The changing fashion trends due to the pandemic

Zeenat Khan

Along with everyone else, the fashion industry is also experiencing the effects of a global health crisis because of Covid-19. The $400 billion US fashion industry is in the middle of a huge crisis. The severe deterioration in fashion is having a serious impact on the global economy resulting in unemployment of millions of artisans, craftspeople, weavers, tailors and seamstresses to name a few. Though lockdown has been relaxed in many countries while coronavirus rages on, the future of the global fashion industry hangs in the balance. For millions around the world, fashion has changed as their homes are their headquarters for the unforeseeable future. As parts of the world are reopening, people are now unapologetically showing their sloppiness in terms of their clothing styles and grooming, and calling it “casual chic.” Since the beginning of April, clothing sales fell 79 percent in the United States. People simply are not getting dressed these days for work. A lot of people are working from home, and their wardrobe preference has changed. They are not investing on trendy clothes while working from home. Whether people are attending zoom sessions, conference calls or virtual court sessions, they are working in their casual attire.

This global pandemic is drastically changing the fashion world and the coronavirus crisis has upended the fashion trend in a major way. The longer we stay in this pandemic; our relationship with fashion will be changing and evolve into something more expressive personal style. To show up for work in the virtual world, people are dressing to appease themselves and not others. Many say why follow strict dress codes when you are not physically required to be in an office environment? Some tend to disagree by saying professional people have to dress well to present a respectable visual image. They have serious reservations against dressing freely or casually even when there is no front-facing interaction. There was a story in the New Yorker a few months back about a circuit judge in Florida. He got very irritated seeing attorneys attending virtual court hearings in pajamas or in T shirts from the comfort of their bedrooms. He sent a letter to all the local attorneys about the need for proper business attire during court proceedings. There are some exceptions though. A guy might wear a button-down shirt and a tie but would keep his boxers or pajama bottom on while attending a virtual meeting. I have actually seen people doing it. Most guys these days are dressing in sweatpants, T shirt, and baseball cap while working from home. They only will put on a pair of sneakers when taking the dog out for exercise, picking up groceries or getting a prescription filled by going to the drive-through window.

How about women? Gone are the days of women walking around in elegant and charming stiletto/pencil heels and bright colored lipsticks. A woman executive now might wear a jacket while in a conference call with her pajama bottom. Some are working from their bed and others do office work from under their blankets. They simply do not want to get up, get ready and hardly make it to their workstation.

Fashion now has become somewhat unisex and people are embracing the mix and match aesthetics. For creative people with a strong sense of style, mix and matching design style are not as hard to achieve as people used to think. The experts believe the trend will continue in the post-pandemic era. Sales of products including clothing have fell drastically since the pandemic started full force in mid-March. Under lockdown, most people’s concern is how to meet basic needs. People are not simply buying things now as before.

High demands for false eye lashes, mascara and other eyebrow products are up by 5 percent, according to market research firm NDP Group. Women are paying more attention to their eyes now as a way of expressing themselves as one’s half face is covered by a protective mask while in public. “It makes complete sense,” said Larissa Jensen, a beauty analyst for NPD. “When you have to go out and you’re wearing a protective face mask, those are the products that emphasize your ‘smize’ — your smiling eyes.” Sales of lip products, meanwhile, fell 5 percent in May. “After all, Jensen said, nobody wants lipstick smudges inside their masks.”

According to a December 5 article in the Elle magazine, famous fashion brands such as H & M and Zara have been cancelling orders in Bangladesh. The ready-made garment industry mainly serves Europe and USA. This sector brings 80 percent of the country’s export income. “Due to store closures and sale downturns, Forbes claims western fashion brands have cancelled over $2.8 (£2.26) billion in orders from Bangladeshi suppliers, potentially sparking a humanitarian crisis.”

“At least 1.2 million workers in Bangladesh are said to have been directly impacted by order cancellations, and of the thousands of factories and suppliers who have lost their contracts: ‘72.4% said they were unable to provide their workers with some income when furloughed (sent home temporarily), and 80.4% said they were unable to provide severance pay when order cancellations resulted in worker dismissals.’ Thankfully, campaigners have already successfully urged companies (such as H&M) to extend some sort of compensation to their suppliers, and there is hope more will follow.”

With the pandemic ravaging human lives, globally people have returned to basics in terms of clothing style and upkeep on a daily basis. Beauty salons and barbershops everywhere have been transformed by the global pandemic. People are relying on self-care in order to avoid intimate interaction as social distancing is the norm now because of extreme circumstances. The designers and sellers of products have been making grim predictions that when people return to work, fashion trends might not continue as before. With shopping malls opening and money being very tight in most families, people simply cannot afford to make impulsive purchases now. When a vaccine is available to the masses, and life returns to normal, the designers and retailers will have to rethink their conception about fashion and will have to come up with different strategies about making the consumers wanting to buy new things. Fashion might not reemerge as before by simply reversing to the pre-pandemic time. If there is a long-term shift in consumer outlook, when they choose between basics vs luxury – undoubtedly, it will affect the fashion industry in a major way. The fashion houses will have no choice but to meet high consumer demands. Consumers probably will be more focused on buying affordable and sustainable products that will reflect the latest trends.

How can one look more stylish at a lower price? The designers everywhere are still making seasonal fashion like they used to but now they are more fixated on making clothes using comfortable fabrics and by offering lower prices. As I am in the middle of choosing a few holiday outfits for my loved ones, my preferred shop J Jill’s winter catalog reflects the sign of the times in this particular hard period in history. Creative people can still look stylish by getting a handful of new things and style it with their existing clothes in unexpected color combinations and not max out their credit cards. At the end of the day, it’s about how you style it, not how much you had spent for your garments.

As coronavirus rages on, the fashion houses across Asia and Europe are being heavily impacted because of very low sales. Because of the financial strains, everyone’s priority has changed. If the pandemic continues in the foreseeable future, the designers will have to be more creative by simply making fashion affordable. I know that the desire for fashionable clothes has not been totally extinguished. We simply cannot spend money now to soothe our inner need to change our wardrobe nonstop.

Fashion designers in developing countries are not too far behind in terms of coming up with innovative ideas to stay afloat during this crisis time. A fashion house in Dhaka, Bangladesh named Bibi Productions is selling a lot of handmade things made from all natural products that consumers can order online. Bibi’s line include essentials such as saree, face mask, washable backpack, scarves made with gamcha material (a traditional thin, coarse cotton towel, often with checked design, found in South Asian countries such as India, Pakistan and Bangladesh).

A scarf made in gamcha style

Indian weavers were enthused by PM Narendra Modi’s gamcha face mask and it boosted e-commerce and employment in Kanpur. “Inspired by the captivating red and white ‘gamcha’ that Prime Minister Narendra Modi used as a face mask during his address to the nation while announcing lockdown 2.0, handloom weavers in Uttar Pradesh’s Baranbaki have got themselves busy. The demand for this traditional piece of clothing has zoomed,” reported the Business Standard.

Since lockdown is somewhat relaxed now, in a lot of the countries the fashion houses and famous designers have enlisted celebrities to promote their more affordable clothes. Purchasing a designer number is out of the question for almost everyone now-a-days. So the fashion houses are finding creative ways to make fashion inexpensive for middle-income families. They are trying to persuade the consumers to buy something new by making bold statements through their celebrity recruits. As some of the big name department stores are facing bankruptcy, these celebrities are urging the public to keep fashion afloat.

Once people re-emerge back into the world and resume their previous lifestyles, the guess is: fashion and style will not bounce back to a similar nature of what it was before. Designers have to create gorgeous clothes for a pragmatic wardrobe. We will most possibly see more athletic wear and casual outfits for office goers. Now that people are more used to wearing casual attire, fashion simply will not go back to normal after the pandemic as emphasis will be on comfort rather than looking ridiculously expensive in designer outfits. When the world starts to recover from the severe economic downfall due to the pandemic, the designers will have a long wait to be able to entice people into buying high-end fashionable clothes. We will most definitely see a long term shift in consumer attitude in their preference of clothing, shoes and accessories. The overly priced haute couture designs shown on the runways of Paris, London, Milan, New York and Mumbai during fashion week will have to change with the times.

To Resolve the Farming Crisis We Need A Different Paradigm

Bharat Dogra

Whenever we hear about serious problems relating to farmers and farming and how to resolve them, we hear this generally in the context of three versions. One version is of existing and upcoming big business interests who want to have an increasing role and ultimately domination in the farming sector. The second version is of the government which while supporting this corporatization on the whole tries also to dress this up and somewhat modify this in such a way that the government may appear to be also protecting the interests of  farmers  in some ways. The third version is of the mainstream farmers’ movement whose main emphasis is on ensuring an adequate price to farmers for their produce.

Unfortunately none of these versions is capable of resolving the crisis of farming and farming in a long-term, sustainable way. The longer-term sustainable solutions have to be found outside the paradigm of these three dominant versions. Unfortunately the media discussion is often confined to only these versions, or a mix of them. On the basis of such discussions we can at best get only temporary and patchy solutions; at worst we will just go from one crisis to another.

Let us consider some of the solutions which have been offered in the past by  these three versions. The big business interests have often talked in terms of GM crops, a new version being gene-edited crops. There is enough scientific evidence to show that this is nothing but a recipe for disaster. The government has often mentioned contract-based farming, with some safeguards, but the  past experience shows how this can be very harmful for ordinary small farmers, also in terms of pushing wrong cropping-patterns and endangering food security.

The mainstream farmer movements have been pushing repeatedly for a higher price which is often stated by them to be  50 per cent more than the  broadly defined cost of cultivation.  This has been discussed so often and emphasized so much as to create an impression that this provides an ultimate solution for the woes of farmers, while the basic fallacy of this approach has been entirely neglected.

The basic fallacy of this approach is that as soon as a price in certain excess of  cost of cultivation is demanded, there is an implicit acceptance of rising costs and the most important task of decreasing costs of farming gets neglected. Since the advent of green-revolution technology, the most important cause of increasing economic problems of farmers as well as their increasing debts relates to increasing costs of farming. So the task of reducing costs is very important. A very important component  of the increase in costs relates to ever- increasing  costs of those industrial, cash-purchased inputs which are also harming farm-ecology like never before. So a basic task has to be reduce  these cash-purchased, costly, ecologically harmful inputs as  much as possible by bringing in cost-reducing, ecologically beneficial, self-reliant methods which make optimal use of village resources while removing or reducing dependence on external input cash purchases.

While this is eminently reasonable, the industrial interests do not want this approach because their earnings increase only when farmers purchase inputs from them. The media gets advertisement revenue mainly from  industrial interests. Political leaders are often in collusion with industrial interests. There is increasing intrusion of big business in agricultural research and extension as well . Hence what is most needed in farming sector in reality does not generally get the support of the most powerful interests.

It is only farmers who can raise the most genuine demands but a lot of efforts are made to entice some of them or some of their leaders towards raising their demands in such a way that the heavy dependence on industrial inputs is not reduced or disturbed. Hence the demand for keeping purchase price in certain excess  of costs is raised. It can be 50% excess or 70% excess, this is not the real issue. The real issue is that as soon as you present the main demand as a demand for a price in excess of costs there is less incentive for deceasing costs, as rise in costs will only lead to  rise in price the farmer will get. Having trapped the farmer in this narrow demand, politicians then compete for the vote of farmers by satisfying them within these narrow limits, without bothering about the really needed change of moving towards eco-friendly, sustainable, self-reliant, extremely low-cost farming.

The danger is that with everyone looking at their narrowly defined interests the real objectives of justice, sustainability, protection of environment and creative durable livelihoods will be neglected. So we have to move out of the current narrowly defined paradigm of farm debate as the solutions based on justice, sustainability, protection of environment, checking climate change, ensuring very creative and durable livelihood to present day farmers as well as landless workers, protection of soil and soil-organisms , pollinators, care of farm animals etc. lie largely outside the current paradigm of farm debate. Interested readers may also look at my article in countercurrents.org dated November 25 2020 titled ‘Social Agro-Ecology is the Key to the Real Progress and Security of Food and Farming Systems’. Suffice it to say here  that we need a meeting of the three main objectives of justice, protection of environment and ensuring adequate healthy, safe food to people.

The pandemic and the normalization of death

Andre Damon & David North

The United States is in the midst of one of the most intense periods of mass death in the nation’s history. More than 16,000 people have died from the coronavirus in the course of just one week, an average of 2,300 every day.

By way of comparison, during the 1918 “Spanish flu” pandemic, some 675,000 people in the US lost their lives over two years, an average of less than 1,000 people every day. In 1995, at the height of the horrific AIDS epidemic, 41,000 people died in a single year, amounting to approximately 112 people per day, or 1/20th the current rate of death.

Coffins with the bodies of victims of coronavirus are stored waiting for burial or cremation at the Collserola morgue in Barcelona, Spain. (Image Credit: AP/Creator: Emilio Morenatti)

Within the next few days, the total death toll from the coronavirus will surpass 300,000, or nearly one out of every 1,000 people in the entire country. The coronavirus is now the leading cause of death in the United States, surpassing heart disease and cancer.

Under conditions in which this level of death occurs day after day, week after week, month after month, the official response is to minimize the catastrophe that is unfolding.

Death has been “normalized.”

In the media, the death toll is reported every day. There is even, from time to time, reference to some particularly ghastly incident, such as the death of both parents or the wiping out of a family. But the subject is dropped, and the newscast moves on to the next item. There is no acknowledgment that this unmitigated catastrophe requires a massive and immediate response. There is no attempt to examine who is dying, where and under what conditions.

Trump, the fascistic would-be dictator in the White House, has treated the deaths as of no significance— “virtually nobody” is affected, as he put it earlier this year. The entire policy of the Trump administration has been based on preventing any coordinated response to stop the spread of illness and death.

As for President-elect Joe Biden, he casually observed last week that “we’re likely to lose another 250,000 people dead between now and January.” He presented this massive death toll as if it were an unavoidable cosmic event, requiring no immediate action. There was no demand for emergency action to prevent this forecast from being realized. Yesterday, Biden outlined his coronavirus policy, centered on the demand that schools must remain open, which is seen by the ruling class as essential in keeping workers on the job.

The normalization of death arises from the decision, rooted in class interests, to treat “economic health” and “human life” as comparable phenomena, with the former prioritized over the latter. Once the legitimacy of the comparison and prioritization is accepted—as it is by the political establishment, the oligarchs and the media—mass death is viewed as unavoidable.

It is from this awful calculus that the slogan emerges, “The cure can’t be worse than the disease.”

Under capitalism, what is meant by “the economy” is the exploitation of the working class. To the extent that the “cure”—that is, the most elementary measures to save lives—impinges on the process of profit accumulation, it is unacceptable. Anything that undermines the extraction of surplus value from the working class, or diverts this surplus value from the capitalists through emergency measures and social services, must be rejected.

From thence the conclusion: Workers must die. When Marx refers to capitalism’s “blind unrestrainable passion, its werewolf hunger for surplus-labor,” these are not just literary phrases. They express the horror of social reality.

The response of the ruling class to the pandemic within the United States and throughout the world arises out of the conditions that preceded it. It has been nearly four decades since Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher assumed office, proclaiming (in the words of Thatcher) that there is “no such thing as society.” The right-wing libertarian “free-market” ideology peddled by Thatcher and Reagan became a staple of every part of the political establishment, embraced by Democrats like Bill Clinton and Laborites like Tony Blair. Their reactionary “free market” nostrums are the basis of capitalist policies in every country.

For decades, Democrats and Republicans alike slashed social spending and welfare programs, funneling ever greater sums into the financial markets. In the process, it was proclaimed, corporations not only had the rights of human beings, the interests of corporations—and the financial oligarchy—were elevated above human beings.

In a financialized world, in which human life has only an abstractly economic significance, those who are not engaged in producing surplus value—and whose cost of care subtracts from the mass of surplus value produced by the expenditure of labor power—are “worthless.” Wherever calculations of profit and loss are made, the ghost of Malthus is always present.

From this basic class logic flows the policy that has been implemented: the downplaying of the threat of the virus, the massive bailout of the rich, the campaign to reopen the factories and reopen the schools. The predictable consequences of this policy are now unfolding.

There are other factors that compound the indifference of the ruling elite. The coronavirus pandemic is a disease that affects primarily the elderly and the working class. Covid-19 spreads rapidly in factories and in-person workplaces, disproportionately affecting the working class who live in shared and multigenerational households and often lack opportunities for social distancing.

In the United States, 80 percent of those who have died have been older than the retirement age of 66. Just five percent of the country’s Covid-19 cases have occurred in nursing homes, but these facilities have accounted for 40 percent of deaths, or more than 100,000 people.

But even the spread of the virus into the ruling class, and into the White House itself, has no effect on the response.

Stopping the pandemic and saving lives is inseparable from getting rid of the social order that produced it. The senseless and preventable sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of lives is the greatest testament to the reactionary and inhuman character of the capitalist order, and the necessity for replacing it with socialism.

Brexit negotiations: Johnson in eleventh-hour discussion with von der Leyen

Thomas Scripps

The UK and the European Union (EU) have yet to reach a deal on Britain’s future relationship with the trading block, despite mounting crises on both sides of the negotiations.

Whatever result is reached will prove to be a staging post for deepening trade and military conflicts between Europe’s rival imperialist powers and pave the way for a fresh assault on workers’ living conditions in Britain and throughout the continent.

After talks between the UK’s chief negotiator David Frost and his EU counterpart Michel Barnier were called off again last Friday evening, Prime Minister Boris Johnson and European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen held a phone call Saturday. A joint statement acknowledged that “significant differences remain” and announced that “a further effort should be undertaken by our negotiating teams to assess whether they can be resolved.”

Negotiations resumed Sunday and Monday, but both sides reported “no tangible progress”. In a second phone call between Johnson and von der Leyen Monday evening, the pair agreed to an in-person meeting this week to discuss the “remaining differences”. That meeting takes place today.

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson (Wikimedia Commons)

By law, Britain leaves the European Union and its common market at midnight on December 31. If there is no deal in place, the UK and Europe will begin trading on World Trade Organisation terms, requiring tariffs, quotas and customs checks.

For workers to take up a fight for their own interests in this unfolding crisis, it is necessary to cut through the endless government propaganda and media chatter to the real class interests at stake.

The focus of the negotiations makes clear the wholly reactionary character of this falling out between imperialist powers utterly hostile to the interests of Europe’s workers.

The two sides’ most fundamental difference is over the so-called “level playing field” and the means of enforcing it. EU member states are formally bound by laws enforcing worker and environmental protections. But these protections, the product of decades of struggle by the working class, have already been massively eroded since the onset of globalisation and the turning of social democratic parties and trade unions into direct agents of the corporations. With the intensification of the global crisis of capitalism, especially since the 2008 financial crash, and the global turn to trade war, the ruling class everywhere is seeking to destroy whatever remains of these protections to ensure global competitiveness.

The Brexit vote—spearheaded by the most rapacious sections of the British ruling elite, on a programme of transforming the UK into an unregulated “Singapore-on-Thames”—is intended to give Britain a head start in this race to the bottom. The Johnson government is seeking to push this advantage and position the UK as a global freebooting economy while still maintaining easy access to the EU’s enormous common market that accounts for over 40 percent of its trade, allowing British capitalists to make huge gains through the super-exploitation of their workforces. This is most nakedly expressed in its push to establish deregulated “free ports”—a longstanding aim of Chancellor Rishi Sunak—with the bidding process for new sites beginning last month, and the first due to open at the end of next year.

The EU is working to block this strategy until it can accelerate its own destruction of remaining social protections and compete on Britain’s cut-price level. Its negotiators insist that Britain must maintain a “regulatory alignment” with the EU on pain of heavy tariffs and taxes and strict quotas. Europe’s leading powers, France and Germany, have made clear their unanimity on this issue.

EU members also face limitations on providing state aid to private businesses, as a means of enforcing market competition—another component of the “level playing field” demanded by Europe. These measures are being undermined by the global drive to protectionism and nationalism exemplified by Brexit. Britain intends to break free of these limitations.

Completely unmentioned in the negotiations or their coverage in the media are conflicts over foreign and military policy. France has emerged as a hardliner in talks with UK, which reflects its push for Europe to develop “strategic autonomy” from the United States. With Britain long functioning as American imperialism’s point-man in Europe, France views a UK in a close relationship with Europe but with far looser controls on its actions as antithetical to its own economic and military ambitions on the continent.

Despite these fierce conflicts, neither side wants to force a break, instead relying on brinkmanship to extract concessions from the other. On Monday, Johnson promised not to break international law with its Internal Markets Bill—which reneges on previous legal agreements with the EU over the Northern Irish border and is due to be voted into law this week—if a deal was reached. Yesterday, the British government announced that it would drop the illegal clauses in the bill after reaching a specific agreement with the EU on Northern Ireland, in what is widely considered a climbdown by the UK.

The EU pushed its advantage Tuesday by announcing it would be prepared to continue talks into the New Year. This would involve Britain crashing out of the union without a deal in place on January 1, causing huge economic damage and placing the UK government under immense pressure to secure any agreement. France had previously threatened to veto any deal it considered “rushed” through at the last minute. The Johnson government responded, “We have been clear that the future relationship needs to be concluded by the end of the year, and negotiation won’t continue into next year.”

In attempting to avoid a “no deal”, both the UK and the EU are balancing their predatory interests against volatile domestic and international situations. The UK is already among the major economies worst hit by the pandemic, with the OECD predicting a 6 percent contraction by the end of 2021. Forecasts for the effect of a “no deal” Brexit are universally dire. A confidential Cabinet Office briefing leaked late last month warned of a “systemic economic shock” and consequent “industrial action” and increasing “community tensions”. This would impact a population already seething at the government’s homicidal “herd immunity” response to the pandemic.

The economic impact on the EU would be felt by those European economies mostly closely tied to British markets, and a “no deal” would threaten military cooperation which Germany is particularly anxious to strengthen. A “no deal” Brexit would deal a political blow to the union at a time when it is already facing a mounting threat of break-up due to rising national tensions between the core countries, Italy, Spain, and the Eastern European states, Poland and Hungary in particular. The two member states are blocking a multi-billion-euro EU budget in protest against attached requirements that governments who receive funding must abide by the “rule of law”.

Hungary and Poland’s blatant authoritarianism is considered an embarrassment to the EU, which threatens to expose its rotten claim to being the world’s beacon of democracy. But France and Germany are hardly going to force the issue, since their own governments are giving succour to the far-right, whipping up Islamophobia, handing carte blanche to brutal police and state security services, and criminalising Muslim and left-wing organisations, including the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (Socialist Equality Party) in Germany.

Both the UK and the EU are hanging on the course of events in the US following the November presidential elections. The victory of Democrat Joe Biden, whose hostility to Brexit is well-known, was a boon to the EU, whose leading powers now hope to form an equal partnership with American imperialism based on an opposition to China. The Tory government’s Brexit strategy had leant heavily on a slavish adherence to Donald Trump’s “America First” agenda and its hostility to the EU. Johnson must either reach an accommodation acceptable to the incoming Democrat administration, or hope for the success of Trump’s ongoing efforts to overturn the election result with the backing of the Republican Party.

Writing against “social patriotism” and nationalism in “War and the Fourth International” in 1934, Leon Trotsky explained that the task of socialists, and ultimately the working class, was “to follow not the war map but the map of the class struggle”. The same can be said of the Brexit negotiations. All possible outcomes—the success of failure rf one imperialist power over another—will mean a redoubled assault on the European working class and an escalation of global militarism.

UK COVID-19 vaccination programme will not halt pandemic deaths due to end of lockdown

Robert Stevens

The first people in the world were given the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine in the UK yesterday. The first person to be inoculated was a 90-year-old grandmother, Margaret Keenan, at her local National Health Service hospital in Coventry.

Pfizer/BioNTechs is not the first vaccine in operation globally, with almost a million people in China already given a vaccine that is still in its testing phase. At least three vaccines in China have been approved for emergency use outside clinical trials. More than 100,000 people have been given the Sputnik V vaccine in Russia.

Boris Johnson’s government has ordered 40 million doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech drug, with the first 800,000 doses arriving last week from Belgium. The government is to roll out the largest vaccination programme in UK history in two phases, with 50 hospitals initially selected. From December 14, it will be also be administered in 1,000 GP-led centres.

The first 10 million doses will be used mainly among older adults in a care home and by care home workers (1,098,000 people). Those aged 80 and over already attending hospital as an outpatient or who are being discharged home after a hospital stay will receive it. Health and social care workers will be also be among the over 5 million people in this second group.

Margaret Keenan receives the vaccine (credit: NHS England and NHS Improvement-Twitter)

To be immunised each person must receive two doses, three weeks apart. Another week must pass before they are immune, meaning the whole process takes about one month.

Vaccinating the whole of the UK’s 66 million population will take months and well into next year. Britain’s Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Patrick Vallance told Sky News Tuesday, “It's going to take quite a long time to make sure everybody in the at-risk groups and all of the groups that are difficult to reach get vaccinated as appropriate... It may be that next winter even with vaccination we need measures like masks in place--we don't know yet how good all the vaccines are going to be at preventing the transmission of the virus.”

The first 800,000 doses only cover 400,000 people. Even if the next several million ordered doses arrive this month, as ordered, from manufacturers who are already reporting delays and problems, this only covers a fraction of the population. The next three bands in line to receive the vaccine are all those 75 years of age and over, 70 and over, and 65 and over. Only then are all 2.2 million individuals aged 16-64 with underlying health conditions set to receive the vaccine. They will be followed by all those aged 60 and over.

By that stage all the first 40 million doses ordered by the UK will be used up. This excludes the age bracket 55-60s (4.4 million people) 50-55 (4.6 million) and the rest of the population (41.5 million).

There are also major logistical problems involved in delivery, particularly to remote rural areas, especially as the vaccine must be stored at 94 degrees Fahrenheit (-70 degrees Celsius). It can only be used within 6 hours of dilution before being discarded.

Despite the immense significance for mankind of the availability of the drug--and promising developments with other vaccines coming on stream--its ability to save lives given its 90 to 95 percent effectivity rate against COVID-19, is being undermined by Britain’s ruling elite in their drive to keep the economy open and make profits.

The government ended its own limited four-week national lockdown in the UK on December 2—replacing it with another ineffectual “Tier system” allowing tens of millions of people to travel, shop and use pubs, bars and restaurants. This will lead to a massive loss of lives, even as COVID-19 continues to kill hundreds every day.

There is no significant pattern of decline, whether in cases, hospitalisations or deaths, to justify ending the lockdown. Yesterday another 616 died of COVID-19, up 13 on the same day the previous week and a substantial increase on the previous day’s 172 fatalities. 12,282 new cases were also recorded.

The national lockdown was ended citing a small decline in cases and deaths due to the very policy being abandoned. The R (Reproduction) rate of the virus fell below 1, but cases and deaths remained high.

Last Thursday, the day the lockdown ended, deaths of people who perished within 28 days of a positive COVID-19 test—the government’s official measure—passed 60,000. The true figure is edging towards 80,000, with the Office for National Statistics (ONS) putting the figure at 76,000 deaths where COVID is mentioned on the death certificate and including deaths in recent days.

The government’s murderous decision to abandon any even limitedly effective restrictions for the next months, as well as continuing to keep open workplaces, schools, colleges, and universities, will see this number soar. Given the actions of Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government, which endorsed a herd immunity policy as the virus began to spread uncontrollably in the spring, tens of thousands more people will be dead in Britain before the vaccine is available to the wider population.

Ending the national lockdown was accompanied by an announcement that all shops are allowed to open for 24 hours a day in December and January to ensure a bumper Christmas and New Year of profits. Travel restrictions will be eased nationally during a five-day Christmas period of December 23—27 and up to three households will be able to meet up.

Johnson could not contain himself in Parliament when the Conservative government was backed by Labour MPs in voting December 1 to end the lockdown, declaring that “everyone in England, including those in tier 3, will be free to leave their homes for any reason. When they do, they will find the shops open for Christmas, the hairdressers open, the nail bars open, and gyms, leisure centres and swimming pools open.”

No guidance has been issued on how to deal with the impact of the virus over the New Year, traditionally a time when masses of people gather together in city centres and in households.

Prominent scientists have warned of what is to come. Professor Gabriel Scally, a public health expert from Bristol University and member of the Independent SAGE group that has criticised aspects of the government’s COVID-19 policy, said bluntly, "It's no use having a good Christmas if you're burying friends and relations in the new year."

Katherine Henderson, president of Royal College of Emergency Medicine, said, “If Covid cases become hospital cases and then sadly go on to become deaths, we will regret a Christmas season that gave granny Covid for Christmas.”

Professor Andrew Hayward, a member of the official Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) told BBC Radio 4, “My personal view is we’re putting far too much emphasis on having a near-normal Christmas… We know respiratory infections peak in January, so throwing fuel on the fire over Christmas can only contribute to this.”

Dr Chris Hopson, chief executive of NHS Providers, said that every region in the UK should be placed in Tier Three if COVID-19 hospital admissions had any chance of being kept down.

This scientific advice is being ignored. New figures this week showed that London, which was placed in the less restrictive Tier 2 to placate City financiers and big business, had an infection rate of 169.2 cases of coronavirus per 100,000 people during the week ending December 2. Analysis by the Daily Mail yesterday reveals that London, with a population of nearly 9 million, “is now recording more cases per day, for its size, than 27 of 61 authorities currently living under Tier Three curbs, including Nottingham, Leeds, Leicestershire, Bristol, Newcastle and Derby.”

The ruling class cannot be allowed to remain in control and carry out its irrational and barbaric decisions. The working class must intervene independently to ensure that lives are saved in a struggle against capitalism and for socialism.

Optare UK bus manufacturing workers strike for pay increase

Barry Mason

Workers at the Optare bus manufacturing plant in Sherburn-in-Elmet, North Yorkshire, England are continuing their strike in pursuit of a pay increase. The workers have not had a pay rise for the last two years.

The 100 Unite union members at the plant voted by a 73 percent majority for action. The ballot took place following months of fruitless negotiations. From October 15, the workers began a continuous overtime ban and a series of 48-hour discontinuous stoppages. From November 17, they escalated action by holding four-day strikes which are continuing. Around 500 workers are employed at the site.

Optare is a subsidiary of the Indian vehicle manufacturer Ashok Leyland, run by the Hinduja group.

The Hinduja group is controlled by four brothers, all multi-billionaires. Last year, Srichand and Gopichand Hinduja saw their fortune increase by £1.3 billion to £22 billion, as they topped the Sunday Times Rich List of the 1,000 richest people in the UK for the third time.

The Optare plant in Sherburn-in-Elmet (credit: Google Maps)

In August 2019, Optare agreed to implement a pay rise from November that year. The company reneged on its promise. Unite had been in negotiations with the company for the previous 18 months and on several occasions agreed to defer pushing the issue.

Speaking on the picket line at the start of industrial action on October 15, Unite union regional officer Richard Bedford said, “We’ve been in negotiations for 18 months now. Our members are wanting an RPI (Retail Price Index) increase plus one percent which is still not forthcoming.”

Exposing Unite’s role in suppressing the fight to win a pay rise, he continued, “We have agreed to defer negotiations on three occasions already throughout these negotiations…”

Unite was still hoping “to get the company back around the table to start talking about an increase,” even after the company announced prior to the stoppage that “it has put in place contingency plans to maintain production and to deliver orders during the industrial action”.

Every statement by the union since has been centred on begging the company to negotiate with their trusted partners. The North East, Yorkshire and Humber Unite twitter feed on November 16 stated, “Our members at Optare near Leeds have escalated their strike action to four days a week from today. Our message is clear, the company needs to stop making false promises and get round the table with a serious offer that reflects our members’ hard work.”

Richard Burgon, a local Labour MP and chairman of the Socialist Campaign Group, visited the picket line last month. While praising the “brave strike action following broken pay rise promises made by a company owned by billionaires,” Burgon speaks for a right-wing party which was bankrolled for years by the Hinduja brothers, when led by Tony Blair, and which still represents the billionaires and not the workers.

On November 6, North Yorkshire police visited the police line and ordered the workers to disperse citing COVID-19 legislation. They warned pickets that if they were to return, they would be issued with penalty notices for contravening lockdown rules. This was one day after national restrictions were reintroduced in England. The police attempted to break up the picket line despite workers being legally on strike, maintaining social distancing, and using hand sanitiser and PPE.

Unite sought a judicial review against the North Yorkshire police chief constable, and the secretary of state for health and social care, Matt Hancock, which was due to be heard November 13. The hearing did not go ahead as the government conceded the workers had the right to picket during the pandemic.

While the strike was allowed to continue, the incident reveals that the draconian powers the government has, under the Coronavirus Act legislation, is to be used against the working class.

The origins of Optare began in 1984 when Leyland closed its Charles H Roe vehicle bodywork plant in Leeds. This was during the second term of Margaret Thatcher’s Tory government, as privatization and deregulation laid waste to manufacturing industry. Russell Richardson, a director at Roe, set up Optare along with some former employees. It was able to win orders for its buses from the public transport bodies the West Yorkshire Passenger Transport Executive (WYPTE) and its South Yorkshire equivalent. It also took orders from the WYPTE’s successor arms-length company, Yorkshire Rider. Developing innovative designs, the company was able to expand its sales and even break into the export market, with sales to Sri Lanka.

In 1990, Optare joined the United Bus group which included the Dutch bus manufacturer DAF. After United Bus’s collapse in 1993 Optare reverted to an independent existence following a second management buyout. It continued developing innovative designs such as low-floor buses.

Optare was acquired by the Hungarian-owned North American Bus Industries (NABI) in 2000. This enabled Optare to export its buses into North American markets. However, in 2005 with NABI experiencing financial problems, another management buyout took place returning Optare to is independent status.

In 2008, as part of a complex takeover process, Optare joined forces with the Darwen Group, the successor organisation of the East Lancashire Coachbuilders company. The company formally known as Optare plc was floated on the stock exchange. A rationalisation process saw the newly created Optare plc close its Rotherham site.

In 2010, Optare began its present incarnation when the Hinduja brothers’ Ashok Leyland group acquired a 26 percent share, increasing it to 75 percent in 2011. Ashok Leyland now has a 99 percent share and total control. Under Ashok Leyland, Optare closed its East Lancashire site in 2012 after moving further out from its east Leeds site to a newly built facility in Sherburn-in-Elmet in 2011.

Ashok Leyland, the one-time subsidiary of British Leyland, is headquartered in Chennai in India. The second largest producer of commercial vehicles in India, it is the world’s third largest bus manufacturer and its 10th largest truck producer.

In its 2019 annual report and accounts Optare reported around £49 million revenues, almost doubling the previous year’s, but showed a near £9 million loss after tax.

In May, Optare, along with the UK other major bus manufacturers, Wrightbus, and Alexander Dennis, issued a begging letter to the government asking for state funding. It warned, “The COVID-19 crisis represents an immediate threat to the future of the UK bus manufacturing industry and its extensive supply chain. Forward orders have already been drastically reduced with many operators deferring or indeed cancelling their orders for new buses and coaches…

“Without immediate support, future orders will not be forthcoming, putting over 10,000 jobs and apprenticeship opportunities at risk. It is vital that Government funding is used immediately to enable bus operators to invest in their fleets, and the UK’s manufacturing base, with confidence.”

Optare workers face a global conglomerate intent to increasing profitability at the expense of its workforce. Workers must organise themselves in a rank and file committee, independently of Unite. The struggle for better wages and to defend jobs can only be successful based on the adoption of a socialist internationalist perspective, which is anathema to the pro-capitalist unions.

Airline unions try to impose wage freeze deal with Virgin Australia

Terry Cook

Within weeks of corporate raider Bain Capital fully taking over Virgin Australia, the country’s second largest carrier, the airline unions have signed off on “in-principle” work agreements that would inflict an 18-month to two-year pay freeze on the company’s remaining 6,000 workers.

This is on top of the unions opposing any unified struggle against the destruction of thousands of jobs at both Virgin and Qantas, the former publicly-owned airline, and the similar suppression of airline workers’ struggles internationally against massive job and pay cuts.

Virgin collapsed and went into administration in March, owing banks and other creditors more than $6.8 billion. It was eventually sold to Bain, a private equity firm selected by the administrators from a gaggle of corporate hyenas circling the failed airline looking for lucrative pickings.

Virgin Australia Airbus A320 at Christmas Island International Airport [Source: Wikimedia Commons]

The pay freeze deal, hatched during closed-door negotiations, was brokered by the Transport Workers Union (TWU), Flight Attendants Association of Australia (FAAA), Australian Services Union (ASU) and Australian Licensed Aircraft Engineers Association (ALAEA).

Anxious to prove their worth to Bain as reliable industrial police forces for further cost-cutting measures, the unions are trying to ram through the deal via online ballots, while providing their members with scant and misleading outlines of their agreements.

The unions even claim that the deal is an “achievement,” because it supposedly provides the surviving workers with “job security.” In reality, they are holding the threat of further job losses over their members’ heads to intimidate any opposition.

TWU national secretary Michael Kaine told media that the agreements ensure “Virgin workers will carry out the airline’s work as opposed to being outsourced.” ASU assistant national secretary Emeline Gaske said it was “pleasing the airline would keep roles in-house instead of contracting work to outside agencies.”

Summing up the unions’ pro-corporate role, ALAEA federal secretary Steve Purvinas said the pay freeze would help place “Virgin on the footing it needs to be a strong, competitive airline.” He called on the Liberal-National Coalition government to provide the company with millions of dollars more in more taxpayer-funded assistance “to ensure the airline’s future survival.”

The unions’ thinly-veiled threats that Virgin workers would face deeper job cuts unless they accept the wage freeze follows confirmation by Qantas last week that it will outsource over 2,000 positions, including baggage handlers, ramp workers and cabin cleaners.

To block any fight by workers against the Qantas outsourcing, the unions are now placing it in the hands of the Federal Court. That was after the TWU failed to convince Qantas to employ the union itself as the cheap labour contractor for the outsourcing operation.

The unions’ claim that by accepting cuts to working conditions and wages workers will protect their jobs is a fraud. Like every airline owner around the world, Bain is utilising the COVID-19 pandemic to restructure and slash costs at the expense of the workforce.

Immediately on acquiring Virgin, without any resistance by the unions, Bain slashed 3,000 jobs and ditched the carrier’s low-cost airline TigerAir at the cost of hundreds of jobs, including cabin crew and ground staff. All the 220 pilot positions at TigerAir were shed before the Bain takeover to make Virgin more attractive to investors.

Responding to the 3,000 job cull, the TWU’s Kaine telegraphed the unions’ willingness to police further cost-cutting. He welcomed Bain’s plan “to restart Virgin Australia” as a “leaner” operation, claiming it offered a “glimmer of hope” for the future.

As they have done for decades, the unions will harness airline workers behind the drive to make their employers “competitive” in the ruthless war for market share. This means that workers will be played off against each other in a continuous driving down of working conditions throughout the global industry.

Virgin’s new CEO Jayne Hrdlicka praised the unions for negotiating the pay freeze. “We’ve asked a lot of them as a result of the operating environment we find ourselves in, and we are grateful for their understanding and support throughout.”

Hrdlicka has a record. She left Bain to become head of strategy at Qantas in 2010, mentored by the airline’s CEO Allan Joyce. She was directly involved in Qantas’s assault on workers’ conditions after Joyce grounded its entire fleet and locked out its workforce during a work contract dispute. This paved the way for destruction of 5,000 full-time jobs, the imposition of an 18-month wage freeze and the slashing of working conditions.

After being appointed CEO of Qantas’s budget airline Jetstar, a position she held until 2016, Hrdlicka drove through cost-cutting programs, including pay freezes, by promising future bonuses that never materialised. During this process, Hrdlicka clearly learnt that the unions’ ritual chest-thumping was empty bluster designed to pull the wool over workers’ eyes.

In October the unions initially railed against Hrdlicka’s appointment as Virgin CEO, fearing she might try to sideline them. Clearly, she and Bain have decided to retain their services as pro-business industrial enforcers for now.

Typically, the unions have given their members only highly selective and deceptive information about the deals they have reached with Virgin. According to the scant details posted on the ASU web site on December 3, the agreements lock workers into low pay and poor conditions.

Under the ASU proposal, the highest pay rate for the most experienced and most qualified guest services workers will remain at the base rate of just $27.27 an hour, while “trainees” will be stuck at $22.22 and new recruits will be unable to rise above $24.64. Only 18 percent of the workforce must be full-time, leaving the vast majority on part-time work, and only guaranteed a minimum of 20 hours a week.

The response of the unions at Virgin takes to new level their record of collaboration with the employers since the 1980s. They have worked with Labor and Coalition governments alike to enforce the destruction of thousands of jobs, the imposition of ever-more onerous workloads and the decimation of previous hard-won conditions.

Virgin workers should reject the pay freeze deals as a first step in breaking out of this union straitjacket. They have to take matters into their own hands and build new organisations of struggle, such as rank-and-file committees, completely independent of the unions. These committees would be tasked with turning out to airline workers globally for a unified struggle against the ruling class offensive.

To succeed, this struggle needs to be based on a socialist perspective. That means the fight for workers’ governments that would place the airlines and all essential industries, along with the major banks and corporations, under public ownership and democratic workers’ control.

US autoworkers speak in support of strikes in South Korea and India

Shannon Jones

US autoworkers are speaking out in support of their brothers and sisters in South Korea and India, who are engaged in struggles against transnational car companies General Motors, Toyota and Kia.

Earlier this month, General Motors workers in South Korea voted down a sellout deal brokered by their union, the Korean Metal Workers Union (KMWU), which was aimed at shutting down a powerful walkout by thousands of autoworkers. The KMWU proposal would have substituted bonuses for annual wage increases. The workers are seeking to win a substantial raise after wages were frozen in 2018 following economic blackmail by management, which threatened to close down operations and seek cheaper labor elsewhere, possibly in China.

Meanwhile, South Korean Kia workers have engaged in partial strikes aimed at securing a wage increase to augment their inadequate salaries. Like GM workers, Kia has retaliated by threatening workers with job losses. Auto management as well as the government are insisting that workers increase productivity to offset financial losses due to the pandemic.

2 GM workers in South Korea, 2019 (Credit: AP photo/Ahn Young-joon)

A member of the Faurecia Gladstone Rank-and-File Safety Committee in Columbus, Indiana, spoke to the World Socialist Web Site Autoworker Newsletter in support of the South Korean autoworkers. The Faurecia Gladstone plant produces catalytic converters and complex exhaust systems for all the major car companies as well as for heavy truck manufacturers and farm equipment makers like Cummins and John Deere.

“General Motors is banking on the workers being intimidated by the threat of closing that plant in South Korea, but that will not be so easy. Really, the working class has them by the shorthairs because the corporation needs that production.

“I was thinking about this in relation to the situation at our plant. I think they’re planning something like a move or a shutdown. I have never seen so many parts stacked up inside the factory and out. They treat you so badly, they can’t even find enough people to come in and work.

“General Motors is doing the same thing to them that Trump is doing to us. But we have the power to shut them down. We need to put our foot down and tell these companies that we are not going to be the victims. They have already demonstrated that they cannot run these businesses without putting their employees in jeopardy.

“Trump advocates a law that says that a company cannot be sued by their employees if they cause them to be infected with COVID-19, and Democrats and Republicans are likely to agree to it.

“All the working class needs to take the Korean autoworkers as an example because these companies are not going to do anything for us. We have to do it ourselves.”

A worker at General Motors’ plant in Fairfax, Missouri, also spoke in support of the striking South Korean workers, drawing a parallel with the experiences of the UAW sellout of the 2019 strike by GM workers in the US.

“It’s just another gross display of the union willing to sell out its members and benefit General Motors. By offering bonuses it saves the company from increased pensions, since hourly wages increase pensions and bonuses don’t.

“It’s tiresome that General Motors threatens its employees and doesn’t abide by a legally binding contract and gets away with it.”

A month-long strike by 3,000 Toyota workers at two plants in the southern state of Karnataka is in imminent danger. Workers are defying a government order to end the strike and accept management’s demands for increased production targets. Now the Karnataka government is threatening to prosecute strikers if they do not knuckle under.

On November 25, tens of millions of workers in India joined a one-day general strike to oppose the right-wing, Hindu-chauvinist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government’s pro-investor “labor reforms,” including fire-at-will contracts and the elimination of health and safety regulations.

The Faurecia Gladstone worker commented, “If we all combine together, even 30 percent of the working class, they won’t be able to push us around like that. The unions put it in the contract that the company has the right to fire you if you refuse to work. The unions are getting rid of strikes. They want to get somebody in there that is more compliant.”

Workers at Fiat Chrysler Sterling Height Assembly (SHAP) north of Detroit also spoke in support of autoworkers In South Korea and India. Workers at SHAP defied threats by the United Auto Workers and management to conduct a wildcat job action over the spread of COVID-19 in the plant last March, helping to force a temporary shutdown of North American Auto production.

A member of the Sterling Heights Rank-and-File Safety Committee said, “It is important that they understand they are not alone in this. It is what we are going through in the US. I thought we were alone in this, but we are not, it’s going on around the world.”

Another SHAP worker spoke about the attempts to repress strikes in India and South Korea, saying, “I am definitely opposed to that. Something like that can easily trickle down to the US. I don’t want anyone to force me to work, like I am in prison or on probation.”

The sentiments expressed by US autoworkers in solidarity with their working class brothers and sisters overseas stands in sharp contrast to the nonstop nationalist poison promoted by the UAW, which spreads the lie that American workers share common interests with the auto company billionaire stockholders and corporate owners.

Workers are objectively united in a globally interconnected network of production, with every vehicle the result of the labor of countless workers internationally. The attempt by employers to increase the exploitation of workers in any area of the world has a detrimental impact on all. Only by overcoming national and ethnic divisions promoted by the unions and uniting as a common force against the transnational conglomerates can autoworkers and all workers secure the defense of jobs, wages and decent and safe working conditions.