US Poor and Low Waged Bear Brunt of Coronavirus Pandemic

Home Care Workers Are Underpaid, Uninsured. Read Source, Mother Jones

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444,retired

The Coronavirus pandemic continues apace in the US as today’s figures show. There are at least 155,252 cases of coronavirus in the US, according to CNN and at least 2,828 people have died from it, 1218 in New York City. The US now has the most confirmed cases globally. As myself and others have pointed out, things can only get worse especially when the virus gets a grip in the homeless community.

There are 575,000 homeless people in the US and Los Angeles is home to some 70,000 of them. It is a common sight in the US these days, homeless, sometimes mentally disabled people, wandering the streets trying to survive. Tent cities within cities are commonplace. While we are told it is the aged with pre-existing conditions that are most vulnerable among the general population, for the homeless, it means everyone, as the middle aged homeless people suffer from ailments more prominent in much older members of the general population.

As with all market failures, and this health crisis is a market failure, it is the poor and the most vulnerable that will be hit hardest

The crisis among the needy is also placing pressure on an already feeble social service system that the US has. Seattle was one of the first places the virus was detected and the city’s homeless shelters, food pantries and suicide and domestic violence hotlines are being overwhelmed. Calls to Seattle’s hotlines have exploded 25% to 25,000 a month.  Workers who have been laid off have been flooding call centers trying to find the location of the nearest food banks. Another aspect of this is many of the workers in these facilities are volunteers and are not showing up during the crisis.

USNS Comfort has 1000 beds for NYC victims

A US navy ship with 1000 beds docked in NYC this morning to provide some beds and relief for an overwhelmed New Your City health care system which saw some 4000, coronavirus patients hospitalized in the city as of last week. A small outdoor hospital using tents has been constructed in Central Park and Elmhurst, a 545-bed public hospital in Queens that I went to when I first came to the US, is transferring patients without the virus to other hospitals so it can concentrate on the pandemic. As of March 25^th, doctors and nurses had only a few dozen ventilators at their disposal.

Health care workers are on the front lines of this pandemic providing vital care and on the other hand being among the first victims. “I feel like we’re all just being sent to slaughter,” said Thomas Riley, a nurse at Jacobi Medical Center in the Bronx, who has contracted the virus, along with his husband.” NY Times.  The Italian authorities have stated that 63 Italian  doctors have died so far. Throughout the US there are complaints of shortages or inadequate protection. The pace of the virus’ spread will place further burdens on health care workers and supplies. Detroit which has 1 in 3 people living in poverty has had 39 deaths and there is an ongoing debate about the prison population and the need to free those incarcerated for petty crime.

Facts For working people was contacted by a home health carer yesterday that urged us not to forget these workers that work for companies like Synergy, Home Instead and Angel Hands, home care outfits.  “I work for one….”, she writes, “….. and I'm terrified to transmit the virus to a person in the homes I go to. The company didn't give us any protective equipment and won’t change the way we work, a few hours in many different houses.”.

“There many of those companies not just the three I mention here.

There are some nationwide and each region has franchises. Seniors pay them to stay home and get help from a non-medical care giver like me who are normally paid $25 hour, we get $12. I go from one home to another and the only thing that they have done is tell us to read what the CDC says. I’m in a very Republican State and you can imagine how people behave. Some say it’s not true, it’s a plot against Trump, the economy, etc. Nothing original.

We are on our own. I try to give.my boss, the owner of the franchise, some ideas like concentrating our hours to fewer clients but it is not working, there’s no way he will take measures. Of course we have no masks and we don't have sick pay leave. Some of us have worked 70 hour weeks.”

Another home carer: “When I did not accept some shifts, like very short ones , they have a way of punishment, they give you less hours. They get $40  an hour for a1 hour visit, we get 16 from that.”

Meanwhile, the home care industry, this is what medical care is in the US, an industry, is becoming a popular target for budding entrepreneurs’ and investors: “It’s not uncommon to build a million-dollar homecare business in just a few years if that’s the goal.”, one site boasts. “In fact, the in home care market in the United States is an immense and growing $89 Billion dollar industry.”, says another. Despite low pay and poor conditions, combined, Medicare and Medicaid are expected to comprise more than 78.0% of industry revenue in 2019, according to a report on the industry. So the working class pays all round.

As millions of workers are laid off (Macy’s is laying off most of its employees in NYC) the burden of those “essential” workers will intensify and threaten their health even more. Gun stores are fighting to stay open as “essential services”, that’s the U.S. Gun manufactures and others are lobbying the body politic for all sorts of public assistance and to be classified as essential.

Prior to the taking over of the mass media by COVID-19, the world was experiencing a continuous series of mass protests, strikes and resistance to the capitalist offensive. From France to India, Chile to Lebanon, Iran, Egypt, China, workers have been fighting back. Putin was facing huge protests.

We are experiencing here fear, insecurity and stress about what will happen? What will be next? But alongside this we see the powerful tendency to unity and solidarity between those whose labor power makes society function. Indigenous people throughout the world have come together in online signing groups. Germans have sung protest songs in solidarity with their Italian neighbors. Four hundred thousand people volunteered to help the National Health Service in the UK, a public service starved of funds by the British ruling class.

Yesterday I was walking through a normally crowded shopping center and stopped to buy a coffee. They have a table by the front door take your order and bring it out to you. As I was ordering my coffee a couple walked up and asked if the place would heat up their food for them in their microwave. I could see that, by training, the young woman serving us hesitated, she is not supposed to do stuff like that. But she took their food and asked if they would like her to put it in another container. No chain would do that normally and the young woman might get in trouble if she did. After all, if you help someone and things go wrong you might get sued.

Workers at Amazon on the US east coast walked off the job today demanding protective equipment, a healthier work environment and more money. The same with sanitation workers in Pittsburg PA, public sector workers in California and this trend will spread as “essential” workers especially will not sit idle as they sense their new power. They have always been essential, just treated like dirt. In the US especially, where the ideology of the free market is so powerful and the media so controlled and censored, selfishness, individualism and the phony “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” has reigned, but that door is closing behind us.

Lessons will be learned here; that’s what great social shocks do. The anger at politicians who sold stock right before the market crash are vilified. Jeff Bezos who is worth some $150 billion and has asked for assistance is mocked. The airlines have asked for $250 billion after pocketing billions themselves for years and slashing employees wages and benefits in the process.

Workers will see that government intervention at the level we see now, especially as Trump forces GM to produce ventilators, would be savaged in the mass media as communism if it were for hospitals or transportation or other essential services.  They will see that other countries have weathered this storm better because they have more social services and the so-called free market is not reliable at all in a pinch.

Prior to all this the anger beneath US society and more and more above it, was reaching a pitch. The mass killings, the suicides (especially of veterans) the homelessness, the drug addiction and homelessness are all part of the capitalist crisis. People who have never been on unemployment, never been to a public hospital, never filed for assistance are living a different life thrust on them in a matter of months or weeks.

In a period of ten years, the US working class has been forced to rescue capitalism and pull it back from the abyss twice. We will pay for this bailout don’t forget and it is capitalism they have at the head of the soup line.  Among older workers, the taxpayer rescue of the Savings and Loans in the 1990’s is not forgotten. And in terms of living standards and workers wages and benefits on the job, we have suffered decades of decline.

In these situations, as Roger Silverman stressed in a piece yesterday, with the onset of the coronavirus, “The flimsy tissue of capitalist ‘civilization’ stands exposed.”

It has long been exposed to millions of people of course, our own poor and especially those in the former colonial countries and what are referred to as the “emerging economies”. The reality is mind you; these countries never really emerge.  When we add the global response beginning to take root with regard to the catastrophe of climate change we are undoubtedly in a new world order and the anger will find organizational expression at some point.