Tag: Angry Workers World

The UK has been hard hit by the Covid crisis, both in economic and in human terms. When we started writing this article in January, the numbers of people who died with Covid passed 100,000. In 2020 the UK economy experienced a slump of nearly 10%, a 300 year record. The reasons for the severity of the crisis are pretty obvious: decades of austerity and outsourcing of public services, which leaves departments that are supposed to track and trace Covid cases with outdated Windows Excel programs, resulting in thousands of results getting lost; a similarly degenerated political class which is incapable of holding the complex web of public and private departments of the science and health sector together and instead dishes out contracts to their similarly incapable public school-mates; an increasingly failing local state, which survived recent years through ever tighter entanglement with the real estate bubble, and which now has to continue sacking front line staff such as social and community workers; last but not least, a fractured working class, on low wages and one of the most meagre sick pay regimes in developed countries. This forces many to continue working despite the health risk. Here, the health and economic crisis are joined at the hip. An economy that depends heavily on a regime of long hours, low wages and low productivity is fragile and increases social inequality by keeping on squeezing. People living in poorer areas of the UK are 2.5 times more likely to die with Covid. The lockdown regime has further accelerated social inequality: while the household savings ratio increased by a record 20% amongst the middle- and high-income strata, debt amongst the working class escalates.