Mass layoffs for workers; millions for GM, Ford and Chrysler CEOs

Andre Damon

Next month, with the expiration of the labor contract for 155,000 US autoworkers at Ford, GM, and Chrysler, auto executives will once again demand that workers sacrifice their own livelihoods for the “good of the company.”

Tough economic times are around the corner, the companies will say. The automakers are strapped for cash and need a war chest to confront a turbulent world economy, stiffening global competition, and the disruption caused by driver-less cars and electric vehicles.

If workers do not want to see more layoffs—like the thousands already fired at GM this year—they had better work longer, harder, and for less money. The United Auto Workers (UAW) —whose executives took kickbacks from the auto companies—will say that workers have no choice but to accept the companies’ demands.

But the fact is that every dollar taken from workers through pay cuts goes to pay for stock buybacks, financial speculation and the yachts and mansions of the corporate executives and the billionaire capitalists whose interests they represent.

This was made clear in a new report on executive pay by the Economic Policy Institute, which showed that CEO pay at the top 350 companies grew by 1,000 percent over the past four decades, while workers’ wages stagnated.

The average CEO got $17.2 million in pay, according to the report, meaning he or she makes in a day what the average worker makes in a year.

GM CEO Mary Barra typifies the social inequality that pervades American society. Last year, Barra received $21.87 million in executive pay, 281 times the pay of the median GM employee, and nearly 600 times the pay of an entry-level employee.

CM CEO Mary Barra - Credit - GM Promotional Photo

In November, Barra announced that GM would close five plants in the United States and Canada, leading to over 6,000 layoffs, including the closure of the Detroit Hamtramck and Warren Transmission auto plants in the Metro Detroit area.

This was followed by a massive “downsizing” among white-collar employees, leading to the loss of 8,000 jobs.

The company’s profits last year amounted to $10.8 billion, enough to pay the annual wages of some 300,000 new-hire employees. But instead, as the company carried out mass layoffs, the money sweated out of workers was funneled to executives and shareholders.

Ford CEO Jim Hackett got $17.8 million in compensation last year, while FCA CEO Mike Manley stands to make as much as $14 million in the coming year. Matthew Simoncini, the CEO of auto parts maker Lear, was paid over $32.4 million, up by 14 percent over the past year.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk was paid a staggering $2.2 billion last year, in order, as Tesla’s board put it, to “motivate Mr. Musk to continue to…lead Tesla over the long term.”

Last year, Tesla announced that it would cut its workforce by 9 percent, followed by another 7 percent this year, in an ongoing jobs bloodbath.

Across the economy, chief executives are being paid millions for overseeing mass layoffs. US Steel CEO David B. Burritt, who was paid over $11 million last year, has just announced hundreds of layoffs with the idling of U.S. Steel’s blast furnace in Ecorse, Michigan.

Overall, CEOs at the 350 largest US companies received 278 times more than a typical employee, according to the EPI report. By comparison, a typical CEO was paid 20 times more than a typical employee in 1965.

Between 1978 and 2018, CEO pay grew by over 1,000 percent, or more than tenfold. Workers’ wages grew by just 11.9 percent over the same period.

Amidst a roaring stock market fueled by money printing from the Federal Reserve, CEO pay has grown by 50 percent during the economic “recovery” after the 2008 financial crash. Over the same period, workers’ wages grew by only five percent. According to the EPI, wages actually fell between 2017 and 2018.

Social inequality has been soaring for decades as the capitalist class succeeded in driving down wages, destroying workers’ health care benefits, and making working conditions worse.

This is a global phenomenon. This year, to cite one example, French fashion billionaire Bernard Arnault became the third person with a net worth of over $100 billion, having made some $25 billion over the past year alone. Arnault’s fortune now equals 3 percent of the economic output of the entire country in one year.

The response of the American ruling class in particular to the erosion of the economic domination of American capitalism in the late 1960s and 1970s was to launch a policy of class war, deindustrialization and financialization. The role of the “celebrity CEO,” epitomized by Chrysler CEO Lee Iacocca, was to spearhead this assault and serve as the representatives of Wall Street in the corporate boardroom—for which they were, and are, handsomely paid.

The unions have been the partners of the capitalists in their fight against the workers. The UAW and other unions approved countless plant closings, mass layoffs, and benefit cuts, all in the name of making the companies more “competitive,” and defending “American jobs.” They long ago transformed themselves into agents of the companies and the state.

The biggest exposure of what the unions have become is the United Auto Workers, whose leaders have been charged with taking millions of dollars in bribes from the auto companies to make sure contracts favorable to the corporations were passed despite opposition from workers.

Whatever their tactical differences, the Democrats and the Republicans are equally committed to policies that increase social inequality and defend the capitalist system that is responsible for it. As the Trump administration had dedicated itself above all to the continual rise of the stock markets, the Democrats are terrified more than anything else of the explosion of social opposition in the working class.

United Auto Workers President Gary Jones, and General Motors CEO Mary Barra shake hands to open the 2019 contract negotiation - Credit - GM promotional photo.jpg

The same conditions that have created unprecedented social inequality are also producing mass protests and strikes all over the world, from Hong Kong and Puerto Rico, to France and Africa. In Puerto Rico, days of mass protests forced the resignation of the governor, a corrupt stooge for Wall Street.

And in January, as autoworkers were fighting mass layoffs in Detroit, tens of thousands of workers went on strike in Mexico’s auto parts factories, with class-conscious Mexican workers sending greetings to American autoworkers and calling for them to join their fight.

With a critical battle looming for American autoworkers, workers must understand that they are fighting not just for themselves and their own families, but for all workers: in the United States, in North America, and around the world.

The antidote to social inequality is the class struggle. But the coming struggles can only be successful if they are waged with a new strategy: against the nationalism and capitalist apologetics of the unions, and for the international unity of the working class against capitalism.

The fight against social inequality requires the building of a new political leadership, the Socialist Equality Party, to organize and unify the struggles of workers on the basis of a revolutionary program. The capitalist profit system must be replaced with a socialist society based on equality, international planning and democratic control of production.

New Zealand: Outrage over babies taken by the state

John Braddock & Tom Peters

On July 30, several hundred people gathered outside parliament in Wellington for a protest titled “Hands Off Our Tamariki [children].” They delivered a petition with 17,000 signatures calling for the government to stop “stealing Maori children.” Green Party co-leader Marama Davidson, a partner in the ruling Labour-led coalition government of Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, accepted the petition.

The protest’s immediate trigger was the attempted seizure in May of a child from the maternity ward at Hawke’s Bay Hospital, which was filmed on cellphones and exposed in an online documentary by Newsroom journalist Melanie Reid. The report highlighted the extraordinary power of Oranga Tamariki (OT), formerly Child, Youth and Family Services (CYFS), to forcibly take babies from parents who are overwhelmingly poor and powerless to defend themselves against the state apparatus.

Thousands of people were outraged by the video, which laid bare the workings of a system that traumatises some of the most vulnerable members of society. The government has promised numerous inquiries into the agency, which, like many previous inquiries, will do nothing to change its brutal function.

The midwives were locked out of the hospital leaving a distressed 19-year-old mother alone in a room overnight, while OT staff tried to pressure her to hand over her newborn child. Police officers were called to block the woman’s family from entering the hospital.

OT had been granted a custody order from the Family Court based on a social worker’s affidavit citing “lack of parenting skills,” domestic violence and the 17-year-old father’s use of marijuana. The mother’s family disputed these claims and filed for an urgent injunction against OT’s custody order, but this did not stop the attempted “uplift.”

Law professor Mark Henaghan told Newsroom he doubted that OT’s custody order should have been granted by a court which heard only from a social worker. Midwife Jean Te Huia said the parents had no “opportunity to defend themselves against the allegations being made against them.” She said both parents were “kids” who were “victims of circumstance,” having grown up in homes with family violence. The mother had already had her previous child taken by OT, despite never having been accused of any crime.

In the end, with legal support and pressure from the Newsroom report, the mother was granted temporary custody of the child and was placed in an OT home for young mothers.

The events at Hawke’s Bay Hospital were not an aberration, but an example of what has become increasingly common. The Family Court grants 90 percent of Interim Custody Orders filed by OT. Three Maori babies a week are currently being taken. In 2017, 45 babies were taken the day they were born. Of 283 babies taken into care last year, more than 70 percent were from Maori or Pacific Island families, who together represent about 23 percent of the population.

Individual social workers are not to blame for the crisis they confront, which is the result of the drastic under-funding of the welfare system. However, under deepening austerity, state agencies such as OT operate as punitive institutions. There are hardly any programs to assist families affected by severe problems related to entrenched poverty, including alcoholism, drugs, gang-related crime and family dysfunction and violence.

In 2016, the National Party government boosted the child protection agency’s powers; it reduced parents’ rights by making them ineligible for legal aid, and established a system with no independent oversight. Newsroom reported “a sharp 33 percent increase in the removal of babies in the time period 2015–

2018: a rate increase from 36 to 46 per 1000 births.” The rate is much higher for Maori: 102 per 10,000 births. Last year there were 6,300 children in state care—the highest number ever—two thirds of them Maori.

The Labour-led government claims that children are taken into care to protect them. However, once in state custody they are often abused and are more likely to end up on drugs, in prison, and to commit suicide. In 2018 alone, 220 children were physically or sexually abused while in OT’s care. Data published in November 2016 revealed five children a year die in state care, and 550 had been abused in the previous five years, in one third of cases by their state-appointed caregivers.

Outrageously, Deputy Prime Minister and NZ First leader Winston Peters, who is Maori, sought to blame Maori people for the soaring child uplifts, saying there was “deep disquiet” about the “treatment of women and children in particular.”

In reality, Maori and Pacific Island families are disproportionately affected by child removals because they represent the most exploited section of the working class. It is overwhelmingly families in the poorest areas, such as Porirua and South Auckland, which are targeted.

The high levels of family distress, dysfunction and violence cannot be separated from the social crisis produced by decades of attacks on living standards. The previous National Party government slashed healthcare, education and other services and pushed thousands of single parents off welfare and into low-paid, insecure and part-time work. Labour has not reversed, but has deepened the austerity measures.

Nearly five million people in the UK live in “deep poverty”

Dennis Moore 

A study by the Social Metrics Commission (SMC) finds that more than 4 million people in the UK are mired in “deep poverty,” with an income at least 50 percent below the official poverty line. Many families in this bracket struggle to pay for the most basic essentials.

Led by a Conservative peer, the SMC includes representatives from charities and think tanks including the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the Office of the Children’s Commissioner and the Institute for Fiscal Studies. It was established in 2016 to develop a new way of measuring poverty.

As well as measuring the incidence of poverty, the SMC developed a broader measurement framework that provides a deeper understanding of the factors that affect the experience of poverty, influence the future likelihood of poverty, or are consequences that flow from being in poverty.

An army of 14.3 million people are in poverty and a third (4.5 million) are in deep poverty and living on the breadline. They account for fully 7 percent of the population. For a couple with two children, deep poverty means a combined income of less than £211 a week, after housing costs. A single parent with one child in poverty lives on less than £101.50 per week.

Research from other sources shows that destitution as a result of benefit cuts and high rents was experienced by an estimated 1.5 million people in the UK. Destitution is defined as an income for a couple with two children of just £140 a week.

General levels of poverty have changed relatively little since 2000-2001. However, there are certain groups that have seen hardship levels rise since 2013—reversing what for a period had been a slight downward trend—with pensioners, and children of lone parents facing the consequences of austerity measures such as the implementation of the Tories benefit freeze .

Since 2013-14, there has been a 9 percent increase in child poverty in families with three or more children—in large part due to the benefit freeze imposed on larger families. This figure does not include the impact on families who are affected by the two-child benefit limit introduced in 2017. The limit restricts the “child element” in Universal Credit and tax credits, worth £2,780 per child per year to only the first two children.

The SMC confirms the impact of disability on levels of poverty, with 6.8 million people living in a household that includes someone who is disabled.

The working poor are a growing social phenomenon internationally. Millions in Britain are struggling to get by, despite having regular employment. The report notes that at the millennium 54 percent of children living in poverty were also part of a family where an adult worked. This figure shot up to nearly three-quarters (73 percent) in 2017-18.

Just under half of those in poverty (49 percent) or 7 million people, are in “persistent poverty.” This is defined as being in poverty now and having been in poverty for at least two of the last three years. Those affected by persistent poverty include 1.8 million workless households and 1.2 million people in lone parent families.

Over two-thirds of those living in poverty (69 percent) live in families where nobody saves money, compared to 38 percent of those not in poverty. One in five (18 percent) of those in poverty are in a family where no one has any formal qualifications, compared to 9 percent for those not in poverty.

Among some groups in the population, such as pension-age individuals, the fall in poverty levels over the last two decades is being sharply reversed. The SMC claims that rates of poverty among pension age adults fell from 19 percent in 2000/01 to 9 percent in 2014/15 but have now risen to 11 percent. There is a similar trend among children, with poverty rates falling from 36 percent in 2000/01 to 31 percent in 2014/15 but has since increased to 34 percent.

US: Homelessness, housing insecurity top list of college student stressors as new year begins

James Vega & Phyllis Steele

This year’s RealCollege survey, the largest annual assessment of basic needs security among college students in the United States, reveals that a staggering number of youth are experiencing food insecurity, housing insecurity and homelessness every day.

The survey, completed in fall 2018 and published in April 2019 by the Hope Center for College, Community, and Justice, interviewed nearly 86,000 students from 123 different two-year and four-year post-secondary institutions across the US and found that 45 percent of respondents reported being food insecure during the 30 days prior to taking the survey.

The breakdown of responses to the survey questions, known as the “Percentage Endorsing Statements,” provides a sobering view of the conditions facing today’s youth.

• 33 percent of four-year college students and 38 percent of two-year students agreed with the statement: “I ate less than I felt I should because there was not enough money for food.”

• 44 percent of four-year students and 51 percent of two-year students “worry whether my food will run out before I have money to buy more.”

• 8 percent of four-year students and 12 percent of two-year students “did not eat for a whole day because there was not enough money for food.”

Over half of the respondents said they were housing insecure over the previous year and 17 percent said they had been homeless. Housing insecurity includes a broad set of challenges, such as the inability to pay rent or utilities, or the need to move frequently. The study considers homelessness as a situation in which a person does not have a stable place to live. Students were identified as homeless if they responded affirmatively to a question asking if they had been homeless or they identified living conditions that are considered signs of homelessness.

Sixty percent of survey respondents at two-year institutions and 48 percent at four-year institutions experienced housing insecurity. The most commonly reported challenge is experiencing a rent or mortgage increase that made it difficult to pay, affecting 30 percent of students at two-year institutions and 25 percent at four-year institutions. Eight percent of survey respondents at two-year institutions and 6 percent at four-year institutions left their household because they felt unsafe. Rates of student homelessness range from 10 percent to 32 percent at two-year institutions and 8 percent to 28 percent at four-year institutions.

The report highlights, “food and housing insecurity undermine academic success. Housing insecurity and homelessness have a particularly strong, statistically significant relationship with college completion rates, persistence, and credit attainment. Researchers also associate basic needs insecurity with self-reports of poor physical health, symptoms of depression, and higher perceived stress.”

Similar to the previous studies, the current research shows that working or receiving financial aid does not alleviate the stress of finding adequate housing. As the authors explain, “Students who experience basic needs insecurity are overwhelmingly part of the labor force. For example, the majority of students who experience food insecurity, 68 percent, housing insecurity, 69 percent, and homelessness, 67 percent, are employed. Also, among working students, those who experience basic needs insecurity work more hours than other students.”

Students who are forced to work while they go to school often come from families that are themselves suffering from poverty and are less likely to be able to help financially.

Likewise, most students eligible for a Pell Grant, a subsidy from the federal government for low-income students, are, in fact, more likely to be housing and food insecure.

Japan-South Korea conflict intensifies

Nick Beams

Japan and South Korea are locked into a deepening economic and political conflict which shows no sign of ending, despite urgings by the United States to settle the dispute involving two of its crucial allies in North-East Asia.

South Korea announced this week that it had removed Japan from a list of countries that qualify for accelerated supply of South Korean products, after Tokyo had imposed a similar measure against South Korea on August 2.

Announcing the decision, Sung Yun-mo, South Korea’s minister of trade, industry and energy said: “It’s difficult to work closely with countries whose practices don’t abide by basic principles of the international export-control system and continuously are applied inappropriately.”

He said Seoul was open to negotiations with the Japanese government. However, that does not seem likely because the attitude of both sides has been hardening over the course of the dispute.

It first came into prominence in early July when Japan announced it would tighten controls over the exports of three chemicals—fluorinated polyamides, photoresists and hydrogen fluoride—crucial for the production of semi-conductors in South Korea.

The decision brought an immediate response from electronics giant Samsung, South Korea’s largest company. “It’s one of the worst situations we have ever had,” an unnamed senior Samsung official told the Financial Times. “Politicians take no responsibility for the mess, even though it has almost killed us.”

The Bank of Korea also weighed in, with the central Bank governor Lee Ju-yeol citing Japan’s export restrictions as one of the factors behind its decision last month to revise its growth forecast downward from 2.5 percent to 2.2 percent.

“If export restrictions are realised and expanded, we cannot say its impact on exports and the economy is small,” he said.

The conflict was set in motion by a decision of the South Korean Supreme Court last October that Japan had to pay compensation to four workers who had been used as forced labour by Nippon Steel during the Second World War.

Japan hit back at the decision saying the question of compensation was covered by a 1965 agreement under which Japan paid $800 million to South Korea. It feared the verdict could open the way for claims by more than 220,000 victims of forced labour and their relatives, resulting in compensation claims that could reach $20 billion.

Concerns were further raised in January when a South Korean court gave the green light for the expropriation of some of Nippon Steel’s equity holdings in a joint recycling venture with a South Korean steel-making firm to fund payments to the four plaintiffs. This raised fears that other Japanese assets could be seized in the future.

Japan did not take immediate action but according to a report in Foreign Policy, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was “highly frustrated with the situation and was looking for a weapon he could use.” He settled on action over exports.

The restrictions on the three key chemicals were announced at the beginning of July. The timing of the decision was politically significant as it coincided with the opening for the election campaign for Japan’s upper house. Abe was seeking to promote nationalism in order to boost support for his planned revision of the Japanese constitution to overturn Article 9 of the constitution—the so-called pacifist clause.

Japanese officials said some South Korean companies were inadequately managing the chemicals and that some, with military applications, were finding their way to North Korea, without providing any specific examples.

Tokyo then upped the ante earlier this month when it removed South Korea from its list of countries entitled to receive preferential treatment in trade. The measure, which comes into effect on August 28, will impact on the export of more than 1,000 different products.

Japan claimed the restrictions were being imposed on “national security” grounds. The decision brought a strident denunciation from South Korean President Moon Jae-in.

Addressing an emergency cabinet meeting on August 2, Moon said: “We will never again lose to Japan. As we have already warned, if Japan intentionally strikes at our economy, Japan itself will also have to bear significant damage.”

The conflict has set off a growing consumer boycott movement of Japanese products involving beer, cars, cosmetics and clothing. The anti-Japanese sentiment is being deliberately encouraged by sections of the Moon administration, which, like Abe, are seeking to whip of nationalism and chauvinism to divert away from deteriorating social conditions.

Questions continue over Russian nuclear accident

Andrea Peters

Questions surrounding the nature of the nuclear-military accident that occurred in Russia’s far north last week continue. On August 8, an explosion at a military facility near the town of Nyonoksa killed seven people and injured more than a dozen others.

After initially denying that any radioactive substance had been leaked into the environment, government representatives were forced to acknowledge unusually high levels of background radiation in nearby Severodvinsk, as much as 16 times the normal level. Shipping in Dvina Bay, possibly the precise site of the accident, is now off limits for a month. Naval vessels equipped to handle radioactive waste have arrived in the area.

On Tuesday, a full five days after the explosion, officials issued and then retracted an order evacuating those living in close vicinity to the accident. Residents of Nyonoksa report that in subsequent days personnel in military uniforms arrived to gather information as to who was in the town on August 8. Doctors, possibly from Moscow, also appeared on the scene. Local authorities told journalists inquiring about these statements that such matters were in the hands of the federal ministry of health and they had no further information.

Greenpeace Russia maintains that the government is not being forthright about the scale and scope of the radiation spike in the area following the explosion. According to the environmental group, state agencies have not told the public that beta, as well as gamma, radiation was released and that Arkhangelsk, a city of 350,000 about 90 kilometers from Nyonoksa, also experienced a significant rise in radiation levels from August 9 to 11.

The Norwegian government is detecting trace amounts of radioactive iodine in Svanhovd, near its border with Russia, although it is not clear whether this is linked to events in Nyonoksa.

Residents in towns and cities near the accident are frightened and angry over the official effort to hide the incident and the lack of information about what happened and the dangers posed to the population. Adding to the fears is the news that emergency responders who initially treated victims have themselves been transferred to Moscow for medical care. Pharmacies in Arkhangelsk, where the media monthly per capita income is about $500, have run out of iodine products, which can be used to treat certain types of radiation exposure.

“We remember Chernobyl,” one local resident told a press outlet.

As concerns over the dangers posed by the accident continue, speculation mounts over what exactly happened at the military facility. The Kremlin has released very little information, stating only that the explosion occurred as part of a test and involved liquid propellant.

In recent years, the Putin government, facing military and geopolitical threats from the United States, has been working to rapidly modernize its nuclear arsenal, ensuring that it is capable of carrying out or responding to a first strike and obliterating its opponent.

Oslo mosque targeted in attempted far-right terrorist attack

Sam Dalton 

On Sunday, 21-year-old Norwegian Philip Manshaus appeared in court on charges of murder and terrorism, one day after he attempted to carry out a fascist assault on the Al-Noor Islamic Centre in Bærum, Oslo. He was ordered detained for four weeks while awaiting trial.

Wearing body armour and carrying two shotguns and a handgun, Manshaus entered the Oslo mosque on Saturday afternoon by shooting through its locked glass outer door, with the aim of killing those inside. The attack was only thwarted because one of the three worshippers present, identified as Mohamed Rafiq, an ex-member of the Pakistani armed forces, tackled and apprehended him. Rafiq and two other people were able to subdue Manshaus until police arrived.

While only three people were present at the time of the attack, more than a dozen had been praying in the mosque for the Eid al-Adha Islamic holiday only 10 minutes earlier. Had Manshaus struck a short time before, a large number of people may have been killed. Manshaus is also suspected of murdering his 17-year-old adopted Chinese stepsister, whose body was found at the family home on Saturday.

The attack came one week after the August 3 shooting at an El Paso, Texas Walmart by Patrick Wood Crusius, also aged 21, killing 22 people.

Manshaus had posted on an anonymous online message board named “Endchan” with a link to his Facebook profile the same day. In it, he stated that the attack was part of a “race war,” and, like Crusius, that he was inspired by Brenton Tarrant, who murdered 51 people in an attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, on March 15. Manshaus refers to Tarrant as “Saint Tarrant.”

The post makes an appeal for others to carry out similar far-right attacks, stating, “If you are reading this you have been elected by me.” Manshaus attempted to livestream the attack using a GoPro camera, but the stream appears to have failed for technical reasons.

Saturday’s attack occurred in the same city where Norwegian neo-Nazi Anders Breivik detonated a car bomb on July 22, 2011, killing eight people and injuring 209. Less than two hours later, dressed in a fake police uniform, Breivik shot and killed another 69 people in an attack on the Norwegian Labour Party’s youth camp on the island of Utoya. Both Tarrant and Manshaus cited Breivik as a role model. Manshaus’ Instagram account contains three pictures: two of himself, and one of Breivik performing the Nazi salute in court.

According to police reports, Manshaus has also stated his admiration for Norway’s Nazi collaborationist president in World War II, Vidkun Quisling.

In response to the attack, Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg condemned Manshaus’ actions and committed to “fight hatred and anti-Muslim attitudes.” The government’s response is aimed at covering up the fact that it bears political responsibility for promoting the anti-immigrant hysteria and chauvinism which breed such fascistic atrocities.

New studies reveal growing epidemic of nurse suicides in the US

Alex Johnson 

New studies show that nurse suicides are reaching epidemic proportions, as the mental health strain on these health care workers is driving increasing numbers of them to take their own lives. MedPage Today last month analyzed national data extracted from Archives of Psychiatric Nursing, a research division of the University of California San Diego (UCSD) School of Medicine, which conducted the first national investigation of nurse suicides in more than 20 years.

Judy Davidson, RN, DNP, and her colleagues at USCD acquired most of their data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS). The researchers found that suicide incidence among nurses, male and female alike, was significantly higher than in the general population. For female nurses, the incidence of suicide was 11.97 per 100,000 while the incidence for male nurses was found to be more than three times that rate, at 39.8 per 100,000.

One researcher for the study told MedPage Today, “This national data confirms what we previously suspected given our local findings, that nurses are at higher risk of suicide than the general population.” Among the subgroups of nurses at higher risk for suicide were nurse anesthetists and retired nurses.

The study also determined the methods of suicides that were the most prevalent. According to the researchers, suicides frequently involved pharmaceuticals, at a rate of 35.1 percent, while firearms were used at a rate of 33.7 percent. Nurses’ access to drugs plays no small role in this distribution. Among the general US population, firearms and pharmaceuticals account for 55.1 percent and 9.1 percent of suicides, respectively.

A study released by Dr. Ben Windsor-Shellard in 2015 linked the disturbing disparity between suicides among female nurses and suicides in the general female population to the access to lethal doses of medications. Windsor-Shellard also noted that lower-paid health care practitioners had higher rates of suicide than higher-paid managers and CEOs.

Davidson, a psychiatrist and nurse, said her interest in the issue of nurse suicides arose after three nurses at UCSD took their own lives within a brief time-span. In 2018, Davidson coauthored a 2018 National Academy of Medicine paper which found that nurses work in one of the most high-pressure environments in the US, with demands for optimal performance being a decisive factor in accelerating feelings of distress and depression.

Besides being in a stressful work environment, nurses are frequently exposed to some of the most disheartening forms of human suffering and death, which contributes to ethics-related stress and increasing dissatisfaction with their work. Although the prevalence of major depressive disorder among nurses is not known, one study mentioned in the paper said that depressive symptoms are found in 41 percent, while another reported 18 percent.

Of the 18 states that were included in the NVDRS’s data set, the researchers found 205 suicides among the 14,774 documented. According to the study, “Nurses were statistically significantly more likely to have reported mental health problems, history of treatment for mental illness, history of previous suicide attempt, leaving a suicide note and physical health problems than the general population.”

Despite the alarming increases in suicide attempts and depressive symptoms, hospitals and clinics have done very little to alleviate the emotional burdens that plague nurses. Nurses have reported a lack of social and professional support within their work settings. They are trained to work under the most strenuous conditions, dealing with human beings hard-hit by discouraging, sometimes tragic circumstances.

Nurses work in high-speed inpatient settings and are exposed to patients’ debilitating physical diseases and psychological trauma. Although institutions may vary, health care environments in general, and for nurses in particular, are known to be harsh and intimidating, causing workers to suppress their feelings and become emotionally aloof until these conditions take their toll.

Leah Helmbrecht, a traveling nurse, wrote an op-ed on nurse.org about her frustrating experience as a new nurse, “I felt like I was in an abusive relationship...with my job,” said Leah. For every shift, she would have to care for six to eight patients, doing things from inserting catheters and helping patients to the bathroom to monitoring vitals and discharging patients.

These arduous tasks would have to be completed all while getting yelled at by patients and their families for the delay in responding to their requests. “It got to the point where I would go to work every day to get yelled at and go home and cry. I was put on an antidepressant, which helped numb the pain, but didn’t make it go away.”

US Kaiser Permanente workers vote overwhelmingly in favor of strike

Dan Conway

In a vote on Monday, more than 98 percent of Kaiser Permanente workers represented by SEIU United Healthcare Workers West (SEIU-UHW) voted in favor of strike action against the health care behemoth. The vote is a powerful expression of opposition to decades of attacks on workers by the multi-trillion dollar US health care industry.

More than 37,000 employees voted in favor of a strike, more than two-thirds of the overall SEIU-UHW membership. The remainder of the group, the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente unions, will vote between now and early September, raising the possibility of a strike by more than 80,000 workers throughout the states of California, Oregon, Washington, Colorado, Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia.

Issues that motivated the strike vote were the ensuring of adequate and safe staffing levels, protection of jobs and benefits, including the maintenance of a defined pension benefit, and opposition to the practice of hiring unlicensed and unaccredited staff members.

Kaiser Permanente, a supposed non-profit, is the largest managed health organization in the United States with more than 12 million members, posting more than $5 billion in net income during the first two quarters of 2019 alone, more than its net income in the entirety of 2018.

This has largely been the result of the company imposing onerous conditions on its 217,000-employee workforce along with downsizing and the imposition of the so-called “Kaiser Model” of patient care. The model, which has spearheaded various innovations in the health care industry including the consolidation and centralization of health care records and the use of technology to better integrate and streamline care delivery, is being utilized to ration health care and otherwise cut costs.

The company advances the claim that various lifestyle changes can in many cases completely obviate the need for hospital-based treatment and thus save billions of dollars in expenses. According to a 2015 analysis of the model conducted by the Brookings Institution, “The financial incentive [of the Kaiser model] is to provide high quality, affordable care and manage population health rather than generating high volume of compensable services.”

Kaiser has recently launched, in partnership with CVS and Target, the 7th and 8th largest retailers in the US respectively, a series of “minute” clinics meant to provide non-emergency medical services for members outside of the Kaiser service area. It also launched last May a partnership with the Unite US social care coordination platform to “address the social factors that impact the overall health and well-being of individuals across the country.” The company has also heavily utilized the practice of virtual medicine, encouraging and in some cases mandating doctor consultations via phone or video conference in place of office visits.

The emergence of such practices along with other now ubiquitous technologies such as fitness trackers and health-related mobile applications have the potential to improve public health. Kaiser and other hospital and insurance chains, however, utilize these methods largely to steer patients away from more expensive yet necessary treatments in order to increase their bottom lines.

While the company as a whole is listed as a non-profit, making it exempt from many federal and tax obligations, many Kaiser doctors are part of what is known as the Permanente Medical Group, or TPMG, which is the for profit arm of the company. TPMG doctors are encouraged to limit patient visits to as short a time period as possible and to recommend the cheapest treatments available.

This cost cutting along with regular employee attrition and the attendant overworking of remaining workers along with the recent consolidation of Kaiser’s extensive real estate holdings across the Western US has made the company’s executives among the highest paid of any health care organization in the US. Thirty-six of its top executives make more than a million dollars a year in salary. Kaiser CEO Bernard Tyson led the pack with $16 million in salary in 2019, an increase of 74 percent over the previous year. In an absurd and cynical statement, a Kaiser press release addressing such astronomically high salaries stated that, “Delivering care that is affordable is critical, which is why a third of Kaiser senior leaders’ total compensation is tied to performance-based incentives.”

Many of the hospital workers who voted in favor of a strike make $44,000 a year or less, meaning they would have to work 363 years to make what Tyson makes in only one single year.

While Kaiser executives rake in millions, workers are forced to endure increasingly harsh conditions of low pay, overwork and severe under-staffing. One Kaiser nurse in Southern California spoke to the WSWS about the conditions she faces on a regular basis. The nurse wished to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation.

“I started with Kaiser 20 years ago and it was one of my first jobs out of school. There were always problems on the job but in the past few years they’ve only gotten worse. A lot of nurses and therapists who have been with Kaiser for a long time are let go all of a sudden with little or no warning.

“I had a coworker who was given a disciplinary review for taking an extra five minutes on his break. The whole review process lasted for about two weeks and then he was gone. Another coworker I know openly complained about being understaffed and she was let go soon after. Both of these incidents took place within the past year alone.

“Neither of the positions have been back-filled,” the nurse said. “This isn’t like a factory or an office building where you can lay off a number of employees all at once. Instead they do it piece by piece. It is extremely hard to work like this where you fear for your job almost every day. It makes me so angry every time I hear [actress and Kaiser spokeswoman] Allison Janney on the radio. It sounds so compassionate and caring, but it’s so at odds with what actually takes place in the hospitals and med centers.

Financial turbulence continues as major economies move towards recession

Nick Beams

Markets around the world fell yesterday in response to the biggest fall on Wall Street for the year on Wednesday, amid further indications from bond markets and production data that the global economy is moving into recession.

In response to the Wall Street decline, markets in Asia fell, with Japan’s Topix index down 1 percent while the Australian market dropped 2.9 percent, wiping $60 billion off share values. Markets in Europe also fell before recovering some of their losses later in the day.

Yesterday Wall Street whipsawed in response to news reports on the state of the US-China trade war. Futures markets were down before the start of trade on the basis of a statement from Beijing that it would “retaliate” against the latest imposition of tariffs by the US, but the market rose in response to what was seen as a more conciliatory statement from Beijing.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Hua Chunying said: “We hope the US can work in concert with China to implement the two presidents’ consensus that was reached in Osaka, and to work out a mutually acceptable solution through equal-footed dialogue and consultation with mutual respect.”

But any prospect of such a resolution appears no closer with Trump saying that any agreement with China had to be “on our terms.”

As trade war tensions show no sign of easing, the bond markets continue to send out signals that the conditions for a recession are building. This week the yield curve inverted in both the US and the UK, meaning that the yield on two-year government debt rose above that on ten-year bonds. This is regarded as a forecast of recession because it indicates that investors are seeking a “safe haven.”

Deutsche Bank strategist Jim Reid told the Financial Times: “For me yesterday’s … inversion is the one that worries me the most. In my opinion, it has the best track record for predicting an upcoming recession over more cycles than any of the others.”

In a further indication of the worsening economic outlook, the yield on 30-year US Treasury bonds dropped below 2 percent, for the first time ever, reaching its lowest level on records going back to the 1970s.

The historically unprecedented conditions now prevailing in financial markets—the result of the pumping out of trillions of dollars by the world’s central banks in response to the global financial crisis of 2008—is indicated by the latest data on negative yielding debt.

Bonds with a negative yield, meaning that investors would make a loss if they held them to maturity, have risen to $16 trillion, after passing the $15 trillion mark just 10 days ago. At the end of last year the value of bonds with negative yield was $8 trillion, meaning that it has doubled in just eight months.

And the central banks are preparing to pump still more money into financial markets. The US Federal Reserve is set to cut its base rate by at least 0.25 percentage points in September and possibly more, while the European Central Bank (ECB) is set to make a major move on monetary policy when it meets next month.

It will be a large-scale operation as indicated by remarks by Olli Rehn, the governor of Finland’s central bank and a member of the ECB’s governing council, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal yesterday.

“It is important that we come up with a significant and impactful policy package in September,” he said.

“When you’re working with financial markets, it’s often better to overshoot than undershoot and better to have a very strong package of policy measures than to tinker.”

The measures under consideration include a further cut in the ECB key interest rate, already sitting at minus 0.4 percent, and a resumption of its asset purchasing program after the ECB had previously decided to phase it out. Rehn pointed to a series of risks, including an unstable political situation in Italy, an economic slowdown in China, uncertainties caused by the US-China trade conflict and the prospect of a hard Brexit as justification for the ECB move.

Scotland records highest drug fatality rate in the UK

Stephen Alexander

Drug-related deaths in Scotland soared by 27 percent to 1,187 in 2018, the highest figure since records began in 1996, according to National Records of Scotland (NRS). Most of the deaths were the result of “accidental poisoning,” the official term for an overdose.

This amounts to 218 drug deaths per million people, roughly three times the rate for the UK as a whole and higher even than in the US—considered the overdose capital of the world.

The deaths have fallen disproportionately on poor, urban areas of the former industrial working class. Dundee City Council area registered the highest rate with 0.31 deaths per 1,000 of population, followed by Glasgow (0.30) and Inverclyde (0.25). Scotland’s capital city, Edinburgh, registered 0.16 deaths per 1,000 of population—still far higher than the UK-wide fatality rate.

Elinor Dickie, a public health advisor at NHS (National Health Service) Health Scotland, emphasised that drug addiction is 17 times higher in Scotland’s poorest areas compared to the wealthiest. “We know from the evidence,” Dickie wrote in Aberdeen’s The Press and Journal newspaper, “that problem drug use is related to social circumstance: job loss, experiences of poverty, childhood adversity and trauma all being factors.”

Although the overwhelming majority of drug fatalities, 86 percent, are linked to the abuse of opioids, including heroin, morphine and methadone, the NRS report attributes the surge in drug deaths to the recent growth of “poly-drug” abuse.

The consumption of opioids in combination with “street” benzodiazepines or “street Valium,” which have flooded Scotland’s cities since 2012, has been particularly lethal. Normally prescribed on a temporary basis for anxiety or stress, street versions of benzodiazepines, such as Etizolam pills, vary in quality and strength. They drastically heighten the risk of an opioid overdose due to their sedative effect on the respiratory system.

While street Valium was implicated in 675 or 57 percent of deaths, prescriptible benzodiazepines diverted from NHS prescriptions were involved in 238 or 20 percent of all deaths. Gabapentin/Pregabalin, another prescriptible non-opioid pain and anxiety medication, was involved in 367 deaths (31 percent). Common recreational drugs, cocaine, ecstasy and other amphetamines, were involved in 273 deaths (23 percent), 35 deaths (3 percent) and 46 deaths (4 percent), respectively. Alcohol featured in 156 drug-related deaths (13 percent).

The vast majority of drug fatalities, 72 percent, were male. But over the past decade, overdoses among women surged by 212 percent compared to 75 percent for men.

Among older generations of long-term victims of drug addiction, 35- to 44-year-olds accounted for 442 drug deaths (37 percent), followed by 345 fatalities (29 percent) among 45- to 54-year-olds. Many of these people became hooked in their youth during the heroin epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s, which blighted areas of high youth unemployment and poverty. Glasgow, Edinburgh, Manchester, Bradford and the Welsh Valley were among the worst hit.

This was a direct product of the Conservative Thatcher government’s (1979-1991) vicious, anti-working-class policies of cuts, deindustrialisation, widespread privatisation and financial deregulation. This agenda has been honoured by successive Labour and Conservative administrations, together with the devolved governments, and was deepened in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.

The epidemic of drug deaths has been building for the best part of a quarter century. According to NRS data, approximately 250 drug-related fatalities were recorded in Scotland in the mid-1990s. By 2008, this number had more than doubled to 574. Fatalities then remained at between 500 and 600 for several years, before surging again by 107 percent to nearly 1,200 in just the past five years (2013-2018).

While conditions in the rest of the UK have been overshadowed by the scale of the crisis in Scotland, the latest figures for England and Wales show that drug deaths are also at record levels: 66.1 deaths per million of population in 2017, compared to 42.9 per million in 1993.

Hospital workers strike spreads throughout France

Anthony Torres

The strike by French hospital workers against the Macron administration’s healthcare legislation, which came into force in March, is spreading throughout the country. Of the 478 emergency services in the country, 216 are now involved in the movement that began in March and involved 80 hospitals by June.

The urgent care nurses and assistants are opposing Health Bill 2022 and the systematic deterioration of conditions for staff and patients that has been implemented over decades. Driven by spending cuts and the demands for “competitiveness,” hospital directors are implementing ever-more destructive cost-cutting measures, creating shortages of doctors and temporarily closing services.

Confronted with growing anger, Health Minister Agnès Buzyn contemptuously announced 70 million euros in additional funding, assigned to increase by 100 euros per month the bonus paid to emergency staff to account for the inherent physical dangers of the work. This did not calm the anger of the workers, who are demanding 10,000 additional jobs, a wage increase of 300 euros net per month, and an end to all bed closures.

Buzyn had to flee the hospital at La Rochelle on July 12, after being pursued by a group of protesting workers. Buzyn, who knows the hospital well from her work there as a doctor, had supposedly gone to assess the mood of staff over the conditions in the facility.

Between 1996 and 2016, the number of people treated in the country’s emergency care services increased from 10 million to 21 million. In 2018, according to SAMU-Urgences de France, 180,000 patients spent a night on a stretcher in the hallways of the urgent care wards.

At the Sainte-Foy-la-Grande hospital in northern Gironde, for example, the emergency service has been closed between 6:30 p.m. and 8:30 a.m. from August 1 to 31. Patients requiring care during these night hours are redirected to the Bergerac hospital in the Dordogne, about 20 kilometers away.

Because of a shortage of doctors, the Pithiviers hospital cancelled its mobile care unit, the Mobile Emergency and Resuscitation Service (SMUR), for 18 days, giving priority to its on-site services instead. The SMUR units of Montargis and Orléans are taking on the additional responsibilities, with longer intervention times as a result, as they too are struggling to recruit doctors over the summer.

According to Vincent Authié, a stretcher bearer and delegate for the General Confederation of Labor (CGT) trade union: “It’s true that we are in a region particularly affected by doctor shortages, but the management anticipates nothing. It does not make plans for staff schedules. We have known for a long time that there would be a problem.” The staff of the hospital joined the national protest movement at the beginning of the summer.

The emergency department of Beaumont-sur-Oise Hospital has joined the national strike movement. There are about 70 per cent of workers listed as participating in the strike movement among paramedical staff, although the service is continuing to operate.

Canada: New federal law expands national security agencies’ repressive powers

Laurent Lafrance 

As one of its last legislative acts before this fall’s federal election, Canada’s Liberal government has pushed through passage of its anti-democratic Bill C-59, “An Act Respecting National Security Matters.”

Bill C-59 expands the state’s power to spy on the population and further entrenches the new, repressive powers that the previous, Stephen Harper-led Conservative government gave the national-security agencies in 2015 on the phony claim Canada was under siege from jihadi terrorists.

Providing yet further proof that they are a right-wing capitalist party, Elizabeth May and her Green Party voted for Bill C-59 and are echoing the Liberals’ claims that it “balances” Canadians’ democratic rights with the need for “security.”

The social-democratic New Democratic Party (NDP) opposed the new law, citing criticisms from civil liberties and privacy groups. But they mounted no campaign to alert the population as to its reactionary provisions; just as they have remained almost entirely silent on the Trudeau Liberal government’s integration of Canada into Washington’s military-strategic offensives around the world, its plans to hike the military budget by more than 70 percent by 2026 and its complicity in Trump’s vicious anti-immigrant campaign.

Thanks in large part to the revelations of US National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden, it is public knowledge that Canada’s premier domestic spy agency, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), and the Communications Security Establishment (CSE), the country’s signals intelligence agency, are carrying out mass surveillance operations that violate the constitutional rights of millions of Canadians and others around the world. Canada’s national-security agencies are implicated in espionage activities against foreign countries, their leaders, and the corporate rivals of Canadian big business, but also against opposition movements both abroad and at home.

Well aware of the strong popular hostility to such anti-democratic intrigues, the Liberals have sought to justify the handing of more powers to the intelligence agencies by portraying Canada as a country under threat from hostile actors. They justified their push to enact Bill C-59 in late June by touting the totally unsubstantiated claims of Canada’s intelligence agencies that Russia or other powers might “interfere” in the coming federal election campaign.

In this, the Trudeau government was drawing on the reactionary efforts of the US political and military-security establishments to use bogus allegations that Russia massively meddled in the 2016 US elections to push for a more aggressive policy against Moscow, increased powers for the intelligence apparatuses, and censorship of the internet.

What is contained in Bill C-59?

Introduced to parliament in June 2017, Bill C-59 is the Liberals’ supposed “reform” of the law Harper and his Conservatives passed in 2015 to strengthen the powers and reach of the national security agencies. So reactionary was Harper’s Bill C-51 that even the pro-Conservative Globe and Mail decried it as a “police state” measure.

Trudeau and his Liberals voted for Bill C-51, but conscious of the strong popular opposition to it, pledged that they would repeal parts of it if they came to power after the October 2015 election.

In fact, Bill C-59 retains all of Bill C-51’s core anti-democratic provisions. Trudeau has sought to camouflage this by touting his legislation’s creation of new oversight or “watchdog” mechanisms, including an Intelligence Commissioner and a National Security and Intelligence Review Agency (NSIRA).

As the World Socialist Web Site noted in its initial analysis of Bill C-59, “These mechanisms are nothing more than a fig leaf, aimed at providing the intelligence agencies with a legal-constitutional cover to spy on opponents of the government and big business—environmentalists, native organizations, leftist and antiwar groups, and above all the working class.” For all the talk of ensuring the national-security agencies respect Canadians’ constitutionally-protected democratic rights, the NSIRA’s mandate is not to inform the population of the spy agencies’ violations of the law, but to prepare confidential reports for the government and the spy agencies themselves. Its members are bound to secrecy even when they uncover illegal acts and the government has wide powers to withhold information from the NSIRA, including on all ongoing security-intelligence operations.

Underlining the NDP’s firm support for and full integration into the criminal activities of Canadian imperialism, retiring New Democrat MP Murray Rankin has accepted the Liberal government’s offer to serve as the first NSIRA chair.

Bill C-59 enshrines the new power Bill C-51 granted CSIS to actively “disrupt” what the Canadian state deems are threats to “national security” and to violate virtually any law when doing so. The legislation’s only restrictions on CSIS’s right to “disrupt” are that a judge must approve the target through the issuing of a “disruption” warrant, and that the agency’s actions must not cause bodily harm or violate the target’s “sexual integrity.” “Disruption” techniques could include breaking into homes, interfering with bank accounts and other personal data, intercepting mail and other packages, destroying property, illegally detaining persons, and running “false flag” and other “dirty tricks” operations.

The Liberals have gone even further than the Conservatives by granting CSE an explicit mandate to mount cyber-war attacks against foreign targets, including states’ computer infrastructure and communication networks. This was in response to criticism from the political establishment and military-security apparatus that the spy agencies were previously limited, at least officially, only to “defensive” operations.

Trump administration sabotages Endangered Species Act

Kevin Martinez

The Trump administration has announced a major overhaul in the way it would enforce the Endangered Species Act of 1973. The changes allow federal authorities to take economic considerations into account when protecting a certain species. Environmental groups say the new rules will push more plants and animals into extinction from habitat loss and climate change.

Since 1973 when the Endangered Species Act was signed into law by President Richard Nixon, more than 1,600 species of wildlife have been legally protected in the US and its territories. The act has been credited for saving the bald eagle, California condor, the grizzly bear and dozens of other species from extinction.

Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, who made billions as an asset stripper in steel and other industries, spoke for the most rapacious sections of big business, declaring, “The revisions finalized with this rule-making fit squarely within the president’s mandate of easing the regulatory burden on the American public …”

Wildlife experts have criticized the administration’s moves, with Noah Greenwald, endangered species director at the Center for Biological Diversity saying, “These changes crash a bulldozer through the Endangered Species Act’s lifesaving protections for America’s most vulnerable wildlife. For animals like wolverines and monarch butterflies, this could be the beginning of the end.”

According to environmental group Earthjustice, the Endangered Species Act has stopped 99 percent of its protected species from going extinct. The Act also is also approved by 90 percent of Americans, according to the group.

Pro-business groups like the Property and Environment Research Center welcomed the changes. Executive Director Brian Yablonski said, “Our interest is getting this landmark wildlife protection law to work better. That means fostering conditions so landowners become more enthusiastic in their role as stewards for species recovery, not worried if they find an endangered species on their land.”

The deregulation of environmental rules has long been sought after by Democratic and Republican representatives of big business, with some saying the recent overhaul does not go far enough. Wyoming Republican Senator John Barrasso said, “These final rules are a good start, but the administration is limited by an existing law that needs to be updated. We must modernize the Endangered Species Act in a way that empowers states, promotes the recovery of species, and allows local economies to thrive.”

Before Monday’s announcement there were several attempts to gut the ESA. Since 2017, there have been about two dozen bills targeting the ESA that were either introduced in Congress or proposed by the Trump administration.

Among the changes proposed by the White House are reducing the protections for any species that are added to the “threatened species” list in the future. Until Monday, animals considered “threatened” were given the same protection as “endangered” animals. Now they will be protected only on a case-by-case basis.