Changes in the car industry threaten Slovakian workers

Marianne Arens

A fundamental change is taking place in the automotive industry. The global downturn in the industry, exacerbated by mounting trade war, together with the generational shift towards electronic and autonomous vehicles, has already resulted in a jobs massacre, which resulted in the loss of more than half a million jobs in 2019 alone.

Car workers in the large assembly plants in the Czech Republic, Romania, Hungary and Slovakia are particularly threatened. The automobile industry has become the central economic factor for the entire region. During capitalist restoration in the 1990s, many large corporations relocated their production to these countries because they found well-trained workers to whom they could pay low wages.

This is particularly true for Slovakia. Global corporations such as VW, Kia, PSA and Jaguar-Land Rover assemble cars in Slovakia. On a per-capita basis, this country of 5.5 million inhabitants is the world’s largest car producer. In 2018, 198 cars were completed there per 1000 inhabitants; last year 202 cars were completed per 1000 inhabitants. Around 80,000 people are directly employed in the auto industry, and a total of 145,000 workers are dependent on the industry. Last year, a total of 1.1 million cars were produced, and cars account for a quarter of all exported goods.

Last year, Volkwagen, the largest private employer in the country, laid off 3,000 workers at its Bratislava plant, as well as 500 Hungarian contractors working in the country. These were the first layoffs in the country’s auto industry in a decade, according to Reuters.

A 2018 study by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) found that Slovakia is the most vulnerable to job losses due to automation, with 40 percent of jobs in the country’s west at risk of being automated in the near future.

In the past, Slovakia was a centre of the arms industry for all of Eastern Europe, which collapsed after the disintegration of the Eastern Bloc in the 1980s and the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. International auto companies found unemployed metal workers here, who were paid only a fraction of Western wages.

Since then, Slovakia has been used as an “extended workbench.” The legal minimum wage today is just under €3 per hour (US$3.26), and the average monthly wage is roughly €950 (US$1,032.90). Slovakian autoworkers face brutal working conditions. “We work like robots on a conveyor belt,” one told the World Socialist Web Site Autoworker Newsletter in 2017. “More is constantly demanded, and mistakes are severely punished.” In the neighbouring Czech Republic, workers at the Skoda car company earn even less than their colleagues in Slovakia. In Hungary, too, where Audi, Mercedes, Suzuki and BMW have plants, or at Ford in Romania, auto workers are confronted with miserable wages.

The conversion of eastern Europe into a sweatshop for European and international manufacturers has created a social powder keg. The first sparks appeared in June 2017 during the strike against Volkswagen Slovakia in Bratislava, the country’s capital and largest city, when 8,000 of some 12,300 workers at the plant paralysed production for six days. The strike was the first work stoppage in a large Slovakian car factory since the restoration of capitalism.

The strike was an early expression of the resurgence of the international class struggle. Exactly one year ago, 13,000 car workers went on strike for better wages at the Hungarian Audi plant in Györ; and a thousand Ford workers went on strike in Craiova in southern Romania in December 2017. In North America last year, 48,000 American General Motors workers struck for 40 days, and 70,000 auto parts workers in Matamoros, Mexico, carried out a wildcat strike in defiance of the pro-corporate trade unions.

Under the title, “A rude awakening in an auto paradise,” finance daily Handelsblatt wrote at the time, “For a long time, Slovakia was considered an auto paradise. Low wages, low taxes, and an industrial policy under head of government Robert Fico, which allowed the car companies to express their wishes.”

However, wages remained low even after the VW strike and other labour disputes. While employers have been forced to pay higher bonuses for night, holiday and weekend work since May 1, 2018, this is by far not enough to compensate for the price increases. Prices are at European Union (EU) levels, and housing in Bratislava, for example, is just as expensive as in any major western European city.

The Slovakian government is now looking anxiously at the impending upheaval in the car industry. A few days ago in Davos, Slovakian Foreign Minister Miroslav Lajcak called on companies to invest more in the future. On the sidelines of the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, Lajcak said, “We don’t want to be seen as a place where only the parts are put together.”

Bratislava is governed by an alliance of the Smer Social Democrats with the right-wing radical SNS, which, in agreement with the EU, is pursuing a strict austerity course and is taking aggressive action against refugees and Roma. The next parliamentary elections will be held later this month, on February 29. Since the VW strike in Bratislava, the government has been concerned that the sharp tensions could easily lead to a social explosion.

Such tensions could be seen in the reaction to the murder of the journalist Jan Kuciak, who had uncovered the Mafia-like ties among the nouveau riche upper class and extending as far as the office of the head of government, Robert Fico. When Kuciak and his wife were shot dead on February 21, 2018, this sparked unrest throughout the country and mass protests in Bratislava, forcing Fico to resign.

VW reacted to the nervousness of the Slovakian government with weak palliatives. On February 3, the VW Board of Directors announced the company would invest €35 million in Slovakia. However, no such investments are forthcoming at a smaller plant in Martin, a town about 230 kilometres east of Bratislava, or at the large VW plant in Bratislava. In Martin, where 800 car workers are currently slaving away for VW, differential gears for electric cars will be developed in the future. However, only about 12 new jobs will be created for this purpose, while 182 workers from Bratislava are to move there.

The announcement amounts to an admission that the VW group no longer offers a future to many thousands of VW workers in Slovakia.

In Germany, VW is preparing a comprehensive cuts operation. In an incendiary speech earlier this year declaring his intent to slaughter “sacred cows,” VW CEO Herbert Diess announced the destruction of 20,000 German auto jobs. A study last fall by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, which is closely aligned with the German Social Democrats, predicted that VW would eliminate 30,000 jobs worldwide.

The cuts in Germany are being coordinated with the IG Metall union, which participates in the company’s supervisory body and is integrated with management through labour-management “works councils.” Bernd Osterloh, chairman of VW’s general works council, expressly supported Herbert Diess’s proposals with the words, “This is the right way forward.”

Steeped in a divisive “Germany-first” nationalism, IG Metall would praise any cuts in Slovakia or Eastern Europe as a defence of “German” jobs. In a “moratorium on fair change,” the German trade union explicitly calls for “strengthening Germany as an industrial location through transformation.” The moratorium is an offer by IG Metall to cooperate closely with the German corporations. It includes a standstill agreement and even the waiver of wage demands.

The trade unions in Slovakia also promote the nationalist and pro-capitalist perspective of “social partnership.” While the trade union Moderne odborov Volkswagen split four years ago from the corrupt OZ KOVO union, which was closely allied with IG Metall, the end of the strike in 2017 proved Moderne odborov also to be a nationalist supporter of social partnership.

It too pursues a policy that pits workers from different plants and countries against each other, thus sacrificing them to the interests of the company. In recent years, this policy has already enabled companies to close European plants such as Opel in Antwerp and Bochum. The closure of Ford in Blanquefort, France, is currently being pushed through using a similar strategy.

As the auto companies are pursuing a global strategy to force workers to pay for sales declines and the cost of new technologies, so too must autoworkers pursue an international strategy to defeat this cost-cutting drive. This requires a struggle against the trade unions, which divide and paralyse workers through their toxic nationalism.

In order to break with this reactionary strategy, autoworkers must form rank-and-file committees completely independent of the trade unions, which take up the fight against factory closures and redundancies on an international level and on a socialist basis.

“Shoot them down”—India’s government incites violence against opponents of its anti-Muslim citizenship law

Wasantha Rupasinghe

India’s Narenda Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government is instigating violent police and vigilante attacks on opponents of its anti-Muslim Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA).

In the run-up to last Saturday’s Delhi assembly election, BJP leaders railed against those protesting against the CAA, accusing them of being in league with Pakistan, and repeatedly led their supporters in chants of “shoot them down.” As a direct result of this incitement, at least three gunmen targeted anti-CAA protesters in New Delhi within the space of four days, starting from January 30.

Protesters in Kolkata in December 2019

Delhi’s police force, which is under the direct control of Modi’s chief henchman, Home Minister Amit Shah, continues to run amok. In the latest outrage, a peaceful anti-CAA protest by Jamia Millia Islamia University students came under brutal police attack Monday.

The BJP government has been shaken by the mass opposition to the CAA, which it rushed through parliament and into law last December.

The CAA makes religion a criterion in determining citizenship for the first time in the history of independent India. It provides a virtually automatic path to citizenship to all who migrated to India from Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Afghanistan prior to 2015—except Muslims.

The CAA is part of a flurry of government actions, including last August’s constitutional coup against Jammu and Kashmir, India’s only Muslim-majority state, aimed at transforming India into a Hindu rashtra or Hindu state, in which Muslims reside on sufferance.

Faced with an economic crisis and mounting popular opposition to its austerity measures and other “pro-investor” policies, the BJP is whipping up anti-Muslim communalism so as to mobilize its Hindu-supremacist supporters as shock troops against the working class, and to divert social anger behind reaction and militarism.

While Muslim students and youth in Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, and West Bengal initiated the anti-CAA agitation, it quickly engulfed all parts of the country, cutting across the religious, ethnic and caste divides that India’s ruling elite has systematically cultivated so as to divide the working class.

Rattled by the sudden emergence of mass opposition, the BJP responded with massive state repression, suspending internet use and imposing blanket bans on all protests across wide areas, and ordering a lethal police crackdown. At least 25 people were killed in December, including 20 in Uttar Pradesh, where Modi and Shah have installed as chief minister a Hindu mahant (high priest), Yogi Adityanath, already under criminal indictment for inciting attacks on Muslims.

In recent weeks the BJP, its ideological mentors in the fascistic RSS, and their Hindu supremacist allies have become even more venomous and threatening in their denunciations of the anti-CAA protests.

Last Sunday, Raj Thackeray the head of the far right Maharashtra Navniman Sena concluded a mass pro-CAA rally in Mumbai with threats of mass violence. “Stones will be answered with stones and swords will be answered with swords,” he thundered, adding that parts of Maharashtra have become “the hub of illegal immigrants from Pakistan and Bangladesh, which need to be cleaned.”

One of the main targets of the BJP’s vitriol is the peaceful sit-in that hundreds of Muslim women have mounted day and night at a major intersection in the poor, predominantly Muslim south Delhi neighbourhood of Shaheen Bagh since the CAA was adopted by parliament last December 11.

The protest at Shaheen Bagh has become a symbol of the opposition to the CAA nationwide, incensing the government. The BJP leadership is particularly concerned about Shaheen Bagh protesters raising social issues, such as mass joblessness, rising prices and the safety of women, and more generally the intersection between opposition to its anti-democratic communalist agenda and growing working-class unrest across India over economic privation.

In the run-up to the February 8 Delhi assembly election, BJP leaders railed against the Shaheen Bagh protestors, likening them to pro-Pakistan traitors and terrorists. Speaking at a February 3 election rally, Modi claimed the Shaheen Bagh sit-in was a “political conspiracy to destroy the country’s harmony.” Two days earlier, at another election rally, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath had tried to tie the BJP’s main electoral opponents in Delhi to the sit-in, while insinuating the Shaheen Bagh protesters were terrorists. He denounced Delhi’s Aam Aadmi Party government, claiming it “supplies biryani” to the Shaheen Bagh protestors, while Modi and the BJP have “been identifying every terrorist and feeding them goli (bullets) instead of biryani.”

On January 28, Anurag Thakur, the junior finance minister in the BJP central government, was caught on video leading an election rally in chants of “shoot them down”—a Hindu right war-cry that gained currency after the head of the West Bengal BJP, Dilip Ghosh, chastised the state’s chief minister, Mamata Banerjee, “for not opening fire and ordering a lathi (police-baton) charge” on those protesting against the CAA. “Our governments in Uttar Pradesh, Assam and Karnataka,” he went on to boast, “shot these people like dogs.”

On the video, the BJP minister Thakur, speaking in Hindi, declares, desh ke gaddaron ko (“Traitors who betray the country,”), to which the crowd enthusiastically replies “goli maaro saalo ko” (“Shoot them down”).

Encouraged by these incitements to violence against those opposing the CAA, a young man shot at anti-CAA protesters at Jamia Millia Islamia University (JMI) on January 30, injuring one student. In a video, shared by the ANI news agency, the gunman can be seen walking and waving a pistol while dozens of policemen in riot gear stand by. Only after he opened fire, did police intervene. While being taken away, the gunman shouted Delhi Police Zindabad (“Long live Delhi Police”).

Less than 48 hours later, on February 1, a second gunman fired two rounds in the air at the Shaheen Bagh sit-in and shouted, “No other community will have a say in this country. Only Hindus will.” The third shooting in four days was reported on February 2, when an unidentified assailant fired outside the JMI campus.

Last December police illegally stormed the JMI campus and assaulted students with tear gas, rubber bullets and truncheons. More than fifty students were hospitalized, many with broken bones and other severe injuries. Since then police have repeatedly harassed and attacked anti-CAA protests led by JMI students.

On Monday, when JMI students sought to march on parliament they were meet with a mass cordon of heavily-armed police. When the students sought to assert their right to protest, they were brutally attacked by the Delhi police. As a result some students were forced to seek medical attention.

Speaking to India Today TV , doctors said that “more than 10 woman students have been hit (by police) on their private parts. We have found blunt injuries on some of the protesters.” One female JMI student told India Today: “One of the women cops took off my burqa and hit me on my private parts with a lathi.”

Despite the repression and BJP threats, opposition to the CAA—and to the BJP’s plans to use the 2020 National Population Register (NPR) and ultimately an all-India National Citizens Register (NCR) to mount an anti-immigrant witch hunt, in which poor Muslims will be the principal victims—continues to grow. On January 29, Bhubaneswar, the capital city of Odisha, witnessed what the media termed one of the largest demonstrations in its history, as a large cross-section of the population took to the streets to oppose the CAA, NPR, and NCR.

US spied on governments for decades through secret ownership of Swiss encryption firm

Kevin Reed

The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and National Security Agency (NSA) have been spying on the encrypted communications of governments all over the world for the past five decades through the CIA’s secret ownership of a global security firm based in Switzerland.

According to a lengthy report in the Washington Post on Tuesday, the CIA-owned company known as Crypto AG sold diplomatic encryption technologies to more than half of the countries in the world for the past half-century, all the while with US intelligence eavesdropping on their communications.

FILE - This April 13, 2016, file photo shows the seal of the Central Intelligence Agency at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, File)

Crypto was a World War II-era mechanical encryption technology company that was acquired in a partnership deal between the CIA and West German foreign intelligence (BND) in 1970. With a reputation for developing sophisticated encryption methods, the company then began selling to governments systems which contained backdoor access keys held by US and German intelligence agencies.

As the Post report explains, “The Swiss firm made millions of dollars selling equipment to more than 120 countries well into the 21st century. Its clients included Iran, military juntas in Latin America, nuclear rivals India and Pakistan, and even the Vatican.” Among the countries that used Crypto technologies for sensitive communications were Japan, Mexico, Egypt, South Korea, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Italy, Argentina, Indonesia and Libya.

The Post report was published jointly with the German public broadcaster ZDF (Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen) and is based on information contained in a classified comprehensive history of the secret CIA program, called “Thesaurus” and later “Rubicon,” that was leaked to the two news organizations. The Post and ZDF also interviewed current and former intelligence officials and Crypto employees, most of whom spoke on condition of anonymity.

Among the instances of spying by Crypto for US intelligence reported in detail by the Post were the communications of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat with Cairo during the 1978 Camp David negotiations, the diplomatic cables between the Iranian regime of Ayatollah Khomeini and Algeria during the US hostage crisis in 1979-80 and the sharing of decrypted communications with Britain from Argentina during the Malvinas War in 1982.

The Post quotes directly from the conclusion of the leaked report: “It was the intelligence coup of the century. Foreign governments were paying good money to the US and West Germany for the privilege of having their most secret communications read by at least two (and possibly as many as five or six) foreign countries.”

The “five or six” countries with access to the decrypted communications are likely the Five Eyes intelligence partnership that includes Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the US. However, the Post report adds that the CIA records “show that at least four other countries—Israel, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom—were aware of the operation or were provided intelligence from it by the United States or West Germany.”

At the height of the Crypto spying operations in the 1980s, the company’s systems were responsible for 40 percent of the world’s diplomatic cables and, while governments using them believed their communications were protected from eavesdropping, everything was being collected and decrypted.

Among the few governments that did not purchase the Crypto systems were the Soviet Union and China because, according to the Post, their “well-founded suspicions of the company’s ties to the West shielded them from exposure, although the CIA history suggests that U.S. spies learned a great deal by monitoring other countries’ interactions with Moscow and Beijing.”

That US intelligence, in collaboration with its imperialist partners, was spying on the diplomatic communications of governments around the world for the past half-century is a significant revelation. While not surprising, it demonstrates in the most concrete manner the blatant criminality and gangsterism of US imperialism.

The revelations also prove that the government in Washington D.C., whether a Democrat or Republican has been in the White House, has been the number one “meddler” in the affairs of other countries for five decades, in complete violation of international law.

The Crypto revelations add to the long history of eavesdropping by the US government on both its allies and enemies in world affairs. Many of the more recent exposures have been published by WikiLeaks or contained in leaks by the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who turned over a trove of secret intelligence documents to reporters from the Guardian and the Post in 2013.

In 2015, during the presidential administration of Barack Obama, WikiLeaks revealed that the NSA had been listening in on the phone calls of German Chancellor Angela Merkel going back to 2009. The WikiLeaks data showed that the US had in fact been spying on the German chancellery for decades, beginning with the administration of Helmut Kohl (1982-1998).

The Snowden revelations, that proved the NSA was collecting and storing the electronic communications of the entire world’s population, showed that US intelligence operations include hacking into the fiber optic backbone of the international undersea cable system that connect the countries of the world together. Among Snowden’s revelations was the fact that the US had intercepted the phone calls of the presidents of Mexico and Brazil in this manner.

The decades of unfettered access by US imperialism through secret backdoor keys built into commercially available encryption equipment exposes the motivations behind the present drive by the Trump administration to force tech companies to abolish end-to-end encryption on smartphones and texting apps. The demand that Apple, Google and Facebook give US law enforcement backdoor access to their products is, in part, aimed at restoring government surveillance of the private communications of rival governments and corporations.

The struggle against government surveillance of the public and the illegal operations of the US military-intelligence state against the countries of the world is fundamentally a question of defending basic democratic rights. While all of the candidates of the Democratic Party accept the unproven allegations of “Russian meddling” in the 2016 elections, not one of them has commented on the Washington Post’s latest revelations of US spying and meddling on behalf of the American giant corporations and big banks.

Airbus Africa4Future Aerospace Accelerator 2020 for African Startups

Application Deadline: 14th March 2020 at 11:59pm In your local timezone (GMT +1)

Eligible Countries: African countries

About the Award: First launched in 2017, the #Africa4Future initiative was created by Airbus BizLab with the objective to encourage and support entrepreneurship in Africa. Through #Africa4future, Airbus seeks to build bridges between the aerospace industry and the different players in Africa.

For this third edition, the accelerator is open to African start-ups, service providers, software companies that are actively working on solutions in Agriculture and infrastructure that are related to remote-sensing technology. This includes automation, blockchain, artificial intelligence, data analytics, material composites, manufacturing and more. Infrastructure refers to transportation/logistics mapping, water monitoring, waste management, real estate, urban development and other related areas.

The program is implemented by Co-Creation Hub (CcHUB), a Pan-African innovation center with a track record of accelerating the application of social capital and technology for economic prosperity. CcHUB will provide strategic support and practical industry know-how to the startups to engage multiple stakeholders within their ecosystem and facilitate the connection with these global organizations.

Type: Entrepreneurship

Eligibility: We are looking for startups/solution providers/companies that:

• Create value in Agriculture and Infrastructure sectors
• Have the ability to leverage remote sensing technologies
• Have been running operations for at least 1 year
• Have an existing product with traction (customers and/or revenue)
• Have a strong management team
• Have experience leveraging partnerships to create impact

In addition to the above, companies must be registered in Africa and at least one active member of the founding team must be a Citizen of an African country.

Number of Awards: 10

Value of Award:

1. Access to the best of Airbus technologies and expertise to create the best possible version of your solution.
2. 250,000 credits on the UP42 platform to access powerful analytics tools
3. An opportunity to present a project to the leadership of Airbus and GIZ for potential collaboration.
4. Tailored coaching to improve your value proposition and your business’ capacity to work with large organizations.
5. Connection with Airbus experts, local industry experts and investors.
6. Potential to connect with the global value chain and build commercial traction through showcase events in Africa and Europe (Viva Tech, Africa-France summit and more)

Duration of Programme: 3 Months

How to Apply: Apply 

Visit Programme Webpage for Details

Google Africa PhD Fellowship Program 2020 for African Students

Application Deadline: 15th April 2020

Eligible Countries: African countries

About the Award: Nurturing and maintaining strong relations with the academic community is a top priority at Google. The Google Africa PhD Fellowship Program has been created to support and recognize outstanding students pursuing or looking to pursue PhD level studies in computer science and related areas.

Fields of Study: Computer science and related areas

Type: Fellowship

Eligibility: Students and professionals are welcome to apply to the PhD Fellowship program.

For current PhD Students

1. Applicants must be enrolled into a full-time PhD program at a university in Africa. Applicants who are currently in their first year of a part-time PhD program and transferring to full-time positions are also welcome to apply.
2. Students should be early PhD students, i.e, should not have been into more than 1 year of their PhD. Applicants for the 2020 Fellowship must have started their program on or after 1-Jan-2020.
3. Students must remain enrolled in the PhD program for the duration of the Fellowship or forfeit the award.
4. Applicants must be pursuing a PhD in Computer Science or related areas.
5. Google employees and family members of Google employees are not eligible
6. Students who are already receiving another corporate fellowship are not eligible.

For current Undergraduate/Masters students and Professionals

1. Grant of the fellowship to this category of applicants is contingent on them joining a full-time PhD program at a university in Africa within the calendar year of the award.
2. Student applicants must be full-time Undergraduate or Masters students enrolled at an African university. Professionals must be employed/affiliated with an organization registered in Africa.
3. The Google Fellowship award shall be contingent on the awardee registering for the full-time PhD program at an African university, in Computer Science or related areas, within the calendar year 2020, or the award shall be forfeited.
4. Grant of the Google Fellowship does not mean admission to the PhD program of a university. The awardee must also complete the PhD admission process of the respective institute/university where he/she wishes to register for PhD.
5. Grant of the Google Fellowship will be subject to the rules and guidelines applicable in the institute/university where the awardee registers for the PhD program.
6. Google employees and family members of Google employees are not eligible.

Number of Awards: Not specified

Details of Google Africa PhD Fellowship: 

• Successful students receive named Fellowships, which include a $10,000 award per year over 3 years.
• The funds are given directly to the university to be distributed to cover the student’s expenses and stipend as appropriate.
• The funds are given as an unrestricted gift, and it is Google’s policy not to pay for overhead on unrestricted gifts.
• In addition, the student will be matched with a Google Research Mentor who we hope will become a valuable resource to the student.
• There is no employee relationship between the student and Google as a result of receiving the fellowship.
• Fellowship recipients are not subject to intellectual property restrictions unless they complete an internship at Google.
• Fellowship recipients serving an internship are subject to the same intellectual property and other contractual obligations as any other Google intern.
• If a Fellowship student is interested, an internship at Google is encouraged, but not guaranteed or required.

How to Apply: 

• Applications are accepted directly from students. There is no limit to the number of students who may apply from each university.
• Applicant’s areas of research interest must be one of the areas listed at https://research.google.com/.

Instructions for Applicants

• Gather the following documents:

• 1. Applicant’s resume with links to publications (if available).
  2. One-page resume of the student’s PhD program advisor.
  3. Available transcripts (mark sheets) starting from first year/semester of Bachelor’s degree to date.
  4. Research proposal (maximum two pages).
  5. Three letters of recommendation from those familiar with the applicant’s work (at least one coming from the thesis adviser in case of current PhD students). If the recommendation writers want to send the letter separately, they can mail it directly to research-africa@google.com with the subject “Recommendation for [applicant-name]”.

Submit your applications by clicking on this link.

Visit Program Webpage for Details

Erdogan battles on multiple fronts in risky regional power bid

James M. Dorsey

The optics seem evident: Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is at odds with just about everybody.

Mr. Erdogan is on opposite sides of Russia in Syria, with Turkish and Syrian troops poised for an all-out fight in the north of the war-torn country, as well as in Libya and didn’t do himself any favours by coming out swinging against his supposed Russian ally during a visit to Ukraine earlier this month.

On all three flashpoints, Turkey and Russia are testing the limits of what was always at best an opportunistic, fragile partnership aimed at capitalizing on a seemingly diminishing US interest in the Middle East, evident already under President Barak Obama, and in Donald J. Trump’s haphazard redefinition of what he sees as America’s national interests.

If that were not already a plate full, Mr. Erdogan’s relations with his US and European allies are strained over unilateral Turkish moves in the eastern Mediterranean, Turkey’s acquisition of a Russian S-400 anti-missile system and/or Turkey’s military intervention in Syria as well as refugees and much more.

Turkey has threatened to close Incirlik Air Base and a critical radar station in Kurecik if the United States and the European Union fail to recognize what Turkey views as its national interests.

At the same time, Mr. Erdogan frets about his alliance with Qatar in the wake of suggestions that the Gulf state and Saudi Arabia are searching for a way to end a Saudi-led 2.5-year-old economic and diplomatic boycott of Qatar.

Reports that the talks between the kingdom and Qatar have failed may not put Mr. Erdogan’s concerns to bed with the United Arab Emirates, Qatar’s most hardline detractor, restoring postal services with the Gulf state.

The restoration, mediated by the United Nation’s Universal Postal Union, was the first time that a third-party succeeded in negotiating any easing of the boycott.

Piling it on, Mr. Erdogan’s powerful navy, imitating Chinese tactics in the South China Sea, has significantly raised tensions in the eastern Mediterranean by sending naval forces to escort Turkish drill ships into contested waters and to block Greek and Cypriot petrochemical exploration vessels in waters recognized as theirs under international law.

Turkey has warned Israel that it needs Turkish approval to build together with Greece and Turkey an undersea natural gas pipeline to Europe.

As he battles on multiple regional fronts, Mr. Erdogan is walking a finely calibrated tightrope, rather than hitting out blindly at everyone, in the assumption that neither Russia nor the United States or, for that matter, Qatar, can afford to lose Turkey. By the same token, neither can Turkey risk jeopardizing its relationships.

As a result, Mr. Erdogan’s confrontational moves constitute a high stakes gamble, particularly with Turkey’s military build-up in northern Syria, an area in which Mr. Erdogan does not enjoy air superiority.

The Turkish leader is betting on Russia blinking first by reigning in Syrian forces and pressing for a negotiated resolution of the crisis.

Mr. Erdogan’s provocative visit to Kiev and backing for Ukraine in its conflict with Russia was about far more than differences over the Russian-backed Syrian assault in Idlib, the last rebel outpost in the country.

Concerned that Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 has put a halt to Turkey’s maritime dominance of the Black Sea and turned it into a Russian lake, Mr. Erdogan sought in Kyiv to play both sides against the middle.

The International Crisis Group has warned that in the Black Sea “Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea has enabled it to expand its naval capability, project power south and shift the strategic balance in its favour.”

Russia’s de facto coastline grew from 475 to 1,200 kilometres or about 25 per cent of the sea’s total shorefront since the annexation.

Add to that 300 kilometres of coastline belonging to Abkhazia, a Russian-backed breakaway region of Georgia.

In a bid to counter Russian advances, Mr. Erdogan’s gamble also constitutes a bid to persuade NATO to back Turkey in the Black Sea, reversing a decades-old policy of keeping the alliance out of the region.

With 13 Turkish soldiers having died in the last week in two Syrian attacks on Turkish targets and Turkey claiming to have killed more than 100 Syrian soldiers in retaliation, Mr. Erdogan’s gambit appears to have produced initial dividends with the Trump administration backing the Turkish leader in his high-stakes Syrian bid.

One key joker is the degree to which Mr. Erdogan may feel that he has no choice but to escalate further than he would like to in response to far-right nationalists who resonate with part of his voter base and are pressuring him to go for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s jugular.

“What are you waiting for? Don’t beat around the bush while Turkish soldiers are being martyred in attacks carried out by soldiers of another state,” said Meral Aksener, leader of the Iyi or Good Party.

Added Devlet Bahceli, head of Mr. Erdogan’s coalition partner, the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP): “Assad is a murderer, a criminal and the source of hostility. There will be no peace in Turkey until Assad is brought down from his throne. Turkey must start plans to enter Damascus now, and annihilate the cruel ones.”

Recession warnings fuel political instability in Australia

Mike Head

Warnings by banks and corporate economists that Australia could fall into recession because of the bushfire and coronavirus disasters are feeding into rising political discontent and the fragility of the Liberal-National Coalition government. By all indicators, the economy is already in reverse, and the damage will only worsen over coming months.

The “back in black” $5 billion fiscal surplus for 2019–20, proclaimed by Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s government in last year’s budget speech, has almost certainly disappeared as well. This is adding to the pressure on the faction-torn government, already discredited by its contemptuous response to the bushfire catastrophe and ongoing vote-buying slush fund revelations.

According to the Australian Financial Review, economists at ANZ and NAB, two of the “big four” local banks, believe that Australian gross domestic product (GDP) will shrink in the first three months of this year because of the coronavirus and the bushfires affecting an already slumping economy.

In the latest development, the government is set to extend its blanket coronavirus travel ban on China, blocking at least 100,000 international students from entering the country in time for the start of tertiary education semesters. Apart from the serious impact on the rights and future of the students, this will deal a hammer blow to Australia’s universities, which depend heavily on Chinese students, as well as related accommodation and service industries.

At $34 billion annually, revenue from overseas students is Australian capitalism’s second biggest export earner behind iron ore. Starved of government funds, the universities rely on charging exorbitant fees to international students, treating them as cash cows. The ratings agency Moody’s warned last Friday that Australian universities will be harder hit than those of any other country because of the high proportion of international students, one quarter of whom are from China.

Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) governor Philip Lowe warned last week that the coronavirus will do more harm to Australia’s economy than the 2003 SARS outbreak, because of the greater reliance on exports to China, and students and tourists from China, than 17 years ago.

Alongside the education sector, the tourism industry is expected to be among the worst hit. Queensland’s Labor Party Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk told state parliament last week the Cairns region had already lost $200 million in bookings, and Gold Coast operators expected to lose $400 million. There has been a flow-on effect to tourists from other Asian nations as well, such as South Korea and Japan, and other parts of the world.

Chinese make up around 16 percent of visitors to Australia and they outspend American tourists by a ratio of three to one. Their annual spending of $12–16 billion is greater than American, British, Japanese and New Zealand tourists combined.

These losses are on top of those inflicted by the bushfire devastation. By the best estimates, the tourism, retail and rural industries will lose around $100 billion in income from the bushfires. That does not include the effect of injuries and shortened lives due to smoke-related stroke and cardiovascular and lung diseases, or the terrible social costs of mental health problems and unemployment.

The RBA has predicted the bushfires would cut economic growth by 0.2 percentage points through the December and March quarters, while the drought would likely depress GDP by a quarter percentage point through all of 2020.

The central bank has yet to even determine the financial fallout from the widening coronavirus epidemic in China and internationally. Business economists believe it could further slash economic growth through the first three months of this year by up to half a percentage point. Yet such predictions could be swamped if the epidemic continues to worsen.

Deloitte Access Economics estimates the virus will cut about $1.8 billion from budget revenues this financial year. Because of the impact on Chinese production, Deloitte partner Chris Richardson also forecast a fall in iron ore prices, which will flow through to the government’s company tax revenues.

KPMG chief economist Brendan Rynne said monthly revenue and spending figures from the Finance Department showed the budget was already $1.1 billion behind expectations and still deep in deficit in December, even before the worst of the bushfires.

Senior ANZ economist Cherelle Murphy said if that trend continued, the $5 billion surplus would “clearly disappear.” This will mean more severe government cuts in social spending to satisfy the dictates of the global financial markets. The credit ratings agencies have warned that any retreat on the surplus could endanger the country’s AAA borrowing rating.

Other economic barometers reveal a deepening underlying slump. New car sales in January fell to their lowest level since mid-2012, following the 2008–09 global financial breakdown. Annual new car sales are now running 12.4 percent below their March 2018 peak.

Retail sales grew by just 0.4 percent over the past year, the fourth-worst result since the 1991 recession. They are likely to stagnate for longer because real wage growth is expected to fall from the already weak rate of 0.6 percent to just 0.2 percent in the 12 months to June 2022. Even this average wage statistic hides the reality that low-paid and insecure workers, in particular, have been subjected to real pay declines for at least six years.

Three RBA official interest rate cuts last year, taking them to a record low of 0.75 percent, have failed to reverse the slump in consumer spending. A lack of consumer confidence has been compounded by household debt, which stands at almost 200 percent of disposable income.

A research report published this month by the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research showed intensifying income inequality, magnified by tax cuts for the wealthy and the stripping away of welfare entitlements. It calculated that income inequality, as measured by the Gini coefficient, increased by almost 10 percent between 1994–95 and 2015–16.

In particular, the income share of the bottom tenth of households decreased from 4.5 percent to 3.6 percent, pushing an additional 3.3 percent of the population (more than 800,000 people) below the poverty line of 50 percent of median income. Two-thirds of the decline stemmed from people being forced off parenting and disability payments and onto sub-poverty Newstart jobless benefits—what the government cynically calls “tax-transfer reforms.”

At the expense of the poor, the top decile increased its share from 22.7 percent to 24.2 percent, boosted by cuts in top tax rates and higher tax thresholds by both Coalition and Labor governments.

The looming further decline in living conditions, accentuated by deeper inequality, is generating intense political disaffection, not just directed against the Coalition government but the entire parliamentary establishment, in which public “trust” has already fallen to historic lows.

Hundreds of thousands denied pensions in Russia

Andrea Peters

Approximately 800,000 people have been kept off Russia’s retirement rolls since the government implemented reforms in late 2018, according to the country’s pension fund.

The changes, which are being instituted over the course of several years, raise the retirement age by five years for men and women. Based on the average size of Russia’s pension in 2019, by one estimate those whose retirement is delayed by the full five years will lose 848,000 rubles in income or about $13,200.

The pension reform is deeply unpopular. It has provoked widespread opposition, including street protests in 2018 and 2019. There are 42 million people receiving pensions in Russia currently and another 10 million nearing retirement age. Collectively, this constitutes about half of the country’s adult population. In dozens of regions of the country, male life expectancy is lower than or very near to the new retirement age, meaning that many will never live long enough to see a pension.

In an effort to assuage social anger and drum up support for constitutional reforms he is seeking, President Vladimir Putin recently announced the indexing of pensions to inflation. This small increase in the size of Russian pensions will be placed, alongside other constitutional changes, on an April 2020 “consultative” ballot. The country’s parliament has already given its stamp of approval in a Duma reading that lasted all of about two hours.

Earlier this month, the state pension fund declared that, in keeping with the anticipated constitutional reforms, as of February 1 it had raised pension outlays for some recipients—war veterans, individuals suffering from radiation exposure, and those who have been named heroes of the Soviet Union or Russia or heroes of socialist labor—by three percent. The total additional cost for each of the 15 million people who fall into these categories comes to around 1500 rubles, about $23.50. The pension fund is also increasing the burial allowance paid out to the family of deceased pensioners to 6,124 rubles, about $95.

The miserable and absurd character of these changes found expression in a February 9 news broadcast, when an anchor with Vesti-Kamchatka lost her composure and began laughing while attempting to report the details of the government’s new “social spending.” For medicines, these pensioners have been allotted the equivalent of 900 rubles a month, about $13.86. For visits to health sanitorium they will get 137 rubles a month, about $2.15. And for transportation, including internationally for medical purposes, they can expect 128 rubles, about $1.99. The footage showing reporter Alexandra Novikova’s open derision was leaked online and has since spread across the internet.

Inflation in Russia for essential consumer items, particularly food, tends to outstrip that of the economy as whole, which means that pension increases often have little to no effect on the well-being of retirees. Overall, real incomes in the country have been falling for several years, counteracting the effect of a generally low unemployment rate. Currently, food costs are rising dramatically in Russia’s far east, due to the closing of the border with China over fears of the coronavirus.

While Russian law establishes that pensioners cannot receive less than a “living minimum,” this level is absurdly low. On average in 2019 it amounted to about 8800 rubles a month for the elderly, approximately $137. Similar to what exists elsewhere around the world, retirees regularly have to choose between buying medicine, purchasing food, and covering their utility bills.

Five days ago, Russia’s newly installed prime minister, Mikhail Mishustin, declared the government’s primary goal to be building “people’s belief in the future.” In an effort to boost Russia’s growth rate, which hovers around a sclerotic 1.5 percent, and contain social anger over the gutting of social spending, the Kremlin has announced it will boost investment in so-called “national projects.” The amounts promised for healthcare, education, and housing, should they even materialize, are paltry and will in no way reverse the decades-long attack on the living standards of the Russian working class.

Ten million workers in Britain toil in “low-quality” jobs

Margot Miller

Research by the Health Foundation reveals that more than one in three UK employees—36 percent or 10 million people—are in low-quality jobs that can adversely affect their health.

The report “What the Quality of Work Means for our Health” confirms what most workers have long suspected—poor conditions at work make you ill.

The Health Foundation, an independent charity founded in 1983, states its commitment “to bringing about better health and health care for people in the UK.” It compiled this report by analysing the latest data from a survey of 40,000 people by Understanding Society in its government-funded UK household longitudinal study at the University of Essex. The data that establishes the link between low-quality work and self-reported poor health covers the period 2016/17.

It has long been accepted that unemployment and poverty impact on health and longevity. A recent study quantified this, showing that the wealthy enjoy “eight to nine more years of ‘disability free’ life after age 50 than the poorest American and English adults.”

Unemployment in the UK is at its lowest point since 1975. The June-to-August 2019 employment rate stands at 75.9 percent. The figure for underemployment shows little change—5 percent of the population or 2.4 million are in part-time employment and prefer longer hours. Of the unemployed, 41 percent have been without work for six months or more.

The report summarises the ways in which unemployment causes poor health.

It is a major stressor, which can lead to “unhealthy coping behaviours,” for example drinking and smoking. It causes poverty, which correlates to poorer health, as well as harming job prospects.

The report finds that higher employment rates have not, however, led to better health outcomes in the population. This is excluding physical injury at work, which is still a problem though the numbers have fallen in the past few decades.

The very nature of many working-class jobs militates against good health. The charity explains that a “proliferation of low-quality jobs carries health risks.”

Their conclusions are based on the link they observed between two or more self-reported socioeconomic risk factors that define low-quality work and self-rated poor health (less than good, very good or excellent).

Low-quality work is defined as low job security (the job may not last beyond a year), low job satisfaction, low job well-being (health, happiness and prosperity), low pay and low job autonomy, in order of prevalence from most to least.

Senior analyst at the Health Foundation, Adam Tinson, said: “Low-quality work is where someone feels stressed and unfulfilled, whether that’s due to pay, insecurity, a lack of autonomy or a feeling of dissatisfaction. This can harm people’s health.”

From the sample, 36 percent or over a third of all UK employees reported being in low-quality work defined by two or more of the above factors. Of this group, 15 percent said their health was poor, twice as many as those not in low-quality jobs.

Any single aspect of low-quality work was associated with more reports of a lack of good health than the group not in low-quality work. Only 27 percent of UK employees reported they were not in low-quality jobs.

The factor most likely to increase stress levels was low job security, including temporary contracts, working in the gig economy and on zero-hours contracts. Working in the modern environment, the security of a “job for life” is something only remembered by the older generation.

The next deleterious factor is low job satisfaction, followed by low job well-being, and then low pay. Low pay is a major cause of stress.

According to the Resolution Foundation almost seven out of 10 adults in poverty in Britain live in households with at least one person in work. This is a rise from 20 years ago when it was five in 10.

The final factor determined as indicating low-quality work is low job autonomy, where the worker feels he has no control over what he or she does.

Take a day in the life of an Amazon order picker. For a wage of £9.12 an hour, he is driven to maximise the profits of shareholders, including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Bezos took a hit recently following a hefty divorce settlement that whittled his wealth, according to Forbes. His super-riches dwindled down from £126 billion to £113 billion—still making him the richest person in the world.

An Amazon employee must work according to targets and the speed of the machines that deliver the goods to be picked. The worker is also competing against his/her fellow workers, as the most productive worker will be named on a billboard and totals revealed. Speed-up is inbuilt into the system. The worker has no control over the job. Toilet breaks are discouraged because time off the job makes meeting targets less likely.

For 10 hours at a stretch, under artificial light, working in a cage with little chance to talk above the noise of machines or loud music and doing repetitive work that can lead to strain injuries—an Amazon order picker’s job easily qualifies as low-quality work.

From halfway through November to January, which are peak times, overtime is compulsory, meaning an 11-and-a-half-hour day, five days a week. The stress levels mount up.

The longer a worker experiences stress, the more the likelihood of damage to health. Allostatic load, or wear and tear on the body due to chronic stress, is associated with a whole array of illnesses both mental and physical, including anxiety and depression, high blood pressure and heart disease, Alzheimer’s, diabetes and asthma. The build-up of stress also weakens the immune system, a possible precursor to infections and even cancer.

The longer one spends in a low-quality job, the greater the risk to health. The report notes that of those in low-quality employment in 2010/11, half or 51 percent were still in work perceived as low-quality in 2016/17.

These findings are confirmed by research on the opposite end of the socioeconomic scale—the Whitehall 11 Study of higher-grade civil servants. Greater autonomy at work and rewards for their efforts including remuneration and promotions reduced stress levels and promoted better health outcomes.

Those in low-quality jobs, the Health Foundation report points out, tend to be younger adults, workers in less skilled and more routine jobs, and members of black or minority ethnic groups.

An earlier study published in the International Journal of Epidemiolog y by Chandola and Zhang found that “unemployed adults who transitioned into poor quality work had greater adverse levels of biomarkers [such as high blood pressure] compared with their peers who remained unemployed.” A similar effect did not occur when moving to jobs perceived as being better.

That more than a third of workers in the UK are in low-quality jobs shows the extent to which the country has been transformed by successive governments into a cheap labour platform—where more than half its inhabitants live on £18,000 a year or less. This destruction of better paid, secure jobs underscores the transformation of the trade unions into organisations that serve the profit interests of the conglomerates.

The Health Foundation offers no solutions to inequality in health outcomes at work, except a few appeals to governments and profit hungry companies.

Clutching at straws, the charity sees a silver lining in Brexit, stating, “With the UK’s employment law set for review as it leaves the EU, action is needed to improve job quality. Beyond regulatory fixes, employers should give greater consideration to job security, job design, management practices and the working environment to boost job quality.”

The exact opposite is being prepared by the Johnson Conservative government. It has already given a foretaste of the massive attacks to come on the living conditions of the working class by announcing the setting up of free ports which will become hubs for super-exploitation of workers by global firms, 5 percent cuts in public spending across the board, and the turn to authoritarian methods of rule.

Rising trade war, of which Brexit is an expression, means companies, aided by the trade unions, will drive down wages and conditions further in order to remain competitive. The only answer to trade war and where it will lead—ever greater impoverishment for the working class—is the appropriation of society’s wealth that is in the hands of a few rich oligarchs.

US jobs report: 11,000 US auto jobs lost in January

Jessica Goldstein

The US economy shed 11,000 auto and auto parts jobs in the month of January, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistic’s monthly report released last week. This represented almost all of the 12,000 jobs lost in the manufacturing sector as a whole. Over the last 12 months, 24,000 jobs had been eliminated in the auto industry, according to the bureau’s report.

January’s figures show that the jobs bloodbath in the auto industry is continuing unabated after the United Auto Workers’ sabotage of the General Motors strike last fall. The union, which is embroiled in a massive bribery and corruption scandal which has implicated much of its top leadership, forced through a sellout contract after isolating the strike which ratified the closure of four GM facilities. A fifth, Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly, is slated to idle for the 18 months starting at the end of February.

The assembly line at the Ford Rouge assembly plant in Dearborn, Michigan [Credit: AP Photo/Carlos Osorio, File]

The union’s betrayal of the GM strike paved the way for similar sellout deals at Ford, which will close its Romeo Engine plant in Michigan in 2022, and at Fiat Chrysler, whose Marysville Axle plant may close next year.

While General Motors is carrying out forced overtime at many plants in order to make up for production lost to the strike, Ford and Fiat Chrysler are carrying out temporary layoffs and plant shutdowns throughout the country. Ford recently announced temporary layoffs at Chicago Stamping Plant in Chicago Heights, Illinois, and is cutting hours at its Chicago Assembly Plant on the south side of Chicago.

Fiat Chrysler (FCA) offered buyouts to 3,900 workers at its Belvidere Assembly plant at the end of January, fueling fears that the plant is preparing to close completely. The company laid off 1,371 workers last May after cutting a shift at the plant.

Both US-based and foreign automakers and suppliers are in the midst of a jobs purge in response to a slowdown in the global industry and to prepare for the introduction of electric and self-driving vehicles, which require far less labor to produce. General Motors ended production at its Oshawa plant in Ontario, Canada, in December, and Ford laid off 400 workers at its Oakville, Ontario, plant last week.

Ford announced in 2019 that it would close plants across Europe, including one factory in Blanquefort, France, three factories in Russia later that year, and its engine plant in Brigend, Wales, in the United Kingdom in 2020. This was in addition to 7,000 white collar job cuts announced last year. The company, already under strain from investors and credit rating agencies to quicken the pace of its “global fitness” program, has now been thrown into a deep crisis by its disastrous 2019 financial performance.

In Germany, Volkswagen announced plans to cut 20,000 jobs in Germany. The IG Metall has indicated its willingness to support these cuts, and is also helping Daimler, the parent company of Mercedes-Benz, to slash 10,000 jobs in Germany by the end of 2022.

While tens of thousands of autoworkers have already lost their jobs in the United States and Europe, the bulk of the layoffs last year took place in India (350,000) and in China (220,000). Chinese auto sales, which had experienced decades of uninterrupted growth to become the world’s largest auto market, suffered its first decline in a generation in 2018, due in large part to the impact of the Trump administration’s trade war measures.

The coronavirus outbreak, which has caused extended plant shutdowns in China’s “motor city” Wuhan, has wreaked havoc on global auto supply chains. The Trump administration is attempting to utilize this public health crisis to pressure companies into shifting to suppliers outside of China. “The fact is, it does give business yet another thing to consider when they go through their review of their supply chain,” Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross told Fox News. “So, I think it will help to accelerate the return of jobs to North America.”

More broadly, the January jobs report points to a continuing economic stagnation confronting American workers. Just 225,000 new jobs were added to the US economy in January according to US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) monthly Employment Situation released last Friday, compared to 304,000 added in January 2019.

The majority, a total of 144,000 jobs, were added in primarily low-wage, precarious sections of industry. Unemployment rose slightly to 3.6 percent, still slightly lower than last January, when it was 4.0 percent. However, for roughly a decade the official unemployment rate, which does not count the underemployed or those discouraged from looking for work, has grossly underestimated the actual state of unemployment. The number of long-term unemployed (without work for 27 weeks or more) and those who have given up looking for work is increasing, from 19.3 percent of the total unemployed in January 2019 to 19.9 percent of the total unemployed in January 2020.

Wages rose by a mere $0.07 per hour to an average of $28.44. However, this figure masks widening income inequality. Around 44 percent of US workers earn low wages under $16.00 per hour. Low-wage employment dominated job growth in January. Construction work rose by 44,000 jobs, leisure and hospitality by 36,000 and transportation and warehousing by 28,000.

The BLS also reported that the year 2019 saw the greatest number of major work stoppages (strikes) in the US out of any year in the past decade. There were 425,000 workers who participated in strikes, with the majority of workers who were on strike in the education sector. The longest strike with 29 lost working days was the strike of General Motors workers in September through October. The systematic destruction of higher-paid manufacturing work and its replacement with low-wage, precarious work is one of the many factors fueling the growth in opposition to capitalism among American workers.

The growing strike wave in the US is a part of the resurgence of the class struggle worldwide, throughout the Americas, Asia, Europe and Africa. The fight against corporate rule and to protect jobs requires a strategy to link all of these struggles of rank-and-file workers under an international and socialist program, in contrast to the pro-corporate nationalism of the trade unions in every country.