Australia: Ovato printing company demands more cuts to jobs and conditions

Noel Holt

In the midst of current negotiations for a new enterprise workplace agreement (EA), heat-set print giant Ovato has ramped up demands that its employees in Australia accept further cuts to jobs and conditions as part of a sweeping restructure to slash costs and bolster profits. The company has eight print centres in Australia, two in New Zealand, and agencies in London, Singapore and Chennai, India.

Attempting to justify its cost-cutting demands, Ovato claimed it had suffered a $130 million drop in sales revenue in the 2019–2020 financial year. However, while revenue fell 19.4 percent from $669 million the previous year, the company still realised $539 million in revenue.

In addition, Ovato reported a 41 percent drop in revenue from March to June this year due to the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on magazine sales. While these were at record lows, the company admitted that book sales, packaging, retail distribution and marketing services were unaffected and in some cases sales increased.

In reality, Ovato, like other employers in Australia and globally, is cynically utilising COVID-19 to restructure operations and accelerate cost-cutting plans already in the pipeline. The assault is being carried out with the full collaboration of the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union (AMWU) which covers the majority of the company’s workforce.

With the onset of COVID-19 in February, the AMWU joined management to demand that workers accept a 40 percent reduction in working hours and take annual leave to keep the company afloat through the crisis and supposedly to guarantee their jobs in the long term.

However on July 30, Ovato suddenly announced it was ending negotiations with the union for a new enterprise agreement (EA) covering 850 of the company’s 1,300 employees, and that it had made an application to the Fair Work Commission (FWC) to terminate the existing EA. If the application were to be approved the workers would be forced back onto the base Graphic Arts Award suffering a massive loss of entitlements, including sharp reductions in severance payments and 30 percent wage cut.

Making applications to the FWC for the termination of agreements has been a standard tactic used by employers in a series of key disputes to intimidate workers and allow the unions to break down resistance and impose regressive work agreements, including at the Loy Yang power station in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley in 2017.

Making clear the company is intent on slashing costs at workers’ expense, Ovato CEO Kevin Slaven, whose remuneration package is $692,088 told the media: “Our nominally expired EA is reflective of a prosperous past, not the current economic reality we face, and our current redundancy scales across all of our business need to better reflect this.”

He also demanded increased workforce flexibility, a euphemism for the jettisoning of protective work practices, and “more appropriate” redundancy payment levels to allow the company to “resize” the business in response to the pandemic, as well as further restructuring to create a “smaller but more agile and profitable company.”

Significantly, Ovato’s insistence on the need to reduce severance pay follows its announcement in early August that up to 300 jobs would be eliminated. In other words, workers are being expected to reward the company for destroying their jobs.

Reacting to Ovato’s decision to walk away from EA negotiations, Lorraine Cassin, assistant national secretary of the AMWU’s print and packaging division, complained: “We are very disappointed that Ovato has chosen to take such extreme action against their workers when the workers have bent over backwards to accommodate the company.”

In reality, it has been the union that has “bent over backwards” to “accommodate” the company. From the outset, the union’s main concern has been to maintain its role as a labour broker, from which its officials derive their lucrative privileges, by negotiating away the conditions of its members.

The AMWU openly admitted on its website on July 30 that it had been working with Ovato since March to “negotiate reduced working arrangements,” fraudulently claiming that this was necessary because of the impact of COVID-19 on the business. However, even before the COVID-19 crisis took hold, Ovato had set in motion a major restructure that has already resulted in redundancies.

In December, Ovato opened a new multi-million dollar print site at Warwick Farm in Sydney in New South Wales (NSW) allowing it to consolidate its heat and web offset presses at one facility and computerise its distribution department. This went hand in hand with the closure of Ovato’s major Moorebank printing operation in Sydney. The overhaul is expected to deliver the company annualised savings of $24 million.

Making clear that such savings will be partly generated via savage job cuts, Slaven declared the consolidation of NSW to take place over the next 18 months would cost $30 million, including outlays on redundancies.

Similar attacks as those being carried out by Ovato are being conducted by companies right across the printing industry sector in Australia and internationally, posing the necessity for a unified industrial and political campaign by print workers to defend jobs and conditions.

Australian Community Media & Printing (ACM), which covers 160 regional publications, announced in July the permanent shutting of print centres in Canberra, Murray Bridge and Ballarat at the cost of up to 200 jobs. This followed several months of talks between major newspaper publishers News Corp, Nine Entertainment and ACM about redrawing print partnerships through the amalgamation of print centres to reduce costs.

Media heavyweight News Corp also announced it is considering plans to close print sites including in Tullamarine (Melbourne), Chullora (Sydney), Ormiston and Beaudesert (Queensland), and has stated that between 500 and 1,000 jobs could go.

Similarly in the United Kingdom, as newspaper and magazine sales crashed between 20 and 25 percent due to COVID-19, news print manufacturers announced mass sackings. Prinovis in Liverpool made 92 workers redundant (20 percent of the workforce), Chantry in Wakefield imposed 53 redundancies, and Lettershop in Leeds pushed through 33 redundancies, among others.

The experiences of workers at Ovato, and across the industry, show that print workers can place no faith in the unions. They function at all times as an industrial police force imposing employers’ demands.

The turn must be to the construction of new independent organisations of struggle such as rank-and-file committees and the fight for a unified campaign by workers throughout the sector in Australia and internationally. This struggle must be based on a socialist perspective and the fight for a workers’ government that would place the print industry under public ownership and democratic control to provide for social need, not private profit.

Australian jobs figures show acceleration of “gig economy”

Mike Head

An enormous economic and social crisis is developing in Australia. Unemployment is continuing at Great Depression levels and poverty is about to worsen dramatically as the government cuts income support payments in order to drive people into low-paid work.

As is happening globally, governments and employers are exploiting the mass unemployment triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic to bludgeon ordinary people back into workplaces, not only in unsafe conditions, but on reduced wages and conditions.

Workers line up outside a Centrelink office in Melbourne [Credit: @LordSedgwick Twitter]

That is the real content of the official jobless data released last Thursday. The statistics show a sharp rise in the numbers of unemployed workers already being pushed into insecure contract work, particularly in the super-exploited “gig economy” workforce, such as uber and food delivery drivers.

Touting the decline in the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate from 7.5 percent to 6.8 percent last month, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg boasted of the “remarkable resilience” of the Australian economy. Yet at the same time, he demanded greater “flexibility” in the labour market, supposedly to create “jobs, jobs, jobs.”

The reality is that even on those vastly-understated figures, nearly one million workers remain jobless and actively seeking work. And as Frydenberg admitted, when those who are on “zero hours” or have dropped out of the workforce, are counted, the “effective” unemployment rate is 9.3 percent, or 1.26 million workers.

Another 3.5 million workers are still on the Liberal-National government’s JobKeeper wage subsidies. Many of their jobs will be eliminated in the coming weeks, despite employers having been bailed out to the tune of about $400 billion by federal and state government “stimulus” packages.

What Frydenberg did not mention is that almost the entire rise in official employment in August—a 44,500 net increase in non-seasonally adjusted terms—resulted from the 50,200 growth in the number of self-employed people without employees (such as “sole traders”).

By contrast, there was minimal growth in the number of employees—just 2,600—offset by a 9,300 decrease in the number of “contributing family workers.” Payroll jobs (employment for a wage) actually fell. Overall working hours rose barely, by 0.1 percent, showing that workers’ hours, on average, are still being reduced.

Some of the rise in self-employed workers may be accounted for by sub-contractors. But corporate economists advised their clients that practically all those “non-employees” were working in the gig economy.

“Delivery drivers, and riders, of major online delivery services are not employed by their respective delivery companies,” Deutsche Bank economist Phil O’Donaghoe wrote in a note to clients. “They are, in effect, ‘self employed’ contractors.”

O’Donaghoe added: “[I]t is fair to infer that many of those new workers hardly worked for many hours (given the paltry rise in overall hours worked). That leaves us describing this as a poor employment print, despite the headline.”

Many of these “gig economy” workers are young. They include the more than two million casual workers, international students and other vulnerable visa holders who have been excluded from the government’s JobKeeper wage subsidy scheme and JobSeeker unemployment benefits.

Millions more will soon be confronted by the same dire plight, as the government cuts the levels of the JobKeeper and JobSeeker payments from September 28, just as banks and landlords move to end six-month moratoriums on mortgages and rental evictions.

Official Australian Bureau of Statistics data reported that the unemployment rate among 15-24 year olds was 14.3 percent—more than twice as high as the overall average.

The figures also indicated that part-time work now accounts for almost half the workforce. Seasonally adjusted full-time employment increased in August by 36,200 to 8.58 million, while part-time employment increased 74,800 to 3.99 million people.

Some economists, such as UBS Australia’s George Tharenou and Carlos Cacho, are forecasting that the official jobless rate will rise “sharply” as businesses collapse. “However, since the government extended temporary bankruptcy protection, and protection for directors from trading insolvent, for 3 months to Dec-20, we now expect the peak in unemployment to be later, perhaps not until 2021,” they wrote in a report.

According to the more realistic jobless data published monthly by the Roy Morgan company, unemployment stood at 13.8 percent, or almost two million workers, in August. The total of unemployment and under-employment was 22.8 percent, or 3.27 million workers. That is as high as the 1930s.

The Roy Morgan survey also showed that this toll was not confined to the state of Victoria, where the government and the corporate elite are demanding the rapid ending of a “stage 4” pandemic lockdown in the capital Melbourne.

Even these estimates do not take into account the current avalanche of job cuts by public universities. Last week, three universities alone—Melbourne’s RMIT University, the University of New South Wales and the Australian National University (ANU)—announced a total of nearly 2,900 job losses.

Some idea of the financial stress and impoverishment to come can be gauged from a recent ANU study. It calculated that since March, the JobKeeper subsidies and the temporary doubling of JobSeeker benefits had saved about 2.2 million people from poverty.

Without these payments, the number living in poverty would have soared from a pre-COVID total of 1.6 million to 3.8 million—or about 15 percent of the population.

The study estimated that just by cutting the JobKeeper and JobSeeker rates from September 28, the government would push an extra 740,000 people into poverty, initially lifting the total to 1.84 million.

On that date, JobKeeper will fall from the minimum wage level of $1,500 to just $1,200 per fortnight, and to $700 for those who previously worked less than 20 hours per week.

The payment to people on JobSeeker and related benefits will fall by $300 to $815 a fortnight. On December 31, JobKeeper will be reduced to $1,000 and $650 per fortnight and JobSeeker to $565.70, well below the poverty line, defined as a fortnightly disposable income of $832.

While gloating about the unemployment statistics, Treasurer Frydenberg announced ramped-up job search requirements for people on JobSeeker. From September they will have to apply for up to eight jobs a month, and participate in “job search plan” meetings with an “employment services provider.” Yet, there are, on average, 13 JobSeeker recipients for every advertised vacancy.

The government intends to use this “welfare compliance” regime to cut people off benefits and dragoon them into low-paid work. Jobless workers’ payments were suspended 2.3 million times in 2018-19.

Frydenberg said changes to industrial relations laws had boosted job creation. “Through the JobKeeper changes we introduced we brought more flexibility in the labour market including changes around duties, around hours and around location of work,” he said.

These changes, agreed by the trade unions, and rubberstamped by the Labor Party opposition, allowed employers to cut workers’ hours, and alter their job duties and locations. Having propped up the government and big business by imposing these attacks and other cuts to conditions on millions of workers, the unions are going further to enforce this “flexibility.”

Frydenberg hailed, as a “positive development,” that Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) leaders have been collaborating behind closed doors for weeks in five “working groups” with the government and employer groups to scrap more of workers’ basic rights.

This week, ACTU secretary Sally McManus reportedly finalised a deal with Business Council of Australia chief executive Jennifer Westacott, representing the largest companies. They propose to axe the “better off overall test” for registering a workplace pay deal, clearing the way for enterprise agreements to openly reduce the conditions of workers.

In return, union-negotiated agreements will be fast-tracked through the Fair Work Commission, taking to a new level the decades-long corporatist partnership between the unions and the financial elite.

Amid growing social inequality, unsafe conditions and social misery, the scene is set for a social explosion. The crucial issue will be for workers to mobilise independently, against the unions, as well as the governments and the corporate elite. This means turning to a revolutionary socialist program to take political power and reorganise society on the basis of human need, not private profit and wealth.

Peace negotiations stall as ceasefire begins to fall apart in Ukraine

Jason Melanovski

Negotiations to end the over-six-year-long civil war in eastern Ukraine have stalled as the longest ceasefire in the civil war’s history has begun to fall apart after the killing of a Ukrainian soldier last week.

Meeting in Berlin last Friday, political advisors from the “Normandy Format” discussions involving Germany, France, Russia and Ukraine failed to achieve any significant steps forward in the ongoing negotiations.

The last meeting between all four heads of state—Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Russian President Vladimir Putin, French President Emmanuel Macron, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel—took place in December 2019 amid much public fanfare but failed to make any significant agreements other than to meet again at some time in the future.

Over nine months later, the four heads of state have failed to schedule a follow-up meeting after a planned summit in March of this year was cancelled due to the COVID-19 epidemic.

The Ukrainian government had stated prior to Friday’s meeting that it expected another summit of the countries’ leaders would subsequently be scheduled, but according to Russia’s envoy Dmitriy Kozak the prospect for another major “Normandy Four” event was not even discussed. The four sides failed to even schedule another meeting between their countries’ present advisors.

Last Friday’s meeting had already been postponed several times due to the supposed unavailability of the French advisor to attend. Speaking to the New York Times in weeks prior to the meeting, a German advisor said it’s status was “up in the air” suggesting that the major European imperialist powers Germany and France have little interest in the Ukrainian crisis as they ratchet up an anti-Russia campaign in their own countries over the Navalny case and Belarus.

Independently of France and Germany, Ukraine and Russia agreed to continue a negotiated ceasefire that first began on July 27 despite back-and-forth accusations of violations in early September.

According to the Ukrainian military, Russian-backed separatists opened fire on government forces in several incidents last week, killing one Ukrainian solider and wounding another.

Representatives of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) in turn claimed that Ukrainian forces had opened fire on the republic six times between September 2 and 15 and accused the Ukrainian side of carrying out “offensive operations” which are prohibited under the cease-fire’s terms.

Negotiations between representatives from Russia, Ukraine and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE)—known as the Trilateral Contact Group—were held throughout August but likewise failed to achieve any major agreements. The main sticking points have been the offering of special autonomous status and local elections independent of Kiev. Both points are vociferously and violently opposed by Ukraine’s far-right.

Within the Ukrainian ruling class there has been significant disagreement over these issues. In August, Ukraine’s deputy representative in the Trilateral Contact Group negotiations, Vitold Fokin, stated that he believed the war would end once Ukraine offered special status to Donetsk and Lugansk and offered amnesty to separatists.

Speaking with news website Strana, Fokin stated, “Another important question is about pardon. On both sides, many crimes have been committed that should ultimately be investigated, and let the perpetrators be prosecuted. But today, in order to end the war and save the lives of soldiers and commanders, my position is to declare general pardon, hold elections, resolve the issue of the special status of certain regions, and best of all, the entire Donbass.”

Fokin’s comments were quickly denounced as treason by the country’s far-right and Kiev officials. Notably Ukraine’s Interior Minister Arsen Avakov, who is known for his ties to the far-right Azov Battalion, stated “None of our soldiers should die because of awkward political gambling. Therefore, the statement by Ukraine’s representative to the TCG Vitold Fokin about a general amnesty and a special status for the entire territory of Donbas is provocative and does not correspond to national interests. We should remember that thousands of our soldiers died for every piece of Ukrainian land in Donbass.”

The Ukrainian government later released an official statement calling Fokin’s words “not the official position of the Ukrainian government.”

The failure to achieve any significant gains in peace negotiations takes place as support for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky continues to erode. Zelensky, who was elected largely on misplaced hopes that he offered an alternative to the rabid war-mongering nationalism of his predecessor Petro Poroshenko, has so far made little progress in achieving peace in eastern Ukraine.

Subsequently, recent polls conducted within Ukraine suggest that Zelensky’s support has fallen precipitously after winning the presidency in April 2019 with 73 percent of the vote. According to polls conducted in June by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, just 38 percent of Ukrainians now support Zelensky’s presidency. Another poll conducted by Ukraine’s Razumkov Center in July found that if presidential elections were held, Zelensky would be supported by just 34.6 percent of voters in an initial election. Furthermore, second place would go to the leader of the Opposition Platform – For Life party led by Yuri Boyko which favors reviving relations with Russia and ending the war by negotiating directly with the break-away regions of Luhansk and Donetsk.

The newly founded party of popular video blogger Anatolity Shariy has also gained noticeable support, receiving 3.7 percent of a potential vote in recent polls. There are fears that Shariy, who has over 2.3 million subscribers on Youtube, could tear away support from Zelensky particularly among younger voters with whom he is popular. Shariy is critical of the right-wing orientation of the Ukrainian government and like the Opposition Platform—For Life party supports an end to the war in eastern Ukraine.

The rise in support for parties that favor a negotiated settlement with Russia has not gone unnoticed by Ukraine’s far-right groups. They have carried out a number of attacks on both members of Shariy’s party and members of the Opposition Platform—For Life party.

In August, members of the Azov Battalion and affiliated National Corps carried out their most brazen attacks shooting a bus carrying 22 members of the Opposition Platform—For Life party in Kharkiv in broad daylight. After critically injuring several and kidnapping two more members of the Opposition Platform—For Life party.

Following the incident, the Opposition Platform—For Life assigned blame for the attack on Zelensky stating, “This crime of the National Corps and Azov is a consequence of the impunity of the far-right radicals acting under the direct patronage and incitement of the authorities, including President Zelensky, who openly declares his support for their position.”

Conversely, the infamous Azov leader Andriy Biletsky responded to questioning by stating that the Ukrainian government should award medals to the 14 men who were detained by police in the attack.

The over-six-year-long war that began in 2014 following the installation of far-right nationalist NATO-aligned government in Kiev has claimed the lives of over 13,000 and left 30,000 injured. In addition, the war has created 1.5 million internally displaced persons and a 2019 UNICEF report found that nearly half a million children in eastern Ukraine “face grave risks to their physical health and psychological well-being” as they attend bullet-ridden schools and walk through fields of land mines.

Despite the nationalist and far-right orientation of Ukraine’s mainstream media, a recent poll found that 53 percent of Ukrainians believe that “all connections with people living in non-government-controlled areas in the east of the country, including transport connections,” should be restored.

Russia’s opposition parties fail to win broad support in regional elections

Andrea Peters

Regional elections held last weekend in Russia have returned broad majorities to the ruling United Russia (UR) party and its political affiliates. Kremlin-backed candidates held onto governorships and control of local parliamentary bodies in the 83 regions of the country where voting occurred.

Despite widespread discontent with the government over the handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, anger over the economic crisis hitting the country, and emerging signs of political opposition in areas of Russia, opposition candidates failed to make headway except in a handful of municipal races in Siberia.

In Arkhangelsk, the far northern region that has been the site of protests over the stationing of a large landfill in the ecologically sensitive area, the Kremlin-backed gubernatorial candidate garnered 69 percent of the vote.

In Komi Republic, the neighboring province that shares the borderland where the dumping ground is to be built, the Stalinist Communist Party (KPRF)—considered the main challenger—won just 14.9 percent of the vote for the regional assembly. While United Russia saw its support cut in half compared to five years ago, it will continue to be the dominant force in the Komi state council because of the election of allied candidates and the role played by so-called “spoiler parties,” new political outfits set up with the Kremlin’s support that drew votes away from the KPRF.

In the Siberian city of Irkutsk, where another Communist Party candidate was vying for the governorship against an incumbent who had been installed by Moscow after the “forced-voluntary” removal of the previous KPRF leader, the Kremlin-backed Igor Kobzev won 70 percent of the vote.

In the Republic of Tatarstan, sitting President Rustem Minnikhanov will continue to hold office. To little electoral effect, just prior to last weekend’s vote Alexei Navalny’s anticorruption organization published details from its investigation into the Minnikhanov family’s real estate operations.

The electoral efforts made by Navalny—the Kremlin oppositionist currently hospitalized in Germany due to an alleged poisoning that Western government and media outlets are pinning on the Putin government—saw modest success in just two regions. In the southwestern Siberian cities of Novosibirsk and Tomsk, a handful of Navalny-backed candidates won seats on local councils.

Across Russia, turnout was generally low, an expression of the population’s fears over coronavirus and disenchantment with the entire political system, those in power and their supposed opponents. In Novosibirsk, just 28 percent of eligible voters cast a ballot. In Tomsk, that number stood at 19 percent. In Arkhangelsk, Irkutsk, the Komi Republic turnout hovered around 28 to 30 percent.

The “official” and “unofficial” opponents of the Putin government—an admixture of Stalinists, far-right nationalists, Kremlin insiders, and pro-Western free marketeers—have thus far failed to win mass, active political support. Whatever the disgust felt towards the current Russian president and his political adjuncts in the regions, millions instinctively sense that the KPRF, the far-right LDPR, the “opposition” Just Russia party, and all the various other political permutations have very little different to offer.

The so-called “liberal” opposition grouped around Navalny and other outfits like the Yabloko party continue to be correctly viewed as allies of Western imperialism and proponents of right-wing socio-economic policies whose main aim is not to secure prosperity for Russia’s working masses but profit for sections of the capitalist class. The recent, near-fatal illness of Navalny, which Germany in particular has seized upon as a cudgel to wield against President Putin, did not bring sympathetic voters to the polls. Navalny’s “smart voting” program—by which voters were encouraged to vote for “anyone but Putin” and given a list of candidates for whom to cast their ballots—appears to have had little impact on the current election cycle.

An investigative commission set up by the federal Duma, Russia’s parliament, declared Wednesday that it had uncovered foreign interference in the regional elections, ranging from “ballot stuffing” to “disinformation on social media” to “round-the-clock hacker attacks on the Central Election Commission.” Commission Chairman Vasily Piskarev said that “NGOs from Germany, France, and Poland conducted a series of online seminars and educational courses with the involvement of American and Lithuanian political strategists, including on the organization of provocations in the course of observing the elections.”

The electoral victory of United Russia at last weekend’s polls does not resolve the political crisis confronting Putin. Coronavirus cases are once again climbing, with there now being more than one million recorded infections and nearly 6,000 deaths in just the last 24 hours. The murderous “herd immunity” policy being implemented everywhere in the world is also in place in Russia, and it is reaping its predictable harvest. Earlier this week, news broke that Russian opera star Anna Netrebko has been hospitalized with COVID-19, after a series of early September performances at Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater. Schools have been reopened across the country with no virtually precautions in place and no plans for a potential move back to online classes.

At the same time, Russia is confronting intensifying geopolitical pressures over Navalny’s alleged poisoning and the eruption of antigovernment protests in the allied state of Belarus. This week, the European Union announced that it will no longer recognize Alexander Lukashenko as the legitimate president of Belarus after his term expires in November.

Dominion grocery workers in Newfoundland in fourth week of strike for higher pay

Carl Bronski

Over 1,400 low-wage workers at 11 Dominion grocery stores across Newfoundland and Labrador are now in the fourth week of a strike after overwhelmingly rejecting a tentative agreement recommended by their union, Unifor.

Lauded by the management and the corporate media as “essential workers,” the Dominion workers laboured without a contract through the first five months of the pandemic (Newfoundland recorded its first COVID-19 case on March 14). Their old contract expired 12 months ago.

The workers, represented by Unifor Local 597, have not received a contractual pay increase since early 2018. In 2019, management cut more than 60 full-time positions. Today, 83 percent of Dominion’s workforce is comprised of low-wage part-time employees with no or at best minimal benefits. Fully three-quarters of the striking workers make less than C$15 per hour with a majority of the part-timers labouring at or just above the current provincial minimum wage of C$11.65, which is among the lowest provincial minimum wage rates in all Canada.

The Loblaw conglomerate, parent company to Dominion, is the largest retail food distributor in Canada, employing 200,000 workers. It is owned by the Westons, the country’s third-wealthiest family.

Last month, workers voted overwhelmingly to reject a miserable contract offer that Unifor had endorsed. The tentative deal only provided for a C$1 per hour raise spread over the next three years. That the rotten contract offer was even brought to the membership, let alone recommended for ratification, underscores Unifor’s complicity in policing a brutal low-wage regime enforced by the grocery oligarchs in Newfoundland and across the country.

In announcing the tentative agreement at the end of July, Unifor Local 597 President Carolyn Wrice displayed the gaping disconnect between the membership and the union bureaucracy. Taking for granted that the workers would swallow the abysmal contract, she stated, “I want to thank the bargaining committee for their hard work and the public for showing their support for the workers. Our members look forward to continuing to play a vital role in their communities.”

On September 1, Loblaw’s Atlantic Canada vice-president, Mike Doucette, sent an inflammatory letter to each striker insisting that because of “fierce competition” and “declining business,” the company will not budge from its original offer.

In response, Chris Macdonald, an assistant to Unifor President Jerry Dias, said that the union is usually given bottom-line company records to substantiate any such claims during negotiations, but Dominion has provided union negotiators no such records during the current dispute. Macdonald perhaps said more than he intended. Workers have asked, if no financial records were provided in an attempt to justify such a sub-standard contract, why did the union recommend acceptance?

The reality is that Loblaw is raking in huge profits on the backs of its low-paid workforce. It recently announced C$162 million in second-quarter net profits. Profits, so far this year, total nearly half a billion dollars and are expected to double by year’s end.

Dominion workers are particularly outraged at the termination of a short-lived C$2 per hour special COVID-19 payment. In a highly provocative and apparently coordinated move, Canada’s three main grocery store chains announced in June that they were scrapping their “pandemic premiums.” Loblaw, Metro, and Empire—the parent company of Sobeys, IGA, Safeways and other chains—introduced the bonus in late March. They did so to dampen worker anger and anxiety about being exposed to the highly contagious and potentially lethal coronavirus in their workplaces while the country was in near total lockdown.

The bonus was touted by corporate bosses and the mainstream media alike as an example of the ruling elite’s recognition of supermarket workers as “heroes.” This was a crucial element in the bogus narrative that everyone was pulling together in the face of the pandemic. In reality, while workers received a few crumbs, the federal Liberal government handed over more than C$650 billion to the financial markets and big banks.

Loblaw owner Galen Weston Sr., who possesses a net worth of C$13 billion and splits his time between a spacious downtown Toronto residence, a private island in Georgian Bay and family compounds in Florida and the Bahamas, and his fellow oligarchs who control Metro and Empire, could not bear the thought of tens of thousands of store clerks dragging down their profit margins by collecting a C$2 per hour bonus for a moment longer than was politically necessary.

The strike in Newfoundland is the first grocery contract dispute in Canada since the beginning of the pandemic. But over the coming year, contracts covering workers at 2,400 other Loblaw outlets will expire. Loblaw is determined to smash the strike in Newfoundland and force the acceptance of the miserable contract offer in order to set a nation-wide precedent. Already, the company has gone to the provincial Supreme Court to successfully appeal for a draconian injunction to limit picketing at the 11 strike-bound stores.

Jerry Dias has replied to the recent company provocations by threatening to launch a boycott of Loblaw stores across Canada. Workers who have followed Dias’s stunts over the years will note that a Unifor call for a boycott of a strike-bound company is in actuality a “kiss of death” administered by the union. Rather than mobilize the full strength of the 315,000-strong union—or even the tens of thousands of Unifor workers in the grocery and retail sector—Dias has coyly hinted that he may send a few union officials to distribute boycott leaflets at a handful of grocery stores across the country or purchase some radio spots denouncing the company.

Thousands of workers at the now shuttered auto assembly plant in Oshawa, Ontario, and at the Unifor-organized FCL refinery in Regina, Saskatchewan, already know the bitter fruits of such a toothless strategy.

The lesson for Dominion workers is that they must take control of their struggle out of Unifor’s hands by forming an independent rank-and-file strike committee to fight for their demands. These should include a substantial permanent pay increase to ensure all workers receive a decent wage, the reintroduction of pay premiums to compensate workers for the dangerous conditions they confront due to the pandemic, and regular testing paid by the company for all workers to protect them from infection. Striking workers should appeal through their committee for a common fight with grocery store workers across Canada, teachers, industrial workers, and health care workers, all of whom confront stepped-up exploitation and brutal working conditions due to decades of austerity and the ruling elite’s reckless reopening of the economy amid a still-raging COVID-19 pandemic.

Union suppresses criticism of job cuts at German steel producer ThyssenKrupp

Dietmar Gaisenkersting

German steel and metal engineering companies are announcing fresh waves of mass redundancies on a virtually daily basis. Just last week, truck manufacturer MAN, a subsidiary of the VW group, announced the elimination of 9,500 jobs out of the company’s global total of 36,000.

Major corporations, banks and hedge funds are using the pandemic to launch attacks on wages and jobs worked out long before the coronavirus crisis. The German DAX index has increased in value 10 times during the past 30 years and a tiny elite have become immeasurably rich as a result. There are now over 100 billionaires in Germany and 23,000 individuals earn more than €1 million per year.

This orgy of new wealth can only continue at the cost of massive cuts to the standard of living of the working class. This is the reason for the mass layoffs, wage cuts and intensification of labour exploitation taking place not only in Germany, but all over the world.

The only answer is a united offensive by the international working class to put a stop to this orgy of enrichment, guided by the perspective of fundamentally reorganising society to meet the needs of the broad masses of the population. The fight against job losses must not be made dependent on whether a particular company makes a profit or a loss—the latter is often the result of billions of dollars in dividends handed out to shareholders and hedge funds. It must be guided by the principle of defending every job, linked to a socialist offensive.

The most hostile opponents of workers in this regard are the IG Metall union and its works councils. The policies of “social partnership” and “codetermination,” which have been legally and institutionally anchored in Germany more than in any other country, have long since mutated into an open alliance between union officials and the corporations against workers.

The trade union secretaries and heads of the works councils, who often earn several times more than an ordinary worker, share the same vision as company managers, i.e., defence of the “competitiveness” of one factory against all others. Within the framework of co-determination, the union bureaucrats develop restructuring plans and rigorously impose them against company employees. Those who resist are either bought off, intimidated or driven out of the company.

ThyssenKrupp is a good example. In March, the executive of the concern and IG Metall agreed to cut 3,000 jobs in order to facilitate the sale or merger of the company’s steel operations.

On September 2, the World Socialist Web Site reported on the manner in which the company’s human resource department and works councils were putting pressure on older workers in particular to quit the company in return for a meagre severance payout. The report was based on conversations with a number of workers. Their names were not disclosed to protect them from reprisals.

The article also addressed the close interrelationship between the union and the company’s board of directors. For example, the labour director of Thyssenkrupp, Markus Grolms, who is responsible for the planned dismissals, was an IG Metall union secretary until April this year.

The article obviously struck a nerve and sent shock waves through the company. The article spread rapidly on WhatsApp and was read several thousand times, with many workers confirming what it said about the role of the works council and IG Metall. As one worker wrote to the WSWS: “It was like this before, but it wasn’t really publicised. The unions are stuffing their pockets full. The works councils and trade unions have thousands of jobs on their conscience.”

On Facebook, where IG Metall officials have easy access, workers were more reticent. For their part, IGM representatives were outraged, including Fred Wans, who ran for the works council election in 2014 with an opposition list and was subsequently expelled from the IGM. The WSWS had reported on the case several times.

Now Wans, however, is openly defending his IGM colleagues on the works council against criticism from workers. “All [!] my colleagues on the works council supervising employees’ invitation to a social plan meeting, are doing an excellent job,” he wrote in a Facebook post. He described reports by workers of being pressured by the works councils as “slanderous.”

He then requested that the author of the WSWS article name informants. When the latter refused to do so, Wans excluded him from his Facebook group and also threatened to take legal action.

Wans knows, of course, that the WSWS never makes unjustified claims, that it thoroughly checks its information and protects its sources and would never hand them over to IG Metall and its works councils. As early as 2015, when he was still in conflict with the IGM, the IGM had put pressure on the opposition works councils to reveal the WSWS informants. Now Wans is doing the same.

How is this about-turn to be explained?

We don’t know Wans’ personal motives or what has been going on behind the scenes. But politically his development does not come as a surprise. Although he opposed the IG Metall and the wage cuts agreed to at the plant by the union, he never broke with the latter’s narrow, nationalist perspective.

As early as the spring of 2015, the WSWS had warned: “Restricting oneself to minimal trade union demands cannot solve the fundamental problems of the workforce and has an invariable logic. It leads to subordination to so-called operational and economic constraints and turns the opposition works councils of today into the corrupt social partners of tomorrow.”

We asked: “What if the global steel market collapses due to the ongoing global economic crisis and the board of directors or a financial investor like Cevian Capital demands the destruction of the steel location in Duisburg? Will the opposition in the works council then demand that the site be prevented from being dismantled through wage cuts and job losses in order to ‘save the site’? Will they seek to make the demolition of the site ‘socially acceptable’?”

This is exactly what has now happened. In 2014, Wans called his opposition list “Interest Group 35-hour week” because it was directed against the wage cuts agreed by the IGM via reduced working hours. Wans himself now supports a reduction of working hours with the deceptive argument that this would secure the site.

The experiences at Thyssen-Krupp underline that the defence of jobs, income and social rights requires a complete break with the unions and their “social partnership” perspective. What is needed is the establishment of action committees organised independently of the unions to defend jobs, wages and working conditions, linking up with workers in other companies in Germany and abroad.

The author of this article invites the workers of Thyssenkrupp to join his Facebook group to discuss this perspective and build an action committee. In order to conduct the discussion openly, IG-Metall functionaries and their works councils have no access.

Neo-Nazis in German police issue new threats

Gregor Link

A neo-Nazi network inside the German police force has been sending messages threatening violence to public figures for more than two years. The network, with the abbreviation “NSU 2.0,” has access to intimate personal data stored in official police databases. Among the list of predominantly female victims are lawyers, politicians, journalists, students and artists—a total of at least 71 threatening notes to 27 persons and institutions in eight different German states.

The series of terroristic intimidations began with attacks on the lawyer Seda Başay-Yıldız, a defender of victims of the National Socialist Underground (NSU), the neo-Nazi terror group that murdered nine migrants and one policewoman. The first of more than a dozen messages sent to Başay-Yıldız declared that her then two-year-old daughter would be “slaughtered.” One-and-a-half hours before the message was sent the personal data of the lawyer and her family had been accessed by a computer of the Frankfurt police.

The owner of the computer was the Hesse policewoman Miriam D., who together with her partner and four other right-wing extremist police officers maintained a chat group which circulated, among other things, illegal Nazi propaganda. The members of the group ridiculed disabled people, concentration camp prisoners, black skinned persons, refugees and Jews. The chat group also posted material mocking the young refugee Alan Kurdi. The boy’s body had been washed ashore in Turkey in 2015 and a photo of his corpse became a symbol for the European Union’s inhumane refugee policy.

In the past five years at least 38 internal proceedings have been initiated against far-right police officers in Hesse. Bearing in mind the fact that German police authorities are themselves investigating the cases, the number of fascist officials is likely to be many times higher. As the World Socialist Web Site has repeatedly pointed out, politicians, the secret services and investigators have systematically covered up the extent of the extreme right-wing conspiracy within the German state apparatus.

Now, official sources demonstrate that it is not only the Hesse police who are involved in drafting and spreading the “NSU 2.0” threatening letters. Last Monday, the Süddeutsche Zeitung and WDR radio reported that four police officers from Hamburg and Berlin have also been questioned recently as suspects.

According to the report, a man and a woman in Hamburg allegedly used their access to police computers to retrieve without authorisation the personal data of journalist Hengameh Yaghoobifarah. In June, Yaghoobifarah, who works for the taz newspaper, wrote a satirical article about the German police and subsequently received threatening letters from “NSU 2.0” which included intimate personal information.

Meanwhile in Berlin, two officers from the Spandau and Neukölln districts are said to have spied on the cabaret artist İdil Baydar and called up her private data. According to media reports, this happened on the same day an identical computer inquiry was made in Wiesbaden. Ten days later Baydar received a threatening SMS mentioning her mother’s first name. To date, none of the officers involved have been relieved from official duty.

The Süddeutsche notes that as early as 2017 there had been “anonymous threatening letters in Berlin, among others, to members of the left-wing milieu and journalists, based on data from police databases.” Der Spiegel also reported that a chief commissioner in the Berlin police force provided members of a far-right chat group with confidential information, including information about a suspect in the investigation of racist arson attacks in Neukölln.

The weekly news magazine also names police officer Roland G., who is a suspect in the case of the bombing of the Fatih Mosque in the city of Dresden. The chief of police, who supervised the shooting range of the municipal police headquarters, had close relations with the far-right Reichbürger movement, which denies the Holocaust and seeks to establish a vigilante group of “German knights.” After being sentenced to a €4,000 fine for incitement, he remains in the service of the police where he has access to official vehicles, among other privileges.

In Landshut, Bavaria, former police officer Hermann S. and his wife were temporarily arrested in late July by Bavarian and Hessen criminal police officials after he was suspected of being one of the authors of the “NSU 2.0” threatening letters. During a house search of the well-connected “New-Right” activist, investigators found an illegal stock of weapons, including two pistols, batons, pepper spray and a pump gun. A computer server was confiscated and is currently being evaluated.

“Group S.”—connecting right-wing terrorists and the police

There is also new evidence in the case of suspected right-wing extremist terrorists from “Group S.” which indicates the involvement of the police authorities. As the World Socialist Web Site has reported, 12 men had hoarded weapons and ammunition and planned to raid mosques throughout Germany in a concerted “commando” action, aimed at killing people at prayer. The intention was to provoke a counter-reaction and “civil war” in order to “rock” and “overcome” the state and social order of Germany, according to a statement by the Federal Prosecutor’s Office.

An informer from the investigating authorities was the only member of the group not to be arrested, although, according to investigators, he belonged to the innermost circle of conspirators.

According to the Tagesschau newspaper, the group regarded 2020 as the year when there would be “no more excuses” and “action” was necessary. One of the group’s supporters was the neo-Nazi Thorsten W., an officer in the police headquarters of Hamm in North Rhine-Westphalia. According to a report in the Süddeutsche Zeitung the officer had “for years openly indicated his extreme right-wing views.” He had promised the group €5,000, “if necessary even more,” for weapons and is alleged to have ordered a pistol at a meeting of the group.

The police officer, who has been in custody since February, wanted to “take action against ‘riffraff’ with his service weapon,” the Süddeutsche reported. In a WhatsApp group, W., together with a police superintendent and another officer, had for years exchanged “racist slogans and Nazi propaganda” and joked that they “wanted to shoot foreigners.” The three men are under investigation by the Dortmund public prosecutor’s office for using license plates bearing the initials of illegal organisations. W. is also alleged to have accessed a confidential police report on the Reichsbürger movement.

Although W.’s right-wing extremist views were evident for years, no disciplinary measures were taken. His office in the Bockum-Hövel police station was only searched when W. was suspected of terrorism. In his office, investigators found Nazi merchandise and stacks of issues of a right-wing extremist monthly paper, together with other evidence.

As the news portal t-online wrote in August, the “assault plans of Group S. ... were further advanced than previously known.” According to the report, a Kalashnikov and ammunition had already been ordered. The money was being held by one of the group’s suspected supporters, but shortly before his arrest the deal was suddenly cancelled.

Then, in July, another suspected supporter of Group S. was found dead in Dortmund Prison. He allegedly promised the group €50,000 to buy weapons. According to media reports, the man was active in the Reichbürger milieu and possessed a cache of weapons and homemade hand grenades. Spiegel magazine quoted a prison spokesman who said that the circumstances of the terror suspect’s death “had not yet been conclusively determined.”

A Spiegel survey of German state institutions revealed at least 18 cases of “Reichbürgers in uniform” in Bavaria, and 12 in the federal police force. In total, there have been at least 340 suspected cases of right-wing extremism in the federal states since 2014. This is clearly a complete underestimation, in part due to the fact that forces such as the Verfassungsschutz, the domestic secret service (Office for the Protection of the Constitution), is constantly moving the political spectrum further to the right with its definition of right-wing extremism.

In its most recent report, the Verfassungsschutz stated that “among the vast majority of members of the milieu [Reichbürger], right-wing extremist ideological elements are ... only slight or indiscernible.” The report was released just weeks before hundreds of far-right extremists led by Reichbürger members attempted to storm the Bundestag. The pictures of far-right “Reich” war flags in front of the German parliament were published in papers all over the world.

“Nordkreuz” and the “Hannibal” network

Marko G., a leader of the “prepper” group “Nordkreuz,” had recently attracted similar international attention. Along with accomplices from the Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania criminal police, Marko G., a trained sniper, ex-elite soldier and long-time member of the police Special Commando Force (SEK), had accumulated an extensive stock of weapons on his private property, including an Uzi submachine gun with silencer and 40,000 rounds of ammunition.

Members of the group were temporarily arrested at the end of last year when extensive lists of “political foes” and lists for orders of caustic lime and body bags were uncovered. Marko G., a member of the far-right Alternative for Germany party, was suspended from duty but is now at large. The Schwerin Regional Court described his preparations for civil war as a “one-time—though in terms of time and content very extensive—breach of conduct” and awarded him a suspended sentence.

According to Der Spiegel, the state criminal investigation department had identified Marko G. as a right-wing extremist back in 2009. In a note to his superiors, the news magazine reported that “G. was conspicuously interested in National Socialism and especially in the SS, ‘without showing the necessary distance.’” Members of the Nordkreuz group, including a lawyer and a senior police officer, discussed plans “to use ‘Day X’ to ‘gather and kill’ leftist refugee supporters,” one witness reported. Marko G. himself told Der Spiegel that “Nordkreuz remains active today.”

Nordkreuz is part of the so-called “Hannibal” network, which, according to insiders, is preparing for an armed coup. The network apparently has over 2,000 supporters throughout Europe as well as links to German army special forces and the neo-fascist NPD. It recruits its members from all sections of the state apparatus.

Nordkreuz, in turn, relies on the “Uniter” group, which networks arms dealers, the security services and elite soldiers, instructs private individuals in domestic combat and trains its own nongovernmental combat unit. Uniter was founded by a former member of the Verfassungsshutz and André S., aka “Hannibal,” a former instructor of the German army Special Forces Command (KSK) and an informant for the Military Counterintelligence Service (MAD).

At the end of May, disciplinary proceedings were initiated against two officers of the Brandenburg police force who were members of Uniter, following an investigation by Stern magazine. The two officers are accused of illegal data retrieval. According to Heise magazine, one of the suspects “did research in the operational documentation system,” while the second officer accessed police information about himself and his family as well as information about another former member of Uniter. The two policemen have since left the group and remain in service.

At the end of last year, the Uniter membership of a lecturer at the police academy in Brandenburg was revealed. According to the taz newspaper, the lecturer was “District Manager East,” i.e., part of the leadership team of Hannibal. He was also suspected of illegally accessing police database systems, but the German Interior Ministry rejected this suspicion in June.

Far-right networks In Germany are able to energetically continue their work because their activities are being systematically covered up by the highest authorities in the state apparatus and political circles.

Germany: Right-wing extremist network in police pays homage to Hitler and the Nazis

Jan Ritter

The right-wing extremist networks in the German police are even more extensive than was previously known. On Wednesday, September 16, 34 stations and private homes in North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) were searched by police officers at around 6 a.m. Over 200 investigators searched buildings in Essen, Duisburg, Moers, Mülheim an der Ruhr, Selm and Oberhausen.

Two weeks earlier, on September 3, investigators had accidentally come across racist and right-wing extremist material on the private mobile phone of a 32-year-old police officer from Essen. They were originally investigating his colleague on suspicion of betraying official secrets to journalists.

According to the police, the racist and right-wing extremist material found meets the offence of using “symbols of anti-constitutional organisations” and of “hate speech.” At least 126 “criminally relevant” pictures were seized, the content of which is inadequately described as agitating against refugees, fascist filth, and the trivialisation of the Nazis.

As Zeit Online reports, one photo montage shows a grinning SS soldier pressing a button marked “Gas.” In the background, refugees are screaming in fear in a gas chamber. Another racist montage also promotes the systematic extermination of people of other skin colours or ethnicities. A man on a bicycle aims a pistol at a black child who is trying to escape from him. Below the picture is written: “When the charcoal runs away while barbecuing.”

Another depiction shows an American policeman. “I like to shoot cans. Pepsi cans, Coke cans, Africans,” he says. Here, Africans are dehumanised with a cheap pun, declared to be objects, and shooting at them equated with target practice using beverage cans. In addition to this racist agitation, numerous other pictures were found showing Hitler, the Hitler salute, swastikas, and Reich war flags, among other things.

The right-wing extremist material comes from at least five chat groups. All 29 members of these chat groups are police officers from NRW and are aged between their mid-20s and mid-50s. According to the police, investigations have been launched against 11 members of the chat groups, as they are said to be solely responsible for spreading the agitation. All other members have merely been suspended and 14 of them are to be removed from active duty. Twenty-five of the officers are under the authority of the Essen police headquarters and performed their duties in a service group for the Mülheim an der Ruhr protection police, whose leader is also a member of the chat groups.

However, the network does not only extend to the constabulary in Mülheim an der Ruhr or the area controlled by the Essen police headquarters. One member works at the NRW State Office for Criminal Investigation, another member at the State Office for Training, Further Training and Personnel Affairs (LAFP), and two officers are employed at the State Office for Central Police Services (LZPD) in Duisburg.

The fact that members of the chat groups belong to all three higher state authorities of the police in North Rhine-Westphalia very clearly shows the extent of the networking of right-wing extremists within the police. The LAFP is, among other things, responsible for the initial and further training of special police units in NRW as well as in other federal states, and the LZPD supports the coordination of forces and operations in special situations and with the necessary special equipment. Thus, the network had access to central bodies of the police in NRW.

The first chat group was established in 2012; the group with the most pictures has been active since March 2015, and the last documented message was sent on August 27, 2020. As the investigations and findings so far are based solely on the analysis of a mobile phone found by chance, the network uncovered is only the tip of the iceberg. Many more mobile phones were confiscated during the raids last Wednesday.

The lie about “isolated cases”

At a press conference hastily convened after the searches, North Rhine-Westphalia’s Interior Minister Herbert Reul (Christian Democratic Union, CDU) was busy trying to distract attention from the comprehensive right-wing extremist structures of the police authority under his jurisdiction. He spoke of a “disgrace for the NRW police force” and regretted that the accusations “hit the police to the core.” He was “shocked” and “appalled.”

This is the height of hypocrisy. Reul is well informed about the extreme right-wing structures in the police and is working systematically to cover up their true extent. In response to recent revelations, he has installed a special representative for right-wing extremist tendencies in the NRW police force. Uwe Reichel-Offermann, previously deputy head of the State Office for the Protection of the Constitution (as the secret service is called), which is subordinate to Reul, now reports personally to him, giving him full control over the results of the investigation.

At the beginning of the year, Reul had already ordered the appointment of decentralised ombudsmen in all police headquarters as contact persons for reporting “anti-constitutional” suspicious activity following the disclosure of several right-wing extremist incidents in the NRW police force. Significantly, Silvia Richter, wife of the police commissioner, took over the post in Essen. Reul had also spoken out against conducting comprehensive studies regarding right-wing tendencies within the police force.

At that time, as reported in Der Spiegel, racist pictures and images of imperial eagles and swastikas were being spread in chat groups by officers of the Aachen-West police station, among others. At a demonstration in Duisburg, a police car with a sticker of the right-wing extremist Identity Movement attracted attention. “Fight back! It’s your country!” could be seen written on the police car. Also, Thorsten W., a suspected collaborator of the “Gruppe S.” terrorist cell, worked for the traffic commissioner’s office in Hamm, where his right-wing extremist sentiments were well known among colleagues.

The right-wing extremist activities in NRW are part of a comprehensive neo-Nazi network that has formed within the security apparatus and the army and is behaving increasingly aggressively. According to the Tagesspiegel, there have been over 170 incidents of a “racist or right-wing extremist nature in the police force” in the last five years, according to official figures. In Berlin, more than 80 cases have been initiated against police officers since 2017. This year alone, numerous new cases have come to light.

In Baden-Württemberg, seven police students were suspended because it became known they had made nationalist, anti-Semitic and misogynist statements, as reported by the magazine Der Spiegel. More than 40 active and former Munich police officers exchanged anti-Semitic messages in a chat group.

In the Frankfurt “Itiotentreff,” a chat group which included five officers and a colleague from the 1st precinct, numerous right-wing extremist messages and more than 100 pictures were shared. The members of the group made fun of disabled people, concentration camp prisoners, dark-skinned people, refugees and Jews. Particularly inhumane posts were news items showing the Syrian refugee boy Alan Kurdi, whose picture became sadly famous in 2015. “Whoever finds him, may keep him,” was written under the picture of his lifeless body, washed up on a beach in Turkey.

On July 23, Die Zeit published an article online, under the headline “Soldiers planning a coup,” revealing excerpts from the nationwide radical right-wing Telegram group #WIR. Among the more than 240 members, at times, of the chat group were “several soldiers, reservists and veterans” of the Bundeswehr (armed forces), including numerous right-wing extremists and neo-Nazis, writes author and right-wing extremism expert Christian Fuchs.

The right-wing extremists are networked nationwide and planned the assassination of left-wingers and the establishment of a fascist regime in Germany on a “Day X.” In the case of Group S., they had been hoarding weapons and ammunition for a concerted “commando” action against mosques and Muslims.

In several German states, data were retrieved from police computers and the personal information subsequently used in right-wing extremist, threatening emails. In the best-known case, the private address of Seda Basay-Yildiz was retrieved via a Hesse police computer in the 1st precinct in Frankfurt. A few days later, the lawyer, who had defended relatives of victims of the neo-Nazi “National Socialist Underground” (NSU), among others, received a threatening letter signed “NSU 2.0.”

The promotion of right-wing extremist structures in the state apparatus

The reason why neo-Nazis can act so provocatively is that no one in the entire political establishment—among the parties, the investigating authorities and the judiciary—seriously opposes them. On the contrary, the spread of right-wing extremist terrorist networks in the army, police and secret services is part of the sharp rightward turn of the ruling class as a whole.

This is evident not only at federal level, where the grand coalition of the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats adopts the policies and programme of the fascist Alternative for Germany (AfD) on all central issues, but also at state level. In NRW, Reul and the Christian Democrat-Free Democrat state government stand for a strict “law-and-order” policy and systematically strengthen the extreme right-wing structures in the state apparatus to take action against the growing left-wing opposition.

Under Reul’s leadership, a regime of “zero tolerance” was established in the Essen police force. As reported by Zeit Online, he had issued the slogan in the Ruhr metropolis, “to take tough action against the criminal machinations of some Lebanese extended families.” Since then, shisha bars, for example, have been under constant surveillance. This policy deliberately promotes racist and right-wing extremist tendencies within and outside the police. In February, an extreme right-wing terrorist committed a massacre at two shisha bars in Hanau and shot nine people.

While the ruling class protects the extreme right-wing networks and allows them to operate despite their bloody terror, it is waging a war against the left. In November 2018, Reul presented a strategy paper titled “Secret Service of the Future.” According to the Süddeutsche Zeitung, he demands that “instead of ‘narrowing its gaze to violent extremist actors,’ the Office for the Protection of the Constitution must once again monitor nonviolent groups more closely.”

He justifies this by saying organisations that are not violent themselves form the “environment of political violence,” “the political breeding ground, the so-called sympathiser scene.” He refers to the protests in the Hambach Forest, where environmentalists are opposing large-scale deforestation to enable opencast lignite mining. Reul had the protest camp cleared in September 2018 using a massive police intervention. The accusation that political opposition endangers the state and creates a breeding ground for political violence is part of the standard repertoire of every totalitarian dictatorship.

Like the entire ruling class, Reul fears that the growing outrage over social inequality, militarism and the increasing of state powers will come together with an anti-capitalist, socialist programme. That is why he wants the Secret Service not to “narrow” its view to violent actors (who are often infiltrated by the secret services), but to monitor, intimidate and suppress legal political organisations. The radical right-wing terrorist networks play a central role in this strategy.