Power, profits and the pandemic

Oxfam International published Power, profits and the pandemic – a paper written by the organisation’s researchers Uwe Gneiting, Nicholas Lusiani, and Irit Tamir – on September 10, 2020.It has been six months since the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 to be a global pandemic, the paper states. Since then, over 800,000 people have died from the disease, around 400 million people – mostly women – have lost their jobs, and up to half a billion could be pushed further into poverty by the time the pandemic ends. It has particularly hit workers and their families, and small and medium enterprises. Large corporations have either managed to sustain themselves or “…cashed in on the disaster.” The authors note that governments could have avoided the skewed economic impacts of the pandemic.This 60-page paper contains six chapters: an introduction (chapter 1); ‘Excessive shareholder payouts left companies vulnerable to Covid-19’ (chapter 2); ‘The problem with amassing profits in a time of despair’ (chapter 3); ‘Putting profits before people’ (chapter 4); ‘Towards a hyper-unequal future?’ (chapter 5); and ‘Begin again’ (chapter 6).