BERNIE SANDERS recently highlighted the fact that Amazon owner Jeff Bezos, who already has one of the largest fortunes the world has ever seen, is calling for an end to the hazard pay rises that Amazon warehouse workers have received, despite hundreds of them being infected with the virus.  

Bezos is so wealthy, and his firm has flourished so much in the shutdown, that his wealth has increased by $30 billion during the pandemic. 

He could easily afford to make these payments out of his own bank balance and would barely notice it.  

Instead, he wants to cut pay and increase the ability to drive his workers even harder.

Bezos is not alone. Early on in this crisis Waitrose faced uproar when it tried to impose time off for sickness as holiday entitlement.  
A whole string of big companies, some of them household names, stand accused of trying to force their employees to work even though they are on furlough.

Most outrageously, it is reported that a string of Tory donors, which means big businesses, have been lobbying the government hard for a return to work.  

One newspaper reported that Sir Graham Brady, chair of the influential Tory back-bench 1922 Committee, had lobbied government on behalf of employers to get people back to work.  

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Tellingly, there was no consideration of the likely health implications. It was not even mentioned.

Well, the donors, the big businesses and the Tory backwoodsmen have got their way.  

The government is “encouraging” workers who cannot work from home to go to work, while the rest can work at home.  

Logically, that is a recipe to get almost the entire workforce back to work one way or another.  

It remains the case that, although the numbers are slowly declining, we are still experiencing thousands of new cases a day and hundreds of additional deaths.  

At the very least the easing of the lockdown is likely to slow the current rate of decline in new cases and new deaths.  

Even more people will become ill, and some will die unnecessarily as a result.

In addition, there is no adequate method to contain new outbreaks now that the lockdown has ended.  

The World Health Organisation has taught us all that this means a system of tracking all new cases, tracing their contacts, testing them all and placing in isolation those who test positive.  

This is how to shift from lockdown, whether it is province-, region- or city-wide, to individual lockdown or quarantine of those at risk.  

But the government has moved ahead to end the lockdown before any of this is in place. This is all in the interests of the “Tory donors.”

It is also completely false to claim that there is no compulsion in Boris Johnson’s advice.  

There are always unscrupulous employers who will attempt to force people back to work. 

In any event, many people are struggling on their full wages and soon reach dire straits when their pay is reduced to 80 per cent.

It should be clear that the advisory nature of the government’s policy is pure hokum if organised workers decided, that, no, they do not want to return to work and risk death.  

This is the position the teachers’ unions now find themselves in. The unions, their members and their leaders are being hounded by the Tory press and the BBC for daring to suggest that they will not return to work when there is a significant risk of illness and even death for themselves, others school workers, parents and pupils. 

This means the actual government policy is “you are only advised to return to work, but if you collectively decided not to return, the heavens will be rained down on you.”  

Experienced trade unionists know that, if support for any major action or policy is limited, there will always be attempts to set up new “associations” or “councils” of workers to take advantage of divisions.  

But the teachers are united behind their unions’ extremely militant proposition that they don’t want to risk death at work.  

Other unions can take heart from this, as for the vast majority of people life and death trumps all other considerations of pay and conditions.

That is why I was keen to sign the statement for the Socialist Campaign Group of Labour MPs.  

Class war is being pursued in response to the coronavirus crisis, and the key class warriors in this country and elsewhere are big business, their political representatives and their media supporters.  
Workers who oppose being forced back to work are simply defending their rights, including the right to life.

The loss of any life is highly regrettable. The mounting death toll in this country hides the human tragedies in every case. Their magnitude is an indictment of this government.

But within those figures we should note who is bearing the brunt of this crisis. The Office for National Statistics shows us that people who live in deprived areas are far more likely to die than those in well-to-do ones.  

Many categories of manual or low-paid labour are also more likely to die than managerial or higher clerical ones.  

Partly because of the carnage that has been allowed in our care homes, the elderly are far more likely to die. And of course, members of the black and Asian communities are also disproportionately hit.  

Each of these is a scandal in themselves. But taken together it is clear that the government’s general back-to-work order means they are willing to allow even more deaths of poorer people, lower-paid workers, the vulnerable and black and Asian people.  

This is an attack on the whole of the working class and the oppressed. We must unite to support every action to resist it.

Diane Abbott is MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington.