Black and Asian American Workers Falling Behind in Getting Back Jobs

Julie Yixia Cai & Dean Baker

In the first half of 2021, the economy added more than 4.2 million jobs, a rise of almost 3.0 percent, as it rapidly added back jobs lost during the pandemic-related recession.

In a recent report in July 2021, Jason Furman and William Powell documented that the recent job transition rate from unemployment to employment was somewhat lower than expected given the job opening rate. The job opening rate averaged 5.6 percent in the first six months of 2021. It had previously never been higher than 4.8 percent — a peak hit in 2018 — and usually is well under 4.0 percent. Given this backdrop, this article investigates how demographic groups are transitioning from unemployment into employment and how that compares to their historical relationship between job openings and transitions.

Effects by Race and Ethnicity

Using the Current Population Survey, we investigate the month-to-month work transition rate of unemployed US workers since 2001 and report the annual aggregated employment transition by racial group. Figure 1 shows the predicted rate of transitions from unemployment to employment for whites, Blacks, Hispanics, and Asian American workers, based on the average job opening rate for the year. As can be seen, Black and Asian American workers have considerably lower transition rates than white and Hispanic workers.

Although the picture of job flows may not seem as bad as during the Great Recession, Black and Asian American job transition rates over the past few months were still not as high as the rates for whites and Hispanics in the recovery following the Great Recession.

In the first six months of 2021, 18 percent of Black and 20 percent of Asian American unemployed workers gained a job, which is around 5 percentage points lower than the rate of re-employment for white and Hispanic unemployed workers. Although unemployment among Hispanic workers usually is higher than that of white workers, their rate of moving into jobs does not look worse than that of their white counterparts, typically outperforming transition rates among unemployed whites, often by wide margins.

Figure 2

To show how racial and ethnic groups transitioned into jobs in the first half of 2021 compared to their past patterns, Figure 2 compares the transition rate for the first six months of the year with the predicted rate (which is illustrated in the trend line) for each group, given the rate of job openings.

In the first quarter of 2021, white and Hispanic unemployed workers were mostly on the predicted path for regaining jobs based on the rate of job openings, although this pace slowed down in May and June. This summer, Black and Asian American unemployed workers were further off track to meeting the expected employment transition based on the job opening rate. For example, about 20 percent of Black, and 25 percent of Asian American unemployed workers gained jobs in June, far below the predicted rate of 30 percent given the job opening rate. This led to a gap between the predicted rate of re-employment and the actual rate of reemployment for the first six months of 2021 of 8.5 percentage points for Black unemployed workers and 6.4 percentage points for Asian American unemployed workers. This compares to a gap between predicted and actual rates of reemployment of roughly 3 percentage points for white and Hispanic unemployed workers (Table 1).

Effects by Gender and Age

We also examined how job transition rates behaved relative to the overall market by workers’ gender and age. Transition rates do not appear to differ significantly between men and women. Women experienced a relative slower exit from unemployment compared to men: 7.3 percentage points below the predicted value given the job opening rate, compared to 6.8 percentage points for men. Somewhat surprisingly, among all unemployed workers, 16 to 19-year-olds were the only group that outperformed with respect to month-to-month employment transition in the first six months of 2021. This mirrors the unusually low unemployment rate for teenagers that we have seen thus far this year.

We might expect to see a slower pace for 16 to 19-year-olds in the coming months, but their job prospects seem to be quite good at the moment. This could be due in part to the current state of the labor market, in which certain sectors, like the service sectors or hospitality, lost workers during the pandemic and now find it difficult to hire workers. Given their lack of work experience in jobs in other sectors, young unemployed workers may find it relatively easy to refill those vacancies. It is likely also the case that young people have fewer fears of the pandemic and are less likely to have family responsibilities that might keep them from working.

By contrast, unemployed workers in their later prime age appear to have a slightly lower rate of gaining jobs. With years of work experience, some of them might want to switch to better jobs or change industries and may be confident that they will find one, given the unusually high number of job openings.

Why This Matters

The pandemic has created an extraordinary labor market situation. During the shutdown last spring, we saw unemployment rates unequaled since the Great Depression. As the economy reopened, we saw extraordinary job growth and rapid declines in unemployment. Looking at standard measures like unemployment and employment rates, the labor market would look reasonably healthy in August of 2021, although “healthy” still implies large amounts of discrimination.

However, we know that in many ways the labor market is very far from normal. In many sectors, workers are still finding it difficult to get reemployed. We also know that there appears to be far more turnover than we would ordinarily see in the labor market.

This analysis provides insight into the extent to which different groups are or are not transitioning from unemployment to employment. While we cannot directly determine the reason for gaps in transition rates from these data, it can be suggestive. For example, the rapid transition rates for teens likely indicates less fear of the pandemic and workers who are less picky about their jobs.

The unusually low transition rates among older workers could stem from a combination of difficulty finding jobs, fears about the pandemic, and workers being more selective about their job choices. The unusually low rates of transitions among Blacks and Asian Americans could reflect similar issues, as well as discrimination in the labor market.

Clearly this is a labor market in which many workers are facing considerable hardship, while others are seeing unusual possibilities. Over 60 percent of current jobholders looked for new jobs in late summer, seeking expanded benefits and more workplace flexibility, besides better pay. More than half the workforce anticipates looking for new jobs in the next 12 months. As the economy moves back towards full employment and the pandemic is hopefully controlled, we may end up with a labor market that looks very different from the one that existed before the pandemic.

Rocky Road Ahead for New, Left-leaning Peruvian Government

W.T. Whitney Jr.

Peruvian president Pedro Castillo took office July 28 following a narrow electoral victory on June 6 and official certification of voting results on July 19. Then and since, right-wing opposition forces have viciously attacked Castillo and his Perú Libre (Free Peru) party. Defamatory media blasts from virtually all Peruvian news sources have been constant. Unfounded accusations of electoral fraud persisted for weeks, along with rumors of a military coup. The opposition recently has concentrated on trying to remove newly-appointed cabinet ministers.

Pedro Castillo taught and served as principal in an elementary school in rural Chotaprovince. He was a leader of the regional teachers’ union. Perú Libre invited him to run for president. That socialist party, founded in 2012 by Cuba- trained neurosurgeon Vladimir Cerrón, claims José Mariátegui, founder of Peruvian Communist Party, as its ideological forebearer.

Political novice Castillo was unknown except in his rural province. His rise owes directly to a rural and/or mostly mestizo population, marginalized and very poor, taking a stand against urban power centers regarded as corrupt, exploitative, and culturally removed.  Lima’s middle class makes up around 35% of the city’s population. One third of all Peruvians live in Lima.

Castillo’s government, with little space allowed for fashioning a program, has had to accommodate its enemies. Perú Libre commands only 37 of 130 seats in Peru’s unicameral parliament. The Poplar Force Party of defeated presidential candidate KeikoFujimori accounts for 24 delegates; eight other parties control the remaining seats.  Two center-left parties, New Peru, headed by Veronica Mendoza, and Together for Peru, are backing Castillo’s government.

Opposition congressional members forced newly appointed foreign minister Héctor Béjar to resign. That former guerrilla insurgent, political prisoner, and academician succumbed to past allegations of terrorist activities. Béjar had already removed Peru from the anti-Venezuela Lima group of OAS nations and outlined an independent foreign policy aiming at reduced U.S. influence.

Populist prime minister Guido Bellido and other cabinet members so far have survived demands for their resignations. The radicalism of Bellido’s past politics and his supposed failure to sufficiently renounce terrorism provoked right-wing furor. Aggressive labor activism on the part of labor minister Íber Maraví was almost his undoing. Other ministers dealt with adverse police reports dredged up by the opposition. Right-wing congresspersons are now studying maneuvers directed at removing President Castillo.

For months, and especially now, opposition attacks have centered on Vladimir Cerrón, Perú Libre’s leader. Formerly governor of Junín province, Cerrón and alleged accomplices face multiple charges of corruption, which by and large seem trivial, especially in comparison with Peru’s steady diet of major scandals.  For example, Cerrón is assigned responsibility for four Patria Libre activists who are charged with securing drivers’ licenses through bribes.

State officials ostensibly looking for documents recently trashed Cerrón’s house, his brother’s house, and the main Perú Libre office in Junín. He has already served jail time. Now, he would be imprisoned for almost three years, if he is convicted.

Castillo’s political vulnerability stems mostly from his enemies’ presumption that he is unqualified to serve as president because of political inexperience and that his teacher is the Marxist Cerrón.

As presidential candidate, Castillo called for a constituent assembly, partial nationalization of large corporations, and increased taxation of businesses.  Yet Prime Minister Bellido’s message to Peru’s Congress said nothing about the Constitution, a constituent assembly, or about renegotiating petroleum-company contracts.

Despite objections from Perú Libre congressional representatives, replacement foreign minister Oscar Maúrtua still cooperates with USAID, a U.S. entity widely accused of interventionist activities.  The new government still enables joint U.S. – Peruvian military exercises and Peru’s police are being taught by U.S. instructors.

Nevertheless, Bellido and economics and finance minister Pedro Francke introduced budgetary legislation “prioritizing health and the health emergency created by Covid-19 and prioritizing education, agriculture, poverty relief, social security, economic reactivation, and promotion of employment and productivity,”

As befits a change-oriented government at work, vice president Dina Boluarte announced on September 15 that, “We are working on collecting signatures for that referendum on the question of a constituent assembly.”

According to an opinion survey released September 13, 42% of respondents approved of Castillo’s performance, up from 38% in mid-August. He registered 29% approval in Lima

One analyst points out that “the main subject is not the government of Castillo, but rather population groups at the bottom, above all in the provinces, and a Peruvian reality that is atrocious. …[R]eaction by all these sectors to the brutal fact of the country’s decomposing political life is central.”

Ultimately, decisions taken in regard to the exploitation of underground resources will bear on Peru’s political feature. “President Pedro Castillo has been quick to extend a friendly hand to China,” Reuters reports. China is Peru’s largest trading partner and a top foreign investor.  China is currently the largest source of foreign investment in Peru’s mining industry.  Peru, second to Chile among copper-producing nations, provides 27% of the copper and 9% of the zinc consumed in China.

COVID-19 vaccine inequality: 75 percent of doses administered in just 10 countries

Jean Shaoul

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues its upward trend across the globe, vaccine inequality grows ever more grotesque.

Of the world’s 195 countries, just 10 rich countries account for most of the 5.86 billion vaccine doses administered so far. To put this in perspective, this is enough to fully vaccinate 2.8 billion of the world’s 7.8 billion population or 50 percent of those over 15 years of age. Instead, only 31.5 percent of the world’s population have been fully vaccinated against the disease.

Wealthy countries have fully vaccinated around 60 percent of their population, with the richest G7 nations having doubled jabbed 58 percent—in a bid to get everyone back to work and boost their own corporations’ profits. This contrasts with less than 2 percent of people that Our World in Data says have been fully vaccinated in low-income countries.

Of the wealthier nations, the United Arab Emirate and Qatar have fully vaccinated 80 percent of their populations, the UK 66 percent of its population, Israel 62 percent, the European Union (EU) 60 percent, China 56 percent, the US 54 percent and Japan 52 percent. Of the middle-income countries, Russia has fully vaccinated 27 percent and Morocco 46 percent. Of the lower middle-income countries, India has fully vaccinated 14 percent, Pakistan 10 percent, Algeria 10 percent and Nigeria less than 1 percent, while some of the poorest countries—Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Vanuatu and Yemen—have vaccinated virtually none.

Vaccination rates are by far the lowest in Africa, where around 39 million or 3 percent of the continent’s 1.3 billion population have been fully vaccinated. Africa has officially reported more than 8 million cases, along with 205,000 deaths, widely assumed to be a vast underestimate given the shocking lack of testing facilities and universal systems for registering deaths, as well as impoverished health systems that struggle to provide oxygen and other care. There were 248,000 new confirmed cases last week as at least 28 African countries saw a surge in infections driven by the Delta variant.

A Kenyan man receives a dose of the AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine donated by Britain, at the Makongeni Estate in Nairobi, Kenya Saturday, Aug. 14, 2021. (AP Photo/Brian Inganga)

Only 12 of Africa’s 54 countries, mostly middle-income countries that have been able to procure vaccines directly from manufacturers at the market price, have hit their target of vaccinating 10 percent of their citizens this month. But not a single vaccine has been administered in Burundi, while fewer than 1 percent of the people in Chad, Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan, and Tanzania have been vaccinated. The World Health Organisation (WHO) has admitted it will be unable to achieve its target of fully vaccinating 10 percent of Africans by the end of September.

This shocking situation flows inexorably from the operation of the capitalist mode of production and distribution that is based on profit maximisation and backed up the world’s most powerful governments that are at the beck and call of the major corporations and their financiers.

While the imperialist powers have monopolised vaccine supplies, having pre-ordered quantities far above their needs, the anarchy of the capitalist market, protected by patents and other restrictions, and the financial oligarchy’s criminal indifference to the lives of billions of people, have ensured that the vaccine rollout has been bedeviled by shortages, disruptions to production and half-measures. Such nationalist policies are not only having a terrible impact on the lives and social conditions of those living in unvaccinated countries. They are creating the conditions for the development and spread of new strains of the virus in these countries that will prolong and intensify the pandemic world-wide.

The handful of giant drug companies that own the patents on vaccines, whose development was largely publicly funded, have fought tooth and nail to ensure that the World Trade Organisation rejects calls from India and South Africa—backed by more than 100 countries, 100 Nobel laureates and prominent human rights groups, including Doctors Without Borders, Human Rights Watch and Oxfam—to waive intellectual property rights and allow them to manufacture or import generic and thus cheaper versions.

Last May, US President Joe Biden publicly backed the call to waive patent rights. But this was just words, with Washington doing nothing to address the technicalities involved or confront the pharmaceutical companies. At last week’s meeting of the WTO, the US, along with the European Union, the UK and Switzerland—all of which are home to major pharmaceutical companies—refused to support the waiver proposal.

While the WHO and its partners set up a hub in South Africa for the transfer of the technology to produce the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines, the companies have so far refused to share their vaccine recipes.

COVAX, the UN-backed public-private initiative designed to share vaccines globally at lower cost, has missed nearly all its targets and has begged rich countries to share their vaccines. Dr Seth Berkley, who heads Gavi, the vaccines alliance, said COVAX had been banking on supplies from India, the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer, but had received no doses since March when India banned exports.

Other problems have included difficulties in scaling up production, especially of the lower-cost AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson vaccines and delays in obtaining regulatory approval for other vaccines. This is even as millions of the single-shot Johnson & Johnson (J&J) vaccines (“filled and finished” but not manufactured in a South African factory) were shipped to Europe.

While the cost of vaccines and the limitations of supply have been major problems, low-income countries face the additional, far higher and often insurmountable costs of vaccine distribution and administration, lacking the infrastructure and healthcare personnel to do so.

According to the WHO, African countries have received 158 million vaccine doses, of which COVAX has supplied about 37 percent, with most acquired through bilateral deals and donations. While donors have pledged funding for more than 68 million doses to African states and to the African Union, including donations via COVAX, fewer than 45 million have been delivered.

COVAX is now expected to supply 1.4 billion doses by the end of 2021, far fewer than its original goal of 2 billion. The WHO and its partners acknowledge they are unable to supply Africa with 30 percent of the COVID-19 vaccines needed before February—just half the 60 percent vaccination coverage target African leaders had set for this year. It will take years before vaccination rates in Africa reach the levels of those in the advanced countries.

Instead of prioritising COVAX, the UN-backed initiative designed to share vaccines globally, Big Pharma, including Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, have their eyes firmly set on signing secret bilateral agreements with each country and lobbying rich countries and their regulators to authorise booster shots.

In the face of the global catastrophe that the Economist magazine estimated has already caused 15 million deaths, the response of WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus was to focus on the efforts of some of the advanced countries to roll out booster jabs for their most vulnerable residents. Tedros said he was “appalled” that wealthy nations, including the US, the UK, Israel, France and Germany, had started or were planning to administer booster shots to those already fully vaccinated while billions around the world had still not received even a single dose of the vaccine. He called for “a moratorium on the use of boosters in healthy populations until the end of the year.”

This is a diversion from the fundamental issues posed. Such a moratorium would serve only to render less effective the doses already given as their efficacy wanes with time, while doing nothing to resolve the global inequality expressed in the problems of ownership rights, cost, production, and distribution. Such that even if provided with these additional vaccine shots, most undeveloped countries would be unable to distribute them.

All global initiatives based on appeals to the ruling elites and Big Pharma to reduce disparities in vaccination rates, including the COVAX programme, have failed. A global vaccine rollout requires the seizure of the assets of the pharmaceutical and other major corporations and their financiers to pay for the necessary measures that include: the abolition of the intellectual property rights held by the giant pharmaceutical companies, global collaboration in vaccine production and distribution by all those countries that have the facilities to do so, and the provision of mass funding for every country to implement a comprehensive vaccination programme in concert with public health officials and health systems to ensure their safe and effective distribution and administration.

FDA advisory panel deals a blow to Biden’s COVID-19 vaccine booster plans

Benjamin Mateus

On Friday, September 17, the scientific advisory committee of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) voted 16-2 against Pfizer’s application to offer a third dose of their COVID-19 vaccine to all eligible recipients, 16 years old or over. The decision came only three days before the scheduled launch of Biden’s announced plan to begin offering COVID-19 vaccine boosters to all those previously vaccinated.

The advisory panel reconvened in the afternoon to vote on a revised booster question. It unanimously supported offering a third jab to those 65 years or older or at higher risk of developing severe COVID-19. Though not taking a formal vote, the panel was polled on which groups might be considered for a booster. All agreed that health care workers or those at high risk of occupational exposure should be given such considerations. The panel’s decision does not bind the FDA, but it usually follows the recommendations.

The advisory panel did not discuss how high-risk occupational exposures would be defined, given the high rates of community transmission. Many workers in factories, teachers at schools, and those working gig jobs have told the WSWS that there have been widespread COVID-19 infections in their workplaces.

Figure 1A, 1B, and 1C Case hospitalization, Case fatality, and Death hospitalization ratio between unvaccinated and vaccinated.

The scientists and public health experts on the advisory panel appear to have been following the data they were presented, which demonstrated a substantial benefit from booster shots, particularly for the elderly and those at higher health risk. They clearly were not simply following orders from the White House, since their recommendation disrupted the administration’s planned September 20 booster shot launch.

That said, neither the panel nor the FDA considered the only real strategy for ending the pandemic, which is to implement a society-wide program of elimination and eradication. Booster shots are actually an indication of the failure of the Biden administration’s claims that vaccination in and of itself would be enough to halt the pandemic. Instead, they buy a bit more time for those most vulnerable, while the coronavirus continues its rampage and is given more leeway to mutate and potentially evolve into even more dangerous variants.

Evidence has been mounting that the immunity generated from the vaccines, both Pfizer and Moderna, begins to wane over time, leading to a higher risk among the vaccinated to developing breakthrough infections and severe disease. Most of this data comes out of Israel, where after a high rate of vaccination in the first months of 2021, the complete abandonment of public health measures has led to a resurgence of infections with the highly transmissible Delta variant, for which the booster campaign has become a stop-gap measure. There has been an appreciable decline in infection rates and disease severity among elderly people in Israel who have received the third shot.

The observation study coming out of Israel demonstrated a significant decline in infections among those receiving a booster, compared to vaccinated groups within several days, reaching a 10-fold factor in the reduction. The third dose also reduced the chance of severe COVID-19 illness by 95 percent compared to those only fully vaccinated.

Table 2 from NEJM Primary outcomes of confirmed infection and severe illness

The Biden administration’s pledge to begin offering coronavirus booster shots to the eligible population by the week of September 20 was first announced in mid-August. On August 25, Pfizer submitted a supplement to their Biologics License Application (BLA) seeking approval to offer a booster dose six months after completing the primary two-shot series. It can only be assumed that these events were coordinated.

Soon after, two senior scientists, Dr. Philip Krause and Dr. Marion Gruber, announced their resignation from the FDA in opposition to a policy of giving boosters to all those previously vaccinated against COVID-19, rather than restricting them to the elderly and vulnerable.

In a critique published in The Lancet, they objected to the claim that enhancing immunity in all vaccinated people will reduce the number of COVID-19 cases, writing, “Most of the observational studies on which this conclusion is based are, however, preliminary and difficult to interpret precisely due to potential confounding and selective reporting. … Current evidence does not appear to show a need for boosting in the general population, in which efficacy against severe disease remains high … the limited supply of these vaccines will save the most lives if made available to people who are at appreciable risk of serious disease and have not yet received any vaccine.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently published a series of studies evaluating the impact of vaccination on the population. Vaccine effectiveness in preventing COVID-19 hospitalization was 86 percent but much lower among those 75 years old or higher (at 76 percent). The estimates were similar between Pfizer and Moderna.

Another study found that though vaccination appeared to confer a more than 10 times decreased risk of COVID-19-related deaths during the period from April 4 to July 17, when the study period was split in halves, COVID-19 deaths among the small fraction of vaccinated individuals who suffered breakthrough symptomatic infections rose from eight percent in the earlier half to 16 percent in the latter half, essentially doubling. The implication here is that not only Delta’s greater ferocity but also declining immunity led to these differences.

In a Tweet released by Dr. Ahmed Elbanna, which epidemiologist Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding highlighted, noted that once vaccinated individuals suffered breakthrough symptomatic infections, the case hospitalization ratio or case fatality ratio were not hugely different to the unvaccinated group.

Factor reduction in confirmed infection rates after booster vaccine - NEJM

This suggests that, contrary to much published commentary, the main advantage conferred by vaccination, as the efficacy begins to wane after six months or more, is that it still greatly reduces the likelihood of contracting infection at all, or of that infection becoming symptomatic. If, however, vaccinated individuals become infected and begin to show symptoms, they suffer morbidities and mortalities similar to those of the unvaccinated.

Dr. Feigl-Ding also showed that several months after being fully vaccinated, antibody titers (a type of blood test that determines the presence and level [titer] of antibodies in the blood) fall from a peak geometric mean of 762 to only 136. Once the booster shots were administered, the titers climbed to 1,419 by day seven and nearly 2,400 after a month. Given that a significant number of the population are now reaching the six-month window from completing their vaccinations, these findings have considerable implications in the Biden’s vaccine-only response to the pandemic.

As Dr. Malgorzata Gasperowicz, a developmental biologist and activist for Zero COVID in Canada, recently said in an interview with the WSWS, “There is this dangerous idea being perpetuated by those relying on vaccines when they say they want to decouple infections from disease severity. These decision-makers suggest that it is acceptable to let the virus spread because it won’t harm us if we are vaccinated.”

She went on to add that though the current vaccines are helping avert severe disease, if the virus continues to evolve, the new variants can develop sufficient immune-escape capabilities that the next time a vaccinated person becomes infected with these new strains, the derived immunity from vaccines may not protect them.

Dr. Malgorzata concluded, “The Delta variant has been the most dangerous strain of the coronavirus. … I was afraid it would be more difficult to bend the Delta curve because it was more transmissible than the Alpha or the original variant. Now, however, we have seen exponential declines [as noted in New Zealand] are possible, and they would be possible everywhere. But taking that decision to eradicate is the most important. And once we take it, in only several weeks, we would stop all community transmission. And if in every region community transmission is contained, then we won’t have a big problem anymore.”

Ford to shut down manufacturing operations in India, slash over 4,000 jobs

Wasantha Rupasinghe

Ford India announced on September 9 that it will end its car manufacturing operations in India, shutting down two plants in Maraimalainagar, a suburb of Chennai in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, and Sanand, in the western state of Gujarat. As a result, over 4,000 full-time Ford workers will lose their jobs. In addition, several thousand more trainees, contract workers, canteen and groundskeeping workers will lose their jobs, along with tens of thousands of employees at supplier plants and car dealerships.

In a statement, Ford spokesperson Sinead Phipps said the company will stop making vehicles for sale in India, which include the Figo, Aspire, Freestyle, EcoSport and Endeavour, right away. Once supplies of those vehicles are sold, there will be no more sold in India. Manufacturing of some of those vehicles will continue for export at the Sanand plant until it closes at the end of 2021, and from Chennai, where the vehicle and engine plants are set to close by the middle of 2022.

The impact of Ford’s exit will extend to hundreds of car dealerships, which employ 40,000 people across the country, ancillary industries, MSMEs (micro, small and medium enterprises) that have supported the plants up until now. Chennai, known as the “Detroit of India,” will be hit particularly hard.

Workers at Ford's Chennai plant (Source: Ford Authority)

As a result of the Ford closures, KE Raghunathan, Convener of Consortium of Indian Associations (CIA), said, “over 4,000 SMEs (small and medium size enterprises) will be closing.” He added, “Tamil Nadu is the worst hit with this decision as it is known as a base for many auto giants. The whole infrastructure created for vehicle exports and the logistics sector will be hit too.” Raghunathan warned that around 10,000-15,000 other workers could be left jobless by the impact on SMEs.

While slashing thousands of hourly jobs, Ford plans to “significantly expand” the number of software engineers, IT specialists, research, analytics, engineering and finance employees in India. The country is already home to the Ford’s second largest salaried workforce after North America and it hopes to expand the use of lower-paid skilled workers to support its global business operations.

Ford is the latest US vehicle maker after General Motors (GM) and the American motorcycle company Harley-Davidson to stop manufacturing in the world’s fourth largest automobile market over the last five years. In other words, tens of thousands of jobs were destroyed in India even before this latest round of bloodletting.

Ford was one of the first global carmakers to enter the Indian market after the initiation of pro-investor economic reforms in 1991. Announcing their decision to pull out, corporate executives said, “despite investing significantly in India, Ford has accumulated more than $2 billion of operating losses over the past 10 years and demand for new vehicles has been much weaker than forecast.”

Ford is a distant ninth, with less than two percent of the market share in India. Japan-based Maruti Suzuki is first, with 47.8 percent, followed by Hyundai and Tata with 17.4 percent and 8.2 percent respectively.

As a result of the company’s “Ford Plus” business plan, CEO Jim Farley said, “We are taking difficult but necessary actions to deliver a sustainably profitable business longer-term and allocate our capital to grow and create value in the right areas.”

This statement makes clear that shutting down operations in India is a part of massive restructuring by Ford and other global automakers driven by the ruthless struggle to cut costs, attract investors and dominate emerging electric vehicle markets. The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated this dog-eat-dog battle with analysts predicting a new wave of mergers and acquisitions and further monopolization of the industry. In response, auto executives have escalated attacks on wages, jobs and working conditions.

In January, Ford announced plans to close operations in Brazil, closing three plants and wiping more than 5,000 auto jobs in the Latin American country. In March 2019, the company announced plans to cut 25,000 jobs worldwide, including 12,000 in Europe and more than 5,000 in Germany alone.

Workers losing their long-term jobs amid the COVID-19 pandemic where shocked and angered over Ford’s surprise announcement. “We never had a clue about the plant shutting down,” Padmanabhan, 46, a worker who worked half his life at Ford’s Tamil Nadu plant, told The News Minute.com on September 10. “It was one-way communication. On Thursday (September 9) afternoon, we were called in for a meeting where Ford India MD [Managing Director] Anurag Mehrotra informed us that the plant is closing. This really was shocking and it’s a matter of our livelihoods.”

Workers are uncertain where they will find other jobs since the pandemic has shrunk the auto market and there is already a high demand for jobs. “Most automakers such as Hyundai and Nissan do not employ permanent staff,” 43-year-old Murugan, who has worked in the factory for 21 years, told local news stations.

While the unions at Ford reportedly blamed Prime Minister Modi’s “Make in India” campaign for the company’s decision to leave India, the fact is the unions have supported every measure to offer up Indian workers as a source of cheap labor for the multinational corporations. This includes the isolation of the courageous Maruti Suzuki workers, whose leaders were framed up in 2017 and thrown in jail for organizing opposition to sweatshop conditions and the company union at the Maruti Suzuki auto manufacturing plant in Manesar, just outside Delhi.

If the Ford unions are now criticizing Modi’s reactionary policies, it is only from the standpoint that he has not done enough to attract foreign capital. The nationalist unions want the government to hand over even more tax incentives and guarantees of super-profits, even though the federal and state governments have already allowed to those companies to do whatever they want.

On September 11, Chennai Ford Employees’ Union (CFEU) went to meet Rural Industries Minister TM Anbarasan and begged the state government to intervene in the crisis. Union officials appealed to the minister to assure the workers that their jobs would be protected. This is worse than useless. The Tamil-nationalist Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK)-led state government, like its predecessor and rival Tamil-nationalist All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK), is fully committed to defend profit interests of companies against workers.

On September 13, a CFEU delegation led by General Secretary P. Senthil Kumar met with the Ford management to plea with management to “reconsider its decision” or “to ensure job security in case of sale of the factory to a third party,” BusinessLine reported. A union leader acknowledged that Ford would not absorb workers in its remaining Indian facilities, saying, “It would be impossible for Ford to redeploy all people in other operations such as engineering and IT services.”

After two rounds of talks with the senior management at Ford, the company made it clear it would not back down on its decision to end car manufacturing operation in India. “The talks have failed,” Kumar told The Hindu on September 15. “Management officials said they had explored and evaluated all options before arriving at this decision.”

The unions are opposed to any mobilization of autoworkers throughout the country and internationally because they do not want to do anything that might frighten off the multinational corporations. Instead, the CFEU is now appealing to Tamil Nadu Chief Minister MK Stalin .

Stalin was elected in April due to mass revulsion with the AIADMK and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu-supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), whose criminal “herd immunity” policies has led to at least 445,000 COVID-19 deaths, with many more not counted.

Stalin’s DMK, which was in an electoral coalition with the Stalinist Communist Party (CPI), the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI-M) and various caste-based parties, defends the property and wealth of the country’s billionaires just as loyally as the BJP and AIADMK. After feigning support for the victims of the pandemic, Stalin kept the manufacturing operations of the multinationals open even as the deadly virus swept through Tamil Nadu.

There is growing frustration and anger among Ford workers. On September 14, workers staged a protest in front of the factory at the Ford India headquarters in Maraimalai Nagar, which the union sought to channel into an impotent appeal to the Tamil Nadu government.

Chief Minister Stalin, Industrial Minister Thangam Thennarasu and senior government officials have reportedly held meetings to decide on a “further course of action.” Whatever comes out of such a meeting will only be to the detriment of the workers, including seeking to attract another buyer who will insist on even greater tax abatements and concessions from workers.

N. Muruganandam, the principal secretary for industries in Tamil Nadu, whose job description is to “promote investments and industrialization” in the state, told Business Standard, “Talks are on between Ford and another automobile maker and some other companies too. The state government will facilitate the smooth handover of the land if they reach a deal.”

As fall begins in Northern Hemisphere, school reopenings fuel global spread of COVID-19

Evan Blake

As fall begins in the Northern Hemisphere and schools have fully reopened throughout the world, the COVID-19 pandemic has reached a critical turning point.

At present, the global average of daily new cases stands at roughly 515,000, while an average of 8,336 people are dying from COVID-19 each day worldwide. These figures have decreased slightly in recent weeks, but given the inadequate testing in almost every country, the real figures are much higher. A survey of excess deaths from The Economist notes that while the official global death toll now stands at 4.7 million, the real figure is likely more than three times as high at 15.6 million deaths.

Daily new confirmed COVID-19 cases per million people (source: Our World In Data)

With only 31.4 percent of the world population fully vaccinated against COVID-19, the vast majority in the wealthiest countries, billions of people remain at risk of infection globally. Furthermore, the uninhibited spread of the virus creates the conditions for the evolution of more infectious and vaccine-resistant variants. On Monday, there were reports of 19 cases in the UK of the more transmissible Delta variant with an E484K mutation associated with greater resistance to vaccines. There have been 99 cases of Delta + E484K sequenced worldwide, including 25 in the United States, 22 in Denmark, 21 in Turkey, six in Italy, and three in Germany.

Most of the roughly 1.5 billion children who switched to remote learning at the start of the pandemic have now returned for fully in-person learning, as capitalist governments worldwide have pursued this policy. The vast majority of these children have not been vaccinated and constitute a growing percentage of new COVID-19 cases worldwide. They have become the primary vector for transmitting the virus to their families and communities, and experts have warned that the full reopening of schools will cause a major surge of the pandemic in the coming months.

The fundamental aim of reopening schools has always been to compel parents to return to unsafe workplaces in order to boost corporate profits and sustain the perpetual rise of the stock market. This only furthers the spread of COVID-19, with large factories often the second leading source of outbreaks after schools and colleges.

The dominant pandemic strategy worldwide remains “herd immunity,” based on letting the virus rip through the population regardless of the levels of infections and deaths. This strategy is sharply expressed in the policy of school reopenings, which exposes millions of children to the virus, with unknown long-term consequences.

While various politicians and trade union officials claim that limited mitigation measures such as mask wearing can make schools safe, the real conditions in overcrowded and poorly ventilated schools expose this as a fraud.

The only viable strategy towards the pandemic is one which aims at the global eradication of COVID-19, to be achieved through mass vaccinations and the universal deployment of all public health measures available, until new cases are brought to zero and the virus eliminated in ever-wider geographic regions. In opposition to this strategy, the ruling elites everywhere are pursuing “herd immunity,” either openly or under the cover of “mitigations.”

In Latin America, which accounts for roughly 8 percent of the world population but one-third of global deaths from COVID-19, schools have reopened throughout the continent. The direst situation is in Brazil, where cases among children have soared as schools fully reopened nationwide. Brazil has the highest number of child deaths from COVID-19 of any country, with 1,581 young people aged 10 to 19 succumbing to the virus in the first half of 2021, and another 1,187 children under the age of 10 dying from COVID-19 since the pandemic began.

Across Europe, school reopenings are expected to produce a catastrophic surge of the pandemic in the coming weeks. The World Health Organization (WHO) recently warned at the end of August that another 236,000 people could die from COVID-19 in Europe by December 1. In France, in the last week of August there were 20,200 cases recorded among children aged 0-19, more than five times the same figure a year ago. In the UK, all mitigation measures have been scrapped and COVID-19 is ripping through schools, with massive surges taking place in Scotland and forecast to hit England in the coming weeks. Cases are also steadily rising in Germany, where schools have reopened, causing outbreaks across the country.

In Africa, official cases and deaths are on the decline, but testing is limited throughout the continent. The Economist estimates that excess deaths are at the highest multiple of official deaths in Africa, with roughly 1.86 million excess deaths, or over nine times the official death toll. At present, only 50 million Africans, or 3.6 percent of the total population, have been fully vaccinated, with the continent facing a 500 million-dose shortage this year. As schools and workplaces fully reopen throughout Africa, COVID-19 will silently spread throughout the population in the coming weeks.

Share of the population fully vaccinated against COVID-19 (source: Our World In Data)

In Asia, official cases and deaths are also declining, but daily excess deaths stand at 20,300, nearly seven times the official figure and by far the highest of any continent in absolute terms. Significantly, major surges are underway in Malaysia, Vietnam and Thailand, all of which had previously eliminated COVID-19 but after lifting travel restrictions and public health measures became centers for transmission. China, which has maintained the elimination strategy, has had to severely restrict international travel and mobilize vast resources to contain repeated outbreaks of the Delta variant brought into the country.

In Australia, which had also previously eliminated COVID-19, cases are once again surging as schools fully reopen. In New Zealand, the Delta variant is feared to be spreading through schools outside Auckland, the largest city which remains at a “Level 4” lockdown. Noted public health experts, including University of Otago epidemiologist Michael Baker, warned in a September 10 blog post that “children are returning to in-person learning with little or no protection against the potential spread of Covid-19 infection in schools.”

The center of the global pandemic is now in North America, with the United States, Canada and Mexico experiencing major surges in new cases driven primarily by school reopenings. In Alberta, Canada, the surge is approaching peaks reached last winter, with a daily average of 1,646 new cases in the province.

Students arrive at PS811 in New York City on September 13, 2021 (AP Photo/Richard Drew)

In the US, there are now an average of 134,972 new COVID-19 cases and 1,582 deaths each day. In the past week, a staggering 844,718 people were officially infected and 10,568 people died from COVID-19. The official cumulative death toll stands at 691,880, while the real figure is estimated to be between 800,000-890,000, greater than the total number of Americans killed during the Civil War and the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic.

The situation is catastrophic throughout the country. Roughly a quarter of all hospitals report that their intensive care units are at or near capacity. As a result of school reopenings, roughly one million children were officially infected with COVID-19 in the five weeks from August 5 to September 9. Child hospitalizations and deaths are at record levels across the US, with an average of 354 children hospitalized every day.

After the Biden administration prematurely declared “independence” from the pandemic on July 4, the scale of the present surge and the dangers posed by the full reopening of schools continue to be minimized. All talk of mitigation measures has disappeared in the corporate media.

A major photo essay published Friday in the New York Times is a case in point. Titled “Glimpses of How Pandemic America Went Back to School,” the piece glorifies school reopenings in the US and exposes the fraud of so-called mitigations in schools. Almost every photograph shows students, staff or both not wearing masks.

Journalist Dana Goldstein writes that school reopenings “have been exciting, anxiety-provoking and sometimes even amusing.” She falsely claims that “schools have generally been able to operate safely during the pandemic with only limited on-site transmission of the virus.”

In reality, just in the past week there have been reports of hundreds or thousands of infections of students and staff in schools across West Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama, Georgia, Minnesota, California, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Florida, and other states. According to one informal tracker, roughly 250 school employees have died from COVID-19 since the last week of July, amounting to roughly 35 per week or five per day throughout August and September.

The global state of the pandemic and the role that schools play as centers of viral transmission make clear that all schools must be closed in order to eliminate and ultimately eradicate COVID-19. This must be combined with the closure of all nonessential workplaces, universal masking, the rapid vaccination of the world population, mass testing, contact tracing, the safe isolation of infected patients, and all other public health measures needed to cut off the chain of transmission. All workers and small business owners affected by these measures must be given the necessary resources during lockdowns, which scientists stress need last no longer than two months.

Pacific governments plan border reopenings amid Delta surge

John Braddock

As the highly contagious and deadly Delta COVID-19 variant surges around the globe, governments across the Pacific are re-opening their borders to international travel, regardless of the risks to public health.

The move is in line with the clamour from big business and political elites internationally for life to return to “normal” as the population is compelled to “live with the virus,” a homicidal policy that threatens tens of thousands more deaths. In the Pacific this agenda is being propelled by demands to restore the devastated tourism industry, deemed essential to the economies of many island businesses.

Fiji, which is experiencing one of the worst COVID-19 surges in the region, is set to reopen its borders on November 1 for fully-vaccinated travelers. Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama declared he wants commercial and international flights to begin as soon as possible.

A nurse stands outside Tamara Twomey hospital in Suva, Fiji. (AP Photo/Aileen Torres-Bennett)

The Fijian government initially set a target of 60 percent of the adult population being fully vaccinated by the end of October, well below even the inadequate 80 percent used by other countries. According to Fiji health authorities, 96.5 percent of the eligible population has now received at least one dose, with 66 percent fully vaccinated. The country’s target of 587,651 people is well short of the total population of 890,000 because children are excluded.

Fiji currently has 12,981 active cases in isolation. Since April, when the Delta variant entered via a quarantine breach, there have been 49,174 infections and 566 deaths. The national seven-day average daily test positivity is 16.2 percent, which is on a downward trend, but still indicates a high level of community transmission. Official numbers fail to show the true extent of cases, as reporting systems are overloaded and in many areas no testing is taking place.

Fiji’s remote islands are recording escalating case numbers: Kadavu in the east, Macuata and Vanua Levu in the north, and Malolo and Naviti in the west have together reported more than 800 cases in the past several weeks.

The move to open the border follows persistent refusals by Bainimarama to impose a full national lockdown, on the grounds that it would “destroy” the economy. As with capitalist governments elsewhere, his strategy is to reach an arbitrary level of vaccination coverage and, based on the fraudulent proposition that vaccines alone can halt the spread of COVID-19, remove all restrictions.

Some internal border closures were lifted last Friday and Bainimarama announced that once Fiji achieves 70 percent full vaccination, all workplaces, tertiary institutions, churches, hotels, restaurants, cafés, cinemas, gyms, pools and tattoo parlours can operate at 70-percent capacity.

Sections of the ruling establishment are clearly worried that the rush to reopen international borders could trigger social opposition and political instability. According to Radio NZ, Bill Gavoka, leader of the main opposition Social Democratic Liberal Party (SODELPA), said Fiji was not ready for the border to open and the government should focus on “health first over the economy, which will fall into line.”

Former chair of the Pacific tourism board David Vaeafe warned that in 1918 New Zealand allowed influenza to enter Samoa, where it “wiped out 20 percent of the population.” Noting how “rampant” COVID is in the Pacific, he said: “It’s important to vaccinate local communities to protect them but also to protect the border.”

Fiji’s tourism industry, however, enthusiastically welcomed the plan. Andre Viljoen, Fiji Airways CEO, boasted that the vaccination rate “puts us on track to be the most COVID-safe holiday destination in the world.” Ahura Resorts said they would target the US market—the centre of the global COVID surge—until New Zealand and Australia lift their border restrictions.

American Samoa last week recorded its first COVID-19 case, a returning resident who arrived on a September 13 flight from Hawaii. Hawaiian Airlines has recently resumed flights from Honolulu, offering two per month through to December 20. Flights were previously stopped for 17 months at the request of the American Samoa government, except for repatriation flights for residents who had been stranded in Hawaii and the US mainland.

Travelers to the capital Pago Pago are required to follow health and safety protocols, including proof of vaccination and negative pre-travel test results. While American Samoa had until now remained COVID- free, Hawaii is in the midst of a serious Delta surge. It registered 550 new cases on September 18, with a daily average of 539. The US state has had over 72,000 cases and 699 deaths.

Guam, a US territory, has fought two major COVID-19 outbreaks which caused 180 deaths and infected over 14,000 people. Earlier this year the island offered COVID-19 vaccinations to American expatriates in Asia with a so-called “Air V&V” vaccination and vacation program for people to visit and get their shots. Borders were reopened for tourism, with fully vaccinated visitors able to skip post-arrival quarantine. The US Center for Disease Controls subsequently raised its travel advisory, warning Americans not to go to Guam.

In French Polynesia the government re-imposed border controls in February, ending more than six months of quarantine-free travel to Tahiti and other islands, which had allowed thousands of tourists into what had been the only accessible tourist destination in the South Pacific. Within weeks, COVID-19 had re-emerged in the community. Two weeks ago, daily case numbers stopped being reported after total infections passed the 40,000-mark. Unofficial reports indicate that infections reached 3,000 cases a day. Officially, 593 people have died as a result of the pandemic.

The Tourism Authority of Kiribati has also welcomed a government decision to reopen the island, which has so far had no COVID cases, from January 2022. President Taneti Maamau urged people who qualify for the COVID-19 vaccines to complete both doses before the end of the year.

The Pacific region’s main powers, Australia and New Zealand, which were forced to suspend their short-lived trans-Tasman “travel bubble” at the outset of the current outbreak in July, are preparing fresh “roadmaps to freedom,” even as COVID-19 devastates their major cities.

As of September 18, Australia had 21,108 active cases and 1,162 deaths. Victoria and New South Wales are recording large numbers of daily infections. Despite claims that New Zealand has “bent the curve” due to the Ardern government’s elimination strategy, Auckland remains in the grip of a long tail of infections, with over 1,000 cases detected since a person who arrived from Sydney tested positive on August 17.

A four-phase plan for reopening Australia unveiled at the end of July suggested those with vaccination certificates would be able to travel overseas when at least 80 percent of the over-16 population is fully vaccinated. Anticipating that the federal government will relax border restrictions before Christmas, Qantas has announced the resumption of its international schedule on December 18, including flights to the UK, Canada, US, Japan, Singapore and Fiji.

New Zealand’s Labour-Green government has declared that “restoring travel connectivity within the region will boost economic activity and long-term recovery.” A plan to begin testing self-isolation for vaccinated people this year, with a new border system based on low, medium and high-risk entry paths in place from early 2022, remains on track, with vaccine passports promised by December. The government announced on Friday that it will “re-assess” the travel bubble with Australia in eight weeks.

In order to prop up New Zealand’s horticulture industry, low-paid seasonal workers from the Pacific islands who have had at least one dose of vaccine will be allowed in without having to quarantine from October. Workers from Samoa, Tonga and Vanuatu will isolate for a week in employer-arranged accommodation before starting work. University of Canterbury professor Michael Plank said that the danger will be workers returning home, taking COVID-19 with them.