UK government’s policies lead to horrific COVID-19 death rates among disabled people

Rory Woods

The Conservative government’s criminal indifference to the lives of some of the most vulnerable people in society has become ever more blatant as the pandemic crisis has unfolded. Earlier this month, the Mencap charity reported that people with learning disabilities were being told in January that they would not be resuscitated if they fell gravely ill with COVID-19.

Edel Harris, Mencap’s chief executive, told the Guardian, “Throughout the pandemic many people with a learning disability have faced shocking discrimination and obstacles to accessing healthcare, with inappropriate Do Not Attempt Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation (DNACPR or DNAR) notices put on their files and cuts made to their social care support.

A National Health Service DNACPR form (credit: WSWS media)

“It’s unacceptable that within a group of people hit so hard by the pandemic, and who even before Covid died on average over 20 years younger than the general population, many are left feeling scared and wondering why they have been left out.”

A support worker, who works with people with learning disabilities, told the World Socialist Web Site, “They should have a chance for life like anybody else. It is outrageous to have DNAR forms in these people’s files without taking into account their choices, wishes and beliefs. We managed to get some of these notices reversed last year.”

Mencap’s warning came two days after the UK’s Office for National Statistics (ONS) reported that six in 10 of those killed by COVID-19 between January and November last year were disabled, despite making up just 17 percent of the study population. According to the ONS, the risk of death involving COVID-19 was 3.7 times higher for men and women with a medically diagnosed learning disability than for the general population.

For the disabled in general, including physical disability, the rate was 3.5 times higher for more-disabled women—defined by someone having their daily activities “limited a lot” by their health—and 3.1 times for more-disabled men. The risk for less-disabled women was two times greater and 1.9 times greater for less-disabled men.

Last November, Public Health England (PHE) reported that the COVID-19 death rate for disabled young people, aged 18-34, was 30 times higher than the rate for people in the same age group without disabilities.

Reports of the widespread placing of DNACPR notices on disabled people caused an outcry last year. Amnesty International condemned the practice in a scathing report, “As if expendable: The UK government’s failure to protect older people in care homes during the Covid-19 pandemic”. The government was forced to sanction a review of the issue through the Care Quality Commission (CQC).

The WSWS commented last June, “The COVID-19 death rate among disabled people is a result of deliberate policies pursued by the British ruling class. A barely concealed agenda of social euthanasia has found expression in numerous medical guidance documents published during the pandemic, which suggest that coronavirus patients can be denied or deprioritised for medical care solely on the basis of their age or existing mental or physical disabilities.”

In its interim report last November, the CQC stated, “In their interviews with relatives, care home managers, advocacy organisations and legal representatives, Amnesty found examples of the inappropriate or unlawful use of DNACPR forms—including blanket DNACPR, their inappropriate individual use and recommendations for use—by GPs, clinical commissioning groups (CCGs), hospitals and care homes. They also found that staff incorrectly interpreting DNACPR prevented people getting access to hospital care and treatment. Amnesty also highlighted that health and social care staff reported pressure during the pandemic to put DNACPRs in place without consultation.”

The CQC acknowledged that the inappropriate placing of these notices had caused potentially unnecessary deaths. It is to publish its final report next month.

Appallingly high death rates among disabled people are the direct consequence of the government’s herd immunity strategy, described as “social murder” in the British Medical Journal. The policy was bluntly summed up at the start of the pandemic by the reported words of Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s advisor Dominic Cummings—“herd immunity, protect the economy, and if that means some pensioners die, too bad.”

Around the same time, columnist Jeremy Warner wrote in the Telegraph, “From an entirely disinterested economic perspective, the COVID-19 might even prove mildly beneficial in the long-term by disproportionately culling elderly dependents.”

The Tory government then discharged thousands of elderly hospital patients to nursing and care homes without carrying out a COVID-19 test. This led to massive outbreaks in care homes causing tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths, accounting for a third of all COVID-19 fatalities during the first wave of the pandemic.

Disabled people have suffered the same brutal disregard for life, left with woefully inadequate support throughout the pandemic by a ruling class which considers them a drain on profits. Last November, disability equality charity Scope reported that one in five disabled people had their request to work from home, be furloughed or redeployed during the pandemic rejected. The government responded by shrugging its shoulders and saying it was the employers’ decision to make.

This month, Scope reported that disabled people had been “cut off” from support and that their mental and physical health was “unravelling”. Some 36 percent of disabled people surveyed reported that their health had been impaired by problems accessing food during the pandemic.

Another study this month, by Inclusion London, found that many disabled people “have experienced reduced support due to high levels of support staff sickness, cuts to care packages, and increases in social care charges.” Eighty-one percent reported problems accessing healthcare, and 36 percent problems accessing the community “due to changes in the external environment, like streetscapes and the majority of services and support having moved online.” These difficulties come on top of the constant cuts in welfare support for many disabled, seriously ill people, leading to numerous deaths.

Speaking to the WSWS, Simone Aspis, the director of disability charity Changing Perspectives, denounced the governments eugenicist agenda.

“It’s just absolutely outrageous that anybody could think about putting do not resuscitate notices in people’s files. Particularly, now, there are treatments available for people with Covid-19. Disabled people must have equal rights access to that. Nobody should be deciding who should get care depending on their impairment.”

“This is an opportunity for the government to use the herd immunity policy as a new form of eugenics for the Covid-19 situation. There just seems to be more and more pressure on disabled people who are not productive, who are not economically viable.”

The calculated abandonment of the disabled has continued with the vaccine rollout.

According to the government’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, people with a “severe or profound learning disability” are in priority group six of ten for receiving the vaccine, except people with Down’s Syndrome, who are in priority group four. There is no special priority for people with a learning disability not considered “severe or profound” or for people with disabilities living in specialist care homes.

Last week, BBC Radio 2 presenter Jo Whiley pulled out of her usual radio show when her sister, Frances, who has a learning disability, was taken to hospital after becoming seriously ill from COVID-19 after an outbreak at her care home in Nottinghamshire.

Hours before, Whiley, 55, had revealed that she had been offered a vaccine before her sister, possibly due to being deemed her carer. She told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that Frances “is in tier 6 [of priority for the vaccine] but she also has quite bad diabetes, which in my understanding puts her in tier four because she has an underlying health condition, so I would have thought that she would have been vaccinated, but that hasn’t happened.”

Whiley continued, “This happens so often—people with learning disabilities are neglected, they haven’t got a voice.”

Frances Whiley was only offered a vaccine on Saturday. Jo said on Sunday, “[My] mum got a message to say that she [Frances] could get vaccinated, but it's too late, she's fighting for her life in hospital. It couldn't be crueller.'

Italian government preparing for confrontation with working class

Peter Schwarz

Both chambers of the Italian parliament have supported votes of confidence in the new government of Mario Dragghi by substantial majorities. It received the backing of 262 votes to 40 opposed, while the Chamber of Deputies voted by 535 to 56 votes in favour of the government.

The 73-year-old former head of the European Central Bank formed a government last week including all major national parties, apart from the fascist Fratelli d’Italia, from the far-right Lega to the social democratic Democrats (PD). Some key ministries will be led by non-aligned technocrats. The business lobby group Confindustria and the trade unions promised the government their support.

Dragghi delivered a programmatic address to the Senate last Wednesday in which he invoked “national unity” and “national responsibility.” He said that no adjective was necessary to define his government. It is “simply the country’s government,” he claimed. He appealed to the population’s “spirit of sacrifice” and the “duty of citizenship,” and added, “Today, unity is not an option, but an obligation.”

Handover of government from Giuseppe Conte to Mario Draghi (Image: governo.it/CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0 IT)

However, his government does not embody the unity of the country, but rather the closing of the ranks of a ruling elite in a country that is deeply divided and heading towards a social explosion.

Dragghi was not being careless when he compared his government to the “governments of the immediate post-war period,” when “political forces that were far apart, if not contradictory” collaborated. At that time, the Communist Party, led by Palmiro Togliatti, joined a right-wing bourgeois government to suppress the socialist strivings of the working class and save Italian capitalism.

Dragghi made clear to the assembled senators how deep the crisis facing Italian capitalism is and that they would risk a social uprising if they failed to back his government.

According to the prime minister, there had been 92,522 deaths and 2,725,106 infections since the beginning of the pandemic, although the official figures are undercounts. Under health care workers alone, 120,000 were infected and 259 have died. As a result of the pandemic, the life expectancy for the entire population has fallen between one-and-a-half and two years, while the decline is between four and five years in areas hit especially hard by the virus. There has not been a comparable decline since the Second World War, stated Dragghi.

Dragghi cited figures from Caritas on the social consequences of the crisis, which showed that between May and September last year, the percentage of the “new poor” increased from 31 percent to 45 percent. “Almost every second person who turns to the Caritas is doing so for the first time,” he said. Among the “new poor,” the percentage of families with young children, women, young people, and people of working age is increasing.

Last year, the number of employees fell by 444,000. Mainly women and young people have been impacted so far, but workers with permanent contracts could soon be out of work.

The impact on social inequality is grave and has few historical precedents, Dragghi continued. Without any interventions, the Gini coefficient, which was 34.8 percent in 2019, would have increased by 4 percentage points in the first six months of 2020. The Gini coefficient is a measure of inequality in income distribution. “This increase would have been larger than the cumulative increase during the two last recessions,” he added.

The pandemic has also had severe consequences for schools. Of the 1.7 million students in secondary schools, only 61 percent were able to participate in distance learning during the first week of February.

“This unprecedented emergency situation demands of us a decisive and swift course towards unity and engagement,” concluded Dragghi. But apart from a “vaccine plan” and a “comprehensive debate about the reform of our health service,” he announced no measures to contain the pandemic.

Leading experts, like the pandemic adviser to the health minister, Walter Riccardi, and the well-known virologist Andrea Crisanti have called for a lockdown of several weeks to stop the spread of the dangerous British variant of the virus in Italy. The fact that some ministers had thus far resisted such measures had caused tens of thousands of deaths, Riccardi told the Italian media.

But Dragghi rejects a lockdown and is sticking firmly to the previous course, which prioritises profits over human lives. He intends to use the pandemic and the misery it has produced to fundamentally restructure Italy’s social and economic system and implement measures that have previously failed due to working class opposition.

Dragghi is an expert at this. Already in the 1990s, he privatised state-owned companies and cut social spending as general director in Italy’s Finance Ministry so as to ensure Italy was “fit” for the euro. After a lucrative spell at the investment bank Goldman Sachs, as head of the European Central Bank he was jointly responsible for the brutal austerity dictates that destroyed the living standards of the population of Greece and other countries. At the same time, he flooded the financial markets with trillions of euros.

While Dragghi devoted just a few sentences to the pandemic, he spent the largest portion of his Senate speech explaining how he intends to boost corporate profits. In this, he based himself directly on the European Union.

“This government emerges on the basis of our country’s membership in the European Union and the Atlantic alliance,” he informed the senators. “Supporting this government means sharing the irreversibility of the decision for the euro, it means sharing the view of an increasingly integrated European Union.” In international relations, his government would be “firmly pro-European and Atlantic” and “better structure and strengthen the strategic and essential relationships with France and Germany.”

Dragghi intends to use the European Union’s coronavirus bailout fund, from which Italy is entitled to €210 billion in subsidies and loans, as a lever to “reform” the country. The purpose for which the funds will be used must be approved by the EU Commission in each case.

The EU fund has the cynical name “Next Generation EU,” and Dragghi also sought to justify his austerity plans with references to the responsibility for the younger generation. “All waste today is an injustice we impose on future generations, robbing their rights,” he said.

Dragghi repeatedly stressed that the funds are not aimed at ameliorating social misery, but to “modernise” the economy. “The government will have to protect the workers,” he said. “But it would be a mistake to protect all economic activities to the same degree. Some of them will have to change, even radically. And the choice of which activities to protect and which to accompany through transformation is the difficult task that economic policy must face in the coming months.”

The economic policy answer to the pandemic will “have to be a combination of structural policy that facilitates innovation, finance policy that facilitates the access of businesses with the capacity to grow to capital and loans, and expansive monetary and budgetary policies that facilitate investments and create demand,” he stated. A significant factor would also be “the development of the ability to attract national and international private investment”—in other words, low wages.

Dragghi did not address the issue of domestic policy. On refugee policy, he merely briefly noted that “the building of a European policy of repatriation for people who have no right to international protection” is decisive. But the very fact that the right-wing extremist Lega, which advocates the establishment of a police state, is sitting around the cabinet table with Dragghi underscores that his government is preparing for a confrontation with the working class. There is no other way to impose its right-wing programme.

Death on an unprecedented scale: One year since the first death from COVID-19 in the US

Benjamin Mateus

This week, many of the national COVID-19 trackers will mark the death of 500,000 Americans in the United States from the coronavirus. It was just one year ago, on February 29, that the first official US fatality from COVID-19 was reported, a man in his 50s residing in Washington state. Postmortem testing in Santa Clara County, California, indicates that there may have been two earlier deaths, one on February 6 and another on February 17.

Still, a closer examination of these horrific numbers, including excess deaths, a term that refers to the number of deaths from all causes during a crisis, above and beyond what would typically be seen, demonstrates that the present catastrophe is far more massive than official figures and, most likely, on par with the 1918 influenza pandemic and even the US Civil War. More on this later.

In time, historians will write on the actual deaths that befell the nation during this pandemic, considering those, directly and indirectly, related to the contagion in their accounting. Most importantly, they will need to explain why it happened. However, it is instructive to take a measure of the scale of this devastation wrought primarily by the ruling class. Much can still be done to avert further calamity. It is not too late for the working class to take the initiative to turn the tide of this pandemic.

Workers move bodies to a refrigerated truck from the Andrew T. Cleckley Funeral Home in the Brooklyn borough of New York, Wednesday, April 29, 2020. The coronavirus pandemic has overrun most funeral homes and morgues in New York City. (AP Photo/Craig Ruttle)

According to the Worldometer COVID tracker, on February 20, 2021, the United States reported 28,706,473 cases of COVID-19 with 509,875 deaths. There are almost ten million active cases. Using back-of-the-envelope math, taking account of new cases and deaths since January 1, 2021, and utilizing a lag in deaths of two to four weeks, the crude case fatality rate for the winter surge was estimated at around 1.5 percent of all confirmed cases of COVID.

This implies that based on present active case estimates, an additional 150,000 deaths may be forthcoming. When health care systems can function at standard capacities, there is an improvement in outcomes, which would help reduce this estimate. Hospitalization rates for COVID-19 have been on the decline since their January peaks.

Yet, as the new B.1.1.7 strain of the SARS-CoV-2 virus is rapidly dominating previous versions, the present retreat in infections will slow in the next few weeks only to be followed by a massive wave unrivaled by previous surges. Some are describing the rapid transmission with this new strain as a second pandemic.

Dr. Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist and director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, has repeatedly warned about a spring surge. In his reply to a question about his prediction of the “darkest days of the pandemic,” he said during a press conference on February 18, “I’m more convinced that that’s actually the case. I think right now what we’re seeing is basically the lull before the storm.”

He explained that the B.1.1.7 strain that first emerged in the United Kingdom has demonstrated it is 30 to 70 percent more transmissible, as well as causing more severe infections, including deaths and hospitalizations. He further added that the virus follows the same path in North America as was seen in Europe and the Middle East.

Dr. Osterholm continued, “If you just think about this right now, we’re loosening up everything, governors and mayors are under such pressure to loosen up everything. When you look at the vaccine, it’s coming, and it’s in right now with the B.1.1.7. This vaccine will work, but we’re not going to have nearly enough in time.” He noted that by the end of March some 30 million of the 54 million people over the age of 65 will still have not been vaccinated. According to the Washington Post vaccination tracker, approximately 13.5 percent of the US population has received at least one vaccine dose.

Excess deaths in raw numbers. Source Our World in Data.

From the time President Joe Biden was elected to office in November to his inauguration on January 20, a period of two-and-half months, 181,276 people died. One month has passed since he swore to protect and defend the population. In that time, 88,212 have perished under his tenure.

Given his promise that there would be no future lockdowns and that schools would fully open for K-12 even though the new variant is threatening the population anew, the memorial held for 400,000 victims of COVID on January 19, the eve of his inauguration, was the height of hypocrisy.

Rather than averting more deaths and suffering, Biden is banking that the vaccines can be administered at a sufficient pace to blunt the misery of future surges. At the G7 virtual summit last week, the White House stated in no uncertain terms that its national vaccine efforts would take priority over the rational and equitable distribution of the vaccines globally.

As Americans continue to die at tragically high numbers, Biden has essentially assured Wall Street that his first hundred days will be spent seeking a rapid return to economic normalcy, whatever the cost to the population. The fundamental difference between Biden and his predecessor, Donald Trump, is his more efficient and deliberate use of the levers of power to achieve these objectives.

The question, again, is how many have died since the beginning of the pandemic?

Last week, a report from the New York Times stated that since COVID arrived in the US, there were half a million more US deaths than usual. Over the period spanning from March 15, 2020, to January 30, 2021, using the conservative estimates provided by the CDC, “about 512,000 more Americans have died than would have in a normal year,” a figure that is 20 percent higher than expected. According to a STAT News report from October 20, two-thirds of the excess deaths were counted as COVID-19 fatalities. (They were using the CDC data as well.)

In that same period, the Times reported that there had been 439,375 COVID-19 deaths, plus another 73,525 excess deaths not directly attributed to coronavirus. If these additional deaths are carried over to the February’s Worldometer total of more than 500,000 COVID-19 deaths, this would bring the total number of excess deaths to over 570,000.

A Financial Times report published on Sunday highlighting the excess deaths suffered in Mexico and by the population of countries that have allowed the pandemic to rip through their communities remarked that these deaths have disproportionately affected the most impoverished neighborhoods. This is true for every country that has embraced the “herd immunity” policy, including the UK and the United States.

Maximo Jaramillo-Molina, a fellow at the London School of Economics who researches inequality, notes, “These are the consequences of a strategy based on trying to do nothing to reduce the damage instead of trying to prevent the consequences.” According to their national mortality statistics and Kobak’s World Mortality Dataset, by January 16, the US excess deaths stood at 467,897 or 19 percent above the previous five years. This is congruent with the data provided by the New York Times .

Even more dire figures are suggested by another report published on January 24 by the New York Times, headlined “Why Vaccines Alone Will Not End the Pandemic,” which cites modeling calculations by Dr. Jeffrey Shaman, an epidemiologist at Columbia, who estimates that actual numbers of infections are far higher than 25 million.

Citing underreporting of asymptomatic infections and those with only very mild symptoms, Dr. Shaman argues that the actual number of infections is closer to 105 million, a figure which has the positive implication that the crude fatality rate is much lower, standing at about 0.5 percent.

Dr. Shaman projects that if restrictions continue at the present level through the summer, the number infected with COVID-19 will reach 158 million by July. Policy actions make a huge difference. If restrictions were lifted this month, an additional 29 million people would be infected. If restrictions were strengthened and kept that way until late July, there would be 19 million fewer infections. In other words, the potential range is from 139 million to a staggering 187 million people infected—a figure that would represent more than half the US population.

Despite having all the therapeutic resources, as well as mass vaccination, the reopening of schools and businesses under President Biden could make the difference of 48 million infections. In the context of Dr. Osterholm’s warnings, such a spring surge would have disastrous consequences on the lives and livelihood of the working class.

The scale of death from the COVID-19 pandemic will be unprecedented in US history. More than one-third of these deaths so far are attributable to those who perished in nursing homes and long-term care facilities. Deaths not directly attributable to COVID-19 infections include the thousands that have died from dementia and neglect. Suicide and drug overdoses have played a tragically prominent aspect in this misery. Overwhelmed health systems saw many with heart disease, malignancies, kidney failure, etc., succumb because access to medical treatments was curtailed.

Similarly, in wars, the scale of death includes not just those who suffered in combat. Illnesses, accidents, and famine are contributing factors to these stark statistics.

World War II claimed 405,399 American lives, while in World War 1 close to 117,000 perished. If all American deaths from all modern conflicts in the 20th and 21 centuries going back as far as the Spanish- American war of 1898 were totaled, that figure is over 625,000 deaths.

The 1918 influenza pandemic caused by an H1N1 virus claimed about 675,000 lives in the United States. A unique feature of this pandemic was that it was so lethal among the 20-to-40-year age groups. The average life expectancy fell by 12 years. With over 25 percent of the population afflicted, only basic public health measures helped limit the devastation.

Approximately 620,000 soldiers died from combat, accidents, starvation, and disease during the Civil War. The number is based on a comprehensive study conducted in 1889 by William F. Fox and Thomas Leonard Livermore after an exhaustive review of combat and casualty records. A more recent estimate by J. David Hacker, a demographic historian from Binghamton University in New York, using a complex set of methodology and assumptions, placed the figure between 650,000 to 850,000.

For two decades, scientists and institutes of public health have warned of a respiratory contagion with pandemic potential. It isn’t just the virus that has produced this calamity, but rather the response to it that was a byproduct of the growing crisis in global financial markets and their dependence on fictitious capital and massive speculations where the central banks play the role of the casino bankrolling their high rollers.

It has been estimated that America’s public debt to GDP ratio, according to Nick Beams, will reach 104 percent by the fiscal year 2021, up from 79 percent in 2019. By the year 2023, it will increase to 108 percent, surpassing the post-World War II level of 106 percent in 1946.

Beams wrote, “But no matter how much it seems that ‘value’ can simply be created out of thin air, this gargantuan mass of fictitious capital ultimately rests on the surplus value obtained from the exploitation of the working class. Its claims can be met only if the available pool of surplus-value is increased.” It is not without its logic that the COVID-19 pandemic has caused such unprecedented massive loss of life.

There is no difference between the policies promulgated by the Democrats compared to the Republicans. The “herd immunity” policy is the policy to extract surplus value out of the working class at a more ferocious rate, no matter the consequences posed by the pandemic. As a trigger event, it has brought into stark contrast the struggle against social murder and for a rational organization of global resources to better the livelihood for all concerned.

Facebook shuts down group with 90,000 cruise ship crew members

Tom Casey

On Friday, an online Facebook Group with approximately 90,000 cruise ship employee members entitled “The Crew Bar” was shut down by the social media company. Moderators received no prior warning or explanation and were only sent a message which read, “Your group has been disabled. This is because it goes against our Community Standards on dangerous individuals and organizations. We have these standards to prevent and disrupt offline harm.”

“The Crew Bar” group name is taken from officially-designated, employee-only recreational facilities in crew living quarters aboard typical cruise ships. The page intended to be an online simulation of this unique social environment. Its purpose was to enable members of the hundreds of thousands-strong, international cruising workforce to stay in touch with one another, share important workplace information and news, and primarily, to socialize.

While there are several similar such groups and pages on Facebook that have been created by and for seafarers, “The Crew Bar” was the largest and most broad-based. Whereas the other groups tend to be oriented to specific crew nationality or employer, the former was used as an all-inclusive platform for ship workers across all companies and nationalities to share their experiences working at sea.

The Crew Bar Facebook Page Banner. Source: The Crew Bar

During the initial phases of the coronavirus pandemic and the subsequent global shutdown of cruising—which left hundreds of thousands of crew members marooned for months—the page functioned as an emotional support group for those who were stranded and concerned about the future of their livelihood in the wake of the collapse of the industry. It also supported those who were nostalgic for better days working at sea.

After the fate of the Diamond Princess—a 4,000-capacity vessel in which a coronavirus outbreak caused nearly 700 infections and 14 deaths in February 2020—what ensued was appropriately deemed a “humanitarian crisis” by former Holland America Line CEO Orlando Ashford.

A subsequent study conducted by the Miami Herald in the spring of 2020, and updated in July, estimated that there had been roughly 1,770 positive COVID-19 cases among guest passengers and a similar number among ship employees within 14 different cruise companies sailing in the early days of the pandemic. The report stated there were approximately 111 COVID-related deaths on ships in the first half of 2020.

While guests disembarked from ships globally by late March 2020, international restrictions on travel combined with the failure of cruise companies to comply with various national travel policies quickly escalated into a desperate situation with over 200,000 ship employees stranded across the globe.

At that time, the World Socialist Web Site played a leading role in exposing the horrendous conditions faced by this section of the working class. Thousands of crew members spent months in captivity with no earthly idea of when they would return home. A majority of these workers had also been cut off of company payroll and were both unable to go home to their families and unable to work to pay for their expenses.

Between March and May, nearly a dozen non-COVID-related deaths were reported on several stranded, crew-only ships. These deaths were either confirmed as suicides or were widely suspected by crew to have been suicides.

Error message seen by administrators of The Crew Bar February 19, 2021. Source 1: The Crew Bar

By the fall of last year, ship employees had taken several actions to fight for their right to be repatriated including protests, hunger strikes and written appeals to the United Nations, international news agencies, global maritime trade unions and other humanitarian organizations. It was not until November 2020 that Carnival Corporation, the world’s largest cruise operator, announced that it had finally returned all but a tiny handful of about 30 crew members.

Recalling his experience of being stranded on ship for over half of last year, a former crew member told the WSWS, “This was actually a crime committed against all of us. It was very much like being in prison. Even though the companies put us in nice living quarters during this time, we were being held without our consent. And also, we weren’t getting paid, so the company was actually stealing months of our time. When I’m on the ship, my time doesn’t belong to me, it belongs to the company. So, if you stop paying me and hold me against my will, it’s both wrongful imprisonment and theft.”

In addition to having suffered through the trauma of being stranded at sea for several months with no pay, thousands of crew members now face the devastating economic impact of the complete destruction of their industry. Bari Golin-Blaugrund, Vice President of Strategic Communications and Public Affairs of the Cruise Line Industry Association (CLIA), gave a statement in November 2020 and presented the figures on the number of jobs lost by the cruise industry shutdown. She said, “From mid-March through the end of this year, it is estimated that the suspension of cruising in the US will result in a loss of more than $32 billion in economic activity and more than 254,000 American jobs.”

Considering that cruise corporations commonly employ maritime workers from around the world, Golin-Blaugrund has presented an incomplete picture. For example, the Philippines has a large percentage of seafarers in its workforce and had 24,000 Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) who were “either stranded on ships or in shoreside quarantine facilities” by late May 2020. In April 2020, the Foreign Minister of Indonesia, another country with a high population of cruise ship workers, said that 11,505 cruise ship crew had been returned to the country after the outbreak of the pandemic.

The disabling of “The Crew Bar” comes amidst Facebook’s recently announced program of depoliticizing its platform for its nearly three billion users, as well as the banning of all news sources in Australia. These moves come as a part of a broader effort by the social media giant to monitor, track and shut down “inauthentic behavior” on its platform. In the aftermath of the 2016 US presidential elections, major tech monopolies including Facebook, Google and Twitter—falling in line with the narrative of “Russian meddling” promoted by the American Democratic Party establishment—announced the strengthening of censorship and content-restricting initiatives.

On January 27 of this year, on a call with investors to review the company’s fourth quarter financials, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the following: “… this is a continuation of work we’ve been doing for a while to turn down the temperature and discourage divisive conversation and communities. Now, along these same lines, we’re also currently considering steps that we can take to reduce the amount of political content in News Feed … We’re still working through exactly the best ways to do this. And to be clear, of course, we’re still going to enable people to engage in political groups and discussions if they want to.”

There is no doubt that “The Crew Bar” is a victim of Facebook’s program of political censorship. In a display of the tremendous popular support for “The Crew Bar,” a replacement group was quickly created which reached over 13,500 members within 48 hours. “I think it’s heartbreaking that ‘The Crew Bar’ was shut down,” a former cruise ship worker who had been a member of the original group told the WSWS. “There was nothing wrong with what the group was doing … it actually brought people together. For crew and ex-crew, we already had an emotionally tough lifestyle. Even before the pandemic it was common for a lot of us to have really dark thoughts.”

The crew member continued, “people go to work on ships to learn new things, meet people from all over the world and find themselves. And the group was ultimately a system of support for that. I don’t agree that Facebook should have prevented a community of 90,000 people from speaking to one another. Certainly not without any warning or explanation. Everyone was already so divided and torn apart by the nature of this industry. There was no reason to take away that line of communication. Especially not during a pandemic.”

Despite what these media conglomerates and the American state may claim, it is clear that the ultimate aim of these censorship measures is not the protection of safety—least of all that of democratic rights. Rather, the ultimate outcome of this broader initiative is the political censorship of left-wing ideas, criticism and assembly, with which the capitalist ruling class does not agree, and furthermore, cannot tolerate.

Ten years after New Zealand earthquake, no justice for victims of building collapse

Tom Peters

Monday marks ten years since the February 22, 2011, Christchurch earthquake, which killed 185 people. Thousands of buildings were destroyed or severely damaged, and entire suburbs in the city’s working class east, an area once home to 10,000 people, were left uninhabitable and eventually abandoned, with the houses all demolished.

Thousands of homeowners spent years fighting with private insurers and government agencies for their properties to be repaired or rebuilt. Some have still not received any payouts, one decade after the disaster.

The death toll was not simply the product of an unavoidable natural disaster. Nearly two thirds of the lives lost, 115 people, were in the CTV (Canterbury Television) Building, which collapsed in seconds due to its extremely unsafe design. New Zealand is well-known for its frequent earthquakes, yet thousands of buildings are not constructed to withstand a severe shake, due to decades of deregulation and lack of government oversight.

The CTV building before the earthquake (Source: Wikipedia)

The CTV victims included medical centre workers and Canterbury Television staff, as well as teachers and 64 foreign students at the King’s Education language school, from Japan, China, the Philippines, Thailand and South Korea.

Both the previous National Party government and the present Labour Party government, along with the police and Crown Law (the state’s senior solicitors), have worked to prevent anyone being held accountable for the collapse.

Successive councils and governments themselves bear responsibility for creating the deregulated environment that inevitably leads to such tragedies. Beginning with the 1980s Labour government, which was in office during the construction of the CTV Building, both major parties have gutted safety standards across mining, construction and other industries, allowing “self-regulation” by businesses.

A royal commission of inquiry in 2012 found that “the building permit should not have been issued” by Christchurch City Council in 1986, due to serious design deficiencies. And there were further inadequacies in the construction. Dr. Alan Reay, whose firm was in charge of construction, employed an unqualified engineer, David Harding, who had never worked on a multi-storey building before, and was not supervised by Reay.

Among other findings, the commission noted that there were “major weaknesses in all of the beam-column joints” and “the connections between the floor slabs and the north wall complex did not comply with basic engineering principles.” But the commission had no power to hold anyone accountable.

The ruins of the CTV building. It collapsed in seconds on February 22, 2011, leaving only the north wall standing, killing 115 people. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Police began a criminal investigation in 2014 and hired engineering firm Beca, which produced a lengthy report identifying numerous design failures. In May 2017, police finally concluded their investigation and recommended prosecuting both Reay and Harding for manslaughter. However, the government’s deputy solicitor-general, Brendan Horsley, intervened and argued that charges not be laid. On November 30, 2017, police announced that there would be no prosecution.

University of Canterbury engineering professor Maan Alkaisi, whose wife, doctor Maysoon Abbas, died in the building, is a spokesman for the CTV Families Group, which continues to demand justice for the victims.

Alkaisi told the World Socialist Web Site that Horsley made the “outrageous” argument that there was no “public interest” in prosecuting anyone, and that a trial would cost millions of dollars. “So the lives of 115 people is not worth a trial, because it’s too costly for him.” Despite a mountain of evidence that the building was a death trap, Horsley also argued that there was “no major departure from normal practice” in the building’s design.

Alkaisi pointed out that the multiple investigations, involving dozens of engineers, had identified more than 300 structural flaws in the building, “yet Mr Horsley ignored all this and he reckons that he knows more than all those experts in the field.”

In a letter to the Japanese victims’ families in 2019, Horsley added, as an additional reason for not laying charges, that Reay was a person of “good character.”

Alkaisi explained: “What we wanted was a trial. Let everybody come, let all the evidence be examined and cross-examined. Let [Reay] defend himself according to the rule of law. They don’t want that. They want to go behind doors, take decisions, and nobody knows exactly how they reach those decisions.”

Maan Alkaisi

Family members met with Horsley, police officials, and other representatives from Crown Law in December 2017. When Alkaisi asked questions about the abandonment of criminal charges, Horsley replied, “You are baying for blood.” Another family member replied that this was not true, that the families wanted justice and to make sure such a disaster never happened again.

“This is Mr Horsley’s mindset; he thought that we are baying for blood, whereas Alan Reay is a good character that we are chasing. So he was extremely biased,” Alkaisi said.

Reay had at least two opportunities to rectify the building’s design flaws: firstly, when a council inspector raised concerns in 1986, Reay did not change anything, but persuaded the council to issue a building permit. Then, in 1990, the flaws were again identified during the sale of the building, and Reay only ordered some minor work, which failed to fix them.

“The reason he did not do any remedy was because it will affect his reputation and it will involve him paying some money,” Alkaisi said. “This is what really hurt us. It’s for money that we lost all those people, for a few thousand dollars, that’s all he was saving. It would not be millions to make the design a bit better, with a better beam column joint, with better connection between the slab floors and the main north wall. That would have saved the whole building.”

Alan Reay and his wife remain major players in the construction industry. Their firm, Engenium (formerly Alan Reay Consultants Ltd), is involved in numerous public and private projects, including a $200 million apartment and retail complex in Epsom, Auckland.

Alkaisi said, “I’ve been told many times: he is influential. So basically, if a person has money and contacts, he is above the law.”

Brendan Horsley, meanwhile, was promoted last year by the Labour Party-led government to the job of Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security, one of the most sensitive positions in the state apparatus, overseeing the country’s two spy agencies.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has rejected the CTV Families Group’s request to appoint independent judges to investigate the police decision not to lay any charges. Ardern and other government ministers have refused to speak with the families about their case.

In December 2020, Alkaisi announced that the families would make a formal submission to the United Nations, alleging discrimination against them by the government. He told the WSWS they would “list all the mistreatment and all the injustice that we suffered in the last 10 years. They want to cover up, I want the entire world to know what happened.”

Alkaisi concluded that politicians “have zero empathy for people” and only care about what will help them in the next election. “They want victims to be perceived as weak, crying, and just to move on, and believe anything they tell you. All their support is giving you a tissue to dry your tears.”

Anita Stewart, whose brother Andrew Bishop died in the CTV Building, aged 33, told the WSWS: “I’m frustrated at the lack of justice. Wouldn’t anyone be?” She noted that Reay’s company “still rakes in millions of dollars and provides the owner with the lavish lifestyle that the deceased occupants of the CTV building couldn’t even continue dreaming of.”

Andrew worked for CTV as a cameraman and was a volunteer for Sumner Lifeboat, a maritime search and rescue operation. “I wish my brother wasn’t a victim of the CTV Building. He died doing the job he lived for and with colleagues he called friends and family,” Anita said. “It often feels like nobody seems to care anymore except our grief-stricken group. The more support our group receives, the stronger our foundation will be to fight for the justice that our loved ones deserve.”

The appalling situation facing the CTV families is comparable to the decade-long fight for justice by the families of the 29 men who died in the Pike River coalmine disaster. “We share similar experiences, similar concerns, similar injustice,” Alkaisi said. The mine exploded in November 2010 after the company ignored multiple warnings that it was a death trap. No one has yet been held accountable.

Both cases, like the official response to the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire in London, which killed 72 people, are examples of class justice. The legal system is rigged in favour of rich and well-connected individuals and companies, who are shielded from accountability.

The preventable tragedies in Christchurch and at Pike River, like the millions of needless deaths worldwide from the coronavirus pandemic, are the outcome of an economic system, capitalism, which places profit ahead of workers’ safety and their lives.

Billions of dollars are urgently needed to strengthen and reconstruct buildings throughout the country to prepare them against natural disasters. This, in turn, requires a struggle for the socialist reorganisation of society, to place the immense resources of the banks and major industries under public ownership and democratic workers’ control, to be used in the interests of human need.

Kroger to close at least two grocery stores in Seattle after hazard pay increase

Kayla Costa & David Fitzgerald

The Kroger Company, the largest grocery chain in the US, is closing two stores in Seattle, Washington after Seattle City Council implemented a hazard pay measure, increasing wages for all supermarket employees by $4 dollars an hour. Kroger recently closed two stores in Long Beach, California in retaliation against local ordinances requiring hazard pay.

Seattle is within King County, where there have been 80,859 positive COVID-19 cases, 5,062 hospitalizations and 1,345 deaths as of February 18. To the south, the state of California has been a global epicenter of the pandemic for weeks.

The Grocery Store Hazard Pay Ordinance is a temporary measure that requires grocery store businesses that employ more than 500 employees to pay hazard pay of $4 dollars per hour. Grocery store businesses that are less than 10,000 square feet do not have to provide hazard pay.

Workers protest against Kroger's closure of the Food4Less in Long Beach (Credit: World Socialist Web Site)

This pay increase would not provide even a near living wage for workers in Seattle. The median cost of a house in Seattle is $714,400. The US Census Bureau determined that the median rent and utilities paid in Seattle from 2015-2019 was $1,614.

Seattle’s largely Democratic city government put forward the $4 pay increase in order to stem worker militancy. Calls to strike Kroger stores found overwhelming worker support in West Virginia and Texas in 2020. The United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW) Local 400 union pushed through a sellout agreement over strong opposition at over 40 stores in and around Charleston, West Virginia. The new contract accepted by the UCFW was almost identical to the contract that was previously rejected. Many workers boycotted the second vote, in disgust over the sellout deal.

Kroger had offered employees $2 an hour in hazard pay at the early stages of the pandemic, but ended all hazard pay in May. Kroger has stated that they “operate on razor-thin profit margins in a very competitive landscape.” Kroger claims that if they provided hazard pay it would “become impossible to operate a financially sustainable business.”

But this claim is contradicted by the fact that on its own website, Kroger boasts, “third quarter net earnings were $631 million, or $0.80 per diluted share. Adjusted net earnings were $557 million, or $0.71 per diluted [sic] share. Identical sales, without fuel, were 10.9%. Digital sales grew 108% during the quarter … We are successfully transforming our business model to deliver consistently strong and attractive total shareholder return in 2020.”

The Brookings Institute has tracked the top retail companies in the US and found that these companies, such as Kroger, “earned on average an extra $16.7 billion in profit this year compared to last—a stunning 40% increase—while stock prices are up an average of 33%.”

Kroger has used these profits to further enrich shareholders, the Brookings report said. It noted that the company bought back $211 million in stock shares during the second quarter in 2020 and announced an additional $1 billion in buybacks in September.

Andrew, an e-Commerce department worker in a Seattle Fred Meyer store, which is also owned by Kroger, told the World Socialist Web Site that the store closures are the company’s “backlash” for “having to divvy up their money in a different way and give more of it to workers.” He added, “They are just here to make money.”

Andrew added, “The grocery store chains are making a lot of money,” He contrasted Kroger’s record growth, sales and profit margins with the high-risk conditions workers have faced during the pandemic.

His e-Commerce department processes online orders and gets the products loaded into customers’ vehicles. During the pandemic, Andrew and his coworkers have gotten “more and more volume added to our workload. We are taking on double what our station is designed for.” The higher volume and greater profits for Kroger comes at a cost to the safety of employees. There are groups of workers confined to tighter spaces in my department.”

One of Andrew’s coworkers passed away during the pandemic, after complications with chronic health conditions that Andrew attributes in part to the high levels of stress and anxiety working in unsafe conditions.

“We are hauling 9 totes collecting items from shelves when the store is more crowded than ever. We are face to face with all kinds of people throughout the day. Management has not made any significant changes to limit the number of people in the store at one time, enforce one-way traffic, change how merchandising is done to limit physical contact.” In fact, management “cut the cleaning staff for the bathrooms” asking the busy front-end customer service workers to check on bathrooms throughout the day. “A global pandemic is going on, and they tell us to just ‘clean up after yourself.’”

According to the UFCW, at least 137 workers it represents at Kroger and other retailers have died during the pandemic and more than 30,100 grocery workers have been infected or exposed to COVID. Despite this, the UFCW has not called a single job action or protest over health and safety.

Andrew said, “I haven’t heard much from them at all. They’ve been talking about hazard pay a little bit, but it seems like the most recent increase was led by the city council, and only then the union supported it. Even when safety concerns have been brought up, we haven’t heard anything or seen anything changed.”

Myanmar military fires on protesting shipyard workers, killing two

Owen Howell

Tens of thousands of people took to the streets yesterday in Myanmar to protest against the military junta after troops opened fire on shipyard workers and their supporters in the city of Mandalay on Saturday, killing two people. Despite the regime’s escalating use of violence, protests and strikes are continuing against the seizure of power by the military on February 1.

Saturday’s confrontation took place at Yadanabon dock, where a large crowd of shipyard workers and others from the working class area gathered. Sailors had occupied a ship and prevented it from setting off to the city of Bhama, some 300 kilometres up the Irrawaddy River. The protesters built makeshift barricades to try to hold back police.

An estimated 500 police officers and soldiers set upon the crowd with tear gas and water cannons. Journalists were forced to escape after being targeted by projectiles. A video showed the police chasing protesters, hitting them with batons and arresting people. Police were seen beating elderly by-standers as well as protesters.

Myanmar’s leader Aung San Suu Kyi addresses the International Court of Justice in The Hague, Netherlands, Wednesday, Dec. 11, 2019. (AP Photo/Peter Dejong)

As the confrontation wore on, soldiers opened fire with live rounds. A doctor who witnessed the assault told Al Jazeera what then unfolded was a “war zone.” One neighbourhood resident told the AFP news agency: “They beat and shot my husband and others. He was standing on the side and watching the protest but the soldiers took him away.”

Two protesters died from bullet wounds. One was a 16-year-old boy, shot in the head, according to Frontier Myanmar. The other victim was shot in the chest and died en route to hospital. He was later identified by relatives as Thet Naing Win, 36, a carpenter.

An emergency worker told AFP 30 others were wounded, with half the injuries caused by live rounds. At least a dozen people were arrested. Severely injured protesters held in police vans were denied emergency medical care.

Soldiers from 33rd Light Infantry Division were reportedly involved in the crackdown. The unit is notorious for atrocities against Rohingya Muslims in the western Rakhine state of the country in 2017. Significantly it was Aung San Suu Kyi, whose National League for Democracy (NLD) government was deposed by the military, who sought to cover up and defend the actions of the army against the Rohingya.

Elsewhere in Mandalay, protests were also attacked, including a rally of 1,000 people led by medical university students. At one point, police reportedly fired upon a monastery near 40th Street that was being used by medical volunteers as a temporary place of refuge for the wounded.

The bloody crackdown in Mandalay, directed against workers, is part of intensifying military repression as the protest movement shows no sign of abating. Mass arrests were conducted on Friday in the northern city of Myitkina, Kachin State, after protests were crushed with considerable force two days in a row.

The death of a young woman, shot by police during a rally at the capital Naypyidaw, was announced on Friday as the first confirmed fatality. Nationwide marches erupted the next day to honour her memory. The woman, Mya Thwate Thwate Khaing, 20, a grocery store worker, had been on life support in hospital for a week with little chance of recovery. While the military insisted live rounds were not used on the day, doctors confirmed that the wound was caused by a bullet.

Together with a near-total internet shutdown for six consecutive days, the government has employed heavy media censorship to conceal or distort the truth about the violence wreaked by the state. The pro-junta Global New Light of Myanmar newspaper falsely claimed the Yadanabon strikers had instigated the violence, sabotaging vessels and assaulting police with sticks and knives.

This is in line with military spokesman Zaw Min Tun’s baseless claims last Tuesday that the military’s actions were embraced by the majority of the population, and that 40 million of the country’s 53 million supported the coup.

In fact, the repressive measures now being adopted by the junta express, not confidence, but a desperate fear that broader sections of the working class are beginning to join the struggle against military dictatorship.

Hundreds of thousands of workers across the country protested on Wednesday in major cities and rural villages alike, in what were the largest gatherings since the coup. In Yangon, Myanmar’s commercial capital, tens of thousands assembled at the Sule Pagoda, calling for the release of Suu Kyi, the detained leader of the ousted government.

Other crowds stopped their cars in the street in a mass “breakdown” intended to blockade off police. Aerial images showed Yangon streets painted with slogans such as “The military dictatorship must fall” and “We want democracy.”

Workers for the state-run Myanma Railways in Mandalay declared their solidarity with the civil disobedience movement in a major work stoppage on Wednesday. That evening, after the 8 p.m. curfew, soldiers and police attacked the housing complex where the railway workers reside, in a bid to intimidate the striking workers. Numerous videos on social media showed muzzle flashes as gunshots rang out and rocks and slingshots hurled at the buildings, along with shouts of “Shoot, shoot!”

Al Jazeera journalist Tony Cheng, in Bangkok, reported: “The campaign of civil disobedience appears to be having a fairly profound impact—people are refusing to go to their jobs and that’s affecting the transport systems and the banking systems particularly badly.

“We understand that the railways in Yangon are now effectively shut down. We’ve heard that flight schedules for domestic flights in Myanmar have closed down, with pilots refusing to turn up. Many civil servants are not going in to work, and while this is a huge problem for the general public, it is also a major problem for the military.”

Workers from these sectors form the vast majority of the 570 arrests made thus far, according to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners monitoring group.

The protests continued yesterday, with thousands gathering in both Yangon and Mandalay. As reported by Al Jazeera, a young protester told the demonstration in Mandalay: “They aimed at the heads of unarmed civilians. They aimed at our future.” Other protests were reported in Myitkyina, the central towns of Monywa and Bagan, and Dawei and Myeik in the south.

What has emerged is a powerful movement of workers across industries, in defence of democratic rights and against authoritarianism. But this movement can only advance on the basis of a break from Suu Kyi and her NLD, which represents a faction of Myanmar’s bourgeoisie and is just as fearful as the military of the threat posed by the working class.