50 million people are now facing hunger at least once a month, including 1 in 4 children. The rate of adults who sometimes or often do not have enough to eat is double in Black and Latino homes, according to the Associated Press.
30 million people are facing eviction as of December 31, 2020 when the current Centers for Disease Control moratorium on evictions ends. There has been a 70% increase in the number of people paying their rent by credit card.
16 million unemployed workers have already lost or will lose their federal unemployment benefits by December 26, 2020. 4.4 million people have already exhausted their federal benefits and another 12 million people stand to lose their unemployment benefits by December 26, 2020 unless Congress passes new laws, according to the Century Foundation.
As many as 12 million people who were entitled to the $1200 stimulus check never received it.
Two major national law firms and several national restaurant chains received $10 million dollars each from the Paycheck Protection Program. More than 25% of the $500 billion in aid went to just one percent of borrowers.
7 million more Americans, about 11%, now live in poverty, than did months ago when the $600 Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation program was operating. NBC News.
Since January, 2.2 million women have lost or quit their jobs or are no longer looking for work because mothers have been forced to choose between caring for their children and their jobs.
Of the record high 1.5 million homeless children in the US, over 400,000 have dropped off their school’s radar during the pandemic. Education Week.
At least 106,000 nursing home residents and staff died from COVID as of early December, around 39% of the overall deaths reported. NBC News.
Failure rates in math and English jumped 600% among low income students in some school districts recently in Maryland. Nationally grade school students are falling significantly behind in math and the percentages may even be worse because a large percentage of students were not even present when testing was done. Several states report that many fewer children enrolled back in school this fall than were there a year ago.
African Americans are 37% more likely to die from COVID than whites; Asians are 53% more likely; Hispanics 16%.
There has been a 31% increase in mental health emergency room visits for children since the pandemic began and an overall 24% increase in emergency room visits for children. Centers for Disease Control.
The Conservative government ended its one-month national lockdown last week with the sole aim of boosting the economy before Christmas, placing countless lives in danger.
Unlike the first lockdown earlier in the year, the most recent excluded schools, with predictably disastrous consequences for the spread of COVID-19. Now the government is using special powers contained in the Coronavirus Act 2020 to prevent schools from taking action to mitigate the dangers.
Children have breakfast at the Little Darling home-based Childcare after nurseries and primary schools partially reopen in England after the COVID-19 lockdown in London, Monday, June 1, 2020. (AP Photo/Frank Augstein)
Since the start of the September term, the infection rate among secondary school pupils, aged 11-16, has soared 50-fold. One in 10 pupils of all ages are off school—and one in five secondary school pupils—either because they themselves are a confirmed or suspected case of COVID-19 or because they have been a potential contact of a positive case. The government’s propaganda line, supported by the Labour Party, that schools are “COVID secure”, is in tatters.
In a damning report, Independent Sage, a group of scientists who have criticised aspects of the government’s COVID-19 response, have called for “urgent action” on outbreaks in schools. The group’s chair, former government chief scientific adviser Professor Sir David King, warned that the risk facing families was heightened by the prospect of multiple generations of families coming together over five days this Christmas under the government’s relaxed restrictions.
The report cited new figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) which compared the infection rates among 11 to 16-year-olds on September 1, just before schools reopened, versus November 21. It showed a staggering increase from 0.04 percent at the start of the school year to 2.16 percent—54 times higher over a 12-week period. The rate of positivity actually peaked at 2.28 percent on November 16 and 17. There are also currently 1,225 people in the 6-17 age bracket in hospital due to COVID-19.
King stated, “It is now clear that secondary school students can be infected and infect each other and adults, and this is at last acknowledged by the government’s official advisers in Sage”.
A recent major study by Imperial College London that analysed the impact of the second national lockdown up to November 24 found that the prevalence of infection increased among school-aged children throughout. They were the only age group to see an increase. The study’s authors found “an increase in weighted prevalence in participants aged 5 to 12 years and those aged 13 to 17 years, i.e. among school-aged children, but a decline in all adult age groups.”
Infected children are very often asymptomatic, making them hard to identify and quarantine from more vulnerable sections of the population. Sedbergh School in Westmoorland suffered an outbreak in November and carried out mass testing of its school community. Headteacher Daniel Harrison reported, “The results show that we had 149 positive cases amongst the pupils who took the test, this represents 28% of the whole school.”
Increasing numbers of school leaders are raising fears that students and staff will have to be asked to self-isolate over the Christmas period.
The Times Educational Supplement (TES) spoke to Bolton headteacher Patrick Ottley-O’Connor, who had tweeted, “Our staff and students are showing great resilience and working hard but there’s a real possibility that I’ll be telling students during the final week of term that they’ll have to self isolate for 14 days over the Christmas break. We’ve currently got 452 out of 1,350 students self-isolating.”
Ottley-O’Connor told TES, “[E]very week we have had between 300 and 450 pupils self-isolating at a time and I don’t see any sign of that changing.”
Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, told TES that this was a growing concern among his members. One had told him, “We will almost certainly be telling some families that their child needs to isolate for 14 days, and this will include Christmas. The really interesting thing is whether families will adhere to that—I suspect some will not, and so we will have infections spreading wider as a consequence.”
Instead of acknowledging the pleas of scientist and school workers; the strain that schools are under; and the impact of rising infection levels over the Christmas period, the government is blocking lifesaving action by educators who are trying to avoid a catastrophe.
Multi Academy Chain, the Focus Trust, announced in November that it would close early for Christmas to try and ensure “no-one is forced to self isolate [at Christmas] because of someone they have come into contact with at school”. The Trust said its 15 schools, based in the north west of England and West Yorkshire, would shut December 11, with lost teaching days to be made up later in the year. Since September, 28 percent of children and 38 percent of staff across these schools have been forced to spend time self-isolating.
Within a week, the government intervened to reverse the decision, repeating the bipartisan mantra that it is a “national priority” to keep schools open, whatever the costs. The government were able to use draconian powers awarded by the Coronavirus Act 2020 to forbid the Focus Trust from closing early. This Act was rushed through parliament in March, backed by Labour when Jeremy Corbyn was party leader. Using its emergency powers, the education secretary can “give temporary continuity directions requiring schools to take certain actions, including staying open”.
The Act was renewed in September, again with Labour backing under new leader Sir Keir Starmer.
A few days later, on November 27, new national guidance for “education and childcare settings (excluding universities)” was released to forbid schools taking even the most minimal action to prevent the spread of the virus. The Department of Education (DfE) declared that schools must not implement any public health measures restricting school attendance without the “explicit agreement” of the DfE. Rota systems limiting the number of people attending school at any one time are banned completely.
In utter distain for the crisis that educators find themselves in, and with unequalled cynicism, the DfE insisted its “contingency framework” is designed “as a means of reducing transmission within settings and the wider community” and that it therefore “should not be used to address operational challenges, including staff shortages”.
Schools will be forced to carry on regardless of staff absence. The DfE has said they can consider options including, “Using staff, such as trainees, more flexibly, using supply staff or recruiting both permanent and short-term staff via the Teaching Vacancies Service.” These “options” either do not exist, cannot be afforded on schools’ already devastated budgets, or will further undermine already woefully inadequate measures for containing the virus.
The problem of teacher shortages in many UK regions is making the situation unsustainable, with some schools having to close their doors completely. On twitter, parent, @Michellethomp1 explained: “Just got an email from my kids’ school. It’s closing for two weeks due to Covid-related staff shortages. They basically have no staff to operate safely. This is a large secondary school with nearly 1,400 kids. Why is no one mentioning the schools in the media?”
The real reason for the government’s demand that schools remain open in the teeth of such a crisis has nothing to do with concern for pupils’ wellbeing. It is rooted in the ruling elite’s relentless prioritisation of profits over lives. Closing schools for a week before the Christmas holidays would hinder the national drive to flood the high streets with Christmas shoppers and hit the operations of the corporations by keeping parents at home. Under the government’s “herd immunity” programme, workers and their families must continue to risk infection to boost the bottom line of big business.
There exists a vast opposition to this homicidal policy. A petition calling on the government to reclose schools and colleges in order to “protect teachers and pupils and their families” climbed from 280,000 signatures to more than 417,000 this month. Another petition to “save Christmas”, not by having millions of people herded together in shops, but by allowing schools to move to online learning from December 9, increased its signatures from 20,000 to over 120,000 between November 20 and November 30.
This sentiment finds no expression in the teacher’s unions, who are allowing the government to enforce its agenda, even as the Tories push for clinically extremely vulnerable staff (CEV) to return to school sites now the second lockdown has ended.
Only now, months after the first deaths of education staff began to be announced, is the National Education Union (NEU) even bothering to call on the government to release figures on how many “teachers and support staff have caught coronavirus, been hospitalised or died”. It remains resolutely opposed to any co-ordinated industrial action to prevent escalating deaths among its membership.
Thousands of students across the UK are organising rent strikes protesting their treatment by Boris Johnson’s government and university authorities during the COVID-19 pandemic.
After students arrived at their campuses in October, all promises of a safe re-opening and a normal university experience were exposed as lies. The virus infected tens of thousands and forced many more into self-isolation with woefully inadequate support.
A slogan is projected onto a University of Manchester building. It reads "Stand Up to the University of MONEYCHESTER" (Credit: Twitter/@rentstrikeUofM)
Students correctly concluded they had been brought to campuses not for their own educational benefit, but as “cash cows” for universities desperate to retain the enormous incomes they collect in tuition fees and rent. They are demanding lower rents, better accommodation conditions, improved food boxes for quarantining students, mental health check-ins, transparency and accountability of security services policing lockdowns, and no redundancies for university staff.
The largest action is at the University of Bristol, where over 1,400 students are taking part in a rent strike that began in October, and which will continue into the new term in January. Strikers have defied threats from the university, including an email to those withholding their rent, warning, “your faculty will soon be notified of this debt and your enrolment status may be affected”. Public condemnation forced the university to retract a further despicable announcement that unpaid rent would be deducted from the bursaries of students who receive financial support.
Despite these heavy-handed tactics, student organisers have refused to end the rent strike until the university meets demands for a 30 percent rent reduction for the entire year, early release from accommodation contracts and better mental health support. Bristol university has so far been forced to grant a full 10-day rebate for the days up to December 18, and a 30 percent reduction for the period between December 19 and early February.
Around 600 students are pledged to join an ongoing rent strike at the University of Manchester in January. The strike has been accompanied by protests against authoritarian security measures taken by the university. On November 5, students tore down steel fencing erected by the university around its Fallowfield campus without warning. A week later, they held another protest in the face of police and security intimidation and occupied the Owens Park Tower accommodation block at the Fallowfield campus in support of the rent strikers.
The occupiers demanded that the university agree to cut rents and commit to making no staff redundancies during the pandemic, and that university management meet with students to discuss their demands. During the two weeks of the occupation, the university refused to meet with the occupiers, escalating instead its punitive measures, including cutting off internet access in the tower. After students refused to be cowed, the university was forced to offer a 30 percent reduction in the term’s rent, worth £4 million.
The University of Sheffield has also agreed to refund rent paid in the last two weeks of term, following another student campaign, to the tune of £1 million.
These successes have given a spur to rent strikes across the UK, with thousands now participating in Sussex, Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Nottingham, and universities across London. Students are joining forces across campuses. Luke, a Goldsmiths University of London student taking part in the rent strike, told LBC radio: “We had a lot of calls with Bristol rent strike organisers, really listening in to their tactics. They told us the university won’t really listen to you at first, they’ll give you little crumbs and little meetings, but you’re going to have to take more action.”
Manchester organisers discussed actions by students in the UK at a meeting for University of Columbia tuition strike is in the US, which involves over 2,500 students.
Students also marched from Owens Park in the student area to St Peters Square in the city centre to demand the resignation of the University of Manchester’s Vice-Chancellor, Dame Nancy Rothwell. She had responded in the Manchester Evening News to questions about why students had been invited back to campuses by mentioning her “responsibility... to make sure the University of Manchester is financially sustainable”, and in an interview on BBC’s Newsnight lied about having apologised to a student who the victim of racial profiling by university security staff.
Rent strikers in the UK have also received statements of support from university staff. In November, 50 academics at Bristol signed an open letter supporting the rent strikers’ demands. Several staff members at Manchester went to the Fallowfield campus to read a statement declaring, “We are with you. We are here for you.”
The concessions won so far in the rent strikes and the broad support they have received are important developments but, as the students involved have said themselves, there is much further to go. Only three universities have offered partial reductions, largely confined to periods in which students will not be using their accommodation due to the early return home for Christmas and planned staggered return to the campuses in the New Year.
The students confront major political issues. Responding to the Covid crisis at universities and the appalling treatment and exploitation of students, the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) explained in a statement issued last month, “The cause of this catastrophe is not fundamentally the pandemic, but the herd immunity policy and the marketised system of higher education which blocked any rational response to the threat of the virus.”
Overturning these obstacles requires extending the struggle across the university system and into the working class. Students and staff must also establish their complete independence from the union bureaucracies.
It is no coincidence that the fight against the pandemic and its consequences has developed rapidly among students, who have weak ties to the trade unions and the Labour Party, and among whom their “official” representatives in the National Union of Students enjoy no credibility. The campus trade unions have done little but offer verbal support for the students’ actions, while blocking any struggle by their own members, including strikes and walkouts, against the unsafe campus re-openings and management demands for massive staff and funding cuts.
Events at the University of Manchester are instructive. When students in Fallowfield tore down the fencing around their campus—in a protest organised independently of the Manchester Students Union (SU)—the NUS posted an empty message of solidarity and declared it “an opportunity for students and SU officers to join forces and lobby the government together.”
While University of Manchester management was refusing to talk to occupiers of the tower, the SU tweeted that they were “meeting with university leaders daily to negotiate the demands our students have presented”, all behind closed doors. The organisers of the rent strike replied that “meeting with the university but not telling us the content is not the support that we were expecting from our SU.”
Students organise rent strike at University of Manchester. The banner on the Owens Park Tower reads "Put Students and Staff before Profit" (Credit: Twitter/@rentstrikeUofM and tke.media)
Five days after the Owens Park Tower occupation began, the SU endorsed an “accommodation pledge” from the university, a mere 5 percent reduction in rent for the year, announced without even consulting rent strikers. The occupiers rejected this insulting offer and denounced the university for refusing to negotiate with them directly. They remained in the tower for more than another week until the 30 percent rent reduction for the term was offered. At this point, the SU issued yet another statement claiming credit for the victory won by the rent strike and tower occupation, making only an oblique reference to the “student campaigning groups” which had actually fought for the rebate.
The fight of students and university staff for safe conditions and a university system which prioritises wellbeing and education over profits requires the formation of rank-and-file campus safety and action committees, from which the treacherous representatives of the NUS and other unions are barred. These committees will ensure students are not once again forced back into conditions which guarantee they will be infected or placed in self-isolation and will fight for the resources necessary to suppress the virus and provide high-quality online learning and student support until a safe return to campuses is possible.
The IYSSE insists that “This programme requires the wholesale dismantling of the market system and the role of private finance in higher education. Tuition fees must be abolished, and student debt cancelled. A cost of living grant must be reintroduced and substantially increased to cover all living costs. The IYSSE demands an end to all scapegoating and victimisation of students and the return of all fees paid this term.
“A fight for these demands is inseparable from a broader struggle for socialism by the working class. The obscene fortunes of the super-rich must be expropriated and used to fund the provision of social needs, including the right to a full and free education.”
After the failure of negotiations this week over the UK’s post-Brexit trading relationship with the European Union (EU), a meeting between Prime Minister Boris Johnson and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen was unable to break the deadlock.
Johnson travelled to Brussels Wednesday for a dinner meeting with von der Leyen at the EU headquarters, but flew back to London that same evening after only being able to agree a new deadline to reach a deal by Sunday evening. No joint statement was issued following the summit.
Boris Johnson meets with Ursula von Der Leyen. Brussels. The Prime minister Boris Johnson meets with Ursula von Der Leyen at the European Commission in Brussels to continue with Brexit talks. Picture by Andrew Parsons / No 10 Downing Street
In coded language to describe the fraught meeting, von der Leyen spoke of “a lively and interesting discussion” with Johnson. “We are willing to grant access to the single market to our British friends—it is the largest single market in the world. But the conditions have to be fair… for our workers and for our companies, and this fine balance of fairness has not been achieved so far.”
A Downing Street statement said that “very large gaps remain between the two sides and it is still unclear whether these can be bridged”.
Talks got underway again Thursday in Brussels between the two sides.
The main areas of disagreement are over trade issues and ensuring a level playing field (LPF). Brussels is demanding that the UK accept an “evolution mechanism”, or “ratchet clause”, which would ensure that if the EU raised its labour and social standards and environmental standards the UK would have to reciprocate and not be able to retain a competitive edge.
The EU also insists on enforceable restrictions on state aid to make sure the UK cannot hand out subsidies to firms giving them an unfair advantage. This is required by Brussels as any trade deal is premised on Britain having tariff-free access to the bloc’s single market—with 450 million consumers and 22.5 million small and medium-sized enterprises.
Another EU demand resisted by London is that it be legally enforced that Brussels can take rapid unilateral measures to protect its market—including imposing tariffs on UK goods—if Britain is deemed not to be adhering regulatory commitments.
Other areas of disagreement including fishing quotas remain unresolved.
As the resumed talks began the EU upped the ante, and rolled out a set of emergency plans it said were required, in order in the event of a no-deal Brexit, to ensure that airlines could continue to fly normal routes between the EU and UK and hauliers could continue to cross the English Channel after Britain leaves the single market on January 1.
These measures would be reliant on the Johnson government accepting and maintaining regulations equivalent to EU law. Another proposal outlined by Brussels as a contingency for no deal being reached is a regulation allowing EU and UK fishing vessels a one year grace period accessing each other’s waters. EU boats catch fish worth €650 million annually in UK waters.
Von der Leyen said as the EU published its response, “Our responsibility is to be prepared for all eventualities, including not having a deal in place.”
Downing Street has not accepted the EU contingency plans at this stage, with Johnson’s spokesman saying it would look very closely at the details” and that negotiators were “continuing to work to see if the two sides could bridge the remaining gaps”. On the fishing proposals, Downing Street reiterated the position Johnson outlined before his meeting with von der Leyen that “once we leave the end of the transition period, we will take back control of our waters. We would never accept arrangements and access to UK fishing waters which are incompatible with our status as an independent coastal state.”
Even before the EU published its contingency plans London had already begun retaliating, with the Department for Transport pushing through an emergency relaxation of rules around EU lorry drivers’ working hours, “involved in the transport of: Food and other essential goods from ports within Great Britain”, in order to keep freight moving from today until December 30. The measures include allowing the increase of the fortnightly driving limit from 90 hours to 99 hours. This is being put in place as the government’s “Yellowhammer” Brexit planning documents predict chaos and miles of queues at UK ports, threatening supplies of food and medical supplies.
Johnson’s hard-line negotiating stance is in part dictated by the fact that he heads a ferociously pro-Brexit party. Any further regulation being proposed by Brussels in the event of a no deal outcome is anathema to MPs who act on behalf of the most rapacious sections of the British ruling elite, committed to transforming the UK into an unregulated “Singapore-on-Thames”. They see breaking from what remains of the EU regulatory framework and any worker and environmental protections as critical to UK firms being globally competitive.
Dozens of Conservative MPs are members of the Eurosceptic European Research Group (ERG). Speaking to the Daily Mail Thursday, David Jones of the ERG said, “The EU’s proposals confirm that they have still not come to terms with the fact that we are no longer a member state. They are proposing arrangements that benefit them more than they do us, but are still demanding that we adhere to their level playing field. They are demanding our fish while offering nothing of substance in return. This is outrageous conduct—almost blackmail—and our government should have nothing to do with it.”
Johnson’s government has already signed several free trade deals with other countries. Yesterday it completed a deal with Singapore worth £17.6 billion, the second largest it has signed in the Asia-Pacific region after the agreement struck with Japan in October. It is the UK’s first deal with a member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, a 10-country bloc with a 650 million population.
The UK formally left the EU in January and entered into a transition period supposedly to conclude with a trade deal coming into operation after December 31. Many UK observers believe that talks will go to the wire. Columnist James Forsyth wrote in the right-wing Spectator yesterday, “The talks are currently in a state of suspended animation. After nine months, the sticking points are the same three issues: the so-called level playing field, fish and governance… The two sides now admit that the only real deadline is the end of the transition period on 31 December.”
As any agreed deal must be ratified by the European Parliament and Westminster, both sides have penciled in emergency sessions for the end of December. The pro-Brexit Sun reported Thursday, “Government officials have drawn up contingency timetables in case they need to pass the necessary legislation at breakneck speed over the Christmas week. They even checked when Parliament last sat on Christmas Day as part of their contingency planning—and found it would be the first time since 1656.” It added, “MPs could even ratify the deal on New Year’s Eve—a day before any new trade deal would take effect.”
Johnson can count on the support of the Labour Party in passing any deal reached with Brussels. On Wednesday Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer, who was a leader of the Remain in the EU faction of the ruling elite in the 2016 Brexit referendum stated, “The prime minister asked me how I’ll vote on a deal that he hasn’t even secured. I’ll say this: if there is a deal, then my party will vote in the national interest—not on party lines, as he is doing.”
The Times reported that “The Labour leader’s spokesman later clarified that no-deal was “not in the national interest”.
Three uranium mines have been shut down in the Kirovohrad region of central Ukraine over disputed payments between the state nuclear energy company Energoatom and the state-owned enterprise operating the mine, Eastern Mining and Processing.
As a result of the alleged nonpayment, approximately 5,000 miners have been placed on unpaid leave. They are still owed approximately $5 million in months of back pay. The shuttering of the mines could also lead to an ecological catastrophe if the mines lose power and water pumps fail to operate, creating a toxic mixture of radioactive uranium-contaminated groundwater that could spread throughout the vast river systems of central Ukraine.
Eastern Mining and Processing maintains that the government nuclear energy monopoly still owes it approximately $5 million to keep mining operations running and pay workers. Energoatom has, for its part, disputed the company’s allegations, stating that it had already paid $92.5 million to the company, according to the terms of an agreement signed last year.
As a state-owned monopoly, Energoatom is the country’s only buyer of uranium. The uranium is converted into nuclear fuel in Russia and then sent back for use in Ukraine’s nuclear power plants. Ukraine produced 801 tons of uranium last year, according to the World Nuclear Association.
Since the destruction of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine’s mines, which during the Soviet Union employed hundreds of thousands and provided dependable jobs, have been left to deteriorate into extremely dangerous conditions. Agreed upon contracts are routinely violated by management, and workers in both the private and public sectors can go months without pay. According to the Independent Miners Union of Ukraine, the situation has deteriorated to such a point that miners working at state-owned mines are now owed over $60 million in unpaid wages.
There are currently 148 mines in Ukraine, 102 of which operate under some form of government management. Sixty-seven of the state-owned mines are located in the separatist-occupied Donetsk region. As a result of the NATO-backed six-year-long civil war that has split the country and decimated the lives of thousands, Kiev was forced to begin importing coal in 2014, even though Ukraine is one of the world’s major coal producers.
While current President Volodymyr Zelensky came to power on promises of improving the country’s impoverished wages and crumbling industrial infrastructure, he has, in fact, accelerated the selloff and closure of Ukraine’s remaining state-owned mines.
According to plans discussed publicly by Ukraine’s Ministry of Energy, all of the country’s unprofitable mines are to be shut down or privatized by 2030. Of the 33 remaining operational coal mines in the country, just four are profitable, according to government statistics.
In October, Ukraine’s parliament approved a major part of Zelensky’s privatization push, which calls for the division of the country’s mines by profit level and their integration into a state-owned enterprise Centrenergo for subsequent selloff at auction. In November, the representative of the Ministry of Energy, Maxim Nemchinov, publicly stated that “… 15 of the 33 coal mines in operation today will be closed. The problem is quite serious.”
Zelensky’s privatization push and failure to resolve the low or outright unpaid wages plaguing Ukraine’s mining industry have been met with increased resistance and sit-down strikes from miners throughout the country.
This week alone, the now unemployed Kirovohrad miners headed to Kiev to protest in front of Zelensky’s presidential office, while miners participated in the occupation of mines over unpaid wages in both Eastern and Western Ukraine. In L’viv, a city in Western Ukraine, 75 miners at the Lisova coal mine have occupied the mine and are refusing to leave until they are paid over $2 million in back wages.
In Volyn, also located in Western Ukraine, miners at the Buzhanska mines likewise occupied the mine and demanded their unpaid wages. Meanwhile, in Eastern Ukraine, not far from the border of the separatist-controlled areas of the Donetsk region, miners have also refused to work. They joined with the miners in Western Ukraine to announce their preparedness to block roads and shut down city centers if the Zelensky government continues to drag its feet on unpaid wages.
This week’s growing strike actions were preceded by an underground strike carried out by miners in the city of Krivoy Rog in September. The miners stayed underground for 43 days to protest the low wages and unsafe working conditions.
Their actions were followed by a quick succession of strikes in mines and other workplaces across the country.
The Krivoy Rog Iron Ore Company, which is jointly owned by Ukraine’s billionaire oligarchs Rinat Akhmetov and Igor Kolomoisky, eventually entered into an agreement with the miners, promising increased wages and better conditions.
Highlighting the huge wealth disparity of modern Ukraine, Akhmetov has a net worth of over $6 billion, while workers at the Krivoy Rog October Mine reported making just $330 a month to work 1,200 meters underground in extremely dangerous conditions.
Just a day after the end of the strike—news of which was virtually blacked out due to oligarchical ownership of the country’s media—the company opened civil court proceedings against 417 of the striking miners for alleged “illegal actions.”
After Zelensky’s own political party “Servant of the People” met with the striking workers and urged them to enter into negotiations with the company, they are now silent over the betrayal of the workers, and the legal case against the workers is being prosecuted with the full weight of the local government legal system behind it.
One worker, Tatiana Garkusha, speaking with OpenDemocracy, stated that despite the betrayal, “This strike made me feel like a fighter—I didn’t even know that I had it in me. After all, many of us are rooting for some kind of revolution. But it turned out that it was hard to get involved in the protest and start, but it was easier to fight. You find like-minded people who have the same language as you.”
A caravan of about five hundred Hondurans, including many families with young children, began its journey to the United States on Wednesday night and early Thursday. The migrants are trying to escape the destruction of their homes and livelihoods by two back-to-back and record-setting storms last month, Hurricanes Eta and Iota. These intolerable conditions have been compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The caravan assembled informally over several days at the main bus station in San Pedro Sula. After the Guatemalan government announced that migrants will not be allowed to enter without passports and a negative COVID-19 test, the caravan split up in an attempt to enter Guatemala through two different border crossings.
Much larger groups are expected to join or form new caravans in the next weeks departing from Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and southern Mexico. As early as December 7, a director of a migrant shelter in the Mexican city of Tenosique on the Guatemalan border reported, “About 20 people are arriving each day who say they lost properties, homes, crops, from Honduras as much as Guatemala.”
The UN estimates that across Central America 6.8 million people were affected by Hurricanes Eta and Iota, 5.5 million of them in Honduras and Guatemala. In these two hardest-hit countries, 140,000 homes were destroyed, and 400,000 people remain in makeshift shelters—many without running water or food.
About 330,000 people have not received any emergency aid because they remain isolated by the destruction of roads and communication infrastructure. Even before the pandemic, over half of the population was already living under the official poverty line, with the UN estimating that 5.2 million people in Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala required humanitarian assistance due to “chronic and extreme violence, forced displacements, food insecurity and the increasingly adverse effects of climate change.”
The flooded town of Campur, Alta Verapaz, Guatemala, on December 3 nexto to a satellite image before the flooding (Credit: UNICEF)
Throughout December, countless testimonies have appeared on local, international and social media describing absolute desperation. Among the most frequent statements of the hurricane victims are “We lost everything,” “We only left with what we could carry,” “We escaped with what we were wearing,” “We have been living on the streets since,” and “How are we going to eat?”
A 13-year-old child at Campur, Alta Verapaz, a Guatemalan town that was entirely flooded, explained to UNICEF: “It was hard leaving our home. It’s still hard. At least I can’t get used to being here at the Cruce Chinamá school. I’m used to my normal life at home. I don’t know what to do here. It feels like a dream that never happened. I would like to wake up and see it never happen.”
After years working to save money and open a fruit shop, Luis Salgado from Honduras told Jornada that the flooding damaged all his produce, and he was left in debt and unable to feed his three children. “First came the pandemic, then the hurricane. We have no money for the children,” he said as he began to march north.
That these migrants are not being dissuaded by the massive deployments of troops and the creation of unsanitary detention camps by the right-wing governments in Guatemala, Mexico and the United States speaks volumes about the situation they confront. Neither has the ongoing upsurge in COVID-19 cases and deaths across Central America, Mexico and the United States stopped their journey.
The post-hurricane wave of migration also coincides dangerously with the efforts of Trump to overturn his electoral defeat in November and remain in power through extraconstitutional means. This has included the stoking of anti-immigrant chauvinism to mobilize fascistic militias and layers of law enforcement and military officials in his support.
Refugee rights groups in Guatemala and Mexico have reported that migrants have also been encouraged by the election of President-elect Joe Biden of the Democratic Party, which is seen as more immigrant-friendly than the Republicans.
Biden, who was Vice-President under an Obama administration that carried out a record number of deportations and the separation of migrant families, has signaled through his cabinet selections that the rampage against immigrants will continue under his administration. He nominated Alejandro Mayorkas to head the deportation machinery at the Department of Homeland Security after being deputy secretary under Obama and the warmonger Susan Rice as domestic policy adviser, being charged with implementing the tactics of the war on terrorism against native and migrant workers alike within the United States.
On the other hand, the migrant caravans, a phenomenon that reached large proportions after 2018, objectively represent contingents of workers and part of a resurgence of the class struggle across the Americas and beyond in recent years. Just like the strikes and mass protests, the caravans are mass mobilizations of workers and youth driven by capitalist austerity and the neocolonial exploitation of labor and natural resources by Wall Street and imperialism.
The caravans have coincided with waves of strikes and mass protests in Honduras against the authoritarian National Party regime, which was installed in a military coup backed by the Obama administration in 2009.
The murderous business re-openings and lack of economic assistance despite the pandemic and hurricanes have already fueled several mass protests across Guatemala, following the congressional approval of an austerity budget that has since been suspended.
The struggles against the right-wing policies imposed by the local elites, the transnational corporations and globalized finance capital can only develop in an insurrectionary mass character and succeed if they become strategically oriented to a unity with the international working class and the overthrow of the capitalist nation-states and the profit system.
It’s an existential matter for workers in Mexico, Guatemala and the United States to join forces with workers in Honduras and internationally to confront the efforts of imperialism to pick off the global working class and poor one piece at a time, while the nationalist and pro-capitalist parties and trade unions fan nationalism and pit workers against each other across national lines.
Based on these fundamental considerations, workers across the region must fight for the defense of their migrant class brothers and sisters from Honduras, Guatemala and beyond. This means defending their ability to travel and settle anywhere they see best for their families, with full citizenship rights.
Workers must also fight for the expropriation of the financial oligarchies and major corporations to allocate trillions of dollars to rebuild Central America, including an emergency program to provide health care, quality education, housing and all other basic needs for those displaced by the storms.
Addressing the Sri Lanka Economic Summit early this month, President Gotabhaya Rajapakse called on big business to take advantage of the “beneficial consequences” of the coronavirus pandemic. The virtual event was organised by the Ceylon Chamber of Commerce, the country’s premier business lobby.
Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapakse, attends an event to mark the anniversary of country’s independence from British colonial rule [Credit: AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena]
India’s Minister of Finance & Corporate Affairs Nirmala Sitharaman was the keynote speaker at the summit, which was held on December 1. She spoke about the “synergistic and complementary” nature of India’s so-called “self-reliant visions” of India and Sri Lanka—jargon used by both governments to cover up their big-business agendas.
Sitharaman is a key figure in the right-wing Bharatiya Janatha Party-led government which has stepped up its pro-market program in recent months. This has included changing labour laws to allow the use of contract workers in every industry, accelerated privatisation and agriculture reforms at the expense of small farmers. These actions have ignited mass struggles of workers and farmers throughout India.
Like governments around the world, New Delhi claims that employees must remain at work and learn to live with the deadly virus as the “new normal.” These policies have seen COVID-19 infections in India climb to almost 9.8 million, with over 141,000 deaths.
In his address, President Rajapakse declared India to be Sri Lanka’s “closest friend and partner” and hailed its efforts to boost international finance capital through a “digital unified single window clearance system”—in other words, to by-pass previous investment rules and regulations.
Rajapakse, who is making similar changes in Sri Lanka, told the summit that his government was balancing “the twin imperatives of containing the virus on the one hand and ensuring continued economic activity on the other.” In some ways, he continued “this new normal has had beneficial consequences. It has forced the adoption of many new work practices.”
Rajapakse’s entire address, in fact, was devoted to urging business to reap the “beneficial consequences” of the crisis—i.e., to step up labour exploitation and boost profits. There was not one word in his speech about dealing with the dire situation facing workers and the poor, social conditions created by the government in league with the big companies.
The president’s claim about the government balancing between the pandemic and economic activities is bogus. Since the end of the April, Colombo has actively demanded employees return to work, producing a new surge of COVID-19 infections.
The number of confirmed cases has jumped from around 3,000 in early October to over 30,000, with 144 deaths according to yesterday’s figures. This is under conditions where the government is following a low-testing regime while claiming that the situation has been properly managed.
One of the so-called “new normal” opportunities cited by Rajapakse at the summit was to “improve efficiency so that work can be carried out even by a skeletal staff.” The government, he declared, was “strongly encouraging new business models,” and new technologies and infrastructure improvement “needed to support this productivity enhancing transformation.”
Stripped of its corporate rhetoric, this means more workforce downsizing and increased exploitation.
When he called for the economy to be reopened in late April, Rajapakse—using social distancing as an excuse—directed state and private institutions to only call back a “required number of employees.” This was a clear signal to employers to slash jobs and wages whilst maintaining the same productivity.
In some factories the monthly wages of permanent workers, who were “temporarily retrenched,” was reduced to 14,500 rupees ($US78) while other positions were eliminated. These measures were imposed with the full backing of the trade unions, which regularly meet with government ministers, state officials and CEOs in a so-called tripartite task force.
During his speech, Rajapakse nervously referred to Sri Lanka’s ballooning foreign and domestic debts. “The large volume of pending debt repayments is a matter of concern… our over-reliance on loans must come to an end,” he said. The solution, Rajapakse continued, was to “attract more foreign direct investment and encourage more local investment to drive our economic growth.”
Sri Lanka’s foreign reserves were reduced this year to about $6 billion after debt-servicing payments. These payments are expected to be $4.5 billion annually for the next four years with the country’s debt to gross domestic product (GDP) ratio likely to surpass 100 percent next year.
In September, Moody’s downgraded Sri Lanka’s credit rating to Caa1, one above the default level. Last week Fitch, another rating agency, lowered the country’s rating to CCC. While Rajapakse has said that the government will meet its debt obligations, the country, in reality, is teetering on the brink of default.
Rajapakse’s attempt to boost foreign reserves by “attracting more direct investments” will involve new laws to fully protect these investors. While he did not elaborate, these measures will be designed to ensure lower business taxes and unhindered exploitation of Sri Lanka’s resources and the working class. And like in other under-developed countries, such as Bangladesh, Vietnam and Cambodia, who mainly export to the US and Europe, this means an intensification of the already cutthroat race to slash jobs, wages and other production costs.
The Rajapakse government previously ordered the Central Bank to release 178 billion rupees to the commercial banks to provide cheap loans to big business. In its 2021 budget, it announced sweeping tax concessions, including cuts in personal and corporate tax, as well as exemptions and tax holidays for foreign and local investors. It also announced more downsizing of the public sector and further privatisations of state-owned enterprises.
Sri Lankan Treasury Secretary Sajith Attygalle told the summit that the government had immediate plans to sell-off non-strategic state enterprises and to list others on the Colombo Stock Exchange. This includes the state-owned Grand Hyatt, Grand Oriental Hotel, Hotel Developers, land belonging to the Ceynor Foundation and expressways.
A few weeks ago, Rajapakse imposed an essential service order on 15,000 port employees after they began challenging demands that they continue working without proper protection from the pandemic, which was spreading through the docks. The repressive move was a direct signal to corporate chiefs that the government will try to crush all opposition to unsafe COVID-19 working conditions and the increasing austerity attacks on the working class.
Notwithstanding the verbal posturing of the opposition parliamentary parties—the Samagi, Jana Balavegaya, Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna and the Tamil National Alliance (TNA)—these organisations have supported the government’s assaults on working people, its enrichment of the major corporations and moves towards dictatorial methods rule. They endorsed the reopening of the economy, the allocation of bailout funds for big business and the essential services order on port workers. Last week, all of them, apart from the TNA, passed the budget’s huge defence expenditure allocation.
Rajapakse’s “advice” to the Ceylon Chamber of Commerce summit further underscores the necessity for the working class to break from every faction of the Sri Lankan capitalist class and their trade union and opportunist hangers-on and to mobilise on the basis of a socialist and internationalist program.
The only party advancing this perspective is the Socialist Equality Party which fights for a workers’ and peasants’ government in Sri Lanka as part of Union of Socialist Republic of South Asia.
The United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Farmers to Families Food Box Program is set to expire at the end of the month. The program was designed to provide food to charities and food banks by contracting companies to purchase food from farms and deliver it to local charitable organizations.
This is the fourth round of budget allocations for the program, running from November 1 to December 31. In total, the program has been allocated $4.5 billion since it began in May of this year. The first three two-month rounds had budgets of over $1 billion.
This current two-month round of funding, however, was drastically cut to just $500 million.
Volunteers pack boxes of food outside Second Harvest Food Bank in Thursday, Nov. 19, 2020, in Irvine, Calif. (AP Photo/Ashley Landis)
With the amount of funding cut by more than half, food banks around the country are already reporting that contractors have already used up their funding, leading some contractors to cease their scheduled deliveries earlier than expected.
The USDA claims the drop in funding was the result of many charities choosing to receive more boxes earlier in the year with an understanding that it would deplete resources by the end of the year. However, charities interviewed by the Washington Post stated that they were not informed of the potential lack of resources for this round.
The food box program was part of the Coronavirus Food Assistance Program (CFAP), which was enacted with up to $19 billion in funding to support farmers who had suffered financial losses during the pandemic. The second iteration of this program, approved by the USDA after the end of the first round on September 11, allowed for up to $14 billion in funding.
With $14 billion allocated to the same program that funded the food box initiative, there is no reason that more money could not have been provided for food aid. This is especially true with a record number of people turning to food banks this year.
The need for more food aid has risen considerably during the pandemic. In 2019, an estimated 34 million people suffered from food insecurity. That number is expected to rise to 54 million by the end of the year, according to Feeding America, the largest food bank network in the United States.
With such a drastic increase in the need for food aid, the stress upon food banks and charities to meet the demand has been immense. Miles-long car lineups have been seen at food banks across the country, with many reporting that it is their first time seeking assistance. Food banks across the country are reporting upwards of a 100 percent increase in demand, making the aid from programs like Farmers to Families so important.
Amid the crisis triggered by the pandemic, the food boxes that the USDA has provided have been critical for many communities, but the USDA has not done enough to address the needs of the working class.
Feeding America estimates that between June 2020 and June 2021 the nationwide demand for food aid will total 17 billion pounds of food, three times last year’s distribution.
So far, the USDA has provided 126.1 million boxes of food. While the USDA has changed the size of the boxes over the course of the program, an average box was likely around 25 pounds of food. This means that the USDA has provided around 3.15 billion pounds, about half of what Feeding America alone expects to be able to distribute next year.
This is a significant amount of food, but it does not meet the need and the program has been plagued with chronic issues, from delivery to quality.
Since food boxes are packaged by contractors, they are all different in their composition and quality. Some recipients have reported high-quality produce from one vendor but low-quality processed meats and moldy produce from another.
A lack of oversight and standard quality requirements has made the program a mess. Some contractors failed to provide the number of boxes promised, while others failed to deliver the boxes to the actual distribution location, ultimately costing the food bank extra money to store and move it.
No program of uniformity regarding what food items would be provided was enforced either. Recipients could only hope that the food they received was of good quality and quantity. In the early stages, many boxes were only filled with one item, forcing the USDA to require that all boxes be composed of produce, meat and dairy products.
But even still, the boxes remained a mystery to those who received them, and the inability of people to choose their items often led to waste as people discarded poor-quality items or allergens.
The USDA is allowing the program to expire as the pandemic breaks records every week. Tens of millions of people are in dire need of food. The food crisis has become so acute that instances of people shoplifting food items from stores have increased considerably. Millions of people cannot afford to pay for rent and utilities, lines for food banks are miles long and tens of millions of people still cannot afford decent health care during an international health crisis.
Considering how little the United States government has done, in both the Republican and Democratic parties, it is inconceivable that the Trump administration will provide more aid between now and the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden. Nor is it likely that a future Democratic-run government would compensate for Trump’s failures, given Biden’s refusal to commit to saving lives during the pandemic and the unwillingness of the Democratic Party to demand that adequate social resources be provided.
