Half of Canada’s population less than $200 away from insolvency as billionaires’ wealth surges

Alexandra Greene

A staggering 53 percent of Canadians are less than $200 away from insolvency or are already unable to meet their financial obligations each month, according to a recent survey.

The latest MNP Consumer Debt Index shows that the number of Canadians under extreme financial stress has reached a five-year high. Since December 2020, that is within a mere four months, those either insolvent or on the brink of insolvency jumped 10 percentage points.

MNP Ltd., which collected the data, is the country’s largest insolvency firm with some 200 offices across the country. Its figures indicate that 30 percent, or almost one in three Canadians, are already insolvent.

The survey’s findings show that the average Canadian is left with just $625 after making their monthly bill payments. This has dropped by $108—a 15 percent decrease—just in the last four months. The steep decline is likely the result of the federal Liberal government and the provinces cutting back or outright eliminating the makeshift income-support programs they introduced at the beginning of pandemic.

The working class is affected nationally, but the percentage of individuals facing insolvency varies from province to province. In Saskatchewan and Manitoba, for example, 59 percent of residents are within $200 of insolvency. In Ontario, Quebec, British Columbia and Alberta, the figure ranges from 52 to 54 percent. In the four Atlantic provinces—Newfoundland, Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia—58 percent of people either cannot or are on the brink of being unable to pay their bills.

In recent decades, real wage gains for working people, especially lower paid, unskilled workers, have been minimal to nonexistent. Meanwhile, the real, inflation-adjusted incomes of the top 10 and especially the top 1 percent have risen sharply. In 2019, the richest 1 percent of Canadians earned 14.8 percent of all income, a more than 160 percent increase from its 9.1 percent share in 1986. Meanwhile, the income share of the poorest half of all Canadians fell from 18.2 percent in 1986 to just 15.6 percent in 2019.

One measure of the big business-state assault on the working class is the real-terms erosion of federal and provincial minimum wages. Saskatchewan currently has the country’s lowest, $11.45 per hour. A worker who worked 40 hours per week at New Brunswick’s $11.75 per hour minimum wage would earn just $470 per week. Yet according to the world’s largest cost-of-living database, the estimated cost of living for a family of four in Fredericton, New Brunswick, is $4,212 per month before rent is taken into account.

Food price increases are expected to further squeeze workers’ incomes in the months ahead. The 2021 Food Price Report from Dalhousie University is predicting that food prices across the country will rise by between 3 to 5 percent this year, the highest increase in the report’s 11-year history. According to the report, the average Canadian family can expect to pay an extra $695 for groceries this year.

These are deeply concerning predictions for households across the country that have suffered job losses, wage cuts, small business losses, and the illness and death of family members due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the ruling elite’s callous “profits before lives” policy.

While governments at all levels and of all political stripes have ensured that the economy remains open so big business can continue making profits hand over fist, they have refused to provide adequate financial support to help working people through the crisis. Meanwhile, the corporate elite and financial oligarchy, after receiving hundreds of billions of dollars in government bailouts, have intensified their decades-long drive to increase profit-margin through job cuts, speedup and cuts to pensions and other benefits,

“The number of Canadians with virtually no wiggle room in their household budgets has reached a five-year high,” said Grant Bazian, president of MNP Ltd., upon last month’s release of the MNP Consumer Debt Index. “The anxiety Canadians are feeling about making ends meet—or already being unable to do so—tells us we may see an avalanche of households falling behind on payments or defaulting on loans, mortgages, car payments, or credit cards.”

According to MNP, a quarter of Canadians have taken on new debt during the pandemic. Whilst mortgage interests are at historic lows, there are increasing indications of a coming spike in global inflation that could lead to a sharp rise in interest rates, and credit card companies that prey especially on the poor continue to routinely charge rates of 20 percent and more.

A March poll conducted for Global News found that young and unemployed Canadians have been hardest hit financially during the pandemic. The survey found 42 percent of Canadians between the ages of 18 and 34 said their financial situation had worsened over the past year.

Young people form a large part of the workforce in many of the sectors that have instituted mass layoffs during the pandemic, notably the retail, food service and hospitality sectors, as well as those in which the precarious “gig economy” model is increasingly prevalent.

As the working class grapples with widespread impoverishment, death and illness as a direct result of the policies of the ruling class, the Canadian financial oligarchy has seen its wealth soar.

Data from Forbes’ April 7 “Real Time Billionaires” and 2020 annual billionaires’ reports indicate that Canada’s 47 billionaires saw their wealth increase by $78 billion last year, giving them a combined wealth of $270 billion.

Canada’s richest billionaire family, the Thomsons, the principal proprietors of the Thomson Reuters Corporation and Globe and Mail, saw its wealth increase by $14.4 billion. Others who recorded massive increases in wealth amidst the pandemic were Tobi Lutke, founder of the e-commerce company Shopify, whose wealth rose by $8.8 billion; and British Columbia’s Jim Pattison. The latter has seen his wealth increase by $7.2 billion over the course of the pandemic, pushing his net worth to $12.6 billion. Pattison is the chairman, CEO and sole owner of the Jim Pattison Group, a conglomerate that owns and operates numerous packaging, food, forestry and media companies.

Pattison owns several grocery store chains that operate throughout Western Canada. While he increased his personal wealth by over $500 million within the first three months of the pandemic, he infamously cut the $2 hazard pay of frontline workers at his grocery stores in May 2020. When asked about the ruthless clawing back of wages, Pattison shifted blame elsewhere, brazenly telling the press, “I’m not involved. We own and finance the company, but we don’t run them.”

The ruling class will only continue to sacrifice the lives and livelihoods of workers in the name of profit as the pandemic rages on. A stop can be put to this only by the mobilization of the working class as an independent political force. Workers across every industry in Canada must form rank-and-file committees independent of the pro-capitalist trade unions and fight for the closure of all nonessential businesses and the suspension of all in-class schooling until the spread of the COVID-19 is halted. The vast wealth hoarded by the financial oligarchy must be expropriated along socialist lines in order to fund the measures needed to protect workers’ lives and livelihoods.

US birth rate declines to lowest point in more than a century

Patrick Martin

The birth rate in the United States continued its long-term decline in 2020, according to figures released Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which showed a 4 percent drop.

Even more alarmingly, the decline doubled to 8 percent in the month of December, the first month that births were affected by the coronavirus pandemic, which came to widespread public attention in the US during the month of March 2020.

Number of live births and general fertility rates:United States, 2008 - 2020

A separate Associated Press report found that the plunge in December continued in January 2021 and February 2021, with births down 9.3 percent and 10 percent respectively, compared to the same month in 2020.

The CDC gave a provisional figure of 3.6 million for the total number of US births in 2020, just slightly ahead of the 3.4 million estimated deaths. It was the lowest total number of births for the United States since 1979.

In 2019, by contrast, 3.747 million people were born and 2.854 million died in the US, for a net gain, not counting immigration, of 907,000 people. The net gain in 2020 was barely 200,000. At the birth rates shown in December 2020 and the first two months of 2021, the US population will actually be declining, not counting immigration.

The Associated Press report found that 25 American states had more deaths than births last year, compared to only five states in 2019.

The general fertility rate in 2020 was 55.8 births per 1,000 women aged 15-44, also down 4 percent from 2019 and marking a new record low for the country. The comparable figures were 59.1 in 2018 and 58.2 in 2019, so the decline is accelerating sharply. The drop in 2020 was more than twice the decline in 2019. Last year’s rate was the lowest since the federal government began tracking it more than a century ago.

The birth rate has been declining steadily in the United States since the Wall Street crash of 2008 and the subsequent deep recession. Whereas in previous crises, such as the Great Depression of the 1930s, the birth rate fell sharply for several years and then rose again, there has been no such rebound from 2008.

This decline has been particularly sharp among younger women, those aged 20-24, where the birth rate has declined by an astonishing 40 percent since 2007. Over the same period, the birth rate for all women has dropped by 19 percent. The result is that the average age of women at their first time giving birth has risen from 23 in 2010 to 27 in 2020, a substantial increase in only a decade.

The birth rate declined across every race and ethnicity, demonstrating that it is a response to broader economic and societal pressures, particularly the impact of the 2008 crash and the subsequent protracted economic crisis on the working class as a whole.

There are complex social interconnections and processes underlying this decline in childbearing, related to advances in contraception which make having a child much more of a conscious decision on the part of women and their partners.

Women have been able to attend college in much greater numbers and enter into careers in the workplace, and thus have delayed childbearing, or opted out altogether. But the more recent drop is clearly the consequence of overriding economic factors.

For a protracted period, from the 1980s on, the lifetime reproductive rate for American women oscillated around the figure of 2.1 children, roughly corresponding to the number required to keep the existing population stable, known as “replacement-level fertility.” This has dropped since 2008 to only 1.6 children per woman in a lifetime, well below the level of replacement.

This latest decline is a damning indictment of American capitalism, under which wages have stagnated and conditions of life for working people have worsened, to the point that tens of millions of families struggle to provide a decent life for children, and therefore feel themselves compelled to have fewer of them or none at all.

Figures provided by Statista.com illuminate the relation between declining birth rate and socioeconomic status, even prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. The birth rate for those at the poverty level or below hit its recent peak in 2008, at 96 per 1,000 women of child-bearing age. This figure has declined steadily since then, to 74 in 2019, and is doubtless even lower in 2020.

For women living between the poverty level and 200 percent of the poverty level, the sections of the working class closest to poverty, there was a similar decline, although not as pronounced, from 72 per 1,000 women to 61 per 1,000 women.

But for women living at 200 percent of the poverty level and above, the financial crash had effectively no impact on their decisions to have children. Their reproductive rate fell slightly, from 48 per 1,000 in 2008 to 43 per 1,000 in 2013, and remained at that level, rising slightly to 44 in 2019.

The coronavirus pandemic thus exacerbates trends already embedded in the development of American capitalism. The preliminary figures for December 2020, and January and February 2021 suggest its colossal impact, not only on those who have died or fallen grievously ill, but on the entire population.

It is not surprising that women and men would not wish to bring a child into the world under grim conditions of mass death, economic privation and great uncertainty. To say nothing of the natural reluctance to make repeated visits to doctors’ offices and hospitals that are overrun with the dying and desperately ill.

These figures demonstrate once again that the only rational and humane policy for dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic is a complete shutdown of non-essential production, schools and other venues where people gather, until the entire population is vaccinated, including children, and the virus is exterminated.

Right-wing parties carry Madrid region as Podemos suffers election debacle

Alex Lantier

The right-wing Popular Party (PP) defeated the ruling Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE) and Podemos in the May 4 Madrid regional election, running a filthy, anti-communist campaign opposing all social distancing measures to halt the spread of the coronavirus. It was a debacle for the Podemos party, whose general secretary Pablo Iglesias announced his decision to retire from politics.

The PP won 65 seats, four short of a majority in the 136-seat legislature, on 44.7 percent of the vote. The More Madrid party, a Podemos split-off, won 24 seats on 17 percent of the vote and the PSOE another 24 seats on 16.9 percent. The far-right Vox party took 13 seats and 9.1 percent. Podemos fell to last place, with 10 seats on 7.2 percent, and the right-wing Citizens party collapsed. The PP carried 175 of Madrid’s 179 localities, including working class “red surburbs” that long voted for the PSOE and its allies.

Pablo Iglesias, former Podemos general secretary (Image credit: PODEMOS/YouTube)

Incumbent PP regional premier Isabel Díaz Ayuso, who ran based on the slogan “Communism or freedom,” declared on Twitter: “Madrid has chosen freedom, concord and a government for all. From Ground Zero we will recover unity, social peace and liberty that all of Spain needs.” Vox national party leader Santiago Abascal and Madrid regional lead candidate Rocio Monasterio are negotiating with Ayuso on whether Vox will join a PP-led Madrid regional government.

This vote is the toxic product of the fascistic policies pursued by Podemos, which strengthen the right. Podemos, which Ayuso demagogically attacked as “communists,” has in fact implemented fascistic policies of “herd immunity,” social austerity and military build-up pursued by right-wing capitalist governments across Europe. Presented with the choice between openly right-wing parties and a cynical pseudo-left party which is also implementing a policy of social murder, voters chose the former over the latter.

In March, Iglesias stepped down as deputy prime minister to run an “anti-fascist campaign” in the Madrid regional elections. He claimed that his goal was “to prevent the far right from taking over the institutions” in Madrid. This was a cynical political fraud, however. He aimed to work out a political framework to continue imposing “herd immunity” and police-state rule on the workers.

During the campaign, the PSOE-Podemos government pledged to end the state of alarm—which allowed it to impose measures like lockdowns, mask mandates, curfews, or other social distancing measures—so the virus could spread freely. Its “herd immunity” policy kept workers at work and youth at school despite mass circulation of the virus. This had already led to over 100,000 COVID-19 deaths, Spain’s National Institute of Statistics reported in February.

Committed to a fascistic “herd immunity” policy that has claimed over 1 million lives across Europe, the PSOE and Podemos were incapable of making any effective criticism of Ayuso. Terrified of opposition on their left, they worked rather to reinforce the far right as a tool to suppress the working class. It is a stark warning that the working class cannot fight either the virus or the drive to fascistic-authoritarian rule under the diktat of pseudo-left parties like Podemos.

A striking sign of the duplicity of Iglesias’ “anti-fascist” rhetoric was his government’s decision to send heavily-armed riot police squads to guard provocative rallies Vox held in working class districts of Madrid. Riot police worked to intimidate counter-demonstrators, whom right-wing legislators publicly denounced in the Spanish Congress.

This handed the initiative to Vox and Ayuso. In a campaign marked by fascistic death threats mailed to Iglesias and other candidates, Vox and Ayuso made far-right appeals to disgust with the PSOE and Podemos. Given the murderous record of the PSOE-Podemos government, this was sufficient for Vox and Ayuso to carry the election despite their own politically-criminal record.

Far-right generals who support Vox, who have pledged loyalty to fascism, have called for a coup that would murder “26 million” Spaniards, 55 percent of Spain’s population, whom they view as impossible to win to fascism. Ayuso, for her part, displayed open contempt for human life that provoked protests in working class districts of Madrid last year.

“It is likely that practically all children, one way or another, will be infected with coronavirus. … Perhaps they will become infected over the weekend at a family meeting, or in the afternoon in the park or catch it from a classmate. We just don’t know,” Ayuso had declared. Nevertheless, she added, they “must return to school” and “be socialized.” Ayuso also demanded that there be “no strikes or threats” from teachers against her policy of infecting children, as, “This is not the time for ‘me, me, me’” from workers.

Ayuso’s policies have led to Madrid becoming the Spanish region with the most deaths, at around 24,000. Home to 14 percent of Spain’s 47 million population, it has seen 19 percent of Spain’s 3.5 million COVID-19 infections. A scandal erupted, moreover, after internal documents emerged showing that Madrid regional officials issued protocols that barred nursing home residents from being transferred to hospitals for life-saving treatment at the peak of the pandemic.

During the regional election, however, Ayuso was allowed to demagogically portray her murderous “herd immunity” policy as a broader assertion of individual freedoms than the PSOE-Podemos government’s own move to end social distancing.

Iglesias’ reaction to the election result Tuesday was a monument of cynicism and cowardice. While noting that “it consolidated the Trump-ist right,” against which he was supposedly devoting himself entirely to fighting, he announced he would abandon politics.

He advanced a reactionary justification: the claim that his empty criticisms of fascism are now too divisive for Spanish politics. “Being useful to Podemos is my greatest aspiration,” he said, “but beyond affection for comrades, it is clear that I am not a uniting figure. I am not a figure that can contribute to consolidating this political force, above all when they have converted you into a scapegoat until your role to improve democracy in your country is limited and mobilizes the worst haters of democracy.”

“We have failed, we fell far short of the mark,” he said, projecting a mood of utter demoralization. He concluded, “I am abandoning all my positions, I am leaving politics, if one means by that professional politics. I will continue serving my country.”

Similarly, the PSOE-linked daily El País editorialized that the election proved that workers support far-right policies. It wrote: “The result of the Madrid regional elections constitutes a genuine political earthquake full of immediate consequences for the community, but also indirectly on the state of national politics. Madrid’s citizens have given powerful support to the platform led by the PP’s representative, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, her model of handling the pandemic, her ultra-free-market economic position, and her polarizing political attitude with strong demagogic tints.”

There is an urgent danger of both mass COVID-19 deaths and fascistic rule, in Spain and across Europe. However, the arguments of Iglesias and El País blaming the workers leave out one thing: the reactionary role they themselves play. In fact, there is deep opposition among workers to calls for military coups, fascist mass murder, mass infections of children, and denying health care to the elderly. This opposition cannot be mobilized, however, under the discredited banner of Podemos.

Indian government grants more powers to the military as popular anger over COVID-19 catastrophe mounts

Wasantha Rupasinghe

As popular anger mounts across India over the authorities’ utter failure to curb the tsunami of COVID-19 cases, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his far-right, Hindu-supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government are granting more powers to the military in the name of controlling the disease. The BJP’s principal concern, however, is not suppressing the virus. It is strengthening the military and boosting its public image in preparation for suppressing social opposition to its criminal mishandling of the pandemic and push to “revive” India’s economy through a battery of “pro-investor” reforms.

Yesterday, India officially recorded 3,780 deaths from COVID-19, setting a new one-day record, while the total number of recorded infections since the start of the pandemic crossed the 20 million mark. Of these, more than 7.75 million or close to 40 percent have been recorded since April 1. However, due to a chronic lack of testing and the ramshackle state of India’s health care system, both the official death and infection numbers are widely seen as gross underestimates of the true scale of the calamity.

Family members of COVID-19 victims leave as their funeral pyres burn at an open crematorium set up at a granite quarry on the outskirts of Bengaluru, India, Wednesday, May 5, 2021. (AP Photo/Aijaz Rahi)

On April 30, the BJP government granted the Armed Forces “emergency access” to funds in order to enable them to set up and operate quarantine and treatment facilities and hospitals for COVID-19 patients. According to officials, the Vice Chiefs of the Armed Forces, including the Chief of the Integrated Defence Staff, the Chairman Chiefs of Staff Committee (CISC), Officer Commanding-in-Chiefs (GOC-in-Cs) and equivalents of all three services have been granted these procurement powers from May 1. Under this arrangement, “Corps/Area Commanders will now be able to get Rs 50 lakh ($US 67,675) per case and Division/ Sub-Area Commanders Rs 20 lakh per case to set up COVID quarantine and treatment facilities,” India Today reported.

While refusing to spend additional resources on India’s desperately underfunded hospitals, the government is handing over funds intended for fighting the pandemic to the armed forces.

Working class anger towards the BJP government and the entire ruling elite began building prior to the pandemic. Last year, two general strikes in January and November drew tens of millions of workers onto to the streets to protest against the economic restructuring and onslaught on workers’ wages and conditions spearheaded by Modi. In recent months, a series of militant strikes have been waged, including by transport workers and Toyota autoworkers in Karnataka, and hundreds of thousands of farmers have mounted a months-long agitation against the Modi government’s pro-agribusiness reform laws.

The BJP government and ruling elite are concerned that the upsurge of workers’ struggles over speed-up, poverty wages, privatisation and precarious contract employment could intersect with and be further fueled by outrage over the collapse of the health care system. Yogi Adityanath, the fascistic BJP Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh (UP), India’s most populous state with 225 million residents, told a video conference attended by select journalists on April 25 that he had asked senior administrative and police officials to “crack down” on hospitals that “discharge patients citing an oxygen shortage or complain to the media about the crisis.” Following this meeting, UP’s Additional Director General (Law and Order), Prashant Kumr, issued a letter to all police officials in the state saying, “misleading information” is being shared on social media “to create panic.” He demanded they “take strong action against unruly elements of society.”

According to the Hindu, as of April 25, the UP police had already arrested 42 people on such charges. Among them is 26-year-old Shashank Yadav, who posted a desperate appeal on Twitter for oxygen to be given to his dying grandfather. He was charged by the UP police with spreading “rumors” over oxygen shortages. His supposed offence is “intent to cause…fear or alarm.”

Far from being “rumours,” reports of oxygen shortages are all too real for millions of people across India. Hundreds of patients have died in hospital wards in recent weeks due to the expiration of oxygen supplies.

The BJP government is attempting to prohibit media outlets from reporting on these horrifying developments and their bitter outcome—overflowing crematoriums and the piling up of dead bodies in the streets.

The district magistrate of Kanpur, UP’s largest city, sent a letter to a local Hindi-language newspaper, Amar Ujala , that denounced its April 23 report on excess deaths in the city as “misleading.” The authorities demanded the issuing of a “clarification for this story.” The Wire news site explained that Amar Ujala had reported that “there had been 476 cremations across different cremation grounds in the district on April 22.” However, the state government’s figures for the day showed “only nine COVID deaths.”

Reports from numerous cities and towns of rows of burning pyres, crammed crematoriums and huge crowds of the bereaved, as well as a significant and growing number of statistical studies by health experts and journalists, make clear that the official death count is a grotesque understatement. An analysis for the Financial Times suggested deaths during India’s “second wave” may be eight times the official tally. Last month, India officially recorded 45,862 deaths, which accounted for 22 percent of India’s overall deaths throughout the pandemic as of April 30.

Late on April 28, Facebook temporarily prevented its users around the world from searching for content through the “ResignModi” hashtag. Amid mounting criticism from Facebook users, the social media giant lifted the ban. Spokesperson Andy Stone claimed it had been a “mistake” and had not been carried out in coordination with the Modi government. Given Facebook’s notorious role in censorship in collaboration with capitalist governments around the world, this denial stretches credulity.

Facebook’s move coincided with reports that the Modi government asked Twitter to remove all tweets critical of the Prime Minister’s handling of the Kumbh Mela, the world’s largest religious festival, which attracts millions of devotees to Haridwar. Despite warnings from medical experts, Modi allowed the festival to go ahead, resulting in major virus outbreaks.

The increased role granted to the military by the BJP government is in keeping with the vast expansion of India’s armed forces undertaken by successive governments, including those led by the opposition Congress Party. The main Stalinist parliamentary parties—the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPM and the Communist Party of India (CPI)—have also endorsed the boosting of India’s military’s prowess to counter its geo-political rivals, Pakistan and, above all, China.

With a massive military budget of $72.9 billion, India was the world’s third largest defence spender in 2020, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Even as tens of thousands fell victim to COVID-19 and hundreds of millions were left destitute due to a lack of financial support from the government during last spring’s lockdown, India increased its defence spending by 2.1 percent.

All establishment parties are agreed that increased military spending is essential to bolster India’s predatory regional and global power ambitions, including its anti-China military-strategic alliance with Washington. By contrast, they view spending on health care as a drain on resources that could be used to purchase weapons of war or enrich the financial elite. This is why the Indian state—the national and all state governments combined—have spent no more than a meagre 1.5 percent of GDP on health over recent decades.

Millions of people in India are increasingly realising that the Modi government and Indian ruling elite have totally abandoned them to their own fates. With hospitals shutting their gates due to a lack of oxygen, ventilators, beds and medicines, and desperate relatives finding nowhere to bury or cremate their dead loved ones, social anger towards Modi and the entire ruling class is reaching a boiling point.

It is increasingly understood that Modi and the BJP government deliberately ignored the warnings of epidemiologists about the risk of a devastating pandemic surge so they could keep India’s economy “open” and boost corporate profits and the fortunes of the country’s 130-plus billionaires.

At the World Economic Forum in late January, Modi asserted, “India has saved humanity from a big disaster by containing corona effectively.” Even as infection rates began to surge from mid-February on, and as warnings of disaster from health experts on the government’s own advisory committees grew, the BJP government persisted in its refusal to impose any new public health restrictions.

On April 20, by which time the daily death toll was well over 2,000 and daily infections were approaching 300,000, Modi declared in an address to the nation that it was necessary to “save India from lockdown,” not from COVID-19. Two weeks on, after millions of further infections, and with reports of multiple new, more-infectious and potentially lethal Indian strains of the virus, the government remains adamantly opposed to shutting down non-essential businesses.

As part of its homicidal strategy of prioritising the profits of India’s industrialists and financial elite over the protection of human lives, the Modi government has largely abandoned even some of the limited improvements made in health care during the pandemic’s early stages. Analysing the government’s data on the number of oxygen-supported beds, ICU beds and ventilators in a May 4 report, India Today noted a “drastic decrease” of these medical facilities between September of last year (when India saw the peak of its first wave) and the end of January (just before the second wave started).

US construction companies face high penalties for serious federal workplace safety violations

Jessica Goldstein

The US Federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) issued its highest fines to a series of construction companies and contractors during the first quarter of 2021, according to a report by the industry website Construction Dive.

Federal OSHA issues penalties to employers found in violation of its workplace safety standards, which include violations that cause injury and death to workers. In states that operate their own Occupational Safety and Health agencies, they are required to adopt maximum penalty levels at least as high as the federal level.

The construction industry report found that OSHA fined contractors for “fall protection, excavation and trenching violations but also for fatalities involving the use of aerial lifts.” Of the three fatal injuries that OSHA cited, all involved aerial lifts, which require training and inspections before operating, by OSHA’s standards.

Construction workers in Detroit (Source: WSWS Media)

According to OSHA’s fact sheet, an “aerial lift is any vehicle-mounted device used to elevate personnel, including: extendable boom platforms, aerial ladders, articulating (jointed) boom platforms” and “vertical towers” or any combination of these. They are dangerous to work with, and workers who work with them regularly face the risks of “fall from elevated level, objects falling from lifts, tip-overs, ejections from the lift platform, structural failures (collapses), electric shock (electrocutions), entanglement hazards,” and more.

The top seven fines cited in the report went to construction contractors around the US:

• Carework Construction in Newark, New Jersey , was fined $404,811. Carework was cited for one willful and two repeat violations related to violations of fall protection standards. The contractor came under scrutiny by OSHA in March 2020 for eight serious and two repeat violations related to fall protection, scaffolds, and protective equipment for workers.
• Arrow Plumbing in Blue Springs, Missouri , was fined $299,950. The fines were issued for two serious and two repeat violations. The company repeatedly violated excavation and trenching standards, even after supposedly committing to a trench safety program after a worker died at one of its sites in 2016 in an unprotected trench collapse.
• Boak & Sons in Youngstown, Ohio , was fined $218,197. The contractor violated ladder safety and scaffolding and fall protection standards. It has repeatedly been found by OSHA to have violated fall protection standards in the past.
• Cunyas Roofing in Bismarck, North Dakota , was fined $207,802. OSHA found that the company failed to provide workers with “guardrails, safety net systems or personal fall arrest systems” and failed to pay for personal protective equipment (PPE).
• Lifetime Contractor Corp. in Trenton, New Jersey , was fined $201,090 after OSHA completed two inspections, one of which was triggered by a worker’s injury after a multi-car garage collapsed at a project site in Elmwood Park, New Jersey. The contractor violated OSHA’s standards for fall protection, hard hat and eye safety, and ladder use standards.
• Eastern Constructors in Geismar, Louisiana , was fined $170,534. Two workers were killed on the job while performing structural steel work for the contractor at a new Amazon fulfillment center being built in Suffolk, Virginia. According to the report, Eastern Constructors was cited for one willful and three serious violations after “both workers fell approximately 54 feet after falling materials from the collapse struck the aerial lifts” they were working on.
• Marfi Contracting Corp. in Staten Island, New York , has been fined $148,643 in total. OSHA issued five citations to Marfi, two serious, one willful, one repeat, and one other after a worker climbed from an aerial lift onto a roof to work, which collapsed, leading the worker to fall 25 feet to their death.

The maximum penalties for serious violations are only $13,653 per violation, and $136,532 per violation for willful and repeat violations, according to an agency memo released January 8, 2021. These fines are pitifully low, given the terrible toll workers and their families suffer, and are often challenged and reduced.

Construction workers are particularly at risk for suffering death on the job. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) publishes data on recorded workplace fatalities annually in its Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries report. Data for 2020 has not been released. For 2019, the year for which the most current data is available, the BLS reported a total of 1,061 construction workers died on the job in the US in 2019, the highest of any sector of industry. Construction workers are the fourth-highest group at risk for dying at work, according to the 2019 report, which found a fatality rate of 9.7 per 100,000 full-time workers in the industry.

These dangerous conditions are by no means limited to the US. Globally, construction work is one of the deadliest industries. The United Nations International Labour Organization (ILO) reported that in 2019, Moldova reported a fatality rate of 44.7 per 100,000 construction workers, Sri Lanka had a rate of 41.7, Ukraine had a rate of 31 and Israel a rate of 12.7. According to the UN ILO, falls were found to be the most common cause of fatality for construction workers worldwide during that year.

The COVID-19 pandemic took a toll on global markets in March 2020. As state governments in the US moved to implement limited lockdown measures that halted some business activities, in response to independent actions by workers to stop production worldwide, this coupled with economic factors led construction projects in the US to grind to a halt. Governments offered little to no assistance to workers and small business owners who were unable to work during the lockdowns.

Demand for new non-residential building starts declined 24 percent and non-building infrastructure projects declined 13 percent in the following months, and the US saw a loss of 220,000 construction jobs, or 2.9 percent, in 2020 compared to 2019, according to BLS reports.

No strangers to dangerous working conditions before the pandemic took hold, construction workers faced even more dangerous conditions upon returning to work. As states rushed to reopen in mid-2020, some demand was regained, mainly in the residential building sector. Overall fewer starts compelled contractors to shore up lost profits, meaning cuts to jobs and safety measures, forcing workers to perform more dangerous tasks with sparser crews.

Construction workers themselves are at a high risk of contracting COVID-19 on the job. Last August, the CDC reported results of a study from Utah that showed that construction work had the second-highest rate of workplace outbreaks next to the manufacturing industry. Another study by the University of Texas at Austin COVID-19 Modeling Consortium found that Austin-area construction workers with COVID-19 were five times more likely to be hospitalized than those in other occupations. The study cited the inability to stay home, lack of ability to social distance, and employer practices as top contributors.

Rather than protecting the interests of the working class whose lives are put at risk for the profits of the financial oligarchy, OSHA has worked in favor of businesses and state governments that have demanded the reopening of the economy during the pandemic. On its federal website, OSHA has reported only 468 known workplace-related fatalities from COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic, a grotesque underestimation. Its data on COVID-19–related workplace deaths is more than six months out of date, with the most recent recorded for October 16, 2020.

OSHA, along with the trade unions, corporations and state governments, is working consciously to cover up the true spread of the disease throughout workplaces in the US. In one example uncovered by the World Socialist Web Site, OSHA turned a blind eye toward the blatant falsification by Stellantis of COVID-19-related deaths at its Warren Truck Assembly Plant north of Detroit throughout 2020.

As a regulating agency, OSHA has little power to enforce its own regulations. It allows businesses found in violation of safety standards to appeal or contest the violations, often resulting in a lowering of penalties, even for those that result in a worker’s death. This often comes as a slap in the face to the loved ones and co-workers of workers who suffer untimely and tragic deaths for the sake of profits.

The Obama administration cut funding for inspection staff at federal OSHA, further crippling its ability to issue citations for violations, paving the way for even deeper cuts to the agency under the Trump administration. The Biden administration has made no mention of improvements, either. Biden’s “American Jobs Plan,” aimed primarily at aggressively undermining China’s economic position on the world scale for the benefit of US imperialist interests, makes no mention of workplace safety.

The incentive for businesses to place profit interests above worker health and safety is abetted by the policies of the administration. Five of the seven construction companies being fined the highest by OSHA are currently pending abatement of the penalties or contesting the violations issued.

Sri Lankan government exonerates alleged war criminals and political cronies

Pradeep Ramanayake

Sri Lankan Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapakse has tabled a resolution in the parliament to end court cases against political supporters of the government and alleged war criminals.

This resolution is based on a paper submitted by the President Gotabhaya Rajapakse and approved by the cabinet. It was based on the recommendations of the Presidential Commission of Inquiry (PCoI), appointed in January last year.

Gotabaya Rajapaksa (AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena)

This commission was tasked with investigating “political victimisations” during the previous government of President Maithripala Sirisena and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, covering the period from January 16, 2015 to November 16, 2019. The commission submitted its final report to the president last December.

The resolution was presented to the parliament on April 9, debated once, and has been scheduled for further debate. If it were to be rammed through parliament, the government could order the withdrawal of judicial punishments and also terminate several ongoing court cases.

The commission also recommended taking action against those responsible for the allegations against the supposedly politically victimised. These include several political leaders from the previous government, and supporting parties that are now in opposition, as well as officers involved in investigating the cases.

The commission has advised the president to appoint another panel, as it has no judicial powers to take action. Rajapakse has appointed such a body and its report is due. If these recommendations are acted on, it would lead to a witch-hunt of political opponents that could include stripping them of their civil rights.

President Rajapakse’s moves, which further undermine the constitution, are another step towards autocratic rule, in the face of the country’s deep social and political crisis.

This infamous presidential commission consisted of three members—a retired supreme court judge Upali Abeyratne, retired appeals court judge Daya Chandrasiri Jayatilleka and a former inspector general of police, Chandra Fernando.

Its report’s introductory remarks demonstrate a blatant political bias. Commissioners have glorified the final phase of the bloody war against the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) which was waged by the government of President Mahinda Rajapakse. At the time, the current president, Gotabhaya Rajapakse, was defence secretary. Both were hailed in the report as “the heroic leaders who made Sri Lanka a unitary state again” by defeating the LTTE in May 2009.

The Commission report criticizes court cases, filed during the Sirisena-Wickremesinghe government, against military personnel and Rajapakse allies, using the “baseless allegations made against real war heroes by pro-western leaders, inspired by the Tamil Diaspora.” This is a bald-faced lie. By UN estimates, in the final months of the war alone, the military’s indiscriminate attacks killed at least 40,000 Tamil civilians.

The Sirisena-Wickremesinghe government came to power in January 2015, promising to address the suppression of democratic rights, war crimes and human rights violations, and investigate the rampant corruption during Mahinda Rajapakse’s rule. It also promised to improve the social conditions of working people in order to exploit widespread opposition to the Rajapakses.

The election of Sirisena as president was part of a US-sponsored regime-change operation. Washington had backed the war against the LTTE and turned a blind eye to the government’s war crimes. However, the US was hostile to Mahinda Rajapakse’s ties with Beijing, under conditions where the Obama administration was determined to encircle and undermine China.

After coming to power, the Sirisena-Wickremesinghe government had no real interest in taking any action over war crimes, not least because the parties that made up the government were also responsible for the brutal 30-year communal war and its many atrocities. Limited legal action was taken in response to public opposition.

Cases were filed over some abductions by military-aligned death squads, the killing and harassment of journalists, and corruption. Virtually all these cases are still dragging on.

Now, on the pretext of ending “political victimization,” the current Rajapakse government is proposing to terminate these cases, including:

* The high court trial against former navy commander retired Rear Admiral, Wasantha Karannagoda, Lt. Colonel, H.M.P. Chandana Kumara Hettiarachchi and several high-ranking navy officers, over the abduction and disappearance of 11 Tamil youth in Colombo and suburban areas during 2008-2009.

* The indictment of navy intelligence officer Gamini Seneviratne in the high court over the killing of Jaffna district MP Nadarajah Raviraj in 2006.

* Those accused of the high-profile murder of Sunday Leader editor Lasantha Wickrematunge in January 2009, and those charged for abduction and torture of journalist Keith Noyahr are to be released.

* Duminda Silva, an MP in the Mahinda Rajapakse government, is to be freed, as his death sentence has been finally approved by the Supreme Court. He was found guilty of the murder of political rival Bharatha Lakshman Premachandra in 2011.

* Significantly, corruption charges will be dropped against the president’s younger brother Basil Rajapakse, the prime minister’s son Yoshitha Rajapakse and current ministers Udaya Gammanpila and Nalaka Godahewa.

The commission has recommended that those politically victimized should be compensated, reinstated in their former posts, and given promotions that they would have received.

According to its recommendations, the charges should be brought against former prime minister Wickremesinghe and several of his government ministers, Tamil National Alliance (TNA) MP M. A. Sumanthiran, opposition Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) leader Anura Kumara Dissanayake, as well as senior police officers, lawyers and government officials. They are accused of making false allegations.

Sajith Premadasa, leader of the opposition Samagi Jana Balawegaya, demagogically declared at a press conference last week: “With this report, the government has planned the political assassination of its opponents. What Hitler did in one night, the government is trying to do through one report.” JVP leader Anura Kumara Dissanayake rhetorically challenged the government to take action against him.

The Bar Association of Sri Lanka passed a resolution condemning the government’s moves as “an affront to the doctrine of separation of powers, the Rule of Law and the independence of the judiciary.” A Sunday Times editorial on April 25 declared that the government’s decision to proceed on the “blatantly biased” recommendations of the commission “betrays a dangerous mindset prevailing among the country’s political leadership.”

These limited criticisms obscure the far-reaching implications of the government’s determination to overturn charges and dismiss cases against military figures and political allies. It further ensures that an already pliant judiciary will act according to the political wishes of the government and, in particular, that no further investigation of war crimes, let alone charges, will take place.

Families paint defiant Covid-19 memorial wall opposite UK Parliament

Paul Mitchell

Families of those who have died as a result of Covid-19 in Britain have painted a defiant and moving 500-metre-long wall of 150,000 hearts opposite the Houses of Parliament in London. The names of their loved ones are gradually being added to the hearts.

The National Covid Memorial Wall was started by Covid-19 Bereaved Families For Justice UK Movement—a group of family members who have “come together to seek justice in the names of our loved ones gone too soon from Covid-19.”

Defiant memorial opposite Parliament marks 150,000 COVID-19 deaths in Britain

The group says, “We firmly believe that had the government approached the pandemic differently, truly ‘followed the science’ and ‘taken the right actions at the right times’ that many of our loved ones would still be here today.

“As time goes on, more evidence emerges about government failings in relation to the timing of lockdown, provision of PPE and testing in health and care settings, isolation of cases within care homes and hospitals and much more.

The National Covid Memorial Wall (credit: WSWS media)

“Despite this and the fact that the UK has one of the highest death tolls in the world, the government continues to speak of its ‘apparent success’. For the hundreds and thousands of people in mourning in the country, this is a failure to recognise the facts and an insult to the memory of our loved ones.”

Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson has refused to meet with the Covid-19 Bereaved Families campaign. He visited the wall with his security officers late in the evening, under cover of darkness on April 27, in a cynical damage limitation exercise, amid allegations, leaked as part of an ongoing factional war in the Tory party, that he had demanded last October “no more f***ing lockdowns, let the bodies pile high in their thousands!”

People adding to the National Covid Memorial Wall (credit: WSWS media)

After Italy and Brazil, Britain has the third highest death toll globally per million population—among countries with a population above 12 million—even based on the government’s own underestimated death toll figure of 127,570.

The outburst exemplified the “herd immunity” discussions being held behind closed doors, with it reported that Johnson also said around the same time of the virus that he would rather “let it rip” through the population than implement another lockdown.

In the centre of these hearts are two message “NHS workers… still suffering" and “NHS workers are for life—not just for Covid—No to 1%”. This is in reference to the Johnson government's derisory 1 percent pay offer for over 1 million National Health Service workers (credit: WSWS media)

Covid-19 Bereaved Families co-founder Matt Fowler told reporters that Johnson would not meet them or discuss their calls for a statutory public inquiry. “For weeks we’ve asked him to come to the wall and meet bereaved families. He’s refused to even acknowledge our request… Then, the day after it’s [alleged] he said he’d let ‘bodies pile high’ he makes a late evening visit under cover of darkness.

“It constantly feels like the prime minister views us as nothing more than an annoyance, an inconvenience on his doorstep. It hurts that he won’t even offer us the respect of engaging with us to learn the lessons from our lost loved ones.”

Hearts signed by the loved ones of a Covid-19 victim (credit: WSWS media)

Earlier in the day, Jackie, visiting the memorial wall with husband Dave to write the name of her brother Bernard in one of the hearts told the WSWS, “I have come here because I hate Boris Johnson and the Tories for what they did to my Bernard.” Recalling the BMJ (formerly, British Medical Journal editorial in February that accused the world’s governments of “social murder” in their collective response to the pandemic, Jackie labelled Johnson a “mass murderer”.

“Not only did I lose Bernard well before his time, but it has been impossible to find out the circumstances of his death. There has been a cover-up that’s impossible to penetrate. The authorities are trying to prevent any legal action and Johnson and his ministers will get away with it. [Labour Party leader Sir Keir] Starmer has been useless.”

A heart reading "For all the people in the world who died from Covid-19" (credit: WSWS media)

Sita had come to record the name of her sister Raksha, who had visited her doctor’s surgery early in the pandemic and contracted Covid-19 from another patient. “She rapidly became ill and died a horrible death.”

“I blame Boris Johnson for what happened. He treated the whole thing as a joke at first before reluctantly ordering a lockdown. Then when the second wave hit, he is even supposed to have said ‘let the bodies pile up high’. I think that has always been their attitude. Now Johnson talks about a third wave being inevitable.

“The government has also given huge amounts of money to their cronies. I still can’t believe something like £35 billion has been spent on the Test and Trace system, which has been a fiasco. When my sister got ill, I was phoned up several times and asked the same questions by people who didn’t know any more than the simple script they had been told to read out.

“At the same time, the government only gave the doctors and nurses a one percent pay rise this year. I can’t bear to watch the politicians and TV talk about our ‘National Health Service heroes’ and how ‘we are all in this together’”.

Sita said that she has family members in India. “As you can imagine they are really scared. It’s a catastrophe there. All the Conservative government here has done is offer a few hundred bits of medical equipment, probably a lorry load. Johnson is refusing to send vaccines. All the talk about how every country would co-operate to stop the pandemic when it first started has vanished into thin air. It is a dog-eat-dog situation which can only lead to more new variants of the virus appearing. There must be a way of running the world in a more just and co-operative way.”

A heart signed by Milton Keyes hospital reading, “For everyone who look after, who we looked after, who we care for, forever and always, Milton Keynes Hospital” (credit: WSWS media)

Flora, a trainee social worker, explained how there was now a lot of pressure to stop home working and get everyone back into the office. “Up to now about 90 percent of the time we have been able to do our work remotely. Occasionally, there was no option but to go out to help people thrown into vulnerable situations. We were always very careful with PPE [personal protective equipment] and social distancing. We were given vaccines although that was only recently. We were praised for all our efforts.

“Now all that is changing. The safety attitude is disappearing. People don’t wear masks, don’t keep their distance. No one’s being tested. Managers are saying we have to be in the office five days a week, that we’re under-performing and they are going to carry out a re-organisation. That’s the thanks we get.

The corner of the National Covid Memorial Wall with Parliament across the river, where the political parties responsible for the social murder of over 150,000 gather (credit: WSWS media)

“I agree with what you said about the trade unions and the Labour Party and how they have co-operated with the government to get everyone back to work as soon as possible and stop us rebelling against all those rich bastards who seemed to have continued making a lot of money whilst we have got nothing.

“The unions are nowhere to be seen at my workplace. That’s probably not the way to say it. They are probably in an office somewhere conniving with management.

“I also agree with your May Day meeting and the idea of having committees of workers set up around the world to do things for ourselves. The pandemic has shown that you can’t sort it out with each country doing its own thing. I guess that goes for most of the world’s problems.”

People look at the 500 metre long National Covid Memorial Wall (WSWS media)