UK businesses call for prisoners to be used to plug labour shortage

Julie Hyland

Food manufacturers are calling on the UK government to allow them to exploit prison labour.

The British Meat Processors Association and the Association of Independent Meat Suppliers (AIMS) are reported to have approached prisons directly and to have spoken to the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) to discuss the recruitment of current prisoners and ex-offenders. But other sectors, from hospitality to care homes, are said to be considering the move.

Tony Goodger for AIMS said, “Much of the food industry is facing a recruitment crisis,” with 14,000 job vacancies in the meat business. The British Poultry Council reports a vacancy rate of more than 16 percent, approximately 7,000 jobs.

Leyhill prison in Gloucestershire, England (Credit: Creative Commons)

Goodger said he had contacted HMP (Her Majesty's Prison) Hollesley Bay in Suffolk in August but was told the demand for inmates was so great that it had reached its quota. Usually, those available for work are in open prisons and coming to the end of their sentence who are released on temporary licence (ROTL), of which there are just 3,000 in England and Wales.

Moves to employ inmates are being presented as part of a new “rehabilitative” approach, with the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) stating, “Helping prisoners find jobs during their sentence and after release makes it much less likely they will reoffend. We will support all industries with skills shortages where possible.”

Penal servitude was abolished in 1948 in England and Wales (1950 in Scotland and 1953 in Northern Ireland). For almost 200 years up until then, the transportation of convicts to the colonies was a feature of the consolidation of Britain’s Empire. Imprisonment with hard labour included the treadmill, the most famous victim of which was Irish novelist and playwright Oscar Wilde.

Any gains from its abolition were rapidly lost. Prisoners are meant to engage in “purposeful activity”, although not necessarily paid labour. Those on work programmes earn a minimum weekly wage of £4. But years of “law and order” policies, combined with massive cuts to public services, means England and Wales have the largest prison population in Western Europe, at almost 79,000 in November 2020—173 prisoners per 100,000 of the population. Rehabilitative measures have largely been jettisoned, with most prisoners confined to their cells for much of the day.

Until now, the UK has not emulated the United States, where convict labour is a multi-billion-dollar industry. Direct employment of inmates is relatively small scale, from the Turkey producer Bernard Matthews to the Timpson Group. But more recently inmates at HMP Leyhill, Gloucestershire have been employed on minimum wage to build eco-homes for Torbay Council, with their wages placed into a fund overseen by the prison governor, and which can only be accessed for housing.

Frances Crook, Chief Executive of the Howard League for Penal Reform, wrote in the Guardian that many prisoners “would jump at the chance to get out of their cells and do something useful”, and urged, “Let firms set up shop inside prisons, as I have done, but inmates get the same wages and employment rights as anyone else.”

There is no chance of that. Crook notes that a commercial graphic design studio set up by the Howard League at Coldingley prison, Surrey ran “successfully for years until the prison authorities realised that, because they paid income tax, the prisoners had employment rights.”

The MoJ said prisoners hired by meat companies would get paid, unless unpaid work was part of their sentence and that “wages would vary according to which businesses inmates work for” but would “probably be less than what an ordinary member of the public would earn.”

This is the real impulse for a return to penal servitude, especially under conditions of a significant labour shortage. Virtually all sectors are impacted. Most attention has focussed on the lack of HGV drivers, a shortage upwards of 90,000, which is blamed for emptying supermarket shelves. But from hospitality to health and social care, it is a growing complaint.

The source of the shortages is manifold. Britain’s exit from the European Union, on December 31, 2020, has seen an estimated one million non-UK born residents leave the country, 700,000 in London alone.

The pro-Brexit campaign centred on claims that the UK would be able to “take back” control of its borders and clampdown on EU migration. EU citizens already employed on that date were able to continue living and working in the UK, provided they registered, but anyone coming to work afterwards requires a visa.

The Brexit deadline came only weeks before the world was notified of the deadly COVID-19 global pandemic. Boris Johnson’s Conservative government, like many the world over, first tried to ignore and then play down the dangers. It openly proclaimed a policy of “herd immunity”, allowing the virus to spread through the population.

In the face of wildcat strikes and protests, it was forced into a lock down at the end of March 2020, but only after it had organised a £330 billion bailout of the corporations and super-rich and £895 billion in quantitative easing—money printing—almost equal to that over the 11 years following the financial crash in 2008.

In October Prime Minister Boris Johnson declared “let the bodies pile up in their thousands. No more f**cking lockdowns” and has been true to his word. With the support of the Labour Party and the Trades Union Congress, all mitigation measures have been abandoned. This centres on keeping schools open despite the known dangers in order to force parents into unsafe workplaces and recoup profits.

The result is a health and social catastrophe. More than 7.2 million people in the UK have been infected, and more than 159,000 people have died. Between November 2020 and February 2021 COVID-19 was the leading cause of death in both England and Wales.

Details of the ages and occupations of those who have died are barely counted, According to government figures, almost 8,000 working age adults died from COVID between March 9 and December 28. Those most at risk were men in “elementary” and service jobs, and women in factories and “caring” occupations. Cases among young and working adults are now rising exponentially.

The numbers stricken with ongoing health complications are unknown. This includes not only Long COVID but thousands unable to access treatment for cancer, cardiology and other critical care due to the severe strains on the National Health Service, which has a 5.45 million people on its waiting list. The number of deaths from all causes was 12.1 percent above the five-year average in the week ending August 27, 2021.

The virus has impacted most on the most exploited and socially vulnerable. Not for nothing has COVID-19 been deemed a “disease of the poor”.

For almost four decades, the ruling elite, whether represented by the Tories or Labour, have carried out a social counter-revolution against the gains and conditions of the working class. Years of deindustrialisation and cheap labour jobs, reinforced by austerity, meant that even before the pandemic wages over the preceding 17 years had been falling—the longest period since the beginning of the 19th century. More than half of those below the official poverty line come from working families, as wage cuts and freezes have been policed by the trade unions.

Those celebrated as “essential workers” during the pandemic are especially exploited. HGV drivers worked long hours for a median hourly pay of £11.80, with the result that average age of drivers is 55. Wages in the food processing plants average £8.91.

Individual firms in certain sectors have sought to resolve their immediate problem by offering “golden handshakes” and a slight increases in wages. Even so, starting salaries are estimated to have increased by just 3.5 percent on average, following a 1.5 percent fall in the year to June 2020.

Solving the shortage through real improvements in overall wages and conditions is off the agenda as far as the financial oligarchy is concerned. The government has already imposed a freeze on public sector wages. At the end of this month, it will withdraw furlough support to almost 1.8 million workers and six million people on Universal Credit are to lose the £20 per week “pandemic top-up”. Together with limiting increases to pensions to just 2.5 percent and a 10 percent hike in National Insurance Contributions, these measures are aimed at making the working class pay the costs of the pandemic crisis.

The primary instrument enabling the imposition of these attacks is the trade unions. Speaking to the annual Trades Union Congress conference this week, General Secretary Frances O’Grady called on the government to “Invite unions in with employers. Get us around the table, and let’s make that industry deliver decent conditions, direct employment and a proper pay rise.”

Her example of a “proper pay rise?” £10 per hour for social care workers, approximately 50 pence per hour above the current average rate, and below the Living Wage.

ICUs across the United States stretched to capacity by COVID-19 Delta variant surge

Benjamin Mateus

The Delta wave of the pandemic has left an immense hidden trail of devastation stemming from a complete abandonment of or inability of local and state public health departments to provide a timely and accurate statistical accounting of the number of cases and deaths. The actual toll of the pandemic becomes guesswork pieced together by daily reports from health systems to their respective states.

However, the limited data available to the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) demonstrates that intensive care unit (ICU) capacity across many healthcare systems in the Southeast, Midwest, the South, specifically Texas, and the Southwest, including California, has exceeded 95 percent.

According to the New York Times, “One in four hospitals are now reporting more than 95 percent of ICU beds occupied, up from one in five last month.” The latest metrics from the HHS website on hospital utilization indicates that out of 84,513 staffed ICU beds in the country, 67,175, or approximately 80 percent, are in use. Almost 31 percent of these beds are being occupied by patients admitted for COVID-19.

The tragic death of Ray Martin DeMonia, a Cullman, Alabama antiques dealer, in Meridian, Mississippi, from a heart attack earlier this month, may seem anecdotal but depicts in glaring reality the consequences to the population when health care systems become inundated by an entirely preventable disease. DeMonia was turned away from 43 hospitals across three states because their ICUs were full. The nearest available bed was 200 miles away at Rush Foundation Hospital. Delay in care, in this case, led to his untimely death.

A heart attack need not be fatal nor debilitating. Rapid intervention that allows the reopening of a blocked coronary artery can restore oxygenated blood to the heart muscle and prevent the tissue from dying. If the blockage persists for five or six hours, a significant portion of the heart muscle can fail, and acute heart failure can occur with the heart attack leading to a dangerous combination. After twelve hours, the damage is irreversible. Additionally, dangerous heart rhythms can be generated that make the remaining heart work inefficiently.

The care of patients in ICUs is labor-intensive. It requires a tremendous investment in resources that include highly trained specialists—a cadre of nurses, physicians, therapists—and a sundry of complex equipment used to treat patients. Additionally, interventional radiological suites, blood banks, laboratories, and pharmacies must work together intimately to allow the hospital services to function efficiently.

However, when these systems reach capacity, the ability to care, treat, and respond immediately to a medical emergency is compromised. Instead of nurses caring for one patient, they may be assigned three or four patients in their extended shifts. Non-ICU staff is utilized who are unfamiliar with the processes or do not know how to respond to critical results. Patients must be monitored in busy emergency rooms or makeshift units lacking the necessary support systems.

A sustained surge in sick patients also means that essential procedures or operations must be suspended. Patients with life-threatening illnesses have to cope until health systems can return to routine operations. But as the current surge of COVID-19 impacts younger patients, ICU stays are more extended. The state of siege under which the hospitals operate runs into weeks, which can be a matter of life and death for patients who desperately need urgent comprehensive medical attention. They also take an incredible toll on the mental well-being of the staff, who feel they are perpetually working over an assembly line of severely ill patients.

Speaking with U.S. News, executive vice president of the Houston Methodist hospital system, Roberta Schwartz, frankly stated, “We basically do ICU in the emergency room. You may hold down there for 45 minutes, and you may hold for three days. You’re going to get great care if you can come to one of our facilities. But ideally, you want to get people up to the appropriate unit as quickly as you can.”

“It’s not very comfortable, but it works,” she told U.S. News about the makeshift ICU. “And a blow-up mattress is better than a sleeping bag, which is better than a tent outside.”

The answer for the ruling elite to the current crisis is the implementation of hospital care rationing programs, as Idaho’s Department of Health and Welfare (DHW) announced last week as the state faced a massive surge in COVID-19 patients. On September 11, there were over 600 patients hospitalized, far above the winter peak when 466 people had been hospitalized at any one time.

DHW Director Dave Jeppsen wrote, “Crisis standards of care is a last resort. It means we have exhausted our resources to the point that our healthcare systems are unable to provide the treatment and care we expect. This is a decision I was fervently hoping to avoid. The best tools we have to turn this around is for more people to get vaccinated and to wear masks indoors and in outdoor crowded public places. Please choose to get vaccinated as soon as possible – it is your very best protection against being hospitalized from COVID-19.” The crisis standard of care, in basic terms, means resources are diverted to those the hospital staff believes have the best chance for survival.

Yet, beyond meagerly suggesting that residents consider getting vaccinated, Idaho’s Republican governor Brad Little, like his counterparts in Florida, Texas and elsewhere, has remained vocally opposed to any mask mandate.

Governor Little is also working with the state’s attorney general, Lawrence Wasden, to use the court systems to stop President Joe Biden’s large employer COVID vaccination and testing mandate.

Meanwhile, patients are being transported across state lines to Spokane, Washington, where there is some capacity in their ICUs. However, as Dr. Christopher Baliga, an infectious disease specialist at Seattle’s Virginia Mason hospital, told the Washington Post, “We are keeping our head above water, but barely. Our capacity to absorb overwhelmed patients from other states is severely limited.”

According to the Economist’s analysis, though COVID deaths are averaging close to 1,700 per day in the US, excess deaths are almost twice as many at 3,100 per day. Cumulatively, with more than 662,000 reported deaths due to COVID, there have been 860,000 excess deaths. The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, an independent global health research center based at the University of Washington, places the current excess deaths in the US at over one million.

Not all these deaths are directly related to COVID infections. Dr. Steven Woolf, director emeritus of the Virginia University’s Center on Society and Health, noted last year, “Some people who never had the virus may have died because of disruptions caused by the pandemic. These include people with acute emergencies, chronic diseases like diabetes that were not properly care for, or emotional crises that led to overdose or suicides.”

To be even more precise, the current preventable deaths are a byproduct of deliberate neglect on the part of state and federal governments, when in the face of inundated health systems operating at overcapacity they steadfastly refuse to lock down and disrupt the transmission of the virus, thereby perpetuating the social murder that is measured economically and tabulated in the ledgers of the financial aristocracy’s portfolios and ever-larger bank accounts.

TV election debate in Germany: All candidates stand for herd immunity, mass layoffs and welfare cuts

Christoph Vandreier

Rarely has an election campaign been so detached from social reality as this year’s campaign for the Bundestag (federal parliament). This was underlined by the penultimate TV debate between the candidates for chancellor of the Christian Democrats (CDU), the Social Democrats (SPD) and the Greens, broadcast simultaneously on both main TV channels on Sunday evening.

The three candidates for chancellor – Olaf Scholz (SPD), Annalena Baerbock (Greens) and Armin Laschet (CDU) – in the Triell (Screenshot)

The three-way debate between Olaf Scholz (SPD), Armin Laschet (CDU) and Annalena Baerbock (Greens) was held in Berlin-Adlershof on the outskirts of the capital, but it seemed like something from another world. All major social developments were blanked out, since all the parties pursue the same ruthless policies in the interests of the super-rich.

In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, the 93,000 deaths in Germany were not even mentioned. All three candidates had previously ruled out a lockdown, which would be necessary to save hundreds of thousands of lives. Instead, they have promoted policies that place the profits of banks and corporations ahead of people’s lives.

The only issue under debate was how to increase vaccination rates, although with the spread of the Delta variant, vaccinations alone can never be sufficient to bring the pandemic under control. With the enforcement of in-person schooling, millions of unvaccinated children are left defenceless and exposed to infection so that their parents can work and generate corporate profits.

Instead of saving lives, all the parties in the Bundestag have gifted billions to the super-rich. According to data from the US business magazine Forbes, German billionaires recorded an increase in wealth of $178 billion in 2020!

A recent analysis by Oxfam found that the world’s 2,690 billionaires would still be $55 billion richer than they were at the start of the pandemic even if they gave away 99 percent of their 2020 profits on a one-time basis. This money, according to Oxfam, would be enough to pay for the vaccination of every single person on the planet and, in addition, transfer 17,000 euros to every one of the world’s unemployed.

In light of these figures, the staged dispute during the debate over tax increases could hardly be surpassed in absurdity. While Laschet categorically ruled out any tax increase, Scholz advocated raising the top tax rate for very high incomes by just 3 percent.

The last SPD-led government, headed by Gerhard Schröder, had cut the top tax rate by 11 percentage points. At the time, Scholz, as SPD secretary-general, played a leading role in implementing Schröder’s “Agenda 2010,” which, in addition to tax cuts and pension reductions, promoted the creation of a huge low-wage sector.

By refusing to tax the rich, all three parties participating in the debate made it unmistakably clear that they would far eclipse this policy and squeeze the hundreds of billions transferred to the corporations and the super-rich out of the working class.

That is why the mass layoffs in industry were not mentioned at all. What is already being pushed through at Opel, Continental and Daimler will reach completely new dimensions after the elections. In the auto industry alone, 500,000 jobs are up for grabs. The same workers, who were forced into completely unsafe workplaces under pandemic conditions, are now to be put out on the street.

In this general attack on the working class, the employers and stock owners can rely on the new federal government, regardless the new chancellor’s party affiliation.

This is evident in the current train drivers’ strike, which also received no mention. The federal government is trying to make an example here. The train drivers are to pay for the crisis with real wage losses and, at the same time, be subjected to the control of the main trade unions in order to suppress any resistance. This is to be extended to the entire working class after the elections. But all these issues were carefully sidestepped in the debate.

With regard to climate change, which was loudly argued over in the debate, all the candidates are pursuing a program that is oriented toward the interests of big business rather than the needs of ordinary people and the environment. Laschet demanded “creativity instead of regulations and bans.” He wants to speed up the approval process for construction projects and relieve companies of red tape—in other words, eliminate environmental and worker safety standards.

Baerbock also presented climate policy as an opportunity for big business. Even the Financial Times, the authentic voice of European finance capital, noted with satisfaction the extent to which the Greens had submitted to the interests of business.

“Baerbock’s ‘pact with industry,’ aimed at helping the country’s businesses cope with climate change, shows how much her party’s relationship with the corporate world has changed,” the finance paper commented on Monday.

The German Institute for Economic Research has just published a study proving that even the rosy promises of all the election programs would not be adequate to achieve even the climate targets set by law, let alone keep global warming below the critical 1.5 degree increase.

In the preceding debates, the candidates had given assurances that they would assert the interests of the German economy internationally, including by force of arms. From the debacle in Afghanistan, which revealed the brutal nature of the Western powers’ war of occupation, all parties drew the conclusion that Germany would have to rearm even further. In the debate they sought to outdo one another in declarations of support for strengthening the Bundeswehr (armed forces) and implementing an aggressive foreign policy that, in the words of Green candidate Baerbock, “does not duck away.”

In every single area of policy, all of the Bundestag parties agree on the broad outlines, and in every single area the line is determined by a ruthless class policy that is rejected by the vast majority of the population.

That is why the debate took on such an artificial character. All the candidates were at pains to hide their real program behind all sorts of platitudes and smokescreens. In the media, too, one found nothing about the parties’ plans. Instead, the coverage resembled a sports report: Who scored a hit? Who went on the offensive, etc.?

When the grand coalition consisting of the Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union and the SPD was voted out of office four years ago, the parties spent four months negotiating behind closed doors over the continuation of the hated government constellation. In this way, they made the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) the official opposition party, while they themselves pursued the extreme right-wing policy of unrestrained enrichment of the ruling class, culminating in their common herd immunity response to the pandemic.

Similar talks behind the backs of the population are taking place again. This was very evident in the debate, which was watched by 11 million viewers. The event was based on an agreement not to address any of the issues that move millions of people.

Regardless of which parties form the next federal government, the homicidal coronavirus policies will continue and the hundreds of billions given to the rich will be recovered from workers through mass layoffs and wage theft.

Indian court exhorts Modi to “protect Hindu rights” with further communalist “cow protection” legislation

Kranti Kumara

A High Court judge in Allahabad in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh issued a reactionary ruling dripping with Hindu-supremacism earlier this month when denying bail to Javed, a 59-year-old Muslim man. In March, more than six months ago, Javed was arrested by the Uttar Pradesh police for the “crime” of cow-slaughter under the state’s draconian anti-cow-slaughter law, and he has been languishing in jail ever since.

Justice Shekhar Kumar Yadav included numerous strident Hindu-communalist observations in his 12-page bail judgment. He called on India’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) national government, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, himself an arch-Hindu communalist, to make “cow protection” a “fundamental right of Hindus” and push legislation through the Indian parliament proclaiming the cow a “national animal.”

Indian Prime Minster Narendra Modi addresses a gathering ahead of Bihar state Assembly elections in Patna, India, Wednesday, Oct. 28, 2020. (AP Photo/Aftab Alam Siddiqui)

Justice Kumar’s comments were breathtaking for their openly Hindu-communalist outlook, medieval backwardness and contempt for basic judicial principles. Invoking ancient Indian religious texts, the judge wrote, “The cow has been shown as an important part in India's ancient texts like the Vedas and the Mahabharata that define Indian culture and for which India is known.”

Needless to say, he failed to mention the Taj Mahal, arguably an even more world-renowned product of Indian culture, which was built for the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan and fuses traditional Indian, Persian, and Ottoman Turkish elements. Nor, in his skewed diatribe on Indian culture, did the High Court judge acknowledge how it has been enriched and transformed over well over a millennium by the culture of Arab, Persian, Turkish, and Central Asian Muslims, including by helping giving rise to Hindustani music, Mughal cuisine and the Urdu language itself.

According to Judge Yadav, “Cow protection and promotion is not just about one religion but it is the culture of the country. It is responsibility of every citizen to save the culture irrespective of the religion.”

Piling on more stupid comments, he declared, “[Whenever] we forgot our culture, foreigners attacked us and enslaved us and if we are not warned, we should not forget the unbridled attack on and capture of Afghanistan by Taliban.”

Absurdly pitting “beef eaters” against those who raise cows for a living, the judge argued that “The right to life is above the right to kill and the right to eat beef can never be considered a fundamental right.” Spewing the pseudo-scientific nonsense that is the stock-and-trade of the Hindu right, he also asserted, “Scientists believe that the cow is the only animal that inhales and exhales oxygen.”

This judgment from the Allahabad High Court, one of India’s oldest and most respected high courts, is emblematic of the extent to which the vile Hindu communalism promoted by the BJP, which has led India’s national government since 2014 and for 13 of the past 23 years, has become firmly entrenched in India’s supposedly secular judiciary, and at all levels. In 2019, India’s Supreme Court, ceding to a decades-long Hindu right agitation, ordered the Indian government to build a Hindu temple on the site of the razed 16th Century Babri Masjid mosque, which was illegally demolished by Hindu fanatics mobilized and incited by top BJP leaders in December 1992 in express violation of an order from India’s highest court.

Justice Kumar’s remarks are of a piece with the poisonous Hindu-supremacist agenda (Hindutva) being pushed relentlessly by the Modi government with the aim of channeling mounting social anger over mass joblessness, poverty and social inequality along reactionary lines and splitting the working class. Since coming to power in 2014, the Modi government has staged one vile communal provocation after another, including stripping Jammu and Kashmir, hitherto India’s lone Muslim-majority state, of both statehood and its special semi-autonomous constitutional status. In the name of “cow protection,” it has encouraged and protected Hindu-vigilante groups that have terrorized and killed poor Muslims. Critics of Hindutva and the Modi government’s communalist policies, including a noted journalist and several prominent intellectuals, have been killed by Hindu extremist terrorists with impunity.

Nowhere is the BJP’s Hindutva extremist agenda being implemented more forcefully than in Uttar Pradesh, which is both India’s most populous state, with an estimated 227 million people in 2018, and home to its largest Muslim population, totaling 34 million.

Uttar Pradesh’s BJP-led state government is headed by Yogi Adityanath, a Hindu mahant (high priest) and notorious Hindu supremacist. Modi and his chief henchman, Amit Shah, personally recruited Adityanath to the BJP and made him its candidate for state Chief Minister in the 2017 Uttar Pradesh assembly elections.

Before he took the helm of the state government, Adityanath had founded his own Hindu-extremist organization, the Hindu Yuva Vahini. Over the previous decade-and-a-half, the organization mounted numerous murderous attacks, lynching impoverished Muslims for the crime of “eating beef” and sometimes burning down their dwellings. The Hindu Yuva Vahini have also attacked Christian churches and pastors.

Adityanath, who rules state with an iron fist, is now using the state administration, especially the notoriously violent state police, to hound and harass innocent Muslims and Dalits (the former untouchables) charging them with concocted legal transgressions, especially cow-slaughter or “illegal” religious conversion.

The Chief Minister has issued two ordinances explicitly directed against Muslims. Although cow-slaughter was banned in Uttar Pradesh in 1955 by a Congress Party state government, Adityanath’s Cow Slaughter Prevention (Amendment) Ordinance, 2020 now makes it punishable by up to 10 years imprisonment and a draconian fine. Beef happens to be a cheaper meat in India and is often availed by the poor, especially Muslims and Dalits, to supplement their nutrition-starved diet.

The second ordinance, termed the “love-Jihad” ordinance, is based on the vile communalist canard that Muslims are seducing Hindu women in order to convert them to Islam, and that this constitutes another front of the Muslim holy war (jihad). In reality, the ordinance is used to criminalize intimate relationships between Muslims and Hindus. Roving bands of Hindu-vigilantes have violently assaulted such couples and the state has brought criminal charges against numerous innocent young Muslim men.

The roots of these reactionary contemporary developments lie in the 1947 communal Partition of the subcontinent into an expressly Muslim Pakistan and an ostensibly secular India. The Congress Party of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru bear the primary political responsibility for Partition as it was unable and organically incapable of unifying the Muslim and Hindu toilers in opposition to the intrigues of India’s departing British colonial overlords, the “two-nation” demand of the Muslim League, and the communal provocations of the Hindu Mahasabha and the BJP’s mentor to this day, the RSS. Fearing the growing movement of the working class and the increasingly radical temper of the anti-imperialist struggle, the Congress betrayed its own program for a united secular India, reached a deal with London under which it inherited the colonial state machine, and implemented partition.

The post-independent “secular” Indian constitution drafted from 1947 onwards and adopted in 1950 includes an explicit “directive” clause, Article 48, that directs the Indian state to formulate legislation to “[prohibit] the slaughter, of cows and calves and other milch and draught cattle.” This was a blatant concession by the Congress Party-dominated Constituent Assembly that drafted the post-colonial Indian constitution to the Hindu-extremist “cow-lobby,” one of a slew of concessions and accommodations the post-independence Congress government made to the Hindu right, although it was politically marginalized and discredited due to the Hindu Mahasabha’s and RSS’s opposition to the anti-colonial struggle and outright collaboration with the British colonial regime.

The Congress Party, which included in its leadership a sizeable faction of Hindu communalists, fertilized the Hindu right during the subsequent three decades, when it continued to dominate Indian politics and continuously held power at the center. It did this first and foremost by making this once fringe movement a legitimate part of the Indian bourgeois establishment. As part of its ever more elaborate attempts to defuse rising social opposition from India’s workers and rural toilers by fanning caste and communal divisions, the Congress subsequently catered to and made concessions to the BJP’s reactionary Hindu supremacist agenda. This eventually led to the brazen and illegal demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992, and helped create the conditions for the BJP to emerge, first as a party of national government, and now the premier party of the Indian bourgeoisie.

Cutoff of federal jobless aid in the US leaves millions of workers scrambling to make ends meet

Jessica Goldstein

An estimated 7.5 million workers in the US lost their $300-a-week federal unemployment benefits last week. That is after the federal government reduced federal unemployment benefits from $600 per week in summer 2020.

Some working-class parents, like 33-year-old Amanda Rinehart of Allentown, Pennsylvania, are unable to return to work because of the need to provide care for their children who are at risk for contracting serious cases of COVID-19 if they return to packed classrooms and day care centers. She told the New York Times, “They should not cut these benefits off until there is a vaccine for all the little humans of all ages, because there are parents like me that have children that are high risk for Covid.”

Centerplate Retail and Food recruiter Daniella Medina, left, writes down information from Omene Casimir during a job fair at Hard Rock Stadium, Friday, Sept. 3, 2021, in Miami Gardens, Fla. (AP Photo/Marta Lavandier)

Her 8-year-old son has asthma and is unable to receive a COVID-19 vaccine, like all children under the age of 12 in the US. Since she has no one to take care of him while he remains at home, she left her job as a hotel assistant manager and was able to get by on about $560 per week in unemployment benefits from the federal and state governments. “I have no idea what I’m going to do once these benefits stop,” she said.

The Biden administration ended four US federal pandemic unemployment programs on September 4. The same week that unemployment assistance was cut, the US Supreme Court ruled to end the federal moratorium on evictions that millions of renters relied on for stable housing during the pandemic. States began to see waves of eviction filings in the first week of the end of the moratorium, with some states seeing eviction filings well above average.

The ending of these programs, which had the widespread backing of both Republican and Democratic officials, has left 11 million workers in the US desperate as they scramble to figure out how they will provide for themselves and their families.

One of these unemployed workers, Ana Cepera, told NBC 6 South Florida that she was facing eviction along with her three children because of the abrupt end of federal benefits. “Right now, I’m without a job… Every day I’m like, OK, is today the day that they’re going to tell me I’m going to lose my home?”

The benefits, which amounted to little more than $1,000 to $1,500 per month, served as a lifeline for millions of workers who would otherwise have been on the brink of starvation and homelessness. Yet many of these same workers found it a struggle to navigate underfunded state benefit systems to receive the benefits they were due after they lost their jobs through no fault of their own. Robin Woods of Pennsylvania, who lost her job of two decades in a layoff during the pandemic, described the struggle to stay afloat to 11 News: “It’s been a struggle from day one. I’d get a lump sum, and then I wouldn’t get it. I have had nothing but problems.”

The Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation (FPUC) provided an additional $300 a week to workers who received at least $1 of regular state or federal unemployment benefits. The other unemployment programs ended by the Biden administration programs include Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA), which provided unemployment benefits to those not traditionally eligible to receive unemployment benefits, such as gig workers and freelancers; Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC),which provided additional weeks of unemployment benefits to workers who exhausted all eligible weeks of benefits in the state’s unemployment system; and Mixed Earners Unemployment Compensation (MEUC), which gave an additional $100 a week to eligible workers who earned self-employment income along with wages earned with an employer.

Situations like those of Ana Cepera and Amanda Rinehart are mirrored by the experiences of unprecedented millions of workers in the wealthiest nation in the world. The Democrats and Republicans, who speak for the interests of the rich, have turned a blind eye to the suffering that their policies have created.

In June, after 25 Republican-led states and one Democratic-led state exited the federal unemployment program early, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki commented that the governors of those states had “every right” to end them early and that the Biden administration “never proposed making the benefits permanent or doing so over the long term.”

Since then, government officials and the press have parroted the hopes of big businesses that the millions of unemployed will be forced by threat of destitution to accept low-wage work in precarious jobs that expose workers to the deadly SARS-CoV-2 virus.

The reality is different. A recent New York Times article reveals that government assistance programs during the pandemic actually kept millions of US workers out of poverty compared to before the pandemic. Roughly 9.1 percent of US workers were considered living in poverty in 2020, a significant drop from 11.8 percent in 2019 and the lowest number since records on poverty levels began to be recorded in 1967, according to the Times .

Data also shows that ending unemployment benefits has done little to compel workers to take on jobs that are dangerous or don’t suit their financial needs or work experience. From April through July, states that cut unemployment early saw only 1.33 percent job growth, states that kept them saw 1.37 percent rise in job growth. There are currently 10.9 million open jobs in US, but most are low wage and in retail, food service and other service industries.

Yet workers are resisting the attempts of the ruling class to push them into dangerous, low-wage work for profits. “We’re still in a pandemic. The idea of being close to hundreds of strangers a day, even while being vaccinated, is not something that appeals to me,” Michael, an out-of-work graphic designer, told CNN Business, explaining why he did not pick up a job as a server at a restaurant while he waited for an opening in his field.

A survey conducted in May by the National Retail Federation and Prosper Insights & Analytics showed that 10 percent of respondents were uncomfortable returning to any kind of in-person work. They mainly cited health concerns over the pandemic and worried that no amount of precautions that employers attempted to use would be effective enough to protect them.

The survey showed 34 percent of respondents said that they wanted social distancing at their workplaces and 33 percent wanted mask mandates, both of which virtually no employer in the US is willing to guarantee for the sake of gaining as much productivity and profit as possible from each worker.

The bipartisan ending of the federal unemployment programs and eviction moratorium comes as the US Bureau of Labor Statistics released data on the Consumer Price Index for August, which shows the inflation rate averaged for all consumer goods in the US at 5.3 percent last month. This is only slightly lower than the 5.4 percent inflation rate reported in July.

The US government has cut meager unemployment benefits for millions of workers at the same time that it has overseen a massive shift of $1.8 trillion to US billionaires, according to a recent report from Americans for Tax Fairness and the Institute for Policy Studies Program on Inequality. Just weeks before the Biden administration ended the federal unemployment programs, President Biden admitted in an address that the US government spent $300 million per day on the two-decade-long war in Afghanistan which ended in a debacle last month.

The rising prices of basic goods coupled with low wages, high levels of unemployment and the uncontrolled spread of the coronavirus pandemic while the richest see their wealth soar to new heights is fueling social tensions of a historic magnitude. Already, the deadly return-to-work drive of the ruling class has caused outbreaks of COVID-19 at workplaces and schools across the US. In most cases, companies, school districts and the unions are not accurately reporting on positive COVID-19 cases in workplaces and schools, sometimes completely blacking out information from the working class and students, further exacerbating the spread of the disease when hospitals all over the US are running out of beds to treat patients.

Concerns over financial stability behind Beijing’s moves against Alibaba

Nick Beams

Over the past year, the Xi Jinping regime has taken significant action against the Chinese high-tech giant Alibaba and its subsidiary, the Ant Group, as part of broader moves directed against high-tech companies.

Alibaba’s founder Jack Ma has been under pressure from government authorities and disappeared from public view for two months at the end of last year, following the decision by financial regulators to suspend the Ant Group’s $137 billion initial public offering (IPO) on Wall Street just as it was about to be launched in November. Had it been allowed to go ahead, the IPO would have been the largest ever.

In this Friday, Oct. 23, 2020, photo, an employee walks past a logo of the Ant Group at their office in Hong Kong. (AP Photo/Kin Cheung)

This week, as initially reported in the Financial Times on Monday, the government moved to break up Alipay, the financial services firm run by Ant. It ordered Ant to separate the app Huabei, which operates like a consumer credit card, from the main group, along with Jiebei, which makes unsecured loans to small businesses.

These actions are part of increased state intervention into high-tech areas of the Chinese economy and its financial system.

Last month, China’s State Council and the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee issued a joint statement saying there was an “urgent need” for new laws to regulate the digital economy and internet finance to ensure that this new business model operated in a “healthy manner.”

There have been various interpretations of the government’s move to tighten control over the country’s high-tech and financial giants. These include: The claim that it emanates from Xi’s authoritarian proclivities; that, in the words of a Financial Times (FT) editorial, it is part of the CCP’s authoritarian drive to bring about a wholesale transformation; and even the claim in an FT column that it is a step towards a second version of the Soviet Union’s central economic planning agency, Gosplan.

There are undoubtedly political considerations in the moves against the high-tech and financial moguls, not the least being Xi’s desire to clip the wings of some of the richest individuals in China, all of them multi-billionaires, in order that their wealth and international financial connections not become the basis for a political challenge to the ruling CCP.

But the more fundamental issue appears to be the implications of what is known as fin-tech for the increasingly fragile Chinese financial system.

An article in the Diplomat earlier this month pointed to these growing concerns. It noted that some observers had pointed to the strident criticism by Ma of Chinese financial authorities last October, just before the attempted Ant IPO, while others have said it is part of a general crackdown to ensure CCP control.

“However, very few have elaborated how exactly Alibaba and its mobile payment system, Alipay, might generate financial risks, and what specific problems they create for regulators… The tension between Alibaba and the monetary authority of China lies in the nature of a privately operated mobile payment system.”

Over the past decade, Alipay has grown into the largest mobile payment platform in the world. People put money into their Alipay account and then use their smart phone to scan a QR code when making a transaction, without the need for cash or cards. Alipay QR codes can be seen everywhere in shopping complexes.

When people use Alipay, the Diplomat report said, they believe they are making transactions in renminbi (RMB), the Chinese currency controlled by the central bank. They are, in fact, using a currency issued by Alibaba with exchanges with RMB at the ratio of 1:1.

In the most extreme case, if Alibaba were to go bankrupt, then any Alipay account would be worthless.

There are other, more immediate, questions.

One problem is that Alibaba is not a commercial bank and is not covered by banking regulations, such as the regular reporting of its reserves. As a tech company, it is free from such supervision.

Another problem identified in the Diplomat article is that Alipay, a privately-run system, is massively used. The issue is how can the monetary authority maintain financial and economic stability “if the majority of grassroots transactions in China take place through a non-RMB currency?”

It pointed out that as the Alipay system continues to grow, “one day the central bank might need Alibaba’s support or even the approval in order to achieve its monetary policy objectives,” a possibility that it cannot tolerate.

The People’s Bank of China (PBOC) cannot roll back the mobile payment system because it is so widespread that “reversing it would likely inflict substantial pain on the economy and cause unnecessary panic.”

So the alternatives appear to be the introduction by the PBOC of its own mobile payment system or the imposition of greater state control over Alibaba and Alipay.

In many respects, the Chinese government is caught in problems of its own making. The development of high-tech firms such as Alibaba and its Alipay system was promoted by the regime in an earlier period as it stepped up the introduction of market mechanisms to facilitate increased dynamism in the Chinese economy and financial system.

The problems it is now encountering recall the remarks of Marx on the development of the credit system in the 19th century. In the first stages, he explained, it “furtively creeps in as the humble servant of accumulation,” but then assumes a powerful and dominant position. Or, as he put it in the Communist Manifesto, the bourgeoisie is like the sorcerer’s apprentice, who conjures up forces from the nether world which then escape his control.

The issues that have arisen in China, among them the private ownership of massive data sets of consumer transactions and the implications of high-tech developments for the stability of the financial system, are not confined to that country.

In an editorial on the moves to break up Alipay, the FT said worries over “how regulators should handle big financial data are not unique to China.”

It pointed out that last year, before he became the head of the US Securities and Exchange Commission, Gary Gensler “published a paper warning that using artificial intelligence to make lending decisions could lead to financial instability.”

US parents and educators denounce school openings as COVID infections spiral out of control

Renae Cassimeda

Ninety-eight percent of K-12 schools in the United States are now open for in-person instruction, leading to a spread of COVID-19 infections in schools and surrounding communities. Over 94 percent of the country is experiencing “high” levels of transmission, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and cases among children have exploded.

More than 1.2 million infections among children ages 0 to 17 have been reported in the US since July 22 when schools began reopening for the fall semester. This is roughly 20 percent of the 5,292,837 child cases since the pandemic began, according to data from the American Academy of Pediatrics. Tragically, 111 children have died since July 22, about a quarter of the 460 total childhood COVID-19 fatalities. According to the CDC, nearly 30,000 children were hospitalized in August alone.

Chicago educators and parents protest school openings (Source: CPS Sick-Out Info Facebook page)

Despite the surge in cases, hospitalizations and deaths, due to the more infectious Delta variant, the Biden administration and state and local officials from both corporate-controlled parties have doubled down on their efforts to keep schools open. The political establishment has pursued this criminal policy with the full backing of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the National Education Association (NEA) and their state and local affiliates.

New York City Public Schools, the largest district in the US with 1.1 million students, began in-person instruction Monday, following a deal between Mayor Bill de Blasio and the United Federation of Teachers. According to the New York City Department of Education Daily Covid Case Map, there have already been 114 classroom closures and over 150 partial classroom closures in the first two days of instruction. There have been 218 positive cases reported this week.

Despite the already concerning numbers, infections are and will be vastly underreported due to inadequate testing, contact tracing, and quarantine protocols in the district. Testing is not mandatory in the district. Only volunteer, unvaccinated students will be randomly tested biweekly. This will result in tests for only 10 percent of unvaccinated children. This is a four-fold decrease from the number of tests administered last semester. Under the current model, hundreds, if not thousands, of infections will go undetected and unreported in the district.

“It is horrible they are making everybody go back while cases are rocketing,” a New York City special education teacher who recently took leave for non-COVID medical issues told the World Socialist Web Site. “They are not quarantining people who are sick or exposed like before. They said we must have safe distancing and testing in the schools but then they do not do it.”

The protocols set up by the mayor and school officials are designed to keep the schools open no matter how severe outbreaks are. Individual schools will be closed only if there is evidence of a COVID-19 outbreak in the building, but this will be difficult to prove given a low level of testing and transparency. The district’s quarantine policy is far more lax than last year’s, and fully vaccinated staff and students in middle and high schools are exempt from needing to be quarantined if exposed to a positive case.

The same conditions exist across the US. Educators and parents are particularly concerned that school officials are providing inadequate details about outbreaks or deliberately concealing life-and-death information from them.

Steve, an educator in the Bay Area of California, said, “One teacher was recently out for about a week. I eventually found out she was out ‘for COVID.’ When she returned, she said none of the students nor the staff members she worked with had been notified that they had been in contact with someone on campus who had been infected with COVID.”

Steve continued, “One of the school substitutes shared with me that he had replaced four teachers over the last three weeks who had been out for COVID. No one had shared with him that he might be in contact with people on campus (students) who had been in contact with persons who had contracted COVID.”

Michael, a parent of two children in a school district in the San Luis Obispo area of California, said, “The local paper reported an estimated 500 cases in the district during the first month of reopening, that’s nearly as many new cases this month as all of last year.

“Our former district did not provide a remote option, so we enrolled our kids in an Independent Study program at a neighboring district. The materials are awful, worse than nothing. We're looking for alternatives, leaning toward homeschooling as soon as the affidavit filing period opens. We are not sending our kids in to be canaries in the mine!

“Some school administrators may have good intentions, but they’re clearly not qualified to decide pandemic risks for children or society. No sane person who cares about reducing a deadly pandemic would require children to gather in schools. It increases spread, as simple as that.”

Adding to the causes for the underreporting of cases is the delay in getting test results, low turnout for testing, positive results for individuals who are identified outside of a district testing program and therefore not reported, and inadequate contact tracing and lax quarantining protocols.

The Tennessee Department of Education (TDOE) relaunched its COVID-19 Dashboard on Tuesday to report cases in each school district. Parents have been in an uproar as major discrepancies have been identified across various districts. They have organized their own tracking of cases through Facebook groups.

A significant discrepancy is in Knox County Schools (KCS), one of the largest districts in the state. The TDOE dashboard shows only 300 new student cases last week in the district, but Tennessee Department of Health data shows 1,012 infections among children ages 5 to 18.

KCS parents recently received a letter from district officials which declared that the dashboard aims to “protect individual privacy.” The data does not include pre-K students or staff, it has omitted a school site due to low enrollment and included total absences without breaking down how many are COVID-related absences.

“The idea of ‘protecting privacy’ is the same canard they have been using since the beginning of COVID,” a former teacher in the district responded to the letter. “FERPA [Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act] has a caveat about providing information if there is a health issue like a pandemic. The school board willfully misinterprets FERPA to avoid providing accurate COVID info. Also, lumping all absences together is pure obfuscation. They know the students who are absent because of COVID or quarantine because they are not marked absent but temporary virtual learners. It would be very easy to have two lists, one of non-COVID absences and one of ‘temporary virtual learners.’”

In addition to parents aggregating their own data on positive cases, Knox County parents have also recently organized sickouts to keep children home to protect their lives and long-term health.

A similar development has occurred in Hawaii Public Schools where a surge in childhood cases has provoked mass opposition from parents and teachers. Parents in Hawaii have also used social media to aggregate COVID-19 infections in schools and have organized an ongoing sickout to keep their children out of schools.

“Our community spread is getting out of hand, and everyone knows schools should not be open now,” a special education teacher in Hawaii told the WSWS. “I had more kids staying home in late August than I had in my classroom, and now we are being told to provide distance learning for kids who are approved for special conditions and can’t come to school. This year may be more challenging in some ways than last year.”

Noting the district’s active role in covering up the spread in schools, she said, “The State has forbidden indoor gatherings of 10 or more, and yet we have full classes of 20-30. This feels schizophrenic. There is no more COVID MOU [Memorandum of Understanding] or any kind of addendum to our collective bargaining agreement pertaining to health and safety. The interim superintendent is claiming spread isn't happening at school, but only out in the community.”

Chicago Public Schools (CPS), the third largest district in the US with over 340,000 students, is also seeing a rise in infections. Last Thursday, CPS officials reported 2,900 students and staff members had been identified as a close contact to someone who tested positive for COVID-19. Yet according to a source close to the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), the district informed the union there were 5,665 students and 98 staff members who had potentially been exposed to the virus.

The media is blaming inadequate contact tracing for the spread. Without a doubt, tracing is inadequate and CPS officials have failed to do the bare minimum. CPS officials have repeatedly missed their deadline to roll out a testing program. The district promised that this would be in place by the start of the school year, and after several delays now says it will be ready at the end of September. So far, only three percent of students and staff have opted into the district testing program. According to CPS, only 638 tests were administered across the district last Monday.

With growing anger among educators and parents, the CTU is calling for the establishment of “guardrails” of improved safety measures and a metric for closing a school, based on a certain number of infections. However, this is just damage control from the CTU, which supported the opening of the schools based on the fiction it could be done “safely.” Last year, CTU President Jesse Sharkey, a member of the now defunct International Socialist Organization, blocked a strike by teachers over Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s criminal reopening of schools.

On Monday night, CPS parents protested outside Lightfoot’s home demanding a remote option due to the lack of safety protocols and thousands of students who have been placed on quarantine for COVID-19 exposure. While the sentiments of parents were no doubt sincere, the “remote option” demand has been promoted in Chicago, New York City and other locations by sections of the trade union bureaucracy affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America as a means of letting off steam and encouraging individual opt-outs by concerned parents, rather than collective action by the working class to close the schools, which is a critical component of the public health strategy needed to save lives.