Workers make the world run.

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Workers for Instacart, the Silicon Valley start-up that employs 175,000 people to deliver groceries nationwide via its online platform, plan to walk off the job Monday if the company does not immediately provide them with hazard pay and increased safety precautions to protect them from the deadly coronavirus now ravaging the nation.



Instacart’s delivery workers are demanding hazard pay of $5 per order, free hand sanitizer and disinfecting wipes, and paid sick leave for workers with pre-existing medical conditions that would make COVID-19, more dangerous if they contract it.

Like millions of sanitation workers, pharmacy and grocery store employees, and healthcare workers across the country, said Instacart worker and strike organizer Vanessa Bain, the company’s shoppers “are working on the frontlines in the capacity of first responders”—all while many other Americans are able to work from home.



“Instacart’s corporate employees are provided with health insurance, life insurance, and paid time off and [are] also eligible for sick pay and paid family leave,” Bain told Vice. adding that the company’s gig workers “are afforded none of these protections.”

“We deserve and demand better,” Bain added. “Without [us], Instacart will grind to a halt.”


Bain slammed the company for “profiting significantly off of this pandemic” and planning to hire 300,000 new shoppers to keep up with demand and capitalize on the unemployment crisis resulting from the pandemic, while failing to ensure the safety of its current workers.


“Instacart has been busy crafting a rather heroic public image as the saviors of families sheltered-in-place, and as the economic saviors of laid off workers,” Bain explained. “In truth, Instacart is providing no protection to its existing gig workers.”




Instacart’s current sick leave policy for its delivery workers allows them to take two weeks of paid leave only if they test positive for the coronavirus. With tests in short supply and many Americans being told by healthcare providers that they don’t qualify for testing, Instacart could be forcing many of its shoppers to work while ill—or at least contagious. Providing the workers with safety supplies and a fair paid sick leave policy could actually save lives.



Considering delivery and grocery workers are just some of the millions of Americans considered “essential” during the public health crisis, “it’s especially cruel to withhold these guarantees from the very workers keeping millions of people fed,” tweeted Joelle Stangler, a field director for Sen. Bernie Sanders.



 Companies like Uber, Lyft, and Instacart would be nothing without the laborers they treat so poorly—people now deemed ‘essential’. No employee, especially those who work for one of the wealthiest corporations in the world, should be forced to work in unsafe conditions. Workers at Amazon warehouses worldwide continue to raise concerns that their employer is not doing enough to protect them from exposure to COVID-19



The pandemic proves that low-waged workers make the world run. Hopefully, history books will record 2020 as the year when people began to mobilize and launch the long-overdue political and social revolution. Common sense tells us it is now time to change what up until now has been considered “conventional” behavior. Now is the time to build  a movement for radical social change. We are all in this together. Hopefully 2020 will be remembered as the moment of transformational change when working people finally awoke. 



“Rise like Lions after slumber

In unvanquishable number-

Shake your chains to earth like

dew

Which in sleep had fallen on you

Ye are many-they are few.”
Shelley




https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/03/27/without-us-instacart-will-grind-halt-delivery-workers-threaten-strike-over-hazard

Farmers need foreign workers

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Charter flights to bring in agricultural workers from eastern Europe are needed as a matter of urgency, otherwise fruit and vegetables will be left unpicked in Britain’s fields. Some large farms have already been chartering planes to bring in labour from eastern Europe. British growers have been contacting companies in the hospitality sector to recruit laid-off staff.
90,000 workers are needed, many in just a few weeks’ time. One leading supplier, Concordia, was looking to bring in around 10,000 labourers – half from the EU and the rest from Russia, Moldova, Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia and Barbados. But all of the non-EU countries are closed. In a big setback, Ukraine extended its lockdown from 2 April until 23 April.

Stephanie Maurel, Concordia’s chief executive, said: “Our recruitment outside the EU is stalled which leaves us with Lithuania, which has closed borders, Romania with no airplanes, and Bulgaria which is our little beacon.”



Nick Marston, the chairman of British Summer Fruits, said. “They may be people from eastern Europe who were working here in the hospitality sector, who are relatively young and don’t have that many ties and want a job paying reasonable pay in reasonable conditions.”

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/mar/28/fruit-and-veg-will-run-out-unless-britain-charters-planes-to-fly-in-farm-workers-from-eastern-europe

There is Always Money for War

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The government has quietly drawn up proposals to lend other countries £1bn of public money so that they can buy British-made bombs and surveillance technology.



The plan was revealed in a single sentence slipped into this month’s budget. Unveiling a new £2bn lending facility for projects supporting clean growth, the government also announced the creation of “a new £1bn fund to support overseas buyers of UK defence and security goods and services”.  The fund will be overseen by UK Export Finance, which gives loans to help foreign countries, especially those with developing economies, buy British goods and services.



“Even in times of crisis, the government is showing that it will go to any length to sell as many weapons as possible,” said Andrew Smith of Campaign Against Arms Trade. “The arms deals being supported with this money could be used in enabling atrocities and abuses for years to come. Government should be regulating and controlling arms sales, not using public money and doing everything it can to promote them.”



In 2018, the latest figures available, the UK won arms contracts worth £14bn. Between 2008 and 2018 the UK was the second biggest arms exporter in the world, with 19% of the market share. Three-fifths of arms sales over the period went to the Middle East. £5.3bn of arms have been licensed to Saudi Arabia since the war in Yemen began. 



https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/28/revealed-1bn-of-taxpayers-cash-to-help-foreign-countries-buy-british-arms

The Rich Get Richer

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THE BAIL-OUTS Millions of people across the world have lost their job and businesses.



But not everyone has lost out. Jeff Bezos, the world’s wealthiest person, is $5.5bn (£4.3bn) richer today than he was at the start of the year. His paper fortune, held mostly in Amazon shares, rose by $3.9bn on Thursday alone to $120bn – enough to buy 188,000 standard gold bars (even taking into account the soaring price of gold).



Bezos benefited this week from the best three-day stock market rally since 1933 helping Amazon’s share price to recover almost all of its losses this month to trade at about $1,920, though that was slightly down on their peak of $2,170 in February.

Other US executives that have been either lucky or smart by selling large chunks of their shareholdings in February include Larry Fink, the chief executive of fund manager BlackRock, who saved potential losses of $9m.



  Lance Uggla, CEO of data firm IHS Markit, who sold $47m of shares on 19 February that would have dropped to $19m if he had held on to them.



 In total US executives sold about $9.2bn in shares of the companies they run in the five weeks before the start of the stock market rout. Selling before the 30% collapse in the market saved them from paper loses of $1.9bn.



 https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/mar/27/jeff-bezos-sold-34bn-of-amazon-stock-just-before-covid-19-collapse

The poor cannot work from home

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As the coronavirus cases continue to rise in America, the US government has advised people to work from home. But working from home is not a privilege everyone has. Only one in four US workers have a job that allows them to work from home.
Those on the lowest incomes are least likely to be able to work from home – just 9% of workers who had earnings in the lowest 25% percentile said they could work from home, compared with 62% of workers in the highest 25% percentile. Full-time workers were twice as likely as part-time workers to say that they can work from home.
The industry where workers were most likely to say they could work from home was financial activities. Ironically, also the industry where employees are highly likely to have savings to tide them over during a period of employment. Not only did 57% of people who work in finance say that they could work from home, but 47% said they did work from home and were paid for doing so.



Safety – too expensive

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The Department of Health rejected high-level medical advice about providing NHS staff with certain protective equipment during an influenza pandemic because stockpiling it would be too expensive, the Guardian revealed.



Documents show that officials working under former health secretary Jeremy Hunt told medical advisers three years ago to “reconsider” a formal recommendation that eye protection should be provided to all healthcare professionals who have close contact with pandemic influenza patients.

The expert advice was watered down after an “economic assessment” found a medical recommendation about providing visors or safety glasses to all hospital, ambulance and social care staff who have close contact with pandemic influenza patients would “substantially increase” the costs of stockpiling.

The documents may help explain a devastating shortage of protective gear in the NHS that is hampering efforts by medical staff to manage the Covid-19 virus pandemic. Officials resisted advice about stockpiling supplies of eye protection in case of a pandemic of this kind.

The new and emerging respiratory virus threat advisory group (Nervtag), to review the UK’s approach to stockpiling personal protective equipment (PPE) for use in an influenza pandemic “to help inform future stockpile and purchasing decisions” Asked what items of PPE would be required in a pandemic, the government’s advisers recommended “providing eye protection for all hospital, community, ambulance and social care staff who have close contact with pandemic influenza patients.”



 A health department official told the advisers to reconsider their advice as information had emerged about “the very large incremental cost of adding in eye protection.” The department asked Nervtag “to clarify the detail of their advice in light of the costings…” The advisory committee then changed its official advice. The recommendation over protective eyewear was rewritten.

Poverty and COVID-19

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Millions of British people are already struggling to get the food they need and are falling into debt because of the coronavirus pandemic.



The Food Foundation said the outbreak would lead rapidly to a hunger crisis unless the government acted immediately to get food aid and money to the most vulnerable and isolated people.



 Anna Taylor, director of the Food Foundation, said, “Our poll results suggest people are already going hungry.”



More than 1.5 million adults in Britain say they cannot obtain enough food.



53% of NHS workers were worried about getting food.



Half of parents on low incomes with children eligible for free school meals said they had not yet received any substitute meals to keep their children fed, despite government promises to provide food vouchers or parcels. Around 830,000 children are therefore likely to be going without daily sustenance.



12% – representative of 6.1 million adults – said they were struggling to follow the government order to stay at home because they had to keep earning to survive.



On 21 March the government instructed people at greater risk of Covid-19 to stay in their homes and self-isolate for 12 weeks. It said it would contact 1.5 million people in this category and set up a system with local authorities, voluntary organisations and business to deliver food parcels to the homes of those who lacked family support.



Military planners have been assigned to work with councils, but the Guardian understands that the scheme is not yet running and will take a few weeks to scale up to supplying food to 400,000 people. The Food Foundation has calculated that more than twice that number – 860,000 people who fall into the medically vulnerable category – were suffering from food insecurity even before the crisis.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/mar/28/families-borrowing-buy-food-week-of-lockdown

Pandemic Refugees

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Thousands flee New Delhi as the 21-day lockdown effectively puts workers living off daily earnings out of work.  After Prime Minister Modi announced the lockdown, construction projects, taxi services, housekeeping and other informal sector employment came to a sudden halt.



India’s most vulnerable fear dying not of the COVID-19 virus but rather of starvation and are fleeing the capital to return to their home towns and villages.



 “Many migrant workers feel they have no choice but to walk home. They are walking along highways, along train tracks with no access to food, no access to basic sanitation,” said Al Jazeera’s Elizabeth Puranam.



Ram Bhajan Nisar, a painter, his wife and two children – aged five and six – were part of a group of 15 who set off by foot from New Delhi to Gorakhpur, a village in Uttar Pradesh state on the border with Nepal some 650km (400 miles) away.

“How can we eat if we don’t earn?” Nisar asked, adding that his family had enough to make it four or five days without work, but not the full three weeks of the stay-at-home order.

Regional governments were advised  to set up tented accommodation along highways for migrant workers and establish relief camps in cities.Authorities sent a fleet of buses to the outskirts of New Delhi on Saturday to meet an exodus of migrant workers desperately trying to reach their native villages. Delhi’s homeless shelters are overflowing with people and the state government has decided to convert public schools into shelters from Sunday.



The government of Uttar Pradesh, which borders New Delhi, sent a fleet of public and private buses with room for 52,000 people to a highway overpass area on the Delhi border where thousands were stranded

Pandemic Profiteering

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A frenetic international market in ventilators and medical supplies has gathered pace in recent weeks as governments scramble to purchase equipment.
Prices for equipment have been rocketing – often changing by the hour.
The equipment is usually made in China and is then purchased by middlemen who offer it on. An array of fixers and consultants are often involved along the supply chain and some are adding huge price mark-ups on equipment they say they can get hold of in the current crisis.
“There are going to be some multi-millionaires made,” said one person who works in this world.



The market price for one particular type of ventilator increased in a week from $27,000 (£21,700) to $96,000 (£77,100) – a sign of just how intense the demand is. 

It is thought there have been cases where offers have been made of equipment which turn out not to exist, or where multiple agents were offering the same items. There is also the concern that items might not meet the correct standards. Some testing kits purchased by countries, including Spain, have shown low levels of accuracy, making them unusable.
Middle Eastern and North African countries have been purchasing from the Middle East-based supplier and the US has been offering to buy up large amounts of stocks at a premium over what others will pay. An Eastern European country recently upped the stakes by offering cash in advance. Some of the companies and individuals involved in this trade operate in the arms and defence industry, acting as intermediaries between manufacturers and militaries, others are new arrivals seeking to leverage contacts in China or elsewhere. 

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