Over 800,000 workers fall off payrolls, as poverty rockets in Britain

Julia Callaghan

This week, it was revealed that there are now an estimated 819,000 fewer people employed on company payrolls in Britain since the start of the coronavirus crisis in February. The figure was compiled by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) using PAYE (pay as you earn) tax data from HM Revenue and Customs.

The latest unemployment data shows an increase in October, up slightly from the previous month. However, the fact that approaching 1 million workers are no longer on the payroll, in comparison with those in work as the pandemic hit the UK at the start of the pandemic shows the scale of the crisis afflicting millions who have lost their jobs and livelihoods. Over a third of the fall in the number of workers on the payroll is accounted for by the hospitality sector.

Footprints in the Community food bank in northern England receives recent donation (Image credit: Twitter/Footprints_UK)

At the same time, the ONS reported that the number of redundancies hit a new record quarterly high of 370,000 in the three months to October.

The number of people claiming welfare benefits increased to 2.7 million in November, according to the ONS. This includes the unemployed, as well as those employed but on low incomes and reduced hours as companies can no longer offer them full-time employment.

Hundreds of thousands of workers and young people unable to find jobs face hardship and deprivation.

Several recent reports have exposed the shocking scale of poverty in the UK, as years of austerity and attacks on workers’ living standards are being compounded by the coronavirus pandemic.

A study by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) reveals that in 2019, even before the coronavirus outbreak, 2.4 million people in the UK had experienced destitution—a 54 percent increase in just two years. The 550,000 children among these who suffered represented a rise of 52 percent over the same period.

The JRF defines destitution as the inability to meet the conditions for “basic physiological functioning”, meaning a lack of two or more of shelter, food, heating, lighting, weather-appropriate clothing or basic toiletries. In income terms, after housing costs, this equates to less than a weekly income of £70 for a single adult or £145 for a couple with two children.

As well as the staggering escalation in the numbers of people experiencing destitution between 2017 and 2019, the destitution itself was also found to be more severe, with more households experiencing both lack a of multiple essential items and a very low income, or none at all.

In the wake of the pandemic, £350 billion was funneled into the pockets of the super-rich in business guarantees. However, less than a third of that sum (£100 billion) has been used to support the millions of working people who have lost their incomes. As a result, the JRF expects the number of people facing destitution to double. This means an estimated two million families, including a million children, face a serious struggle for life itself.

Official UK poverty figures covering 2020 will not be available until 2022, but the Legatum Institute has used up-to-date data to create a model of the likely level and distribution of poverty by this time. While praising the government’s “strength of reaction” to the pandemic, the right-wing Tory think tank nonetheless says that almost 440,000 people were plunged into poverty in summer 2020 and then almost 700,000 more in the winter. This puts the total number of people living in poverty in the UK at more than 15 million, or 23 percent of the population.

But even this is a conservative estimate compared to that of the New Economics Foundation, which has produced figures showing the number of people falling below the “minimum socially acceptable standard of living” having now reached an “eye-watering” 20.6 million—or around three in 10 people. “Worse still,” says the report, “this is set to rise further by the end of winter, to a total of 22.5 million living below the minimum income standard by April 2021, and 13.3 million below the threshold for especially high risk of deprivation.”

The worst affected are working people who have lost their income during the COVID-19 crisis, particularly young workers, and those in the lowest-paid jobs, who were already in a precarious financial situation, unable to cope with any unexpected costs or changes to their working situation.

Paltry welfare benefits do not provide a “safety net” from the harsh effects of job or income loss. Compared to other benefit systems around the world, the UK is winning the race to the bottom. Data from Human Rights Watch shows welfare support for children and families (as a proportion of GDP) was slashed in half between 2010 and 2018. The Institute for Fiscal Studies says the UK benefit system now replaces just 13 percent of average earnings for single people and 20 percent for couples, against international averages of over 50 percent.

In addition to poverty-level benefit rates, the five-week minimum wait between filing a claim for Universal Credit (welfare) and receiving the first payment pushes many immediately into a desperate situation. Claimants are often forced to take out a “budgeting advance” to see them through these initial weeks, which then must be paid back through deductions to the already measly subsequent payments. This means that by the time their claim goes through, many are already in debt to the government. The JRF calls this “destitution by design”, with a Universal Credit claimant in its report quoted as saying, “As soon as my claim went through… I owed them £514… Because for six weeks, I had no income, so when I got the advance, that went on everything that I [already] owed… you’re just never catching up, because of the way it starts.”

The number of those claiming Universal Credit has doubled over the course of the year, rising particularly rapidly between March and May.

The UK’s largest food bank network, the Trussell Trust, agrees that this government enforced debt is a “core driver of destitution”. Almost half of those who used food banks this summer faced having money taken from their benefit payments by the government, with three quarters of those repaying Universal Credit debts.

In the six months from April to September, the Trust saw demand for its food parcels increase by 47 percent and estimates it could give out nearly 2.5 million meals in the run-up to Christmas, with two fifths of these set to go to children.

Revealing the precarious situation confronting many of the 16 million Universal Credit recipients, the meagre £20 weekly temporary uplift to the benefit introduced at the start of the pandemic has reportedly kept around 700,000 people, including 300,000 children, above the poverty line. The government is to remove this additional payment at the end of March, with many experts warning of the devastating effect this will have. Even with the extra £20 per week, the average benefit income of a family with children is still £2,900 a year less than it was in 2011. JRF director Helen Barnard said, “There is no conceivable scenario in which [the £20 top-up] will not be needed, and inaction risks a sharp rise in poverty.” Save the Children’ head of poverty, Becca Lyon, said, “Parents tell us they’re already having to go without meals or electricity when their money runs out—they simply cannot afford to lose over £1,000 a year.”

The approximately two million people on “legacy benefits” rather than Universal Credit have been excluded from the additional weekly £20. From April, these claimants, many of whom are disabled, will receive an “increase” of just 0.5 percent to their payment—equal to just 37p per week.

This month, tens of thousands receiving Universal Credit, who made their first claim at the start of the pandemic in March and have not worked since, will be told that their benefit payments will be capped. On average, that will make these households £250 per month worse off from January 2021, with many at immediate risk of destitution. Shelter housing charity chief executive Polly Neate said the benefit cap “limits families’ basic incomes to the point where parents have to choose between paying their rent or feeding their children. And too many get to the point where they have no choice, and homelessness becomes unavoidable.”

These same desperate and rapidly worsening living conditions faced by millions of people in one of the world’s “richest” countries are shared by hundreds of millions more internationally.

What is the impact of $37,000 of student debt on a worker’s life?

Emily Ochai

The average student in the United States today leaves college with $37,172 of debt from student loans. All told, national college debt stands at a staggering $1.56 trillion, the highest figure ever recorded for student debt.

A major factor in this immense rise in student debt has been the constant increase in college tuition, which has risen by 1,140 percent since the late 1970s. Despite this massive spike in college tuition over the last five decades, the median household income has remained unchanged since 1999.

More millennials, those aged 24 to about 40 years old, have a college degree than any other generation of young adults. In 2013, 47 percent of 25- to 34-year-olds received a postsecondary degree. For most, however, getting a college education has not led to a significant increase in quality of living.

Instead, millions of young people leave school shackled to the banks. This reality is having a staggering impact on the social behavior of an entire generation. Millennials are delaying life milestones such as buying a house, having savings or investments, getting married, starting a family, and pursuing a graduate degree.

For Gen Z, those younger than 24, the situation is gearing up to be the same, or even worse, due in part to the disastrous conditions caused by the pandemic. In fact, almost 50 percent of the high school class of 2020 changed their plans as a result of the pandemic according to a survey by Junior Achievement and the PMI Educational Foundations.

Of those who made a shift, 36 percent said they will not work, 32 percent decided to delay their start date for college, and 16 percent changed the career path they wish to pursue.

Under the current conditions, in which millions of people are unemployed or underemployed, student debt becomes even more debilitating. And, for millions of high school graduates, the prospect of piling up a mountain of debt in the face of an immense economic crisis is enough to deter them from pursuing a higher education at all.

For those working class youth who decide to take the risk, the impact will be deeply felt on all other aspects of their lives.

What exactly is the impact of $37,172 of student debt on a worker’s life? Below are 10 facts that illustrate the obscene amount of student debt held by young people and its lasting impact on their lives:

1. The total student debt in the US could be paid for in full by less than 2 years’ worth of the current US military spending, which now stands at $934 billion. The cost of one small diameter bomb could more than cover the average student debt load.

2. The number of hours of minimum wage work needed to pay in-state tuition and fees for each year of a four-year public college for the “Baby Boomer” generation (born between 1946 and 1964) was 510. For millennials, it is 1996. Millennials have taken on a staggering 300 percent more student debt than their parents’ generation.

3. More than 3 million people over the age 60 are still paying off college loan debt.

4. The average time to pay off student loan debt is 21.1 years. Assuming that a young person goes to college immediately after graduating from high school and takes only four years to graduate, that would mean the average age to complete paying off student loan debt would be over 43.

5. It takes only 16 seconds for Jeff Bezos to make the average students’ total student debt.

6. More than 4 in 100 Americans die with student debt. About 68 percent had credit card balances at the time of death. The next most common kind of debt was mortgage debt (37 percent), followed by auto loans (25 percent), personal loans (12 percent) and student loans.

7. The national average income for a service worker is $31,083, while the average student debt is $37,172. According to GlassDoor, the national average salary for Amazon Warehouse Worker is $28,677, approximately $8,500 less than the average national student debt. ZipRecruit announced that as of November 10, 2020, the average annual salary of a Starbucks Barista is $24,208 which is approximately $13,00 less than the average national student debt.

8. Student loan debt is the second highest form of consumer debt category in the United States according to research released in May 2019 by Federal Reserve Bank of New York Research and Statistics Group. Mortgage debt being the highest, student debt loan is higher than both credit cards and auto loans.

9. 32 percent of consumers filing for Chapter 7 bankruptcy carry student loan debt. Of that group, student loan debt comprised 49 percent of their total debt on average. Student loan debt, by a wide margin, makes up the largest proportion of the average bankruptcy filer’s total debt if that filer also has student loan debt.

10. Compared to those without student debt, graduates with debt also have lower rates of attending graduate school, owning a home, and having savings or investments. A survey from the New York Times revealed that for people of age 20 to 45, for those who did not plan to have children, 13 percent raised having too much student debt as the reason.

The rise in student debt is part of an overall attack on public education overseen by both Democrats and Republicans. This includes the dismantling of public schools through privatization, the promotion of charters, and the transformation of universities into profit-making enterprises subordinate to the interests of giant corporations and the military-intelligence apparatus.

Student debt is without a doubt one of the most prominent issues for young people, affecting every aspect of their lives.

Under the current pandemic conditions, where emergency or unexpected expenses could arise at any time, the burden of student debt together with rising unemployment rate is crushing young workers. In fact, young workers are vastly over-represented in sectors that were devastated by the pandemic, such as retail and food service. Earlier this year, more than 7.7 million workers younger than 30 became unemployed, which is equivalent to one in three young workers.

As the ruling elites and the mass media scapegoat young people for the spread of the pandemic, university students are being forced to pay full tuition for rushed and unplanned online learning programs.

The International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) is fighting for the immediate abolition of all student debt. We believe that everyone should be able to attain a college education without being required to enter the modern equivalent of indentured servitude. Public education is a social right, not a privilege.

The ruling class claims that there is no money to finance free public education, but trillions are made available for war and gambling on Wall Street.

Colombo chief medical officer reveals Sri Lankan government’s “herd immunity” policy

Pradeep Ramanayake

Dr. Ruwan Wijayamuni, Chief Medical Officer of Colombo’s Municipal Council, told Sri Lankan media last Sunday that his organisation has started testing people to find out whether they have “developed antibodies against COVID-19 after being exposed to it.”

The tests are being conducted in collaboration with the Medical Faculty of Sri Jayewardenepura University. Speaking to the Daily Mirror, Dr. Wijayamuni said, “Unlike the first wave, we cannot wait till there are zero cases to lift the status of isolation. We have to live with the virus till an effective vaccine is found.”

Soldiers checking a worker before he boards a train in Colombo (Credit: WSWS Media)

In other words, after following the “herd immunity” policy for the past 10 months, the Sri Lankan government is now directing health authorities to assess the results of its murderous program. President Gotabhaya Rajapakse has previously boasted that, unlike other countries, his government “controlled the pandemic.”

Although shaken by the recent sudden increase in COVID-19 infections, the government is determined that major workplaces should be kept open so that corporate profit-making can continue unhindered.

Early this month, Rajapakse told a meeting of the Colombo Chamber of Commerce that it faced “the twin imperatives of containing the virus, on the one hand, and ensuring continued economic activity, on the other.” He urged investors to take advantage of the “beneficial consequences” available in the “new normal.”

The “herd immunity” policies promoted by the ruling elites everywhere have resulted in a massive increase in deaths and infections internationally. Yesterday the global death toll climbed to over 1.65 million and confirmed cases to nearly 75 million.

The Sri Lankan government called for a reopening of the economy in late April and then lifted a total lockdown in May. Apart from the Western Province, all schools reopened on November 23. The end result was a huge rise in cases—from 3,000 in early October to more than 35,000 as of yesterday—and an increase of the death toll from 13 to 160 in the same period.

These comparatively small figures, however, are the result of low testing numbers. Instead of implementing aggressive testing, isolation and treatment, the government deliberately limited testing rates.

On December 2, the Health Policy Institute, a leading research body, released a report that rejected government claims about “effective control” of the pandemic. The report bluntly stated, “Sri Lanka’s PCR test rate has never been sufficient to control the second wave of the pandemic.”

Kandy Hospital nurses demonstrate in July 2020. One placard calls for nurses to be paid outstanding allowances for treating COVID-19 patients. Another says “We don’t want to be called Health Heroes, living in luxury quarantine hotels. Pay us the outstanding allowances.” (Credit: WSWS Media)

The Western Province, which includes the capital Colombo, is now a hotbed for COVID-19. According to recent government data, 13,623, 7,272 and 1,855 people have been infected in the Colombo, Gampaha and Kalutara districts of the province.

Anyone travelling out of the province, which is the country’s most populous and largest industrial centre, must self-quarantine for 14 days. Workers in the Western Province, however, have been directed to attend their workplaces, another criminal government policy to benefit the large corporations.

The increasing number of infections has overwhelmed hospitals allocated to treat COVID-19 patients. This week, the National Operations Centre for Prevention of COVID-19 Outbreak, headed by Army Commander Shavendra, announced that it would “take-over hospitals that can treat large number of people and rapidly convert them for COVID-19 treatment.”

On Sunday, police spokesman Ajith Rohana said that there were almost 96,000 people in home quarantine. Anyone violating the quarantine regulations, he said, was a “traitor” and would face a three-year jail term or a heavy fine.

The so-called “home quarantine” system was introduced last month after official quarantine centres were converted into treatment facilities. Many people confined to their homes, however, lack basic requirements and have been forced to leave their abodes to get food and other essentials. These mainly poor people are those that Rohana denounces as “traitors.”

Starving poor people confined to their flats in Colombo have demanded that the government provide them with adequate assistance in order to maintain their existence. Early this week, the authorities were forced to lift the lockdown of ten such flats.

Outbreaks have been reported at several factories, including major garment exporting plants. Since October, hundreds of infections have been discovered in factories owned by Brandix and MAS Holdings, two of the countrycs largest apparel manufacturers.

Hundreds of workers were also reported positive in the Katunayake Free Trade Zone, along with more than 40 new cases discovered at another export manufacturing zone in Seethawaka.

The dangerously low COVID-19 testing rate in factories monitored by the Board of Investment is threatening the lives of tens of thousands of workers and their families.

While over 700,000 workers are employed in these plants, under the official health authority protocols, “1 percent of the employees are to be subjected for PCR tests daily, or, 5 percent of the workforce to undergo PCR tests weekly.” The testing is being conducted under the supervision of a task group appointed by the navy.

Hundreds of thousands of plantation workers and their families are also facing the risk of contracting COVID-19.

By Tuesday, the number of infected people in Nuwara Eliya, the major plantation district, had risen to 304, mainly from the Norwood, Norton, Watawala, Agara Oya and Bogawantalwa estates. At least 47 tea plantation workers have contracted COVID-19 at the Blackwater estate, near Ginigathhena in the central plantation district.

The government reopened schools on November 23, claiming that the country was safe. Since then it has had to close almost 300 schools after teachers and students tested positive. All schools in the Galle education zone and 140 schools in the country’s North have also been closed because of infections.

Across Sri Lanka, teachers, students and parents are opposing the reopening of schools. According to provincial education authorities, the student attendance is less than 55 percent and in most provinces does not exceed 30 percent.

Rather than provide adequate funds to strengthen the neglected and rundown public health system, the Rajapakse government has slashed expenditure in the sector for next year by 28 billion rupees ($US150 million).

Corporate media, Democrats escalate claims of Russian hacking of US government agencies

Kevin Reed

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) of the Department of Homeland Security issued a warning on Thursday that the recently reported hack of “US government agencies, critical infrastructure entities, and private sector organizations” was carried out by “an advanced persistent threat (APT) actor beginning in at least March 2020.”

The CISA technical announcement makes no reference to the widely reported assertion that the hack was carried out by Russian intelligence. This claim, which has yet to be backed up by any proof or evidence, is being shamelessly repeated by nearly every corporate news organization in the US based upon the statements of unnamed cybersecurity experts and government officials.

United States Department of Energy Forrestal Building in Washington DC [Photo credit: energy.gov]

The assertion that Russian intelligence is behind the hack has been picked up by Republican Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Democratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, who sent a letter to IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig on Thursday raising concerns that personal taxpayer information may have been stolen in the breach. The senators demanded details about IRS measures being taken to ensure that the hackers did not “still have access to internal IRS systems.”

After attending a Senate Armed Services Committee briefing, Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut tweeted, “Russia’s cyberattack left me deeply alarmed, in fact downright scared. Americans deserve to know what’s going on.” While he said he would push to make more information public, Blumenthal failed to give any facts to substantiate the claim of Russian participation in the hacking operation.

Although he did not mention Russia, President-elect Joe Biden issued a statement that the breaches were “a matter of great concern” and that he would impose “substantial costs on those responsible for such malicious attacks.”

“We have learned in recent days of what appears to be a massive cybersecurity breach affecting potentially thousands of victims, including U.S. companies and federal government entities,” Biden said. “I have instructed my team to learn as much as we can about this breach, and Vice President-elect Harris and I are grateful to the career public servants who have briefed our team on their findings, and who are working around-the-clock to respond to this attack.”

Although the scale and scope of the hack are still being investigated—and may never be fully disclosed to the public—the CISA alert states that the months-long breach “poses a grave risk to the Federal Government, local, tribal, and territorial governments” as well as civilian organizations and companies responsible for US telecommunications and energy infrastructure.

The CISA alert states that the threat actor “has demonstrated patience, operational security, and complex tradecraft in these intrusions,” and the agency “expects that removing this threat actor from compromised environments will be highly complex and challenging for organizations.”

While the US government itself has not publicly accused Russia of the intrusion, news sources have been reporting that hacker groups named Berserk Bear and Cozy Bear connected with the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) are behind the intrusion into the enterprise IT software systems sold by SolarWinds of Austin, Texas.

CISA confirmed on Sunday that government and corporate IT systems based on the SolarWinds Orion Platform had been hacked by exploiting vulnerabilities in the software pushed out to the government agencies and corporations during routine system updates. CISA states that these “supply chain attacks” used sophisticated methods to insert malicious code and mimic legitimate activity on the SolarWinds platform in order to monitor activity on the system and avoid detection.

The Trojan horse-style intrusion reportedly enabled the hackers to gain access to email traffic on the SolarWinds network management and infrastructure monitoring systems.

Among the government organizations named by the media as having been hit by the hack are the Treasury Department, the Commerce Department, the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security, the Justice Department, the Pentagon, the National Security Agency, the Energy Department, the US Postal Service and the National Institute of Health.

The corporate and private entities reportedly impacted by the SolarWinds exploit were many Fortune 500 companies in the US such as Microsoft Corporation and the ten largest US telecommunications providers.

Bloomberg reported on Thursday that the National Nuclear Security Administration, responsible for maintaining the US nuclear stockpile, was targeted as part of the hack. However, an investigation has found the “mission-essential national security functions” had not been impacted by the intrusion, according to Shaylyn Hynes, a Department of Energy spokeswoman. “At this point, the investigation has found that the malware has been isolated to business networks only,” Hynes said.

The combination of the way in which the hack was initially reported and the subsequent unfounded claims of its Russian source—as well as the timing just days after the Electoral College officially declared Joe Biden as president-elect—gives the events of the past few days an especially smelly character.

The same newspapers, and even the same state-connected “journalists,” like David Sanger of the New York Times, are peddling ever more elaborate tales of the gigantic Russian bogeyman, without a shred of factual substantiation. But readers are urged to draw the conclusion that Russia remains, along with China, the greatest threat to the US “national interest.” Happily for the military-intelligence apparatus, this is exactly the perspective outlined by the Pentagon in its most recent national security documents, which declared the main focus of US military security policy had shifted from the “war on terror” to “great-power conflicts,” particularly with those two countries.

Once again, the Democrats and the intelligence community are firing up the engine of anti-Russia propaganda to manipulate public opinion for purposes connected with the foreign policy and geostrategic aims of US imperialism. Having passed through the experience of more than two years of the Mueller probe into “Russian interference” in the 2016 elections—which ended without proving that the regime of Vladimir Putin manipulated the presidential election in favor of Donald Trump—workers and young people must reject this latest propaganda exercise in the lead-up to Inauguration Day.

UPS Worldport facility begins distribution of vaccine

Nick Barrickman

On Sunday, shipments of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine began arriving at United Parcel Service’s massive Worldport facility in Louisville, Kentucky, the first leg of the massive logistics operation to distribute the life-saving cure for COVID-19 to the United States’ population.

The vaccine is being distributed to at least 636 locations throughout the country, according to Army General Gustave Perna, the Chief Operating Officer of President Donald Trump’s Operation Warp Speed. Hundreds of doctor’s offices, CVS and Walgreen’s pharmacies throughout the United States received the vaccine on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. In addition to UPS, FedEx is also heavily involved in the movement of the vaccine to different locations in the US.

A UPS worker unloads a shipment of Covid-19 vaccines (Twitter/@UPS)

“The Vaccine is Here,” proclaimed Louisville’s WDRB.com News on Sunday. According to the website, “The doses are stored at -70 degrees Celsius until they are administered and cannot be refrozen. Dry ice will be used in the shipping and delivery process to ensure the doses remain at the proper temperature.”

The two containers of the vaccine are affixed with tracking devices that ensure they are easily located at all times in the massive complex. Shots will be sent to various locations throughout the US with high population concentration. For security reasons, neither Pfizer nor the shipping companies moving the vaccine are announcing the total number of doses that are being provided.

The vaccine has arrived at peak holiday season in the United States. UPS’s Worldport facility is the shipping giant’s central hub for its air freight fleet. UPS employs over 12,000 workers in Louisville, mostly at Worldport, which handles over 300 flights on a daily basis. According to company spokespeople, the hub ships over 2 million packages an hour in off-peak times.

With the pandemic and the influx in demand for shipped goods, the location has been working at essentially peak capacity for the majority of 2020. “The busiest time’s right before Christmas. We’re going to be well beyond 4 million [packages in an hour],” said company spokesperson Jim Mayer of the growth in demand.

To handle the surge in demand, the corporation has hired over 100,000 seasonal employees nationwide, while also adding 39,000 permanent positions. It has expanded its weekend services to include both residential and commercial shipping to fully capture the market created by the pandemic.

Despite this, UPS is still falling behind in staffing at its massive Worldport hub. “One of Louisville’s largest employers is still looking to fill 1,000 seasonal positions locally,” NBC’s local affiliate reported last month.

Both UPS and FedEx have profited handsomely throughout the pandemic. The massive logistical infrastructure overseen by the shipping giants have placed them in an advantageous position to capture the demand for both essential items as well as the newly-developed vaccine. “Vaccines might help to lift the companies’ profits, and potentially. their [sic] stock prices,” wrote Al Root in Barron’s.

He added: “But FedEx and UPS shares have had a good year so far. and [sic] vaccine distribution is a relatively minor factor compared with the explosion in e-commerce volume the pandemic has triggered.” The two corporations’ stock value has ballooned by 92 percent for FedEx and 44 percent for UPS. There are also ample opportunities for profit in “shipping things such as syringes and saline solution, as well as temperature-controlled packaging materials,” notes the financial publication.

Despite the surge in stock profit, the average seasonal employee at UPS receives an average of $14.50 an hour for the essential work they carry out. The WSWS reported the death of 28-year-old David A. Platt at the Worldport facility last month. Platt was killed by blunt force injuries at the job site, the coroner said. In addition, at least two UPS workers died from COVID-19 in spring at the same facility.

The company is poorly managing its testing and contact tracing for viral infections among its workforce. According to the Independent Pilots’ Association, which represents UPS’s air freight workers, over 200 pilots contracted COVID-19 last month. This is double the number of infections from the entire year up to that point, IPA spokesman Brian Gaudet said.

“There are 380 flights in and out of Louisville everyday. There is now testing available only for international pilots, but not inbound pilots who are coming in from flying from all points of America and the globe,” said Gaudet to WFPL. This raises the likelihood that pilots are being forced to sacrifice themselves in order to ship the life-saving vaccine to America’s essential workers, who are first in line to receive treatment.

“UPS doesn’t really care [about the workers] until they absolutely need to,” Anthony, a UPS worker in Baltimore, told the World Socialist Web Site.

Speaking of his Baltimore location, he said, “In October we got forklifts to help with some high-volume Amazon stuff. The sad thing is we’re not getting paid anything more for it.”

Fed commitment to financial stimulus measures becomes open-ended

Nick Beams

While the US Federal Reserve did not further cut its base interest rate or increase its asset purchases at its last meeting for the year held earlier this week, it did provide assurances to financial markets that the massive stimulus initiated as a result of a market freeze in March would continue indefinitely.

In September, Fed officials committed themselves to maintain low interest rates for an indefinite period but the markets were still looking for so-called “forward guidance” on the Fed’s asset purchases. At present these comprise the buying of $80 billion per month of Treasury bonds and $40 billion per month of mortgage-backed securities.

Chairman of the Federal Reserve Jerome Powell testifies before a House Financial Services Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, Dec. 2, 2020. (Greg Nash/Pool via AP)

They got it when the Fed’s open market committee changed the wording of its policy statement. Previously it said these purchases—running at the rate of $120 billion per month or $1.4 trillion a year—would be maintained “over coming months.” On Wednesday the committee said the asset purchases would continue “until substantial further progress has been made” toward its goal of around 2 percent inflation and maximum employment,

As the Financial Times noted, such targets “may not materialise in the post-pandemic economy for a very long time” while the Wall Street Journal commented that Fed officials do not expect to reach their stated goals for years.

During the press conference on the decision, Fed chairman Jerome Powell said the new guidance on asset purchases sent a “powerful message” about the central bank’s intentions.

“What we’ve done is we’ve laid out a path whereby we’re going to keep monetary policy highly accommodative for a long time … until we’ve reached very close to our goals, which is not really the way it’s been done in the past,” he said.

“It’s not going to be easy to have inflation move up. We’re honest with ourselves and with you in the [projections] that even with the very high level of accommodation that we’re providing ... it will take some time.”

These messages were intended to allay any fears in financial markets that in the event of any uptick in inflation or a decline in the jobless rate the Fed would consider moves to pull back on its stimulus measures.

Even with these guarantees, there was some dissatisfaction that the Fed had not extended its measures either by targeting its bond purchases towards longer-term securities, increasing their prices and thereby lowering their yields, or by increasing the aggregate size of its purchases.

Sections of the market were looking for such a commitment because there is some concern that increased government spending as a result of COVID-19, financed by debt, will, in and of itself, lower the price of bonds, thereby leading to upward pressure on interest rates that will need to be countered with further increases in purchases by the Fed.

The fragility of the financial system was highlighted in comments made to the Financial Times by Shamik Dhar, chief economist as BNY Mellon Investment Management.

He noted that historically high prices of both bonds and stocks have been premised on the expectation of years of rock-bottom interest rates and both could tumble if the Fed signaled there was even a chance of higher borrowing costs.

“That’s a world where fixed income [that is the bond market] stops being a hedge for equities, and both sell off together. That would be a big shock.”

In fact, this is not a matter of prediction but of recent history. Financial markets in the US and around the world effectively froze in mid-March when such a situation developed and the $20 trillion US Treasury bond market—the bedrock of the global financial system—was paralysed.

This led to Fed pumping trillions of dollars into financial markets and initiating the current asset purchasing program that has seen Wall Street reach new record highs. As a result hundreds of billions have been siphoned into the coffers of Amazon chief Jeff Bezos and other financial oligarchs.

The official claim is that what the Fed calls “a very high level of accommodation” is necessary to provide a boost for the underlying real economy. But within ruling circles it is well known this is largely a fiction.

In a comment published in the Financial Times this week, former British Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown warned against the belief that the mass vaccination against COVID-19 would bring a global economic recovery. He warned the G7 economies were unlikely to reach 2019 levels of output by 2022 and the global economy would remain essentially stagnant thereafter.

“The world economy is heading for a low-growth, high-unemployment decade,” he wrote.

“Expecting low interest rates to restore pre-crisis levels of private investment while unemployment crushes demand would be like pushing on a string. The liquidity crisis of 2020 could easily become the solvency crisis of the 2020s and the scars of long-term unemployment could last a generation.”

Brown’s “solution” consisted of an internationally co-ordinated plan by the major powers to boost the global economy.

“What is missing in the management of the crisis is an internationally co-ordinated plan for growth that recognises the limits of monetary policy when interest rates are near zero,” he wrote.

“Only co-operation between the US, Europe and China can change that and that is why January’s US presidential inauguration should be followed by an emergency summit meeting in February.”

Anxious to secure his place in history and looking back through rose-tinted glasses to the summit meeting over which he presided in April 2009 in response to the global financial crisis, Brown wrote that such an initiative could bring synchronised global growth.

But any boost after the 2008 crash was short-lived and by mid-2010 there was an austerity drive all the major economies coupled with deepening attacks on wages and working conditions such as the “restructuring” of the auto industry in the US.

Moreover Brown’s plea of international co-operation and collaboration ignores the deepening conflicts between the major economy powers—most sharply seen in the clash between the US in China but not confined there—over the past decade.

India: The Economic Fallout of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Women

Akanksha Khullar

The COVID-19 pandemic induced restrictions has plunged the Indian economy into a severe downturn with disruptions to markets and supply chains, closure of businesses, limited travel facilities, and constricted international trade. This has resulted in rising unemployment and financial insecurity in India. Given how the public health crisis has further entrenched gender inequities, women will disproportionately bear the brunt of the pandemic’s economic fallout. However, the government’s stimulus packages for economic recovery lack welfare schemes specifically designed to help women, leaving them with little to no respite.

Uncertainties Affecting Women
Women in India have long faced economic disadvantages, primarily due to socially entrenched discrimination and rigid notions of gender roles. Consequently, despite accounting for 48.03 per cent of the country’s population, only 19.9 per cent of India’s female population figures in the national labour force. On an average, Indian women earn 35 per cent less than men. This state-of-affairs is set to worsen due to the pandemic’s far-reaching impact on the economy, lives, and livelihoods.

For instance, with economic slowdown inducing cutbacks, women are considerably more vulnerable to job losses than men due to existing gender inequalities and the less secure nature of their employment, among other factors. According to the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy, with the commencement of the nationwide lockdown, the unemployment rate reached 23.5 per cent between March to April 2020, with higher shares of unemployed women.

India’s Sixth Economic Census (2016) showed that 13.8 per cent of business establishments were owned by women. A majority of these were micro-enterprises operating in sectors—like tourism, hospitality, and education—which have been hit the hardest by the pandemic. At present, with limited access to financial assets, credit facilities, and social protection, many of these women-led-businesses are at a greater risk of facing obstacles to remaining afloat, or perpetual closure, particularly due to declining demand, failure to repay debts, labour shortage, etc.

In a society where women already work nearly ten times as much as men, the public health crisis has also increased the burden of unpaid care work on women. This work is often unrecognised and not factored in national economic metrics. With an increase in domestic responsibilities or time women spend caring for children and elderly family members, home schooling, and domestic chores, the combined pressure of domestic chores and work-from-home have also led many women to opt out of paid work, thereby impacting their already low workforce participation rates.

The situation is grimmer in rural India, where around 73.2 per cent of the women are employed in the agricultural sector—which is seasonal and often has unstable profits, with no job security and extremely low wages. Pandemic-induced restrictions on movement, and supply chain and market disruptions, have also limited female farmers’ ability to cultivate and sell their produce normally, thereby affecting their livelihoods.

Inadequate Economic Relief Measures
Although this disproportionate impact on women necessitates a gendered approach in the country’s economic policies, targeted measures for women remain largely missing from India’s stimulus packages.

For instance, in late March 2020, the Indian government announced monthly cash transfers of INR 500 to female Jan Dhan account holders for three months. However, this amount is insufficient to sustain lives and livelihoods. Reports indicate that a minimum of INR 3000 per month is required for the next three to four months to help people cope with the pandemic. Given how women are at a greater risk of losing their jobs, and are among the hardest hit by the pandemic, this much monetary assistance at the very least should be provided.

Moreover, stimulus packages have focused more on easing credit availability for micro-enterprises. For example, the government has set aside INR 50,000 crore equity infusion for small enterprises; almost INR 300,000 crore collateral free loans; and 2 per cent interest subvention on MUDRA Sishu loans. None of these include special provisions earmarked for women-owned micro-enterprises and business. They also don't mention the sectors that employ large numbers of women.

The financial aid package also includes an increase in the minimum wage rate under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Act, 2005, which attracts large numbers of women to waged employment. However, the increase is of a nominal INR 20, which is far below the wage levels that notified by the Ministry of Rural Development. It has now been fixed at a low rate of INR 202 despite the numerous economic challenges that women in rural areas are confronted with, thus doing little to alleviate their financial woes.

In terms of workforce management, in June 2020, the Indian government stated that it would direct INR 500 billion towards the creation of temporary jobs. However, there is no notification regarding the formulation of any employment generation scheme specifically targeted towards women or for improving their post-COVID-19 employability rate.

Looking Ahead
Given the economic challenges faced by women because of the pandemic, it is imperative for future relief packages and economic policies to focus on restoring employment and livelihoods as well as on fixing broken supply chains for all, including women. This will only be possible through an inclusive and gendered policy framework.