Chinese mineworkers arrested after protest on unpaid wages

John Ward

Police at Shuangyashan in China’s northeastern province of Heilongjiang have detained more than 30 mineworkers who led large protests in early March over unpaid wages. The police crackdown points to fears in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership of social unrest amid a slowing economy and plans for mass sackings in basic industries.

The protests had erupted during the National People’s Congress after Heilongjiang provincial governor Lu Hao told a press conference that all the workers employed by the large state-owned Longmay Mining Group had been paid in full. Banners at the protests read: “We want to live, we want to eat.” According to Reuters, the protests were called off after a day when the company offered to pay two months’ wages.

The protests were deeply embarrassing for Lu, a member of the CCP Central Committee and touted as a potential Politburo member. He was compelled to admit that he had been wrong and promised to ensure workers would be paid in full. Lu blamed the company for withholding information and promised to “severely punish” anyone who did so again.

As the arrests make clear, Lu’s main aim is to ensure that there are no more protests. A worker named Chen told Agence France Presse that miners were still owed more than 60 percent of their wages from 2014 and 2015. He declined to give his full name because of fear of reprisals. “The miners don’t dare protest anymore,” he said.

The government has plans for mass layoffs in the coal industry. The China National Coal Association has estimated that 5,600 coal mines, more than half of all mines in China, will close in the next five years. About 1,000 mines will close this year. At the start of March, employment minister Yin Weimin said 1.3 million jobs would be axed in the coal industry.

The government has announced a 100 billion yuan ($US15.5 billion) fund to retrain and relocate sacked coal and steel workers. But Reuters reported last week that the projected costs for laying off 1.3 million coal miners alone are as much as 195 billion yuan.

The situation facing workers in the “rust belt” northeastern provinces, with a large number of older coal mines, is particularly dire. Longmay, the largest state-owned enterprise in Heilongjiang, announced last year it would sack 100,000 workers out of a workforce of 248,000. One worker from Hegang, also in Heilongjiang, told the Sydney Morning Herald in January: “There are no prospects here... All I want is for my son to go out when he’s older. There isn’t much hope in this place.”

Lu Hao has been tipped as a rising political star. He is the youngest provincial governor and was the youngest full member of the CCP Central Committee when appointed. Born in 1967, he was leader of the Chinese Youth League, a post also held by current Premier Li Keqiang and former President Hu Jintao. Lu was appointed at the age of 28 as the manager of a debt-ridden wool company, becoming the youngest director of a state-owned factory.

Lu’s “success” at restructuring the wool factory brought him to the attention of the CCP leadership. But one former worker told the South China Morning Post: “Lu didn’t manage the factory well. The factory wasn’t profitable but it became a showcase for higher leaders, so it only looked good on the surface.” Lu was profiled last November in the Economist, which noted his “work ethic” and “solid record,” as well as his promotion by the People ’ s Daily and other major state-owned papers.

Lu was installed as governor of Heilongjiang in 2013, no doubt to manage the mass layoffs that were looming and to deal with the resulting social and economic dislocation. Clearly his public embarrassment at China’s most significant annual political gathering by protesting workers could not go unanswered.

The arrests in Heilongjiang are not an isolated incident. Also in March, eight construction workers in Sichuan Province were detained and publicly shamed over a protest they organised of hundreds of workers last August to demand unpaid wages. According to the Wall Street Journal, the eight workers were charged with “obstructing official business,” found guilty and sentenced to jail terms of six to eight months.

The authorities sought to make an example of the workers for the “crime” of demanding their wages. The Langzhong Municipal Court organised a public rally where the eight were paraded on a platform in order “to educate the public on how to lawfully protect their rights.” Their cases were read aloud as the workers stood flanked by two police.

This spectacle provoked a popular backlash on social media. One comment declared: “Don’t take the public for fools. You think the people don’t understand your purpose in using public sentencing? Let me tell you this: public sentiment is not to be bullied!” The court subsequently removed the notice from the web site and said it was conducting an investigation.

These incidents are part of a growing wave of strikes and protests across China. According to the Hong Kong-based China Labour Bulletin, of the 2,913 protests and strikes in the past 12 months, arrests took place in 170 cases. Of these, 95 arrests were in the past six months. Eighty-one percent of the protests and strikes have been about wage arrears.

Data from the bulletin’s web site, which relies on social media reports, shows that since the start of this year there have been almost 800 protests and strikes. In March alone, five incidents involved more than 1,000 workers, including the protests in Shuangyashan.

At the end of the National People’s Congress, Premier Li Keqiang claimed that structural economic reform and the elimination of huge excess capacities in basic industries would proceed without mass layoffs. The notion that millions of steel workers and coal miners are going to be absorbed in service industries, even as the economy continues to slow, is absurd. The recent arrests are a warning of the methods that the CCP will use to deal with resistance by workers to the job destruction being prepared on a mass scale.

Australian government in disarray over spending cuts

Mike Head

Within two days, severe cracks have appeared in the latest extraordinary effort by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s government to break through a political impasse and impose sweeping cuts to health, education and other social spending.

Turnbull’s plan—suddenly announced on Wednesday at a football game, without any detail whatsoever—to hand back income taxing powers to the states, is blatantly designed to shift the blame for devastating and deeply unpopular cuts onto state and territory governments.

Turnbull declared that by returning the taxing powers that they had relinquished in 1942, during World War II, to the state governments, the latter would be forced to take “responsibility” for funding public hospitals and schools. “If the states had to raise all of the money they spend themselves,” he said, “they would spend that money much more wisely.”

The prime minister made clear that the $80 billion slashed in 2014 by his predecessor, Tony Abbott, from federal funding to the states over the next decade for public hospitals and schools, would be maintained. He then went further, announcing his intention to scrap all federal government funding for public schools and hand it over to the states. Federal government financing of private schools, many of which cater to the sons and daughters of the super-rich, would, however, continue.

As for public hospitals, Turnbull declared he would give the states only an extra $3 billion until 2020, a tiny fraction of the $57 billion budget shortfall for the sector over the next decade. Last December, Turnbull promised the states that his government would increase the level of federal funding to 50 percent of state hospital costs, but has reneged on that pledge, indicating that the share would now be kept at 45 percent, well below the rising costs of healthcare.

Turnbull boasted that his state-taxing scheme was the greatest restructuring of the Australian federation in 70 years. In reality, it is yet another desperate attempt by the prime minister to demonstrate to the financial and corporate elite that his leadership can deliver what Abbott failed to: deep cuts to public spending, lower corporate taxes and further reductions in wages and working conditions.

This was Turnbull’s second dramatic manoeuvre in just two weeks. It followed last month’s sudden decision to trigger a double dissolution election of both houses of parliament in order to break a deadlock in the Senate, where opposition parties and so-called independents, posturing as opponents of austerity, have blocked key budget measures. If the move succeeds, the next federal election, due between August 2016 and March 2017, will be brought forward to July, clearing the way for a post-election austerity offensive.

Today Turnbull met with state and territory leaders for a Council of Australian Governments (COAG) meeting in Canberra to discuss his ultimatum. There were clear signs of rifts within his Liberal-National Coalition, just six months after he ousted Abbott.

The instability within his own ranks was highlighted yesterday when Treasurer Scott Morrison flatly contradicted Turnbull’s initial suggestion that states could possibly lift their taxation rates to fund necessary public services. Morrison said he would “guarantee” that the states could not do so for some years. He outlined a “transitional phase” for at least the next three-year term of parliament, during which the states would be prohibited from increasing the level of income tax. Turnbull had made no mention of any such transitional arrangement.

Morrison, who is tasked with handing down the government’s budget on May 3, after Turnbull suddenly brought the date forward by a week, was evidently not consulted before the prime minister unveiled his “federation restructuring.”

According to media reports, Turnbull’s plan was drawn up in the Prime Minister’s Department, not the Treasury. The latter has advocated more direct measures to reduce the burgeoning budget deficit, namely, the slashing of public spending in order to enable the government to cut corporate taxes.

In January, Treasury secretary John Fraser opened the political year with a speech insisting that major cuts to social programs—notably pensions, welfare benefits and disability care—be imposed because of the rapidly deteriorating economic situation, globally and in Australia.

Fraser declared that the country’s AAA rating by global credit agencies was in jeopardy unless cuts were made urgently. This was primarily due to the haemorrhaging of tax revenues as a result of the falling prices for Australia’s main exports, especially iron ore, coal and liquefied natural gas.

There is no difference between Turnbull and Morrison on the need to impose the burden of this sharp economic reversal on the working class. But the acute dilemma that has confronted the government, like the six-year Labor government before it, is how to inflict such cuts under conditions where widespread hostility exists among millions of ordinary people toward the austerity measures.

There is increasing visible nervousness within ruling circles about Turnbull’s evident failure to live up to his promise of delivering more effective political salesmanship than Abbott.

Today’s editorial in Murdoch’s Australian praised the Coalition’s intention to cut spending by “encouraging discipline” on the part of the states but said it was “unnerving that such a landmark proposal comes from the Prime Minister on the sidelines of a rugby league media event two days before a meeting with the premiers and in the second week of an unofficial election campaign.”

Noting that Turnbull and his Treasurer “didn’t seem to co-ordinate their message,” the newspaper stated: “[H]ere we have a sketchy idea, informally announced and, so far, poorly explained. Serious economic reform demands more considered advocacy.”

Similar complaints were made of Abbott and his Treasurer, Joe Hockey, before their sudden removal from office.

Driving these tensions is a volatile and rapidly worsening economic situation. The 20-year mining boom that sustained Australian capitalism has been unraveling since 2011, under the deepening impact of the 2008 global financial breakdown, a marked slowdown in China and the recessions gripping Japan, Europe and every resource export-dependent economy.

Over the past two years, the collapse of the resources boom, while hitting the mining states of Western Australia and Queensland particularly hard, was partly offset by an unsustainable housing bubble, especially in Sydney and Melbourne.

Soaring house prices, combined with falling real wages, have placed home ownership increasingly out of the reach of working-class families, while sending household debt levels to the highest in the world. Housing debt per adult increased by 136 percent from 2004 to 2015, according to data released this week by the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority, taking the total debt to $1.9 trillion.

This bubble is showing signs of bursting. Housing construction has begun to decline over the past half year and recent figures point to falling apartment prices. These trends have major implications for state governments, whose budgets already show aggregate annual deficits of about $10 billion, alongside the federal government’s $38 billion, despite being propped up by property-related taxes.

Shares in major Australian banks have fallen by around 30 percent over the past year, and have fluctuated wildly again this week, on fears of their exposure to a housing crash and to mining losses, as well as to increasing instability on Chinese and other Asian markets.

Temps and contractors accounted for all US job growth since 2005

Patrick Martin

All US job growth for the last decade came in “alternative work arrangements”—people working as independent contractors, temps, through contract agencies or on-call—according to a study published Tuesday by Princeton University and the RAND Corporation.

The proportion of the workforce in such contingent arrangements rose sharply from 10.1 percent in 2005 to 15.8 percent in 2015. That means that nearly one in six full-time workers was in a contingent status, usually without job security, health benefits, vacations and other paid time off. Many contract workers are not even paid for legal public holidays.

Source: Authors calculations based on Bureau of Labor Statistics CWS 1995 and 2005 and Rand-Princeton CWS 2015.

The actual number of contingent full-time workers rose from 14.2 million in February 2005 to 23.6 million in November 2015, an increase of 9.4 million. Since total US employment rose by 9.1 million during this period, the number of workers in conventional, full-time positions actually dropped by nearly 400,000. Neither figure includes part-time employment, which has likewise become far more widespread over the past decade.

As the study’s authors emphasize, “A striking implication of these estimates is that all of the net employment growth in the U.S. economy from 2005 to 2015 appears to have occurred in alternative work arrangements.” They add, with some understatement, “It appears that as of late 2015, the labor market had not yet fully recovered from the huge loss of traditional jobs from the Great Recession.”

According to the Princeton report, all four categories of nonstandard work increased from 2005 to 2015, with independent contractors remaining the largest group, at 8.9 percent of all workers, but the proportion of workers in the other three categories more than doubling, from 3.2 percent in 2005 to 7.3 percent. Contract workers—those employed by a contracting agency that supplies them to the company where they actually work—quintupled, from 0.6 percent of workers in 2005 to 3.1 percent in 2015.

The study found significant changes in both the occupational and demographic characteristics of the contingent workforce. In 1995 and 2005 surveys by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, construction and office services were the two largest employers of contingent workers, each accounting for about one-fifth of the total.

In 2015, however, in the wake of the collapse of home construction following the subprime mortgage debacle, construction jobs had fallen to only 7 percent of the contingent work force. In its place, education and health care had become the largest single employer, accounting for 21.9 percent. This coincides with a dramatic decline in the social position of education workers, with mass layoffs of teachers and other school employees.

According to the study, “Occupational groups experiencing particularly large increases in the nonstandard work from 2005 to 2015 include computer and mathematical, community and social services, education, health care, legal, protective services, personal care, and transportation jobs.”

The age structure of the contingent workforce has shifted as well, and not in the way that might be expected from conventional media coverage of the economy. Only 6.4 percent of young workers, aged 16 to 24, were employed in alternative work arrangements in 2015, about the same as in 2005. This reflects the reality that the super-exploitation of the vast majority of young workers is done through part-time working rather than contingent forms of full-time working.

For workers in prime working years, aged 25-54, 14.3 percent had alternative work arrangements in 2015, while the figure for those aged 55-74 rose to 23.9 percent, nearly one in every four workers in the oldest age bracket. Both figures were sharply up from 2005 and 1995.

One additional figure is particularly startling: the proportion of contingent workers holding multiple jobs. This figure has more than quadrupled over the past 10 years, from 7.3 percent in 2005 to a staggering 32 percent in 2015. This demonstrates the nearly unbearable stress affecting this section of the working class: in addition to a full-time job with no benefits or job security, one-third are working at another part-time or full-time job to make ends meet.

These bare figures provide a better picture of the economic and social reality of working-class life in America in 2016 than all the self-congratulatory speeches of Obama administration officials, or the puffery of their media apologists, hailing the US “economic recovery” that supposedly began in 2009.

This recovery has been a bonanza for the wealthy and the Wall Street moneymen, but the social position of the working class has been steadily eroded under Obama. This is not an incidental byproduct, but the deliberate aim and goal of administration policy, beginning with the auto industry bailout, based on slashing the wages of new hires by 50 percent.

Doing the bidding of Corporate America, the Obama administration pushed through a health care “reform” program to cut costs for business and the government. A major aspect of the Affordable Care Act was to offer the pretense of health care coverage for the rapidly growing army of contingent workers unable to obtain insurance through the traditional employer-based system.

As the New York Times noted Thursday in a commentary on the Princeton report, the shift to nontraditional employment “has profound implications on social insurance. More so than in many advanced countries, employers in the United States carry a lot of the burden of protecting their workers from the things that can go wrong in life. They frequently provide health insurance, and paid medical leave for employees who become ill. They pay for workers’ compensation insurance for people who are injured on the job, and unemployment insurance benefits for those who are laid off. They help fund their workers’ existence after retirement, at one time through pensions, now more commonly through 401(k) plans.”

By and large, contractors, temporary workers, and those hired through contract agencies have no access to these benefits and must bear all the costs of social insurance themselves. For the vast majority, this simply means doing without. Under the measures of the Affordable Care Act, they would be required to purchase insurance from private companies or face a fine.

The study, titled, “The Rise and Nature of Alternative Work Arrangements in the United States, 1995-2015,” was conducted by Lawrence Katz of Harvard and Alan Krueger of Princeton, and involved a survey of more than 6,000 workers last November.

RAND Corporation underwrote the survey as a replacement for the Contingent Worker Surveys that were conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in 1995 and 2005. The survey was discontinued under the Bush administration, which sought to reduce the amount of information available on the conditions of working class life. While justified on right-wing ideological grounds—ending “unnecessary” government spending—the real goal was to conceal the savage impact of the actions of giant corporations in cutting jobs, wages and benefits.

The drive to impeachment and the dangers facing the Brazilian working class

Bill Van Auken

The protracted drive to impeach the country’s Workers Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores—PT) President Dilma Rousseff appears to have taken a qualitative leap forward following the withdrawal from the government Tuesday of the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (PMDB), the largest party in Brazil’s national congress.

The mounting pressure for a change of government in Latin America’s largest country, independent of any popular vote, poses a serious threat to the working class. The dangers arise not merely out of the conspiracies of the right-wing politicians, judges, business lobbies and media conglomerates that are pushing for impeachment, but more fundamentally from the rapid intensification of the economic, social and political crisis gripping Brazilian capitalism and the absence of any genuine revolutionary leadership in the working class.

The impeachment process has developed in tandem with the now two-year-old Operation Car Wash (Lava Jato) investigation into a vast corruption scandal centered on bribes and kickbacks for inflated contracts with Petrobras, Brazil’s state-run energy conglomerate and the largest corporation in Latin America.

The investigation has uncovered not only the systemic corruption of the Workers Party, but the terminal rot of the entire bourgeois political setup in Brazil, with every party implicated together with all of the prominent politicians pursuing Rousseff’s impeachment.

Underlying this political breakdown is the deepest economic crisis in Brazil since the Great Depression of the 1930s. After a 3.8 percent contraction of the economy last year, the same or worse is predicted for 2016. Official unemployment has risen to 9.5 percent, with over 1.8 million jobs wiped out over the past year. Some two million unemployed Brazilian workers are expected to run out of their jobless benefits by June. And, for the first time in nearly a quarter of a century, real wages are in decline and social inequality is rising.

It is this objective crisis that has created the conditions in which sections of Brazil’s middle class have been whipped into a political frenzy of hatred for the PT and Rousseff. Mass pro-impeachment demonstrations have seen calls for the military to intervene and even appeals to Donald Trump to save Brazil. Fascistic assaults have been reported on people wearing red, the color associated with the PT, and others suspected of supporting the ruling party.

The turn to the right by these layers is rooted in their anger and disillusionment that the promise made by PT governments that Brazil had somehow escaped the effects of the global financial crisis and was on an irreversible path to “First World” capitalist development has turned to ashes. It is provided a scapegoat for the economic debacle in the PT, not only its corruption but its minimal assistance programs to Brazil’s poor, now seen as an intolerable diversion of wealth from the more privileged social layers.

With Rousseff’s approval rating having fallen below 10 percent, broad sections of the working class, confronting mass layoffs and falling wages, are also disgusted with the PT, a corrupt bourgeois party. With the aid of the CUT (Central Única dos Trabalhadores) union bureaucracy, the PT has masqueraded as the representative of the “people,” while tailoring its policies to the profit interests of Brazilian and international capital and the prescriptions of the IMF.

To the extent that Rousseff and her predecessor, Workers Party founder Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, have been able to make any broader appeal against the drive to impeachment, it is because of disquiet among sections of the population over the extra-legal and patently politicized methods being utilized to bring down the government, as well as the fascistic moods being whipped up to further this aim.

Lula, as the former metalworkers union leader turned president is universally known, was himself on the receiving end of these methods, hauled out of his apartment in a pre-dawn raid by scores of police for an involuntary interrogation earlier this month.

Rousseff, Lula and various pseudo-left elements gravitating around the PT have begun to try to rally support by portraying the impeachment drive as a “coup,” drawing a direct comparison to the 1964 US-backed military overthrow of the government of President Joao Goulart, carried out precisely 52 years ago today.

While the dangers facing the working class from recent political developments are undeniable, this comparison is at best self-serving. Goulart was overthrown under conditions in which he was advocating bourgeois nationalist reforms. These included nationalization of the country’s oil refineries, controls forcing multinational companies to reinvest all profits in Brazil, a limited land reform and cuts to military spending, policies that earned him broad popular support as well as the enmity of the ruling oligarchy, the military and Washington.

Rousseff has responded to Brazil’s economic crisis with “fiscal adjustment” policies, placing the burden of the crisis on the backs of the working class. Her government recently passed anti-terrorism legislation granting it police-state powers against domestic opposition. Rousseff and the PT’s resistance to the alleged “coup” is not a struggle against the demands of capitalist reaction, but rather an insistence that her government can successfully achieve the aims of big business.

If today the predominant layers of both domestic and foreign capital are pushing for her impeachment, it is because they see a radical change in government as the means to dramatically accelerate reactionary capitalist policies already being pursued.

However, there is no unanimity in regards to the best way to achieve this policy. Elements of the ruling class, including on the right, have advocated that the best means for achieving an increase in the “competitiveness” of Brazilian capitalism through the driving down of labor costs is to bring back Lula, acting in concert with the union bureaucracy, to control and suppress any struggles of the working class. This option has been advanced by none other than Delfim Netto, the former finance minister of the military dictatorship in the 1960s, who was credited with creating the Brazilian “economic miracle” of that period based on similar methods enforced at gunpoint.

Responsibility for the dangerous crisis now confronting the Brazilian working class—whether the PT stays or goes—rests most directly with those who promoted the Workers Party as some new “democratic” instrument for realizing a uniquely Brazilian path to socialism. Established in the wake of the tumultuous student protests and mass workers strikes of the late 1970s that ultimately forced the military to surrender power, the PT was an instrument for containing and taming the struggles of the working class and blocking the construction of a mass revolutionary socialist party.

Organizations linked to revisionist tendencies that broke with the International Committee of the Fourth International, including those affiliated to the Pabloite United Secretariat, the followers of the Argentine Nahuel Moreno and the French revisionist Pierre Lambert played a key part in promoting the PT. Today, they all continue to play a politically reactionary role in the face of the current crisis.

The Morenoite PSTU (United Socialist Workers Party) has responded to the impeachment drive with the slogan “Fora Todos,” or “Throw them all out” and the call for a new general election, which is essentially an adaptation to the right-wing demonstrations of the upper middle class. Its adaptation to the right in Brazil is in sync with its international policy, which mirrors that of similar tendencies in Western Europe and North America in the hailing of CIA-orchestrated wars for regime-change and right-wing coups, from Libya to Syria and Ukraine, as “revolutions.” In its casual dismissal of any talk of a “coup,” the PSTU seeks to lull the working class over the real threats that it faces.

Taking a seemingly opposite position is Democracia Socialista, the erstwhile Brazilian section of the Pabloite United Secretariat, which has remained inside the PT, with its most prominent leader, Miguel Rossetto, now serving as labor minister and a major spokesman for the Rousseff government. Warning of a repeat of the 1964 coup, it calls for “the unity of broad sectors in defense of democracy” and a “return to the [PT] election program of 2014.” This means a subordination of the working class to bourgeois parties and politicians, and the recycling of the false promises that were immediately abandoned in favor of austerity measures as soon as the voting is over.

The reality is that democratic rights, as well as jobs, living standards and social conditions, can be defended only by mobilizing the working class in a politically independent struggle against both the PT government and its bourgeois opponents, based on a socialist and internationalist program. This requires a thoroughgoing assimilation of the lessons of the betrayal carried out by the PT and its pseudo-left enablers and the building of a new revolutionary party of the working class as a Brazilian section of the International Committee of the Fourth International.

New layoffs in New Zealand meat processing

John Braddock

Amid an ongoing global restructuring of the meat processing industry, New Zealand company Affco laid off 214 workers at its Rangiuru plant, in the Bay of Plenty, earlier this month.

About 50 workers briefly protested the layoffs outside the plant. The Meat Workers Union (MWU) said the company was targeting unionised senior staff, in apparent defiance of court orders. Veteran workers would normally be laid off last at the end of the killing season, but instead this time had gone first. Some workers had 35 to 45 years of service. The layoffs came three weeks earlier than usual, putting workers at least $1,800 out of pocket.

Owned by the Talley Group, an agribusiness conglomerate, Affco is New Zealand’s fourth largest meat processor. It has been in and out of court over the past year, following a lockout of MWU members who refused to sign individual contracts at several plants. The Rangiuru layoffs came after the Employment Relations Authority ordered the reinstatement of two MWU delegates who had been sacked over their union activities.

The union declared it would return to court over the way the layoffs were carried through. This is a ploy to divert and suppress any united action by meat workers over deepening struggles within the industry. A series of fruitless court cases have been taken against Affco over repeated legal breaches, including lengthy lockouts and the denial of the union’s access rights at processing plants.

Last August, the MWU called off a planned two-day strike by about 1,000 workers at eight Affco sheds in an 18-month dispute over Affco’s demands for cuts to pay rates, a longer working day, an end to seniority for workers and changes to work breaks. The Employment Court had earlier dismissed court action by the MWU over Affco’s move to lock out workers at the Rangiuru plant. The court ordered the parties back into mediation, which the MWU accepted but Affco walked away from.

Affco has continued attacks on jobs and conditions. In February, 170 Wairoa meat workers returned to work, ending a five-month lockout after the Employment Court declared that Affco unlawfully locked out workers and breached its “good faith” obligations under the Employment Relations Act when bargaining employment contracts.

These are the most recent in a series of assaults. A 65-day lockout of 110 meat workers at the Canterbury Meat Packers Rangitikei lamb and sheep plant in 2011 resulted in the MWU and the Council of Trade Unions agreeing to cuts to pay and conditions after the workers were virtually starved back to work. In early 2012, 1,300 Affco meat workers held a 5-day strike in support of 1,000 workers locked out from five plants over a collective agreement dispute.

Globally, US, Brazilian and other giants are rationalising production and slashing labour costs in pursuit of ever-greater corporate profits. Last November, Tyson Foods, the world’s largest meat producer, announced that two of its US plants would close in 2016 at a cost of 880 jobs. Australian meat workers face ongoing demands for wage cuts, increased productivity, casualisation and job cuts following a series of industry takeovers.

In November 2014, financial commentator Rod Oram, an advisor to the industry “reform” group Meat Industry Excellence (MIE), warned in the Sunday Star Times that the New Zealand processing industry had entered a “death spiral.” From 2003 to 2013, the number of sheep in New Zealand fell 22 percent, while beef cattle fell 20 percent as many farmers, seeking bigger profits, converted to dairying. The processing companies, Oram claimed, had failed to slash excess capacity. One report commissioned by MIE recommended the closure of up to 19 plants.

Confronted by worldwide cost-cutting, the two biggest companies operating in New Zealand, Alliance and Silver Fern Farms (SFF), are attempting to wipe out each other, along with their local rivals. In October 2015, SFF accepted an unprecedented 50/50 partnership proposal for an investment of $261 million from China’s largest meat processor and retailer Shanghai Maling.

Workers are bearing the brunt of the bitter fight for survival, facing an onslaught on jobs, wages, working conditions and living standards. In recent disputes, Affco has asserted its right of complete control over chain speeds, manning and tallies, and replaced seniority rights with performance-based job allocations.

Meatworkers operate under oppressive conditions. One, with 10 years’ experience, told the WSWS he is normally required to work 12 hours a day, 6 days a week. If for any reason this is reduced to an 8-hour day, which can happen without any explanation, he finds his pay packet insufficient to live on.

Such conditions are the result of decades of attacks carried out by employers and governments with the full support of the trade union bureaucracy. Until the 1980s, meat processing was, for almost a century, the core of the organised working class in New Zealand.

Like all the unions, the MWU collaborated in the 1980s with the Labour government’s pro-market agenda to open up the previously protected economy to international competition. Over the decade following 1984, 14,000 freezing workers’ jobs were eliminated, and some 28 plants closed, devastating many provincial towns.

Workers initially resisted the onslaught with a series of strikes around the country. The MWU was instrumental in facilitating the closures, insisting they were inevitable and calling for “decent” redundancy payments. In 1988 at the South Island Fortex Seafield plant, amid mass picketing by workers, the MWU agreed to allow shift work, a first for the industry. This enabled the plant to run 22 hours a day, 6 days a week, opening the way for further assaults on long-established conditions won by meatworkers.

The MWU’s betrayals flow from their nationalist, pro-employer perspective of ensuring that New Zealand companies are “internationally competitive.” This means helping employers to cut costs to match the wages and conditions imposed on workers in other countries, pitting meat workers against each other along national lines.

MWU organiser Roger Middlemass told the Manawatu Standard in October 2014 that the union supported closures if they led to more “stable” employment for the remaining workforce. Middlemass said: “We need to take a New Zealand Inc. approach ... We’re a small country … No-one wants to see the New Zealand meat industry owned by foreign countries.”

Underlining the MWU’s nationalist orientation, it has involved the Maori tribal “Iwi Leaders Group” (ILG) to help impose corporate-union deals on meat processing workers, who are largely Maori. The ILG represents the interests of the privileged Maori political and business elite, who are hostile to the working class. Its negotiators, who helped the MWU to cancel the planned strike across eight Affco sheds last August, include Ken Mair, an official of the Maori Party which is a partner in the National-led government and Tukoroirangi Morgan, a former MP in the right-wing populist NZ First Party.

Affco is not, as the MWU maintains, an “outlier” in the industry. All the meat companies have joined the offensive against workers. The MWU is keeping each group of workers in struggle isolated within their own plants in order to wear them down, often under conditions of lockout, and by tying up disputes in the courts, giving the union time to negotiate and impose settlements.

Nearly 750 dead in US house fires in 2016

Steve Filips

So far this year 743 people have been killed in house fires in the US, according to a running estimate by the US Fire Administration (USFA). The organization, which bases its tally on a survey of published media reports, counted 2,290 fire deaths in 2015.

In the current year, the states with the highest number of fire deaths include Texas with 45 dead; New York, with 41; Georgia, 38; Michigan, 34; Pennsylvania, 32; and California, with 32.

House fires are a manifestation of the American social crisis. The leading cause of these tragedies is unsafe alternative heating and lighting methods, generally utilized by the poor and working poor, often as a result of their gas or electricity being suspended by for-profit monopolies.

The likelihood of fires resulting in death is augmented by outdated and unsafe housing and inadequate fire protection. Much of the American housing stock, extending from one-family homes to multi-unit apartments, has not been adequately appraised for fire hazards. Meanwhile, fire protection has been victimized by severe budget-cutting in recent years. Much of the country is served by volunteer-only fire departments.

The number of people killed in house fires in the US over the last 15 months, at 3,033, according to the USFA, is substantially more than the 2,381 US soldiers killed in 15 years of fighting in Afghanistan. That war, which has killed and displaced millions of Afghanis, cost the US government $1 trillion dollars, according to a 2014 estimate by the Financial Times. The current federal budget appropriates less than one one-thousandth of that, $690 million, in grants for fire departments.

The following is a sampling of recent house fire tragedies:

In Syracuse, New York, on January 20, a house fire claimed the life of Takiya Bell, age 13. The blaze was started by candles that were being used for light and heating. On the night of the fire, temperatures had dropped to 23 degrees. Emagine Rucker, 2, and Na’Leyah Keith, 13, were injured. The tenants had reportedly been living without utilities since November of last year, when they moved in. The poverty rate for the Pond street home in the 13208 zip code on Syracuse’s north side was 33.8 percent in 2014, according to the US Census Bureau.

On February 13, in Fayetteville, West Virginia, two people were killed in an early morning fire likely caused by a basement wood burning stove.

A February 19, a fire in Buffalo, New York, killed Demetrius Johnson, 24, and, in another apartment, Juan Montanez, 49. Before dying Johnson saved the life of his three-year-old son and his daughter, Treasure Brighton, 8. Treasure Brighton suffered severe burns on over 80 percent of her body and remains hospitalized. The poverty rate in the neighborhood is 30.3 percent.

In Bellmont, New York on February 22, an early morning fire took the life of Stephen A. Harrington, 52. The fire is believed to have been caused by a wood burning stove.

On March 3, in Rochester, Minnesota, a four-unit apartment building caught fire in the late afternoon, claiming the lives of Melissa Phiefer, 25 and her 2 year old daughter Emily, who were found unresponsive by firefighters in their basement apartment.

In Orange, Massachusetts, a single family home caught fire on March 6, killing two young girls, Leena Ciolino, 6, and Victoria Gaignard, 8. Leena’s father sustained injuries while attempting to rescue the girls from the second story where the fire is believed to have started. Victoria Gaignard was at the house on a sleepover.

On March 7, a fire at a boarding house in northwest Atlanta, Georgia, killed four men and two women. Earnest Eberhardt, 61, the homeowner, was among the dead. Relatives told the media that Eberhardt would take in people to his house without asking rent. Among the victims were Gene Spurley, 62, Anthony Brown, 54, Velma Rivers, 46, and Anthony Jones, 49. An acquaintance of the victims, Janette Ragland, said that that portable space heaters were in use at the house and were the likely cause of the fire. The poverty rate in the neighborhood is 39.5 percent, and 62.9 percent for those 18 years old and younger.

On March 10, in Omaha, Nebraska, a single-family two-bedroom rental home with ten occupants caught fire in the early morning hours, killing Bibiano Pacheco-Perez, 21, and Brenda Martinez-Palma, 24. The poverty rate in the neighborhood is 41.2 percent, and 60.5 percent among children.

On March 11, in Winchester, Kentucky, an apartment fire killed three and injured six. The dead are Tina Reynolds, 29, Donald Hisle, 36, and Dixie Everman, 71. Half the residents in the ten-unit complex were receiving federal housing assistance.

On March 14, in Orange, New Jersey, a fire in a single family home killed brothers Nishawn and Nayon May, 2 and 7 years old, respectively, as well as their uncle Maurice May, 52. The mother of the boys saved her teenage daughter and suffered severe burns over most of her body while attempting to save her children. Ten people lived in the home. Over a third of children in the neighborhood live below the official poverty level.

Costa Rica closes its borders to Cuban migrants

Andrea Lobo

The Costa Rican Government has closed its borders to a new wave of Cuban migrants traveling by land to the United States. As of last Friday, 1,600 of them were stuck at the Panamanian border under overcrowded and reportedly unsanitary conditions.

The Costa Rican president stated the previous week, “We ask the Cuban migrants not to travel anymore… The government has ended its humanitarian assistance operation.”

Luis Miguel Hincapié, Panama’s vice minister for foreign relations, reported on Saturday that there would be a meeting “with [foreign relations] vice-ministers from all countries involved in the beginning of April… Cuba, Ecuador, Colombia and Central America.”

Costa Rica’s “humanitarian” act, which was officially terminated March 15, consisted of housing and arranging for the 7,800 Cubans who were stranded in Costa Rica since last November to continue their journey to North America. During the following week, the Costa Rican government doubled up border surveillance to prevent more Cubans from crossing.

The closing of the preferred corridor of Cubans to the US—from Ecuador to Panama, and northward to Texas, where, as opposed to Florida, they can enter legally by presenting themselves to US border officials—was initiated last November, when the Costa Rican police arrested several bands ofcoyotes, people-smugglers, forcing an initial wave of Cubans to go through the Nicaraguan border stations.

Soon after, on November 15, the Nicaraguan Government militarized its borders to prevent the Cuban migrants from crossing. They fired rubber bullets, tear gas, and high pressure water hoses, demanding that the Costa Rican authorities fix the problem by “removing” the migrants from the border.

According to the US Customs and Border Protection data, 43,159 Cubans entered the US in fiscal year 2015, a 78 percent rise from the previous year, and over five times as many as in 2011. A Cuban emigrant in Panama told Fusion news, “Cubans are afraid that [Presidents Raúl Castro and Barack Obama] are going to make a deal after their hug, and the US is going to revoke the Cuban Adjustment Act.” The Cold War-era act provides unique treatment to Cuban refugees, who are allowed to stay in the US once they set foot on US soil and are automatically granted legal residency after one year.

During January, and after several failed negotiations, Costa Rican authorities made deals with Mexico, Guatemala and El Salvador to let the migrants fly over to El Salvador and travel by bus to Mexico for $555—an opportunity about 5,000 Cubans took, while the rest desisted or used other coyotes to continue their dangerous trip to the US. Another 1,300 Cubans were flown directly to Mexico.

The Costa Rican General Department for Migration and Foreign Matters (DGME) congratulated the institutions and communities involved in this operation, but insisted that “it is not possible for the country to repeat it.” One of the agency’s main concerns is that the continuing inflow of Cubans will feed the growth of smuggling organizations.

Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, acting in concert with the Cuban government, intended to generate a humanitarian crisis to put pressure on Washington to stop the welcoming of Cubans into the United States under the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act. Claiming to defend the rule of law and its national sovereignty, Nicaragua attacked migrants, including hundreds of children, and left them to their fates, at the hands of criminal organizations and in the face of a mounting health crisis.

Despite their initial scathing denunciations of Nicaragua, the other countries in the Cuban migration corridor have followed suit. Towards the end of November, the Ecuadoran Government, another Cuban ally, imposed a visa requirement for Cubans, making Guyana the only country in mainland Latin America without this restriction for Cubans.

Claiming that they don’t have the resources to continue their assistance, the Costa Rican authorities decided in December not to issue any more transit visas to Cubans. The foreign minister said the government spent $3 million on sheltering and feeding the migrants, while the US State Department gave them $1 million.

After allowing more Cubans to enter, the Panamanian Government has given very little assistance. According to NGOs aiding those at the border with Costa Rica, the Panamanian authorities have removed the Cubans living in tents and placed them in a border police “bunker” with very poor sanitation, leading to protests that resulted in five arrests last Wednesday.

The Panamanian authorities are now completing a census in order to deny assistance to incoming Cubans, who continue to enter in large numbers, primarily from Colombia.

The tensions between Central American governments have exposed the fragility of three decades of supposed economic, political, and social integration since the end of the civil wars in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. The UN Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLAC) recently celebrated the creation of regional markets for medicines and electricity and the “95.7% harmonization of tariff lines” as part of the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR) with the United States.

Nonetheless, historically, the economic liberalization, increased dependency on foreign capital, and rabid competition for greater foreign investment that results from these common markets and transnational free trade treaties has led to intensifying nationalism and xenophobia and subsequent attacks on the working class, especially through regressive taxes and cuts in social security and education.

For instance, the Central American Common Market, initiated in 1960, led to an initial tripling of foreign capital and cheaper imports for wealthier consumers, but resulted in the Honduran-Salvadoran 1969 war, increased inequality, and an economic recession once the market had reached its maximum demand by the late 1960s. The resulting social crisis and empowerment of the oligarchies were principal causes of the civil wars in the late 1970s.

Nicaragua’s spokeswoman and first lady Rosario Murillo blamed Costa Rica for the migrant blockade and warned on November 17: “We can’t rule out the possibility of another invasion of our territory promoted and encouraged by Costa Rica.” She was referring to a conflict over a river delta island at the border, which the International Court of Justice decided a day before her statement constituted Costa Rican territory and demanded reparations from Nicaragua for environmental damage and its military incursion on the island.

Government officials and the press in both countries have used the migrant issue to instigate greater xenophobia. For instance, on November 25, the Costa Rican ambassador in Nicaragua, Javier Sancho, when denying visas to over 1,000 Nicaraguans requesting work visas that day, compared them with livestock: “People have to understand that Costa Rica is a country of rights, there are laws and procedures they have to fulfill; Costa Rica is not some pasture [‘potrero’] that everyone can come into.”

After several unsuccessful meetings with the other Central American governments throughout December, Costa Rica condemned the other countries for their lack of cooperation and “bad faith” and decided to break from the Central American Integration System (SICA), the UN sponsored political body for the region. These political ruptures are an expression of the tensions generated by economic deceleration due to falling commodity prices and the exporting of US capital between Central American countries and to Southeast Asian economies, particularly Vietnam.

These regional conflicts generated by the world economic crisis historically have been exploited by the US and local elites in an attempt to convince workers of the various countries on the Central American isthmus to blame each other rather than the real source of mounting social crises—capitalism and US imperialist domination.

This time around, however the US client regimes are all directly criticizing US foreign policy, namely the special refugee status for Cubans, for ultimately causing the present crisis.

These criticisms arise not only in relation to the millions of dollars in costs in dealing with migrants and smugglers. The local ruling elites are also concerned about popular anger over the glaring disparity between the treatment of Cubans under the US Cuban Adjustment Act, and the treatment meted out to Central Americans trying to reach the United States.

It is not lost on Central American workers that their governments are aiding Cubans to move into the US as refugees, while they accept millions of dollars from the State Department to prevent their “own” citizens from escaping and seeking asylum away from the intense violence and poverty over which these same governments preside.

However, given the political rapprochement between Washington and Havana and the coming flood of US capital into Cuba, there are growing calls for the revocation of the act, meaning that Cuban migrants would be subjected to the same treatment as their Central American counterparts.

Instead of relieving the tensions and controversy, the State Department reminded Central Americans of their sub-colonial status by stating that it has no plans to change its migration policy. Instead, the Obama Administration has intensified its raids and deportations and continues to pay Mexico to stop Central American families fleeing, chiefly, Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala.

According to the New York Times, about 80 percent of Central American migrants appealing for refugee status since the large influx in 2014 are being deported, while the New Yorker reports fourteen flights a week since 2014 sending them back.

Through direct military coups, as in Honduras in 2009, increasing national antagonisms, and flooding the political elite’s coffers with “security and development” financing, such as the $1 billion 2016 Alliance for Prosperity with Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala, the US State Department safeguards the region as a platform for cheap labor, natural resource exploitation, and military operations.

The Central American oligarchical elites will quiet their complaints against Washington--whether they come in the form of the timid criticisms of Solís or the phony “anti-imperialist” rhetoric of Ortega--and get on with their attacks on the living standards of the working class in service of imperialism.

Hungary strengthens state security powers after Brussels attacks

Markus Salzmann

The Hungarian government has responded to the terrorist attacks in the Belgian capital March 22 by further strengthening its state apparatus. Last week, it tabled a draft law loosening restrictions on telephone and Internet surveillance, and providing the authorities with continual access to bank accounts.

Despite the best efforts of the Fidesz Party government, the authorities can currently only carry out telephone surveillance with a court order. Telecommunications providers also have the opportunity to oppose surveillance. According to the new law, in “dangerous situations” Internet and telephone communication will be completely cut off and only SMS communication and emergency calls will be possible.

The strengthening of the security agencies with more personnel and technology is also planned. According to interior minister Sandor Pinter, a counter-terrorism centre is to be developed which will evaluate, analyse and pass on information, and, when necessary, issue warnings. In this context, the constant domestic deployment of the military is being pursued.

“The events in Paris and Brussels have settled the debate, the terrorism threat has grown,” the interior minister declared at a press conference. Prime Minister Victor Orban described the attacks in Brussels as “an attack on Hungary,” which had to be responded to with “all necessary steps.”

The government is shifting blame for the terrorist attacks onto refugees seeking protection in Europe. Foreign minister Peter Szijjarto said there was hardly a reasonable person left in Europe who would not deny that the terrorist threat has increased because of uncontrolled illegal immigration.

Interior minister Pinter stated that the details of the new measures would be outlined at a later date. However, he was forced to admit that they were so significant that some would require a two-thirds majority in parliament to pass.

The human rights organisation Amnesty International has already expressed concern that the expansion of anti-terror laws will undermine basic individual rights.

In January, Orban initiated a constitutional reform, which empowers the government in case of a vaguely defined terrorist emergency to significantly restrict democratic rights. At the time, it was clear that the limitation of democratic rights was directed above all against popular opposition to the government. Hungary has been repeatedly rocked by protests during recent months.

Earlier this month, tens of thousands demonstrated in Budapest against the government’s education policy and solidarised themselves with striking teachers. It was the largest anti-government protest in two years. The demonstrators demanded better pay and working conditions for teachers and more state funding for the education system. Recent polls showed high levels of support for the teachers’ demands.

The government can rely on the support of the opposition parties in the implementation of the new measures. The Fidesz government has relied on support from the fascist Jobbik Party since it lost its two-thirds parliamentary majority.

Jobbik declared it would support the anti-terror measures on the condition that “they are actually aimed at prevention.” Jobbik spokesman Adam Mirkóczki made clear that the far right party would attach further conditions to their support for the measures, and demanded the strengthening of several laws related to the threat of terrorism.

The Socialist Party (MSZP) is also in fundamental agreement with the measures. The chairman of the national security committee, Zsolt Molnar, said that the MSZP was prepared to support all measures which increased the security of the Hungarian population.

Along with Hungary, several other European governments have responded to the Brussels attacks with drastic measures. The Polish government announced a major expansion of the intelligence agencies’ powers to “combat terrorism.” Interior Minister Mariusz Blaszczak said, “We will present the bill to parliament at the beginning of April so that it can be adopted by May.”

The new measures make surveillance of telephone conversations and Internet data easier. The use of anonymous pre-paid mobile telephones is to be restricted and bank account data from “suspect persons” will be monitored. “Terrorist suspects” can be detained for longer periods of time and foreigners can be deported more easily.

The Polish government has also blamed refugees as a whole for the attacks in Brussels. “After what happened in Brussels yesterday, we cannot say that we are in the meantime willing to take in any migrants,” Prime Minister Beata Szydlo told the television station Superstacja. The Prime Minister thus contradicted a promise by the previous government last September that Poland would accept 7,000 refugees.

Over recent months, the Polish government has rapidly strengthened the state apparatus. Since the Law and Justice Party (PiS) assumed power last autumn, it has undermined the power of the courts, expanded its control over the surveillance agencies, co-opted the state radio and television broadcasters and begun a massive rearmament programme both externally and domestically.

In February, a law came into force massively expanding police powers. At the same time, PiS has increased military spending and armed and integrated paramilitary units into the state apparatus. In total, these units amount to 80,000 men, which corresponds to two-thirds of the regular Polish armed forces of 120,000.

The Brussels attacks have also been exploited in the Czech Republic to accelerate the domestic deployment of the army. In an emergency cabinet meeting in Prague last Tuesday, the government adopted a measure allowing the deployment of 550 active army personnel for a period of two months. According to Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka, this would strengthen the police forces.

Australian prime minister lurches from one crisis to the next

Peter Symonds

Just over a week ago, Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull set the stage for a rare “double dissolution” election, involving all seats in both parliamentary houses on July 2. The move is a desperate bid to break the logjam in the Senate—the parliamentary upper house—where opposition parties and so-called independents have used their majority to block key budget measures.

Yesterday, Turnbull announced another extraordinary scheme aimed at silencing mounting criticisms within corporate and financial circles that his Liberal-National Coalition government had failed to commit to deep cuts to public spending, lower corporate taxes and further inroads into wages and working conditions.

On the eve of a meeting of the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) with state premiers on Friday, the prime minister proposed a far-reaching change to taxation that would devolve responsibility to the states for the raising of income taxes allocated to the funding of public schools and hospitals.

The plan would reverse the tax system established in 1942 in the midst of World War II, under which the federal government collected all income tax and dispensed tied grants to the states. While the states are currently responsible for public education and health, the new scheme would dispense with the principle of equal provision of services across the country, and could sow the seeds for a fracturing of the Australian federation.

Increasingly, Turnbull is taking on the appearance of a drowning man clutching at straws. Central to the government crisis is the hostility among millions of ordinary working people to the entire political establishment, after decades of attacks on jobs and living standards. Since the eruption of the 2008 global financial crisis, Australian politics has been beset by one upheaval after another, leading to four changes of prime minister in less than 8 years. A key factor in the turmoil has been the inability of governments, both Labor and Coalition, to overcome deep opposition among voters to the corporate agenda of austerity.

With an election due this year, Turnbull calculated that a double dissolution, along with changes to voting procedures for the Senate, offered the best chance of clearing the independents out of the upper house and then proceeding with the demands of big business. Turnbull, having ousted Tony Abbott as party leader and prime minister just seven months ago, is fixated on stamping his authority on the Coalition and obtaining an electoral “mandate.”

By this week, however, the prime minister appeared to be having second thoughts, putting out feelers to the independents on a compromise that would allow the passage of legislation to re-establish the draconian Building and Construction Commission (ABCC) with extensive coercive powers against building workers.

A “double dissolution” election—the constitutional mechanism to resolve an impasse between the two houses of parliament—requires a trigger, that is, government legislation that has been blocked by the Senate. Turnbull chose the ABCC laws as the trigger, anticipating that the Senate would oppose them, thus making the need to stamp out “union corruption” a central feature of the Coalition’s election campaign against the opposition Labor Party.

If the government is now reconsidering its options, its main concern is that the wellspring of opposition to the establishment parties could result in a new Senate that is just as fractured as the present one. This dilemma is compounded by the fact that a budget has to be brought down in May, prior to the election. If it contains harsh spending cuts, it will only further alienate voters. If it does not, it will bring a new round of criticism from big business and the potential for moves to oust yet another prime minister.

Turnbull’s latest plan to insist that state governments levy their own income tax is driven primarily by short-term political expediency. Under fire from the corporate elite for doing nothing to slash social spending, he is proposing to shift all responsibility onto the states for raising the extra financing needed just to keep schools and hospitals functioning. He is offering the state governments, which are desperate for money after the Abbott Coalition government cut $80 billion from health and education funding in 2014, an initial sweetener—an additional $3 billion pittance—in return for signing up to a discussion on the proposed tax arrangements.

Turnbull made the announcement yesterday on the fly, without notes, calculations or projections. He had conducted no prior discussions with the state governments and his new policy has deepened the rift between himself and his treasurer, Scott Morrison. According to the prime minister, the plan will make state governments responsible for funding services and end their “blame game” with Canberra. “If a state government, over time, wants to raise more money by lifting taxes, well it will be answerable to the public,” he said.

Concerned about the electoral repercussions, Treasurer Morrison had scotched the idea of higher taxes, suggesting that the prime minister had “not gone that far.” This was the second time in less than a fortnight that Morrison and Turnbull were at odds with each other. Last week, Morrison was not informed in advance of Turnbull’s decision to recall parliament—even though, as treasurer, he would have to deliver the budget a week earlier than scheduled.

The government’s disarray has only been exacerbated by the response from state governments, big business and the establishment media, none of which has wholeheartedly embraced Turnbull’s tax plan. Every state premier has questioned the lack of detail, even those most likely to benefit. The Business Council of Australia declared it was concerned that “anything which risks increasing complexity reduces the competitiveness of Australia’s income tax system.”

Paul Kelly, editor-at-large at Murdoch’s Australian, declared the proposal was “riddled with economic and political problems.” He warned that Turnbull risked becoming “an experimental ideas merchant devoid of the ability to close the deal.”

The proposal to allow state governments to levy income tax has broad implications. It was originally devised by the Abbott government’s Audit Commission in its 2014 recommendations as a means of establishing “competitive” federalism, aimed at pitting states against each other in an endless fight to attract investment by lowering business costs. Abbott rejected the proposal as a form of “double taxation”—a criticism repeated by the Labor opposition yesterday.

The plan would lead to a further deterioration of public education and health as state governments cut funding to provide tax breaks and other incentives to big business. At the same time, poorer states would be substantially worse off. According to one estimate, the differences would be huge: to raise the same level of income, Tasmania would have to levy taxes 41 percent higher than the national average, whereas the Australian Capital Territory could afford to drop its taxes by 31 percent.

The proposal would also accelerate the privatisation of essential services. State governments would be left to finance and operate public schools and hospitals that have already been savaged by decades of cutbacks. The federal government, however, would continue to directly fund private schools, and indirectly provide funding for private hospitals, via its rebate for those taking out private health insurance.

Whether the tax plan survives tomorrow’s COAG meeting remains to be seen. An earlier proposal floated by Turnbull for an increase in the regressive and unpopular goods and services tax (GST), in order to boost funding for the states, was withdrawn before it was even formally announced.

Increasingly the Turnbull Coalition government, torn by internal divisions and recriminations, is thrashing about in search of a solution to the same impossible political conundrum that wracked its predecessors—the Rudd and Gillard Labor governments, and the Abbott Coalition government —how to impose the dictates from above on the millions below, who are becoming ever-more hostile and restive.