RESIST A PREMATURE STAMPEDE BACK TO MONEY-MAKING

Employers demanding 'business as usual' could threaten workers' lives

for PPE, mass testing and workers' control over health and safety 

Nobody wants the so-called lockdown to continue indefinitely. But for the preservation of human life, it's absolutely essential. All the evidence shows it's helping to suppress the spread of this deadly killer. 


It may appear bizarre to raise this in the same week the governments of the UK and Scotland announced continuation of the lockdown until at least 7 May, but the growing danger is a premature removal of restrictions, motivated by big business profits, at terrible risk to human life.

As we warned two weeks ago, sections of employers, of the Tory party, and indeed right wing Labour figures such as Sir Keir Starmer and Tony Blair, are ramping up the drumbeat of demands to 'reopen the economy'. 


Literally as we post this, the Scottish government has published a paper on future criteria for easing the lockdown. 
However well-intentioned as "the start of a conversation that treats the public like adults", the danger is it could be turned into background music for a growing chorus of demands by profit-itchy businesses to 'get back to normal'. A dangerous stampede towards a premature exit strategy motivated by their desire to make money, whatever the human risk. 

The Pressures of Social Isolation

Millions of workers are currently stuck at home. The Resolution Foundation think tank predict 11.7 million will have been either furloughed or made unemployed in the UK over the next three months. 
The ability to work from home is closely linked to earnings levels, with the lowest paid almost entirely unable to do so. 


Many of those millions not only live in fear of infection - including from household members who are working in essential services - but also suffer isolation, sometimes family tensions, increased incidence of domestic abuse, and even a lack of adequate food supplies through combinations of poverty and the inability to access supplies. 


Cramped housing, and lack of a garden to enjoy the pleasant weather, add to the frustration for millions. Whether living alone or with small children in a small flat, each creates its own pressures, plus humans are a naturally social being. 
And millions are on 80% or 90% of their normal wage, as employers with profits measured in not just millions but billions take the public subsidy of the Job Retention Scheme, but whinge that they simply can't afford to top up workers' wages to 100%. 

Trump leads the wreckless stampede

So no trade unionist or socialist worth their salt would advocate an indefinite lockdown. But that is not the threat we face. The growing and present danger is the government bending to big business lobbies to prematurely revive production, in pursuit of recovering profit margins, putting thousands of workers at risk of death.  


The most glaring, grotesque display of this trend is to be found in the USA. As far back as 24 March, a group of powerful billionaires met with Donald Trump, bombarding him to set an early date for lifting health restrictions, so as to reassure the money markets. 

The rich and powerful lobbyists Trump met included chief executives of private equity companies, hedge fund managers and others with so-called 'net worth' ranging from $17.1billion to a mere $2.8billion. The same fat cats are enjoying splendid self-isolation on vast holiday estates or lavish private yachts, but are hellbent on throwing millions of American workers back into production, and to hell with the consequences. 


Within hours of meeting this batch of brass-necked billionaires, Trump appeared on Fox News, declaring he would like to see the economy open up and "just raring to go by Easter," 12 April. He gushed that it would be "a beautiful timeline because Easter is such a beautiful day". 


Just days later Trump handed over $500billion in a bailout of big business. But not content with being subsidised to the hilt, many business moguls persisted with their demands to reopen production. 
For example, Dick Kovacevich of Wells Fargo demanded that people aged under 55 should return to work by late April, stating: 
"Some of them will get sick, some may even die, I don't know. Do you want to take an economic risk or a health risk? You get to choose." 


Not to be outdone, Paychex Inc's Tom Golisano - whose personal wealth sits at $3billion - said: 
"The damage of keeping the economy closed as it is could be worse then losing a few more people. You're picking the better of two evils".

Tragic scenes of mass, unmarked graves on Hart Island, Bronx, New York

‘I’d rather die than kill the country’

One other singer of this song in a whole chorus-line of the obscenely rich is conservative TV and radio host Glenn Beck, who even six years ago had personal wealth of $90million. He blurted out the opinion: 
"I would rather have my children stay home and all of us who are over 50 go in and keep this economy going and working. Even if we all get sick, I'd rather die than kill the country".


The same week that the global death toll crossed the grisly landmark figure of 100,000, refrigerated lorries stacked high with human corpses stood outside hospitals in the USA, and people were buried in unmarked mass graves in a field in the Bronx. But that same week the media emphasis switched from grim warnings of the mounting death toll to talk of 'light at the end of the tunnel', with Trump advocating the US "open with a big bang." 

And Texas governor Dan Patrick was but one of many politicians leaving no doubt about their priorities:

"American senior citizens should accept the likelihood that some of them would die in order to allow the economy to reopen and preserve the America that all America loves for their children and grandchildren." 
Now Trump is actively encouraging small but highly publicised right-wing, gun-toting demonstrations calling for an end to the lockdown, with vicious, populist slogans like 'Liberate Minnesota', 'Liberate Virginia'.

Gun-toting right-wing demo to 'Liberate Florida' from lockdown

British bosses put profit first

However, this mounting pressure to put what they call 'the economy' before public health is not restricted to the USA. 

In fact, we've seen an intensification of aggressive national capitalist rivalries, in the face of a global pandemic that knows no borders. We witness this as they not only grab hold of safety equipment intended for other countries, but also ignore scientific warnings in a race to reopen production in the interests of the separate national ruling classes. 


Across Europe, governments are being pressurised by the big profiteers to reopen 'business as usual', and nowhere more so than in Britain. 

With its customary brutality, the Economist magazine has written: 
"COVID-19 presents stark choices between life, death and the economy. It sounds hard-hearted but a dollar figure on life...is precisely what leaders will need if they are to see their way through the harrowing months to come. Eventually even if many people are dying, the cost of distancing could outweigh the benefits."


Director of Wellcome Trust and Tory government advisor Sir Jeremy Farrar told Sky on Sunday on 19 April that the lockdown should be eased within weeks.
"The damage it's doing to all our health, our well being, our mental health, is disproportionately affecting the most vulnerable."

Tories 2018 Act to hamstring union safety reps

What Tory & corporate con-merchants really mean

We even suffer the grotesque spectacle of Tory Scottish Secretary of State, Alistair Jack, declaring:
"I would hate it if we come out the other side and the poverty that came from a broken economy killed more people than COVID-19. We know from previous analysis of recessions and depressions that poverty kills."


There should be no doubting what these voices of big business really mean, behind their honeyed words of 'concern'.  


When they speak of 'the economy' they actually mean the profits of a tiny clique who own the bulk of the economy. 

When they express concern about people's mental health being damaged through social isolation, the lockdown, these are the very same class of business owners who have generated an epidemic of mental illness before COVID-19 ever appeared. 
They've caused record levels of mental illness through insecure jobs; alienation at work from total lack of control by workers, even over their working hours; poverty pay; and horrendous physical and mental pressure by them overworking a shrinking workforce in pursuit of maximum profit. 

The same Tories, like Alistair Jack, who belatedly stumble on the truth that poverty kills, preside over a system that is built to consciously create poverty for millions to provide the wealth of a few millionaires -  in the full knowledge that poverty kills. 
They have systematically dismantled wages, benefits, sick pay, and the health service in a fashion that has caused countless avoidable deaths. 


The same Tories listened to and echoed the same big business voices by not calling a halt to non-essential production in good time, and thereby caused thousands of unnecessary infections and deaths in February-March, as they let COVID-19 rip through the population, with their ruthless theory of 'herd immunity', until they eventually conceded a partial lockdown on 24 March.


They couldn't give a damn about workers' health. Their one concern is owners' wealth. They are quite prepared to sacrifice human life on the altar of their great god, Profit.

London Mayor's warning, as calls to lift lockdown there earlier raised

Tories split under pressure?

The Tory Cabinet appear split on the issue. Leaks to the Times newspaper report that Gove and Chancellor Sunak want restrictions lifted once the peak of death has passed, arguing the government should "run things quite hot". 
Health Minister Hancock was more cautious, and de facto deputy PM Dominic Raab remained silent but is expected to side with those who want a rapid return to work. 
Boris Johnson, not noted for his humanity or care for workers' health,  has come out against lifting restrictions too early in fear of a second wave of the virus. He no doubt feels the pressure of scientific experts and public opinion, at least for now - especially in the wake of milking his own illness for every droplet of propaganda and popularity.


For example, when The Sunday Times reported senior ministers wanted to reopen schools on 11 May, it provoked a ferocious backlash from concerned staff and parents, with the head teachers' union (NAHT) denouncing unattributed government comments for spreading fear and confusion. 
"Instructing school leaders and their teams to return without including them in the planning stages or sharing proper safety arrangements would be extremely reckless." 

Meantime, the National Education Union (NEU) launched a petition to delay schools reopening until it is safe to do so, gathering 160,000 signatures within days.

"Now is not the time to ask if Tories were too slow" - Sir Keir Starmer

Starmer: being savaged by a dead sheep!

In a devastating display of the nature of the new Labour leadership, Sir Keir Starmer has for weeks repeatedly opined "Now is not the time to ask if the government was too slow to act."

When he did eventually question the government in parliament on 22 April for 'being slow', his criticism of the Tories whose actions have caused countless unnecessary deaths was about as effective as being savaged by a dead sheep. 


Starmer instead says "The critical question is the exit strategy from lockdown", even demanding a recall of the parliament to discuss it. Starmer has even seemed more eager to reopen schools than at least some of the Tory Cabinet. 

That working class hero and warrior for truth, justice and peace, Tony Blair, has been resurrected to parade round TV studios preaching the same gospel. 


At best, Starmer and Blair could be accused of attention seeking in a fashion that creates confusion around the need for strict measures to suppress the virus, as death still rips the heart out of families, not just in hospitals but in care homes and in the community. At worst, they are echoing the chorus line of profiteering businessmen who put profit before people and are prepared to ignore or deny the evidence that the lockdown is at least one part of what is necessary to stem the fatal tide.


When Starmer insists "now is not the time to ask" if the Tories were too slow to initiate social distancing and (at least partial) lockdown of non-essential businesses, he is dangerously letting them off the hook, removing pressure from them. 
Because the same Tories are just as liable to prematurely end these precautionary measures as they were reluctant to introduce them, for the same reasons: not wanting to undermine private profiteering, putting what they misleadingly call 'the economy' before public health, profit before people, regardless of how many are slaughtered in the hunt for renewed production and sales. 

Scientists warn of catastrophe

An array of eminent scientists, nationally and internationally, are warning against premature removal of lockdown restrictions. 


The World Health Organization has warned it could lead to a deadly resurgence of the disease, which in turn could force governments to reinstate even more severe lockdowns. They warn that there is no clear evidence that people who have contracted COVID-19 then become immune to it. And in fact reports from South Korea and China indicate people who had recovered from it have caught it a second time, which further punctures the callous nonsense of relying on 'herd immunity'.  


Directly contradicting Donald Trump, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious diseases, Anthony Fauci, recently said: 
"We need to shutdown all non-essential business for several months, with social quarantine, to at least slow or stop COVID-19."


Professor of Virology at the University of Surrey, Nicholas Locker recently stated:
 "You can't lift the lockdown as long as you're not testing massively. As long as the government is not testing in the community we're going to be on lockdown." 



Editor of The Lancet magazine Richard Horton says: 
"It's wrong to say we don't have an exit strategy. We do. What is missing are the plans for its implementation. Surveillance, early detection, isolation, contact tracing, monitoring, real time estimates for the speed of spread of the virus."

Mass testing, tracing, isolation 

Emphasising that much more needs to be done than the current partial lockdown, the head of the Institute for Global Health at University College London warns isolation of the elderly and vulnerable on it's own is doomed to failure. These people do not live apart from others, they will inevitably catch the disease if it lets rip in the rest of the population, and it's unlikely those most at risk could be isolated for the four to five months they reckon is required to get 'herd immunity', which they in any case reject as unethical. 


This body of experts has a different plan they calculate will avert 353,000 deaths in Britain. It includes mass testing of everyone; contact tracing for those testing positive; care and thorough isolation; alongside proper provision of PPE for workers in essential services, such as the NHS, care workers and those in food supplies. They advocate weekly testing for everyone which would require 10 million a day, something they estimate is possible to virtually reach by August. The same Institute for Global Health estimate this would require 70,000 public health workers (about 6-7,000 in Scotland). 

Very limited testing early March abandoned by UK & Scottish governments 

But there is no evidence that the government has such plans. 
They have failed to provide PPE of either the quantity or quality required to frontline staff putting their own lives on the line to care for others. 
The alleged 'Health' Secretary Matt Hancock recently advised hospital staff to wash and re-use contaminated gowns, and blamed the scarcity of PPE not on supplies organised by his government, but on how much NHS staff use it! Nurses have died of COVID-19 after complaining of lack of proper protection. 


The Tories' promises of 100,000 tests a day at the end of April sound increasingly hollow and insulting as they only just reach the figure of 18-20,000 daily. 
Every day, the 5pm UK government briefing claims progress on testing and provision of PPE, followed an hour later by TV news horror stories of hospital staff and care workers left unprotected and untested for the virus, with increased numbers pronounced dead as a result. 

JD Sports warehouses still working - unsafely

Unions must demand concrete safety measures

Rather than allow workers to be victims of a premature stampede back to 'business as usual', the unions have a particular duty to demand a concrete plan of safety measures before non-essential businesses reopen. 
And not just empty promises of such measures from a government shown to have lied and prevaricated throughout this crisis, but actual concrete supplies and measures already in place. 


Those would need to include recruitment of a vast army to conduct mass testing of the population without stripping frontline workers from other lifeline services. 


'Test, trace and isolate' needs to be transformed from a mantra to a material reality before it's safe to consider reopening non-essential businesses. 
And isolation for those who test positive should include safe, caring health facilities, not just being stuck at home with others in the family, when the evidence from China suggests most transmission occurs within families or households. 

Seize production to match needs

It should include demands for the government to take over appropriate production units for the emergency, sustained supply of quality PPE for all workers in the firing line. 

It's brilliant and life-affirming to see networks of people sewing scrubs for NHS staff in their homes, but the scale of mass production required can only be organised by the state. Which raises the need for the government to take over major companies to coordinate armies of workers producing - in safe  conditions - all the safety equipment for NHS, care, food retail, and other essential services staff. 


Likewise, rather than the unseemly squabble between different nations for supplies of masks, scrubs, ventilators and Intensive Care Units, the government should commandeer factories to produce all that is needed, in the same fashion industries were taken over by governments for war production during World War Two. 
We cannot rely on the whims of the capitalist market to meet the life and death needs of workers and their families.

Recent scenes inside JD Sports warehouse: putting profit before people!

Unions' critical role

This whole crisis has heavily emphasised the critical importance of organised trade unions and collective action. It took intense lobbying by union reps, and mass walkouts by workers in many cases, to gradually force employers to introduce basic safety standards, or to shut down non-essential workplaces, with the demand for 100% average pay. 

Likewise, the RCN was right to offer full support to any of their 450,000 nurse members who "make the difficult decision to refuse to work without proper PPE" in the hospitals. 


The Royal College of Anaesthetists has since conducted a survey of members, who are at the very front line of treatment, applying ventilators to patients with severe COVID-19 infection. They found one in every five lacks proper PPE, and one in four feels pressurised to work despite this lack of protective equipment. 
They have now, rightly, advised members to refuse to work without adequate PPE, not only to protect their own health but that of patients too. 

Demand workers' control of Health & Safety through elected union reps

For workers’ control of health & safety

At workplace level, this whole experience underlines the importance of workers' control of health and safety, through elected shop stewards and Health & Safety reps. 

Such bodies need to be revived or established in every workplace, applying concrete demands for safer working conditions where they are already at work, or before non-essential production or sales resume. 

These to include reorganisation of workplaces to guarantee safe social distancing; deep cleans and intensified daily cleaning routines; screens, masks, surgical wipes and increased washing facilities; full average pay for vulnerable workers to self-isolate, or to shield vulnerable family members; and the right to refuse work when feeling endangered, as already exists as a right on paper, under Health & Safety legislation. 


Mass, weekly, professional testing at workplace level, as well as in the community, would be a major strand to any serious plan towards reviving production, sales and public transport.


Through this whole process it's right there needs to be a plan on when and how to ease lockdown. But workers' union representatives,  alongside scientists, need to be fully involved in decision-making, not just told what senior management have already decided in their absence. 

Construction workers still being forced to work: how can they keep 2m apart?

Workers’ voices must be heard 

It's welcome that Nicola Sturgeon has established a panel to look at this scenario, but very unwelcome that the unions are not represented on it, certainly not so far. 


The initial members of the SNP government's Advisory Group on Economic Recovery gives us a warning glimpse of the 'business as usual' outlook of that government. It's to be led by Benny Higgins, former Chief Executive of Tesco Bank for ten years, after stints as a top boss in RBS and HBOS. His first comrade-in-arms is Sir Anton Muscatelli, overpaid Principal of the University of Glasgow, not best known for his support for striking staff or protesting students! 


Both at national level and in each workplace the expertise and knowledge of workers themselves needs to be harnessed to ensure the safest possible working arrangements regardless of the impact on short-term profits. 


We need to organise resistance to any premature return to capitalist 'business as usual'. 

Workers' lives must come before the profits of the parasitic plunderers.