JEFF BEZOS, MARK ZUCKERBERG & ELON MUSK MAKE $163BN IN JUST FIVE MONTHS
AT THE SAME TIME, GLOBAL ECONOMY IS CONTRACTING AND WORKING PEOPLE ARE EXPECTED TO PAY THE PRICE, WITH MORE THAN 1 IN 5 CHILDREN IN WALES LIVING IN POVERTY.
As many people are plunged into joblessness and poverty during the Coronavirus pandemic, the wealth of the richest people on the planet has soared.
The Financial Times newspaper reported this weekend that top secret Swiss bank accounts – where the super rich store their money – have seen their clients’ assets surge this year. One bank, Lombard Odier, once a lender to Napoleon, keeps hold of a staggering SFr287bn of millionaires and billionaires money (around £242bn).
The rising wealth of the richest contrasts with the overall health of the economy. All in all, the global economy is expected to contract by 4.4% this year because of the pandemic, but the figure for the UK is almost double that at 8%.
As we already see with child poverty in Wales and the row over free school meals in England, it is those already struggling who are paying the price of the downturn.
But at the same time as those at the bottom suffer and struggle even to feed themselves, many billionaires are becoming richer than ever before.
The net worth of Jeff Bezos, Amazon boss, rose $73bn between mid-March and mid-September. Over the same period, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Tesla’s Elon Musk saw their wealth increase by $45bn each. The US tops the list for the country with the most billionaires. The UK is eighth, but in all major economies the wealth of billionaires has grown.
In China, which is second on the list, 257 people became billionaires in 2020. In the 22 years that data has been gathered on the country’s super rich, the wealth of those at the top has never grown so much as in 2020.
This isn’t the first time that billionaires have profited from a crisis however, especially in the West.
“Some bankers believe the last time the super rich had it so good was in 2009, after the great financial crunch,” writes the Financial Times. “As then, the crisis has been as much of an investment opportunity as it has a threat. This time, the scale of the payday is far greater, thanks to governments and central banks’ quicker reaction to cushion the blow.”
Many think that state economic intervention has helped the richest by keeping stock markets more stable. In other words, the wealth created by the majority of people has been funnelled into the hands of a tiny number of people instead of being used to support those most in need.
The soaring wealth of Jeff Bezos is particularly startling given how Amazon workers are treated.
Earlier this year, the company announced that it would be cutting worker’s pay, which had only been raised by $2 per hour in America and similar amount in the UK. The payment ended in June, however, with the firm saying it had become too costly.
Amazon ‘fulfilment centres’ or warehouses are notoriously dangerous workplaces. There are two in Wales. On black Friday last year , workers at the Newport site took part in a UK wide day of action against the ‘appalling’ treatment of workers.
Their union GMB reported that an investigation revealed more than 600 ambulance call outs to Amazon warehouses relating to serious injuries. “Workers are breaking bones, being knocked unconscious, and being taken away in ambulances.” An union official said.
It also found that 87% of workers in a survey said they were in varying degrees of permanent joint pain. The union also found that workers had also been forced to urinate into bottles and pregnant women were made to stand for hours to meet targets. One woman reported losing a pregnancy at work, and even then an ambulance was not called.
At the same time, a culture of union busting and silence pervades. When we visited their Swansea warehouse car park last year to try and talk to workers, we were met by a team of managers within 5 minutes and ordered off the premises. No workers wanted to talk, with one simply saying that bosses would have his ‘guts for garters’ if he spoke to us and another saying they had been instructed not to tell people what happens inside.
These are the kind of conditions – alongside a larger labour chain of exploitation – that allows a figure like Bezos to amass so much money.
His net worth is now $200bn, according to Forbes magazine.
At the same time, poverty is rising and workers face pay squeezes and redundancies. In a classroom of 25 pupils in Wales, 7 children are living in poverty, according Alison Garnham, chief executive of Child Poverty Action Group. Nurses are fighting for a 15% wage increase after enduring the pandemic, while care homes have struggled to pay for PPE. Many workers are losing their jobs as services like leisure and the arts are cut to save amounts of money which are a fraction of the wealth being hoarded in Swiss bank accounts.
*an earlier headline on this article was changed
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