US health care workers demand strike action to address understaffing, low pay as pandemic crisis deepens

Alex Johnson

Mass resistance among nurses and health care workers against the criminal policies of hospital conglomerates and governments is erupting across the United States under conditions in which the coronavirus pandemic is spreading uncontrolled in virtually every part of the country.

COVID-19 infections are growing in almost every state, which is leading to a staggering growth in hospitalizations that are threatening to push the nation’s health care infrastructure to a breaking point. The pandemic is now entering into a third major surge, with hospitals in most states reporting more incoming patients with COVID-19 than at any point during the year.

A hospital room [Credit: Pixabay.com]

In Indiana, state officials have reported that health care workers are feeling “exhausted” due to the sheer magnitude of coronavirus patients and are highly at risk of burnout. The state is experiencing an explosive surge in the pandemic’s spread, with the total number of cases increasing by more than 200 percent between September 15 and October 25.

On Monday, Indianapolis Mayor Joe Hogsett implemented new coronavirus restrictions in the state, consisting primarily of caps on the number of patrons for restaurants, bars, night clubs and gyms. Health officials on Thursday have ordered schools in Marion County to move to virtual learning by November 30 and through January 18. These limitations will not be sufficient to slow down the spread of the virus and are proven to be ineffective compared to full lockdowns. Public health experts are warning that the flood of new cases could eclipse Indiana’s “first wave” of the coronavirus and push overwhelmed and fatigued frontline hospital workers over the edge.

Indiana is facing its greatest patient load to date, which is being exacerbated by chronic understaffing. According to the state’s health commissioner, the influx of patients has forced hospitals to delay elective surgeries. The Indiana Healthcare Workforce Reserve reported that it is receiving approximately five requests daily from hospitals in desperate need of staffing assistance.

In Flint, Michigan, over 1,000 nurses at the non-profit McLaren Flint Hospital were preparing to go on strike earlier this month after the nurses union and hospital management failed to reach a settlement for their labor contracts for a month. The conditions at the hospital are grim, with nurses demanding that the hospital address the severe shortage of nursing and ancillary staff. A strike was averted after the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) union rescinded its strike notice following a tentative agreement reached with the hospital.

The agreement reached between the AFSCME and McLaren bears all the markers of a sell-out contract that will not resolve the critical need for adequate staffing and much-needed equipment. A joint statement from the union and McLaren Flint says negotiators agreed on “better nurse-to-patient ratios, commitments to provide PPE [personal protective equipment], a better compensation package and a seat on hospital committees.” The specific details of the contract have not been released, including how nurse staffing would accommodate rising patient levels, the quality of the PPE that will be doled out or the type of “compensation package” that health care workers will receive.

Michigan is lurching toward a catastrophic health crisis consuming the entire state’s hospital system. Health executives from Beaumont, Henry Ford, Spectrum and health systems in the Upper Peninsula identified multiple hospitals where the positivity rate tripled. Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer said at a press conference that the state was in “the worst part of this pandemic to date.” She told reporters that the situation facing the state is what medical experts have been “warning about and dreading since the beginning of the pandemic.”

Nurses at St. Mary Medical Center in the Langhorne Borough of Buck County, Pennsylvania, voted overwhelmingly for strike action after a year of negotiating for their first union contract. The union, the Pennsylvania Association of Staff Nurses and Allied Professionals (PASNAP), represents 775 St. Mary nurses, with 85 percent of them voting for strike authorization in late October. The strike is set to occur on November 17.

According to PASNAP, the nurses at St. Mary have been bargaining with hospital management for their first union contract since last October. Nurses and St. Mary have not able to reach an agreement on minimum staffing levels. Nurses at the hospital have been forced to work shifts where only a handful of nurses are tasked with treating upward of 25 patients. The hospital has remained intransigent in its refusal to concede to the demands of nurses. During the last negotiation session with nurses in October, the hospital’s bargaining team reportedly left “abruptly” an hour and 25 minutes early without coming any closer to an agreement.

St. Mary is a part of the Trinity Health Mid-Atlantic hospital system and is one of Trinity’s most profitable hospitals, with total patient revenue reaching more than $1.6 billion in 2014.

Despite the authorization for a strike, nurses should harbor no illusions in PASNAP, which has made concerted efforts to suppress the emergence of a strike while having nurses work without a full contract for over a year. The union was forced to issue a vote for a strike in response to the rank-and-file opposition of nurses.

Elsewhere in Pennsylvania, the PASNAP at Mercy Fitzgerald Hospital in Delaware County reached a deal with Trinity Health System, averting a planned walkout by 260 nurses to protest unsafe staffing and improved wages. The new contract does little to nothing to ensure safer working conditions or guarantee a long-term pay increase. The union said Thursday that the new contract was designed to increase the number of nurses, but the precise number of additional staff still remains unclear. Moreover, the union agreed to a meager 3 percent annual wage increase for the first three years of the contract, which will barely keep pace with inflation levels.

The state is fast turning into a major hot spot for the spread of the COVID-19 virus. On Thursday, the state recorded 5,488 new confirmed cases within 24 hours, a new daily record. In opposition to warnings from infectious disease experts, Secretary of Health Dr. Rachel Levine said in a virtual call with the media Thursday that there are no current plans for a statewide shutdown despite the staggering rise in infections.

Pennsylvania is emerging as a major epicenter for health care worker opposition. In addition to St. Mary, more than 1,500 nurses represented by PASNAP at Einstein Medical Center and St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children in Philadelphia are expected to strike in the coming weeks due to the insufferable staffing levels at both hospitals. In the union’s latest press release on November 5, nurses are seeking strike action because they feel “pushed to the brink by unsafe staffing that seriously undermines patient safety.”

An additional 1,000 nurses could potentially go on strike if the two hospitals fail to reach an agreement. Frontline nurses at four Philadelphia-area hospitals have taken steps toward a strike to protect their patients and themselves from the surge of COVID-19 infections.

One registered nurse at St. Christopher’s told CNN that staffing was the “number one issue.” In a scathing denunciation of the for-profit health care system, the nurse said: “We’re in an era of health care being run by hedge fund groups. They do not care about where or how long they run as long as they make them profitable. They’re not invested in these hospitals."

Although most nurses at St. Christopher’s have voted to strike, the union has not provided the requisite 10-day strike notice. Maintaining the pro-corporate position of “labor-management collaboration,” the union is still seeking to negotiate with Tower Health, the owner of St. Christopher’s. Since buying the hospital in December of last year, Tower Health has already closed down one of the two floors at St. Christopher’s allotted for less sick patients. The company has also bled staffing dry, which has led to a shortage of staff available for pediatric care.

In Ohio, approximately 125 nurses represented by the Ohio Nurses Association (ONA) at East Liverpool City Hospital are set to begin a three-day strike November 21 over staffing and retention issues. The contract extension that nurses are operating under is set to expire at midnight November 20. The hospital has refused to address poor nurse retention and consequent staffing shortages, which have resulted in many nurses being forced to work overtime. Nurses are also demanding a revision to their wage scale to incentivize staff to work overtime. One unit in the hospital has over 14 position vacancies, which has led to poor working conditions and has worsened treatment quality for patients.

The hospital has attempted to guilt-trip nurses for deciding to strike, blaming them for launching such an action during the health care crisis caused by the pandemic. The strike itself bears the marker of a “Hollywood strike,” which is purposed as a temporary procedure to let nurses blow off steam for a few days and then allow the union to continue negotiating a sellout deal with hospital management. ONA has refused to call attention to the hospital’s acknowledgment that it intends to use strikebreakers to undermine the strike.

Hospital laundry workers staged a rally in lower Manhattan this week demanding their employer, Unitex, provide them with two masks a day and change working conditions to allow at least 6 feet apart between workers. Laundry workers tend to work under conditions that give ample opportunities for viral infections to spread, including cleaning soiled bed linens and gowns.

The Laundry Distribution and Food Services Workers Union has been in contract negotiations with Unitex for months, with the company repeatedly insisting that any future contract would mean a cut to workers’ pensions. Union representatives, however, have made attempts to derail the strike movement growing among workers. Union representative Albert Arroyo told a local news station, “The last thing they want to do is to go on strike, that’s not what they want to do, but the employer is pushing them into a strike.”

In order for health care workers to advance their interests and protect their lives during this pandemic, they must break from the straitjacket imposed on them by the pro-corporate trade unions and establish their own independent organizations, rank-and-file safety committees, in hospitals and medical centers nationwide to coordinate a decisive struggle against the profit-driven capitalist system. Workers must demand that the necessary financial and industrial resources be diverted away from Wall Street and the upper echelons of the corporate oligarchy to instead be used to eradicate the pandemic by fortifying health care infrastructure and closing nonessential production while providing full income to all those unable to work.

Another 709,000 file for unemployment in the US as evictions resume, food lines grow and job cuts continue

Jacob Crosse

For the 34th straight week in a row, over 700,000 people filed for unemployment in the US according to the Department of Labor’s latest report. The 709,000 state claims coupled with an additional 298,154 initial claims for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance brings the weekly total once again to over 1 million new claims.

Nearly 67 million claims have been filed since mid-March as the worst economic crisis to befall the working class in the United States since the Great Depression of the 1930s leaves millions on the brink of destitution. While the 709,000 marks a slight reduction from the previous week’s nearly 755,000 claims, the staggering figure is still three times higher than the pre-pandemic average, exemplifying the ongoing job apocalypse that has decimated workers, particularly in entertainment, hospitality, education and transportation sectors.

People wait for a distribution of food in the Harlem neighborhood of New York, April 18, 2020 [Credit: AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews, File]

Telecommunications giant AT&T, which posted over $42.3 billion in revenue in the third quarter of this year, announced possibly “thousands” of layoffs in North America as part of a “restructure” of its WarnerMedia division this week. A company spokesman declined to state the exact number to the Wall Street Journal, but indicated that over 1,000, and up to 2,000, out of the company’s 25,000 workers will be fired. News of the mass layoffs sent shares of AT&T up nearly 2 percent as the financial oligarchy continues to enrich itself off desperation and death.

Even as layoffs continue, unemployment benefits are expiring for millions. For the week ending Oct. 24, a total of 21,157,111 people were receiving some form of assistance, a drop of roughly 375,000 people from the previous week. While a small number of those dropped off due to finding work, for the majority it is simply a matter of running out of state unemployment benefits which for most is capped at 26 weeks, although several states such as Florida and North Carolina limit the number of regular unemployment payments to a mere 12 weeks.

While the official national unemployment rate is now 6.9 percent—a gross underestimation of the true extent of joblessness—several states are much higher with Hawaii leading the country at 9.9 percent. This is followed by California at 8.9 percent; New Mexico, 8.5 percent; Nevada, 8.2 percent, while Massachusetts is at 7.0 percent. In Los Angeles and Las Vegas, cities heavily reliant on entertainment, travel and dining, the unemployment rate is at 15.1 and 14.8 percent, respectively.

However a large driver in job losses in Nevada is not just due to the lack of tourism. Previewing the austerity measures teachers and students can expect under a Biden administration, massive cuts in education funding were rammed through a Democratic controlled legislature and signed by Democratic governor Steve Sisolak in a special session in July. The $160 million in cuts led to a nearly 20 percent reduction in public education jobs compared to 2019, representing roughly 10,900 fewer teachers and support staff according to the Pew Research Center.

While Nevada has the highest percentage reduction in education jobs out of all US states, nearly every state, except for North Dakota and Utah, recorded year-to-year reductions in public education workers. Pew estimates that overall state and local education employment in the US is down 8.8 percent compared to October the previous year. Florida, West Virginia, New York, Maine and California have all posted double digit percentage reductions in education jobs, with California shedding over 100,000 public education workers compared to the year before.

Officially 25.7 million people are considered “temporarily” laid off, unemployed or have seen a reduction in hours or pay since the pandemic has begun. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that due to job losses and reductions in hours, over 12 million people have lost their employee-based health insurance.

The historic job losses are compounded by the out of control spread of the coronavirus in the US, which is mirrored internationally by capitalist governments that have embraced a genocidal policy of “herd immunity.” Eschewing lockdowns and financial assistance to workers, small businesses and their families, the “back to work” and “back to school” policies championed by Democratic and Republican governors alike have led to over 248,000 deaths in the US while millions of jobs have been lost and will never return.

It has been 15 weeks since unemployed workers last received the $600 enhanced federal unemployment benefit, included as part of the misnamed $2.2 trillion CARES Act Wall Street bailout passed at the end of March. By December 26, two federal programs, the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program and Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation, will expire leaving some 13.6 million workers, an overwhelming majority of whom have already used up their state benefits, with nothing. The end of the year will also see the expiration of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s limited eviction moratorium, although this hasn’t prevented some mayors, like Miami-Dade’s Carlos Gimenez, from resuming evictions, which he announced would begin again today.

In what has become commonplace in the richest country on the planet, food lines continue to snake around blocks in large cities and rural communities alike. The latest Household Pulse survey data collected by the US Census Bureau from October 14–26 found that nearly 11 percent of US adults, 24 million people, reported that their household sometimes or often did not have enough food to eat within the last week, a more than 7 percent increase from the same period last year.

Despite the disastrous situation facing millions of workers and families, through no fault of their own, the US government and the two parties of capital have no plans to pass much needed relief.

“Hopefully we can get past the impasse we’ve had now for four or five months and get serious,” Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said on Thursday. McConnell has been appointed by the Trump White House to lead coronavirus relief negotiations during the lame-duck session before inauguration day on January 20.

On Friday, Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in between hosting a dinner party for new members of Congress, gave another half-hearted call for “negotiations” with Republicans on a stimulus bill using the $2.2 trillion Heroes Act as the baseline for negotiations. The massive bill was shot down by McConnell months ago and has no chance of being passed, even in a Biden administration.

Their opposition to passing meaningful relief is contrasted with the speed the two parties exhibited in passing funding for the US Postal Service prior to the election, revealing the charade of the so-called “negotiation” process. This same duplicity is echoed in Biden’s declarations to “follow the science” in regards to the pandemic, while refusing to support the closure of non-essential factories and schools to control the spread of the coronavirus. In both cases the response of the Democratic Party is guided by the financial concerns of the ruling class, not the health and safety of the population.

The decisive factor in ending the pandemic and reorganizing society on human need, not private profit, remains the independent intervention of the working class fighting for socialism.

Close all nonessential workplaces! Full compensation for workers and small businesses!

Andre Damon

The COVID-19 pandemic in the United States is surging out of control.

The worst-case warnings of public health experts have come true. A quarter million people are now dead. Over the past month, the number of daily new cases has tripled. On October 13, there were 51,000 new cases in the United States. On Friday, there were a staggering 182,000 new cases, up from 162,000 the day before.

In the country’s manufacturing heartland, home to the factories that have become hotbeds of the disease, the situation is even more dire. In Michigan, the number of daily new cases has increased fivefold over the past month.

Medical works operate a testing tent at a COVID-19 mobile testing site, November 11, 2020, in the Brooklyn borough of New York [Credit: AP Photo/John Minchillo]

Throughout the country, hospitals are filling up, and cities are bringing in refrigerated trucks to store bodies. The state of Illinois says that it is less than two weeks from running out of hospital capacity.

At the present rate, there will be a nationwide hospital bed shortage by next month. The availability of medical care is the biggest determinant of survival rates, and this scenario will be accompanied by death on a massive and unprecedented scale. According to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, the death toll could hit 439,000 by March.

In response to this disaster, the world’s leading public health experts have called for emergency lockdowns to stop the spread of the pandemic.

On Wednesday, Dr. Michael Osterholm called for a nationwide shutdown of nonessential production, with full compensation of lost wages. “We could pay for a package right now to cover all of the wages, lost wages for individual workers, for losses to small companies, to medium-sized companies or city, state, county governments,” he said. “If we did that, then we could lock down for four to six weeks.”

Given that Osterholm sits on the incoming Biden administration’s COVID-19 task force, markets immediately dropped in response to his remarks, amid fears on Wall Street that his comments signaled support for lockdowns on the part of the newly elected administration.

The response from the Biden campaign was categorical. Dr. Vivek Murthy, a spokesperson of the Biden campaign’s COVID-19 Task Force, replied, “We’re not in a place where we’re saying, ‘Shut the whole country down.’”

In the face of condemnations from within the incoming administration, Osterholm himself made clear he was speaking only for himself: “Nobody’s going to support it. It’s not going to be supported out of the administration. It’s not going to be supported in Congress.”

The Biden campaign’s rejection of a nationwide lockdown helped fuel a surge in the stock markets, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average closing up by 400 points, within 200 points of an all-time record, amid a surge in deaths and cases.

As for US President Donald Trump, he made clear there would be no lockdowns while he remains president. “I will not go to a lockdown,” Trump said on Friday. “This administration will not go under any circumstances to a lockdown. The cure cannot be worse than the problem itself.”

Osterholm’s demand represents the consensus of all reputable and independent scientists in response to the pandemic. But his remarks have been greeted with universal condemnation from all sections of the political establishment.

In an editorial, the Wall Street Journal denounced “the good doctor’s household remedy.” It declared, “Lockdowns don’t crush the virus. They merely delay its spread until the lockdowns end.”

What filthy liars! These are the same people who just days ago hailed the “Covid Vaccine Cavalry” that would lead to a “mid-2021 pandemic exit.” These sophists simultaneously declare that the pandemic will be over within months and that nothing can be done to save lives in the meantime.

The New York Times has also been waging a furious campaign to demand that schools remain open. It published an editorial Wednesday entitled, “Keep Schools Open, New York.” To justify the demand that schools remain open, the Times published a news article asserting, “Research from around the world has also shown that elementary schools have seen only limited outbreaks.”

In reality, the Times has been the leading advocate for allowing COVID-19 to spread unchecked. In March, Times columnist Thomas Freidman coined the phrase, “The cure can’t be worse than the disease,” to justify prematurely reopening businesses. This was the same phrase invoked by Trump Friday to declare that there will be no more lockdowns.

While millions of people voted against Trump in last week’s election in the hope that a Biden administration would repudiate Trump’s “herd immunity” policies and take urgent measures to stop the pandemic, no faction of the US political establishment supports even the most basic measures to contain the pandemic.

That is why it is necessary for workers to take emergency action. Factories and workplaces are becoming major hotbeds for transmission of the virus, with hundreds of cases tied to individual manufacturing and processing facilities. As the pandemic surges, the factories are becoming death traps.

Workers must establish rank-and-file committees to enforce the shutdown of nonessential production, and to establish safe working conditions at essential facilities.

But the pandemic cannot be stopped on the level of individual plants. A nationwide shutdown, accompanied by a surge of social resources into health care, testing, and contact tracing, is necessary to contain the pandemic. Only in this way can the virus be contained until the arrival of vaccines, and the lives of hundreds of thousands of people saved.

Such lockdowns are untenable unless they are accompanied by full compensation for lost wages for workers and earnings for small businesses. All people economically affected by the pandemic must be made whole.

All those who make a distinction between lives and livelihoods are peddling falsehoods. This trade-off exists if one accepts beforehand the sanctity of the wealth of the financial oligarchy. In the midst of the greatest national emergency of the century, the vast wealth hoarded by the financial elite must be confiscated and put at the disposal of society.

All rents to corporate landlords and mortgages to major banks, together with payments on student loans and credit card debt must be immediately suspended. All workers who have lost wages because they have helped educate and care for children studying from home must be compensated.

The shutdown of substantial portions of nonessential production in March saved countless lives by preventing hospitals from being inundated. But the ruling class did not take this measure of its own accord. It was terrified by mass walkouts at major manufacturing facilities throughout the Midwest, where workers took the initiative to shut down production.

The ruling class has made its position clear: Hundreds of thousands of lives are to be sacrificed for Wall Street before a vaccine arrives. Workers must not allow this mass murder! They must take a stand to defend their lives and those of their coworkers, friends, and families.

The measures necessary to contain the pandemic are incompatible with the capitalist system. If a social order sets itself at war with the preservation of human life, then it is that social order, and not human life, that must be sacrificed.

Black List/Google Assistant Storytelling Fellowship 2020

Application Deadline: 15th January 2021

About the Award: The Black List is pleased to partner with Google Assistant to present the 2020-2021 Black List & Google Assistant Storytelling Fellowship, which will provide financial and creative support in the development and execution of a new original feature film script or pilot that highlights contemporary stories and perspectives from historically underrepresented communities. 

Type: Fellowship

Eligibility: Pitches should be contemporary in nature and avoid violence and/or illegal activity as the premise of the story. Completed scripts can include the natural helpfulness of technology in everyday life, but shouldn’t be focused around technology or from a dystopian view. At the end of the Fellowship, each recipient would provide Google with a copy of their new draft along with a report addressing how the grant has been used to advance their work. 

Selection Process: Opt-ins will be open until midnight on Friday, January 15, 2021. On Monday, January 18, 2021, up to 15 writers will be invited, based on the strength of their scripts as determined by the Black List, to submit a one-page personal statement and professional resume. Those materials will be due on Friday, January 22, 2020. From those submissions, up to five (5) writers will be selected by the Black List and Google Assistant to receive the 2020-2021 Storytelling Fellowship. Fellowship recipients will be notified in February 2021.

Number of Awards: 5

Value of Award: Up to five writers will receive $20,000 each for the purpose of supporting those writers for six months as they work to draft their new feature screenplays and/or teleplays. During the course of those six months, the Black List and Google Assistant will also pair each fellowship recipient with a screenwriting mentor. 

How to Apply: REGISTER

Visit Award Webpage for Details

AI for Development (AI4Dev) Challenge 2020

Application Deadline: 17th November, 2020.

About the Award: AI4Dev is organized by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and Facilitated by NilePreneurs, in partnership with UN Agencies and other local and international organizations.

Eligible Field(s): With this challenge, we are targeting AI integrated solutions for one of the below United Nations Sustainable Development Goals 

• Zero Hunger
• Good Health and Well Being
• Decent Work and Economic Growth
• Industry Innovation and Infrastructure

Type: Contest

Selection Criteria: Wondering if you have what it takes to be a part of the change and become acknowledged by ITU as an emerging innovator in the Arab & African states?

• Problem Relevance: Does your idea relate to at least one the four stated tracks of SDGs and applies to at least the country of submission?
• Solution Urgency: Is your product needed urgently and will impact vulnerable groups and beneficiaries?
• Solution Scalability: Is the solution you are offering scalable with minimal investments needed in new geolocations?
• Team Requirements: Are you a diverse team of not less than 2 with at least 1 female member, and have the business and technical skills needed to move forward with your idea? If you don’t have a team, Click here to team up!
• Use of AI: Is AI the core of your idea and is being used innovatively as an integral part of the solution?
• Data Acquisition: Is the data planned sufficient to sustain your model? Do you know how to acquire your needed data

Number of Awards: 4

Value of Award: If you can innovatively provide a solution for one of our targeted SDGs, your idea will be selected to receive mentorship and training from experts in the field, guidance in developing prototypes and exposure while presenting to industry experts, in the attendance of representatives from UN, and multinational organizations.

Above all of that, 4 winners will be granted prizes valued as follows:

• 1ST Place Winner –  5K USD
• 2ND Place Winner – 3K USD
• 3RD Place Winner  – 2K USD
• 4TH Place Winner  – 2K USD

How to Apply: All it takes to Create an impactful AI solution with ITU is to pass through 5 Milestones:

• 01 Application: You will be requested to provide information about yourself & your team as well as a brief about your Idea.
• 02 Selection: All Applications will be evaluated, and applicants will be shortlisted according to the evaluation metrics.
• 03 Challenge: The applicants will receive different types of technical and business support by experts in the field.
• 04 Judging: Judges will evaluate the applicants’ ideas and prototypes, shortlist them and choose the winners according to criteria.
• 05 Closing Ceremony: The ceremony will take place virtually where the winners will be notified, and the prizes will be announced.

JOIN THE CHALLENGE

• It is important to go through all application requirements in the Award Webpage (see Link below) before applying.

Visit Award Webpage for Details

Adobe Research Fellowship 2021

Application Deadline: 4th December 2020 at 5pm Pacific Time

About the Award: This year, Adobe will be awarding fellowships to graduate students working in the areas of computer graphics, computer vision, human-computer interaction, machine learning, visualization, audio, natural language processing, and programming languages.

Type: Fellowship, Research

Eligibility: In order to be considered for the 2021 Adobe Research Fellowship, students must meet the following criteria:

• Be registered as a full-time graduate student at a university.
• Remain an active, full-time student in a PhD program for the full duration of 2022 or forfeit the award.
• Cannot have a close relative working for Adobe Research.

Selection Criteria: Recipients are selected based on their research (creative, impactful, important, and realistic in scope), how their work would contribute to Adobe, their technical skills (ability to build complex computer programs), and their personal skills (problem-solving ability, communication, leadership, organizational skills, ability to work in teams).

Selection Process: A committee of Adobe researchers will be reviewing all applicants and will choose the recipients at their discretion. Students may be invited for phone interviews for internship opportunities prior to Fellowship winner selection. 

Number of Awards: Not specified

Value of Award: The Adobe Research Fellowship consists of:

• A $10,000 award paid once.
• A Creative Cloud subscription membership for one year.
• May qualify for an opportunity to interview for an internship at Adobe

How to Apply: Applications must include:

• A research overview comprising two pages of text and figures not including citations. At least half a page should highlight how the student’s research could contribute to Adobe.
• Three letters of recommendation from those familiar with the students work. One letter should come from the student’s advisor.
• A CV.
• A transcript of current and previous academic records both undergraduate and graduate.

Click here to begin.

Visit the Program Webpage for Details

The New Elite: Dark Nights Rising

Thomas Klikauer & Nadine Campbell

There is a new elite on the rise. Unlike the old traditional elite, America’s new elite lives no longer from inheritance and breeding but on achievement. The old elite was based on land, property, and factories. The new elite is very different. This elite has gone through a rigorous training regime – all the way up to elite universities in the Ivy League – to arrive at highly selective elite jobs.

The old elite was defined by what Thorstein Veblen called leisure and conspicuous consumption (1899). The new elite is a working elite. It has to work – mostly in elite professions – to earn money. The new elite’s employment is located in a relatively narrow spectrum of occupations separating the new elite from non-elite, i.e. white-collar workers in middle-class employment. The new elite finds employment mainly in three main categories: in management – CEOs (cf. JPMorgan’s CEO Jamie Dimon got $31.5 million in 2020), CFOs, top-management, etc.; in finance (hedge fund managers such as Jim Simons with a net worth of $23.5bn – not million – billion!); and in elite law firms like Wachtell, for example.

Having gone to elite day-care centres, elite kindergartens, elite pre-schools, elite primary schools and elite high-schools, the new elite arrives at elite colleges as a jumping-board to elite postgraduate universities. For example, at Harvard and Yale, more students come from households in the top 1% of the income distribution than from the entire bottom half, writes Daniel Markovits in The Meritocracy Trap. Markovits also sees the new elite as being trapped because of its constant exposure to elite training, prep-schools, private tutors, etc.; the relentlessness of examinations and assessments; and eventually, the harshness of stressful burn-out jobs at the top of the income pyramid.

In sharp contrast to 18^th and 19^th century Satanic Mills run by the old elite, the new elite works in what might be called elite white-collar salt mines creating unbearable levels of workplace stress, anxiety, cocaine use, alcoholism, and rafts of other work-related stressors. These are symptoms and illnesses of high-pressure jobs. In other words, from birth to death, the new elite is trapped in a gold cage.

Semantically, it creates an elite language that denies ordinary workers a language through which they can understand and articulate the pathologies of contemporary capitalism. Linguistically, it cements the increasing exclusion of middle-class and the working class. Perhaps more importantly, workers have become victims without a language of victimhood. This is a significant achievement of corporate capitalism.

Simultaneously, media capitalism adds more gloss on glossy jobs for the new elite while simultaneously justifying joblessness, wage stagnation, and precarious employment in gloomy jobs. Increasingly, it also creates mass unemployment for workers and the middle-class. The increased alienation and exclusion of workers and the middle-class paralleled by the concentration of power in the hands of the new elite means precisely what Supreme Court Judge Louis Brandeis once noted,

we can have a democratic society or

we can have concentrated wealth in the hands of a few.

We cannot have both

The new elite is about concentrating wealth and power in the hands of a few. And those few – the new elite – justify the system for which they have been trained and worked so hard for many long hours. What was once known as standard office hours – 9am-5pm – has muted for the new elite into a work regime that begins at 9am or earlier on one day and runs through to 5am on the next day with email checking during breakfast and late-night conference calls.

Exemplifying such work regimes is Amazon’s turbocharged corporate Darwinism with unreasonably high expectations on its elite staff as well as its underpaid and harshly exploited warehouse workers. It is as Amazon boss Bezos once said, you can work long, hard or smart, but at Amazon.com you can’t choose just two out of three. Implementing his relentless work regime, Amazon runs a continual performance improvement algorithm on its own staff. It is a remote-control super-surveillance panopticon relentlessly scrutinising and always ready to get rid of workers deemed unproductive.

In many areas, the rise of the new elite is a zero-sum game – I win you lose. It clearly identifies the so-called “losers”. Overall, the share of national income of workers has fallen. It came as predicted by those who understand neoliberalism. Shifting wealth away from workers and towards capital during the last decades was paralleled by the rise of neoliberalism, around the middle of the last century. Simultaneously, stock prices which can be roughly seen as capturing the income made by capital have far outstripped the wages of ordinary workers. In other words, neoliberalism and the rise of the new elite have vacuumed wealth upwards. To camouflage this neoliberal propaganda, corporate media invented the infamous trickle-down economics. In short, the rich are made richer, while the poor are made poorer.

Not surprisingly, somewhere in the range of 40 to 50 million Americans suffer from material deprivation. Of course, this has been purposefully engineered through a neoliberal tax policy, for example. In the USA, the top tax rate has fallen by more than half. It has cut taxes for the rich that was over 90% throughout the 1950s and early 1960s. Neoliberal politicians reduced top tax rates to 70% starting when Ronald Reagan assumed the presidency in 1981. Today it is below 40%, and in some cases, it is way below that.

The new elite can hire creative tax lawyers and accountants who know the deliberately installed loopholes so that the new elite can reduce their taxes further. As a consequence, someone like Donald Trump, who Forbes estimates to have $2.5bn – $2,500,000,000 – paid a meagre $750.- in taxes. Trump pays less taxes than those voting for him! As the new elite is made richer and richer, the government takes a smaller and smaller share of their wealth.

Worse, the annual probability that a middle-class family who has suffered a significant financial reversal, defined as a decline in income, drop by more than 50% doubled between 1970 and 2000. For those children born into such families, it does not get better when they enter underprivileged schools. A poor child, in a poor school district, in a poor state, receives about $8,000 worth of schooling annually.

Compared to a middle-class child, in a middle-income school district receives about $12,000. At the same time, a middle-class child in a wealthy school district receives $18,000. A rich child in a wealthy school district receives $27,000. And now to the new elite. The very affluent children attending an elite private school receive $75,000 worth of schooling per year. The poor kid has lost before the race begins. There is no level playing field. Such stark disadvantages are cloaked through rafts of ideologies pretending that everyone has the same opportunities and the same chance in life.

Of course, the inequality in schooling is further exacerbated through private tutoring needed to pass entry exams into elite schools and elite universities. One test preparation tutoring company, for example, catering to elite students in New York City charges $1,500 for a ninety-minute Skype tutoring session. With a father on $15/hr – minimum wage, for example, it takes him 100 hours of work to pay for the 90 minutes training. The poor simply have no chance. The “$1,500-for-90-minute-tutoring” elite child in New York is not alone. Globally the private tutoring market has exceeded $100bn. This is what the new elite spends to get their children into elite schools, elite universities, and eventually into elite professions.

These are very serious numbers – $100bn. The new elite wants, pays for, and gets real education rather than gimmicks, ploys, exam tactics, and cheap trickery. Instead of teaching elite students how to simply take entry exams, they are tutored to become better at what the test measures. They develop superior abilities to read comprehensively, think coherently, process numbers, and use their brains most effectively under exam conditions.

Elite tutoring delivers results. Elite children who are consistently involved in extracurricular tutoring are 70% more likely to go to high-quality colleges compared to children who are only occasionally involved in tutoring. Even more critical is the staggering 400% higher likelihood of getting into elite colleges/universities compared to children who do not engage in such activities. In addition to elite tutoring, the income and achievement gap measured by SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) is staggering. Here are two examples:

1) students from families earning over $200,000 per year – top 5% – score 388 points higher than students from families earning less than $20,000 per year – the bottom 20%; and

2) students whose parents hold graduate degrees (top 10%) score 395 points higher than students whose parents have not completed high school – the bottom 15%.

Education stratifies. It does not unify, nor does it create equality. The new elite simply out-educates the middle-class by more and more, year after year after year. The outcomes of this system systematically favour the new elite in many ways. The top twenty private high schools as ranked by Forbes send 30% of their graduates to the Ivy League, Stanford, and MIT alone. These schools also send two-thirds of their graduates to colleges and universities ranked in the top 25 in their categories.

Of course, the entire system is tilted toward the elite as 37% of all college students now come from households in the top 25% of the income distribution. In short, a college education is no longer for the working class and the poor – if it ever was. The share of all bachelor’s degrees handed out to students from that bottom quarter was just 10% in 2014 – down from a meagre 12% in 1970. There is no school-to-college pipeline for the poor – just a school-to-prison pipeline.

The new elite will not go to prison. Prison is for the poor. Instead, the rich attend the most selective private universities. At elite universities, more freshmen have fathers who are medical doctors than those with fathers that are hourly workers, teachers, clergy, farmers, and soldiers combined. Top universities are increasingly closed off to the middle-class. Across the Ivy League, Chicago, Stanford, MIT, and Duke, more students come from families in the top 1% of the income distribution bracket than from the entire bottom half. The clear-cut “wealth elite university” link is mind-numbing.

Once in an elite university, it gets even better for the already privileged students. Elite colleges spend much more on training their wealthy students than non-elite colleges spend on training for their less rich students. Additionally, for many middle-class students, an undergraduate education is as good as it gets. However, for the new elite, their elite undergraduate degree is merely an intermediate step towards attending another elite university for their postgraduate education. That is, elite universities, for most elite students, only serves as a tool obtain a postgraduate degree needed to gain top employment as a CEO, CFO or hedge fund manager.

At the same time, education becomes removed from a civil, if not, a human right. It is no longer a civic duty of the state — hyper-individualism reigns. Education is individualised and moved onto the individual person. Even companies and corporations ride the trend towards individualisation of education and training as the average US company invests less than 2% of its payroll budget on workplace training.

Moving workplace training for elite jobs out of the workplace and into elite universities alters the socioeconomic composition of people receiving such training. Training and education become a factor for the elite rather than the working class and increasing less for the middle-class. Increasingly the focus is on training rather than education. The difference between training and education is that you can train a dog, but you cannot educate a dog. It moves elite education towards the wealthy.

Much of this creates a cycle in which the new elite reproduces itself by sending their children to the elite school, colleges, and universities that they themselves have attended. Elite students attending elite professional schools (business and law schools, etc.) received their BAs at elite colleges. Their pipeline is somewhat different from the poor’s school-to-prison pipeline.

These self-reproducing elite’s make up the engine that sustains the privileged. It excludes poor and middle-class children from future income and status. The system no longer promotes equality of social and economic opportunity. As training and education become exclusive rather than inclusive, elite children systematically outperform middle-class children. They outperform not just the poor, but the middle class and they do so at each stage of their education.

In short, poor and middle-class students face more social, educational, and financial obstacles to graduate from college than students from elite families don’t. Such an unfair education system means there are no longer enough high-achieving high school graduates from outside the elite to make a positive impact at elite colleges. The elite has effectively insulated itself. Non-elite students can no longer compete with the thousands of hours and millions of dollars invested in elite children by their elite parents.

Increasingly, monetary wealth and educational achievement work together. In that way, the wealthy and highest performing students are now overwhelmingly one and the same. Unlike the traditional elite’s, land, factories, and inheritance, for the new elite, education assumes the role breeding played in aristocratic regimes. Now, there is a new monopoly that elite families exercise over pathways into income and status. As any monopoly demands, their monopoly increasing excludes others – poor and middle-class children are barred from elite training and entry into high-paying work.

With their educational monopoly in place, the new elite can flaunt the ideology of “equal opportunity” because it no longer exists. Equal opportunity has become a mere ideology that sustains the elite. With next to no chance in rigorous entrance examinations, the middle-class is increasingly excluded. All the while, it is told there is an equal opportunity, and hard work will pay off. Yet, these entry examinations systematically favour well-prepared candidates. The majority of admitted students now engage in so-called “test preparation services” to help improve their scores. It comes at a price the middle-class hardly, and the poor cannot afford.

Today’s elite children are exposed to a rather, relentless, merciless, and harsh system. They diligently study and doggedly train. They are under constant stress to measure up to the next test, the next admission competition, the next examination, and the next assessment. All of these conditions prepare the elite to work in highly competitive employment in adulthood. Before they know it, they have become Excellent Sheep.

Since the seminal book Schooling in Capitalist America, things have gotten worse. Today, the new elite’s children – just as working-class and middle-class children at lower levels – are conditioned to accept the domination of capital “before” even entering the workforce. Today, the well-conditioned acceptance of hierarchy, domination, and authority applies to elite children as well.

Much of this has rather dire consequences for the poor and the middle-class. Middle-class jobs are increasingly eliminated. Simultaneously, jobs for the poor are made even worse. At work, managerial control is smoothed and consistently move onto technology. The adjacent ideology makes these technologies appear neutral, and if possible, even natural.

Meanwhile, middle-level managers are successively eliminated. The new elite no longer has any use for them. Technological advances in computing, the Internet, and algorithms – algorithmic management – in measuring employees, surveillance, communication, and data analysis gives elite managers immense powers of scrutiny and command over workers. Such algorithms are indeed Weapons of Math Destruction.

Next to Amazon, one of the best-known examples using algorithms is Uber. Uber’s use of algorithms furnishes the über-surveillance power of a relatively small elite group of top managers. It enables them to watch Uber’s thousands of employees directly. At Uber, algorithm coordinates the work of hundreds of thousands of drivers. Most of these drivers have never met a single Uber middle manager.

Corporations such as Uber no longer require vast sections of middle management to manage the link between business strategies set by top management and the implementation of such a strategy that is assigned to workers. In the very near future, the corporate restructuring will eliminate or at least shrink middle-management substantially. It will diminish unnecessary, unwarranted, and often rather incompetent white-collar middle managers. With that layers of managers reporting to managers will be gone.

Instead of this, elite consulting firms will tell elite managers in large corporations how to use algorithmic management. These elite managers no longer seek to automate line workers away, but how to automate the middle manager’s job away. There is a rather massive change already on the way. It consciously plans and operationalises a massive corporate clean-out of middle managers.

This is made possible because of new managerial technologies capable of culling middle-management. It is merely a surplus that is no longer required. It is made redundant by new technologies. This has been the case ever since the birth of capitalism. What is new is that it is set to hit middle-management and inevitably, the middle-class.

Finally, corporate consulting firms, like McKinsey Global Institute, have already predicted a dramatic shift away from middle-management. It predicted that nearly one-third of the US workforce will be displaced through automation and algorithms by the year 2030. These are not manual production workers. Significantly, it will be middle-management and mid-skilled jobs that are lost.

It is the new elite that is driving this process. This is a self-reproducing elite based on elite training at elite universities and business schools ready to find employment in elite corporations. According to Daniel Markovits, this new elite operates with the motto, we are all in this together, but some pigs are smarter than other pigs and deserve more money.

How much exploitation does Narendra Modi’s popularity cost?

Annesha Mukherjee & Satyaki Dasgupta

The popularity of Prime Minister Narendra Modi saw a rise according to India Today’s ‘Mood of the Nation’ poll. Similar results were also observed in Gaon Connection-Lok Niti-CSDS survey. Some of the economic policies that his popular government has introduced since the advent of COVID-19 include three Bills on agricultural market reforms, three labour code bills, and auctioning off coal mines for commercial mining.

These policies are in confirmation with the mainstream economic theories which discourage government intervention because it leads to inefficiency in the market. These theories advocate for flexible labour laws which are claimed to encourage private investment, employment opportunities and economic growth. Along similar lines, the India INC has supported the changes in labour laws because they enable employers to operate more ‘freely’. Moving towards free markets for agricultural produce by doing away with any kind of government intervention, is supposed to ensure greater prosperity for the Indian farmers. Additionally, privatisation of coal mines is expected to facilitate the Ease of Doing Business in India.

To be able to appreciate the full impact of these policies, it is imperative to understand the workings of the prevalent system. This system has in its heart the profit-maximising motive of big industrialists. In the labour market of our economy, on one hand there are workers who have only their labour to sell, and on the other hand are these big industrialists who require this labour for their production process. However, the latter also hold private ownership of factories, machineries, and other such factors of production, making them capital-owners and allowing them a higher bargaining power than the workers. The profit-maximising motive of capitalists can be served by minimising the wages to be paid to workers over which they have direct control, unlike other costs of production like rents which are often determined exogenously. Any technological progresses made increases the productivity of the workers. But, without a corresponding increase in workers; wages, any increase in productivity and hence, profits, is accrued only to the capitalists. Thus, in such a system, it is always in the interests of capitalists to keep workers’ compensations at a minimum, thereby exploiting them, because that necessarily translates into higher profits. Some properties of such a system at work can be observed in the phenomena of increase income inequality, increase in temporary contractual employment and lower wage shares.

When we view the functioning of our economy through this lens, we understand that the policies advocated by conventional economic theories essentially gives the right to capitalists to maximise their profits through greater exploitation of workers. With the introduction of new agricultural, labour and mining policies, the government is merely acting as a facilitator in this process.

Impact on Coal Miners and Tribals

One of the new government policies is the auctioning off of forty coal mining blocks in Eastern and Central India, which were ‘off limits’ till now. Workers in coal mines generally work in very harsh, unsafe and precarious conditions. On owning the coal mines, capitalists will have no incentive to provide safety precautions or even higher compensations to the workers. In fact, they might even employ women and children at extremely low wages. In the absence of government intervention and in a bid to reduce their costs, capitalists will only seek to maximise their profits through greater exploitation of coal miners.

With the aim of expanding their production process, capitalists might acquire the neighbouring coal-rich areas which are typically inhabited by tribals, thereby dispossessing them of their land and livelihood. Although the process of dispossessing tribals from their land is not a new phenomenon, the government was earlier responsible for rehabilitating them. However, with the government relieving itself of its responsibilities, capitalists will have no such incentive since they are not accountable to people. Consequently, being dispossessed from their lands and having only their labour to sell, the tribals will join the ranks of the swelling pool of unemployed labour force. This is expected to push down wages. The entire process of dispossessing tribals will only serve to aggravate their impoverishment.

Thus, with the auctioning off of coal mines, the rights of the tribals over their lands stands unacknowledged. The inhabitants now stand at the risk of being dispossessed in the name of development, which is now supposed to be furthered by capitalists. The introduction of this policy shows that the government is merely acting as a lapdog of the capitalists, and any further investments made in these coal mines necessitates the impoverishment of the workers in the mines, and of the tribals who have been inhabiting these lands till now.

Impact on Farmers

One of the many criticisms of the newly introduced Farm Bills is the apprehension of a corporate take-over of agricultural produce. These corporates are effectively the big capitalists we have been referring to in our article till now. It is being argued that these policies will phase out the Minimum Support Price (MSP) provided to farmers, which would earlier be regulated by the government. However, with the possible doing away of the MSP, hoarding of farm produce by big capitalists, and no regulation of essential food prices, the prices of agriculture produce in general, and of essential food in particular, will be now dictated entirely by these capitalists. Consequently, an overall increase in the prices is expected, thereby leading to a fall in real wages.

Additionally, with the phasing away of MSP and the mandi system, there will be no administering of the prices received by famers for their produce. As a result, this will have a considerable impact on the small and marginal farmers who constitute 75 percent of the farmers in India. It will become increasingly difficult for them to meet their costs of production due to lower prices received for their produce. In effect, they might be compelled to sell their lands. Some of them might end up as casual workers in the agricultural sector, while others might give up farming altogether. Either way, once they sell their lands, they will be joining the burgeoning unemployed labour force, because similar to the case of dispossessed tribals, they too will have only their labour to sell.

Thus, introduction of the new Farm Bills is yet another government policy which is heavily skewed towards the big capitalists, with increasing impoverishment of the famers – through their loss of livelihood and by reducing them to penury.

Impact on workers

The three new labour bills have been introduced with the motivation of facilitating the Ease of Doing Business in India. One essential way in which this is being done is by easing the procedure for the capitalists to hire and fire their workers. This is primarily paving the way for greater contractualisation of the workforce. The temporary nature of contracts smoothens the process of firing workers, while the provision of minimum or no social security benefits encourages capitalists to hire workers. Contractualisation is thus one of the many ways of making labour laws flexible, which is often claimed to encourage investments, employment and hence, economic growth. But what is often ignored in the process is how it increases the vulnerability of the workers due to no income or job security. In fact, the assumption that workers will be hired elsewhere immediately after being fired from a job or after the termination of their contract, is presumptuous in the context of the Indian economy which has been witnessing jobless growth for quite some time now.

By reducing the cost of hiring workers, increasing contractualisation leads to falling wage share of workers and consistently increasing profit share of the capitalists. Moreover, the proposals of increasing working hours made by some states shows that the achievements of decades of workers’ struggle are being attacked directly. Along with contractualisation, the requirement of increased percentage of employees to form trade unions in workplaces, will further reduce the bargaining power of the working class as a whole. This will aggravate the vulnerability and docility of workers, since they will be increasingly dispensable to the whims and fancies of capital.

Thus, we can see the socio-economic impact of capitalism as two sides of the same coin. On one side there is the constant promotion of ‘Ease of Doing Business’ by hankering for new investments through tax incentives and other supply-side policies. On the other side, there is the associated vulnerability, docility and exploitation of the working class. Therefore, anybody who sympathises with the recent migrant crisis, cannot be in favour of any pro-capitalist policies. When the government acts as a broker for capitalists with the introduction of new policies in crucial sectors of our economy, it may help the Prime Minister’s popularity but it also legitimises the exploitation of workers, who are the most indispensable part of the society.