Workers Are Being Put in “The Line of Fire”: Organized Labour and Mandatory Vaccines
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Throughout the previous year, governments and corporations have crushed the exercise of our human rights, constitutional rights, and civil liberties on a massive scale. The scope of the violations integral to the assault on people’s rights is now being rapidly extended into the imposition of government-sanctioned vaccine mandates. Working people are now being put squarely in the line of fire. They are facing ultimatums from employers that they will lose their jobs if they do not accept the injection into their persons of dangerous medical products.
In the UK, EU and UK, COVID jabs are already confirmed to have injured many millions and, at the very least, to have killed tens of thousands. The real numbers are probably much larger. Studies have pointed to the likelihood that the scale of deaths and disabilities inflicted by the COVID clot shots are far in excess of the officially-reported figures. See this.
The vaccine mandates are targeting legions of blue-collar tradespersons, service providers, and white collar professionals including professors, doctors, and government administrators.
If enforced, vaccine mandates will form the basis of broader systems of vaccine passports meant to govern the movements, interactions, certifications as well as the entry of people into all manner of establishments, domestically and internationally. If realized, this new mechanism would bring about a fundamental remaking of our societies along decidedly authoritarian lines.
Following in the wake of the enormous damage done by the reckless and nonsensical lockdowns, governments have made themselves pushers of dangerous drugs in the form of COVID jabs known to do way more harm than good. See this.
To employ a sports metaphor, let’s assume that the imposition of masking, lockdowns, and social distancing represents a football field of lost territory for the exercise of our fundamental freedoms. The enforcement of vaccine mandates, which make continued employment of workers contingent upon their receiving COVID jabs, expands the scale of the theft of our rights and freedoms by a huge order of magnitude. Imagine losing the equivalent of say about 100 more football fields of exerciseable liberty to the predators seeking to diminish and subordinate us.
Authorities are seeking to impose vaccine mandates on both public sector and private sector workers. Ultimately, however, it is governments that are empowering the leadership of the corporate world to engage in the imposition of injections as a major condition of employment. The same governments that can empower vaccine mandates also retain the imperative to outlaw the practice of forcing workers to take unwanted jabs in order to retain employment.
The forcing of vaccines on people who depend on jobs for their livelihoods amounts to an assault on individual rights unlike anything we have seen to date. It sets many precedents that change the legal framework for all sorts of human relations inside and outside the workplace.
Moreover the adoption of vaccine mandates implies much more than agreeing to take the current set of COVID jabs. Rather it marks the beginning of an agreement to accept cradle-to-grave programs of regular vaccines. The cumulative effect of these programs will basically be to annihilate the natural immunity of those receiving the shots. Their inherited immunity will be replaced by artificial immunity, engineered to generate rich streams of profit that will flow to the indemnified vaccine manufacturers.
The consequences of all this are enormous. For example, what comes next if it is established that governments and corporations have a legitimate legal imperative to coerce people to accept the injection of toxic substances into their bloodstreams? How could it be that activities once seen as basic rights of citizenship could become privileges reserved for those who subordinate themselves to rule of Big Pharma and its vassal states?
If governments and corporations together with their domination of a complicit media can claim the protections of law to force killer vaccines on us, then what else can’t they do? Some of the most oppressive forces in society will have gained vast new powers to invade our most personal space of all, our very bodies. Hence it is that the successful imposition of vaccine mandates would obliterate the legal and political ground supporting many different categories of individual rights.
The billionaires and their banker friends currently pulling the strings of this manufactured viral crisis are being presented with many green lights to advance a wide array of their nefarious schemes to tighten their control over humanity. The attacks on our social fabric include efforts to eliminate the middle class, to reduce the size of the human population and to put the survivors of the murderous culling into a perpetual state of dispossessed servitude.
There is something diabolical about any plan to create a new set of criteria and procedures that cut masses of workers and their dependents off from paychecks and the necessities they buy. In a capitalist society this form of economic punishment has dire consequences. This threat, therefore, ranks near the top level of coercive measures being ushered into place as we enter the autumn of 2021.
The previous nine months have been a time of unprecedented vaccination hucksterism. Deceptive and glitzy advertising campaigns were mounted to cajole citizens into taking the COVID jabs voluntarily in spite of the reality that the process was a medical experiment lacking full regulatory approval. To the ad campaigns were added many gimmicky incentives such as free beers, joints, lap dances, lottery tickets, and money.
Now the stick is replacing the carrot. People are being told that only by taking the vaccine can they retain jobs and participate in society. The forms of prohibited activity for the so-called unvaccinated might include bans on travel, education, as well as the obtaining of various forms of licenses and certification. The prohibited realm reserved solely for the vaccinated might include various forms of sporting, cultural, dining, and recreational events and facilities.
The propaganda machine is now being primed up to prepare the majority population for this outcome. The minds of the vaccinated are being poisoned to hate the “unvaccinated, or, worse yet, the “anti-vaxxers.” The alleged crime of COVID jab resisters is their failure to conduct themselves in a socially responsible fashion. On the basis of this form of psychological warfare, conditions are being created to justify the creation of a new class of lepers and untouchables. The old institution of South African apartheid and the segregationist Jim Crowe laws in the American South are being dusted off and prepared for a new kind of outcast.
Workers and Their Unions Face Off in the Manufactured COVID Crisis
New forms of panic are reverberating through society as people come to the realization that the manufactured COVID crisis is taking on many new and menacing dimensions. Workers are being put in a vice of opposing pressures. Many of them are being instructed that they have to make a choice between being stabbed with potentially lethal and injurious clot shots or they must accept the termination of their jobs and livelihoods.
This awakening of people to heretofore hidden realities is putting a sudden spotlight on the often-compromised leadership of labour unions. In Canada the crisis is also drawing attention to the moribund state of social democracy. Canada’s New Democratic Party has betrayed its founding principles in its drift towards the fascistic tendencies of Blairite neoliberalism.
A former coal miner, Richard Trumka was until recently the leader of the 12 million member strong AFL-CIO, the largest association of organized workers in North America. In June Trumka declared,
For working people getting vaccinated for COVID-19 is a matter of life and death. The battle against Covid-19 cannot be won without working people. And now we have the best possible tool to protect ourselves, to protect our loved ones, and to protect everyone we proudly and successfully serve. And that’s the COVID-19 vaccines. The vaccines are safe and very effective, totally free and widely available……When we get the shot together we show our solidarity. So let’s roll up our sleeves. Let’s get vaccinated. And then let’s get back to healing and rebuilding this country.
A month after he made this video, Trumka died of a heart attack that may have resulted from blood clots engendered by the COVID 19 injections.
There are, of course, many individual workers who disagree with the position of their union leaders on vaccine mandates and related matters. A popular position among union members is that there should be freedom of choice rather than coercion applied in the administration of COVID jabs.
The workers who tend to be most wary of the health effects of the controversial vaccines include police, firefighters, EMS workers and some nurses. Those who are averse to taking COVID shots are starting to join together with a larger array of dissidents who object to vaccine mandates. Many of those who have been vaccinated do not extend their personal choices to granting permission to impose mandatory vaccines.
In Canada the emerging dissident movement of employed people against mandatory injections goes by the name, Frontline Workers for Freedom. Many of those police, firefighters, and EMS workers publicly demonstrating their commitment to freedom of choice do not have the backing of their unions.
While the big nurses’ unions tend to go along with the other big unions, including the teachers’ unions, the nursing profession is full of internal division and even disgust in some circles. The disgust is derived from the ineptitude shown by some health authorities in their handling of the manufactured COVID crisis. A significant nexus for the dissenting nurses is Canadian Frontline Nurses. See this.
The widespread sense among many nurses is that they are being betrayed and demeaned by their employers. The consequential despair of many nurses is causing them to quit in droves. Now looming on the immediate horizon is a further large-scale removal of the remaining nurses if officials carry out their threats to enforce mandatory vaccines.
Much of the growing disarray in health care facilities is being caused by the growing exodus of health care workers combined with the widespread misrepresentation of those who head to hospitals for vaccine injuries. Hospitals often have many available beds but lack sufficient health care workers to fully service the available facilities. Surgeries are often postponed with the false message that everything can be blamed on the irresponsible behavior of the so-called “unvaccinated.”
Almost every professional group and association has been thrown into a chaotic state by the manufactured COVID crisis. Teachers are in crisis. Honest journalists are rebelling against the imposed regime of dishonesty in reporting. Judges and prosecutors are starting to see that all agencies of law enforcement are losing credibility in the eyes of the public. The list goes on and on.
One cannot help wondering if the chaotic breakdown underway isn’t being instigated from above as part of a plan to ruin public services, but especially in the fields of health care and education. Might this ruination be a prelude to the thoroughgoing privatization of anything that remains of government-supported social services? Might the privatization of even fire fighting agencies be on the table?
The unions of university professors have by and large been in lockstep with the position of the AFL-CIO leadership. As an example, let’s consider the position of the Canadian Association of University Teachers, CAUT. CAUT, it seems, is acting pretty much on the basis of the assumption that governments and the mainstream media are acting in good faith to protect the health of the general public.
As a coalition of all the university faculty associations in Canada, CAUT has adopted a very superficial understanding of the manufactured COVID crisis. David Robinson, CAUT’s Executive Director, has stated,
The best available science tells us that vaccines are effective in reducing transmission and the severity of infection, that very high vaccination rates are required to achieve herd immunity, and that the growing community threat from the Delta variant of the virus is best managed by widespread vaccination.
See this.
On the shakey basis of these glib assumptions, CAUT officials seem prepared to accept the inherently coercive nature of vaccine mandates. Robinson tries to tiptoe around this issue by stipulating that vaccine mandates are acceptable in universities so long as “human rights accommodations are followed.”
When addressing the human rights of those who quite reasonably refuse to accept COVID jabs, CAUT suggests that “the unvaccinated can be accommodated through masking, physical distancing, or working or studying from home” as long as “all legal privacy issues are fully respected.”
CAUT seems to be playing into the hands of those that envisage some sort of leper colonies for the unvaccinated. No real room is being left for those who seek to express their human rights, safe from the incursions of injections coercively enforced on entire groups of people without their informed consent. Those who are properly informed generally opt against taking part in the huge medical experiment currently running contrary to the legal requirements of the Nuremberg Code. See this.
As it presently stands, therefore, a key requirement to attend many universities is to take the COVID jabs. By doing so, students, faculty members and staff show a willingness to put aside their own critical thought as well as the conclusions they derive from their own independent research. In other words, they must agree to go along with a program of administrative dictate no matter how flawed the reasoning coming from power-serving administrators.
CAUT’s position on vaccine policy is quite consistent with the waning influence and integrity of this ossified organization in decline. CAUT’s compromised position on mandatory vaccines is consistent with its inadequate protection of academic freedom. The responsibility to protect academic freedom constitutes the main reason for CAUT’s existence in the first place. CAUT is duty bound to safeguard academic freedom as its highest priority.
From my own work experience in collaborating with CAUT officials, I can say the organization gives lip service to the goal of protecting academic freedom but it is unwilling to act assertively in controversial cases. CAUT’s failure to do its job is perhaps reflected in the dearth of assertive faculty members at Canadian universities willing to voice controversial positions on the real character of the manufactured COVID crisis
Trade Unions and Prosperity Now and in the Past
What is to be made of the concerted push to institute vaccine mandates, vaccine passports and medical apartheid within the framework of burgeoning surveillance states? This push is creating the basis for much future controversy and division within the realm of trade unionism and labour relations. This development is not surprising. Labour relations have been an area of great contestation throughout major conflicts of many different kinds.
A few snapshots from history might present a small panorama of the historical background of trade unionism as it applies to the current situation. I think of the Ford Motor Company factories in the Detroit area in the 1930s when Henry Ford hired anti-Soviet Ukrainian union busters to keep out organized labour. I think of the decades following World War II when Roosevelt’s New Deal was applied in a way that caused increased wealth and benefits to flow towards unionized workers. Many of them were able to enter the middle class on the basis of good factory jobs.
I think of the last three decades when North American plutocrats undermined trade unionism on this continent by transferring whole industrial complexes to China. The other side of the massive growth in manufacturing in China resulted in a form of deindustrialization throughout North America. Rust belts replaced thriving manufacturing centers.
Millions of jobs were thus ceded away. Domestic workers were ruthlessly deplatformed from well-paid positions leaving whole communities as well as the main elements of the trade union movement seriously crippled. Millions of victims of the process suffered many severe consequences becoming the so-called Deplorables inclined to vote for Donald Trump.
This history has set the framework of the present crisis that exists in large measure because of the propensity of many folks who see themselves as Left Progressives to accept the manufactured COVID crisis at face value. For this constituency, the proclaimed crusade to fight and destroy COVID represents a means of empowering government authorities to act on behalf of what they wrongly assume is the collective good.
In recent times most of the Left is especially guilty of betraying many of its core principles as it sides with Wall Street, Big Tech, Big Pharma, Big Media and big corporate networks of many kinds. Those who operate these enterprises from the towering heights of socialism for the very rich have many of their own agendas. The agendas include demolishing the last remnants of the welfare state.
As Todd Gitlin predicted in 1996 in the Twilight of Common Dreams, the Left began to falter when it abandoned its heritage of emphasis on big universal themes like the oppressive orientation of the ruling class towards the working class. In the place of this inclusive approach, the Left became a balkanized realm obsessed with diversity and the splintered perspectives emanating from massive engagements with identity politics. Little by little the conditions evolved to the point that characterizations of any group could only come from members of that group.
Now we are facing an onslaught of booster shots, vaccine mandates and vaccine passports. If these massive initiatives are allowed to go forward, what comes next? Will those who seek to escape the penetration of coercively-injected COVID stabs subsequently find themselves in internment camps for their re-education?
When will those woke individuals who see themselves as Left Progressives actually wake up to what is going on? What would it take for them to say, enough is enough? Can the trade union movement in its diminished state reinvent itself? Can it disentangle itself from the machinations of a ruling class intent on expressing its conquistadorial impulses by ruthlessly exploiting its own manufacturing of the COVID crisis?
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Dr. Hall is editor in chief of the American Herald Tribune. He is currently Professor of Globalization Studies at University of Lethbridge in Alberta Canada. He has been a teacher in the Canadian university system since 1982. Dr. Hall, has recently finished a big two-volume publishing project at McGill-Queen’s University Press entitled “The Bowl with One Spoon”.
He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Featured image is from Children’s Health Defense