The criminal responsibility of Chilean State for COVID-related crisis

Mauricio Saavedra

Two recent studies published in major health journals (one in The Lancet and the other in Science) shed further light on how long-standing class war and malign neglect policies against the poorest sections of the working class have played out during the COVID-19 pandemic in Chile. They add weight to a mountain of evidence that the state’s class-based health care system bears criminal responsibility for the avoidable deaths of tens of thousands and the spread of the disease in the working class population.

The latest epidemiological study, released by the Chilean Ministry of Health on Wednesday, reported 1,907,154 accumulated cases since March 2020 and 43,855 deaths associated with the coronavirus. This tragedy is the product of deliberate policies. The rapid and unabated spread of coronavirus across every part of the nation is due to the prioritization of the economic interests of the corporate and financial elite above all else.

Health Minister Enrique Paris addressing Congress 20 July 2021 to explain his decision to allow a tourist with the Delta variant to travel without first quarantining. (MINSAL)

The venal and reactionary Chilean bourgeoisie is today clamoring for an end to all forms of restrictions and confinement when the Gamma variant, estimated to be twice as infectious as the original virus, is the most dominant strain and the Delta variant is now in circulation. For them, even Health Minister Enrique Paris’ pro-business “Step by Step Plan” of placing only the most heavily infected communities in quarantine and lockdowns is intolerable.

The fascistic UDI (Independent Democratic Union) and Republican parties are the most vociferous in calls to end lockdowns, and are riling small and micro-business owners and the middle class who are being crushed by the near absence of government assistance during the pandemic. Any further confinements “will only provoke disaster and bankruptcy,” UDI deputies prophesy, knowing full well that their bourgeois patrons have reaped a bonanza during the past year and a half.

However, the entire capitalist state, from the right-dominated administration of billionaire President Sebastian Piñera to the Congressional left and the corporatist unions have allowed the lives, health and wellbeing of millions to be sacrificed so that the main export sectors remained operational and the richest families could double their obscene levels of wealth from $21 billion in March 2020 to $42.7 billion in April 2021.

Negligible state handouts forced working class families to violate lockdowns for food and work as Chile’s extreme social inequality was only exacerbated in the past 16 months. Tomás Pérez-Acle, from the Science and Life Foundation, reported to El Mostrador at the beginning of June that “78 percent of those infected are under 49 years of age,” and that “44 percent of the people in the ICU are under 50 years of age.” Not only are they the demographic that has been vaccinated the least, they are of working age.

Health care unions rally in support of questioning of Enrique Paris. (Credit: Guillermo Correa, El Porteño)

The left parliamentarians approved bills facilitating the suspension of hundreds of thousands of contracts, forcing workers to eat into their unemployment insurance under the “Employment Protection Law,” allowed massive layoffs and agreed to postpone collective bargaining negotiations. Of the 2 million jobs destroyed during the pandemic, only half have been recuperated and many are under worse contracts.

To this day, absolutely nothing has been done to resolve the lack of potable water, electrification and sewerage in hundreds of squatter settlements. Nor has anything been done to deal with the overcrowded western and southern working class communes of Greater Santiago, where social distancing remains impossible.

Riots against hunger, the lack of running water, government negligence and indiscriminate police violence have been met with authoritarian measures and a permanent state of emergency since March of last year. With the support of Congress, Piñera passed draconian laws beefing up the repressive apparatus and allowing the use of the military for policing operations, even as human rights organizations filed a case in the International Criminal Court against government and military authorities for crimes against humanity.

In contrast, Congress introduced populist measures (such as three withdrawals of personal savings from private pension funds) in order to secure the support of better-off sections. The government permitted the wealthy unimpeded travel and opened the country to international tourism, in that way allowing the Alpha, Lamda, Gamma and now Delta variants to proliferate. Meanwhile, they militarized the borders to deny entry to desperate refugees fleeing from economic crises in Venezuela, Bolivia and other parts of the Americas and initially refused to vaccinate those who had entered.

Despite high vaccination rates in Chile, this year the country has recorded some of the highest numbers of daily cases since the outbreak of COVID-19: almost two-thirds of all infections were recorded in the first sixth months of 2021 and nearly half the fatalities.

At the beginning of 2021 the international media sang only praise for Chile—the poster boy of free market economists—because of its vaccination progress. They were forced to backtrack by April as cases surged, despite more than half of the population being inoculated. By June, the government grudgingly acceded to a blanket lockdown of densely-populated Santiago following some of the worst COVID-19 case numbers since the pandemic began.

In a telling interview published in the German magazine Der Spiegel in June, Soledad Martínez, a Chilean public health expert, revealed just how disastrous the official response has been.

“The situation is catastrophic,” Martínez explained. “We are a really negative example. You shouldn’t do things the way Chile does. So I can only warn: no country in the world should now act as if everything is over and suspend measures such as mask-wearing.”

Martínez described how, following the aggressive vaccination plan predominantly with the Sinovac vaccine, “measures of social distancing (were) thrown overboard,” allowing the virus to spread greatly. “We health scientists have warned about this, but unfortunately we have not been listened to. To me, it feels like watching a train wreck in slow motion. It could have been prevented.”

“We have high death rates, and younger people are dying. What is particularly terrible is that, unfortunately, pregnant women and their unborn babies also die or have to be intubated—with an uncertain outcome. These fates are extremely depressing,” she added.

Intensive care units have been overloaded for months (in reality, collapsed) and patients are today being redirected to outpatient and primary care facilities or are treated at home.

“Opening new beds also requires personnel,” protested Dr. Manuel Nájera, vice-president of the Society of Epidemiology. “There have been discussions about setting up field hospitals, but the lack of personnel is a problem for opening more beds all at once. Today there are fewer staff due to the collapse, fatigue, medical leave. Of course, we are calling for opening more beds, because the affected population numbers are very high; the demand for critical hospitalization is exceeding the installed capacity we have. Why were sufficient measures not taken in advance? It does not make any sense.”

This catastrophic scenario has been confirmed 10-fold by reports at the national and regional level by the Medical Association and the health unions.

¥ Metropolitan Region regional president of the doctor’s college, Francisca Crispi, told CNN Chile that the situation of the health care network “is extremely serious. We have reached an occupation of 99% of critical beds with more than 2,500 critical beds occupied, which we have never seen in the history of our country.”

Jose Luis Espinoza, the president of Chile’s National Federation of Nursing Associations (FENASENF), said his members were “on the verge of collapse.”

¥ The health care system in the Valparaíso region, the second most populous area, is in a state of collapse: the Claudio Vicuña Hospital in San Antonio has a 100 percent occupancy rate, while the Carlos Van Buren Hospital has 97 percent occupancy.

Dr. Ignacio de la Torre, regional president of Valparaíso Medical Association, told local media that “it is not only the risk of getting sick from COVID, at this moment any patient with a complex disease has serious difficulties being attended in a timely manner and with the necessary quality.”

“The minister always says that we can still resist, but I do not know how much the health team can resist ... this level of stress, taking into account that in the region we have even had cases of suicide by people who have been mistreated and, in addition, had the stress of working exhausting shifts,” added Francisco Álvarez, president of the Federation of University Health Professionals Valparaíso-San Antonio.

¥ President of the Biobío region Medical Association, Dr. Germán Acuña, explained to Diario U de Chile that nurses, kinesiologists and physicians were directed to solely work as intensive care personnel. “There is staff burnout, a bed is not just a piece of furniture with a ventilator, it is all the associated staff. The administration people are also tired. We would like to have 20, 30 more beds but we don’t know if we can have the staff,” he explained.

¥ Maule Regional president of the Medical Association, Dahiana Pulgar, said that “we are in an extreme situation. In ICU beds, Maule is facing an overwhelming work overload, with beds that are not available because there are no personnel, they are on medical leave.”

The paper published in The Lancet July 2, the combined effort of academics from the University of Pennsylvania and several Chilean universities, concretely explains what has been known for decades: that the two-tiered Chilean health system, starved of funds, personnel, infrastructure and resources, plays a significant role in unfavorable outcomes. This has only been exacerbated during the pandemic.

From data collected in 2017 and 2018, the report found that Chilean patient-to-nurse ratios are “substantially worse than international standards” and it also has one of the lowest nurses-to-doctors ratios among countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

“Nurse workloads across public hospitals vary substantially, from nine to 24 patients per nurse, a remarkable difference in a public hospital system,” the academics explain. While a nurse in a private hospital cares for an average of 8.7 patients (still high in accordance to international standards) public hospital nurses care for an average of 14.7 patients.

“Every additional patient added to the average nurse’s workload increased patients’ risk of in-hospital death by 4%. Patients in hospitals with 18 patients per nurse, compared with those in hospitals with eight patients per nurse, had 41% higher risk of death, were 20 percent more likely to be readmitted within 30 days of discharge, had stays that were 41 percent longer…”

This brazen disregard for the well-being of health professionals reflects the state’s attitude toward the working class as a whole. This is made graphically clear in the paper published in Science Magazine at the end of May. The report published by multiple universities and institutes from the UK, US and Chile assesses “how social factors propel (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic in an economically vulnerable society with high levels of income inequality.”

The study, which focused on the first four months of the outbreak of COVID-19 from March 2020 in Chile, conclusively demonstrates that infection fatality rates were higher in the poorest communes because of comorbidities, continued mobility during lockdown periods and lack of access to health care. “Disparities between municipalities in the quality of their health care delivery system became apparent in testing delays and capacity. These indicators explain a large part of the variation in COVID-19 underreporting and deaths and show that these inequalities disproportionately affected younger people.”

The focus of the study was Greater Santiago, which today is home to 8.1 million people. The report states that while the region accounted for 36 percent of Chile’s total population by the end of August 2020, it recorded 55 percent of the confirmed COVID-19 cases and 65 percent of the COVID-19-attributed deaths.

Map of Greater Santiago (Wikimedia commons)

The true value of the study is its focus on correlating disease and death with poverty. “The maximum incidence (of infections) in Vitacura (among the most exclusive communes in Santiago) was 22.6 weekly cases per 10,000 individuals during the middle of May, whereas (the southern working class commune of) La Pintana reported a maximum of 76.4 weekly cases per 10,000 individuals during the first week of June.” In other words, the infection incident rate in working class communes was more than three times higher than in the bourgeois communes.

COVID-19 fatality rates recorded show the same correlation: “the highest rate of 4.4 weekly deaths per 10,000 individuals is observed in San Ramon … whereas Vitacura reported a maximum of 1.6 weekly deaths per 10,000 in June.”

Because the South and West zones have four times fewer beds per 10,000 people and four times lower proportion enrolled in the private health system than the East zone, “(n)otably, more than 90% of the COVID-19-attributed deaths in the South and West zones occurred in places other than health care facilities, compared with 55% in the East zone.”

In the Health Ministry’s July 11 summary of community indicators and COVID-19 cases in the Metropolitan Region (see map), the incidence rate continues to impact working class western and southern communes by up to twice as much as in the wealthy northeastern communes.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed how successive governments have ravaged Chile’s national health care system. Chile began spreading the gospel of the free market in health care under the fascist-military dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet as early as the 1970s. It is this policy of sustained socioeconomic shock therapy, adhered to by the right, the fake left and the unions that has laid the groundwork for the incalculable loss of life today.

Canadian government summits on anti-Semitism and Islamophobia: a political fraud

James Clayton & Keith Jones

Over the course of two days this week, Canada’s federal Liberal government is holding two separate “emergency summits” on anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. These meetings will do nothing to uproot anti-Jewish or anti-Muslim hatred. Rather, they are grotesque political stunts, organized to obscure the real issues behind a spate of violent anti-Muslim attacks and a troubling growth in hate crimes targeting Jews; and to shape public discourse in line with the domestic and global interests of Canadian imperialism.

The government used Wednesday’s “National summit on Antisemitism” to equate left-wing opposition to the crimes of the Israeli state and Zionism with anti-Semitism. Today, they will pretend that the past two decades of Canadian history did not happen. The complicity of Canadian imperialism in the scapegoating of Muslims, its staunch support for the Israeli state’s ongoing dispossession and repression of the Palestinian people, and its alliances with far-right forces—including those who promote hostility to Jews and Muslims—whenever politically expedient, will be covered up with weasel words. Everything will be chalked up to “racism” and empty appeals for “Canadians of all faiths to come together” will be made. But the fact remains: the violence which the Canadian state condones and perpetrates against Palestinians, Afghans, Libyans, Syrians, Yemenis and Iraqis, and has justified in the name of a spurious “war on terror,” is spilling over into far-right attacks on Muslims in Canada.

Canada’s Ukraine Ambassador, Roman Waschuk, addresses a memorial gathering in Kiev for the soldiers of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which while collaborated with the Nazis in the murder of hundreds of thousands of Poles and Jew. Members of the two organizations often marched under German command and in German uniforms. (Photo Credit: Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade)

The twin summits are the Liberal government’s pragmatic, impromptu response to several recent events. Israel’s latest eruption of genocidal violence against the Palestinians, which claimed the lives of hundreds of innocent civilians, sparked widespread public outrage and large demonstrations in Canadian cities. The brutal June 8 attack in London, Ontario that killed four members of a Muslim family, the Afzaals, shocked the country.

On June 10 the Liberals poached one of the three Green Party MPs, Jenica Atwin. She had clashed with Green Party leader Anamie Paul, a staunch Zionist, including over tweets labelling Israel an apartheid state, and had been threatened by Paul aide Nathan Zatzman, with deselection as a Green candidate for her criticisms of Israeli state violence. Trudeau and his top advisers viewed Atwin’s defection as a pre-election coup. But the government immediately came under fire for embracing an “apologist for Hamas” from much of the corporate media, the Conservative opposition and sections of the Liberal caucus. The Liberal top brass quickly prevailed upon Atwin to make dutiful public mea culpas. But even before then, and as part of the same effort in political damage control, they decided to act on demands from the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, the country’s leading pro-Zionist organization, and B’nai B’rith for an emergency summit on anti-Semitism.

As this was playing out, the NDP, taking up a call from the National Council of Canadian Muslims, pressed for a national summit on Islamophobia in response to the London terrorist atrocity. Initially Trudeau was non-committal, but on June 11, the same day the government announced its national summit on anti-Semitism, the House of Commons unanimously adopted a non-binding motion from the NDP MP for London-Fanshawe, Lindsay Mathyssen, calling for the emergency summit on Islamophobia.

The very fact that the government has chosen to convene separate “emergency summits” speaks volumes as to their worth. It wants to frame anti-Semitism and Islamophobia as if they are entirely separate maladies: one, say a cancer-like disease and the other a psychosis of the mind. In reality, they are two symptoms of a malignant capitalist body politic. Far-right elements have been emboldened by the sharp shift of establishment politics in Canada and internationally ever further to the right, including the vilification of immigrants as threats to Canadian and Quebec “values” and the promotion of militarism and imperialist violence.

Canada’s ruling elite fully embraced Washington’s “war on terror,” which demonized Muslims in the Middle East and at home as extremists and potential terrorists. For a decade and a half the “war on terror” played a central role in Canadian political life, serving as the pretext for foreign aggression and war and for a massive expansion of the powers and reach of the national security apparatus. All the while, Ottawa and Washington had, and continue to have, a completely mercenary relationship with Islamist extremist organizations, at times using them as proxies in their regime-change operations, as in Libya and Syria, and other times citing their presence to justify new foreign interventions.

Muslims have been the targets and victims of some of the most egregious crimes of the Canadian ruling class and its state over the past two decades. These include:

· The invasion and decade-long occupation of Afghanistan by Canadian troops, which featured house-to-house searches and arrests and the transfer of Afghan captives to be tortured by the CIA without any due process whatsoever.

· The provision of covert diplomatic and military support for the US invasion and destruction of Iraq in 2002, including weapons, Canadian Navy ships, refuelling and intelligence. Canada was deeply complicit in a war that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands and destroyed Iraqi society.

· The Canadian military’s participation in the destruction of Libya during the NATO-led air war of 2011.

· The extra-legal torture and persecution of Maher Arar, and the vilification directed at Omar Khadr, a Canadian child soldier in Afghanistan, who, with Ottawa’s complicity, was tortured and detained at Guantanamo Bay for 10 years.

· The campaign of the Harper Government against “barbaric cultural practices,” which sought to whip up animosity against Muslims.

· The chauvinist campaign Quebec’s ruling elite has mounted to depict immigrants, especially Muslims, as a threat to Quebec values. This has resulted in Bill 21, which bans the wearing of religious symbols, such as the hijab, by teachers and public officials in positions of authority, and denies public services to Muslim women who wear the niqab or burqa.

· The unbroken record of pandering by Conservative and Liberal governments to India’s far-right, Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government, which has systematically persecuted the country’s Muslim minority. This has also involved Canada’s two main parties fashioning electoral appeals to BJP sympathizers among Indo-Canadians.

Could the murder of the Afzaal family by a right wing-terrorist and ongoing violent attacks on Muslim women in Edmonton have something to do with this sorry history? No effort will be spared at today’s conclave to cover up these connections.

If the conference on Islamophobia aims to cover up the horrific record of Canadian imperialism in devastating the lives of millions of people throughout the Middle East, the conference on anti-Semitism is aimed at criminalizing left-wing opposition to militarism and war. By labelling virtually all criticism of the far-right Israeli government’s brutal suppression of the Palestinian people as anti-Semitism, the Trudeau government and other backers of the summit are adding fuel to an international slander campaign that aims to tar left-wing criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic.

The anti-Semitism conference was not aimed at exposing the far right, which is the real source of anti-Semitic hatred and violence and is on the rise in Canada. On the contrary, the Canadian ruling class is increasingly politically aligned with these elements. It is significant in this regard that Canada’s corporate media has remained virtually silent on the vicious Islamophobic campaigns by close international allies, like French President Emmanuel Macron, and the support extended by the German ruling elite to the anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic fascist Alternative for Germany (AfD), now the official opposition in the German parliament.

Instead, the political establishment has focused in recent years in denouncing and trying to effectively criminalize criticism of Israel from the left. Both the federal government and Ontario provincial parliament have adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of anti-Semitism, which equates criticism of the Israeli government and the Zionist project of creating an exclusivist Jewish state through the dispossession of the Palestinians, as anti-Semitic. This was the definition used by the British ruling class and the Blairite right within the Labour Party to witch-hunt former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters by branding them anti-Semites. As the World Socialist Web Site previously observed, “The level of cynicism involved” in this smear campaign “beggars belief. Anti-Semitism, racial hatred directed towards the Jews, is historically identified with the far right, especially with Nazi Germany, though it had many adherents within the British ruling class, including among the Royal family. Now the left is being targeted as the source of anti-Semitism even as the fascist Alternative for Germany has been elevated to the position of official opposition in the Bundestag and similar formations, including Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France, are being cultivated by the ruling elite throughout Europe.”

The increasing willingness of many people to publicly call Israeli state crimes by their proper name has disturbed the ruling class. The rampages of right-wing Israeli mobs through the streets of East Jerusalem crying “Death to Arabs!”—a call for genocide effectively endorsed by the Israeli government whose supporters were shouting the slogan—occasioned large public demonstrations of protest in Canadian cities. The Israeli and Canadian authorities immediately sought to spuriously conflate these demonstrations with anti-Semitism. Likewise, left-wing political figures have been targeted. Niki Ashton, a New Democratic Party MP who is fraudulently portrayed as a “socialist” by various pseudo-left groups, was the object of a vicious smear campaign in March for agreeing to speak alongside Corbyn at an online meeting. Palestinian activists at a Toronto demonstration who defended themselves against a violent assault carried out by the local leader of the Jewish Defense League were accused of “anti-Semitism” by Toronto Mayor John Tory.

There has also been a rise in real anti-Semitic attacks, which themselves are facilitated by the deliberate conflation of the state of Israel with Judaism on the part of the ruling class. In May a shop in Toronto's Kensington Market shop was spray painted with anti-Semitic graffiti. A young man “of no fixed address” was arrested and charged with a hate crime.

Tellingly, the man tasked with pointing the finger at “left-wing anti-Semitism” at yesterday’s summit was Irwin Cotler, a “human rights” lawyer, former Liberal cabinet minister and the Trudeau government’s “Special Envoy for Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combatting Antisemitism.” Cotler, who chaired the anti-Semitism event, earned his “human rights”’ credentials defending the far-right Russian dissident/Israeli politician Natan Sharansky in his bid to emigrate from the Soviet Union to Israel in the 1980s. Sharansky, who held several cabinet positions in Israeli governments 20 years ago, was a vocal supporter and architect of Israeli expansion into the Palestinian Occupied Territories. Cotler has made a lucrative career conflating expressions of political opposition to Israeli state crimes against the Palestinians with “anti-Semitism,” and in recent years has been among the most strident voices in the Canadian establishment calling for aggression against Iran and China.

The claim that political opposition to Israeli state crimes in the Occupied Palestinian Territories is tantamount to “anti-Semitism” hobbles the fight against real acts of anti-Semitism, which is a scourge, and as the events of the 20th century demonstrated, a mortal threat to the working class.

But the Canadian government is determined to cover up the source of that threat, which is not principled political opposition to the crimes of the Israeli state and its imperialist patrons, but rather the political far right, including active fascist networks which operate freely inside Canada’s own military and police ranks. Just last year, an individual inspired by these elements attempted to assassinate Prime Minister Justin Trudeau! The same political elements who attempted the overthrow of American democracy on January 6 are active in Canada, with anti-Semitism and Islamophobia as their stock in trade. One can only imagine what “position” the Canadian government would have contorted itself into had a fascist coup in the capital of its closest political ally succeeded.

Perhaps a clue can be found in Ukraine, where the Canadian state is happy to align itself with an ultra-right regime led by parties that celebrate far-right Ukrainian nationalists who collaborated with the Nazis and in the Holocaust. Canada’s own deputy prime minister, Chrystia Freeland, has been engaged in a desperate campaign to cover up her own grandfather’s past in Ukraine as the publisher of a pro-Nazi newspaper during WWII. How can this be squared with “combatting anti-Semitism”?

This week’s Canadian government-sponsored summits will solve nothing, and their utterly fraudulent character will be apparent to a growing number of workers who see that the Canadian state condones and facilitates the very crimes it claims to be so outraged by.

The fight against Islamophobia and anti-Semitism, which are crucial questions for the world working class, requires a principled commitment to historical truth. The one thing the Canadian government cannot do is to undertake an historical investigation of how its own actions directly contributed to the murder of the Afzaal family, and to a climate where various ethnic and religious groups, including Jews, can be scapegoated by the far right with impunity.

Pandemic slashed US life expectancy by 1.5 years in 2020

Trévon Austin

Life expectancy in the US plummeted by 1.5 years in 2020, according to a report released this week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), marking the largest one-year drop since 1943, when young men were dying every day on the battlefields of World War II. The precipitous decline is a continuation and acceleration of a downward trend in US mortality since 2015.

Life expectancy is defined as an estimate of the average number of years a person born in a given year may expect to live. The metric does not precisely predict actual life span, instead being a measure of a society’s general health. The drastic fall in 2020 reflects the accelerating decay of American society under the pressure of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has been allowed to run rampant under a bipartisan “herd immunity” policy, resulting in more than 35 million infections and over 625,000 deaths so far.

National Guard members assisting with processing COVID-19 deaths and placing them into temporary storage at LA County Medical Examiner-Coroner Office in Los Angeles, Jan. 12, 2021. (LA County Dept. of Medical Examiner-Coroner via AP)

According to the report, if an American child were born today and lived his or her entire life under the conditions of 2020, the child would be expected to live 77.3 years, down from 78.8 in 2019. Life expectancy for American males declined 1.8 years from 2019 to 2020, while life expectancy for American women dropped by 1.2 years from 2019. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, US life expectancy has not been so low since 2003.

The report estimated COVID-19 deaths contributed to approximately 74 percent of the decline in life expectancy. Researchers discovered disparities among racial groups, with the virus being responsible for 90 percent of the decline in life expectancy among Latinos, 68 percent among the non-Hispanic white population and about 59 percent among the non-Hispanic black population. There was no data on Asian Americans or other racial groups in the report.

According to CDC data, black Americans are hospitalized with COVID-19 at 2.9 times the rate of white Americans and die at two times the rate. Nonwhite Hispanics are hospitalized at 2.8 times the rate and die at 2.3 times the rate of white Americans. Federal data indicates life expectancy for black Americans has not fallen so much since the mid-1930s amid the Great Depression. While health officials have not recorded Hispanic life expectancy as far back, the 2020 decline was the largest recorded year-to-year drop.

The report’s authors and bourgeois publications, such as the New York Times and the Washington Post, were quick to attribute the discrepancy among racial groups to “systemic racism” inherent in American society. In reality, these differences reflect the disproportionate impact the pandemic has had on the working class and poor. Minorities are more likely to be employed in jobs deemed “essential” by the ruling class and forced to expose themselves to the deadly disease.

Poor workers more commonly depend on public transportation, risking exposure with every outing, or live in multigenerational homes in cramped conditions more conducive to spreading the virus. Experts say it is also possible Hispanics are disproportionately affected because many are undocumented and ineligible for federal pandemic relief or unemployment benefits. Additionally, there are obstacles related to accessing coronavirus tests, treatments and vaccines for the undocumented.

The overall decline in life expectancy reflects the pandemic’s massive toll on American society and its broader impacts on social health, including a record-high number of deaths from drug overdoses and other so-called deaths of despair. In 2020, more than 93,000 Americans died from drug overdoses. This staggering figure is more than 10 times the estimated 9,000 overdose deaths recorded by the CDC in 1988, around the height of the crack epidemic.

Experts state approximately 11 percent of last year’s decline stems from accidents or unintentional injuries. Drug overdose deaths, which spiked 30 percent during the pandemic, made up about one-third of unintentional injuries in 2020. The report also noted an increase in homicides and diabetes, which together accounted for about 5.5 percent of the decrease in life expectancy. Chronic liver disease and cirrhosis, which suggest growing alcohol abuse, accounted for nearly 2.5 percent of the decrease.

These “deaths of despair” cannot be separated from the broader impact of the pandemic. With hospitals overwhelmed with coronavirus patients, addiction treatment and other mental health programs have been cut when they are needed most, due to the social isolation and financially insecurity spawned by the pandemic. The stress and depression caused by job loss, housing insecurity, and the pandemic itself have exacerbated issues with substance abuse. According to the American Medical Association, more than 40 states have recorded increases in opioid-related deaths since the pandemic began.

Researchers noted even if COVID-19 deaths decline in 2021, the socio-economic effects of the pandemic will linger for years. A study last month from the Virginia Commonwealth University found the pandemic widened the life expectancy gap between the US and 16 other high-income countries. Researchers found the gap increased from 3.05 years in 2018 to 4.69 years in 2020.

More than 225,000 Americans have died from the coronavirus so far this year—a number expected to increase significantly as deadly variants continue to spread among the population. This massive loss in life is not simply a result of the deadly disease but the consequence of a deliberate policy pursued by capitalist governments across the globe.

Since the onset of the pandemic, governments around the world responded to the greatest public health emergency in a century by pumping trillions into the stock markets and corporations to prop up world capitalism. Determined to extract this money from the working-class, governments have forced workers into unsafe plants and factories to continue production. The ruling classes of the world allowed the virus to spread and have even welcomed its deadly rampage in pursuit of the disastrous “herd immunity” policy.

The entire response to the pandemic has been guided by the prerogatives of the wealthiest sections of society. The world’s billionaires added more than $4 trillion to their collective wealth in the first year of the pandemic. Over the same period, nearly 3 million people succumbed to the virus. The victims include both the young and old and are disproportionately working class and poor.

The pandemic has laid bare the grim reality of capitalism, which subordinates all aspects of social life to the pursuit of profit. Furthermore, it demonstrates the inability of the capitalist system to deal with a global crisis.

Continental workers in Bebra and Mühlhausen, Germany vote for strike

Marianne Arens

At Continental Automotive in Bebra (North Hesse) and Mühlhausen (Thuringia), almost 92 percent of the workforce at the automotive parts supplier voted for an indefinite strike on July 15 to defend jobs. Their willingness to fight is huge. “Ready to strike—we want to start and not wait for the executioner,” reads a poster in Mühlhausen.

However, instead of calling a strike, the IG Metall and IG BCE unions continued negotiations with management on Wednesday, July 21. “Against the background of recent, minor progress in negotiations,” wrote IGM district leader Jörg Köhlinger, “IG Metall is now giving the company one last chance at the negotiating table to avoid industrial action.” The union is “ready for a reasonable solution at the negotiating table,” IGM Secretary Dr. Matthias Ebenau also assured.

The works council representatives and union secretaries want to prevent a strike in defence of all jobs because they fear it could trigger a chain reaction. They agree with management and are pursuing the goal in Bebra and Mühlhausen of pushing through what they see as the “necessary” liquidation of almost 500 more jobs without it leading to a social uprising of the Conti workers.

The negotiations on a “social contract” are not to defend jobs but rather the way to push through the destruction of jobs against the declared resistance of the workers.

Significantly, Carola Rühl, chairperson of the works council of another Conti plant in Schwalbach/Taunus, wrote, “In Schwalbach, after tough wrangling, we finally succeeded in organising the inevitable job cuts in a socially acceptable way.” In Schwalbach, IG Metall agreed to the destruction of 220 jobs. Other examples of this “socially acceptable” (i.e., organised by the union and the works council) job destruction are at the Aachen tyre plant (1,800 jobs), the Karben site (1,088 jobs), as well as at Babenhausen, where production will be closed by 2025, costing 2,570 jobs.

24-hour protest strike at Continental Karben on April 15, 2021

Workers at all these sites are ready to fight. In mid-May, workers in Karben rejected a “social contract” worked out by the union and management. The union responded with intimidation and pushed through another vote on a slightly modified version of the contract, which also foresees the closure of the plant by 2025. A similar procedure is now on the agenda for Bebra and Mühlhausen.

It is obvious that the trade unions are not fighting a principled battle for jobs. The Continental Corporation decided more than a year ago to cut 30,000 jobs and close dozens of sites, and IG Metall is playing the key role in this. It is no coincidence that the deputy IG Metall chairperson, Christiane Benner, is also deputy chairperson of the Continental supervisory board, for which she receives several hundred thousand euros a year. There is no doubt that she has been involved in all the plans for a long time.

The massive cuts, initially justified by pointing to the coronavirus pandemic, are now openly aimed at making the world’s second largest automotive supplier fit for the intensified competition on the world market and to increase profits for shareholders and investors. An important component of this is the conversion to electric mobility, which directly affects the Bebra-Mühlhausen plant network. These plants belong to Vitesco Technologies, the name under which Continental intends to float its former Powertrain division for drive technology on the stock exchange in September. The largest Vitesco sites are in Nuremberg (2,300 employees) and Regensburg (3,000 employees).

When the spin-off of Vitesco was decided in May, it immediately led to an increase in Continental’s profit expectations by at least one percentage point, from 5-6 to 6-7 percent, which shows that shareholders have full confidence in the implementation of the planned cuts. To profit from the e-boom, Vitesco wants to focus on electric drives in the future. The managers will then no longer have any use for sites such as Mühlhausen, which had previously produced control technology for combustion engines.

It has been known since September 2020 that the plant in Mühlhausen, with 160 jobs, will be closed by the end of 2022. In Regensburg, too, 2,100 Vitesco jobs will fall victim to profit maximisation. In Mühlhausen, Conti workers already tried last January to prevent the removal of machines through a blockade.

The workers’ willingness to fight is beyond doubt. But the problem is that the IG Metall and IG BCE are not on the side of the workers but of management, whose perspective they represent. The union officials are masters at keeping workers busy with ineffective actions. They organise roadblocks, 24-hour strikes, religious services at the factory gate, spectacles with balloons, whistles and drums, and much more. But these protests stop exactly where the struggle only begins: with the capitalist profit interests.

The trade unions are completely oriented towards the welfare of Germany as a business location, from which their functionaries make a very good living. That is why they also support the transformation at Continental, which is currently attempting to sacrifice 30,000 jobs. And that is why they refuse to organise a strike to defend the jobs in Bebra and Mühlhausen.

In the strike ballot, workers in Bebra and Mühlhausen voted by 91.7 percent for indefinite strike. They must now implement this decision to strike and enforce it against the resistance of the trade unions. They must take the reins into their own hands and make this strike the starting point for an actual, joint industrial action of all Conti workers at all locations!

The first step must be to break with the IG Metall and IG BCE and their bankrupt methods, which only lead to deadlock. The World Socialist Web Site proposes that workers at each site build independent action committees that will enable them to unite across all sites and national boundaries to defend jobs together.

The corporation the Conti workers confront, and with which IG Metall is in alliance, originally owed its influential position on the DAX (German stock exchange) to the Nazi era. Based on fascist tyranny, it was able to enrich itself immeasurably by supplying Germany’s arms industry in the Second World War. In doing so, it did not shy away from extreme cruelty.

Just one example, cited by Wikipedia: Continental used concentration camp prisoners to test the durability of rubber shoe soles. The unfortunates chosen to do this had to run in circles for as long as they could, and anyone who fell down was shot. The rubber soles lasted for 2,200 kilometres.

Continental’s current owner, the Schaeffler family, is one of the richest German billionaire families. Its managers have already made good on the losses from the stock market crisis of 2008 by putting pressure on the workers through dismissals and wage theft. Since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, they have again openly shown their willingness to walk over corpses.

While more and more plant closures and mass layoffs are being dictated, the group has seen a new upswing in its profits and exceeded analysts’ expectations in the first quarter of 2021. Trade magazine Autowoche wrote: “Above all, the clear progress in profitability helped Conti shares jump to the top of the DAX on Friday.” This has not prompted the corporation, or the union bureaucrats, to forgo the layoffs.

Chinese city hit by “once in a millennium” torrential rains

Peter Symonds

At least 25 people are dead after torrential rain and flooding hit the central Chinese city of Zhengzhou, in what the local meteorological bureau described as a “once in a millennium” event. A dozen people were killed after being trapped by flood waters in the city’s subway, with five more injured. Hundreds were trapped in the train and had to be rescued.

The flooding brought much of the city, with its population of over 12 million, to a halt on Tuesday. More than 80 bus lines and the subway service were temporarily suspended while the city’s airport cancelled 260 flights. Some neighbourhoods were without water and electricity and about 200,000 people had to be evacuated.

Floodwaters in China (Source: CGTNOfficial)

Zhengzhou is an important industrial city. It is home to three huge factories owned by the Taiwan-based electronics-assembly giant, Foxconn Technology Group, which employs hundreds of thousands of people. More than half of Apple’s iPhones are manufactured in the city. Power was temporarily cut to one of the Foxconn sites.

Zhengzhou is the capital of Henan province, which has more than 100 million people. The province has been battered by storms over the past few days. The banks of major rivers burst in several locations, flooding several cities and leading to the closure of highways into the province. At a press conference yesterday, local authorities said that more than 1.2 million people had been affected and 20,000 hectares of crops damaged.

According to the official Xinhua news agency, at least four people were killed in Gongyi city near Zhengzhou, when houses and walls collapsed. The heavy rain has also caused a number of landslides. In the city of Dengfeng, there was a major explosion at an aluminum alloy factory after the floodwaters caused a factory wall to collapse and water to mix with chemicals kept inside.

The Zhengzhou meteorological bureau said the downpours were the heaviest in the city on an hourly and daily basis since records began in 1951. It received 671.1mm of rain—more than its average annual rainfall 604.8mm—in just over three days from Saturday evening to Tuesday. On Tuesday afternoon, 201.9mm fell in one hour.

According to China’s National Meteorological Center, the heavy rainfalls in Henan were the result of water vapour being pushed by Typhoon In-Fa and hitting a mountainous area.

The rainfall was greater than in 1975 when Henan experienced one of the world’s deadliest floods caused by a typhoon. More than 60 dams, including the large Banqiao dam, devastated large areas of the province with estimates of the death toll ranging between 26,000 and 240,000. More than 10 million people were affected, and 30 cities and counties inundated.

Chinese authorities clearly concerned about breached riverbanks, the failure of dams and a far greater catastrophe ordered thousands of troops into Henan. The People’s Liberation Army announced on Wednesday morning that it had averted the collapse of the Yihetan dam near Zhengzhou. Blasting operations had “successfully opened a new flood diversion opening” and lowered water levels.

President Xi Jinping declared that some dams had already burst, “causing serious injury, loss of life and property damage.” He pompously ordered “leaders and [party] cadres from all walks of life… to take the lead in commanding, quickly organise forces for flood protection and disaster rescue.”

Xi was responding to growing public outrage. According to the Financial Times, shock and anger have already been expressed towards weather forecasters, for failing to adequately warn of the dangers, and the state media that downplayed the seriousness of the floods. One widely shared article noted that local state media had initially said people trapped in subway cars were not at risk.

“Even if it was a once in a millennium downpour that caused the Zhengzhou floods, it may not be a natural disaster,” the article said. “If the dam discharge… caused the flood, then that’s definitely a human-made disaster.”

Zhengzhou, which lies on the southern bank of the Yellow River, has long been prone to flooding. In 2016, it was chosen to become one of 14 pilot cities involved in the country’s “sponge city” construction program, aimed at retaining and recycling rainfall. By 2020, the city had spent 53.5 billion yuan ($8.3 billion) on projects such as reinforcing the riverbanks and building water-permeable roads. The current disaster now raises questions about the efficacy of these expensive projects.

While China experiences annual storms and heavy rain at this time of year the threat of flooding is growing worse. The authorities have built tens of thousands of dams in part to mitigate flooding, but many are poorly maintained and prone to collapse in heavy rains. The dangers are compounded by excessive construction on low-lying areas and land reclamation of wetlands and lakes that have traditionally been a buffer against floodwaters.

Other areas of China have also been hard hit, with heavy downpours in Beijing last week resulting in the evacuation of 15,000 people from their homes. On Sunday, two dams collapsed in Inner Mongolia, following torrential rains. Earlier in the month, the city of Bazhong in Sichuan province suffered three days of heavy rain that affected over 380,000 people.

Following the devastating floods in Europe, the disaster in Zhengzhou adds to concerns about the impact of climate change. Climate scientists are warning that climate change is increasing the frequency and severity of extreme weather events such heatwaves and floods.

Australian COVID crisis expanding with more than half the population under lockdown

Oscar Grenfell

A COVID outbreak that began in a handful of Sydney suburbs mid-last month is now undeniably a massive national health crisis in line with the resurgence of the pandemic globally. As a direct consequence of the criminally-negligent policies of the state and federal governments, Labor and Liberal-National alike, the highly-infectious Delta variant is spreading in cities and towns across the country that are home to more than 13 million people, over half the total population.

Sydney remains the epicentre, frequently recording more than one hundred cases per day, and with ever-greater indications that the crisis is out of control. But infections are also rising in Melbourne, the state capital of Victoria and the second-most populous city. Locally-acquired cases are also being registered in South Australia for the first time in many months, prompting the imposition of lockdown measures.

Long lines of cars at inner-west Sydney COVID-19 testing station [Photo: WSWS Media]

The New South Wales (NSW) Liberal-National Coalition government today announced 124 cases in the 24-hours to 8 p.m. last night, the highest figure since infections were first registered on June 16. Premier Gladys Berejiklian declared that the state needed to be prepared for “cases to go up even higher” over the coming days.

The figures continue to be presented in a dishonest manner, aimed at downplaying the extent of the spread. The government highlights the number of daily cases where those with the virus were circulating in the community throughout their infectious period. It then briefly notes the number of other people who were in the community for “part” of their infectious period, without providing any further details.

When the two figures are combined, however, it demonstrates that the spread of the virus is largely unchecked. Of yesterday’s 110 infections, 73 were in the community for all or part of the time that they were potentially-contagious. The proportion was even higher today, at 87 of 124.

Only 67 of today’s cases were “linked to a known outbreak,” meaning that well over 40 percent were of “unknown origin.” The number of such infections, where chains of transmission have not been determined, are rising rapidly. This indicates that there are many cases that are not being identified at all by the health authorities. Of the 1685 infections recorded in Sydney 419 or 25 percent are “mystery cases.”

Contact-tracing, which the NSW government, along with Coalition Prime Minister Scott Morrison previously boasted was the “gold standard,” has broken down. Late last week, it was revealed that NSW authorities had issued an urgent appeal to other state administrations to help bolster its contact-tracing efforts. Yesterday it was reported that Transport NSW workers were being seconded to assist the pandemic response, including in a quasi-medical capacity, advising those tested of their isolation requirements, providing them with risk assessments and advising of “referral processes.”

This desperate measure comes amid revelations that people are in some cases waiting in excess of 100 hours before receiving their test results, far above the 24–48 hours that is aimed for. Laverty Pathology, which processes some 10,000 tests per day, is reportedly struggling to keep up with demand. The reliance on the private company again highlights the refusal of state and federal governments to bolster the chronically-underfunded public health sector, even under conditions of a global pandemic.

Berejiklian today sought to defend her government’s response to the outbreak, even though it is now undeniable that official policies have not only failed to halt the spread of the virus but created the conditions for its expansion. She claimed that the restrictions introduced by her government had been proportionate and had prevented “thousands and thousands of new cases” being recorded each day.

In reality, the fact that the highest daily tally has been registered almost a month-and-a-half into the outbreak, is an unanswerable indictment of the government. For ten days, after infections were first recorded on June 16, it refused to impose any additional safety measures, aside from an extension of mask mandates.

When stay-at-home orders were eventually put in place, they were of such a limited character that they could not be described as a lockdown. Virtually all businesses, including non-essential retail, remained open, along with the vast majority of workplaces.

Only last weekend did the government impose some non-essential business closures. But this was limited to three Local Government Areas (LGAs) in southwestern Sydney, that have been epicentres over recent weeks. Similar localised measures have been tried and have failed repeatedly. And the dozens of industries were exempted a day after the restrictions were put in place, following joint lobbying from big business and the thoroughly-corporatised trade unions.

The spread, moreover, is far wider than one or a handful of LGAs, but extends throughout Sydney, with infections and exposure sites being registered in every direction.

Western Sydney, which had recorded very few cases over the first month of the outbreak, is emerging as a new hotspot, with 29 infections yesterday, and 40 today, up from fewer than five per day a week ago. As in the southwest, the western suburbs are working-class, with far higher averages of household density and workers who cannot perform their employment from home.

Three of the state’s central west local government areas of Blayney, Cabonne and Orange are now in lockdown following infections through workplace transmission.

The extension of the pandemic to the regional area is another indication that workplaces are central drivers of transmission. Data indicates that around ten percent of infections, since the outbreak began, have been contracted at work. Around 30 percent of those have then unwittingly spread the virus in the community. An unknown number have transmitted it to family members.

Despite this clear evidence, the government is continuing to reject calls for sharper restrictions. NSW Health Minister Brad Hazzard today declared that “nobody wants to impose restrictions on our population that are unnecessary.” What he meant is that the NSW government and its counterparts will not implement necessary public health measures if they will have a negative impact on corporate profits.

This means that the government has no perspective whatsoever to bring the outbreak under control. In the press conference today, Berejiklian and Hazzard were unable to state what policies they would implement to reduce transmission.

This criminally-negligent program has a homicidal character, especially under conditions of Australia’s shambolic vaccine rollout, which has seen only around 14 percent of the adult population fully-inoculated. Three aged care facilities in Sydney have recorded eight positive cases, six of whom are unvaccinated staff members. They are among the tens of thousands of aged care workers, nurses and other frontline workers who remain unvaccinated.

The response in NSW has allowed the virus to spread across the country. South Australia has recorded 14 cases over recent days, prompting a limited lockdown of the state.

Victoria today registered 26, up from 22 yesterday and the highest tally in ten months. While the virus “spilled” into the state from NSW, the policies of Victoria’s Labor government have facilitated its spread. This included the resumption of mass sporting events, with two football matches, attended by tens of thousands of people, among the state’s almost 400 exposure sites. A statewide lockdown was yesterday extended for at least seven more days.

Exposure sites have also been recorded in the regional Victorian areas of Phillip Island, Mildura, Wycheproof, Bacchus Marsh and Waurn Ponds, as well as the NSW central west region around Orange, indicating that the virus is spreading outside of the major capital cities.

Despite the expanding crisis, there is a drumbeat from the corporate sector and the financial press for governments to dispense with even the limited safety measures in place, and to embark upon a course of “living with the virus.” These increasingly strident calls are directed against the mass popular sentiment, which is in favour of scientifically-grounded public health policies, dictated by the needs of society, not those of the corporate and financial oligarchy.

Delta variant spreads in Sri Lanka, as government lifts health restrictions

Sakuna Jayawardana & K. Ratnayake

On July 15, Dr. Hemantha Herath, Sri Lanka’s deputy director general of health services announced that all remaining health restrictions would be relaxed, even though the highly infectious coronavirus Delta variant was being detected in several districts across the island.

“Keeping the country closed indefinitely is not going to help at all,” Herath told the Daily Mirror. He insisted that “people should take the responsibility” for ensuring “social and economic activities are carried out without leaving any room for the spread of the disease.” He failed to explain, however, what workers and the poor could do to prevent COVID-19 spreading in the absence of the restrictions.

Dr. Hemantha Herat, Sri Lanka’s deputy director general of health services [Source: YouTube]

Herath stressed the necessity for “achieving economic goals,” and that relaxation of the restriction was in order “to find money”—in other words, profits and the economy take precedence over public health.

On Tuesday, Herath admitted that between 20 and 30 percent of COVID-19 cases involved the Delta B.1.617.2 variant. Apart from Colombo, the deadly variant has been found in the Jaffna and Kilinochchi districts in the North and in Galle and Matara in the South. The current numbers are deceptive because health authorities have been directed to conduct lower numbers of PCR (polymerase chain reaction) tests.

Herath’s call for the removal of all health restrictions and unrestricted economic activity by big business, slavishly echoes the government’s line. Like its capitalist counterparts around the world, the Rajapakse government has placed the pursuit of profit before human life.

On July 5, President Rajapakse told a meeting of co-operative society representatives that it was necessary to “face the pandemic, the only solution is the vaccination.” “Without opening the country we cannot sustain the economy,” he said.

Confronted with worsening economic problems, the Rajapakse regime is desperate to drive up production and boost exports in order to maintain foreign loan repayments.

Long lines outside vaccination centres in plantation areas [Photo credit: Facebook]

The Delta variant has now been detected in over 110 countries, with the World Health Organisation warning that the new and highly-transmissible variant will quickly become dominant in the coming period. Highly-vaccinated countries are currently seeing an upsurge of Delta cases.

Medical specialists in Sri Lanka have warned that the island faces an explosive outbreak as a result of the removal of health restrictions, low testing rates and neglect of other important health and safety measures.

Yesterday, Professor Padma Gunaratne, president of the prestigious Sri Lanka Medical Association (SLMA), warned that the island faced the beginning of a “fourth wave” of the coronavirus and its Delta variant.

“There was no significant decline in the number of COVID positive cases,” she said, because of the shortcomings of current health restrictions. The SLMA has called for an effective lockdown of the country but is being ignored by the government.

Gunaratne warned that vaccines alone would not protect the population. “We cannot think of moving forward in the country [and just resume] our social activities like before the start of the pandemic. Having such thoughts is a myth,” she warned.

Dr. Ravi Rannan-Eliya, executive director of the Institute for Health Policy, issued similar cautions in an interview with the Island on Monday. “Given that even highly vaccinated countries, like the UK, the USA, and Israel are experiencing explosive outbreaks of Delta variant, Sri Lanka needs to be especially vigilant,” he said.

Rannan-Eliya explained: “The simple answer is aggressive testing, contact tracing and isolation,” adding that vaccination alone was not the answer. He warned that health authorities were “doubling down on cutting testing, maybe with the mistaken hope that case numbers will fall as a result.”

The health ministry reported yesterday that the total number of confirmed COVID-19 cases was 289,577 with 3,917 deaths. Daily cases recorded in recent days are around 1,400 but this is based on lower testing. Since March 2020, 10 babies have died at Lady Ridgway Hospital, the country’s premier children hospital and 13 pregnant women have also become victims.

On Tuesday, only 9,000 PCR tests were conducted, down from the 12,000 daily on the previous three days. The reduction in PCR testing is in defiance of experts urging that there should be around 60,000 each day for effective tracing. The highest number of daily tests carried out in Sri Lanka has been 25,000 and then for just two days.

The government’s health expenditure is a pittance with only 28 billion rupees ($US140 million) allocated in the 2021 budget, and only 10 billion rupees, or 0.1 percent of gross domestic product, added in response to COVID-19.

The government’s reaction to the crisis has created the conditions for the rapid spread of the virus. Thousands became infected after last year’s rapid reopening of the economy in mid-April, following a brief and limited national lockdown during which most garment factories remained open.

In June 2020, as infections were rapidly spreading across the country, President Rajapakse called on provincial governors and district administrative officers to fully support ongoing production at factories and all development projects. These facilities should not be immediately shut down “if an infected person is detected,” he declared.

The media reported earlier this month that 23 workers were infected at the Sisalu Fashion garment factory in Medirigiriya, a remote area in the North Central Province. The health officials, however, sent those workers to quarantine centres but ruled out any closure of the factory. Ten days later workers reported feeling ill at the same plant and it was discovered, after limited tests, that 124 workers were infected.

Big business is reaping high profits from the government’s policies. On Monday, Export Development Board chairman Suresh de Mel boasted that export revenue was $5.6 billion in the first half of 2021, an increase of 27.5 percent compared to same period last year. He voiced his appreciation for this contribution to the economy, “despite the severe third wave of COVID-19.”

The trade unions fully supported last year’s reopening of the economy, backing the demands of big business and government and scuttling workers’ struggles and protests. All the opposition parliamentary parties, including the United National Party, Samagi Jana Balawegaya and Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, and the pseudo-left groups have similarly backed these reactionary policies that place profits ahead of human life.

The Rajapakse government and the rest of the Sri Lankan political establishment, aided and abetted by the unions, are creating the conditions for a greater catastrophe for workers and the poor.

To confront these dangers, the Sri Lankan working class must take the initiative. All non-essential production must be closed with full compensation to all employees in these workplaces and institutions. Those working in the essential services must be given the necessary protective equipment and safety measures must be implemented to fully protect their health, and the rest of the community.

Small businesses and the self-employed must be paid adequate compensation. Schools must be closed but online education facilities provided to all students. Billions of rupees are needed to improve health services.