COVID-19

Transit Unions Join Forces To Win Safety Protections And Beat Back Layoffs

January 12, 2021 Richard Marcantonio, Labor Notes. Organize! COVID-19, Labor Unions, Public transportation, Worker Rights and Jobs

Transit workers have been hit hard by the pandemic. Last year at least 100 from the Amalgamated Transit Union and 131 from the Transport Workers lost their lives to Covid-19. Before Covid, transit unions in the Bay Area—six ATU locals, and one local each of TWU and the Teamsters—often faced their individual struggles in isolation. But during the pandemic, these locals united across the region and came together with riders to demand protections for all. That unity forced reluctant politicians to make Covid safety a priority. It also set the stage for the unions and riders to team up again to stave off layoffs. And there are more fights ahead.

Eviction Moratorium Is A Useful Lesson In How Reform Happens

January 12, 2021 Ray Valentine, Organizing Work. Organize! COVID-19, Eviction Defense, Evictions, Tenant organizing

It didn’t make a lot of headlines, but in the recent stimulus and government funding deal, Congress extended what is probably the most significant federal housing policy in a generation: the nationwide eviction moratorium. We should study how it came to be, because it illustrates how working class people successfully influence public policy through collective action outside the political process. Originally implemented by the CDC in September, the moratorium is obviously imperfect in a number of ways: it is clearly designed to be narrowly targeted at “deserving” tenants and to compel people to pay what they can, its reach is limited because in practice it has to be implemented by local judges and sheriffs...

How To Keep On Keeping On

January 11, 2021 Ellen David Friedman, Labor Notes. Organize! COVID-19, PPE, Worker Rights and Jobs, Working Class

Even asking the questions is exhausting. Who’s making the Covid decisions, and why do they change every day? How has the workload doubled? What about the new extremes of micro-management? Which of my co-workers, or their families, or my customers or patients or students are going to get sick? And why can’t we seem to do anything to stop all this suffering? The pull to give up, to withdraw, to hunker down and “just survive” is almost irresistible—even for a committed activist like you. But here we are. We are connecting to one another at work, even if just through images on a screen.

Tribes Mount Organized Responses To COVID-19

January 9, 2021 Lisa Hardy, Gwendolyn Saul and Kerry F. Thompson, The Conversation. Create! COVID-19, health, Indigenous Sovereignty, Land Rights

As the months roll by, the pandemic continues to hit Indigenous nations hard. But this phenomenon is not new. Epidemics have been part of colonialism since settlers arrived. Health inequities tell us that illnesses have different outcomes on different populations; however, leading medical professionals warn the general public of the dangers of oversimplifying health data. They don’t tell the whole story. And, in the case of Indigenous nations, the story of inequity is imbued with dispossession of lands and is met with organizing from the inside: two crucial points for untangling and responding to COVID-19.

Patriarchy And The Pandemic

January 8, 2021 Surangya, People's Dispatch. Strategize! COVID-19, LGBTQ, Pandemic, Patriarchy

The COVID-19 pandemic has made it agonizingly clear that the systems under which we are living were already broken. The pandemic has only exacerbated the crisis of the capitalist system and removed any illusions about this reality. However, the impact of the crisis has not been uniform. The neoliberal capitalist model, which survives and profits by exploiting the vulnerable, again fell back on its same old ways. As a result, it has been the workers, the migrants, the women, and others, whose unpaid and underpaid labor serves as the basis for capitalists to profit, who have suffered the most. In this conversation with Renata Porto Bugni from the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, we discuss the study done by the organization...

A New Book Analyzes The Impact Of COVID-19 On The US And China

January 7, 2021 Danny Haiphong, Black Agenda Report. Educate! Capitalism, China, COVID-19, Socialism

The COVID-19 pandemic has placed China and the United States on the opposite ends of human progress. In the U.S., massive casualties of the pandemic have been coupled with the worst capitalist crash since the Great Depression. The story is much different in China. China began re-opening its economy as early as April of 2020. Deaths due to COVID-19 are virtually non-existent, and economists now predict that China’s economy will surpass the U.S. economy in GDP terms two years ahead of schedule. Capitalism on a Ventilator: The Impact of COVID-19 in China and the U.S. is an anthology comprised of more than fifty contributions from authors, activists, and journalists seeking to break through the lies...

Eldercide In The United States

January 6, 2021 Margaret Morganroth Gullete, Dissent Magazine. Educate! COVID-19, Eldercide, Health Care, Longterm care

Contrary to what many believe, the tens of thousands of deaths of those living in long-term care (LTC) were no inevitable biological catastrophe. Their grieving, angry family members know better: they know the conditions that prematurely deprived their loved ones of the remainder of their lives. By December, just as vaccine distribution started, nearly 110,000 residents and staffers had died. The extra deaths among our elders constitute an appalling percentage of the 1.4 million Americans who were living in nursing homes before the pandemic. These older adults were of all races, genders, ethnicities, religions, and political persuasions.

40% Of Chicago Teachers And Staff Didn’t Report To Schools As Ordered

January 6, 2021 By Nader Issa and Stefano Esposito, Chicago Sun Times. Resist! Chicago, COVID-19, School reopening, Worker Rights

About 40% of Chicago Public Schools teachers and staff who were expected to report to schools Monday for the first time during the pandemic didn’t show up for in-person work, officials said Tuesday, accusing the Chicago Teachers Union of pressuring its members to defy the district’s orders. In all, about half of teachers and three-quarters of school-based support staff in preschool and special education cluster programs returned to classrooms as expected, accounting for 60% of those 4,400 employees scheduled to go back to specific schools, the district announced. Officials didn’t immediately provide data on another estimated 1,400 employees that were supposed to return but work at more than one school.

In 2021, Let’s Ring A Global Alarm On Inequality That Everyone Can Hear

January 6, 2021 Sam Pizzigati, Counterpunch. Educate! COVID-19, Economic inequality, Pandemic, Recession

Remember that old joke they used to tell — and maybe still do — in luxury retail circles? The customer, precious product in hand, walks over to a haughty sales clerk at a high-end emporium and timidly asks: “How much does this cost.” “If you have to ask,” the sales clerk smiles back, “you can’t afford it.” How much more unequal have we become in 2020? This question demands that we turn that old joke inside-out: We have to ask because we can’t afford not to know. And we can’t afford not to know because inequality is killing us. We have to know exactly what we’re facing. And what we’re facing, the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton have just reminded us, doesn’t look good.

Defying CPS, Some Chicago Teachers Union Members Won’t Return To Schools

January 5, 2021 Diana Wallace and Morgan Greene, Chicago Tribune. Resist! Chicago, COVID-19, Public schools, School reopening

The Chicago Teachers Union says some of its members are choosing not to return to school buildings on Monday, in defiance of Chicago Public Schools’ reopening plans. The union said Sunday it is “rejecting CPS’ effort to force thousands more back into unsafe buildings beginning this Monday” and that teachers intend to continue providing their lessons remotely “until buildings are safe” for them and for students. Additionally, more than 30 aldermen signed on to a letter sent Sunday to Mayor Lori Lightfoot and Chicago Public Schools CEO Janice Jackson, saying they were “deeply concerned” that the reopening plan does not meet the district’s equity objectives and fails to address some safety concerns.

Black Inmates Begin 2021 With Uprising In Saint Louis Justice Center

January 4, 2021 Huey Dessalines, Peoples Voice. Resist! COVID-19, health, Missouri, Prisoner rights

Saint Louis, MO - It is a custom in the City of Saint Louis and other predominantly New Afrikan cities to welcome a new year by firing into the air. The coming of the New Year 2021 saw the most oppressed of our people improve on this popular custom by initiating a struggle against atrocious conditions at the Saint Louis “Justice” Center. This justice center downtown is directly across from the hideous faux-gothic, soot stained monstrosity of City Hall, and it is not lost on many who enter the doors of either building that one feeds the other. The City needs Black people incarcerated because, as Huey P. Newton and other revolutionary theoreticians pointed out, New Afrikan people after slavery technically ended became a surplus population.

Alabama Prisons Are On Strike

January 2, 2021 Devin Cole, Workers.org. Resist! Alabama, COVID-19, Prison Strike, Worker Rights

Occupied Muscogee Creek / Cherokee / Yuchi / Choctaw / Shawnee / Chickasaw land - As of Jan. 1, 2021, incarcerated workers in Alabama’s odious prison system are on strike! Led by the Free Alabama Movement, incarcerated workers throughout the state of Alabama have put down their work tools and refused to go to work from now until Jan. 31. The inhumane conditions of Alabama Department of Corrections, their negligence around COVID-19, and their implementation of video visitation equipment in prisons that ADOC claims is “due to COVID,” but is really a front for eliminating in-person visitation, has contributed further to the psychological warfare against everyone incarcerated in Alabama prisons and has fueled this strike.

Family Faces Eviction By Agency Meant To Help Them

January 1, 2021 Poor People's Army, Popular Resistance. Resist! COVID-19, Eviction, HUD, Philadelphia

Philadelphia, PA - Imagine being a parent, hustling “gig economy” jobs, without a home during the COVID-19 pandemic. For Jasmine and Ariel, this has been the reality since May. They are a couple in their 30s, both with children from previous relationships, and navigating the minefields of poverty and pandemic. They had an apartment, but when Jasmine missed a check-in with her probation officer, she was sent to prison, leaving Ariel with no way to pay the rent and without a home. According to a recent study conducted by geographers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, there are 10 abandoned properties for every 1 homeless person in Philadelphia.

Prisons And Jails Are COVID-19 Super-Spreaders

January 1, 2021 Marc Norton, Popular Resistance. Create! California, COVID-19, Pandemic, Prisons

One in five prisoners in the U.S. has been reported to have had COVID-19. That’s 20% of people behind bars. And that is likely a “vast undercount,” according to Homer Venters, the former chief medical officer at New York’s Rikers Island jail complex. If compassion for prisoners does not move policy makers or the general public, then eyes should turn to a pair of recent studies, one by the Prison Policy Initiative and the other by the Marshall Project, focused on prisons and jails in the U.S. According to data in these two reports: Prisons and jails are “super-spreaders” of the virus, not only among prisoners, but also among people in the communities where prisons and jails are located.

Biden Predicts Surge In Deaths

January 1, 2021 Barry Grey, WSWS. Educate! COVID-19, Joe Biden, Pandemic, Reopen Economy

On Tuesday, Democratic President-elect Joe Biden gave what was billed as a “major speech” on the coronavirus pandemic. He spoke following a meeting with his coronavirus advisory panel. In perfunctory remarks that lasted barely 15 minutes, Biden provided a grim description of the mass death already occurring and predicted that things would get only worse in the coming months. “We will lose tens of thousands more lives in the months to come,” he said. “Hospitals are being stretched beyond capacity. That is data before the impact of cases coming from the holidays and this coming holiday of New Year’s Eve. “We have to anticipate that infections over the holidays will produce soaring death tolls in February.

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