Tens of thousands of jobs at risk as works council at German automaker Daimler announces layoffs

Dietmar Gaisenkersting

German automaker Daimler’s works council does not represent the interests of the workers, but rather the shareholders and company bosses, as is shown by the solicitude it expresses for their needs. There is no other explanation for the circular letter addressed to the company’s 300,000 employees from Central Works Council Chairman Michael Brecht and his deputy, Irgun Lümali calling for an intensification of attacks on workers.

Due to declining sales and a reduction in profits, the works council warned about a drop in share prices and raised concerns over whether dividends would be paid out. Therefore, a further reduction of the workforce and cuts to workers’ benefits were unavoidable, the pair wrote. The already planned 15,000 job cuts are inadequate, the letter continued, and will need to be dramatically increased. The two works council leaders wrote that talks on this have begun “between the works council and company management.”

“We currently find ourselves in an unprecedented situation,” stated the letter. Along with the global pandemic, which has sickened millions and caused many deaths, “we are in a global economic crisis.” It is unclear how long these conditions will last. “That means that the coronavirus remains the number one risk to jobs,” the letter noted.

Daimler corporate head office

The works council is repeating word for word the arguments of company management and industry analysts. At the beginning of the year, the auto sector was expecting to sell 90 million cars and light utility vehicles around the world in 2020. Now, at the conclusion of the first six months of the year, most automakers and suppliers estimate total sales of 70 million by year’s end.

The corporate consultancy firm Alex Partners anticipates ruthless competition among automakers with the aim of driving rivals out of business. “Only automakers and suppliers with financial and innovative strength will survive the upcoming market cleansing,” they wrote. As a whole, the auto sector “will certainly not turn a profit this year,” Elmar Kades, the head of Alex Partners’ auto division, told financial daily Handelsblatt. In Europe, sales are only likely to return to pre-crisis levels in five years.

Financial consultants Ernst & Young reported that the profits of the world’s 17 largest automakers collapsed by 58 percent during the first three months of the year to a combined $7.5 billion, the lowest level since 2009. “Revenue declined by 9 percent, and new car sales by an even greater 21 percent.”

Constantin M. Gall, head of the automotive transport division at Ernst & Young, expects that the worst is still to come, saying, “We only saw the initial impact of the global COVID-19 pandemic during the first quarter. The second quarter will turn out to be far worse. The auto sector globally will then slide deep into the red.”

Managers everywhere have obligations to shareholders. Daimler CEO Ola Källenius has declared the internal slogan to be, “Margins take priority.” This means that the workers must bear the cost of retaining profit rates. Several weeks ago, he declared, “We have to take action.”

Daimler’s works councillors have spearheaded this approach. In addition to the collapse in sales triggered by the coronavirus, the sector also confronts the transition to electric vehicles and self-driving cars. Brecht and Lümali stress, “We must press ahead speedily with the transformational process we are presently involved in. To do that, we require multi-billion investments. This money must be earned, in spite of the crisis.”

Since the money cannot be generated due to declining demand, it is to be raised through cost-cutting. “No sales, no revenue,” wrote the two works council heads. Just how hard the “coronavirus shock” has hit the auto industry economically “will be glaringly displayed by the second quarter earnings—and not just at Daimler.” The economic challenges will thus grow, “making the transformation of our sector an even more demanding accomplishment.”

This transformation must be directed “from the top.” The pair consider themselves to be at the top. This is why the central works council is already talking to management about further job cuts.

The job cuts agreed thus far were to take place indirectly and in administration. But the works council has now turned its focus to production workers. Brecht and Lümali step up the pressure, writing, “Depending on the demand for our products, it cannot be excluded that the personnel measures will be extended, depending on the plant and job type, into the production divisions.”

The pressure is high and will continue to rise, they added. “The economic situation will also get worse,” they said. Even when the number of workers receiving short-time work benefits declines, “management intends to alter fixed costs and procedures.” This is why management wants to restructure.

Källenius has already announced that models failing to generate sales will not be built, and that the number of engines being built will be reduced. Daimler’s Scandinavian CEO believes that the COVID-19 pandemic has merely “exposed the Achilles heel of the auto industry,” according to Handelsblatt. Long development cycles and expensive fixed costs have made the sector vulnerable.

Brecht and Lümali admit that they are negotiating over three “projects.” Firstly, Daimler plans to manage its IT infrastructure under the slogan “twice as fast” with a significantly reduced workforce. Key servicing tasks are to be outsourced by the middle of next year. “A total of 2,000 workers worldwide, including close to 900 in Germany, will transition to these external firms through a company transfer agreement,” write Brecht and Lümali.

Secondly, the automaker plans to restructure its internal organization, which was only established last year, through the creation of three independent divisions: auto, trucks, and mobility services. Daimler AG, with its 6,000 employees, will be reduced in size as a holding company. “Consideration is currently being given to transferring administrative and central responsibilities into the three company divisions,” wrote the works councillors in their letter to the employees.

Thirdly, Daimler is also reviewing whether administrative tasks in the human resources and financial departments can be merged. “In addition, consideration is also being given to transitioning parts of the business into limited liability company structures. The result would be further job cuts or company transfers,” write the works councillors.

Handelsblatt also notes that among the leadership cadre, “discussions have long since begun on capacity cuts. Over the medium term, we must reduce our capacity by 10 to 20 percent in order to utilise the plants at their capacity. Only China is excluded from this,” wrote the financial daily, citing a manager. “It is ‘inherently important’ to extend the savings goals, added another leadership member.”

In other words, Daimler’s leadership is discussing the destruction of tens of thousands of jobs.

The letter from the two works councillors underscores once again that Daimler workers not only confront company management, but also the works council and IG Metall trade union. The two works council commanders stand at the head of an army of IG Metall officials, who ensure peace and stability in the plants, and the seamless imposition of attacks on the workforce.

For this, they are paid, or perhaps more accurately “bribed,” with fat salaries: Michael Brecht, in his capacity as deputy chair of Daimler’s supervisory board, earned half a million euros in 2019. Irgun Lümali, his deputy, earned €280,000 last year for his seat on the supervisory board. These are only two of the thousands of IG Metall officials who are bound to company management and shareholders with millions of euros in salary payments.

This is why they consider it out of the question to use the billions of euros being hoarded by the corporations for the workers rather than the shareholders. According to Ernst & Young, the automakers are sitting on a huge hoard of cash. “At the end of the first quarter, the 17 largest automakers had €207 billion of liquidity at their disposal, 13 percent more than three months earlier,” they wrote in their press release.

To defend jobs, autoworkers must break with the trade unions and their bought-and-paid-for works councillors, form independent action committees, unite their struggles internationally, and fight for a socialist programme. It is necessary to transform the entire auto industry, including producers and suppliers, into democratically-controlled public utilities in order to redirect the billions currently flowing to the shareholders into the guaranteeing of jobs and decent living standards.

Hundreds of thousands of Indian coal miners launch three-day strike against privatisation

Arun Kumar

Hundreds of thousands of Indian coal miners employed by government-owned Coal India Limited (CIL) launched a three-day strike yesterday against the privatisation plans of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government. Some reports indicate more than 500,000 full-time and contract workers have downed tools.

The miners launched their job action in open defiance of threats made by CIL Chairman Pramod Agrawal, who warned that any strike would be deemed illegal. Workers would face “no work-no pay and other penal actions,” he declared June 29, because the coal industry has been declared a public utility service.

The strike is expected to result in production losses of 4 million metric tonnes of coal. The authorities have responded forcefully, with at least five arrests reported in the Jhanjra area of the Eastern Coalfields in West Bengal. According to a union spokesperson, management has called in outsiders to work for CIL’s Southeastern Coalfields subsidiary, which operates in Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh, creating an “extraordinary situation” without precedent for CIL.

Striking Indian coal miners (Credit: Twitter/ @prasenjitberaES)

Facing an economic crisis that has been transformed into a collapse by the coronavirus pandemic, the Modi government has announced a “quantum jump” in pro-investor reforms, including throwing open the coal industry to private investors and privatizing parts of CIL.

In a final attempt to prevent the strike, Coal Minister Pralhad Joshi, Coal Secretary Anil Kumar and trade union leaders held a virtual meeting on Wednesday. However, with the government refusing to make any concessions, the unions were forced to go ahead with the strike. The main demands of the strike are the withdrawal of plans for commercial mining and foreign direct investment in the coal industry, and the overturning of the decision to de-link Central Mine Planning & Design Institute Limited (CMPDIL) from CIL. The strikers are also demanding the enforcement of enhanced wages for contract workers at CIL and the Singareni Collieries Company Limited (SCCL), another public sector-coal company, jointly-owned by the Indian and Telangana state governments.

The major unions who called the strike include the Center of Indian Trade Unions (CITU) and the All India Trade Union Congress (AITUC), which are affiliated to the two main Stalinist parliamentary parties–the Communist Party of Indian (Marxist), or CPM, and the Communist Party of India (CPI), respectively. The strike was also endorsed by the Indian National Trade Union Congress (INTUC), which is affiliated to the Congress Party, the traditional ruling party of the Indian bourgeoisie, and the Hind Mazdoor Sabha (HMS).

These unions have no intention of mobilising the social power of the working class against privatisation and the Modi government. Rather, their main concern is to maintain control over the mounting opposition to the government, which has been further fueled by Modi’s callous disregard for the devastating health and social impact of the pandemic, and tie it to the Congress and other right-wing opposition forces.

The coal strike is the first major industrial action by Indian workers since the outbreak of the pandemic. The anger among coal miners is so widespread that even the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh (BMS), which is affiliated to Modi’s Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), was forced to join the strike call.

In an attempt to defuse the militancy among the miners, the unions organised protests on June 10 and 11. However, the Modi government announced its decision to auction 41 coal blocks throughout the country for commercial mining on June 11 and launched the process of auction on June 18. On the same day, the unions issued the three-day strike call.

CIL Chairman Agrawal also sought to deceive the workers, claiming that they would not be affected by the government’s move because “no coal block allotted to CIL is going to be auctioned.” CIL at present “has 463 coal blocks that can meet the requirement of thermal coal for the foreseeable future,” he said. Contrary to his claims, allowing private capital into the coal sector will inevitably intensify the pressure to attack the jobs, wages and conditions of CIL workers.

In an attempt to whip up reactionary Indian nationalism against the workers’ opposition to its privatisation drive, the Modi government claimed the decision to allow commercial mining and FDI in the coal sector is aimed at developing a “self-reliant” India and to drastically reduce coal imports. ThePrint website reported that as he launched the auction, Modi said, “We are not just launching the auction for commercial coal-mining today, but bringing the coal sector out of decades of lockdown.”

Coal India’s daily production of around 2 million tonnes of coal accounts for over 80 per cent of the country’s coal production. India also imports around 250 million tonnes of coal annually.

Business Today reported that major corporate players could barely contain their excitement as they rush to compete with each other to profit from the Modi government’s accelerated privatisation drive. “The major beneficiaries of Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman's fourth tranche of economic relief package (announced in mid-May) will be business groups like Adani, Anil Ambani’s Reliance Group, Vedanta and Kalyani, besides companies like Tata Power, JSW Steel, GVK, Hindalco and GMR,” enthused Business Today. “Adani Group,” it continued, “will be able to tap new opportunities coming up in sectors like coal, minerals, defence, power distribution and airports, while Vedanta and Aditya Birla group’s Hindalco will be able to cash in on projects in coal and minerals mining.”

Most of the trade unions involved in the three-day strike are linked to parties that have been directly involved in implementing pro-market restructuring over the past three decades. Congress and the BJP have both led national governments that have sold off public assets, including public sector enterprises (PSEs), at fire-sale prices; corporatized and partially privatized other PSEs; raised or scrapped caps on foreign investment; lavished business with round after round of tax cuts; and promoted the proliferation of cheap-labour precarious contract jobs in both the public and private sectors.

From 1991 through 2008, the CPM and CPI supported a succession of right-wing national governments, most Congress Party-led, that implemented privatization, deregulation and other “pro-market” policies, while pursuing closer ties with Washington. In those states where the CPM and CPI have formed the government—West Bengal, Kerala, and Tripura—they have similarly pursued pro-investor policies.

In an attempt to promote the Congress as an opponent of privatisation, INTUC president Chandra Shekhar Dubey claimed, “Remember the time when coal workers had to suffer a lot in collieries under private owners and the Indira Gandhi government nationalised the coal sector in the early seventies for saving them from the distress.” Telegraph India quoted Dubey as saying, “We cannot allow our workers to go back to the same situation after half a century.”

In line with the Stalinists’ never-ending attempts to promote the big business Congress Party as a “lesser evil,” D.D. Ramanandan, general secretary of the All India Coal Workers’ Federation, which is affiliated to CITU, applauded Dubey’s remarks. “That’s true,” he said. “It’s like going back to square one.”

The fact of the matter is that the first moves to privatise coal blocks were made by Congress-led governments. It was only after the Supreme Court in 2014 cancelled the coal-block allocations the Congress-led UPA government had made, due to a lack of transparency and competitive bidding, that the Modi government brought in the Coal Mines (Special Provisions) Act of 2015 to return these coal blocks to the private sector through auctions.

The Stalinists are attempting to divert the genuine opposition of workers to privatisation along reactionary nationalist lines. The CITU’s statement on the strike, while lamenting that the Modi government went ahead with its privatisation plans despite the protests organized by the unions last month, embraced the Prime Minister’s nationalist rhetoric. It called for “all our respective state chapters to extend their solidarity support to this agitation to defend this core public sector in the national interest and for our nation’s self-reliance in this sector.”

In the months leading up to the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, mass opposition among the working class, youth and rural toilers was developing against the Modi government. This found expression in the January 8 general strike opposing its austerity measures and pro-investor polices, and the mass protests against the anti-Muslim Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). The Modi government exploited its ruinous ill-prepared coronavirus lockdown to launch a crackdown on protests, particularly those against the CAA. The coal miners’ strike indicates that working class opposition is erupting once again.

The Stalinists responded to the pandemic by lining up with the Modi government in the name of “national unity” to fight the virus, while making limited criticisms about the inadequacy of the measures taken by the government to contain the pandemic and provide basic necessities for the people during the lockdown. When border tensions escalated between India and China last month, the Stalinists again rallied behind the Modi government, and called for the defence of “national interests,” i.e. the reactionary geopolitical interests of the Indian elite.

The three-day coal miners’ strike is part of an emerging international upsurge of the working class that is developing ever more openly in rebellion against the corrupt pro-capitalist unions. In the United States, autoworkers have formed their own rank-and-file safety committees independently of the United Auto Workers (UAW) union to demand safety measures be taken in the factories against the coronavirus.

Any genuine struggle by workers to defend jobs and conditions requires a complete break from the corporatist trade unions, the formation of rank-and-file committees of miners and a turn to other sections of workers in India and internationally who confront similar attacks. Such a struggle can only go forward if it is based on a genuine socialist program to restructure society to meet the needs of the vast majority of working people, not the profits of a wealthy few.

COVID-19 danger persists in South Korea

Ben McGrath

The COVID-19 pandemic is persisting in South Korea as new cluster infections continue to appear, including in the densely-populated Seoul metropolitan area, which is home to half of the country’s 51 million people.

Nationally, there were 43 new cases on Monday, raising the total confirmed infections since the outbreak began in January to 12,800. Throughout June, the country has averaged approximately 45 new cases a day.

Health officials have expressed concern at the virus’s recent spread, including at churches, noting that a number of infections have been among older, more vulnerable people.

Workers wearing protective suits spray disinfectant as a precaution against the coronavirus at a bus garage in Seoul, South Korea, earlier this year. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)

Yun Tae-ho, a senior health official at the Ministry of Health and Welfare stated on Monday: “Infections tied to small gatherings have increased, making it hard to contain virus transmission. It is worrisome that the virus is spreading in regions beyond the Seoul metropolitan area.”

By the end of April, the number of new daily infections was in the single digits, leading many to assume that the worst of the pandemic was over for South Korea. In early May, however, new infections began to emerge after an individual who visited several nightclubs in Seoul later tested positive for COVID-19.

The virus then spread to cities in the surrounding Gyeonggi Province. Among the new cases are more than 150 workers at Coupang distribution centers in Bucheon, Goyang, and Incheon. Coupang is a South Korean warehousing company similar to Amazon.

On June 21, almost 200 dockworkers in the port city of Busan came into contact with Russian sailors who later tested positive for COVID-19. The Russian ship that docked at the port was carrying marine products. While port authorities conducted an electronic review of the ship’s health documents, a proper quarantine inspection was not conducted due to a lack of personnel. The longshoremen and sailors, moreover, worked in close contact with one another and often did not wear masks given the difficult work and the below freezing temperatures inside the ship.

All of these cases expose the false claims that workers and others can avoid catching COVID-19 by simply following social distancing guidelines, wearing masks or by regularly checking people’s temperatures, as was required at the nightclubs visited by the positive patient in May. The surge in new patients also exposes the fallacy that other countries, where there are far more cases, can safely reopen.

From the outset, the concern of President Moon Jae-in’s administration has been to prevent an explosion of social anger and do everything possible to keep workers on the job so that businesses continued making profits. Unlike in other countries, Seoul never implemented a lockdown or broad closure of businesses and workplaces but instead issued recommendations, many of which were ignored by companies or followed in a perfunctory manner to mollify workers’ concerns.

Businesses in South Korea have only shut down when new cases have been confirmed. This has only been temporary, putting workers’ lives at risk when they re-open. At least one worker in the automotive industry, employed at one of Hyundai Motors’ part suppliers, died in June from the virus.

The growth in cases did not stop teaching in schools resuming in May, nor did it halt plans to reopen the few shuttered businesses where large numbers of people gather, including sporting events. Professional sports teams are pressuring the government to allow fans into stadiums, claiming a lack of revenue.

Public safety is a major political issue, particularly following the sinking of the Sewol Ferry in April 2014 that killed over 300 people, and the outbreak of the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) in 2015 that left South Korea as one of the hardest hit countries outside of the Middle East.

The massive protests that erupted in 2016 against the Park Geun-hye government were in part driven by anger over the former president’s indifference to and incompetence in handling these events. The government acted out of fear of renewed protests as the COVID-19 pandemic developed, particularly in the face of growing social inequality and mounting attacks on working conditions.

In order to carry out its agenda, the government utilized police state measures to track people for testing, including through CCTV cameras. The number of these cameras has exploded over the past decade, increasing from 300,000 in 2010 to well over one million today. Nearly half were installed explicitly for use by the police.

Government authorities are also tracking people’s credit cards and cell phones in order to determine where they had been and who else to test. So intrusive is this surveillance that the authorities can identify who a person sat next to in a movie theater. In the hands of the capitalist state, all of these measures can and will be used against government opponents, above all targeting the working class as it enters into social and political struggles.

COVID-19 testing in South Korea has slowed considerably. Having been hailed for its initial aggressive testing regimen, the country has only tested some 24,400 per million of the population. This ranks it 82nd in the percentage of tests conducted by countries according to the Worldometer COVID-19 tracker. The Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC) only tests those suspected of having the virus or of having been in contact with a positive case.

In other words, the resources are not being made available to carry out a wide scale testing of the population, which means the current number of asymptomatic infections is unknown. The KCDC stated that for the last two weeks of June, it failed to trace 11.8 percent of new cases, meaning an explosion of new cases is very possible.

As pandemic accelerates in US, young people made the scapegoat of ruling elite’s malicious return to work policy

Benjamin Mateus

On June 27, the number of COVID-19 cases surpassed 10 million cases. It has taken less than six days for another 1 million cases to be tallied with over 521,000 fatalities globally. Yet, international health organizations continue to warn that it is still not too late to employ an all government approach to public health in containing the devastation being wrought primarily on the working class. However, the “worst is yet to come” if the world continues to dismiss these admonitions.

Yesterday, more than 200,000 new cases were reported among more than 200 nations with the United States, by itself, contributing an unprecedented 57,236, a one-day high that will undoubtedly be surpassed as the pandemic becomes more deeply entrenched in the country, with almost every state reporting a rise in new cases. By comparison, Europe had only 13,507 new cases and 413 fatalities. Concerningly, the number of new cases is beginning to rise again throughout the continent and may very well see another surge of cases.

Medical student Kimberly Olivares, left, takes a sample from a patient at a free COVID-19 testing site provided by United Memorial Medical Center, Sunday, June 28, 2020, at the Mexican Consulate, in Houston. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip)

With Independence Day weekend coming up, the likelihood of lighting off of fireworks and further fueling the raging pandemic seems a sure matter. Even the New York Times writes in disbelief that 30 days of new cases show the US outbreak spiraling out of control, citing that the US has set a single-day record five times in little over a week. Officials have been warning their communities to celebrate at home as the health systems in the hardest-hit states are reaching capacity.

Florida has had a single-day high of over 10,100 cases. Texas recorded 8,240 new cases yesterday. California, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Tennessee and the Carolinas have registered more than 1,000 new daily cases. Additionally, Ohio and Kansas had seen single-day highs recently when, by all accounts, things were “going well.”

Since reaching its ebb on June 7 after the initial peak on April 10, the number of new cases has returned to its previous accelerating trajectory. There is a clear correlation between the poorly conceived reopening of the economy—the lifting of restrictions and the mandatory return to work, policies agreed to and supported by the entire political establishment—and lack of any well-organized concrete public health initiative such as contact tracing, testing, isolation of contacts, and care of those infected. The situation is brazenly careless as the country is flying blind through this second surge, ignoring all the lessons of the last few months.

By all accounts, Health and Human Services and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have been instrumental in signing off on this deadly policy on the behest of the ruling classes. Furthermore, they have used their position to enrich the companies tasked with producing therapeutics, vaccines and non-pharmacologic interventions. They have wholly refused to listen to the alarms being sounded by healthcare facilities and workers who are overwhelmed by the massive surge of new patients as personnel, equipment and stamina run short again.

Repeatedly, governors and state officials have thrown the blame for these surges on the backs of young people citing irresponsible behavior, admonishing them for their reckless actions and endangering the lives of others and their own. At the Coronavirus task force brief last week, Vice President Mike Pence said, “Younger Americans have a particular responsibility to make sure that they’re not carrying the coronavirus into settings where they would expose the most vulnerable.”

Texas governor Greg Abbott noted, “At this time, it is clear that the rise in cases is largely driven by certain types of activities, including Texans congregating in bars.”

Governor of Ohio, Mike DeWine, said, “I don’t think we reopened too soon, our numbers were very good. The problem is that people are not wearing masks. You go out, and everywhere you look, they’re not wearing masks.”

Even House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told NPR, “I totally agree with Joe Biden. As long as we’re faced with this crisis, masks should be mandatory. In fact, the reason the CDC hasn’t made it mandatory is because they don’t want to embarrass the president.” Such is the content of these statements where the division between the Democrats and Republicans centers on mandating vs. suggesting the wearing of a mask as they both celebrate the unprecedented rise in the stock markets.

There is no call to return into lockdown, save lives, or bring the pandemic under control. An opinion piece in Bloomberg by Justin Fox, using military jargon, encapsulates the ruling elite’s intention: “The choice now isn’t between opening the economy and letting Covid-19 rage. It’s between implementing a few targeted policies (indoor mask-wearing; restrictions on bars and other indoor settings most conducive to transmission; investments in contact tracing and other public-health efforts) that could probably bring the disease under control, and just letting it continue to spread like this—dragging down the economy the entire way until we have vaccines and better treatments.”

Behind these sentiments is the weight of the recent job report that is couched in nervous exuberance. The Bureau of Labor Statistics said that US employers added “a much larger than expected 4.8 million workers” to the payroll, bringing the unemployment rate down to 11.1 percent. They also noted that the jobless claims for the week of June 27 fell for 13 straight weeks in a row to 1.43 million.

Robert Frick, the chief economist for the Navy Federal Credit Union, said, “Another surprisingly strong job report released today showed Americans were hired back by the millions last month, but as with last month’s report, it came with major caveats. The biggest is the surge in COVID-19 cases in many states across the country that may slow hiring significantly this summer.”

In a new ABC News poll, the majority of Americans feel the economy has opened far too quickly. Though the population, after adhering to the necessary restrictions imposed for several weeks, were more engaged in public activities, they have grown more concerned with the rising surges. Going to church has declined from 57 percent to 49 percent. Those willing to fly has decreased from 44 percent to 36 percent. Even the Wall Street Journal took note that restaurant seating in several large cities was down, and credit-card spending had slackened.

According to a labor economist at the University of Tennessee, Marianne Wanamaker, “We’re at the beginning of a slow recovery. I think the recovery will stall out if we don’t get control of the virus.”

The passing holiday will be used as another excuse to decry American irresponsibility as the surge will continue unabated. “Let it rip,” they said, and the state and local officials have dutifully acknowledged their orders and “let it rip.” Yet, the catastrophic rise in the number of cases is bound up with the drive to push workers back into the factories, assembly buildings, and plants where the virus has begun to infect people in astronomical numbers. At the same time, the US stock market posted a phenomenal first quarter mounting a triple-digit gain on Wednesday.

US unemployment rate dips, but millions remain jobless or face wage cuts

Jerry White

The US added 4.8 million jobs in June the Labor Department reported Thursday as leisure, hospitality, retail and other largely low-wage businesses reopened last month as part of the rush to reopen the economy.

Responding to the figures President Trump declared, “this is the largest monthly jobs gain in the history of our country,” which proves that “our economy is roaring back.” He boasted that the “stock market is doing extremely well” and then claimed that his administration’s response to the pandemic was “working out very well.”

After an historic loss of 22.2 million jobs in March and April, employment has increased by 7.5 million over the last two months. But the US has still suffered a net loss of 14.7 million jobs—or 9.6 percent—since February.

A man walks past a retail store that is going out of business due to the coronavirus pandemic in Winnetka, Ill., Tuesday, June 23, 2020. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh)

The fall in the official jobless rate to 11.1 percent, moreover, is based on employment data that was collected in mid-June before at least 19 states were forced to pause or roll back reopening plans due to the 80 percent rise in COVID-19 cases over the last two weeks. On Thursday the US hit a new daily record of 53,000 infections, with the new epicenters of the disease in Texas, Arizona, California and Florida.

According to the Labor Department report, leisure and hospitality employment rose by 2.1 million, accounting for about two-fifths of the gain in total nonfarm employment in June. Jobs in food services and drinking places rose by 1.5 million last month, following a similar gain in May. Despite these gains, employment in food services and drinking places is down by 3.1 million since February.

Employment in the retail trade rose by 740,000, after a gain of 372,000 in May and losses totaling 2.4 million in March and April combined. On net, employment in the industry is 1.3 million below what it was in February.

Economists warn that many of the job gains in restaurants, bars and retail establishments can be attributed to the government’s Paycheck Protection Program, which provided small businesses loans to cover eight weeks of wages and other expenses. The expiration of these loans will to lead to a new wave of layoffs.

The herding of workers back into the factories, despite the uncontrolled spread of the virus, also led to a rise in manufacturing employment by 356,000, with over half the job gains in motor vehicle and parts production. Manufacturing employment is still down by 757,000 since February. Construction employment also increased by 158,000 in June, following a gain of 453,000 in May. There have been several outbreaks of coronavirus on construction sites in California, Texas and other states.

The official jobless rate does not count millions of workers who are undocumented immigrants, those forced to work part-time who want full-time jobs and workers who have fallen out of the labor force. Some 8.2 million workers, up from 5 million in February, are not counted as unemployed because they have not been actively looking for a job during the last four weeks or were unavailable to work. Another 9.1 million workers were forced to work part time in June, more than double the February level.

In a separate report released Thursday, the Labor Department stated that 1.43 million workers filed first-time claims for unemployment benefits last week. More than 48 million laid off workers filed for benefits over the last 15 weeks and the number receiving benefits for consecutive weeks rose by 59,000 last week to 19.29 million. Several states saw increases in initial claims last week, including Indiana (24,033), Washington (8,110) and Virginia (7,769), the Labor Department reported.

Despite Trump’s claim that the “economy is roaring back,” corporations are carrying out mass layoffs and using the pandemic to implement long-planned restructuring and cost-cutting plans. Under the terms of the bipartisan CARES Act, the government handed a $25 billion bailout to US airlines, which agreed not to implement any involuntary layoffs or furloughs before October 1. A tidal wave of layoffs is expected after that.

American Airlines told staff Thursday it has more than 20,000 employees, including 8,000 flight attendants, that it doesn’t need due to reduced air travel plans in the Fall. Last month, American Airlines CEO Doug Parker told investors that the company would have “20 percent fewer people,” adding, “We’re able to use this crisis to figure out things that we can do more efficiently.”

Delta Air Lines told its pilots last week that it would soon send out furlough notices to 2,558 pilots, nearly 20 percent of its pilots. United CEO Scott Kirby said last month that the airline could avoid layoffs if employees were willing to accept reduced work hours and pay. "We are hopeful at United that we can work with our unions to variablize our pay structure and frankly, not lay anyone off, not furlough any of our frontline employees. Instead, using voluntary programs, and in particular, asking people to work fewer hours until we get through the crisis."

Demands for reduced work hours and wage cuts are being made across the economy. In an article titled, “Pay cuts are becoming a defining feature of the coronavirus recession,” the Washington Post noted this week that twice as many US workers have had their pay cut during the pandemic than in the Great Recession.

At least four million private-sector workers have had their pay cut, according to data provided to the Post by economists who worked on a labor market analysis for the University of Chicago’s Becker Friedman Institute. “Salary cuts are spreading most rapidly,” the article noted, “in white-collar industries, which suggests a deep recession and slow recovery since white-collar workers are usually the last to feel financial pain.”

Hourly workers have also seen their hours and weekly pay reduced. Companies like General Motors, BuzzFeed News, Occidental Petroleum, HCA Healthcare, Mass General Brigham, Tesla and Sotheby’s, as well as the states of Ohio and California, have told workers they must accept pay cuts between 5 and 50 percent to save their jobs. The median wage reduction was 10 percent, the study found.

Two years ago, business leaders and the corporate media were complaining that record low unemployment levels had led to “tight labor markets” and the largest increase in wages in nearly a decade. Although the increase—3.1 percent—was barely above inflation and did not even make a dent in the decline in real wages that has taken place not only since 2008, but since 1978, the paltry rise was considered unacceptable by the corporate and financial elite.

With the destruction of tens of millions of jobs—and estimates that nearly 40 percent will never come back—the ruling class has gotten rid of its “tight labor market” problem. It now hopes to use mass joblessness as a hammer to further drive down the wages and conditions of workers.

At the same time, the Trump administration wants to use the prospect of destitution to drive workers back into the factories and other workplaces, which are still vectors of the deadly COVID-19 disease.

On Wednesday, Trump’s labor secretary, Eugene Scalia, made it clear the administration would not renew the extra $600 a week in benefits that unemployed workers receive, once the program ends the week of July 25. “The extra $600,” Scalia told an Ohio audience, “was really an important benefit for Americans” when “the economy was shutting down and Americans were being told ‘You can’t go to work.’ As we reopen, I don’t think we want to continue that,” Scalia said.

The elimination of the benefit will mean a 66 percent reduction in weekly income for jobless workers even as food prices have seen the largest rise in half a century. The gutting of this meager social safety net, along with demands for sacrifice from corporations that have received massive bailouts, will provoke enormous social conflict and foster greater support for the socialist transformation of the US and world economy.

“Wall Street is a giant vacuum cleaner, sucking up all the money in society,” said a Fiat Chrysler worker in Detroit who participated in a work stoppage over the spread of COVID-19 in his factory last week. “This is a class war.”

Acumen West Africa Fellows Programme 2021

Application Deadline: 6th August, 2020

Eligible Countries: Countries in West Africa

To be taken at (country): Fellow’s Home country

About the Award: The program equips extraordinary individuals from across East and West Africa with the knowledge, support system and practical wisdom to unlock their full potential and drive positive change in society. Fellows are bright minds and big thinkers who dare to do what’s right, not what’s easy, to create positive change in their country. Fellows can come from diverse cultural, geographic and socioeconomic backgrounds and work in any sector, and they must be committed to ending poverty in their community through their work.

Type: Fellowship

Eligibility: 

• Innovators who either started an organization or enterprise, or who are driving change within an existing organization or company.
• Men and women of all ages and education levels who are able to participate in a program conducted in English.
• East Africans who demonstrate a commitment and concrete connection to the region.
• Leaders with strong personal integrity, unrelenting perseverance and moral imagination.
• Committed individuals ready to undergo an intensive yearlong personal transformation and leadership journey.

Number of Awardees: Not specified

Value of Fellowship: Over the course of a year, Fellows remain in their jobs while taking part in five week-long seminars, where they receive the tools, training and space to innovate new ideas, accelerate their impact, build a strong network of social leaders from across their region and around the world.

Year 1

• Join a diverse cohort of social change leaders in a rigorous year-long experience
• Improve your capacity to innovate and drive change with a mix of in-person and online seminars
• Part-time — you stay in your job while participating in four 5-day seminar in various locations across West Africa

Beyond Year 1

• Be a part of a lifelong fellowship that extends beyond your first year
• Join a larger local and global community committed to a world beyond poverty and injustice

West Africa is home to some of the world’s fastest growing economies – yet it will require a different type of leadership to ensure that the fruits of this growth are felt by all. It will require leaders grounded in integrity, and relentless in their pursuit of equity and justice. The West Africa Fellowship will bring together entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs and organization-builders from both the public and private sectors who are modeling this leadership, and who are hungry to do more.

Duration of Fellowship: 1 year

How to Apply:

Our application process consists of these steps.

1. Step 1: Leave us your information here and be the first to know when applications open
2. Step 2: Apply online – Applications open 1 July and closes 6 August
3. Step 3: Complete Stage 2 application between 7 Sept and 24 Sept
4. Step 4: Attend an in-person Selection Conference in mid-November
5. Step 5: Fellows are announced in January 2021

When will you find out?

1. Step 1: Our Fellows are selected in early December
2. Step 2: Fellows are announced in January 2021

Apply Now

Visit Fellowship Webpage for details

Trump’s Record on Foreign Policy: Lost Wars, New Conflicts and Broken Promises

Medea Benjamin & Nicolas J. S. Davies

On June 13, President Donald Trump told the graduating class at West Point, “We are ending the era of endless wars.” That is what Trump has promised since 2016, but the “endless” wars have not ended. Trump has dropped more bombs and missiles than George W. Bush or Barack Obama did in their first terms, and there are still roughly as many US bases and troops overseas as when he was elected.

Trump routinely talks up both sides of every issue, and the corporate media still judge him more by what he says (and tweets) than by his actual policies. So it isn’t surprising that he is still trying to confuse the public about his aggressive war policy. But Trump has been in office for nearly three and a half years, and he now has a record on war and peace that we can examine.

Such an examination makes one thing very clear: Trump has come closer to starting new wars with North Korea, Venezuela, and Iran than to ending any of the wars he inherited from Obama. His first-term record shows Trump to be just another warmonger in chief.

A Bloody Inheritance

First, let’s look at what Trump inherited. At the end of the Cold War, US political leaders promised Americans a “peace dividend,” and the Senate Budget Committee embraced a proposal to cut the US military budget by 50 percent over the next ten years. Ten years later, only 22 percent in savings were realized, and the George W. Bush administration used the terrorist crimes of September 11 to justify illegal wars, systematic war crimes, and an extraordinary one-sided arms race in which the United States accounted for 45 percent of global military spending from 2003 to 2011. Only half this $2 trillion spending surge (in 2010 dollars) was related to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, while the US Navy and Air Force quietly cashed in a trillion-dollar wish list of new warships, warplanes, and high-tech weapons.

President Barack Obama entered the White House with a pledge to bring home US troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, and to shrink the US military footprint, but his presidency was a triumph of symbolism over substance. He won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize based on a few speeches, a lot of wishful thinking, and the world’s desperate hopes for peace and progress. But by the time Obama stepped down in 2017, he had dropped more bombs and missiles on more countries than Bush did, and had spent even more than Bush on weapons and war.

The major shift in US war policy under Obama was to reduce politically sensitive US troop casualties by transitioning from large-scale military occupations to mass bombing, shelling, and covert and proxy wars. While Republicans derisively dubbed Obama’s doctrine “leading from behind,” this was a transition that was already underway in Bush’s second term, when he committed the United States to completely withdrawing its occupation troops from Iraq by the end of 2011.

Obama’s defenders, like Trump’s today, were always ready to absolve him of responsibility for war crimes, even as he killed thousands of civilians in air strikes in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria and drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, including the gratuitous assassination of an American teenager in Yemen. Obama launched a new war to destroy Libya, and the United States’ covert role in the war in Syria was similar to its role in Nicaragua in the 1980s, for which, despite its covert nature, the International Court of Justice convicted the United States of aggression and ordered it to pay reparations.

Many senior US military and civilian officials deserve a share of the guilt for America’s systematic crimes of aggression and other war crimes since 2001, but the principle of command responsibility, recognized from the Nuremberg principles to the US Uniform Code of Military Justice, means that the commander in chief of the US armed forces, the president of the United States, bears the heaviest criminal responsibility for these crimes under US and international law.

Is Trump Different?

In January 2017, as Donald Trump prepared to take office, US forces in Iraq conducted their heaviest month of aerial bombardment since the “shock and awe” bombing during the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. This time, the enemy was the Islamic State (IS), a group spawned by the US invasion of Iraq and Obama’s covert support for Al Qaeda–linked groups in Syria. Iraqi forces captured East Mosul from the Islamic State on January 24, and in February, they began their assault on West Mosul, bombing and shelling it even more heavily until they captured the ruined city in July. A Kurdish Iraqi intelligence report recorded that more than forty thousand civilians were killed in the US-led destruction of Mosul.

Trump famously summed up his policy as “bomb the shit out of” the Islamic State. He appeared to give a green light to the military to murder women and children, saying, “When you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families.” Iraqi troops described explicit orders to do exactly that in Mosul. Middle East Eye (MEE) reported that Iraqi forces massacred all the survivors in Mosul’s Old City.

“We killed them all,” an Iraqi soldier said. “Daesh (IS), men, women, children. We killed everyone.” An Iraqi major told MEE,

“After liberation was announced, the order was given to kill anything or anyone that moved . . . It was not the right thing to do . . . They gave themselves up and we just killed them . . . There is no law here now. Every day, I see that we are doing the same thing as Daesh. People went down to the river to get water because they were dying of thirst and we killed them.”

By October 2017, Raqqa in Syria was even more totally destroyed than Mosul in Iraq. Under Obama and Trump, the United States and its allies have dropped more than 118,000 bombs and missiles on Iraq and Syria in their campaign against the Islamic State, while US HIMARS rockets and US, French, and Iraqi heavy artillery killed even more indiscriminately.

The wholesale destruction of Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, and other major cities in Iraq and Syria cannot be legally justified under the Hague and Geneva Conventions, any more than the destruction of entire cities in past wars, like Hiroshima or Dresden. Despite the total lack of accountability, it is clear that American bombs, rockets, and shells killed thousands of civilians in each city and town captured. Obama and Trump share responsibility for these terrible crimes, but they are an escalation of the systematic war crimes the United States has committed since 2001 under three presidents.

In Afghanistan, as the Taliban gradually takes control of more of the country, Trump has resisted the temptation to send in tens of thousands more US troops, as Obama did, but he instead approved a major escalation in US bombing that made 2018 and 2019 the heaviest and deadliest years of US bombing in Afghanistan since 2001.

Trump has shrouded his war-making in even greater secrecy than Obama. The US military has not published a monthly Airpower Summary since February 2020, nor official troop deployment numbers for Afghanistan, Iraq, or Syria for nearly three years. But the United States has dropped at least twenty thousand bombs on Afghanistan since Trump came to power, and there is no evidence of a reduction in bombing under the peace agreement the administration signed with the Taliban in February. Some US troops have been withdrawn under that agreement, but the remaining 8,600 are still being replaced as their tours end, keeping US troop strength at about the same level as when Obama left office.

Trump made a great show of repositioning US troops in Syria in October 2019, leaving the United States’ Kurdish allies in Rojava to confront the Turkish invasion alone. But there are still at least 500 US troops in Syria, and Trump deployed 14,000 more US troops to the Middle East in 2019, including to a new base in Saudi Arabia.

Trump has vetoed every bill passed by Congress to disengage US forces from the Saudi war in Yemen and to halt the sales of US-made warplanes and bombs, which the Saudis use to systematically kill Yemeni civilians. He created a new conflict with Iran by pulling out of the nuclear deal, and in January 2020, he capriciously flirted with a full-scale war on Iran by ordering the assassination of Iran’s General Qasem Soleimani and Iraqi military commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis in Iraq.

Trump’s bizarre decision to move the US Embassy in Israel to a plot of land that is only partly within Israel’s internationally recognized borders — and partly on Palestinian territory that Israel is illegally occupying — quite literally took US international relations into uncharted territory. Then Trump unveiled a so-called peace plan based on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ambition to annex the rest of Palestine into a “Greater Israel” with vastly expanded — but still unrecognized and illegal — international borders.

Trump has also backed a coup in Bolivia, staged several failed ones in Venezuela, and targeted even the United States’ closest allies with sanctions to try to prevent them from trading with US enemies. Trump’s brutal sanctions on Venezuela, Iran, North Korea, Syria, and Cuba are not a peaceful alternative to war, but a form of economic warfare just as deadly as bombs, especially during a pandemic and its accompanying economic meltdown.

A Boon to the Merchants of Death

Once the large-scale US military occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan ended under Obama, the US military budget fell to $621 billion by 2015. But since then, military spending for procurement, research and development (R&D), and base construction has risen by 39 percent. This has been a huge windfall for the Big Five US weapons makers — Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics — whose arms sales revenues rose 30 percent between 2015 and 2019.

The 49 percent increase to more than $100 billion for R&D on new weapons systems in 2020, part of the enormous $718 billion Pentagon budget, is a down payment on trillions of dollars in future revenue for the merchants of death unless these programs are stopped.

The pretext for Trump’s huge investment in big-ticket, high-tech weapons, including a new Space Force with a $15 billion price tag for 2021, is the New Cold War with Russia and China that he officially unveiled in the 2018 National Defense Strategy. Obama was already trying to shift away from the United States’ lost counterinsurgency wars in the greater Middle East through his “Pivot to Asia,” the US-backed coup in Ukraine, and the expansion of US land and naval forces encircling Russia and China.

But Trump has the same problem as Obama as he tries to wriggle out of the “forever wars”: how to bring US troops home without making it obvious to the whole world that this chronically weak imperial power and its extravagant multitrillion-dollar war machine has been defeated everywhere. Even the most expensive weapons still only kill people and break things. Establishing peace and stability require other kinds of power and legitimacy, which the United States does not possess and which cannot be bought.

Before President Dwight D. Eisenhower left office in 1961, he remarked, “God help this country when someone sits in this chair who doesn’t know the military as well as I do.” Trump is obviously as dazzled by chests full of medals and whizz-bang technology as every other president since Eisenhower, so he will keep giving the Pentagon everything it wants to keep spreading violence and chaos around the world.

Just as Obama co-opted and muted liberal opposition to Bush’s wars and record arms spending, Trump has co-opted and muted conservative opposition to Obama’s wars. Now, with the outpouring of protests against domestic police repression and calls for defunding the police, there is a growing chorus to also defund the military. That is certainly not a call Trump would listen to, but would Joe Biden be more receptive to public calls for peace and disarmament than Obama and Trump?

Probably not, based on his long record in the Senate, his roles in authorizing war on Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Iraq, his close ties to Israel, and his failure to rein in US war-making as vice president, despite personally opposing Obama’s escalation in Afghanistan. Biden is also trying to outdo Trump in his opposition to China. Like Obama and Trump, Biden would be mainly a new manager and salesman in chief to sell the military-industrial complex’s latest strategy for war and global military occupation to the corporate media and the American public.

We will not rescue our country from the iron grip of the military-industrial complex by picking the lesser evil and hoping for the best. That has not worked for sixty years, since Eisenhower defined the problem so clearly in his farewell address.

On the other hand, a civil society coalition, led by the Poor People’s Campaign and including CODEPINK, is calling for a $350 billion cut in the military budget to fund human needs and public services, and representatives Barbara Lee, Pramila Jayapal, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have introduced a resolution in Congress to do just that.

At the margins, this campaign could have more impact on Biden than on Trump, but not if people sweep up the bunting on election night and think their job is done, as liberals did with Obama and anti-war conservatives did with Trump. Unless and until the American public applies overwhelming pressure to dismantle the US war machine and its futile bid for “full spectrum” global dominance, the US military will keep losing wars on its own terms, bleeding us dry (metaphorically), and bleeding our neighbors overseas dry (literally), until it loses a major war with mass US casualties or destroys us all in a nuclear war.

The US peace movement has always had huge passive public support, but it will take mass collective action, not just passive support, to secure a peaceful future for our children and grandchildren. Public outrage and activism are starting to take away the license to kill black and brown people with impunity from the militarized RoboCops on our streets. The same kind of collective political action can defund and disarm the US military and take away its license to kill black and brown people everywhere.

Building a new anti-war movement that is connected to the domestic anti-police struggle is the only thing that can rein in US militarism. Because reelecting a president with as much blood on his hands as Trump — or simply transferring the command of the war machine to Joe Biden — certainly won’t.