Artificial Antibodies Are The Latest COVID-19 Treatment. But Hospitals May Struggle To Use Them.

As hospitals face the logistical nightmare of giving people the few doses of new antibody drugs available, scientists say they're concerned we still don’t have enough data to show they work.

Dan Vergano BuzzFeed News Reporter
Posted on November 25, 2020, 

Boston Globe / Getty Images
Emergency medicine doctors work out of a temporary tent set up at UMass Memorial Hospital in Worcester, Massachusetts, Nov. 11.

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As the third wave of the pandemic surges, a much-hyped COVID-19 treatment that just received a green light from the FDA — monoclonal antibodies — is beset by shortages and doubts over its effectiveness.

On Saturday, the FDA gave emergency authorization for monoclonal antibodies made by the pharmaceutical firm Regeneron, a drug cocktail dubbed a “miracle” cure by President Donald Trump after it was used in conjunction with other drugs to treat his coronavirus infection in October. Earlier this month, the agency authorized another monoclonal antibody treatment called bamlanivimab, made by the drug company Eli Lilly. Both therapies were authorized for use in patients who were recently diagnosed with COVID-19.

The concept of the treatment is simple: Doctors infuse lab-made antibodies into a patient’s blood, boosting their own natural immune defense against the coronavirus during the early stages of infection. So far, preliminary data suggest that the treatment could lessen symptoms and shorten hospital stays. But that benefit isn’t certain, medical experts say, and the drugs may even cause harm if they’re administered later in an infection.

“Although it is promising, it’s not possible to endorse bamlanivimab wholeheartedly,” said Harvard Medical School’s Rajesh Gandhi, an infectious disease physician at Harvard Medical School. “The level of evidence is just too low to come to a definite conclusion.”

Meanwhile, the federal government has started shipping out the few doses of the drug available so far, but hospitals face big challenges to actually give them to people. Because the drugs need to be administered intravenously via one-hour infusions, some doctors fear that the antibodies will only become available to wealthy communities where hospitals can afford to set up and staff infusion facilities.

“We are still figuring it out here and everywhere,” Gandhi said. “I don’t think we can say we have it all settled how patients will best get monoclonal antibodies.”

There is still no cure for COVID-19 — and the concerns over evidence and distribution make antibody therapies just the latest in a string of fraught treatments endorsed by the FDA. The only drug to receive the health agency’s full approval so far, remdesivir, has faced scrutiny over how well it works. Last week, the World Health Organization recommended against its use in hospitalized patients, saying, “There is currently no evidence that remdesivir improves survival and other outcomes in these patients.”

Then there is the case of convalescent plasma, the blood product from COVID-19 survivors that contains antibodies against the coronavirus, whose August emergency authorization was criticized for lacking sufficient evidence. Most infamously, after pressure from Trump in March, the agency endorsed hydroxychloroquine, only to revoke its authorization in June after studies showed it didn’t help patients with COVID-19 and came with dangerous side effects. The only drug shown to reduce deaths, the cheap and widely available steroid dexamethasone, is only recommended for use in patients who are severely ill and has yet to receive an endorsement from the FDA.

New COVID-19 drugs like monoclonal antibodies are desperately needed, Gandhi said, as medical centers nationwide strain under a third surge in the pandemic that led to 176,000 new cases and more than 88,000 hospitalized patients reported on Tuesday alone, with shortages of beds and staffers in many states.

But the challenges antibody therapies present just underline that prevention — not getting infected in the first place — is the best treatment, especially as case numbers surge ahead of Thanksgiving in the US. “I cannot emphasize enough the importance of flattening the curve, which is more important than any therapeutic advancement,” Gandhi said.


Megan Jelinger / Getty Images
A healthcare professional suits up to enter a COVID-19 patient's room in the ICU at Van Wert County Hospital in Van Wert, Ohio, Nov. 20.

Scientists still have big questions about how well antibody therapies work.

Eli Lilly’s clinical trial of bamlanivimab was a small one, enrolling only 452 patients who were recently diagnosed, who received three different doses of antibodies. It showed a lower rate of hospitalizations — but not a decreased chance of death — in patients who received the antibodies at the middle dose of 2,800 milligrams. The federal government however is distributing doses at the lowest dose of 700 milligrams, arguing that amount would still be effective while stretching supplies.

A clinical trial of the Regeneron treatment, which is a combination of two antibodies, showed that the drug reduced viral loads in patients and cut medical visits by 57% in the month after the infusion.

But both treatments ran into trouble when they were administered to patients who were further along in their illness, when the body’s own immune response can go haywire and cause a patient’s health to rapidly deteriorate. In October, Lilly halted a trial of its antibodies in severe COVID-19 cases after finding it offered no benefits. Shortly after that, Regeneron ended enrollment in a similar trial on the advice of its safety board.

For those reasons, an Infectious Disease Society of America committee has recommended against routine use of Lilly’s monoclonal antibodies for all COVID-19 patients, as did a panel with the National Institutes of Health. (Gandhi sits on both panels but did not speak on their behalf.) “Bamlanivimab should not be considered the standard of care for the treatment of patients with COVID-19,” the NIH COVID-19 treatment guidelines said.

Given that caution, the monoclonal antibodies are only recommended for high-risk patients who have recently been diagnosed with COVID-19, especially those with underlying health issues like obesity, diabetes, or heart disease, Massachusetts General Hospital infectious disease physician Robert Goldstein told BuzzFeed News.

Because of the uncertainty about the benefits of the treatment, doctors should decide which patients receive antibodies on a case-by-case basis, asking them if they want to take an unproven drug that might cause an unwanted reaction for unclear benefits.

Nevertheless, that still leaves a tremendous number of people who might benefit from the antibodies if they work, said Goldstein.
We are also facing a national shortage of doses.

The federal government is responsible for distributing the antibodies nationwide — but at the moment, there aren’t very many of them.

In the last two weeks, the federal government has shipped around 130,000 doses of the Ely Lilly antibodies to more than 2,400 sites across the country. On Tuesday, it shipped another 35,000 doses of the Regeneron antibodies.

The Department of Health and Human Services said it will be allocating only about 40,000 doses of bamlanivimab a week; Regeneron expects to have doses for about 80,000 patients by the end of November, according to the company. That’s less than half the number of new cases now recorded daily in the US.

“There is an enormous mismatch between the overall, presumed clinical need and the amount of drug available,” Goldstein said. Even if we knew exactly which patients to give them to, he added, “we’d still be trying to get a very small quantity of drug to a large number of people across the country.”

Medical centers, meanwhile, face challenges in setting up the infusion centers needed to distribute the drug.

“There's multiple challenges, the first being: Where do you have the location, and what is that location, and is that a safe location?” said infectious disease physician Lisa Davidson of Atrium Health, one of the country's largest medical systems, which operates nearly 40 hospitals and is based in Charlotte, North Carolina.


“One of the recommendations was to use infusion centers, but a lot of our infusion centers have immunocompromised patients that we really don’t want exposed to the coronavirus,” Davidson said. “Then some people suggest the emergency room. We don't want to flood our emergency rooms, and, you know, the numbers are so high all over the country. It’s a real challenge.”

Hospitals were still distributing the first 90,000 doses of the Elly Lilly antibodies, when HHS sent its second-week shipment of 40,000 doses, according to the agency.
Not all hospitals will be able to do the infusions — causing concerns that lower-income communities won’t have equal access to the drug.

There are at least two worries that the allocations might lead to the infusions going to the wrong places. The first is that HHS determines how many doses go to each state based on its number of new cases and hospitalizations. That might mean shipping doses to overwhelmed states that haven’t had the time or resources to set up the infusion centers needed to distribute them. Meanwhile, the more well-prepared hospitals could infuse more patients, but could end up with not enough doses for all the patients they’d like to treat.

“We will be watching closely in the first week or two and will adjust allocations accordingly,” John Redd, the chief medical officer of the HHS’s Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness & Response, told BuzzFeed News by email. Redd said that to start, the agency will only provide the drug to hospitals “because we know they already have the infrastructure for drug administration” — rather than sending the drug to smaller health clinics.

But this could also mean that the infusions will only go to well-heeled hospital systems with the resources to set up separate infusion centers, leaving low-income and disadvantaged communities hardest hit by the pandemic out of luck.

“It’s not enough for the federal government to ship out the antibodies,” said the Cleveland Clinic’s Adarsh Bhimraj, speaking at an Infectious Diseases Society of America briefing on Monday. “Steps need to be taken so insurers pay for them and hospitals can set up transportation for patients to iron out this kind of unequal access to new treatments.”


MORE ON THIS
The FDA Has Authorized The COVID-19 Antibody Drug That Chris Christie TookStephanie M. Lee · Nov. 10, 2020
Trump's Doctor Said The President Now Has Antibodies, Leaving Out The Fact That He Was Just Given A High Dose Of AntibodiesAzeen Ghorayshi · Oct. 7, 2020
These Updating Charts And Maps Show The Coronavirus Pandemic’s Impact Across The US And The WorldPeter Aldhous · July 9, 2020
Remdesivir Just Became The First Drug Approved By The FDA To Treat COVID-19Azeen Ghorayshi · Oct. 22, 2020


Dan Vergano is a science reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in Washington, DC.

Delta Fired A White Flight Attendant After Asking Whether She Was “Racist” Toward White Men

Delta Air Lines said Kiersten Bak violated their social media policy. She says she was just calling out harassment from trolls.

Delta is the only major airline whose flight attendants do not have a union, though not for lack of trying. 

Julia Reinstein BuzzFeed News Reporter
Posted on November 25, 2020,

Courtesy of Kiersten Bak

A Delta Air Lines flight attendant was fired in October after the airline objected to posts she’d made on her personal Facebook account, including one in which she called out a man who had been trolling her.

Kiersten Bak, 26, told BuzzFeed News she regularly receives harassment on Facebook because of the company she runs, a cheeky feminist merchandise site called “That Fucking Feminist.” The products, sold on a Shopify website, are automatically posted on Facebook Marketplace, which links her personal page as the seller.


On Aug. 29, Bak, fed up with the trolls, shared one of these messages on her Facebook account. A man she did not know had sent her an unprompted message that read, “You are one dumb woman.”

“Imagine having the ego of a white man in America 🥺 🥺,” Bak captioned the screenshot. “(no idea who this guy is. just some random snowflake who messaged me and immediately blocked me so I couldn’t respond 😂).”

She was subsequently called in for a meeting with superiors, suspended, and ultimately fired on Oct. 7, following a nearly monthlong investigation. Bak said managers criticized her social media posts and questioned her on whether she, a white woman, was “racist” toward white men.

Delta indicated to Bak that it had been alerted to her Facebook page — where she did not list the airline as her employer but was wearing the company’s uniform in her profile picture — by one of the people who had harassed her.


“In our phone conversation you stated that you were not trying to engage in victim blaming,” reads a termination letter seen by BuzzFeed News, “but you stated that you receive 10 to 15 messages daily from individuals you do not know, similar to the message from the individual who complained to Delta about your posts, because they disagree with your beliefs expressed on social media.”

Bak called the company hypocritical, citing its public commitment to diversity and stamping out racial injustice. In July, following nationwide protests over the police killings of George Floyd and other Black Americans, Delta CEO Ed Bastian vowed to add more Black members to the company’s board. In September, the airline made headlines when it surprised a Black passenger who was being harassed by a racist seatmate with an upgraded seat on her return flight and a goody bag, complete with a Delta-branded “Black Lives Matter” pin.

“It just proves what I’ve said all along is completely true,” Bak told BuzzFeed News of the company’s decision to fire her. “When they were presented with an upset white guy who harassed me, they picked his side and not the side of their employee who did nothing wrong.”

In a statement to BuzzFeed News, a spokesperson for Delta denied Bak’s story of her firing but would not provide evidence or any further details.

“While personnel issues are considered private between Delta and its employees, the circumstances described by our former employee are not an accurate or complete explanation of the company’s termination decision,” the spokesperson said. “Delta is a values-led company and our employees know and understand that they are representatives of our brand at work and through their conduct in social media and other public forums. When Delta employees intermix Delta’s brand with conduct or content that does not reflect our values of professionalism, inclusion and respect, that conduct can result in discipline or termination.”



Nurphoto / Getty Images



Bak became a Delta flight attendant in March after completing the rigorous eight-week training program. The job was perfect for her, she said, because the flexible hours meant she could keep working on her small business selling custom T-shirts from her home in Saline, Michigan.


In July, Bak rebranded her business as That Fucking Feminist, where she sells products that include “Suburban Housewives for Biden” T-shirts, Ruth Bader Ginsburg prayer candles, and masks emblazoned with “Just Put Your Damn Mask On, Karen.” She also sells Black Lives Matter T-shirts, donating all the proceeds from these items to Black Lives Matter and similar organizations.

The following month, tired of the racist and sexist vitriol flooding her inbox over her progressive merchandise, Bak decided to turn the harassment into something positive: a little project she dubbed “Petty With a Purpose.”


“For every message I got, I would make a donation,” Bak said. “So, if they messaged me something about Black Lives Matter, I would donate to Black Lives Matter in their honor and send them a screenshot with a receipt, saying, ‘Thank you so much for your message! For every angry message I receive, I make a donation to [a charity].’ Then I’d block them and not converse any further.” As part of this, Bak would post screenshots of the interactions on her business’s Facebook page.

Between T-shirt sales and Petty With a Purpose, Bak has donated more than $8,000 to Black Lives Matter, Planned Parenthood, the Biden campaign, and several progressive organizations.

On Sept. 10, Bak said, she received a call from her base manager, informing her that an investigation had been opened into her social media activity. As directed, Bak removed ties to Delta from her Facebook and made the page significantly more private.

She said she then headed to a two-hour disciplinary hearing with two other base managers. “I went in that day, and they had about 10 pages of blown-up screenshots from my Facebook page,” Bak said. “And they just kind of questioned me on all of them.”


Facebook



The Facebook post Bak said got her into trouble. (The man's name and photo have been obscured by BuzzFeed News.)


The post they seemed most bothered by, Bak said, was the screenshot of the man who’d called her “one dumb woman,” with her commentary about the “ego of a white man in America,” which she had posted to her personal Facebook page, rather than that of her business.

“They asked me, ‘Do you think this about all white men?’” Bak recalled. “I did everything to not laugh. I was respectful, and I said, ‘Well, my dad is a pretty nice guy. No, of course I do not think this about all white men in America — but when you get 10 messages a day … only from white men named Chris or Brian or Todd, yes, I’m going to have this opinion about white men in America.’”

The managers seemed to take particular issue with her use of the word “snowflake,” Bak said, and she spent about half an hour explaining how it is a term the far right uses to mock liberals as sensitive, and that in her comment she was flipping the term back on her harasser.

“[One base manager] said, ‘Is it racially charged?’ And I said, ‘no!’ I think she thought I was being racist because he was white, and snowflakes are white,” Bak said. “It seemed as if they maybe thought I was being racist towards this guy, but, [speaking] as a white person, you can’t be racist towards a white person.”

They also questioned her for a photo she shared of anti-Trump cookies her friend had decorated. Two of them depicted President Donald Trump as a pig and said “Make AmeriKKKa Great Again” in royal icing. The other two were decorated to look like umbrellas and read “Super Callous Fragile Racist Sexist Nazi POTUS.”

“They said, ‘What’s wrong with these cookies?’ And I said, ‘Well, nothing,’” Bak said. “She said, ‘How about the KKK bit?’ And I was like, I’m not saying, like, go join the KKK! … She pointed to the KKK bit, as if insinuating I was promoting the KKK. … These were anti-KKK cookies!”

Bak said another post they highlighted was a photo of her in uniform where her cardigan was unbuttoned, which is against the company’s dress code. But she said she had taken the photo after a flight and strictly followed uniform regulations while working.


Courtesy of Kiersten Bak

The photo of Bak with her cardigan unbuttoned that she said she was asked about by managers.

In the meeting, Bak said, she was questioned on whether she’d ever used swear words or said anything political to a customer on board a flight. She said she did not and would not.

“I said, ‘I’m a very outspoken person, but I know the time and place for it,’” she said. “They also questioned my vocabulary since it says ‘fuck’ all over my page, and I said, ‘No, I do not swear on planes while I’m working; I’m a respectable human being.’”

Bak’s termination letter confirmed Bak was fired for violating the Delta social media policy by posting what it called “insensitive and offensive posts.”

In the letter, Delta said Bak was not fired based on her “personal beliefs” but for the way she shared them on social media.

“You stated your belief that your messages, and the messages Delta has indicated in support of Black Lives Matter, equality and social justice are the same, but you believe that you have been terminated for expressing such beliefs,” the letter states. “Ms. Bak, your termination was not based on your personal beliefs. Your termination was based on your violation of Delta’s Social Media Policy and the fact that the way you communicated your messages does not align with Delta Values and because you associated yourself with Delta when making the offensive comments.”

A copy of Delta’s employee social media policy shows the company does not prevent employees from posting political opinions online, but it does prohibit “using hateful, racist or other discriminatory language or images, advocating violent or illegal acts, participating in hate groups or shaming others.”

This policy has come under criticism in the past. In 2018, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) put out a letter calling the policy language too broad, and argued that it could stifle workers’ rights to speak openly without the risk of discipline.

The social media policy garnered publicity and controversy in June, when longtime flight attendant Kevin Lee Jennings — who was well known for her opposition to unionizing and beloved by Delta management — either left or was fired as a result of her tweets deriding the Black Lives Matter movement. Following her exit, a Delta spokesperson told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that the company has “zero tolerance for racism, bigotry, and hateful acts” and that Jennings “no longer works at Delta.”

Delta is the only major airline whose flight attendants do not have a union, though not for lack of trying. Both IAM and the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA (AFA-CWA) have spent years trying to organize the flight attendants of Delta. In November 2019, nearly a decade after the last union attempt narrowly failed, AFA-CWA announced it was relaunching a campaign to unionize Delta. But since they do not currently have a union contract, Delta flight attendants are considered at-will employees and just cause is not required to fire them.

Taylor Garland, a spokesperson for AFA-CWA, told BuzzFeed News having “fair and transparent due process” during disciplinary action is one of the main reasons so many Delta employees want a union.

“Flight attendants should have a union representative on their side to ensure management does not apply subjective discipline without a process to fully consider the facts,” Garland said.

 

Julia Reinstein is a reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in New York.

Uber And Lyft Spent Hundreds Of Millions To Win Their Fight Over Workers’ Rights. It Worked.

At the start of the year, it looked like the labor movement was gaining ground in its fight for gig workers’ rights. The tech industry spent big to defeat them.

Caroline O'DonovanBuzzFeed News Reporter

Posted on November 21, 2020,

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Mike Blake / Reuters

A demonstration in Los Angeles to urge people to vote no on Proposition 22.

At the start of 2020, organized labor had a lot to celebrate.

The workers’ rights advocates who for years had warned of the potentially devastating impact of the growing gig economy had succeeded in getting California to pass landmark legislation that would defend basic labor rights for hundreds of thousands of people.

At the time, the coronavirus pandemic — which would crater the economy and wipe out millions of jobs — wasn’t even a consideration; for unions, things were looking up.

The passing of the law, called AB5, in September 2019 officially made drivers for Uber, Lyft, Postmates, DoorDash, and Instacart employees in California, securing them benefits like a legal minimum wage and paid sick days. It was a huge victory over the tech industry, which had fought vociferously to define gig workers as considerably cheaper independent contractors. But by February of this year, the bill’s sponsor, Lorena Gonzalez, a member of the California State Assembly, wasn’t in a triumphant mood. In fact, she was feeling rather frustrated.

Although her bill had passed, it was widely criticized for the unintended consequences it would create for some groups of freelancers, and Gonzalez was bearing the brunt of that backlash. She also knew the fight wasn’t over and that the major gig economy companies were readying themselves to challenge the bill. A coalition of these companies — made up of Lyft, Instacart, DoorDash, and Postmates, and largely led by Uber (which acquired Postmates in July) — had announced their intention to put a workaround initiative on the ballot in the fall, and they already had a $100 million war chest behind it.

“We went to a press conference and went home,” said Gonzalez of the union response to the AB5 backlash. “The employers were better at organizing their workers than we were.”

She added, “I just want us to act with a sense of urgency.”

Nine months later, her concern seems justified.

Though it ultimately cost the gig economy companies upward of $224 million, they succeeded in getting voters to pass Proposition 22, a ballot initiative that exempts them from following labor law and from paying certain taxes. That kind of record-setting spending — a significant chunk of the breathtaking $785 million total spent on ballot measure campaigns in California this election — would have been a monumentally difficult hurdle for the labor movement even in a year without a global pandemic making grassroots organizing more difficult, or without a hotly contested presidential election dominating the news cycle. In the weeks leading up to Nov. 3, polls showed that the race on Proposition 22 was tight — but in the end, the tech industry won a decisive victory with 58% of the vote, effectively rolling back historic labor regulations and setting an anti-regulatory precedent for the gig economy that could have national implications.

Gonzalez said that despite the loss, she doesn’t have any regrets about how the labor unions ran their campaign. But it’s fair to say that the momentum that had built up by February has slowed. As she said at the time, “We have to advocate for change in this moment or we’re going to lose it.”

That moment in California has now passed — how the gig economy managed to survive it will serve as a blueprint for its strategy throughout the rest of the country.

Uber has been defending the legality of its business model almost since its inception. In the beginning, it had to fight local governments and taxi companies for the right just to operate on city streets. Since then, Uber and the litany of startups that have popped up in its image have repeatedly been sued by workers who believe they deserve the same basic rights as traditional employees. Until the last few years, though, most of those suits failed to result in a policy change as the gig economy companies were able to successfully argue that the technology they had invented, whether getting a ride or ordering groceries at the click of a button, was so novel that labor laws as currently written couldn’t apply to them.

People turn to work on gig economy apps because they need extra cash, often because their main job only offers part-time work. Some depend on apps like Lyft or Postmates the same way others use payday loans; many rely on the gig economy to plug holes in the social safety net. Whatever drivers earn — less than minimum wage, according to some studies that are contested by Uber — has to cover car maintenance, gas, and income taxes, on top of whatever bills they needed to pay to begin with. And if anything goes wrong — like you get into an accident, your car breaks down, or you have a sudden illness — there’s no paid sick day or unemployment insurance to help. While some gig workers say the ability to work whenever and wherever they want makes the trade-offs worth it, others end up feeling like they’ve taken on a considerable amount of risk in exchange for a relatively small payout.

In 2018, the California Supreme Court seemed to upend that status quo by ruling that, given the extent to which the apps invisibly control the work they do, gig workers should in fact be treated as employees. That ruling, known as the Dynamex decision, was followed by the passage of AB5. And for a moment it seemed like — at least in California — the gig companies’ attempts to sidestep regulation by claiming their products are too innovative to be beholden to labor laws were at an end.

But with the passing of Proposition 22, it seems Uber et al. have succeeded in doing just that.

It serves as a reminder that the real innovation venture capitalists spent hundreds of millions of dollars developing isn’t in hailing a cab or ordering a Big Mac at the push of a button — but in finding new ways to exploit loopholes in the system.

Mario Tama / Getty Images

Uber and Lyft drivers protest in California

Labor leaders have not always agreed on the best strategy for fighting the gig economy’s encroachment.

In June 2019, the New York Times reported that even when victory seemed at hand, some union bosses had been meeting in secret with industry representatives to talk about negotiating a deal with the companies rather than continuing to fight them in the courts and the statehouse. The move created “deep rancor” within the labor movement, according to the Times.

While cutting a deal with Uber and Lyft would inevitably have forced unions to make concessions, it might also have spared them the considerable expense of fighting the companies. As venture-backed technology firms, the gig companies have access to unprecedented amounts of cash. Their investors aren’t worried about them spending hundreds of millions of dollars to beat back regulation, because none of the companies are profitable anyway. Gig economy backers are happy to spend as much as it takes for the companies to find a way forward for the independent contractor model — because if they can’t, the whole experiment might as well be over anyway. By claiming the crisis is existential, gig companies can justify any amount of spending to resolve it.

Though unions have long fought well-capitalized corporations, tech’s particularly reckless kind of spending is impossible for them to compete with. “They spent $20 million in the last week [of the campaign] alone, which is more than veteran consultants here in California have ever seen by a lot,” said Steve Smith, communications director for the California Labor Federation, who worked closely with the campaign against 22.

Bradley Tusk, a political consultant who helped Uber in some of its earliest regulatory battles, said the labor movement got a leg up with AB5 because Uber overcorrected on its bad reputation under former CEO Travis Kalanick and got too soft.

“You can’t be loved by everyone or avoid criticism by everyone and at the same time win this kind of thing,” Tusk said. “[Uber] didn’t spend enough money. Everything that it would take — the messaging, the messengers, the resources — wasn’t there, and they lost,” he continued. Uber wouldn’t make that mistake again. “They realized it was a potentially existential crisis for them, they spent $200 million to fix it, and they did.”

Even as the tech companies spent that record sum, the financial resources that the labor movement had to fight back with were spread unusually thin. Prop 22 wasn’t even the movement’s top priority; another ballot initiative aimed at getting corporations to pay property taxes, Prop 15, had been a major focus of the labor movement for almost a decade. Had it passed, the measure would have brought a huge influx of cash into the state budget, a boon for public sector unions. Other statewide ballot initiatives that required unions’ attention and funds this election cycle included a proposition to eliminate cash bail and another to regulate dialysis clinics.

“Usually when we have a ballot campaign, there’s one that everybody just focuses on, and we can raise money from labor and outside sources all sort of focused on that campaign,” said Smith of the California Labor Federation. “This year, we had a number of them that were really important.”

On top of that, some individual donors who might have supported the fight against Prop 22 chose instead to focus on national politics, hoping to win Democratic seats in the Senate and unseat President Donald Trump. And it didn’t help matters that major Democratic leaders in the state — including Gov. Gavin Newsom, who might have directed dollars to labor — stayed out of the ballot fight.

Gonzalez said, “There were a lot of different priorities.”

As a result, there just wasn’t as much cash to go around as there might have been. All in all, the anti–Prop 22 campaign spent around $20 million — about 10 times less than the companies spent to pass it.

Most experts agree that given the sheer amount of money the tech industry was willing to spend, there wasn’t much the campaign against Prop 22 could have done differently.

“When you’re facing that kind of opposition spending, it’s very difficult to get your message across,” Smith said. “We did the best job we could given the limited resources we have.”

Ballot measures can be complicated and boring, and sometimes don’t fall neatly on one side of the partisan divide or the other. This tends to give whichever side has the deeper pockets an even greater advantage when it comes to defining the narrative in a campaign.

The “Yes on Prop 22” campaign spent its money saturating airwaves and inundating mailboxes with campaign materials that claimed the measure would actually protect workers and their jobs. It was a clever argument, considering it was the companies themselves who were threatening to raise prices and cut the number of available gigs if they didn’t get their way. Ads in favor of Prop 22 mentioned a fund for healthcare and guaranteed minimum earnings. Although one labor-backed study found that the deal wouldn’t actually guarantee more than $5.64 an hour, it nonetheless succeeded in confusing some voters into thinking a “yes” vote was in support of workers’ rights. That made it difficult for the unions to explain, even to liberal voters, why they should vote against it.

For its part, the Yes campaign said voters knew exactly what they were doing. “Nine million Californians voted yes on Prop 22,” spokesperson Geoff Vetter told the Washington Post. “To suggest that these millions were somehow so feebleminded they voted for something they didn’t want is offensive to voters and flat out wrong.” Uber spokesperson Noah Edwardsen said: “A diverse and sizable majority of California voters, from both parties and nearly all corners of the state, said Yes on Prop 22. That’s simply a fact.”

The worker-friendly veneer of the tech companies’ messaging was so successful that some early focus groups conducted by unions found that voters who had read the proposition’s language assumed it was actually written and funded by the labor movement, according to Smith.

“We had as many people saying unions were behind it as saying the companies were behind it,” he said. “That was their strategy — confuse this thing every day for a year and make sure voters don’t really know what’s going on.”

Unions are, of course, accustomed to being outspent by their corporate opponents. But the tactics they typically rely on to combat that imbalance — like organizing at workplaces and door-knocking with volunteers — were disrupted by the pandemic. That was compounded by the mounting frenzy of the presidential election, as the behavior of President Trump, an expert at dominating media attention, grew increasingly erratic.

The combination of all those factors made it increasingly difficult for the labor movement to regain control of the narrative. “There was just no way of getting our voice across,” Gonzalez said.

The fact that corporations in California can choose to sidestep the law if they’re willing to spend aggressively enough to do it strikes some as unfair. The ballot initiative process was intended to make the legal system more democratic by allowing the people to have a voice. But corporate spending in electoral politics has warped the proposition system, allowing companies to manipulate it — not just by buying ads but by paying for the signatures that get the measures on the ballot to begin with.

Nelson Lichtenstein, a labor history professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, said efforts to reform the process have gained little traction. In 2018, then–California governor Jerry Brown actually vetoed a bill that would have made paying for signatures to get a measure on the ballot illegal.

“The propositions have become a mechanism for wealthy people or institutions,” Lichtenstein said. “Everyone is denouncing Uber and Lyft for spending $200 million on this, but I’ve seen no proposal to say that we should somehow regulate this to not be able to do that.”

For Uber, that was money well spent. “The day after they won the referendum, their stock price went up,” Lichtenstein said. “It was an extremely effective investment.”

Scott Heins / Getty Images

Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi

That’s good news for Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, who earns a salary of around $1 million, received a $40 million stock grant in 2019, and has spent millions more acquiring additional Uber stock. After the election, Khosrowshahi said the company plans to “loudly” advocate for laws similar to Prop 22 in other states.

The law is all but permanent in California, where the language of the proposition requires a seven-eighths supermajority for it to be overturned. That leaves gig workers in California without unemployment insurance or paid sick leave as they continue to work through the ongoing global pandemic. The majority of those workers are people of color, who are more likely to experience serious health effects from the coronavirus but less likely to benefit from any economic recovery.

As low-wage earners have struggled to recover from this year’s unprecedented economic fallout, delivery apps meant to provide a side hustle are, for some people, now the only opportunity to earn any income at all. If laws like Prop 22 are passed in other states, it will cement gig work as something that’s more about getting through desperate times than about finding a path to stability and security.

Some leaders within the labor movement are hopeful that President-elect Joe Biden will make gig workers’ rights part of his agenda when he takes office in January. But given the close ties between Biden and the many former Obama administration officials who took jobs in the tech industry, that seems unlikely. Lyft’s policy chief, Anthony Foxx, served as Obama’s transportation secretary when Biden was vice president. Vice President-elect Kamala Harris is sister-in-law to Tony West, who has been Uber’s top lawyer since 2017. And recently, Biden named former deputy labor secretary Seth Harris to his labor transition team — Harris coauthored a paper in 2015 that proposed the creation of a third worker classification, a permanent legal workaround to making gig workers employees.

Bradley Tusk, the political consultant, put it bluntly: “I don’t think this is something the Biden administration will spend a lot of time on,” he said. “If they’d won the Senate, that’s one thing. But without it, he’s going to have enough trouble getting stimulus passed or infrastructure.”

But even given that, Tusk doesn’t think the gig economy’s battle with workers is over just yet. There are pending bills in states, including New York, New Jersey, and Illinois, that the gig companies will have to fight.

“By winning Prop 22, they slowed momentum around the country,” he said, “but the issue isn’t going away.”

• 

  Caroline O'Donovan is a senior technology reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in San Francisco.

Farmers in India clash with police during protests against new laws


A tear gas shell fired by police explodes near protesting farmers in India after police try to stop farmers from entering Delhi to protest against new farm laws, at the New Delhi, Haryana Sindhu border on Friday. Photo by Rajat Gupta/EPA-EFE


Nov. 27 (UPI) -- Thousands of farmers clashed with police in India on Friday during protests over the country's new laws allowing farmers to sell directly to private buyers.

Police used tear gas, water cannons and barricades to try to stop the farmers from entering Delhi to protest against the laws, which they fear will leave them vulnerable to large corporations.


A Delhi Police spokesperson told Al Jazeera that farmers were granted permission to enter the capital city and protest peacefully at the Nirankari Samagam Ground in the Burari area away from the center of the city.

"The government doesn't care about the farmers. It's trying to destroy us and help big corporates," farmer Sukhdev Singh told Al Jazeera. "We don't want to jam the roads. We just want to march to Delhi, but it's the government which is resorting to violence and blocking roads and causing inconvenience to people."

After clashes, police escorted farmers to a protest site and urged them to continue demonstrations peacefully.

Farmers associations estimated that 50,000 farmers would participate in the march, which began early this week as farmers from neighboring Haryana state set out for the capital city.

"They are traveling with trolleys full of rice and grains and are cooking their own food. They say they're ready for a long battle," BBC Hindi's Dilnawaz Pasha reported.

The new laws, first introduced in September, seek to loosen rules related to the sale, pricing and storage of agricultural products. Farmers worry about losing the income protections of the government-controlled wholesale market, which includes an assured minimum price.

The Bharatiya Janata Party said the new laws will increase farm incomes and productivity.

LESE-MAJESTE 

Thailand charges protesters with insulting monarchy

Thailand's pro-reform protests have grown and authorities are responding with new charges. File Photo by Narong Sangnak/EPA-EFE


Nov. 25 (UPI) -- Authorities in Thailand are charging protesters with lese-majeste, a draconian law that can punish offenders with a 15-year prison sentence for "insulting the monarchy."

Several protesters including leader Parit "Penguin" Chiwarak have received summons for lese-majeste among other charges, Al Jazeera and The Guardian reported Wednesday.

King Maha Vajiralongkorn said a few weeks earlier Thailand is a "land of compromise," but the charges come after the protesters, many of them students, began to demand the king relinquish control of royal assets estimated to be worth tens of billions of U.S. dollars.

Thailand's Crown Property Bureau, which is under the direct control of the King, manages the royal family's assets that include real estate in Bangkok and shares of Siam Commercial Bank. The king owns a 23% stake in the country's oldest bank, according to The Guardian.

Tens of thousands of people including students have gathered for peaceful protests for months in the nation's capital demanding reform after the 2014 military coup, but police have at times responded with violence. Last week authorities fired water cannons and tear gas at the activists.

Parit said Wednesday the lese-majeste charges he faces would not deter the movement.

"To those who thought to use this section [of the criminal code], let me tell you right here that I am not afraid," Parit said on Twitter.

The activist also said the "ceiling is broken."

On Wednesday protesters gathered outside Siam Commercial Bank rather than the Crown Property Bureau to avoid clashes with pro-royalist groups, reports say.

Thailand's defenders of the monarchy have blamed foreign governments for the protests.

"Don't make Thais fight among each other or our nation will collapse. Remember that! Stop the conflict and stop the interference. This is Thailand, not Hong Kong," the royalists said last month in statement.

MONOPOLY CAPITALI$M

ViacomCBS sells Simon & Schuster to Pengiun Random House


ViacomCBS also said it will upgrade and rebrand its CBS All Access streaming service under the name Paramount+ next year. File Photo by John Angelillo/UPI | License Photo


Nov. 25 (UPI) -- ViacomCBS said Wednesday it has agreed to sell publisher Simon & Schuster to Penguin Random House for more than $2 billion.

ViacomCBS said the $2.175 billion sale came after "a highly competitive auction" for the publisher, which has been involved with works by Stephen King and presidential scholar Doris Kearns Goodwin, along with popular titles like The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and Catch 22.

"This divesture follows a strategic review of non-core assets ViacomCBS undertook early in 2020," ViacomCBS said in a statement. "Proceeds from the transaction will be used to invest in ViacomCBS's strategic growth priorities, including in streaming, as well as to fund the dividend and pay down debt."

ViacomCBS said it will upgrade and rebrand its CBS All Access streaming service under the name Paramount+ next year.

"We've made the determination that Simon & Schuster is not a core asset of the company," ViacomCBS's CEO Bob Bakish said. "It is not video-based; it doesn't have significant connectivity to our broader business. At the same time, there's no question it's a marquee asset that's highly valuable."

The ViacomCBS portfolio includes the CBS network, Showtime Networks, Paramount Pictures, Nickelodeon, MTV, Comedy Central, BET and PlutoTV.

The deal is expected to be completed next year.

Bertelsmann buys Simon & Schuster for $2.2 billion in U.S. publishing play

By Douglas Busvine, Klaus Lauer


BERLIN (Reuters) - German media group Bertelsmann has agreed to purchase publisher Simon & Schuster for $2.175 billion (1.63 billion pounds) in cash from Viacom CBS, strengthening its presence in the United States.

Bertelsmann outbid Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp in a contest for the publisher of Dan Brown, Hillary Clinton and Stephen King which Viacom put on the block earlier this year.

The deal represents the second major move in CEO Thomas Rabe’s drive to consolidate Bertelsmann as the world’s biggest bookseller, after the 185-year-old publisher took full control of Penguin Random House less than a year ago.

“We are building our position as one of the leading creative content companies in the United States,” Rabe said on Wednesday of the move deeper into Bertelsmann’s second-largest market.

“I’m convinced that this a good day both for book publishing and for authors.”

The acquisition of Simon & Schuster, which reported revenue of $814 million in 2019, is profitable and employs 1,500 staff, is expected to close in 2021 subject to U.S. antitrust approval.


The merged entity would have a U.S. market share of less than 20%, making the transaction “approvable”, Rabe told reporters.

However, News Corp CEO Robert Thomson criticised the deal, which he said had an “anti-market logic”.

“Bertelsmann is not just buying a book publisher, but buying market dominance as a book behemoth. Distributors, retailers, authors and readers would be paying for this proposed deal for a very long time to come,” Thomson added.

TALKING BOOKS

Jonathan Karp and Dennis Eulau will stay on to run Simon & Schuster under the umbrella of the far larger Penguin Random House. Combining printing, sales and distribution would deliver significant synergies, Rabe said.


Pencils with the logo of German media group Bertelsmann CEO are seen at the annual news conference Berlin, Germany, March 22, 2016. REUTERS/Fabrizio Bensch

VIDEO REPORT https://www.reuters.com/video/?videoId=OVD62MXGF&jwsource=em

Size is important in publishing as bestseller lists become dominated by a handful of blockbusters - such as Penguin Random House’s edition of ex-U.S. President Barack Obama’s memoir ‘A Promised Land’.

But overall U.S. book sales have been growing by a mere 1% a year, according to the American Association of Publishers, as readers are distracted by social media and other online formats.

Rabe described books as the “past, present and future” of Bertelsmann but also highlighted the U.S. publishing deal’s significance for its digital content as people turn to e-books or listen to narrated ‘talking’ books.

CASHING IN

Founded in 1835 as a publisher of theological texts, Bertelsmann is a private conglomerate spanning magazine, educational and music publishing and controls European TV group RTL.

Rabe is restructuring to reduce its exposure to declining areas such as printing, has merged its Arvato CRM customer services unit, and made a string of smaller technology bets.

The lack of its own public equity to serve as an acquisition ‘currency’ has constrained Bertelsmann’s ability to chase big deals, even as tech giants led by Facebook and Alphabet’s Google suck up more ad dollars.

Yet Rabe was able to pay cash after this year building a war chest of 4.3 billion euros ($5.1 billion) in liquid funds.

Rabe pulled this off by retrenching during the coronavirus crisis, and selling other investments and property. And, while Bertelsmann’s focus is mainly on organic growth, it has the capacity to do further deals, he added.

Viacom CBS, which was advised by LionTree Advisors and Shearman & Sterling LLP, said it would plough the sale proceeds into its streaming operations, fund its dividend and repay debt.

Writing by Douglas Busvine; Editing by Louise Heavens and Alexander Smith

Delta, pilots agree to cut work hours to stave off layoffs, furloughs



Gates at New York City's John F. Kennedy International Airport are sparse with travelers on August 4, as the pandemic has seriously depressed demand for air travel. File Photo by John Angelillo/UPI | License Photo


Nov. 25 (UPI) -- Delta Air Lines pilots on Wednesday approved a labor agreement in an attempt to fend off furloughs next year by reducing their hours.

The Air Line Pilots Association approved the deal with 74% support, which will cut pilots' guaranteed monthly flying time an average of 2%, or two hours each.

Delta had threatened furloughs if the plan, which covers 1,700 pilots, was not accepted.

"We are grateful to keep all our pilots actively employed and provide stability for you and your families," John Laughter, Delta chief of operations, said in a message to pilots Wednesday.

Laughter warned that the travel industry is still unsteady and volatile, however, due to depressed demand for air travel brought on by the coronavirus pandemic, and the surge of cases in recent weeks.

"But there is still much to be thankful for," he said. "And by working together we continue to maintain and grow a loyal customer base that feels confident choosing Delta time and again for our safety, reliability and service."

The pilots' agreement with Delta comes at the same time Southwest Airlines is engaged in negotiations with its union workers for similar measures. The aim is to cut operating costs and sidestep involuntary layoffs or furloughs -- something the budget carrier has never done before in 50 years of flying.

American Airlines and United Airlines have already furloughed tens of thousands of employees, but they had to wait until October to make the cuts, per the agreement in the spring that gave them critical federal funding aid.

upi.com/7057133

U.N. study shows women working harder, getting poorer during pandemic

Women worldwide are doing more unpaid labor and risk falling into poverty due to the COVID-19 pandemic, a study released by the United Nations said. 

File Photo by Pat Benic/UPI | License Photo

Nov. 26 (UPI) -- Women are doing more unpaid work during the COVID-19 pandemic and have a greater danger of slipping into poverty, a report released Thursday from the United Nations shows.

The report, "Whose Time to Care?" from U.N. Women, surveyed data in 38 countries and found that both women and men have increased their unpaid workloads, but women are "still doing the lion's share."

More women than men were leaving the workforce to take on care burdens for children and other family members, the research gathered by telephone and online survey methods showed.

"Greater numbers of women -- who are already less likely to be in the workforce -- have left the labor market altogether," the new report said. The difference is highest in Latin America, a region hard hit by the economic fallout of COVID-19, with 83 million women outside the labor force (up from 60 million before COVID-19).

Since the pandemic began, 56% of women and 51% of men have increased the time they spend on unpaid care work, the report says, but the difference expands when the study looked at caring for children.

Research in July by Ipsos for U.N. Women in 16 countries showed that before COVID-19, women spent an average of 26 hours per week on child care, but that has increased to 31 hours since the pandemic began. For men, the reported number of hours increased to 24 per week from 20 per week in pre-COVID-19 times.

Most alarming, the report says is that research published in September by U.N. Women shows that the economic losses related to the pandemic could push 13% of women and children into poverty.

"Next year 435 million women and girls will be living on less than $1.90 a day worldwide -- including 47 million specifically impoverished by COVID-19," the report said.

The report calls on governments to adopt concrete policy actions, including investing in the so-called "care economy," which suffers from underpayment and exploitation. U.N. Women encourages governments to support paid family and sick leave and organize "cash for care" programs that subsidize parents who take off work to care for children when schools are closed due to COVID-19.

"It is high time that this work be recognized, reduced, redistributed and, ultimately, supported," the report said.

International shipping is killing the climate
By Christiaan De Beukelaer, University of Melbourne

Trucks deliver offloaded containers to designated areas at the Qingdao New Qianwan Automatic Container Terminal in Qingdao, Shandong Province, in 2019.
File Photo by Stephen Shaver/UPI | License Photo

Nov. 17 (UPI) -- The shipping of goods around the world keeps economies going. But it comes at an enormous environmental cost -- producing more CO₂ than the aviation industry. This problem should be getting urgent international attention and action, but it's not.

This week, all 174 member states of the International Maritime Organization will discuss a plan to meet an emissions reduction target. But the target falls far short of what's needed, and the plan to get there is also weak.

As other industries clean up their act, shipping's share of the global emissions total will only increase. New fuels and ship design, and even technology such as mechanical sails, may go some way to decarbonizing the industry -- but it won't be enough.

It's high time the international shipping industry radically curbed its emissions. The industry must set a net-zero target for 2050 and a realistic plan to meet it.

Globally, more than 50,000 merchant ships ship about 11 billion tons of goods a year. In 2019 they covered nearly 60 trillion ton-miles, which refers to transporting one ton of goods over a nautical mile.

Per ton-mile, carbon dioxide emissions from shipping are among the lowest of all freight transport options. But in 2018, shipping still emitted 1,060 million tons of CO₂ -- 2.89% of global emissions. By comparison, the aviation industry contributed 918 million tons of CO₂, or 2.4% of the total.

And as international trade increases and other sectors decarbonize, global shipping is expected to contribute around 17% of human-caused emissions by 2050.

An emissions pariah

The IMO, which regulates the global shipping industry, did not set meaningful emissions reduction targets until April 2018. This is despite being requested to reduce emissions as far back as 1997 under the Kyoto Protocol.

The IMO has pledged to halve shipping emissions between 2008 and 2050 while aiming for full decarbonization. By 2030, the carbon intensity (or emissions per ton-mile) of individual ships should fall by 40%, compared with 2008 levels.

The IMO's Marine Environment Protection Committee, is devising binding rules for the industry to achieve these emissions goals. Draft measures being considered this week focus solely on reducing the carbon intensity of individual ships. The plan has been slammed by critics because emissions reductions are not in line with Paris Agreement commitments of limiting global warming to 1.5℃ or 2℃ by 2100.

There are two main issues with the 40% emissions intensity target.

First, it's not ambitious enough. Research suggests limiting warming to 1.5℃ requires the shipping industry to reach net-zero emissions. Merely reducing the carbon intensity of ships will barely make a dent in current emissions. Worse, even the best-case scenario will likely lead to a 14% emissions increase compared to 2008.

Second, the IMO has yet to say how it will meet its targets. The plan up for discussion this week is weak: not least because it lacks enforcement mechanisms.

So how do we fix the problem?

Earlier this year, I sailed on the Avontuur. This 100-year-old two-masted schooner under German flag sailed from Germany to the Caribbean and Mexico to load 65 tons of coffee and cacao, then ship it under sail to Hamburg.

The round-trip took more than six months and 15 crew members. Roughly 169 million ships like the Avontuur would be needed to transport the 11 billion tons of goods moved by sea each year. It would require 2.5 billion crew, compared with 1.5 million today. Clearly, that is not realistic.

So how, then, do we solve the international shipping problem? Clean transport advocates say we must reduce demand for cargo transport by using what's locally available, and generally consuming less and moving to a post-growth economy.

Some scientists concur, arguing either carbon intensity or shipping demand must come down -- and probably both.

Ships can significantly reduce their emissions simply by slowing down. Carbon emissions increase exponentially when ships travel above cruising speed. But the industry seems unwilling to pick this low-hanging fruit, perhaps because it would compromise just-in-time supply chains.

Ships commonly burn huge amounts of heavy fuel oil. Emerging fuels, such as hydrogen and ammonia, have the potential to cut emissions from ships. But producing these fuels may create substantial emissions, and adopting new fuels would require building new ships or retrofitting existing ones.

Existing vessels can also be retrofitted with more efficient propulsion mechanisms. They could also be fitted with wind-assist technologies such as sails, rotors, kites and suction wings. Research suggests these technologies could reduce a ship's emissions by 10%-60%.

And new designs for sail-powered cargo vessels are emerging. But these ships are yet to be built and it may be a long time before they are widely used.

Looking ahead

Technological solutions on their own will not bring the necessary emissions reductions. New technologies must be embraced immediately, and ambitious regulation is necessary. Industry and consumer demand for shipped goods must fall as well.

Earth's remaining carbon budget is fast shrinking and all industry sectors must do their fair share. At this point in the climate crisis, further delays and weak targets are inexcusable.

Christiaan De Beukelaer is a senior lecturer at the University of Melbourne.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.