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Washington, May 6: At a time when the coronavirus pandemic has squeezed them, multi-national companies in America are laying off workers while paying cash dividends to their shareholders. Thus making the workers bear the brunt of the sacrifices while the shareholders continue to collect.

The Washington Post said in one of its reports that five big American companies have paid a combined USD 700 million to shareholders while cutting jobs, closing plants and leaving thousands of their workers filing for unemployment benefits.

Since the pandemic was declared an emergency, Caterpillar has suspended operations at two plants and a foundry, Levi Strauss has closed stores, and toolmaker Stanley Black & Decker has been planning layoffs and furloughs.

Steelcase, an office furniture manufacturer, and World Wrestling Entertainment have also shed employees.

Executives of those companies told the Post that the layoffs support the long-term health of their companies, and often the executives are giving up a piece of their salaries. Furloughed workers can apply for unemployment benefits.

But distributing millions of dollars to shareholders while leaving many workers without a paycheck is unfair, critics argue, and belies the repeated statements from executives about their concern for employees' welfare during the coronavirus crisis.

Caterpillar, for example, announced a USD 500 million distribution to shareholders April 8, about two weeks after indicating that operations at some plants would stop. The company however declined to divulge how many workers are affected.

"We are taking a variety of actions globally, but we aren't going to discuss the number of impacted people," spokeswoman of the company, Kate Kenny, said in a reply to an email by the Post.

This spate of dividends is also likely to revive long-standing debates about economic rewards.

"There are no hard-and-fast rules about this," said Amy Borrus, deputy director of the Council of Institutional Investors, a group that argues for shareholder rights and represents pension funds and other long-term investors.

Many large US companies choose to issue a regular, quarterly dividend to shareholders, often increasing it, and they boast about these payments because they help keep the share price higher than it might otherwise be. Those companies might be reluctant to announce that they are cutting or suspending their dividend during a crisis, Borrus was further quoted as saying.

But "companies have to be mindful of the optics of paying dividends if they're laying off thousands of workers," she added.

On March 26, Caterpillar had announced that because of the pandemic, it was "temporarily suspending operations at certain facilities." Two plants, in East Peoria, Ill., and Lafayette, Ind., were coming to a halt, as well as a foundry in Mapleton, Ill., according to news reports.

"We are taking a variety of actions at our global facilities to reduce production due to weaker customer demand, potential supply constraints and the spread of the covid-19 pandemic and related government actions," Kenny said via email.

"These actions include temporary facility shutdowns, indefinite or temporary layoffs," she added.

Similarly, Levi Strauss announced April 7 that the company would stop paying store workers, and about 4,000 are now on furlough. On the same day, the company announced that it was returning USD 32 million to shareholders.

"As this human and economic tragedy unfolds globally over the coming months, we are taking swift and decisive action that will ensure we remain a winner in our industry," Chip Bergh, president and chief executive of the company, also told the Post.

Stanley Black & Decker announced on April 2 that it was planning furloughs and layoffs because of the pandemic. Two weeks later, it issued a dividend to shareholders of about USD 106 million.

The notion that a company's primary purpose is to serve shareholders gained prominence in the 1980s but has come under attack in recent years, even from business executives, the newspaper reported.

Corporate decisions to suspend dividends and buybacks are complex, however, and it is difficult to know whether these suspensions of dividend and buyback programs were motivated by a desire to conserve cash in anticipation of bad times, and how much they are prompted by a sense of obligation to employees.

Over recent decades, the mandate to "maximize shareholder value" has become orthodoxy, for many, and it is often unclear what motivates companies to pare dividends or buybacks for shareholders, said William Lazonick, an emeritus economics professor at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, who has been one of the leading critics of companies that distribute cash to shareholders through stock buybacks and dividends rather than reinvesting the profits into employees, innovation and production.

Beijing, Mar 24:  China reported 78 new confirmed cases, including 74 imported infections, while the death toll from the novel coronavirus increased to 3,277 after seven more fatalities were confirmed from the COVID-19, health officials said on Tuesday.

The overall confirmed cases on the Chinese mainland have reached 81,171 by the end of Monday. This included 3,277 people who died of the disease, 4,735 patients who were still being treated and 73,159 patients discharged after recovery, the National Health Commission (NHC) said on Tuesday.

The NHC said, 78 new confirmed COVID-19 cases were reported on the Chinese mainland on Monday, of which 74 were imported from abroad taking the number of overseas cases to 427.

Also on Monday, seven deaths and 35 new suspected cases were reported on the mainland with all the deaths in Hubei Province.

The total COVID-19 cases in Beijing climbed to 522 with eight deaths prompting local governments of Beijing as well as Shanghai to announce that all overseas arrivals will be subjected to nucleic acid tests to ensure proper detection.

Of the 74 newly imported cases, 31 were reported in Beijing, 14 in Guangdong, nine in Shanghai, five in Fujian, four in Tianjin, three in Jiangsu, two in Zhejiang and Sichuan respectively, and one in Shanxi, Liaoning, Shandong and Chongqing respectively, the NHC said.

Beijing is already diverting all international flights to different cities where the passengers will be quarantined for 14 days before arriving in the city.

The NHC said 132 people were still suspected of being infected with the virus.

Coronavirus epicentre Wuhan has reported one confirmed case after a gap of five days prompting officials to begin to ease restrictions.

Wuhan also reported seven new deaths, bringing the total number of deaths in the city and Hubei province for which Wuhan is the capital to 3,160.

The province also saw 444 patients discharged from hospital after recovery on Monday. Among the 4,200 patients being treated in hospital, 1,203 were still in severe condition and another 336 in critical condition, the local health commission said.

By the end of Monday, 356 confirmed cases, including four deaths have been reported in Hong Kong, which has restricted the entry of foreigners into the city. Also a total of 25 confirmed cases were reported in Macao and 195 in Taiwan including two deaths, state-run Xinhua news agency reporrted.

After days of decline in coronavirus cases, China on Monday said that COVID-19 has effectively been "stemmed" in the country and it started easing severe restrictions imposed on Wuhan's 11 million people who were under lockdown since January 23.

The authorities began relaxing restrictions in Wuhan as it reported no new case for the fifth consecutive day on Monday.

Significantly, the Central Leading Group (CLP), headed by Premier Li Keqiang which is coordinating efforts to contain the virus since January 23, said the virus has been curtailed in the country as well as in Wuhan.

"The meeting noted that the spread of the virus nationwide, particularly in the epicentre of Wuhan, has been effectively stemmed," an official statement said on Monday.

The meeting, however, warned that the risks for sporadic infections and localised outbreaks have not gone away. With the pandemic rampaging across the world, the situation remains complex and challenging.

"Wuhan city and Hubei province should stay focused on medical treatment and community-level containment as the two key priorities. They should continue to treat the severe cases, promptly admit new cases, and advance epidemiological investigations," the meeting said.

In Wuhan, officials said people are allowed to go back to work while restrictions on the public transport are gradually being eased.

The Hubei province and its capital Wuhan with over 56 million people were under lockdown since January 23. The vicious virus broke out in city, reportedly at a live animal market in December last year and became virulent inflicting thousands of people in the city and province catching the government off guard.

As the country saw a surge in imported infections, the Chinese government announced that all international flights scheduled to arrive in Beijing will be redirected to airports in 12 other Chinese cities from Monday.

International passengers flying to Beijing will instead land at airports in 12 cities including Shanghai, Tianjin, Nanjing and Shenyang as their first points of entry, the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) said in a statement.

On Monday, China said international travellers should "think twice" about choosing Beijing for flight transfer in view of the restrictions.

Starting from Monday, all international flights scheduled to arrive in Beijing will be redirected to airports in 12 other Chinese cities, Liu Haitao, an official with China's National Immigration Administration said.

Passengers would go through entry procedures and quarantine measures at the designated cities' airports before they continue their flights to Beijing, Liu said, urging travellers to reserve enough time for their next flights to make sure that they do not miss their outbound flights.

Feb 22: A 20-year-old Chinese woman from Wuhan, the epicentre of the coronavirus outbreak, travelled 400 miles(675 km) north to Anyang where she infected five relatives, without ever showing signs of infection, Chinese scientists reported on Friday, offering new evidence that the virus can be spread asymptomatically.

The case study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, offered clues about how the coronavirus is spreading, and suggested why it may be difficult to stop.

"Scientists have been asking if you can have this infection and not be ill? The answer is apparently, yes," said Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease expert at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, who was not involved in the study.

China has reported a total of 75,567 cases of the virus known as COVID-19 to the World Health Organization (WHO) including 2,239 deaths, and the virus has already spread to 26 countries and territories outside of mainland China.

Researchers have reported sporadic accounts of individuals without any symptoms spreading the virus. What's different in this study is that it offers a natural lab experiment of sorts, Schaffner said.

"You had this patient from Wuhan where the virus is, travelling to where the virus wasn't. She remained asymptomatic and infected a bunch of family members and you had a group of physicians who immediately seized on the moment and tested everyone."

According to the report by Dr Meiyun Wang of the People's Hospital of Zhengzhou University and colleagues, the woman travelled from Wuhan to Anyang on Jan. 10 and visited several relatives. When they started getting sick, doctors isolated the woman and tested her for coronavirus. Initially, the young woman tested negative for the virus, but a follow-up test was positive.

All five of her relatives developed COVID-19 pneumonia, but as of Feb. 11, the young woman still had not developed any symptoms, her chest CT remained normal and she had no fever, stomach or respiratory symptoms, such as cough or sore throat.

Scientists in the study said if the findings are replicated, "the prevention of COVID-19 infection could prove challenging."

Key questions now, Schaffner said, are how often does this kind of transmission occur and when during the asymptomatic period does a person test positive for the virus.