US daily hospital admissions for children reach all-time pandemic high

Benjamin Mateus

“We have reached a grim juncture: more US children are hospitalized with COVID than at any other time point in the pandemic, and this number will continue to grow as the Delta variant spreads.”—Dr. Heather Haq, Baylor College of Medicine, August 9, 2021

The United States has reclaimed its position as the global epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic—a criminal “achievement” of the American ruling elite—due to the rapid transmission of the Delta variant, which now accounts for more than 93 percent of all sequenced cases.

Every reputable epidemiologist and public health official had warned that abandoning mitigation measures combined with ending mask mandates was a recipe for disaster. Now the disaster is here.

The country saw almost 700,000 new cases of COVID-19 last week, a 17 percent increase over the previous week. The death toll last week was 3,500 people, a 13 percent rise from the preceding week, and deaths are a lagging indicator. They will increase more rapidly. Every state in the US is reporting a rise in daily case rates. The current cumulative totals are 36.63 million COVID-19 infections and over 633,000 deaths.

Peyton Copeland, 5, hospitalized with Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children (MIS-C). Photo: (Twitter/@Cleavon_MD via Tara Copeland)

According to the COVID tracker of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the current seven-day moving average (the daily rate averaged over a seven-day period) is 683 percent above the lows observed on June 19, 2021. In contrast, the number of COVID tests has barely climbed 15 percent. This means that American society is flying blind into a new pandemic storm.

The current seven-day average of positive tests is close to 10 percent. The seven-day average for new hospital admissions of patients with confirmed COVID-19 in the United States in the first week of August was 8,308, a 22 percent increase from the last week in July. In total, there are now 66,477 people admitted to US hospitals for complications from COVID.

Much of the current surge is taking place across Southern states—Florida, Louisiana, Arkansas and Missouri—that have had relatively low rates of COVID vaccinations compounded by resistance to implementing any significant measures to contain the spread of the virus. However, former Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb recently warned that Northern states may see a rapid rise in cases once children are back in school.

“The Northern states are more impervious to the kind of spread we saw in the South, but they’re not completely impervious. The challenge right now is that the infection is going to start to collide with the opening of school,” he explained on “Face the Nation” Sunday.

The director of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Francis Collins, speaking on ABC News, noted, “And now we’re paying a terrible price as the cases go up quickly, most of the cases, of course, now in unvaccinated people.”

The US has just fully vaccinated half the population and about 90 million people have yet to get a single dose. Collins added, “Almost all of the deaths are unvaccinated people. And these are younger people now, including children. The largest number of children so far in the whole pandemic right now are in the hospital, 1,450 kids in the hospital from COVID-19.”

The American Academy of Pediatrics, which has been a consistent source of information on COVID and children, reported that since the onset of the pandemic nearly 4.3 million children have tested positive with the virus. Of the almost 700,000 COVID cases confirmed in the US in the first week of August, 94,000 were among children. The positivity rate on tests among children ranges between 4.8 and 17.6 percent, underscoring the fact that the number of pediatric cases is grossly underestimated.

The state of Mississippi is facing a dangerous collapse in its ability to render immediate intensive care to its population. State health officer Dr. Thomas Dobbs informed the press that there were no ICU beds available in about 20 of the state’s top-level hospitals. On Monday, more than 200 people were crowded into emergency rooms across many of the state’s hospitals waiting for admission.

Dobbs tweeted the following grim statistics from the Mississippi State Department of Health: “Today MSDH is reporting 6,912 more cases of COVID-19 in Mississippi, 28 deaths, and 153 ongoing outbreaks in long-term care facilities.”

In Louisiana, COVID hospitalization records are being shattered almost daily. The number of COVID admissions has risen to the highest level since the beginning of the pandemic. Over the weekend, the state confirmed more than 12,200 new infections, bringing the seven-day count to an all-time high of 28,239. On Sunday, there were 2,720 patients hospitalized across the state.

In Florida, Darlene Andrews, a nurse at AdventHealth’s Orlando-area hospitals, noted that occupancy at six of seven hospitals had reached beyond full capacity with one at 123 percent for adults, she told the Wall Street Journal. The waiting time in the emergency rooms for beds is growing. Delays threaten unstable COVID cases or other urgent health conditions. The chief clinical officer Neil Finkler said point-blank, “This surge has come at us like a freight train.”

The two most populous states in the South, Texas and Florida, have the most reactionary, anti-science and, literally, anti-human, state officials.

The office of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis released a statement to the effect that the State Education Board could withhold salaries of superintendents who choose to implement mask mandates.

His office recently issued an executive order banning masks in schools, writing, “Education funding is intended to benefit students first and foremost, not systems. The Governor’s priorities are protecting parents’ rights and ensuring that every student has access to high-quality education that meets their unique needs.”

Such reactionary statements and maneuvers are motivated by political calculations and eschew any concerns for the public health safety of his constituents. And in this, the Republican governor has partners among the Democrats, despite their pretense of bitter hostility: The White House and the CDC are equally impervious to the requirements of science when they order children to go back to in-person instruction in schools, an effort that will insure mass infection and innumerable deaths.

In a similar vein, Governor Greg Abbott of Texas has thrown down the gauntlet staking out a firm position against any mask mandates while health officials are warning of reaching ICU capacity in the Austin area. The COVID-19 modeling consortium of the University of Texas projected that if the pandemic does not slow, it is almost certain that school openings will increase community transmission, fueling an already untenable situation.

When the mayor of San Antonio criticized Abbott’s ban on mask mandates as “risking the safety of our children,” the governor’s office issued a callous and chilling statement: “Governor Abbott has been clear that we must rely on personal responsibility, not government mandates. Every Texan has a right to choose for themselves and their children whether they will wear masks, open their business, or get vaccinated.”

No one has the “right” to infect or kill other people under conditions of a deadly pandemic—not even the governor of Texas. This is a declaration, not of individual rights, but of government indifference to mass death.

And for all of the posturing about the “right to choose,” the children of Texas and throughout the country are being sent back into schools without any rights at all, including the right to be free of a disease that threatens death, or, in the form of Long COVID, a long-term and perhaps permanent physical and intellectual disability.

As the tweet by Dr. Heather Haq, assistant professor in the Department of Pediatrics at Baylor College of Medicine, noted, with 259 children hospitalized on August 7, the US surpassed a grim milestone for more children hospitalized in one day for COVID than any other time during the pandemic.

The rising number of pediatric hospitalizations is sparking concerns among health officials that when schools reopen, children will become the focal point of the burgeoning health crisis. The question is no longer if they get infected, but rather how sick can they get? Dr. Richard Malley, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at Boston Children’s Hospital, told the New York Times, “Everybody is a little bit nervous about the possibility that the Delta variant could in fact be, in some way, more dangerous in kids.”

To put it bluntly, this is not the time to experiment with the lives of children and certainly not to facilitate reopening of schools so that parents can go back to work producing profits and adding to the already bloated wealth of the capitalist elite. As one forthright epidemiologist warned, the next stage in the coronavirus tragedy, affecting millions of children, would be “the pandemic of the innocent.”

Studies confirm safety of AstraZeneca and other COVID vaccines against threat of blood-clotting disorders

Benjamin Mateus

A recent population-based study commissioned by the European Medicine Agency (EMA) found that blood-clotting events after receiving the AstraZeneca COVID vaccine were the same or less frequent than for those who received the Pfizer mRNA vaccine.

Early in March 2021, concerns had been raised over blood-clotting events associated with the AstraZeneca vaccine. On April 7, 2021, the safety committee of the EMA concluded that there may be a link between the AstraZeneca vaccine and very rare cases of unusual blood clots, recommending it be listed as a side effect. These rare blood clots occurred in veins in the brain (cerebral venous sinus thrombosis, CVST), the abdomen (splanchnic vein thrombosis) and in arteries, in combination with low levels of blood platelets.

The announcement came on the heel of dozens of European countries, including Germany and France, suspending their use of AstraZeneca in March on reports of a handful of cases where the blood clots had proven fatal, prompting national and international health authorities to investigate the reports.

These developments had been preceded by an open brawl among European powers over AstraZeneca’s inability to meet delivery schedules, with some EU governments attacking the pharmaceutical company (based in Britain and Sweden, Britain not being a member of the EU, Sweden outside the euro zone) on a clearly nationalistic basis.

The vaccine was jointly developed by the bi-national company and Britain’s Oxford University and was promoted as a vaccine for the world. At one to two dollars a shot, it was intended to provide the world access to a cheap and readily storable vaccine. Meanwhile, Pfizer ($18.20 to $23.00 per shot) and Moderna ($22.60 to $25.50) have recently increased their prices by as much as 25 percent.

French President Emmanuel Macron openly denigrated the AstraZeneca vaccine in January, calling it quasi-effective. The repercussions had a disastrous impact on the European and global vaccination campaign, causing significant mistrust and confusion regarding the benefits of the vaccine against SARS-CoV-2.

Since the announcement, many European countries, as well as Australia and Canada, have stopped using AstraZeneca in younger people (those under 50 or under 60). The US has yet to approve the vaccine despite tens of thousands of doses being stockpiled.

A dismayed Adam John Ritchie, a project manager at the University of Oxford’s Jenner Institute, explained, “The thing that terrified me more than anything else is that the one vaccine that’s not-for-profit is the one that has been dumped on over and over and over again.” He added that he felt AstraZeneca was made a “scapegoat” at a period in the EU vaccination campaign when it was struggling to ramp up its efforts.

As Politico observed, “But as these excess doses headed toward developing countries, the cascading negative press of the past few months is exacerbating the reluctance to accept it. These nations are caught in a bind—highly dependent on the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine but increasingly looking to other [unavailable] options.”

A week after the EMA’s announcement, the World Health Organization’s regional director of Africa, Dr. Matshidiso Moeti, in comments which received hardly a mention in the mainstream press, noted that 12 million doses of AstraZeneca COVID vaccines had been administered without any cases of blood coagulation disorders being reported.

She added (this in April), “To date, more than 200 million people have received AstraZeneca vaccines around the world, and cases of blood clots and low platelets are extremely low—fewer than 200 cases have been reported. COVID-19 on the other hand has claimed nearly three million lives worldwide.”

Though real-world data demonstrated that the AstraZeneca vaccine is equivalent to Pfizer’s in preventing severe disease and hospitalizations caused by the Delta variant, South Africa opted not to use it and sold its supply to other African nations due to reported poor efficacy against the Beta variant that had developed in that country. More recently, however, with the dominance of the Delta variant, newly appointed South African Minister of Health Joe Phaahla told the press that the government would begin using AstraZeneca.

In a recent publication in The Lancet, AstraZeneca researchers provided context for the number of cases of Thrombosis with Thrombocytopenia Syndrome (TTS) reported to their “global safety database, which captures all spontaneously reported adverse events from real-world use of its medicines and vaccines worldwide.”

In short, there were 399 cases of TTS among 49.23 million first doses of their COVID vaccines and 13 cases among 5.62 million recipients of the second dose. Based on the exposure level, the number of cases of this dreadful complication is between two to eight for every million vaccinees. By comparison, COVID-19 killed 9,000 people globally just on August 7, 2021.

In other words, COVID-19 killed in one hour the number of people who contracted TTS blood clots in the five months of administering the AstraZeneca vaccine, most of whom did not die. The current cumulative total places reported COVID-19 deaths at 4.3 million, and by all accounts, a woeful underestimate.

TTS is a serious condition. However, the risk estimates presented by AstraZeneca appear to be comparable to real world incidences. The CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) during an April 14, 2021, presentation placed the rate of this event in the general population at 2.2 to 15.7 per one million persons. The median age among those developing the condition was 37, with a female to male predominance of three to one. The data reported is consistent with several publications noting this incidence rate in the population.

Turning now to the recent Lancet report that is in preprint, researchers from Spain, the UK, and the Netherlands had sought to compare the rates of blood-clotting disorders and low platelet counts following vaccination with BNT162b2 (Pfizer’s mRNA COVID vaccine) and ChAdOx1 (the AstraZeneca/Oxford adenoviral vector vaccine) to answer the important questions about the potential adverse effects associated with the vaccines and compare that to COVID-19 infections. They used the average of such blood-clotting events in the general population as their comparative reference.

The study included nearly 946,000 who received the Pfizer vaccine (82.3 percent fully vaccinated), over 426,000 with the AstraZeneca vaccine, and close to 223,000 who were infected with COVID-19. Data on almost 4.6 million “background participants” was used for the general population average. Their findings led them to conclude that “in this study, including 1,372,213 people vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2, similar safety profiles were seen for both vaccines.”

The rates of deep vein thrombosis (DVT), blood clots in the legs, was similar in those receiving the first dose of the vaccines and slightly elevated above background (general population) levels. However, COVID-19 patients had more than a three-fold rise in this category.

Table 1: Incidence of Venous Thromboembolism with Vaccines and COVID-19

In the category of pulmonary embolism, or clots to the lung, again, both vaccines were similar to background though Pfizer’s was slightly higher and the difference was statistically significant. However, those with COVID-19 infections had a 15-fold rise in this complication.

In the category of overall venous thromboembolism, those receiving the Pfizer vaccine had, once again, a slightly higher and significant risk of such a complication, while those receiving the AstraZeneca vaccine did not demonstrate a significant increase. By comparison, those with COVID-19 infections had an eight-fold rise, again, highlighting the dangers associated with infection.

The risk associated with heart attacks and strokes was only elevated for those with COVID-19 infections. Cases of arterial blood clots and TTS were quite low and in line with expected rates for both COVID vaccines. Less than five cases of TTS were identified among those receiving the AstraZeneca COVID vaccine. The incidence rate among those receiving the Pfizer vaccine was consistent with population-based rates.

In distinction to their findings, the authors referenced a previous study from Denmark and Norway of more than 280,000 people vaccinated with the AstraZeneca shot that showed rates of Venous Thromboembolism (VTE) were twice as high as expected. In that study, VTEs were driven by cerebral venous sinus thrombosis (CVST) events. Such events were not increased in the later study, though among women between the ages of 20 and 44, the study found a higher incidence of Deep Vein Thrombosis (DVT) with AstraZeneca. On the other hand, rates of low platelet counts were higher in the Pfizer group, particularly in men ages 20 to 40 years.

These continued and ongoing studies and analysis are necessary both to establish the risks associated with these treatments, as well as comparing these risks to the benefits the vaccines offer, not just in preventing COVID-19 itself, but in reducing the blood-clotting complications associated with COVID infection.

However, these studies also suggest the danger of politicizing research, which can only work to dissuade the population from seeking these life-saving measures. The mixture of national tensions, commercial considerations and elements of panic over AstraZeneca’s COVID vaccine led to major slowdowns in the vaccination program in Europe and other countries globally. It fueled vaccine skepticism and hesitancy that furthered the unnecessary rise in preventable deaths.

The exceedingly small risk associated with AstraZeneca was elevated to a major political and media talking point and detracted from focusing on the enormously greater dangers associated with the pandemic infections. Vaccines should be evaluated on the basis of science and not hysteria. The case of AstraZeneca is just one example among many of how the vaccine rollout has been distorted and rendered less effective by the commercial concerns and national tensions inherent to capitalism.

Afghan regime’s rout exposes crisis of US imperialism

Bill Van Auken

The rout of Afghan regime forces at the hands of the Taliban insurgency has led to increasingly bitter recriminations in US ruling circles on the theme of “Who lost Afghanistan?” The Wall Street Journal Monday published an editorial that termed the US withdrawal a “debacle” and charged that the Taliban was able to make its advances because “Biden ignored military advice and withdrew so recklessly and without a plan to prevent disaster.”

Taliban in Kunduz city, northern Afghanistan on Aug. 9, 2021. (AP Photo/Abdullah Sahil)

A military catastrophe on this scale, however, cannot be attributed to the lack of a “plan.” The reality is that US imperialism is paying the price for two decades of crimes against the people of Afghanistan carried out under four successive administrations, Democratic and Republican alike. Together they sent three-quarters of a million US troops to Afghanistan to wage a dirty colonial-style war in which it is conservatively estimated that at least 175,000 civilians were killed. The result of this mass killing, as well as the terrorizing of the population with the ever-present threat of bombing raids and drone strikes, night raids and the systematic torture of detainees, succeeded only in swelling the ranks of the insurgency.

Within the space of barely one week, the Taliban has overrun six provincial capitals. On Friday, they captured Zaranj, near the border with Iran, and Sheberghan in the north, and on Sunday they took three more capitals: Kunduz, the commercial hub in the north of the country, as well as Sar-i-Pul and Taloqan. On Monday, local officials confirmed that the insurgency was fully in control of Aybak City, the capital of Samgan province, which controls the main highway linking the capital of Kabul with the country’s northern provinces.

Ongoing urban warfare has reduced the grip of the US-backed regime in Kabul to just some neighborhoods and, in some cases, blocks in other besieged capitals, including Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand province, and Kandahar City in the south. Fierce fighting is also taking place in Herat and Mazar-i-Sharif, the largest city in Afghanistan’s north.

Defending forces loyal to the US-backed regime in Kabul have surrendered to the Taliban by their thousands or laid down their weapons and removed their uniforms. In some cases they have defected to the insurgency. The Taliban has insisted that, in most instances, it has been able to negotiate surrenders of districts and cities without fighting.

Where there has been resistance to the insurgents, as in Lashkar Gah and other besieged capitals, it has been heavily reliant on airstrikes by US warplanes operating from “over the horizon.” This has included the use of B-52 strategic bombers flying from the Al-Udeid airbase in Qatar, F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter jets flying off the deck of the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan deployed in the Arabian Sea, and AC-130 Specter gunships.

The use of this airpower against heavily populated urban areas will inevitably inflict a bloody toll in terms of civilian casualties. In Lashkar Gah, US bombs destroyed a health clinic and a school, while officials reported 20 civilian deaths over the space of 48 hours. Afghan security officials, while attempting to minimize the government’s loss of control, have taken to touting body counts from the air strikes, claiming the deaths of hundreds of Taliban fighters. How many civilian bodies are lumped into these totals is unknown.

The reasons for the Taliban’s success can be grasped in the record of the US occupation in the largest of the cities the insurgency has overrun in recent weeks, Kunduz, with a population of nearly 350,000.

In 2001, shortly after the US invasion, Taliban forces in Kunduz surrendered to US special forces and a militia loyal to the warlord Gen. Rashid Dostum, who forced them into metal shipping containers and transported them to Sheberghan, Dostum’s stronghold. Most of some 2,000 prisoners suffocated in the containers, those still alive were shot.

In 2009, a German officer called in a US military airstrike against a crowd in Kunduz province that was siphoning fuel from two tanker trucks stuck at a river crossing. The 500-pound US bombs left at least 142 civilians incinerated.

And in 2015, a US AC-130 gunship slowly and deliberately reduced to rubble a civilian hospital run by Doctors Without Borders (MSF) in Kunduz, killing at least 42 patients and medical staff and wounding many others.

No one has ever been punished for any of these crimes, but they are certainly not forgotten by those who survived them and the relatives, friends and neighbors of those who did not.

The regime that these crimes were meant to defend has never been more than a puppet of the US occupation and a corrupt kleptocracy, enriching a layer of politicians, warlords and their cronies through the embezzlement of US aid.

At a press conference last month, US President Joe Biden defended his decision to order all but a handful of US troops out of Afghanistan by the end of this month and strenuously denied that there existed any similarity between the debacle in Afghanistan and the one in Vietnam in 1975. “They’re not remotely comparable in terms of capability,” he said. “There’s going to be no circumstance when you’re going to see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy of the United States from Afghanistan.”

With both Washington and London telling their citizens over the weekend to get the first flight out of Afghanistan, and gun battles breaking out in the streets of Kabul, Biden’s assurances ring increasingly hollow.

In Vietnam, it took more than two years from the withdrawal of US troops for North Vietnamese and National Liberation Front forces to take Saigon. In Afghanistan, the US intelligence agencies’ “worst case scenario” of Kabul falling within three months of US troops pulling out of Afghanistan is beginning to look overly optimistic.

A debacle on this scale calls into question the survival of not just the regime in Kabul, but the one in Washington as well. The collapse in Afghanistan is part of the implosion of an entire policy pursued by US imperialism over the course of more than three decades.

In the wake of the Stalinist bureaucracy’s dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the American ruling class concluded that nothing stood in the way of its employing US imperialism’s overwhelming military power to reverse the protracted erosion of Washington’s global economic position and impose US hegemony over strategically vital areas of the globe. From the first Persian Gulf War and the US interventions in former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, Washington has been at war ever since.

The US invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, launched on the pretext of retaliation for the September 11 attacks, had been prepared well before the collapse of the Twin Towers. The war’s strategic objective was not the destruction of Al Qaeda, a Frankenstein’s monster created by the CIA-orchestrated war against Soviet forces in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Rather it was waged to project US military power into Central and South Asia by seizing control of a country bordering not only the oil-rich former Soviet republics of the Caspian basin, but also China and Iran.

Under the slogan of the “war on terror” or what George W. Bush described as “the wars of the 21st century,” Washington claimed the right to invade any country it perceived as a threat to its global interests. Within less than two years of the Afghanistan invasion, the US military was sent into a war in Iraq based on lies about nonexistent “weapons of mass destruction.” Regime change wars, launched under the hypocritical banner of “human rights,” were waged in both Libya, the country with the largest oil reserves in Africa, and Syria.

While killing and maiming millions, turning tens of millions more into refugees and decimating entire societies, these wars have failed to further Washington’s hegemonic aims, while producing debacles similar to the one now unfolding in Afghanistan.

Far from deterring the growth of American militarism, the debacles produced by the “war on terrorism” have only paved the way to the shift of US global strategy to “great power conflict,” in the first instance, confrontation with nuclear-armed China and Russia. The withdrawal from Afghanistan was carried out not to end America’s longest war, but rather to shift the Pentagon’s resources to the South China Sea, Eastern Europe and the Baltic.

Underlying the eruption of American militarism and the growing threat of a third world war is the insoluble crisis of US and world capitalism, which finds its sharpest expression in the policy of “herd immunity” and social murder pursued by the ruling classes in the United States and internationally in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The relentless pursuit of profits at the expense of human life has laid bare the irreconcilable contradiction between capitalism and the needs of masses of working people the world over, while provoking mounting class struggle.

Ford targeted older salaried employees during 2019 layoffs, documents in age discrimination lawsuit reveal

Marcus Day

Ford Motor Company specifically targeted older salaried employees for layoff in a bid to shed pension and other employment expenses during its years-long, multi-billion-dollar cost-cutting campaign, according to recently unearthed emails. The documents, uncovered as part of a class action lawsuit against the company, were obtained by the Detroit Free Press, which published extended interviews with a number of the employees involved in the suit on Friday.

Ford Motor Company World Headquarters (WSWS)

The layoffs took place in 2019 under then-CEO Jim Hackett, who was elevated to his position in 2017 and tasked with carrying out a sweeping restructuring of the company’s global operations to reinvigorate Ford’s slumping share price. Despite an international campaign involving plant closures and thousands of cuts to white and blue collar jobs, Hackett’s “turnaround” plan was ultimately judged to be insufficiently aggressive by Wall Street and he was ousted in 2020, replaced by current CEO Jim Farley last October.

Ford laid off at least 7,000 salaried employees in 2019, 10 percent of its global white collar workforce, as part of its euphemistically named “Smart Redesign” restructuring, as well as 12,000 mostly hourly workers in Europe.

The layoffs were part of what the WSWS Autoworker Newsletter characterized at the time as a jobs bloodbath throughout the auto industry, including most notoriously the 14,000 job cuts and five plant closures by General Motors announced in November 2018. Despite years of record profits, the corporations were seeking to offset stagnating sales and the investment costs in electric vehicles by slashing their workforces and ramping up the output of those who remained.

The lawsuit by a group of salaried employees at Ford, many if not all of whom were in management positions, was initially filed in June 2019, shortly after their termination the prior month. Their suit accuses Ford of violating federal labor and tax law, as well as civil rights protections against age discrimination, when it targeted employees for layoff who were older and had higher pension costs. Ford employees hired before 2004 qualified for pensions, which have come to be viewed as an intolerable drain on profits by America’s financial oligarchy.

In one December 2018 email quoted by the Free Press, a director of a Ford vehicle line at the time told his ex-wife: “As you probably have heard, Ford is in the process of a ‘Smart Organization Redesign’ that is targeted to eliminate 25% of the LL6 through LL2 [a salaried pay grade rating] population by 2nd quarter 2019. They are targeting the most senior leaders first (29+ years of service and 50+ years old).”

According to the suit, Ford hired an outside firm, Boston Consulting Group, which developed an algorithm to find which employees’ termination would reduce costs the most, using birthdates and the number of years employed as factors.

The Free Press cited an email from Ford’s “chief people and employee experience officer,” Kiersten Robinson, who wrote to the consulting group in May 2019 shortly before the layoffs were carried out. Robinson described a board of directors meeting on the layoffs in which they “challenged” whether the layoffs were “aggressive enough” and pressed to make sure “junior” (i.e., younger and lower-cost) employees would be elevated after the cuts: “Thank you again for your help with the BoD [board of directors] discussion on SRD [Smart Redesign]. Overall it went well. There was sensitivity in the room to the employee sentiment, a desire to understand the communications plan, challenging whether we are being aggressive enough and a request to understand/ensure we are using this process to identify and elevate junior talent in the organization. Not sure how we realize this last request. Would love your thoughts.”

A number of those interviewed by the Free Press say that they were months or even weeks away from reaching pension milestones, with the result that their termination left them with only a fraction of the retirement income they had expected. Requests to find some means to bridge the time to reach full retirement age, even if it meant demotion or pay cuts, were coldly rejected by Ford, they said.

One parts distribution manager told the Free Press, “I would have retired at age 50, which is next year, making $60,000 a year in pension. Now I have to wait until age 62 to get $10,500 in pension a year.”

Describing the abrupt manner of his firing, he said he was called into a Ford facility and told his employment was ended “that hour.”

“I had my company car, a Flex, and had to give up my only means of transportation. I couldn’t even get home. I couldn’t pick up my daughter from school. They told me to call Uber but it was such a small town.”

While Hackett himself was ultimately pushed out from his position as CEO, his fate stands in stark contrast to those who suffered the jobs axe below him. Hackett received total compensation of $17.4 million in 2019, and in 2020, he received $16.7 million for just nine months.

Meanwhile, Ford’s large investors are reaping the benefits of the staggering rise in the stock markets during the course of the pandemic, fueled by the provision of virtually free money by central banks. Ford’s share price has risen substantially over the last year, more than tripling since it hit a low of nearly $4 a share in April 2020. The company’s stock is now trading at its highest level in over five years.

Although the lawsuit centers on Ford’s ruthless treatment of white collar employees—whom in many cases it tossed aside after decades of employment—it is of a piece with the brutal attacks the company has been carrying out on its global workforce for decades.

Ford, along with the other automakers and large industrial firms, has long been seeking to rid itself of “legacy” workers, particularly those with pensions and relatively better benefits, which themselves were the product of struggles carried out by earlier generations. The Big Three companies have relied upon the willing assistance of the United Auto Workers union to shred these gains and force out older workers through speedup and other means, increasingly replacing them with low-paid temporary workers, an employment category with virtually no job security or benefits.

Pointing to the connections between the company’s callous treatment of both salaried and hourly employees, a Ford worker in Louisville, Kentucky, told the WSWS Autoworker Newsletter, “The exact same thing is happening in the plants, especially to people who have been injured.”

He said he had seen management harass senior coworkers, looking for ways to push their output to the limit. “They do a time study on older people, and ride them hard. I’ve seen them make fun of an older guy because he couldn’t keep up. They changed his job so he was doing two people’s work. He was walking like 15 miles a day, while he was on dialysis two times a week after work. He never complained, always did his job and kept up. They’re ruthless.”

UN agency report documents worldwide impact of climate change

Patrick Martin

The latest report issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Monday morning goes beyond all previous global scientific documents to definitively link human industrial and agricultural activity to climate change, and to link climate change to specific weather events like recent droughts, heat waves, storms and flooding.

ClimateChange 2021: the Physical Science Basis (Source: Twitter/IPCC_CH)

Some 234 scientists summarized the results of more than 14,000 separate studies, but the language of the report is stripped of the usual bureaucratese that afflicts agencies of the United Nations, mainly to conceal conflicting class and national interests. In part, that is because this report is confined to the physical evidence of climate change and avoids any discussion of the social consequences or policy proposals—both are set for reports to be issued next year.

Nonetheless, the language is much stronger than previous IPCC studies. The summary for policy makers declares, “It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land. Widespread and rapid changes in the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere and biosphere have occurred.”

They go on to warn, “Human influence has warmed the climate at a rate that is unprecedented in at least the last 2000 years,” adding, “Observed warming is driven by emissions from human activities…”

“Evidence of observed changes in extremes such as heatwaves, heavy precipitation, droughts, and tropical cyclones, and, in particular, their attribution to human influence, has strengthened,” the report continues.

The report notes that from 1850 to the present, human activity has raised the average temperature of the globe by 1.1 degrees Celsius, mainly through the burning of fossil fuels like coal, gas and oil.

A further increase of 0.4 degrees, bringing the total rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius, will take place over the next decade, regardless of what policy measures are adopted. It is the inevitable consequence of emissions of carbon dioxide that have already taken place, as well as other processes that are now in the past.

The report is strongest when it applies new developments in data modeling, satellite measurement and attribution science (establishing causal links) to give regional and even local accounts of the impact of climate change. For example, the United States was divided into Western, Central and Eastern portions, each considered separately and as parts of the global whole.

Unlike the last such report, issued in 2013, this IPCC document directly links climate change to such events as the recent flooding in Germany and Belgium, the heat dome over the Pacific Northwest, droughts and wildfires in the western US and the eastern Mediterranean, and the increasing frequency and intensity of hurricanes and cyclones.

The alarm being raised by the scientists is thus not merely general, but concrete and specific. If there is not a concerted, systematic and global response to the dangers, there will be more frequent and ever larger such disasters.

In part, the prospect of greater weather extremes at both ends of the spectrum—drought and storms—relates to a simple physical relationship. The higher the temperature of the air, the more water vapor it can accommodate and store. Rainfall can be heavier, but also, droughts can be longer and more severe since water is diverted elsewhere.

An atmosphere 1.1 degrees hotter than in the preindustrial era already produces disastrous changes in rainfall, heat waves and snowstorms. The 1.5-degree rise that is inevitable will have further consequences. A rise by 2 degrees, let alone 3 or 4, would mean catastrophes on the order of the German and Chinese floods taking place every week or every day.

Added to this is the disproportionate impact of global warming on the polar regions, the Arctic and Antarctic, and especially the huge glacial formations there, which, once melted, cannot be easily reconstituted under conditions of a warming planet.

The objective data is absolutely irrefutable: carbon dioxide in the atmosphere reached a seasonal high of 419 parts per million this year, the highest in two million years, based on the fossil record.

Many of the consequences of global warming are already irreversible, at least on a scale of decades. Increased ocean temperature and acidity have already killed off massive swaths of the world’s coral reefs, while sea levels have steadily risen one inch every decade for more than a century.

Catastrophes on a truly global scale, such as the disintegration of the Greenland or Antarctic ice caps, or the breakup of the Gulf Stream, are on the horizon if there is not significant change in the trajectory of climatic processes.

The new report sets the framework for an upcoming conference of 197 nations in Glasgow, Scotland in November, the next stage in an endless, and fruitless, process that included the Paris accords in 2015, in which the same countries pledged to take voluntary action to limit the rise in world temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial level.

The conference led to no concrete improvement and was followed by the US withdrawal from the accord under the Trump administration, headed by a scientific ignoramus and mouthpiece for the fossil fuel industries who called claims of global warming a Chinese plot.

The replacement of Trump by Biden allows the reestablishment of a superficial global consensus, which will duly be ratified at Glasgow through some diplomatic patchwork. But no assembly of capitalist nation-states is capable of actually dealing with the existential threat of climate change, whatever the rhetoric of Biden and his climate envoy, John Kerry, the former senator and secretary of state (and apologist for American imperialist violence and aggression).

Climate change is a global threat, but it is inextricably bound up with the development of the capitalist system. It is not industrial development itself—as the IPCC report implies—that is the cause of the climate crisis, but the development of the productive forces under the aegis of the capitalist ruling class, on the basis of private profit and the nation-state system, that has given rise to the disaster now facing humanity.

Australia: Warehouse job cuts ahead as supermarkets increase automation

Martin Scott

Australia’s major supermarket chains are expected to outlay around $10 billion in capital expenditure over the next three years, in a bid to drive down labour costs and cash in on the growing online grocery market.

The major component of this investment is in new, highly-automated distribution centres, which will replace smaller warehouses across Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria, destroying thousands of jobs.

Vanderlande automated pallet building system at Melbourne South Regional Distribution Centre (Source: Youtube/Primary Connect)

The motive for this is clear. The forthcoming closure of Woolworths’ Yennora, Minchinbury and Mulgrave distribution centres is expected to cut the company’s wage bill by $135 million per year and bring $65 million in other annual cost savings. Coles’ “Second Century” strategy aims to slash a billion dollars by 2023, relative to 2018 costs.

These sweeping restructuring operations are driven by the profit demands of the companies’ major shareholders, which include the world’s largest banks and investment funds.

The intensifying onslaught on working-class jobs is only possible because of the role played by the unions, particularly the United Workers Union (UWU), which has coverage over most supermarket distribution centre workers. The UWU serves as an industrial police force of management, suppressing any genuine opposition to warehouse closures.

This was expressed sharply in the recent Smeaton Grange dispute, where 350 locked-out workers resisted the union’s campaign to ram through a sell-out enterprise agreement for 14 weeks, before the financial pressure created by the union’s refusal to provide strike pay finally forced a “yes” vote.

The UWU made no attempt to mobilise its members working in other Coles warehouses, ensuring the lock-out had minimal impact on the company’s operations and profits.

The UWU operation at Smeaton Grange was not an aberration, but a pledge from the union to Australia’s major supermarket chains that it will do everything do enforce the cuts they are demanding.

Woolworths, Australia’s largest supermarket chain, several years ahead of major competitor Coles, in terms of automation, is expected to invest more than $1.8 billion in 2021, up from $1.6 billion last year.

In May, the company’s supply chain arm, Primary Connect, began construction of a new National Distribution Centre (NDC) at Moorebank, in southwestern Sydney. The 40,700 square metre facility, set to open in 2023, replacing the current NDC in Mulgrave, Victoria, will feature “wall-to-wall automation” from Dematic, and service more than 1,000 stores.

The Moorebank site will also house a slightly smaller Regional Distribution Centre, fitted out with end-to-end robotised case picking technology from Vanderlande. The warehouse, which will supply around 200 stores, is set to open in 2025.

The location was chosen to allow the company to profit from the federal government’s investment of more than $550 million in the Moorebank Intermodal Terminal, which provides a direct rail link to Port Botany, and an upgrade to the M5 Motorway—Moorebank Avenue intersection.

Woolworths also plans to build a 60,000-square metre fresh food distribution centre in Wetherill Park, to replace its Minchinbury warehouse.

The closure of the existing distribution centres in Yennora, Minchinbury and Mulgrave will destroy 1,350 jobs.

Coles has revealed it plans to spend $1.1 billion this year and $1.4 billion in 2022 on warehouse automation and e-commerce, around 50 percent more than its average capital expenditure in recent years.

The company is building two 70,000 square metre distribution centres, equipped with WITRON automation technology in Redbank, southwest Brisbane and Kemps Creek, western Sydney.

These facilities, set to open in 2023, will replace existing warehouses at Smeaton Grange, Eastern Creek and Goulburn in New South Wales, as well as Forest Lake and Heathwood in Queensland. These closures will result in the destruction of around 2,000 jobs.

Aldi sold its six distribution centres last year to finance the construction of three new automated facilities in New South Wales, Victoria, and Queensland. The discount supermarket chain plans to open the first of these new warehouses in Sydney, in 2024 or 2025.

Metcash, a wholesale distributor that supplies most other Australian supermarkets, will invest $375 million over the next three years in refurbishments, e-commerce and warehouse upgrades. This announcement has prompted criticism from financial analysts, who argue it will not be enough to allow the company to compete with the major chains.

The introduction of sophisticated automation in distribution centres will also impact jobs in retail stores. The new technology is able to build pallets according to the layout of individual supermarket aisles, reducing the amount of back-of-house sorting required. One analyst, quoted by the Australian Financial Review in 2018, speculated: “Woolworths hasn't talked this up ... but they could save four people per store.”

Both Coles and Woolworths are also building smaller automated fulfilment centres to capitalise on the boom in online shopping. Growth in the segment was accelerated with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic last year, with Woolworths reporting 92 percent growth in the six months to December and Coles 48 percent. Over the same period, in-store sales increased by 9.3 percent for Woolworths, and 7.2 percent for Coles.

Woolworths received planning approval in June for a 20,000-square metre online fulfilment centre in the western Sydney suburb of Auburn. The facility, expected to open in 2024, will operate 24/7 and employ only the equivalent of 250 full-time workers to process 50,000 orders per week, double the rate of manual facilities.

The shift to dedicated online fulfilment centres will lead to job cuts in retail stores, where orders are currently picked and packed from supermarket shelves.

A report conducted by Australian Catholic University (ACU) researchers for the UWU, surveyed workers one year after they were retrenched, when Woolworths closed its Hume distribution centre in 2019. The facility was shuttered, destroying 680 jobs, when the company opened its Melbourne South Regional Distribution Centre (MSRDC), the first of these highly automated warehouses.

Of the 64 workers surveyed in August 2020, 28 percent reported being unemployed, despite nearly one third having applied for more than 30 jobs since the warehouse was shuttered. Only 11 percent were in permanent jobs, while 23 percent were employed through a labour-hire company and 17 percent had found only casual positions. Only one of the surveyed workers did not report a reduction in income after the closure.

The report noted that in August 2016, the official unemployment rate in Broadmeadows, where the Hume warehouse was located, was already at 15.9 percent, more than twice the national average of 6.9 percent. By October the following year, the official Broadmeadows figure had climbed to 26.7 percent. Significantly, the distribution centre was less than two kilometres south of Ford’s car assembly plant, which was closed in October 2016.

Unsurprisingly, given its provenance, the report draws the same conclusion as the UWU—increased automation will inevitably lead to the destruction of thousands of jobs, and there is nothing that workers can do except hope for a slightly improved redundancy package.

The reality is, the UWU, and its predecessor the National Union of Workers, played a key role in the Hume shutdown, suppressing opposition to the announcement and diverting workers’ anger into appeals for improved redundancy payouts and for the company to offer a handful of workers redeployment to the MSRDC, 73 kilometres away.

The union has performed the same function at other distribution centres, including Coles warehouses in Goulburn, slated to close in October, and at Smeaton Grange.

This is among the sharpest expressions of the corporate, anti-working-class character of all the unions. Taking their pro-capitalist and nationalist program to its logical conclusion, they have become thoroughly integrated into company managements, and directly preside over the destruction of jobs and the gutting of conditions.

The unions’ assertions that technological progress, including artificial intelligence and automation, inevitably leads to a worsening of the social position of the working class, is based on the bureaucracy’s support for capitalism and the dominance of social life by the banks and the major corporations.

In reality, the issue is who owns, controls and profits from the technology.

In the hands of the capitalist class, every technological development means a new opportunity to slash labour costs and drive up profits. In the hands of the working class, automation could be harnessed to shorten working hours—without reducing pay—and eliminate onerous tasks, while also increasing productivity, to meet the needs of all.

This would free up precious hours for workers to engage in leisure and cultural activities, profoundly improving quality of life for the entire working class.

This is the perspective for which workers must fight—a socialist future, where the wealth of the billionaires is expropriated and the major corporations and banks are placed under the democratic control and ownership of the working class.

Unemployment Record Now Far Ahead of Recovery from Great Recession

Dean Baker

The July employment report again showed very strong gains in both the establishment and household survey. In addition to showing 943,000 new jobs in July, the numbers for April and May were also revised up substantially so that the average over the last three months is now 832,000. At that pace, we would make up the jobs lost in the recession in seven months.

The 0.5 percentage point drop in the household survey was also impressive. We didn’t get down to 5.4 percent unemployment following the Great Recession (GR) until March of 2015. The Black unemployment rate fell 1.0 percentage points to 8.2 percent, a level not reached following the GR until May of 2016. The unemployment rate for Hispanics dropped 0.8 percentage points to 6.6 percent.

Not all the news in the household survey was positive. The unemployment rate for Black teens rose from its record low level of 9.3 percent to 13.3 percent, but this is still lower than any pre-pandemic level.

Unemployment for Asian Americans Above Level for Whites, Reversing Pre-Pandemic Pattern

The unemployment rate for Asian Americans fell from 5.8 to 5.3 percent, but it is still 0.5 percentage points above the rate for whites. It had generally been slightly lower before the pandemic. It’s not clear whether this is the result of discrimination or small businesses owned by Asian Americans continuing to feel the impact of the pandemic.

Share of Unemployment Due to Quits Rises, but Still Low

The share of unemployment due to voluntary quits rose 0.9 percentage points to 10.8 percent. However, this is still low; it should be around 14-15 percent in a strong labor market. The share of the unemployed who reported being on temporary layoffs fell to 14.3 percent, which is a normal level. It had been over 70 percent during the shutdowns last spring.

Share of Long-Term Unemployed Still High

The share of long-term unemployed (more than 26 weeks) fell 2.8 percentage points in July, but it is still very high at 39.3 percent. It was only above this level in the recovery following the Great Recession.

Unincorporated Self-Employed Rises in July

The number of people who reported being unincorporated self-employed rose by 425,000 in July, which puts it almost 800,000 above the 2019 average. This could mean many people are starting small businesses as a result of changes in their situation in the pandemic.

Women Accounted for Most of the New Jobs in July

Women accounted for 649,000 of the new payroll jobs in the month. Their share of payroll employment is now 49.9 percent. It had been just over 50.0 percent before the pandemic.

Hardest Hit Sectors Were Big Job Gainers

Local government education added 220,700 jobs, restaurants added 253,200 jobs, hotels added 73,700 jobs, and arts and entertainment added 53,000 jobs. However, employment in all four sectors remains well below its pre-recession level. In percentage terms, the hardest hit sector is motion pictures. It added 17,800 jobs in July, but jobs in the sector are still 30.2 percent below its pre-recession level. Manufacturing and construction both had good gains in the month, adding 27,000 and 11,000 jobs, respectively.

Nursing Homes Continue to Shed Jobs

Nursing homes shed another 1,500 jobs in July, which puts employment 215,600 (13.6 percent) below the pre-pandemic level. This is likely due to the difficulty in finding workers and also reduced demand as the result of many nursing home deaths in the pandemic.

Mixed Evidence on the Labor Shortage Story

The Employment Cost Index (ECI) for the second quarter showed that many of the claims about soaring labor costs were not true. The ECI rose just 0.7 percent in the quarter and is up just 2.9 percent over the last year. However, wages do appear to be rising rapidly at the bottom.

Pay for production and nonsupervisory workers in leisure and hospitality is up 13.0 percent from its year-ago level. It has been rising at an annual rate of 24.3 percent for the last three months (May, June, and July) compared with the prior three months (February, March, April).

The average hourly wage overall is up 4.0  percent for the last year. That is somewhat more rapid than the pre-pandemic clip but can certainly be supported by the rapid productivity growth we have seen in the pandemic. It is important to remember that there was a large shift from wages to profits in the first quarter.

Hours Are Little Changed

There was little change in the length of the average workweek, another piece of evidence for a labor shortage. Average weekly hours for production workers were unchanged in July at 34.2. This is up from 33.7 pre-pandemic, but below the 34.4 peaks in Jan and March. In leisure and hospitality, average hours increased by 0.2 hours to 25.3, the same as the high reached in April.

Very Solid Jobs Report

The job growth figure was again better than most economists had predicted. It appears that the spread of the Delta variant had not had a major impact on the labor market, at least through the middle of July. If its spread can be contained we will likely continue to see strong job growth, coupled with declines in unemployment.