Redefining Anti-Semitism on Facebook

Neve Gordon

The objective is to force Facebook to alter its hate speech definition so that its own “detection algorithm” will characterize any criticism of Israel as hate speech and automatically remove the pertinent content from the platform.  

Given that Facebook has 2.7 billion users and is the world’s largest and arguably most influential media platform, it comes as no surprise that right-wing Zionist organizations have identified it as a site to promote their agenda.

Several years ago, for example, the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs alongside students and professors from IDC, an Israeli university in Herzliya, helped create Act.IL, an “online community that will act to promote a positive influence on the international public opinion towards the state of Israel via social media platforms.”

ACT.IL established an army of trolls and then developed an app whose role is to render the trolls’ work more effective. The idea behind the app, Act.IL’s founder Yarden Ben-Yosef explained, was simple:

“Companies, such as Facebook, remove content following reports from the community. If there is only one person reporting it, he usually gets told by Facebook the content doesn’t meet the criteria for removal. If 300 report it—the content is removed immediately. As soon as content inciting against Israel is posted online, we send a message through the app and all of its subscribers immediately report it.”

While the establishment of a trolling army to stifle criticism of Israel might already seem pernicious, a slew of right-wing Zionist organizations have recently come up with an even more pernicious strategy, and, if successful, all content critical of Israel will be removed from Facebook and other social media platforms without the intervention of a single troll.

Algorithms instead of Trolls

The Zionist organizations understood that no army of trolls, even when such an army receives aid from the Israeli military and Shin Bet, can monitor the massive amount of content on Facebook. They therefore decided to alter their strategy and shift the burden of surveillance to the social media giants themselves.

Adopting the by now well-known approach of weaponizing anti-Semitism, they began pressuring Facebook to introduce a specific definition of anti-Semitism to its own data mining tools, so that instead of trolls labelling criticism of Israel anti-Semitic, algorithms would.

The objective, in other words, is to force Facebook to alter its hate speech definition so that its own “detection algorithm” will characterize any criticism of Israel as hate speech and automatically remove the pertinent content from the platform. 

The Campaign

Working closely together with the Israeli government, this past summer the pro-Israel lobbying group StopAntisemitism.org launched a new campaign funded by right wing philanthropist Adam Milstein.

In July, Israel’s Minister of Strategic Affairs published an op-ed in Newsweek urging social media companies to root out the anti-Semitic “virus” by fully adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism. A few weeks later, on August 7, 120 organizations representing the “who’s who” of Zionist right-wing groups (the number has since risen to 145) sent a letter to Facebook’s Board of Directors, calling upon them to fully adopt the IHRA definition as the “cornerstone of Facebook’s hate speech policy regarding antisemitism.”

This definition, which has been endorsed or adopted in some official capacity by over thirty countries, includes eleven examples of anti-Semitism, seven of which involve criticism of Israel. This is just the latest concrete manifestation of the how any critique of the Israeli government and its politics now assumes the taint of anti-Semitism.

There is, to be sure, an irony here. Historically, the fight against anti-Semitism has sought to advance the equal rights and emancipation of Jews; yet, in the IHRA definition those who speak out against the subjugation of Palestinians are called anti-Semites. In the first case, someone who wishes to oppress, dominate and exterminate Jews is branded an anti-Semite, while in the second, someone who wishes to take part in the struggle for liberation from colonial rule is branded an anti-Semite. In this way, Judith Butler has observed, ‘a passion for justice’ is ‘renamed as anti-Semitism’.

Yet the people behind this campaign are neither interested in irony nor in justice, and certainly not in justice for Palestinians. As Lara Friedman, the president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace who wrote an expose on the Facebook campaign for Jewish Currents, has pointed out, their letter to the Board of Directors “represents the latest front in the battle to use the IHRA definition to officially exclude criticism of Israel from the bounds of acceptable discourse.”

Facebook Responds

The campaign seems to have had an immense impact. Four days after receiving the letter from the Zionist organizations, Guy Rosen, Facebook Vice President for Integrity, announced that the organization had updated its hate speech policy to take into account certain kinds of implicit hate speech, such as “stereotypes about Jewish people controlling the world.”

Facebook’s vice president of content policy sent a letter to the signatories, noting that the company “draws on the spirit—and the text—of the IHRA,” and that under Facebook’s policy, “Jews and Israelis are treated as ‘protected characteristics.’”

Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO, even  wrote a personal note to Milstein who financed the campaign. She assured him that the IHRA definition has been “invaluable—both in informing our own approach, and as a point of entry for candid policy discussions with organizations like yours.”

Yet, as Friedman from the Foundation for Middle East Peace explains, the company still seems to be reluctant to adopt the parts of the definition that relate to Israel, and it is not coincidental that in Facebook’s responses they mention only hate speech towards Jews.

Friedman cites senior Facebook official Peter Stern who three months before the campaign was launched asserted that “We don’t allow people to make certain types of hateful statements against individuals. If the focus turns to a country, an institution, a philosophy, then we allow people to express themselves more freely, because we think that’s an important part of political dialogue . . . and that there’s an important legitimate component to that. So we allow people to criticize the state of Israel, as well as the United States and other countries.” 

The Battle Continues

Not surprising, Facebook’s new hate speech policy hasn’t satisfied the pro-Israel lobby, and in the August 7th letter part of the ire was directed towards Stern, claiming that he had “admitted that Facebook does not embrace the full adoption of the IHRA working definition because the definition recognizes that modern manifestations of antisemitism relate to Israel.”

In a tweet responding to Sandberg’s letter, Milstein made it clear that the campaign will continue: “We look forward to working with @Facebook to ensure #antisemitism is eradicated from the platform and the #IHRA working definition of antisemitism is fully adopted by your organization.”

On the other side of the political spectrum, a group of scholars (myself included) specializing in antisemitism, Jewish and Holocaust history, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict wrote Facebook about the dangers of adopting the IHRA definition.

While urging Mark Zuckerberg to: “Fight all forms of hate speech on Facebook,” we called upon him to refrain from “adopting and applying a politicized definition of antisemitism, which has been weaponized to undermine free speech, in order to shield the Israeli government and to silence Palestinian voices and their supporters.”

If Facebook does eventually bow down and include the full IHRA definition in its algorithms, free speech on Israel/Palestine, which is already under immense pressure, will receive a lethal blow. It is up to Facebook users to voice their concern by notifying Zuckerberg and Sandberg that they will abandon the platform the moment the media giant decides to adopt the IHRA definition. Ultimately, we, the users, do hold the power.

How Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations Fuel Pandemics

Martha Rosenberg

The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic may be the worst in recent memory but another pandemic occurred just a decade ago. During 2009 and 2010, the world was stricken with H1NI, a novel virus hosted by pigs.

Originally termed swine flu, the novel virus was a new and ominous combination of five viruses ––  North American swine flu, North American avian flu, two swine flu viruses found in Asia and Europe and a human flu virus.

The viruses had undergone reassortment and swapped genes, creating a novel virus not previously identified in humans. Not only did no one have immunity or antibodies to the novel virus, experts said humans could both give and get H1N1 from pigs.

“Unlike the situation with birds and humans, we have a situation with pigs and humans where there’s a two-way street of exchange of viruses,” warned Nancy Cox, who served as Director of the Influenza Division at the CDC during the H1NI pandemic.

Five months after its identification, H1N1 had spread to 43 countries according to the WHO which declared it a pandemic in June 2009. Between 151,700 and 575,400 people died worldwide according to the CDC.

An Earlier Bird Flu Scare Was a Dress Rehearsal for H1N1

In 1997 a strain of avian or bird flu called H5N1 surfaced in Hong Kong and for eight years had much of the world fearing a pandemic. Like H1N1, the bird flu virus H5N1 was a novel pathogen not encountered before  and by 2004, it had spread to more than 50 countries in Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Though there were cases where H5N1 was “transferred from birds to humans, in settings such as farms or open markets with live animal vending,” said researchers in the Canadian Journal of Infectious Diseases and Medical Microbiology, H5N1 lacked the human-to-human transmission of H1N1. However, of those who got the virus as many as 66% died.

During the H5N1 pandemic scare hundreds of millions of birds were exterminated in inhumane ways in a vain attempts to stop the disease  but new, unexposed animals introduced into the same, virus-laden environments perpetuated it. The disease remains endemic in several countries and a serious worldwide threat.

Bird viruses related to H5N1 such as H5N2, H5N7 and H5N8 have continued to rage through U.S. poultry CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations) since 2015, with tens of millions of birds destroyed –– 12% of U.S. egg layers and 8% of turkeys in recent years.

Big Food succeeded in hiding the extent of the bird flu outbreaks on U.S. poultry CAFOs to avoid scaring people away from eating their products. “It doesn’t affect humans, just birds,” they declared even as CAFO operations across the country have been depopulated under the public’s radar. When a new U.S. bird flu outbreak occurred in 2020, the mainstream press barely mentioned it.

CAFOs Are Creating Pandemics Say Experts

Prehistory is full of records of plagues and pandemics. In modern history we have seen the Asian flu pandemic of 1957, the Hong Kong flu pandemic of 1968 and the AIDS pandemic of 1981.

But, according to the Journal of Public Health policy, today’s pandemics are different, especially when it comes to flu viruses:

“For centuries, the evolution of the influenza virus had remained relatively stable. In recent years, however, the virus has undergone an evolutionary surge, with new variants emerging rapidly. The intensive confinement of animals is shown to be a major contributor to this surge. Highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) H5N1, first isolated in the Guangdong Province of China in 1996, is one of the most notable pathogens to appear recently…

The crowding and stress of CAFOs, also called factory farms, are only part of what has changed in modern meat production. The other big change is the extent to which food animals are medicated and vaccinated. For example, Merck, a leader in both human and animal vaccines, markets over 30 vaccines for poultry diseases like fowl pox, turkey coryza, bursal disease, coccidiosis, laryngotracheitis, hemorrhagic enteritis, avian encephalomyelitis of course salmonella and E. coli. It also markets vaccines for cattle, pigs and ever farmed fish.

According to a Science magazine article titled “Chasing the Fickle Swine Flu,” vaccination is now routine in traditional animal farming.

“Another crucial change has been the recent wide-scale vaccination for swine influenza. In less than a decade, vaccination has become the norm for breeding sows.”

The big question that neither Big Food or Big Vax want to see the public ask is whether vaccinations are driving pandemics, not just because of crowding but because of the uniform immunity created by the animal bio-engineering behind CAFOs.

According to Science magazine:

“Widespread vaccination may actually be selecting for new viral types. If vaccination develops populations with uniform immunity to certain virus genotypes, say H1N1 and H3N2, then other viral mutants would be favored.”

CAFO’s also spread pandemics through their unethical treatment of workers. According to Environmental Health Perspectives, protection of the 54,000 workers working on swine and poultry CAFOs during the H1N1 pandemic was “relatively small” and workers can unwittingly spread the virus.

In a 2-year prospective study of 803 rural Iowans, published in Emerging Infectious Diseases in December 2007, he [Dr. Gray] found that CAFO workers were 50 times more likely to have elevated H1N1 antibodies than nonexposed controls. Equally important, their spouses were 25 times more likely to harbor these antibodies, reflecting how the viruses can jump from farm workers to their intimate contacts. 

By July, the CDC had reported that 16,200 workers across 23 states had tested positive for the Covid 19 virus.

The worldwide danger of CAFOs has long been recognized says Dr. Michael Greger, a physician and internationally recognized public health:

The public health community has been warning about the risks posed by factory farms for years…in 2003, the American Public Health Association, the largest and oldest association of public health professionals in the world, called for a moratorium on factory farming. In 2005, the United Nations urged that ‘[g]overnments, local authorities and international agencies need to take a greatly increased role in combating the role of factory-farming,’ which, they said, combined with live animal markets, ‘provide ideal conditions for the [influenza] virus to spread and mutate into a more dangerous form.’

Yet the continued creation of new viruses by CAFOs and animal vaccinations is not abating and promises more deadly pandemics. Worse, food producers seemed to have learned nothing from previous bird and swine flu pandemics.

Catastrophic wildfires, corporate air pollution, and COVID-19: A collision of crises

Henry Hakamaki

Devastating wildfires that have broken out across the western United States, particularly in California, Washington, Oregon, and Idaho, which at latest count have claimed 33 lives and 4.6 million acres of land, are increasingly creating the potential for three major crises to collide: wildfires, air pollution and the coronavirus pandemic.

Air quality indexes, measures of the amount of particulate present in the air, in Portland and Seattle are currently being recorded as the worst in the world due to particulates emitted from the ongoing wildfires nearby. The scientific data suggest that residents of these cities (and much of the Pacific coast of the United States as well as British Columbia, which all currently are experiencing incredibly poor air quality) will simultaneously be facing an increased risk of developing COVID-19 as well as an increased risk of severe disease if infected.

Meanwhile, corporations nationwide have been given the green light by the current administration to emit as many air pollutants as they see fit, only further escalating the assault on the environment and the blatant disregard for the health and safety of working people across the country.

While seemingly disparate crises, the wildfires driven by climate change, the corporate attack on American citizens for the sake of profit, and the COVID-19 pandemic all have effects that intertwine with one another.

The effect of corporate practices that shirk environmental regulations, along with politicians from both major parties passing regulations that are far too lax in the first place, is well documented in regard to climate change. Climate change in turn has exacerbated the wildfires across the West Coast.

What is less well documented in the media is the effect of air pollutants, due to both corporate emissions and particulate matter released by the massive wildfires, on the risk of infection and the risk of death due to COVID-19.

Air pollution caused by the wildfires will exacerbate the COVID-19 crisis due to both immunological and sociological factors. Research has suggested that particulate matter in the air, due to industrial pollution, the burning of fossil fuels, and now the fires on the West Coast, increases the likelihood of infection by COVID-19 and the likelihood for severe disease. Meanwhile, the fires themselves are forcing mass evacuations of individuals, creating de facto climate crisis refugees, putting them into close contact with other individuals and creating a veritable breeding ground for COVID-19 transmission.

From an immunological standpoint, two factors are at play in regard to the effects of the air pollution and COVID-19: increases in likelihood for infection and increases in severity among individuals who are infected.

In April, data from a large cross-sectional study was released as a preprint by researchers at Harvard using county-level data of nearly every county in the US. This study accounted for more than 20 other variables, and then compared COVID-19 deaths and long-term air quality data in each county. The results were striking. It was determined that just 1 microgram per cubic meter of PM2.5 (particulate matter smaller than 2.5 microns in size, small enough to be inhaled deeply into the lung) was associated with an 8 percent increase in COVID-19 fatalities.

Since then, a similar analysis was conducted using data from the Netherlands, which found that the same increase in PM2.5 levels, 1 microgram per cubic meter, increased the number of cases of COVID-19 by 7.2 percent, and an increase in COVID-19 fatalities of between 9.4 percent and 15.1 percent.

For comparison sake, Portland’s PM2.5 level at the time of writing is over 400 micrograms per cubic meter, whereas on Thursday, September 3, the PM2.5 level during the day in the city was 5 micrograms per cubic meter. The higher figure represents an increase of 395 times the difference cited in the studies above.

It has been known for quite some time that air pollution, particularly airborne particulate matter, is a significant risk factor for cardiovascular pathology, being responsible for 5 million deaths in 2017 alone, and being linked to death in individuals with heart or lung disease, heart attacks, aggravated asthma, decreased lung function, and respiratory inflammation.

These pathologies have been linked directly to increased severity of COVID-19 infections, and increased risk of death due to COVID-19. Other studies have since found increases in COVID-19 infections and deaths in areas with higher airborne particulate levels in the UK and an increase in deaths in some regions in Italy .

The immunological reason why airborne particulate matter increases the likelihood of infection and death due to COVID-19 is increasingly becoming understood. The ACE2 receptor on the surface of human cells acts as the main entry point for SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for COVID-19, to enter the cell by binding with the spike protein of the virus.

It is currently hypothesized by scientists that increased expression of ACE2 on the cell surface will increase the severity of COVID-19 infections by allowing for more points of viral entry, though the data on this front is not quite clear, as ACE2 also has anti-inflammatory effects that may be beneficial in late-stage infection.

A study published in 2018 showed that exposing mice to PM2.5 particles for both two days and five days significantly increased the expression of ACE2 on the lung cells of the mice. If this finding in mice also holds true in humans, it could provide some evidence as to why regions with more air pollution, even when controlling for all other confounding factors, record more cases and more deaths due to COVID-19 than areas with lower air pollution levels.

Essentially, higher air pollution would increase the ACE2 expression on the lung cells of individuals living in those areas, allowing for increased viral entry to the cells, and more infections and more severe disease among infected individuals.

In addition to potentially allowing more viral entry to cells via increased ACE2 expression, airborne particulate matter, when in the lungs, induces inflammation of the lung cells. The most severe damage in COVID-19 infections is actually caused by an overreaction by the innate immune cells, and this overreaction is driven by proinflammatory cytokines, the same signalling markers that are present at increased quantity in lungs exposed to high levels of airborne particulate matter.

The chronic inflammatory state of individuals in areas with very poor air quality would increase the likelihood for what is known as a cytokine storm, where massive amounts of pro-inflammatory cytokines are released by the innate immune system, and which is likely responsible for the severity of the most severe cases of COVID-19.

Furthermore, data suggest that exposure to higher levels of airborne particulate matter is associated with changes in blood coagulation, tending towards hypercoagulability. This may also play some role in the severity of COVID-19 infections of individuals in areas with poor air quality, as coagulopathy has been noted as one of the more severe outcomes associated with COVID-19 infection. These immunological effects of airborne particulate matter all could play major roles in the risk of infection and severity of infection by COVID-19.

The wildfires on the West Coast are not simply increasing the likelihood for infection from an immunological standpoint, however. The wildfires are currently forcing hundreds of thousands of individuals to evacuate, oftentimes to high schools where social distancing would be much more difficult to achieve than at their own homes.

In Oregon alone, over 500,000 residents are under varying levels of evacuation orders, many of whom will soon be forced to live in close proximity to others. This intermingling of individuals dramatically increases the likelihood of transmission of COVID-19, as the closer the contact between individuals, the higher the probability of infection occurring if any individuals being forced together are infected.

To compound problems nationwide, the EPA drastically relaxed environmental regulations on March 26, including emissions regulations, due to the pandemic. This relaxing of regulations will allow corporations to emit as much air pollutants as they want, as long as they claim they are “acting responsibly.”

The inevitable increase in air pollutants due to this decision by the EPA will only exacerbate the COVID-19 crisis in communities where the majority of the emissions are taking place. Through this action, air quality levels will be expected to deteriorate wherever major corporations operate.

This means that not only are individuals suffering through air quality issues due to the wildfires on the West Coast at risk for the immunological impacts of airborne particulate matter for COVID-19, but individuals nationwide will be forced to suffer more severely due to the never-ending search for more profits by the corporations, irrespective of any impacts on public health.

The disregard for the working class by the government and big business interests over the course of decades has laid the groundwork for the convergence of these crises, and until the working class stands up and demands that their health take priority over profits, it should be expected that these crises will continue unabated.

Australian health workers still being denied adequate PPE

Clare Bruderlin

As the Australian ruling elite and its political representatives in Labor and Liberal-National governments press ahead with a reckless pro-business drive to lift all coronavirus safety measures, reports have emerged that health workers are still being denied adequate personal protective equipment (PPE).

In Victoria, which has been the centre of a surge in COVID-19 infections over the past three months, the state Labor government of Premier Daniel Andrews has signalled that it will announce this Sunday an accelerated “roadmap” for the full reopening of the economy, despite continuing evidence of community transmission.

The number of health workers in the state who have been infected since the pandemic began has continued to climb, reaching an official total of 3,514. Since Monday, at least 18 of the 66 new COVID-19 cases were among health workers. Another 34 infections have been linked to outbreaks in aged care.

Health worker infections accounted for around 20 percent of new COVID-19 cases between July and August. Data from the Victorian Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) shows that the majority of health worker infections (48.3 percent) have occurred in aged care, while 30.8 percent of infections were among hospital staff, including doctors and nurses. Health workers in “other settings,” such as dentistry, pharmacy and paramedics, accounted for 20.9 percent of cases.

Nearly half of the state’s 532 active cases stem from clusters in aged care facilities, where over 1,900 residents have been infected and 614 have died. The Victorian government is yet to provide a full breakdown of hospitals where COVID-19 outbreaks have occurred. This cover-up is bound up with the push by governments to fully reopen the economy, despite the risk to the wellbeing and lives of frontline health workers.

According to the most recent data from the DHHS, hospitals are a major source of coronavirus transmission, with key outbreaks at Footscray Hospital and the Alfred Hospital in Melbourne accounting for at least 22 active cases.

A recent article by the Saturday Paper alleged that, according to a confidential government document, coronavirus outbreaks have been reported in at least eight hospitals in the past two weeks, some of which have not been publicly announced by the DHHS. The article states that “Staff at some of these hospitals have not been told about the transmissions happening in their workplaces and are not being offered extra protection.”

One doctor told the Saturday Paper, “There’s a lack of transparency with what’s actually going on in healthcare facilities. We need more transparency because I think if you knew that your hospital was responsible for 25 percent of the current infections at the moment, then there’s more pressure on the hospitals to be providing enough PPE, improving social distancing and taking other steps to protect staff.”

The article also reported that a number of doctors involved in testing and contact tracing “were concerned that outbreaks were disproportionately occurring among migrant workers and international students who are working as nurses and cleaners in aged-care facilities. Those employees are unable to access government support measures, leaving them vulnerable and financially desperate. Many live in overcrowded accommodation with shared bathrooms, creating a risk for coronavirus to spread.”

In April, the federal Liberal-National government lifted visa restrictions on some 20,000 international nursing students employed in the health system so they could work up to 40 hours per fortnight. Many were left with no choice but to take on the additional hours in order to remain in Australia, as the government refused to provide any ongoing financial support for international workers and students during the pandemic.

No measures have been put in place to address the rapid spread of COVID-19 among health workers, who have reported PPE shortages, no “fit-testing” procedure for masks, staff shortages and inadequate infection control measures.

Initially, on August 11, Victorian Health Minister Jenny Mikakos claimed that the majority of health workers infected with COVID-19 contracted the virus outside their places of employment and that workplace infections accounted for just 15–20 percent of cases. Two weeks later, as health worker infections surged, the government was forced to reveal that at least 70–80 percent of “second wave” COVID-19 infections among health workers in Victoria were acquired at work.

At the beginning of August there were just over 1,000 confirmed COVID-19 cases among health workers. By September 1, infections had trebled, to over 3,000 cases.

Despite health workers’ anger and concern over inadequate PPE and infection control, on August 25, Labor Premier Andrews declared that his government was not responsible for the mounting cases among health staff. He claimed instead that the outbreaks “further demonstrates the wildly infectious nature of the virus.”

In a statement signalling that mass outbreaks among health workers would continue, and the government would do nothing to prevent them, Andrews said: “My message to every healthcare worker is, if you get coronavirus at work, put in a WorkCover claim straight away.” In other words, frontline workers were told to accept that they would be infected by a potentially-deadly disease, and if they did, it was up to them to ensure that they were not thrown into destitution.

Workers continue to lack even basic PPE. Health staff in contact with COVID-positive patients have said that they are often only provided with surgical masks, rather than the recommended N95 masks. Despite repeated claims by the government that there is sufficient supply of high-grade PPE, Victoria’s Chief Medical Officer Andrew Wilson told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation this week that if N95 masks were provided for all workers in contact with COVID-19 patients, the state would “burn through the supplies in one week.”

Moreover, despite the fact that DHHS guidelines for PPE state that to be effective, masks must form “a tight facial seal covering the nose, mouth and chin,” the state government has only run one “fit testing trial” for PPE, which was for “high-risk” staff at Northern Health. Fit testing has not been made mandatory for hospitals dealing with COVID-19 outbreaks in Victoria.

The refusal of state and federal governments to take any measures to prepare the health system for coronavirus outbreaks is not an accident. It is the result of a deliberate policy. While they have transferred hundreds of billions of dollars to the banks and major corporations during the pandemic, just $2.4 billion was pledged to health spending.

Hospitals and aged care facilities have also been left understaffed and unequipped to deal with a global pandemic. This is the result of decades of funding cuts to public healthcare and the privatisation of services by successive governments, Labor and Liberal-National alike. The process has been facilitated by the trade unions that have collaborated with managements to slash workers’ wages and conditions.

In one of the largest outbreaks of coronavirus at Frankston Hospital in August, where more than 600 staff were forced into isolation after being exposed to COVID-19, the Australian Nurses and Midwives Union stated that workers raised concerns with them about infection control practices at the hospital, access to appropriate sizes of N95 masks, fit testing and fit checking and staffing levels in COVID-19 and suspected COVID-19 wards. Despite knowing this, the unions did nothing to address health workers’ concerns and advance demands for PPE.

Recent research into a major COVID-19 outbreak at the Royal Melbourne Hospital in August has revealed that the hospital, where health workers had access to “adequate PPE,” was still unprepared to manage an influx of coronavirus patients.

The outbreak occurred after the admission of patients from aged-care facilities hit by coronavirus led to the virus spreading through several hospital wards. More than 260 healthcare workers subsequently fell ill between July and August.

Researchers found that some wards for COVID-19 patients were not as well ventilated as others and that while some patients were in single rooms, “[M]any were in multi-bed spaces where it was difficult to physically distance patients. Staff reported patients often suffering from a delirium with accompanying wandering behaviours and repeated vocalisation.”

As contact tracing led to large numbers of staff forced into quarantine, the remaining employees experienced high workloads and the care that could be provided to patients was more limited. The researchers found that “many staff reported physical and mental fatigue and stress during these outbreaks” and that “workforce shortages meant that staff were taking on extra shifts at short notice and working in unfamiliar roles.” These factors further exacerbated the outbreaks.

The damning record, and that fact that even after the tragedies of the past months, health workers are being denied PPE and safety measures, demonstrates again that the fight for the most basic interests of the working class, including to life itself, requires a struggle against capitalism and all of the governments that defend it.

Australian government seeks to ban phones in immigration detention

Martin Scott

In the latest brutal assault on immigrants and refugees, the Australian Senate is set to vote early next month on a bill that will further expand the powers of authorities to search asylum-seekers and others held in detention centres, and confiscate their possessions including mobile phones.

If passed, the amended Migration Act will grant the home affairs minister the power to declare any item a “prohibited thing” and allow strip searches and the use of sniffer dogs.

These searches, which can be carried out by “authorised officers and officers’ assistants,” will not require a warrant, or even any suspicion that any “prohibited thing” will be found.

The new laws will allow the home affairs minister to prohibit items according to extremely broad criteria:

Possession of the thing is prohibited by law in a place or places in Australia, or possession or use of the thing in an immigration detention facility might be a risk to the health, safety or security of persons in the facility, or to the order of the facility. [Emphasis added]

Specifically listed in the bill as examples are mobile phones, SIM cards, computers, and any electronic devices that can connect to the internet.

The claim that the new laws will protect the health and safety of detainees is exposed as utterly false by the response of immigration authorities to the COVID-19 pandemic.

In April, Australian Human Rights Commissioner Edward Santow called for the “urgent” and “immediate” release of immigration detainees, yet refugees continue to be held in cramped conditions, as many as six to a room, with no possibility of social distancing.

Detention centre personnel are rotated between facilities, increasing the risk of infection. When a guard working for Serco, a private contractor which operates many of Australia’s detention centres, tested positive for COVID-19 in March, none of the inmates at the Brisbane Kangaroo Point facility where he had last worked were tested.

In August, the Federal Court ordered the release of a 68-year-old man from the Melbourne Immigration Transit Accommodation centre due to his high risk of contracting the coronavirus. Rather than being released into the care of family, who are Australian citizens, he was transferred to another detention centre.

Four refugees at the Brisbane Immigration Transit Accommodation (BITA) facility began a hunger strike in August after one of the detainees, Adnan, was moved to the high-security section of the compound. According to Farhad Rahmati, a striking refugee, Adnan had been transferred after complaining to a Serco manager that kitchen and medical staff at the detention centre were not wearing masks or social distancing.

Balcony protest by refugees detained at Kangaroo Point Central Hotel (Credit: Facebook - Refugee Solidarity Meanjin)

In a video posted online, and presumably shot with a mobile phone, Rahmati said: “Adnan was sent to Nauru when he was only 15 and now he’s 22 and still in detention. So my demand is just bring him back, because he’s not a criminal. A higher-security compound is not where you are supposed to keep asylum seekers and refugees. So my next meal will be with him here in residential.”

Rahmati himself had been transferred to BITA from the Kangaroo Point facility in June after a series of protests involving detainees and supporters.

Speaking to ABC Radio, Rahmati said: “I was told that ‘because the protesters yesterday mentioned your name, we [Australian Border Force] have been instructed to take you back.’”

These incidents make clear that the real reason for the mobile phone ban is to hide the conditions inside detention facilities and prevent detainees from interacting with the public, among whom there is already broad support for refugees and widespread opposition to the attacks on immigrants.

The COVID-19 pandemic has also heightened the importance of mobile phones in allowing detainees to communicate with friends and family, with all personal visits suspended since March 24.

In the first seven months of this year, there were 423 self-harm incidents in Australian immigration detention centres, around 8 per month more than the average annual figure between 2016 and 2019. There were 80 incidents of self-harm at the Perth Immigration Detention Centre, compared to an annual average of 52.5. BITA recorded 61 incidents in the first seven months of 2020, 6 more than the annual average.

Even outside of a pandemic, access to mobile phones and the internet is often the only source of human connection for refugees subjected to punitive and isolating detention for an average of 525 days.

Many are detained for years on end. The Guardian reported Tuesday that a Sri Lankan man has been held for more than 11 years after fleeing brutal persecution in his home country.

The man was sentenced to five years in jail because the fishing boat he shared with 31 others on his journey to Australia was registered in his name. Although his conviction was overturned and all charges were withdrawn more than eight years ago, the man has not been released.

The man’s visa application was denied on the basis that he had “previously engaged in criminal or other serious conduct.” This is indicative of the extremely low bar of “criminality” applied to immigrants. The government has fraudulently claimed that the new laws are necessary because many detainees have “criminal histories.”

According to Regina Jeffries of the University of New South Wales’ Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law, mobile phones and internet access are also a vital tool for asylum seekers to communicate with legal advocates and comply with the government’s “extremely tight timeframes” for submitting applications and supporting documents.

Jeffries stated: “It’s actually quite difficult for people to use the inadequate facilities that the detention centres currently provide, which are tightly controlled, and don’t necessarily give them the ability to facilitate the handling of their case.”

This is not the first time the Australian government has tried to prevent immigration detainees from using mobile phones.

In November 2016, Australian Border Force (ABF) adopted a policy extending the ban on mobile phone possession and use by refugees who had arrived by boat to all those held in immigration detention. Lawyers acting on behalf of 80 detainees challenged the move in the Federal Court, and a temporary injunction was granted in February 2017. The court ruled in June 2018 that the phone ban was not allowable under the Migration Act. In September 2017, a bill very similar to the one currently before the Senate was introduced but not passed.

While Labor and the Greens voted against the current bill in the House of Representatives, and have indicated they will do the same in the Senate, they do this in the knowledge that the fate of the bill will rest in the hands of the cross bench.

The reality is that the persecution of so-called “illegal” immigrants has been spearheaded by the Labor Party for decades. In 1992 the Keating Labor government introduced mandatory detention for all refugees arriving by boat, in a frontal assault on the right to asylum, protected under international law. This set a global precedent for attacks on refugees.

In 2011, the Greens-backed Gillard Labor government reopened offshore detention centres among a raft of other measures aimed at preventing refugees from seeking asylum. This went hand in hand with an escalation of Australian involvement in predatory imperialist wars and military preparations, spearheaded by the United States, that have displaced millions over the past two decades.

As nationalist and pro-capitalist organisations, Labor, the Greens and the trade unions defend the whole framework of “border protection,” that underlies the decades-long assault on those fleeing war and oppression.

The experiences of the pandemic have further underscored the need for workers to come to the defence of refugees, as part of the fight for the social and democratic rights of the working class as a whole.

Sri Lankan plantation workers strike against wage cuts

M. Thevarajah

Hundreds of plantation workers at tea estates in Hatton, Maskeliya and Nanuoya in the Nuwara-Eliya district walked out on strike this month in protest against wage and allowance cuts and increased production targets imposed by Regional Plantation Companies.

Uda Rathalla Estate workers picketing against austerity measures

The stoppages were in defiance of the plantation unions—the Ceylon Workers Congress (CWC), the National Union of Workers (NUW), the Upcountry People’s Front (UPF), the Lanka Jathika Estate Workers Union (LJEWU) and the Democratic Workers Congress (DWC)—which have fully endorsed managements’ attacks.

• About 300 workers from Uda Rathalla Estate in Nanuoya, which is run by Kalani Valley Plantations, walked out on September 10 against wage cuts and the sacking of two permanent workers from the estate’s day childcare centre.
  
  
• Some 175 workers from the Agarawatte division of the Strathspey Estate, which is controlled by the Maskeliya Plantation Company, held a two-day strike on September 9 and 10.
  
  
• Up to 150 workers from the Sempahawatte division of Strathdon Estate, which is owned by Hatton Plantation Company, staged a three-day strike beginning September 10.
  
  
• Over 100 workers from the 3rd division of Gawarawila Estate at Upcott in Maskeliya struck on September 11. The estate is controlled by the Horana Plantation Company.

Fearing that the strikes would rapidly spread throughout the plantations, senior CWC and NUW officials immediately moved to stop all industrial action. CWC leader Jeevan Thondaman, who is President Gotabaya Rajapakse’s current state minister for plantation housing and community infrastructure, and P. Digambaram, the leader of NUW and the previous government’s minister of plantation infrastructure, personally intervened to stop the strikes.

Both officials offered worthless promises to the plantation workers, claiming that they would resolve the issues by “discussing with plantation management.”

As well as cutting wages, plantation management is demanding even higher production rates. At the Uda Rathalla Estate, the daily tea plucking target is 18 kilos per worker, but as one female picker told the media, “if we pluck one kilo less than the daily target we are only paid a half day’s wages, that is 350 rupees [$US1.89].”

Another worker said, “We told the Assistant Labour Commissioner and the trade unions about these unjust work demands but nobody cares about that; they are all supporting estate management.”

Strathdon estate workers have to pluck 19 kilos per day but if they fail to pluck at least 12 kilos they only receive a half-day’s pay. Workers said that all the unions, including the CWC and NUW, held discussions with the Assistant Labour Commissioner at Hatton and the plantation companies, and agreed to the cuts at Strathdon and at Strathspey Estate, where the daily target is 18 kilos.

Uda Rathalla Estate workers speak with SEP campaigners

The 2018 collective agreement signed between the plantation unions and the companies included increased productivity demands and wage cuts, which have been systematically imposed by management over the past 18 months in the face of mounting opposition from workers.

By increasing the plucking target, Sri Lankan plantation companies expect to drive up daily targets to levels similar to those in India and Kenya. According to the Regional Plantation Companies (RPCs), the average daily plucking target of an individual worker in Sri Lanka is 18–20 kilos. In India and Kenya it is 40 and 60 kilos respectively.

The “revenue share” or out-grower system being proposed by plantation companies is another component of management demands for higher productivity in Sri Lanka. Under this exploitative scheme, a single family is given a piece of land with about 1,000–1,500 tea bushes.

Workers and their families have to maintain and harvest the tea. Although the company provides fertiliser and agricultural chemicals, this cost is deducted from the revenue earned from the tea harvest. All retirement benefits, such as the Employees Provident Fund (EPF) and Employees Trust Fund, are abolished under this system.

Not only that, but plantation companies are moving to evict the workers and their families from the estates and force them to live in “new estate villages.” This means that the provision of limited housing, healthcare and education facilities, under the existing arrangements, will end.

In December 2018, the plantation unions betrayed a struggle of 200,000 estate workers who walked out on strike to demand that their daily wage be increased from 500 to 1,000 rupees. In a crude attempt to win the votes of estate workers in the last general election, Gotabhaya Rajapakse and the CWC leadership made a series of bogus promises to grant workers’ demands for a 1,000-rupee daily wage.

Plantation workers told WSWS correspondents that the new work targets were extremely difficult because many of the estates produced less tea as a result of poor maintenance.

As one Strathspey estate worker explained, “Management is not interested in clearing the estate. The grass has grown and it’s difficult to walk among tea bushes and we are attacked by snakes and wasps. This year several workers died from wasp attacks. Fertiliser and anti-fungal chemicals, which are required for the healthy growth of the tea bushes, are not being used and there are fewer leaves. This means that the daily target cannot be achieved.”

Mohanraj, from Strathdon estate, said: “Forty hectares of this estate have been abandoned and not cultivated and another nine hectares have been granted to a private businessman. The remainder of the estate is too small. This means less leaves and less income, and wages so low that we can’t even buy essential items.

Mohanraj

“Therefore, most of the workers from here go to Colombo in search of jobs and the women go to the Middle East. When we went on strike both [CWC leader] Jeevan Thondaman and [NUW leader] Digambaram came here and told us to stop the strike, but they provided no resolution to our demands. The unions all back the government and the companies, otherwise the companies could not act this way.”

Mohanraj said he supported the World Socialist Web Site’s call for workers’ to break from the unions and form action committees. “We ourselves have to organise the struggle to win our rights,” he said.

Bhavana, from Strathspey estate, said management’s daily production demands could not be reached, even if workers were on the job for eight hours without a break. “These targets cannot be met in the rainy and drought periods. When our wage is cut, both our EPF and bonuses are also cut,” she said.

“I’m a member of the CWC and I argue with the union leaders at the estate over what the unions are doing for these problems. They are silent. They are with the management and are involved in secret discussions with the management. They do not tell us what they discuss.”

While the Sri Lankan tea industry has faced a deep crisis since 2014, this has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Much of the country’s tea is purchased by Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Russia. In the first six months of 2019, 129 million tons were exported to these countries. This declined by 14.5 percent during the same period this year.

Under bogus plans to “rescue the tea industry,” the Rajapakse government is planning to intensify its attacks on plantation workers.

Earlier this month, President Rajapakse told a meeting of the Presidential Task Force for Economic Resurgence that 10 out of 20 RPCs have been deactivated and that these estates should be granted to small tea holders, a proposal endorsed by the CWC, NUW and DWC. The government also plans to auction off some estate land for gem mining. These socially destructive plans will see thousands of estate workers and their families lose their jobs and accommodation and face economic destitution.

Hollywood unions ratify return to work agreement dictated by giant corporations

Marc Wells

After months of negotiations behind closed doors, the Hollywood unions have reached a return-to-work agreement that will expose entertainment industry workers to the COVID-19 contagion as television and film production resumes.

The Teamsters, the Basic Crafts Unions, the Directors Guild of America (DGA), the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA), the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE)—reached the deal earlier this week with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP). The latter includes Paramount, Sony, Disney, Warner Bros. and other major movie studios, most broadcast and cable television networks, as well as independent film and television production companies. The deal is a waiver handed out to the major companies for the resumption of production that was halted with the March lockdown due to the pandemic.

Hollywood sign (Photo: Thomas Wolf)

The agreement went into effect on September 21 and will be effective until April 30, 2021. Its framework is a unions’ report issued last June, deceitfully named “The Safe Way Forward.” While the document has been presented as based on science, it clearly specifies the high risks involved, but essentially concludes, “Taking action based upon these guidelines is an essential and necessary element of any such return to work.”

In the report, lab-based PCR diagnostic testing is deemed as the cornerstone for a safe work environment and it is applied to every cast and crew member before the first workday, then only periodically.

While testing is certainly one of several science-based measures to monitor and possibly control the spread of the virus, its inadequate application only seeks to justify the dangerous reopening of the industry amid a contagion that has already killed 200,000 people in the US and nearly one million worldwide.

The agreement signed this week adopts the unions’ test-based premise, as well as the use of protective equipment (on the basis of availability) and a “zone system” that would supposedly segment interaction between workers on the basis of their tasks.

Zone A is the area where all activity takes place without protective equipment or social distancing. It can be as large as necessary, can function for several hours and can exist as a bubble within Zone B. Testing occurs three times a week.

Zone B is the rest of the production where social distancing as well as protective equipment requirements are supposed to be observed. According to the unions’ recommendation, “people cleared to work in Zone A ONLY come into contact with people in Zone B who are rigorously practicing physical distancing.” Testing in Zone B will take place once a week.

Zones C and D include other workers in production areas other than the set or employees associated with the production, who are able to wear protective equipment at all times.

This classification alone should be sufficient to give an idea of how vulnerable such environments will be. All that is required to access Zones A and B is a test within the last 48 hours. Moreover, the agreement is subject to testing availability: in case of a shortage, the “Producers and Unions shall discuss the possibility of appropriate adjustments in the foregoing testing requirements.” In other words, the protocol is arbitrary and subject to the market law of supply and demand, not to a rational plan for the preservation of social health care.

The unions admit that to “mitigate the risk of people getting sick when they are violating every physical distancing guideline for hours on end, for weeks at a time” ultimately comes down to “a lot of testing” [emphasis in original]. However, testing will occur once or three times a week, depending on the zone, inevitably exposing workers to a relatively high risk of contagion.

Other provisions, such as a meager 10-day sick leave and a quarantine pay based on the scale for the employee’s job classification/applicable minimum, are completely insufficient, especially in light of the risks involved. First, the experiences of the last six months and the scientific evidence show a high number of long-term cases, certainly longer than 10 days.

Additionally, after quarantine a worker can only be reinstated in the case “the position continues to exist, or the role has not been recast.” Due to the nature of film and television production and its strict schedule, it is quite possible that a quarantine period will result in the job being lost, along with pay, which is replaced by the reduced minimum scale quarantine pay.

Anyone who has worked on a set knows that such a zone system cannot be enforced. Social distancing is often impossible for those who handle equipment. Film and television work are very physical and collaborative. Sanitizing common surfaces, bathroom sharing and, importantly, air ventilation and purification, are not properly addressed in the new agreement. The only reference to bathrooms is in consideration of possible additional units whose cost “shall be excluded from consideration of whether a program falls within a given budget tier.”

As for ventilation, the airborne nature of this virus makes it necessary for sets and recording studios to retrofit the air systems. Instead, the new protocol includes mere suggestions such as “Allow adequate ventilation of indoor locations” or “[i]n indoor spaces, ventilation systems and other measures should be used to increase circulation of outdoor air as much as possible.” This assures that the virus will be easily transmitted.

Responding to the collaboration of the unions, the AMPTP wrote that it “wishes to express its appreciation not only to the unions, but to the hundreds of others who became involved in the return-to-work effort for their willingness to collaborate to resolve the difficult workplace issues presented by operating in a coronavirus world.”

Such a statement makes it clear that there is no dividing line between the interests of the corporations and the unions, which have agreed to risk the lives and health of thousands of entertainment workers.

In typical fashion, the unions announced the agreement to their membership as an accomplished fact, with no consultation or ratification vote. Each union is now announcing webinars in which members will be force-fed a corporate decision. “The new measures will be implemented by employers in order to minimize the risk of transmission,” the unions said in a joint statement.

Perhaps the most revealing statement came from IATSE president Matthew Loeb, who said, “Though this process was not easy, unprecedented inter-union collaboration and unwavering solidarity enabled our unions to achieve strong COVID-19 protections that will translate into tangibly safer workplaces.”

Both the unions and companies are exploiting the precarious economic situation of entertainment workers to push through this deadly return to work. As the bitter experiences of workers in the auto, meatpacking, health care and other industries shows, whatever safety “theatre” is employed to justify reopening will be quickly abandoned to increase productivity and profits.

Entertainment workers, like their brothers and sisters in every other sector of the economy, must take matters in their own hands: form rank-and-file safety committees, advance demands on the basis of independent science and fight to prepare a general strike in unity with the entire working class.