Despite political repression and restrictions on rallies and public activities, HKCTU organized a public event on On May 1st, International Workers’ Day. The public exhibition and leafleting drew public support despite a heavy police presence. The activity raised awareness of the struggle for worker and trade union rights and the imprisonment of trade unionits fighting for democracy. Police stormed the public event at the last minute in a failed attempt to create fear. [See Times of Turbulence, Our Call to Resistance: HKCTU’s statement on International Workers’ Day 2021] The IUF Asia/Pacific Regional Organization conveyed a message of congratulations to HKCTU for their courage in celebrating International Workers’ Day.
As part of their International Workers’ Day avtivities and rallies across the region IUF members included solidarity for the workers of Hong Kong and Myanmar in their May 1st message.
Lee Cheuk Yan, General Secretary of HKCTU, was sentenced to 14 months in prison for two cases of unapproved assembly of “8.18” and “8.31” in 2019. This year, he need to missed May Day activities rarely. His wife “Sister Ngor” Tang Yin Ngor [Elizabeth Tang] visited her 96-year-old mother-in-law yesterday. When Mama Lee asked about her son, she laughed and said, “Today is May 1st (yesterday), and he is going to have a parade.” Mama Li nodded, thinking of her son parades on the streets every Labor Day. Sister Ngor said that her mother-in-law was suffering from dementia. She did not know that there was no parade on Labor Day this year, nor Lee Cheuk Yan had already been in jail. Sister Ngor appeared at the HKCTU Street Station yesterday afternoon to give out flyers. Reminding everyone do not forget Lee Cheuk Yan.
64-year-old Sister Ngor is the general secretary of the International Domestic Workers Federation. She met Lee Cheuk Yan at the Christian Industrial Committee in 1982. Since 1983, this pair of labor movement lovers has celebrated May 1st Labor Day together. Recalling the past Labor Day, they were often very busy. Manage the process of parade applications, supplies, vehicles, etc. Lee Cheuk Yan got up at 7 o’clock in that morning and accepted a radio interview. “Labor Day is a day for workers, and it should let workers’ leaders speaking.” Her husband managed the parade, and she organized foreign domestic helpers joined the parade, “HKCTU mobilized all members on Labor Day. The people feel the strength and unite with the workers and others fields. The people know that everyone is not fighting alone.”
However, this year, Lee Cheuk Yan is in the Lai Chi Kok Reception Center. The Labor Day parade was not approved. The radio interview was the director of Food and Health Bureau Chan Siu Chee and the director of Civil Service Bureau Nip Tak Kuen. The foreign domestic helpers were busy queuing for testing COVID-19. Sister Ngor got up and went for a walk in the park. Afterward, she went to visit Lee Cheuk Yan’s mother who suffers from dementia. Lee’s mother asked her son as usual, and Sister Ngor smiled and replied, “Today is May Day, and he has a parade.” Sister Ngor said that she sometimes lied about “(Lee Cheuk Yan) has already come yesterday”, and sometimes said that he was too busy. Mama Lee did not read the news very much, and she would forget it even if she read it. So she still doesn’t know her son is in prison. “It might be a kind of happiness for her.”
Sister Ngor stood silently at the HKCTU Street Station at Kwai Chung Plaza and handed out leaflets at midnight. She was greatly encouraged when passerby received the leaflets. She described this as a reflection of “the heart is not dead.” As for whether she would worry that there will be no May Day parades in the future, she said that the May Day parades have been peaceful since 1983, and there is no reason not to be approved. Yesterday morning, she received a message from a worker saying that she will wait for Lee’s released from prison next year. Even she is carrying crutch or shitting on wheelchair; she has to walk on the streets on Labor Day.
Last Friday, Sister Ngor visited Lee Cheuk Yan. Lee also missed Labor Day and he has wrote the May Day declaration. Therefore, she firmly believes that her husband will be with everyone even if he is not on the street. “I hope everyone will not forget him.” Lee Cheuk Yan was sentenced to imprisonment on April 16, and that day was Friday. She went to work as usual on Monday, because she told herself to live as usual and do what she should do, and at the same time urge everyone to “hold on.” Lee Cheuk Yan will be transferred to Shek Pik Prison this week. May 26 is the wedding anniversary of them. It is Wednesday, and Shek Pik Prison is not allowed to visit on Wednesdays. Sister Ngor did not complain, but smiled helplessly.
Sister Ngor said that she had built up an optimistic attitude from the labor movement. She recalled that the number of May Day demonstrations in the years after the return in 1997 was not large, but the trade union continued to organize, mobilize, and built a solid foundation. In 2005, Korea farmers arrived Hong Kong to launch anti-WTO demonstrations, it has indirectly stimulated the local labor movement. She said: “We understand that labor movement is just like anyone’s destiny. There are good and bad. Don’t be discouraged at the bad time. You have to believe it will change. You can always try your best to do what you can do. When the timing is better, I’m already collapsed; therefore this good timing is still useless.”
There can be no doubt that the COVID-19 pandemic and the prolonged crisis we face for the next decade exposes the vulnerability and weaknesses of the prevailing political and economic system.[1] It also exposes how our values have been displaced: individualism over collectivism; economic growth over social justice; consumption over environment. But in most cases, it simply means there are no values at all.[2] Over the last 45 years the fundamental tenets of neoliberalism have gone from anti-establishment ideas and ‘radical’ policy to become the everyday logic within which virtually everything is decided.[3]
In 2020 we saw so clearly how neoliberalism created the vulnerabilities that allowed a zoonotic disease to become the worst global health crisis in 100 years and the most severe economic decline since the 1930s. Yet in 2021 we see international and national policies on health and recovery still operating within the iron cage of neoliberalism. We cannot save lives and livelihoods unless it is profitable. We cannot provide health care and social protection unless it is a commodity. The universal human rights to food and nutrition, housing, health care and education exist only as an individual right to participate in the market – to buy these as commodities. It is a product in the economy, not a service to society.
Even what appears as public and free now (COVID-19 vaccines) is simply an instalment plan. The costs are added to the national debt to be paid by future generations.
In the OECD countries, governments borrowed USD 18 trillion from financial markets in 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This is a 61% (USD 6.8 trillion) increase over 2019. It is the highest single increase in government borrowing in history. In 2021, this government borrowing will reach USD 19 trillion. [4] However, 25% of the money borrowed in 2020 will mature before the end of 2021, requiring even more borrowing. With an average term to maturity of 7.7 years, the rest will be repayable just as we are trying to come out of the 10-year global recession.
Combining this government debt with private sector debt, the pandemic response in 2020 led to increased borrowing of USD 24 trillion, with total global debt now at USD 281 trillion. This 355% more than the total dollar value of all goods and services created (i.e., the total sum of global GDP).[5] This is not an argument against public spending in a time of crisis, but the basis for concern about the debt cycle and more structural adjustment in future. We should also expect another financial crisis in Europe and Asia-Pacific, including the impending banking and mortgage crisis in China.
The repeated cycle of debt, crisis and structural adjustment is already familiar for less developed countries. This occurred in the context of a massive shift in wealth from South to North – from developing to developed countries. A new study quantifies this shift in wealth at USD 62 trillion from 1960 to 2018. If lost growth is included, the amount is USD 152 trillion.[6] The biggest shift in wealth occurred during structural adjustment under the neoliberal policies of the IMF and World Bank in the 1980s and 1990s.
The same structural adjustment forced the privatization and commercialization of hospitals and health care, water, everything. Now these countries are also borrowing to finance health care and to order patented vaccines.
The pharmaceutical companies praised for their COVID-19 vaccines are today fighting against moves by governments the remove of patent protection and allow the generic, mass production of vaccines. These vaccines are a commodity to be sold for profit, not a public good. Governments can buy them and make them available to citizens for free. But they cannot manufacture them to make them freely available to all.
So today we are not seeing a restoration of public health care and public services through government spending after 20 years of privatization and commercialization. We are seeing the costs nationalized spread out over the next 20 years of debt repayment. The financial markets are cashing in on human suffering on a massive scale.
The UNCTAD Trade and Development 2020 report warns that if we maintain austerity policies (meaning the neoliberal policies that do not allow public spending on social protection and public goods and services), then we face “a lost decade” from now until 2030. Increased global unemployment, reduced social spending and social protection, and declining real wages risks “… a transfer of income from workers to profit earners of approximately USD 40 trillion by 2030”.[7]
Preventing such a massive transfer of income from workers to profit earners is surely our most important political task, alongside tackling climate change and preventing the next pandemic.
To stop this massive shift in income from workers to profit earners, we need to restore public goods and services; increase social protection and increase government spending and public investment, including in the IUF sectors. To do this governments need to cancel national debt and restore the tax base. At a minimum this requires and end to tax havens and tax holidays, restoring corporate taxes, and re-introducing a capital gains tax and regulatory instruments such as the Tobin tax.[8]
A significant part of this public spending and investment must be used to tackle climate change and biodiversity loss. This can be done in the context of addressing the disease drivers (which includes unsustainable agriculture and food systems). We could develop organizing and collective action on both climate and biodiversity and preventing the next pandemic. This is the COVID-19 era in which the next pandemic is already taking shape. Nothing has been done yet to tackle the human-mediated disease drivers that will cause the next pandemic.[9] So it is not a matter of if, but when.
[2] As Dee Hock, former chief of the Visa bank-card operation, observed: ”It’s not that people value money more but that they value everything else so much less – not that they are more greedy but that they have no other values to keep greed in check. They don’t know what else to value.” Quoted in “The money society”, Fortune, July 6, 1987.
[3] In turning the academic ideas of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman into a political program, Thatcher and Reagan were considered radicals within their respective political parties. Now it is mainstream thinking today, even within the social democratic and labour left.
[8] UNEP, Preventing the Next Pandemic – Zoonotic diseases and how to break the chain of transmission, UNEP, July 2020. The seven human-mediated factors identified as “disease drivers” are related directly and indirectly to activities in the IUF sectors: 1) increasing human demand for animal protein; 2) unsustainable agricultural intensification; 3) increased use and exploitation of wildlife; 4) unsustainable utilization of natural resources accelerated by urbanization, land use change and extractive industries; 5) increased travel and transportation; 6) changes in food supply; 7) climate change.
On International Workers’ Day we will have all sorts of demands in different countries, depending on different situations. But I think what unites us is that we know that working people deserve better. We know that we need to come together to build the economic, political and social power to make the changes needed so that we will never again face a pandemic like this and a crisis like this. So that we will never again see such suffering and hardship on this scale.
We need to ensure that everyone has access to universal free health care and that everyone’s jobs and incomes and livelihoods are protected. We must ensure that there are public goods and services to provide for us. We need to rebuild quality education, quality housing, quality healthcare. And the only way to rebuild that is to ensure there is corporate taxation, capital gains tax – that we tax the rich. We must shift wealth to working people. We must shift wealth to all the public services and public goods that are needed by working people. This must happen.
It’s no longer a policy debate. It’s absolutely a matter of our survival and this pandemic has shown us that.
Links to the video message with subtitles in different languages:
In the face of brutal political repression, our sisters and brothers in Hong Kong and Myanmar cannot mobilize and rally freely on May 1st, 2021, International Workers’ Day. We ask all unions to include their voices and demands in your rallies. Our sisters and brothers cannot be silenced. We will add our voices and demand that democracy and democratic rights are restored in Myanmar and Hong Kong. We will show our relentless determination to defend workers’ freedom and rights in Myanmar and Hong Kong!
