European PPE shortages betray lack of solidarity with workers
Frontline health workers dealing with the COVID-19 outbreak are not being provided adequate Personal Protective Equipment to help protect themselves during this crisis.
We are not only seeing a lack of solidarity from European governments to health and care workers but also a lack of solidarity between European governments to effectively coordinate a response to this crisis.
This week the UK government came under fire for purportedly missing three chances to join an EU scheme to bulk buy Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) to help fight the COVID-19 pandemic. On Monday, the Guardian reported that the UK was not involved in EU attempts to procure several millions of pounds worth of PPE on the 28th February and the 17th March. The UK government initially stated that it was not in the EU, and would therefore be “making its own efforts.” But the government then U-turned saying it did not receive an email to be part of the initiative. An official spokesman for the prime minister told journalists “Participating in this scheme would not have allowed us to do anything we have not been able to do ourselves.”
Lack of suitable PPE throughout EU states betrays a fundamental disregard for workers on the frontline of this crisis. PPE shortages endanger the lives of healthcare professionals and limit the availability of staff who can deal with this crisis. It also has an impact on mental well-being. Chief Executive of NHS Practitioner Health, Lucy Warner, has stated that “we are likely to see NHS staff suffering similar symptoms to shellshock.” A study published by the Lancet showed that 70% of health workers on the frontline in Hubei suffered from extreme levels of stress, 50% had depressive disorders, 44% had anxiety and 34% insomnia.
Not only are frontline staff working long shifts, and trying to deal with the psychological and physical trauma of patients, but they also do so with the looming prospect that they will more than likely catch this virus due to poor provision of adequate PPE. Rosie Hughes, a UK based junior doctor, wrote in the Guardian that “testing positive for the same virus that has killed so many of my patients is obviously a daunting prospect but it felt inevitable given the lack of safe PPE.”
The UK is not the only EU country to suffer from a lack of PPE. More than 100 deaths in Italy are from Doctors and Nurses who account for more than 8% of all infections. Severe PPE shortages in Spain have also contributed to at least 12,000 healthcare professionals contracting the virus. According to Forbes some staff at Madrid’s La Paz hospital are left with little choice but to reuse gowns when treating different patients and double up on flimsy masks in the absence of more sophisticated respirator masks.
Within this crisis we can also see an absence of solidarity within the EU. Germany initially imposed a ban on the export of masks, goggles and gloves due to a shortage in early March. In the coming days and weeks, staff are getting ready to receive 1.5 billion euros worth of PPE which seems somewhat late considering discussions began in early February and procurement only began on the 17th March.
Through this crisis, we can help rebuild a Europe that treats its workers fairly and with solidarity.
DiEM25 believes that during this crisis there is an opportunity to help foster EU-wide solidarity. The lack of adequate PPE provided to frontline workers dealing with this crisis betrays a complete disregard for their physical or mental well-being. However, it also demonstrates a complete lack of unity between European nation states in their efforts to coordinate an effective response to PPE shortages.
DiEM25’s 3-point plan outlines a cohesive response to the crisis. It would provide a €1 trillion in eurobonds from the ECB, which would European nations to borrow whilst securing a stronger union. This borrowing will help provide frontline medical staff with the PPE and resources needed to tackle this crisis.
DiEM25 TV Presents: Roger Waters, Jodi Dean, Angela Richter and more!
DiEM25 TV has been bringing you fascinating content during the coronavirus crisis.
We’ve featured such greats as Noam Chomsky, Saskia Sassen, Slavoj Žižek, Astra Taylor, Brian Eno, Stefania Maurizi and Gael García Bernal. And you’ve been able to discuss issues like corona-neo-fascism, love, hope and humour in times of coronavirus, as well as the EU’s abject failure to deal with this crisis.
Here’s what DiEM25 TV has in store for you in the upcoming days:
Register to our upcoming programmes and send in your questions to our guest participants in advance or through the live chat on YouTube!
Monday, April 20, 20:00 CEST
Yanis Varoufakis and Roger Waters: “Another Now”
[Register HERE]
Tuesday, April 21, 20:00 CEST
Daniel Ellsberg and Angela Richter: “The Urgent Global Need for Whistleblowers”
[Register HERE]
Friday, April 24, 20:00 CEST
Srećko Horvat: “Virus Mythologies” with guest Franco “Bifo” Berardi
[Register HERE]
Saturday Night Special, April 25, 20:00 CEST
Judah Friedlander and Davide Castro
[Register HERE]
Monday, April 27, 20:00 CEST
Yanis Varoufakis: “Another Now”
[Register HERE]
Tuesday, April 28, 20:00 CEST
Tariq Ali & Maja Pelević: “Visible skies above, a tsunami of banalities below”
[Register HERE]
Thursday, April 30, 20:00 CEST
Jodi Dean & Maja Kantar: “It’s about the Fight”
[Register HERE]
Friday Night Special, May 1, 20:00 CEST
Srećko Horvat: “Virus Mythologies”
[Register HERE]
Monday, May 4, 20:00 CEST
Yanis Varoufakis: “Another Now”
[Register HERE]
Disintegration of the Eurozone has begun. Austerity will be worse than in 2011
Yanis Varoufakis Interviewed by TSF Radio Noticias.
TSF: The Eurogroup approved a 500 billion package to fight the crisis. You recently wrote in the Guardian that The EU’s coronavirus relief deal is a gift to Europe’s enemies. Explain.
YV: To begin with, the 500 billion euros is almost entirely loans. It’s exactly what Europe doesn’t need, especially like the countries that were hit the hardest, like Italy or Spain or Greece, which have the least capacity to have the necessary increase in public debt.
The reason why the Eurobonds – that nine countries, including Greece and Portugal, demanded – are essential is because it constitutes a debt restructuring, so that debt does not go to the nations, it is spread out across Europe. By being spread out, its total net present value shrinks over the next 20 years and therefore it’s far more manageable.
By rejecting the eurobonds, and instead saying “take money from the European Stability Mechanism” – and that’s loans – or from the markets, supported by the European Central Bank, countries like Greece or Portugal are going to be so heavily indebted by this time next year that even there is no preconditions for those loans, the return of the fiscal compact next year will mean levels of austerity for a very large part of Europe, even worse than the one Greece experienced in 2011. As the European economy begins to emerge from the coronavirus recession, we will be hit by a secondary recessionary wave that will be imposed by Brussels, by Frankfurt.
Make no mistake: they will demand fiscal consolidation.
We can already hear from Germany talking about coming back to Black Zero [a rule that determines a debt brake by imposing a balance between expenditure and receipts] next year. Make no mistake: they will demand fiscal consolidation for Portugal, for Greece, for Italy, for Spain next year. There can be no better gift to the euro skeptics and to the nationalists that want to destroy the European Union than that.
TSF: But where is the main problem? Is it the solution’s nature or amount? Germany’s own relief package is bigger than Europe’s.
YV: It’s both. It’s the total size and the distribution.
The total size of direct fiscal injections agreed on the Eurogroup is pitiful. The rest of the world is laughing at Europe, and rightfully so. It’s only 0,22% of the euro area GDP. The rest is loans, and loans are useless. If you have a bankruptcy problem, you can not deal with it by additional loans, and what we are facing now is a bankruptcy problem as a result of the lock down for so many weeks and months.
Germany, because of its fiscal space, is affecting a 6% stimulus of direct fiscal injections, not loans. In the case of Portugal and Greece, it’s around 0,9%. This is going to magnify ridiculously imbalances that area already a problem in the eurozone, to such an extent that the politics, specially in come southern countries like Italy, for instance, will become toxic and I just don’t see that the eurozone can survive this second wave in the same error category that we made in 2010 when it treated our countries’ problems, which were insolvency, like something that can be dealt with by means of loans.
TSF: Do you think, in the long term, countries that are now opposed to eurobonds will have no other option but to accept this solution?
YV: I can’t see how. We have a symmetric stretch to our peoples, whether you’re german or french or portuguese or greek. If this crisis has not changed the mind of the ruling classes in Germany, the Netherlands, Finland and Austria and so on, persuading them that this is a time for Euro bonds, for unification rather than “everyone by themselves”, I can’t see why they would change their minds in the future. This is why I think April 9th is going to be remembered as the moment when the disintegration of the European Union and the monetary union in particular has begun.
TSF: How do you classify Mario Centeno’s role as Eurogroup’s president?
YV: One word: shameful. Mr. Centeno’s head should hang in shame for having brokered this non deal. If this was not a tragic situation it would come down as a joke. Mr. Centeno comes from a country that knows the pain of austerity, that knows the euro area never dealt rationally with the major crisis of 2010 and 2011. Mr. Centeno had the moral and political duty to the people of Portugal and Europe not to repeat the performances of Mr. Junker or Mr. Dijsselbloem when they were presidents of the Eurogroup. I’m afraid he’s going to go down in history as a shameful president of the Eurogroup, just like his predecessors.
TSF: The Dutch finance minister suggested Italy and Spain should be investigated for not having money to deal with this crisis, and he later apologised after Portugal’s prime minister said these words were disgusting. Does the word solidarity still mean anything in Europe?
YV: No. It doesn’t. I remember the bailouts given to Portugal and Greece were disguised as solidarity. Yet they were solidary with Deutsche Bank, Societé Generale, because the money that went to our treasuries and ended up repaying debts to french and german banks that placed so many debt in the United States in 2008 that they were insolvent.
But I am afraid we are making a big mistake, as greeks, as portuguese, even as germans. It is not a case of solidarity. We should not be asking the dutch minister for solidarity. If you ask a dutch citizen for solidarity, they have a right to reject it. They can say “I want to be solidary, I’ll give you a gift or a loan, but you can’t ask me to go into debt jointly with you”. And they have a point about that.
The dutch finance minister is right on this. He does not have an obligation, for the purpose of solidarity, to agree to eurobonds. But he has the obligation to accept eurobonds because it is the only sensible financial policy which is also in the interest of Holland.
What the dutch and the german and austrian and finnish finance ministers must be made to understand is that the reason why their finances are so much better than Portugal’s or Greece’s or Spain’s is because they have been experiencing negative interest rates for the last eight years so their debt has been coming down even though they didn’t have to do anything.
Their net exports to China, The United States or the United Kingdom were held at a high level because the euro was relatively low. And it was low because in the euro area you had the deficit countries: Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece. Their savings and surpluses are due to they being in the same area as the deficit countries. They can’t say this was only their own doing and therefore it’s their money and will not go into common debt. If they want the benefit of the euro, they will have to have the eurobond. If they are clever in their selfishness, they should want the eurobond. We southerners should not appeal to their solidarity or philanthropic instincts. We should appeal to their common sense.
April 9th 2020: The Eurogroup led by Mario Centeno approved a 500 billion relief package to fight the pandemic consequences
TSF: Can this crisis lead to the end of the eurozone?
YV: There’s not doubt it will, if we continue down this road. Italy is going to have to borrow huge quantities of money, and there will be a GDP collapse of at least 10%. The debt to GDP ratio will go up to 180% or more very soon. The deficit will be gigantic: 15%, maybe 20%. Brussels will next year say: “You will have to go from, let’s say, 18% to 7%”. That’s a 11% GDP austerity program. Any government that implements an 11% austerity program will be out very soon. Matteo Salvini is going to ride into government and I can assure you the first thing he will do is a plan for the exit of Italy from the Euro. When Italy is out, we’re all out.
TSF: Some human rights groups are alerting to a dangerous situation in the Greek refugee camps. Is Europe and the Greek government doing enough to make sure a disaster does not happen in these camps because of the coronavirus?
YV: The Greek government has been despicable. They have been treating refugees as non-humans. They have done absolutely nothing to provide them with livable conditions. Our party, MeRA25, which I represent in the parliament, has been demanding from day one that they are relocated. We have so many empty hotels, because there is no tourism. Break up those camps and relocate those families in empty hotel rooms, pay something to the hotels, so they make some money. Everybody would be better off. The government has done something horrific: they shut the camps down, without any medical facilities in it. Even without the coronavirus they were dying of the terrible conditions they are living there. Throw in Covid-19 and it’s a catastrophe.
TSF: The IMF predicts a heavy recession in all the eurozone. Are we in for a long term recession?
YV: There’s no doubt the disgraceful Eurogroup that Mr. Centeno presided over has condemned the eurozone to be the sick economic block of the world. China, the United States and the United Kingdom will have a much faster recovery. The lack of a fiscal boost in the eurozone will guarantee we will exit this crisis with our economies much weaker and the imbalances between north and south countries far worse.
TSF: You founded the Democracy in Europe Movement (DiEM25) and the greek political section MeRA25. The 2025 reference is about the movement hoping to democratize Europe by 2025. Do you maintain this goal?
YV: We never hoped we would. It was a very different question we asked ourselves back in 2015. The question was: how long do we have to democratize Europe before the point of no return. A little like in climate change. When will Europe find itself in a situation where internal imbalances and centrifugal forces are such that we can’t unite? And we said 10 years, and decided to call our movement DiEM25. The coronavirus is proving this to be over optimistic. If we don’t unite now, when we face with a symmetric threat, if we can’t understand now that we are in this boat together… and it’s not a question of solidarity, it’s a question of rationality.
TSF: What are your political objectives with MeRA25?
YV: The objective is one: to end the never-ending bankruptcy of Greece. We have bankrupt banks, a bankrupt State, bankrupt families and bankrupt businesses. And as long as we keep pretending we can overcome this through loans, we will simply perpetuate the bankruptcy. Our young will leave the country, and that’s the greatest nightmare: we will end up with a country full of old people, many of them foreigners living here in beautiful five star apartments in privatized beaches in this beautiful country, with our young living in the United States, in Canada, in China or India.
When will we win? That will depend on our capacity to convince the people of Greece against an armclad media system that belongs to the oligarchy. Our little party is struggling, but we are positive, we entered parliament in our first attempt, and our message is getting across despite the demonization we are experiencing.
TSF: You leaked the recordings of the Eurogroup meetings in 2015. Don’t you think this could lead to further distrust between countries?
YV: Quite the opposite. The argument that the people are not clever enough is an argument against democracy, and for fascism. Look at the April 9th Eurogroup. Important decisions were made in there that condemn Europe to more recession, austerity and pain for the majority of Europeans. I believe portuguese citizens have every right to know what Mr. Centeno said in there on their behalf. The german voters should know what their finance minister said. If you keep treating people as incapable as dealing with information that concerns their lives, what you are saying is “We don’t want a democracy. We want an oligarchy with occasional elections where people go to the polls without information of what their representatives are doing behind closed doors”.
TSF: Looking back at the time you were Greece’s finance minister, do you regret anything? Would you have done anything differently?
YV: Oh, of course. Anybody who doesn’t rethink what they’ve done with new information is a dangerous fanatic.
I would have done many things differently. But the question is: what would I have done differently with the information I had at the time? And I think I should have been far less conciliatory to the troika. I should have been far tougher. I should not have sought an interim agreement. I should have given them an ultimatum: “a restructure of debt, or we are out of the euro today”.
Check out the original article in Radio Noticias.
DiEM25 launches online conference series for political organising!
Beyond the Balcony: Organising for European Solidarity
Europe is undergoing an unprecedented crisis.
As a response, DiEM25 is launching a series of online conferences featuring Coordinating Collective and National Collective members. Open to all DiEMers, they will be a space to organise national responses to COVID-19 as a movement.
This is the time for DiEM25 to bring hope — and concrete help — to Europeans in desperate need. We declare once more our determination to open our arms to all those who seek to change the world, not just to interpret it.
These are trying times. For us as individuals, for our families, but also for our communities and countries. The European Union is stubbornly refusing to enact the common-sense policies we outlined in our 3-point plan which would alleviate the pressure of this crisis from the weakest in our society, and protect our livelihoods during and after the pandemic.
The pandemic and its subsequent political and socio-economic upheavals must not distract us from the current migratory and environmental challenges that still need to be resolved. We cannot afford to be in denial. As our DiEM25 TV guests David Graeber and Jeremy Scahill noted, this is precisely the time to not give up on imagining a better European society — there is too much at stake.
We must either enact policies that can work and allow the EU to evolve, or the European project will fail. DiEM25’s prediction that Europe would either be democratised or disintegrate is more relevant than ever.
In order to better understand our movement’s place in the historic circumstances we find ourselves in, and to better prepare for their consequences, these conference calls allow for transversal discussions that will be live streamed on our YouTube channel.
This series of online conferences will be open to all DiEMers in order to determine our national responses to the pandemic. These conversations will be followed by concrete mobilizing actions by the movement to create change at this decisive moment!
Our first call will be about Italy — ground zero of the Covid-19 crisis in Europe — with subsequent calls across the continent.
Join us from your country to help organise national responses to COVID-19. Sign up for the conferences below!
Click the link to register.
Italy: Saturday April 18, 11.00 CET
France: Wednesday April 22, 19.00 CET
Germany: Saturday April 25, 11.00 CET
United Kingdom: Wednesday April 29, 19.00 CET
Spain: Saturday May 2, 11.00 CET
Greece: Wednesday May 6, 19.00 CET
Turkey: Saturday May 9, 11.00 CET
EU Accession countries: Wednesday May 13, 19.00 CET
Portugal: Saturday May 16, 11.00 CET
Benelux: Wednesday May 20, 19.00 CET
Scandinavia and Visegrad Group: Saturday May 23, 11.00 CET
PAN-EUROPEAN: Wednesday May 27, 19.00 CET
The programme will depend on the most urgent issues that the country faces at the time of the conference call. They will be conducted as with coordinators (NCs, EWs or DSCs where the former do not exist) as panellists, and all other DiEMers as participants who will be able to ask questions. Participants can come from any country. We also invite you all to join our pan-european call on Wednesday, May 27.
Let’s mobilise the structures that DiEM25 has built over the last four years; from National Collectives to Electoral Wings, from DSCs to thematic groups, and from the Green New Deal for Europe campaign to DiEM25 TV, in order to seize this historic moment.
We look forward to seeing you there!
Find us on YouTube for more exciting episode and initiatives.
Capitalists are sacrificing us on the altar of profit
Even during a pandemic, capitalists are sacrificing us on the altar of profit.
After long and tedious negotiation, the Eurogroup have finally agreed on their response to the Covid-19 crisis, although for many families it has come far too late. Italy, Greece and Spain will now be allowed access to emergency bailout funds, on the condition that they be placed in a straitjacket of brutal austerity as soon as they experience recovery.
The European elites, having learned nothing from the crises of the last ten years, have yet again demonstrated to the people of the continent that the fiscal balances of Germany and Holland matter more to them than the lives of Italians and Spaniards.
Like all capitalists, the German and Dutch ruling classes are deluded about the origins of their fortune.
Germany’s budget and current account surpluses are a direct result of the indebtedness of Italy, Spain and Greece, and the artificially low value of the euro that is a consequence of that fact. It would seem natural for those looted surpluses to be used in this instance to provide ventilators, protective equipment and economic support to the countries most affected by coronavirus.
Earlier this month, Pedro Sánchez wrote that the virus, this “invisible enemy … is putting the future of the European project to the test”. That test is now complete; and the shallowness of European solidarity exposed. Perhaps the European Union will be the greatest institutional victim of a deliberation that capitalists all over the world are now having; about whether lives (of workers) are more important than the economy (and by ‘the economy’, they mean the stock market: something that has little-or-nothing to do with anyone but themselves) in the context of this pandemic.
Across the Atlantic Ocean, Trump is calling for people to ‘go back to work, much sooner than people thought’. This flies in the face of all scientific and epidemiological opinion, but American capitalists have never let something like empiricism get in the way of good business. As Jeremy Scahill from The Intercept puts it, “it really does seem clear that many corporate vultures don’t seem to care if millions of vulnerable working class or poor people in this country die in the name of returning to their drive for more and more profit.”
ABC’s chief political analyst, Matthew Dowd, wrote that “we must find a balance between protecting citizens’ health and protecting our economy. Decimating our economy in pursuit of fighting the virus doesn’t do our citizens any good in the short or long term.” In a way, Dowd is right. If people aren’t going back to work, they might survive, which would be tragically detrimental to the profits of funeral directors.
Similar sentiments have been expressed in Britain, where Boris Johnson’s government infamously flirted with a ‘herd immunity’ strategy, which would have potentially led to half a million deaths in order to ‘protect the economy’, before they abandoned it (presumably for fear of electoral repercussions). The reasoning behind this was that most of those deaths, it was assumed, would be pensioners.
The mass death of pensioners is not a problem for capitalists because pensioners are typically economically unproductive and represents a burden on the welfare system: indeed, the ageing population represents an existential threat to market capitalism. Jeremy Warner from the Daily Telegraph expressed the probable views of Britain’s leaders when he wrote that ‘from an entirely disinterested economic perspective, the COVID-19 might even prove mildly beneficial in the long term by disproportionately culling elderly dependents’.
Such is the ideological inheritance of capitalism.
In a system where profit is god, our elites are quite happy to sacrifice us on its altar — even, it seems, during a deadly pandemic. And if profit is god, then the angels are surely billionaires, who have seemingly so far spent the lockdown competing as to who can behave in the more amoral and sadistic fashion.
Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world, is asking the public to donate to pay the wages of his brutalised staff during lockdown. Richard Branson, who has in the past sued Britain’s health service, has asked staff to take eight weeks unpaid leave despite being worth nearly £4 billion. These people drink from fountains of wealth while the workers who built the fountains languish in drought and pestilence.
Defenders of capitalism insist on its rationality and how it is a natural system based on human nature, but the poorest dying in order to sustain profit for the wealthiest doesn’t strike me as rational. There is no market incentive to find a vaccine for COVID-19, just as there is no market incentive to prevent the upcoming extinction of the human race in the form of climate breakdown.
Perhaps the one thing we can all learn from this collective trauma is that the market doesn’t actually possess many answers. And with stagnant wages, flatlining living standards and social misery as permanent features of capitalism long before coronavirus arrived, who would want to die for such a comprehensively failing system?
The sanctity of ‘the economy’ compared to human lives in the minds of our elites raises broader questions about the nature of western civilisation. After all, what is civilisation but a measure of how we treat those in need? When Cuba, an island thousands of miles away from Europe, provides more medical expertise and aid to Italy than Germany; when exploited African migrants are forming cooperatives to provide healthy food to Italians in lockdown; and when the European commission is banning the sale of protective equipment between member states, then what exactly is the point of the European Union? Where is European solidarity, where is European civilisation?
The human cost of capitalism is usually well hidden from western populations.
It only appears sporadically on the news, like when Bangladeshi slave-labouring children are crushed to death in a derelict factory, or when indigenous tribes of the Amazon rainforest are murdered. What happens now that western lives are on the chopping block too? It will be interesting to see how many people will still consent to a system that views them as expendable, especially now that it has been proven beyond all doubt that labour, not capital, is what sustains the world around us.
In the fourteenth century, the Black Death epidemic spread across the world, devastating all that it touched. For those who survived, however, the world changed for the better. Serfdom was destroyed, and peasants were able to demand better wages and conditions from their lords. Our current economic predicament is a similar crisis of labour, and it is well within the power of workers to remake the world around them.
Capitalism, if the World Trade Organization’s predictions are correct, may have been dealt a crippling and perhaps mortal blow by Covid-19. The sacrifice must end. It’s time to take society, not profit, as our god. DiEM25’s 3-point plan to deal with the current crisis, involving 1) a eurobond stimulus, 2) solidarity cash payments to all European citizens and 3) a Green New Deal for Europe may now be the only way to save the European Union.
The featured image is a screenshot of the aerial drone footage taken in the United States of temporary mass graves due to the pandemic and featured on The Guardian.
Berlin Diaries: “Welcome to the new reality”
Week Four 05/04/2020 – 12/04/2020
Photo:
lasst grüßen (greetings!)
wellkommen in der neuen realität (welcome to the new reality)
This project chronicles an ongoing, personal thought process driven by reflections of the world we live in and the system we are part of. A world that has — on a micro level at least — suddenly shrunk to the size of our homes. A system that has failed us all in the sight of what is, objectively speaking, just a minor disaster.
Easter Sunday marks almost exactly one month since partial lock-down measures were officially implemented in Berlin.
Hordes of chocolate Easter Bunnies armed with equally chocolate Easter Eggs aren’t making this commercialised religious spectacle any sweeter this year, despite the good weather!
For the entire week, the city was bathing in warm pools of sunlight, unpolluted fresh air and gentle northern breeze. Berliners — probably encouraged by the outstanding efficiency of German health system — took full advantage of the weather by flooding the streets, river walks and local parks. Queues in front of coffee and ice-cream shops were as long as they would normally be and grass covered canal banks looked pretty much the same as previous years.
Southern bank, shaded by nearby buildings of Neukölln — was completely empty. Sunny side of Kreuzberg’s northern bank — almost full. Social distancing? Some, but mostly none. Social irresponsibility? Bucketful! Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted small graffiti on a nearby wall, reading – “We are young, we are the stars and we burn brightly!”.
It made me think of the future.
Some 6.700Km further West, Trump was thinking of the future, too. He was contemplating new lies, thinking of new ways of how to blame others for his own failings, of new insidious ways to extend his mandate and, perhaps surprisingly, of moon mining and tapping asteroid resources by signing an executive order and therefore officially establishing U.S. policy on the exploitation of off-Earth resources. How about some Personal Protective Equipment desperately needed by the health workers, here on Earth? Forget about it!
Under his watch and with over 500.000 confirmed cases of COVID-19, the United States steamrolled to the very top of the John Hopkins statistics list, leaving China and all European countries well behind. When we add to this growing food crisis and the close to 17 million people that have filed up for unemployment in the past three weeks, it’s easy to conclude that the American Dream is nothing but a feverish illusion, or a nightmare caused by Incubi and Succubi of monstrous neoliberal system in place.
Without a doubt, the most horrifying and distressing images from the past week have come via drone video footage showing a massive, freshly dug trench on Hart Island being filled with coffins. They showed dozens upon dozens of white wooden caskets stacked next to each other, creating a scene that was closely reminiscent of fictional post-apocalyptic stories. Of course, we are talking about COVID-19 victims with no next-to-kin or families who can afford a funeral. The nameless and easily forgotten ones. Temporary burials only — officials are saying — as if that makes it any better or easier to digest, even if true!
Perhaps mildly aware of the ordeal, and unable to face growing criticism both at home and abroad, Trump accused the World Health Organisation of bias towards China and threatened to cut US funding for this specialised agency of the United Nations. This is probably the most disgraceful thing any leader could possibly do in such a situation, but I guess that the world must be used to American preposterous outbursts by now. Such desperate rhetoric and actions are nothing but the reflections of rage and agony of a diminishing empire intimes of irreversible decay.
In the UK, the situation was almost equally grotesque. Johnson, being released from the intensive care unit, was praising and thanking the NHS for saving his life. The same NHS that his political party was privatising and underfunding for decades. The same NHS that infamously ended up as part of post-Brexit trade deal negotiations with the US.
In typical fashion of ‘special relationship’ echo-chamber, the UK government, just like its US master, is also enraged with China and deeply concerned that it might be hiding facts and statistics concerning the COVID-19 outbreak. It is indeed possible that the Chinese government might not be communicating the full picture of local horrors to the world, but we don’t know this for sure.
What we do know for certain is that the British government hid the findings of 2016 pandemic drill from the general public. This drill, code-named Exercise Cygnus, highlighted shortages of intensive care beds, vital equipment and mortuary space. In short, it underlined utter UK unpreparedness for even the mildest cases of potential pandemics.
Baseless accusations and finger pointing, towards the WHO, China, or anyone else, won’t save the UK, the US or any other government from the fact that the blame for utter neglect clearly lies at their own door steps.
In the EU, mainstream media has largely ignored the news of Mauro Ferrari’s resignation letter to the position of President of the European Research Council, the main scientific body of the European Union. Towards the end of the letter, Ferrari underlined the main issue perfectly:
“I am afraid that I have seen enough of both the governance of science, and the political operations at the European Union. In these three long months, I have indeed met many excellent and committed individuals, at different levels of the organization of the ERC and the EC. However, I have lost faith in the system itself.”
Let’s repeat the last two words — the system itself! The main message being: it is the system that’s the problem rather than the individuals serving it. In the case of the EU, this is particularly important to understand since the survival of the union depends on it.
After everything that has been going on over the last few weeks, it is blatantly clear that the world won’t be the same after the pandemic ends.
The magnitude of inevitable changes in our societies in our cultural, economic and political landscapes, will be directly proportional to the length of the pandemic itself. In other words, the longer the pandemic lasts, the greater and more radical reforms we will need to overcome its effects.
Over the last few days, I was wondering how the world would look like in the case of a global strike of the working class, or in the case of a world-wide, nonviolent proletarian revolution. No one knows, of course, but maybe the world wouldn’t look significantly different to how it looks right now? Perhaps global ‘lock-down’ measures triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic can end up serving as one of major inspirations for a green, socialist, world-wide activism in the near future? Recent initiatives like the Progressive International, announced by DiEM25 and the Sanders Institute, are certainly encouraging developments in this regard.
One day our governments will lift those measures and order us to get back to work, but what if people actually refuse to do so until a long list of specific demands isn’t met? This is a historic and inspiring time which should be understood and used as such. The ruling class is already on it, let’s make no mistakes about it! What about the rest of us?
Learn more about the Progressive International, launching soon!
For previous and future articles written by Ognjen Ogy Vrljicak, you can visit his blog.
Uberised workers are on the frontline of the crisis
“The uberisation of the economy must be halted in order to guarantee that the labor rights of all European peoples are protected.”
“Uberisation” has become so prevalent in our Western economies that the word itself has entered the most conservative French dictionaries. The uberisation of the economy refers to a new type of worker, most of the time working for digital platforms as gig workers. Such platforms’ business model only works if they offload their costs related to employees — and most often, also their tax burden, as most of these companies are based in tax havens or states that have highly reduced corporate taxes.
Digital platforms such as UBER, Deliveroo, Take it Easy, Foodora or Amazon choose to rely on freelance ‘service providers’ rather than contracted workers in order to make an increased margin of profit. These platforms entice thousands of workers with false promises on the advantages of not being salaried employees: freedom, staggered working hours, being their own boss and so forth.
The other side of the coin is obvious, but not always properly assessed by those that are targeted: since they are not contracted workers, they do not benefit from the protection of Employment Law or from collective agreements. They therefore do not have access to employment benefits such as paid holidays, compulsory weekly rest, a minimum fixed salary, limited grounds for dismissal and, above all, unemployment protection and pension contributions. This pension contribution usually amounts to 50 percent of their wage and would be covered by the employer in France if they were under contract
It has by now become clear to most workers that they do not benefit from the advantages espoused by these platforms.
What freedom is there when such platforms impose clients and routes? How can you be your own boss when you cannot turn down a call or a passenger at the risk of being badly rated and immediately dismissed? What free time do you have when you do not set your own prices and those imposed on you are so low that they force you to work until you find that you are putting your life, and sometimes even your health, in danger?
Ken Loach, in his latest film Sorry we missed you, illustrates the precariousness under which the uberisation of our economies is placing an increasing proportion of workers, including its potentially fatal consequences: “You don’t get hired here,” states the delivery-depot boss in Loach’s movie “You come on board. We call it on-boarding. You don’t work for us – you work with us” — but you die alone as a consequence of it, he may have added.
Uberised workers have become the new slaves of our economies: they are exploited at will for miserable incomes without any social protection and permanently tracked by embedded geolocation tools. The newspaper The Australian referred to this as “The Hunger Games at Work.”
Many large companies have seen the benefits they can derive from this flexible and disposable workforce. For example, some French retail banks recently announced that their account managers would soon no longer be hired as employees but will be ‘accepted on a freelance basis’.
During COVID19, major household retailers are now also adopting similar practices: in France as in other European countries, supermarkets like Franprix and Carrefour are taking advantage of this crisis to uberise their new staff instead of hiring them, even though their current profits would enable them to continue hiring employees.
During this pandemic, the precariousness of a large proportion of workers is becoming more visible.
Not only do self-employed workers no longer have any income, but they also have no right to unemployment benefit. They have little or no access to medical services depending on the country in which they work. Yet on the frontline, one finds those exploited workers, serving as delivery people who take on the risks of the virus to deliver takeaway meals, DVDs and toys to a confined population who will pay a trifle for a non-essential service.
A large number of customers who have become accustomed to these types of services for quite a few years now do not seem to ever ask themselves the question of whether or not they are endangering the lives of others. It is reminiscent of left-wing politicians prior to the COVID19 crisis arriving in Uber cars to campaign rallies where they would denounce low wages and precarious working situations.
Uberised workers constitute a proletariat that we do not hear from because they are not salaried workers and hence do not have workers’ representatives nor trade unions to speak for them.
For the moment, salvation came from a few courageous individuals amongst them and from the reasonable decisions handed down by several courts of justice that have taken hold of the problem in a number of European countries and beyond:
- In France, following multiple accidents, the law of 8 August 2016 granted to those ‘onboarded’ on a freelance basis by such platforms the right to have such companies finance their work accident insurance (something that employers usually take care of), as well as the right to be represented by a trade union and the right to be trained. The Court of Cassation has already reclassified a freelancer of Take It Easy as an employee in 2018, considering that the platform controlled the worker through geolocation and that he was not indeed a freelancer;
- A Spanish court has recognised the qualification of Deliveroo freelancers as an employees;
- The Court of Appeal in London granted Uber drivers the status of employees with minimum wage and a right to breaks and paid holidays in December 2018;
- In the United States, Uber agreed to pay up to $100 million to settle the appeals of two drivers aiming at being given employees’ rights;
- In Australia, Foodora decided to close down after action was taken by the Fair Work Ombudsman responding to inadequate remuneration that was reported as being paid to three of its workers.
Most recently on 4 March 2020 the French Court of Cassation demonstrated the existence of employer-employee relationship between the Uber platform and its workers as they must obey the platform’s commands and handed down a major ruling which reclassified this kind of service contract as an employment contract with all of the protections inherent to the status.
Platforms complained that this would ruin their business model. Ironically, it could be argued that in the early 19th century some businessmen also considered that the abolition of slavery would ruin their businesses, but this obviously would not justify holding back the abolition of slavery. Nevertheless, Emmanuel Macron’s government immediately reacted by declaring that there was a need to invent new rules “allowing freedom…”. Whose freedom?
In these times of COVID19, where health protection is synonymous with life or death, it is essential on this subject as on many others that DiEM25 encourages and leads trans-European reflection to counter the wishes of neoliberal governments allied with such platforms.
These platforms do not even pay taxes in the countries where their underpaid and abused workers operate, face danger and have to be taken care of by underfunded hospitals and infrastructure. They need to be held accountable for the position that they are putting workers in. The uberisation of the economy must be halted in order to guarantee that the labor rights of all European peoples are protected.
The toxic impact of the Eurogroup agreement of 9th April 2020
Yanis Varoufakis speaks on the toxic impact of the Eurogroup agreement of 9th April 2020 with CNN’s Richard Quest.
On April 9th 2020, Eurobonds were ‘put to bed forever’.
“Yesterday, with the Eurogroup decision — which by not making a decision on it, effectively missed the greatest and I think last opportunity we had in the Eurozone to have Eurobonds (…)”
“It’s not a question of philanthropy or even solidarity. The Netherlands and Germany benefit enormously from an exchange rate of the euro which is low because you’ve got deficit countries like Italy, Greece and Spain in them. Now at the same time, to the extent that they benefit enormously from that and from the negative interest rates that have been eating into the debt of both the Netherlands and Germany — those are the benefits for the Netherlands and Germany. If they want to keep those benefits, they will have to keep Italy in the Euro, and the only way to do that is by mutualizing debt.”
“Greece v. 2 already is Italy. Europe is on the verge of losing Italy; the hearts and minds of italians through a comedy of errors.”
DiEMTV presents: Evgeny Morozov, Shoshana Zuboff, Roger Waters and more!
DiEM25 TV has been bringing you fascinating content during the coronavirus crisis.
We’ve featured such greats as Noam Chomsky, Saskia Sassen, Slavoj Žižek, Astra Taylor, Brian Eno, Stefania Maurizi and Gael García Bernal. And you’ve been able to discuss issues like corona-neo-fascism, love, hope and humour in times of coronavirus, as well as the EU’s abject failure to deal with this crisis.
Here’s what DiEM25 TV has in store for you in the upcoming days:
Register to our upcoming programmes and send in your questions to our guest participants in advance or through the live chat on YouTube!
Friday, April 10, 20:00 CEST
Srećko Horvat: “The Virus Mythologies”
15 min introduction + 45 min Q&A
[Register HERE]
Saturday Night Special, April 11, 20:00 CEST
Evgeny Morozov and Renata Ávila: “Tech in the Times of the Pandemic”
15 min introduction + 45 min Q&A
[Register HERE]
Monday, April 13, 20:00 CEST
Yanis Varoufakis with Special Guest Johann Hari: “Another Now”
15 min introduction + 45 min Q&A
[Register HERE]
Tuesday, April 14, 20:00 CEST
David Graeber & Maja Kantar: Debt, Bullshit Jobs and Political Self-Organisation
15 min introduction + 45 min Q&A
[Register HERE]
Friday, April 17, 20:00 CEST
Srećko Horvat: “The Virus Mythologies”
15 min introduction + 45 min Q&A
[Register HERE]
Saturday Night Special, April 18, 20:00 CEST
Shoshana Zuboff and Renata Ávila: “COVID-1984 – Surveillance Capitalism”
15 min introduction + 45 min Q&A
[Register HERE]
Monday, April 20, 20:00 CEST
Yanis Varoufakis with Special Guest Roger Waters: “Another Now”
15 min introduction + 45 min Q&A
[Register HERE]
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