UK “second jobs” scandal reveals class gulf discrediting Parliament

Robert Stevens

A media barrage in Britain has erupted over just how many Members of Parliament (MPs) have second jobs and the amount they earn. A backbench MP earns £82,000-a-year plus expenses. MPs are allowed to work as consultants for private businesses and no limit is placed on the number of hours MPs are allowed to work in jobs outside of parliament.

Owen Paterson, a grandee of the ruling Conservatives, who more than two years ago was exposed for his highly renumerated (£500,000) lobbying on behalf of two companies, has been at the centre of the second jobs scandal.

Last month, Paterson faced a 30-day suspension from the House of Commons after the parliamentary standards watchdog found he had breached lobbying rules in an “egregious case of paid advocacy”. Parliamentary standards commissioner Kathryn Stone found that Paterson used his parliamentary office to hold meetings with medical diagnostics company Randox and meat processor Lynn’s Country Foods on 25 occasions between October 2016 and February 2020. Patterson was a paid consultancy fees for both companies totaling £100,000 a year.

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer speaking in Parliament (credit: UK Parliament/Jessica Taylor)

Despite attempts by Prime Minister Boris Johnson to block the suspension of prominent Brexiteer Paterson, by whipping MPs to vote for a plan to create a Tory-led committee to rewrite parliamentary standards rule, Paterson quit parliament, 24 hours later, on November 4.

The crisis worsened as the scandal enveloped former attorney general Sir Geoffrey Cox.

Cox earned almost £6 million from work on top of being an MP, including a salary with law firm Withers from which he rakes in £400,000 a year (£813 an hour). The Independent reported, “On top of his annual retainer, Sir Geoffrey was paid £156,916.08 for 140 hours of work by the same firm between April and May 31, 2021—roughly the same as the prime minister earns in a year.”

So brazen was Cox that he spent up to a month in the British Virgin Islands during lockdown working for Withers on a lucrative contract while voting by proxy in Parliament.

By the end of this week, by which time it had been established that more than a quarter of Tory MPs have second jobs (90 out of 360), from which they earn a collective £4 million a year, the prime minister was named as one of the worst offenders. The Financial Times estimated that Johnson had helped himself to more than £4 million in second job income over the last 14 years. This includes the £1.6 million made since re-entering parliament in 2016, after his eight year spell as London Mayor, from speeches, newspaper columns, book advances and royalties. It included the £250,000 a year he received for his Daily Telegraph column, a sum Johnson once described as “chicken feed”.

The adage that money talks applies in spades when it comes to the “Mother of Parliaments”. Last week the Sunday Times Insight team revealed that the Tory Party was “systematically offering seats in the House of Lords to a select group of multimillionaire donors who pay more than £3 million to the party.” It added, “In the past two decades, all 16 of the party’s main treasurers—apart from the most recent, who stood down two months ago having donated £3.8 million—have been offered a seat in the Lords.”

The investigation revealed that “Many other Conservative donors have also been ennobled alongside the party’s treasurers: 22 of the party’s main financial backers have been given peerages since 2010. This includes nine donor treasurers. Together they have given £54 million to the party.”

The scandal is only the latest iteration revealing how deeply MPs get their snouts in the trough. In 1994, John Major’s Tory government was staggered by the cash-for-questions scandal.

In 2009, under Gordon Brown’s Labour government, parliament was hit by a scandal over the abuse of expenses—with MPs spending millions in tax payers money on everything from a £1,654 “floating duck island” for his pond (a Tory MP) to a £20,700 for roof repairs, including some to the bell tower of his stately home (a Labour MP).

Earlier this year, former Prime Minister David Cameron, in office from 2010-15, was exposed for his lobbying efforts on behalf of the financier Lex Greensill. After leaving office, Cameron took a job with Greensill Capital, the now collapsed supply chain finance company, and on its behalf lobbied ministers, including Chancellor Rishi Sunak.

The pandemic revealed that many of the contracts given to the private sector were the product of cronyism and corruption. A Transparency International UK (TI-UK) report into the awarding of contracts, published in April, examined £18 billion worth of contracts awarded between February and November 2020. It concluded that one in five—worth £3.7 billion—raised “red flags” for possible corruption.

Among TI-UK’s findings were that £1.6 billion worth of personal protective equipment (PPE) contracts (comprising 14 tenders) were awarded to entities with known connections to the Conservative Party. Three contracts worth £536 million went to politically connected companies for testing-related services. Health Secretary Matt Hancock awarded £30 million worth of contracts for vials and plastic funnels to his former local pub landlord.

As most of the MPs with second jobs are on the government’s benches, Labour attempted a point scoring operation. But this soon came unstuck as Labour MPs, including shadow cabinet ministers, have also made a killing from the private sector.

The pro-government Daily Mail reported that David Lammy, Shadow Secretary of State for Justice/Shadow Lord Chancellor, pulled in £141,000 in three years for speeches at Google, Facebook, City corporations and media appearances.

Labour MP Chris Bryant, chair of the Parliament’s Committee on Standards and Privileges which found Paterson guilty of 'egregious' breaches of lobbying rules, received £2,000 from investment banker Goldman Sachs for speaking at an event.

Another Labourite who has railed against Tory sleaze is right-winger Jess Phillips. But Phillips, an MP only since 2015, has pulled in tens of thousands of pounds working for the private sector. Among the firms paying Phillips collectively over £30,000 are right-wing newspapers, including from the Murdoch press and Daily Telegraph, and a property developer, Anthony McCourt.

Those in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, hence the Labour supporting LabourList website warning, “The second jobs row is an opportunity for Labour, but not a clear open goal.”

The second jobs scandal was as toxic for Labour as the Tories, it cautioned, noting, “Keir Starmer has this week been asked about ‘discussions’ he had over taking employment with Mishcon de Reya in 2017, and he was paid while an MP (before becoming Labour leader) by the law firm.”

Before becoming an MP in 2015, Starmer, a Queens Counsel and former Director of Public Prosecutions and Head of the Crown Prosecution Service (2008-2013), earned thousands from Mishcon de Reya. From June 1 until September 30, 2016, he received £4,500 a month excluding VAT for legal advice provided to the Mishcon de Reya Academy. Starmer worked approximately six hours per month. He only stopped receiving payment on becoming Shadow Brexit Secretary in October 2016. However, as the Times reported, he “received £3,200 for legal advice to a separate firm, Simons Muirhead and Burton, the following month.”

In the June 2016 Brexit referendum, Starmer advocated Britain remaining in the European Union. After the referendum result to leave, he advocated a second referendum aimed at reversing the plebiscite. Labour campaigned for this policy, under his insistence, in the 2019 general election.

In July 2016, Mishcon de Reya’s services were employed on behalf of a group of businesses in legal action to prevent the government from triggering the procedure for withdrawal from the European Union without an Act of Parliament. In January 2017, it won the case with the Supreme Court upholding a November 2016 decision of the High Court that the Secretary of State did not have the power under the prerogative to give notice pursuant to Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union.

It has long been understood in ruling circles that serving as an MP penalises the very social layers who enter parliament. Including the substantial expenses allotted, MPs earn far more than an average worker, but for many among this grasping, avaricious layer it feels like penury.

However, this is a sacrifice they are prepared to tolerate knowing that once they retire, they will reap the financial benefits with positions on boards as advisers and consultants. This is the endgame not just for the Tories. The archetypal example for them all is former Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair who has raked in tens of millions of pounds since leaving office. Should Starmer lose the next general election, it is likely he will soon be back to earning far more in a month than he presently can in a year.

However, the money grubbing of MPs is a pale reflection of the looting of society by the major corporations and oligarchs whose wealth means they view the likes of Johnson and Starmer as lackeys whose loyalties can be secured for chump change.

Despite the wall-to-wall coverage in the media over the second jobs scandal, it likely will soon be dropped. For months Labour has focused on no end of pathetic campaigns against Johnson, covering everything from the choice of curtains at his Downing Street flat to the cost of the refurbishment of his apartment, supposedly to show how “out of touch” he is. But this only reveals that on the main issues, the Tories and Labour are aligned and operate as a de facto coalition.

Johnson real crime, for which he will never be held to account by Labour, is his committing mass murder during the pandemic, overseeing the preventable deaths of over 165,000 people. However, what is certain is that in the long-term, the degraded spectacle now playing out will hasten the inevitable breaking from the ossified parliamentary setup by the working class.

Chilean state spreads terror in indigenous communities

Mauricio Saavedra

State-orchestrated terror reached another level in southern Chile last week when the armed forces opened fire on unarmed civilians. The unprovoked aggression, which left one dead and several seriously wounded unfolded in the context of the militarization of indigenous communities, escalated in October when deeply unpopular right-wing President Sebastian Piñera decreed a State of Constitutional Exception in four provinces.

Piñera, who faces a Constitutional Accusation that may lead to his impeachment, decreed the first 15-day State of Exception in the provinces of Biobío and Arauco in the Biobío region and the Malleco and Cautín provinces in the Araucanía region on October 12. He extended it for another 15 days on October 26. Congress approved its extension last Tuesday.

Funeral of Yordan Llempi Machacan, murdered by Marines Nov 3 (Credit: Facebook)

On November 3, the day of the incident, Piñera boasted that the deployment of “more than 2,000 troops of the Armed Forces including armored vehicles, helicopters, airplanes, maritime patrols which, together with the work carried out by the Carabineros and the Investigative Police, have allowed the development of more than 20,000 controls, the arrest of 59 people who had arrest warrants.”

Before the dust had even settled, Minister of the Interior Rodrigo Delgado publicly supported claims by the head of national defense in the Biobío region, Rear Admiral Jorge Parga, that Mapuche insurgents “ambushed” and “attacked” military personnel.

According Parga, hooded individuals “attacked” Carabineros with large caliber weapons and then “retreated into a wooded area and, hidden in the forest foliage, attacked and ambushed the personnel.” When the Marines arrived, they began “to repel in the first instance with non-lethal ammunition and shotgun shots,” but in the face of “the constant fire from the hooded men, the personnel had to use their service weapons.”

Commander in Chief of the Navy Juan de la Maza in an interview with El Mercurio praised “the reaction demonstrated by the Marine patrol” and the “fulfillment of duty of the Navy personnel, in accordance with the attributions and duties assigned in this state of constitutional emergency…”

Piñera went on further claiming that “firearms, a rifle and munitions of war and a vehicle with a warrant for robbery” had been intercepted from the “terrorists” in the confrontation.

Witnesses have since come forward debunking the official version as a story cut out of whole cloth.

What has so far come to light about the state murder of Yordan Llempi Machacan, a 23-year-old member of the Mapuche indigenous community, is that Marines were responsible for the indiscriminate firing of live rounds at two roadblocks on the Cañete-Tirúa route. The military, with Carabinero enforcements, established checkpoints on the main thoroughfare in the Biobío region, 650 km south of Santiago. Dozens of cars were backed up due to armored vehicles blocking the road.

At approximately 4:00 p.m., the military signaled for the civilians to begin moving when, without rhyme or reason, they sprayed the area with live ammunition. At one checkpoint, Yordan Llempi was shot while sitting in his courtyard. Other houses were shot at.

March calling for end to Militarization (credit: Facebook)

Danitza Herrera told Resumen that Yordan, her partner, “was in the courtyard of his house when the militia began to shoot like crazy. They started shooting; they had the road cut off. It was not an ambush by the Mapuche community members; that was a lie.”

Precious minutes were then lost because the Marines first barred the exit to Yordan’s home and then prevented the family from taking the critically injured man to the nearest hospital, a well-trodden military tactic denounced by human rights groups. The Marines “blocked the road and did not let us take him to Cañete hospital,” 20 km away. Instead they were forced to take Yordan 50 km to a community health center in Tirúa, where he died on the way due to loss of blood.

At another checkpoint Marines shot at vehicles. Iván Porma Leviqueo received several shots at point-blank range when he went to help the wounded. A bullet that went through José Huenchuleo’s arm while in his Ute (utility vehicle) hit 15-year-old Joaquín Polman’s knee. A nine-year-old girl was also injured by live fire. Another was shot in the face. These are the known casualties of events that are still being pieced together. According to El Ciudadano, there were still other Mapuche people with gunshot wounds who had not received medical care several days after the incidents.

It can be categorically stated that this bloody exercise was used by the government to stampede sections of the middle class into clamoring for a strong hand and to justify an extension of the State of Emergency in the Mapuche territories to the point of normalization. This has been Piñera’s favored course throughout his three years in office.

Piñera transformed the southern region into a war zone, only to replicate the war-zone atmosphere in Santiago during the pandemic. More and more draconian laws were passed that beefed up state powers and further criminalized first the Mapuche population, then refugees and migrants, and later all forms of social protest.

Militarization of the Araucanía

He equipped the Carabinero and PDI police with military vehicles and military grade materiel, surveillance and intelligence equipment and unleashed the Carabinero Special Forces and the Special Operations Group (trained in Colombia and the US to combat terrorist groups), responsible for human rights atrocities in Mapuche territories and later in Santiago when millions took to the streets at the end of 2019. Amid the largest anti-capitalist demonstrations in Chilean history, the police, special forces, black berets and the military committed rape, torture and murder.

Carabineros have been used as a private police force for large landowners and the forestry conglomerates. Interferencia revealed that CMPC subsidiary Forestal Mininco provided the vehicle which the police officers used when they killed Camilo Catrillanca, a militant of the Mapuche, Arauco-Malleco Coordinating Committee. This was further extended to the point where now the military can be deployed to protect “critical” privately-owned infrastructure throughout the country.

Today’s use of the Navy, notorious for coordinating repressive operations including torture and murder during the fascist military dictatorship, is in line with the policies advanced by the fascist Republican Party candidate Jose Antonio Kast who has surpassed the official right-wing candidate, Sebastian Sichel, in the presidential election polls.

In a sense he is trying to recreate at a higher level the atmosphere during 2017 elections, which saw appeals to backward sentiments of law and order to combat so-called “rising delinquency,” being tough on “illegal immigration” and dealing with “terrorism” in the south.

There is no doubt that Piñera is playing the xenophobic and law-and-order card to unite the right and the extreme right of his coalition Chile Vamos with an out-and-out fascist.

Piñera, assisted by the compliant conglomerate media, has recently begun polluting the airwaves with talk about the danger of insurgency and narco-terrorism, accusing Mapuche guerrillaist organizations of terrorism and drug trafficking.

What these groups have conducted are legitimate land seizures and raids of private property combined with bankrupt peasant-based actions consisting of arson attacks on machinery, vehicles, timber and property.

The WSWS has a principled opposition to the middle-class nationalist politics associated with guerrillaism, which have been brought into the Mapuche communities by the Frente Patriotica Manuel Rodriguez (FPMR), the Movimiento Izquierda Revolucionario (MIR), MAPU-Lautaro and other pseudo-left and anarchist groups.

These anti-Marxist organizations in no way further the fight for the conquest of power by the working class but on the contrary drive a wedge between workers and the extremely impoverished peasant Mapuche communities. While making up 10 percent of the national population, the percentage of Mapuches living in poverty is up to four times the national average, and in some communes, such as Cholcol, multidimensional poverty—lack of access to proper housing, potable water, electricity, health care, educational facilities, etc.—affects 65 percent of the people.

The claims of insurgency, terrorism and drug-trafficking is aimed at further criminalizing the Mapuches.

To what end? Former Navy Director of Intelligence Oscar Aranda provides an insight in an article for Revista Marina , an organ of the military institution, where he calls for a counterinsurgency strategy against the Mapuche population. In spite of the intelligence jargon, the experiences in Algeria, Vietnam, Central America and more recently Afghanistan provide us with enough evidence to know what is in store.

“Insurgency, both rural and urban, is the abandonment of political dialogue as the engine of democratic progress and its replacement by violence,” writes Aranda, turning reality on its head. It is the state that has by force historically denied the Mapuche peasant communities the right to land for more than a century when the defeated tribes were placed on reservations. More recently, the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet rescinded the land seizures of the 1960s and 1970s and repressed peasant organizations. Thanks to his 1974 701 decree, subsidizing 75 percent of the costs of forestry plantations, the Matte and Angelini conglomerates have amassed 2 million hectares, while the entire Mapuche population lives on less than 500,000 hectares.

The deeply anti-democratic “anti-terrorist law,” promulgated in 1984 under the auspices of Pinochet’s National Security Doctrine, has been applied under both military and civilian rule against indigenous communities with bloody results.

The call for counterinsurgency measures takes this punitive approach to a whole new level. Aranda continues, “[i]t is legitimate for the State to respond to the insurgency with a multisectoral effort to modify the social, economic and cultural problems that serve as its substratum, while simultaneously neutralizing, acting in accordance with the law, those insurgent elements that develop irregular actions (added emphasis).

“Within the latter is Counterinsurgency (COIN), which is a military activity of neutralization of irregular actions when police means are overwhelmed by the escalation of violence in terms of intensity or geographical scope.” In other words, the methods employed by the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan are to be brought to southern Chile.

NATO ratchets up anti-Russian offensive in Poland and Ukraine

Thomas Scripps

The UK announced yesterday that it has dispatched a detachment of ten troops from the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers to Poland is the first deployment of boots on the ground by an allied NATO power to assist with the country’s border confrontation with Belarus. Although small, the involvement of forces from Britain signals an escalation of the ongoing provocation being staged by the Polish government, ultimately targeting Russia.

Several thousand refugees are seeking entry from Belarus to the European Union (EU) via Poland and have been met with a massive deployment of military force and violence. A reported 20,000 Polish soldiers are currently stationed on the Belarussian border, overseeing illegal, brutal, pushbacks of asylum seekers.

Poland has accused Belarus of “hybrid warfare” and “state terrorism,” claiming government forces are ferrying people thousands of miles and helping them across the border. They have pointed the finger at Russian President Vladimir Putin as the architect of this policy.

Soldiers of the Ukrainian State Border Guard Service line up at the border with Belarus in the Volyn region, Ukraine, on Thursday, Nov. 11, 2021. Ukraine has sent 8.5 thousand servicemen amid the migrant crisis as thousands of migrants who came to Belarus from the Middle East and Africa are trying to enter the European Union through Poland. (Ukrainian Police Press Office via AP)

That Poland’s sabre rattling is part of a broader offensive was confirmed by statements issued this week by members of the United Nations Security Council and NATO.

On Thursday, during a meeting of the UNSC, Estonia, France, Ireland, Norway, the United States and Britain issued a statement, rejected by permanent UN member Russia. The statement read, 'We condemn the orchestrated instrumentalisation of human beings whose lives and wellbeing have been put in danger for political purposes by Belarus, with the objective of destabilizing neighboring countries and the European Union's external border and diverting attention away from its own increasing human rights violations.”

They called for a “strong international reaction” and pledged 'to discuss further measures that we can take.'

NATO’s statement made clear the scope of the anti-Russia offensive being mounted:

“The North Atlantic Council strongly condemns the continued instrumentalisation of irregular migration artificially created by Belarus as part of hybrid actions targeted against Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia for political purposes… We will remain vigilant against the risk of further escalation and provocation by Belarus at its borders with Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia, and will continue to monitor the implications for the security of the Alliance.”

While NATO mounts a propaganda campaign over the alleged “weaponization” of migrants in Belarus, it continues to carry out reckless military provocations in the Black Sea, on Russia’s border.

Russia reported Thursday that it had scrambled a fighter jet to intercept a British Boeing RC-135 Rivet Joint spy plane, which it claimed was trying to get close to Crimea. The Russian military said four spy planes and two US warships were observed operating in the region in the same 24-hour period.

Russia’s military spokesperson Major General Igor Konashenkov commented, “The Russian defence ministry treats the military activity of the US and its allies in the Black Sea region as scouting out a potential theatre of war in case Ukraine prepares a military operation to solve the crisis in eastern Ukraine.”

Tensions have been mounting for the last month, following an escalation of the conflict in the east of Ukraine and renewed talk of admitting the ferociously anti-Russian Ukrainian state to NATO.

On October 26, Ukrainian forces carried out their first drone strike on pro-Russian forces in the Donbass region, using a Turkish Bayraktar TB2k—technology Foreign Policy described as a “game changer” in the conflicts in Nagorno-Karabakh and Libya.

The possibility of Ukraine being granted NATO membership was underscored by US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s trip to Ukraine, as well as Georgia and Romania, a few days earlier. Asked during his visit about Russia’s objections to Ukraine’s NATO ambitions, Austin replied, “Ukraine… has a right to decide its own future foreign policy, and we expect that they will be able to do that without any outside interference.”

He called on Russia to “end its occupation of Crimea” and warned, “We will continue to do everything we can to support Ukraine's efforts to develop the capability to defend itself.”

Putin responded, “Formal membership [of Ukraine] in NATO may not take place, but military development of the territory is already under way… This creates a threat to the Russian Federation.”

On October 30, the Washington Post reported a significant build-up of Russian forces near the country’s Ukrainian border. Politico took up the story two days later, reporting that satellite images from Maxar Technologies showed “a buildup of armored units, tanks and self-propelled artillery along with ground troops massing near the Russian town of Yelnya.” These included the elite 1st Guards Tank Army.

The website continued, “a new analysis by Jane’s [a military intelligence company] on Monday reveals that equipment from Russia’s 4th Tank Division has been moved to areas around Bryansk and Kursk close to Ukraine's northern border.”

Ukraine’s defence ministry claims there are some 90,000 Russian troops involved in total.

Russian spokesperson Dmitry Peskov dismissed Politico’s article as “low quality.” At the same time, he insisted, “The movement of our military equipment and army units… is exclusively our business.”

He said yesterday, “We take measures to ensure our security when our opponents take defiant action near our borders. We can’t stay indifferent to that.”

Ukraine has so far deployed 8,500 troops to its side of the border with Russia.

On Wednesday, US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken held a joint press conference in Washington with Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba. Blinken claimed, “Our concern is that Russia may make a serious mistake of attempting to rehash what it undertook back in 2014,” referring to the annexation of Crimea following the NATO-backed coup in Ukraine.

Warning, “We’re looking at this very, very closely. We’re also consulting very closely with allies and partners,” he concluded, “The message we’re sending today that I repeated to Dmytro is that our commitment to Ukraine’s sovereignty, to its independence, to its territorial integrity is ironclad.”

The secretary of state added yesterday that the US was “looking at the various tools that we have.”

His threats were echoed by the French foreign and defence ministers after a meeting with their Russian counterparts. The French ministers, “warned of serious consequences related to any new harm to Ukraine’s territorial integrity” and “condemned the irresponsible and unacceptable behaviour of Belarusian authorities concerning the instrumentalization of migration flows targeting several countries of the European Union,” according to a joint press release.

On Friday morning, the UK’s Daily Telegraph ran the front-page headline, “Russia may invade Ukraine, warns US.” The story claimed that “senior Whitehall sources” had told the paper the UK government was “concerned” about reports of Russian troop movements near the Ukrainian border and that “there was ‘twitchiness’ and ‘anxiety’ among officials.”

It continued, “They [US officials] have shared intelligence on the Russian movements with allies and briefed them on the possibility of a military operation.”

These events highlight the serious danger of war breaking out in Europe.

In Poland and Ukraine, the European and NATO powers are relying on far-right proxies with major fascist constituencies to push an aggressive anti-Russian campaign involving the deployment of thousands of troops. They have their own forces positioned within striking distance of Russian territory.

The situation they have created threatens to trigger an armed confrontation. In addition to its deployment of soldiers to the border with Ukraine, Russia carried out snap paratrooper drills with Belarus on Friday, just 20 miles from the flashpoint on the Polish border. Britain claims the Royal Air Force escorted two Russian nuclear-capable bombers flying over the North Sea towards the English Channel the same day.

Seeking to deflect enormous social tensions outward and to pursue their long-held strategic goal of a dominated, subservient Russia, the imperialist powers are preparing a catastrophe.

Brutal repression against striking public employees in São Paulo, Brazil

Tomas Castanheira

On Wednesday afternoon, teachers and municipal workers in São Paulo faced violent repression by the police as they protested against a City Council vote on a “pension reform” that dramatically slashes their pensions.

Tear gas fired at striking workers in front of the São Paulo City Council building (WSWS Media)

The area in front of the City Council building was turned into a battlefield, with the police firing a barrage of tear gas canisters and rubber bullets at the thousands of workers gathered there. Several were wounded by the gunfire, and one worker fractured her foot, remaining on the ground for hours without medical care as tear gas bombs landed by her side. The councillors proceeded with their session, which extended into the early morning hours, when they passed the criminal bill.

Municipal workers had been on strike since October 15 against the austerity measures introduced by Mayor Ricardo Nunes of the Brazilian Democratic Movement (MDB). As soon as the vote ended, “at midnight and forty minutes,” declared SINPEEM, the largest union of municipal teachers, the unions declared the strike over.

This was the second strike this year by São Paulo’s municipal educators, the largest section of public service workers. In February, they struck for four months against the unsafe reopening of schools. The large support for the new strike movement, which gathered tens of thousands in several demonstrations over the last month, is an expression of the growing opposition of the working class to the intolerable conditions being imposed by capitalism.

In the last months, in addition to public employees in São Paulo, workers at General Motors in São Caetano do Sul went on strike against the company’s proposed contract and rejected the agreement presented by the union, which buried the strike against the will of the workers. More recently, truck drivers held a strike in protest over the increase in fuel prices that affected the operations of Brazil’s largest port in the city of Santos, on São Paulo’s coast. In the south of the country they were joined by demonstrations of app delivery and oil workers.

The living standards of Brazilian workers have been seriously affected in the last two years. Brazil and the entire Latin American region were hit by the COVID-19 pandemic while already in the midst of a prolonged economic crisis, which has severely deepened. Unemployment levels have reached historic highs, more than 20 million have been thrown below the poverty line, and hunger has returned as a widespread social issue. Brazil’s working families struggle to make ends meet in the face of rampant inflation that has already reached 10.67 percent over the past 12 months.

Economic desperation is compounded by the catastrophic results of the COVID-19 pandemic policies of fascistic President Jair Bolsonaro and the capitalist ruling class as a whole. The country already has more than 610,000 recorded deaths from the coronavirus and continues to record about 230 deaths daily, with significant levels of under-reporting. But across the country, local governments of all political parties are promoting an end to minimal mitigation measures, including an end to mask mandates in public places and the imposition of mandatory face-to-face education for all children.

As the WSWS reported, there was a widespread revolt against these inhumane conditions imposed by Brazil’s ruling class on the part of São Paulo’s municipal workers. Their anger was even greater in the face of the insistent and voracious attacks by the São Paulo City Hall and the endless betrayals by the unions that claim to represent them.

Workers have been fighting attempts to scrap their pensions since at least 2016, when a proposed pension reform was presented by then-Mayor Fernando Haddad of the Workers Party (PT). The attacks were intensified by his successor, João Doria of the Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB), now governor of São Paulo, who brought the pension reform known as “ Sampaprev ” to a vote in March 2018. Public employees responded with a strike and massive street demonstrations, which led to the postponement of the vote on the bill. At that time, the unions called for a “suspension” of the strike, knowing that sooner or later the bill would be brought to a vote again.

The lifelong president of the SINPEEM union, Claudio Fonseca of the Citizenship party, a successor to the Stalinist Communist Party, was then a city councillor. The unions waited for Fonseca’s colleagues in the Council to convene, amid the 2018 Christmas celebrations, a new session to approve Sampaprev to call for new demonstrations. Just like this week, the public employees were barbarically repressed while the project was being approved by the councillors. Amid a rebellious mood among the workers, the unions held an assembly that voted to call a strike at the beginning of the 2019 school year.

The 2019 strike, which fought for the repeal of the recently approved pension reform, once again assumed massive proportions and was ended in a rigged vote by SINPEEM and its allies, who trampled on the decision of the majority of workers who voted to continue the movement. The same scam was applied by the unions in the strike against the unsafe reopening of schools, this time in an online meeting.

After increasing the retirement contribution rates for active employees in 2018, thus eroding their salaries, the MDB government extended the attack to already retired employees, who will have 14 percent of benefits that exceed the minimum wage ripped off. The unions, for their part, repeated their sordid strategy to disorient the workers. They subjected the powerful force of more than 100,000 São Paulo public employees to the powerlessness of the “allied” PT and PSOL councillors to reverse the vote.

The failure of this strategy was demonstrated immediately, when the entire PT caucus voted in favor of one of the bills that made up Mayor Ricardo Nunes’s austerity package. The justification of the PT councillors was that the bill would be approved anyway, and they advanced its approval to discuss mitigating amendments. In reality, the Workers Party had already carried out attacks of the same character against the pensions of public employees in the states they rule, such as Ceará and Bahia.

Tired of these theatrics and recognizing the impotence of these methods to respond to the attacks of the capitalist state, many workers talked about radicalizing their struggle, with actions ranging from blocking the city streets to occupying the City Council building to prevent the vote. This mood was definitely present in Wednesday’s demonstration.

As the beginning of the session approached, tensions grew between the workers and the shock troops. Demonstrators threw eggs and other harmless objects at the police, who promptly started firing tear gas grenades. The response of the union officials, perched on the top of sound trucks, was to immediately denounce workers opposed to the union’s capitulation as “divisive” and “infiltrators” and spread lies that people with “backpacks full of bombs” had been seen among the crowd.

SINPEEM’s directors claimed that the police, ready to savagely repress the workers, were there “working” and that they were their allies, since the police would also be harmed by the austerity measures. The president of SEDIN (Union of Childhood Educators), Claudete Alves of the PT, on the other hand, declared that confronting the police would mean using “fascist methods” that would equate the workers with far-right supporters of President Bolsonaro. Fonseca then stated that “the last thing we need today is to invade the City Council building,” since “our goal is to convince the councillors” to change their vote.

These fraudulent and deeply reactionary arguments reveal the class character of the unions. Having degenerated decades ago, they have turned into empty bureaucratic husks that support a privileged bureaucracy opposed to workers’ interests. They are not only rabid opponents of socialism but of any form of class struggle. Their real role is that of policemen of the working-class movement, and therefore they identify with and respect the “work” of the shock troops.

Over 40 killed by floods in South India and Sri Lanka

Kapila Fernando

At least 41 people have been killed by floods caused by heavy rains in South India and Sri Lanka over the past week. The severe weather, which initially began in late October and worsened on November 7, was due to a low-pressure area over the Bay of Bengal.

Working people and the poor in urban and rural areas alike, who have already been hit by the COVID-19 pandemic and escalating price rises in food and other essentials, are the worst affected.

In Sri Lanka, 25 people have been killed and thousands more displaced by floods and landslides. The current disaster followed devastating floods in June, which led to 17 deaths.

Men wade though floods in Puttalam Nagavillu [Source: Facebook]

According to the latest reports from the Disaster Management Center (DMC), residents of 145 Divisional Secretariats in 17 districts, with over 212,000 people from more than 60,200 families, have been impacted. About 23 homes have been destroyed and 1,229 houses partially damaged, with the displaced sent to 76 “safe locations” managed by DMC provincial offices.

In South India, 16 people were killed in Tamil Nadu, according to state disaster management. Many parts of Chennai, the state capital, are flooded, with roads under water and thousands of residents in low-lying areas displaced. The rains in the past week are among the heaviest recorded in Chennai since 2015.

Several Chennai hospitals, including the ESI hospital, ESI medical college hospital, Anna Nagar hospital and Chaithapettai hospital, were badly affected and saw the transfer of patients to other facilities. Many schools and university colleges in the state were closed and some train services suspended.

The largest downpour in Sri Lanka occurred at Point Pedro, Jaffna in the Northern Province on Wednesday, which recorded 204 millimetres. In Mannar district, in the same province, floods destroyed 13 houses and partially damaged 802 homes, impacting 3,500 families. Over 100 homes were badly damaged in the Mirigama area in the Western Province.

Flooded street in Jaffna [Source: Facebook]

Transport and the supply of essential services have been severely restricted by flooded highways and railways as well as landslides and falling trees. Working class families and the poor, struggling with the escalating cost of essentials, such as gas, fuel, sugar and rice, now confront food shortages because farmland and grocery shops are under water and fishermen throughout the country are unable to work. A lack of safe drinking water and other basic requirements heighten the danger of island-wide outbreaks of cholera, diarrhoea and dengue fever.

Half of the deaths in Sri Lanka have been caused by landslides. On Wednesday, a middle-aged woman and two girls, aged 8 and 13, were killed by a landslide at Rambukkana in Kegalle district. In Galigamuwa, in the same district, a woman was hospitalised with injuries caused by a landslide that day. Her husband and their 32-year-old son were killed in the incident. Their bodies were not found until the following afternoon.

Ramukana landslide where three people, including two children, died [Source: Facebook]

Others killed by landslides included a married couple in Rideegama Udawatte and a female health worker at Narammala in the Kurunegala district in Northwestern Province.

Sri Lanka’s National Building Research Organisation (NBRO) has issued landslide warnings for a number of divisional secretariat areas in 10 districts. Kandy, Kegalle and Kurunegala have been designated as the most dangerous areas.

Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapakse voiced his sympathy in parliament for the flood victims on Thursday, but failed to provide any details about government support measures. He appealed to the opposition political parties to participate in unspecified “relief programs” in a clear attempt to contain popular anger over the government’s failure to provide proper assistance.

On Thursday morning, DMC director general Sudantha Ranasinghe told a press conference that the situation had “ developed gradually” and that action had been taken to warn people in affected areas about the dangers. Attempting to blame the victims, Ranasinghe claimed that those who died did so because of their “failure to vacate the dangerous areas and their careless behaviour.”

Ranasinghe said that President Gotabhaya Rajapakse had directed him that anyone who failed to vacate from NBRO-categorised dangerous areas would be forcibly evacuated by the police and through court orders. He said nothing about whether the forceful evacuations were temporary or if evacuated people would be provided alternative houses.

Annual landslide deaths in Sri Lanka are increasing, because official warnings are limited to mere announcements and successive governments have failed to organise proper pre-disaster warnings and genuine evacuations, including the provision of alternative facilities for evacuated families.

The majority of those vulnerable to landslides are workers from the tea and rubber estates and poor peasants who cannot afford to buy land in safe areas or build strong houses.

Most plantation workers are still living in line rooms built during British colonial rule, many of them a century old and easily damaged by light winds and rain. In 2016, a landslide killed about 200 people from three villages at Samasara Kanda in Kegalle district.

Sri Lankan governments, moreover, have forcefully evacuated tens of thousands of poor people from small homes, including in Colombo and labelling their makeshift self-built dwellings as “unauthorised buildings.” The residents are also being blamed for causing floods in urban areas and are being forced out with the lands being handed over for big business investment projects.

Colombo governments have spent huge sums of money on infrastructure developments, such as expressways and new airports, to attract international capital, but have failed to initiate substantial programs for decent housing for workers and the poor, or adequate waterways, drainage and sanitary facilities. Contrary to government claims, a major factor in city flooding is improper urbanization, where profits take precedence over scientific planning according to human need.

While the rainfall is expected to decline over the next few days, the danger of flooding remains, with an increasing risk of landslides, because reservoirs and lakes in the central hill areas have overflowed into low-level areas. There is also the danger of a major dengue outbreak, with over 1,360 cases reported in the first 10 days of November, compared to only 770 cases for the whole of November last year.

Travel nursing demand reaches all-time high amidst nursing shortage and Delta surge should be in pandemic

Katy Kinner

Demand for travel nurses, who are temporary short-term nurses used to cover staffing demands, is at an all-time high across the US.

Registered traveling nurse Patricia Carrete, of El Paso, Texas, walks down the hallways during a night shift at a field hospital, Wednesday, Feb. 10, 2021, in Cranston, R.I [Credit: AP Photo/David Goldman]

According to data from a health care staffing firm SimpliFi, there were over 30,000 available travel nurse positions nationwide in August, a 30 percent increase from the coronavirus’ January surge. Today, data from various travel nurse agencies suggests the demand is significantly higher, with estimates ranging from 50,000 to 100,000 open positions nationally this fall.

While demand for travel nurses has spiked multiple times throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, the spread of the Delta variant has put an unprecedented strain on nurse staffing levels, causing hospitals to contract out to travel nurse agencies.

The recent worsening of the nurse staffing crisis is caused by both the influx of patients falling ill with the Delta variant as well as an increase in nurses leaving the profession, fed up with the unending stress, poor pay and terrible staffing ratios that make their jobs unsafe.

According to a September survey by the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses, two-thirds of ICU nurses have considered leaving the profession entirely. The staffing crisis is further exacerbated by an influx of previously canceled procedures, appointments and surgeries having been rescheduled for this summer and fall.

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the function and mechanism of travel nursing. Before the pandemic, travel nurses made up about 3–4 percent of overall national nursing staff, but as of August 2021, travel nurses make up about 8–10 percent of hospital nursing staff.

Traveling nursing first began in an official capacity in 1978 with the advent of the first agency, TravCorps, which was intended to meet seasonal demands in New Orleans brought by the Mardi Gras celebration. Throughout the 1980s, travel nursing was utilized as a tool to handle national nurse staffing problems. Today, travel nursing in the US has become a $10 billion dollar industry.

While the surge in popularity of travel nursing has deepened the country’s nursing shortage, it has been a boon for staffing agencies. One staffing agency, AMN Healthcare Services, reported a 41 percent increase in revenue from the same time last year, a trend to be found across the industry.

Until the COVID-19 pandemic, travel nurses filled temporary, localized staffing shortages or increased patient burdens, such as those caused by natural disasters, seasonal increases in tourist destinations or labor strikes.

In the early weeks of the pandemic, when the virus was significantly worse in localized areas such as New York, travel nursing functioned as before, with nurses shipped to the areas of most need and paid more if traveling from a farther distance. However, as the coronavirus saturated the globe and demand for travel nurses skyrocketed everywhere, hospitals were forced to sharply increase their incentives if they wanted to attract temporary workers.

The heavy utilization of travel nurses—at one time meant to be a stop-gap measure—is just another example of the irrational handling of the pandemic. The hiring of travel nurses is a band-aid amidst a devastating global nursing shortage and in some cases can be a catalyst for worsening health care, especially in rural and community hospitals. Travel nursing is also not immune to the global nursing shortage, and there is no guarantee that the increasing amount of open travel nurse positions can be filled.

Rural hospitals find themselves in a severe crisis as they are unable to compete with travel nurse salaries which are often double or quadruple the salaries found at rural hospitals.

A new survey of rural hospitals from the Chartis Group, which provided their preliminary results to Vox, reveals how deep the problem runs. The survey showed that 99 percent of rural hospitals surveyed said they were experiencing a staffing shortage, and 96 percent of them said they were having the most difficulty finding nurses. Rural hospitals were already operating on razor thin margins, with record numbers of hospitals closing in 2020 and now an additional 216 rural hospitals at high risk of closure as of Sept 2021.

In addition to hospital system funding, money for travel nurses can come from state and federal funding, where it can be canceled at the whim of politicians and the ruling class. For example, in September, Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves signed an order that would bring in 900 travel nurses for the price of $10 million a week for an 8-week contract. When this contract ended on October 31st, the state immediately returned to previous staffing levels, spurring other nurses to leave the field or take travel nurse positions themselves, worsening the already devastating staffing crisis in Mississippi. In many cases, the same staffing agencies that filled the state-funded positions were the ones luring Mississippi nurses away from the state with high-paying contracts.

Hospitals also use travel nurse agencies to undercut the power of striking workers, forming special contracts to ensure profits continue rolling in. In the same breath, hospital CEOs tell workers there is no money to increase wages and hire more workers while signing contracts with travel nursing agencies.

Bill rates for travel nurses have increased significantly with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The agency takes a cut of the bill rate, so hospitals are paying a much higher rate than the posted nurse salary. In December 2019, average weekly travel nurse wages were about $1,600 according to data from a travel nurse recruiting company, Vivian Health. A year later, weekly pay average was more than $3,500, with rates rising during surges. Rates for ICU nurses are often highest, as they are most in demand and the job requires specific training and skills. Current ICU travel nurse rates can be as high as $6,000–8,000 per week.

Hospital systems are willing to pay these rates, as the alternative would be to raise the pay and improve benefits for their staff nurses and attract new applicants.

Although highly paid, working as a travel nurse is difficult and can be dangerous to nurses and patients alike. There are no significant scientific studies on the safety of travel nursing, but evidence suggests that travel assignments present numerous safety issues.

While it depends on the agency and hospital, nurses can be provided with little to no orientation. At the same time, nurses are often entering units with high patient to nurse ratios and a lack of experienced staff, which presents additional safety risks. Some crisis travel nurse contracts can call for nurses to work four to six 12-hour shifts a week, wearing nurses down to a point where medication errors and other mistakes are more likely to occur.

While the extra hands provided by travel nurses are appreciated in hospitals that need the help, this method of fighting the pandemic does not stop the breakdown of the health care system, and only serves the lucrative travel nurse agencies and hospital systems while worsening the working conditions for health care workers.

But there is a growing movement of health care workers who are saying, “Enough is enough.” Most notably, over 32,000 Kaiser workers have set an open-ended strike date for November 15, demanding the institution of safe staffing ratios, wage increases, as well as the prevention of the two-tier wage and benefit system Kaiser is fighting to impose.