Rural America Deserves a Real COVID-19 Response

Gloria Oladipo

As the COVID-19 pandemic spreads, many rural communities are in a uniquely difficult position.

According to Kaiser Health News, nearly 80 percent of rural America is categorized as a “medical desert,” meaning the nearest hospital is more than 60 minutes away. These hospitals are also much harder pressed to come up with ventilators and personal protective equipment for practitioners — and not to mention COVID-19 tests, which are in short supply everywhere.

Health care in rural America was in crisis well before the outbreak, with higher uninsurance rates in the countryside limiting access to care and financially undermining health facilities. Despite legislation giving financial relief to some hospitals, over 350 rural hospitals remain at high risk of closing.

Rural communities are at risk of severe outbreaks for other reasons as well.

For one, many rural communities lack reliable broadband connections. With so much COVID-19 information being transmitted via the internet, some rural residents may miss out on key updates.

Rural residents are also typically older, putting them at higher risk of dying from COVID-19. And they disproportionately lack access to healthy food and other necessities, which have become only more scarce in the pandemic.

Given the various risk factors associated with rural communities, a coronavirus outbreak in rural communities would be catastrophic. However, some government officials have not shown urgency.

For one, despite warnings from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on a potential “second wave” of COVID-19 infections, some governments are easing social distancing mandates. For example, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp is allowing non-essential businesses to reopen.

Meanwhile, the federal response to COVID-19 has utterly failed. In addition to failing to expand severely limited U.S. testing supplies, the White House has not kept its promises to provide more protective equipment or control misinformation.

Indeed, it’s been issuing a steady stream of its own misinformation, prompting warnings from health officials that no, you should not inject bleach to treat coronavirus. A direct consequence of Trump’s carelessness has been a steady increase of emergency room visits and poison control calls for bleach ingestion.

Rural communities cannot afford to be neglected during the COVID-19 pandemic. Governments at all levels must coordinate their efforts to educate, protect, and care for rural residents during this uncertain time.

In addition to continuing and strengthening local social distancing orders, local governments must continue making resources — like food, shelter, and medical supplies — accessible and free. Accurate information on COVID-19 must also be made accessible, especially for rural residents without an internet connection.

In addition to government help for rural hospitals, temporary and affordable clinics should be created in high-risk areas with limited hospitals. Nationally, testing and protective equipment such as masks and gloves should be readily available regardless of one’s location.

The response to COVD-19 will be a true test in capability, resilience, and crisis-planning for all those in positions of power. The neglect of rural communities during this pandemic is yet another way this nation’s COVID-19 response continues to fail.

The Plight of Refugees and Migrant Workers under Covid

Graham Peebles

In a world where nationalism and social division is increasing, bigotry growing, are the words refugee, asylum seeker, migrant worker, derogatory labels triggering prejudice and intolerance? Such terms create an image of ‘the other’, separate and different, strengthening tribalism, feeding suspicion, our common humanity denied.

Under the shadow of Covid-19 those living on the margins of society have been further isolated; the refugees and migrants of the world, those displaced internally or in a foreign land, people living in war zones, and the migrant workers in the Gulf States, India, Singapore and elsewhere.

Refugees/migrants and migrant workers are among those most at risk from Covd-19, the economic impact of the pandemic as well as xenophobic abuse linked to the virus. Migrant workers (who universally have few or no labor rights) from Qatar to India have been discriminated against, discarded and ignored. Migrants, particularly those of Chinese or Japanese appearance in the US and elsewhere subjected to violence and abuse, and in refugee camps across Europe and the Middle East, including Gaza, thousands have been left in unsafe camps without medical support.

Homeless, hungry and at risk

Even before the pandemic erupted, to be a refugee, migrant, or migrant worker was commonly to be mistrusted, marginalized and in danger. Whether working as a maid in one of the Gulf States, an internal migrant worker in their homeland or living inside an overcrowded refugee camp these men, women and children are amongst the most vulnerable people in the world. In Europe, where thousands of refugees (many from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan) are packed into camps, their lives already swamped by uncertainty, the fear of the virus hangs heavy. Lacking sanitation and essential services these overcrowded tarpaulin cities are unsafe; the Moria refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesbos, for example, was designed to accommodate 2,840, but now has 19,000 people; 40% are under 18, self-harming and attempted suicides are widespread. Compounding the heightened risks Covid has created, since July 2019 asylum seekers throughout Greece no longer have free access to the healthcare system, other than emergency support.

Meanwhile, in countries with large populations of migrant workers Covid-19 and the economic impact of the pandemic is adding additional layers of suffering to already arduous lives, not just of workers, but the families migrant workers support. According to the UN, round 800 million people globally are supported by funds sent home by migrant workers. Families depend on such payments to pay rent and buy food; when this flow stops, as is the case for many now, poverty and the risk of starvation is made more acute. The World Bank is warning of huge drops in global remittance payments of around 20%, resulting from the economic downturn triggered by the pandemic, which they say has impacted on migrant communities particularly hard.

In the Gulf States, which depend on millions of workers from Africa and Southeast Asia, Covid-19 is intensifying discrimination and increasing abuse against migrant domestic workers, including abrupt termination of their contracts. In Kuwait suicide among migrant workers has surged; Saudi Arabia has deported thousands of Ethiopian workers (A total of 2,968 migrants were returned in the first 10 days of April, UN state), without any medical screening, which the UN humanitarian co-ordinator for Ethiopia said, is “likely to exacerbate the spread of Covid-19 to the region and beyond.” And in Lebanon (where the majority of migrant workers are Ethiopian) and elsewhere across the region, lower income families unable to cover salaries, cover food costs or provide accommodation have laid off domestic staff; resulting in migrant workers being at high risk of forced labor, including prostitution.

Worse still is the case of freelance (‘live out’) workers, whose work has stopped, leaving them with no income, no food and nowhere to go. In Qatar, (one of the richest countries in the world, with over two million migrant workers) which has one of the highest rates of infections per capita, many of those suffering from the disease are migrant workers. Foreign workers from Nepal, Bangladesh, the Philippines are being laid off or remain unpaid, as the economic impact of the virus hits. Some domestic workers (women) have been made destitute. In Singapore, widely thought to have responded well to the pandemic, migrant workers, employed mainly in the construction industry, were thrown to the wolves. And in India following the hasty decision by Prime Minister Mahendra Modi to lock the country down on 25th March, (giving people four hours warning!) tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of internal migrants working in cities were forced by their landlords to vacate their homes and had no choice but to head back to their native village. Without funds and with transportation suspended, huge numbers were forced to walk the hundreds or thousands of miles home.

Homeless, hungry and at risk of contracting coronavirus, migrant workers were ignored by the Modi regime. Reacting to this wholesale neglect, the UN Special Rapporteurs on the right to housing and on extreme poverty said (4th June), “we are appalled at the disregard shown by the Indian Government towards internal migrant laborers, especially those who belong to marginalized minorities and lower castes…..the Government has failed to address their dire humanitarian situation and further exacerbated their vulnerability with police brutality [which is commonplace in India] and by failing to stop their stigmatization as ‘virus carriers’.”

Contemporary Slavery

Covid-19 has highlighted a raft of social inequalities and destructive practices throughout the world. As such issues float to the murky surface of human affairs an opportunity presents itself for reform, for changes in attitudes and practices.

There needs to be a fundamental overhaul of employment rights for migrant workers throughout the world, with migrant workers receiving the same protections as native employees, including access to health care, limits on the hours of work, rates of pay, days off etc.

The Kafala System is used throughout the Gulf States, where the UN estimates there to be “35 million international migrants in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, and Jordan and Lebanon, of whom 31 per cent were women.” Under Kafala a migrant worker, many of whom are domestic staff and therefore out of sight, cannot resign if an employer is abusive, the work exploitative or the conditions unacceptable. Amnesty International relates, that it “ties the legal residency of the worker to the contractual relationship with the employer.” The system enables employers to essentially own workers, giving them total control of workers’ movements. This legitimization of modern-day slavery must be brought to an end immediately.

Refugees and migrants are human beings fleeing violent conflict (are often traumatized), persecution and economic hardship. The journey into an unknown future is often treacherous, always uncertain. In the vacuum left by governments and regional authorities like the EU, that should be processing asylum applications in designated centers and offering safe passage, criminal gangs control migration routes and methods of travel, which are unsafe and extortionately expensive. Deaths are commonplace, abuse and exploitation widespread. If they survive the dangers and arrive in their destination country, all too often they are viewed with distrust and antagonism, instead of being warmly welcomed. They are pushed into the shadows, the margins of society, offered little or no state support and made to feel unwanted.

This must change; all should be embraced, not only those with skills in short supply. The idea of judging who can and cannot enter a country based on some discriminatory points system related to national need (the Australian way – a country with a shameful immigration record), as the UK government is proposing, reduces human beings to commodities, some of which are more valuable on the ‘open market of immigration’ than others – and is completely abhorrent.

Deal with the causes of migration, help construct a world at peace by cooperating, sharing and building relationships; reject competition and nationalism in favor of unity and tolerance and see a dramatic fall in the numbers of people forced to leave their homeland, whether in search of safety or opportunity.

US retail bankruptcies and closures pile up amid pandemic

Trévon Austin

The retail apocalypse continues to unfold in the United States under the economic pressure of the coronavirus pandemic. Since May, multiple well-known and long-established companies have filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy including Neiman Marcus, J. Crew, J.C. Penney and Brooks Brothers. Tailored Brands, parent company of Men’s Wearhouse, and Lord & Taylor, along with its parent company Le Tote, became the most recent retail casualties on Sunday.

Prior to filing for bankruptcy, Tailored Brands announced in July that it would close up to 500 stores “over time” and cut about 20 percent of its corporate jobs. According to a public filing, Tailored Brands had about 19,300 employees as of Feb. 1, and 1,274 stores in the US and 125 stores in Canada. The company said it secured a deal with the majority of its senior lenders for a $630 million restructuring plan so it can survive bankruptcy.

Lord & Taylor in Palisades Park Mall West Nyack, NY (Credit: Flickr.com/Mike Kalasnik)

The company's filing is partially a consequence of the trend away from business attire and toward more casual clothing during the pandemic. Millions of white-collar workers have shifted to working from home as offices have been closed and meetings moved online.

Founded in 1826, Lord & Taylor is considered America’s oldest retail store. A company official from Lord & Taylor estimated that about 20 of the company's stores are currently in a liquidation sale. The retailer runs 38 stores in the Northeast with a few more locations in the Midwest and Florida.

Lord & Taylor, which was bought by online clothing rental service Le Tote for $100 million last year, has been struggling in recent years. Under its previous owner, the Canadian-based Hudson’s Bay Company, Lord & Taylor’s chief executive complained that the store was in a fraught “middle space” among retailers because it neither sold high-end luxury nor discount apparel.

The latest additions bring the number of US retail bankruptcies this year to 43. According to S&P Global, 2020 has already seen more retail closures than the past eight years, with five months still left in the year. The last time retail companies recorded similar numbers of closures was 2010, with 48 companies filing for bankruptcy.

In 2008, a record 441 retailers filed for bankruptcy in the depths of the Great Recession. This marked the advent of the series of brick-and-mortar bankruptcies and store closures dubbed the retail apocalypse which has wiped out indoor shopping malls and strip malls around the country.

Retailers already faced severe challenges before COVID-19 forced stores to close and sparked a historic contraction in the economy. Not only were retailers struggling to compete with e-commerce stores such as Amazon and Walmart, but also ever-increasing debts threatened their stability. The arrival of the pandemic only accelerated a process that was already underway.

The coronavirus pandemic pushed retailers further into crisis. Shelter-in-place orders keeping people in their homes for weeks and the sudden loss of tens of millions of jobs facilitated a rapid change in spending habits. Shoppers abandoned malls, where many retailers who filed for bankruptcy are concentrated, as social distancing measures were implemented.

Experts also expect the pandemic to weaken the back-to-school shopping season, a typically busy time for retailers. With many schools engaging in remote learning, what families purchase for students is likely to shift towards electronics and away from clothing and other traditional items.

As the economic consequences of the pandemic continue to unfold, more bankruptcy filings are expected. A report from Coresight Research estimated that as many as 25,000 stores could permanently close in 2020, and about a quarter of all malls in the US could shutter their doors within the next three to five years.

UK government clears the path for “slums of the future”

Julia Callaghan

A major change to UK planning law coming into force at the end of this month allows more non-residential premises to be converted into housing without planning permission. Achieved through the expansion of highly controversial “permitted development” (PD) rights, this will open the floodgates for more substandard, “rabbit-hutch” housing to be created. Developers will use their vacant and redundant office and commercial buildings to profit from the wave of working-class people who are losing their homes along with their livelihoods due to the COVID-19 crisis.

On August 23, the moratorium on new evictions in England and Wales ends, threatening homelessness for the near quarter of a million people who have fallen behind with their rent since the start of the pandemic. On August 31, PD rights will be extended, as part of what Prime Minister Boris Johnson has called “the most radical reforms to the planning system since the end of the second world war,” which, he boasts, will “scythe through red tape.”

PD was introduced in 1948 as a bypass for the normal planning process, intended for minor property modifications such as the installation of fences, porches, and small home extensions. In recent years, it has been extended far beyond this purpose and, since 2013, has allowed the conversion of entire office blocks into housing. Since 2015, more than 60,000 flats have been created through PD in England, with almost 90 percent coming from office conversions.

Now, a wider range of commercial and industrial buildings will be allowed to switch to residential use, such as empty premises on Britain’s ailing high streets, including the 245 department stores that have closed over the past eight years.

Defunct buildings may also be demolished and rebuilt as housing, again with no need for planning permission or accompanying scrutiny. Permission is granted directly by parliament, and local authorities may only assess limited issues, such as flood risk, the impact on transport and highways, and external appearance.

Upward expansions of up to two storeys on existing buildings will be approved via the same route.

On the same day the government made its announcement, it published a report exposing the appalling quality of new housing created via PD. “Research into the quality standard of homes delivered through change of use permitted development rights” was carried out by University College London and the University of Liverpool on 3,156 housing units across 11 local authorities. The study concluded that PD creates “worse quality residential environments than planning permission conversions in relation to a number of factors widely linked to the health, wellbeing and quality of life of future occupiers.”

The housing units studied were found to be incredibly small. Only 22.1 percent complied with the “nationally described space standard”, which states that a single unit must not be smaller than 37m2. Many were well below half that size, at 16m2, which Labour MP Clive Betts pointed out is “about the size of the base of the ministerial limousine that [Johnson] gets driven around in each day.”

The flats often had poor window arrangements and little natural light. Some had no windows at all. They were more likely than planning permission schemes to be situated in desolate, under-resourced areas, such as business parks or industrial estates, and just 3.5 percent had access to any private amenity outside space.

In response to the announcement to extend PD rights, the author of the report, Dr. Ben Clifford, said, “We could see even more poor-quality, tiny flats being crammed into commercial buildings lacking amenities and green space…what others have rightly called the slums of the future.”

An infamous example of an office-to-residential PD project is in Harlow, a town in which over half of all new homes in 2018/2019 came from office conversions. With its 214 units, Terminus House is referred to as a “human warehouse,” where a “double studio” starts at just 14.7m2. This is only marginally larger than the 10m2 recommended by the Association for the Prevention of Torture as the minimum size of a double prison cell. With no room to move, many residents live—eating, drinking, sitting, and sleeping—in their beds. Crime, violence, drug abuse, and all the other brutal, tragic social problems that come with poverty and inhumane living conditions are rife. Suicide is common. Last June, a man was found in his room in a state of decomposition, five to six weeks after he had taken his life.

In Watford, the Wellstones PD site had been an upholstery firm, warehouse, and petrol station. A typical industrial building with concrete structure, corrugated roof, and tiny slit windows, directly abutting main roads on three sides, it was approved to be turned into 15 flats, ranging from 16.5m2 to 21m2. Seven flats would have no windows whatsoever, and those on the upper floors no means of escaping in the event of a fire.

It was only with the outpouring of public outrage over Wellstones and other such projects that the government made the reluctant caveat that PD flats must have “adequate” natural light.

PD schemes are exempt from contributing to social or affordable housing, making them an even more profitable option for developers, while further starving communities of housing for those who urgently need it, including the nearly 277,000 recorded homeless people in England.

The government announced yesterday that it was extending this exemption to all small sites, not only PD developments.

Several MPs have expressed outrage about PD and its effects, and former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn said he would scrap it altogether. But despite the handwringing, all three major parties have worked together to destroy social housing protections for working people over the past 40 years. Since Margaret Thatcher’s opening shot in the 1980s, with her boast of creating a “home-owning democracy,” the attack on social housing has continued unabated.

Fewer council homes were built during the New Labour years than in a single year of Thatcher’s government. Instead, the door was opened to the private sector in the form of non-profit housing associations. With the Housing and Regeneration Act of 2008, it was Gordon Brown who welcomed profit-making in social housing. Since the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition came to power in 2010, the building of housing for social rent has dropped by 80 percent, and PD has expanded. Johnson’s further deregulation of the private rental sector completes the handover of society’s most vulnerable individuals and families to some of its most cutthroat capitalists.

Labour’s hypocrisy knows no bounds. Croydon Central Labour MP Sarah Jones has called on the government to scrap PD, despite Croydon having the largest number of office-to-residential conversions in the country, some of which have been commissioned by the council itself. Its cabinet member for housing, Alison Butler, recently said the council is considering further such conversions.

The Socialist Equality Party advances a genuinely socialist housing policy. The SEP insists that everyone has the right to a safe, affordable, and comfortable home—one that promotes, rather than destroys, physical and mental wellbeing. The profits of property developers, along with those of the entire ruling class, are squeezed directly from the lifeblood of the poor. Their billions must be expropriated and used to fund decent homes, quality public services, and infrastructure that meets 21st century needs, and provides a high standard of living for every member of society.

Britain’s National Health Service workers demand pay rise amid COVID-19 crisis

Rory Woods

National Health Service (NHS) workers including nurses, midwives, paramedics, cleaners, porters, and other allied health professionals under the Agenda for Change pay system are demanding a pay rise. They have rejected the Conservative government’s bogus claim that they have recently had a “significant pay rise.”

Hundreds of health workers demonstrated in London last week and dozens of protests are scheduled in cities across the country this Saturday, organised by Facebook groups. These actions coincide with the growing working class opposition internationally to the criminal policies of the governments during the coronavirus pandemic. In the UK, the murderous “herd immunity” policy continues to serve the demands of the financial oligarchy for a reopening of the economy, even as coronavirus spreads through communities and workplaces. According to official figures, more than 46,000 people have already perished, including more than 540 health and social care workers. The UK is among the worst countries in the world in terms mortality and health care worker deaths.

National Health Service (Source: Wikipedia Commons)

Last month, the Boris Johnson government announced a miserly 2 to 3.1 percent pay increase for 900,000 “public sector workers.” The Treasury stated, “Reflecting the vital contributions public sector workers make to our country, these pay rises cover the Armed Forces, teachers, police officers, the National Crime Agency, prison officers, doctors and dentists, the judiciary, senior civil servants, and senior military personnel.”

This excludes more than a million health workers in the NHS. In May, Health Secretary Matt Hancock refused any pay award for health workers, claiming that they had already had a “significant” raise. He was referring to a meagre 6.5 percent increase over three years from 2018, dwarfed by the 20 percent fall in the value of their wages over the last ten years.

This “significant pay rise” leaves the average nurse £6,000 worse-off a year, as the accumulated inflation over the last ten years stands at 31.33 percent. This was a result of year after year of pay caps and pay freezes imposed by Tory-led governments and implemented with the tacit support of the health sector trade unions.

Those unions, including the Royal College of Nursing (RCN), Unite, and Unison, now trying to get a hold on workers’ protests, played a key role in selling out the 2018 pay struggle. The rotten deal reached with the Tory government and sold to the members as “the best deal in 8 years” was expected to be a de-facto pay cut as the estimated combined Retail Price Index inflation hike for the period was 9.6 percent. Pay progression of workers was also tied to performance. Former Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt welcomed the deal for imposing “profound changes in productivity.”

Sickness absence enhancements for low paid workers was slashed and unsocial hours payments went down by several percentage points for workers on band 1-3 of the Agenda for Change pay system. Many workers received only a 1.5 percent pay rise until their incremental pay progression.

Many health workers are outraged by the government’s decision to refuse them a pay rise, against the views of the population. A survey carried out among British adults by Unison found 69 percent in favour of a significant wage increase for health workers in the light of the COVID-19 pandemic. A petition demanding a 10 percent pay increase has reached more than 116,500 of signatures. Another calling to scrap spiteful car parking charges for NHS workers has gathered more than 768,000 signatures.

Health workers went on to social media, scathingly criticizing the government’s hypocrisy in calling them “NHS heroes” at the peak of the pandemic and now ignoring their demand for a decent pay increase. Some called the government’s stand a “kick in the teeth” and a “slap in the face.” Many identified that the trade unions are hostile to their demands and on the other side of the barricade in this struggle.

Lynn Grounds wrote in the Nursing Notes Facebook group, “No pay rise is presumably in preparation for more privatisation… selling it off with low salary bill will be attractive to the Conservative Government.”

Charlotte Mclaughlin commented on the same platform, “Indefinite strike until decent pay discussions are finalised and I don’t think the RCN should be involved they sold out the last time and are not equipped with delivering their members requests.”

Commenting on the rotten 2018 pay deal, Nettie Holding said, “I did not vote for this and neither did a lot of nurses. It doesn’t matter what we vote for it happens anyway because nurses are abused by government all the time and shafted by the unions.”

A health care assistant told the World Socialist Web Site, “It is a lie that we had a significant pay rise. As an HCA, on the top of my pay band I received a small pay rise over the last three years as a part of the pay deal. But that cannot recompense the lost value of my wages over the last 10 years under austerity measures. Unions told us that it was a great deal. I knew it was far from the truth. Many of my colleagues realised that it was a total fraud when they received their first pay packet in July 2018 after the deal.”

Even after eight months of the pandemic, NHS workers are still working without adequate protection from the coronavirus. None of the murderous Public Health England (PHE) guidelines which led to hundreds of avoidable deaths of health and social care workers have been changed. Surveys carried out among nurses and doctors highlighted that significant numbers of workers still do not have proper Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) to shield themselves.

There are more than 40,000 nursing vacancies in England and many nurses are thinking of leaving the profession because of low pay and unsafe working conditions. A recent survey of 42,000 members by the RCN found the percentage thinking of leaving the profession has increased to 36 percent, or more than a third, from 27 percent at the end of last year.

Of those nurses who are thinking of leaving, 61 percent cited pay as a primary factor, with others citing the way nursing staff have been treated during the COVID-19 pandemic (44 percent), low staffing levels (43 percent), and lack of management support (42 percent).

The legacy of under-funding, privatization, and attacks on pay, terms, and conditions in the NHS left by both Labour and the Tories could not be clearer. The trade unions have been revealed as tried and tested instruments of the ruling class and its governments. They are not only responsible for the erosion of the social position of the workers but are complicit in implementing unsafe guidelines which have led to hundreds of deaths from COVID-19 across the sector.

NHS workers must act and organise independently of the trade unions and establish rank-and-file committees to unite with all other workers, to fight for better pay, terms, and conditions, and to safeguard health and safety at work. These committees must take up a socialist political struggle to secure the resources needed for a fully functioning health care system, by seizing control of the wealth and resources of the financial oligarchy, banks, big corporations, and big pharmaceutical companies.

Belarus arrests 33 Russian military contractors ahead of presidential elections

Jason Melanovski

Belarus last week arrested 33 Russian military contractors just outside the capital Minsk, in what it claims was a Moscow-backed plot to carry out terrorist activities and foment unrest in the country just prior to presidential elections to be held on Sunday, August 9. Moscow has denied these allegations.

This week, President Alexander Lukashenko, who has served as President of Belarus since 1994, used bellicose language to denounce Moscow, calling the Kremlin’s statements “all lies.” Lukashenko also claimed that he also planned to apprehend another group of Russian mercenaries who had been sent to the south of the country.

The arrested have been identified as members of the Wagner Group, a private military contracting firm that has reportedly sent mercenaries to other countries, such as Venezuela, Syria and eastern Ukraine, in order to protect Russian military and economic interests. The mercenaries themselves have denied any involvement in terrorist activities within Belarus and claimed to be on their way to see the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, Turkey.

Map of Belarus

In the same speech in which he accused Russia of being “liars” and claimed that instability in Belarus “will explode in such a way that it would reverberate all the way to Vladivostok,” Lukashenko also paradoxically stated: “Russia has always been and will remain our close ally, irrespective of who takes power in Belarus or Russia.”

Lukashenko’s arrest of the alleged mercenaries was welcomed by the US-backed Ukrainian government. Kiev has called on Minsk to send 28 of the 33 arrested to Ukraine for prosecution on charges of fighting on the side of separatist rebels in the eastern Ukrainian provinces of Donetsk and Lugansk.

Speaking to Lukashenko by phone, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky stated, “I hope that all those suspected in terrorist activities on Ukrainian territory will be handed over to us for prosecution in accordance with the existing international norms.”

While the specific details surrounding the actions and arrests of the Russian military contractors within Belarus are murky, the incident marks a new nadir in relations between the two countries. Unlike other former Soviet Republics, such as Ukraine, Latvia and Lithuania, which have morphed into NATO-backed self-proclaimed enemies of Moscow since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Belarus established a “union state” with Russia in 1997, including a somewhat integrated economic zone.

The previous plans for a fully integrated “union state,” including a shared military, currency, and legal system, never materialized. However, both Russian and Belarusian citizens are freely able to travel, work and study in both countries. Under these conditions, the arrest of Russian citizens on Belarusian territory just days before the presidential elections is an obvious signal to Moscow, as well as the US and EU, that the Belarusian ruling class is actively considering a much stronger orientation to American and European imperialism.

The Lukashenko regime is heading into Sunday’s elections amidst a profound crisis. Reports have suggested that Lukashenko, who has easily won previous elections with 75 percent of the vote or more, may be facing the toughest challenge yet to his regime.

In recent months, Lukashenko has alienated much of the population with his claims that the COVID-19 pandemic is nothing more than a “psychosis.” He has done virtually nothing to stem the spread of the virus. Unlike many neighboring countries, Belarus had not even a temporary shutdown of the economy.

According to John Hopkins University, with a population of just 9.5 million the country has reported 68,000 Covid-19 infections and 567 related deaths. Neighboring Poland, which had a limited lockdown, has reported 48,789 cases and 1,740 deaths with a population of approximately 38 million. Lukashenko himself reportedly also contracted the virus.

Moreover, in the past year the Belarusian economy has suffered fall-out from a prolonged spat between Russia and Lukashenko over Russian-subsidized energy supplies to Minsk. The scaling back of Russian subsidies combined with the coronavirus pandemic has created a $700 million deficit in the state budget.

Workers in the country have long been unable to make a living on their wages. As in neighboring Ukraine, many younger workers have been leaving the country to work in Russia or the EU. Last year, Lukashenko admitted that Belarus had lost 8 percent of its population due to labor migration.

Exploiting the growing economic and social crisis, US imperialism and the EU have aggressively intervened in the current elections in Belarus, openly backing and encouraging Lukashenko’s main rival from the pro-Western opposition, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya.

Tikhanovskaya announced her candidacy after her husband, a well-known opposition blogger, was arrested last May and barred from running. She has presented virtually no political program other than opposition to Lukashenko and empty calls for “democracy” and “free” elections. In recent weeks, the pro-Western opposition has organized several demonstrations that have drawn thousands of people in Minsk.

The Belarusian state has responded by jailing over 1,000 protesters since the beginning of the presidential campaign. Predictably, the United States government, which has been busy jailing, beating and kidnapping protesters off its own streets, hypocritically denounced the Belarusian government. The spokesperson of the U.S. State Department, Morgan Ortagus, tweeted, “We are deeply concerned about the reports of mass protests and detentions of peaceful activists and journalists.”

The United States has had no diplomatic representation in Belarus since 2008, when Lukashenko cracked down on western-backed nationalist and liberal opposition parties.

However, over the past few years, the relations between Belarus and the US have become much closer, as the Washington has sought to exploit and deepen the growing rift between Lukashenko and Moscow in order to turn the strategically important country into another NATO-backed ally. Lukashenko and his defense minister have repeatedly indicated readiness to hold joint exercises with NATO.

Lukashenko publicly supported the US-backed coup in 2014 in Ukraine, and established close relations with the Poroshenko and the subsequent Zelensky governments.

In February of this year, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo visited Belarus for a two-hour long conversation with Lukashenko on the country’s dispute with Moscow over energy supplies. It was the first visit of a US Secretary of State to Belarus since 1993. At a press conference after the meeting, Pompeo effectively reversed over a decade of American foreign policy towards the country, stating that the United States could offer Belarus all the oil it needs. He said, “All you have to do is call us.”

Lukashenko’s precarious balancing act between Russia and Western imperialism has been closely followed by American think tanks, which are debating whether backing Lukashenko might be a viable path for pursuing US interests in the region.

The Atlantic Council, one of the most bellicose think tanks in Washington D.C., warned that Lukashenko could be facing a “Minsk Maidan” after the presidential election. This reference to the heavily US- and German-backed and funded protest movement in Ukraine in 2013-2014, which culminated in a far-right coup that installed a regime that has been totally compliant with the interests of US imperialism, is a clear indication of the strong involvement of the US in the current anti-Lukashenko protests.

Earlier this year, Foreign Affairs, the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations think tank, published an article entitled, “Will Belarus be the next Ukraine?” Emphasizing the key geostrategic significance of Belarus for Russia, it noted: “... if Belarus were to pivot westward, Moscow would lose a potential military staging ground and risk seeing Western political and economic influence extend over a population that many Russians regard as part of their own nation.” The piece concluded by urging Western governments to back Lukashenko.

Whatever the outcome of Sunday’s elections, recent events have made clear that Belarus, like neighboring Ukraine and the Baltic states, is at the center of a growing imperialist drive towards war against Russia, a drive which has only been accelerated by the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression.

Canadian court rules Safe Third Country Agreement with US violates refugee rights

Laurent Lafrance

Canadian Federal Court Judge Ann-Marie McDonald recently ruled that the Canada-US Safe Third Country Agreement (STCA) violates refugee rights and the Canadian constitution’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The decision represents a blow to the Trudeau government, which has falsely presented itself as “pro-refugee” to provide a “progressive” cover for its reactionary policies at home and abroad.

The case was brought by the Canadian Council for Refugees, the Canadian Council of Churches, and Amnesty International on behalf of citizens from El Salvador, Ethiopia, and Syria. The most significant case was that of Nedira Jemala Mustefa, a Muslim woman from Ethiopia of Oromo origin, an ethnic group persecuted by the US-backed Ethiopian government. She arrived in the US at age 11 and lived in the country for several years as an undocumented refugee. She graduated from a Georgia high school in 2015. However, because she had arrived after the cut-off date to apply for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, she was unable to obtain proper documentation to continue her studies in the country.

Like thousands of migrants fearing Trump’s brutal anti-immigrant witch-hunt, Mustefa attempted to cross to Canada in 2017 at the official border at Saint-Bernard-de-Lacolle, Quebec. She was questioned for 30 hours before being delivered back to US authorities and “immediately imprisoned.” She was detained for one month, alongside people who had criminal convictions, in a maximum-security prison in upstate New York known as “Little Siberia” for its frigid conditions. She was locked in solitary confinement for the first seven days, which she described as “a terrifying, isolating and psychologically traumatic experience.” Her dietary requirements as a Muslim were not respected and she lost 15 pounds.

In her ruling, McDonald wrote that Canadian officials had handed Mustefa over to the US knowing she would be imprisoned, knowing in other words, that she would be deprived of her fundamental rights under Canadian law. Justice McDonald concluded, “The evidence clearly demonstrates that those returned to the US by Canadian officials are detained as a penalty,” which is a violation of their “right to liberty and security” as stipulated in section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

A spokesperson for Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness Minister Bill Blair said, “We are aware of the Federal Court’s decision and are currently reviewing it.” The federal government argued before the court that the US has a “fair” detention review process, citing Mustefa’s eventual release by American authorities. But that argument was rejected by the judge as not providing “sufficient evidence of minimal impairment” of her rights.

Mustefa is only one among thousands who have been sent back to the US after unsuccessfully seeking protection in Canada. Even before Trump’s ascent to the presidency, the US was notorious for its mistreatment of asylum seekers. US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) routinely separates children from their parents and has imprisoned tens of thousands of innocent refugees in military-style prisons where they are subjected to abuses, violence and even rape. Under “deporter-in-chief” Barack Obama, and now under Trump, the US has deported millions of desperate migrants fleeing war, persecution and economic hardship in their home countries, which have more often than not been ravaged by US imperialism.

The court’s decision, which further exposed the federal government’s collaboration with Trump’s crackdown on migrants, could not have come at a worse time for the Liberal government. Trudeau is at the center of a scandal which has divulged a web of incestuous and corrupt ties between the top ranks of the Liberal government, including Finance Minister Bill Morneau, and WE, a “philanthropic” charity that has powerful corporate backers.

The cultivation of Trudeau’s image as a “refugee-friendly” and “humanitarian” leader has proven invaluable in covering over the criminal activities of Canadian imperialism at home and abroad, including the growing involvement of the Canadian Armed Forces in a series of US-led wars, intrigues, and provocations around the globe. At home, Trudeau has developed a corporatist partnership with the trade unions and big business to drive workers back on the job amid the COVID-19 pandemic, and to prepare the political groundwork for imposing massive austerity and increased exploitation to make working people pay for the hundreds of billions of dollars in bailout funds the state has provided the rich and super-rich.

As part of Ottawa’s close collaboration with the Trump administration, the Trudeau government has followed in the footsteps of the previous Conservative government of Stephen Harper and adopted a series of reactionary measures targeting refugee rights and expanding “border-security” cooperation with Washington. This includes the Trudeau-Trump pact announced as the pandemic erupted last March, according to which all asylum seekers attempting to cross into Canada—including those who used a “loophole” to escape the reactionary provisions of the STCA by entering Canada “irregularly”—would be immediately sent back to the US. This is a clear violation of international law.

While the court’s decision sheds light on Canada’s complicity in the mistreatment of refugees, it also seeks to preserve the false portrayal of Canada as a more humane country than the US. Judge McDonald granted the Trudeau government some breathing space to refurbish its image by suspending the effect of her ruling for six months. During this time, the government can ask parliament to make some cosmetic changes to the agreement in order to satisfy the court. In other words, the STCA is still in full effect, and Canada can and will continue to deny asylum seekers the right to claim refugee status and immediately return them to the US.

Signed in 2002 in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attack and officially adopted in 2004, the STCA is part of Canada’s efforts to maintain and deepen its military-strategic partnership with Washington. It is an integral part of a Canadian immigration system so closely tailored to the needs of big business that it has won high praise from Trump and leaders of Germany’s far-right opposition party, the AfD.

The STCA stipulates that any refugee entering Canada at an official entry point from a so-called “safe country”—that is, one where basic democratic rights and the rights of refugees are supposedly protected—can immediately be returned there without having the right to file an asylum claim in Canada. However, those crossing outside official checkpoints have the legal right to file a claim. In the last three years, thousands of asylum seekers have used this “loophole” to avoid being sent back to the US, and risked their personal safety by crossing into Canada on foot. This influx still represents a drop in the ocean of a global refugee population numbering more than 70 million.

The Conservatives and the chauvinist pro-Quebec independence Bloc Québécois have long demanded that the “loophole” be closed and the entire US-Canada border be declared an official entry point. The Liberals resisted this, at least until last March, saying such a change was unnecessary because most “irregular” entrants to Canada are deported anyway.

According to the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada, of the roughly 58,000 irregular migrants who have crossed the border since February 2017, 14,500 have been accepted and 12,000 have been rejected. Some 29,600 claims are still awaiting a decision.

The Canadian Council for Refugees and other human rights organizations celebrated the court ruling as a great victory. They are claiming it could push the government into scrapping the STCA, and enable refugees to enter via official checkpoints without fear of immediate deportation.

Even in the extremely unlikely event such a change were made, it would barely begin to address the plight facing refugees and immigrants. Among those who are successful in their effort to stay in Canada, poverty, unemployment and homelessness are rampant. According to a report by the City of Toronto, as of October 2019, approximately 40 percent of all shelter users in the city’s permanent shelter system were refugee/asylum claimants, with an average of 15-20 new claimants entering the shelter system each day.

Thousands of migrants have been detained without charge in various immigration holding centers or provincial prisons. According to the site Neverhome.ca, the Canadian government jailed over 87,317 migrants without charge between 2006 and 2014, including more than 800 children. This trend has continued in recent years. According to the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA), there were 6,609 people detained in immigration holding centres in 2017-18, up from 4,248 a year earlier. There were 1,831 detainees held in jails last year, compared to 971 in 2016-17.

Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna wins election setting the stage for an eruption of working-class struggles

K. Ratnayake

President Gotabhaya Rajapakse’s Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) won the national election on Wednesday and is set to form the next government with a substantial majority. The party secured 128 seats in the 225-member parliament, an increase of 53 MPs.

The opposition Samagi Jana Balavegaya (SJB), which was established early this year as a breakaway from the right-wing conservative United National Party (UNP), won 47 seats. The thoroughly discredited UNP, which was led by former Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, lost 58 seats and will not have a single MP in the next parliament.

The Sinhala chauvinist Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), which contested the elections as the Jathika Jana Balavegaya—a new formation established with backing from a host of academics and professionals—won two seats, four less than in the previous parliament. The Tamil National Alliance (TNA), based in the war-ravaged North and East, secured only nine seats, down from 16 MPs in the previous parliament.

Gotabhaya Rajapakse [Credit: AP Photo]

According to initial Election Commission estimates, only 71 percent of electors cast a ballot. This is a 12 percent drop in the numbers participating in the presidential election 10 months ago and 6 percent lower than the 2015 August national election.

On Wednesday, President Rajapakse issued a statement insisting that he had won 70 percent of the vote and falsely claiming it was an “expression of confidence” in the government’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

The sharp fall in the number of voters, however, indicates opposition to Rajapakse’s increasingly authoritarian methods and his backing for a big business offensive against jobs, wages and unsafe working conditions. Rajapakse’s claims of lower COVID-19 infection rates in Sri Lanka are because his government has refused to carry out mass testing.

The SLPP campaigned during the election for a two-thirds parliamentary majority, so it could rewrite the constitution and scrap all current limits on the president’s executive powers. The party’s lavish election campaign is estimated to have cost around 1,202 million rupees ($US6.5 million), far more than the other capitalist parties spent on their propaganda.

President Rajapakse addressed dozens of rallies, mobilising people in violation of the official pandemic health regulations. Each of Rajapakse’s appearances, according to an election monitoring group, cost the state 27 million rupees.

After casting his vote on Wednesday, Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapakse, the president’s brother, told the media that if the SLPP failed to win a two-thirds parliamentary majority in the election it would “make arrangements” to secure the necessary numbers. In other words, by purchasing MP votes.

The Sri Lankan president and his brother, along with the military hierarchy, want a dictatorship. Like every government around the world, President Rajapakse is determined to impose the burden of the economic crisis, accelerated by the coronavirus pandemic, on the masses. This will set the stage for the eruption of intense class struggles and revolutionary upheavals.

In the run up to the election, the SLPP stepped up its anti-Muslim and anti-Tamil chauvinism in order to divert social tensions and polarise Sinhala voters. The party used the findings of an official investigation into last year’s Easter Sunday bombings by an ISIS-backed Islamic terrorist group to unleash a wave of anti-Muslim propaganda.

At the same time, it insisted that the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) was remerging. The police provided fuel for these unsubstantiated assertions by suddenly claiming that they had found weapons in several places in the North.

Over the past six months, the opposition parties, including the SJB, UNP, JVP, TNA, the Muslim parties, and the plantation-based unions have publicly supported President Rajapakse and the SLPP minority administration. These formations attended two all-party meetings called by Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapakse’s then SLPP minority administration and backed the president’s measures to “combat the pandemic.”

On April 27, the same organisations pledged “unconditional support” to the president if he reconvened the dissolved parliament. The SJB and UNP separately met with him twice to offer their backing, while the TNA held a private meeting with the prime minister at which they guaranteed their support.

On May 4, UNP leader Ranil Wickremesinghe told the Daily Mirror that his party was “willing to help the government” because it is not “a time to play adversarial politics.”

None of these parties challenged the rapid and ongoing militarisation of Sri Lanka’s government administration. All of them back the government’s unsafe “reopening of the economy” and the massive attacks on jobs, wages and social rights. Like Rajapakse, these parties all fear the eruption of protests and strikes by workers, young people and the rural masses.

The pseudo-left played a key role in preventing the working class from challenging the government. The Nava Sama Samaja Party (NSSP), the Frontline Socialist Party (FSP) and the United Socialist Party (USP) derailed workers’ struggles against the austerity measures of the former Sirisena-Wickremesinghe government. This paved the way for Gotabhaya Rajapakse to pose as the sole opposition during last year’s presidential election.

NSSP leader Wickremabahu Karunaratne even contested this month’s election on a UNP district ticket. The FSP wrote twice to the prime minister supporting the government’s response to the pandemic, despite its “differences.”

FSP union leader Duminda Nagamuva, after meeting with Sri Lankan Labour Minister Dinesh Gunawardena, said that the minister had promised to solve workers’ problems. The USP and its unions also met with Gunawardena and big business leaders, supporting their wage and job cutting plans and blocking the eruption of workers’ struggles.

Having come to power by exploiting these betrayals, President Rajapakse’s new government is now preparing for class war.

On Wednesday, Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapakse ominously declared: “We are ready to face the economic challenges. We have already faced challenges more severe than these.”

This is a reference to the sharp decline in Sri Lankan economic growth, which is expected to be negative 1.3 percent this year. The COVID-19 pandemic has severely impacted on Sri Lankan exports, foreign remittances have drastically fallen and tourism has collapsed. Colombo also has to pay $US4 billion for foreign loans over the next three years.

Rajapakse’s statement that previous governments have “faced more severe challenge than this” is a reference to Colombo’s communalist war against the LTTE, which ended in May 2009.

At that time, Mahinda Rajapakse was the president and his brother Gotabhaya Rajapakse the defence secretary. Forty thousand Tamil civilians were killed and hundreds of surrendered fighters “disappeared” in the final weeks of the war, according to United Nations estimates. During and after the war, the Rajapakse administration ruthlessly suppressed the struggles of workers and the poor.

Addressing an election rally last week, President Rajapakse denounced a protest strike by 10,000 Colombo Port workers against the sale of a port terminal to an Indian company.

“The ports have been closed down for no other reason than to leave our economy in ruins. I’m not intimidated by this,” he declared. “[E]very time a leader who cares about the country comes to power extremist groups work towards sabotaging [him].”

While Rajapakse hopes that an absolute parliamentary majority and new dictatorial measures will allow him to take on the working class, the eruption of militant struggles will assume revolutionary proportions. The rising anger of workers and youth against this corrupt political social order and its attacks on jobs, living conditions and democratic rights, including during the 30-year war, is reaching a breaking point.

The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) was the only organisation in the elections that explained the deepening crisis and the need for workers and youth to break from every faction of the bourgeoisie and make the necessary political preparations for the revolutionary challenges ahead.

It called on workers to form action committees in every workplace and in working-class neighbourhoods to confront the pandemic disaster and government attacks on wages, job and democratic rights, along with the danger of imperialist war. The SEP explained that the fight for a workers’ and peasants’ government to implement socialist measures is the only way forward for the working class.

The SEP won a total of 780 votes in the three districts that it contested—Jaffna 146, Colombo 303 and Nuwara Eliya 331. While these numbers are still small, they are class-conscious votes for socialism and an indication of growing support for the SEP.

In the coming period, the SEP will intensify its political struggle to win broad layers of workers and youth to socialist internationalism and build it as a mass party to lead the working class to power.

New US unemployment claims top 1 million for 20th straight week

Jacob Crosse

Data published by the US Labor Department on Thursday showed that for the 20th straight week more than 1 million workers filed unemployment claims for the first time. Unlike in previous weeks, the workers who filed last week will not be eligible to receive the enhanced federal unemployment benefit of $600 a week that expired last week along with a partial federal moratorium on evictions.

Thursday’s report did little to prompt movement between the Democrats and Republicans toward an agreement on a fifth coronavirus stimulus bill. This is despite over 30 million workers losing out on the enhanced benefits last week, while over 23 million are facing eviction in the next two months, according to the Aspen Institute.

Hundreds of people wait in line for bags of groceries at a food pantry at St. Mary's Church in Waltham, Mass. earlier this year. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)

Instead, the negotiations, with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows on one side and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer on the other, ended the same as on previous days: without an agreement, much less a date for a possible vote.

Without the possibility of an agreement before Friday, senators from both parties adjourned for a three-day weekend.

“We’re still a considerable amount apart,” Meadows told reporters after another day of dithering. Pelosi, talking out of both sides of her mouth, said she could see “light at the end of the tunnel,” but that the two sides were “very far apart—it’s most unfortunate.”

Making clear the willingness of the Democrats to agree to a cut in benefits, Schumer expressed “disappointment” over Thursday’s talks and blamed the Republicans for being “unwilling to meet in the middle.”

The 1.19 million new unemployment claims for the week ending July 25 were slightly down from the 1.43 million claims the previous week. However, the figure is still nearly double the pre-pandemic record of 695,000 claims set in 1982. Overall, roughly 55 million unemployment claims have been filed since mid-March.

Currently, there are an estimated 5.4 million job openings, while over 31 million people are collecting some form of unemployment pay. The few jobs that are available are mostly low-paying and carry a high risk of contracting the virus.

Research conducted by the California Policy Lab found that “more than half (57 percent) of recent unemployment claims” are from workers who are resubmitting or reopening their claims after they had returned to work but were then let go again.

This important statistic shows the falsity of claims by Republicans and some Democrats that the now expired federal supplement to state unemployment benefits enacted in March as part of the CARES Act corporate bailout is an “overpayment” and creates a “disincentive to work.” Workers are not as a rule refusing to return to previously held jobs, despite legitimate concerns about the risk of COVID-19 infection. Rather, the jobs are not there, as businesses continue to close while the virus spreads out of control across the country.

The research conducted by the California Policy Lab coincides with findings released Monday by Cornell University, which found that 31 percent of workers who returned to work after being laid off or furloughed at the start of the pandemic have since been laid off a second time. An additional 26 percent of workers surveyed reported that even though they had been called back to work, their supervisor or boss warned that they could be laid off again.

As with all aspects of the coronavirus crisis, the working class and poor are being made to suffer the brunt of its effects, including joblessness. Recent analysis conducted by economics professor Peter Ganong at the University of Chicago concluded that workers in the lowest income quintile, that is, the bottom 20 percent, have experienced three times as many job losses as higher-paid workers in the top quintile.

In addition to Thursday’s new unemployment claims report, the Department of Labor released data showing that over 16.1 million people are currently collecting traditional unemployment benefits from their state. The ending of the federal supplement means a reduction in weekly income for millions of workers of between 60 percent and 80 percent, depending on the state where they reside.

Oklahoma has the highest drop-off. The average Oklahoma worker will see an 85.6 percent reduction in wages without the federal enchantment. Louisiana is second, with a 75.4 percent reduction, while jobless workers in Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Arkansas, Tennessee, South Carolina, North Carolina and Florida will receive at least 70 percent less in benefits.

Reporters from the World Socialist Web Site spoke to Rick, an unemployed child care worker from Michigan. He said: “I was first put on a leave of absence from my job working in early childhood education in March. It was originally not intended to last very long. I remember my bosses and coworkers being very blindsided by the whole situation.

“It’s been very difficult to remain sheltered in place for this long. I am fairly certain that I will not be able to be rehired at the same job that I left in March.

“In June, I tentatively accepted an offer to return to the job on a limited basis by the end of July, with the hope that COVID cases would stay low. When they began increasing again in early July, I called and told them I was uncomfortable with returning to work at that time. My employer said she understood and that many of my coworkers had also said they wished to wait for a few more months before returning.

“I have fears now that I will be removed and will have to reapply to work there again. This will basically wipe out all the pay raises I’ve received while working there and force me to start all over again. We’re already too low-paid as it is.

“This brings up the $600 expanded benefits. With those, I at least had financial support that I needed if the pandemic continues to remain a problem. Before the pandemic, I would try to limit myself to spending about $10 a day on any items beyond gas for my car or bills.

“Working in child care, there had been weeks when my bank account would run out days before my paycheck arrived. I would bum food from the kitchen at my job. Some of my coworkers actually brought food from home and would share.

“When the first expanded payments came in, I found myself able to actually fill my cart at the grocery store. I would go early in the morning to avoid the crowds and maintain healthy social distancing. Remarkably, I could participate in society somewhat more easily during the pandemic, simply due to actually having some money to spend.

“What really gets me about them saying this benefit is a disincentive to work is that I didn’t create this pandemic. They did. They failed us and want to tell us that we’re the ones being overpaid!

“It’s not easy having to remain inside during the summer, losing contact with friends and coworkers. Not to mention the children. I can hope that I’ll be able to at least last a few more months until it’s safer to look for work. I can only hope.

“I’ve had fights with family because they refuse to take the coronavirus seriously. I don’t know if at this point I’ll even retain all my job skills when I go back because it’s been nearly six months of waiting. I certainly don’t enjoy life being put on hold. Now they want us to risk dying as well. The crisis this has created won’t go away with a return to work. Everything is changed.”