Dutch caretaker government accelerates lifting of social-distancing measures

Parwini Zora

Like its US and UK counterparts, the Dutch government is accelerating its scrapping of remaining social-distancing measures, following a rapid ease of restrictions since April 28, risking a surge of infections come summer. “In fact, this is the end of the lockdown,” said Prime Minister Rutte at a televised press conference on May 28.

Netherlands Prime Minister Mark Rutte (Wikimedia Commons)

Starting today, restaurants are allowed to serve indoors with a maximum of 30 socially distanced customers. At the same time, cinemas, theatres and museums will reopen to those with bookings. Private homes will able to have four guests rather than the current two a day. Secondary schools are also to reopen by June 7, five weeks before the summer break.

“The cabinet wants to largely unlock the Netherlands sooner than planned, starting June 30,” news agency NOS reported, though most Dutch adults are still not fully vaccinated. Currently, only 9.2 million jabs have been administered, two-thirds of these being first vaccinations. The population of the Netherlands was 17.28 million in 2019, according to Eurostat.

Over the past 15 months, there have been over 1.6 million infections and at least 20,000 deaths from COVID-19 in the Netherlands. Over 2,500 infections and a dozen deaths are still recorded each day, testifying to the broad circulation of the virus. Yet the government has moved up the launch of its so-called “third phase” of reopening by four days, to June 5, pointing to a drop in new infections and fatalities late last month, even as more virulent strains of the virus, like the so-called Indian variant, spread internationally.

It is yet another indication of the subservience of the entire Dutch political establishment to big business, the Amsterdam stock exchange and the demands of the far right.

An estimated 140,000 routine hospital operations were reportedly delayed as hospitals were flooded with COVID-19 cases. The Dutch communal health services (GGD) issued a statement signed by the public health directors from the 25 GGD branches declaring that they are short at least €600 million a year to sustain routine health care. “Basic care is too impoverished,” continued the GGD, adding that “the lesson of the pandemic is that basic care has not been sufficiently funded.”

But US pharmaceutical firm Pfizer has used a letterbox company in Capelle aan den Ijssel in Zuid-Holland to hold $36 billion of its annual revenue last year and avoid paying tax on windfall vaccine profits, the investigative journalism platform Follow the Money revealed. Although Pfizer develops medicines and vaccines based on publicly-funded research, it had paid little tax, and almost no tax in the Netherlands, the report concluded. Pfizer’s revenue soared 42 percent in the first three months of the year. The Netherlands rank as the world’s fourth-largest tax haven.

According to a recent Dutch Central Bureau for Statistics (CBS) report, in 2020, absenteeism due to illness among employees was highest in health care, where absenteeism was always above average. This is the direct consequence of decades of austerity that led to chronic under funding of medical infrastructure and staff, leading to work overload with stagnant wages and high burn-out rates, even before the pandemic.

After frontline health care workers, the highest burnout rate for 2020 was recorded in education, for the fourth year in a row, as partial COVID-19 distancing measures led to rapid shifts between online and hybrid teaching that massively added to non-paid working hours for educators. Education is one of the professions most prone to burnouts: 27.4 percent of staff, compared to a national average of 17 percent, suffer from burnout complaints. Education is also plagued by acute staff shortages.

“We want to make it possible for the students to go to school for at least another six weeks before the summer holidays start,” outgoing Education Minister Aire Slob declared at a press conference, echoing the position of Rutte, a vocal advocate of “back to school” policies.

Secondary schools are to give all students in-person lessons five days a week starting May 31, which will be mandatory across all Dutch provinces by June 7. At school, students are only to keep their distance from teachers and staff, and not from each other. Face masks will be mandatory only in school hallways.

Across the English Channel, British schools are already seeing rising COVID-19 outbreaks, despite the roll-out of the vaccine, since Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative government lifted most restrictions on May 17.

According to NOS, many secondary school teachers hesitate to stand in front of full classes. “Many employees in education are concerned about their health,” declared Henrik de Moel, director of the General Union of Educational Personnel (Algemene Onderwijsbond, Aob). De Moel noted that “not everyone has had their turn for even the first vaccination.”

The unions have worked closely with the Rutte government, however, to block strike action and subordinate workers in education and other sectors to Rutte’s policy of allowing the virus to spread. They declared that they feel “forced to advise” teachers of their right to collectively invoke the Working Conditions Act, if necessary, to protect themselves. The Aob blandly added that “in recent weeks, many colleagues in secondary education have expressed serious concerns about their safety if the schools were to reopen fully without proper measures.”

Continuing to posture in order to avoid strikes, a consortium of five education unions (AOb, CNV Onderwijs, FvOv, FNV Overheid and Leraren in Actie), has submitted a joint letter to the Dutch House of Representatives. It respectfully noted the “concern” felt by the unions that it would be best if secondary schools reopened fully after the summer holidays, and not before.

The unions’ one-and-a-half page document endorsed the policy of the European Union and the Rutte government to let the virus circulate in workplaces and schools, asserting that “currently the situation at the schools is manageable, as pupils go to school on average for 2.5 days.”

On the other hand, Dutch magazine Quote 500 has released its 2020 list of the richest people in the Netherlands: the wealth of the 500 richest in the country rose by €6 billion from 2019 to 2020, to €186 billion. More than half (265) increased their wealth over the past year, as millions were plunged into poverty across Europe. The Netherlands had 38 billionaires by the end of 2020—five more than in 2019—led by beer mogul Charlene de Carvalho-Heineken, with €12.1 billion in recorded assets.

French scientist tries to silence whistle-blower over discredited COVID-19 hydroxychloroquine claims

Samuel Tissot

French microbiologist Dr. Didier Raoult, who published a now-discredited paper in March 2020 claiming that hydroxychloroquine was effective at treating COVID-19, has threatened legal action against scientists criticizing his research. These include Elizabeth Bik, the whistleblower who first exposed methodological inconsistencies in Raoult’s research, and Boris Barbour, who runs the not-for-profit website Pubpeer allowing scientists to review each other’s work.

Dr. Didier Raoult (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

On May 18, an open letter supporting Bik against Raoult’s attack titled “Scientists stand up to protect academic whistleblowers and post-publication peer review” was published. It has since been signed by over 1,000 scientists across the globe, working across multiple disciplines.

Elizabeth Bik is a microbiologist and research integrity specialist whose work investigating academic misconduct has led to more than 170 paper retractions and exposed more than 4,000 cases of duplication, data manipulation, plagiarism, and ethical breaches. On March 24, 2020, Bik published a blog post that exposed a number of inconsistencies with Raoult’s March 17 paper, which claimed treatment with the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine significantly increased the chance of survival for patients with severe cases of COVID-19.

Bik raised a number of methodological concerns within Raoult’s study. This included the removal of one subject who had died and two who had become too ill to receive treatment during the study from his results, raising suspicions that Raoult cherry-picked data to support the finding that the drug was effective against COVID-19. Bik also found that the study began on March 5, one day before it received official clearance from the French Ethics Committee on March 6, and that Raoult’s paper was peer-reviewed in just 24 hours, a process that usually takes weeks. Bik also unearthed an undeclared conflict of interest: one of paper’s co-authors, J. M. Rolain, was the editor-in-chief of the journal to which it was rapidly accepted.

Bik then began reviewing Raoult’s other work and ultimately flagged concerns with 62 more of Raoult’s papers. This led to an angry response from Raoult and his colleagues.

Raoult has denounced Bik on Twitter as a “witch-hunter,” “nutcase,” and “failed researcher,” while his colleague Eric Chabrière described her as a “dung-beetle.” Raoult later accused Bik of trying to blackmail him without any evidence and denounced her on national television. He also took the thuggish decision to publish Bik’s personal address to his followers on Twitter.

On April 29, Raoult’s lawyers sent a letter to Nature claiming they have filed a lawsuit against Bik, accusing her “of aggravated moral harassment, attempted blackmail and attempted extortion.” Bik is yet to receive any notification of legal action, however. It is unclear whether Raoult and his lawyers intend to continue the case, or if the letter was only an attempt to intimidate Bik into self-censorship with the threat of legal action.

Bik maintains her innocence and has refused to withdraw her criticisms despite these attacks. She responded to Raoult’s action by asking, “Why doesn’t he show me proof that I am wrong? I would be happy to accept that,” adding, “Science should be discussed in the scientific arena, not the legal one.”

Didier Raoult is a controversial figure within scientific circles. While his groundbreaking research has led to the discovery of hundreds of new types of viruses, he has complained of the “dictatorship of the methodologists” and dismissed the importance of randomized trials for objective experimentation. He is currently under investigation following a complaint last November by a group representing 500 specialists of France’s Infectious Diseases society, accusing him of breaking nine rules of the doctors’ code of ethics.

In France, he won popular sympathy early in the pandemic by insisting that people be treated, commendably providing free tests at his institute for anyone that showed up. At that time, he rejected a “herd immunity” policy of letting coronavirus spread unchecked and told the government that a firm test-and-trace strategy was essential to eliminate the virus. President Emmanuel Macron responded to Raoult’s rising influence and profile in the media by bringing him on as a scientific advisor.

Unfortunately, Raoult increasingly tailored his statements to what was politically acceptable to Macron. In May 2020, he stated that the virus was naturally coming to an end and that “nowhere do we see a second wave.” Despite mounting evidence schools were drivers of the pandemic, Raoult advised Macron that children are not significant spreaders of the virus, paving the way for the premature reopening of schools on May 11, 2020.

In December 2020, Raoult dismissed COVID-19 vaccines, which had proven highly effective in clinical trials, as “science fiction and, above all, as publicity.” He made a right-wing comment opposing mandatory vaccination, saying: “If we played around with making vaccines mandatory, there would be a revolution. Luckily we haven’t done that.” In fact, universal vaccination against the virus is a critical component of an international public health policy to halt the pandemic.

Raoult’s harassment of Bik has been denounced by scientists around the world. An open letter defending Bik states that Raoult’s “strategy of harassments and threats is creating a chilling effect for whistleblowers and for scholarly criticism more generally.”

Lonni Besançon, a co-author of the open letter and computer scientist in Australia, told Nature, “Investigating someone’s research is definitely not harassment. This is a scientific question, this should not fall onto the legal system to figure out.” A spokesperson for Pubpeer, the other target of Raoult’s threatened lawsuit, stated: “A successful legal action could have a chilling effect on post-publication peer review.”

Bik’s exposure of Raoult and his bullying response raise important scientific and political issues regarding scientific integrity.

At the beginning of the pandemic, Bik was joined by a host of other scientists expressing concern over research advocating the use of hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19. This included Paul Garner, the editor of the Cochrane Infectious Disease Group, who told the BMJ (formerly, British Medical Journal ) that, “they [hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine] could do harm” and “there is absolutely no evidence that chloroquine is effective in people infected with the coronavirus.”

Nevertheless, after the first lockdowns in the spring of 2020, Raoult’s research was endorsed by capitalist politicians seeking to promote all and any “cures,” regardless of their efficacy, in order to impose a quick end to lockdowns and return to work to boost corporate profits. Then-US president Donald Trump hailed Raoult’s work as “very good” and hydroxychloroquine treatment of COVID-19 as “the biggest game changer in the history of medicine.” The drug was also promoted by Brazil’s fascistic president, Jair Bolsonaro.

The adoption of “herd immunity” policies that have led to the deaths of millions have relied in no small part on constant offensives by state officials to mislead the public about scientific data. This underscores the critical importance of free scientific discussion, unhampered by any threats of legal action or violence in the pursuit of the truth.

In France, which will surpass 110,000 deaths by the end of the week, Macron has declared war on scientists, repeatedly ignoring their calls for lockdown and denouncing their “incessant tracking of errors.” Macron’s adviser Stéphane Séjourné even went as far to denounce the “uncontrolled and suffocating interventions of scientists” in January of this year. The targeting of scientists like Bik for pursuing scientific investigation of existing research only worsens this toxic atmosphere and hampers the fight to inform the public about the coronavirus.

East Timor’s coronavirus pandemic worsens

Patrick O’Connor

East Timor has seen a significant increase in daily coronavirus infection rates, with the impoverished South East Asian country last month recording an official seven-day average of between 100 and 200 over the past four weeks.

AstraZeneca vaccinations at Dili Plaza (Source: WSWS Media)

This is the highest registered in the country during the pandemic. East Timor has an official tally of 7,310 infections since the beginning of the pandemic, but 2,396 of these occurred between May 19 and June 1.

The real rate of infection spread is almost certainly significantly higher than these numbers. Throughout the country, contact tracing is virtually non-existent. Testing remains limited, especially outside of the capital, Dili. Within the capital, positive tests as a proportion of the total carried out were nearly 17 percent in mid-May, indicating widespread undetected transmission.

Lockdown restrictions, initially affecting the capital Dili, were imposed in early March and remain in place. They have been undermined, however, by a series of government decisions aimed at bolstering its political position and promoting business activity.

Infection numbers in East Timor (Source: Our World in Data)

Timor’s President Francisco Guterres and Prime Minister Taur Matan Ruak have imposed a series of restrictions on movement and on social and recreational activities—but there are a number of dangerous exemptions, most notably by allowing the Catholic Church to continue to hold indoor ceremonies.

This has been absurdly defended on the grounds that the Church can help “educate” the population about the coronavirus threat. In other words, people are gathering in large numbers in enclosed places, supposedly to be informed that the most dangerous thing to do amid the pandemic is to gather in large numbers in enclosed places. The government’s decision sacrifices public health to the obscurantist priorities of the Catholic Church, which is a powerful institution in the country.

Other government decisions also threaten to create super-spreader events. Some food has been distributed to alleviate the threat of mass hunger caused by the worsening economic crisis. But this has been done in disorganised ways, with distribution centres featuring little social distancing and proper use of personal protective equipment.

There are few restrictions on economic activity. The main shopping complex in Dili was briefly closed during the initial wave of infections, but is now open, allowing large numbers of people to shop in enclosed spaces.

A lack of basic social infrastructure is hampering health efforts in numerous ways. At Dili’s busiest market, Taibessi Market, a single hand-washing station has been broken and disused for months.

East Timor is among the most impoverished countries in the world and the economic crisis triggered by the pandemic has worsened the conditions of the working class and rural poor. The government is protecting an $18 billion sovereign wealth fund, generated by the country’s oil and gas exports, while taking only the most limited measures to compensate people for lost jobs and incomes.

Many residents in Dili are still dealing with the devastating consequences of floods in March and April. The flooding triggered by Cyclone Seroja was the worst natural disaster in Timor’s history—41 people were killed, 27,000 homes were washed away, and 22 roads and 11 bridges were destroyed. Many affected families are still waiting for promised public assistance.

Bairo Formosa health care centre, Dili (Source: WSWS Media)

The government’s failure to provide adequate social and economic support during lockdown conditions has undermined the public health response.

After restrictions were first imposed on March 8, including on travel from and to Dili and the regions, university students in the capital reported going hungry after being unable to receive assistance, including food, from their families in the countryside. Bags of rice were delivered by university administrators, but this was not enough for students.

On April 2, the beginning of the Easter weekend, hundreds of students and other Dili residents responded to a fake alert on social media suggesting the government was lifting travel restrictions, and gathered in close contact with one another at the city’s three main exit points.

“We have to travel to the municipalities,” Feliciano Mota, one of those who fled the capital, told the Timorese agency Tatoli. “We can’t handle living conditions here in Dili.”

It is likely that this event contributed to the spread of COVID-19 throughout East Timor, with all 13 of the country’s municipalities registering infections.

Also undermining the public health response is the ongoing political crisis in the country. In early 2020, former president and prime minister Xanana Gusmão had been on the verge of returning to office. The global coronavirus pandemic coincided, however, with a political shift that saw Gusmão’s erstwhile allies join Taur Matan Ruak’s coalition government that includes the Fretilin party.

Broken and disused hand washing station at Dili's Taibessi Market (source: WSWS Media)

Gusmão has since mounted a Trump-Bolsonaro type misinformation campaign, suggesting that COVID-19 is no worse than the flu and that restrictions are unnecessary and illegitimate. His reckless, anti-scientific statements have spread confusion. Many people are ignoring public health advice on face masks, hand washing, and social distancing.

Vaccines are only slowly being made available. The primary responsibility for this lies with Australian imperialism. The Liberal-National government in Canberra has responded with utter indifference to the danger posed by COVID-19 to the people of East Timor, and the wider South Pacific and South-East Asian region. Timor has received just 60,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine from Australia, while an additional 24,000 doses have come from the World Health Organization’s COVAX programme.

The limited Australian donation was largely driven not by humanitarian concerns but by geo-political ones. It followed the Chinese government’s announcement that it will send 100,000 doses of its Sinovac vaccine.

Numerous articles in the Australian media and foreign policy outlets have sought to portray China’s vaccine donations to the region as a sinister plot aimed at undermining Australian hegemony. The Age last month quoted former Australian diplomat Ian Kemish who declared that Canberra needed “to be careful about a Chinese attempt to opportunistically seek to gain influence in our near neighbour.”

Australian imperialism’s exploitation of its impoverished neighbour’s oil and gas reserves, and neglect of the Timorese people’s basic needs, now threaten a humanitarian disaster. If COVID-19 infections continue to spiral higher, East Timor’s piecemeal healthcare system—there are just 3,300 essential medical personnel in the country of 1.3 million people—will quickly collapse.

Two high-rise workers in China killed in strong winds

Lily Zhao

On May 10, two high-rise maintenance workers were trapped in a suspended scaffold during a heavy thunderstorm with strong winds and killed. Both workers were cleaning the outside of the glass outer wall at the 17th floor of a skyscraper in Wuhan, the capital city of Hubei Province in central China.

A witness posted a video of this horrific incident online, in which one could see how the suspended scaffold was repeatedly blown meters away and then crashed into the wall of the building. The suffering and eventual death of the two workers, which was viewed more than 10 million times, not only sparked widespread anger over the company’s disregard for the lives of workers, but also revealed a tip of an iceberg of the exploitative and dangerous working conditions of high-rise constructions workers.

Screenshot from video captured by witness

The two workers, Han, 54, and Yang, 34, worked for the Hubei Skyscraper Decorative Arts Engineering Company but without a proper labor contract or any insurance. The construction of the skyscraper was under the supervision of the Wuhan Railway Group Cooperation, which then contracted the construction out to Shanghai Baozhi Ltd. Baozhi subcontracted the outer wall decorative work to the company from Hubei, which employed Han and Yang. Layer on layer of subcontracting is very common in the construction industry in China, giving rise to a blurring of responsibility for workers’ wages and safety.

The decorative company directed the two workers to do the cleaning work at 1:30 p.m. on the day of the tragedy. An hour later, at 2:30 p.m., the two workers attempted to seek help by making phone calls, saying that “electricity was cut off and the metal swing stage [had] stopped working.” Around the same time, a strong wind started buffeting the scaffold, as filmed by the witness, trapping the workers. Twenty minutes later, the suspended scaffold was finally anchored, but both workers were already fatally wounded.

According to the official notice published by Wuhan Emergency Management Bureau, the project manager has already been detained for further investigation. The two workers were sent to the hospital and pronounced dead after attempts made to save their lives. However, this notice is vague on when the workers were sent to the hospital and is at odds with the account given by the relatives of the two workers.

Posts made by relatives on social media stated that they were not notified for about three hours. When they arrived at the scene, the bodies of the two workers had simply been left on the 17th floor of the building covered with plastic canvas. No one from either the Wuhan Railway Group Cooperation or the Shanghai Baozhi was present to speak to them.

At around 11 p.m. that night, dozens of unidentified people wearing identical clothes arrived where the bodies were, robbed the relatives of their cell phones, beat them up, and took the bodies away without any explanation.

The tragic deaths of two workers are completely avoidable and the negligence of the company utterly criminal. Per regulation of Classification of High-Rise Work, high-rise work is strictly prohibited when winds exceed level 5. On the day, the wind in Wuhan reached level 10 in the midst of a thunderstorm.

In an interview, a staff member of the company employing Han and Yang reported that all departments in the company had been notified of upcoming strong winds and were ordered to halt ongoing work around 11 a.m. However, the two workers were still sent up to work in the afternoon and given meaningless advice to take serious precautions.

These terrible deaths have exposed the dangerous conditions faced by high-rise maintenance workers on a daily basis, not just in China but around the world. Most workers spend 8–10 hours suspended in the air each day and are exposed to a number of risks, including the burning temperatures of glass walls in summer, as well as heat stroke and sun burns, and freezing temperatures during the winter.

Construction workers at work, Tianjin, China [Credit: Yang Aijun/World Bank via Flickr]

The greatest danger of all is, of course, of falls—many have witnessed the severe injury and death of co-workers. According to a survey by the Ministry of Emergency Management in 2018, there were 1,732 incidents and 1,752 deaths across the construction industry during the first half of the year, of which 48.2 percent were high-rise, work-related cases.

Responding to popular anger on social media over the Wuhan deaths, the state-run Xinhua news agency published an article two days later, entitled “One needs to keep vigilant about production safety at every single moment.”

This article, full of platitudes about the importance of workplace safety, concluded: “One must keep in mind safety in production, must not leave anything to chance, and should not just remember that human lives are more important than anything once the price in blood has been paid.”

Such empty phrases are simply ignored by companies intent on making profits at the expense of the safety and lives of workers as was demonstrated just two weeks later.

On May 26, despite warnings of thunderstorms and strong winds, three high-rise workers were trapped in a scaffold suspended outside a skyscraper in Tianjin, a city in northeastern China. The scaffold was dashed against the building many times by the wind before the three workers were eventually safely rescued.

The Stalinist Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which has presided over the restoration of capitalism in China, has long been complicit and responsible for the exploitative conditions facing workers. A huge percentage of the working class in China consists of migrant workers coming to big cities for better employment opportunities. On a daily basis, they suffer attacks on wages, wage arrears, prolonged working hours, working without a proper contract (like Han and Yang in this case), and are denied most social services in the cities.

All of this takes place as a result of the CCP regime which protects the profiteering of corporations, has integrated the super-rich into the party apparatus, and uses police-state repression against the struggles of workers.

Pandemic provokes wave of bus workers strikes across Brazil

Tomas Castanheira

Responding to brutal cuts in jobs and wages and grossly unsafe conditions at workplaces, a wave of strikes by bus drivers and fare collectors has engulfed bus transportation systems across Brazil over the past year.

A report published last week by the National Association of Urban Transport Companies (NTU) made this clear. Between March 2020 and April 2021, workers carried out 238 strike movements, protests and demonstrations that disrupted the circulation of 88 different bus transportation systems in the country. And given that these struggles have continued at a feverish pace over the past months, this number must already be considerably higher.

Bus workers on strike march in Vitória, Espírito Santo. May, 2020. (credit: CNTTL)

The intense strike movement of bus workers in Brazil is part of an international resurgence of class struggle that has been accelerated by the catastrophic response of capitalist governments to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The pandemic had a tremendous impact on transportation systems. In Brazil, although considered a public service, bus transportation is run by private, profit-driven companies that have incurred substantial losses that they have tried, as much as possible, to shift onto the backs of the hundreds of thousands of workers they employ.

The NTU report states that since the pandemic began, some 77,000 jobs have been cut in the industry. Those workers who have managed to keep their jobs have suffered heavy cuts in their salaries, officially implemented through a wage and hours reduction bill approved last year by Jair Bolsonaro's government, and by delays in payments that have become widespread among the companies.

The attacks on bus workers during the pandemic represented only the most recent escalation of a process that has been going on for the last few years. Bus companies have declared for years that their operations are not profitable enough, and in response they have raised fares, laid off workers and sought to eliminate the jobs of fare collectors, intensifying the workload of the drivers.

The immense anger that has built up among the workers against increasingly intolerable conditions imposed by capitalism were exposed by the explosion of strikes in the last 14 months. Besides paralyzing the transportation systems, bus workers expanded their struggles with protests that took over the streets of capital cities all over Brazil.

In Teresina, capital of Piauí, drivers and fare collectors started a strike in May 2020 against the dismissal of 400 co-workers and cuts in their wages and benefits. They marched almost daily in the streets and in front of the City Palace, raising hand-made signs that read: “I don’t have enough to eat today, imagine tomorrow” and “Bus drivers’ lives matter.”

Although the strike was ended by the union after 50 days, the problems faced by the workers have not been solved. Last Monday, bus drivers from three bus companies in Teresina held their seventh strike since the beginning of 2021, demanding their unpaid wages.

In Vitória, capital of Espírito Santo, a series of militant strikes broke out in different bus companies in the city throughout 2020. The bus workers held several demonstrations and used buses to block traffic on the city’s main avenues. Although their demands were essentially the same, the unification of the workers’ struggle was undermined by the unions negotiating the termination of the strikes with each company.

In one of the longest and most militant strikes in Vitória, at the Tabuazeiro bus company, the workers continued their movement in defiance of decrees by both the courts and the union. “We are now at the company’s door convincing workers to accept the injunction [preventing the strike], but they are not complying with the union’s request,” declared the president of the bus drivers union.

The strikes have increasingly taken on a political character. On election day of the second round of Brazil’s municipal elections, some 2,500 bus drivers went on strike in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil’s second largest metropolis, demanding their unpaid wages. The workers’ protest was interconnected with the widespread repudiation of the capitalist political system at the ballots across Brazil, which reached record levels in the last elections. In Rio de Janeiro, nearly 50 percent of electors refused to choose between the two hated candidates.

This process of political radicalization of the working class expressed itself with special clarity in an episode that occurred in Maceió, capital of Alagoas. In September of last year, a group of bus workers fired from the Veleiro company blocked one of the city’s main avenues, demanding the payment of their outstanding salaries seven months after they were dismissed.

A worker interviewed during the demonstration by a local TV station stated: “This is going to happen to all the workers, to the workers as a class. This is absurd, we are fathers of families. This is happening to the system as whole, it’s the system that is allowing all this. It’s not Veleiro; if it were only the company, it would already have been solved. The system is unable to solve it.”

The protest was met with brutal repression by the government of Renan Filho of the MDB party. The military police Special Operations Battalion was mobilized to conduct a war scenario on the streets of Maceió, attacking the workers with rubber bullets and gas grenades while chanting battle songs.

An official statement from the Veleiro company, in repudiation of the workers’ protest, demonstrated the terror with which the ruling class perceives the revolutionary implications of these growing struggles. The company stated, “If all problems have to be solved in this way, society will live in anarchy.”

Besides the economic demands, the struggles of bus drivers and fare collectors were driven by the highly unsafe conditions in transportation that led to explosive rates of infections among its workers.

Bus drivers accounted for the highest number of workers whose labor contracts were terminated by death over last year. In São Paulo, the largest city in the country, the COVID-19 death rate among bus drivers and conductors is three times higher than the rest of the population. Up until April, according to the union, 131 bus drivers had died from the disease just within the city.

The outbreak of the second wave of COVID-19 in Brazil since the beginning of this year has fueled mass anger among workers against deadly conditions in their workplaces. In the first five months of this year, infections and deaths skyrocketed, jumping from 195,000 deaths on January 1 to more than 470,000 today.

On April 16, bus drivers in Salvador, the capital of Bahia, shut down bus garages and blocked avenues with their cars after the news of the death of two co-workers from COVID-19. In the same period, bus drivers in Vitória went on a one-day strike to protest the unsafe resumption of public transportation, which had been shut down for two weeks to contain the spread of the coronavirus. Other similar protests have taken place in different regions of the country.

At the same time that bus workers were striking, other sections of the Brazilian working class were giving combative responses to the danger of infections in their workplaces. Strikes and protests against deadly conditions have also erupted in the rail and subway transportation systems, among teachers against the unsafe reopening of schools and by oil workers over outbreaks of infections in their plants and offshore platforms.

This clearly demonstrates that the wave of strikes among bus workers in the last period represented a powerful movement of the working class in defense of broad social interests. How is it possible then that these struggles have remained deeply isolated from each other until today?

Just as in every country, the radicalization of Brazilian workers is exposing the absolute contradiction between their interests and those of the corporatist trade unions that claim to officially represent them.

The National Confederation of Land Transport Workers, which includes more than 300 unions, made this abundantly clear in an open letter it sent to the government at the end of February. The union demanded that the state fund the bus companies – the same demand made by the association of the companies – with the stated aim of “mitigating the growing general strike movement” among its ranks.

In the months following the publication of that letter, which were marked by a growing rank-and-file revolt against the increasingly catastrophic situation of the pandemic, the unions employed a series of criminal maneuvers with the aim of sabotaging the workers’ movement towards a general strike.

Seeking to deflect the growing call among workers for the implementation of scientific measures to combat the deadly virus, the trade union federations called for a March 24 action dubbed as the “working class lockdown.” The event was a complete fraud. Not even the innocuous one-day strike announced by the unions was organized in the workplaces. The bureaucrats limited themselves to holding token demonstrations demanding the speeding up of vaccinations.

With the same strategy, the public transportation unions in the state of São Paulo called for a general strike on April 20, also dubbed as the “transportation lockdown.” The call coincided with the highest peak of COVID-19 deaths in Brazil, which exceeded the average of 3,000 deaths per day. In the state of São Paulo alone, 1,389 deaths were registered in a single day in April.

A transportation strike under these conditions would have a colossal impact on the circulation of people and the transmission rate of the virus, and would point towards an independent working-class response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The movement was, however, called off on the day before by the unions after they had a theatrical negotiation with the state government, which agreed to include transportation workers as a priority in the vaccination schedule.

This grotesque betrayal has been widely used as model by local unions across the country, which continue to hold a series of theatrical one-day strikes to alleviate the pressure from rank-and-file workers, which invariably end in their inclusion in the local vaccination schedule.

The wide popular anger against the criminal handling of the pandemic and the social crisis by the fascistic Bolsonaro administration has emerged in massive demonstrations across the country last Saturday.

By isolating and betraying these movements, the corporatist trade unions are playing a key role in implementing the homicidal herd immunity policy of Bolsonaro and the ruling class. The corrupt leaderships behind these unions, connected to the Workers Party and their allies in the pseudo-left, are trying to deflect the growing movement against Bolsonaro into a dirty deal within the bourgeois state.

AB InBev’s Beer Garage Budstart 2021

Application Deadline: 4th June 2021

About the Award: BudStart is Accelerator program of Beer Garage with focus on Global Fintech, APAC and Africa ecosystems.  We aim to solve complex business problems through co-innovation/plug & play implementation model partnering with the best-in-class startups from across the globe. We’re looking for game changers from all over the world who are willing to disrupt, put their talents to the test, and push the boundaries of innovation.

Type: Entrepreneurship

Selection Criteria:

• Ability to demonstrate the business value & scalability of the solution
• Readiness to expand to new geographical regions
• Experience with CPGs particularly alcohol/beverages segment would be an added advantage
• Innovative Commercial models: OPEX, Gain Share, Lease, etc.
• Strong product roadmap

Eligible Countries: African countries

Number of Awards: Not specified

Value of Award:

• You will be eligible for Paid Engagement with milestone payments and paid Proof of Concepts (POCs) up to $50,000
• You’ll have access to key executives in our global markets with the potential to explore expansion opportunities and have referrals to other corporate partners
• You’ll have opportunities to upscale to an Enterprise Grade Product as well as deployment in a live environment. We will assist in the co-creation of a product roadmap
• You’ll have access to key ABI leaders and SMEs for functional knowledge, as well as opportunities to attend Beer Garage’s exclusive industry mentor sessions
• You’ll have possible opportunities for investment with exposure and recommendation to our VC network/partners as well as opportunity within ABI’s ecosystem with Z Tech and ZX Ventures
• You’ll be eligible to access free credits from our partners – AWS and Freshworks. You’ll also have access to all Beer Garage events and other trainings on design thinking, cracking corporate deals, etc

How to Apply: Prepare your pitch deck to attach in the application form. It should include the following:

• Problem you are solving
• Proposed solution
• USP/Differentiator amongst other solutions in the market
• Case Studies – Success stories with other clients
• Value Proposition for ABI • Commercial Model
• Scalability Approach • Clientele
• Team Credentials

Apply here

Visit Award Webpage for Details

Cambridge-Africa ALBORADA Research Fund 2021

Application Deadline: 3rd September 2021.

Eligible Countries: Sub-Saharan African Countries (Including Sudan)

Fields of Grant: Applications should generally fall into one of these four research-related categories:

1. Workshop/research training course, in Africa
2. Travel between Cambridge and Africa
3. Research Project
4. Equipment

About the Award: The Cambridge-Africa ALBORADA Research Fund competitively awards grants of between £1,000 and £20,000, for:

• research costs (such as reagents, fieldwork and equipment)
• research-related travel between Cambridge and Africa
• conducting research training activities in Africa (e.g. setting up courses/workshops).

Type: Grants

Eligibility: 

• Applications should be submitted jointly by an applicant based in Cambridge and an applicant based in a university or research institution in sub-Saharan Africa.
• Both applicants must be at post-doctoral level or above, and by completing an 2 application it is understood that they are both doing so with support from their Senior Researcher/Head of Group/Principle Investigator, if they are not in this position themselves.
• Both applicants should have a formal link to a research group/department/faculty in their home institution.
• The Cambridge applicant must be either working at the University of Cambridge, or at a research Institute affiliated with the University. Previous successful Cambridge applicants have included those from: Wellcome-Trust Sanger Institute; MRC Human Nutrition Research; National Institute of Agricultural Botany (NIAB).
• The African applicant must be from a sub-Saharan African research Institution or university. The Cambridge applicants will act as the lead applicants, for administrative purposes, as the awards have to be paid to their Cambridge departments/faculties/institutes.
• Requests for additional support from returning Cambridge or African recipients will only be considered in the following instances:
  • For supporting courses and workshops in Africa that have been previously funded, or are new. Applicants must provide justification that includes evidence that other sources of funding have been sought, and what plans there are for future funding sustainability. Also, a report(s) should have been submitted for the previous funding received
  • Request for funding for research (reagents, equipment or travel) with the old or a new collaborator, but for a new project. Report(s) should have been submitted for the previous funding received.

Number of Awards: Not specified

Value of Program: Grants are between £1,000 and £20,000. Awards will range from £1,000 – £20,000, and limits apply for categories as follows:

• Maximum of £20,000 for applications in the sciences (including equipment)
• Maximum of £6,000 for applications in the social sciences and humanities
• Maximum of £5,000 for a workshop/course in Africa
• Maximum of £3,000 for a travel award

How to Apply: 

• The online application form has been designed to allow both applicants (Cambridge- and Africa-based) to log in, update, save and eventually submit electronically.
• To access the form, the Cambridge based applicant must Register Here. Only applicants with @cam.ac.uk, @sanger.ac.uk, @babraham.ac.uk, @bas.ac.uk and @niab.ac.uk email addresses can register.
• The Cambridge-based applicant must then log in to the Cambridge-Africa ALBORADA Research Fund application form, where they will see the words “Invite a 2nd applicant to view/edit this submission”. Click on this link in order to invite the Africa-based applicant to register and edit the forms.

Visit Program Webpage for details

China’s Demographic Crisis

Dean Baker

Both the Post and NYT had pieces today on how China is encouraging families to have more babies in order to counter an alleged demographic crisis. The basic story, which has been repeated many times in the U.S., is that China will be seeing a decline in the ratio of workers to retirees, since families have had relatively few children over the last four decades. This is supposed to be really bad news, in fact, a crisis.

In response, China’s government is apparently taking steps to encourage families to have more children. This follows several decades in which it had the opposite policy in place, encouraging families to have just one child.

The crisis story is a bit hard to understand for those of us familiar with arithmetic. Every wealthy country has seen a sharp reduction in the ratio of working age people to retirees. That is something that happens when better living standards and improved health care allow people to live longer. Also, when countries have gotten wealthier, people have chosen to have fewer children.

This rise in the ratio of retirees to working age population has not prevented both working age people and retirees from enjoying higher living standards. This isn’t magic, productivity rises through time as technology improves and workers become better educated. This means that each worker can produce more output in the hours they work.

The graph below projects the number of effective working age people per retiree under various productivity assumptions. The first bar shows the 2020 ratio in China of 3.74 working age people to retiree (people over age 60 for this calculation). This ratio is projected to fall to 1.68 by 2045.

Source: Statistica and author’s calculations.

That only looks bad until we factor in productivity growth over the next 25 years. In an extremely pessimistic case, where productivity growth averages just 1.0 percent annually (the lowest sustained rate the U.S. has ever experienced), the ratio of 2020 equivalent workers per retiree would be 2.15. This would mean that the average worker would have to see a decline in their income relative to retiree’s income (i.e. a tax increase), to ensure that retirees have the same income in 2045 as in 2020. This doesn’t imply a decline in workers’ wages, as will be shown shortly.

The next bar assumes a 2.0 percent annual rate of productivity growth over the next 25 years. That is roughly the average in the United States over the post-World War II era. In this case, the decline in the ratio of 2020 equivalent workers is more modest, dropping to 2.76.

China has actually been seeing very rapid productivity growth over the last four decades. Its productivity growth averaged more than 6.0 percent annually between 2009 and 2019. The next two bars show the ratio of 2020 equivalent workers to retirees assuming alternatively 4.0 percent annual productivity growth over the next quarter century and 6.0 percent annual productivity growth over this period.

In the former case the ratio of 2020 equivalent workers to retirees would be 4.48. In the latter case it would be 7.21. This means that if the goal is to ensure that retirees enjoy the same living standard in 2045 as they did in 2020, this can be easily done without any increase in taxes on the working population.  In fact, if the goal is to just maintain retirees 2020 living standards, tax on workers can be reduced in these high productivity growth scenarios.

Output Per Person

If we’re looking at how demographics affect living standards, another way to evaluate the picture is to look at output per person. This calculation picks up directly the impact of a smaller segment of the population working. The graph below shows the story, with the same set of productivity assumptions in the earlier figure.

Source: Statistica and author’s calculations.

As can be seen, even in the very low productivity growth scenario, output per person would be slightly higher in 2045 than in 2020. That means that it should be possible to structure distribution so that everyone can see an improvement in living standards over this period, albeit a very small one.

If China’s productivity growth over the next quarter century matches the U.S. post-World War II average, then incomes will be more than 30 percent higher in 2045 than they were in 2020. That would allow for substantial improvements in living standards for both workers and retirees.

In the 4.0 percent productivity growth scenario per person income will be more than twice as high in 2045 as in 2020. And if China can sustain the 6.0 percent productivity growth of the last decade, per person income will be 3.4 times as high in 2045 as in 2020.

In short, even modest rates of productivity growth will easily offset the impact of a declining ratio of workers to retirees that China is expecting over the next quarter century. If the country can sustain productivity growth rates anywhere near what it has been seeing, the impact of the drop in the ratio of workers to retirees will be trivial in comparison.

Four Factors that Make the Demographic Problem Less Serious

There are four major reasons why changing demographics pose even less of a problem than indicated in the discussion above. The first has to do with more accurately calculating the ratio of workers to retirees. I was deliberately sloppy about what we were measuring in using working age people to retirees (people over age 60). Many people, generally women, between the ages of 20 and 60 are not in the paid labor force. If the share of women in the paid labor force increases over the next quarter century, then the drop in the ratio of workers to retirees will be smaller than indicated in the calculations above.

There is a similar story on the over 60 part of the calculation. As the country gets richer and the workforce is better educated and healthier, a larger share of the population over age 60 is likely to continue working. This is both because jobs will be less physically demanding on average and also because better educated people are more likely to have jobs they find inherently rewarding. In the United States in 2019, before the pandemic, 56.0 percent of the people between the ages of 60 and 64 were employed. Of people between the ages of 65 and 69, 33. 3 percent were employed on average. Insofar as a substantial segment of this older group in employed, it both raises the number of workers and reduces the number of retirees who need to be supported by the work of others.

The third issue is the pollution and crowding that would result from efforts to increase the population. These negatives are not picked up in measures of GDP, and there is good reason to believe they are substantial. China has done much to clean up its air and water in the last two decades, but many areas still have severe problems. Other things equal, more people consuming more energy and material items, means greater problems with pollution. This can be offset with increased efforts at containing pollution, but these efforts carry a substantial cost.

The problem of more people goes well beyond what we just think of as pollution. More people means more traffic congestion. People will have to live further from work, which means longer distance commutes. Public infrastructure will see more wear and tear and everything from parks and museums to beaches and sporting events will be more crowded. These costs are picked up at best imperfectly in GDP measures, and in many cases, not at all. This means that if China’s solution to its declining ratio of workers to retirees is to have more children, it may be making matters worse for its population a quarter century into the future.

This brings up the final point, which everyone should have guessed by now. Children are also dependents. If our plan for reducing the ratio of workers to retirees is to have more children, that provides zero help at all for the next two decades, and only modest help in the following decade or so.

Meanwhile, the ratio of dependent children to workers will have risen substantially. It will take a very very long time for an increase in fertility rates to lead to fall in overall dependency ratios.[1] In the case of the United States, the total dependency ratio (both young people and older people relative to working age population) was 0.681 in 1945, at end of World War II. Then we had the baby boom, which led to a sharp increase in the ratio of young dependents to working age people.

We did not see the ratio of total dependents to working age population fall back below its 1945 until after 2000, more than 55 years later. We know that China’s leaders are often praised for having a longer- term view, but in this case we are not talking about planning for 2045, but rather 2075.

The long and short is that China does not face a demographic crisis, contrary to what you read in the paper, and encouraging people to have more children is not a good solution.