Oil and the Pandemic

Conn Hallinan

During the reign of the Emperor Justinian I (527-565 AD), a mysterious plague spread out of the Nile Valley to Constantinople and finished off the Roman Empire. Appearing first in China and North India, the “Black Death” (Yersinia pestis) radiated throughout the Mediterranean and into Northern Europe. It may well have killed close to half the world’s population, some 50 million people.

Covid-19 is not the Black Death, but its impact may be civilizational, weakening the mighty, raising up the modest, and rearranging axes of power across the globe.

The Middle East is a case in point. Since the end of World War II, the wealth of the Persian Gulf monarchies—Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Kuwait and Qatar—has overturned the traditional centers of power that dominated the region for millennia: Turkey, Egypt and Persia. While those civilizations were built on agriculture, industry and trade, the monarchs were fabulously wealthy simply because they sat on a sea of oil.

The monarchies—Saudi Arabia in particular—have used that wealth to overthrow governments, silence internal dissent, and sponsor a version of Islam that has spawned terrorists from the Caucasus to the Philippines.

And now they are in trouble.

The Saudi owned oil company, Aramco, just saw its quarterly earnings fall from $24.7 billion to $6.6 billion, a more than 73 percent drop from a year ago.

Not all the slump is due to the pandemic recession. Over the past eight years, Arab oil producers have seen their annual revenues decline from $1 trillion to $300 billion, reflecting a gradual shift away from hydrocarbons toward renewable energy. But Covid-19 has greatly accelerated that trend.

For countries like Saudi Arabia, this is an existential problem. The country has a growing population, much of it unemployed and young—some 70 percent of Saudis are under 30. So far, the royalty has kept a lid on things by handing out cash and make-work jobs, but the drop in revenues is making that more difficult. The Kingdom—as well as the UAE—has hefty financial reserves, but that money will not last forever.

In the Saudi case, a series of economic and political blunders have worsened the crisis.

Riyadh is locked into an expensive military stalemate in Yemen, while also trying to diversify the country’s economy. Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman, is pushing a $500 billion Red Sea mega project to build a new city, Neom, that will supposedly attract industry, technology and investment.

However, the plan has drawn little outside money, because investors are spooked by the Crown Prince’s aggressive foreign policy and the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. The Saudis are borrowing up to $12 billion just to pay Aramco dividends of $75 billion a year.

The oil crisis has spread to Middle Eastern countries that rely on the monarchs for investments, aid and jobs for their young populations. Cairo sends some 2.5 million Egyptians to work in the Gulf states, and countries like Lebanon provide financial services and consumer goods.

Lebanon is now imploding, Egypt is piling up massive debts, and Iraq can’t pay its bills because oil is stuck at around $46 a barrel. Saudi Arabia needs a price of at least $95 a barrel to meet its budgetary needs—and to feed the appetites of its royals.

When the pandemic ends, oil prices will rise, but they are very unlikely to reach the levels they did in the early 2000s when they averaged $100 a barrel. Oil prices have been low ever since Saudi Arabia’s ill-conceived attempt to drive out smaller competitors and re-take its former market share.

In 2014, Riyadh deliberately drove down the price of oil to hurt smaller competitors and throttle expensive arctic drilling projects. But when China’s economy slowed, demand for oil fell, and the price has never recovered.

Of the top 10 oil producers in the world, five are in the Middle East: Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, the UAE and Kuwait. All of them are in dire straits, although in Iran’s case this is exacerbated by US sanctions. With the exception of Iraq—where massive demonstrations have shaken the country’s leadership—most of those countries have been politically quiet. In the case of the monarchies, of course, it is hard to judge the level of dissatisfaction because they do not tolerate dissent.

But how long will the royals be able to keep the lid on?

“It is a transformation that has speeded up by the corona virus cataclysm,” says Middle East expert Patrick Cockburn, “and will radically change the politics of the Middle East.”

There is no region untouched by the current crisis. With the exception of the presidents of Brazil and the US, most world leaders have concluded that climate change is a reality and that hydocarbons are the major culprit. Even when the pandemic eases, oil use will continue to decline.

The virus has exposed the fault lines among the mighty. The United States has the largest economy in the world and is the greatest military power on the globe, and yet it simply collapsed in the face of Covid-19. With 4 percent of the world’s population the United States accounts for 22 percent of the pandemic’s fatalities.

And the US is not alone. The United Kingdom has more than 40,000 dead, and its economy has plummeted 9 percent. In contrast, Bangladesh, the world’s most crowded country, with twice Great Britain’s population, has around 4,000 deaths and its economy has contracted by only 1.9 percent.

“Covid-19 has blown away the myth about ‘First’ and ‘Third’ world competence,” says Steven Friedman, director of the Center for the Study of Democracy in Johannesburg.

Turkey, Vietnam, Cuba and Nigeria all have far better records fighting the virus than Great Britain and the European Union.

Partly this is because Europe’s population is older. While Europe’s average age in 43, Africa’s is 19. Younger people infected with corona virus generally have better outcomes than older people, but age doesn’t fully explain the differences.

While Turkey developed sophisticated tracking methods to monitor measles, and Nigeria did the same for Ebola, the US and United Kingdom were systematically starving or dismantling public health programs. Instead of stockpiling supplies to deal with a pandemic, Europe and the US relied on countries like China to quickly supply things like personal protection equipment on an “as needed” basis, because it was cheaper than producing their own or paying for storage and maintenance,

But “need” doesn’t work during a worldwide pandemic. China had its own health crisis to deal with. The lag time between the appearance of the virus and obtaining the tools to fight it is directly responsible for the wave of deaths among medical workers and first responders.

And while the Chinese economy has re-bounded—enough to tick the price of oil slightly upwards—the US, Great Britain and the EU are mired in what promises to be a painful recession.

The neo-liberal model of low taxes, privatization of public resources and reliance on the free market has demonstrated its incompetence in the face of a natural disaster. The relationship between wealth and favorable outcomes only works when that wealth is invested in the many, not the few.

The Plague of Justinian destroyed the Roman Empire. The pandemic is not likely to do that to the United States. But it has exposed the fault lines and structural weaknesses that wealth papers over—until something like Covid-19 comes along to shake the glitter off the system.

Multinationals and Oil Companies Are Imposing Their Greed on the People of Mozambique

Vijay Prashad

Three years ago, on October 5, 2017, fighters with the Al Sunnah wa Jama’ah (ASWJ) entered the town of Mocímboa da Praia in northern Mozambique. They attacked three police stations, and then withdrew. Since then, this group—which has since proclaimed its allegiance to the Islamic State—has continued its battle, including capturing the port of Mocímboa da Praia in August 2020.

Mozambique’s military has floundered. Under pressure from the International Monetary Fund, Mozambique’s government has cut the salaries of government employees, including the military. It now relies on private security companies hired by multinational corporations to do its fighting; this outsourcing of defense is permitted by the IMF and the wealthy creditors. That is why Mozambique’s Ministry of Interior has hired the South African Dyck Advisory Group (DAG), the Russian Wagner Group, and Erik Prince’s Frontier Services Group. Colonel Lionel Dyck, the head of the Dyck Group, recently told Hannes Wessels that “The Mozambican Defence Forces are unprepared and under-resourced.”

Dyck, Wagner, and Frontier Services Group are joined in northern Mozambique by a range of other mercenary security forces (such as Arkhê Risk Solutions and GardaWorld) hired by the French energy company Total and the U.S. energy company ExxonMobil. Both firms have interests in the gas fields in Area 1 and Area 4 of Mozambique’s Rovuma Basin, which increases the country’s natural gas reserves to 100 trillion cubic feet (third only to Nigeria and Algeria in Africa). These firms are to invest more than $55 billion in the extraction of natural gas and in the construction of liquefaction plants.

Total, the French firm, and Mozambique’s government signed a deal to create a joint force to provide security to these gas fields. Mozambique’s minister of mineral resources and energy—Max Tonela—said that this deal “reinforces security measures and efforts to create a safe operating environment for partners like Total.”

The narrative fed by Total, Mozambique’s government, and the private security firms is that the conflict in northern Mozambique is authored by the Islamists, and that all measures must be taken to thwart this three-year-old insurgency.

The Forgotten Cape

This area of northern Mozambique—Cabo Delgado—is known colloquially as the “forgotten cape” or Cabo Esquecido. A study of government statistics shows that the people of this part of Mozambique—where the anti-colonial war against the Portuguese broke out on September 25, 1964—experience all the traps of poverty: low income, high illiteracy, and low morale. Lack of opportunities alongside social aspirations led to the emergence of various forms of economic activity, including artisanal mining for rubies and trafficking of Afghan heroin toward South Africa. The arrival of Islamism simply provided another outlet for the deep frustrations of sections of the population.

It is called the “forgotten cape” because not much of Mozambique’s social wealth has come into the communities of the region; it is not forgotten by the oil and gas companies. These companies—and their predecessors such as Texas-based Anadarko—as well as the other large multinationals such as Montepuez Ruby Mining (owned by the UK-based Gemfields) have participated in the eviction of thousands of people from their homes and livelihoods. Given permission by the government in Maputo to settle the land to remove the rubies and the natural gas, these firms have returned little to the people of the north.

The Phantom of ISIS

There’s nothing like the appearance of Islamist groups that fly the flag of ISIS to allow Western firms to set aside their own role in the creation of poverty. Everything becomes about terrorism. In June 2019, two Mozambican scholars—Mohamad Yassine of the Higher Institute of International Relations (ISRI) and Saíde Habibe, who co-authored a 2019 study on Islamic radicalization in northern Mozambique—said that ISIS will not find fertile ground in northern Mozambique; this is largely because the Muslim population in that region is small. These so-called Islamists, Habibe said, are better known for their role in the illicit trades than in the creation of an Islamic State.

A French NGO—Les Amis de la Terre France—published a report in June 2020 that made the point that the insurgency “was built on a tangle of social, religious, and political tensions, exacerbated by the explosion of inequalities and human rights violations linked to gas projects.” The militarization of the conflict to protect the gas installations, the NGO argues, “contribute[s] to fuel the tensions.” Indeed, “Human rights violations are on the increase in [these] communities, caught between insurgents, private military and paramilitary forces, multinationals or their subcontractors.”

South Africa’s Institute for Security Studies published a report in October 2019 called “The Genesis of Insurgency in Northern Mozambique.” The institute is known to be quite hawkish when it comes to security issues. But reality is too difficult to avoid. This report cautions that “a lasting solution to the extremist violence in Cabo Delgado cannot be brought about by hard power and military might.” Social inequality is the main problem. The introduction of the energy firms, rather than bringing prosperity to the people, says the institute, “appears to have brought discontent.”

Interventions

Just off the coast of Mozambique is the island of Mayotte, which is a French possession with a French military base (and which is facing unrest). The governments of France and Mozambique are considering a maritime cooperation agreement, which could eventually allow direct French intervention to protect Total’s investments.

At a briefing on drug trafficking in Africa, U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Heather Merritt said that the issue of the heroin trade is very significant, and that the U.S. is willing to assist the government in Mozambique in any way.

South Africa’s intelligence chief Ayanda Diodlo has said that her government is “taking very, very seriously” the threat in northern Mozambique. South Africa is considering a military intervention, despite a warning from ISIS that it would open up a new front inside South Africa if this happens.

Such interventions—by France, the United States, and South Africa—will not solve the problem of northern Mozambique. But they will certainly provide a reason for Western countries to create a military foothold on the continent.

Meanwhile, for the people of Mocímboa da Praia, it would be business as usual.

Screwing with the Unemployment Statistics

Dave Lindorff

Something is screwy about unemployment numbers out of Washington.

In late July, just before the end of the supplemental $600 weekly checks for people collecting unemployment benefits, the New York Times reported that 30 million were receiving those checks.

That’s 30 million laid-off workers who qualified for unemployment benefits, which is not everyone who was laid off, since many people who get work for a wage don’t qualify for unemployment compensation.

For example, between mid-March and the end of the first week of May, according to US News, 33 million laid off workers applied for unemployment compensation benefits. At least three million of them were denied benefits for one reason or another. That of course doesn’t count the people who lost work but hadn’t worked enough weeks to qualify and who never even bothered to file. It also doesn’t count many “independent contractors” who were not being defined as employees by the companies paying them, which would include many people working as gardeners, roofers, carpenters, in nail salons and as cab drivers. But just for the hell of it, let’s just go with that 33 million number, and say that is the number of unemployed in the US.

Now recall that the US has a population of almost 330 million.

How many of those people are working age? We can define working age, for the sake of argument, as 18 to, say, 67. (I’m assuming that latter number, situated midway between 65, when people qualify for Medicare and often decided to retire, and 70, the age when a person can collect the maximum amount of Social Security benefits per month, will balance out.) Using Census Bureau data (which I tinkered with to get the number of 18 and 19 year-olds, as well as of 66-69 year olds), I come our with about 219 million. Now a lot of those people don’t get classified by the Bureau of Labor Statistics as part of the labor force either because they are full-time students, or have never worked (stay-at-home parents, for example, with no access to or funding for daycare, or those disabled and unable to work, or already retired), but again for the sake of argument, let’s just call them all workers.

Well, what percent of 219 million is 33 million? The answer is 15%. I’d say that means that the US has clearly got an unemployment rate of at least 15%. So what is the BLS saying the unemployment rate is? Well, in their unemployment report for July, The BLS was listing the jobless rate as being 10.2%. That figure is 50% lower than the percent of workers who are receiving unemployment benefits!

How can that be? It can’t. It’s just wrong.

Part of the problem is that the BLS, which maybe should be just called the BS, doesn’t consider someone to be unemployed and part of the labor force if they have not looked for work in more than a month. But of course, there are good reasons why someone who is able-bodied and who needs a job may not look for one. In an economy like this one, there simply may not be any jobs for certain people with certain skills. In certain parts of the country, if you’re not willing to move, you just have to wait for the economy to improve before you’ll be able to find a job. Take waiters. With restaurants closed or only able to operate at 25% or 50% capacity, there just aren’t as may jobs for waiters or other restaurant staff. That means people with those job backgrounds need to compete with people in other service sector jobs that are also probably not hiring. Under such circumstances looking for work is an exercise in futility.

At any rate, clearly the unemployment rate is at least to 15% just based on the number of people who had jobs and are now eligible for unemployment benefits (at least until those short-term programs run out). But it is actually worse than that because a more honest figure would include those who would like a job if they could find one, or who have a part-time job but used to have, and would like to have a full-time one. The BLS actually has that number. It’s called the U-6 unemployment figure. In July it was 18.3% But I suspect it must be higher, because all those 33 million people getting unemployment benefits are required by their state labor departments to be actively looking for a job, so they wouldn’t be in that category of worker included in the U-6 figure. That means unemployment or under-employment must really be well above 20% of the working population. I would guess that it’s probably close or equal to the 25% unemployment that the US reached during the depth of the Great Depression.

In any event, it’s clear that the government is not doing a good job of describing the current economic crisis facing the country and its people in this pandemic-induced depression. And the news media, which for the most point print the monthly and weekly BLS statistics on jobs and layoffs and total unemployment, after putting a positive spin on tiny optics in hiring or drops in the unemployment rate. How under those circumstances can the public and elected officials make appropriate decisions on economic policy, on who to vote for in November and on their own lives (whether to buy a house or a car, or to go to college or have a child, etc., for example).

When the country was in this type of dire situation situation back in 1936, the government, headed by Franklin D. Roosevelt, was creating public jobs to build roads and bridges, develop national parks, build electric networks and dams, was even funding artists, musicians, writers, orchestras, the production of plays, basically anything to get people back to work and earning a paycheck.

Now the government in Washington cannot even see its way clear to pass a bill to hand everyone adult a second $1200 check to help pay the rent or put food on the table.

One reason is that the depth of this crisis is being hidden from us.

The numbers prove it, but you have to do a little work to find them.

Can We Address That British Eugenics Scandal?

Justin Podur

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has been known to have an interest in eugenics, but despite the persistence of support for this discredited idea over the years, eugenics is a scientific and moral failure.

In February, an adviser to Johnson resigned when some old racist posts he wrote in 2014 emerged. The contractor, Andrew Sabisky, called himself a “superforecaster” by trade and trafficked in theories of race and intelligence. Footage resurfaced of Boris Johnson talking about genetic inequality and IQ in 2013. Articles announce that “eugenics is back” every few years (2018, 2016, or 1989), so it is probably the case that eugenics never left. With the political right in the ascendant in many parts of the world, it is inevitable that the pseudoscience of eugenics would be on the rise with it.

Some academics will also follow, as they have from the days when craniometry justified the British Empire. Richard Dawkins, a retired Oxford biologist active on Twitter where he was called a “tedious old racist” in 2018, tweeted in February what was likely a reaction to Sabisky’s eugenics scandal:

“It’s one thing to deplore eugenics on ideological, political, moral grounds. It’s quite another to conclude that it wouldn’t work in practice. Of course it would. It works for cows, horses, pigs, dogs & roses. Why on earth wouldn’t it work for humans? Facts ignore ideology.”

The comparison of human “races” to dog breeds is so pervasive that it should be answered comprehensively, and the tweet should be picked apart in detail. The comparison has nothing to do with science, as I will show, and should be abhorred by the scientifically minded.

Dawkins’ posture is one where he claims to want to distance himself from eugenics “on ideological, political, moral grounds,” while suggesting that the “facts” are in favor of eugenics. The “facts” in this trope aren’t a matter of argument and evidence but some kind of secret magic that only those with a strong stomach can handle. The less brave and bright resist the “facts” out of fear that they will clash with our “ideological, political” commitments. But as far as eugenics goes, there are no “facts”: eugenics has been an intellectually corrupted project from its inception in the 19th century. Eugenics comes to us from a time when the British Empire was plundering the world and its proponents went looking for evidence to prove racist conclusions they already believed. No one who understands science fears that racists will abuse eugenicist “facts.” As anthropologist Jonathan Marks writes in his book Is Science Racist?: “[T]here is no fear of potential abuse of knowledge. There is simply the collection and dissemination of intellectually corrupted information. That is the legacy of scientific racism.”

Like climate deniers who work in fields of science other than climate and make public statements to try to pretend there is no consensus on the topic, Dawkins used his authority as a retired biology lecturer to tweet claims outside his area of expertise. A scientific organization that has authority on the topic, the American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG), made the following three points in a 2018 statement:

+ “Genetics demonstrates that humans cannot be divided into biologically distinct subcategories”

+ “Genetics exposes the concept of ‘racial purity’ as scientifically meaningless”

+ “[T]he invocation of genetics to promote racist ideologies is one of many factors causing racism to persist”

Dawkins’ defenders might now argue that his tweet had nothing to do with racism and that it is just about eugenics. That the entire pseudoscientific history of eugenics, pervaded and corrupted with racism, is irrelevant to his claims about “practice” and “facts,” by reference to other species. Dawkins mentioned the breeding of “cows, horses, pigs, dogs & roses.” There are different flaws when each of these comparisons is put under the microscope.

Roses? Spraying fertilizer on roses helps them—does it help us? There is almost nothing that works for the plant Rosa gallicanae that also works for us, so that can be quickly dispensed with.

Cows and pigs are bred to be docile, to pack on as much edible meat as possible in a short amount of time, and ideally to go quietly to their deaths. Unless Dawkins envisions a cannibal future, cows and pigs are irrelevant to this analogy with humans. (It is worth mentioning that these are also two of the planet’s three most abused animal species—the chicken, of whom 69 billion were slaughtered in 2018 compared to 1.5 billion pigs and 302 million cows, wins this heart-rending competition.)

That leaves horses and dogs.

Horses were once our choice animal for transportation. Now that we use fossil fuels, most horses today are involved in what the Equine Heritage Institute calls “recreational horse use,” in which the horse is made to carry a person on its back and run fast for our entertainment.

With the other animals eliminated, Dawkins’ argument comes down to the comparison between humans and dogs. Dog breeding has been done for many thousands of years, and dogs have been bred for many jobs.

Does it “work”? Specifically, since the idea is if it works for dogs it could work for humans, does breeding work for the species being bred (dogs, or in Dawkins’ implicit proposal, humans)? Of course not. From the perspective of the dog, it is a nightmare.

A couple of popular internet memes sum up what thousands of years of dog breeding have achieved for the bred species. In one, a stunning photograph of a wolf is shown thinking: “Humans at a campfire… It’s cold and I’m starving, maybe I should ask for some scraps. What’s the worst that could happen?” Below, captioned “10,000 years later,” is a photo of a pug in a knitted hat made to look like a birthday cake. Similarly, photos of a wolf and a pug are used in another meme, where the photo of the wolf says “product of evolution,” and the photo of the pug says “product of intelligent design.”

This latter meme reveals the irony that Dawkins of all people should make the eugenicist claim that dog breeding “works.” In The God Delusion as well as much other work, Dawkins’ principal argument against the existence of God is that evolution can produce more complex forms of life (including human intelligence) than any divine intelligence could. Similarly, the artificial selection of dog breeding has—as the humorous memes demonstrate—propagated traits that are disadvantageous to dogs compared to what natural selection was able to do for the wolf.

The 2008 BBC documentary “Pedigree Dogs Exposed” investigated the UK’s Kennel Club and the breed standards that have led, by breeding exclusively for appearance, to a dog population with hundreds of genetic diseases. What is called “breeding” to achieve these traits is better called “inbreeding,” with brother-sister, mother-son, father-daughter, and father-granddaughter matings regularly made—there are no incest taboos, no health considerations, and no concern for genetic diseases made in awarding prizes at dog shows. Perfectly healthy puppies—like Rhodesian ridgeback puppies that don’t have the ridge, which actually brings with it additional health risks—are killed at birth to maintain the “purity” of the breed. Kennel Clubs and breeders were offended by comparisons of dog breeding to racism, but the shared history is beyond dispute. Kennel Clubs were founded in the late 19th century, after Carl Linnaeus, Comte de Buffon, and Arthur de Gobineau had laid the intellectual foundations of scientific racism, and there was the freest exchange of ideas between eugenicists and dog breeders. Also in the late 19th century, Canada’s first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, whose statues have had travails in Montreal and Toronto leading to scolding and arrests, said that “the Aryan races will not wholesomely amalgamate with the Africans or the Asiatics… the cross of those races, like the cross of the dog and the fox, is not successful.”

In “Pedigree Dogs Exposed,” the documentarians show old photos of breeds like German shepherds and bulldogs that had long legs and upright postures, contrasting them with the top dogs in those breeds today, whose legs get shorter and shorter as their mobility decreased. Those are the “show dogs.” But “working dogs” aren’t beyond question either. Bulldogs were bred, as the name indicates, for fighting with bulls for entertainment. Pit bulls, for fighting one another. Dobermans, for protecting a rent collector. Is this work that should be done? In reality, breeding dogs for these jobs was of dubious benefit to human society; trying to make the case that it was beneficial to the dogs, as a species, is preposterous. And if that is true for dogs bred solely for work, how much sadder is it for the pedigree dogs bred solely to meet circular aesthetic criteria (one breeder, asked about the morality of killing puppies who lack the ridge, responded: “Well, if it doesn’t have the ridge, it’s not a ridgeback, is it?”)?

Perhaps Dawkins envisions a well-funded eugenics department that could overcome incest taboos and ethics reviews, as well as the small matter of human reproductive freedom, to use inbreeding to create human breeds. But what most eugenicists are really interested in is not such a scientific project. They are interested in the idea of racial differences in intelligence.

But dog breeds provide no insight into how this aspect would work for humans either. Dogs, the outcome of artificial selection, have breeds that can be identified by their genotypes. A paper about the differences between dog breeds and human “races” that appeared in the journal Evolution: Education and Outreach in July 2019 stated that about 27 percent of dogs’ genetic variation could be explained by breed. Humans are the outcome of natural selection, and most genetic variation occurs within human groups. Classifications of humans by genotype don’t match up with what racists think of as the different human “races.” The closest science can get to the racist position is the trivial point that people who are close together geographically are (relatively) close together genetically. And even this regional variation can explain only 3.3-4.7 percent of human genetic variation, according to the paper.

It is this regional variation that is being exploited by mail-order genetics companies like 23andMe, which Marks calls “science-lite,” because its users accept the findings they like and reject the ones they don’t, which is probably the intended way to use the test. As for “race,” there is no such thing, except for racism, which is the unscientific belief that there are such things as distinct human “races.”

So, is dog breeding successful? Dog breeding has been disastrous for the dog as a species. Does dog breeding provide evidence that eugenics could work? The analogy between dog breeds and human “races” is broken.

If racists want to push eugenics, the rest of us should realize that they do so without the backing of science, which has moved on, leaving the detritus behind.

COVID-19 Changes Work in Germany

Thomas Klikauer & Nadine Campbell

In a great workplace, most people would work independently of their immediate boss, and they might even like what they do. Having enough time and being flexible is increasingly more important to many employees in Germany. Even before the Coronavirus pandemic, there were more and more German companies that started to realise that the work of the future does not lie in a distant future any longer. Recent changes in work arrangements in Germany are not all about technology, albeit technologies such as Zoom, cloud computing, platform works, and algorithms have aided recent changes in German work arrangements.

During the Coronavirus pandemic, German companies and corporations have started to realise that work can be done very differently from how it was done in the past. What is happening in Germany no longer lies in the distant future. It is happening today. Since early 2020, nobody had a fixed work desk at Cologne’s headquarters of the European insurance giant AXA. Those few employees who still come into the office and do not work from home enter AXA’s open-plan offices – not a good idea during a global pandemic. AXA’s office is nicely furnished with fake forest wallpaper and basketball baskets. Those few arriving in the morning, look for a desk that has not been occupied – which is plenty nowadays. AXA’s “no desk policy” applies equally to everyone, whether the head of Germany’s subsidiary, departmental bosses, and it even applies to students on an internship.

However, Germany not only experiments with new work designs, Germany, as expected, has plenty of regulations when it comes to working hours. For example, employees at a Bielefeld digital agency Rheingans have been working only five hours a day since 2017 instead of eight. During this time, the company did not go bankrupt. Instead, it has managed to accomplish the same workload. Beyond that, employees get the same salary. Every day after 1 pm, workers have plenty of time for social activities, outings, hobbies, friends, family, and volunteering.

Germany’s medical technology manufacturer Braun is currently testing an organisational model in which – instead of following the classical managerialist structure of departmental hierarchies –employees can volunteer to participate in what Braun calls team circles. These flat-hierarchy teams engage in large and new projects and are organised in a self-managed manner. However, top management’s control has not disappeared.

Core changes such as this have emerged in recent work re-arrangements in Germany. To some extent, these transformations have altered Germany’s traditionally rigid hierarchical patterns of work. For several years now, the concept of flat organisational structures has been making the rounds in corporate boardrooms, management conferences, academic publications, and in corporate team coaching. In Germany, this new approach to work is seen as an answer to the question of what work can look like in a digitised and increasingly individualistic corporate world. German supporters of flatter organisational structures are convinced that the era of all-controlling managers hiding behind office doors and on top floors is largely over.

Virtually, the same goes for the classic – i.e. highly inflexible – 9-to-5 working day as well as for rigid corporate structures so profoundly ingrained into Germany’s work psyche. No longer might there be a hierarchy of managerial levels in a pyramid-like organisation chart with the CEO as a rule. The time in which new ideas are only implemented after they have been tested down to the last detail should also be over. The Coronavirus pandemic has changed that. Some German companies and corporations are moving towards a greater tolerance for trial-and-error tests for new corporate structures. Old inflexibilities are quickly being eliminated.

According to one recent study, 74% of German companies have put the topic of work re-organisation on the corporate agenda. Some even talk about an epochal upheaval in Germany’s work arrangements. This might transform German office work for good. Given recent developments, this might well be a serious trend. What will be required in the future are plenty of companies that realise they can no longer avoid very serious changes to the way work is done. In many German offices, people are starting to recognise that rigid hierarchical forms of organisation simply no longer work.

In some cases, German companies simply have to react to the demands of employees as well as the Coronavirus pandemic and change their organisational structure. Often these changes or some of them will remain into the future. Many people in Germany’s white-collar workforce want to engage, to contribute ideas. They want to be more flexible when it comes to working hours and a better work-life balance. Germany’s labour market has been moving in this direction for years.

Even in Germany, more and more people are working part-time. Part-time work was just a tick over 14% in 1990. But today, it is almost a third of Germany’s entire workforce. Like everywhere, German women, in particular, have been driving this change. Almost half of them work part-time. Still, men, especially younger men, are slowly catching up. 11.5% of all men were employed part-time in 2019 compared to just 2% in the early 1990s.

The departure from Germany’s traditional 40-hour week – already a fact in Germany’s powerful metal industry since the 1990s – fits two further facts. Since 1990, the productivity of every hour worked in Germany has grown by almost half – unlike wages! This indicates automation, robotics but also work intensification. On the downside, Germans also work longer and longer as they get older. This also indicates a trend toward further work intensification. But overall, Germany is in the midst of a massive redistribution of work. The new flexibility, combined with a very serious increase in working from home, is supported by a serious desire to spend less time commuting to work. But these trends are neither universal nor evenly spread.

In most cases, German white-collar work remains tied to fixed working hours. Until the Coronavirus pandemic, office work was still locked in a specific location – the office. With the possibilities of digitised work and a serious push from the Coronavirus pandemic, German bosses have realised that these old forms of work are no longer working. Furnished by IT, the need for employees to work in a specific location is vastly diminishing. Cloud computing has facilitated this move even further. Some German work experts already believe this is the end of the classic office.

Still, work will continue to mean that there are specific work processes to be followed, and there will also be places where you can meet – virtually or physically. The Coronavirus pandemic has given these changes a very significant boost. Suddenly, some of Germany’s relatively rigid corporate executives have become somewhat open to questioning the need for a physical presence. The Coronavirus pandemic and the rise of Zoom has also challenged the need for business trips. Contrary to what many thoughts, the topic of new work arrangements not only concerns Germany’s relatively tiny group of start-ups and digital agencies. Greater flexibility applies to many companies, and it applies to small business companies with less than 500 employees.

The main reason why these changes are well received is that they fit perfectly with employees’ desire for greater self-determination and meaningful work. This applies particularly to young and highly qualified Germans just entering the world of work. Outsourcing, automation, and an increased used of robots have eliminated plenty of strenuous, dangerous, and monotonous tasks. Outsourcing, automation and an overall move towards the service industry has given employees some opportunities to develop rather freely. This utopia has been as old as automation itself.

During the early 1930S, the economist John Maynard Keynes assumed that workers would only have to work three hours a day. That did not quite materialise. Later, the same optimism was found in the work of the philosopher Jeremy Rifkin. He also assumed that the increase in production through digitisation would make large parts of conventional work superfluous. But the reality of the 2020 Coronavirus pandemic is far more depressing than Keynes assumed. Keynes wasn’t able to foresee the Coronavirus pandemic. As the Coronavirus pandemic hit economy after economy, millions of workers around the world are facing unemployment. Many workers have lost their jobs because of the Corona pandemic, and many will continue to do so.

What has been shown, once again in the current crisis, is that it is precisely those professions that are indispensable to social life – health workers, for example – that are often the ones that are furthest away from the aforementioned new forms of work. In many of these professions, employees would be happy if the same altering rigidity of working time would apply to them as well as the 40-hour workweek they are expected to work.

Long before the Coronavirus crisis, it became clear that even in Germany, its steady rise in productivity has not been possible without exhausting (over)work. In addition, Germany has the largest low-wage sector in Europe. Nearly eight million people – more than one in five working people in Germany – earn less than €11.40 (US$ 14.-) per hour in 2018. Most of these are women. Many are forced to take on multiple jobs to get by.

Current developments led to the question, whether the hope of decent work and space for self-development, in the midst of tougher global competition and a global crisis, will remain an illusion. In many German companies and corporations, there are still rigid power structures occupied by Germany’s corporate apparatchiks. These cannot be discussed away. All the much-trumpeted hype about new organisational models, flatter hierarchies and trust should not obscure this.

For a very long time, many have not understood why the move to new forms of work proceeded so slowly in Germany. German managers remain highly sceptical about new forms of work compared to their non-German counterparts. Perhaps, one should be very clear about this. The main task of companies is not to create decent work, to design work sensibly, and to make work humane. Ever since Karl Marx, this remains the truth even though many people don’t like to hear that.

The central purpose of a company is to make profits and to satisfy its customers. Many German companies and corporations and their corporate apparatchiks have no interest in meaningful work arrangements, cooperation, working closely with Germany’s trade unions and works councils, as well as extending Germany’s well-known co-determination. Instead, Germany’s rigid managers merely ensure that the corporate mission is carried out as quickly, as efficiently, and as cheaply as possible. In other words, work arrangements are nothing more than an element to gain even greater efficiency, productivity, and profit-maximisation.

Perhaps German companies and corporations would be well advised to mentally separate internal work organisation and cooperation from its customers. If German managers fail to create good and decent working conditions, workers and trade unions might – one day – be powerful enough to enforce such changes onto Germany’s corporate apparatchiks. As for today, the trend is in the opposite direction. In Germany, like in many other countries, the number of jobs without collective bargaining coverage is increasing.

During the 1980s, more than a third of all German workers were still organised in trade unions. Today, it is well below 20% and union membership is concentrated in old industries, and union members themselves are on the older side of Germany’s age pyramid. Worse, the number of jobs without collective bargaining has increased from 24% to 43% between 1998 and 2018. Not surprisingly, those German workers with the weakest trade unions representation are workers with the lowest wages. It pays to be a union member, and that is why capital fights tooth and nail against trade unions. Unlike workers, they know what they are doing just as Warren Buffet said,

“There’s class warfare, all right,

but it’s my class, the rich class,

that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

But even among the young, well-educated knowledge workers of the digital economy, trade unions no longer have a good standing. Worse, new work arrangements may even reinforce the de-unionisation trend. One reason is that to many younger workers, trade unions have been made to appear unnecessary and old-fashioned. To rely on collective bargaining and trade unions has been removed from their mind-set.

Unknowingly, these young professionals are taking a new risk. The home office can quickly become home sourcing – like outsourcing. Once executives and their corporate apparatchiks realise that it doesn’t really matter where their employees are located, the idea to replace them with freelancers workers or “home sources” from other countries like China, India, Romania, etc. where wage levels are much lower, is a short step. Given the way, the mind of many corporate apparatchiks work, this is a real danger.

With the Coronavirus pandemic and new work arrangements on the horizon, old contradictions between capital and labour have not gone away. Much of this is at the heart of a manifesto on the Future of Work after Corona signed by more than 3,000 scientists worldwide– including Thomas Piketty, Rahel Jaeggi, and Nancy Fraser. In mid-May this year, it was simultaneously published in dozens of media outlets around the world – in the midst of the Corona crisis. The need for such a manifesto has shown that employees are still seen as an interchangeable resource. In reality, employees remain the key to the success of employers and even more so for those who invest their work, their health, and their life in a company.

To achieve decent work in a post-Coronavirus world, stakeholders must formulate a clear and comprehensible vision of what a world of work of the future should look like. Work should be more flexible. But it should not fall behind the achievements of current labour regulations and labour laws. Most importantly, the transformation process towards digitalisation, working from home, etc. needs to be based on participation and the giving up of old and out-dated decision-making power currently still held by corporate apparatchiks. Corporate leaders should, for once, not hide that behind the smart but deceptive rhetoric of Managerialism.

Today, it is still a fact that employees are mostly excluded from the management of companies. Still, capital claims the right to manage without realising that it is getting in the way of an innovative workplace desperately needed for the future. The capital-labour contradiction remains the most important reasons for the stark imbalance when it comes to the governing of the workplace.

Beyond that, there is still the option of Taking Back the Economy. Truly participatory models for online platforms have already been developed. These are Platform Cooperatives. Among the many examples is New York’s Up & Go. At first glance, it appears like a standard App through which cleaners offer their services. At the surface, it operates at the same principle as it happens on platforms like Handy and Taskrabbit or Germany’s helpling.de. For the latter, it is customary in these corporate platforms to have no security, while workers hardly earn a minimum wage. As a viable alternative, there are collaborative platforms like Up & Go.

Up & Go‘s fifty cleaners are all immigrant women from South America. Unlike the corporate behemoths of the internet, they own the company. Up & Go’s workers pay 95% of the revenue to themselves. The rest goes to the digital infrastructure. When customers book an Up & Go service, the boss comes. All workers are the boss. Up & Go is an attempt to combine the best of two worlds of the global cooperative movement. For customers, it is easy to book help quickly through the App. For the female workers, there is the safety of a regular job and the pride of being an entrepreneur.

Yet, platform cooperatives make up only a tiny market share. Worse, not all will survive in competition with corporations behemoths like Uber, Germany’s Lieferando and others. These corporations have very little say on workers’ participation, cooperation, and co-determination.

This is precisely where the proposal of The Future of Work after Corona manifesto comes in. It proposes that states should issue job guarantees so that no one is forced to accept poor working conditions. Unsurprisingly, no other proposal in the manifesto has met with as much scepticism from the corporate business press. The elimination of unemployment seems to be unwanted. Capitalism always had unemployment. In fact, it thrives on unemployment so much so that a standard 5% unemployment rate is presented as “normal” and even healthy by many neoliberal economists.

Still, there is also strong support for states to underwrite a national job guarantee. It comes from a non-neoliberal macroeconomic perspective. Economies can be stabilised by such a job guarantee. After a slump in the economy, for example, – like the one during the current Corona crisis – workers and the economy do not have to contend with the negative consequences of job losses and reduced consumer demands. These benefits outweigh the potential cost of a state-issued job guarantee.

Such a guarantee can be a vital step towards unconditional basic income or UBI. UBI seeks to decouple work and income from life. Most likely, the vast majority of people would use their newfound UBI freedom for meaningful self-determined activities. Next to UBI, a regulated and state-supported labour market will continue to play a central role. On the way to UBI, a state-guaranteed job might be designed to eliminate the working poor. Even those highly skilled workers in Germany’s top companies may, at some point, ask themselves, why do we still have these dysfunctional, out-dated, anti-democratic structures at work?

Anti-Turkey alliance emerging in the Arab World

Abdus Sattar Ghazali

The intended target of the UAE-Israel alliance is not Iran but Turkey, whose regional clout poses a threat to Gulf rulers, says David Hearst, the editor in chief of Middle East Eye.

In an article titled – A new message resounds in the Arab world: Get Ankara – Hearst wrote Saturday: Israel had been saying for some time to Arab diplomats that it no longer regarded Iran as a military threat. The head of Mossad, Yossi Cohen, told Arab officials that Iran was “containable”.

The new foreign invader threatening the Arab world is not the Persian, nor indeed the Russian – but the Turk as reflected in the speeches at the virtual Arab League conference in Cairo on Wednesday which endorsed the UAE-Israel relations by rejecting a call to condemn the deal.

At the Arab League Foreign Ministers’ virtual meeting the UAE Foreign Minister Anwar Gargash said: “The Turkish interference in the internal affairs of Arab countries is a clear example of negative interference in the region.” Gargash accused Turkey of threatening the security and safety of maritime traffic in Mediterranean waters, in a clear violation of relevant international laws and charters and of the sovereignty of states.

Gargash was followed by Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry, who  said that Turkish interventions in many Arab countries represented the most important threat to Arab national security. “Egypt will not stand idly by in the face of Turkish ambitions that are manifesting in northern Iraq, Syria and Libya in particular,” he said.

Ahmed Abu Al Ghait, Secretary-General of the Arab League, said: “The past period witnessed growing bullying and hostility by regional powers towards our Arab region, and the escalation of interference in the affairs of our Arab countries by two neighboring countries, namely Iran and Turkey.”

As for Turkey, Abu Al Ghait said Ankara continued to occupy large parts of the Syrian territories, and began its attacks on Iraqi lands and recently, it plunged into the Libyan civil war with direct military intervention. Abu Al Ghait said the League is following the situation in Libya with great concern, and hopes that the Libyan parties will reach a permanent agreement and a comprehensive ceasefire.

The chorus of statements against Turkey last week, did not go unnoticed in Ankara, Hearst said and quoted an unnamed Turkish source as saying: “The UAE has been undertaking the job to isolate Turkey in operational levels….. They have been financing it. However, the real enablers of this strategy are Israel and some US politicians close to the pro-Israeli lobby. They have been part of any effort to establish an alliance against Turkey. They have been backing the UAE in the interest of the Zionist and Evangelical alliance, especially before the presidential elections in November which could bring electoral support for their offices.”

The Jordan Times

The Jordan Times, the official voice of the kingdom, published an article in July saying: “Turkish troops and Ankara backed militias are active in three Arab countries: Libya, Syria and Iraq. This is a geopolitical reality that the Arab world, as well as the international community, must acknowledge and react to.

“In fact, Turkey’s territorial, political and economic ambitions in these countries and beyond are advertised by top Turkish leaders including President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

“Turkey now has military bases in Qatar, Libya, Somalia, Northern Cyprus, Syria and Iraq; and not all with the consent of legitimate governments.”

It is disturbing that Arab countries have taken sides rather than work together to stop foreign intervention in their internal affairs. It is feared that this violation of Arab countries will lead to further fractures in intra-Arab ties paving the way for long-term foreign domination, the Jordan Times concluded.

The French connection

There are other foreign actors in this push to declare Turkey the new outlaw of the Eastern Mediterranean, Hearst pointed out adding:

The French military’s role in supporting the Gaddafi-era army general, Khalifa Haftar, in his war-crime-ridden attempt to capture the Libyan capital is as well-documented as the use of Emirati planes and Russian snipers. Recently, however, during his forays into Beirut, President Emmanuel Macron has further spread France’s rhetorical wings.

On the first of two trips to the shattered Lebanese capital, Macron said: “If France doesn’t play its role, Iranians, Turks and Saudis will interfere with Lebanese domestic affairs, whose economic and geopolitical interests are likely to be to the detriment of the Lebanese.”

In the meantime, French warships have been holding joint exercises with Greek ones amid an oil-drilling dispute off Cyprus, which Turkey claims violates its maritime borders.

Macron maintains that his dispute is not with Turks, but with Erdogan. This tactic has been tried before and failed. The problem is that in confronting UAE-backed forces in Libya, or upholding Palestinian rights in Jerusalem, or bombing the Kurdistan Workers’ Party in Iraq, or targeting President Bashar al-Assad’s forces in Syria, Erdogan has the full support of the Turkish army and all major Turkish political parties.

Why is Turkey being confronted now?

For all the domestic reservations over his role as president, Erdogan has created Turkey as an independent country whose armed forces are capable of confronting Russian forces in Syria and Libya, but one that keeps its place at the negotiating table with Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to Hearst.

Turkey’s economy is the size of Saudi Arabia’s, and its military is self-sustaining. Turkey started manufacturing high-technology drones when Israel and the US refused to supply them. It is forgotten today, but Israeli planes once trained on Turkish airfields because of the shortage of airspace back home, according to informed Turkish sources.

When it discovers gas in the Black Sea, Turkish companies have the technology to develop the fields and supply the domestic market – unlike Egypt, whose reliance on British, Italian and US companies means it reaps a fraction of the rewards from its gas fields, Hearst argued.