by IUF Asia/Pacific | Jun 3, 2021 | COVID-19, Land & Freedom, Right to a Safe Workplace
With the surge of COVID-19 in cities across India, millions of migrant workers returned to their villages in rural areas. They feared a repeat of the 2020 crisis when they lost their jobs and livelihoods during the strict lockdown. Around 20 per cent of migrant workers who returned in 2020, stayed in their villages. This added to the employment crisis in rural areas.
In this crisis the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) has proven to be a vital source of livelihood for rural communities. In most cases it is the only work available for rural workers.
NREGA provides 100 days of paid employment on public works for unemployed rural workers. This work includes building public wells, irrigation ditches, and working on their own land. This in turn supports access to potable water and food security in rural communities.
NREGA applications
The IUF-affiliated Gujarat Agricultural Labour Union (GALU) assisted more than 20,000 members and returned migrant workers in six tribal districts to gain paid work under NREGA. Rural workers in tribal districts are the most vulnerable, with a high rate of out-migration due to poverty. After returning to their villages the paid work under NREGA is crucial to their livelihoods.
COVID-19 testing at NREGA sites
GALU ensures that NREGA pays for marginal farmers to farm their own land for food crops and rural communities have access to food grains under National Food Security Act. While promoting mask wearing, distancing and washing hands at NREGA worksites, GALU also arranged for COVID-19 testing with local authorities.
GALU is now focused on promoting vaccine awareness and access to vaccines. GALU is organizing vaccination drives in rural communities through its awareness campaign and arranging free & safe transportation to vaccination centres for women workers. Initially this transportation will be arranged for 2,000 women.
In the COVID-19 era NREGA will continue to play a vital role in rural workers’ access to the right to food and nutrition and the protection of livelihoods. GALU along with other IUF-affiliated unions such as SEWA are demanding that NREGA coverage is extended to 200 days of paid work.
by IUF Asia/Pacific | Jun 3, 2021 | COVID-19, Land & Freedom, Right to a Safe Workplace, Women Unions & Power
In the early stages of the pandemic in 2020, women’s self-organized Water, Sanitation & Health Committees on tea plantations in West Bengal and Assam included COVID-19 awareness in their ongoing fight for health and safety rights.
From April 2020 they ensured physical distancing and wearing masks, assisted home-based workers to make three-layered masks and distributed them to workers in the plantation. They also formed teams to inspect company-run hospitals for pandemic preparedness and met with the plantation management to secure quarantine and isolation facilities in the plantations.
The women’s Water, Sanitation & Health Committees are now playing a vital role in encouraging workers and their families to be vaccinated. They met with the management in plantations in Assam and West Bengal to ensure equitable and safe access to vaccines within the plantations.
The women’s committees are also working closely with government women health workers (ASHA workers) to ensure that when vaccines are available, plantation workers are ready and willing to be vaccinated.
The women’s committees will also maintain a list of names and dates to ensure workers and their families return for their second dose.
A Water, Sanitation & Health Committee member in the Nowera Nuddy tea plantation in West Bengal commented: “Despite the shortage of vaccines, we are getting some. So we must make sure that as many as people as possible in the plantation are vaccinated. No vaccine allotted for the plantation should be returned unused.”
So far 146 workers and family members in the Nowera Nuddy tea plantation are fully vaccinated.
by IUF Asia/Pacific | May 26, 2021 | COVID-19, Education & Training, Women Unions & Power
The recent surge in COVID-19 in India has had a terrible impact on rural areas. Agricultural workers, small and marginal farmers and their communities are faced with a neglected, under-funded and under-staffed rural health care infrastructure, and as a result suffer higher rates of illness and fatalities. Due to the role of union leaders and organizers as community leaders taking charge in this crisis and trying to ensure access to both health care and food security, they need to be physically present to represent, petition and demand on behalf of their members and their families. As is so common in villages and rural areas, access to livelihood programs, food rights and social protection must be negotiated with the authorities and the role of union leaders and organizers is vital. At the same time, this puts them on frontline in this pandemic, taking much greater risk.
As leaders they also play a vital role in promoting wearing masks, washing hands and distancing to slow the spread, and to be vaccinated against COVID-19.
In response, the IUF Asia/Pacific Regional Organization is supporting women leaders and organizers in villages in several states in India. Through the IUF Asia/Pacific Regional Solidarity Fund and the special contribution of the United Workers Union (UWU) in Australia, we are able to support thousands of women leaders and organizers in rural areas as frontline workers in the fight against COVID-19.
The IUF-affiliated Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) through their VimoSEWA co-operative provides COVID-19 health insurance for SEWA women organizers and leaders who are involved in COVID-19 safety awareness, livelihood protection and vaccine awareness. Under this scheme anyone who tests positive for COVID-19 receives immediate cash assistance. This helps to meet basic needs during quarantine, including food and medicine, and is crucial for them being able to support their members.
There is an urgent need to get members and their communities vaccinated as soon as vaccines are available. SEWA Madhya Pradesh is organizing COVID-19 safety and vaccine awareness programs to reach out to rural communities in 62 villages in three districts through mobile vans to give information on COVID-19 testing and vaccines that will benefit around 10,000 people. Since SEWA Madhya Pradesh is trusted in these villages, this campaign is proving effective against the fake news that was causing vaccine hesitancy or anti-vaccine sentiment. There is dramatic increase in the number of people in these villages signing up for vaccination.
Women in villages are often unable to reach vaccination centers due to the lack of safe public transport or dependence on male relatives for transport (where vaccine hesitancy among men effectively denies women access to vaccination). In response SEWA is also organizing free & safe transportation to vaccination centres. Initially this transportation will be provided for 1,600 women. By providing free & safe transportation, an important obstacle is removed and allows union leaders and organizers to finally break through vaccine hesitancy in rural areas.
by IUF Asia/Pacific | May 1, 2021 | COVID-19, Social Justice
Hidayat Greenfield, IUF Asia/Pacific Regional Secretary
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.
Notes
[1] Reasserting collective rights and taking collective social action in the COVID-19 era – IUF Asia/Pacific (iufap.blog) 27 August 2020, vulnerability, insecurity and the future of work – IUF Asia/Pacific (iufap.blog) 16 October 2020.
[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.
[4] OECD, Sovereign Borrowing Outlook for OECD Countries 2021, OECD, 2021.
[5] Institute of International Finance, Global Debt Monitor COVID Drives Debt Surge—Stabilization Ahead, 27 February 2021.
[6] Hickel, J., Sullivan, D., Zoomkawala, H., “Plunder in the post-colonial era: Quantifying drain from the global South through unequal exchange, 1960-2018”, New Political Economy, 30 March 2021.
[7] UNCTAD, Trade and Development Report 2020: From Global Pandemic to Prosperity for All – Avoiding Another Lost Decade, UNCTAD, 2020
[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.
