the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Dec 7, 2020
In true form, capitalism has delivered us another bad result. The holidays have been cancelled! No shared gatherings, no shared memories, no shared food, fellowship and rest.
Even before Covid, many workers had already forfeited holiday breaks. For many who do work, the increased exploitation has meant crazy work schedules that have eliminated holidays. And for those who have been permanently unemployed, lack of money and squabbles with government agencies to get some leave little room to rest.
But what is happening with these holidays is that families and friends are being torn apart. The love and sharing has been replaced by masks and isolation. It is not a small thing. These rules may need to be followed to protect human life first. We are in the middle of a horrific pandemic. Ordinary people didn’t cause it, but ordinary people are paying a heavy price for a completely mismanaged response to a deadly threat.
Every day, the U.S. is breaking records for the numbers of people infected by Covid-19. Record numbers of hospitalizations. A coronavirus death every 30 seconds and less. And while the news is full of promises that Biden will fix it, promises that a vaccine will be delivered any moment now, working people are facing a deepening crisis.
The medical and hospital system has been shredded by over nine months of pandemic. Front-line medical professionals and workers are falling victim to a system that has used them up and thrown them away without adequate protections or replacements. Hospitals that have been operating without enough of anything—not staff, not beds, not supplies in normal times—are crashing. In many areas of the country, there are no hospitals. These are choices that capitalism has made, to put profit over human life, just as it does in production.
If they were unable and unwilling to deliver testing, tracing and treatment, what makes us think they can get a vaccine delivered to the population quickly? The capitalists would prefer not to have the problem of the pandemic, which threatens their profit-making economy into the future. But they are not at all inclined to dip into their past and current profits to stop it. They are satisfied to speculate on Wall Street and take huge profits while the population suffers.
Meanwhile, workers are spending what little we have to provide for food, clothing and shelter. The temporary orders to delay evictions expire December 31. The pitiful aid package Congress promises is a political football and totally inadequate. And workers in record numbers are still without jobs.
Is there nothing we can do? With sick family members, with savings depleted, with more mouths to feed, what chance do we have of making it through?
As our combined reserves are depleted, we have no choice but to turn to each other and band together.
Yes, the working class is divided. The Trump administration put a spotlight on that, but didn’t create it. We have to overcome those divisions. We do it by uniting in a fight against the bosses who have the money and don’t care about any of us.
We workers have something the capitalists want and need. Our labor. Without it, not a single wheel would turn. Without it, there is no profit for them. We have to unite and use the power we have as a class to fight for our very lives. We know how to do that, and it’s the only way out. But we can’t fight each other.
And we can’t simply fight to reform this system, thinking we can make it better. In the past, fights of workers have pushed the bosses back, but guess what? Because capitalists and their profit-making system remained in place, they were able to come back at us with a vengeance.
This sleeping giant of a working class has to wake up and move. Our lives depend on it. But we have to unite beyond families, beyond workplaces, beyond neighborhoods and city borders. Not for charity. Not for temporary help. However unprepared and however sick and discouraged we may be, we have to organize and fight.
We have to get rid of this capitalist system that puts profit before human life and replace it with a system built by and for workers.
Dec 7, 2020
The state of California has long had fewer beds and lower staffing levels than the rest of the country, with only 1.8 hospital beds per 1,000 residents as of 2018. Shortages in California are also much worse than in the rest of the world. The country of Poland, for example, has three times the number of hospital beds per capita as California.
Hospital executives admit that this is a deliberate design.
“Having excess capacity—that you’re heating and lighting and cleaning and all of that stuff—is just antithetical to your efforts to be as cost efficient as possible, as lean as possible,” explained Nancy Foster, the American Hospital Association’s vice president for quality and patient safety policy to The New York Times (December 1).
In other words, hospital executives run hospitals in the same way they would run a restaurant, reducing staffing and tables, in order to optimize profits.
The drive to increase profits led the hospitals to create severe shortages of hospital beds and hospital staff even before the pandemic hit.
In the middle of the pandemic, these shortages have been catastrophic. As the number of patients due to the pandemic have mounted, many California hospitals have been turning seriously ill patients away, sending them home in what they call “hospital at home” programs—with few or no available doctors and nurses to treat them. This has cost untold lives that could have been saved if the patients had received the proper health care.
The novel coronavirus has exposed the health care system in California for what it is—a disaster in human terms. California produces and holds tremendous wealth. Its advanced science and research facilities are the envy of the rest of the world. But those who produce this wealth have no support from the very owners they enrich. Instead, the entire system is geared to profit off of the population’s illnesses.
Dec 7, 2020
United for Respect, an organization representing Amazon and Walmart workers, is now demanding a $5-an-hour pay increase, pandemic pay leave, free COVID testing, contact tracing and treatment, as well as full pay to workers who need to self-isolate after a positive case is detected.
These workers are called “heroes” and “essential workers” because they risk their lives every day. But retail companies pay barely more than the minimum wage. Home Depot pays cashiers $12 an hour on average, while those working at Dollar General make a measly $8 an hour. The average starting wage at Walmart is $11 an hour.
While many of the top retail companies provided some hazard pay, temporary pay raises and bonuses in the first months of the pandemic, they ended that more than five months ago. And they haven’t brought any of the pay raises back, even now that the pandemic is more dangerous than ever.
These top retail companies’ profits have skyrocketed during the pandemic. Walmart, Kroger and Home Depot’s 2020 profits increased by close to 40% on average in comparison to their last year’s profits, reaching tens of billions of dollars. Amazon’s profit rose to incredible heights, 200%. The stock prices of these giant corporations are also dramatically higher, up an average of 33%. As such, these companies handsomely exploit the dire conditions created by the COVID-19 epidemic to their advantage. Being so profitable for these companies is not very surprising. They pay very low wages!
“Amazon canceled the measly $2 bonus back in June. Jeff Bezos has made $70 billion since March when the pandemic started. Amazon calls us heroes in their commercials, they call us essential, but it feels like we are expendable,” said Courtenay Brown, an Amazon Fresh worker in New Jersey. Yes, that is correct. Under capitalism, their profits are everything, and our lives are nothing.
Dec 7, 2020
Food delivery company DoorDash will pay out 1.5 million dollars for thousands of tips paid by customers in Washington, D.C. from 2017 to 2019 which the company pocketed for itself. The city’s prosecutor made this announcement at the end of November.
With DoorDash as with other food delivery companies, customers request online food orders to be delivered to them, and pay a set fee. The customers also choose what tip to pay online. But DoorDash workers said the company was stealing their tips. Many began complaining, and then customers complained. Reporters picked up on the story, and in D.C. the prosecutor filed a lawsuit a year ago.
The D.C. settlement is one step forward. But what about the rest of DoorDash’s 400,000 or more deliverers nationwide? And what about InstaCart, which had the same policy of pocketing workers’ tips?
Stealing workers’ money—capitalism at its most normal.
Dec 7, 2020
In September, California Governor Gavin Newsom, with great fanfare, claimed California’s place as leader in the fight against global warming: he said by 2035, California will issue permits to electric vehicles only.
What a joke! California remains a haven for oil companies using highly dirty and dangerous drilling methods such as fracking and steam injection.
CalGEM, the state agency that is supposed to watch for hazardous oil drilling in California, has not even been following its own regulations, according to an audit conducted by the state of California. In 2019 alone, CalGEM issued hundreds of permits for new oil wells, which use fracking and steam injection, without the required paperwork and reviews. Fracking and high-pressure steam injection are known to cause contamination of the groundwater and water wells—very bad for the people and land of California, but very profitable for the oil companies!
And Governor Gavin Newsom has approved a bunch of fracking permits himself, violating his own moratorium on fracking.
The first fracking permits Newsom approved were for Aera Energy, a joint venture of oil industry heavyweights Shell and ExxonMobil. Newsom is apparently best friends with lobbyist Jason Kinney, whose firm represents Aera. Recently, Newsom violated his own COVID-related recommendations to attend the indoors birthday party of Kinney at a very expensive French restaurant—and got caught on camera!
No, California is not any different than the rest of the country. The politicians are little more than servants to the big oil companies that have turned California into their own private dump, polluting the soil and water at will in the name of unbounded profit.
Dec 7, 2020
The billionaire Sackler family, notorious pushers of addictive pain killer OxyContin, reached an 8.3 billion dollar settlement with the U.S. Justice Department. Its U.S. company, Purdue Pharma, admitted to crimes committed which ignited this country’s deadly opioid epidemic. Approved by a bankruptcy judge on Nov. 17, the deal will settle many of the more than 2600 victim and state lawsuits against the company.
At a Department of Justice press conference, officials hailed the settlement as “significant.” But Purdue Pharma made $35 billion pushing OxyContin in the U.S. The devastating epidemic that resulted has claimed nearly half a million lives since 1999. It left millions severely addicted while millions of family and friends suffered the consequences of their loved ones’ addiction. Meanwhile, the Sackler family’s net worth skyrocketed to over 13 billion dollars.
After a massive public outcry and the avalanche of lawsuits, the company finally admitted responsibility. Victims exposed how Purdue conned patients and convinced doctors that the risks of addiction and overdose were minimal. Purdue, already in bankruptcy, is to pay the vast majority of the settlement costs. These payouts to victims will compete with other debts of the bankrupt company.
And the Sacklers’ huge fortune remains untouched, as they will pay out only 225 million dollars to victims. The deal says the Sacklers must give up their ownership of Purdue Pharma. That’s a joke because they long ago gutted the company of most of its financial assets. The Sacklers transferred more than $10 billion out of the company between 2008 and 2017 as news of their crimes came to light, and moved over $1 billion into Swiss bank accounts for extra safekeeping.
Then they transferred Purdue’s deadly drug pushing apparatus offshore to the Sacklers’ Mundipharma, which is incorporated in China.
Mundipharma’s “marketing strategy” for OxyContin is the same as that employed in the U.S. Mundipharma continues to push the lie that OxyContin is less addictive than other opioids—the same lie Purdue Pharma admitted was false in U.S. courts. Mundipharma pushes larger doses of the drug even though higher doses are more dangerous.
These criminal capitalists are responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths, and continue to profit off of addiction overseas, yet the federal government works to cover for them. When faced with public outrage they put on a big public show, expressing disapproval for the many callous, corrupt and inhuman deeds. But in the end the capitalist criminals, deserving of jail time, massive financial penalties and more, only receive the proverbial “slap on the wrist.”
Dec 7, 2020
In the summer of 2019, Sam Johnson gave the following speech, responding to concerns that a number of people had raised about the growth of violence coming from the government, the police and the extreme right, insisting that working people had the means of dealing with this. Today, as the right continues to make itself heard, what Sam had to say is even more relevant.
Well, those violent attacks the brother was talking about, I’ve been through some of that, I know what it will take to stop it. Working people have to come together to stop it.
We have to stand up and bring our forces together. The police, troops, all that, they’re part of the working class. When we fight, we can bring them together with us. We can bring those forces they use to protect them, we can bring them with us.
We can stop those right-wing maniacs from shooting at us. I know what happened with the KKK. They were in Alabama when I grew up. My family had a problem with them. My auntie had a juke box, people came over to listen to it, have a drink. The KKK told her to get rid of it. She said, it’s not going to happen. They told her, when we come back that better be out of there. When they came back, my family was organized—family and friends around the family. They were organized in a two-block area around my auntie’s house, waiting on the KKK to come back. My family was there with their rifles and their shotguns. But the KKK had got the message what was waiting for them. Unh, un, no, they didn’t come.
I’ve known about those fights. I know it will take a fight again. In California, I was there in ‘65 in the rebellion. Two years later, I came here, I was here only two months, and Detroit blew up. I was living right there, in the area where it started, we were living right there, my nephews are still living there. I saw what people did, how the cops backed off.
That’s what we have to understand about those people shooting at us. We’ve got the forces to stop that. They’re not going to want to come close to us, when we’re organized.
But now, some people are just sitting back waiting for some politician, some Democrat to do something about this violence. Get rid of Trump they say. Yes, get rid of Trump, but then what? They say put a Democrat in office. But what’s going to happen? The Democrats are going to have the same old policy they had before. And we’re going to have the same problems we have now and worse.
If we understand all that, then we understand that when we come together, we can stop all the problems we’re having today. We’ve got the power and the forces that can do that. We can do that. We can take back everything they’re taking from us. That’s what I know, we have the power to do that.
We have to understand where the problems come from. They come from that capitalist class that wants to keep raising their profits, put their profits before our lives.
Well, how did we get what we have today? No one gave it to us. Workers really fought against the companies. That’s how we got what we’ve got, jobs, pensions, medical care. It’s how we got schools for our kids.
So if we know problems come from what the capitalist class is doing, we’ll know what we have to do—stop waiting for the politicians that run this government to help us. That’s their politicians, the capitalist class politicians. The president runs it for what the capitalists need, to push their profits up.
Most times, workers today say there’s nothing we can do. But there is something we can do, we are the majority of the population. We are the ones who make this whole country run, but we make it run for what the capitalists want. We can see that it ain’t right, and we’ve got the forces to stop it. But we’ve got to bring our forces together.
Myself, I came up in the auto plants in the ‘70s. We were able to bring different groups together, black, white, Yugoslav, Albanian, Arab, Polish. That division they created among us, we could get past that. When we did, we didn’t stop everything, but we backed the bosses up.
I’ve been around quite a while, I may have slowed down somewhat, but in my mind, I know what it takes.
That’s why I talk to young people. Once they get it, if they talk to other young people, they can deal with it. They’re faster than me, and I know they’ll fight. They fight all the time now, in neighborhoods just about all over the country. But they don’t know what to fight for. They’re fighting each other, killing each other, putting up gangs to fight each other. But those gangs can come together. We’ve got to come together. We can stop all this. But we’ve got to come together. That’s what it will take. To deal with the real problems. Once we do that. We can stop it from happening again.
We’ve got the forces to protect ourselves, to stop the violence from happening. Once we get the bigger picture, we’ll know what we can do. We don’t need to worry about what’s going to happen. The ones causing the problems for us, they’re going to worry about what’s going to happen to them. But we’ve got to stand up and fight. That’s what we have to do, we definitely have to fight.
That’s what I want the younger people to understand what’s happening. Once they get the bigger picture, they can spread it. And that’s what it’s going to take, the next generation, two or three generations after me. Coming together. Let’s do it.
Are you tired of it and don’t want all this violence? Don’t want it to happen? If you understand why it’s happening, let’s do it. Let’s get together. Let’s do it NOW!
Dec 7, 2020
A recent study published in the November 4, 2020 journal Science Advances calls in question the “Man-the-hunter” hypothesis. The study is based on the 2018 discovery of a grave in the Andes Highlands in southern Peru. The grave contained a 9,000-year-old partial skeleton with stone projectile points and animal processing tools neatly stacked alongside the skeleton. In other words, a big-game hunter’s toolkit.
“Oh, he must have been a great chief. He was a great hunter,” exclaimed one of the archaeologists after excavating this 9,000-year-old skeleton. James Gorman and his colleagues were excited to find this burial. There was only one problem with their discovery.
After the skeleton sat in a museum for a year, bio-archaeologist Jim Watson looked at the bones and found they were too thin to belong to a male. Oops! The research team that excavated the grave then had to perform more studies on the skeleton to definitively determine its gender.
After using a relatively new test for gender that analyzes dental enamel proteins, the discoverers of the “big” man, as they had been calling it, found it was in fact female. A young female who probably died between the ages of 17 and 19.
The scientists had assumed it was male because it was found with hunting tools. And prehistoric women didn’t hunt—or so that is what they thought. But was this find the exception or the rule?
The team, a mixture of anthropologists and archaeologists from the University of California and Arizona, began to reexamine other reports of burials hypothesized as belonging to male hunters and found that an additional 10 had been incorrectly recorded as male. Out of over 400 burials discovered, only 27 were found with big-game hunting toolkits. Eleven of the 27 were female! The team concluded that their 9,000-year-old female big-game hunter was not exceptional. Prehistoric women hunted.
“The message [of the new finding] is that women have always been able to hunt and have in fact hunted,” according to Bonnie Pitblado, an archaeologist at the University of Oklahoma.
Conventional thinking in anthropology has it that prehistoric hunting was an activity reserved for males, while females did the gathering. The new research is throwing these preconceived notions about prehistoric gender roles into serious doubt. The idea of women hunting has been widely held as biologically impractical in foraging societies because hunting is presumed to be incompatible with maternal responsibility.
Scientists based their assumptions on studies of contemporary hunter-gatherers where in most cases the men hunt and women gather. Comparing modern groups with ancient groups is problematic. For one thing, the technology is less advanced in ancient societies. While both the modern and ancient peoples made stone tools, modern groups had made many profound advances. It is literally the difference between throwing a spear versus using a bow and arrows.
Moreover, there are examples of modern hunter-gatherers where women regularly hunt. One notable example is a group living in the Philippines known as the Aeta. Most Aetas are trained for hunting at age 15, including women. While men and some women use a bow and arrows, most Aeta women prefer knives and often hunt with their dogs in groups with other women. When they hunt this way, they have a 31% success rate as opposed to 17% for the men. Their rates are even better when they combine forces with men. Mixed hunting groups have a 41% success rate.
Essentially, the authors of the study are saying that this prehistoric woman was buried with her stuff, which is a reasonable assumption. Grave goods are strongly associated with an interred person’s societal status and role. Warriors, for example, are often buried with their swords and shields. In fact, this exact association was recently used to show that some Viking warriors were women.
Early subsistence economies that emphasized big-game hunting would most likely have encouraged participation of all able individuals. Alloparenting (parenting by group members other than the mother), which appears to be very ancient in the human species, would have freed women of child-care demands, allowing them to hunt. Communal hunting, which also appears to be quite ancient, would have encouraged contributions from females, males, and children, whether in driving or killing large animals.
Moreover, the primary hunting technology of the time—the atlatl or spear thrower—would have encouraged broad participation in big-game hunting. Pooling labor and sharing meat are necessary to mitigate the risks associated with the atlatl’s low accuracy and long reloading time. Peak proficiency in atlatl use can be achieved at a young age, potentially before females reach reproductive age.
The researchers admit their assumptions were based on “classic sexism.” Unfortunately, even scientists are not free of the biases they are raised with. Scientists had the blinders of sexism on, which allowed them to see female remains as male because they were buried with hunting tools. Acknowledging that women hunted smashed their world view that men go out and work and bring home the bacon and women stay home and raise the kids—a notion just as wrong today as it was in prehistory.
It turns out sexism is a luxury prehistoric groups did not have. They were too busy trying to survive.
Dec 7, 2020
Translated from Lutte Ouvrière (Workers’ Struggle), the newspaper of the revolutionary workers’ group active in France.
Tax shelters hide 427 billion dollars from taxation worldwide—245 billion by corporations and 182 billion by very wealthy individuals, according to a recent report by the Tax Justice Network. The group also reports that corporations sheltered 1.3 trillion dollars of their profits in fiscal paradises, while individuals sheltered 10 trillion in assets.
But these numbers are surely underestimated. Much tax sheltering, legal and illegal, is protected by privacy laws, so it’s impossible to measure its true extent. Governments might wish to collect some of the tax revenue they are losing, but not by restricting the liberty of capitalists to roam the world in pursuit of the highest profit—which translates to the lowest taxes.
The group explains that the main fiscal paradises are inside the world’s richest countries and are supported or authorized by the most powerful governments of Europe and the U.S. The leading tax shelter is the Cayman Islands, which officially remain a British overseas dominion, sheltering 16.5% of the total hoard; in second place, the United Kingdom itself, with 10%; then Belgium, 8.5%; Luxemburg, 6.5%; and the U.S., 5.5%.
Telling governments to fight against tax shelters is like asking the fox to protect the chickens. When governments pass measures that are the least bit restrictive, big corporations and their owners resort to their armies of lawyers to find the loopholes—legal or not—to get around them.
So long as society remains the prisoner of capitalism, the right of capitalists to avoid taxation will remain guaranteed.
Dec 7, 2020
The following is the editorial from SPARK’s workplace newsletters, for the week of November 30, 2020.
In October two million people were diagnosed with Covid; in November, there were four million new cases.
No, this rapid increase, doubling in one month, is not just more testing. People are dying. Twenty-five states recorded record-high deaths from the virus in November. In nine states, one out of every one thousand residents has died from Covid since January. Two of those states—North Dakota and South Dakota—recorded almost all their deaths over the last three months.
It’s a medical catastrophe. In its midst, one piece of advice is being drummed into our heads: “stay at home.” On Thanksgiving, don’t visit family. Don’t invite friends. Don’t have anyone in beyond your own household—maybe two households if you are sure they have been taking precautions for the last 14 days. (Do we ask our grandmother to show us her negative Covid test?)
Yes, of course, in the middle of a rapidly spreading epidemic, we should take precautions to protect ourselves and to protect others.
Certainly, some people have been careless. Some individuals may even have flaunted their unwillingness to protect others.
But individuals did not cause this pandemic. Covid became a widespread disease because of the actions of government, whether headed by Democrats or Republicans.
For decades, government raided public health funds in order to provide more money to the stock markets. Even after Covid hit, government didn’t restore funds for public health, the main system for battling an infectious disease.
Even after Covid overwhelmed hospitals in New York last March, government didn’t stock up on supplies or medicines that might have reduced the horrible explosion in other areas. It didn’t require companies to produce all the protective equipment and testing supplies needed. It didn’t require hospitals to increase staffs. In fact, it watched as hospitals around the country laid off nurses and other medical staff.
Slaughter houses and many other factories ran under conditions that guaranteed an explosion of the disease. Spreading out from the workplaces, whole towns became infected. Prisons became the new hot spots from which regions were infected. Government watched and did nothing. OSHA? OSHA’s been a joke for a long time.
Politicians debated about schools: stay open or run on the internet. But they didn’t come up with the money to do either. That would have required government to take money away from the corporations and the banks, whose profits have been fed with public money.
Government systematically continued to prioritize profit over the needs of the population—just as it always has done before the virus struck. This is why we are facing an out-of-control epidemic today.
Consider this miracle vaccine that is supposed to save us all—if we can only hang in there and wait. Billions of dollars have already been pumped into pharmaceutical companies for a vaccine. Practically nothing has been spent on preparing to carry out widespread vaccination. The same lack of public health infrastructure that allowed the virus to spread will prevent the vaccine from being delivered in a manner effective for the whole population.
“Stay at home, wait for the vaccine.” This may be the only answer this system has for us. But it is not the answer we need. Our kids need school, a safe school; they suffer without it. We need to work—safely; without work, we don’t cover rent or a house note. We don’t want our elders rotting alone in nursing homes where no one can see them, where we can’t monitor what is happening to them. And, quite simply, we need human contact.
Those are simple needs. A system that can not find the way to deliver them has no reason to exist. We have no reason to want it to go on existing.
Dec 7, 2020
The pandemic has caused an unimaginable increase in work at the Michigan Unemployment Insurance Agency (UIA) that no one could have foreseen.
This is not just a Michigan problem. At the beginning of the pandemic, half of all U.S. states saw their unemployment websites crash.
But in Michigan, the MiDAS computer system was built on a foundation treating simple mistakes as fraud, and that foundation was never ripped out and rebuilt, as it should have been.
There are other problems too. The imaging system that customers use to upload documents keeps losing documents!
UIA has a phone system that kicks employees out without any type of notice, making answering customer calls that much harder.
With a new surge in coronavirus cases, unemployment claims can be expected to rise.
The Director of the UIA resigned, but the problems will not magically go away. UIA workers would appreciate management—just for once—getting off our backs as we perform miracles with this ridiculous equipment we have been given to work with.
Dec 7, 2020
Seven hundred workers at Infinity Health Care nursing homes ended their 12 day strike Friday evening, after reaching a tentative agreement. The workers, represented by SEIU’s Healthcare local, are primarily Certified Nursing Assistants, as well as dietary aides, housekeepers and laundry workers.
Shantonia Jackson, a CNA in Cicero, west of Chicago, describes the job: “We’re all hands-on with everything. We’re here to brush your teeth, comb your hair, pick your clothes out, clean you. I’m really hands-on with the emotion as well, just talking to people and making sure they’re okay.” It’s essential work—caring for the health and emotional needs of the elderly.
The intimate nature of the work makes it high risk during the Covid pandemic, both for the workers and especially for the home residents. Cicero’s Cityview Multi-Care Center is the largest nursing home in the state—and one of the largest Covid outbreaks, with 259 residents and workers testing positive, and 8 deaths.
Infinity has been paying as little as $11.50 an hour to CNA’s at some of its eleven Chicago-area facilities. Paying low wages helps to line the pockets of its owners—Infinity is a for-profit operation, drawing a large share of its revenue from Medicare and Medicaid. Moreover, Infinity drew 12.7 million in funds from the CARES act earlier this year.
By striking, the workers won an immediate wage increase of $1 to $2 an hour, plus hazard pay, and additional sick-time. The strike is a move in the right direction for workers willing to defend themselves.
Dec 7, 2020
On December 2, registered nurses at Keck Hospital of USC and USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center in Los Angeles held an informational picket and car caravan “honk-a-thon.” They were protesting unsafe working conditions and hospitals’ policy changes that “discourage” health care workers from taking time off, even when experiencing COVID-19 symptoms!
This was only the latest of many, many protests that have taken place throughout the state of California against unsafe conditions at work in the middle of the pandemic. The protests are for hospital staff, and for the patients’ safety as well.
For example, stories abound of hospital employees not being able to get tested for COVID-19 from their own hospital! In the middle of a pandemic, regular testing should be automatic.
Why doesn’t it get done? One, it costs money. Two, the bosses don’t want to pay for results that reveal the need for increased staffing levels and for employees being quarantined.
The fight of the hospital employees against their own management is a matter of life and death ... for the employees and their patients. Safety costs money and the bosses have to be forced to give it up.
Dec 7, 2020
In the working-class community of East San Fernando Valley, COVID-19 infection rates are the highest in Los Angeles County. Ten out of 25 COVID-19 hotspots are clustered in the Valley, according to the L.A. County Department of Health.
Being low-paid front line “essential” workers is the main reason for this deadly concentration of the epidemic in this area. The workers’ average yearly income of $22,000, or $10.60 an hour, is well below the minimum wage of $15.
Because their wages are so low, many East Valley workers avoid getting tested for COVID-19, fearing a positive result would cost them days or weeks of sick time, vacation days, and the very paychecks they depend on for their daily survival. Many companies that employ front line workers do not even provide sick time and vacation days. Some workers go to work knowing that they are sick, because they do not have any other option.
Very high housing costs further worsen these conditions. These low-wage workers live together in crowded environments. “Most live in some sort of substandard [housing]. There can be a family of six living in a garage. They’ll double up and triple up. You might have four families, one in each bedroom and living room,” according to MEND, a non-profit organization established to fight the poverty in the Valley. Kids are now stuck at home all day after their classrooms are shuttered, making the living conditions at home even more complicated.
The hard work of these workers enables many businesses in Los Angeles—supermarkets, warehouses, restaurants, slaughterhouses, clothing industry, food processing plants—to generate huge profits.
Capitalism breeds the poverty. And the poverty breeds this epidemic.
Dec 7, 2020
A coronavirus outbreak at an Illinois veterans home in LaSalle, Illinois, has killed 28 and infected nearly 200. One staff member and one resident tested positive at the end of October—the numbers ballooned from there. An ongoing investigation found that nursing home workers continued to work after testing positive, and that the hand sanitizer in use was ineffective. One hundred and five workers at the home have tested positive to date. All details are not yet out, but it would seem the home’s management kept the infected workers on the job—with deadly results.
This society preaches patriotism, as it sends young people abroad to fight its wars—wars which cost trillions. And after they return, veterans are rewarded for this “service” with inferior care. No expense is spared to impose the capitalists’ will across the globe, yet there is nothing for hand sanitizer and staff for vulnerable veterans.