Explainer-Global energy shortage or a coincidence of regional crises?

(Reuters) - Gasoline stations running dry in Britain. Power costs surging in the European Union ahead of winter. Forced restrictions on energy use in China. And rising prices for oil, natural gas and coal.

© Reuters/MATTHEW CHILDS FILE PHOTO:

 A sign informs customers that fuel has run out at a petrol station in Hemel Hempstead

You would be forgiven if these events made you believe the world had suddenly been stricken by a global energy shortage. But you would also be mostly wrong.

While the supply squeezes slamming consumers and businesses in each of these areas is acute, the disruptions have less in common than you may think.

What unites them is a broad-based rebound in energy demand from lows hit during the depths of the coronavirus pandemic that has raised prices for oil, gas and coal; ongoing supply restrictions by oil cartel OPEC; and global transport bottlenecks that have complicated fuel distribution.

But the list of what separates them is longer, reflecting that the disruptions may have more to do with local policy choices and regional dynamics than a general shortage in global energy supply.

Oil prices broke $80 a barrel this week for the first time in three years, with natural gas and coal also scaling multi-year peaks. The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and allied countries will meet next week to decide whether to unleash their spare production capacity to help tame prices.

Here is a brief summary of what is disrupting energy markets in Britain, Europe and China:

CHINA CRUNCH

China’s government has begun rationing electricity to energy-hungry businesses because of a crunch in coal supply. Because Beijing sets power prices, coal plants struggling with higher coal costs have been unable to operate economically and are shutting down.

Goldman Sachs estimated that as much as 44% of China's industrial activity has been hit by the power shortages, which could hit its GDP.

The China Electricity Council, which represents power suppliers, said on Monday that coal-fired power companies were now "expanding their procurement channels at any cost" in order to guarantee winter heat and electricity supplies.

But coal traders have said finding fresh import sources may be easier said than done, with Russia focusing on serving Europe’s power needs, rains interrupting output from Indonesia, and trucking constraints hindering imports from Mongolia.

EUROPE’S POWER BILLS

The price of keeping the lights on in Spain has tripled, reflecting a broader spike up in power bills across the European Union in recent weeks. The surge in electricity costs has raised fears of a difficult winter ahead as households demand heat and push consumption to a seasonal peak.

The reason for the rising costs in Europe is a confluence of local factors, ranging from low natural gas stockpiles and overseas shipments, lackluster output from the region’s windmills and solar farms, and maintenance work that has put nuclear generators and other plants offline.

The timing is tough as demand is only expected to rise in the coming weeks and months, but the return of power plants from maintenance and the startup of the recently completed Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia to Germany could eventually ease markets.

In the meantime, Spain, Italy, Greece, Britain and other others are planning national measures, ranging from subsidies to price caps, aiming to shield citizens from rising costs as economies recover from the COVID-19 pandemic.

UK PETROL STATIONS RUN DRY

Panic-buying by motorists has left fuel pumps dry across major cities in Britain in one of the worst energy disruptions facing the country in decades. Fights have broken out at filling stations as the government urged calm.

But the problem wracking Britain is not a lack of gasoline, it is a lack of truckers to distribute the fuel from refineries to retailers – one of the odd side-effects of Britain’s exit from the European Union, and a hangover from postponed trucker certification and training during the pandemic.

The fix? Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government has been issuing temporary visas to thousands of foreign truck drivers to get fuel to market, has put the army on standby to help out, and hopes to restore order at the pumps before the holidays.

(Writing by Richard Valdmanis; Editing by Marguerita Choy)

Russia arrests leading cybersecurity exec on treason charges

MOSCOW (AP) — Russian authorities have arrested an executive of a top cybersecurity company on the charges of high treason, a move that has sent shock waves through Russia's business community.

A court in Moscow on Wednesday announced a ruling to place Ilya Sachkov, founder and CEO of the Group-IB, one of the leading cybersecurity companies in Russia, in custody for two months pending investigation and trial.

The court didn't offer any details about the case against the executive as the case files have been classified, the Interfax news agency reported — as is typical with treason cases in Russia.

According to Russian media reports, Sachkov was arrested on Tuesday morning and the law enforcement raided the offices of Group-IB in Moscow. The company on Wednesday confirmed that the raid took place.

In a statement Wednesday, Group-IB said the company's employees were “sure” of their boss's innocence and “honest business reputation.” The company refused to comment on the accusations against Sachkov or details of the case, citing ongoing legal proceedings.

Russia's state news agency Tass reported, citing anonymous sources, that Sachkov also insisted on his innocence. The agency's source alleged that Sachkov “worked for foreign intelligence services and passed on cybersecurity data that constitutes a state secret.”

Sachkov's arrest on treason charges surprised many. Russia's business ombudsman Boris Titov demanded that investigators “explain themselves,” “given the caliber and the uniqueness of entrepreneur Sachkov for Russia's entire IT industry.”

If the authorities don't explain their case against Sachkov, “a critical blow will be delivered to the sector and its investment appeal," Titov said.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov argued Wednesday that Sachkov's case “has nothing to do with (Russia's) business or investment climate,” because “accusations (against him) are not connected to the economy, they are connected to treason.”

Group-IB specializes in combating cyberattacks, online fraud and investigating high-tech cyber crimes. Top Russian banks and companies, including state-run ones, are among the company's clients.

Group-IB helped Russian authorities investigate cyberfraud cases and is also said to be an official partner of the Interpol and Europol.

The Associated Press

Former Nazi death camp secretary, 96, stands trial

A 96-year-old former secretary at a concentration camp will go on trial in Germany Thursday, one of the first women implicated in Nazi-era crimes to be prosecuted in decades.

© Wojtek RADWANSKI

 Around 65,000 people died in the Nazi concentration camp at Stutthof (now Sztutowo) in occupied

Poland

AFP 2

Irmgard Furchner is charged with complicity in the murders of more than 10,000 people at the Stutthof camp in occupied Poland.

Furchner's trial in Itzehoe, northern Germany, will be followed a week later by the start of proceedings against a 100-year-old former camp guard in Neuruppin, near Berlin.

They are among the oldest individuals to be prosecuted for their role in the Third Reich, as Germany races to put on trial the last surviving suspects.

The court case in Itzehoe starts one day before the 75th anniversary of the sentencing of 12 senior members of the Nazi establishment to death by hanging at the first Nuremberg trial.

Aged between 18 and 19 when she worked at the camp, Furchner, who now lives in a retirement home near Hamburg, will be tried in youth court.

The prosecutors accuse the pensioner of having assisted in the systematic murder of detainees at Stutthof, where she worked in the office of the camp commander, Paul Werner Hoppe, between June 1943 and April 1945.

Around 65,000 people died at the camp, not far from the city of Gdansk, among them "Jewish prisoners, Polish partisans and Soviet Russian prisoners of war", says the indictment.

- Little time left -

After long reflection, the court decided in February that Furchner was fit to stand trial, albeit only for a few hours at a time, dragging proceedings out until June 2022.

Seventy-six years after the end of World War II, time is running out to bring people to justice for their role in the Nazi system.

Prosecutors are currently handling a further eight cases, including former employees at the Buchenwald and Ravensbrueck camps, according to the Central Office for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes.

In recent years, several cases have been abandoned as the accused died or were physically unable to stand trial.

The last guilty verdict was given to former SS guard Bruno Dey, who was handed a two-year suspended sentence in July at the age of 93.

- Execution order -

Furchner is the only woman to stand trial in recent years for crimes dating to the Nazi-era, as the role of women in the Third Reich has long been overlooked.

But since John Demjanjuk, a guard at a concentration camp, was convicted for serving as part of the Nazi killing machine in 2011, prosecutors have broadened the scope of their investigations beyond those directly responsible for atrocities.

According to Christoph Rueckel, a lawyer representing survivors of the Shoah who are party to the case, Furchner "handled all the correspondence" for camp commander Hoppe.

"She typed out the deportation and execution commands" at his dictation and initialled each message herself, Rueckel told public broadcaster NDR.

Furchner's lawyer, Wolf Molkentin, told the German weekly Spiegel, it was possible the secretary had been "screened off" from what was going on at Stutthof.

At least three other women have been investigated for their roles in Nazi camps, including another secretary at Stutthof, who died last year before charges could be brought.

The prosecutor's office in Neuruppin is currently looking into the case of a woman employed at the Ravensbrueck camp, according to officials at the Central Office in Ludwigsburg.

Among the women to be held to account for their actions during the Nazi era was Maria Mandl, a guard at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, who was hanged in 1948 after being sentenced to death in Krakow, Poland.

Between 1946 and 1948, in Hamburg, 21 women went on trial before a British military tribunal for their role at the Ravensbrueck concentration camp for women.

sea/mfp/jj

Despite Biden's pledge, a private prison is becoming a for-profit immigrant detention center in Pennsylvania

cdavis@insider.com (Charles Davis) 

A patch is shown on the uniform of a guard with the GEO Group, Inc., during a media tour of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center, Monday, Dec. 16, 2019, in Tacoma, Wash. The GEO Group is the private company that operates the center for the US government. 

AP Photo/Ted S. Warren

President Joe Biden issued an executive order phasing out the use of for-profit federal prisons.
But the order did not apply to privately-run immigrant detention centers.
ICE is detaining more than 21,000 people, up from 14,000 when Biden took office.
See more stories on Insider's business page.

When protesters disrupted one of his speeches in June, demanding he end the use of for-profit immigrant detention centers, President Joe Biden responded with frustration.

"I agree with you," he said at a rally in Georgia. "I'm working on it, man!"

But more than three months later, critics say the president has failed to keep this promise.

Just this week, it was announced that US Customs and Immigration Enforcement intends to house as many as 1,875 people at a jail in central Pennsylvania that will be run by the GEO Group, one of the nation's largest for-profit detention companies, local outlet The Progress News reported.

More than 21,000 people are currently being held in ICE detention centers across the country, up from the 14,000 detained when the new administration took power - though well below the over 55,000 immigrants detained at the peak in 2019 under former President Donald Trump.

From private prison to for-profit detention

Soon after taking office, Biden issued an executive order that called for the Department of Justice to phase out its contracts with private prison companies. At the time, Politico reported that he was considering whether to extend such a ban to ICE. He never did.

Now facilities that were once private prisons are becoming for-profit immigrant detention centers. The new GEO-run facility in Pennsylvania, for example, was previously a GEO-run federal prison - the company announcing the day of Biden's inauguration that the federal government had opted not to renew its prison contract.

It "flies in the face of the administration's commitment to fight for racial equity and disavows the very foundational principles of the executive order," Setareh Ghandehari, advocacy director of Detention Watch Network, an activist group, said in a statement. "The perverse financial incentives that drive incarceration are ever-present and thriving in ICE detention."

ICE did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Azadeh Shahshahani, legal and advocacy director at Project South, a group that helped expose involuntary medical procedures at a for-profit ICE facility, told Insider that the conversion of private prisons to private detention centers would jeopardize the rights of immigrants.

"It is reprehensible that the Biden administration continues to entrust the well-being of immigrants to private prison corporations with horrendous human rights records," she said. "The only interest driving prison corporations is the profit motive."

A climate reckoning in coal country

Andrew McCormick 
This story was published in partnership with Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story. The author is Covering Climate Now’s deputy director.

© Provided by NBC News

Growing up in southern West Virginia, Jacob Hannah was always of two minds about coal.

His father and grandfather were coal miners. Coal meant a roof over their heads and a tie to bind the small community of Wilsondale that they called home. People there found purpose in coal, proud to know their work was helping power the nation.

But Hannah, 29, also saw neighbors who grappled with nasty illnesses: bronchitis, black lung and cancer. Worksite injuries were a constant. And he began to hear more news about climate change and the role that coal and other fossil fuels played.

“The coal economy is a sinking ship,” he said, “but it’s difficult for anyone who grew up in Appalachia not to feel a sense of defensiveness and protectiveness towards coal.”

Hannah is a conservation coordinator for Coalfield Development, a nonprofit group working to revitalize West Virginia, in part through clean energy. The organization recently put in place the state’s largest nonprofit solar installation. He’s proud of his family’s legacy but traveling around the state and taking stock of shuttered storefronts and scarred land have convinced him that the need for change is clear.

“We need an antidote,” he said. “We need medicine to strengthen our communities.”

At a time when U.S. leaders are finally moving to address climate change, it’s fitting that a state long at center stage in America’s resource-extraction economy would hold the spotlight.

Since the start of Joe Biden’s presidency, all eyes have been on Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., whose vote in an evenly divided Senate positions him as a linchpin in the federal climate agenda. Prior to entering politics, Manchin founded and ran the coal-brokerage firm Enersystems. He handed the company to his son upon being elected West Virginia’s secretary of state in 2000 — he served later as governor, before joining the U.S. Senate in 2010 — but retained millions in company stocks. According to the senator’s financial disclosures, Manchin continues to earn hundreds of thousands each year from the sale of coal.

To date, the centrist Democrat has been critical of the action that scientists around the world agree is necessary to avoid the worst of the climate emergency. He argues that a rapid move toward clean energy could sound the death knell for communities already suffering from fossil fuels’ decline.

Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., talks with constituents before holding a town hall meeting with coal miners on March 31, 2017, in Matewan. 

(Bill Pugliano / Getty Images file)

In Manchin’s home state, however, some say change can’t come soon enough. Coal remains a backbone of some West Virginia communities. But with a nationwide shift toward renewables underway, many West Virginians are eager to secure a place for the state in America’s clean energy future.

“For a long time, the culture here has been, ‘What’s good for coal is good for West Virginia,’” said James Van Nostrand, director of the Center for Energy and Sustainable Development at the West Virginia University College of Law. “But that hasn’t been true for 10 years, or decades longer.”
Coal in decline

In the mid-1900s, coal employed more than 100,000 people in the Mountain State. Over the years, new technology enabled companies to mine more with fewer workers. Then, beginning in the mid-2000s, the shale revolution saw natural gas challenge and ultimately, in 2016, replace coal as America’s leading energy source for electricity production. In 2019, the last year for which data is available from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, coal employment in West Virginia was down to roughly 14,000.

Throughout this decline, poverty spiked, placing West Virginia consistently among the poorest states in the country. The state has also come to lead the nation in population decline, with young West Virginians increasingly leaving to find gainful employment. A grim joke in the state goes that people have overtaken coal as West Virginia’s top export.

In a state prized for its natural beauty, the environmental situation is no better. Abandoned mines and thousands of uncapped oil and gas wells pollute local air and water. Mountaintop removal, a mining practice that involves deforesting mountain peaks and then blasting them out of existence to get at coal underneath, continues to cover surrounding areas in hazardous dust.

Crayfish expert Roger Thoma looks for crayfish in Ash Camp Branch near Laurel Creek, W.Va., on March 12, 2019. A coal company has a mountaintop removal operation at the head of this stream. 

(Michael S. Williamson / The Washington Post via Getty Images file)

Health impacts are widespread, and in Charleston, the state capital, deregulation is standard. Many political leaders in West Virginia have direct ties to the coal industry, ​​including Gov. Jim Justice, a Republican and a billionaire who owns multiple coal companies and, in his official capacity, oversees the state regulatory arms meant to hold those companies accountable.

“It’s not uncommon for me to turn on the tap water, and it’s brown,” said Angie Rosser, director of the environmental nonprofit West Virginia Rivers Coalition. “That’s normal in many parts of West Virginia. Some of us don’t remember ever having safe water.”
The floods

Further emphasizing West Virginia’s legacy as a fossil fuel producer, climate change is also taking a toll.

Rosser, like many West Virginians, lives near a river. In June 2016, torrential rains filled the Elk River outside her home, triggering a flash flood. That day, floods killed 23 people and devastated much of central West Virginia. She said her town, Clendenin, hasn’t been the same since.

“People have left," she said. "There are abandoned houses. We still don’t have a grocery store.”

Scientists called the flooding a “thousand-year event” but only a preview of what climate change might have in store for West Virginia. As global heating progresses, the Appalachian region is projected to become significantly wetter, with heavier rainfall making floods both more likely and more dangerous.

 Larry Brooks walks down the hallway of his trailer on a mud covered floor which was destroyed by flood waters on June 25, 2016, in Elkview, W.Va. Brooks said he lost about 95 percent of the personal belongings in his home. The flooding of the Elk River claimed the lives of at least 23 people in West Virginia. 

(Ty Wright / Getty Images file)

Traditionally, climate change has been a near-verboten subject in her state, Rosser said. The implicit threat to coal was always one thing. In a deeply conservative state, the politicization of climate change was another. A 2020 study by Yale University and George Mason University showed that fewer people in West Virginia believed climate change was occurring than in any other state — 59 percent of adults compared with 72 percent nationwide.

Affinities toward coal notwithstanding, she said it’s clear that West Virginians’ foremost loyalties lie with their families and preserving the state as a safe and prosperous place to call home.

“I’m hearing more conversations acknowledging that coal isn’t coming back,” Rosser said. “There’s a lot of fear and anxiety actually that maybe we waited too long.”
‘Just transition’

Increasingly, a transition away from coal might be a conversation some West Virginians are willing to entertain.

Along with other local nonprofit group, Rosser’s organization recently produced a “Citizens Guide to Climate Change.” Written “by West Virginians, for West Virginians,” she said, the guide aims to push climate discourse in the state forward, unpacking the causes and impacts of climate change from a local perspective and laying out a menu of potential solutions, such as a Green New Deal, enhanced emissions regulations and a carbon tax.

Rosser expected skepticism, but responses to the guide have been positive, she said. Especially resonant is the goal of a “just transition,” which suggests that, although fossil fuels are very much to blame for climate change, a special debt is owed to fossil fuel workers, as the nation shifts to new sources of energy.

“We put in the work to lift America into an industrialized power, through the use of coal,” Rosser explained. “Now, we deserve reinvestment.”

And West Virginia is ripe for reinvestment, according to Jeremy Richardson, a native West Virginian and a senior analyst with the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Climate and Energy program. There is “plenty of untapped potential,” he said, to create jobs as an “off-ramp” for current and former coal workers — first, in reclaiming and restoring land damaged by fossil fuel exploitation and, second, in domestic manufacturing of clean energy components, such as windmill blades and parts for solar panels. West Virginia is also well-suited to wind and solar energy production.

 Wind turbines in eastern West Virginia on May 4, 2018.

 (Tom Williams / CQ-Roll Call via Getty Images file)

Clean energy is unlikely to replace every coal and fossil fuel job lost in West Virginia, he added. But it can help begin to diversify the state’s economy. It will also make West Virginia more attractive to outside industries and companies, such as car manufacturers — which increasingly have made their own climate commitments and, thus, are unlikely to invest where clean energy is scarce — sparking further economic development.

“West Virginia is behind the eight ball, because we haven’t done a lot by way of developing and deploying clean energy,” Richardson said. “We really need to go far fast.”

Whether West Virginians will reap the benefits of clean energy opportunities depends in large part on the state’s leaders in both Charleston and Washington, said Van Nostrand, of West Virginia University. In this regard, there have been halting gestures toward sustainability, he added, but the state lags behind most others, as well as the latest climate science. In August, a landmark United Nations report warned that the consequences of climate change, including the extreme weather wreaking havoc already, will grow dramatically worse this century if humanity fails to rein in emissions.

Also critical: making sure climate action reaches communities of color in West Virginia. The state is more than 90 percent white, but African Americans nevertheless comprised a substantial portion of the coal labor force, said Pam Nixon, a community organizer with the Charleston, West Virginia, chapter of the NAACP.

As technology in the industry progressed, though, Black workers typically weren’t selected for training opportunities; when layoffs became commonplace, they were far more likely than their white peers to be let go.

“When Manchin and others talk about not leaving coal workers behind, they don’t usually acknowledge that Black coal workers were left behind years ago,” she said. “We need to make sure this trend doesn’t continue. Blacks and Latinos in West Virginia, we need to be sitting at the table.”
A decision

Manchin, who chairs the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, was instrumental to the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure package, passed in August by the Senate and pending House approval. That bill includes some $120 billion for clean energy and climate resilience projects, as well as $21 billion to clean up abandoned mines and cap leaking oil and gas wells.

Experts say these provisions can be a boon for West Virginia, but they’ll fall short of meeting the needs of the state. At the national level, climate scientist Michael E. Mann called the bill “a far cry from meeting the moment,” arguing that it does nothing to reduce America’s reliance on fossil fuels.

A separate, larger bill, hailed as the most comprehensive climate legislation in U.S. history, promises more robust investments in renewables. But Manchin has said he opposes the measure, citing its $3.5 trillion price tag.

Manchin’s Senate office did not respond to an emailed request for comment.

Unwilling to wait, some in the senator’s state are taking matters into their own hands.

 Smoke billows from the Pleasants Power Station in Belmont, W.Va., on Nov. 12, 2011. 

(Michael Williamson / The Washington Post via Getty Images file)

This summer, West Virginia environmental groups banded together, traveling to six communities in the state as part of the “Democracy, Jobs, and Care-a-van Summer Jam.” They offered live music, free food, prayer and a message about clean energy.

“The best way to honor West Virginians as energy producers is to bring them into what clean energy looks like today,” said Morgan Sell, an organizer with the West Virginia Working Families Party and president of the Eastern Panhandle Green Coalition.

Sell said she found people receptive, even those with politics different from her own. But many were also angry at the pain and poverty their communities had been asked to endure.

“When you talk about clean energy or something like manufacturing electric vehicles, West Virginians are extremely interested,” she said. “But politicians aren’t having these conversations with us. Instead, they make assumptions about what we want.”

Indeed, a June poll by Data for Progress and the Chesapeake Climate Action Fund found that a clear majority of West Virginians, 56 percent, support a clean electricity transition by 2035, while only 36 percent oppose such a transition.

"We’re intensely creative people in West Virginia,” Sell said. “We have the drive to bring ourselves out of this, to build ourselves up. We just need resources and support.”

AT&T to require vaccines for 90,000 of its union workers

AT&T has become one of the largest employers in the U.S. to mandate vaccines for a significant number of frontline workers.

© Provided by The Canadian Press

The telecom company said Wednesday that its employees in the Communications Workers of America union will be required to be fully vaccinated by Feb. 1, “unless they get an approved job accommodation.”

CWA represents about 90,000 AT&T workers, the union said. It is the largest union at the company, which had about 230,000 employees as of the end of January.

The Dallas company said it is extending a vaccination policy that it set for managers in August that required them to be vaccinated by Oct. 11. Unlike the federal government's vaccine mandate for large employers, AT&T is not offering employees the option to take a weekly test instead of getting inoculated.

The federal mandate, an effort to push more Americans to get vaccinated, will cover as many as 100 million people. About 77% of U.S. adults have had at least one vaccine dose, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The CWA workers at AT&T can request an exemption for religious or medical reasons, and employees who are not vaccinated by Feb. 1 get a 60-day unpaid “reconsideration period” to change their minds, said union spokesperson Beth Allen.

The policy applies to employees who work in stores, customers’ homes and other worksites as well as people who are temporarily working from home. AT&T's union employees include workers at cellphone stores, call centers and technicians.

Tali Arbel, The Associated Press

Amazon settles with employees allegedly fired for criticizing working conditions

(Reuters) -Amazon.com Inc and the U.S. National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) said on Wednesday the company had reached a settlement with two former employees who alleged they were fired last year after they criticized the working conditions at the e-commerce giant's warehouses.

 The logo of Amazon is seen at the company logistics centre in Boves

Amazon had terminated the employment of Emily Cunningham and Maren Costa, who had accused the company of enforcing policies in a discriminatory fashion and instituting rules that "chill and restrain" the staff from exercising rights, according to their charge filed in October.

NLRB found in April that Amazon illegally fired them for advocating for better working conditions during the pandemic.

The U.S. agency said the company had reached a non-Board settlement, whose terms were not disclosed, with the two former employees. A non-Board settlement is a private agreement between parties, where they agree to resolve cases by settlement rather than litigation.

The NLRB Regional Director, however, is required to review and approve the private settlement agreement before allowing the charges to be withdrawn.

"We have reached a mutual agreement that resolves the legal issues in this case and welcome the resolution of this matter," an Amazon spokesperson said in an emailed statement.

CNBC first reported about the settlement.

Cunningham and Costa gained prominence for pushing the e-commerce giant to do more on climate change, questioned Amazon's pandemic safety protocols and worked to raise money for warehouse staff at risk of contracting COVID-19.

(Reporting by Sabahatjahan Contractor, Nishit Jogi and Niket Nishant in Bengaluru;Editing by Vinay Dwivedi)

Is That All There Is? Why Burnout Is A Broken Promise

Whizy Kim 1 day ago

In the story of our lives, we might be the main character, but work is the dominating theme, our constant motivation. It’s the central thing we do as adults, the primary focus of our mental function for most hours of the day, most days of the week. The types of jobs we have influence who we know, where we live, how much society respects us. Being jobless, then, isn’t only difficult because of the financial instability — it’s also a kind of social death. As such, the fate of the jobless — the attendant derision or pity is often used as a cautionary tale. And the warning works: Most of us are terrified of losing our livelihoods.

The so-called Great Resignation has been making headline after headline for months now, as people have been quitting their jobs in droves. There were predictions that when federal pandemic benefits expired just after Labor Day, industries facing a labor shortage would find an influx of job seekers. And yet, snatching away benefits hasn’t worked that way. So far, there hasn’t been a dramatic increase in applicants. It’s not just a perplexing economic problem. People rejecting available jobs runs counter to what we’ve been taught since childhood — that work isn’t just how we live our lives, it’s why we live our lives.

It’s a sign of the times — and of how fed up people are with the conditions of work — that people are now rejecting this worldview, and doing so to such a degree that it’s become a movement. If the movement has a motto, it would be the word that’s been on everyone’s lips over the past 18 months: burnout. According to an Insider survey of over 1,000 American workers, 61% said they were currently “at least somewhat burned out.” An Indeed report from March found that the majority of respondents said their burnout had worsened during the pandemic, with 52% overall saying they were currently burned out. You’ve probably heard — or said yourself — the following things repeated ad nauseum: “I’m so tired. I’m so exhausted. I can’t believe we have to keep going.“

But burnout isn’t just fatigue. It’s far more insidious and complicated.

“Work burnout happened to me when I worked at a large corporation and realized that although I was putting in long hours, doing good work, and it looked good on paper — I was going nowhere,” says Alexis, 38, who works in the PR industry. “Then I saw a meme [that said] ‘if you died tomorrow, your job would be posted faster than your obituary,’ and it sucked all the joy out of everything I did.”

“Burnout happens when work consumes your mind outside of the office, yet your only opportunity for a long time is to tread water while killing yourself,” she says.

Camilla, 29, saw her health deteriorate. “For me, the burnout was serious when I relapsed badly into anorexia nervosa,” she says. She worked in health and safety in the meat industry. “It took me a year to recover to the point where I could work again, and even at that, I only work part time out of the house. Anything more, and I can easily slip back.”

Her husband, who works in hospitality and retail, is burned out, too. “[He] realized it was bad months ago, but felt trapped. He has since handed in his notice with no job to go to, because he simply can’t take it anymore,” Camilla says. “He feels suicidal, exhausted, and hopeless. But having put in his notice, he instantly felt better.”

Camilla has come to the exact same morbid conclusion as Alexis: “At the end of the day — your job will be posted before your funeral notice ever will be. Remember that.”

Maybe a telltale sign of burnout is when you start thinking in such extreme terms, ruminating on life and death as it pertains to your work satisfaction. If you’re wondering what would happen if you died tomorrow, and weighing how deeply your workplace would feel the loss of you, you’re not just tired. You’re preoccupied with existential questions related to meaning and purpose. And they’re all related to your job.

Alice, 28, felt suddenly and wholly burned out after her company announced a major restructuring. It soon became clear that there was no longer a future for her there, but it was a job she had sincerely loved. She had worked hard at it for years.

“I sobbed,” she recalls. “And I was like, I haven’t cried like this since I was dumped by my abusive ex.” It was as painful as any romantic betrayal, she says: “I felt empty.” Only, unlike a breakup, Alice still is connected to her employers, “because I’m financially dependent on them.”

There’s a lot of debate about what exactly burnout is: A medical condition? A philosophical matter? Is it just the cost of doing business? Of being alive? According to the World Health Organization, it’s an “occupational phenomenon.” But that seems to be an anodyne way of saying that the exact nature, cause, and solution to burnout aren’t entirely clear.

And there certainly does seem to be variance on what we talk about when we talk about burnout. Does burnout imply a length of time that you’ve gone without a break, or a certain degree of severity? Can you be burned out even if you don’t have an extreme workload? If you’re recharged after a few days of PTO, is that not burnout? Does it come with depression? Can you love your particular job but still be burned out? Does burnout cause a fundamental shift in how you think about your work?

For some, burnout is just another way to say their stamina has been used up, and they need a vacation. But for others, “burnout” is a term that encompasses a kind of melancholic meditation on the unrelentingness of work; more recently, the pandemic and climate crisis anxiety seem inseparable from it.

The Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) is a test developed by psychologists to measure this “phenomenon” on three scales: exhaustion, cynicism, and professional efficacy. An online test on MindTools asks you to rate yourself on statements like, “I am harder and less sympathetic with people than perhaps they deserve,” and “I feel that I have no one to talk to.” It also includes a statement on perceived workload, but it doesn’t include a numeric scale of the average number of hours worked. Overwork in sheer hours seems to be too simple a metric to diagnose burnout.

For a long time, “burnout” was a word most commonly used in the medical industry. In 2014, Dr. Richard Gunderman wrote an article for The Atlantic in which he argued that the reason medical students seem to suffer higher rates of burnout compared to other college students isn’t because the work is intrinsically more difficult, but rather because the way they were being taught was often soul-crushing. It was an educational environment, he claimed, that did little to nurture compassion — ironic, considering these were training to care about the wellbeing of others. Gunderman contends that burnout is not, then, necessarily caused by stress and overwork, but “the sum total of hundreds and thousands of tiny betrayals of purpose, each one so minute that it hardly attracts notice.”

Thinking of burnout as a form of betrayal is illuminating, because it frames burnout not as a solitary experience — an agony you battle alone, something that’s your sole responsibility to heal from — but a relationship in conflict. For those medical students, the conflict comes from being let down by their professors and mentors, and their subsequent interrogation of whether this path would allow them to be the kind, empathetic doctors they wanted to be. For others experiencing professional burnout, the details of the conflict vary, but the core problem remains the same: Workers feel betrayed by their employers.

This is why burnout hits when work fails to live up to our expectations of it. Many of us were raised on the mantra: “It’s not work if you love what you do,” and so we want to believe that our jobs can not only provide financial stability, but also emotional and spiritual nourishment. Not all work is a calling, but the journey toward finding the right job can be likened to a pilgrimage. In a time of increasing secularism, work remains our steadfast religion.

In Peggy Lee’s 1969 anthem Is That All There Is, she sings about the end of a great romance. But she’s not despairing over the extreme pain that came with losing love — rather, she’s disappointed that the end of her relationship wasn’t more ruinous. “I thought I’d die,” she sings, “But I didn’t. And when I didn’t, I said to myself: Is that all there is to love?”

Lee’s disillusionment isn’t just about mourning something tangible, but is also about the loss of a fantasy — that this love was the most important thing to her being, that it was necessary for her survival. For many suffering from professional burnout, there’s a similar disillusionment. When your dream job disappears, shouldn’t you be allowed to disappear, too? Instead, not only can’t you disappear, but you’re also staring at many more decades of meaningless work until you can retire. How do you cope with that? The disappointment can be staggering.

And yet, in the depths of disillusionment and burnout, there can also sometimes be a strange sense of freedom in recognizing that work might never provide the purpose and emotional sustenance you once believed it would. And that’s okay. You’ll survive. Collectively, we will simply need to come up with a new way of thinking about work. It turns out, work — like any relationship — isn’t the be-all, end-all we’d thought it could be

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Journalist Anne Helen Petersen, who wrote a viral Buzzfeed article on burnout that garnered millions of views, agrees, and believes purpose-driven passion is a particular trap for burnout. In her book, Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation, she observes, “The desire for the cool job that you’re passionate about is a particularly modern and bourgeois phenomenon — and, as we’ll see, a means of elevating a certain type of labor to the point of desirability that workers will tolerate all forms of exploitation for the ‘honor’ of performing it.” Studies have also shown that “obsessive passion” can increase work conflict, which in turn increases the chance of burnout.

Connected to the “cool job” being a bourgeois preoccupation is the recognition that the omnipresence of the burnout conversation right now is due to relatively privileged workers experiencing it — including many who work in media, whose thoughts on burnout are inherently going to be more amplified. But, burnout, after all, has long been a regular feature of many low-wage, precarious jobs.

“That’s the thing — when middle class people realize it, it bumps it over into a majority realization,” says Petersen. “Because, ostensibly, middle class people are the largest component of the United States or of most countries. And so that bumps it over into more shared public consciousness. I mean, it kind of sucks, right? You have to wait for the people who have previously been comfortable to realize something for it to become part of a larger conversation.”

Now that burnout is a well-established part of the conversation, is it time to just throw up our hands and reject any notion that we might find work we love? Not exactly. In fact, it’s not that we should be seeking jobs we feel nothing for, or feel ashamed for loving our jobs — it’s more that we should recognize that passion can make an already unequal relationship even more unequal. It’s realizing that “passion” is irrelevant to the reciprocal obligations between employers and employees. It’s acknowledging that it’s okay to have a completely transactional relationship to work, especially when facing the threat of burnout.

In order to survive without a passion for labor, work itself has to be less necessary for survival. But that’s hard to imagine — a world where work doesn’t take center stage, where you don’t mention your job within minutes of meeting someone new. The concept of a post-work world has existed for a while now, but the idea that people should care less about their jobs, let alone work less, often causes deep moral outrage. This isn’t all that surprising, considering how much of our identities are defined by work. It’s as if, without work anchoring all of our lives, society itself will disintegrate.

“I have internalized capitalism — which is when you really think of yourself only in terms of your ability to work,” says Petersen.

She also reveals that while she’s gotten some pushback from older generations on the idea that work doesn’t need to be the great, overwhelming passion of your life, not everyone feels that way: “I think some [boomers] have gotten to this point in their life where they have a midlife crisis and are radicalized, like, ‘I shouldn’t do this. I look back on my life, and what do I have to show? What is a career? Who did I serve with my career?'”

Throughout her book, Petersen not only surveys what burnout looks like, but lays out the ways in which it’s a structural rot. If a bridge collapses, we wouldn’t just tell people how to drive around it, we would demand it be repaired. In the same way, we need to repair the crumbling infrastructure of work, not get emails from HR about how to “practice self-care” and be told to take PTO without ensuring that we can realistically take time away from their jobs, or any guarantee that things will be better once we’re back from vacation.

Petersen has some ideas about what to do: “It has to be things like making emailing after hours or slacking after hours into something that you actually get a talking-to about,” she says. “A negative performance review instead of something that’s implicitly praised because you’re working all the time.”

Petersen is also in favor of a four-day workweek. “If we were actually working four days, then you would see some shifts, because people would have time for things that give them sustaining recharge every week,” she continues. “This is very different from taking a week off one time.”

“We’re talking about really reorganizing the way work finds its place in your life,” says Petersen. “We have to think about, What if work wasn’t the center of our lives? How do we reorganize our entire life, our entire society, so that even if we are spending the most time doing it, that it is not the number one priority. It is not the way that we define whether we are successes and failures. It is not the primary access of our identity.”
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However much it feels like “everyone” is quitting their jobs, we should be wary of thinking that all, or even most people have the ability to do so. It’s also unclear yet that we’re seeing a major shift in power between workers and employers. The Great Resignation has likely been bolstered by stimulus checks and enhanced unemployment benefits. But most of us need jobs as a matter of financial necessity, and quitting on the spot remains only a pleasant fantasy for many, rather than a plausible reality.

Still, though, what it represents is a hopeful blip, and a reminder to employers that their futures are also precarious if they don’t take care of their workers. Perhaps it could be an inspiration toward implementing a long-term bulwark against burnout. Instead of encouraging vacations, discrete periods of rest, it’s time to enact labor protections that guarantee higher wages, that end at-will employment, that boost unemployment benefits permanently, that disentangle healthcare access from employment status. In other words, creating a world where workers who aren’t being treated well, who aren’t satisfied with their jobs, can simply quit without a backwards glance. Until that happens, burnout will continue to be endemic in our society, and individuals will continue to find their own solutions for how to cope.
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Alexis, who identified her burnout thanks to a meme, is currently working at a different company — and that change alone has helped. “I feel phenomenal,” she says. “They treat me like a person who deserves kindness and a future they want. I know it feels like a low bar, but I’ve been amazed at the people I’ve met here who feel the same way.”

“Maybe burnout is what led me to a better place. But traveling through the muck to get here was about as painful as it gets,” she says.

Camilla is doing better, too. “I’m happily working at a deli in a local shop,” she says. “It’s not what I spent thousands training for, but I’m happy doing that part-time while I write.”

Alice, though, is still at her burnout job, finishing up a long-term project that could take anywhere from six months to a year. “I dream of working 30 hours max a week,” she says. “I would love to take a year off. But I don’t have the money.”

When psychologist Herbert Freudenberger coined the term “burnout” in the 1970s, it was a very personal endeavor, a result of his attempt to describe what he was feeling in his own line of work. “I don’t know how to have fun,” he observed in a voice recording describing his symptoms. “I don’t know how to be readily joyful.”

He didn’t explicitly ask, “Is that all there is?” But he might as well have. After all, part of the recovery from burnout is making a promise to prioritize being joyful, in whatever ways we can. If the old career adage promised that as long as you do what you love, you’d never work a day in your life, the new one is simply: Work is just work. And life is too short and important to be wholly dedicated to it. As Peggy Lee sings: If that’s all there is, then let’s keep dancing.

Names have been changed to protect identity.

After a paid week off, refreshed employees return to Señor Froggy restaurants in Kamloops


One week after taking time off for their mental health — a week away from work with pay — Señor Froggy owner Rob Stodola said his employees are reporting feeling happy to be back at work and appreciative for the break.

From Sept. 13 to Sept. 20, the downtown and North Shore locations of the local Mexican restaurant shut down operations to give all staff a paid break after reported burnout amidst the effects of this summer’s heat wave, a month-and-a-half of smoke, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and findings of probable graves on the site of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School.

“I think it was a very worthwhile thing to do,” Stodola told KTW. “It seemed to rejuvenate everybody.”

Stodola said he has noticed more smiles, laughter and joking around in his two restaurants since the reopening on Sept. 21, adding he would do it again if need be.

“Everybody was happy with that [time off]. Half of them wanted more,” Stodola said with a laugh.

He noted it was clear how overstressed staff members were by the fact most of them reported doing “virtually nothing” and just relaxing during their time away from work.

“It was surprising, a little bit worrisome, how many of them had several days where they just couldn’t move,” he said. “They needed that time and, obviously, their bodies were going on adrenaline.”

As for Stodola, the small-business owner took that week off and avoided work-related emails and voicemails.

“I had to be very disciplined in that,” he said.

Instead, Stodola spent time with his kids, went for drives around town with his wife and completed some household projects.

While there is a financial hit to weather, and it will be about three or four months until that’s fully realized, Stodola said it was worth it.

“Everything in business costs. Yes it’s a financial hit, but we had decided that to begin with. We went into it with eyes wide open,” Stodola said.

He said the restaurants were busy before the week and off and continue to be upon reopening.

The restaurants opened amid the new public health order requiring proof of vaccination to attend certain non-essential businesses and events.

With Señor Froggy being a fast food, counter-service restaurant, checking customers’ vaccine status is not something employees will have to do, though Stodola is encouraging staff and customers get vaccinated.

Michael Potestio, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, Kamloops This Week

Widespread labour shortage not going away any time soon: BDC report


CALGARY — Nikita George was a fine arts grad looking for a job in the music industry when the COVID-19 pandemic hit

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© Provided by The Canadian Press

With concert venues shut down and music schools closed, the Calgary woman quickly realized she had two choices — sit home and wait for things to improve, or set out on a completely new path.

She chose the latter, enrolling in a six-month rapid-training program offered by Calgary tech training non-profit InceptionU. Last week, George started her new job as a full stack developer for Acuspire, a Calgary tech startup.

"At first I was a little bit scared, because it's a big jump from music and teaching to tech," George said. "I thought about just waiting (for the pandemic to end), but then I thought maybe I should take advantage of this. Use the pandemic to learn something, develop a new skill, so that there are other opportunities I could go for."

Much has been written in recent months about Canadian employers struggling with labour shortages 18 months into the COVID-19 pandemic. A report released Wednesday provides additional evidence, with more than 60 per cent of Canadian businesses saying that widespread labour shortages are limiting their growth.

The report, produced by the Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC), combines the findings of two surveys — one that polled 1,251 Canadian entrepreneurs in May 2021 and a survey of 3,000 Canadian employees conducted in June 2021. Its findings suggest 49 per cent of business owners have had to delay or have been unable to deliver orders to clients due to a lack of labour.

It also says many small- and medium-sized business owners report job vacancies sitting empty for three or four months at a time, with 61 per cent saying they've had to increase their own hours or their employees' work hours as a result.

“It’s very serious, because it’s slowing down the growth of many businesses in Canada, and as a result is going to slow down the growth of the economy,” said Pierre Cléroux, BDC’s chief economist.

However, the report also pokes holes in some of the established narratives we've heard so far about the labour shortage. Contrary to popular opinion, Cléroux said, the pandemic didn't create Canada's labour shortage — it just made an existing problem worse. While COVID-19 certainly disrupted the Canadian labour market by temporarily cutting off the flow of immigrants to the country and by prompting some workers to quit rather than risk being exposed to the virus on the job, Cléroux said the key problem is simple demographics.

"Today, 16 per cent of Canadians are over 65. In the next five years, many Canadians are going to retire," Cléroux said. "And not a lot of young people are entering the job market."

Some employers struggling to hire have suggested that the Canada Emergency Response Benefit and other government assistance programs could be making it more attractive for employees to stay at home rather than return to the workforce as the economy opens up. But the BDC report suggests the phaseout of CERB and programs like it won't fix the problem.

While sectors like accommodation and food services, retail, and manufacturing have lost thousands of jobs during the pandemic, professional and business services, education, public administration, and health care actually gained workers during the pandemic. In fact, the report says that a full 20 per cent of workers who lost their jobs during the pandemic are now, like Nikita George, working in an entirely different field.

"Now they prefer that job, so they don’t go back. That makes the situation worse for some sectors of our economy,” Cléroux said. "We want to send a signal to businesses that this is a long-term issue."

Cléroux suggested employers should look to automation and technology to help address workforce challenges, as well as offer a "total compensation package" that includes perks such as benefits, training and flexibility to help attract applicants.

In a report released in August, the Business Council of Alberta also concluded that pandemic-era support programs like CERB are not the driving factor behind the labour force shortage. About one quarter of businesses surveyed by the council said that income supports are a barrier to finding workers, but only seven per cent said they are the most significant obstacle.

The group said "increased compensation, more remote work flexibility, improved skills training and micro-credentialing" may be necessary for employers seeking to attract workers and reduce job turnover.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 29, 2021.

Amanda Stephenson, The Canadian Press