strict conditions frequently leads to benefits being cut off. Tens of thousands of workers have been made homeless, destitute, and hungry by this brutal system.

Today thousands of workers are losing their jobs across swathes of the economy. In May alone, over 5.2 million people claimed Universal Credit. By way of comparison, just over 2 million did so a year earlier. Unemployment is rising exponentially, and economists are predicting a return to mass unemployment that could rise well beyond that of the 1980s and reach levels not seen since the 1930s Great Depression.

Even as the government reopens the economy in conditions that remain unsafe for millions with the pandemic still spreading, particularly in workplaces, it has ensured that benefit sanctions return. On July 1, job centres reopened including in-person meetings between claimants and work coaches.

With the government bringing an end to any measures to combat the virus, all obstacles to a return to profitability must be eradicated regardless of the risks to the public. This includes either driving the unemployed into cheap labour work in dangerous conditions or ending the costly provision of benefits to those unable to find or do a job, and therefore surplus to requirements.

A 2015 report by the Trussell Trust highlighted how sanctions were used to reduce benefit payments for those in need of them. One claimant was sanctioned for missing an appointment because he was at hospital with his partner, who had just given birth to a stillborn child. Another missed an appointment because his brother had died that day. In a case reported from an Essex foodbank, a claimant was sanctioned because, although he had turned up in good time, the length of the queue in the job centre meant he failed to keep his appointment.

The announcement that job centres were to reopen and sanctions reimposed came as the main trade union representing Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) staff warned that many job centres were expected to open on July 1 without having conducted a proper COVID-19 risk assessment. In a public place where hundreds arrive and leave all day, a survey by the Public and Commercial Services union revealed widespread concerns among staff about insufficient floorspace in job centres to implement a safe 2-metre social distancing requirement. The government has now scrapped the 2-metre rule in favour of a nonsensical “1 metre plus”. The union also reported there was not enough plastic screens and personal protective equipment.

In addition to risking their lives, many thousands of physically and mentally vulnerable people must again visit job centres and be subjected to the de-humanising job search regime. People still suffering the effects of post viral fatigue will be pressured into work, as will those for whom the lockdown and its ending have been traumatising and stressful. Once more the benefit system will prey upon the most vulnerable as the ranks of the homeless, destitute, and imprisoned grow.

Ayaz Manji, senior policy officer at Mind, the mental health charity, described the decision by the government as “appalling” and demanded it be reversed: “Suspending benefit sanctions was put in place to protect people from the impact of coronavirus. But reintroducing sanctions when coronavirus is still very much an issue is nonsensical.”

The DWP claimed the government has “been there for those who have lost jobs or have reduced hours in this pandemic, promptly processing new claims and getting money into the accounts of those in urgent need within days.” Under conditions of an ongoing pandemic, the spokesperson continued, “Now our focus is rightly switching to Getting Britain Back into Work. From July, people can make an appointment with their work coach if they can’t get the help they want online or over the phone and work coaches will be calling all claimants to help them get ready for the world of work.”

After reminding workers they will be forced into whatever work is deemed suitable, the government claimed that conditionality arrangements would be sensitive to new claimants’ local jobs market and personal circumstances. Clear guidance would apparently be issued to staff to ensure people were not sanctioned unless they breached conditionality “for no good reason.”

This is fooling nobody. Thousands of workers over recent years have experienced the docking of their benefits by the DWP “for no good reason”. The tragic deaths of Stephen Smith and Errol Graham are only two of the cases of the terrible suffering endured by those who required assistance, but instead received only hostility.

Last year, the WSWS reported a study which found that more than 900,000 Job Seeker’s Allowance (JSA) claimants who reported a disability have been financially sanctioned since May 2010. Also sanctioned were 110,000 claimants of Employment and Support Allowance (ESA), a benefit paid to someone who is sick, and placed in the “work related activity group” (WRAG). A further 140,000 sanctions were applied, but later cancelled.

In the House of Commons on June 30, the day before job centres reopened, Work and Pensions Secretary Thérèse Coffey opposed the suspension of sanctions being extended beyond the three-month lockdown. “It’s important that as the job centres fully reopen this week, we do reinstate the need for having a claimant commitment” she said.

During questions in parliament, Labour’s Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, played the role of a loyal partner in a de facto government of national unity. He made no call for the scrapping of sanctions, cautioning only that people could lose benefits at a time when “unemployment has risen sharply.”

How corporations and government finance the German trade unions

Ulrich Rippert & Marianne Arens

At present, hardly a day goes by without new mass sackings being announced. The bad news emanating from the corporate boardrooms and banks is coming thick and fast. Companies are using the coronavirus crisis and the billions they have received from state coffers to cut jobs en masse and implement drastic social cuts that have long been planned.

This capitalist offensive against the working class is based on close collaboration with the trade unions and their works council representatives. Many rationalisation programmes, which are linked to massive job and social cuts, are drawn up by the unions and enforced by their officials in the factory. Those who protest against them are intimidated and silenced. Those who resist are quickly found on the dismissal lists drawn up by the works councils in the context of “co-determination,” the placing of so-called “employee representatives” on company boards.

“Social partnership” and “co-determination,” which are enshrined in law in Germany as in hardly any other country, have always meant the renunciation of class struggle and the subordination of workers’ interests to the interests of capital. During the economic boom of the post-war decades, this could still be combined with winning wage increases and social improvements. In some cases, the unions even organized larger strikes, although they were always careful not to endanger capitalist rule.

But that was a long time ago. Since the 1980s at the latest, the trade unions have supported one round of social attacks after another. They organised the closure of entire branches of industry, such as the coal and steel industries, helped to draft the Hartz laws introducing so-called labour and welfare “reforms” and ensured resistance to the closure of factories, such as at Opel Bochum, remained impotent and isolated. Major strikes, in which hundreds of thousands of workers shut down production for weeks on end, have not taken place for decades.

With the coronavirus pandemic, which has led to the deepest international economic crisis since the 1930s, the role of trade unions as a tool of the corporations is taking on a new dimension. At Lufthansa, the mainstream union Verdi and the sectoral unions UFO and Cockpit compete with offers to reduce wages by 20, 30 or even 45 percent and to cut several tens of thousands of jobs. The situation is similar in the car and supplier industry, at banks and the department store chain Galeria Kaufhof Karstadt.

It would be absurd to call the unions “workers’ organisations.” They are organs of the corporations with the special task of disciplining workers, ensuring the smooth running of production and increasing levels of exploitation. While there may still be workers who are members of a trade union, they have no voice. Often, they become union members because otherwise they will not be hired, or are the first to be fired, or because the unions negotiate special benefits only for members.

The transformation of trade unions into a company police force is not the result of the—ever-abundant—corruption of individual functionaries.

It arises firstly from the trade union point of view, which accepts and supports capitalist private property and the bitter struggle for markets and profits. The more the world market is dominated by monopolies, the more bitter the struggle between them becomes, the closer the trade unions move together with “their” national corporations.

From their perspective, the interests of trade unions and “business” are identical. They always speak of the defence of the business location, never of the defence of the working class. In the name of defending the location, they sacrifice jobs, wages, and social benefits—often leaving nothing remaining. On the other hand, they reject the mobilisation of the working class across locations and national borders with open hostility.

Secondly, the same applies to trade union officials: Being determines consciousness. They form a privileged social class. Corporations and the government spend millions maintaining an army of functionaries who earn many times the wages of an ordinary worker. The trade unions run their own schools and think tanks—they too are financed directly or indirectly by the state and corporations—which provide ideological training for shop stewards and works council representatives and advise the corporations on redundancies and cutbacks.

It is worth taking a look at this web of institutions, relationships and funds, which is carefully shielded from the public eye. This makes clear why it is not possible to reform the trade unions in the workers’ interests and why new, independent organs of struggle—action committees—must be built.

One of the most important mechanisms through which corporate funds are channeled into the trade unions is their involvement in company supervisory boards, which is regulated by law in Germany. The 1976 Co-Determination Act obliges corporations with more than 2,000 employees to have equal representation on supervisory boards, i.e., employees and shareholders each appoint half of the supervisory board members. At the same time, the law secures the supremacy of the capitalist owners, because in the event of a dispute, the chairman, who is appointed by the owners, has a double voting right. The number of companies with co-determination in this form varies between 640 and just under 700.

The union-owned Hans Böckler Foundation (HBS) was founded at the same time as the Co-Determination Act. It is a non-profit, i.e., tax-privileged, and is financed from two sources: the emoluments flowing from trade union supervisory board members, a large part of which they are obliged to pay to the foundation by trade union resolutions, and from millions of euros in subsidies from the German government.

According to the annual report of IG Metall, Germany’s largest union, “the 7,000 sponsors, in particular supervisory board members who pay the majority of their royalties to HBS” form the foundation’s bedrock. In the 2017/18 financial year, they transferred a total of €47.1 million. More than half of this came from the mandate holders of IG Metall. In addition, the HBS received funds amounting to €28.6 million from the federal Ministry of Education and Research.

In 2018, more than €75 million flowed into the work of the trade unions directly from the corporations and the federal government through HBS. With this money, HBS finances the training and education of trade union officials, as well as several social and economic institutes, which prepare competition analyses, rationalisation programmes, innovation activities and cuts programmes of all kinds for the supervisory boards and company boards.

The Institute for Co-Determination and Corporate Management (IMU), which started its work at the beginning of 2018, is concerned with “consulting, qualification and research for the elected representatives of co-determination.” Here, trade union functionaries are trained to justify and enforce the social and job cuts to the workers.

The Economic and Social Research Institute (WSI) develops trade union collective bargaining policies that are closely coordinated with the companies. The Institute for Macroeconomics and Business Cycle Research (IMK) develops market analyses and researches macroeconomic relationships.

Recently, the Hugo Sinzheimer Institute for Labour Law (HSI) also became part of HBS. It focuses on the development of national and international labour and social law, which sets narrow limits for strikes and industrial disputes.

The trade unions and HBS not only advise companies, they can also rely on an army of functionaries inside the companies. IG Metall alone has 50,000 works council representatives and 80,000 shop stewards. In 2018, works councils were elected in a total of 28,000 German companies, with one works council representative for every 500 employees being released from work at the company’s expense. This is often associated with a higher salary, various additional income and other privileges.

The main task of these company-paid functionaries is to maintain “industrial peace,” i.e., to suppress any form of opposition. In March, for example, the IG Metall agreed to a wage freeze until the end of the year for the 4 million workers in the metal and electrical industries. Now it is working intensively to get production back on track, even though safety measures are poor in many factories and there is still a threat of infection with COVID-19.

The Hans Böckler Foundation openly boasts that co-determination increases company profits. A recent study on the importance of co-determination states, “Companies with more co-determination usually perform better than average when it comes to key economic indicators: their return on assets is on average around 65 percent higher than in companies with weak or no co-determination at all. The operating profit of more co-determined companies is on average almost 11 percent higher, and the cash flow per share is even more than three times higher than in companies with little co-determination.”

This leaves nothing to be desired in terms of clarity. It is all about “cash flow per share” and “return on investment.” To this end, the so-called “employee representatives” on supervisory boards are paid princely wages, not to say “well-lubricated.”

Trade union representatives on supervisory boards often claim they do not personally benefit from this and pay over their emoluments in full to HBS. But this is a lie.

For one thing, even if they follow the union rules, which they are not legally obliged to do, they can keep at least 10 percent of the income for themselves. What they can put in their own pockets is easy to calculate. The trade union “payments calculator” can be found on the internet.

Accordingly, a works council prince such as Michael Brecht, who received a total of half a million euros as deputy chairman of the Daimler supervisory board in 2019, was able to keep €60,000 plus part of the attendance fees for himself. On top of this, there are various expenses and remuneration for tasks he performs in his capacity as a supervisory board member. According to media reports, Brecht’s annual salary is around €200,000. It is therefore fair to assume that, together with the supervisory board salary, he collects a quarter of a million euros annually.

Other heads of works councils sometimes earn even better. For example, the head of the general and group works council at VW, Bernd Osterloh, claims to collect up to €750,000 “in a good year.” The former head of the Porsche works council, Uwe Hück, is said to have received up to €500,000 per year.

The situation is no better in other unions. Frank Werneke (Social Democratic Party, SPD), who last year replaced Frank Bsirske, the long-time Verdi chairman, is a member of the supervisory board of the AXA Leben insurance group. His deputy on the Verdi board, Andrea Kocsis, is deputy chairman of the supervisory board of Deutsche Post AG, and Verdi board member Stefanie Nutzenberger, who played a key role in the Karstadt-Kaufhof restructuring, sits on the supervisory board of the retail group Rewe.

Christine Behle, also a Verdi board member, has inherited the lucrative position of deputy chair of the supervisory board at Deutsche Lufthansa AG from Frank Bsirske. She also sits on the supervisory board of Hapag Lloyd AG, Bremer Lagerhaus-Gesellschaft and Dortmunder Stadtwerke AG. The list of trade union functionaries who unscrupulously enrich themselves within the framework of co-determination is a long one.

Workers can only defend their jobs, wages and living conditions by breaking with the trade unions, rejecting their nationalist policies pitting workers at one location against another, building independent action committees, joining forces internationally and fighting for a socialist programme.

The future of the global cruising industry: Layoffs, pay cuts and prolonged misery for crews

Tom Casey

Despite the prolonged frenzy of industry media speculation surrounding the resumption of luxury cruising after its shutdown in March—even as daily global COVID-19 infections reach new heights—developments over the past several weeks have made it clear that there will be no return to normal under the given circumstances.

Last Tuesday, June 23, Standard & Poor (S&P) and Moody’s, two major US financial analytics companies, announced a reduction in the credit rating of Carnival Corp (CCL), the world’s largest cruising company, to below investment-grade. This followed similar downgrades to “junk” status in late-March of two other major cruise companies, Royal Caribbean Cruise, Ltd. (RCCL) and Norwegian Cruise Lines (NCL). RCCL and NCL are the world’s second and third-largest cruise operators, respectively.

Carnival’s downgrading came days after an announcement by the Cruise Line Industry Association (CLIA) that the shutdown of sailings in United States ports would remain in effect until September 15 of this year. The CLIA briefing read, “Although we are confident that future cruises will be healthy and safe, and will fully reflect the latest protective measures, we also feel that it is appropriate to err on the side of caution to help ensure the best interests of our passengers and crew members. […] The additional time will also allow us to consult with the CDC on measures that will be appropriate for the eventual resumption of cruise operations.”

Royal Caribbean CEO Richard Fain (Credit: Wikimedia commons)

The firsthand experience of crew members who remain stranded on ships, or of those who have recently been repatriated from a marooned ship, completely belie the CLIA’s claim that the industry is prioritizing the interests of cruise workers.

As the WSWS has widely documented, the industry halt in the spring was followed by the complete failure of the cruise corporations, worldwide governments and their lackeys in the global labor bureaucracies to repatriate hundreds of thousands of maritime workers. As a result, cruise crew member casualties have numbered in the dozens and thousands of others have faced financial ruin. While there were a number of deaths among ship workers that were related to COVID-19, many others were widely suspected to have been suicides by desperate and depressed employees who saw no other way out. A June 24 press release by the Seafarer’s Hospital Society (SHS), a British maritime charity organization, declared that suicide has become “now the foremost cause of deaths amongst seafarers.”

The disastrous impact of the pandemic was well-known to the cruise corporations from the outset. As early as March, these enterprises took initiatives to force their impending losses onto the backs of their employees. Just days after the shutdown, thousands of stranded onboard crew were deemed “non-essential” and then pressured into accepting waivers to their salary while they waited indefinitely for repatriation. Thousands more onboard crew whose incomes had previously relied heavily on customer gratuities during normal operation were also reduced to receiving a fraction, if any, of their income.

On March 18, it was revealed by a leaked document that NCL planned to reduce the pay and hours of its salaried shoreside employees in the US by 20 percent. Although the measure was only scheduled to go into effect until June, the company’s CEO Frank Del Rio soon thereafter announced additional furloughs for up to 20 percent of the NCL shoreside staff.

“As voyage suspensions continue to extend however, we are left with little choice but to make additional difficult decisions regarding our current state of operations, and the resources needed to support it, in order to ensure our business is well-positioned when sailings resume,” the CEO said in a statement.

By mid-April, RCCL announced that it would shed 26 percent of its 5,000 shoreside workers in the US. The 1,300 job losses were comprised primarily of permanent layoffs, though some were described as “90-day temporary furloughs with paid benefits.” More than 500 of these cuts were described as permanent layoffs of transportation and warehousing jobs, all from the state of Florida.

Carnival plc, the British division of CCL’s dual-listed operations, cut 450 jobs at its headquarters in Southhampton in early-May. These were followed by CCL’s announcement that it would eliminate 850 of its shoreside positions and furlough another 537 employees in the US. These remaining American workers are to take a 20 percent pay cut, and senior officers are to have their earnings reduced by 25 percent. CEO Arnold W. Donald accepted a 50 percent reduction to his annual compensation, which had averaged $11 million per year from 2013 to 2019. The latest round of cuts, announced by Carnival UK last Wednesday, axed “nearly a third” of their shoreside staff.

Cruise companies have worked closely with the large banks to secure loans to bolster their liquidity for what they see as an unstable short-term future. While leveraging the trillions in credit which was unconditionally assured to US banks by the federal government in the CARES Act, these corporations are not only looking to finance what remains of their ongoing operations, but also doubtlessly seeking to keep their senior officers’ bloated earnings afloat.

Del Rio, an individual whose net worth was estimated by wallmine.com to be $36.4 million in February, 2020, made a telling statement to the Re-Engineering Readiness conference, a travel-industry summit, in late-May. He said, “People are rushing to bars and restaurants as they reopen, they want to get back to their normal lives, and cruising is a part of their normal lives.” Echoing the lines of the US establishment and its criminally reckless return to work drive, Del Rio declared, “Great harm has been done on a permanent basis to economies, and that has to stop immediately.” He then boasted, “The growth we have seen in the cruise sector over the last 20 years, we will see over the next ten years.”

In a damning follow-up to Del Rio’s comments, Jim Walker, a writer and attorney for CruiseLawNews.com, a Miami-based law firm and cruise crew advocacy group, published an article with the headline, “Cruise Line CEO’s Income: The Rich Get Richer.”

Walker notes that Del Rio was the highest paid cruise industry CEO in 2018. He cites Seatrade Cruise, a cruise industry publication, which noted that “Mr. Del Rio received compensation valued at $31.9 million in 2015, including nearly $17.8 million in stock options and $10.3 million in stock awards. His cash income was about $4 million including a salary of over $1.8 million, and a bonus of $1,900,000. Other compensation in 2015 included a cash automobile allowance, tax preparation service and a country club membership [totaling] $140,651.”

According Walker’s report, Donald is currently valued at $68.5 million. According to a report issued by the company to the Securities and Exchange Commission in February, Donald’s earnings in 2019 were $11,149,514—approximately 723 times the median annual employee wage of $15,429.

Donald has referred to the cuts at Carnival as a “very difficult thing to do.” Adding insult to injury, he continued, “unfortunately, it’s necessary, given the current low level of guest operations […]” stating that he “look[s] forward to the day when many of those impacted are returning to work with us.” Considering the drastic difference between his income and that of his average employee, the crocodile tears from Donald, no less with Del Rio’s rapacious calls for an immediate return to sailing, should be seen as completely fraudulent and self-serving.

Richard Fain, the CEO of RCCL, is estimated by Walker’s article to have a current net worth of $123 million. “In 2018, he collected $13,510,000 (versus $13,343,413 in 2017 and $10,405,684 in 2016). Mr. Fain was the highest paid cruise executive for 2016 and 2017,” the report states.

The Miami Herald documented in mid-May a discussion between RCCL officials and a representative of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in which the company declared that CDC restrictions on travel made repatriation of their crew “too expensive.” Although RCCL later denied the validity of these comments to its employees, it continued to shift the blame for the failure to repatriate them on to the local governmental agencies.

The report given by Moody’s last Tuesday on CCL’s credit downgrading came with the following explanation: “Carnival […] benefits from our view that over the long run, the value proposition of a cruise vacation relative to land-based destinations as well as a group of loyal cruise customers supports a base level of demand once health safety concerns have been effectively addressed. In the short run, Carnival’s credit profile will be dominated by the length of time that cruise operations continue to be highly disrupted and the resulting impact on the company’s cash consumption, liquidity and credit metrics. The normal ongoing credit risks include […] the highly seasonal and capital intensive nature of cruise companies, competition with all other vacation options, and the cruise industry’s exposure to economic and industry cycles as well as weather related incidents and geopolitical events.”

The report continued, “The rapid spread of the coronavirus outbreak and deteriorating global economic outlook are creating a severe and extensive credit shock across many sectors, regions and markets. The combined credit effects of these developments are unprecedented. The cruise sector has been one of the sectors most significantly affected by the shock given its sensitivity to consumer demand and sentiment. More specifically, Carnival’s exposure to increased travel restrictions has left it vulnerable to shifts in market sentiment in these unprecedented operating conditions and the company remains vulnerable to the continued uncertainty around the potential recovery from the outbreak.”

Put in simpler terms, the entire cruise industry is seeking to insulate the profits of its top earners against a prolonged future of global economic and political turbulence. Only four days after Moody’s report on CCL, Angela Merkel announced that the EU would deny incoming US citizens entry into the European Union (EU).

As the WSWS reported, although the rationale for this measure was the US’s inadequate response to the containment of the number infected to COVID-19, it came within the context of increasing tensions between the US and the EU over the viability of the US dollar as well as Trump’s continued threats to default on US debts to China. Days later, at a press conference before the July 1 European Council, Merkel issued calls for increased military spending for the purpose of independently defining global European alliances.

The capitalist ruling elites worldwide are responding to the crisis of the coronavirus pandemic not only with a murderous back-to-work policy and an attack on living conditions for the working class, but also with an increasingly aggressive drive toward what the US has outlined as “major power conflict.” Maritime workers at home and on ships around the world must join together with their brothers and sisters in the international struggle against inequality, austerity, war, and the capitalist system as a whole.

More than 170 killed in accident at Myanmar jade mine

Oscar Grenfell

The death toll continues to rise from a tragic accident last Thursday at a jade mine in the Hpakant region of Kachin state in northern Myanmar. Authorities have confirmed more than 170 fatalities, but according to some reports the real number of those killed may stand at 200 or more.

The disaster is the worst in the history of Myanmar’s multi-billion dollar jade industry. It has highlighted the perilous conditions confronting oppressed and super-exploited miners in the mostly unregulated sector, which provides large profits to sections of the country’s military-dominated regime.

Survivors have recounted the terrifying scene they confronted when the accident occurred at the Wai Khar mine shortly after dawn on Thursday morning. They have said that the only warning of the impending catastrophe was a deep rumbling noise. Within seconds they were engulfed by an enormous wave of mud and water, as high as seven metres.

Without any chance of escape, those working in the pit were engulfed by the water. Many of the victims who perished drowned, while others appear to have been struck by debris. Unaccounted-for miners may have been buried beneath the mud.

The accident occurred following a month of heavy rain from seasonal monsoons. According to the New York Times, the mine pit was beneath a 300-metre slope topped with a mining run-off. The precipitation weakened the foundations of the mining waste, causing it to tumble into the pit below. One of the mine’s walls collapsed. Water that had built up on the other side of it came flooding into the mine.

Rescue workers retrieving bodies from the mine site (Credit: Myanmar Fire Services Department)

Rescuers faced the harrowing scene of dozens of bodies floating on what had become a vast lake at the former site of the mine.

As of yesterday, the official death toll stood at 172. Another 52 survivors received various injuries. Rescue teams are continuing to work at the site, but this has essentially become a body-recovery operation.

Some 77 of those who perished were placed in a mass grave on Friday, amid fears that the large number of cadavers could result in the spread of disease. Another 40 workers were buried on Saturday, while only a minority have been cremated in line with Buddhist religious practices.

Relatives of those who died have spoken to the media about the difficult conditions of work and life that confronted the victims.

Aye Mon, a 30-year-old woman who lived near the mine, told Al Jazeera yesterday that she had been widowed by the accident, which killed her husband and her brother. She explained: “My husband had been working in the jade mining business for more than 10 years. But it was the first time for my brother. It was his second working day in the mine.”

Her brother, who was just 22-years-old, had traveled more than 600 kilometres from his home village of Monywa to find work at the mine. “My husband and my brother were both buried yesterday. I have nothing to depend on in my life. All I have left is just my two-year-old daughter,” Aye Mon said.

Another relative cited by Al Jazeera, Win Kyaw, explained that his 20-year-old son had lost his life. Kyaw, who is 42, had worked at mines in the area for more than 20 years. He said that over that time, he had worked in the dangerous conditions to find small stones that only yielded him $10 to $15 a piece.

Kyaw added: “My son got two big stones last year but a group of soldiers from the Myanmar army took them from him. If we find a big stone, they always come and ask for it.”

Rescue workers carrying one of the victims of the accident (Credit: Myanmar Fire Services Department)

The jade mining sector in the Hpakant region is shrouded in secrecy. A murky web of senior military generals, massive army-linked corporations, smaller companies, middlemen, separatist rebel groups and wealthy buyers, the majority of them from China, are all involved.

Because of this, the identity of the individuals or groups that were profiting from the Wai Khar mine remains opaque. According to media reports, it was operated until last Tuesday by a consortium of five companies that had official permission to mine the site. If this is true, it means that the government allowed mining to continue in the days leading up to the tragedy, despite the monsoonal rains threatening the mountain of mine waste above the pit.

The companies and officials had supposedly shut the mine as the dangers grew on Tuesday, but miners continued to work.

The Kachin Independence Army, which has fought a separatist war for an independent state of the Kachin ethnic minority since 1961, is active in the area near the mine and is also alleged to finance its operations through the jade trade. Some commentators have suggested that it may have been involved in the continued operation of Wai Khar in the lead-up to the accident, but no hard evidence of this has been provided.

Primitive and dangerous river gold mining in northern Myanmar (Credit: John Hulme)

Many miners in the region function as impoverished contractors, working at different sites and earning a pittance from whatever they extract. Because of this, when mines are officially closed, they receive no entitlements and are forced to continue their search for jade regardless of the dangers. Most miners are internal immigrants living away from family networks of support.

Accidents are a common occurrence, especially during the monsoonal season. Because the sector is unregulated, the true number of fatalities is unknown, but is estimated at over 100 per year.

While most of the miners in the region, who number between an estimated 100,000 and 300,000, live in abject poverty, vast fortunes are made through the jade trade.

Gold miners in northern Myanmar (Credit: John Hulme)

Global Witness, a British-based non-governmental organisation, estimated the sector was worth as much as $31 billion in 2014 alone. This would have been almost the equivalent of half of national gross domestic product.

The organisation’s Asia director, Mike Davis, said at the time that “Myanmar’s jade business may be the biggest natural resource heist in modern history.” He noted that it involved a “rogue’s gallery of military hard-liners, army companies, proxy tycoons and major drug lords,” who were raking in tens of billions every year.

Global Witness identified Than Shwe, the country’s former military dictator, Maung Maung Thein, former general secretary of the country’s previous ruling party, Union Solidarity and Development Party, and Ohn Mint, a former top military general, as major players. Their families allegedly netted $220 million in pre-tax sales at the country’s official jade emporium in 2014, and were beneficiaries of a raft of trade and tax concessions.

The trade has continued unabated, despite the supposed “transition to democracy” that the country’s former military dictatorship began a decade ago. In practice, the army generals continue to dominate Myanmar.

Their rule has been given a democratic facelift by the integration of the National League for Democracy (NLD) into the government. For decades, the NLD claimed to oppose the ruling junta. Its leader Aung San Suu Kyi was hailed by the western powers and the corporate press as a heroic fighter for democracy.

The NLD, however, opposed military-rule from the standpoint that it cut the Burmese elite off from potential foreign investments and involvement in imperialist-dominated institutions. Its right-wing character has been demonstrated by the NLD’s involvement in the brutal attacks on the Rohingya Muslim minority, that have dramatically escalated over recent years.

Suu Kyi, who has defended the persecution of the Rohingya, pledged in 2016 that the NLD-led government would reform the jade industry. Four years on, however, and nothing has changed.

A jade market in Mandalay (Credit: John Hulme)

Last year, the NDL supported the passage of a new gemstone law, which did not address the abuses suffered by migrant workers or contain any measures aimed at curtailling the criminal operations of the military and other wealthy concerns. It was condemned by human rights organisations and hailed by Myanmar’s mining industry groups. 

Suu Kyi responded to the latest disaster by vaguely lamenting the poverty of internal migrant workers and expressing “sadness” over the deaths. 

Brazil’s coronavirus cases top 1.5 million amid record unemployment

Tomas Castanheira

Brazil began the month of July surpassing the milestone of 60,000 deaths caused by COVID-19 and recording 1.5 million confirmed coronavirus cases. These terrible numbers, surpassed internationally only by the United States, are the result of a deliberate policy of opposing all public health measures to contain the spread of the deadly virus.

When Brazil registered its first cases of coronavirus cases in mid-March, fascistic President Jair Bolsonaro declared himself radically against the shutdown of economic activities. He said that it was impossible for workers to simultaneously maintain their health and their incomes. They would either face widespread infections or mass layoffs: death by the virus, or death by starvation.

Today, almost four months later, reality has proven that this supposed “choice” was fundamentally false. Brazilian working class homes are now being devastated simultaneously by disease and unemployment.

Bus line in Belém, Pará. (Credit: Marcelo Camargo/Agência Brasil)

Last Tuesday, the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) announced that, from March to May, some eight million workers lost their jobs in the country. For the first time since the institute started the survey in 2012, more than half of the working age population is unemployed.

This social catastrophe, however, is the responsibility of not only the sociopathic genius of Bolsonaro, but of all the political parties of the establishment, including the self-declared opposition headed by the Workers Party (PT). The initial disagreements over the official policy in response to the pandemic have vanished, giving way to a “united front” for the normal operation of economic activities under extremely unsafe conditions.

The series of statements made in March by Bolsonaro, minimizing COVID-19 as a “little flu”, and advocating a policy of herd immunity, stating that the pandemic was like a “rain” in which everyone should get wet, caused shock and anger in the Brazilian and international population. He emerged as the world leader with the most bluntly stated contempt for human life.

Riding a wave of middle-class “panelaços” (beating pans in protest) against the government, Bolsonaro’s bourgeois rivals tried to present themselves as politicians of an essentially different sort, reasonable and committed to life. The governor of São Paulo, João Doria, of the Brazilian Social Democratic Party (PSDB), declared on March 25 on social media: “Mr. President, in our state we have 40 deaths per COVID-19, out of a total of 46 in Brazil. These are persons who had an identity number, and relatives who will continue to miss them. They’re not fantasy deaths, Mr. President. And that’s not just a ‘small flu’”.

The governor of Rio de Janeiro, Wilson Witzel of the Christian Social Party (PSC), who, like Doria, was elected in 2018 as a local representative of Bolsonaro, declared on the same occasion: “We will be able to resurrect the economy. But it is impossible to resurrect those who have died.”

These right-wing politicians were openly praised by the PT and its allies. In a Twitter post, shared by Doria, the former PT president Luís Inácio “Lula” da Silva said: “We have to recognize that those who are doing the most serious work in this crisis are the governors and mayors.”

In São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, large field hospitals with thousands of beds were built to treat COVID-19 patients, and the Consortium of the Northeast, under the leadership of the PT governors and their allies, established a Scientific Committee to Fight Coronavirus. These policies covered up the fact that none of the states adopted serious measures to combat the virus, with massive testing and contact tracing. The only economic activities officially closed were retail, schools and leisure.

However, the auto industry, dragging the auto parts factories behind it along with other productive sectors, suspended their activities, declaring that it was because of expectations of “low market demand” as a result of the global economic crisis. This helped to create the false impression that a strict shutdown of the economy had been officially decreed.

Just like the local governments, the trade unions took advantage of these closures to pose as defenders of workers’ lives. After the automakers had already announced collective vacations, the ABC Metalworkers Union, one of the major unions in the country, printed on the cover of its newspaper: “Either the companies stop... or we stop the companies”.

But, independently of and in opposition to the unions, a wave of wildcat strikes and protests broke out in workplaces, denouncing the insufficiency of the measures adopted by the governments and corporations against the spread of the virus.

At the end of March, call center workers from all over Brazil stopped work against the unsafe operation of their companies in the midst of the pandemic, raising the slogan: “we are not going to die in our cubicles!” A group of operators who went on strike in Bahia confronted the PT Governor Rui Costa, who presides over the Consortium of the Northeast declaring: “Your quarantine is selective. We have to die because we are poor, we have to stay in that company in Boa Viagem (neighborhood) and bring disease to our families. There are already infected people inside. This is going to be a tragedy foretold.”

In the same week, in Santa Catarina, hundreds of workers in a meat processing plant, owned by JBS, engaged in a spontaneous strike against unsafe working conditions and were brutally repressed by military police as they protested in front of the plant.

Meanwhile, the bourgeois parties dropped their differences to jointly articulate the fundamental policy of guaranteeing capitalist interests in the face of the economic crisis deepened by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Between late March and early April, they approved the transfer of huge sums of money to the corporate and financial elite. Congress unanimously approved a corporate rescue package of 700 billion reais (about $140 billion)—less than 15 percent of which was destined for 600 reais in emergency aid to workers who lost their sources of income. It likewise passed the so-called “war budget” amendment, which freed the government from its fiscal targets and allowed the Central Bank to buy junk bonds for the first time in history.

In early April, the Bolsonaro administration created, through a provisional measure, conditions for corporations to suspend labor contracts and cut workers’ wages by as much as 70 percent. These measures were immediately embraced by the unions, which, defending them as the only way to save jobs, signed agreements of this nature on a wide scale, affecting nearly 12 million workers.

With the problems confronting capitalist accumulation having received rapid and forceful responses, the coronavirus was spreading at an increasing speed amidst government neglect. According to Worldometers, between the beginning and end of April, the weekly average of new cases jumped from less than 600 cases per day to more than 5,000. The death toll in the same period rose from around 250 to almost 6,000.

A series of strikes and protests by health care workers erupted across the country, denouncing a much more serious situation in the hospitals than was being reported, with a lack of adequate personal protective equipment for workers and no structure for patients. “Unfortunately, the public system in Belém has already collapsed,” declared a doctor, weeks before the mayor acknowledged the collapse of the health and funeral system in the city, which is the capital of the northeastern state of Pará.

In the first days of May, Brazil broke the 100,000 mark of confirmed coronavirus cases, and several capitals announced the overcrowding of their hospitals. Researchers estimated, pointing to the under-reporting of cases, a real number of about 2 million infections already by that time. Some states, such as Pará and Ceará, have decreed lockdowns, although under very loose terms.

However, a change of perspective was taking shape within the international bourgeoisie. All over the world, the ruling elites adopted a new policy—canonized in Donald Trump’s slogan, “the cure cannot be worse than the disease”—of suspending all measures to contain the virus and prematurely reopening the economy.

The Brazilian ruling class unified around the genocidal campaign led by Bolsonaro of a “war on lockdowns”. The sociopathic and obscurantist president emerged as a consistent representative of the interests of the entire capitalist class.

Heads of dozens of Brazilian industrial and commercial associations marched alongside Bolsonaro to the Supreme Court to say that the measures to contain the pandemic had already gone too far. The businessmen declared their concern that the worldwide resumption of economic operations, especially in Asia, would threaten the competitiveness of Brazilian capitalism. They stated that conditions were ripe for the resumption of production in the country.

The criminal demands of the ruling class were not confronted by any local government; on the contrary. Instead of constraining the resumption of production, governors and mayors threw off the restrictions and went on to reopen all activities. In São Paulo, the state most affected by the pandemic, Doria retreated from an already presented lockdown proposal and instead announced plans to reopen commerce.

The consequences of this policy were expressed in a sudden rise of the Brazilian Stock Market, which recorded its best May since 2009.

The trade unions played a central role in this process. Since April, they have promoted a campaign for the recovery of Brazil’s industry in the midst of the pandemic, as an issue of national “strategic interest”. Voicing the most reactionary interests of the Brazilian ruling class, the presidents of the Central Única dos Trabalhadores (CUT) and Força Sindical, the country’s largest trade union federations, wrote a joint article attacking Brazil’s dependence on products manufactured in China.

As soon as the corporations decided to resume their operations, these same unions helped to force workers back into their deadly workplaces, affirming that the companies had established absolutely safe protocols.

The general resumption of work and the reopening of trade led to explosions of cases in large companies, infecting hundreds or thousands of workers at once. Outbreaks of COVID-19 in meat processing plants led to the contamination of entire cities as well as of the largest indigenous reserve in Brazil, threatening the extinction of native peoples.

Touching words in defense of life were spoken by bourgeois politicians when the country had not reached 50 deaths by COVID-19. Today, Doria and Witzel are silent in the face of more than 15,000 deaths recorded in São Paulo and 10,000 in Rio de Janeiro. The third state with the highest number of deaths is Ceará, governed by Camilo Santana of the PT, with more than 6,000 confirmed COVID deaths.

The bourgeois state has failed to contain the spread of COVID-19 on all fronts. All of the meat processing units closed by the Public Ministry of Labor (MPT) around the country were reopened days or weeks later, causing new outbreaks of the virus. Recently, an infected plant continued to operate for a week after its closure was ordered by the MPT, and in fact only suspended operations after the workers took action.

The only social force defending human life intransigently is the working class, through its strikes and protests. Only the expansion of this movement can prevent the coronavirus from causing hundreds of thousands more unnecessary and avoidable deaths. All social sectors committed to the progress of humanity, including scientists and researchers, must turn to the working class and help it establish its control over the economy and society.

But the essential task for the achievement of this perspective is the independent political mobilization of the international working class, unified around a program of socialist policies that confront the interests of individual profit that govern society today. It is necessary to build revolutionary parties, sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), as the leadership of the workers’ movement in Brazil and every country.

US labor secretary says “reopening” will proceed in face of surging pandemic

Kevin Reed

Speaking on the “Fox News Sunday” program, Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia made clear that the White House remained committed to reopening the US economy and forcing workers back to work despite an uncontrolled spread of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Scalia, the son of the late far-right Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, is a leading figure in the Trump administration and a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force. On Sunday, he said, “I believe that we can continue to reopen our workplaces safely.”

He added, “Our workplaces can be very safe places to be.”

Secretary of Labor Eugene Scalia delivers remarks during the coronavirus update briefing in April. (Official White House Photo by Andrea Hanks)

Scalia is lying. He knows very well that workers who have returned to work in manufacturing industries such as auto or been forced to continue working in meatpacking, logistics, mass transit, agriculture and other sectors are getting sick and dying from COVID-19 across the US.

His department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has received some 6,000 coronavirus-related complaints and to date issued just a single citation. Scalia has refused to make federal guidelines for a safe return to work during the pandemic mandatory.

In his Sunday TV interview, Scalia made it clear that the Trump administration has one priority: to get workers who were temporarily displaced due to coronavirus lockdowns back on the job as soon as possible to resume producing profits for corporate America. He ignored the pandemic and talked about the June employment report. Calling it “an extraordinary jobs report,” he said, “[W]e added nearly 5 million jobs in June. The projections had been that we might add around 3 million, so we did extremely well.”

Asked if rising COVID-19 cases in 40 states, including some where hospitalizations are hitting record highs, showed that the return to work had been “too soon” or “too fast,” Scalia said, “We knew that as people came out of their homes, emerged from their basements and the like we knew that cases would go up.”

Seeking to downplay the unfolding catastrophe, he continued: “We are far, far better prepared to deal with those cases now,” adding, “We’ve got a much better understanding of how to treat the virus.” Both of these statements are false. Hospitals in major cities such as Houston are now being overrun by coronavirus patients, and the virus itself has mutated and is infecting people in ways it had not in the initial months of the pandemic.

To the extent that Scalia acknowledged the life and death dangers facing workers in the expanding pandemic, he argued, like others in the Trump administration, that it was a matter of individual responsibility and implied that the surge was the public’s fault.

“Yes, we have new cases, we have to keep an eye on that,” he said. “But there are precautions that the president and the vice president have underscored and those do remain important and we’ve gotten a reminder of that over the last couple of weeks.”

The moderator asked Scalia about a recent statement to Congress by Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, who warned that unless the pandemic were brought under control, the nation’s economic outlook would remain uncertain. Scalia dismissed the Fed’s concerns and boasted that seven-and-a- half million workers had been forced to return to work over the past two months. “We’re doing very well,” he declared. “We do need to be careful about the virus, but I am just optimistic.”

Secretary of Labor Eugene Scalia on Fox News Sunday on July 5

Scalia was nominated as labor secretary by President Trump, confirmed by the Senate and sworn in on September 30, 2019. He replaced the Alex Acosta, who was forced to resign after it emerged that as US attorney for the Southern District of Florida he had approved a plea deal and “non-prosecution agreement” for convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in 2008.

Scalia’s background is in corporate law, having worked at the Los Angeles firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, where he specialized in helping large companies resist labor regulations. Throughout the Trump administration, the Labor Department has been used as a front for attacking workers’ rights and suppressing their wages and benefits. Scalia was added to Trump’s coronavirus task force on May 18, when the back-to-work campaign was launched in earnest by the White House, with the support of both political parties.

On June 9, Scalia told lawmakers that his agency had issued only one pandemic-related citation--to a nursing home in Georgia for failing to report that six workers had been hospitalized within a 24-hour period. The proposed penalty from OSHA was $6,500.

At one point in the Sunday interview, Scalia said, “We know that there remain many Americans still out of work. We want to help them get back to work.”

In order to “help” workers get back to work, Scalia made it clear that he was not in favor of an extension of the federal supplemental unemployment benefit of $600 when the next coronavirus stimulus package is voted on by Congress, likely at the end of this month or in early August. “There are some states where you can get on an annual basis $75,000 a year right now on unemployment, and, as we reopen the economy, I don’t know that we need a benefit like that,” he said.

He hinted that he might support a drastically reduced federal benefit in the range of $25 a week as part of a deal with the Democrats that included Trump’s call for a payroll tax deduction. He also suggested that a new “stimulus” bill would include even more extensive cuts in business regulations than those already carried out by the administration.

Trump is pushing for a cut in the payroll tax largely because it would eliminate a major source of funding for Social Security and Medicare, boosting the drive to dismantle what remains of basic social programs dating back to the last century.

Trump rails against Marxism and “international socialism”

Patrick Martin

In his two speeches on July 3 and July 4, marking US Independence Day, Donald Trump launched into new diatribes against socialism and Marxism, appealing to his ultra-right supporters on an increasingly fascistic basis.

In his speech Friday night at Mount Rushmore in South Dakota, Trump sought to take advantage of the confusion spread by attacks on the statues and monuments to Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, and other heroes of the Civil War, as well as leaders of the American Revolution like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, by posturing as a defender of the leaders of these two democratic revolutions.

But the substance of his appeal was diametrically opposed to the liberating democratic principles of the American Revolution and Civil War. His remarks were delivered barely a month after Trump went on national television to urge that the military intervene to suppress the mass protests against the police murder of George Floyd, in effect demanding the establishment of a military dictatorship in the United States, headed by himself.

President Donald Trump speaks during a "Salute to America" event on the South Lawn of the White House, Saturday, July 4, 2020, in Washington. (Image credit: AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)

Trump declared that “our country was founded on Judeo-Christian principles,” although the First Amendment to the Constitution established what Jefferson later called the “wall of separation” between church and state.

Trump went on to hail the “American family” (a signal to indicate his sympathy for the Christian fundamentalists), as well as “the solemn right and moral duty of every nation to secure its borders” (although America was founded as a nation of immigrants and the “open door” principle for those seeking refuge). He reiterated his nativist slogans about “building the wall” and taking care of “America first.”

In his remarks Saturday at the White House, before a Fourth of July fireworks display introduced by flyovers from warplanes, Trump went even further, denouncing the “radical left” and “Marxists” as the enemies he was seeking to defeat. He attacked the millions who protested against the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, calling them “the anarchists, the agitators, the looters, and people who in many instances have absolutely no clue what they are doing.”

Trump dropped his pretense of verbal sympathy for victims of outrageous police crimes, like George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, instead hailing the policy and the military. He claimed that news media reports on his defense of monuments to the Confederacy, and his threat to veto legislation that would remove the names of Confederate generals from US military bases, were “dishonoring people fighting for freedom in the Civil War,” although those fighting on the Confederate side were, of course, fighting against freedom and for slavery.

In both televised speeches, according to press reports, Trump stuck closely to his prepared text—likely drafted by his chief fascist adviser, Stephen Miller—and read from a teleprompter in a grim and threatening tone of voice.

He concluded the Fourth of July event by announcing that he would seek to set up a “heroes garden” of statues of a mélange of public figures, some of them uncontroversial, like Benjamin Franklin and Frederick Douglass, others thoroughly right wing, like the late Justice Antonin Scalia, preacher Billy Graham, and President Ronald Reagan.

The actual text of the executive order, released by the White House, identified those to be honored in the proposed monument as “historically significant Americans” who included “opponents of national socialism or international socialism.”

In his only reference to the coronavirus pandemic that has killed 130,000 Americans in four months, while the White House sabotaged any effort to fight it systematically, Trump blamed the catastrophe on China, blasting “China’s secrecy, deceptions and cover-up that allowed it to spread all over the world, 189 countries. China must be held fully accountable.” He went on to claim that “we’ve made a lot of progress, our strategy is moving along well,” and that “99 percent of [cases] are totally harmless.”

This last statement was made at a time when the United States has broken all previous records for daily new infections, topping the 50,000 mark repeatedly, numerous states have rescinded previous reopening policies because of the upsurge in COVID-19, and public health experts have warned that cities like Miami, Houston, Phoenix and Los Angeles could soon be where New York City was two months ago, faced with a complete breakdown of their health care systems.

The Democratic Party response to Trump’s eruption was a combination of two reactionary tendencies: embracing the claim that race and not class is the fundamental dividing line in American society; and seeking to attack Trump from the right on foreign policy, portraying him as unduly conciliatory to both Russia and China.

In a 90-second commercial released on the Fourth of July, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, former Vice President Joe Biden, declared American history to be “a constant push and pull between two parts of our character, the idea that all men and women—all people—are created equal and the racism that has torn us apart.” This does not just elevate race above class, but utilizes race to blot out class divisions altogether, under conditions where the gulf between the financial aristocracy and the great mass of working people, black, white, Hispanic and immigrant, is greater than ever before.

A second commercial released by the Biden campaign two days earlier sought to outstrip Trump in China-bashing. The 150-second online video statement declares, “The uncomfortable truth is that President Trump left us vulnerable and exposed to this virus. He ignored the warnings of public health experts and intelligence agencies and put his trust in China’s leaders instead. And now, we’re all paying the price.”

It goes on to accuse Trump of being “more worried about protecting his trade deal with China than he was about the virus that had already come to America” and “trusting China with the health and safety of the American people.” It ends with Biden declaring, “I’ll demand an international investigation into the circumstances of the COVID-19 outbreak and China’s response.”

While Biden is beating the anti-China drums, his supporters in Congress and the media have used the bogus “Russian bounties” exposure, launched by the New York Times a week ago, to raise once again the claim that Trump is a stooge of Moscow.