Showing posts with label Covid19 and the working class. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Covid19 and the working class. Show all posts
Saturday, January 2, 2021
The state of India is no different. India has the dubious distinction of having the second largest number of Covid cases after the United States with the number exceeding 10 million. Nearly 1,50,000 people have died due to the virus. The unplanned and hasty lockdown imposed by the Modi government plunged the economy into a deep crisis. The destruction of the economy saw millions of migrant workers trekking back to their faraway villages stalked by hunger and disease. This was mass misery inflicted by a callous government.
THE Latin term `annus horribilis’ (horrible year) has been widely and understandably used to define the year 2020 which had just ended. This is a natural description of an unprecedented year, which has seen a global pandemic – the corona virus pandemic – the comparable scale of which happened a full century ago when the “Spanish flu” caused worldwide havoc in 1918-1919.
The global pandemic also brought out in sharp relief the contradictions and the social and economic inequalities which exist in our societies. Amidst the economic depression, the super-rich have got richer. The profits of the financial corporations have zoomed up while millions have been plunged into joblessness, poverty and hunger.
The far-right BJP government’s callous imposition of a strict lockdown without preparations to cater to the migrant workers in the cities who depend on daily wages had triggered an unprecedented forced mass-migration. This pushed tens of thousands to walk hundreds of kilometers back to their villages. Dozens died on the road. The government also took advantage of the pandemic to scrap labor laws and deregulate the trade of agricultural commodities. On November 26, despite heavy repression and arrests of trade union leaders, 250 million workers were mobilized by ten central trade unions in what turned out to be arguably the largest general strike in human history. On the same day, hundreds of thousands of farmers from neighboring states arrived at the borders of Delhi, braving tear-gas, water cannons and baton charge by police as they broke the barricades erected on their way.
The ILO estimates that the global labor income has seen a 10.7% decline, compared to the same period in 2019, which itself saw the slowest economic growth since the 2008-09 crisis. This decline translates into a global labor income loss of US$3.5 trillion, which equals 5.5% of the world’s GDP during this period.
From the over 1,100 strikes in the US, averaging over three a day, to history’s largest known general strike witnessed in India, labor actions across continents in 2020 demonstrated the firm refusal of the working class to passively accept on to its shoulders the burden of an unprecedented economic that has been intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic.
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