“It can’t be a choice between dying at work or being homeless”
Workers oppose rush back to work as death toll rises among grocery, transit and autoworkers
Strikes and other job actions are continuing as workers demand the closure of non-essential workplaces and protection against the coronavirus pandemic. The number of COVID-19 cases worldwide has surpassed 1.5 million, with nearly 90,000 deaths as of this writing.
In the US, the daily death toll hit a new record for the second day in a row. Total deaths have neared 15,000. The staggering loss of life includes an increasing numbers of grocery store, warehouse, delivery, public transit and health care workers, along with teachers and school employees. In New York City alone, 41 transit workers and at least 25 teachers and other Department of Education employees have died from COVID-19, while 500 firefighters have tested positive.
Although there were more than 30,000 new cases on Wednesday, bringing the US total to well over 430,000, President Trump, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and the news media are pushing the narrative that “the curve is flattening” and the worst will soon be over. This is part of a new push for an “orderly” return to work, regardless of the threat to workers and their families.
A worker, wearing a protective mask against the coronavirus, stocks produce before the opening of Gus's Community Market, Friday, March 27, 2020, in San Francisco. (AP Photo/Ben Margot)
On Wednesday, Trump tweeted, “Once we OPEN UP OUR GREAT COUNTRY, and it will be sooner rather than later...Our Economy will BOOM, perhaps like never before!!!"
Supermarket and delivery workers have joined the ranks of frontline and essential workers protesting unsafe conditions and the lack of protective gear. At least four grocery store workers have died in recent days, including a Trader Joe’s worker in Scarsdale, New York; Leilani Jordan, a 27-year-old greeter at Giant’s Campus Way South store in Largo, Maryland, and two Walmart workers—Phillip Thomas, 48, and Wando Evans, 51—at the same Chicago-area store.
On Tuesday, grocery store workers in Boston from a number of chains, including Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s and Stop & Shop, demonstrated. After nine Barnes & Noble workers at a Monroe, New Jersey warehouse tested positive, workers staged a protest Tuesday to demand the closure of the warehouse for two weeks, paid time off, and full disinfection of the facility.
“We’re putting our life on the line for $10 an hour,” one Dollar General worker told NBC News. “Essential really means we’re exhausted and dispensable.”
Although a supervisor from UPS’s giant Worldport facility in Louisville, Kentucky died Saturday, the giant package delivery company and the Teamsters union are keeping more than 1,000 workers on the job. There is growing sentiment among UPS workers to take matters into their own hands. Three workers at the Chelmsford UPS warehouse near Lowell, Massachusetts tested positive, and at least two UPS workers died in the Chicago area.
Last month, Fiat Chrysler workers conducted a wave of wildcat strikes and other job actions after management, the United Auto Workers and the Unifor union in Canada resisted workers’ demands to close the plants.
“When we walked out of the auto plants it was a clear sign that we can take charge over what is going on,” Ryan, a young second-tier worker from the Sterling Heights Assembly Plant in suburban Detroit, told the World Socialist Web Site.
“This was a great, I’d say, revolutionary movement but it was tarnished by the claims of management and the UAW that they decided to close the plants for our safety. This was a movement against the union. They were keeping the plants open and we said, ‘No, we don’t want to get sick and die, let’s get the people out of there.’
“We have to have the right to withdraw our labor until we have safe conditions. They can’t just cast us aside like our lives aren’t worth anything. Before we walked out, some people were working sick because they didn’t have any sick time and were just trying to make a living. It can’t be a choice between dying at work or being homeless.”
Detroit has become one of the epicenters of the pandemic. The state of Michigan ranks third in the country behind New York and New Jersey, with 959 deaths. In addition to the conditions of poverty in the city, which has been ravaged by decades of plant closings, a contributing factor to the spread is the fact that workers were kept on the job while the contagion was spreading.
The death toll has risen to 18 autoworkers. With the backing of the UAW, the automakers are now pushing for a restart of production in early May. The efforts to continue parts operations in Mexico to feed plants in the US and Canada, however, have encountered opposition from maquiladora workers in the border city of Matamoros, who have launched a wave of wildcat strikes .
While Honda announced that it was extending the shutdown of its US and Canadian plants through May 1, Toyota announced that it would resume production on April 20, Hyundai will restart its Alabama plant on Friday, and Volkswagen will resume production in Chattanooga, Tennessee on Sunday.
A worker at the Ft. Wayne, Indiana General Motors plant told the WSWS, “I do not want to suddenly risk getting sick or getting my family sick. I’m a single mother for my teenage son and couldn’t imagine what to do if either of us were to get sick. Returning to GM could be a death sentence to anyone in my orbit.
“There are over 4,500 employees at my plant and most of us touch the same truck that goes by. It’s impossible to stay away from the virus working shoulder to shoulder with people from all over Indiana and Ohio. It’s impossible to disinfect every single truck that goes by every 53 seconds. I know more time off would mean working 7 days a week the rest of the year, but my family’s health is more important than [GM CEO Mary Barra] making $6 million a year.”
The corporations, with the full assistance of the UAW, are seeking to exploit the economic distress of workers to force them back into the plants. At GM’s CCA (Customer Care and Aftersales) parts warehouse in Flint, Michigan, the UAW has recruited a “voluntary” workforce by “dangling health insurance over our heads,” as one worker told the WSWS. There have now been four confirmed COVID-19 cases at the facility, including one second-shift worker who has been absent since March 28.
The pandemic and the response of the ruling class is radically changing the outlook of workers. “Building cars right now is not essential work,” Ryan, the Sterling Heights Assembly worker said. “We should be building ventilators and lifesaving equipment. Every day I see the infection and death numbers rising, and I want to know what we are doing to save lives.
“This is a 100 percent capitalist system. The people in power want to defend their interests and oppose anything that would really help us. People are dying and the news cameras are focusing on the stock markets going up.
“Workers are not just going to give up. It is inevitable that this movement is going to spread to all workers. The workers at Amazon, Starbucks, in the supermarkets and hospitals, everybody in the working class should come together to combat the corporations and the government,” Ryan said, “so we can be the masters of society, and over our own lives.”
Jobless Claims Hit 6.6 Million
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The coronavirus continued to weigh on the U.S. labor market last week.
New applications for unemployment hit 6.6 million in the week ended April 4, Labor Department data showed Thursday. The prior week, originally reported at 6.6 million, was revised to 6.9 million.
Claims from three weeks ago were also revised upward. These rose from around 1 million for the week ended March 21 to 3.3 million.
A staggering 16.8 million Americans have been thrown onto the unemployment rolls in just three weeks, underscoring the terrifying speed with which the coronavirus outbreak has brought world economies to a near standstill.
The CARES Act expanded the ranks of those eligible to file claims for unemployment benefits and raised the amount paid to unemployed workers. Self-employed workers and independent contractors can now file for benefits, expanding the number of claims.
New claims for state unemployment benefits are a proxy for layoffs. Released weekly, they are some of the few real-time indicators of economic conditions.
Actual job losses may be higher than the most recent figures reveal. Applications in many states have been hampered by websites and phone lines failing due to the rapid rise in the volume of claims.
–The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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Nearly 1 out of every 3 renters did not pay their April rent.
The coronavirus tore apart the U.S. economy, leaving many people unemployed or furloughed for the time being. The ripple effects of those firings left many landlords without a check on the first of the month. According to data from the National Multifamily Housing Council and a consortium of real-estate data distributors, 69% of renters paid their landlords for April compared with 81% who paid for March. For an annual comparison, 82% of renters paid their landlords in April 2019. The rental statistics included renters who had issued partial payments in the data. Some renters who are waiting on a paycheck may still make their rent payment before the end of April. The data set included only data from those who rent apartments and did not include single-family homes or low-income housing facilities. In total, data from more than 13.4 million renters was included in the report.
More Americans Are Going on Strike
For decades, the decline of the American labor movement corresponded to a decline in major strike activity. But new data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, or BLS, indicates a recent and significant increase in the number of Americans who are participating in strikes or work stoppages. As a report from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute explained on Tuesday, strike activity “surged” in 2018 and 2019, “marking a 35-year high for the number of workers involved in a major work stoppage over a two-year period.” 2019 alone marked “the greatest number of work stoppages involving 20,000 or more workers since at least 1993, when the BLS started providing data that made it possible to track work stoppages by size.” Union membership is declining, but workers themselves are in fighting shape.
EPI credits the strike surge to several factors. Unemployment is low, which bestows some flexibility on workers depending on their industry. If a work environment becomes intolerable or an employer penalizes workers for striking or organizing, a worker could find better employment elsewhere. (Though federal labor law does prohibit employers from retaliating against workers for participating in protected organizing activity, employers often do so anyway, and under Trump, the conservative makeup of the National Labor Relations Board disadvantages unions when they try to seek legal remedies for the behavior.)
The other reason undermines one of Donald Trump’s central economic claims. Though the president points to low unemployment as proof that his policies are successful, the economy isn’t booming for everyone. Wage growth continues to underperform. People can find jobs, in other words, but those jobs often don’t pay well. As the costs of private health insurance rise, adding another strain on household budgets, Americans are finding that employment and prosperity are two separate concepts.
Without a union, exploited workers have few options at their disposal. They can take their concerns to management, and hope someone in power feels pity. They can stage some kind of protest, and risk the consequences. Or they can find another job, and hope their new workplace is more equitable than the last. Lackluster wage growth suggests that this last option is not as viable as some right-to-work advocates claim. Unions afford workers more protection. Not only do they bargain for better wages and benefits, union contracts typically include just-cause provisions, which make it more difficult for managers to arbitrarily fire people for staging any sort of protest at work. Discipline follows a set process, which gives a worker chances to improve. Retaliation still happens, but would likely happen more often were it not for union contracts, which are designed to act as a layer of insulation between workers and managers with ill intent.
The new BLS data reveals that despite their relatively small numbers, unionized workers are exercising the power afforded them by their contracts. Elected officials ought to listen to what this activity tells them. A strike wave is a symptom that the economy is actually not as healthy as it superficially looks. Nobody withholds their labor unless they’ve exhausted all other options. Strikes and stoppages stem from exasperation, sometimes even desperation. Workers know they’re playing a rigged game, and they’re running out of patience.
“The remarkable thing is how weak wages are, how weak the economy is, given that as a result of the tax bill we have a $1 trillion deficit.”
Donald Trump is ‘just wrong’ about the economy, says Nobel Prize-winner Joseph Stiglitz
President Donald Trump told business and political leaders in Davos, Switzerland last week that the economy under his tenure has lifted up working- and middle-class Americans. In a newly released interview, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz sharply disagreed, saying Trump’s characterization is “just wrong.”
“The Washington Post has kept a tab of how many lies and misrepresentations he does a day,” Stiglitz said of Trump last Friday at the annual World Economic Forum. “I think he outdid himself.”
In Davos last Tuesday, Trump said he has presided over a “blue-collar boom,” citing a historically low unemployment rate and surging wage growth among workers at the bottom of the pay scale.
“The American Dream is back — bigger, better, and stronger than ever before,” Trump said. “No one is benefitting more than America’s middle class.”
Stiglitz, a professor at Columbia University who won the Nobel Prize in 2001, refuted the claim, saying the failure of Trump’s economic policies is evident in the decline in average life expectancy among Americans over each of the past three years.
“A lot of it is what they call deaths of despair,” he says. “Suicide, drug overdose, alcoholism — it’s not a pretty picture.”
The uptick in wage growth is a result of the economic cycle, not Trump’s policies, Stiglitz said.
“At this point in an economic recovery, it’s been 10 years since the great recession, labor markets get tight, unemployment gets lower, and that at last starts having wages go up,” Stiglitz says.
“The remarkable thing is how weak wages are, how weak the economy is, given that as a result of the tax bill we have a $1 trillion deficit.”
As the presidential race inches closer to the general election in November, Trump’s record on economic growth — and whether it has resulted in broad-based gains — is likely to draw increased attention.
BLOG: THE GREATEST TRANSFER OF WEALTH TO THE RICH OCCURRED DURING THE OBAMA-BIDEN BANKSTER REGIME
“The middle class is getting killed; the middle class is getting crushed," former Vice President Joe Biden said in a Democratic presidential debate last month. "Where I live, folks aren't measuring the economy by how the Dow Jones is doing, they're measuring the economy by how they're doing," added Pete Buttigieg, a Democratic presidential candidate and former Mayor of South Bend, Indiana.
Trump has criticized Democrats for tax and regulatory policies that he says will make the U.S. less competitive in attracting business investment.
“To every business looking for a place where they are free to invest, build, thrive, innovate, and succeed, there is no better place on Earth than the United States,” he said in Davos.
Stiglitz pointed to Trump’s threats last week of tariffs on European cars to demonstrate that turmoil in U.S. trade relationships may continue, despite the recent completion of U.S. trade deals in North America and China.
“He can’t help but bully somebody,” Stiglitz said.
Max Zahn is a reporter for Yahoo Finance. Find hi
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