Thirsty in Paradise: The Growing Water Crises Across the Caribbean islands

Farah Nibb

In the popular imagination, the Caribbean is paradise, an exotic place to escape to. But behind the images of balmy beaches and lush hotel grounds lies a crisis, the likes of which its residents have never experienced.

Caribbean islands are in a water crisis, and their governments have warned that water scarcity may become the new norm.

Within the past five years, every island in the region has experienced some sort of water scarcity. For example, Trinidad is experiencing its worst drought in recent memory, and residents are under water restrictions through at least the end of June 2024, with fines for anyone who violates the rules.

Dominica, considered the nature island of the Caribbean for its mountain rain forests, is seeing a significant decrease in freshwater resources and increasingly frequent water shortages. In Grenada, known as the spice isle, drought has affected water systems throughout the island.

Jamaica is also facing water restrictions and has had to resort to water shutoffs in recent years, limiting water availability to a few hours per day in some areas. St. Vincent and St. Kitts have had to ration water. Barbados has experienced several water bans in recent years.

In fact, recent data shows that the Caribbean is one of the most water-stressed regions in the world.

I study the intersection of critical infrastructure and disasters, particularly in the Caribbean. Safe water is essential for all human activity and public health. That’s why it is important to understand the root causes of the water crises and to find effective, affordable ways to improve water supply systems.

3 reasons water demand is outstripping supply

Changing precipitation patterns and droughts are straining Caribbean water supplies, but water demand has also been outstripping supply for a number of reasons.

1. Rapid urbanization and industrialization

The Caribbean is one of the most rapidly urbanizing regions in the world. About three-quarters of its population lives in cities, and that percentage is rising, adding pressure on public water systems.

At the same time, increased industrialization and commercialization of agriculture have degraded water quality and in some cases encroached on sensitive water catchment areas, affecting the soil’s capacity to retain water.

A plane lands in Sint Maarten. Visitors’ water needs come first on many islands that depend on tourism. Richie Diesterheft/Flickr, CC BY-SA

This competing demand for limited fresh water has reduced stream flows and led to water being drawn down from sensitive sources. In Dennery North, a major farming community in St. Lucia, water shortages have left residents collecting water from rivers and other sources for their homes and farms.

Unregulated extraction of groundwater can also worsen the problem. Many islands depend on groundwater.

For example, 90% of water supply in Barbados comes from groundwater, while in Jamaica it is 84%. However, increasing demand and changes in annual rainfall patterns are affecting the ability of aquifers or groundwater to recharge. As a result, supply isn’t keeping up with demand. This is a huge problem for the island of Utila, located off the coast of Honduras, where the current rate of aquifer recharge is only 2.5% annually. For comparison, Barbados has a recharge rate of 15% to 30% of annual rainfall.

2. Water-intensive tourism industry

It’s no secret that the Caribbean is a popular tourist destination, and tourist economies depend on vast quantities of water.

Even during water rationing, water is diverted to hotels and other tourist-dependent sites first. That can leave local residents without water for hours or days at a time and facing fines if they violate use restrictions.

Tourism not only increases the consumption of water but also the pollution of water resources. Building golf courses to attract more tourists further increases tourism’s water demand and runoff.

3. Weak water infrastructure governance

Another problem water systems face is weak governance that leads to excessive loss of treated water before it even reaches the customer.

A well-performing water utility will usually have water losses – known as nonrevenue water – below 30%. In the Caribbean, the average nonrevenue water is 46%, with some as high as 75%.

The reasons range from lack of appropriate management practices to metering inaccuracies, leaks and theft.

Climate change and extreme weather worsen water insecurity

These troubled water systems can struggle on good days. Worsening extreme weather, such as hurricanes and flooding, can damage infrastructure, leading to long outages and expensive repairs.

The Caribbean is the second-most disaster-prone region in the world. The islands face frequent earthquakes, landslides, devastating hurricanes and other destructive storms. As global temperatures and sea levels rise, the risk of extreme weather and storm surge causing erosion, flooding and saltwater contamination increases.

Three months after Hurricane Maria hit in 2017, well over 14% of the Caribbean population was still without portable water. Hurricane Dorian in 2019 left Grand Bahama Utility Co. and the country’s Water and Sewerage Corp. with U$54 million in damages. A year after Dorian, WSC was “still working on restoring operations to pre-Hurricane Dorian levels.”

How hybrid rainwater harvesting can help

Improving water access in the Caribbean means working on all of those challenges. Better governance and investment can help reduce water loss from theft and leaks. Government and social pressure and educating tourists can help reduce waste at hotels and resorts.

There are also ways to increase water supply. One involves being more strategic about how the islands use a practice the region has relied on for centuries: rainwater harvesting.

Rainwater harvesting involves capturing rainwater, often from where it runs off rooftops, and storing it for future use. It can replace irrigation, or the water can be treated for household uses.

An example of a rainwater harvesting tank.
Penny Mayes via Wikimedia, CC BY

Right now, rainwater harvesting is not managed as part of the islands’ centralized water management system. Instead, households bear the cost to finance, build and maintain their own systems. Finding technical support can be difficult, leaving households to contend with seasonal variations in water quantity and quality. That makes risks to drinking water safety difficult to identify.

If rainwater harvesting were instead combined with central water systems in a managed hybrid water model, I believe that could help expand safe rainwater harvesting and address water issues in the region.

It’s a relatively new concept, and integrating decentralized sources can be complex, including requiring separate pipes, but it has potential to reduce water stress. Decentralized sources, such as rainwater harvesting, groundwater or recycled gray water, could serve as backup water sources during shortages or provide water for nonportable purposes, such as flushing toilets or irrigation, to reduce demand for treated water.

Engineers in Australia are weighing the potential of hybrid water systems to help face the challenges of delivering secure, safe and sustainable water in the future.

Fulfilling a human right in the islands

The World Health Organization has declared that access to a sufficient, safe and reliable water supply is a fundamental human right, and that to accomplish this, water suppliers have a responsibility to provide adequate quantities of potable water.

Hybrid water systems could help ensure water safety and security for island communities and improve the water systems’ resilience amid the human and environmental pressures facing the Caribbean.

Child homelessness in England reaches a record high

Margot Miller

The National Housing Federation (NHF) has sent an open letter to Conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer, and leader of the Liberal Democrats Ed Davey, with proposals to end the crisis of homelessness in the UK. 

The “#PlanForHousing—Our open letter to the next Prime Minister” details the sharp rise in child homelessness last year in England and the “grave” consequences if government policy does not change direction.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, and Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer at the he State Opening of Parliament, November 7, 2023 [Photo by UK Parliamentt/Flickr / CC BY-NC-ND 4.0]

Child homelessness rose last year by 15 percent to 145,800. The number of households in temporary accommodation—whether hotels, hostels, or even converted shipping containers—by the end of 2023 was 112,600, up 12 percent in a year. Rough sleeping rose by 27 percent to 3,898 on a given night.

The letter states, “An entire generation of children risk having their futures snatched away if the next Prime Minister does not act to end the housing crisis.

“Millions of children across the country do not have anywhere safe and decent to call home. These children are living without space to study, play or even have a good night’s sleep; while their parents struggle to afford essentials like food and clothes.”

The NHF describes itself as “the voice of England’s housing associations”, which provide social housing alongside local authorities, offering cheaper rents than the private market.

The letter notes that children from black and Asian minority families as particularly affected, many living in damp, unsanitary conditions.

Not only is there a crisis in the number of affordable homes available, whether social or to purchase, but many homes owned by private landlords are unfit for human habitation.

In December 2020, two-year-old toddler Awaab Ishak died from a respiratory condition attributable to mould growing in the flat he shared with his parents in Rochdale.

ITV News reported that 55 children have died since 2019, with living in temporary accommodation registered as a “contributory factor” in their passing. (Figures collated by the National Child Mortality Database). Forty-two of the children were under one year old, their preventable deaths due to one or more factors—multiple occupancy, inability to regulate room temperature, damp, or no room for sterilizing feeding equipment. The majority lived outside London.

In March, the Observer reported that some children spend their entire childhood without a permanent home. In 50 local authorities a total of 14,000 household have been in temporary accommodation for longer than five years, some as long as 20 years.

Social workers report children exhibiting developmental delay, with some learning to crawl and walk on beds. The lack of stability has a detrimental effect on mental health.

Based on new analysis by the NHF, the letter warns that on the current trajectory, by 2030 in England:

• 160,000 or seven children in every school will be living in families which are homeless.
• In every school 85 children will be living in overcrowded conditions.
• 4.8 million families will be unable to afford to pay their rent or mortgage.

The Conservative government’s 2019 manifesto made a commitment to build 300,000 homes a year by 2025, though Michael Gove, Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, then stated that this target—addressed to local authority planning committees—was advisory.

Labour Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves said a Labour government would make the targets mandatory. But even if the target was achieved, high house prices coupled with rising interest rates mean mortgages are out of reach for many families and young people.

Private landlords charge extortionate rents and are loath to let their properties to the unemployed, as housing benefit does not necessarily cover full rent. Plus they demand a hefty deposit in advance.

Re-elected Labour Mayor Andy Burnham boasts a target of 10,000 new council homes in Greater Manchester by 2028, if the Right to Buy council houses introduced by Margaret Thatcher and maintained under successive Labour and Tory governments is suspended. But Burnham is a loyal leading figure of a political party which makes no commitment to ending Right to Buy, and venerates Thatcher.

The Housing Act 1980 gave five million tenants in England and Wales the right to buy their council home. This was part of the Thatcher government’s (1970-1990) roll back of the welfare state, which the Labour governments of Blair and Brown (1997-2010) continued, enthusiastically embracing privatization.

Homelessness charity Crisis found that in 2023, 25,749 social homes were either sold or demolished in England, while just 9,500 social homes were built. The Big Issue newspaper reported that 90,000 new social homes are needed each year (as deemed by Parliament’s Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Committee) to resolve the desperate housing shortage. This measure is proposed by the NHF letter.

The likelihood of cash-strapped local authorities stepping in to resolve the housing crisis with a programme of council house building is zero. According to the Local Government Association, councils in England face a funding gap that will reach £4 billion in two years. Half of councils anticipate bankruptcy within five years. Over the last 13 years, central government funding to local authorities has been slashed by 40 percent.

The housing crisis is just one aspect of the decline in social conditions for the working class. Department for Work and Pensions statistics released in March showing 4.3 million children are living in relative poverty after housing costs for 2023/24, an increase of 100,000 from last year. Relative poverty is living in a household where the income is 60 percent or below the average income.

Children living in absolute poverty rose to 3.6 million from 3.3 million last year. Absolute poverty is when basic needs of life, including food, shelter, education, healthcare, safe drinking water are unmet. 826,000 children live in households which resorted to foodbanks last year.

Among the NFT letter’s 33 signatories are the CEOs of leading charities such as the YMCA, St Mungo’s, The Trussell Trust, St Martin’s-in-the-Fields, Shelter, Child Poverty Action group, NSPCC, Centrepoint, Barnardo’s and Glastonbury festival organiser Sir Michael Eavis.

Other signatories are leaders of education unions including Pepe Di’lasio, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, and Paul Whiteman, general secretary of the NAHT school leaders’ union.

Appealing to the leaders of the main political parties which defend the capitalist system that caused the housing crisis in the first place is a fantasy. Sunak, Starmer and Davey couldn’t care less what happens to poor children. Neither will the references the NHF makes to the electorate’s housing concerns garnered in a YouGov poll sway them. Facilitated by the education unions, they allowed children to be exposed to repeated COVID infections, each time increasing the danger of Long COVID—and there are still no mitigations in schools!

All three support the sending of weapons to Israel, which rain down on the Palestinians in Gaza. Among the slaughtered are over 12,000 children. In grave danger are 600,000 children who are refugees in Rafah, as the Israeli Defence Forces prepares to raze the city to the ground.

To pay for battlefronts in the Middle East, Ukraine and plans for war against China, society’s wealth is being drained away from housing, health and education to defence spending, which is increasing by at least another £75 billion to 2.5 percent of GDP. Labour is 100 percent on board with this. The most Labour’s Shadow Secretary of State for Housing and Levelling Up Angela Rayner could muster was, “Labour will robustly hold developers to account to deliver affordable housing.”

There are over a million privately owned empty houses, which must be expropriated along with the wealth of the super-rich, and the nationalization without compensation of private development companies.

Former Fijian PM Bainimarama jailed for 12 months

John Braddock

Fiji’s former long-serving prime minister and coup leader, 69-year-old Frank Bainimarama, has been sentenced to a year in prison for perverting the course of justice. He was spared jail during sentencing last month, but an appeal lodged by the country’s director for public prosecutions was upheld last week by Fiji’s high court.

Former Fiji Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama with Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong, May 28, 2022 [Photo: X/Twitter @JVBainimaramafj]

Bainimarama and former police commissioner Sitiveni Qiliho both pleaded not guilty in March 2023 to charges of abusing the authority of their respective offices by terminating an active police investigation.

Bainimarama was found guilty by the high court on May 9 of attempting to pervert the course of justice while prime minister by instructing Qiliho not to investigate allegations of graft at the region’s University of South Pacific (USP). Qiliho was sentenced to two years in prison for his abuse of office.

A former military chief, Bainimarama seized power in a coup in 2006 and later won sham elections in 2014 and 2018 falsely hailed as “democratic” by the regional powers Australia and New Zealand. He led the Pacific Island nation for 16 years until narrowly losing the 2022 election to a three-party coalition led by previous coup leader and now prime minister, Sitiveni Rabuka.

Bainimarama continued to lead his FijiFirst Party but in February 2023 was suspended from parliament for three years over seditious remarks, subsequently resigning as an MP. He delivered a belligerent speech on the opening day of parliament accusing the incoming government and Fiji’s president of “setting out to destroy constitutional democracy” and appealed to the military, which he once commanded, to act. Qiliho meanwhile is a former army officer who ran a notoriously brutal police force and has a murky past with links to previous coups.

The convictions of both men centre on allegations concerning misuse of money at the USP in 2019. The regional university, headquartered in Suva, is owned by 12 Pacific states with part funding from Australia and New Zealand.

USP vice-chancellor Pal Ahluwalia was witch-hunted and suspended in 2020 by the university council for “material misconduct,” after exposing alleged corruption under the leadership group, with millions of dollars missing. Hundreds of students and staff protested the professor’s suspension and demanded the removal of the USP Executive Committee.

Ahluwalia’s removal prompted warnings that the university’s autonomy and academic freedom were under threat. Ahluwalia was later reinstated and cleared of the bogus allegations. After he submitted a report to the council, Auckland accounting consultancy BDO was hired to investigate.

When the damning BDO report reached the council, it was suppressed and the government froze a $A28 million university grant. The BDO report was leaked, naming 25 senior staff accused of manipulating allowances to pay themselves hundreds of thousands of dollars. The government flatly refused to accept the findings. The attacks on Ahluwalia were reportedly directed by pro-chancellor Winston Thompson, a former Fijian ambassador to the United States with close links to the Bainimarama regime.

With further investigation blocked, in February 2021 officials raided the home of Ahluwalia, who is a Canadian national, and his wife, summarily deporting them. The pair were declared “prohibited immigrants” by Bainimarama for unspecified “repeated breaches” of the Immigration Act and their visa conditions.

Bainimarama’s imprisonment over an abuse of office is bound up with tactical disagreements and ongoing turmoil within the country’s ruling elites which confront a worsening economic and social crisis.

Among Rabuka’s first moves on taking office was to bring Ahluwalia back from exile and reinstate him. Rabuka delivered an effusive public apology at the USP, saying: “It doesn’t matter who did it. As far as the world is concerned, Fiji did it to you.” He promised to pay the first installment of $10 million in grants owed to USP.

Significantly, Rabuka also reinstated the Great Council of Chiefs which had been disbanded by Bainimarama, who accused it of promoting ethnic divisions. The ethnic Fijian nationalist wing of the ruling elite, which Rabuka supports, seeks to maintain political and economic privileges for the traditional chiefs and was bitterly opposed to aspects of Bainimarama’s rule, particularly over issues of land ownership.

Rabuka is no less authoritarian than Bainimarama. He ruled as prime minister from 1992-1999 after leading two military coups in 1987 to boost the position of ethnic Fijians against Indo-Fijians, many of whom fled the country. He now leads an unstable government overseeing simmering anger in the working class.

Fiji’s workers and youth are suffering skyrocketing inflation and the destruction of thousands of jobs exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The poverty rate is nearly 30 percent and, as internationally, more austerity measures are on the way.

As for Bainimarama, he has been jailed over one instance of an abuse of power, but his major crimes are a litany of attacks on the social and democratic rights of the Fijian working class.

Fiji’s administrations have all been anti-democratic and anti-working class, imposing harsh austerity measures while intimidating opposition parties, with repressive media restrictions and violence by the police and military. The sedition provisions in Bainimarama’s Crimes Act and Public Order Act have repeatedly been used to target journalists and government critics. Assemblies, protests and strikes are routinely banned.

The COVID-19 outbreak that began in April 2021 quickly spread and for a considerable period, the country’s vaccination program proved inadequate and the health system faced collapse. Bainimarama repeatedly refused to implement a nationwide lockdown to control the escalating numbers, saying it would “destroy” the economy.

The pandemic sharply exacerbated the country’s social disaster. Fiji’s unemployment rate, around 6 percent before COVID, increased to 35 percent. The tourism industry, the country’s main foreign exchange earner, collapsed with the loss of 100,000 jobs. Half the country’s 880,000 population experienced extreme financial hardship and food shortages. Bainimarama seized on the crisis to tighten his rule. Amid emerging protests, nine opposition MPs were arrested after criticizing a government land bill.

Opposition by workers has always been ruthlessly suppressed. In March 2019 a stoppage by 33 air traffic controllers at Fiji Airports was declared unlawful. Shortly afterwards, the government banned two May Day protests and arrested over 30 workers and trade union officials for breaches of “public order.” They included protesting workers who had been sacked and locked out by the Fiji Water Authority.

The imperialist powers were prepared to support Bainimarama as long as it suited their interests. Under pressure from Washington, Canberra and Wellington made it a priority to restore relations following Bainimarama’s coup in order to fend off China’s growing influence. Concerned about his initial “Look North” orientation to Beijing, they endorsed Fiji’s 2014 bogus election, paving the way for the restoration of full diplomatic, economic and, above all, military relations.

Fiji plays an important role in the escalating US-led geo-strategic confrontations in the Pacific against China. As chair of the Pacific Islands Forum, Bainimarama was instrumental in arranging US Vice President Kamala Harris’ involvement in the organisation’s 2022 summit, from which China was excluded. With Bainimarama emerging as a key ally, signing military agreements with both Australia and New Zealand and supporting the US confrontation with Russia in Ukraine, Washington has earmarked Fiji as one of the main “hubs” of its upgraded engagement in the region.

According to Fiji’s 2013 Constitution, Bainimarama’s conviction rules him out of contesting an election for the next eight years unless any appeals are successful. Nevertheless, he will retain formal leadership of FijiFirst, still the single largest party in the parliament. In a country that has experienced four military coups since 1987, Bainimarama continues to wield influence in the armed forces and the state.

Biden oversees jobs bloodbath in public education

Nancy Hanover

School districts across the US are announcing devastating school closures, mass educator layoffs, and termination of tutoring, counseling, and other critical education services. Education analyst Chad Aldeman recently told CNN that as many as 384,000 full-time positions may be cut—an unprecedented assault on the public education system.

Striking West Virginia teachers in 2018 (WSWS Media)

The real cut in jobs, however, is likely to be much higher. During the Great Recession under former President Barack Obama, the equivalent of 110,000 full-time education jobs were cut. But the real job loss was estimated at 364,000 including part-time or hourly staff. 

The education jobs bloodbath is now being justified as necessary to bring staffing levels to 2018-19 levels, before the three rounds of federal pandemic aid to schools. The Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund (ESSER) funds began in March 2020 and will be fully allocated by September 2024; they amounted to roughly $190 billion. 

The limited federal assistance to schools over four years may sound generous; it was nothing of the kind.

To put this in perspective, Biden’s one-year military budget, signed in March, was officially $825 billion, but likely more than $1 trillion when monies for all classified operations are included. On April 24, Biden signed legislation providing another $95 billion to fund the genocide in Gaza, the brutal US/NATO war against Russia in Ukraine, and for armaments to be used against China.

In other words, the pandemic lifeline to the nation’s 75 million schoolchildren (averaging $47.5 billion annually each of four years) is a mere 4 percent of the most recent US budget for weapons of death and destruction ($1.1 trillion).

It could not be clearer that the priority of the ruling elites is global military and economic hegemony, no matter the price for the future of society. Biden who touted himself as the “education president” with a “teacher spouse” has decided to provide a blank check for war while insisting there are insufficient funds for public education.  

The Democratic president’s decision to refuse a new infusion of aid to schools is not a return to “normalcy.” It constitutes a fundamental shift towards a war economy on the “home front” in which education is subordinated to the immediate profit needs of business, especially the business of war.

As it was, the pandemic funds amounted to little more than a financial band-aid. Districts were reeling from declines in state tax revenue, skyrocketing IT costs, and huge increased costs for outsourcing services. Food service costs rose 21.3 percent, school transportation rose 14.5 percent, and utilities went up in many districts by double digits. 

Schools also bore the costs of the intense social crisis caused by the let-it-rip COVID policies of the Trump and Biden administrations. Schools provided food, medical attention and mental health supports to young people, resources that were largely unavailable anywhere else. Today, more than one in five students seek mental health help in schools. However, declining resources have meant cutting mental health professionals. A report this month shows effective mental healthcare is available now in less than half of schools, even prior to further cuts. 

Criminally, the limited resources under the ESSER provided no allocation for disease control such as universal HEPA filtration systems and far-UV technology. As every parent knows, an entire generation has been infected and re-infected with COVID, passing the deadly disease onto family and friends, with death, disability or persistent Long COVID affecting millions.

None of these infrastructure conditions were adequately addressed. The majority of the nation’s schools continue to have poor air quality and infrastructure, receiving a D+ from the American Society of Civil Engineers in its most recent evaluation.

The one area in which ESSER funds made a substantial difference, however, was tutoring. As a result of what amounted to a national investment in one-on-one and small-group tutoring, US students made dramatic strides in overcoming the learning loss associated with the worst years of the pandemic. According to a study by the University of Chicago Education Lab based on test scores between spring 2022 and 2023, “high dose” tutoring enabled students on average to gain back one-third of their original loss in math and one-quarter of the original loss in reading. This leap surpassed expectations and was better than the average annual gain in scores.

The response, however, of the Biden administration was encapsulated by Christina Grant, the superintendent of education for the District of Columbia, who said, “Spending close to $2,000 per student isn’t going to be sustainable anymore. We need to understand how to scale an intervention like high-dosage tutoring.” Far from using the knowledge of effective tutoring to raise educational levels, the current cuts mean scuttling most one-on-one programs altogether. 

Across the US, teachers, educators, parents, and students are up in arms about the cuts. Additionally, the political issues are coming into focus. Nearly 50,000 academic workers across 10 campuses in the University of California system are voting to strike against the brutal suppression of students’ democratic rights to protest the genocide in Gaza. This is an important indication of the growing ability to unify the working class, bringing together the defense of social rights and the class struggle with the fight against war and the attack on democratic rights.

Among just a few of the struggles now breaking out: 

• Parents and teachers have been protesting for weeks in Houston, Texas at the City Hall, the Board of Managers meetings, and local schools. The district has been taken over by the state and is implementing wide-ranging cuts to address a $450 million budget gap. An unnamed number of teachers, counselors, librarians, and nurses are losing their jobs. Also in Texas, the Arlington schools will axe 275 positions affecting mental health services, tutoring and after-school care.

• On May 7, over 1,000 Los Angeles educators protested massive budget cuts. One teacher, Cheryl Zarate, related that her school alone had to find $800,000 in cuts, explaining they could lose as many as six campus aides, two counselors, school climate advocates, custodians, and an assistant principal. School psychologists will no longer be available every day, only on campus two days a week.

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• School board meetings have erupted across Michigan, as educators and parents have denounced cuts, including in Wayne-Westland, Grand Rapids, Ann Arbor and Detroit. A Citizens Research Council of Michigan report indicated that as many as 5,100 full-time-equivalent educators’ jobs were at risk in the state due to the ending of federal COVID school money.

• A similar report from the University of Washington indicates that the state has 12,000 school positions at risk of layoff including more than 5,000 teachers.

• Over 100 Denver, Colorado teachers rallied May 13 to denounce their district’s reneging on their contract’s cost-of-living adjustment.

• After months of protests in Durham, North Carolina, teachers were promised a pay increase, only to be told that the district is short by $27 million and cannot pay it. “I will say to you like never before, our house is on fire,” a school board member told teachers this week. 

Such cuts are replicated everywhere and are being implemented by both Democratic and Republican-controlled districts. Hartford, Connecticut will cut 384 jobs, including teachers and support staff. Youngstown, Ohio will close or consolidate five elementary schools and make staff cuts. Missoula, Montana’s superintendent said reductions of this nature hadn’t been seen “in a generation,” citing plans to cut 33 teaching positions and 13 administrative positions, including its special education director and fine arts director. This week, East Brunswick, New Jersey announced it will cut 51 teaching positions, including 15 teachers, 10 instructional coaches, seven school counselors, and the assistant superintendent of student activities and services.

How have the unions responded to this existential threat to public education?

First, both the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), headed by Randi Weingarten, and the National Education Association (NEA), are preoccupied with propping up the floundering campaign of Genocide Joe Biden in an effort to safeguard their dues stream and maintain their seat at the table. The avowed Zionist Weingarten has traveled the country denouncing tens of thousands of anti-genocide students as “vile antisemites” and green lighting the vicious witch-hunting of pro-Palestinian educators. 

As to budget cuts, both unions have joined hands to suppress strike action and enforce contracts that sanction layoffs. They are terrified that the outbreak of even local strikes could spark a far broader movement. Aware of the national tsunami of cuts and austerity underway, they know they are dealing with a political tinderbox. This universal policy was most recently put into effect at the University of Michigan, wherein the AFT worked overtime to force through a deal and prevent a strike in concert with student protesters on campus. 

To this end, Weingarten has issued no tweets against the layoffs, no warnings about the impact to children of the loss of support programs, and turned a blind eye to the fate of communities whose schools are being closed. Instead, she largely devotes her X/Twitter page to the promotion of various Democratic Party politicians.

Her main role, however, is as an asset of the US State Department. She has worked for months to cover up for the US funding and direction of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, traveling to Israel proclaiming its “right to defend itself.” In service to the US-NATO proxy war against Russia, Weingarten also traveled to Ukraine to whitewash the Nazi-infested regime of Volodymyr Zelensky. 

On May 15, in that vein, Weingarten registered her support to Biden’s inflammatory trade war measures against China which aim to prepare the next escalation of imperialist war, against China. 

The National Education Association (NEA) is likewise preoccupied with the reelection campaign of Biden, not the fate of hundreds of thousands of educators losing their jobs. President Becky Pringle is on the campaign trail, last week accompanying Jill Biden to Arizona, and traveling with Weingarten to the White House for photo ops on “Teacher Appreciation Day.” 

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There is a deep connection between the destruction of public education, the terrible growth of social inequality, the suppression of democratic rights and the ever-escalating imperialist wars. They all arise out of the fundamental breakdown of the capitalist economic system.

Australian federal Labor government budget includes paltry student debt “relief”

Eric Ludlow

In Tuesday’s budget, the federal Labor government included a so-called “wipe out” of $3 billion dollars of university student debt to counter inflation which has seen loan repayments balloon in recent years.

But the “relief” is a tiny fraction of the crippling debts incurred by university students amid the worst cost-of-living crisis in a generation.

Unemployed workers registering to receive social welfare outside Centrelink office in Sydney in 2020.

An estimated 3 million Australians have student debt, under the Higher Education Contribution Scheme (HECS) and the Higher Education Loan Program (HELP).

HECS-HELP debts are repaid through the tax system, with payments required once an individual’s annual income is more than $51,550. The minimum rate of repayment increases as income increases. While these loans are technically interest free, the outstanding debt is indexed to inflation, based on the annual Consumer Price Index (CPI).

Under Labor’s “relief” measures, this indexation will instead be based on the lesser of the CPI or the Wage Price Index (WPI). As a result, outstanding HECS-HELP debts will this year increase by around 4 percent, rather than the 4.7 percent estimated under the CPI method. This would have been the second-highest increase in more than a decade.

The change will also be applied to the 2023 indexation, retroactively reducing last year’s increase from 7.1 percent to 3.2 percent.

Education minister Jason Clare claimed: “This will wipe out what happened last year and make sure it never happens again.”

But the ongoing high cost of goods and housing, as well as falling wages means that students will continue to struggle to pay off debts.

Average HECS-HELP debt for an individual is $26,494. The Labor government’s scheme will reduce this by only around $1,200. Most students have an upper limit on how much debt they can incur of $113,028. A student with this much debt will see their debt reduced only a little more than $4,500.

According to the Australian Taxation Office, the total HECS-HELP debt in Australia is more than $100 billion, of which a substantial proportion is expected to never be repaid.

The Australian Government Actuary estimated that 14.7 percent of new student debt incurred in 2019–20 would never be paid. In 2020–21, this increased to 15.1 percent and in 2021–22 it was 11.8 percent.

According to a survey published in April by Australian finance website Finder, more than 60 percent of students are “slightly” or “extremely concerned” about their ability to repay their debt—a nearly 10 percent increase on the previous year. An additional 12 percent believe they will never be able to pay off their student debt.

Among the most disadvantaged students are those studying critical degrees that require them to undertake unpaid placements to gain workplace experience, such as midwifery and nursing.

A recent report in the Australian Nursing & Midwifery Journal (ANMJ) examined “placement poverty”—the strain put on students undertaking hundreds of hours of mandatory unpaid clinical placements.

Midwifery student Erin Pereira told the ANMJ: “The attrition rate in midwifery is quite bad. A lot of students drop out, and I know a lot of it is due to the fact that it’s such an expensive degree to get through, with huge placement hours.”

A survey of students on clinical placements conducted by Griffith University student associations in September and October 2023 found that 95 percent suffered a significant impact on financial wellbeing.

Loss of regular income was experienced by 97 percent of students, while 49 percent reported total loss of income while on placement. Meanwhile, expenses such as fuel, parking, tolls and childcare increased for 80 percent of respondents.

One participant in the Griffith survey said: “I know people living out of cars or in tents because they cannot afford rent. Then we’re being told to finish our degree, we need to complete 1,000 hours of placement, approximately six months of unpaid work.”

A separate survey last year by La Trobe University’s student union found 52 percent of students on placement struggled to pay for rent, food, bills and medicine.

The Labor government budget also introduced a paltry $319.50 weekly payment for students on placement—equivalent to $8 an hour. The total cost of this scheme is $427.4 million. The payment would become available for 68,000 nursing, teaching and social work students, and 5,000 Vocational Education and Training (VET) students from July 2025.

Students who undertake mandatory unpaid placement in veterinary science, radiology, medicine, occupational therapy, physiotherapy and psychology will not be eligible to receive the payment.

The loans are means tested, meaning students will only receive the payment if they are deemed eligible by the government, based on their current assets.

Before the budget was announced, Clare said Labor’s measures were in response to recommendations from the Universities Accord earlier this year. That report, while paying lip service to tackling “disadvantage” among students, is a further restructuring of universities into pro-corporate institutions for pumping out job-ready candidates for big business and increased militarism.

In fact, Labor’s schemes will not make a dent in the financial stress experiences by students and youth. Labor is attempting to present a progressive gloss to a budget which entrenches a further degradation of public education in the country and slashing of social services, while doing nothing to address the cost of living crisis.

For decades, universities have undergone pro-corporate restructuring under successive Labor and Liberal-National Coalition governments. The primary role in these profit-driven changes has been played by the Labor Party, propped up by the unions and the Greens.

It was the Hawke-Keating Labor government that in 1989 abolished free university tuition and introduced HECS-HELP debts. Then in 2012–13, the Greens-backed Labor government of Prime Minister Julia Gillard introduced the largest single cut to Australian universities in the country’s history, to the tune of $3 billion.

Since it came back into office in 2022, Labor has junked its election promise of “a better future” and is overseeing a massive social crisis among students, youth and the broader working class. While the government is cutting social spending, it is overseeing falling real wages.

The other side of the pro-business program is tax cuts for the wealthy and subsidies to big business. Meanwhile, Labor has boosted military spending to record levels, now above $50 billion a year and growing, in line with its commitment to US-led wars and military preparations globally. Last month, it outlined a plan to increase spending on the military by $50 billion over the next decade on top of already record defence budgets.

Study reveals doubling of opioid deaths across Canada during early stages of COVID-19 pandemic

Steve Hill

A recent study authored by scientists at Unity Health Toronto and published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal has revealed that premature opioid-related deaths more than doubled across Canada at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. They increased from 3,007 in 2019 to 6,222 in 2021.

Using publicly available aggregate and age- and sex-stratified data from the Public Health Agency of Canada, representing 98 percent of Canada’s population, the study also found that more than one-quarter of those deaths occurred among younger adults. In 2021 the proportion of deaths related to opioids among people aged 20-29 was 29.3 percent. Another 29 percent of deaths occurred among people aged 30-39, meaning that those in their prime years under 40 accounted for close to 60 percent of all opioid deaths.

At the end of 2019 when COVID first emerged globally, Canada was already in the throes of a drug toxicity crisis. The number of opioid-related deaths rose by almost 40 percent from 2,470 in 2016 to 3,447 in 2019. Opioids can cause euphoria, one of the main reasons why they are taken for non-medical reasons, but they can also cause breathing difficulties and death. Of the approximately 600,000 deaths attributable to drug use worldwide in 2019, close to 80 percent were related to opioids.

Some have attributed the sudden increase in deaths in Canada over the 2019-2021 period to the public health measures taken during the early days of the ongoing pandemic. It is suggested that the lockdowns of various forms and duration imposed in certain jurisdictions during that time reduced access to harm reduction programs, and intensified the levels of anxiety in vulnerable populations, leading to increased substance use.

The attempt to blame limited efforts to combat the pandemic for problems that are ultimately rooted in the capitalist system’s prioritization of corporate profits over everything else plays directly into the hands of the political far-right, whose demagogic denunciation of all public health measures was subsequently embraced by the political and media establishment to justify their “let it rip” pandemic policy.

Canada was the country hardest hit, outside of Asia, by the 2003 Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) epidemic. Hundreds of people caught the disease and 44 died. Valuable lessons about public health measures, quarantine restrictions and the need to promote collective well-being in a crisis situation were learned by medical professionals. But the political establishment cavalierly ignored these lessons in the intervening years, leaving Canada totally unprepared for the pandemic.

Under mass pressure from the working class to combat the pandemic, as shown by a series of wildcat work stoppages in early 2020, including in the auto industry, governments across Canada and around the world intermittently enacted a series of haphazard measures whose principal purpose was to ensure the continuation of corporate profits. Society’s most vulnerable, and those who were already struggling to make their way in uncertain and harsh economic conditions, were offered little assurance or material assistance.

The fact of the matter is that to the extent anxiety, isolation and increased drug use did occur among vulnerable populations, this had far more to do with the protection of corporate interests by granting vast exemptions to lockdowns for big business, thereby allowing a deadly virus to run rampant and kill tens of thousands, than with any anti-COVID measures. Advocates of this position also conveniently forget the small matter of the overwhelming of hospitals and other medical services by the ruling elite’s criminal “profits before lives” pandemic policy, which had the effect of significantly restricting the availability of emergency medical care.

The rise of opioid deaths among young people

The authors of the Unity Health study, which covers the period from January 2019 to December 2021, note that while both prescription and unregulated drugs have contributed to the crisis for some time, the proportion of opioid-related deaths involving fentanyl had risen to more than 80 percent of the total by early 2023.

Shaleesa Ledlie, a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto’s Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy, and co-author of the study, stated that there were likely several factors involved in the finding that such a large percentage of opioid-related deaths was comprised of younger people. This may include the fact young people are often in social situations that involve more casual drug use where overdoses are not expected and a life saving medication like naloxone is not available.

Another possibility is that younger people are unaware of how the composition of illicitly available opioids has changed dramatically over the past decade. Fentanyl and other additives comprise a much larger and unpredictable level of the product on the street, leading to a vast range of potential potency and effects.

According to data provided by the Government of Canada through its Health Infobase, between January 2016 and September 2023 there was a total of 42,494 apparent opioid toxicity deaths; 41,045 reported opioid-related poisoning hospitalizations, where 65 percent were accidental; and 169,723 reported opioid-related poisoning emergency department visits, where 77 percent were accidental.

The Health Infobase also showed that between January and September 2023, 88 percent of the accidental apparent opioid toxicity deaths in Canada occurred in British Columbia, Alberta and Ontario. Males accounted for 72 percent of accidental apparent opioid toxicity deaths, while those aged 20 to 59 years accounted for 88 percent.

Of all accidental apparent opioid toxicity deaths, 82 percent involved fentanyl, a 44 percent increase since 2016 when national surveillance began. Additionally, 82 percent involved opioids that were only non-pharmaceutical and 57 percent also involved a stimulant. Over the same period, fentanyl and its analogues were involved in 44 percent of opioid-related poisoning emergency department visits, a frequency which has increased 120 percent since 2018, when national surveillance began.

The social crisis and the epidemic of opioid deaths

Another recent study by the MAP Centre for Urban Health Solutions at St. Michael’s Hospital, published in BMJ Public Health, adopted a race-based approach to analyzing data on opioid-induced deaths. Researchers surveyed more than 6,600 opioid toxicity deaths in Ontario from July 2017 to June 2021.

The researchers found that the vast majority of the deaths over this period were among those identified as white, but that racialized groups were over-represented in relation to their percentage of the provincial population. The MAP Centre study also specifically noted the broader observation that across all ethno-racial groups, with some variations between them, opioid toxicity deaths were concentrated among people who resided in low-income neighbourhoods and among the homeless. This far more significant finding exposes the crisis as primarily an issue of class, not race.

A study published in The Lancet in February 2023 noted that what began as a jump in overdose deaths from prescription opioids some 15 years ago has turned into a runaway crisis involving mostly illicit toxic synthetic opioids. Fentanyl and its analogues are now combined with psychostimulants such as cocaine, methamphetamine and benzodiazepine, creating a poly-drug death crisis. 

Benzodiazepine is a depressant that slows the nervous system but it is not an opioid—therefore naloxone is ineffective against it. Combining benzodiazepine with a strong opioid like fentanyl reduces the effects of countermeasures and increases the risk of death.

A container of Narcan naloxone, a common medication used for reversing opioid overdoses [AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein]

In the United States, a new class of synthetic opioids known as nitazenes that contain more than 20 unique compounds and that could be hundreds to thousands of times more potent than morphine, and 10 to 40 times stronger than fentanyl, have appeared in the illicit opioid market. Fentanyl test strips cannot detect nitazene analogs and  specialized lab testing is required to identify them in toxicology samples.

Eight years ago, on April 14, 2016, the government of British Columbia declared an opioid-death public health emergency. Since then, more than 14,000 people have died, making toxic drugs the leading cause of death for people in the province aged 10-59. According to the BC Coroners Service, they account for more deaths than homicides, suicides, accidents and natural disease combined.

The crisis has continued to worsen in spite of the declaration of a public health emergency because the entire response, like the response to the COVID-19 pandemic across the country, has been subordinated to the imperatives of the capitalist profit system.

It is no coincidence that a July 2023 report from Oxfam International found that Canadian billionaires saw their wealth grow by an astonishing 51 percent since the beginning of the pandemic in 2020. Mirroring the sudden spike in opioid deaths between 2019 and 2021, which was concentrated in the least wealthy layer of society, the jump in wealth accumulation for the richest layer was the accelerated continuation of a decades-long trend.

According to the report, in November 2022, Canada’s 50 billionaires, now estimated to number 63, had assets of $249 billion. The bottom 40 percent of the Canadian population, 15.6 million people, had slightly less at $248 billion.

For 2023, Statistics Canada reports that average disposable income for the highest income households, the top 20 percent of the income distribution, increased at the fastest pace of any income group relative to a year earlier. Furthermore, the top 20 percent held more than two-thirds of the country’s net worth, while the bottom 40 percent only held 2.7 percent.

The Labour Force Survey of March 2024 indicates that youth unemployment rose 1 percentage point in the month to 12.6 percent, the highest since September 2016, excluding 2020 and 2021 in the early days of the pandemic. The employment rate—the proportion of the population aged 15 and older who are employed—declined by 0.1 percentage points to 61.4 percent in March, the sixth consecutive monthly decrease. Employment among youth aged 15 to 24 fell by 1 percent, continuing a trend which has seen virtually no net employment growth among youth since December 2022. The youth employment rate fell to 55 percent, the lowest level since February 2012, excluding 2020 and 2021.