Cartoons of the day

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Cartoon of the day

Special mention

 

Chart of the day

Bullets flyin’, helicopters, police sirens, preachers lying
Genocism, criticism, unemployment, racism. . .
That’s exactly what Hell look like

— Kendrick Lamar, “Heaven & Hell”

This morning, the U.S. Department of Labor (pdf) reported that, during the week ending last Saturday, another 1.5 million American workers filed initial claims for unemployment compensation. That’s on top of the 42.7 million workers who were laid off during the preceding eleven weeks.

Here is a breakdown of each week:

• week ending on 21 March—3.31 million

• week ending on 28 March—6.87 million

• week ending on 4 April—6.62 million

• week ending on 11 April—5.24 million

• week ending on 18 April—4.44 million

• week ending on 25 April—3.87 million

• week ending on 2 May—3.18 million

• week ending on 9 May—2.69 million

• week ending on 16 May—2.45 million

• week ending on 23 May—2.13 million

• week ending on 30 May—1.88 million

• weeks ending on 6 June—1.54 million

All told, 44.21 million American workers have filed initial unemployment claims during the past three months.

To put that into some kind of perspective, I calculated the initial claims totals for two other relevant 12-week periods: the worst point of the Second Great Depression (encompassing the weeks ending on 17, 24, and 31 January, 7, 14, 21, 28 February, 7, 14, 21, and 28 March, and 4 April 2009) and the weeks immediately preceding the current depression (so, 28 December, 4, 11, 18, and 25 January, 1, 8, 15, 22, and 29 February and 7 and 14 March 2020).

As readers can see in the chart above, the difference is stunning: 7.7 million workers filed initial claims during the worst 12-week period of 2009, 2.6 million from late December to mid-March of this year, and 44.2 million in the past twelve weeks.

Once again, keep in mind, the most recent numbers still don’t include perhaps millions of other American workers, since many states are still addressing backlogs of claims. Masses of workers have been unsuccessful in applying for unemployment insurance because state websites and phone lines are inundated and still, even now, not working correctly.

Moreover, because they’re only initial claims, the numbers also don’t include the 7.1 million American workers who were deemed officially unemployed in early March, before most of the shutdowns started.

According to the most recent report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of unemployed workers fell by 2.1 million to 21.0 million in May, leading to an official unemployment rate of 13.3 percent—although, by correcting the misclassification of a large number of workers (who were classified as employed but absent from work), the official rate would have been about 3 percentage points higher. Moreover, the surveys on which those data are based only capture those who were unemployed in mid-May.

If we allow for the fact that at least some workers have been forced to have the freedom to return to work in recent months, then the total number of fully unemployed workers is something on the order of 38.9 million.* That would mean an unemployment rate of more than 24.6 percent, which is just below the rate last seen in the first Great Depression (25 percent) and almost two and a half times the highest rate (10 percent) suffered during the Second Great Depression.**

On top of that, we should add in the workers who are involuntarily working part-time jobs—in other words, workers who would like to have full-time jobs but have been forced “for economic reasons” to accept fewer hours. The reserve army of unemployed and underemployed workers then rises to more than 49.54 million—or 31.3 percent of the U.S. labor force.

Moreover, as I argued this past Monday, millions of unemployed workers are not included in this number:

In addition to first-time job-seekers who have unable to find a job (some unknown portion of an estimated 3.8 million high-school graduates, 1 million who graduated with associate’s degrees, and 2 million with bachelor’s degrees), it doesn’t include any of the estimated 8 million undocumented workers who have lost their jobs.

Right now, no one in the White House is offering a real plan for the tens of millions of unemployed and underemployed American workers to be able to pay the rent, purchase health insurance, or get enough to eat.

 

*I used the following, perhaps overly generous, assumptions: 1 in 2 workers who were unemployed in mid-March have been able to find jobs and 2 in 10 workers who filed initial claims in the past eleven weeks have gone back to work.

**At the highest of levels of unemployment following the 2007-08 crash, there were 15.3 million jobless Americans.

Cartoon of the day

Special mention

Chart of the day

Gambling man rolls the dice, workingman pays the bill
It’s still fat and easy up on banker’s hill
Up on banker’s hill, the party’s going strong…
Down here below we’re shackled and drawn

— Bruce Springsteen, “Shackled and Drawn”

This morning, the U.S. Department of Labor (pdf) reported that, during the week ending last Saturday, another 1.9 million American workers filed initial claims for unemployment compensation. That’s on top of the 40.8 million workers who were laid off during the preceding ten weeks.

Here is a breakdown of each week:

• week ending on 21 March—3.31 million

• week ending on 28 March—6.87 million

• week ending on 4 April—6.62 million

• week ending on 11 April—5.24 million

• week ending on 18 April—4.44 million

• week ending on 25 April—3.87 million

• week ending on 2 May—3.18 million

• week ending on 9 May—2.69 million

• week ending on 16 May—2.45 million

• week ending on 23 May—2.13 million

• week ending on 30 May—1.88 million

All told, 42.65 million American workers have filed initial unemployment claims during the past eleven weeks.

To put that into some kind of perspective, I calculated the initial claims totals for two other relevant 11-week periods: the worst point of the Second Great Depression (encompassing the weeks ending on 24 and 31 January, 7, 14, 21, 28 February, 7, 14, 21, and 28 March, and 4 April 2009) and the weeks immediately preceding the current depression (so, 4, 11, 18, and 25 January, 1, 8, 15, 22, and 29 February and 7 and 14 March 2020).

As readers can see in the chart above, the difference is stunning: 6.5 million workers filed initial claims during the worst 11-week period of 2009, 2.19 million from late January to mid-March of this year, and 42.65 million in the past eleven weeks.

Once again, keep in mind, the most recent numbers still don’t include perhaps millions of other American workers, since many states are still addressing backlogs of claims. Masses of workers have been unsuccessful in applying for unemployment insurance because state websites and phone lines are inundated and still, even now, not working correctly.

Moreover, because they’re only initial claims, the numbers also don’t include the 7.1 million American workers who were deemed officially unemployed in early March, before most of the shutdowns started.

According to the most recent report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (pdf), the number of unemployed workers rose by 15.9 million to 23.1 million in April, leading to an official unemployment rate of 14.7 percent—”the highest rate and the largest over-the-month increase in the history of the series.” But the surveys on which those data are based only capture those who were unemployed in mid-April.

If we allow for the fact that at least some workers have been forced to have the freedom to return to work in recent months, then the total number of fully unemployed workers is something on the order of 36.2 million.* That would mean an unemployment rate of more than 24.1 percent, which is getting closer and closer to the rate last seen in the first Great Depression (25 percent) and almost two and a half times the highest rate (10 percent) suffered during the Second Great Depression.**

On top of that, we should add in the workers who are involuntarily working part-time jobs—in other words, workers who would like to have full-time jobs but have been forced “for economic reasons” to accept fewer hours. The reserve army of unemployed and underemployed workers then rises to more than 48.5 million—or 31 percent of the U.S. labor force.

Moreover, as Patricia Cohen reminds us, millions of unemployed workers are not included in these numbers:

Laid-off workers who have not applied for benefits and those who have left the labor force entirely are not included. Nor are any of the eight million undocumented workers who lost their jobs. They are not eligible for any benefits. Neither are new graduates just entering the labor force.

Right now, no one in the White House is offering a real plan for the tens of millions of unemployed and underemployed American workers to be able to pay the rent, purchase health insurance, or get enough to eat.

 

*I used the following, perhaps overly generous, assumptions: 1 in 2 workers who were unemployed in mid-March have been able to find jobs and 2 in 10 workers who filed initial claims in the past eleven weeks have gone back to work.

**At the highest of levels of unemployment following the 2007-08 crash, there were 15.3 million jobless Americans.

Cartoon of the day

Special mention

 

Cartoon of the day

Special mention

 

Cartoon of the day

Special mention

 

The jungle—pandemic edition

Like nursing homes, the U.S. meatpacking industry has become one of the hotspots of the novel coronavirus pandemic.

By 5 May, over 10,000 meatpacking plant workers in 29 states and working at 170 plants had tested positive for the coronavirus. At least 45 of those meat industry workers had died. The outbreaks have prompted at least 40 meat slaughtering and processing plant closures—lasting anywhere from one day to several weeks—since the start of the pandemic.

They should have been closed down and stayed closed, to protect the health and safety of meatpacking workers. But then Donald Trump, on 28 April (the day after John Tyson, the chair of the board of Tyson Foods, published a full-page ad in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette), invoked the 1950 Defense Production Act and designated the meatpacking plants as part of critical infrastructure in the United States. He thus ordered meat processing plants to stay open to protect the nation’s food supply amid the coronavirus pandemic. On top of the fact that production lines necessitate that workers stand very close together, most are low-income, hourly workers, many of them immigrants.

More than a century later, the U.S. meatpacking industry is back to The Jungle.

Upton Sinclair’s famous novel brought the difficult working and living conditions of meatpackers to light. I taught it on a regular basis in my Commodities: The Making of Market Society course, in the section on labor as a commodity. I discovered that Sinclair’s exposé, which was serialized in the socialist magazine Appeal to Reason before it was published as a single volume, had disappeared from high-school reading lists. But when students read it, it opened their eyes to the exploitation of labor in the meatpacking industry, especially when they read passages like these:

It was all robbery, for a poor man. The rich people not only had all the money, they had all the chance to get more; they had all the know-ledge and the power, and so the poor man was down, and he had to stay down . . .

All day long this man would toil thus, his whole being centered upon the purpose of making twenty-three instead of twenty-two and a half cents an hour; and then his product would be reckoned up by the census taker, and jubilant captains of industry would boast of it in their banquet halls, telling how our workers are nearly twice as efficient as those of any other country. If we are the greatest nation the sun ever shone upon, it would seem to be mainly because we have been able to goad our wage-earners to this pitch of frenzy.

Unfortunately, the reception of Sinclair’s graphic descriptions of the meatpacking industry in Chicago focused more on the quality of the food than on the working conditions, causing him later to lament that “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.”

Fortunately, conditions in the meatpacking industry did improve over time, especially when the openly left-wing United Packinghouse Workers of America engaged in a militant battle to organize workers across racial and ethnic lines and to bargain over pay and working conditions with employers. As Meagan Day explains,

For a few decades, thanks to this high degree of worker organization, meatpacking was not one of the most dangerous, difficult, and undercompensated jobs in the United States.

But then the industry itself changed, with the growth of a few very large meat-processing corporations, which in turn decided to move plants to more rural areas, where it was much harder to organize workers.*

Exactly one century after the first installment of Sinclair’s novel appeared, conditions had deteriorated so badly that Human Rights Watch, for the first time in its history, singled out a particular U.S. industry for violating basic human and worker rights. According to its report, “Blood, Sweat, and Fear: Workers’ Rights in U.S. Meat and Poultry Plants,”

Meat and poultry industry companies do not promise rose-garden workplaces, nor should it be expected of them. Turning an eight hundred pound animal or even a five pound chicken into tenders for the supermarket checkout or fast food restaurant counter is by its nature demanding physical labor in bloody, greasy surroundings. But workers in this industry face more than hard work in tough settings. They contend with conditions, vulnerabilities, and abuses which violate human rights.

Employers put workers at predictable risk of serious physical injury even though the means to avoid such injury are known and feasible. They frustrate workers’ efforts to obtain compensation for workplace injuries when they occur. They crush workers’ self-organizing efforts and rights of association. They exploit the perceived vulnerability of a predominantly immigrant labor force in many of their work sites. These are not occasional lapses by employers paying insufficient attention to modern human resources management policies. These are systematic human rights violations embedded in meat and poultry industry employment.

Today, seven companies dominate the industry (according to data from the National Provisioner)—the same companies that have been featured in recent news reports about the growing number of virus infections and temporary plant closures in rural America: Tyson, JBS, Smithfield, and so on.

These corporations and others in the contemporary meatpacking jungle only pay their workers, on average $14.05 an hour or $29,230 a year (median pay for slaughterers and meat packers in May 2019). That’s less than three-quarters (73.4 percent) of the median pay for all occupations in the United States ($19.14 an hour)—and much less even than many other groups of “essential” workers, including bus drivers ($20.69), licensed nurses ($22.83), postal service workers ($25.03), and tractor-trailer drivers ($21.76).

The fact is, even before the pandemic, giant meatpacking companies were more determined than ever to keep labor costs as low as possible and production as high as possible. This meant hiring cheap labor, maintaining intolerably high line speeds, and demanding cuts in wages and benefits from unionized facilities.

And then, once the pandemic was underway and spreading across the country, the meat-processing industry’s failure to protect its workers from the coronavirus triggered the most serious threat to U.S. meat supplies since World War II.

Now as in 1906, safe working conditions are the priority for workers on the meat-processing assembly-lines. The Trump administration has clearly sided with the corporations. The question for the rest of Americans is, are they going to respond to the crisis in the meatpacking industry with their hearts or their stomachs?

 

*According to union researcher Daniel Calamuci, writing in 2008, the United Packinghouse Workers of America eventually merged with the Amalgamated Meat Cutters in 1968 and, in 1979, they became part of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union. The new union adopted a much less militant stance. For example, when one of its union locals at a Hormel plant in Minnesota went on strike in 1985 to preserve its workers’ high wages, the national organization declined to support it.

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Gleaners and us—pandemic edition

Jean-François Millet, “The Gleaners” (ca. 1855–56)

We already had high food insecurity in this country and now we are putting another layer of need on top of it.

— Kevin M. Fitzpatrick

One of the many irrational characteristics of capitalism is that billions of tons of food go to waste while hundreds of millions of people struggle with hunger on a daily basis. And like all the other senseless attributes of the way the economy is currently organized, the mismatch between the enormous quantity of food that is available for human consumption but is not consumed and the vast number of people who are food insecure has been highlighted and heightened by the COVID-19 pandemic—especially in the United States.

Even before the pandemic, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations reported that approximately 30 percent of food produced for human consumption around the world is either lost (from post-harvest to distribution) or wasted (at retail and consumption levels) each year—while an estimated 821 million people (just below 11 percent of the world’s population) were undernourished (pdf).* And in the United States? According to the National Resources Defense Council (pdf), the degree of food waste was even higher—between 39 and 43 percent of the total U.S. food supply. At the same time, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (pdf), more than 37 million Americans (13.9 percent of households) suffered food insecurity—and less than one-third of the food that was thrown out would be enough to feed this population completely.

This senseless combination of widespread food waste and food insecurity in the United States has only worsened in recent months. On one hand, with job losses skyrocketing because of the response to the novel coronavirus pandemic, hunger is a growing issue for millions of Americans. On the other hand, farmers aren’t able to harvest and sell the food they’re growing.

 

We’ve all seen the photos and read the stories: American workers and their families are lining up outside understocked food banks while animals are being culled, mountains of produce are rotting in the fields, and crops are being plowed under.

Clearly, the capitalist food system has failed. It certainly didn’t function well before the pandemic. And now its irrationality is even more evident, as it discards tons of food while more and more workers and their families go hungry.

But there are alternatives, outside of capitalism.

Frank Döring, cafeteria of an elementary school in Vanceburg, KY

For example, many schools are continue to prepare and making available, for pick up or delivery, free meals to needy students. But the “grab-and-go process,” without much more government assistance, becomes difficult the more remote the schools and the populations they serve are. Moreover, the free meal stations and deliveries put those who travel to work, prepare the food, and deliver it at additional risk for exposure to the coronavirus.

Food pantries and food banks are also providing free food (Feeding America estimates that demand has increased an average of 70 percent, and 40 percent of those being served are new to the system) but, across the country, they’re underfunded, understaffed, and understocked. Meanwhile, farmers are donating many tons of food but they’re finding it costly to harvest and distribute the food they can’t sell.

The Agriculture Department could step in to purchase the surplus food from farmers and deliver it to needy families. However, within the Trump administration, Secretary Sonny Perdue has been very slow to respond. As a result,

The scale of produce waste is staggering. Farmers in Florida, which provides much of the fresh produce to the eastern half of the U.S. during the winter and spring, left about 75 percent of the lettuce crop unharvested, along with significant portions of the state’s sweet corn, cabbage and squash. Up to 250 million pounds of tomatoes could end up left in the fields, according to the Florida Department of Agriculture & Consumer Services. Florida officials estimate produce growers there have taken a half a billion dollar hit. In California, the industry is projected to lose more than $1 billion per month.

A fourth possibility is for an army of volunteers to pick and pack food that is ripening in the fields. And that’s what they’re beginning to do in Florida—they’re gleaning. For example, farmer Hank Scott

invited volunteer pickers with the Society of St. Andrew, a Christian hunger relief organization, to glean as much produce as they could and donate it to nearby food banks. Anything green they left behind will likely be plowed back into the ground, feeding no one and adding to the farm’s ballooning losses. . .

As the gleaners rescue vegetable after vegetable, they are both a final lifeline for desperate families and a sign of just how badly the novel coronavirus has kneecapped the systems that are supposed to keep everyone fed.

 

Because of that story, I was reminded of French Avant-garde filmmaker Agnes Varda, who focused her lens on the activity of gleaning in her remarkable 2000 film, The Gleaners and I. Beginning with Jean-François Millet’s famous depiction of “The Gleaners,” Varda documents the history (dating back to a 1554 French law that allows “the poor, the wretched, the deprived” to enter the fields once the harvest is over, and take what they wish) and current forms of gleaning (collecting the odd-shaped potato, the overripe fig, or the damaged apple and “dumpster-diving” for the supermarket product whose “sell by” date has passed). She also ruminates on her own activity as a filmmaker who, during the course of making the film, gleans from and with her diverse subjects, including rural drifters, homeless alcoholics, gypsy families living in trailers, a chef who gleans because he “likes to know where his food comes from,” and young punks who live on the street. These are all people who insist on finding a use for what capitalism has determined it has no use for.

As it turns out, the Center for Agriculture and Food Systems at Vermont Law School has created the National Gleaning Project, a clearinghouse for gleaning and food recovery-related information. They have compiled information on gleaning and food-recovery organizations in 46 states plus the District of Columbia, along with a directory of relevant federal and state laws, and conducted a series of research reports. While the two terms are often conflated, and there are many different activities included under the rubric of gleaning and food recovery, the Project emphasizes

the main intent of the practice [which] is to recover surplus food for distribution to food insecure populations, meaning there is a charitable dimension to the act.

It’s that charitable dimension—the gift, if you will—that takes gleaning and other related activities (including field gleaning, wholesale produce salvage, perishable and prepared food rescue, and non-perishable food donations, collection, and recovery) beyond capitalism.** They are all ways of reducing waste and providing food to those who need it outside a system based on private property, wage-labor, and markets. In other words, gleaning and food recovery serve both to challenge the irrationality of the capitalist food system and to create a real alternative.***

And right now, in the midst of the senselessness of widespread hunger and massive amounts of food going to waste, we need more than ever to question and escape the logic of capitalism and make sure Americans get the food they need.

 

*Considering all people in the world affected by moderate levels of food insecurity together with those who suffer from hunger, it is estimated that over 2 billion people do not have regular access to safe, nutritious, and sufficient food, including 8 percent of the population in Northern America and Europe.

**In France, since 2015, supermarkets are required by law to be charitable—to donate all unsold but edible food to charities for immediate distribution to the poor.

***There is one glaring exception: gleaning will not solve the Jungle-like problems in American meat plants. As I see it, the only alternative is to give workers a say in how meat is processed and how their labor is organized.