health

Immigrant Meatpackers Fightback Against Intimidation And Death Traps

April 20, 2020 Mike Elk, Pay Day Report. Resist! COVID-19, health, Immigrants, Meat Packers, Worker Rights

As COVID-19 ravages communities across the U.S., many experts agree that meatpacking plants, where employees work shoulder-to-shoulder, are the next ground zero for the spread of COVID-19. In several rural communities with sudden COVID-19 spikes, many residents say that the meatpacking plants that surround the city and employ several thousand area residents are responsible for accelerating the spread of COVID-19. Albany, Ga., rocked by COVID-19, has seen more than 30 people die from the virus. For a city of only 70,000, Albany has the fourth-highest per capita rate of COVID-19 cases, with 659 cases for every 100,000 people. The town is ringed by a series of a half-dozen meatpacking plants, where thousands of workers are employed in meatpacking.

Nicaraguan Opposition Misrepresents Government Response To COVID-19

April 19, 2020 John Perry, Council on Hemispheric Affairs. Educate! COVID-19, health, Media, Nicaragua, US coup

The right-wing opposition in Nicaragua, having failed in their attempted coup in 2018, still looks at any potential crisis as a new opportunity to attack the Sandinista government. Their latest chance, of course, arrived with the coronavirus pandemic. Even though the virus has barely hit the country yet, the government is under attack. The international media are lapping up opposition propaganda and ignoring or disparaging the government’s efforts to deal with the coming crisis, even though preparations began before those in many other countries. Since early April, Nicaragua’s well-connected opposition leaders have used their contacts in the international press to push a series of stories relating to the pandemic. These stories – detailed below – variously claim that President Daniel Ortega is in quarantine or has died, that his government is in denial about the coronavirus or that it is ill-prepared and inactive in the face of the threat. None of this is true.

COVID-19 Strike Wave Interactive Map

April 19, 2020 Pay Day Report. Resist! COVID-19, health, Strike, Workers Rights and Jobs

So far, we’ve identified over 100 wildcat strikes that happened since the beginning of March. (Several larger strikes like at Instacart and Whole Foods happened in multiple cities). We suspect many strikes aren’t reporting at all for a variety of reasons and that the numbers are higher than we can track. The map will be updated regularly. Send updates on new strikes to melk@paydayreport.com In some places, workers are simply calling out sick en mass and refusing to show up so bosses shut dow their plants. Many areas have no reporters with connections to the labor movement so many strikes are going completely uncovered. In other places, workers have protested for an hour or two before bosses have agreed to workers’ demands. Also, some union leaders are hesitant to get the media involved out of fear of retaliation

Venezuela Has The Lowest COVID-19 Rate In Latin America

April 18, 2020 Telesur English. Educate! COVID-19, health, Latin America, Venezuela

According to data compiled through April 11, Venezuela had carried out 181,335 COVID-19 tests, which allowed this South American country to detect patients in time and become the Latin American nation with the lowest infection rate. "President Nicolas Maduro's measures place Venezuela as the country that has best fought the COVID-19 pandemic so far," Communication Minister Jorge Rodriguez said. "The recovery rate is the highest in the region with 53 percent, above Colombia that only reaches seven percent and Brazil with 0.8 percent," he added. Additionally, while Brazil has an average of 104 infected persons per million, Venezuela has only 6 infected patients per million inhabitants, a successful result that would not be possible if the Bolivarian government had not performed COVID-19 tests free of charge.

St. Vincent Hospital Nurses Face Furloughs Amid COVID-19 Crisis

April 17, 2020 Mark Conti, Telegram.com. Educate! COVID-19, health, Nurses, Profits

Worcester, MA — On the same day Gov. Charlie Baker announced that Massachusetts was in a COVID-19 surge, nurses at St. Vincent Hospital are facing furloughs. St. Vincent Hospital nurses on the union negotiating committee on Wednesday unanimously rejected a proposal by Tenet Healthcare, the for-profit company that owns the hospital, that the nurses said would require them to work independently in areas of the hospital in which they did not have proper training or experience. “They’re asking us to agree to a mandatory furlough of nurses,” said Marie Ritacco, a nurse in the post-anesthesia recovery area, PACU. “We’re expecting the surge. We need to keep every nurse.”

Black Essential Workers Refuse To Be Invisible

April 17, 2020 Monica Moorehead, Workers.org. Educate! Black Working Class, COVID-19, Essential worker, health

April 14 — Just last week, U.S. bourgeois papers — the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe and others — published major articles on the devastating numbers of confirmed infections and deaths of African Americans caused by COVID-19. The articles emphasized the numbers were disproportionate compared to the percentage of African-American people in the U.S. population. And in this tragic way, the virus is helping to publicize on a wider basis the racial inequality that has been the foundation of capitalism in the U.S. An April 6 WW article, “Racism, COVID-19 and Black people,” pointed to the institutionalized racism — including after the Civil War and the era of “Jim Crow” laws — that has been the underlying cause of suffering by Black people as a nationally oppressed grouping in the U.S.

Waffle House Puts Profits Over People In The COVID Era

April 16, 2020 Liberation Staff Asheville, Liberation News. Educate! COVID-19, health, Profits, Worker Rights

Waffle House, like many struggling industries across the country, has chosen to place the burden of its lost profits on the shoulders of those who keep it running every day of the year. COVID-19 has brought opportunity again and again for corporate entities and long-standing business empires to ravage the pockets of their workers, those whose labor has lined corporate pockets for generations. The capitalist class has, not unexpectedly, proven itself unwilling to place human lives over profit-hoarding and welfare for the rich. The Party for Socialism and Liberation’s own Jason Carroll reports directly from the front lines of this struggle, bringing to light the unconscionable disregard Waffle House has shown for its workers in this crisis, and long before.

Dozens Of Strikes Say, ‘No Safety, No Work!’

April 16, 2020 Martha Grevatt, Workers World. Resist! COVID-19, health, Strike, Workers

As the death toll climbs, workers deemed “essential” have staged at least 75 separate job actions since the Chipotle walkout. Walkouts, sickouts, sit-ins and, most recently, car and social-distance pickets have involved people from a wide range of occupations. In addition to many fast food workers, those protesting include workers in health care, construction, manufacturing, meat and poultry processing, retail, warehouses, public transit, bars and restaurants, water and sewage, beverage bottling, nursing home care and more. Common demands of the walkouts are for employer-provided personal protective equipment such as masks, gloves and hand sanitizer, social distancing, hazard pay and the right of sick workers to stay home with pay. Payday Report lists almost 30 work stoppages that have occurred since April 1.

GE Workers Protest, Demand To Make Ventilators

April 15, 2020 Katie Ferarri, Labor Notes. Resist! COVID-19, General Electric, health, Strike, Workers

Last Wednesday union members at General Electric plants across the country protested to pressure the $88 billion company to shift production to ventilators and ensure safe working conditions during COVID-19. Actions at plants in Massachusetts, Virginia, Texas, and New York were coordinated by the Industrial Division of the Communications Workers (IUE-CWA)—the latest in an escalating pressure campaign. GE workers are facing a two-fold threat under COVID-19: dangerous working conditions and job loss. On March 23 the company announced that GE Aviation would cut 10 percent of its total U.S. workforce and that half the company’s maintenance, repair, and overhaul employees could be furloughed for the next three months. GE could avert the layoffs, the union said, by accepting funds from the recent stimulus bill or by shifting the impacted GE Aviation shops to ventilator production.

New CDC Guidelines Could Worsen COVID-19 Spread And Racial Disparities

April 15, 2020 National Nurses United. Educate! CDC, COVID-19, health, Pandemic, social distancing

New guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) encouraging workers exposed to the coronavirus to stay on the job would likely worsen the spread of the coronavirus and exacerbate the disparity of infected cases, and deaths, of African Americans that has become a national scandal. Under its new recommendations, the CDC revokes previous guidelines that most workers who are exposed to the virus should be isolated for a period of 14 days. Instead, CDC says essential workers can mainly just wear a mask and not practice social distancing, “as work duties permit,” a significant loophole that can be easily exploited by employers. “The loosened guidelines are dangerous, and risk exposing other workers and the public to infection, with supposed mitigation measures that are far less effective in reducing the threat of spreading the virus...

EPA Is Unleashing Pollution That Makes Us Vulnerable To COVID-19

April 15, 2020 Sharon Zhang, Truthout. Educate! COVID-19, EPA, health, pollution

Past exposure to air pollution increases the risk that an individual will suffer critical illness after contracting COVID-19, according to a report released on April 8 by researchers at Harvard. In light of this finding, the recent decision of Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to indefinitely suspend environmental rule enforcement is tantamount to gross negligence. And, as waves of the virus come and go, the rule suspension could have consequences for months to come. The Harvard research has confirmed what scientists had already strongly suspected to be true: Exposure to air pollution exacerbates the worst effects of the virus. Just one unit more of long-term exposure to hazardous fine particulate matter, the researchers found, is correlated with an increase in COVID-19 mortality of 15 percent.

COVID-19 Crisis Highlights The Need For A Much Stronger Public Sector

April 14, 2020 Subin Dennis, People's Dispatch. Create! COVID-19, health, Public ownership, Recession

It is a sign of how bad things are when the editorial board of the Financial Times, the world’s leading business newspaper, carries an editorial calling for “radical reforms… reversing the prevailing policy direction of the last four decades.” The FT editorial of April 3 has advocated, among other things, a more active role for governments in the economy, ways to make labor markets less insecure, and wealth taxes. The FT’s editorial board, increasingly concerned about saving capitalism from itself, had written about the need for “state planning” and a “worker-led economy” last year in August. But the April 3 editorial has garnered much more attention since it comes amidst a massive crisis.

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