Politicians fear the people: Workers win unemployment benefit expansion

Without pressure from the working class, capitalists and the politicians who serve them will concede nothing. This pandemic has exposed how broken the system is, and how deadly the consequences are. We stand in solidarity with the striking workers and the unemployed in these and future crucial struggles. The 3.3 million people who filed for unemployment benefits as the Coronavirus shutdown began have been joined by an additional 6.6 million newly-unemployed workers in the latest weekly Labor Department statistics. And there are likely millions more who did not file with the Labor Department because websites and call centers were inaccessible or they are unjustly denied benefits due to immigration status. The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis has estimated that 47 million people could lose jobs in the next quarter as a result of the pandemic. The resulting 32.1% unemployment rate would far exceed the 24.9% experienced in the Great Depression. The deadly impact of the pandemic is not surprising, given that tens of millions of people, many of them barely making ends meet, have no access to health care and medical insurance is often linked to employment. Add mass layoffs as businesses grind to a halt, and a purely medical threat becomes a full-blown crisis exposing profound structural flaws in a profit-driven system. The pandemic makes it obvious that workers keep society running, not the bosses. Read the full article: https://www.liberationnews.org/politicians-fear-the-people-workers-win-unemployment-benefit-expansion/