As pandemic continues and nearly 500,000 file for unemployment, US states seek to blackmail workers back on the job
As part of the bipartisan assault by the ruling class to blackmail workers back into accepting low-paying, dangerous work in crowded factories and dangerous face-to-face service, retail and hospitality industries, moves are being made to eliminate any COVID-19-related health, safety and social assistance, including extended weekly unemployment payments.
The latest attacks on the health and well-being of the working class come even as the coronavirus continues to spread throughout the country, with nearly 5,000 reported deaths in the last week alone and over 590,000 since February 2020, a figure which has been shown to be a vast undercount.
According to the US Department of Labor (DOL), nearly 500,000 Americans filed for first-time unemployment benefits last week, which is double the pre-pandemic average. Despite the DOL reporting over 16 million claims filed across all unemployment programs, and an increase in continuing state claims, states such as Montana are moving to eliminate CARES Act created programs, such as the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) and the Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC) programs, in order to force workers into competing for part-time and low-paying work.
The DOL reported that for the week ending May 1, 6.8 million Americans were enrolled in PUA, 4.9 million in PEUC, and nearly 3.7 million through traditional state unemployment systems.
In announcing on Tuesday that Montana would no longer participate in the federal programs, consigning some 25,000 Montanans currently receiving unemployment benefits to destitution, Republican Governor Greg Gianforte claimed, “Montana is open for business again,” while blaming “a labor shortage” on “the vast expansion of federal unemployment benefits ... now doing more harm than good.”
In a move that is sure to be replicated by Republican and Democratic-run states across the country, Gianforte announced that effective June 27, unemployed workers who had exhausted their state benefits but were claiming benefits through PEUC or PUA would no longer be eligible for said benefits. The state will also end the miserly Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation $300 weekly payments, which is already half of the previous $600 payments that were in effect through July of last year.
Previous to Gianforte’s announcement, eligible jobless workers in Montana, if they were able to navigate the unemployment bureaucracy, could possibly receive between $151 and $510 per week from the state program, meaning that the federal boost raised the weekly pay to between $451 and $810. This is equivalent to yearly wages of between $23,452 and $42,120—in other words, enough to maintain a worker with a family in poverty.
Gianforte gives voice to the parasitic demands of Wall Street speculators and capitalist owners who, unburdened with having to work and risk their health and wellbeing in crowded kitchens, dilapidated factories and run-down schools, are ready to move on from the pandemic and resume the exploitation of the working class in order to make real the artificial inflation of the stock market through the extraction of surplus value from the working class.
In a recent article that appeared in Crain’s Detroit Business, Gianforte’s fears that unemployment benefits were stifling the reopening of the economy were echoed by Susan Houseman, vice president and director of research at the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research in Kalamazoo. Houseman mused that “generous benefits” during the pandemic have “put pressure on employers to raise wages.”
In the same article, Mark Garrett, president and CEO of Morrell Group, lamented that workers have “so many options” and are “ghosting” on interviews or “applying and acting interested in roles then not following through,” in order, in his opinion, to oblige requirements by state unemployment systems which require jobless workers apply for work in order to remain eligible.
In an interview with NPR, small business owner Amy Ward said she does not think there should be “extra incentives to stay home right now.” Ward was particularly incensed that her employer contribution payments toward unemployment had increased in the previous year, telling NPR she was “frustrated that I am paying for all these people to be on unemployment, especially when I need people to work.”
There are no doubt many workers who are refusing to return to work—given the ongoing spread of the virus, poor pay, family obligations, and the demeaning character of low-wage jobs. However, there is the fact that thousands of workers in hyper-exploited essential industries, such as agriculture, food service and transportation have died in the last year due to the herd immunity policies that have been enacted by Republican and Democratic governments alike in the name of preserving profits above all else.
As reported by the World Socialist Web Site in February, a preprint server medRxiv study conducted in California found that the reopening of non-essential businesses, coupled with failing to provide these workers adequate safety and medical protection led to a “39% increase in mortality among food/agriculture workers, 28% among transportation/logistics workers, 27% among facilities workers, and 23% among manufacturing workers.”
Reporting figures from the study, the WSWS wrote: “Among the most lethal jobs were hand laborers (2,550 deaths), truck drivers (1,962 deaths) and construction laborers (1,587 deaths). At least 1,360 line cooks and head cooks lost their lives during this time, as did 562 customer service representatives and 378 house cleaners. Even jobs one might consider less dangerous because workers are often outside, such as grounds maintenance workers, suffered 712 deaths, 40 percent more than average.”
As the WSWS has maintained since the beginning of the crisis, the pandemic is above all a political issue, not a medical or biological one. The tools and resources exist to not only eliminate the coronavirus by closing down non-essential operations and schools with full compensation for workers until the population is fully vaccinated, but to provide housing, food, health care and well-paying work to all. The primary task remains building an independent socialist movement of the working class against the existing political, social and economic set-up, which has proven incapable and unwilling to safeguard the lives and well-being of millions of people in the US and globally.
New estimates claim COVID-19 death toll is twice as high as reported
A new global “excess mortality” estimate of deaths caused by the coronavirus paints a truly harrowing portrait of the real state of the ongoing pandemic. While official counts of the pandemic place the current global death toll at more than 3.26 million, the study calculates the dead at 6.93 million.
The study was conducted by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), a research center at the University of Washington. Throughout the pandemic, Dr. Chris Murray and his team have sought to use numerical methods to track and predict the cases and deaths caused by the pandemic, and are cited often by various agencies and departments of the United States government.
As the authors note, however, such reports, based on officially recorded statistics, are inherently underestimations. The amount of testing and reporting of deaths in countries, and in states and provinces within those countries, changes over time and varies greatly across national lines. Reported cases are also subject to manipulation for political reasons.
By estimating the excess mortality of a given region—the deaths in excess of previously calculated averages for a defined period—researchers at the IHME were able to get a more robust picture of the disastrous state of the spread of the disease in each country studied, as deaths as a whole are generally recorded with some degree of accuracy. Importantly, for the first time since the beginning of the pandemic, this analysis looks at excess deaths across the entire planet.
“Once we completed this analysis,” Murray said in an interview accompanying the data release, “our understanding of the magnitude of COVID to date has been much worse than what we have been thinking so far. We have estimated to date that 6.9 million people have died from COVID globally already.”
In terms of absolute number of deaths, the United States, India, Mexico, Brazil and Russia have the most fatalities caused by COVID-19. In the US, more than 905,000 people have died, 58 percent more than records indicate. In India and Mexico, deaths stand at 654,000 and 617,000, respectively, nearly triple officially acknowledged deaths. The adjusted number of dead in Brazil stands at nearly 596,000, about 46 percent above official counts. And Russia has an excess death count about that of Brazil, 593,000, indicating the tally of the dead in that country has been undercounted by at least a factor of five, around double previous excess mortality estimates.
Other countries had even higher ratios of excess mortality to reported mortality. Japan’s death toll was estimated to be more than 10 times higher. In Egypt, under the yoke of a blood-soaked military dictatorship backed by the imperialist powers, the IHME reports that the pandemic has claimed more than 12 times the lives reported by that regime. And in Kazakhstan, the total COVID-19 deaths are at least 14 times more than government tallies.
Notably, these adjusted death counts reveal high death counts in whole regions that to date have reported relatively low numbers of COVID-19 deaths. In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, the ratio of actual cases to reported cases ranges from 1.6 to 4.1, suggesting many tens of thousands more human lives have been lost in those countries that previously thought. A similar situation exists across the Indian subcontinent and in numerous countries in Southeast Asia and the Pacific.
The COVID-19 fatality rates, deaths per 100,000 people, reveal equally stark disasters in other parts of the world, particularly eastern Europe, the Balkans and Central Asia—not coincidentally regions that have suffered drastic declines in their living standards in the past three decades as a result of the restoration of capitalism after the dissolution of the USSR and imperialist intrigue and war. In Azerbaijan, for example, the official pandemic death rate is 44.6, whereas excess mortality figures estimate a death rate of 648.8, a more than 14-fold increase. In Belarus, the estimated actual death rate is nearly 17 times the official numbers, nearly 460 dead for every 100,000 people.
Moreover, unlike previous excess mortality studies, the current IHME model was careful to as much as possible not include deaths not directly caused by the virus itself. They analyzed six “drivers of all-cause mortality” related to the pandemic, broad categories that make up the excess death counts. These include COVID-19 itself, deaths caused by delayed or deferred health care, deaths from increased mental disorders and drug use, a reduction in deaths from injuries because of lockdowns and social distancing mandates, fewer deaths from other diseases, including the flu, and measles, and reduced deaths from heart or lung conditions because many of those individuals instead died prematurely from the coronavirus.
This approach allowed the IHME team to accurately calculate deaths caused by the coronavirus even in places where excess deaths actually went down for the above reasons, as well as to differentiate between deaths caused by the virus itself and those caused by the pandemic’s impact on society. In total, the scientists were able to exclude 615,000 deaths that occurred from March 2020 onward, providing a very clear picture of the colossal death toll of the pandemic.
The data also suggest many areas for further study on the indirect human cost of the coronavirus. They show that, for example, opioid deaths in the US increased by about 15,000 last year, likely a result of increased anxiety and depression brought on by the immense social crisis.
In addition, the study makes clear the even its immensely high excess mortality calculations are likely an underestimation. In Europe, they excluded data during five weeks of late summer when a heat wave made accurately estimated COVID-19 deaths much more difficult. They were also not able to use the reported all-cause deaths data from Brazil, which has been plagued by an incomplete registration of deaths since near the beginning of the pandemic and was forced to use a secondary record instead.
The authors further note that “As the evidence is strengthened in the coming months and years, it is likely that we will revise our estimates of the total COVID-19 death rate upward in future iterations of this work.” This will no doubt especially hold true for areas like sub-Saharan Africa where even reported deaths, the yardstick of this method, are difficult to get with any specificity and are generally undercounts.
Such a frank admission about the ongoing global catastrophe must not terrify but galvanize the entire working class. The cost in human lives is more than double official records, and likely even higher. And as new variants spread unchecked in countries such as India, the death toll is already spiraling to new heights. If millions more deaths are to be prevented, the response to the pandemic must be forcibly wrenched from the politicians and oligarchs who have “let the bodies pile high in their thousands” through the method of class struggle and the struggle for socialism.
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