WWF'S SECRET WAR
WWF Admitted “Sorrow” Over Human Rights Abuses

A 160-page report, in response to a BuzzFeed News investigation, found long-standing failures at the celebrated wildlife charity.

Katie J.M. Baker BuzzFeed News Investigative Reporter

Tom Warren Investigations Correspondent

Posted on November 25, 2020


Tim Lane / BuzzFeed News

Read the original March 2019 BuzzFeed News investigation.

One of the world’s largest charities knew for years that it was funding alleged human rights abusers but repeatedly failed to address the issue, a lengthy, long-delayed report revealed on Tuesday.

A BuzzFeed News investigation first exposed in March 2019 how WWF, the beloved nonprofit with the cuddly panda logo, financed and equipped park rangers accused of beating, torturing, sexually assaulting, and murdering scores of people. In response, WWF immediately commissioned an “independent review” led by Navi Pillay, a former United Nations commissioner for human rights.

The 160-page review, which has now been published online, corroborates problems exposed by BuzzFeed News in Nepal, Cameroon, the Republic of the Congo, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The report claimed the panel was prevented by the COVID-19 pandemic from traveling to locations where the abuses reportedly took place.

The review found that WWF had failed again and again to follow “its own commitments to respect human rights” — commitments that are not just required by law but essential to “the conservation of nature.”

In a statement issued in response to the review, WWF expressed “deep and unreserved sorrow for those who have suffered,” and said that abuses by park rangers “horrify us and go against all the values for which we stand.” The charity acknowledged its shortcomings and welcomed the recommendations, saying “we can and will do more.”

Pillay’s review declined to address whether high-level executives, who BuzzFeed News found were aware of “accelerating” violence at at least one wildlife park as early as January 2018, were responsible for the charity’s missteps.

In the Congo Basin, where WWF did an “especially weak” job fulfilling its human rights commitments, the wildlife charity did not fully investigate accounts of murder, rape, and torture out of fear that government partners would “react negatively to an effort to investigate past human rights abuses,” the panel found. There and elsewhere, WWF provided technical and financial support to park rangers, known locally as “eco-guards,” even after learning about similar, horrifying allegations — and, in some cases, after damning reviews commissioned by the non-profit itself confirmed “serious and widespread” reports of abuse.

The report found “no formal mechanism in place for WWF to be informed of alleged abuses during anti-poaching missions” in Nepal, despite torture, rape, and murder allegations ranging from the early 2000s to this past July, when park officials were alleged to have beaten an Indigenous youth and destroyed homes of a local community. “WWF needs to know what is happening on the ground where it works” in order to fulfill its own human rights policies, the report said.


Frank Bienewald / Getty Images
A river in Nepal's Chitwan National Park.

Overall, WWF paid too little attention to credible abuse allegations, failed to construct a system for victims to make complaints, and painted an overly rosy picture of its anti-poaching war in public communications, the report found. "Unfortunately, WWF’s commitments to implement its social policies have not been adequately and consistently followed through,” the report’s authors wrote.

WWF has supported efforts to fight wildlife crime for decades. Although local governments officially employ and pay park rangers who patrol national parks and protected wildlife reserves, in a number of countries across Africa and Asia WWF has provided crucial funding to make their jobs possible. The charity has framed its crusade against poaching in the hardened terms of war.

In a multipart series, BuzzFeed News found that WWF’s war on poaching came with civilian casualties: impoverished villagers living near the parks. At the time, WWF responded that many of BuzzFeed’s assertions did “not match our understanding of events” — yet the charity swiftly overhauled many of its human rights policies after publication.

In the US, the series spurred a bipartisan investigation and proposed legislation that would prohibit the government from awarding money to international conservation groups that fund or support human rights violations. It also prompted a freeze of funds by the Interior Department, a review by the Government Accountability Office, and separate government probes in the UK and Germany.

The new review offers more recommendations for the charity to improve its oversight, including hiring more human rights specialists, conducting stronger due diligence before committing to conservation projects, signing human rights commitments with WWF’s government and law enforcement partners in the field, and establishing effective complaint systems so that Indigenous people can more easily report abuse.

The review found that there was no “consistent and unified effort” across WWF’s network of offices around the world to “address complaints about human rights abuses” until 2018.

Many of the panel’s findings pointed directly to the top: “Commitments to meet the responsibility to respect human rights should be approved at the most senior level of the institution,” the panel wrote. Although all of WWF’s offices in the Congo Basin fall under the direct authority of WWF International, staff at its headquarters in Gland, Switzerland did little to oversee the organization’s work there.

WWF International also didn’t provide clear guidance to local offices about how to implement its human rights commitments. For example, there were no network-wide norms about how to work with law enforcement and park rangers. As a result, each program office “was left on its own to develop – or not – codes of conduct, training materials, conditions for supporting rangers, and procedures for responding to allegations of abuse.”

“Ultimately, the responsibility was on WWF International and the WWF Network as a whole to ensure that the allegations of human rights abuses by eco-guards to which WWF was providing financial and technical support were properly addressed,” the panel wrote.


Ezequiel Becerra / Getty Images
WWF International Director General Marco Lambertini


Last October BuzzFeed News revealed that both Director General Marco Lambertini and Chief Operating Officer Dominic O’Neill personally reviewed a WWF-commissioned report documenting “accelerating” accounts of violence by WWF-backed guards in Cameroon. That report was sent to higher-ups in January 2018 — more than a year before BuzzFeed News began exposing similar abuses. Yet Pillay’s review said little about whether WWF executives were responsible for the charity’s failings.

Instead the review focused on WWF’s complex system, under which individual program offices partner with countries “with apparently very limited consultation or oversight from WWF International,” even when WWF International is legally responsible. This obscured “clear lines of responsibility and accountability,” resulting in “difficulties and confusion” and “ineffective” attempts to address human rights, the panel wrote.

The panel couldn’t find a single contract between WWF International and its partner countries that contained provisions concerning human rights responsibilities or the rights of Indigenous people.

The panel also criticized WWF’s press briefings at length, saying it needed to be “more forthcoming about the challenges it faces” and “more transparent about how it responds when faced with allegations of human rights abuses associated with activities that it supports.” In some cases, “it is clear that to avoid fuelling criticism WWF decided not to publish commissioned reports, to downplay information received, or to overstate the effectiveness of its proposed responses.”

An internal focus on promoting “good news” seems “to have led to a culture” in which program offices “have been unwilling to share or escalate the full extent of their knowledge about allegations of human rights abuses because of concern about scaring off donors or offending state partners,” the report said. “WWF at all levels should be more transparent both internally and externally about the challenges it faces in promoting conservation and respecting human rights. Equally important, it must be more forthright about the effectiveness, or lack of effectiveness, of its efforts to overcome those challenges.”

The report attracted immediate criticism from prominent voices who said it did not fully acknowledge the charity’s responsibility for abuses against Indigenous people. Stephen Corry, the director of Survival International, the tribal rights advocacy group, said “the report echoes previous WWF responses in passing the blame onto ‘government rangers.’” A spokesperson for Rainforest Foundation UK said the report “fails to take responsibility” for WWF’s shortcomings “or issue a sincere apology to the many individuals who have suffered human rights abuses carried out in their name.”

The Forest Peoples Program, an Indigenous rights group that has reported abuses to WWF, said the report showed the need for all wildlife charities to take a hard look at themselves.

“The human rights abuses suffered by Indigenous peoples and local communities listed in the report highlight fundamental issues that arise across the conservation sector as a whole, not isolated to WWF,” said Helen Tugendhat, program coordinator at the Forest Peoples Program. “We urge other conservation organizations as well as conservation funders to read this report closely and evaluate and amend their own practices.”

MORE ON THIS
WWF Funds Guards Who Have Tortured And Killed People Tom Warren · March 4, 2019

A Leaked Report Shows WWF Was Warned Years Ago Of “Frightening” Abuses

Katie J.M. Baker · March 5, 2019

WWF Executives Were Warned Of Widespread Atrocities By Anti-Poaching Rangers The Charity Funded

Katie J.M. Baker · Oct. 17, 2019



Katie Baker is an investigative reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in London.


Tom Warren is an investigations correspondent for BuzzFeed News and is based in London.

The Coronavirus Outbreaks In Meatpacking Plants Were Likely Much Worse Than Official Numbers Show

Of the 45 JBS, Smithfield, Tyson, and Cargill facilities around the country that recorded at least 50 confirmed COVID-19 cases, only 20 ordered full-scale testing for all employees, according to a BuzzFeed News investigation.

Karen Wang BuzzFeed Contributor Albert Samaha BuzzFeed News Reporter
Posted on November 27, 2020

Andy Cross / Getty Images
JBS Greeley Beef Plant president of safety, Jay Rawlings heads up to the plant from the new employee entrance that includes a temperature check with an infrared camera system April 23, 2020.


During the first wave of the pandemic, the meatpacking industry emerged as an early and shocking hot spot. Since then, around 40,000 meatpacking workers nationwide have tested positive for the coronavirus, according to news organizations tracking the industry. Around half of them were employed by JBS, Smithfield, Tyson, or Cargill, the four industry giants collectively responsible for more than 80% of the meat consumed in the US. At least 200 workers have died.

But a BuzzFeed News investigation has found that the real scope of the outbreaks — in an industry where workers stand shoulder to shoulder for hours in sometimes poorly ventilated warehouses — was likely far worse, because dozens of plants didn’t test all their employees even when scores of workers were falling ill and, in some cases, public health officials offered the tests free of charge.

As infections surge anew across the country, the extent of the spring outbreaks — and thus the true scale of the danger to the industry’s workers — remains unknown, shrouded by meatpacking companies’ patchwork testing practices. And even now, with federal officials giving meatpackers broad authority over how to keep their workers safe, the companies have yet to implement universal testing. All four companies told BuzzFeed News that they have minimized the risk their workers face through new safety gear, protective barriers, distancing protocols, screening programs aimed at ensuring that anyone showing symptoms stays home, and mandatory testing for employees who show symptoms or are exposed to a confirmed case.

But meatpacking workers are still getting sick.

Seven months after the JBS plant in Greeley, Colorado, briefly closed due to an outbreak in the spring that left six people dead, the virus has hit that workplace again: Last week, 20 employees at the facility and 34 more at the local corporate headquarters tested positive, according to state health department data.

The company attributed that to “the increase in the number of cases in the surrounding community,” JBS spokesperson Cameron Bruett told BuzzFeed News, noting that it was “not unexpected.”

“The rate of increase among our workforce is not nearly at the rate we are seeing in the local community,” he said. But the plant still does not conduct facility-wide testing, leaving the full scope of the new outbreak uncertain. At Greeley, as at many plants across the country, an early outbreak wasn’t enough to spur universal testing protocols.


Of the 45 JBS, Smithfield, Tyson, and Cargill facilities around the country that recorded at least 50 confirmed cases, only 20 ordered full-scale testing for all employees, according to interviews with local health officials, company statements, and a review of data compiled by the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting.

The four companies say that they responded to outbreaks by directing sick and exposed workers to quarantine for two weeks, implementing additional safety policies, and encouraging employees to stay home or get tested if they showed symptoms or were in close contact with someone who tested positive.

In Joslin, Illinois, where local officials announced that 194 employees tested positive at a Tyson plant in the spring, the Rock Island County Health Department told BuzzFeed News that the company declined its offer for a local clinic to set up facility-wide testing. Instead, Tyson partnered with mobile health clinics to test workers who had symptoms or were exposed to a known case.

“The decision to conduct facility-wide testing is handled on a case-by-case and has typically involved the input of state and/or local health officials as well as other outside medical experts,” Tyson spokesperson Gary Mickelson told BuzzFeed News, noting that the company conducted facility-wide testing at 17 of its 25 plants with outbreaks of at least 50 cases. “Other factors include the number of active cases involving our workers as well as the number of cases in the community.”

In Arkansas, seven meat processing plants owned by JBS, Tyson, or Cargill with at least 50 confirmed cases declined the state health department’s offer “to conduct testing on-site,” according to Danyelle McNeill, Arkansas Department of Health’s public information coordinator, and just two of those plants later arranged for all employees to be tested. In statements to BuzzFeed News, Tyson denied that the state offered mass testing for its Arkansas facilities, Cargill didn’t address specific plants, and JBS said that local testing was “widely available” and the company has “partnered with the health department on contact testing our team members.”

In Colorado, JBS officials turned down testing in the early days of the April outbreak. Though testing kits were scarce at the time, state officials secured enough tests to cover all 3,200 workers at the Greeley plant, where a coronavirus outbreak was emerging, according to the local health department. But on the day the testing was scheduled to start, JBS “got a hold of all the employees and told them that they weren't testing anymore,” said Rosario Hernandez, whose husband works at the plant. If they needed to get tested, she said, “they had to do it on their own.” Company and union officials confirmed her account.

The Greeley plant later emerged as one of the deadliest workplace clusters in the US, with six employees dying of COVID-19 complications in April and May.

The numbers at the Greeley plant were high, but "if they would have tested every worker, this would have probably been one of the highest in the whole country," said Kim Cordova, president of UFCW Local 7 of Colorado and Wyoming.

In all, that location logged a total of 312 confirmed cases as of mid-November, according to local health department data. Some plants of similar size that did facility-wide testing, such as Tyson’s pork processing operations in Waterloo, Iowa, and Logansport, Indiana, recorded around 1,000 confirmed cases each — a testament to the way the contagious virus raced through the plants, sickening some and making many others asymptomatic carriers.


The company maintains that it acted quickly to close the plant after the outbreak began and that local testing is available for everybody.


“If someone did not get tested, it was a personal decision,” JBS spokesperson Bruett told BuzzFeed News.


Courtesy the Hernandez family
Alfredo Hernandez
Rosario Hernandez’s husband was among those who got sick.

Alfredo Hernandez, who has worked at the JBS plant in Greeley for 31 years, developed a cough and felt unusually tired in mid-March, before he was aware of any cases at work. He thought it was a cold at first, but his exhaustion escalated, his temperature rose, and his back began to ache. On March 23, Rosario called her husband’s supervisor to say he was showing coronavirus symptoms. She left a voicemail message that was never returned, she told BuzzFeed News. JBS didn’t comment on specific cases.

Five days later, with her husband's condition worsening, Rosario drove him to the hospital, where he was immediately hooked up to an oxygen mask and tested for COVID-19. He was positive. Within days, more workers fell ill, Rosario and Cordova said. By April 1, county health officials were aware of at least 14 JBS workers who tested positive, including nine who "worked while symptomatic and therefore were contagious to others," the Weld County Department of Public Health and Environment stated in an April 4 letter to JBS's human resources director. By April 10, the number had risen to 43, including 14 hospitalizations and two deaths. "The rapid nature of the spread of disease among JBS employees is very concerning," state and county officials said in a letter to JBS that day, ordering the company to "identify ill workers" and implement "an ongoing testing and monitoring program."

And yet, the company quickly abandoned a plan to test all its workers.


Initially, JBS, in conjunction with local officials, announced plans for comprehensive testing. But the company changed course within 24 hours, instead deciding to close the plant for two weeks but let testing be voluntary, according to spokespeople for JBS and the state health department.

Though the state initially directed that all workers be tested before the plant reopened, officials retreated from the order. The state health department didn’t respond to questions about the reason for the shift. In a statement to BuzzFeed News, it noted that the two-week closure “provided quarantine or isolation time for employees who were exposed or sick.”

JBS spokesperson Bruett said that such mass testing had proven to be logistically unfeasible "given the short turnaround." The union, however, alleged that the company didn’t want to know how high its case count really was, fearing a public relations problem that could keep the plant closed even longer.

The company says the safety of its workers has always been its top priority; Bruett noted that JBS directed workers who needed or wanted tests to a drive-through-testing facility, although he acknowledged there was no way that site could accommodate the entire workforce.


The day the plant reopened, local health officials set up a temporary testing site for JBS employees and their relatives, but it only had capacity to test 300 a day and stayed open just five days, according to records obtained by BuzzFeed News. By the end of April, 245 workers had tested positive. Like at most plants that closed due to outbreaks, JBS reopened its Greeley facility without knowing for certain whether infected workers were cleared of the virus or untested workers were bringing it inside.

Employees could return once they were free from symptoms for 72 hours without having to get retested. While masks, face shields, fans, and plexiglass barriers have reduced exposure, at least 65 workers at the plant have tested positive in the months since it reopened, according to health department data.

The company “was just pushing for that plant to open regardless of testing or regardless of whether people were positive without symptoms,” Cordova, the union president, said. “The workers in this plant have been treated as just sacrificial human beings.”

JBS noted that public health officials approved their plans to restart operations at the plant. But while Weld County's health department signed off, the state health department did not, and requested that it be removed from the company’s statements about the reopening, according to emails obtained by BuzzFeed News. State health officials did not respond to questions about why they did that.


Andy Cross / Getty Images
The exterior of the JBS Greeley Beef Plant April 23, 2020.

Nine months into the pandemic, JBS tests a random sample of workers every two weeks, the company said, and Tyson conducts surveillance testing based on an algorithm tied to “the number of positive cases involving plant workers as well as people in the community,” according to a company statement. Smithfield says that it now requires all workers to be tested before a closed plant reopens.

But Cordova, the union president for JBS Greeley, noted that many workers are torn between protecting their health and avoiding “financial devastation.”

“There's a 'work while sick' culture in these facilities,” she said. “The workers feel like they can't afford to wait and not have a source of income.”

Two medical assistants contracted to conduct COVID screenings at the JBS Greeley plant after it reopened claimed in affidavits filed earlier this fall that the company encouraged workers to clock in even when they showed symptoms, such as a cough or a high temperature, the Greeley Tribune reported. The company, in a statement to the newspaper, called the claims “unsubstantiated” and said that its “screening process has been reviewed and approved multiple times by local, state and federal entities, including the CDC.”

Meatpacking workers are not assured paychecks if their illness exceeds their two-week sick leave. In Minneapolis, where more than 200 JBS employees tested positive in April, nearly 80% the 930 COVID-related worker’s compensation claims in the industry were rejected, with the rest still pending, and in Utah, where more than 300 JBS workers tested positive, the company rejected all seven claims filed through the end of July, Reuters reported.

“Given the widespread nature of viral spread, our third-party claims administrator reviews each case thoroughly and independently,” Bruett told Reuters.

Hernandez was in the hospital for a week. When he returned home on April 5, he was bedridden and hooked up to an oxygen tank. JBS provided two weeks of paid sick leave, but after that Hernandez had to apply for short-term disability, which covers around 60% of his salary, though he went four weeks without pay before the claim was processed, his wife said.

He provides the sole income in his household, and he is unsure when he will return to work. He still feels lingering effects of the infection months after testing positive, with body aches, fatigue, and difficulty breathing.

In September, the Department of Labor issued a fine to JBS for “for failing to protect employees from exposure to the coronavirus” at the Greeley plant. The total penalty was $15,615. While the union protested that the amount was so low as to be “insulting,” the company argued that it shouldn't have been fined at all, calling the citation “entirely without merit” because it “attempts to impose a standard that did not exist in March as we fought the pandemic with no guidance,” according to statements from both sides. JBS contested the fine, and the case will go to an independent arbitrator. ●


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How A 4th Of July Meal Exposes The Coronavirus Risk For Thousands Of US Food Workers Albert Samaha · July 4, 2020

This Texas Town Is America’s COVID-19 Future Anne Helen Petersen · June 14, 2020


Karen Wang is a senior at the University of Southern California. She is based in Los Angeles.


Albert Samaha is an investigative reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in New York

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.

The journalists at BuzzFeed News are proud to bring you trustworthy and relevant reporting about the coronavirus. To help keep this news free, become a member and sign up for our newsletter, Incoming.

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.”


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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.”

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  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.