Information Interruptus: Bing, Google and the News Media Bargaining Code

Binoy Kampmark

It’s looking a touch quixotic, but the News Media Bargaining Code has become Australia’s weapon of choice in attempting to redistribute proceeds from big tech into the coffers of a withering fourth estate.  It has now reached a point of sufficient concern for Google as to become threatening, winding its way to a Senate Committee Inquiry before going to Parliament for a vote.

The Code aims to remunerate news media businesses for content they generate that is subsequently found through searches on digital platforms.  The body behind its drafting, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, states that it would “address the fundamental bargaining power imbalance between Australian news media businesses and major digital platforms.”  Such an imbalance has led to news outlets “accepting less favourable terms for inclusion of news on digital platform services than they would otherwise agree to.”

The Code encourages tech giants and news outlets to engage in commercial negotiations outside its remit and establish a framework for negotiations where the parties bargain in good faith in coming to binding agreements.  Arbitration is available to determine the remuneration in question should the parties find themselves unable to reach an agreement.

The redistribution measure in the draft Code amounts to a “link tax” that would only serve to benefit core news media and require them to be alerted prior to any upcoming algorithmic rankings made by the tech giants.  Those companies are also required to yield collected consumer data.  As the ACCC describes it, Facebook and Google would have to furnish “information about how and when [they] make available user data collected through users’ interactions with news content.”

Mandating such data collection converts Google into a hoover of consumer information.  Tech giants, according to the code in its current form, have to list all collected data which may, or may not be handed over without the consent of the user.

This is a field with many villains and few heroes.  Google has not covered itself in glory by threatening to pull its search engine from Australia in what would amount to an act of information interruptus.  A statement by Mel Silva, Managing director for Google Australia, excoriates the Bargaining Code for potentially undermining “the benefits of the internet for millions of Australians”.  The company takes issue with having to pay publishers for links – not even the article itself – that would pop up in the search results.  “Right now, no website or search engine pays to connect people to other sites through links.  This law would change that, making Google pay to provide links for the first time in our history.”

On January 31, Google published 12 answers on questions pertaining to the Code.  They are naturally self-flattering.  Market alternatives are suggested.  “Instead of paying for links, we’re proposing to pay publishers through Google News Showcase, our AU$1.3 billion global investment in news partnerships over the next three years.”  A commercial arbitration model based on News Showcase is also suggested, “one that would let arbitrators look at the comparable value of similar transactions, rather than an unpredictable process which looks at one side’s costs and discounts the value Google provides publishers.”

Australian politicians smell a chance for undeserved popularity.  Other platforms are also sensing a chance to move in.  Microsoft, in a move that can only draw some suspicion, supports the Code and is willing to supplant Google’s role in Australia should that search engine exit.  Company president Brad Smith and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella have already spoken to Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Communications Minister Paul Fletcher.  Smith was keen to butter up the officials, with Microsoft “committed to Australia and the news publishers that are vital to the country’s democracy.”  Public interest journalism faced “many challenges from the digital era” and supported the ACCC in its efforts to confront them.  The proposed code “reasonably attempts to address the bargaining power imbalance between digital platforms and Australian news businesses.”

Given that Microsoft, with its search engine Bing, is a midget relative to the monster that is Google (Google’s Australia share is 94.5%, Bing’s 3.6%), this sounds much like the loser’s bid to claim ground yielded by a great and bullying power.  Smith promises further investment “to ensure Bing is comparable to our competitors”.

Clearly, the message from that company has found a willing audience in the Australian government and among such think tanks as the Australia Institute’s Centre for Responsible Technology.  Morrison found Microsoft’s confidence appealing.  Admitting to having no expertise on the subject of Google’s influence in the search market, Fletcher was still delighted by Microsoft’s interest “in the market opportunity in Australia”.  Bing is also attractive for not personalising searches to the user.  Bing, suggested one academic, “doesn’t know and frankly doesn’t care that you’re in the market for yoga pants, for example.”

For all that backslapping praise, Bing comes with its problems.  The engine hosts its own rich share of misinformation and disinformation.  Conspiracy theories find comfortable spaces to occupy in the search algorithms. It privileges student-essay sites, the bane of many university instructors.  Chris Duckett and Null Pointer further suggest that Bing will leave the general or casual searcher generally satisfied but not one keen on trawling the deeper subjects.  By way of contrast, Dave Nilsson of the digital marketing agency ConvertedClick is sold on the image and video searches on Bing.  Good if you like pictures and prettiness, then.

There is much wishful thinking behind the Code, not least in the pigs might fly notion that individual journalists will necessarily benefit from it.  Reining in the gargantuan power of big tech monsters is an admirable position to take and Australian politicians can draw upon precedent.  They might have, for instance, busied themselves with drafting such laws modelled on the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation.  But a model that props up such failing entities as News Corp and actually seeks to channel cash into the long stained and grubby pockets of media moguls is a questionable proposition.  Australia finds itself caught between a blackmailing Silicon Valley giant and such ruthless purveyors of mind numbing trash as Rupert Murdoch.  Some choice.

UK unemployment rises to highest level in four years

Simon Whelan

The number of workers being made redundant in the UK is rising at the fastest pace on record, as pandemic lockdown measures place increasing pressure on the economy.

The Office of National Statistics (ONS) revealed last week that unemployment is at its highest level for four years, reaching 5 percent. It found that 1.7 million workers are without work.

Britain’s economy has suffered the deepest recession for more than 300 years, with Bank of England chief economist Andrew Haldane saying that without state intervention the unemployment figures would have already reached five million. The government’s furlough scheme has supplemented the wages of almost 10 million workers employed by more than 1.2 million companies during various pandemic lockdowns since last March.

In addition to the rapidly rising figures of those without work, millions more workers on furlough run the risk of being made redundant once the scheme is lifted at the end of March. The government’s independent economics forecaster, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), expects the jobless rate to more than double from pre-pandemic levels to 7.5 percent when furlough ends—representing more than 2.6 million people out of work.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, over 210,000 UK jobs have been axed and this figure does not include job losses announced by transnational corporations making redundancies but who have not yet stipulated how many jobs will be cut from their UK located operations. According to the Financial Times, “418,000 people have fallen out of work since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, taking the total number of unemployed people to 1.72m.”

Jobs have been slashed across all sectors, with retail especially hard hit—with closures, mergers and acquisitions occurring as traditional retailers lose out to the online corporations.

The Arcadia group, which included the Topshop and Miss Selfridge brands, fell into administration at the beginning of December last year with debts of £750 million. Last week, online retailer Asos bought up Topshop, Miss Selfridge and another Arcadia brand, HIIT, from administrators for £265 million. Only a fraction of Arcadia’s 13,000 strong workforce will keep their jobs as Asos is only concerned with the online operations of these firms.

This week another fashioning conglomerate Boohoo acquired Dorothy Perkins and two more Arcadia brands for £25.2 million. Boohoo also bought the remains of collapsed high street department store chain, Debenhams, for £55 million, including its digital assets. From next month, 125 Debenhams stores will close. Boohoo previously bought the collapsed retailers Oasis and Warehouse and will take over the e-commerce and digital assets of their brands, and their inventory.

As with Asos, Boohoo’s business model requires no high street shops and the deal sees 214 stores permanently close and 2,450 jobs lost immediately.

Edinburgh’s department store, Jenners, will close in early May with 200 workers losing their jobs.

This year will see thousands more job losses in retail, following the closure of 320 stores every week in 2020. The Centre for Retail Research forecasts 200,000 job losses in 2021. Job losses were being “caused by high costs, low profitability, and [the high street] losing sales to online shopping… The low growth in consumer spending since 2015 has meant that the growth in online sales comes at the expense of the high street.”

Job losses continue in manufacturing, with car maker Nissan in talks with trade unions over redundancies at its Sunderland plant. The BBC reported, “About 160 office-based roles are potentially affected by the consultation which does not involve production staff…”

Rolls-Royce is shedding 9,000 staff from its 52,000 pre-pandemic workforce, with 7,000 jobs already gone. On Monday it was announced that it was finalising, with the trade unions, a cost-saving shutdown. Employees will lose two weeks pay over the summer affecting all 19,000 staff in its civil aerospace arm worldwide. The firm has 12,500 UK employees.

The Conservative government is finalizing its “road map” for ending all restrictions on opening up the economy, to be announced February 22. Fearing the outbreak of workers struggles in the current febrile atmosphere, the Trades Union Congress (TUC) have raised concerns regarding the consequences of mass unemployment unless the pandemic furlough scheme is extended.

Frances O’Grady, TUC General Secretary, framed her response in pro-business terms: “The government must understand we need to work our way back to growth, and for that we need people in jobs. Otherwise we are going to end up with real, deep economic and social problems.”

O’Grady advised Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak to extend furlough provisions until the end of 2021. O’Grady appealed to the better nature of the Tory government, which has overseen over 120,000 deaths over the last year, saying it had a “moral obligation” to prevent a return to 1980s levels of mass unemployment.

Between the early to mid-1980’s, unemployment topped three million. The real figure of those without jobs, including large numbers shifted off onto other welfare benefits and 19 government instigated changes to the way the numbers of unemployed was calculated, meant the real numbers without work was probably double the official figures.

Speaking on behalf of big business, the director general of the British Chamber of Commerce, Adam Marshall, called for a slight extension to the furlough scheme—extending it only from April to July.

The Tories are refusing to extend any form of economic support to workers, with the Treasury claiming to have already spent in excess of £280 billion. The government increased the value of Universal Credit unemployment benefits by £20 a week at the start of the crisis, but this is set to be cut back at the end of March—bringing about a significant increase in poverty.

All talk is that the economic fundamentals are sound and that exit from the European Union is a springboard to economic recovery. This is premised on ramping up the exploitation of the working class, in particular the younger generation.

The Department for Work and Pensions recently rolled out a long-planned cheap labour scheme to push 160,000 unemployed people into an already saturated jobs market. Blaming the unemployed for their plight, Therese Coffey, the employment secretary claimed “digital job surgeries” would assist those without work to improve their interview skills.

Young people, who are being lined up to take up mainly minimum wage jobs, are bearing the brunt of the unemployment crisis. Many are employed in sectors of the economy typified by a lack of security, part-time status, poverty level wages and poor terms and conditions—hospitality, the arts, retail, leisure, entertainment and security, all negatively affected by shutdowns and physical distancing measures.

Since the first pandemic lockdown in March 2020, unemployment for those aged 16 to 24 increased by 124,000 to 597,000. The number of graduate entry level posts declined 11 percent during 2020. Recruitment is reduced at more than half of the UK’s biggest graduate employers, representing the largest annual decrease since the financial crisis in 2009.

Experts have drawn attention to the long-term impacts of unemployment, not the least of which include lower pay and reduced employment prospects. In addition, the mental and physical health of young people is being adversely affected.

The group most affected by the pandemic are those aged 50 plus. There are now 91,000 more unemployed older people than there were 12 months ago—an increase of a third in a single year, significantly more than in any other age group. Workers aged over 50 who lose their jobs are significantly more likely to suffer long-term unemployment than other age group and are more than twice as likely as other age groups to be out of work for at least two years.

Johnson government’s homicidal drive to reopen UK schools justified by feigned concern for children’s welfare

Liz Smith & Margot Miller

The Johnson government is hell-bent on relaxing lockdown restrictions to reopen the UK economy, beginning February 22. Schools are to reopen in England from March 8 with the Tories justifying this on the grounds of feigned concerns about children’s welfare.

Schools in Scotland and Wales will reopen even earlier, on February 22, and Johnson is under pressure to reopen sooner in England. Tory MP Mark Harper, from a 70-strong section of the party in the anti-lockdown “Covid Recovery Group”, told the BBC: “I was pleased the Prime Minister confirmed that schools will be the first thing to reopen from 8th March but disappointed it wasn’t earlier. Now we see that Scotland is going to start bringing back pupils from 22 February, straight after half-term, many colleagues will hope that Ministers will look urgently to see if that could happen in England as well.”

Professor Robert Dingwall of the government’s New and Emerging Respiratory Advisory Group (NERVTAG), referring to the numbers vaccinated, told the Telegraph, “Many people… think it’s a tolerable risk to get the kids back as the Scots are doing.”

Year seven pupils are directed to socially distance as they arrive for their first day at Kingsdale Foundation School in London, Thursday, Sept. 3, 2020. AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth)

The pandemic demands the strictest lockdown measures. At least 113,000 people have succumbed to the virus in the UK and new more transmissible variants are emerging.

Just over 12 million people of the 66 million population have received only their first vaccine dose. Until the virus is suppressed in the population, the opportunity lurks for vaccine-resistant strains to develop. According to one study, whose results are being verified, the protection offered by the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine may not be as effective against the new South African variant.

When Johnson precipitously reopened schools and businesses last September, it led to a massive resurgence of the virus which killed more people than the first wave in the spring. He used the same cynical justification for opening schools then: “It’s the kids from the poorer families who aren’t going back, and so you are entrenching social injustice.”

Another unsafe reopening would be devastating. Professor Neil Ferguson’s team at Imperial College London warns that easing restrictions too rapidly from March to July could lead to an additional 130,800 fatalities between now and June next year. This would take UK COVID-19 deaths up to around a quarter of a million.

Addressing Parliament January 27, Johnson declared reopening schools “a national priority” and insisted, “we are doing everything in our power to keep them open because children’s education is too vital… This is why schools were the very last to close and when we move out of lockdown, they will be the first to reopen.”

Children’s education and mental health certainly suffered the over the past year. The attainment gap between poorer and better-off children widened. Referrals to child mental health services reached an all-time high. Charities such as Childline and the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children experienced an increase in children under 11 seeking counselling.

Child and adolescent psychotherapist Jane O’Rourke, founder of website for mental health professionals Mind in Mind, told the BBC Today programme for “deprived children, the pandemic has exacerbated issues… not just [for] teenagers. I am seeing very young children displaying signs of depression, five, six, seven-year-olds.”

But the government—backed by the Labour opposition and education unions—is not rushing to reopen schools out of concern for children’s welfare. As in the US and Europe, schools are viewed only as holding pens for children which must be opened to get parents back to work and producing profits for the corporations. Child welfare is being weaponized in a despicable propaganda campaign to justify criminality and mass deaths described by the British Medical Journal as “social murder”.

Johnson had the gall to repeat his previous absurdity that schools are simultaneously “safe” and contribute to the spread of the pandemic: “I want to stress that the problem is not that schools are unsafe to children. The problem is that schools may nonetheless act as vectors for transmission, causing the virus to spread between households.”

The fact is that schools, alongside workplaces, are proven major vectors for the virus and that closing schools is one of the most effective measures that can be taken to save lives. Up to 100 children a week are currently being hospitalised with paediatric inflammatory multi-system syndrome (PIMS), a rare inflammatory disease linked with coronavirus.

Johnson was not contradicted by Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer, who agreed, “Of course we welcome any steps to reopen schools.” He then wrote in the pro-Tory Daily Mail, “I share the Government’s ambition to make it a national mission to reopen our schools. I will do everything in my power as leader of the Labour Party to make that happen.”

The education unions took the same line. National Education Union (NEU) joint leader Mary Bousted said in a press release on January 27, “We all want schools to open, but like the Prime Minister we want them to open when it is safe to do so… We agree with Boris Johnson that this is a balancing act [emphasis added].”

The Tories’, Labour’s and the unions’ concern for the fate of children is belied by decades of cuts to children’s services and rising child poverty. Johnson added a derisory £300 million to the £1 billion catch-up programme for pupils announced in November. This measly amount is no compensation for the privations of the last year for which the government was responsible—overseeing a surge in unemployment, poverty and destitution—let alone the decades of cuts to education and children’s services.

Between 2009-10 and 2019-20, spending on state education fell by 8 percent in real terms. In this time, more than 1,000 Sure Start centres—that provided a wide variety of services to support children's learning skills, health and well-being—closed due to Tory austerity cuts imposed by Labour controlled councils. These forced the poorest families to rely on volunteer provision run by charities and the church.

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation wrote in a recent report that “in 2019, 4.2 million children were living in poverty” and a total of “14.5 million people in the UK, over one in five.”

United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Philip Alston, following his visit to the UK in 2018 reported that, “Although the United Kingdom is the world’s fifth largest economy, one fifth of its population (14 million people) live in poverty, and 1.5 million of them experienced destitution in 2017. Policies of austerity introduced in 2010 continue largely unabated, despite the tragic social consequences. Close to 40 percent of children are predicted to be living in poverty by 2021. [emphasis added]”

Such deprivation has had a catastrophic effect on the mental health and well-being of the UK’s children. Over the past five years mental health professionals repeatedly emphasised the impact on children’s mental health of social disadvantage combined with government-driven tests and exam pressures.

In 2017, research carried out by the National Health Service (NHS) reported one in 20 five to 19-year-olds met the criteria for having two or more mental disorders. One in eight (12.8 percent) five to 19-year-olds had at least one mental health disorder. That rose in the first year of the pandemic to one in six, which translates into four to five children in each class.

Less than one in three children and young people with a diagnosable mental health condition get access to NHS care and treatment and the average median waiting time for children in 2017/18 was five weeks to receive an initial assessment and nine weeks to receive treatment. In 2019/20, 538,564 children were referred for help, an increase of 35 percent on 2018/19, and nearly 60 percent on 2017/18. The numbers getting treatment are also increasing but at a much slower rate. In 2019/20, 391,940 children received treatment.

Research by the Young Minds (YM) mental health charity on A&E attendances by young people with psychiatric conditions in 2018 showed a doubling in five years to 27,487.

The fight to put an end to child poverty, provide high-quality children’s services and education, and to end the mass loss of life from the pandemic puts the working class in direct conflict with the profit interests of capitalism. These goals are incompatible with the monopolisation of huge swathes of social wealth by a tiny super-rich oligarchy, many of whom have profited handsomely throughout the pandemic and benefited from government bailouts and money printing. That wealth must be seized and distributed to meet social need.

International Criminal Court ruling paves way for legal proceedings against Israel for war crimes

Jean Shaoul

The International Criminal Court (ICC) has ruled that it does have jurisdiction over war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Palestinian territories of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem.

This paves the way for investigations into Israel and Hamas’ conduct during Israel’s murderous assault on Gaza in 2014 and Israel’s response to the weekly protests held under the banner of the Great March of Return that started in March 2018 and lasted for more than a year.

According to United Nations figures, Israel’s bombardment of Gaza in 2014 killed 2,251 Palestinians, including 1,462 civilians, and injured 11,231. Of the Palestinians who lost their lives, 521 were children and 283 were women. The civilian death toll was far higher than that of the estimated 400 fighters belonging to Hamas, the Islamist group that controls Gaza and the ostensible target of the war. Just 67 Israeli soldiers, along with six civilians, were killed, and 1,600 soldiers were injured. The UN’s Human Rights Council (UNHRC) concluded that the mass killing and destruction were deliberate, not accidental, resulting from explicit decisions taken at the highest level of the Israeli government.

Gaza Strip, July 2014: The Kaware’ family home, where eight people, including six minors, were killed, and from the Hamad family home where six members of that family, including one girl – a minor – were killed. (source: Muhammad Sabah and B'Tselem-Creative Commons)

Israeli forces responded to the largely peaceful Great March of Return protests, held in Gaza near its border with Israel, by firing tear gas canisters, some of them dropped from drones, rubber bullets and live ammunition, mostly by snipers. As a result, 214 Palestinians, including 46 children, were killed, and over 36,100, including nearly 8,800 children were injured. One in five of those injured (over 8,000) were hit by live ammunition. In contrast, just one Israeli soldier was killed and seven others injured during the demonstrations.

The ICC ruling constitutes a potential legal barrier to Israel’s plans to extend and/or build new settlements and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plans, now on hold, to annex the Jordan Valley in breach of the ban on an occupying power settling civilians in or annexing occupied territory.

While Fatou Bensouda, the ICC’s chief prosecutor in The Hague, announced in December 2019 that there was sufficient evidence to investigate allegations of war crimes, she requested a jurisdictional ruling from ICC judges to confirm that the court has the necessary territorial jurisdiction before proceeding to a full investigation. The Palestinian Authority, which is an observer state at the UN, joined the ICC in 2015 and asked it to investigate Israeli war crimes.

Until now, the ICC has largely confined its investigations to Africa, which accounts for virtually all of those indicted or arrested by the court since its founding nearly two decades ago. The announcement reflects the increasing international opposition, and within Israel itself, to the wars, repression, occupation, dispossession, torture and collective punishment inflicted on the Palestinian people.

This latest ruling has infuriated Israel and its patron in Washington, which rejects any constraints on its geostrategic interests and plans for a new imperialist carve up of the world in which Israel plays a central role in carrying out this agenda and suppressing the working class in the region.

Neither state signed up to the 1998 Rome Statute that established the ICC with powers to prosecute individuals—not states—accused of genocide, crimes against humanity or war crimes committed since July 2002, when the statute came into force. This was because their record of wars of aggression and criminal actions would open their officials to prosecution.

As the ICC came under pressure from the major powers, Bensouda sought to deflect allegations of anti-Israel bias by accusing the Palestinians of committing war crimes, despite the grossly uneven nature of Israel’s seven-week long war against Gaza in 2014 and provisions in the UN Charter recognizing the right of self-defence when attacked.

Last April, the Trump administration revoked Bensouda’s entry visa to the US and two months later announced that it was placing sanctions on the ICC in response to the court’s intention to probe the conduct of US forces in Afghanistan. Netanyahu called the ICC a “kangaroo court” and a “politicized court obsessed with conducting witch hunts against Israel, the United States and other democracies that respect human rights.”

While any investigation or prosecution of Israeli officials by the ICC is fraught with practical difficulties, which Israel will seek to exploit, and Bensouda’s term of office expires in June, the ICC’s ruling poses two threats to Israel.

It opens up the possibility that hundreds of Israeli government and military officials could be open to arrest if they travel abroad to countries that have “universal jurisdiction”, although countries including the UK have refrained from using such powers against Israelis. A senior Israeli official in the Justice Ministry said that it had prepared a list of hundreds of Israelis who might be at risk and that “We are preparing to mount a full defence for any Israeli citizens that the court attempts to legally persecute if an investigation is opened.”

Second, the ruling, by recognising the Palestinian Authority as a state with the right to seek redress from the court, paves the way for legal action against Israel in the ICC over any construction in West Bank and East Jerusalem settlements that are now home to nearly 700,000 Israelis, or the demolition of homes belonging to Palestinians. As an Israeli official told Ynet News, the online outlet for the Yedioth Aharonot newspaper, “It is unprecedented that every action taken on the West Bank can now be investigated by the court.”

Attacking this latest ICC ruling, Netanyahu said, “Today, the court proved once again that it is a political body and not a judicial institution. The court ignores real war crimes, and instead persecutes Israel, a country with a stable democratic regime that holds up the rule of law and is not a member of the court. With this decision, the court harmed democratic nations’ right to defend themselves from terrorism and played into the hands of elements that undermine efforts to expand the circle of peace.”

Netanyahu released a video statement accusing the court of “pure anti-Semitism,” even as it “refuses to investigate brutal dictatorships like Iran and Syria, who commit horrific atrocities almost daily.” He pledged to “fight this perversion of justice with all our might.”

Netanyahu’s statements distort the ICC’s actual ruling that merely determined that Palestine, which is recognised by the UN General Assembly and whose Palestinian Authority, established under the 1993 Oslo Accords had joined the ICC, could delegate its jurisdiction to the ICC. The court insisted that it had no authority to rule on Palestinian statehood and that its ruling on jurisdiction is “neither adjudicating a border dispute… nor prejudging the question of any future borders.”

In Washington, the incoming Biden administration continued former President Donald Trump’s support for Israel, with State Department spokesman Ned Price saying, “The United States objects to today’s [ICC] decision regarding the Palestinian situation. Israel is not a State Party to the Rome Statute…

“The United States has always taken the position that the court’s jurisdiction should be reserved for countries that consent to it, or that are referred by the U.N. Security Council,” he added, concluding, “We will continue to uphold President Biden’s strong commitment to Israel and its security, including opposing actions that seek to target Israel unfairly.”

The furious response by Tel Aviv and Washington to the ICC’s ruling flows from the ever-escalating pursuit of their predatory interests by means of military force.

Peru in COVID-19 lockdown as new Brazilian variant exposes murderous “herd immunity” policy

Miguel Andrade

Peru’s government imposed another two-week lockdown on January 31 in an attempt to counter a renewed collapse of the country’s health care system. Family members of COVID-19 patients have been left waiting in the streets for up to three days to fill life-saving oxygen cylinders, and the daily death toll has risen to over 180 in a country of just 32 million inhabitants. Late January figures show 600 excess deaths in the country when compared to January, 2020, pointing to a vast underestimation of the already alarming rate of COVID-19 deaths.

The new lockdown involves a total ban on land and air travel in or out of 10 of the 26 regions in the country, including the capital, Lima. It allows each person to leave their home for just one hour a day. Before the second wave of the pandemic spread in the northern hemisphere with the murderous maintenance of an “open economy” for the holiday season, Peru had sustained the world’s highest per capita death rate, a situation the renewed lockdown backhandedly admits may be repeated in the next months.

The Pargue Taruma Cemetery in Manaus, Brazil. Credit: Bruno Kelly

Peru has thus far recorded over 42,000 official COVID-19 deaths and roughly 1.2 million cases. Among the hardest hit are Peruvian health care workers, with nearly 300 doctors having died from COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic, along with over 100 nurses.

The medical consensus is that the real number of infections and deaths is far higher, as the country has a test rate of only 200,000 tests per million inhabitants.

This rate is just one fifth that of the United States, which itself suffered open sabotage by the Trump administration in order to hide the extent of the pandemic’s spread. At the same time, the Peruvian test rate is much higher than in neighboring countries such as Brazil and Argentina, where it stands at just 140,000 per million, and Mexico and Bolivia, where the rate is under 50,000 per million.

The capital of the Peruvian Amazon, Iquitos, was left out of the lockdown, after already having registered cases of the new Brazilian variant first found in travelers from Manaus. This new variant is suspected to be a major factor in the horrific collapse of the health infrastructure in Brazil’s Amazonian capital. Authorities are being forced to fly no less than 1,500 patients out of Manaus to avoid more deaths from the lack of oxygen. Peru’s department of Huánuco and the capital Lima have also registered cases of the Brazilian variant. In neighboring Bolivia, more than 100 cities had their COVID-19 alert status raised to maximum last week, but no lockdown has been announced yet.

Parallel to the surge in cases in Latin America is the unprecedented surge in the demand for medicinal oxygen, which now stands at almost triple the production and distribution rate in Manaus, and has surged by more than 700 percent in Mexico from December 20 to January 20, according to local authorities. In both Mexico and Peru, pandemic profiteers have tripled the price of oxygen cylinders.

With a rolling average of more than 1,000 deaths and 45,000 new cases in Brazil for 18 days now, the lack of oxygen is already threatening Brazil’s largest and richest city, São Paulo, which has taken in patients from around the country. The leading medicinal oxygen producer, White Martins, has notified local authorities in the city that it will retrieve oxygen cylinders from 3,000 home users in order to avoid a collapse in distribution to hospitals. From the north to the south of Brazil, nine states have more than 80 percent of COVID-19-dedicated ICUs occupied, while expansion capacity is hindered by hospitals struggling to treat patients who avoided or were unable to find medical care during the pandemic, leading to the onset or aggravation of other diseases.

The new Brazilian variant, named P.1 by the expert community, shares many genetic characteristics with the UK and especially the South African variants, which are believed to be more contagious than the original Wuhan strain. In the case of the South African variant, clinical trials have already found a dramatic decrease in the efficacies of two of the newest vaccines, from Novavax and Johnson & Johnson. The Novavax vaccine had its efficacy reduced from 89 percent in the UK to just 50 percent in South Africa, where the new strain is already dominant, while the Johnson & Johnson vaccine saw its efficacy drop from 72 percent in the US to just 57 percent in South Africa.

The P.1 variant was originally detected in Japan, after the genetic sequencing of samples taken from SARS-CoV-2 carriers coming from Manaus. Japanese authorities notified their international counterparts on January 10, and by January 27, eight countries, including South Korea, the United States and a number of European countries, had already registered cases of the new variant. Brazilian researchers have concluded that the new variant now accounts for at least 91 percent of cases in Manaus, up from 50 percent in December.

The resurgence of COVID-19 in the Amazon region connecting Brazil and Peru is the direct product of the murderous herd immunity policies pursued by the ruling classes internationally, and underscores their utter bankruptcy. Manaus was the stage for some of the most terrifying scenes internationally in the pandemic in mid-2020, with pictures of hundreds of fresh graves being dug seen around the world.

In September, a preliminary study estimated that 76 percent of the population in the city had already contracted COVID-19. The local authorities boasted that the city had achieved “herd immunity,” using this as the pretext for reopening schools and sending 110,000 pupils back to their classrooms—5 percent of the city’s population. The Manaus study was accepted for publication in the prestigious Science magazine, but appeared only in January, when the city was already seeing a 600 percent jump in COVID-19 deaths from December.

The same January 15 Science issue in which the article on the Manaus infection rate appeared, published a piece in the magazine’s Perspectives commentary section by British health experts Devi Sridhar and Deepti Gurdasani, reviewing the Manaus data. They warned bluntly in their headline, “Herd immunity by infection is not an option.”

They wrote: “What the findings of Buss et al. definitively show is that pursuing herd immunity through naturally acquired infection is not a strategy that can be considered. Achieving herd immunity through infection will be very costly in terms of mortality and morbidity, with little guarantee of success.” The article concluded: “Even a mitigation strategy whereby the virus is allowed to spread through the population with the objective of keeping admissions just below health care capacity, as is done for influenza virus, is clearly misguided for SARS-CoV-2.”

The same conclusion was reached almost in parallel by another team of Brazilian experts that had their work published in the Lancet on January 27. Titled “Resurgence of COVID-19 in Manaus, Brazil, despite high seroprevalence,” the article also raised the possibility that the Manaus surge could be related to the new variants evading previously acquired immunity. The Lancet paper also raises the crucial point that the same infection rate—or “attack rate,” as it is termed by immunologists to differentiate it from active infections—was found in the Peruvian Amazon capital, Iquitos. At the time, the EFE Spanish news agency posted a report titled “The strange case of the Peruvian city where the coronavirus ‘disappeared,’” also raising the dangerous and unsubstantiated prospect that “herd immunity” had been achieved in the city.

Lucas Ferrante, the lead author of an August 7 Nature Medicine article, titled, “Brazil’s policies condemn Amazonia to a second wave of COVID-19,” told the Intercept on February 3 that the new Brazilian strain may turn Manaus into the epicenter of a deadly international third wave of the pandemic. Expressing with utmost clarity the scientific understanding of the dynamics of the breeding of new variants, he said that the new variant was “caused by the second wave” his team had warned about in August. He concluded: “Either a lockdown is imposed now, or Governor Wilson Lima and President Bolsonaro will be responsible for the impact of additional infections and deaths in the republic and around the world.”

Even at this point, Manaus’ authorities are refusing to shut down non-essential services. On Monday, Ferrante stressed to Estado de S. Paulo: “It is unthinkable to return to in-person learning in any part of Brazil right now, in order to avoid the further spread of the new variant. We also recommend the shutdown of factories in the Manaus Industrial District,” adding this could be done “without pay cuts for workers.”

In fact, the city has been a central target of Bolsonaro’s herd immunity policy. The president and his sons—especially Eduardo, the head of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the Brazilian House who was a special guest at Trump’s White House in the lead-up to the January 6 putsch—celebrated the “liberation” of the city in late December, when authorities decided to “reopen the economy.” This followed a small, and largely staged, protest against restrictions by a handful of Bolsonaro loyalists. This had the same character as the staged anti-lockdown protests attended by right-wing militias in Michigan and other US states.

The reopening of Manaus was the most blatant act in what has been recently described by law scholars at the University of São Paulo (USP) as an “institutionalized strategy for virus propagation” by the Bolsonaro administration. A legal team coordinated by USP’s Global Health and Ethics expert, Deisy Ventura, in collaboration with the Conectas advocacy group, was able to document a timeline of actions taken by the Bolsonaro administration, including federal decrees, the promotion of quack cures and the undermining of any measure that restrained the economy.

This timeline, together with the unchecked spread around the world of deadlier new variants of SARS-CoV-2, stands as testimony to the essential unity of the ruling classes internationally in promoting the spread of the virus in the name of “herd immunity,” despite the somewhat more polished language of some European leaders, the incoming Biden administration or Bolsonaro’s local rivals in Brazil. Against clear scientific requirements, one state after another is pressing ahead with reopening schools, with the São Paulo government boasting of “leading” the back-to-school drive by enforcing the return of pupils in face of a strike by teachers.

Manaus stands as Bolsonaro’s pandemic Guernica. Just as the punitive bombing of the small Spanish town by the fascists in 1937 previewed the horrors of World War II, the murderous policy pursued in the Amazonian capital exposes the cruelty of the ruling classes and the pandemic carnage that is being unleashed worldwide.

Workers around the world must take the struggle against the herd immunity in their own hands, organizing a shutdown of non-essential services with full compensation for workers and ruined small businesses to stop the spread of the virus until effective vaccines are available worldwide.

Right-wing US Supreme Court majority again exempts large religious gatherings from COVID-19 safety measures

John Burton

Late Friday night, the right-wing Supreme Court majority enjoined California from prohibiting indoor church services in “Tier 1” counties where coronavirus infection rates and COVID-19 deaths are highest. The fractured 6–3 ruling expands the exception from public health measures first carved out for religious services last November.

The ruling comes just as California hospitals are beginning to recover from the holiday surge that caused emergency rooms and intensive care units to overflow, along with morgues, throughout the state. If California were a nation, its nearly 45,000 COVID-19 deaths would rank 15th in the world.

In this Sunday, June 7, 2020, file photo, a hundred faithful sit while minding social distancing, listening to Los Angeles Archbishop Jose H. Gomez celebrate Mass at Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, the first Mass held in English at the site since the re-opening of churches, in downtown Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes, File)

Under the ruling, California can continue to bar large, prolonged indoor gatherings such as sporting events, lectures and political meetings, but must allow indoor religious services up to 25 percent of capacity. A prohibition against singing remains in place for the time being.

Based on scientific studies and the advice of public health and epidemiological experts, California implemented complex, evolving regulations to restrict activities based on relative risks of transmitting COVID-19 and the resulting toll on the health care system. Since August, all large indoor gatherings have been prohibited within the most at-risk regions. Anticipating “free exercise” challenges, California explicitly provided for unlimited attendance at outdoor religious services and deemed faith-based streaming services “essential.”

Nevertheless, a Pentecostal denomination headquartered in San Diego County challenged the regulations, claiming that the regulations prohibiting large indoor gatherings and singing violated the First Amendment when applied to religious services. After the lower courts upheld the state regulations, the Supreme Court declined the church’s request for an injunction last May, with Chief Justice John Roberts casting the decisive vote in favor of the health measures over the dissent of right-wing Associate Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Trump appointees Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch.

Roberts wrote at the time, “Although California’s guidelines place restrictions on

places of worship,…similar or more severe restrictions apply to comparable secular

gatherings, including lectures, concerts, movie showings, spectator sports, and theatrical performances, where large groups of people gather in close proximity for extended periods of time. And the Order exempts or treats more leniently only dissimilar activities, such as operating grocery stores, banks, and laundromats, in which people neither congregate in large groups nor remain in close proximity for extended periods.”

The same 5–4 majority upheld public health regulations against free exercise of religion challenges in several other states, including Nevada and Illinois.

After Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg died last September, the Trump administration rammed through right-wing extremist Amy Coney Barrett. No longer needing Roberts’s vote, the new majority issued a late-night order the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, ruling 5–4 that New York’s public health regulations “singled out houses of worship for especially harsh treatment” and violated the “minimum requirement of neutrality” under the Free Exercise Clause.

Aligned with the three remaining moderate associate justices, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, Roberts dissented from the New York decision, writing, “It is a significant matter to override determinations made by public health officials concerning what is necessary for public safety in the midst of a deadly pandemic.”

A renewed challenge to the California regulations proved Roberts’s support of science to be short-lived. Voting with the majority last week to strike down California’s prohibition of large indoor gatherings, the chief justice showed no reticence in substituting his judgment for that of public health officials, explained his flip-flop: “The State’s present determination—that the maximum number of adherents who can safely worship in the most cavernous cathedral is zero—appears to reflect not expertise or discretion, but instead insufficient appreciation or consideration of the interests at stake.”

Roberts’s argument is reductio ad absurdum. Of course, a few people can sit far apart in a cathedral without posing any health risk. His ruling, however, allows services with up to one-quarter of capacity in facilities that are not necessarily “cavernous.”

Barrett’s single-paragraph concurrence, joined by Kavanaugh, her first signed opinion as a justice of the Supreme Court, upheld the “prohibition on singing and chanting during indoor services,” but only because the church and its pastor did not meet “the burden of establishing their entitlement to relief from the singing ban.”

Gorsuch’s opinion, joined by Thomas and Alito, is replete with the rhetoric of the right-wing political commentators that provided cover for Trump’s January 6 coup attempt, complaining that public health officials “have been moving the goalposts on pandemic-related sacrifices for months, adopting new bench-marks that always seem to put restoration of liberty just around the corner.”

Basing his analysis on a paranoid, fabricated premise that California was “impermissibly targeting” religion, Gorsuch characterized the health regulations as a “demand that individual right give way to collective interests.”

“Of course we are not scientists,” Gorsuch continued, “but neither may we abandon the field when government officials with experts in tow seek to infringe a constitutionally protected liberty.”

After bashing science, Gorsuch aimed at another perennial right-wing target, “California’s powerful entertainment industry,” which supposedly benefits from “a State playing favorites during a pandemic…while denying similar largesse to its faithful.”

“But if Hollywood may host a studio audience or film a singing competition while not a single soul may enter California’s churches, synagogues, and mosques, something has gone seriously awry,” Gorsuch wrote.

Associate Justice Elena Kagan dissented, joined by the two remaining moderates, Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor. “The Court orders California to weaken its restrictions on public gatherings by making a special exception for worship services. The majority does so even though the State’s policies treat worship just as favorably as secular activities (including political assemblies) that, according to medical evidence, pose the same risk of COVID transmission,” she wrote.

“The State is desperately trying to slow the spread of a deadly disease,” Kagan continued. “It has concluded, based on essentially undisputed epidemiological findings, that congregating together indoors poses a special threat of contagion. So it has devised regulations to curb attendance at those assemblies and—in the worst times—to force them outdoors. Crucially, California has applied each of those rules equivalently to religious activities and to secular activities, including some with First Amendment protection of their own.”

Kagan concluded with an emotional appeal. “I fervently hope that the Court’s intervention will not worsen the Nation’s COVID crisis. But if this decision causes suffering, we will not pay. Our marble halls are now closed to the public, and our life tenure forever insulates us from responsibility for our errors. That would seem good reason to avoid disrupting a State’s pandemic response. But the Court forges ahead regardless, insisting that science-based policy yield to judicial edict.”

Americans United for Separation of Church and State said in a statement that “The Supreme Court has misconstrued religious freedom to mean religious privilege and placed the health of the American people in jeopardy.”

San Diego County, the home of the plaintiff church, recently announced its youngest COVID-19 victim, a 10-year-old boy, along with its oldest, a 106-year-old man. The Supreme Court’s ruling will lead to many more such tragedies in the coming months.

Facebook’s “depoliticization” aimed at censorship of left-wing and socialist organizations

Kevin Reed

The ongoing drive to impose online political censorship of the left has become clearer over the past week following remarks by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg that the social media platform was being “depoliticized.”

Speaking during a fourth-quarter earnings call with investors on January 28, Zuckerberg said the company was working on methods to “reduce the amount of political content in News Feed.” He said that Facebook was “continuing to fine-tune how this works” and “we plan to keep civic and political groups out of recommendations for the long term and we plan to expand that policy globally.”

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies before a House Energy and Commerce hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington on April 11, 2018 (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

While individuals, pages and groups have been ostensibly blocked, banned or deleted for violating “community standards” in the past, Zuckerberg said the ongoing efforts to “turn down the temperature and discourage divisive conversation and communities” would include “groups that we may not want to encourage people to join even if they don’t violate our policies.”

Zuckerberg’s remarks were in part a response to a letter he received on January 21 from Democratic Representatives Tom Malinowski of New Jersey and Anna Eshoo of California that blamed Facebook for presenting users with “content most likely to reinforce their existing political biases, especially those rooted in anger, anxiety, and fear,” and for using algorithms that “undermine our shared sense of objective reality, intensify fringe political beliefs, facilitate connections between extremist users.”

Malinowski and Eshoo praised Facebook’s decision before the 2020 elections to stop “recommending that users join political and social issue groups” and denounced the lifting of these restrictions before the Georgia run-off election, which caused “a spike in partisan political content and a decline in authoritative news sources in users’ newsfeeds.”

While it may appear that Zuckerberg and the Democrats are responding to the storming of the US Capitol on January 6 by a fascist mob incited by Donald Trump in a coup attempt aimed at overturning the results of the 2020 elections, their choice of words is significant. They do not refer to the far-right, fascists, neo-Nazis, militia groups and others who include in their ranks leading members of the Republican Party, law enforcement officers and active and retired US military representatives.

The reference to “divisive conversation,” turning down “the temperature,” “fringe political beliefs” and “extremist users,” make it clear that the effort to shut down political dialogue on social media is aimed at silencing left-wing and socialist politics and preventing the working class from using Facebook to organize its struggles against the capitalist system.

In comments to Politico on January 29, Rep. Malinowski elaborated on his vision of political censorship when he said did not care about how the depoliticization of Facebook would impact political organizing of progressive and left groups on the platform, “as long as these new rules apply to everybody equally.” He added, “Access to Facebook for campaigns is a nice thing to have, but it's not necessary for democracy to function. There are a lot of ways to reach voters.”

A similar line of argument was advanced by the right-wing Wall Street Journal in a major article published on January 31 entitled, “Facebook Knew Calls for Violence Plagued ‘Groups,’ Now Plans Overhaul.”

After the Journal makes the lying claim that the “Capitol riot” was the product of “hyper-partisanship,” the article goes on to say that the proliferation of “extremist groups” on Facebook was to blame. Instead of focusing on a defeated President seeking to overthrow the US constitution by mobilizing a fascist mob against Congress, the Journal presents the views of Nina Jankowicz, a social media researcher at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., who wrote that Facebook groups were destroying American democracy.

That the real target of the effort to shut down Facebook groups is the political left comes out when the Journal says Facebook conducted an investigation in August 2020 of “US groups tied to mercenary and hyperpartisan entities” using platform tools to build large audiences. “Most of the Groups were on the right end of the political spectrum, but ‘Suburban Housewives Against Trump’ appeared near the top of the charts, too, the August presentation said. Conservative or liberal, the Groups shared a common thread: They had harnessed passionate super-users and Facebook recruitment tools to achieve viral growth.”

Facebook’s reduction of politics in the news feed policy has been identified as a far-reaching attack on democratic rights by free speech advocate Tim Karr, senior director of strategy and communications at the advocacy group Free Press. Karr told Politico that Facebook should be able to address concerns about amplification of the far-right without hurting civic-minded groups.

“Facebook has the ability to fix its recommendation algorithm to exclude white supremacist, militia and conspiracy groups still in its midst, and to do it without harming well-intentioned organizations that are using its platform to organize,” Karr said. “This isn’t rocket science.”

It could not be clearer that the entire US ruling establishment is attempting to utilize the events of January 6 as justification for shutting down progressive, left-wing, anti-capitalist and socialist political organizations and publishers on social media platforms such as Facebook. The subsequent shutdown of groups, pages and accounts—including the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) at the University of Michigan and leading members of the Socialist Equality Party in the US—by Facebook that began on January 22 is part of this strategy.

Fear of growing opposition in the working class to government policies—especially the response to the COVID-19 pandemic—and against the rise of the fascist right is a critical aspect of the plans to shut down political discussion on social media and block algorithms from promoting left and socialist groups in the news feed of users.

Workers and young people must demand that socialist groups and political discussion about the threat of fascist dictatorship on social media be defended. No confidence can be placed in the Democratic Party to do anything about the danger to democratic rights represented by the January 6 attempted coup by Donald Trump and his supporters in the Republican Party.

The way to defeat the far right is not by shutting down political dialogue online but by utilizing these tools as instruments in the struggle to educate and organize the international working class in the struggle against the capitalist system—the source of the fascist menace—and for socialism on a world scale.

Mass layoffs in Germany as companies restructure in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic

Dietmar Gaisenkersting

On Monday, the official COVID-19 death toll in Germany rose to 61,675 and the DAX share index hit a new record of 14,169 points. The parallel rise in death tolls and share prices shows that the pandemic is good for the big banks, hedge funds and corporations.

On the one hand, this is because federal and state governments are subordinating the health and lives of working people to the profit drive of corporations and their shareholders, pumping hundreds of billions of Euros into the economy to the benefit of the financial markets and the biggest corporations.

On the other hand, large companies are using the pandemic to implement long-planned rationalisation measures and destroy hundreds of thousands of jobs, while smaller companies receive no government support. Not a day goes by without a corporation or business announcing job cuts and the closure of plants and branches.

Protest against job cuts at the Daimler plant in Berlin-Marienfelde in November 2020 (WSWS photo)

Workers not only confront the corporations, but the trade unions and their workplace representatives. The unions maintain a huge apparatus whose sole focus is to guarantee the highest possible return on investment to corporate owners, no matter the cost to workers’ jobs and wages.

This is exemplified by IG Metall, which likes to call itself the largest single trade union in the world. While it still has about 2.2 million members, that is a fifth less than 20 years ago. This huge loss of membership under conditions of ever-greater attacks on workers speaks volumes about the character of the union—which functions as an arm of management, not a representative of workers.

Of the €591 million in membership fees that IG Metall collected last year, it spent just €25 million on things such as strike pay and legal protections, that is about four percent of total income. The largest part of the membership fee income, €216 million, went to pay the apparatus and the branch offices. The union has set aside another €89 million for “bad times”; this money “works” for the IGM in secret. It has spent €31 million on training sessions for its workplace representatives and functionaries.

While betraying workers the IG Metall will occasionally stage toothless noisy protests, signature campaigns and other appeals to those in power to cover up its sellouts. While it simulates a “struggle,” behind the scenes it is working out plans with the corporate tops on how to implement the attacks as smoothly as possible. So-called “social” plans destroy jobs through staff turnover, early retirement and partial retirement, forced severance pay and “transfer companies,” which just delay the inevitable trip to the dole office.

Hundreds of thousands of relatively well-paid jobs have been destroyed in this way over the last two decades. Those jobs that have been created are generally low-paid and offer little security of employment.

Now, taking advantage of the coronavirus pandemic, the corporations are ringing the bell for the next round of cutbacks. This is hardly reported at all in the media. One must search the business press and local papers to get an—albeit incomplete—overview. We have compiled some of the latest reports here.

 About 10,000 jobs are at risk among aviation industry suppliers, about 6,300 of them in northern Germany. This is the result of a survey conducted by IG Metall among works councils in mid-December. The companies report a pandemic-related drop in turnover of 45 percent in 2020 and see no improvement this year either. According to IG Metall, small and medium-sized companies often have less strength to survive the crisis.

 The IT company IBM is planning almost 1,000 redundancies in Germany. The reason cited is “maintaining competitiveness and a realignment of the organisation and skills.” In October last year, business daily Handelsblatt had reported that 2,300 jobs were to be cut in Germany. A month later, it said that in Europe, a total of 8,000 to 10,000 redundancies were planned. IBM is in negotiations with the trade union Verdi about “social plans,” that is the best way to impose the cuts.

 Deutsche Edelstahlwerke (DEW), which belongs to the Swiss Steel Group with sites in Witten, Krefeld, Siegen, Hagen and Hattingen, is threatening to close plants if workers do not agree to pay cuts. IG Metall has agreed on a “reconstruction collective agreement” to “save the crisis-stricken company,” which provides for 400 job cuts by 2024 and the elimination of holiday pay and half of the Christmas bonus this year and next. The steelworkers had already given up 40 percent of their Christmas bonus in 2020.

 The chemicals company BASF wants to cut about 2,000 jobs in its “Global Business Services” by 2022 to reduce costs. At the headquarters in Ludwigshafen, almost 600 workers are to lose their jobs. The cutbacks will begin next month. The IGBCE union supports this with the usual proviso that the cuts take place without “compulsory redundancies.”

 The industrial and automotive supplier Schaeffler announced last September that it would cut 4,400 jobs at 17 locations, mainly in Germany. Six plants are to be closed, many jobs relocated and parts of the company sold. The company wants to save 250 to 300 million euros annually from 2023. Last week, IG Metall and the works council presented management in Schweinfurt with a trade union “alternative concept” for the restructuring.

 According to IG Metall, the Bavarian company Lingl, which, among other things, equips brickworks, will lay off a third of its current 400 employees. This was agreed by the union after weeks of talks with the insolvency administrator and the works council. The dismissed workers will be moved to a “transfer company.” Forty of the affected workers will retire early.

 The Austrian Mayr-Melnhof Corporation, headquartered in Vienna, plans to close its small German site of R+S Stanzformen GmbH in Niederdorfelden, Hesse, with 80 workers losing their jobs at the end of March. On 31 January, about 90 workers at crane manufacturer Tadano in Zweibrücken were also given notice.

 Deutsche Bank wants to close one in five branches—100 of its 500 branches in Germany—this year. How many jobs this will cost has not yet been negotiated with service sector union Verdi.

 The perfumery chain Douglas is closing 500 of its 2,400 shops across Europe. About 2,500 will lose their jobs. Most of the affected shops are in Italy and Spain. In Germany, the country’s largest perfumery chain wants to close almost one in seven shops, which would mean about 60 of the more than 430 branches. About 600 of the 5,200 employees in the German shops will lose their jobs. Douglas boss Tina Müller blamed the shift to online retailing, from which, however, the chain is earning well. Despite the closed shops, sales only fell by 6.4 per cent to €3.2 billion. But profits plummeted, so now employees are paying for it with their jobs.

 The Swedish fashion chain Hennes & Mauritz (H & M) also wants to cut about 800 jobs in Germany alone. The priority is to lay off young mothers in the shops because the walk-in customers and main sales quotas are in the evenings and on Saturdays, when young mothers are less likely to be available. Also, more and more customers are switching to online retail.

 Siemens Energy only recently announced the reduction of 7,800 jobs. IG Metall supports the plans in the name of cost reduction and together with the board of directors and the works council has presented the “Future Agreement 2030” to ensure a smooth reduction of jobs. It has since become known that 700 of 3,700 jobs are to be lost in its Berlin gas turbine plant alone. The IGM had made numerous concessions in the years before, supposedly to secure the jobs at the location.

The WSWS had reported previously the loss of tens of thousands of jobs at Ford, Daimler, at the engineering company Heller, at Airbus, Commerzbank, MAN Truck & Bus and Adler fashion stores.