Karl Leffme is a socialist in New York CIty.
New York governor Andrew Cuomo has issued an executive order requiring all nonessential workers to stay home. But construction workers are still being forced to build luxury condos — more evidence that for capital, high-priced real estate is more important than workers’ lives.
Crises like the one we’re in upend the social order, reveal long-festering conflicts, and throw open the doors to futures both bleak and transformative. We can emerge from this crisis a more just society.
For decades, America’s hospitals have been underfunded and understaffed in the name of efficiency. An examination of conditions at one public hospital in Oakland show us how unprepared this austerity-starved health care system is for what’s to come.
A single-payer system in the United States would have meant a more coordinated public health response to coronavirus crises and free and universal health care to all those who need it, like Canadians have received. Instead, our response has been patchwork, uncoordinated, and insufficient — putting millions of lives unnecessarily at risk.
The coronavirus pandemic has revealed a simple fact: it’s low-wage workers like cleaners, cashiers, and care workers who make our society run — not bankers, landlords, or CEOs.
For years, Emmanuel Macron has worked to get rid of the 35-hour workweek and worker protections from unfair dismissal. Today, his government is using the coronavirus lockdown as a pretext to push ahead with this agenda — and allow bosses to unilaterally undermine labor conditions.
The airline industry will not survive the coronavirus. Now is the time to nationalize it — and use this moment to chart a course to a low-carbon future.
Australian workers need an economic bailout to save them from a coronavirus-induced depression. Instead, Scott Morrison’s right-wing government is using the state to attack unions and shovel money to corporations.
Our new political education series, Stay at Home, launches this Thursday at 6 PM EST on our YouTube channel, with special guest Mike Davis.
Even before the coronavirus, the United States’ sanctions against Iran were unconscionable. But now, with one person dying of coronavirus every ten minutes in Iran, the sanctions are killing untold numbers of people. They must end now.
Bernie Sanders can’t continue campaigning as usual, and he certainly can’t drop out of the race. We desperately need Bernie to retool his entire operation to demand a robust government response to the coronavirus — a response the Democratic Party will never spearhead themselves.
Before we hand over billions and possibly trillions of dollars to corporations that have proven time and again that they value profits above all else, we should take a pause. There is time to put people first.
Boris Johnson has always fantasized about being his generation’s Winston Churchill. With his destructive bungling of the response to the coronavirus crisis, he is shaping up to be the British George W. Bush.
Jails and prisons will inevitably prolong the COVID–19 outbreak and increase the rate of infection. Any rational response to the crisis must include a coordinated national effort to get as many people out of jail as possible — fast.
As the COVID-19 pandemic intensifies, our ruling classes are coming to the conclusion that in the contest between loss of profit and loss of life, they choose death.
Joe Biden just abdicated national leadership by disappearing for a week in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic. According to mainstream media, it’s no big deal.
Labour MP Navendu Mishra spoke to Jacobin about the UK government’s feeble response to coronavirus — and why workers with precarious income and housing need help now
Cuba is caricatured by the Right as a totalitarian hellhole. But its response to the coronavirus pandemic — from sending doctors to other countries to pioneering anti-viral treatments to converting factories into mask-making machines — is putting other countries, even rich countries, to shame.
Because self-isolation hurts corporate profits, billionaires are calling to end the too-limited public health measures taken so far by the US government. Unless we take action, Trump might heed their advice — and enormous numbers of people could die as a result.
Some of the first US cases of coronavirus came from Washington nursing homes. We spoke to a nursing home worker and in-home care worker in the state about what it’s like providing care in the midst of a pandemic, and the brutal low-wage working conditions, worker shortages, and lack of decent health care that can only worsen the crisis.