The following open letter was issued by workers of the Hotel Transamérica chain in Brazil, who are putting out a series of demands to ensure their safety during the COVID-19 pandemic.

NYC Mayor Bill De Blasio’s treatment of the NYC Public Schools is an indictment of capitalism’s prioritization of profits over the wellbeing and safety of its youth and workers.

In order to understand what is to come it is necessary to understand what came before. In January and February 2020 the Fightback editorial board drafted the following perspectives document. This piece outlined the general processes in Canadian politics and economy in order to orient the activity of revolutionaries. Most notably it detailed the coming economic crash that would impact Canada especially hard. We said that all this crash needed was a spark to set it off, but we didn’t know what that spark would be or exactly when it would strike. Now we know that the spark was the COVID-19 pandemic.

At the end of 2019, the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) announced a drop in unemployment from 12.3 percent in 2018 to 11.9 percent in 2019, that is, a 0.4 percent reduction. This change is not only insignificant, it’s also distorted: over the same period the number of discouraged workers, who gave up looking for work, increased by 1.4 percent. Informal workers – those without any kind of contract or self-employed – increased significantly, reaching a record number of 41 percent of workers who have some occupation. In practice, this means that unemployment has not decreased. On the contrary, it has led to discouragement or dragged workers into a precarious work

Workers from the Alimentos Salva Foods Company – located in the port of La Guaira – which packages food products coming from abroad that are later distributed by the Local Committees of Supply and Production (CLAP), have sent an denunciation to the editorial board of Lucha de Clases about the unsafe and unhealthy conditions in which they have been forced to work.

The Argentine comrades of Corriente Socialista Militante discuss the economic and social impact of the coronavirus. The workers cannot be made to pay for this disaster! They will not die so the bosses can continue to enrich themselves!

This statement by the El Salvadorian comrades of Bloque Popular Juvenil criticises the limited measures taken by the government to fight the coronavirus, particularly those that undermine democratic rights. Non-essential production must be halted, health services adequately supported, and the population protected. Make the bosses pay!

"We are facing one of the greatest challenges in our history," said Iván Duque on Sunday, 15 March referring to the health alarm the country is facing due to the increase in cases of people infected with the COVID-19 virus. The disease, already declared as a pandemic by the WHO, has crossed the ocean and surpassed our borders to settle in Colombian lands.

While the AMLO government has taken some preventative measures against the COVID-19 outbreak, Mexico’s response to the pandemic has been hampered by the corrupt capitalist system.

This article was originally published on 14 March. The situation in Brazil has developed since, and more updates will be forthcoming, but it shows how the Bolsonaro government’s first move was to protect profits and continue attacks on the working class rather than protect public health.

The Trade Union Block of the Social Unity in Chile has demanded that the government introduces an immediate preventative quarantine to fight the spread of Covid-19, otherwise, it will call a “humanitarian general strike” in order to shut down all economic activity “which is not essential for the maintenance of health and life”. Meanwhile the hated Piñera government is attempting to use the health emergency to put an end to the five month old uprising.

The COVID-19 pandemic has plunged American society into panic and dismay. All fifty US states and Washington, DC have now confirmed cases of the novel coronavirus, and the death toll is rising by the hour, after surpassing 150 deaths on March 18. Public health officials worry the US has reached a tipping point and may fast approach the situation seen in Italy, where hospitals are overwhelmed and the entire country is locked down. Dr. Carlos Del Rio, a professor at Atlanta’s Emory University School of Medicine, recently told CNN: “I’m really worried about … having the worst possible combination: too many patients; too (few) doctors, nurses … to take care of them.”

The following was written by a comrade whose sister tragically became a victim of femicide, which has become a plague on Mexican society. The comrade demands justice for her sister, and every other victim of the rotten capitalist system, which has violence against women written into its DNA. Not one more woman murdered! Justice for Sara Abigail and all victims of femicide!

Every day, 10 women are murdered on average in Mexico. Yet open violence is only the tip of the iceberg. Mexican women face constant harassment, discrimination and humiliation at home, in the workplace, and in the streets. Women in general, and working-class women in particular, bear the brunt of the crisis of Mexican capitalism and the process of social decomposition that accompanies it. Pent-up anger at this state of affairs has now come to surface as International Women’s Day saw unprecedented mobilisations, followed by a women’s strike that paralysed the

On 8 March, an epoch-making march filled the streets of Chile to mark International Working Women’s Day. According to the organisers, around 2 million marched in Santiago alone, and the national figure was around 3.5 million people.