international Declaration: For a single public health system, free and universal *

Our health, our rights: not their profits and a privatized health that does not guarantee serving the most needy, nor our security.

The next 28 April marks World Day for Safety and Health at Work. This year falls in the midst of a global crisis accelerated and aggravated by the Coronavirus pandemic.. That punishes the workers and popular sectors of the world and highlights the results of austerity and adjustment policies, reactionary structural reforms that suppress achievements, the growing social inequality and the debacle of health and other public services. The governments, beyond nuances and particularities, They have been prioritizing capitalist profits over the health of the people.

While the integrity of health workers, who are in the first trench of fighting the pandemic is a priority, We do not fail to point out the need to defend the rights of the entire working class and exploited sectors.

Governments and employers talk about “prevention of accidents and illnesses in the workplace”, but the protection elements are lacking, workers' hygiene and safety committees, They monetize occupational risk and make enormous businesses with the life and working conditions of workers through risk insurers and self-insurance..

Governments and employers say they promote safe work, healthy and dignified and do nothing other than institutionalize the precariousness of employment and the liquidation of the social salary. They hypocritically lament, together with the bureaucratic union leaders, the growing number of victims of work accidents and occupational diseases. But these, They are nothing other than the most grotesque expression of capitalist decadence.

The pandemic combined with the economic recession and adjustment measures, They will surely add consequences among health workers and those branches considered essential or that maintain their operation during the pandemic.. Will increase risk exposure, burnout and post-traumatic stress. As well as the agenda of demands and the program for the new struggles that have already begun to emerge and will intensify., in defense of public health and labor rights. And that we propose to direct to emergency and background measures, socialist in nature.

The crisis of health systems and working conditions

The pandemic is revealing the collapse of health systems, exhausted by the capitalist logic of profit, privatization and adjustment. It demonstrates the inability of the capitalist system to respond to the health and economic-social contingency.. Rescue measures, They are for banks and companies, not for workers. The world looks perplexed at scenes that seemed buried in history books: bodies piled up in hospitals, abandoned in places or burned on public roads. And coronavirus victims dying without artificial respirators.

Without a doubt, the drastic reduction of health budgets promoted by capitalist financial organizations, the promotion of tariffication and privatization policies for health services that have enlarged the private sector to the detriment of the state sector and the progressive reduction in public investment in science, technology and research, They combine to place the population in a state of defenselessness. Without a sanitary trench to defend it.

Governments have been failing to stop the pandemic. The emergence of the crisis of the system has forced in many cases to take measures such as budgetary injections, seizure of respirators, productive reconversions to manufacture inputs and even incorporation of the private sector into the state even temporarily as in Ireland. Demonstrating that the failure is due to capitalist logic and that socialist measures are needed as we have been demanding.

A special chapter is the health of healthcare workers. Thousands of health workers contaminated and died due to lack of Personal Protective Equipment. It is not something inevitable. To the previously existing working conditions of high risk exposure, Now the consequences of its location on the front line of confronting the pandemic are added without the adequate elements and without a global strengthening of the health system..

In addition to the general epidemiological curve that in many places they want to show us as having a favorable evolution, It is indisputable that positive cases are growing in the health team, setting up another alarming curve that affects those in the trenches.

Because, On World Day for Safety and Health at Work, today is proposed, first, the claim for EPP health team workers, of licenses for risk groups, of the diagnostic tests that correspond. But this is not enough if measures are taken to move towards a single system., nationalizing the private sector.

Caring for those who care and moving towards a socialist model of health

We promote the struggle from the working class and the peoples of the world for a program of emergency measures in the path of a socialist model to guarantee full rights for workers and a single system that guarantees universal access, free and egalitarian.

• Health budget, based on non-payment of debts and real tax on large fortunes, starting with banks and corporations. We must prioritize our health, not your earnings.
• Immediate hiring of necessary health personnel with an adequate salary and full labor rights.
• Protection and safety elements for all workers during the pandemic. Periodic diagnostic tests for the entire working class that is in essential tasks, first, for all health team personnel. Licenses for risk groups. Dissolution of risk insurers. Full coverage by the state.
• National Crisis Committees, regional and in each establishment with workers and patients, for planning the intervention against the pandemic and its democratic leadership.
• Declare the entire productive structure of our countries of social utility to centralize, plan and reconvert all economic activity based on the majority social needs for supply and health response to the pandemic.
• Unified Health System, to centralize installed and personal capacity. Public production of medicines. Declaration of social utility of laboratories and large pharmaceutical monopolies and of all installed capacity of the private sector towards its nationalization and definitive incorporation into the single system. Financing of the system from general income based on a progressive tax system.
• That licenses be guaranteed with the full payment of wages and the payment of the entire wage to quarantined workers and that dismissals and suspensions are prohibited. Subsidies for informal workers, self-employed and unemployed. Prohibition of evictions. Housing and food distribution for the homeless. End all persecution of migrants, no expulsion and full access to the health system.
• Outside Bolsonaro and the denialist governments, criminals of their peoples. Fight for a way out of the pandemic in favor of the working class, the popular and health sectors, the life and rights of the majority; because they are worth more than all capitalist profits. Pandemics for the working class and the peoples of the world, are two: COVID19 and the system that exploits and oppresses us. There is no possible humanization of capital. It is necessary, health and a model of life, of a socialist society with full democracy, real.

Nevertheless, this statement and the date of 28 of April, It's just a starting point, since we intend to multiply and extend a true campaign of international scope beyond this specific day. The international framework that we describe above, the reality and agenda of the working class around the world, especially that of the health sectors, places on the agenda the program we are proposing as a perspective for struggle and organization.

* This declaration arises from the collective debate of the International Socialist League, Socialist Struggle of Brazil and different social and union organizations from different parts of the world.