The UK’s High School Examinations Fiasco

Kenneth Surin

The highest qualification for high-school students in England, Wales, and the north of Ireland, is the A-level. Scotland has a different system called the Highers.

UK students seeking admission to tertiary education within the UK’s four sub-nations have to take A-levels or Highers– though the International Baccalaureate and qualifications in other countries equivalent to the A-level, such as the Abitur in Germany or Bac in France, are also recognized. The US SAT is not recognized.

The A-level exam is unlike the US’s SAT.

The SAT is multiple-choice, whereas the typical A-level exam involves writing 2-4 long (or longish) essays in a 3-hour period in response to questions chosen from an exam-paper with a typical range of 8-12 questions. For this reason successful students taking the more demanding A-levels receive a year’s advance credit if they choose to matriculate at a US university.

Another key difference is that UK students don’t apply directly to individual universities.

Since the UK only has 1 private university, the 105 government-funded universities have a centralized admissions system (UCAS).

Via UCAS, students about to take their A-levels apply to 5 universities at which they wish to study (ranked by applicants in order of interest). Applicants are advised to list the subject they wish to study (this includes joint-degrees), since applicants only get one personal statement for all universities they apply to, the statement having to be tailored to their subject, as opposed to university, of choice.

A key part of the application will be the predicted grades for the applicant provided by their teachers.

UCAS forwards applications to the universities concerned, who then assess the application and decide whether to make an offer for study, which includes the grades applicants must achieve in order to matriculate.

The examinations are set and graded by a number of exam boards.

England, Wales and Northern Ireland have several exam boards; schools can choose between them on a subject-by-subject basis, without restrictions.

Currently, there are 5 exam boards available to state schools: AQA (Assessment and Qualifications Alliance); CCEA (Council for the Curriculum, Examinations & Assessment); OCR (Oxford, Cambridge and RSA Examinations); Pearson; and WJEC (Welsh Joint Education Committee).

The Covid lockdown threw a spanner in the works of this system, by preventing students from taking proctored A-level exams at their respective schools. Students had grades to aim for, but sans exams, had no way to attain their hoped-for objectives.

This is where the government blundered.

The 2020 A-level exam period would have run from Monday 11 May until Wednesday 26 June. It became apparent in March that it would be impossible to hold this year’s exams because of the pandemic lockdown, and the government cancelled them.

The Tory education minister, Gavin Williamson (a dimwit whose main claim to fame is being the 2006 fireplace salesperson of the year), therefore had a couple of months to implement an alternative mode of grade-calculation for 2020’s exam takers.

The government decided that grades for these thwarted exam-takers would be based on a combination of their predicted grades, rankings provided by teachers, and an algorithm based on schools’ previous results.

The flaw in the use of this algorithm was clear even without the benefit of hindsight. As is the case nearly everywhere, exam results tend to mirror a location’s prevailing poverty levels.

Students in poorer areas come from schools with lower levels of attainment, the converse being the case for schools in prosperous areas.

The algorithm downgraded 40% of predicted A-level results, with students in less-advantaged areas the hardest hit, while private schools enjoyed the biggest leap in the percentage of top grades.

As a result, thousands of poorer pupils missed out on places at university—in effect the algorithm assigned them grades based on their postcode.

Facing a huge public outcry (including Tory MPs), Williamson dumped the algorithm by making a drastic U-turn in government policy, saying A-level students would now be given the grades their teachers had predicted.

The result has been an absolute crisis for universities.

Those allowed to matriculate on the basis of the algorithm could not now be denied their university places, while those with subsequently acceptable grades based on their teachers’ predications are having to be admitted as well.

An example of this chaos was given me by a family member in the UK university system. A medical degree in the UK is a 5-year undergraduate degree, and clinical practice is of course a vital part of it. But with matriculants now considerably in excess of what medical schools can accommodate, it will be impossible to conduct clinical practice within the existing framework.

What next for medical schools?

Perhaps doctors who are not as well-trained because of shortfalls in their clinical practice, or a huge compensatory infusion of government funds for medical schools in a time of pandemic-induced economic recession, with a post-Brexit crisis still to come on top of this in early 2021?

Hopefully for Brits it will be the latter.

And what about Williamson himself, as well as his boss BoJo Johnson?

Williamson remains in post as education minister despite another U-turn after screwing-up the A-levels exams.

He had decreed that state schools should reopen (in September) without masks being required in classrooms.

Furious protests from parents and teachers compelled a reversal– masks will now be worn in classrooms when schools reopen.

Williamson and BoJo are trying to preserve their careers by throwing educational bureaucrats under the bus.

The head of England’s exam regulator (Ofqual), Sally Collier, has resigned, and the head civil servant in the department of education (DfE), Jonathan Slater, will step down on September 1 after the “prime minister concluded that there is a need for fresh official leadership” in the department, the DfE announced.

Slater is the fifth senior civil servant given the boot in less than a year, following the permanent secretaries of the Foreign Office, Home Office and Ministry of Justice, as well as the cabinet secretary, Mark Sedwill.

Gone are the days when ministers took responsibility for poor decisions made on their watch by resigning (this only seems to happen in Japan)— these days a hapless bureaucrat or two has to face the chopping block in their place, while the ministers involved still drive around in their black limousines, and lie repeatedly in media interviews and even in parliament about the debacles they preside over.

The UK’s parliament is touted in some circles as the mother of all parliaments— nowadays, more appropriately, it is perhaps the motherfucker of all parliaments.

BoJo Johnson became the source of derision even in the normally sedate parts of mainstream media when he blamed the A-levels fiasco on the nonsensical notion of a “mutant algorithm”.

Given that an algorithm can only be applied more or less well by those in charge, there were many jokes about who the real “mutants” were.

The technique used by the Tories in this episode is known in social media as “firehosing”.

Firehosing involves churning out as many lies as feasible as often as possible, not so much with the aim of having people swallow the lies peddled, but rather with the aim of sidelining arguments purporting to rely on ascertaining facts, and putting in their place phantasmagorias of “reality” reduced to the positioning of “narratives” and “optics”. Those who can sell these positions best are then said to win the “argument” in question.

Individuals such as BoJo (and Trump) don’t really care if people believe them. Their aim is to supplant what used to be considered “reality” by relatively well-informed social groupings possessing a modicum or approximation of scruples, with a riotous epistemological anarchy (à la Fox News), so that those so disposed are in a position to affirm that right is wrong, the true is false, left is right, and so on.

This is the underpinning of what is now considered “post-truth” politics.

BoJo and his allies, however, are not the UK’s first post-truth politicians.

That title belongs to the fundamentally unserious and lightweight “Dodgy” Dave Cameron, BoJo’s fellow Etonian and Oxonian predecessor as prime minister, who was an advertising executive on a minor commercial TV channel before he took up politics (saying he wanted to do this because he’d “be good at it”).

For now this is another story, along with the firehosing surely to follow the disastrous no-deal Brexit almost certain to kick-in on 1^st January 2021.

In the lead-up to this possible future story, the current Optimum opinion poll may become relevant.

The poll shows Labour is now in a tie with the Tories for the first time since last summer, before BoJo became the Tory leader. In just 5 months since the lockdown was imposed by Johnson, the Tories have relinquished a 26-point lead over Labour, who now stand neck-and-neck with the Tories on 40%.

The sad truth for Labour is that it has done nothing to merit this gain. Its Blairite leader, the erstwhile leading lawyer Keir Starmer, has wiped the floor with BoJo in parliamentary debate, but apart from trying to sideline the party’s Corbynites, he’s not made a single policy move or statement of significance since becoming leader.

The opportunism and unbearable lightness that was Tony Blair’s mantle may now descend on Starmer, by his own choice.

Relying on the Tory opposition to shoot themselves in the proverbial foot, which they’ve done repeatedly so far, can bring impressive but variable gains for now, but this Tory foot-shooting won’t fill Labour’s policy vacuum in the longer term.

As for the pandemic, in the last weekend of August, the UK recorded 1,715 Covid cases in largest weekend figure since mid-May.

The Twilight of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization

Melvin A. Goodman

It is time for the United States to debate the downsizing, if not the dissolution, of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).  U.S. national security would be strengthened by the demise of NATO because Washington would no longer have to guarantee the security of 14 Central and East European nations, including the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.  European defense coordination and integration would be more manageable without the participation of authoritarian governments in Poland and Hungary.  Key West European nations presumably would favor getting out from under the use of U.S. military power in the Balkans, the Middle East, and Southwest Asia, which has made them feel as if they were “tins of shoe polish for American boots.”

Russia would obviously be a geopolitical winner in any weakening—let alone the demise—of NATO, but the fears of Russian military intervention outside of the Slavic community are exaggerated.  The East European and Baltic states would protest any weakening of NATO, but it would be an incentive for them to increase their own security cooperation.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was created seven decades ago as a political and military alliance to “keep the United States in Europe; the Soviet Union out of Europe; and Germany down in Europe.”  The collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989; the Warsaw Pact and the East European communist governments in 1990; and the Soviet Union in 1991 marked the high water mark for the alliance.

For the past three decades, however, the United States has weakened NATO by forcing a hurried and awkward expansion on the alliance.  Most recently in 2020, North Macedonia was admitted as its 30th member, further weakening the integrity of the alliance. Did President Donald Trump actually believe that the presence of North Macedonia as well as 13 other Central European states would strengthen U.S. security?

The enlargement of NATO demonstrated the strategic mishandling of Russia, which now finds the United States and Russia in a rivalry reminiscent of the Cold War.  President Bill Clinton was responsible for bringing former members of the Warsaw Pact into NATO, starting in the late-1990s; President George W. Bush introduced former republics of the Soviet Union in his first term.  German Chancellor Angela Merkel deserves credit for dissuading Bush from seeking membership for Ukraine and Georgia.

The United States justified the expansion of NATO as a way to create more liberal, democratic members, but this has not been the case for the East European members.  Russia, moreover, views the expansion as a return to containment and a threat to its national security. Russia was angered by the expansion from the outset, particularly since President George H.W. Bush and Secretary of State James Baker assured Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze that the United States wouldn’t “leap frog” over Germany if the Soviets pulled their 380,000 troops out of East Germany.

NATO’s success from 1949 to 1991 was marked by a common perception of the Soviet threat, which is the key to solidarity in any alliance framework.  In 2020, however, the 30 members of NATO no longer share a common perception of the Russian threat in Europe.  The United States has one view of Russia; the key nations of West Europe have a more benign view; and the East Europeans perceive a dire threat that the others do not share.  The United States has always expressed some dissatisfaction with the asymmetric burden sharing and risk sharing within the alliance, and the Trump administration has threatened to withdraw from NATO over the burden sharing issue.

Turkey has rapidly become the outlier within NATO, and there have been a series of confrontations in the eastern Mediterranean that threaten the integrity of the alliance.  Greek and Turkish warships collided in August, creating the first such confrontation between the two navies since 1996, when the Clinton administration mediated the problem.  The United States no longer acts in such diplomatic capacities, so French President Emmanuel Macron has stepped into the breach by sending jet aircraft to the Greek island of Crete as well as warships to exercise with the antiquated Greek navy.  Greece and Turkey, which joined NATO together in 1952, are rivals over economic zones in the Mediterranean where there are important deposits of oil and natural gas.  Greece and Turkey have squabbled since 1974 over the divided island of Cyprus.

Turkey and France have additional differences over Turkey’s violations of the UN arms embargo on Libya.  The two NATO allies had a confrontation in the Mediterranean when a French warship tried to inspect a Turkish vessel.  Last week, France joined military exercises with Greece and Italy in the eastern Mediterranean following a Turkish maritime violation of contested waters.  Paris backs Athens in the conflicting claims with Ankara over rights to potential hydrocarbon resources on the continental shelf in the Mediterranean.

President Macron took a particularly tough line in stating that he was setting “red lines” in the Mediterranean because the “Turks only consider and respect…a red-line policy,” adding that he “did it in Syria” as well.  Macron’s tough stance is somewhat surprising in view of the concern of France and other European NATO countries regarding Turkey’s ability to turn on the refugee spigot, which would cause economic problems in southern Europe.  Turkey has been using the refugee issue as leverage since 2015, when huge numbers of refugees in West Europe led to a rightward shift in European politics.

There is also the problem of Turkey’s purchase of the most sophisticated Russian air defense system, the S-400, which was developed to counter the world’s most sophisticated jet fighter, the U.S. F-35.  As a result of the purchase of the S-400 system, the United States reneged on the sale of eight F-35s to Turkey at a loss of $862 million, creating additional problems between Trump and Turkish President Recip Tayyip Erdogan. Turkey had planned to buy 100 F-35s over the next several years, and had begun pilot training in the United States.

Trump’s constant harangues about burden sharing have created more friction within NATO.  Trump falsely takes credit for increased European defense spending, but it was the Obama administration that successfully arranged greater Canadian and European defense spending in 2014 in the wake of Russia’s seizure of Crimea. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg panders regularly to Trump on the issue of increased defense spending, ignoring Trump’s false claims that NATO spending will increase by $400 billion annually.  The $400 billion is in fact the increased spending over an eight-year period.

With Trump’s drift toward isolationism and unilateralism (“America First”), there is incentive for the European Community to take control of its own “autonomous” defense policy.  The Europeans have reason to believe that a second presidential term for Trump could lead to a sudden U.S. withdrawal from NATO.  The unilateralist character of U.S. foreign and defense policy strengthens the case for building European defense cooperation along side of an undetermined transatlantic relationship with the United States.

Ecocide- A Sibling of Genocide

Bijit Das

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

-Voltaire

Humanity has been the witness of glory and upheavals since history. A history that has long been constructed to corner the reality that stalks now and then. Utmost resistance of reality also leads to an explosion, explosion of fragmented truth, which if given a shape from the understanding of Immanuel Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason” we can see that those fragments will have undifferentiated consciousness and later looking into the abyss of this consciousness we could gaze of underrating, in with the abyss gazes us with pure reason, a reason with certain limit and scope.

The truth that we are talking of is about environmental destruction generating destruction of civilization vis-a-vis the reverse. The literature on the expansion of cities, war, trade, demographic changes and migration speaks of human greed for existence and achieving the pleasure of assorted fetish.  In fact, surviving is every soul’s greed but achieving this in the context of another soul is a curse of Darwinian evolutionary praxis of “Survival of the Fittest”.

The colonial hard-headed truth of upholding iniquity against indigenous mortals with denial of rights has a legacy of victimisation. In parallel, it is also perceived that this inequality is also against the non-human species of the living and the non-living. The former scaffolds genocide and the later ecocide.

Human agency causing extensive impairment and destruction in the ecosystem of a territory leading to the diminishing of habitat and living of the inhabitants in the following territory falls under the realm of ecocide. Whereas, genocide refers to purposely wiping up a huge flock of people of a specific nationality, ethnicity, religion or race.

It is, however, perplexing that one is recognised by the human-created institution of law while the other is not. Law is yet to take crime against nature seriously for which the dark abyss stalks the institution and shows us a limit of metaphysics.

There has always been a cordial relationship between indigenous people and their land. However, due to the profit mongering of various agents, there is a separation between the two. And the destruction of one can lead to the destruction of another. The paradox of genetically modified crops for the farmers is not a new fact, so is the destruction of land and leading to the destruction of lives. However, understanding how the political economy works for fading away off resources and truth needs serious attention.

If we look colonialism in the purview of violence, harm, exploitation and victimization, we will know that a rat race for dominance over resources has played an important significance in holding ground for not letting people understand how crimes against the dispossessed are entwined with the crime against nature.

In various wars, because of bombing and explosions, ecosystems are being damaged causing the annihilation of living and non-living. The shadow of various wars on our planet, especially Vietnam cold war speaks of war against the unborn. Scientific glory in inventions like herbicides played a hidden role in the following war as a tactic against soldiers. Agent Orange, an organochlorine biocide blended with dioxin was used by the US military as a tactical commitment of unmasking the hidden Vietnamese fighters through demolishing crops and paddy fields.

The deadly toxic component notched into the Vietnamese population leading to the demise of thousands. This incident haunted the future generations because of the abnormalities caused by transmission of the harmful component from mothers to their foetus.

The saga of contemporary military actions carried out by various nations in the name of peace directed against those who violate and abuse of human rights, can also on contrary themselves deny and violate human and environmental rights. The functioning of defence and war produces various wastes. But in terms of dangerous and radioactive waste that causes harm, the seriousness of dumping those is questionable. Examples of disposing of radioactive waste into water bodies are not a new phenomenon, which can sometimes lead to damage to the marine ecosystem.

Environmental embeddedness of human and non-human are never acknowledged by the perpetrators of environmental destructions. Neither the full surmount of this relationship is acknowledged, nor the persona of capitalism and resource accumulation for yielding such menaces.

To understand the consortium of both ecocide and genocide, we have to perceive with attention on culture. Culture is the element that brings solidarity among the mass through its various instrumental projections of material and nonmaterial.

Culture foregrounds as a key concept in understanding the process of genocide. Because of the presence of the binding force between human beings, the destruction of a group of people can be led to genocide via the substantive passage of culture that is through conquering culture. This conquering of culture is done through conquering the fundamental organs which operates for the homeostatic equilibrium of our society.

These organs are the social, biological, economic and cultural.  Society functions through the independent and dependent functions of these organs. Therefore, an assault on any one of it might lead to lethally cripple the entire building of a society. And this can result in social death of a group. Thus homicide occurs at the level of targeting one or more organs leading to mass killing and erosion of society.  When land and ecosystem are encompassed within the realm of culture, the destruction of these identities can lead to social death too, which can lead to an ecologically induced genocide.

Among the ecocides and homicides happening in and around us, think tanks and governments have always induced for sustainable development which is an oxymoron because of the finite nature of the natural resources echoed by the ghost of Thomas Malthus since centuries and just the spirit of capitalism is simply ecologically unsustainable. Therefore sustainable development in the emancipation of capitalism is just an utopia.

The pseudoscience behind the right-wing drive to force schools to open (part 2)

Benjamin Mateus

Children and COVID-19: are they contagious?

In the UK study, the authors estimated that the infectivity of children and adolescents was 50 percent compared to adults, though they admit the data is sparse on this question. The CDC has placed the best estimate for asymptomatic COVID-19 cases at 40 percent and infectivity of 75 percent, yet this does not clarify if there is a difference in infectivity among different asymptomatic age groups. The exact value is dependent on multiple variables, but, as other studies have documented, the capacity for children to be vectors for the transmission of the infection had been indirectly established, and they have become a growing component of COVID-19 cases, accounting for over 9 percent of all cases in the US.

It needs to be affirmed that early during the pandemic, the immediate school closures isolated and protected children, and therefore this age group represented a comparatively small proportion of infections. This contributed to illusions that children were impervious to the contagion. However, as the lockdowns were lifted and social interactions became more frequent, the number of infections attributed to children climbed rapidly. It is worrisome that the COVID-19 test positivity rate of children and young adults under the age of 18 is almost twice that of adults, implying that testing among this group is insufficient and infected children most likely represent a larger number than has been reported. What has been reported is that with more infections, the number of hospitalizations among children has also risen.

It was a study published August 7 by the CDC in their Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report that provided the necessary proof of the capacity for children to infect. The report drew media attention during the height of the summer months when an upsurge of infections in the sunbelt states had demonstrated the calamitous character of the initiative to reopen businesses and social venues. At the same time, governors and local officials were strong-arming school districts and teachers to begin readying for in-person classes. The conclusions of the study confirmed what teachers and parents already profoundly feared.

The study was triggered by an outbreak in Georgia. On June 21, some 621 campers and staff members participated in an overnight camp. All attendees had supposedly adhered to the mandate to have documented negative SARS-CoV-2 testing within 12 days before arriving at camp. Though specific preventive measures were enacted, campers did not wear cloth masks, and windows and doors were not opened in cabins to increase ventilation. According to the camp administration, attendees engaged in indoor and outdoor activities that included singing and cheering.

On June 23, a teenage staff member left camp after developing flu-like symptoms. The following day her test confirmed COVID-19 infection. Camp officials began sending children home, and the Georgia Department of Public Health was notified and commenced an investigation on June 25. The camp was closed on June 27.

A total of 597 Georgia residents had attended the camp. The median age of the campers was 12 years, while that of staff members was 17 years. Test results were available for 344 attendees, of which 260, or a staggering 76 percent, were positive. Test results for 253 people were not available.

What surprised the authors most was their finding that the attack rate was highest among those 6 to 10 years of age. The CDC wrote, “Asymptomatic infection was common and potentially contributed to undetected transmission, as has been previously reported. This investigation adds to the body of evidence demonstrating that children of all ages are susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 infection and, contrary to early reports, might play an important role in transmission.” This was the most succinct demonstration of the ability for young children to be vectors for the transmission of COVID-19, contradicting the prior view that they were effectively “immune” and considered an insignificant factor in the transmission of the virus.

Around the same time as the publication of the CDC report, a contact tracing study was conducted in the province of Trento, Italy. During March and April, 6,690 contacts were linked to 2,812 cases of COVID-19. Out of these contacts, 890 developed symptoms of COVID-19 for an attack rate of 13.3 percent. Though there were only 14 children with COVID-19 under 15 years of age, 11 of their 49 contacts became secondary cases, for an attack rate of 22.4 percent, the highest rate of any age group.

The authors also reported that nasal swabs submitted to the Charité laboratory in Berlin showed that the viral load in children was similar to adults. They concluded, “This greater risk of spread resulting from contact with an infected child that emerged from our analysis might be explained by the different nature of interactions between adults and children. While the positive adult would be likely to be more adherent with isolation precautions, it may be more difficult to truly isolate children, resulting in continuing contact with parents and siblings. Overall, our data are, therefore in support of a policy of maximum caution with respect to the reopening of children ’ s communities and primary schools. [emphasis added].”

Another study that corroborated the conclusions reached by the Italian research came from South Korea. Overall, the researchers detected COVID-19 in 11.8 percent of all household contacts, but rates were higher for contacts of children than adults. The highest attack rate, 18.6 percent, was among school-aged children 10 to 19. They, however, found it was lowest for those children under the age of 10. These findings led Michael Osterholm, an infectious diseases expert at the University of Minnesota, to state, “I fear that there has been this sense that kids just won’t get infected or don’t get infected in the same way as adults and that, therefore, they’re almost like a bubbled population. There will be transmission. What we have to do is accept that now and include that in our plans.”

Lastly, a study published in JAMA Pediatrics on July 30 compared viral loads in children and adults at a pediatric tertiary medical center in Chicago, Illinois, and provided the evidence that young symptomatic children had viral loads that were equivalent to or higher than those found in adults. These authors, too, cautioned that young children’s behavioral habits and close interaction in schools and daycare settings would potentially amplify the transmission once restrictions were eased.

Is airborne transmission (aerosolization) the primary route of transmission?

On July 6, in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, lead authors Lidia Morawska, Ph.D., MSc, International Laboratory for Air Quality and Health, Queensland University of Technology, and Donald Milton, MD, DrPH, Institute for Applied Environmental Health, University of Maryland School of Public Health, along with 31 contributing authors and 206 signatories, published an open letter titled, “It is Time to Address Airborne Transmission of COVID-19 . ” This was an appeal to medical communities and relevant international organizations to recognize the potential for airborne spread of COVID-19, also understood as aerosolization. The World Health Organization has been slow to adopt these recommendations.

Both the CDC and the WHO have emphasized that the spread of the virus to others occurs through two dominant routes—surface contamination and respiratory droplets. The basis for these conceptions can be traced back to the work done by Dr. Charles Chapin, a public health researcher, in his seminal work from 1910, The Sources and Modes of Infection. He wrote in his preface, “We know now that direct contact with the sick, or with healthy carriers of disease germs, is an exceedingly frequent mode of transmission, and that infection by means of the air, or from infected articles, is not nearly as common as was formerly believed.” Lacking technology in the proceeding decades to measure aerosols, his construct for the transmission of diseases dominated among infectious disease experts and epidemiologists until recently and most specifically with the COVID-19 pandemic.

Aerosols are like bits of fluid so small they can linger in the air. The human hair is 80 microns and aerosols smaller than 50 microns can spend enough time in the air to be inhaled. By comparison, the SARS-CoV-2 virus is only 0.1 microns, allowing plenty of volume to contain numerous particles. It has also been shown that viruses can survive in these aerosol droplets.

A presentation by Dr. Jose-Luis Jimenez, professor of chemistry at the University of Colorado at Boulder and a Fellow of the American Association for Aerosol Research, summarized evidence in favor of and against various routes of SARS-CoV-2 transmission.

Specifically, he notes that indoor settings are the dominant location for infections. Super-spreading events where the growth factor (R0) of the virus can be as high as 20 occurred in restaurants, choir rehearsals, churches, etc. Poor ventilation aids in transmission. SARS-CoV-1, influenza, and MERS all transmit via aerosol. Viruses stay infective in aerosol forms. Dr. Jimenez writes, “COVID-19 is likely a lower-contagiousness aerosol-driven disease. It infects best at close proximity, also at the room-scale if we ‘help it along’ (indoors, low ventilation, long time, no masks). And it has trouble infecting at long range.”

A compelling case study from January published by the Chinese CDC involved a restaurant in Guangzhou, China, where a person with COVID-19 infected members from three families sitting at neighboring tables. None of the waiters or 68 patrons at the remaining 15 tables became infected. A video record of the day in question annotated the location of infected individuals. Using experimental tracer gas measurements and computational fluid-dynamic simulations, the study concluded that the air currents created by the air conditioning units blew virus-laden aerosols from the infected person to the nearby tables.

Earlier in the month, in a study from the University of Florida, a team of virologists and aerosol scientists were able to prove that respiratory droplets from COVID-19 patients contained the infectious virus. Live viruses were collected from seven to 16 feet from patients hospitalized with the virus. The sequences of the viral genetics from the aerosols matched that of newly admitted symptomatic patients to their rooms.

Both the Harvard T.H. Chan Schools of Public Health and the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) Epidemic Task Force have provided guidelines for updating school buildings and their heating and air conditioning units to ensure a typical classroom’s air is exchanged at least four to six times each hour. This includes designs for modification of rooms with window fans, central air purifiers and MERV13 HVAC filters that can remove a large portion of the airborne particles.

However, according to a report published by the US Government Accountability Office in June, more than “half of the public school districts need to update or replace multiple building systems or features in their school … an estimated 41 percent of districts need to update or replace heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems in at least half their schools, representing about 36,000 schools nationwide.”

Additional areas of concern raised by the report in their national survey from August to October 2019 include improving security (92 percent), expanding access to technology (87 percent), and monitoring health hazards (78 percent). In other words, even without COVID-19, public schools across the nation have significant needs for funding to bring them up to necessary standards.

Conclusion

The tenets of public health have been proven time and time again. Social distancing, the wearing of face masks that are correctly and tightly fitted, hand-washing, cleaning surfaces, and proper ventilation and air exchange: all these practices can protect people from becoming infected or passing an infection to others.

More importantly, community spread can be mitigated through the establishment of a public health infrastructure that can efficiently and expeditiously test suspects and quickly trace and isolate contacts. The break in the transmission of the disease is the essential factor in bringing the virus under control. Additionally, those infected need to be isolated and provided medical observation, care, and treatment. This is the first pandemic in which human society has at its disposal the technological and scientific capacity to halt the virus.

Offsetting this, however, is the fundamental relationship between the community and the local, state, and federal governments whose primary job is the security and wellbeing of the citizens. In the present instant, the utter failure on the part of the political establishment is not that they are inept, stupid, or unable to comprehend scientific data (although that may describe some).

Rather, the political system and government administration work as directed by definite socioeconomic pressures that compel them to assure the health of the economy, i.e., the super-rich and giant corporations, at any cost. Behind the inability to ramp up testing, the utter failure to build a cadre of contact tracers, the never-ending changes in policy and guidelines, each worse than the one before, amount to the state asserting a policy of herd immunity for the sake of the financial markets. Teachers, parents, and all workers have the science behind them, but they must act on it and assert their own interests, preparing to conduct a general strike against the murderous policy of the state.

Qantas eliminates over 2,000 ground crew jobs

Terry Cook

In yet another major destruction of its workers’ jobs, Australia’s former government-owned airline Qantas announced last week that it will outsource ground crew work, including baggage handling, aircraft cleaning and bus services, at airports across the country at the cost of 2,500 permanent jobs.

The federal government is bailing out Qantas as it exploits the COVID-19 pandemic to try to impose a further brutal restructuring. Since March, the company has already received $248 million from aviation-specific government support schemes and $267 million through the government’s JobKeeper scheme, which was supposed to keep employees on the books.

The affected airports include Australia’s busiest—Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Brisbane and Adelaide—as well as terminals in larger regional centres such as Canberra, Darwin, Cairns and Alice Springs.

Qantas will outsource some 2,050 jobs, while its low-cost carrier Jetstar will outsource 370. Even before the latest restructure, Jetstar had outsourced ground crew roles at 17 terminals.

The new round of job shedding is on top of 6,000 direct job cuts announced by Qantas in June. The company is gutting its 29,000-strong workforce as part of the drive to slash costs by $15 billion over three years and then $1 billion annually after 2023. Some 4,000 of these jobs will be axed before the end of this month.

Qantas domestic CEO Andrew David said he realised the decision to outsource ground operations “would be tough” for the affected workers, many of whom were among the 15,000 Qantas workers stood down in April without pay or on enforced leave.

For all this feigned sympathy, workers’ lives are being ripped apart to maintain shareholder values and fund exorbitant executive remuneration packages. David himself received a $3.5 million pay packet last year, as did Qantas’s CEO of international operations Tino La Spina, while Jetstar chief executive Gareth Evans pocketed $4 million.

Qantas Group’s chief executive Alan Joyce, whose tenure with the airline has been extended to at least 2023, while thousands of workers lose theirs, received a staggering near $24 million.

The workers discarded under the company’s ground operations outsourcing plan will be required to reapply for their positions and negotiate new work agreements with whichever body-hire companies secure the contracts via a cut-throat bidding process. The successful bidders will no doubt take advantage of the growing pool of jobless airline workers to severely cut wages and working conditions.

Backed by one government after another, Qantas has been eliminating jobs, including by out-sourcing, for years. In 2018, the company offloaded its subsidiaries Snap Fresh and Q Catering, which had a 1,200 in-house workforce, to the Emirates Group’s data catering, cargo and ground handling entity. This resulted in a loss of workers’ conditions including a superannuation benefits scheme.

In July 2012, Qantas sold off its Sydney-based Cairns and Riverside catering facilities, which employed 370 people, to Gate Gourmet, a company notorious for a mass sacking at its Heathrow, UK operations in 2005 during a work agreement dispute.

Previous Qantas restructurings included the destruction of 5,000 full-time jobs, the imposition of an 18-month wage freeze and the slashing of working conditions.

Now Qantas, like airlines across the globe, is utilising the pandemic to bring forward even more ruthless cost-cutting measures that were in the pipeline well before COVID-19.

Qantas’s outsourcing of ground operations came after CEO Joyce claimed the airline had registered a net financial year after-tax loss of $1.9 billion. He used this to justify further job cuts.

In reality, the loss featured a $1.2 billion write-down of part of the company’s fleet, currently in storage. Excluding such one-off costs, Qantas remained in the black with a reported profit of $124 million.

Moreover, when Joyce announced the 6,000 job cuts in June he admitted that the carrier had $5 billion in capital. He said it could “survive even under current restrictions” but declared: “I don’t want to continue to burn through cash.”

Over the three years to June 2020, Qantas had amassed $4.43 billion in profits, mainly through its ruthless restructurings.

The assault on the Qantas workforce was spearheaded by the grounding of the airline’s entire fleet in 2011, under the last Labor government, during a work contract dispute to impose an agreement slashing jobs and conditions.

The airline unions then agreed to enforce the company’s demands during closed-door arbitrated negotiations overseen by the Labor government’s Fair Work industrial tribunal.

That betrayal ensured the airline unions maintained their role as an industrial police force to contain workers’ opposition and retain their place at the negotiation table to broker further regressive work agreements.

Despite some token criticism, the airline unions have again signaled that they will do nothing to oppose the latest Qantas job cuts. Instead, they are calling for even more government financial handouts to the airlines.

Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) president Michele O’Neil pleaded with the Liberal-National government to “act immediately to put in place an aviation industry support plan.”

Transport Workers Union national secretary Michael Kaine called on Prime Minister Scott Morrison to personally intervene over a “misuse of taxpayers’ money” in relation to Qantas’s JobKeeper wage subsidies.

But as the JobKeeper bonanza for Qantas and other major employers demonstrates, the wage subsidy scheme was never a package designed to support the millions of workers hit by the economic fallout from the pandemic. It is a corporate handout aimed at propping up big business, attacking the wages and conditions of workers, and disguising the devastating unemployment crisis confronting the working class.

Riots spread across working class districts in the Netherlands

Harm Zonderland & Parwini Zora

Last month, amid the unfolding social crisis triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic, riots broke out in some of the most impoverished working class neighbourhoods of major Dutch cities .

The riots started in the Schilderswijk district of The Hague, a neighbourhood devastated by increasing social misery, shunned by the media and subjected to continual police harassment. A heavily immigrant area, Schilderswijk faces high unemployment and—as in poorer working class areas in cities across Europe—is increasingly dependent on food banks and dwindling social benefits due to the impact of the pandemic.

According to official reports, roughly one hundred rioters, mostly youth who organised on social media platforms, threw rocks and fireworks at riot police for several consecutive nights, allegedly opened up fire hydrants due to the heat wave, and set dumpsters and bus stops on fire.

The riots quickly spread to the working class neighbourhoods of Kanaleneiland and Overvecht in Utrecht. Amersfoort and Rotterdam followed after, where youth were under heavy surveillance and were forcibly dispersed by Mobiele Eenheid (ME) riot police units invoking emergency decrees. According to a Deutsche Welle news report, dozens were detained in The Hague alone by heavily armed police.

The riots were a particularly sharp expression of mounting working class anger and discontent at the extreme social polarization and growing unemployment during the pandemic. Between August 12 and 18, the Markteffect research agency carried out a survey that found more than 40 percent of respondents reporting no confidence in the government and the National Institute for Public Health and Environment (RIVM). In March, this figure was only 15 percent.

The growing working class anger and social conflict has provoked a vicious outpouring of hatred in the press. De Volkskrant published a report under the headline “The Schilderswijk riots over nothing, against everything,” claiming that the “easy answer” as to why the riots broke out is simply “boredom.”

It continued, “Before Summer the youth were stuck for long in their little rooms, because the schools were closed. The customary holiday to Morocco is cancelled, so are most festivals and other events. It is searing hot, everybody takes to the streets, where there is not much to do. Then bring your own ‘entertainment.’”

As the riots continued and spread to other cities, the Schilderswijk residents, who are largely of foreign descent, were increasingly subjected to right-wing slanders in the press. Moroccan workers in particular were singled out and scapegoated as part of a vicious xenophobic campaign to create a right-wing consensus for tougher police-state measures to secure “Law and Order.”

According to De Telegraaf, Paul Andersson Toussaint, a right-wing columnist, told the paper: “Law and order must be re-introduced. … Talking does not help, and the soft Dutch approach of talking and involving community leaders has to stop. You have to draw the line and say—to here but no further. The criminal macho culture has to go. There is nothing racist about that.”

The events also provoked comments from Geert Wilders of the far-right Freedom Party (PVV) who has for years been railing against workers of Moroccan descent, claiming there is a ‘Moroccan-problem’ in the Netherlands. Wilders infamously once whipped up an audience to chant ‘less, less’ when he asked whether there should be more or less Moroccans in the Netherlands.

In response to the riots, Wilders tweeted: “Also in Utrecht, Kanaleneiland, the criminal Moroccans rule. Why is the army not deployed? Make PVV the largest party in 2021, and I will expel all the criminal scum from our country, including their families. All of them.”

In a not very dissimilar vain, The Hague city council member Kavish Partiman, of the Christian Democratic Appeal (CDA), gave voice to the increasingly official stance embracing the agenda of the far right. He said, “Cuts in subsidies and benefits to the households where these troublemakers live might be an option. If the parents cannot teach norms and values to their children, perhaps we should forcefully remind them of the norms and values that apply in our society.”

Many politicians, from the parliament to the local council, have since lined up to blurt out their alignment with the far right and call for a tougher crackdown on riots and severe punishments for arrested “troublemakers.”

In fact, the pandemic has exposed before millions of people in the Netherlands and internationally the criminal negligence and political indifference of the ruling elite. This is what truly lies behind the urban youth rebellions: decades of “polder model” austerity, slashing essential health and social services to the bone, diminishing the social position of the working class.

The police crackdown on the protests reflects the calculations of the political strategists of the ruling class, that they must prepare for an eruption of working class opposition. Ever since 2018, there have been consistent waves of strikes in the Netherlands and internationally. Political consciousness is rapidly changing amid growing anger against social inequality, and the ruling elite itself feels ever more isolated and desperate.

Dutch Minister of Justice and Security Ferdinand Grapperhaus, who has denounced the riots as “anti-social,” warned that the riots not only involved youth. “I also see guys aged 30 or 40 walking amongst them,” he added.

The minister is set to speak with the mayors of cities hit by the riots, to determine if the national state could offer more “assistance,” including access to its whopping €6.3 billion police budget. That budget has been raised significantly since 2018. This translates to autocratic police-state forms of rule, more mass surveillance, emergency decrees, illegal arrests and summary prosecutions, and plans for more “integration and cooperation” between the Dutch military and police.

Government reopening campaign leads to COVID-19 surge in Indonesia

Owen Howell

Indonesia’s COVID-19 case numbers are continuing to surge as new daily records were reached on three consecutive days late last week. Saturday witnessed a spike of 3,308 confirmed cases bringing the national positivity rate—the percentage of positive results from all tests—up to more than 15 percent.

Over 2,000 cases have been detected every day for the past week. The virus’s death toll, by far the highest in South East Asia, has risen to nearly 100 fatalities a day, suggesting that infection rates are considerably higher than official figures. In total, data from the health ministry has confirmed 174,796 cases and 7,417 deaths nationwide.

The government believes the recent spike is related to the lifting of mobility limits across the capital city, Jakarta, during public celebrations of Independence Day on August 17 and Islamic New Year on August 20. Jakarta, the country’s initial virus epicentre, saw a record increase on Sunday of 1,114 infections.

Jakarta Governor Anies Baswedan claimed in an online discussion broadcast last Monday via YouTube that the spread of COVID-19 in the capital is “relatively under control.” He presented no evidence, however, to substantiate this vague assertion.

In reality, the rapid spread of the pandemic in Jakarta and across the country is the outcome of the government’s disastrous efforts to reopen the economy, which began in early June. Governor Anies himself has been at the forefront of this back-to-work drive, with utter disregard for the deaths and illnesses that it is resulting in.

On Friday, the Jakarta administration extended partial social restriction measures for the fifth time, to be effective until September 10. The move demonstrates the Indonesian ruling elite’s resistance to imposing a full-scale lockdown, which would necessarily involve a halt to production in most industry sectors.

The reopening of businesses throughout the archipelago has created the conditions for new clusters to emerge. The latest spike has consisted largely of workplace transmissions.

In the Cikarang industrial zone of Bekasi in West Java, at least 88 workers at a factory belonging to automotive spare part manufacturer PT Nippon Oilseal Kogyu tested positive for COVID-19 last week. The company has closed some of its units as a result, according to kompas.com.

Bekasi’s many industrial plants, located outside Jakarta, have recently emerged as new viral hotspots. Over the past two weeks, the local administration announced 242 new cases at an LG Electronics factory, as well as 71 infections at a Suzuki motorcycle plant in the same area.

The city of Depok in West Java experienced a spate of clusters in offices. Local coronavirus taskforce spokesperson Dadang Wihana told Tempo last week that many of those who have been infected: “[W]ork at offices, such as banks and hospitals. New clusters at such offices created new family clusters in Depok.”

The city administration revealed previously that around 60 percent of its residents commute daily to nearby Jakarta for work. Jakarta itself has reported at least 90 office clusters since early June.

The reopening of schools has accompanied the government’s frenzied drive to send workers back on the job. For example, Sragen regency in Central Java is planning to reopen 63 elementary and junior high schools in 20 districts on Monday, despite a surge of 89 new cases within the small area over the last two weeks.

Paediatricians and teachers have openly criticised the reckless and premature reopening, and have called for schools to focus on distanced learning to prevent children from contracting the disease. Education Minister Nadiem Makarim has dismissed these concerns, describing his government’s decision as “bold” but necessary.

The Federation of Indonesian Teachers Associations (FSGI) has received reports of at least 180 teachers and students testing positive. In addition, the Indonesian Pediatricians Association (IDAI) found 60 children have died from the virus, while over 6,000 aged 6 to 17 have contracted the coronavirus.

The government expanded a school reopening policy early last month for schools in COVID-19 “yellow zones,” or supposed moderate-risk areas. When a previous policy in early July allowing schools in “green zones” (low-risk areas) to reopen was in force, the FSGI discovered 79 regions had violated the guidelines. Local authorities have been herding children to school and forcing parents to resume work, even when it defies the nominal official directives.

The true scale of transmission through workplaces and schools has likely not been recorded due to extremely low levels of testing. Indonesia has so far performed over 2.2 million tests, in a population of over 273 million. In other words, only 8,118 tests per million people have been conducted, placing the country’s testing rate (ranked 162nd) among the lowest in the world. By comparison, Singapore has performed 312,870 tests per million people.

Health experts have expressed growing concern over the country’s low testing capacity, urging authorities to adopt an aggressive testing regime, large-scale contact tracing and isolation for those with confirmed infections. Professor Wiku Adisasmito, chair of the national taskforce, admitted that “Indonesia can only achieve 35.6 percent of the World Health Organisation standard.”

The Sydney Morning Herald recently contacted two leading epidemiologists, Pandu Riono and Dicky Budiman, who both estimated the actual number of cases was now more than one million people. If this were true, Indonesia would rank at number four for infections in the world.

Indonesia’s understaffed and under-equipped healthcare system remains under pressure.

The Indonesian Medical Association (IDI) revealed on Monday that at least 100 doctors have died from the virus. Among them are distinguished and well-known professionals from Airlangga University’s School of Medicine and Soetomo Hospital in Surabaya, East Java.

IDI Chairman Daeng Fiqih said the association was attempting to coordinate with the national taskforce to ensure the availability of protective equipment in hospitals and health facilities so as to prevent more deaths among health workers. He also urged hospitals to create a work schedule based on preventing fatigue which has made workers more vulnerable to the virus.

The current number of active cases, 41,420, is pushing the medical system to its limits. Last week, IDI spokesperson Halik Malik told the Anadolu Agency that deaths among doctors have increased significantly over the last two months. The majority of the victims were between 28 and 39 years old.

Johnson government’s “hostile environment” for immigrants and asylum seekers wins fascist allies

Robert Stevens & Barry Mason

The Conservative government’s “hostile environment” for immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers is leading to a surge in activity by far-right forces.

In response to attempted crossings of the Channel from France to the UK by a few hundred refugees, Boris Johnson’s government has mobilised armed forces as if it were repelling an “invasion.” This involves RAF Atlas A-400M, Shadow R1 and P-8 Poseidon aircraft and Royal Navy vessels.

The government’s filthy xenophobic agenda is amplified by a venal right-wing media. The Daily Mail headlined one piece “Despite drowning of young Sudanese man, the boats from France keep coming,” referring to the tragic death of asylum seeker Abdulfatah Hamdalla last month. It declared, “More than 1,400 migrants have already crossed the Channel in small boats in August alone—a record for a single month—despite there still being 10 days before September.”

In response to Abdulfatah’s death, Home Secretary Priti Patel said she would work with France’s Macron government to strengthen border controls. This week, the Ministry of Defence confirmed that an Army Watchkeeper drone —previously used in Afghanistan—is to fly over the English Channel to monitor migrant boats. The MoD said, “The deployment of Watchkeeper provides further defence support to the Home Office in tackling the increasing number of small boats crossing the English Channel. It will provide a leading surveillance and reconnaissance capability, feeding information back to the Border Force and allowing them to take appropriate action where necessary.”

The Watchkeeper, described as “battle-winning technology,” will be operated in the Channel by the 47th Regiment Royal Artillery.

The deployment of weapons of war against desperate men, women and children crossing the 21-mile stretch is accompanied by a ramping up of deportations of asylum seekers by the Home Office. Official figures show that the Home Office has already spent around £1 million deporting 285 people during the pandemic.

On August 12, a charter flight carrying 14 people destined for France and Germany took off. Those on board had all recently arrived in the UK via the Channel in small boats. This went ahead despite last-minute high court actions and other interventions. Nineteen of the asylum seekers due to be deported, from countries including Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait and Yemen, had their tickets on the flight deferred by the Home Office after intervention by their legal representatives, Duncan Lewis solicitors.

On August 14, an Iranian national who crossed the Channel in a dinghy was deported to the Netherlands. On August 26, the Home Office deported, on a flight to France and Germany, people from Kuwait, Iran, Syria, Iraq, Sudan and Yemen. The following day, the government was prevented from deporting 23 refugees and asylum seekers on a chartered flight to Spain after courts ordered that legal appeals of those on board must be heard.

The Sun on Sunday, owned by billionaire oligarch Rupert Murdoch, editorialised, “It is vital that Priti Patel can protect our borders by deporting illegal immigrants. Delaying tactics by migrant-chasing human rights lawyers are a huge obstacle to this.” It cited a Tory government official who denounced “activist lawyers chasing dinghies to get taxpayers’ cash for keeping illegal immigrants in our country.”

But for social distancing rules stipulating that 20 people can currently be deported on a charter flight, many more would have suffered the same fate. Those being deported face great dangers and in addition their health is being massively imperiled, with the Independent reporting it “understands that there will be no testing for deportees or immigration escorts on departure or arrival, raising concerns that the move could risk spreading COVID-19 between countries.”

So vicious is the “deportation drive” that there have been at least eight suicide attempts in Brook House immigration removal centre near Gatwick Airport. On August 6, a 41-year-old Yemeni asylum seeker, Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah Alhabib, was found dead in a Manchester hotel room where he had been placed by the Home Office. According to a fellow asylum seeker Abdullah was in a state of constant fear of being deported from the UK at any time.

In order to service mass deportations, the notorious Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre has, according to the BBC, “been repurposed to house Channel migrants.” Located near Luton Airport, it can hold up to 400 people in detention.

Even this does not satisfy the media, with the Daily Mail complaining Monday in an article headlined “Deportations are lowest on record” that “The number of illegal immigrants, visa overstayers and foreign criminals booted out of the UK fell by a third last year…”

Joining the government-media offensive is Nigel Farage, the leader of the right-wing xenophobic Brexit Party. He is fronting a series of YouTube videos, centred on opposing “illegal” immigration under the title, “Nigel Farage investigates.” On August 16, he released a video enthusiastically endorsing Patel’s description of the number of migrants being able to cross the channel as “unacceptable” and “shameful” and backed the use the military and her appointment of former Royal Marine, Dan O’Mahoney, as “Clandestine Channel Threat Commander.”

But Farage complains that Patel’s “tough talk” is not backed by the appropriate action. In another video, Farage, who said he was acting on a “tip-off,” visits the Rivenhall hotel in Patel’s Essex constituency of Whitham. The hotel was being used to accommodate asylum seekers and refugees. The hotel had reopened at the beginning of August after being closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. He is filmed entering the hotel and asking for a room, only to be told it is fully booked until the end of September. Farage tells the camera that his “exposure” could be a “massive embarrassment for Priti Patel.” The video ends with Farage calling for the Tories to get “it sorted” and appealing for “whistle blowers” to contact him.

The Home Office responded to Farage’s witch-hunting by announcing that the placement of asylum seekers at the Rivenhall hotel had been “an error and alternative accommodation would be sought.”

Other far-right layers saw their opportunity. Last week members of the fascist organisation Britain First entered hotels in London, Essex, Birmingham and Warrington in which asylum seekers were being housed. In Warrington, the fascists filmed themselves banging on hotel residents’ doors and demanding to know which country they were from. Clearly terrified, some said they were from countries including Iraq and Sudan. The leader of the group, Paul Golding, filmed himself following a migrant, who had left a hotel in Epping, and demanding to know where he was from. He then proceeds to film the hotel’s windows before staff call the police. Similar provocations are being organised by another fascist outfit, For Britain.

Far-right groups are now reportedly planning a mobilisation on September 5 to “take Dover by force” by blocking roads and ferries. This is the same day that an anti-racist group intend to hold a protest in Dover town centre “to stand in solidarity with refugees and migrants who are seeking sanctuary from war, poverty, persecution or climate catastrophe.”

The Socialist Equality Party calls on workers and young people to demand an end to the systematic brutalisation of immigrants and asylum seekers by the government, the immediate closure of all immigration detention centres and the granting of a right of residence, with full citizenship rights and access to welfare, housing, health care and education, to all those imprisoned in them or forced to endure demeaning stays in hotels that are not fit for purpose.

European governments end furlough schemes amid jobs massacre

Richard Tyler

The first response of governments in Europe and around the world to the developing coronavirus pandemic was to protect profits and private wealth. Various forms of grants, interest-free loans, and other schemes funneled trillions from the public purse into the accounts of shareholders and the super-rich.

The scale of this state-funded largesse dwarfed even the bailout of the banks following the 2008 crash.

With coronavirus infections spiraling exponentially, and massive public pressure to protect lives by stopping all non-essential production and other social activities, such as keeping schools open, governments belatedly imposed various forms of lockdown. Millions faced the prospect of losing their paycheques. The spectre of mass protests developing that could rapidly careen out of the control of the usual reformist and trade union channels forced the introduction of various measures to provide some degree of income protection.

Furlough schemes were introduced in most Western European countries, providing state finances to subsidise the payrolls of companies who could no longer operate due to the pandemic.

Nevertheless, while multi-billionaires such as Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk saw their already grotesque wealth increase during the pandemic, workers saw their incomes fall, or disappear altogether. Now, with COVID-19 cases approaching 4 million in Europe and over 207,000 deaths, workers are being driven back into unsafe factories, offices and schools so that the flow of profits can be restored and increased. To that end, furlough schemes are either being phased out or the level of support cut back, to provide an economic imperative to return to work.

It is estimated that over the course of pandemic, the wages of more than 40 million workers in Europe were covered by the state. Without these payments, the employers would undoubtedly have fired millions straight away.

In Britain, the Job Retention Scheme (JRS) has covered up to 10 million workers and provided employers 80 percent of gross wages, to a monthly income limit of £2,500. The government’s homicidal back to work agenda has significantly reduced the number of workers on the furlough scheme down to about 12 percent, according to a survey of businesses by the Office for National Statistics.

There was no compulsion for employers to make up the other 20 percent of wages not paid by the JRS, meaning many low-paid workers placed on furlough saw a significant cut in their monthly pay packet. The level of state subsidy was reduced in August and will fall to 70 percent this month and 60 percent from October, with the scheme ceasing altogether from November 1.

In France, 2 million workers remained on the “partial unemployment” scheme in July, down from a high of around 11 million. The level of support has been reduced from 84 percent of net salary, falling to 60 percent in October, although the duration of the scheme has been extended and employers will pay a larger share.

In Spain, temporary furlough scheme payments known as ERTEs, which cover up to 70 percent of salary, are due to expire in September. Between April and May, 3.4 million Spanish workers were furloughed, reducing to 843,000 in August as the Socialist Party/Podemos government pushed the back-to-work drive.

The scheme, already prolonged twice, is due to expire at the end of September. A tripartite meeting between government officials, unions and employers’ organisations is set for September 4 to discuss prolonging it again. Spain will receive some €21.3 billion from the European Union’s recently established SURE (Support to mitigate Unemployment Risks in an Emergency) towards its “social shield.” There remain some 550,000 Spanish workers left without receiving any benefits or subsidies.

In Italy, the programme paying furloughed workers for up to 18 weeks is to be extended to the end of the year, with a ban on firings. However, the share paid by the employer is set to increase, meaning many companies will simply lay off workers rather than pick up the tab.

In Germany, the system of Kurzarbeit (short-time working) can pay up to 87 percent of net wages. At the height of the lockdown, 10.1 million workers were on furlough, including a third of the workforce in industry. In May, 7 million workers received such payments, with the number falling to 5.6 million in July. The coalition government is extending the programme until the end of 2021.

In the Netherlands, the furlough scheme will expire at the end of September. In Portugal, it ended in most cases in July. Greece has extended its measures to the end of September, but workers only receive a pittance of €534 if they do not work for a month.

Mass unemployment threatens

Governments have paid the wages of private sector employees, with corporations benefiting from the state-funded bailout to the tune of hundreds of billions of euros. The same firms have responded by massively downsizing their workforces. The number of layoffs has steadily risen throughout the course of the pandemic. Employers have been able to use the time to bring forward long-planned restructuring measures that threaten tens of millions of jobs in Europe.

A recent study by the think tank McKinsey Global Institute estimated that 59 million workers in Europe—over a quarter of the entire workforce—are in jobs that are seriously at risk.

“The future of work in Europe” found that the coronavirus crisis had strongly affected Europe’s labour markets, which it says, “may take years for employment to return to its pre-crisis levels.”

According to the authors, the areas most threatened are wholesale and retail (14.6 million), accommodation and food (8.4 million) and a substantial number in manufacturing and construction.

The threat to employment arises not simply from the pandemic, but from longer-term structural changes that have far-reaching consequences. McKinsey lists automation and AI (artificial intelligence) as the two most significant factors that will impact on jobs. The report argues that nearly 70 percent of jobs at risk due to automation are also threatened by COVID-19, which could “accelerate some displacement [a euphemism for mass sackings] once projected to take 10 years.”

Those most likely to lose their employment are low-skilled workers, with 80 percent of jobs at risk (46 million) held by people without a degree.

Christophe Catoir, president in France of recruitment and employment agency Adecco, spoke of a “huge wave of restructuring coming, especially in Germany, France and the United States.” September and October would see an additional 1 million unemployed in France, “not just people on short-term work, but highly skilled people.”

Senior research manager at the EU’s research arm Eurofond, John Hurley, said, “unemployment is going to come home to roost, especially when generous furlough programmes start to ease off.” There is “going to be a shakeout, and it’s going to be fairly ugly.”

The prospect of a jobs massacre was underscored in the comment of Governor of the Bank of England Andrew Bailey, who said it was “unlikely” that many jobs will return after the crisis.

In an August 22 piece, the Economist magazine warned, “Mass unemployment threatens,” in presenting the brutal situation facing British workers. Millions will be thrown onto the dole “as the furlough scheme winds down and the deepest recession for a century hits employment.”

“The official unemployment rate, as of the end of June, was just 3.9%—remarkably low at any time, let alone when GDP had dropped by more than a fifth. America’s June figure was 11.1%. It has stayed low in Britain because of the furlough scheme, under which the government paid 80% of the wages of employees.”

It continued, “Britain produces its unemployment figures with a two-month lag, so nobody knows what the jobless rate is now; but huge redundancies are being announced.”

The magazine cited predictions by the Bank of England that unemployment is set to nearly double to 7.5 percent and around 12 percent by the Office for Budget Responsibility. Other surveys predict unemployment may treble to nearly 15 percent.

It concluded. “Britain will soon have neither a furlough scheme nor generous unemployment benefits. Universal credit [welfare benefit] was increased by just £20 a week at the budget in March. The replacement ratio—the percentage of their previous income that British workers receive from benefits—is among the lowest in the OECD, and lower than in the early 1990s. A rise in unemployment will thus not only be painful for victims, but also suck spending power from the economy.”