Thailand cuts COVID quarantine measures ahead of borders re-opening

John Braddock

Thailand will waive its mandatory quarantine requirement in Bangkok and nine regions from November 1 to vaccinated arrivals, as authorities desperately try to revive the moribund tourism sector. Like its counterparts around the world, the Thai military-backed government is placing business profits before the health and lives of working people.

Besides Bangkok, the regions targeted for opening include tourist areas Chiang Mai, Phangnga, Krabi, Hua Hin, Pattaya, and Cha-am. Before the pandemic hit, Thailand's tourism sector attracted nearly 40 million visitors annually and generated $US60 billion per year, accounting for 20 percent of the country's economy.

A mother tries to comfort her son refusing to get the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine at a hospital in Bangkok, Thailand, Tuesday, Sept. 21, 2021. (AP Photo/Sakchai Lalit)

Southeast Asia is under imperialist pressure to remove control measures to free up trade and global supply chains. Bloomberg lists Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam and the Philippines at the bottom of its Covid Resilience Ranking. Data from 53 countries underscores where finance capital deems the virus is being handled with the least economic and social upheaval, on the basis of virus containment, “the economy” and “opening up.”

Last week, the Thai government raised the public debt ceiling to about 70 percent of GDP. In an another attempt to kick-start the economy, a new scheme aims to attract as many as 1 million people on special 10-year visas, hoping to lure “high end” tech workers and retirees who cannot roll over short term stays elsewhere. Potential applicants have to invest up to $US250,000 in Thai government bonds or property.

Though Thailand managed to contain COVID-19 throughout 2020, it has experienced its most severe wave over recent months, after the Delta variant spread quickly through slum housing, markets, and factories.

The country’s manufacturing and export sectors have been seriously disrupted. By late July, the Industry Ministry reported the virus had spread to 518 plants with 36,861 workers infected. They were spread over 49 of the country’s 77 provinces, and included food processing, electronics, apparel, metal works and plastics manufacturers. The situation is now much more serious.

While case numbers are currently on a downward trend, on 2 October, 11,379 new cases were recorded, with the seven-day average at 11,046. Over 1.6 million people have been infected, with 16,937 deaths, most of them since April. There are 112,251 active cases, including 3,324 that are critical. Fewer than 100 fatalities occurred last year when the pandemic first hit the country.

The country’s Centre for COVID-19 Situation Administration (CCSA) cut quarantine mandates from 14 days to seven on October 1. It also approved the reopening of businesses, including theatres, sports venues and nail salons in 29 provinces with high infection rates classified as “dark red”. A nightly curfew in many parts of the country has been cut by one hour.

Bangkok is aiming to reopen to tourists by November 1 if double-dose vaccinations cover at least 70 percent of the city’s population. By late last month, just 42 percent of Bangkok’s 7 million residents are fully vaccinated and the capital was still logging high numbers of daily cases, including 2,455 infections on September 22.

The decisions by the CCSA, chaired by Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-Ocha, the former military head and 2014 coup leader, are part of its “living with COVID” strategy to restart the economy. The moves come after the pace of inoculations was ramped up in major population and economic centres, with 1 million doses administered daily in the past two weeks.

The vaccination rollout has been belated and chaotic. Only 33.1 percent of the country’s 69.8 million people are fully vaccinated. The CSSA has recently approved a plan to procure 3.35 million doses of vaccines, although no delivery timeframe was provided. It is seeking to buy 2.79 million doses of Pfizer and BioNTech vaccines and 165,000 AstraZeneca shots from Spain and 400,000 AstraZeneca doses from Hungary.

The Southeast Asian nation has delayed and changed its tourism reopening several times due to low vaccination rates amid concerns that the easing of rules would see infections surge again, overwhelming the health-care system.

In July, the government promoted its “Phuket sandbox” pilot, reopening the tourist resort island to fully vaccinated visitors from designated “low risk” countries. Flights into Phuket soon arrived from Singapore, Israel and the Middle East with hundreds of visitors. Tourists were able to roam the island, but not travel to other parts of the country for 14 days.

The regime’s “living with the virus” strategy is, however, provoking determined social opposition. Street demonstrations that predate COVID have recently evolved into pandemic-related rallies.

Last year’s mass protests saw thousands of mainly young people demand an end to the regime, including the removal of Prayuth as prime minister, changes to the military-devised constitution, reform of the monarchy and abolition of the draconian lese majesté law. This movement was temporarily stifled by police repression and COVID restrictions.

The latest wave of protests began at the end of June and has escalated, despite police crackdowns. More than 10 demonstrations were broken up with force over the last month.

Bangkok’s Din Daeng district has become the site of a two-month long uprising by young people. The area has turned into a battleground with nightly clashes between protesters, mostly students from vocational colleges and poorer neighbourhoods, and police, who routinely respond with rubber bullets and teargas.

More than 1,000 people currently face legal charges for political activities, including at least 132 for lese-majesté, or insulting the monarchy, which can lead to 15 years in prison.

One protester, a 19-year-old trainee electrician, told the Guardian that the economic situation and the government’s management of public funding cannot be tolerated. He declared: “Everything has culminated, everything has exploded now during COVID.”

A 17-year-old said: “It’s as if they look at us not like a citizen, it’s as if they see us as slaves.” Two of his family members died after becoming infected with COVID. “They don’t have connections, so they had to wait and wait [for a hospital space],” he said, with one dying at home.

The wider population, including locals offering protesters protection from the police, are increasingly sympathetic to the young protesters. Prajak Kongkirati, a professor at Thammasat University, told the Guardian: “They are below 18 years old, some of them are only 13 or 14… Many of them lost their parents because of COVID, many of their parents lost their jobs, so they had to quit education.”

According to Prajak, the government could face a “dilemma” over fully lifting COVID restrictions. The Din Daeng protests remain small, he noted, but reopening the country could lead far larger numbers of young people taking to the streets. “Their ideology hasn’t changed, their commitment to political struggle hasn’t changed,” he declared.

Canada’s meatpacking workers face dangerous conditions and ruthless exploitation

Frédéric Charlebois

Strikes in recent months at Olymel and Exceldor slaughterhouses in Quebec have highlighted the terrible conditions in which meatpacking workers in Canada operate, as well as their growing determination to fight against these conditions.

Faced with increased competition in international markets, which consume 50 percent of the beef and 70 percent of the pork produced in Canada, the big meat companies, like Cargill, Olymel and Maple Leaf, have consolidated their operations into ever-larger plants in order to reduce production costs.

While there were 235 slaughterhouses in Ontario in the early 2000s, there are now only 120. According to a 2009 report by the Food Processing Labour Sectoral Committee, “from 1995 to 2007, the proportion of hogs slaughtered in all of Canada by the four largest plants increased from 77 percent to 90 percent.”

This concentration of production is even more significant in the beef industry, where two plants, Cargill in High River and JBS in Brooks, both in Alberta, account for 70 percent of beef processed in the country. If you add Cargill’s Guelph, Ontario plant, that figure rises to 85 percent.

At the same time, there has been an ever-intensifying assault on meatpacking workers, who have had major concessions imposed on them in contract after contract, making conditions in the industry increasingly intolerable.

According to Statistics Canada, the average wage in the meat packing industry was $21.51/per hour in 2019. Many workers earn less than this grossly inadequate wage. For example, the hourly rate was $20.10 at Cargill after three years of service in 2019, and it was just $14.85 after 2 years for Class 1 workers at duBreton.

In recent years, workers have been subjected to wage freezes and outright pay cuts, with the result that a significant proportion of workers now need a second and even third job to support themselves and their families.

The conditions in the meat processing plants are among the worst imaginable. Workers work in a wet and cold environment with large temperature variation. The smell of blood and animal waste is omnipresent.

The slaughter industry has the usual hazards associated with heavy manufacturing and manual labor. Added to this are the physical and biological hazards inherent in handling stressed animals about to be slaughtered.

These conditions, combined with ever-increasing production quotas, result in high workplace accident and injury rates. Data from the province of Alberta, for example, shows that the manufacturing sector had the third highest rate of injuries in 2019, with the largest proportion (19 percent) involving meat processing and packaging. Among the worst plants was Olymel’s Red Deer, Alberta plant, which had 283 injuries in 2019 and 248 injuries in 2020.

The arduous conditions that prevail in slaughterhouses lead to high turnover and understaffing, resulting in overwork for those employed in the industry. Even before the pandemic, there were 28,000 vacancies nationwide. To fill this labor shortage, companies are turning to temporary foreign workers, one of the most exploited sections of the working class.

According to Canada’s Department of Employment and Social Development, the governments of Justin Trudeau in Ottawa and François Legault in Quebec launched a pilot project in early August that calls for “a 10 to 20 percent increase in the maximum number of temporary foreign workers employed in low-wage positions.”

A temporary foreign worker’s right to remain in Canada depends on their keeping the job with the employer named on their work permit. This reality makes it almost impossible for foreign workers to challenge horrendous working conditions. In addition to receiving lower wages than their Canadian counterparts, they often live in crowded conditions. Some are employed by employment agencies that pay them less than the “regular” workforce and fail to provide proper training to avoid injury.

The pandemic has been particularly difficult for these workers because of their precarious status. As infections increased in the factories, fear of the virus was combined with fear of protesting their conditions and having their employers terminate their contracts. During temporary closures, foreign workers were often abandoned. At duBreton in Rivière-du-Loup, Quebec, during a temporary closure due to an outbreak, the employer reportedly went so far as to tell some foreign workers, who had no money to eat, to go to a food bank.

Meat industry workers have been the victims of such callous disregard throughout the pandemic.

Meat processing plants are ideal environments for airborne virus transmission, as is the case with COVID-19, because of their cold, damp environment. In addition, because of the way the facilities are designed and how space is allocated to allow for assembly line work, distancing is nearly impossible. Despite these significant hazard factors, so-called “essential workers” were forced to work in crowded factories without any protection throughout the first wave of the pandemic.

Following the May 2020 award of $77 million in federal grants to “help protect” workers, the meat industry—which never shut down its plants—used the government’s back-to-work policies to bring production back to pre-pandemic levels.

As all levels of government abandoned the most minimal measures to limit the spread of the virus, workers were forced to put their lives at risk to fatten the bosses’ stock portfolios.

In the next two pandemic waves, companies hid infections in factories and tried to blame workers when they contracted the disease. Press reports have revealed that some companies insisted workers who had been in contact with the virus return to their jobs while they were waiting for test results or had not completed their quarantine.

After a year and a half of the pandemic, thousands of meat processing workers have contracted COVID-19. At Cargill High River alone, an outbreak in late April and early May 2020 infected 949 of the plant’s 2,000 workers. Authorities said the outbreak was responsible for more than 1,550 additional cases.

Hundreds of workers had to be hospitalized, many of whom will retain long-term effects from the disease. There were also more than a dozen deaths among workers or their families, including three at Olymel in Red Deer, three at Cargill in High River and one at Olymel in Vallée-Jonction, Quebec.

This human and social catastrophe unfolded with the full complicity of the pro-capitalist unions. While workers demanded protective measures and equipment and the closure of plants unable to guarantee their safety, the unions constantly suppressed their opposition. They actively collaborated with employers and governments to keep factories open that had become death traps and denounced calls for job action as “illegal.”

Sri Lankan workers and poor hit by escalating costs of essential items

Saman Gunadasa

On Monday the Sri Lankan cabinet withdrew a September 2 government gazette notice imposing price controls on rice, the country’s staple food. The decision opened the way for big business rice mill operators to announce an increase of 115 rupees per kilogram ($US0.5), or 17 percent in the lowest grade nadu rice, and 145 rupees, or a 37 percent hike per kilogram for samba rice.

These increases, along with higher costs for other staple foods and essentials, will drive up the already exorbitant cost of living in Sri Lanka, and heavily impact on workers and the poor, struggling to cope amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. Even though testing rates are being reduced in Sri Lanka, COVID-19 has infected more than half a million people and killed almost 13,000.

Dairy and cooking gas importers are now lobbying the government to grant large price rises for their products. They want to increase the cost of a 12.5-kilogram cooking gas cylinder by 800 rupees, or 54 percent, and a kilogram of milk powder by 350 rupees or 37 percent. Fearing the eruption of protests, Cabinet postponed making a full decision on these price hikes, which will trigger scarcities and increase black market trading.

The price of essential foods, such as lentils, yellow gram, chilies, canned fish, onions, green gram and sprats, has risen continuously over the last 12 months, with increases in these items of between 25 percent to 150 percent.

Colombo’s decision to withdraw the price controls, makes clear that President Gotabhaya Rajapakse’s declaration of a state of emergency on August 30, had nothing to do with ending shortages and price hikes in rice, sugar and other essentials.

The Socialist Equality Party warned on September 11: “The real target of the emergency laws is the working class and rural masses, who are confronting enormous hardships, as the burden of the country’s economic crisis is directly imposed on them.”

The government’s actions expose it as an apparatus to protect big business and its exorbitant profits, not the lives of the working class, farmers and other oppressed people.

Currently, 800 containers of essential food items, such as lentils, sugar, garlic, sprats, canned fish and milk powder, are being blocked in the port, due to the scarcity of foreign currency. The Central Bank, under government pressure, has just announced that it will provide the required US dollars to release these goods.

Even though the official year-on-year food inflation rate was around 11 percent for August, the real rate is over 30 percent, according to independent economic estimates. The latest increases in rice, dairy goods and cooking gas prices, will further erode the real value of workers’ wages and see a further escalation of strikes and other social struggles by workers and the rural poor.

Up to 250,000 teachers are continuing their three-month online learning strike, to demand higher wages. On Monday, 90,000 public sector health workers struck in protest against cuts to a pandemic-related special allowance, and for several other demands. Plantation workers have also been involved in protests over back-breaking production demands by big business estates, following an abysmal daily wage increase of about 250 rupees.

Hundreds of thousands of low-paid production workers in the free trade zones, mainly in the apparel, rubber and electronics industries, have also suffered wage cuts, lay-offs and increased workloads, since the pandemic began. Around half a million workers in the tourist sector have been laid off, as a result of dramatic falls in tourist arrivals. Thousands of import sector workers are also unemployed, after the government placed import bans on automobiles and other foreign-made goods, in an attempt to prevent further declines in foreign currency reserves.

While the Sri Lankan economy already had a widening budget deficit and crippling debt repayments, the coronavirus pandemic has drastically worsened this crisis. According to a September 16 Moody’s report, Sri Lanka will have to pay between $4 and $5 billion in annual debt repayments until 2025. With its foreign currency reserves just $3 billion at the end of August, the government’s priority has been avoiding an international debt default.

The rupee has been effectively devalued by 27 percent since early last year, while printed money stock has increased by 35 percent, to 2.8 trillion rupees ($14 billion). The running budget deficit is reportedly around 12 percent of GDP and continuously increasing.

As workers and the poor suffer from these ongoing social attacks, various government cronies and big businesses are reaping windfall profits. After coming to power, President Gotabhaya Rajapakse sharply reduced most corporate taxes by between 15 and 24 percent. In the last business quarter—from April to June 2021—nine top companies amassed 364 billion rupees ($1.82 billion) in earnings, collectively pocketing 21 billion rupees ($105 million) in net profit.

Sri Lanka’s recently appointed finance minister, Basil Rajapakse, the younger brother of President Gotabhaya Rajapakse and Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapakse, has instructed government ministries to stop “unnecessary allowances” to state employees and “save money.”

The government is intensifying its moves to privatise state institutions, such as the Colombo Port, Ceylon Petroleum Corporation (CPC) and Ceylon Electricity Board (CEB). On September 17, it signed a deal with the US-based New Fortress Energy, which will buy a 40 percent share in the Yugadanavi Power Plant at Kerawalapitiya, near Colombo. The Western Jetty at the Colombo Port is to be privatised and a 13-acre plot sold to a Chinese company.

Legislation, covering Sri Lanka’s petroleum supply and distribution, is being amended in order to privatise CPC, while negotiations are underway for a $500 million credit for petroleum imports from India, and facilities from the United Arab Emirates. The government is also in the process of selling key real estate in Colombo city.

At the same time, President Rajapakse is militarising his administration and moving rapidly towards a presidential dictatorship, based on the military and Sinhala-Buddhist chauvinist forces. A draconian essential service act, banning strikes in most of the public sector, has been imposed and emergency rule declared, with military generals being placed in key government ministries and the military being put on stand-by in every district across the island.

These measures, which are directed against the working class, are supported by all of the opposition parties, including the pro-US United National Party (UNP) and its break-away group Samagi Jana Balavegaya (SJB), the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), the Tamil National Alliance and the pseudo-left Frontline Socialist Party (FSP).

The SJB and the UNP have urged the government to appeal to the government for assistance from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The previous UNP government, under Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe and President Maithripala Sirisena was defeated in the presidential and general elections in 2019 and 2020, after ruthlessly imposing IMF-prescribed austerity measures. The JVP, and its breakaway group, the FSP, argue that capitalism can be reformed by curbing corruption.

Ford announces $11.4 billion electric vehicle investments in Tennessee and Kentucky

Shannon Jones

Ford Motor Company this week announced an unprecedented $11.4 billion investment in electric vehicle production targeted for sites in Tennessee and Kentucky. The investment, being made in partnership with South Korea-based energy company SK Innovations, is the largest manufacturing investment in the company’s history and will create two large manufacturing complexes, one near Memphis, Tennessee, and the other south of Louisville, Kentucky.

The move presages a massive restructuring in Ford’s operations as it moves away from gas vehicles. The company has targeted a goal of 40 percent EV production by 2030. The new EV operations will be much less labor intensive than production of gas-powered vehicles, involving more technical operations and far fewer assembly jobs, since EVs require fewer moving parts.

The two new sites are expected to employ some 10,000 workers. The megacampus near Memphis is being called Blue Oval City, after the Ford logo, and is supposed to be the largest and most efficient factory in the company’s history, dwarfing the massive Rouge Complex outside Detroit, which was the largest factory in the world when it opened in 1928. It will include an assembly plant, a battery plant and a supplier park. According to the Detroit Free Press “Inside the plant, ‘zero-waste-to-landfill’ processes will capture materials and production scrap at an on-site materials collection center to sort and route materials for recycling or processing either at the plant or off-site.”

In Kentucky, the company is planning the BlueOvalSK Battery Park, which will consist of twin battery plants that will supply electric power for new Ford and Lincoln electric vehicles set for production later this decade. The first batteries will be produced in 2025 with the complex in full operation by 2026. Construction will start later this year.

When fully operational, the three battery plants will turn out 1 million units a year to power a range of Ford vehicles.

The new EV megasites dwarf Ford’s previous commitment of $950 million in the Rouge Complex in Dearborn, Michigan, to build the all-electric 2022 F-150 Lightning. It also puts Ford, at least temporarily ahead of other major carmakers in the shift to EVs, including General Motors and Stellantis, as well as Japanese-based rival Toyota, which has focused more on hybrids rather than all-electric vehicles. However, General Motors is currently renovating its Detroit-Hamtramck assembly plant to produce new electric Hummers sometime next year.

The announcement of the new investments by Ford was immediately hailed by the United Auto Workers, with UAW President Ray Curry appearing with Ford President Jim Farley at an event in Memphis announcing plans to build an electric truck and battery plant in nearby Stanton, Tennessee.

In a groveling statement, Curry declared, “The UAW looks forward to continuing our long-time partnership with Ford as consumers transition to make electric vehicles in the right way. The UAW has always taken a lead in manufacturing innovation with our employer partners. We look forward to reaching out and helping develop this new workforce to build these world class vehicles and battery components.”

However, while praising its “partnership” with the UAW, Farley did not explicitly confirm that the UAW would be let into the new plants, both located in right-to-work states. “Obviously, they’ll have to hold an election, and it’s up to the workers, but Ford Motor Company has had a tremendous partnership with the UAW, and I wouldn’t want to change that,” the Ford president said.

There is every indication that, whether or not the UAW or some other union is ultimately recognized as the bargaining agent for workers at the new EV facilities, Ford will insist on a lower pay scale than is currently in place at its assembly plants to offset the investment costs and compete with the lower wages at Tesla, which currently is far ahead in EV capabilities. Investors have built up the stock of Elon Musk’s EV startup, which accounts for well under 1 percent of global vehicle sales, to the point where it has a market capitalization that dwarfs Ford and other makers of traditional gas-driven vehicles.

For its part, there is no doubt the UAW will agree to whatever terms the company demands in order to secure representation and the ability to collect dues from workers.

The company’s selection of sites in the Upper South, rather than Michigan, the manufacturer’s traditional base of operations, has set off bitter recriminations in the state. Referring to Ford’s selection of Tennessee and Kentucky sites, Randy Thelen, CEO of The Right Place, an economic development organization in Western Michigan, declared, “The automotive industry is Michigan’s game to lose, and we’ve lost the first inning.”

In announcing the project Ford shamelessly sought to shake down local governments for handouts, setting off a bidding war between states. In an interview on CNN Farley said, “Essentially, we need support to help customers make this transition financially.”

Kentucky, under Democratic Governor Andy Beshear, is ponying up $250 million in forgivable loans while offering an additional $36 million for training. Tennessee, meanwhile, has offered a massive $500 million incentive for the site outside of Memphis.

Explaining the choice of Tennessee and Kentucky, Lisa Drake, head of Ford global purchasing operations, said, “Battery cell plants are huge energy consumers, and a city can’t just whip together a plan anywhere. … We chose the best place for the company, the labor market and the environment.”

The construction of battery plants in the US is being presented in the context of a strategic move aimed at weaning US producers off reliance on China, particularly in light of the shortage of semiconductor chips from the Asia-Pacific region and global supply chain bottlenecks. It follows moves by GM and other automakers to locate battery production in the US . This is in line with the agenda of the Biden administration, which has indicated it views the development of a domestic supply chain for EVs as a matter of “national security.”

Given the scarcity of key battery ingredients, such as lithium and cobalt—80 percent of US supplies come from China—the plants will place an emphasis on recycling at the large Tennessee site. The complex will include a battery materials recycling facility that will recycle waste material from battery manufacturing so that it can be fed back into the battery plants. It will be operated by Redwood Materials, a company started by a former Tesla executive. The company has said it can recover more than 95 percent of cobalt, lithium, copper and nickel from batteries.

“This is a really important strategic bet to insource these key components. It won’t be the last,” Ford CEO Jim Farley said in an interview Monday published in the Free Press.

While the drive to produce electric vehicles is being presented in altruistic terms, as part of an effort to confront climate change, as with every other aspect of capitalist society it is subordinated entirely to the drive for profit. EVs promise massive cost savings to the auto giants due to the far lower assembly costs versus gas driven vehicles. This will of necessity entail a further attack on the jobs and living conditions of autoworkers.

US police have killed more than 30,000 people since 1980

Trévon Austin

A new study published in The Lancet found that US law enforcement killed at least 30,800 people from 1980 to 2019.

The study, conducted at the University of Washington School of Medicine’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, also found a sharp increase in police killings over the period covering almost 40 years. During the 1980s the mortality rate associated with police violence was 0.25 per 100,000. By the 2010s the rate jumped up to 0.34 per 100,000, an increase of 38.4 percent.

Moreover, researchers discovered that more than half of fatal encounters with police in the United States went unreported at the same time. The study estimated 55 percent of deaths from police violence were not reported or were misclassified in official government databases between 1980 and 2018. These unreported killings represent more than 17,000 deaths at the hands of US police that were kept from public view over a period covering almost 40 years. However, this troubling statistic is still likely an underestimation of the real impact of police brutality.

A demonstrator raises their hand while facing off against a perimeter of police as they defy an order to disperse during a protest against the police shooting of Daunte Wright, late Monday, April 12, 2021, in Brooklyn Center, Minn. [Credit: AP Photo/John Minchillo]

The new study provides a clearer picture of the issue of police violence in the United States. However, it does not fully account for the real social toll. What’s missing from this report is the untold number of victims that are brutalized by police but survive the physical and emotional scars bore by the victims and their families and the immeasurable suffering inflicted on families and communities that lose a loved one at the hands of police.

To grasp the extent of underreporting of police-involved killings, researchers compared data from the US National Vital Statistics System (NVSS), a government database that collates all death certificates, to three common open-source databases on fatal police violence: Fatal Encounters, Mapping Police Violence and The Counted. Open-source databases collect information from news reports and public record requests, encompassing a wider range of incidents.

The paper noted a Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study found that police killings accounted for 293,000 global deaths from 1980 to 2019. In 2019, the US accounted for 13.2 percent of the 8,770 global deaths at the hands of police, while only accounting for 4 percent of the world’s population.

“The difference these practices have on loss of life is staggering: No one died from police violence in Norway in 2019, and three people were recorded to have died in England and Wales from police violence between 2018 and 2019,” the researchers wrote.

Researchers discovered the top five states with the highest underreporting rates were Oklahoma, Wyoming, Alabama, Louisiana and Nebraska. The states with the highest mortality rate of police brutality were Oklahoma, Washington D.C., Arizona, Alaska, Nevada and Wyoming. Additionally, the paper found that men are killed by police at significantly higher rates than women, with 30,600 police-involved deaths recorded among men and 1,420 among women between 1980 and 2019, a difference of over 2,000 percent.

The study suggested “several factors” are behind the underreporting, including clerical mistakes wherein a coroner or medical examiner may fail to indicate police involvement in a death certificate’s cause of death section. However, the grim reality is that the cover-up of police murders is a conscious policy of the American ruling class and police state.

The researchers noted the fact that coroners and medical examiners are often embedded within police departments and may feel “substantial conflicts of interest” that disincentivize them from indicating law enforcement involvement in a death. The study cited a 2011 survey of National Association of Medical Examiners members that found 22 percent of respondents reported having been pressured by an elected official or appointee to change the cause or manner of death on a certificate.

The national media and the Democratic Party frame police violence as a purely racial issue. Following the sentencing of former Minneapolis Officer Derek Chauvin, President Joe Biden claimed the murder of George Floyd “ripped the blinders off for the whole world to see the systemic racism” imbedded in American society.

The “race, not class” mythology of police killings has been incessantly promoted by the Democratic Party and its political satellites. Regardless of a victim’s skin color, the epidemic of police violence in America devastates families and impacts entire communities. However, this is not how police brutality is presented in the national media.

Undoubtedly, racism plays a role in many police murders and accounts for the fact that minorities are killed at rates disproportionate to their share of the national population. However, a more thorough analysis shows that the killing of minorities by police is only one aspect of the reign of terror by American police against the working class.

A 2018 analysis of police violence statistics published by the World Socialist Web Site found that when economic and social demographics of the cities and counties where people are killed by police are taken into account, the glaring racial disparities that are the focus of the media and the Democrats largely disappear.

Rather, police violence is concentrated on the poorest and most disadvantaged men and women.

“Police violence is focused overwhelmingly on men lowest on the socio-economic ladder: in rural areas outside the South, predominately white men; in the Southwest, disproportionately Hispanic men; in mid-size and major cities, disproportionately black men. Significantly, in the rural South, where the population is racially mixed, white men and black men are killed by police at nearly identical rates. What unites these victims of police violence is not their race, but their class status (as well as, of course, their gender).”

In 2020, police killed 475 white people, 241 black people and 169 Hispanic people, as well as 126 people of unknown race. Police violence affects all sections of the working class. Presenting police violence as a racial issue only serves to divide the working class and obfuscate the social processes behind police killings. In truth, the epidemic of police violence in America is reflective of a society defined by an immense and ever-growing social inequality.

For decades, conditions for American workers have become more dire as their real wages stagnate and social programs eliminated in favor of the militarist aims of American imperialism. The financial crisis of 2008-09 exacerbated the misery of the working class, as well as police killings. Significantly, the study published in The Lancet recorded a sharp uptick in police killings around this time, further indicating a link between America’s social crisis and police killings.

This is further established by the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic. While workers and children are forced into unsafe environments, endless sums of money are made available to the ultrawealthy to continue their bonanza of financial speculation on Wall Street. Meanwhile, poverty, hunger, homelessness and death have become commonplace among the working class.

The rise in police killings in the United States is the manifestation of the social inequality that pervades American society. Rather than being a “black vs. white” issue, it is the armed representatives of the capitalist state (frequently minorities themselves) carrying out their social function: protecting the property of the wealthy and violently suppressing working-class opposition to the capitalist system. Ending police violence requires the abolition of the capitalist system, which police ruthlessly defend with a bloody fist.

Australian government accelerates border reopening despite soaring COVID-19 cases

Mike Head

Prime Minister Scott Morrison yesterday announced Australia’s international border will reopen next month for states that have reached 80 percent vaccination rates for people over 16, even as the country’s COVID-19 infections hit new highs.

Australia Prime Minister Scott Morrison [Credit: AP/Kiyoshi Ota]

This may start within weeks for New South Wales (NSW), the most populous state, where the current Delta outbreak began in June after the state government refused to implement even limited lockdown measures for 10 days.

Fully vaccinated Australians and permanent residents arriving in NSW will be able to home quarantine for just one week, instead of quarantining at a hotel for a fortnight, pending the supposed success of a brief state home quarantine trial.

Commercial flights out of Australia also will resume for vaccinated Australians. These moves will effectively end 18 months in which restrictions on international travel have limited the arrival of the virus, except for constant leaks from the inadequate quarantine hotels.

Morrison’s announcement marks an acceleration by his Liberal-National Coalition government of a “roadmap” agreed by the bipartisan “National Cabinet” in July, which said international travel would gradually reopen once 80 percent of eligible people were vaccinated nationally and in the relevant state.

This speedup was effectively accepted by yesterday’s meeting of the “National Cabinet” of federal, state and territory government leaders, mostly from the opposition Labor Party. They collectively “noted” the “progress” being made on these fronts by Morrison’s Liberal-National government.

Morrison portrayed the decision as a gain for ordinary people. “It’s time to give Australians their lives back,” he said. That is after denying entry to tens of thousands of Australian citizens and residents for a year and a half by refusing to provide decent and sufficient quarantine facilities.

In reality, the acceleration is being undertaken to satisfy the demands of the corporate elite for a faster full reopening of the economy despite soaring Delta infections.

An article in the Financial Times, the London-based voice of international finance capital, this week declared: “Australia is making ‘big mistakes’ in failing to reopen to the world, with business leaders accusing the government of putting politics before science ahead of a looming general election.”

“Increasingly fed up with COVID-19 lockdown policies, and a failure to rollout vaccines that would allow the economy to open up, the leaders of many of Australia’s biggest companies—including BHP, Macquarie and Qantas—have said the nation will have to learn to ‘live with the virus,’ as many other countries have done.”

This is a demand that Australian governments must suppress the widespread working-class opposition to being forced to return to unsafe workplaces and schools, under conditions in which hospitals are already unable to cope. Scientists and health experts are warning of rising infections in coming weeks as schools and workplaces reopen.

“It’s time for corporate Australia to turn its disquiet and rumblings into a roar,” Greg O’Neill, chief executive of Melbourne-based fund asset management company La Trobe Financial, told the Financial Times. “It’s time for courage and honesty. Not politics.”

“Living with the virus” means that infections must be allowed to spread in Australia, as globally, infecting thousands more people, killing hundreds and inflicting the still fully-unknown effects of “long COVID” on many more.

Since the start of the pandemic, there have been over 108,000 confirmed cases in Australia and more than 1,300 people have died. These numbers are already rising quickly—over 2,350 cases and 12 deaths were reported today—as limited existing restrictions are lifted.

So far, the toll remains much lower than in other countries, such as the UK, where 59,000 children were infected with COVID-19 in the first two weeks of school reopenings and new cases have risen from 2,000 a day in May to nearly 35,000 a day over the past month. In the United States, more than 200,000 new pediatric infections each week have been reported over the past five weeks, mostly the result of school reopenings.

The September 29 Financial Times article featured a declaration by Graham Turner, chief executive of travel company Flight Centre. “The borders should have never been closed,” he told the newspaper. “We’re making some very big mistakes here.” Together with Qantas, the national air carrier, Flight Centre’s profits would be most directly boosted by open borders.

Turner accused Morrison of being “scared of making a wrong move.” Decisions were being made for “political reasons” and that was “the most frustrating thing for business.” Turner said he had spent five weeks working in London over July and August and “they’ve still got a lot of infections but they’re back to normal.”

Yesterday, Turner threatened to mount a legal challenge against internal border closures if state governments did not adopt “reasonable” plans to scrap them within weeks, accusing them of costing his company $100 million a month.

Until now, border closures have confined COVID-19 cases to low figures in most states and territories—Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia, Tasmania and the Northern Territory—allowing their governments to posture as protecting their populations.

The Financial Times article seized upon, and inflated, a month-old “open letter” to Australia’s governments, dated September 1, by the Business Council of Australia (BCA), representing the largest conglomerates operating in Australia. Signed by 79 companies, including the major banks, Uber, Credit Suisse, Bain, Boeing, Bupa and Shell, the letter declared that it was “necessary to open up society and live with the virus.”

Governments had to “stay the course” in imposing a plan to end restrictions once vaccination rates reached 70 percent and 80 percent. However, the open letter did not use the phrase “big mistakes,” as the article suggested. That came from Turner, reflecting a stepping up of the corporate pressure on the federal and state governments.

Pointedly, the Financial Times article said “political pressure” was mounting on Morrison, “whose conservative coalition government has a threadbare majority, is trailing in the polls and is embroiled in multiple scandals.”

Two days later, on October 1, the BCA chief executive Jennifer Westacott issued a new statement welcoming the Morrison government’s “rolling back” of restrictions as “critical” and citing “analysis” by the EY global consulting giant estimating the cost of international border closures to be around $7.6 billion per month.

“This will help send the message to the world that Australia is open for new jobs and investment,” Westacott stated. She also insisted that the next step was to end all state and territory restrictions, including border closures. “Now, state and territory leaders must release their domestic reopening plans and stick to them,” Westacott said. At stake was “our international reputation as a good place to do business.”

As the interventions by the BCA and the Financial Times demonstrate, the ruling capitalist class is intent on driving up profits, regardless of the cost in terms of working-class health and lives.

The UN Crisis

John Feffer

Jair Bolsonaro gave a speech at the UN General Assembly this month. It was full of the usual misstatements and exaggerations for which the Brazilian leader has become notorious. But the most noteworthy part of the speech had nothing to do with its contents. It was Bolsonaro’s refusal of take a COVID-19 vaccine, despite New York City regulations on public gatherings and the UN’s urging of all world leaders to do so.

The planet faces enormous threats at the moment. The pandemic is still raging throughout the world. Climate change is an immediate risk. Wars continue to devastate Yemen, Ethiopia, and Syria.

Given these crises, the United Nations is needed more than ever. And yet the body could not compel Jair Bolsonaro to get vaccinated or risk the fallout of preventing him from speaking to the General Assembly.

This problem of rogue actors has long bedeviled the United Nations. But the rise of right-wing populists who insist on their sovereign (and often selfish) right to do whatever they please poses an additional challenge to the international community.

Nation-states frequently use the principle of sovereignty—the exclusive authority to determine the rules within national boundaries—as a justification for their actions. The COVID-19 pandemic is only the most recent example of the shortcomings of sovereignty. With little regard for the common good, the richest countries made sure to secure more than their fair share of vaccines. The World Health Organization, UNICEF, and the World Bank tried to ensure access to the vaccine for poorer countries by setting up the Vaccine Alliance (GAVI). It was supposed to distribute 2 billion doses by the end of 2021. So far, it has managed to distribute only 240 million.

The problem has largely been one of supply, given the huge purchases of the vaccine by richer countries. But there is also the challenge of delivering doses to countries where medical infrastructure is weak. As a result, the Global Dashboard for Vaccine Equity reports that, as of September 21, just 3.31 per cent of people in low-income countries have been vaccinated with at least one dose, compared to 61.51 per cent of people in high-income countries.

Let’s face it: the rich run the world, and the United Nations just doesn’t have the power to change that.

Nor has the UN risen to the challenge of climate change. Here the problem is one of brokering effective compromises. The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change is the body responsible for convening the Conference of the Parties (COP) meeting every year. In Paris, COP21 did manage to produce a binding treaty on climate change. But the commitments made by all the parties to the agreement were not sufficient to reduce carbon emissions fast enough to prevent a catastrophic increase in global temperatures.

Moreover, the commitments were voluntary. The U.S. delegation insisted on this because it feared that the U.S. Congress would reject any binding pledges.

It’s no surprise, then, that carbon emissions are expected to rise this year by 5 percent, the second largest increase in history.

The fault here again lies mostly with the richest countries—China, the United States, Japan, Germany, South Korea, Canada, Saudi Arabia—that have been the biggest emitters of carbon. But rich countries have also refused to provide enough money to help poorer countries transition to cleaner energy. In 2009, rich countries promised to mobilize $100 billion by 2020 for this transition. A dozen years later, the fund is still $20 billion short.

Of course, many countries face another deadly scourge: war. Imagine how many lives would be saved, how much reconstruction could take place, and how waves of refugees could be reduced if the UN were able to conduct a peacekeeping mission in Afghanistan, establish an on-the-ground presence in Syria, and separate warring parties in Tigray province in Ethiopia. Instead, the UN is relegated the task of providing humanitarian assistance. Its program in Syria, with a target of $4.2 billion a year, is the largest in the world.

But humanitarian assistance is a never-ending drain in the absence of security on the ground. Most of the peacekeeping budget of the UN goes to the existing 13 missions. The Biden administration has promised to pay down the over $1 billion peacekeeping bill it owes the UN, but the UN is going to need a lot more than that to play an effective role in bringing peace and security to the most conflict-torn areas of the world.

For one thing, the UN doesn’t have a capability to respond quickly to emergencies around the world. An Emergency Peace Service could fill that gap. It has some support internationally, and it’s even come up twice as bills in the U.S. Congress. Without a permanent, professional corps of emergency responders, the UN will constantly be one step behind in dealing with crises around the world.

This is not an easy time for the United Nations. It is underfunded. Proposals to reform its governance have largely gone nowhere. It has been forced to cobble together ad hoc responses to the world’s biggest problems.

But perhaps the biggest challenge to the UN is the refusal of nation-states to delegate sufficient authority to international institutions. Right-wing populists like Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro attacked “globalists” on a daily basis. They have done as much as possible to destroy international agreements, but they’re not alone. Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping have insisted that they have the right to do whatever they want within their own national borders. Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines is resisting any “interference” in his drug war as part of an investigation into his government’s human rights abuses. Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua has similarly pushed back against UN criticism of his human rights record. Most strong-arm leaders eye the UN skeptically.

Without a lot of money or institutional credibility and facing a strong anti-internationalist philosophy, the United Nations has a great deal of difficulty compelling its members to protect human rights, the environment, or the rule of law. Look how ineffectual it was in dealing with Jair Bolsonaro.

Without credible enforcement mechanisms, the UN will be incapable of making the Bolsonaros of the world behave responsibly. And unfortunately, the disease of Bolsonarism is spreading.

Australia: 2,000 StarTrack truck drivers strike over pay and job security

Jim Franklin

Around 2,000 truck drivers at StarTrack, a parcel, freight and logistics company owned by Australia Post (AP), held a 24-hour national strike on Thursday, September 23.

Striking StarTrack workers (Photo: Facebook/TWUAus)

As part of negotiations for a new enterprise agreement (EA), the workers are demanding a limit on outsourcing and for labour-hire casuals to receive the same pay and entitlements as permanent employees. According to the Transport Workers Union (TWU), outsourcing at some StarTrack facilities has reached as high as 70 percent.

The workers are also seeking a wage increase greater than the company’s current offer of 3 percent per annum. The union has not publicly specified what figure it is demanding, meaning that anything above 3 percent will likely be touted as a “victory,” even if it falls short of the recently announced official CPI increase of 3.8 percent.

The dispute takes place in an atmosphere of mounting anger throughout the trucking industry. Around 4,000 Toll drivers struck for 24 hours on August 27, and thousands of workers at Linfox, Bevchain have also recently voted in favour of protected industrial action. Another 3,000 workers at FedEx struck for 24 hours on Thursday.

These major transport companies are increasingly employing workers on short-term contracts, effectively creating a two-tier system to undermine the conditions of full-time drivers. This includes changes to shifts and the allocation of work to casuals and contractors, rather than giving overtime hours to full-time workers.

Despite the common grievances of workers throughout the transport industry, the TWU has isolated the strikes to one company at a time, minimising disruption to the supply chain. Although more than a month has passed since the Toll strike, and none of the issues have been resolved, the union has barely mentioned the company’s name and has presented no plan for further action at Toll.

Speaking outside StarTrack’s Minchinbury, Western Sydney facility, on September 23, TWU National Secretary Michael Kaine claimed that these attacks on workers’ conditions were the result of Australia’s major trucking companies coming under “incredible commercial pressure” from international competitors such as Amazon Flex.

Kaine continued: “These companies, like StarTrack and others, have traditionally been good companies. With these workers, they have built up good secure jobs.”

Highlighting the union’s close alignment with management, Kaine invited StarTrack to “go to the federal government together and fix this Amazon effect.” Kaine issued a similar invitation to Toll’s management during the August 27 strike.

The TWU’s campaign against Amazon has nothing to do with defending the rights of gig-economy workers—probably the most exploited layer in the transport industry—but is instead directed at shoring up the profitability of Australia’s multi-billion dollar trucking companies.

The nationalist line that “good” Australian companies must be defended against their overseas rivals serves only to pit Australian workers against their counterparts internationally. The struggle to defend pay and conditions at StarTrack, Toll and elsewhere will not be won through appeals to the Australian ruling class, but through a turn to the global working class.

Kaine was careful to reassure management that the union would continue to enforce the company’s use of casual and contract labour in “peak” periods. Kaine said: “Always in our agreements, there is the flexibility for the company to be able to hire more workers, truckies, sortation workers in to deal with those peaks.”

The reality is, the growth in online shopping due to COVID-19 lockdowns has seen StarTrack and AP operating at “peak” levels year round. Rather than responding to this surge with the creation of new full-time jobs, the companies have seized upon the pandemic as an opportunity to entrench the massively increased use of contractors, usually reserved for Christmas and Easter, as standard operating procedure. This is a direct product of the “flexibility” Kaine defends as an unquestionable feature of every EA enforced by the TWU.

This month AP announced annual profits of more than $100 million before tax and a 10.3 percent revenue increase to $8.27 billion. StarTrack’s volumes increased by 12.2 percent over this period, making it AP’s most profitable division.

Both the TWU and the Communication Electrical Plumbers Union (CEPU), which covers most AP workers, have signed sell-out EAs for years that have resulted in the decline of workers’ conditions and pay.

Last year, under the guise of the pandemic, the CEPU worked with AP management to implement restructuring by introducing the Alternative Delivery Model (ADM), which doubled the workload of postal workers. This model could only be introduced because the CEPU signed a Memorandum of Understanding behind workers’ backs. This agreement contained a no-strike clause and served as a guarantee that the union would enforce the ADM.

Last month, the CEPU rammed through another sell-out EA at AP which offered a meagre 3 percent per annum wage rise—really a pay cut in view of inflation and the fact that workers did not receive a pay rise at all in 2020—and committed workers to ongoing restructuring.

Along with the previous EAs, these deals have allowed management to increase the use of casuals and contractors to replace full-time jobs. Far from representing the interests of workers, the enterprise bargaining system implemented by the Hawke-Keating Labor governments has been a mechanism to divide workers and tie them to the demands of their employers.

The unions, which fully support this anti-worker system, have acted as an industrial police force, imposing this straitjacket on the working class.

This is highlighted at AP by the fact that the TWU and CEPU have refused to organise any joint action to defend workers’ conditions, even though AP workers and StarTrack drivers were undergoing EA negotiations simultaneously.

StarTrack management is seeking to drive a wedge between the workers and is trying to undermine the action by StarTrack drivers. It is using the fact that one section of the workforce, under the CEPU, has signed a new EA and is now receiving the first three percent wage rise, while those workers represented by the TWU have yet to do so and are therefore “missing out.”

This was highlighted in a flyer sent to employees by StarTrack management on August 31, the day after AP announced that workers had voted up the new EA.

The flyer stated: “Star Track has made it clear from the beginning that we will not be providing any greater pay offer than what we've offered to 30,000 Australia Post employees…. The TWU’s delays will cost you money and will hurt all Australians who are reliant on us at this challenging time…. Don’t let the TWU hold your pay rise to ransom over its industry campaign.”

The situation confronting StarTrack workers along with their brothers and sisters throughout the transport industry and AP is the product of decades of betrayals by the unions.