India’s unprecedented economic contraction deepens mass social misery

Kranti Kumara

The Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government’s incompetent and chaotic response to the COVID-19 pandemic has created an unmitigated socio-economic and medical disaster, with tens of millions of workers and their families forced to go hungry due to job and income losses and the pandemic raging across the country out of control.

In late March, the autocratic Modi government announced, without any forewarning, a hastily improvised coronavirus lockdown. As businesses shut down, tens of millions of wage-workers—both day-labourers and those earning regular salaries in the formal sector—lost their jobs. With the Indian economy contracting by an unprecedented 23.9 percent in the April-June quarter, the unemployment rate shot above 20 percent.

Impoverished workers employed under the MNREGA program. (Photo Credit; Centre of Indian Trade Unions)

Unaccompanied by any serious mobilization of resources to provide systematic coronavirus testing, contact tracing and vastly improve the country’s ramshackle public health system, the lockdown utterly failed to halt the spread of the deadly pandemic. The number of confirmed COVID-19 cases has risen by a multiple of 47, since the BJP central government, supported by opposition-led state governments, abandoned virtually all lockdown measures at the end of May and, in the name of reviving the economy, effectively embraced a policy of “herd immunity”—letting the virus run rife through the population. As of yesterday, India had almost 9 million confirmed cases, second only to the US, and an undercounted official death toll of over 131,000.

The government’s calamitous response to the pandemic and callous, class indifference to the fate of working people was highlighted first and foremost by the suffering inflicted upon the impoverished migrant workers. As a result of the lockdown, tens of millions of internal migrant workers got stranded in cities all over the country, having lost their daily wages and in many cases their housing. Left by the authorities to fend for themselves without income or food, millions of migrant workers walked hundreds of kilometers to reach their home villages. In the process, they inadvertently helped spread the virus from urban to rural India.

With no jobs available in their villages, these workers have been compelled to compete for the menial jobs, such as ditch-digging, made available under the government’s Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee program (MNREGA). MNREGA formally guarantees one member of every rural family 100 days of manual work per year at a sub-minimum wage rate that varies, depending on the state, from to 202 to 284 rupees per day (roughly US $2.70-$3.80). Despite the steep increase in demand for these jobs, the Modi government has cut the MNREGA budget by 13 percent this fiscal year.

In the current (April 2020 to March 2021) fiscal year, India’s real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is expected to fall by double digits, an unprecedented contraction. The National Council for Applied Economic Research (NCAER), India’s oldest independent economic policy research institute, estimates that the country’s GDP will shrink by a massive 12.6 percent, while Moody’s in an updated forecast issued yesterday estimates a contraction of from 10.6 to 10.8 percent.

India’s April-June GDP contraction of 23.9 percent was far and away the biggest among the world’s twenty largest economies. Economic activity rebounded somewhat in the second quarter. On a year-to-year basis, economic analysts are forecasting a second quarter decline in the order of 8.6 to 13 percent. But the recovery has slowed in recent weeks, with one prominent Indian economic think-tank speaking of “recovery fatigue.”

Even prior to the pandemic, the Indian economy was facing a serious crisis with a steep fall in the economic growth rate to a mere 4.2 percent in the 2019-2020 fiscal year, and a massive growth of “non-performing” corporate debt that threatens to cripple the country’s banks. Just a few years ago, an 8 percent economic growth rate was considered the bare minimum needed to absorb the 1 million new entrants into the job market every month and avoid social unrest.

As would be expected, the current historic contraction has impacted every sphere of economic activity. This has led to a massive growth in joblessness—among day-labourers, workers in large manufacturing enterprises, and also professionals such as software engineers, teachers and accountants—further depressing consumer demand.

A recent article in the London-based Financial Times, “Suicides rise after virus puts squeeze on India’s middle class,” noted that despite their “earning top degrees in business administration or engineering, many graduates have been forced to shelve their aspirations and take jobs working as drivers for Uber or food delivery companies.”

The current slump has intensified a long-term decline in India’s labour-force participation rate that dates back to the beginning of the 21st Century. According to the Center for Monitoring the Indian Economy (CMIE), a prominent private business information company, the Employment Rate in October was a mere 37.6 percent. Employment Rate is defined as the percentage of the working age population that partook in some regular economic activity.

In India, about 67 percent of the population, or about 900 million people, are estimated to be between the ages of 15 and 64. An Employment Rate of only 37.6 percent implies that little more than a third of the working-age population is engaged in some regular economic activity, whether as a street vendor, factory worker, day-labourer, salaried employee or as a small business owner. Even if one excludes students, housewives and retirees, this means that there are hundreds of millions who are not “employed,” and thus entirely dependent on their families or must eke out a miserable existence through sporadic and irregular economic activity. Even among the so-called employed, the overwhelming majority are employed in the unregulated “informal sector,” enduring brutal working conditions, low pay and zero benefits.

Salaried jobs, which include occupations such as security guards, have disappeared at an alarming rate over the past six months. CMIE estimates that salaried jobs have fallen from 86 million to 65 million, a job loss of 21 million.

The situation in rural areas, with many migrant daily-wage workers stuck in their villages, is nothing less than a social calamity. Given that over 800-900 million persons in India survive on less than $2.50 per day, the current economic devastation has pushed hundreds of millions to the brink of starvation.

This shocking reality was underscored by a study titled “Affordability of nutritious diets in rural India,” published in the Food Policy journal in October. According to the authors, in rural areas, where the majority of Indians still live, close to 75 percent of the population would not be able to afford the cheapest possible nutritious diet even if they spent all of their earnings on food.

Although these findings are based upon household survey data of the National Sample Survey Organization (NSSO) from 2001-2011, it would be no exaggeration to state that the current reality is worse than a decade ago. Despite this, the Indian government claims that country has achieved “food security.”

Due to a collapse in economic activity, both national and state government finances are in absolute shambles. Former Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Governor C. Rangarajan has estimated that the combined fiscal deficit of the state and national governments this year will be a historic high of 14 per cent of the GDP.

Because of the precariousness of Indian government finances, Moody’s Investor Services has downgraded the country’s sovereign credit rating to one level above junk with a negative outlook. This mirrors similar ratings by the Fitch and Standard and Poor’s credit rating agencies.

The BJP government’s “answer” to the economic crisis has been to intensify the Indian ruling elite’s class war assault. To attract investment, it has accelerated a privatization drive; pushed through legislation aimed at promoting precarious contract-labour and that guts restrictions on layoffs and plant closures in the “formal sector; and adopted a farm “reform” that boosts agri-business at the expense of small farmers.

The Modi government has also doubled-down on the Indian ruling class’ military-strategic partnership with US imperialism, using the current border conflict with China as both a means to justify integrating India ever more fully into Washington’s anti-China war drive and to deflect public anger over the social crisis. With Washington’s explicit support, India is trying to attract American companies under pressure to “decouple” from China to make India an alternate production-chain hub.

All of this will invariably mean a further boost in military expenditures by New Delhi, whose $70 billion military budget is already the world’s third largest, and further draconian cuts to social expenditure.

A head-on clash between Modi, his pro-big business, Hindu supremacist BJP government and India’s increasingly rebellious working class is fast developing. Albeit with the aim of diverting the growing social anger behind the opposition Congress Party and other right-wing forces, India’s unions have felt compelled to call a one-day nationwide general strike for Thursday, Nov. 26.

US jobless claims surge

Jacob Crosse

On Thursday, the US Department of Labor jobless claims report revealed that another 742,000 people filed first time unemployment claims, an increase of over 30,000 from the previous week and the highest number in a month. The increase in filings upends claims of an imminent economic “recovery” and underscores the urgent need for indefinite financial relief for jobless workers, small business owners and their families.

The figures are based on the week ending November 14, just before several states such as Michigan, California, Oregon, Illinois and New Mexico began implementing stay-at-home or shelter-in-place orders to lessen the out-of-control spread of COVID-19, which has risen dramatically in the last two weeks in the US from roughly 90,000 daily cases to over 160,000 cases, according to data compiled by Worldometers. Over 255,000 have died in the US due to COVID-19 as of this writing.

People wait to speak with representatives from the Oklahoma Employment Security Commission about unemployment claims Thursday, July 9, 2020. (AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki)

The haphazard, chaotic and criminally delayed lockdown measures taken by some governors and mayors, which do not include the shutting down of “superspreader” factories and schools in response to overwhelmed hospital systems, have not been accompanied by an infusion of stimulus, leaving locked down workers and small business owners to fend for themselves.

Thursday’s report showed that another 233,000 workers were added to the Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC) program, bringing the total to 4.38 million, while claims for the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) program increased by 23,863 last week, raising the total to 320,234. The 233,000 added last week just to the PEUC program is about 8,000 more total claims compared to a typical week prior to the pandemic.

Between state unemployment and federal claims, the DOL (Department of Labor) has recorded 35 straight weeks of over 1 million jobless claims, an unprecedented number that has no historical comparison since tracking began. In addition to gig workers such as DoorDash, Uber and Lyft drivers, “independent contractors” and construction workers have seen employment opportunities evaporate as entire industries went into lockdown in March and never recovered.

An analysis of employment data by the Associated General Contractors of America found that only eight states, plus Washington D.C. had returned to or exceeded pre-coronavirus employment levels. The eight small states that saw mild recovery were South Dakota, Utah, Wyoming, Virginia, Kentucky, Missouri, Idaho and Maine. Only Virginia added more than 4,000 jobs while Idaho and Maine combined accounted for 300.

Meanwhile, California, with a significantly larger workforce, has seen a decline of over 6 percent in jobs, leading to 54,900 fewer workers employed from February through September compared to last year. This is followed by Texas, which reported 51,900 fewer construction jobs available, a 6.8 percent year-to-year decline, and New York reporting an 11 percent decrease.

Roughly 20.3 million people are still receiving some form of unemployment either through the state or federal pandemic unemployment programs that were created as part of the CARES Act at the end of March. Both of the programs are set to expire on December 26, leaving an estimated 12 million workers with nothing.

The coming “benefits cliff” is exacerbating mental health stressors for millions of people. “I’m in panic mode now, and depression is starting to set in because I don’t know how we’re going to pay the oil bill,” Laurie Jones, a laid off worker, told the Maine Beacon. “When I lose unemployment, I don’t know how we’re going to keep the lights on.”

The report revealed that continuing claims, that is people who had previously filed and were receiving funds, declined by 429,000 to roughly 6.4 million, the lowest since the pandemic began. This isn’t to say that 429,000 people got a job; instead, for many it is likely their unemployment eligibility has run out and they have simply dropped off.

For those who are still receiving benefits, the meager funds provided are not enough to keep pace with daily expenses. “I’m living on $216 a week,” said Jones. “It sucks.”

Data from the Federal Reserve shows that over 10 million fewer people are employed compared to the beginning of this year, a drop from a February high of 153 million to 142 million as of October 2020. The evaporation of millions of jobs and the deaths of thousands of people hasn’t been enough to satiate the voracious appetites of Wall Street investors and large corporations as layoffs continue to be announced.

On Wednesday, New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority CEO Pat Foye released a “doomsday” budget that aims to slash service by 40 to 50 percent, increase fares and tolls, and eliminate 9,367 jobs, pending federal intervention. The changes are slated to go into effect as early as May and would cut the MTA workforce by about 13 percent.

“Firing 9,000 workers and slashing 40 percent of subway and bus service would cost millions of New Yorkers several hours of commuting time each week and devastate the city for decades to come,” said Betsy Plum, executive director of the Riders Alliance.

The MTA is seeking $12 billion in funding this year, while the American Public Transportation Association, a lobbying and advocacy group dominated by the transit agencies themselves, estimates that without $32 billion in emergency funding, six in 10 public transit systems in the US will see significant service reductions and layoffs in the coming months.

In Michigan, where roughly 952,000 people are currently collecting some form of unemployment compensation, an estimated 250,000 people could be laid off in the hospitality sector in the coming months, Michigan Restaurant and Lodging Association president and CEO Justin Winslow told MLive.

In Lexington, Kentucky document-management company Lexmark, which employs 2,000 workers in the US, including 1,400 in Lexington alone, announced nationwide layoffs would begin on Wednesday. Despite workers accepting a pay freeze in March to stave off the unspecified number of layoffs, the company wrote it was proceeding with “taking this difficult step to ensure that Lexmark is positioned for long-term success.”

Even Major League Baseball champions the Los Angeles Dodgers, who signed a 25-year $8.35 billion television deal with SportsNet LA in January 2013 to help catapult the organization to a Forbes valuation of $3.4 billion this past year, announced layoffs on Thursday. Refusing to state how many workers would now be jobless, the organization cited “widespread economic devastation caused by the coronavirus,” in justifying the layoffs.

In addition to the Dodgers, the Oakland A’s announced in October that it would lay off 20 percent of their employees. The San Francisco Giants and Boston Red Sox also announced they would be laying off 10 percent of their workforce, while the Chicago Cubs eliminated 60 jobs in their business department this past September. Earlier reports also indicate that the Houston Astros and Baltimore Orioles have implemented an unspecified number of layoffs.

Despite ongoing layoffs and record-setting unemployment claims, which have led to an additional 8 million people falling into poverty since May according to researchers at Columbia University, “negotiations” on another relief bill to extend unemployment benefits and eviction protections continue to prove fruitless, as intended.

Nearly four months after the $600-a-week federal unemployment enhancement expired, with over 54 million in the US facing food insecurity, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer announced on Thursday that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have “agreed to sit down and the staffs are going to sit down today or tomorrow to try to begin to see if we can get a real good Covid relief bill.”

When it comes to interfering with Wall Street profits, President-elect Joe Biden revealed again that his and the Democratic party’s commitment to science was merely a “hypothetical.” During a Thursday question-and-answer session with reporters, Biden dismissed any talk of a nationwide lockdown, despite nearly 2,000 people succumbing to the virus on November 18, with cases rising in all 50 states.

“It was a hypothetical question,” Biden angrily said in response to a reporter mentioning the concept of a nationwide lockdown. “I am not going to shut down the country, period.”

Biden added, “I’ll say it again: No national shutdown. … there’s no circumstance which I can see that would require a total national shutdown. I think that would be counterproductive.”

Increased use of food banks by middle-income families in UK as food poverty surges

Dennis Moore

Charities have identified an increase in the number of middle-income families being forced to use food banks.

These families are defined as the “new hungry” and constitute a growing layer of those who had previously had decent incomes and led a comfortable lifestyle. Now they are increasingly having to claim welfare benefits and use food banks to be able to feed themselves and their families.

The Feeding Britain network, a charity working with food banks, reports that its members have started providing food to middle-income families, often with mortgages and cars. They were typically business owners and the self-employed, thrown into financial crisis because they had lost their jobs during the pandemic and not been picked up by the benefit system.

Footprints in the Community food bank in northern England receives recent donation (Image credit: Twitter/Footprints_UK)

“We now see families at food banks who before the pandemic were able to pay their bills and still be comfortable enough to put food on the table. For the first time in many years that is no longer the case,” said the charity’s national director, Andrew Forsey.

The wider use of food banks by what would have only recently been considered a more affluent layer is a growing trend and an indicator of how the pandemic has created a far-reaching cost of living crisis.

Prior to the pandemic, the majority of those using food banks were typically destitute, without financial means, awaiting welfare benefit payments or low-paid workers not earning enough to feed themselves or their families.

Food banks have been handing out more and more food parcels throughout the pandemic as increasing numbers of families and individuals struggle to survive. Feeding Britain’s network of charities reported a staggering increase in demand from those needing food aid between March and September. This is expected to get a lot worse during the current lockdown.

The Beaumont Leys Food bank in Leicester went from providing food to 50 families to 500 families a week as the pandemic took hold in March. The NewStarts food bank in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire reported that demand had risen by 700 percent over the same period. Bonny Downs community association in East Ham, London handed out food to 4,000 people between April and June and there were lengthy queues forming an hour before the food bank opened.

Many of those who have lost their jobs are having to claim Universal Credit (UC) for the first time and are confronting the bitter reality that what they receive is not enough to live on. The Tory government increased UC by a meagre £20 a week following the onset of the pandemic, taking the total amount for an individual’s living expenses from just £73 to the still paltry £93 a week.

Jen Coleman from Black Country Food Bank said, “The £20 increase [in Universal Credit] has not meant that those in poverty have suddenly become better off, it has meant that they have been able to survive.”

While the UC increase was miniscule, millions will be thrown into yet deeper poverty if the government press ahead with their proposal to remove the £20 a week top-up, planned for April 2021.

For millions of workers and young people, the preceding decade was characterised by the imposition of austerity and cuts to essential services, driving a rise in the number of families depending on food banks to feed themselves. In the last five years, demand for emergency food has increased and since the onset of the pandemic the number of those being forced to use food banks has shot up—with half of those using food banks doing so for the first time.

Food charities reported that the first full month of lockdown in April this year was their busiest ever, with Britain’s biggest food bank network, the Trussell Trust, reporting that in the last two weeks of March demand for food parcels increased by 81 percent compared to the same period in 2019. It gave out 89 percent more food parcels in April than the same time last year, with the number of families requiring help doubling.

In the first six months to September, a record 1.2 million emergency parcels were handed out by the Trussell Trust. The number of food parcels the organisation handed out to children rose by 122 percent, with 470,000 parcels going to them.

In May, the Food Foundation reported that over 5 million people in the UK were living in households with children who had experienced food insecurity during the lockdown. The government and the Labour Party had to be forced by a popular campaign launched by England footballer Marcus Rashford to extend its free school meals programme to include the six-week summer holidays.

Data from the Trussell Trust, which runs 1,300 food banks, showed that greater demand was due to people moving from a wage income to benefits and people working for low wages. Low income, benefit delays and sickness or ill health were the three main reasons people were being referred to a Trussell Trust food bank, according to its latest report.

In 2017, 1.5 million people experienced destitution and were not able to afford essentials. Modelling carried out by Edinburgh’s Heriot-Watt University forecast that the economic impact of the pandemic in 2020/21 will lead to 670,000 additional people being pushed into destitution for the remaining part of 2020—a consequence of losing jobs, income and businesses.

This will translate into an additional 300,000 emergency food parcels having to be distributed in the last quarter of 2020, an increase of 60 percent on the same time last year.

Many of those who have been furloughed throughout the pandemic have lost 20 percent of their income as the scheme only covers 80 percent of wages. This disproportionately affects the low-paid who were typically already living a hand-to-mouth existence when working full-time. In the coming winter months, many of these families face the stark choice between paying for heating or putting food on the table.

The government’s main concern during the pandemic was to protect the interests of big business and finance, handing billions to the banks and the corporations, implementing a “herd immunity” policy and providing pitiful to non-existent financial support to furloughed workers and those who lost their jobs. The effect of this policy was to starve especially low-paid workers back into unsafe workplaces.

The burden of feeding the increasing numbers of people unable to find work has meanwhile been placed at the foot of overstretched food banks and charities, now feeling the strain of growing demand as more and more people end up hungry.

Toyota workers in India continue strike, defy state back-to-work order

Shibu Vavara & Arun Kumar

Over 3,000 workers at two Toyota Kirloskar Motor Private Limited (TKM)-owned car assembly plants in Bidadi, India, 50 kms from Bengaluru (formerly Bangalore), are continuing their strike in defiance of a back-to-work order issued by the Karnataka state government on Wednesday. Striking workers have been locked out since November 10 in an attempt to break a sit-in-strike launched by workers the previous day against the suspension of a union leader.

Three days after locking out the workers, Toyota escalated its witch hunt, suspending another 39 workers for supposed “acts of misconduct,” even though the facility has been closed. Workers have refused to return to work until management lifts the suspension of all 40 workers.

Locked out striking Toyota workers outside of plant

On Tuesday, Karnataka Deputy Chief Minister C. N. Ashwath Narayan, a member of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu-chauvinist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), announced his decision to “prohibit” the ongoing strike and end the lockout following a meeting with officials from the company, the TKM Employees Union (TKMEU) and the state government. Making it clear his strikebreaking order was driven by the ruling class’s aim of developing India as a more attractive cheap-labor platform than China, Narayan said, “The whole world is looking at India as an alternative to China, and countries like Japan, South Korea and Taiwan are eager to set up shop in Karnataka. Under such a situation, there should not be any talk of strikes and lockouts.”

The TKM auto plants are 89 percent owned by the Japanese auto giant Toyota Motor Corporation, while Kirloskar Group, an Indian conglomerate, owns the remaining 11 percent. The sprawling 432-acre industrial complex in Bidadi employs 6,500 hourly and salaried workers and has an annual capacity of 310,000 vehicles. Workers produce the MPV (Multi-Purpose Vehicle) Innova, the Fortuner SUV and Corolla and Camry passenger cars for the Indian market.

The present conflict began when TKMEU Treasurer Umesh Gowda Alur went to management on November 9 to relay workers’ complaints over the unbearable speedup on the assembly line. This led to a heated argument after which management suspended Alur. Workers responded by launching a sit-down strike to demand Alur’s return and an end to the oppressive working conditions.

A striking worker told the WSWS: “Toyota continues to brutally exploit workers at its manufacturing plants. In 2014, when workers went on strike, management declared a lockout and suspended 32 workers. When it lifted the lockout, management insisted the suspended workers would not be taken back until they went through a series of disciplinary inquiries. After the inquiries, it only reinstated 12 workers three years later. The fate of seven workers is still pending. The remaining suspended workers decided to leave the company.”

The worker then described conditions in the plant. “The management treats union leaders badly and gives them no respect. When it reopened the plants last June, it employed fewer workers to follow the COVID-19 safety rules. That meant fewer workers were responsible to meet the same production quotas that existed with the full capacity of workers. We used to produce an Innova car in every 3 minutes but now we are being told to do the same in 2.5 minutes.”

These conditions are similar to what workers face at the Maruti Suzuki car assembly plant at Manesar, in the northern Indian state of Haryana. In 2011-12, they launched a year-long struggle to break with the company stooge union and improve their conditions. Maruti Suzuki management and the Congress Party-led Haryana state government responded by launch a joint vendetta to crush the rebellion, destroy the newly formed Maruti Suzuki Workers Union (MSWU) and demonstrate to global investors that no resistance to industrial slavery would be tolerated. In March 2017, 13 militant workers, including the entire leadership of the MSWU, were sentenced to life imprisonment on trumped-up murder charges.

“Supervisors on the floor have to give you permission to go to the bathroom,” the Toyota worker continued. “As soon as they let you go, they start counting the time until you return to your position. The time is calculated, and it is deducted from your salary.” If workers do not meet their production targets, he added, they do not get their pay.

Striking TKM workers are camping outside the factory after management announced it was locking out workers and told them to vacate the premises. Workers are continuing their strike and denouncing management’s efforts to intimidate them.

In a cynical attempt to justify the lockout, management told the media that it was to protect workers against the spread of the coronavirus. “As a part of the sit-in strike, the team members were unlawfully staying on the company’s premises and compromising COVID-19 guidelines, thereby leading to a potentially dangerous situation in the factory. This led TKM authorities to declare a lockout for unionized employees bearing in mind the safety and well-being of its employees.”

In fact, TKM management has been oblivious to the safety of workers. The plants were reopened on May 26, after being shut for 55 days under the Modi government’s lockdown measures. Although management claimed it was enforcing new safety protocols, two workers tested positive on June 7 and 16 respectively, forcing the plants to close again.

When they reopened on June 19, it was with a “reduced workforce” and with office staff working from home. Since then, virtually every day a dozen workers are infected due to workers being crammed together on the assembly line. By October 28, at least 565 workers at the complex tested positive and two had died. So, any suggestion that management expelled striking workers from the plant to protect them from the virus is a patent lie. Like the state government, management’s true aim is to break the strike and force workers to surrender.

According to media sources, the holiday season has been prosperous for the company, which has seen a rise in sales over last month, up 52 percent between September and October. This is still 1.87 percent below last October’s sales. Under those conditions, the company is determined to resume production as soon as possible to cash in on higher holiday sales no matter what the cost to workers from the spread of the COVID-19 virus.

TKM management has resumed talks with TKMEU with the aim of ending the strike and restarting production. The back-to-work order is also being used by management to force them back to work.

It is not clear yet whether TKMEU officials will cave in to management and the government’s demands and quickly end the strike. In any case, neither the TKMEU nor any of the other unions has a program to fight the corporate onslaught, which is supported by all of the capitalist parties, from the BJP and Congress to the two principal Stalinist parties, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPM and the smaller, older Communist Party of India (CPI).

Rather than mobilizing auto and other workers throughout Karnataka and the rest of the country, TKMEU officials are appealing to management and government officials. TKMEU President Prasanna Kumar Chekkere told Business Line, “The workload is very heavy. We are not given leave even for personal emergencies. We want them to consider our requests on humanitarian grounds.” He said the union has also written to the Labor Department seeking redress for workers’ grievances.

The TKMEU has called a meeting of striking workers for this morning at the protest site outside the plants to announce its decision on the strike. Given its past record, it is likely the union will capitulate to the state government’s order. In April 2014, the TKMEU worked quickly to end a one-month strike after a similar order by the state government, then led by the Congress party. A deal was reached that did not meet a single demand of the workers.

The state repression of autoworkers and other sections of the working class poses the need for an independent political strategy for Indian workers. Like other global auto giants, Toyota is using the pandemic to accelerate the restructuring of its international operations, slash jobs and reduce labor costs. To fight the global corporations, autoworkers need an international strategy and must coordinate their struggles across borders.

The Indian trade unions are mostly tied to the various capitalist parties, including the Stalinists, and are tied to the national framework. Like the nationalist unions around the world, they have responded to globalization by suppressing working-class opposition and voluntarily accepting reductions in labor costs in order to attract foreign investment.

To take forward their struggle, workers need new organizations, including action committees controlled by rank-and-file workers themselves, and a new socialist political strategy. The lockout should be transformed into a strike of regular, contract and apprentice workers at the Toyota plants and a broader mobilization of the working class throughout every industry and the public sector.

The fight against multinational corporations like Toyota requires the unification of Indian workers with their class brothers and sisters in Australia, Japan, the US and Europe in a common fight to defend jobs and living standards and oppose the capitalist system.

No justice for families 10 years after New Zealand’s Pike River mine disaster

Tom Peters

November 19 marked the 10th anniversary of the 2010 Pike River coal mine disaster. Twenty-nine miners died after a series of underground explosions in a mine located on the remote West Coast of the South Island. Their bodies have never been recovered.

More than 100 family members of the victims gathered yesterday at the entrance to the mine. They observed a minute’s silence at 3:44 p.m., the time of the first explosion, and read out the names of the dead.

Dean Dunbar at his son Joseph’s memorial stone

The Labour Party-led government held an event at parliament in Wellington, with 34 people from six families taking part. Anna Osborne, who lost her husband Milton in the mine, and Sonya Rockhouse, whose son Ben died, gave speeches calling for greater enforcement of workplace safety and justice for the victims. Osborne said: “WorkSafe NZ’s investigations have remained weak, their enforcement poorly resourced, and they most often simply choose not to prosecute. In New Zealand you can, rightly, go to jail for killing a kitten… but not for killing a worker.”

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern declared that the Labour Party government “stands with you and the Pike 29” and was “very close to fulfilling the commitment” to re-enter the mine to gather forensic evidence and reopen the investigation into the disaster. She stated that the families had “suffered because no-one was held accountable at the time.” In fact, to this day no charges have been laid against Pike River Coal’s (PRC) managers and executives.

The entire New Zealand ruling elite, including successive National Party and Labour Party governments, big business, government departments, police, sections of the judiciary and trade unions have carried out a decade-long cover up of the causes of the tragedy and denied justice to the families of the deceased miners.

The disaster was an industrial crime, caused by gross negligence and cost-cutting by PRC, which placed production and profit ahead of workers’ safety and their lives. The mine had inadequate ventilation, faulty methane gas sensors and no suitable emergency exit as required by law.

Map of Pike River Mine showing the drift, the mine workings and the rockfall (red X) (Source: Pike River Recovery Agency)

A 2012 royal commission of inquiry found that there were at least 21 times in seven weeks when methane levels were in the explosive range. The mine was a death trap that could have blown at any time and there were many warnings, which management ignored. Those responsible include not only the company, but also the Department of Labour (DoL, now called WorkSafe), which knew about the blatant safety violations but did not shut down the mine.

Complicit throughout has been the Engineering, Printing and Manufacturing Union (EPMU), now renamed E Tu, which suppressed opposition by workers to safety breaches. After the explosion EPMU leader Andrew Little defended PRC, telling the media there was “nothing unusual” about the company and it had “a good health and safety committee that’s been very active.” Little subsequently became a Labour Party MP and in 2017 was made “Minister Responsible for Pike River Re-entry.”

Successive National Party and Labour Party governments had slashed regulations and gutted the DoL’s specialist mines inspectorate, which had just two inspectors in 2010. Labour MP Damien O’Connor later admitted that he had been warned about the increased risk of a mining disaster because of deregulation, but took no action.

The DoL charged PRC chief executive Peter Whittall for safety breaches, but the charges were dropped in a sordid deal in 2013 between Whittall and the government agency. The Supreme Court later found the deal was unlawful, but charges were not reinstated.

Seeking to prevent any further investigations, the previous National Party government planned to permanently seal the mine without recovering the bodies. This was only stopped when the miners’ families protested in 2016 along the road to the mine, gaining widespread support in the working class.

The Labour Party and its allies, the Greens and New Zealand First, campaigned in the lead-up to the 2017 election promising to re-enter and re-investigate the mine. Ardern’s government then established a Pike River Recovery Agency (PRRA).

Three years later, however, there have still been no prosecutions. Crucial physical evidence has gone missing or been destroyed by police, who never treated the mine as a crime scene and allowed PRC management to remain in charge of the site following the disaster.

The re-entry only began in May 2019 and is proceeding slowly. In March 2020, Little stated that the PRRA would not excavate into the workings of the mine beyond a rockfall at the end of the 2.3-kilometre drift tunnel. Little told a parliamentary committee in June: “There is always a limit to these things and I have no intention of returning to Cabinet for any further resources.” He said it was “just impractical” to go beyond the rockfall, even though that is where the miners’ bodies are most likely to be.

An incident form submitted by shift supervisor Dene Murphy in June 2010 drawing attention to grossly inadequate ventilation. One of many warnings that was ignored. (Source: Royal Commission into the Pike River disaster)

The government intends to seal the mine by the end of March 2021.

Dean Dunbar, whose son Joseph had just turned 17 and was on his first day underground when he died at Pike River, told the World Socialist Web Site: “Here’s how I look at it. It’s very simple: in a modern society you don’t wipe out 29 men and boys, entomb them and walk away.”

He added that if the government was “going to put a dollar amount on the recovery of Joseph and 28 others, then [they should] at least put a couple of bore holes on the other side of the rockfall to make sure our blokes aren’t all sitting there together, which is where we think they are.” If there was no attempt to investigate beyond the rockfall, “then that just tells us they don’t really want to know what happened.”

Dunbar said, “I now understand the phrase: the cover-up becomes worse than the original crime.” Evidence that was blown out the mine’s ventilation shaft—a door to a control panel on an underground fan—could identify the cause of the first explosion. It had been photographed but then “mysteriously went missing.”

Bernie Monk, whose son Michael died at Pike River, said the families had waged a decade-long battle for the truth. Former National Party Prime Minister John Key and Police Minister Judith Collins falsely claimed that the mine could not be re-entered and the force of the first explosion meant “everyone died straight away, it was a burning inferno, everyone was ashes and there was nothing to recover.”

Bernie Monk (center, arms folded) and other family members and supporters blockading the road to Pike River in 2016. (Source: Facebook)

Richard Healey, an electrical engineer who independently investigated the disaster on behalf of some of the families for 18 months, told the WSWS: “We now know that actually parts of the mine are remarkably undamaged.” Images taken in 2011 by cameras lowered through bore holes, some of which were made public six years later, showed intact bodies, along with items such as rubber hosing and a wooden pallet.

Monk, Dunbar and Healey say the evidence strongly suggests there were survivors after the first explosion on November 19, 2010, and potentially after the second explosion five days later, shielded by the rockfall. “We have an image of an open self-rescue canister lying on the floor with the self-rescuer [emergency breathing apparatus] removed. That pretty much tells me that someone was in there and accessed that equipment,” Healey said.

In 2011, when the mine site was in the hands of receivers who still employed managerial staff from PRC, hundreds of cubic metres of concrete were poured down a slim-line ventilation shaft into the underground “fresh air base” where self-rescuers were stored. Healey feared that this would have “destroyed any possibility of recovering evidence” from the area.

Healey also strongly criticised the PRRA’s investigation, saying it was “destroying” the crime scene. Those gathering evidence were mining professionals, not forensic investigators or police photographers. They were using “ancient” equipment including “a camera which has about the performance of a very old cell phone,” instead of LiDAR technology used by police to create detailed 3D images.

In response to claims by the media and politicians that the mine re-entry has become too expensive, Monk pointed out that there had been an $80 million insurance payout to PRC’s major shareholders NZ Oil & Gas and the Bank of New Zealand. He asked, “Why wasn’t that used to do the job we’re doing today?”

Monk said the record of the police gave him no confidence that the current investigation would result in successful prosecutions. He added: “We didn’t have to go down the mine to bring charges against people because the royal commission stated that there were [multiple] times in the seven weeks leading up to the explosion that mine could have blown up.”

He described the 2012 royal commission as “a farce” because Whittall and Doug White, PRC’s general manager, were told by their lawyers not to answer questions that could incriminate them. In an extraordinary decision, the commission placed a 100-year embargo on all the evidence it looked at, hiding it from public scrutiny.

Monk and Dunbar also criticised Little and the EPMU. The union had never made any criticisms of PRC before the explosion and never organised any strikes over health and safety, even after a group of miners protested the lack of emergency gear underground. It ensured that there was no further interruption to operations.

Monk noted that the EPMU had not supported the families’ 2016 protests against the attempt to seal the mine, despite 11 of the dead miners being union members. He approached a union leader at a memorial service last year to ask them to push for an investigation beyond the rockfall. “He said to me: ‘Bernie, you know they’re never going through that rockfall.’” Monk replied: “You want us to come up here every year and put our fists in the air and say ‘solidarity’ when there’s 11 of your men sitting buried in Pike River and you haven’t got off your arses.”

The story of Pike River, both the preventable deaths and the ongoing cover-up, mirrors similar tragedies internationally, including the 2010 Upper Big Branch mine explosion in West Virginia, which also killed 29 people, and the Grenfell Tower fire in London where 72 people died.

In New Zealand, it was followed by the collapse of the CTV building in the 2011 Christchurch earthquake, which killed 115 people. Police decided it was not in the “public interest” to prosecute anyone for its multiple dangerous construction flaws. Likewise, no one has been held accountable for 21 deaths caused by the White Island/Whakaari volcanic eruption last year. Despite numerous warnings, tourism companies had profited from dangerous excursions to the island.

The chief political lesson Pike River and all these disasters is that workers cannot rely on any of the established political parties, police, government regulators or trade union bureaucracies to protect their safety. All these organisations are loyal to the profit system and seek to subordinate workers to the demands of big business. This fact has been underscored by the COVID-19 pandemic: in one country after another, unions are collaborating with governments and corporations to force workers to risk exposing themselves to the deadly coronavirus by returning to workplaces before it is safe and without proper precautions.

Biden, Pence both reject lockdowns to save lives as coronavirus pandemic explodes

Patrick Martin

At press conferences held only minutes apart Thursday afternoon, President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President Mike Pence each flatly rejected any possibility of a lockdown of the US economy to save lives, despite the impending catastrophe from the coronavirus pandemic.

The twin statements amounted to a joint, bipartisan declaration that hundreds of thousands of Americans must die rather than sacrificing the profits of Wall Street and giant corporations, which demand that workers stay on the job no matter how hazardous the workplace has become as COVID-19 spreads uncontrollably in virtually every American state.

Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden meets with residents of Kenosha at Grace Lutheran Church in Kenosha, Wis., Thursday, Sept. 3, 2020. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

Pence’s statement was merely the reiteration of the longstanding policy of the Trump administration. He appeared at the first public briefing by the White House coronavirus task force in many months, only in order to make it emphatically clear that there was no change in Trump’s policy of back-to-work and back-to-school.

The timing of the press conference seemed to be determined by the announcement the day before that schools in New York City, the largest US school district, would end in-person instruction and revert to online instruction only because of a sharp increase in the positivity rate in COVID-19 tests administered to city residents.

Pence declared that the policy of the Trump administration remained that all schools should reopen for in-person instruction, even though this will mean a horrific toll in disease and death among teachers, students and school workers.

The Biden statement had more political consequence, since it was a declaration by what is still expected, by the media and corporate America, to be the next administration, one which was elected in large measure because of popular outrage over the indifference and callousness evinced in Trump’s handling of the pandemic.

Biden was therefore at pains to demonstrate that he would be as obedient a servant of big business as Trump, so that there would be no reason for the financial aristocracy to seek to overturn Biden’s clear-cut victory in the Electoral College and the popular vote.

Appearing side-by-side with his running mate Kamala Harris, Biden offered his usual mixture of vague and mushy responses to questions about economic policy, the transition process and Trump’s efforts to overturn the election. But on the lockdown question he was categorical and definitive.

After an hour-long video conference with 10 Democratic and Republican state governors, largely dealing with the coronavirus pandemic, Biden first acknowledged that the United States had reached “another tragic milestone, 250,000 deaths,” and the vast suffering this has caused. Biden then offered the victims of the pandemic only his prayers, while praising the governors for their bipartisan efforts to encourage mask wearing and restrict venues like bars and restaurants.

The president-elect said there was a great deal of consensus among the governors on the need for economic relief for states and cities, whose budgets have been devastated by COVID-19 related shutdowns and expenses. “The federal government has to deliver this relief sooner rather than later,” he said, although he gave no hint as to how this would be accomplished given the six-month-long deadlock in Congress on the issue.

After a few generalities about the difficulties of coordinating the delivery of a vaccine to 330 million Americans—once one or more vaccines have been approved by federal agencies—and boilerplate remarks about how America could accomplish any goal if we “come together as a country,” Biden took several questions.

He announced that he had already made a selection of a treasury secretary, although he did not reveal the name, and said that the person would be widely accepted within the Democratic Party as well as to “moderates” who had supported his campaign. In other words, not Senator Elizabeth Warren or anyone else identified with the left-populist wing of the Democrats. He voiced general support for the policy of the Federal Reserve, which has pumped trillions into the financial system over the past eight months, fueling the rise in the stock market and in the personal wealth of the billionaires.

When one reporter cited Biden’s previous statements as a candidate, that he “would support a nationwide shutdown if scientists recommended it,” Biden responded sharply, “it was a hypothetical question, and the answer was I would follow the science.”

He continued, “I’m not going to shut down the economy period. I’m going to shut down the virus. That’s all I’m going to shut down and let me say that again. No national shutdown. No national shutdown because every region, every area every community can be different. So there is no circumstance that I can see that would require a total national shutdown.”

Biden went on to give a few banal examples of different degrees of restriction on operations of gyms, restaurants and churches, but he avoided the central issue of keeping large factories, warehouses and office buildings open, facilities which have been shown to be among the most important vectors for mass infection by coronavirus.

Besides his categorical assurances to corporate America that there would be no return to lockdown conditions, Biden spoke extensively, but in a deliberately obscure manner, on the increasingly frenzied efforts of the Trump campaign to overturn his election victory.

One reporter asked him to “take a step back and look at the way the president is handling in his refusal to concede. What do you think is really going on here?” Given the opportunity to characterize Trump’s actions as a political coup, Biden reduced the issue to Trump’s personality and psychology.

“Let me choose my words,” he said. “I think we are witnessing incredible irresponsibility, incredibly damaging messages being sent to the rest of the world about how democracy functions and I think it is—well I don’t know his motives, but I think it’s totally irresponsible.”

Asked about Trump’s summoning Michigan Republican officials, including leaders of the state legislature, for a meeting at the White House today, Biden dismissed the suggestion that this action was “meant to overturn the election.” He described it as “another incident where he will go down in history as one of the most irresponsible presidents in American history.”

He then continued, “It’s not within the norm at all. The question’s whether it’s even legal. But it will be interesting to see who shows up. We have won Michigan. It will be certified. We will end up making clear that they are—that we won.”

Biden’s press conference was held several hours after the Trump campaign’s attorneys, headed by former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, held a 90-minute media briefing (beginning with a 60-minute diatribe by Giuliani) to publicize false and unprovable charges about vote-counting software supposedly being used to transform a “landslide victory” for President Trump into Biden’s current 306–232 lead in the Electoral College, and six-million-vote lead in the popular vote.

Without offering a shred of evidence, Giuliani, Sidney Powell and Jenna Ellis made a series of claims based on anti-communist hysteria and outright anti-Semitism, charging that the Venezuelan government and Jewish billionaire George Soros had interfered in US elections in order to defeat Trump.

A major focus of these wild conspiracy theories, including xenophobic allegations about the votes of Americans being counted in Germany by a Spanish company, was the claim that Biden’s lead of 148,000 votes in Michigan—his largest lead among the six states now being contested by the Trump campaign—was the result of systematic fraud by Democrats in Detroit and Lansing.

Soon after, the White House announced that top Michigan Republicans would meet with Trump in the White House on Friday. The leader of the state senate, Mike Shirkey, and the leader of the state house, Lee Chatfield, both declared this week that they did not support the state legislature appointing electors to replace those chosen by the voters on Nov. 3.

Such an action would have no precedent in American history, and would amount to a direct and unconstitutional usurpation of power by the Republican Party and Trump.

Consumer Price Index: “There is Zero Basis for any Concerns About Inflation”

Dean Baker

+ US CPI overall and core CPI were both flat in October, up 1.2 percent and 1.6 percent year over year, respectively. A sharp drop in energy prices lowered overall US CPI, with the core being held down by a drop in medical care prices by 0.4 percent.

+ Rental inflation remains low; rent proper and owners’ equivalent rent were both up 0.2 percent in October — increasing to 2.7 percent and 2.5 percent, respectively, over the last year. Rents in the NYC metro area fell slightly in October, up just 0.6 percent since March; likely a lower rise (or fall) in the city itself.

+ Hotel prices fell sharply: a 3.7 percent monthly drop. This  likely indicates a fall in business due to the spread of pandemic. Prices are now down 15.9 percent year over year.

+ Restaurant and store-bought food prices continue to converge, former up 0.3 percent, while latter up 0.1 percent, over last year 3.9 percent and 4.0 percent, respectively.

+ Used vehicle prices fell 0.1 percent after rapid increases, still up 11.5 percent year over year. New vehicle prices were up 0.4 percent — an unusually large price increase, up 1.5 percent year over year. This is likely an anomaly, but it’s  worrying if it is not. Car insurance was down 2.3 percent in October after a 3.5 percent September drop.  This 7.1 percent year over year drop likely reflects much less driving and fewer accidents. Airfares jumped 6.3 percent in October, still down 20.0 percent year over year.

+ Prescription prices were down 0.4 percent in October and year over year. It’s important to remember this does not factor in the cost of new drugs. Health insurance prices (administrative costs and profits, not premiums) dropped 1.2 percent, after a 1.5 percent drop in September. They are still up 10.2 percent year over year.

+ Finally, college tuition continues to fall. It was down 0.1 percent in October, up just 0.6 percent year over year.

Overall, there is zero basis for any concerns about inflation in this story. The economy is being hit hard by a pandemic (see hotels) and likely could use support.