Solidarity 544, 21 April 2020

Social distancing for supermarket workers

Protective screens have been put up between till operators in most supermarkets, in order to enable them to open twice as many tills while ostensibly adhering to social distancing guidelines, but many staff feel like they just don’t go far enough. According to a senior USDAW official, the union approved their use in Tesco (where I work) without even seeing the screens, and upon seeing them doubts were raised about why they had been approved in the first place. The policy pushed by USDAW and adopted across many of the supermarket chains is that it is to remain only one checkout operator per...

Sweden in the pandemic

Swedish policy in the pandemic has been an outlier in two ways. Alone in Europe, it has not had a lockdown, only social distancing guidelines. And the policy has been explicitly set by the public health scientists. The outcome is unclear: Sweden's cases and deaths show the same sort of graphs as other countries, worse than some, not as bad as others, and with similar doubts about the accuracy of the figures. Some scientists in Sweden are calling for policies there more like the UK's. The Left Party is calling for "compensation to people in risk groups who cannot work from home", "increased...

Leaked Labour report shows two scandals

Much comment on the leaked 850-page Labour Party report leaked on 12 April has focused on its extensive and vivid documentation of the already-known fact that from 2015 the hold-overs from the Blair-Brown era in the Labour Party machine were viciously and unscrupulously hostile to - indeed out to sabotage - the Labour Party's new elected leader, Jeremy Corbyn, and to more or less anyone "left" or Corbyn-supporting. But the report is entitled “The work of the Labour Party’s Governance and Legal Unit in relation to antisemitism, 2014-2019”, and that, too, deserves analysis. At the moment, it...

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