Netanyahu lifts Israel’s third lockdown despite warnings of renewed surge in March

Jean Shaoul

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu began reopening Israel’s economy at the weekend following a third partial, six-week lockdown. He did so despite dire warnings from health experts that this could lead to a renewed outbreak of the pandemic.

All shops and businesses will reopen without restrictions, while entry to gyms, cultural and sporting venues, hotels, art galleries and swimming pools will be open to those fully vaccinated or recovered from COVID-19. How this will be verified and enforced is unclear. Houses of worship that cannot meet these conditions will be limited to 10 people indoors and 20 outdoors. Schools and kindergartens will reopen on a phased basis, depending on the infection rates in their towns and cities.

The government took this criminal decision on behalf of Israel’s financial elite despite nearly 5,000 new cases a day. Some 6.7 percent of over 75,000 tests are proving positive, down from 9.4 percent a week earlier but still higher than the 4.9 percent rate at the beginning of the lockdown, and the 4.5 percent and the 1.7 percent rates at the end of the second and first lockdowns.

With each of the second and third surges seeing a higher death toll than the previous one, 5,463 Israelis have now died. Last Saturday, there were still a massive 992 patients in hospital—after weeks of hovering around 1,200—of whom 388 were in critical condition.

Israelis receive a Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine from medical professionals at a coronavirus vaccination center set up on a shopping mall parking lot in Givataim, Israel, during a nationwide lockdown to curb the spread of the virus, Thursday, February 4, 2021. (AP Photo/Oded Balilty)

Professor Nachman Ash, the coronavirus czar, warned, "An irresponsible opening of the economy will lead to another lockdown," saying that the more the economy opened, the more the infection rate will climb.

Ash said that if anyone had told him two months ago that the country would be reopening with more than 5,000 new virus cases diagnosed every day and close to 1,000 people still hospitalized in serious condition with COVID, he would have called them crazy.

Professor Ran Balicer, who heads the coronavirus cabinet’s advisory board, said the government already tried the “trick” of reopening the economy against the advice of health officials. He told the Ynet website, “Both times it did not end so well, the disease spiraled out of control and never did we try to go out [of a lockdown] with 5,000 new infections a day and hope for the best.”

While around 3 million people, one third of the population, will have received both doses of the vaccine by next week, this is still far less than the target of 5.2 million people Netanyahu had originally promised as the condition for allowing businesses, restaurants, sporting and cultural events to reopen.

In December, before the start of the third lockdown, the government had pledged that thanks to the vaccination campaign, this would be the last major coronavirus wave and the last lockdown. Experts are disputing these claims. Professor Doron Gazit of Jerusalem’s Hebrew University has estimated that even with a longer lockdown of another two to three weeks and the reopening of the economy only after fewer than 1,000 new cases a day, there is likely to be another outbreak in March due to a combination of the high transmission rate and limited vaccination.

Preliminary results from a study of 1.2 million members by the Clalit health maintenance organisation's research institute show that the Pfizer coronavirus vaccine used in Israel has produced a 94 percent fall in symptomatic coronavirus cases and was equally effective across all age groups, including people aged 70 and older. Nevertheless, the vaccine’s effectiveness in reducing the rate of transmission, as important as blocking the disease, is unknown. Imperial College London’s model suggests that—other things being equal—a vaccine that blocks 40 percent of infections, preventing 40 percent of the incidence of the disease, would be equally effective in reducing the number of deaths as a vaccine that eliminates 80 percent of disease but leaves the transmission rate the same.

A report by Israel’s national information centre said that infection is still widespread. While the number of hospitalisations has declined from the January peak, the number of new infections is still around the level of the September peak, is double the April peak, and overcrowding in hospitals remains high.

The profile of patients in a serious condition has changed, reflecting both the effectiveness of the vaccine programme among the older population and the emergence of new and more virulent strains, including the variants discovered in the UK, South Africa, and Brazil.

Around 75 percent of cases diagnosed last week were among those under 39, with as many as 15 percent of patients in a serious condition in that age group. Some 38 percent of the new cases are 19 or younger and 37 percent are between the ages of 20-39, up eight percent from January. Just 6.2 percent are those aged 60 and older, meaning that hospital beds freed up by older patients are being filled by those under 50 and ever younger patients.

There is general agreement among doctors that the third wave of the virus has been more aggressive than its predecessors, with more patients becoming seriously ill, experiencing worse symptoms and a more rapid deterioration such that they needed ventilators sooner.

Researchers at the Hebrew University have found, as have scientists at the Weizmann Centre, the Technion in Haifa and Tel Aviv University, that COVID-19 patients in serious condition are increasingly likely to die, and to die more quickly, while the infection rate has still to decline, despite the vaccination drive.

Healthcare experts have warned that reopening schools will cause a spike in Covid infection among children under 16 and too young to be vaccinated and called on hospitals to prepare for an increase in cases among children as schools reopen.

The government took the decision to reopen, fully cognisant of this. On Sunday, Dr Segal Liverant Taub, who heads the Ministry of Health’s general medicine division, wrote to hospital administrators, urging them to prepare their facilities for children and their medical teams to treat young people by February 25. “In the upcoming two months, we expect an upward trend in infection in children of all ages in Israel. Evidence is accumulating for higher infection rates of the British variant, whose prevalence in Israel is about 80 percent, among children.”

The same day, five children were rushed into Meir Hospital in Kfar Sava suffering from the disease, one now in a critical condition. Three of the children—a 13-year-old, a 10-year-old and an 18-month-old—have active infections, while the other two are suffering from long-COVID symptoms, more than a month after falling ill. Dr Dganit Adam, director of Meir Hospital’s paediatric intensive care unit, said, “We are witness to the fact that despite everyone being certain that children are not endangered by the coronavirus, there are an increasing number of children being hospitalized for COVID-19 and the complications that follow it.”

In another worrying development, a 25-week-old foetus died of COVID-19 after the mother tested positive for the disease over the weekend. So far, a pregnant mother has directly passed on the virus to her baby in 1 to 3 percent of cases. This recent wave, in which the UK variant has predominated, has seen more younger people infected, including pregnant women, with dozens of pregnant women ending up in intensive-care units and delivering their babies prematurely via C-section.

Netanyahu is staking his political survival on the successful rollout of the vaccination drive, aiming for 90 percent of those over 50 years of age to be vaccinated by the end of this month and promising Israelis they would be Covid-free by late March. The pandemic is dominating the March 23 elections, the fourth in less than two years, under conditions where one million people are unemployed, the average standard of living based on income fell by 22.7 percent in 2020 and the economy is looking into the abyss. Facing years in jail if convicted of bribery and corruption, his freedom depends on retaining the premiership with a sufficient majority to pass legislation that will allow him to evade trial.

Netanyahu has called the unvaccinated “the new enemy” and announced the introduction of an app-based “green passport” for those who have been vaccinated, allowing them entry into hotels, museums, restaurants, pools, shopping malls and sports matches and to travel overseas. The government is reportedly considering legislation to make vaccination for teachers compulsory, and to allow municipalities to see which of their residents has not been vaccinated.

Health Minister Yuli Edelstein has called for the forced testing every two days of all unvaccinated “public-facing” employees, including teachers and bus drivers. He accused unvaccinated teachers of “taking unnecessary risks with students’ health”.

UK government to appoint “free speech champion” to spearhead right-wing offensive at universities

Thomas Scripps

Education Secretary Gavin Williamson has announced plans to guarantee “free speech” at UK universities. The government is creating the legal framework for state intervention on the campuses, to protect right-wing reactionaries and silence protest.

Williamson’s proposals include placing a free speech condition on universities which want to access public funding, allowing the Office for Students (OfS) to fine institutions which breach the condition, appointing a “free speech champion” to investigate alleged breaches and recommend redress, and allowing academics, students or visiting speakers to sue for compensation where they claim to have had their free speech infringed.

Education Secretary Gavin Williamson (credit: Wikimedia Commons-Kuhlmann/ MSC)

The requirements will also apply to directly to student unions, which the government is looking at bringing under the remit of the OfS instead of the Charity Commission.

The announcement follows a letter sent by Williamson to the outgoing and incoming heads of the OfS, Sir Michael Barber and Lord Wharton of Yarm. Under the heading “Specific priorities”, the education secretary criticised Barber for failing to intervene aggressively enough on the campuses and called on Wharton to do more:

“[T]o date there has been little regulatory action taken by the OfS in relation to potential breaches of the registration conditions relating to freedom of speech and academic freedom… I intend to publish a policy paper on free speech and academic freedom in the near future and I would like the OfS to continue to work closely with the Department to deliver this shared agenda and ensure our work is closely aligned. I would also like it to take more active and visible action to challenge concerning incidents that are reported to it or which it becomes aware of, as well as to share information with providers about best practice for protecting free speech beyond the minimum legal requirements.”

Wharton is a Tory peer who was given the OfS position despite lacking any experience in the higher education sector.

Williamson’s “free speech” proposals are taken almost word-for-word from a report by the right-wing Policy Exchange thinktank last summer, “Academic freedom in the UK: Protecting viewpoint diversity”. The report called for a “Director for Academic Freedom”, an “academic freedom clause”, for the OfS to “be willing to exercise its existing powers to fine HEPs [higher education providers]” for alleged “breaches of academic freedom” and for student unions to be subject to the same regulations.

Tom Simpson, a professor at Oxford University and an associate fellow at the Policy Exchange, welcomed Williamson’s proposals, before asserting that “a very online culture allows the views of a minority to exert disproportionate influence on administrators, and to exert a chilling effect on other academics.”

The World Socialist Web Site described the Policy Exchange report as “a manifesto for a political alliance of the Tory government and its social Darwinist periphery, the libertarian right, and the most right-wing sections of the Labour Party. It argues for a combined intervention into both academia and student politics on campus to suppress left-wing protest and give free-reign to far-right ideologues.”

That the right feel able to posture as defenders of democratic rights is thanks to the role played by the pseudo-left and identity politics on campus. A similar report by the right-wing Adam Smith Institute (ASI) states, “Student unions are perceived as ineffective by students, lack democratic legitimacy, and undermine freedom of association and expression… Only one-in-ten students actively participate in student union elections.”

This much is true. But contrary to the ASI’s self-serving claims, it is a result of the right-wing climate—the scramble of the affluent middle class for personal advance based on assertions of “identity”—which dominates official campus politics.

Identity politics has nothing to do with socialist politics, which seeks to unify the working class, allied with the best elements of student youth, in a struggle not for individual or sectional advantage but for social equality. Rooted in irrationalist and reactionary postmodern philosophy, identity politics is opposed to the Enlightenment, and above all Marxism, and is advanced by the pseudo-left to obscure the fundamental division in society—class.

Lacking popular support or democratic principles, the identity politicians have utilised the practice of “no platforming” inherited from the 1970s. The tactic gained broader sympathy among students several decades ago because it targeted fascists and the far-right. Even then, it had dangerous political implications in that it was often linked to appeals for proscriptions and bans by the state and other institutions when history has shown repeatedly that measures nominally introduced against the right are then routinely deployed against the left.

The lurch to the right by the petty-bourgeois layers that find a home either in the Labour Party apparatus, various identity-based groups and campaigns, and in the pseudo-left groups, has exposed more clearly the reactionary implications of no-platforming.

By far the most outrageous case is the attempted blacklisting of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, on grounds of the Swedish state’s concocted sexual assault investigation. In 2012, George Galloway was banned by the National Union of Students on the grounds of being a “rape denier” for defending Assange. In 2015, Cambridge Students’ Union attempted to ban Assange from speaking on campus, and Sheffield Students’ Union tried the same in 2016. Both efforts were overturned by the popular opposition.

Campus identity politics assumes its most absurd dimensions in the conflict between different identity groups. In 2016, a National Union of Students LGBT representative at Canterbury University refused to speak alongside gay rights advocate Peter Tatchell, accusing him of being racist and “transphobic”. In 2015, the student union’s women’s officer at Cardiff University led a petition of 3,000 students to bar feminist campaigner Germaine Greer from speaking, again for her “transphobic” views. In 2015, feminist Julie Bindel was barred from speaking at Manchester University students’ union, which claimed her presence could “incite hatred towards and exclusion of our trans students”. Bristol University students’ union voted for a blanket ban on “trans-exclusionary radical feminists”, most prominently Greer, in 2018. Last year, Oxford historian of class and gender relations Selina Todd was no-platformed by the Oxford International Women’s Festival after being labelled a “transphobe”.

This is a reactionary, anti-democratic mess. The de facto drawing of a line between someone like Tatchell and members of the far-right is hysterical nonsense and has repulsed large sections of the population, opening the door to government intervention on the campuses, which will be used to invite in the real fascistic right.

Under the protection of the government’s new “free speech” requirements, student protests of the kind which challenged social Darwinist pseudoscientist Noah Carl being awarded a prestigious research fellowship at Cambridge University will be suppressed. Academics like Oxford’s Nigel Biggar, who specialises in apologias for the crimes of the British Empire, will be allowed to get on with their mission of creating a right-wing “counter-spiral” in academia.

The fascists Tommy Robinson and Stephen Bannon, French National Rally leader Marine Le Pen and Alternative for Germany spokesperson Alice Weidel have previously been invited to speak at the Oxford Union, all provoking significant opposition that would now be punished as an attack on “free speech”. Such invites of despised far-right figures will be encouraged at campuses across the country, led by so-called free speech societies set up by darling of the Tory right and anti-lockdown campaigner Toby Young. Young was the Tories’ first pick to lead the OfS before his attendance at a secret eugenics conference was exposed in the London Student .

Toby Young in 2011 (credit: creative commons)

Events in Germany provide a sharp warning. On February 3, seventy German academics founded the “Network for Academic Freedom” with the declared mission of rehabilitating discredited Professor Jörg Baberowski—a leading academic voice of right-wing extremism—to promote other far-right voices and demonise students who voice opposition to the relativisation of the crimes of German imperialism, in particular of the Third Reich.

The hypocrisy of the British government’s claim to be acting in defence of “free speech” is on display in Williamson’s letter to the OfS heads. Two subheadings below “Free Speech and Academic Freedom” is “Antisemitism”, under which the education secretary asks the OfS to help force higher education institutions to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism. The IHRA definition provides a mechanism to attack free speech regarding opposition to Israel and the ethnic-nationalist ideology of Zionism. It has been used to justify the mass purge of left-wing Labour members and the cancellation of pro-Palestinian events.

The UK government is also proceeding with a review of “left-wing extremism” aimed at criminalising huge swathes of the left. It will target “far-Left fringe groups” accused of “hijacking important causes and mainstream cultural activity”—that is, seeking to advocate their political views. The outcome of this review will build upon the surveillance of students already in place under the Prevent scheme supposedly targeting radicalisation by Islamist groups.

Third data release from Gaia spacecraft maps 1.8 billion stars in the Milky Way

Bryan Dyne

Astronomers from the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium have made public the first part of the third major data release from the European Space Agency’s Gaia spacecraft. The findings, published or being reviewed in a series of papers in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, accurately mapped the position of 1,811,709,771 stars in our Milky Way galaxy, including the distances from Earth and relative motions of 1,467,744,818 of those stars.

Artist’s conception of the Gaia spacecraft as it maps the Milky Way. Credit: ESA/ATG medialab; background: ESO/S. Brunier

In short, the Gaia mission has provided the best map of the Milky Way to date, a tool which will be used in every field of astronomy. The spacecraft has provided both a trove of data that will be studied for years, as well numerous jumping off points for further research.

The specific findings of this data release were to explore the edge of the Milky Way, measure shifts in the Solar System’s orbit around the center of the galaxy, provide an updated census of nearby stars, and further characterize the two satellite galaxies of the Milky Way, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. The third release also improves the accuracy and precision of the measurements over the second release.

Gaia was designed by the European Space Agency (ESA) and is operated by a team of more than 2,500 people from 15 countries. It launched on December 19, 2013 from the Guiana Space Centre in French Guiana and sits at the Earth-Sun Lagrange point 2, a point behind Earth from the perspective of the Sun where the gravitational forces of the two bodies are canceled out. This creates a very stable location for a space-based observatory to do precision work, a requirement for Gaia.

The orbit has the added benefit of minimizing fuel usage. The spacecraft is expected to run out of propellant to adjust itself as needed in late 2025, the effective end to its mission.

The latest Gaia release maps almost double the 1 billion stars of the mission’s original goal, roughly 1 percent of all stars in our galaxy. To do this, Gaia was designed to be able to pinpoint object that are 400,000 times fainter than can be seen with the human eye. To make their measurements as accurate as possible, researchers made at least 70 observations of presumed stars before including them in their data.

A visual summary of Gaia’s Early Data Release 3. Credit: ESA; CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

The mission is the successor to the ESA Hipparcos mission, which operated from 1989 to 1993. The spacecraft name is an acronym (HIgh Precision PARallax COllecting Satellite) but also a reference to Hipparchus of Nicaea, the ancient Greek astronomer who is credited with founding trigonometry and incidentally discovering the precession, or change, in Earth’s spin axis. Hipparcos was the first satellite dedicated to the field of astrometry, the accurate measurement of the position and motion of astronomical objects. The final Hipparcos Catalogue was published in 1997 and contained positions and distances for more than 118,200 stars.

Gaia was first proposed during the last year of the Hipparcos mission, given that a follow-up study would be necessary to further probe the Milky Way. It took another 13 years before the project was finally authorized, and another seven before it was built and launched. Overall, the mission has, during the 15 years since it was approved, cost about €740 million, one-fiftieth of the current annual military budget of Germany alone.

To understand the importance of mapping the Milky Way today, an analogy can be made to the importance of mapping Earth over the course of hundreds of years. Exploratory voyages such as those undertaken by Ferdinand Magellan (1519–1522) and James Cook (1768–1799) revolutionized the understanding of Earth, bringing distant civilizations closer together. Today, highly accurate maps of our planet from orbiting satellites provide invaluable knowledge about the past, present and future of our home world.

Similarly, the difficult but seemingly mundane task of mapping stars provides a wealth of knowledge from the physical signatures that hide in such data. There are three main characteristics of a star, position, distance and color, from which these signatures emerge.

The future position of nearly 75,000 stars cataloged by Gaia are shown here in three different views. Credit: ESA/Gaia/DPAC; CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO; S. Payne-Wardenaar, S. Jordan, C. Reylé and Smart et al. (2020)

The position and color of a star are in principle relatively easy to record. If one can overcome the blurring effects of Earth’s atmosphere on a telescope and keep the temperature and gravitational forces on the optics constant, all of which are achieved by putting a telescope in space, one can get extraordinarily precise measurements of stellar positions. Gaia was designed to overcome terrestrial limitations, and in doing so has produced its latest map of more than 1.8 billion stars.

In the same vein, a spectrometer, which finds the colors of light (the wavelengths) being emitted from a given object, is much more accurate when boosted above Earth’s atmosphere on a satellite. Once the wavelengths of light being emitted are known, one can derive a star’s temperature and mass. Of the 1.8 billion stars it mapped, Gaia measured the brightness in red and blue light of more than 1.5 billion.

Distance and motion are much harder to calculate given how far away these stars are. Astronomers use the parallax method, measuring the change in the position of astronomical objects as compared to their background when Earth is on opposite sides of its orbit around the Sun. By observing these minuscule shifts, and employing the trigonometry of Hipparchus, one can determine the distance to an object without needing to travel interstellar distances. (This effect can be observed by holding up a finder against a static background, and using first one eye, then the other.)

This process is further complicated by the fact that every celestial body is always in motion, and as such there is no such thing as a truly “static” background. To compensate, the spacecraft also collected light from 1.6 million extragalactic sources to provide multiple “absolute” frames of reference, using very bright and distant objects known as quasars. In doing so, Gaia found the distances from Earth and motion through the Milky Way of more than 1.4 billion of the stars it mapped.

As an added benefit, this map of quasars is the largest ever produced. Quasars are a form of active galactic nuclei in which much of their energy is generated from the accretion of matter by supermassive black holes in their centers. Because so much of their energy is emitted in such a small area, they serve as very pinpoint distant beacons to calibrate any mapping scale. The quasar data published in the third data release, three times the amount from the second data release, is being used to study these supremely energetic objects.

Quasars aside, with the position, distance and temperature of a star, a great deal of physics and astronomy can be done, the most important of which is calibrating what is known as the cosmic distance ladder.

The position and color of every star imaged by Gaia were used to create this map of the entire sky. The galactic center is in the middle of the image, with the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds below the galactic plane. Credit: ESA/Gaia/DPAC; CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO; A. Moitinho

There are many methods one can use to estimate the distances to certain objects. Parallax is the only known direct method, and thus the basis for all other measurements. Other indirect measurements generally look for ways to infer the absolute brightness of a star, compare that to the apparent brightness, or magnitude, as seen from Earth, and then derive a distance. RR Lyrae variables and Cepheid variables, for example, are stars which periodically change brightness, and have a well defined relationship between their luminosity and how often their brightness changes. Type Ia supernovae are the result of white dwarf stars accreting matter up to a very specific mass, then exploding with known intrinsic luminosity in a spectacular event that can be seen across the cosmos.

Because the brightness of the variable stars and type 1a supernovae can be known without knowing the distance to these stars, they are known as “standard candles.” The term was coined by astronomer Henrietta Swan Leavitt for all astronomical objects that have a known intrinsic brightness, from which the distance to them can be determined.

Another method is to use the different wavelengths of light emitted from a star to estimate its mass, age and composition, which in turn can be used to estimate a given star’s actual brightness. This method is most often used on the Hyades cluster, which appears in the constellation Taurus. The Hyades are a group of about 100 stars, all gravitationally bound to each other and with roughly the same age, place of origin and chemical composition. Thus astronomers can use the light from each individual star to estimate the distance to the cluster as a whole, which has been calculated to be about 153 light years away.

And since the Hyades are the closest cluster to Earth, they have long been a target for parallax measurements, though the uncertainty in those measurements was very high. Such errors were reduced to 6 percent by Hipparcos and reduced by a further two orders of magnitude by Gaia, confirming that the Hyades are 153 light years away.

This video is a three-dimensional view of the Hyades cluster using information from the mission’s second data release from the ESA’s Gaia satellite. Credit: ESA/Gaia/DPAC; CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

Such correlations form the rungs of the cosmic distance ladder. The light from Cepheid variables in a distant galaxy can be compared to the light from a type Ia supernova in that same galaxy. A type Ia supernova in a closer galaxy can be compared to the light from RR Lyrae stars in that second galaxy. And RR Lyrae stars in the Milky Way can be compared to the Hyades, or perhaps directly measured by parallax.

Thus, distances across the cosmos are known if the parallax to nearby stars can be measured. In that sense, the Gaia spacecraft is not just a tool to map the Milky Way galaxy, as impressive as that is: it also provides a new and immensely improved baseline for mapping the entire Universe.

Such a map is necessary for many fields of research in astrophysics and cosmology. Cepheid variables, for example, are not just one way to measure distances to galaxies, they are also used to measure the speed at which galaxies are moving apart from each other. Detailed knowledge of the distance and temperature of so many stars provides a better understanding of the history of the Milky Way, which in turn informs our knowledge of how stars and galaxies everywhere evolve.

Gaia also measured the bending of starlight of thousands of stars that passed, from the spacecraft’s perspective, behind the Sun. Like Arthur Eddington in 1919, astronomers used Gaia to test Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Gaia’s observations have again confirmed that general relativity correctly describes the structure of spacetime.

There have been many other achievements of the Gaia mission: measuring the orbits and inclinations of extrasolar planets, revealing that stars are being pulled from the Small Magellanic Cloud to the Large Magellanic Cloud, showing the orbits of nearby stars around the galaxy, uncovering the origin of the warped shape of the Milky Way, and finding which stars were born at the same time and place, even after they have been flung out to different parts of the galaxy, just to name a few. The curious reader is greatly encouraged to explore the full spectrum of what the Gaia team has studied.

Adopting “anti-separatist” law, Macron moves to censor French universities

Alex Lantier

On February 16, the National Assembly approved President Emmanuel Macron’s “anti-separatist” law, also known as the law “to strengthen respect for the principles of the Republic.” By imposing strict state control of the Muslim faith and a principle of collective responsibility on associations and political parties in order to facilitate their rapid banning by the police, the law aims to effect a drastic and reactionary transformation of social and political life.

Macron with French Army Chief of Staff General Pierre de Villiers in 2017 [Credit: Etienne Laurent/Pool Photo via AP, File]

Macron’s La République en Marche party and the Democratic Movement (MoDem) voted in favor of the law. Unsubmissive France’s 17 deputies voted unanimously against the law, though they had voted for many of its articles in parliamentary commissions; so did Les Républicains (The Republicans). Most French Communist Party and Socialist Party deputies abstained, as did neo-fascist deputy Marine Le Pen. By a vote of 347 to 151, with 65 abstentions, the Assembly approved the law, which will now go to the Senate for approval in March.

The fundamentally undemocratic and fascistic nature of this law emerges in the remarks made the same day by Minister of Higher Education Frédérique Vidal. The “anti-separatist” law goes hand in hand with a frontal assault on academic freedom and freedom of conscience.

Vidal confirmed that the government will ask the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) to investigate all ongoing university research in France to assess its ideological acceptability: “Yes, I will indeed ask for an assessment of all the research taking place in our country, whether it is research on post-colonialism for example.” She called for measures to combat “the radicalization of opinions and statements.”

Vidal was developing comments she had made Sunday on CNews, where she announced that she would ask the CNRS to investigate and root out “Islamo-leftism” in “all currents of research” in France. She called for “a distinction to be made between what is academic research and what is political militancy and opinion.”

The Conference of University Presidents (CPU) reacted by publishing a communiqué to denounce Vidal’s statement. It states: “The CPU expresses its astonishment at the new sterile polemic on the subject of ‘Islamo-leftism’ in the university. ‘Islamo-leftism’ is not a concept. It is a pseudo-notion for which one would seek in vain even the beginning of a scientific definition, and which it would be appropriate to leave, if not to the animators of CNews, more broadly, to the far right that has popularized it.”

The CPU also criticized “the misuse of the CNRS, whose mission is in no way to produce evaluations of the work of teacher-researchers, or to clarify what is ‘political militancy or opinion’. The CPU demands at the very least urgent clarifications, both of what are the ideological bases of such a request, and as to the form of the request, which sets up the CNRS in opposition to the universities.”

Nevertheless, the government and the CNRS are moving quickly to implement the ideological evaluation of university research by the state. CNRS representatives told Le Monde that the CNRS is “discussing with the cabinet to clarify the minister’s expectations.” Le Monde added that the ministry had confirmed, “without providing further details,” that “the objectives will be defined in the coming days.”

Law professor Noé Wagener stated: “Deputies of the president’s party, in addition to those of The Republicans party, now firmly believe that higher education has become a hotbed of ‘separatism.’ ... The idea that there is academic work that is ‘bad’, because it is dangerous for social life, has become entrenched in their minds and may lead to legislative initiatives that restrict academic freedom.”

Terrified by rising social anger against austerity and capitalism, and against “herd immunity” policies on the pandemic, Macron is trying to brand opposition as thought crime. If it uses the terms used by neo-fascist polemicists such as Michel Onfray or Eric Zemmour to evaluate academic research, it is because it is aiming at the same targets as them: opposition to the wars waged by Paris in the Islamic world, as well as to militarism and the police state. Its target is not only researchers, but the entire working class.

The government says nothing about the sanctions it wants to impose on academics its inquiry finds guilty of “Islamo-leftism.” But such an evaluation would inevitably have the character of a witch hunt: academics denounced by the government would be equated with criminals complicit in terrorism and therefore enemies of the people, though it is self-evident that they have carried out no terrorist acts.

The official presentation of the “anti-separatist” law as a defence of republican principles is a fraud. Drafted under the authority of Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin, a former sympathizer of the far-right monarchist Action Française party, it undermines the 1905 law on secularism and separation of religious and state affairs, by subjecting the Muslim faith to strict state control. Associations that the law threatens with potential dissolution, including political parties, are also effectively under orders to conform to the “anti-separatist” diktat.

This is not a defence of the international principles of “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity” laid out for people of all races and origins by the French Revolution of 1789. This law was inspired by forces that are in fact conscious enemies of the democratic principles established during the American and French revolutions in the 18th century: they aim to impose anti-social and murderous policies in the interest of the financial aristocracy, despite rising working class opposition.

As is often the case in France, this reactionary measure was inspired by intellectuals linked to power and trained by petty-bourgeois, anti-Trotskyist organizations.

Vidal’s proposed measure echoes a call to the government to censor universities, the so-called “Manifesto of the 100,” made in November 2020 by a group of right-wing intellectuals including Marcel Gauchet, Pierre-André Taguieff, and former Education Minister Luc Ferry. Gauchet was a student of Claude Lefort, the co-founder of the group Socialisme ou Barbarie, which broke with the Fourth International and with Marxism in 1949. Today, they relentlessly elevate racial and ethnic criteria in order to promote right-wing, nationalist opposition to Marxist class politics.

Their manifesto appeals to anti-Americanism, French nationalism, colonialist hatreds and barely disguised white nationalism to justify university censorship. They write: “Nativist, racialist and ‘decolonial’ ideologies (transferred from North American campuses) are alive and well, feeding a hatred of ‘Whites’ and France; and sometimes violent political militancy attacks those who still dare to oppose anti-Western dogmatism and the multiculturalist orthodoxy.”

They continued, “As the wearing of the Muslim veil—among other symptoms—has spread in recent years, it is time to give things their right names and also to become aware of the responsibility, in the current situation, of ideologies that have originated and spread throughout the university and beyond. The importation of Anglo-Saxon ideologies, intellectual conformism, fear and political correctness are a real threat to our universities. … We therefore ask the Minister to put in place measures to detect Islamist aberrations.”

If the adoption of such measures by the government shows above all its weakness and panic in the face of rising working class anger, it would be a fatal error to minimize the dangers of dictatorship posed by the “anti-separatist” law and the censorship proposed by Vidal, Gauchet and others. It is essential to politically mobilize the workers and youth against this attempt to stifle freedom of opinion and democratic principles, by waging a socialist struggle against the financial aristocracy and all its political servants.

São Paulo’s municipal teachers strike grows despite union sabotage

Tomas Castanheira

On Wednesday, the strike by the nearly 60,000 municipal teachers in São Paulo ended its first week. The return of students to the classrooms, scheduled for Monday, was answered by educators with the expansion of the strike, bypassing the unions’ efforts to sabotage their struggle.

A survey by rank-and-file teachers on WhatsApp groups indicates that the strike has spread to hundreds of schools in the city, preventing many of them from reopening. Another 530 municipal schools had the resumption of classes postponed due to the lack of a minimum number of cleaning personnel, exposing the precarious conditions of the educational system and the incompetence of the São Paulo City Hall administration.

Teachers striking against pension cuts march in Sao Paulo last year.

The efforts of Mayor Bruno Covas of the Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB) to reopen São Paulo’s municipal schools is part of a dirty propaganda campaign coordinated between the corporate media, the state government of João Doria (also from PSDB), and Brazil’s fascistic president Jair Bolsonaro. Together, they seek to shatter the widely held conviction that reopening schools will give a deadly boost to the COVID-19 pandemic.

In São Paulo and throughout Brazil, the spread of the pandemic is catastrophic. The country has topped 240,000 deaths from COVID-19, and for almost a month has maintained a terrible average of over a thousand deaths a day. The state of São Paulo has been registering increasing numbers of infections and accounts for 56,700 of these deaths, 398 of them reported on Tuesday.

The threat posed by the reopening of schools is underscored by the circulation of new, more infectious variants of the coronavirus in São Paulo. The state has already confirmed 25 cases of the P.1 variant of COVID-19, originally discovered in Amazonas, 16 of them through community transmission. Most of these cases occurred in Araraquara, a city of 238,339 inhabitants in the countryside of São Paulo, which on Tuesday went into health care collapse, one day after enacting a lockdown.

Studies show that this new variant has spread rapidly among the population of Manaus, with its percentage detected in tests jumping from 52.2 percent of cases to 85.4 percent in less than a month. This is a serious warning of the consequences of the criminal “herd immunity” policy promoted by the ruling class all over Brazil.

This policy, which aims to preserve capitalist profits at the expense of millions of lives, is being directly confronted by the struggle of educators in São Paulo to keep classrooms closed. As the president of the capitalist educational think tank Todos Pela Educação stated, the reopening of schools is seen by the bourgeoisie as the “pillar of support for economic recovery,” that is, a necessary measure to force as many workers as possible into insecure workplaces. São Paulo is regarded as the spearhead of the reopening campaign throughout Brazil.

The logic of development of this movement, which is imposed by the very nature of the COVID-19 spread, is toward the unification of the struggle of educators across state borders and with all sections of the working class to promote a general strike that closes every school and all non-essential economic activities in the country in order to stop the pandemic.

This program has broad support among educators all over Brazil, who in several states are organizing strikes against the reopening of schools. It is, on the other hand, fiercely opposed by the National Confederation of Education Workers (CNTE), the trade union federations, and local unions, which are persistently acting to break the teachers’ struggle in São Paulo and isolate it from their colleagues across the country. Last Friday, the APEOESP leadership, composed of the Workers Party (PT), the Maoist Communist Party of Brazil (PCdoB), and the pseudo-left Socialism and Freedom Party (PSOL), ended the strike of São Paulo state teachers against the will of education workers. This criminal political maneuver was staged ahead of the return to classes in the municipal schools, preventing the powerful unification of the strikes of São Paulo state and municipal educators.

The aim of the APEOESP to artificially divide state and municipal educators, when there are a large number of teachers who work double shifts teaching in both school systems, was openly expressed by union leaders, who claimed during the last online union assembly that the two systems have “different realities.” These efforts to isolate workers are supported by the unions officially representing municipal educators, the main one being the SINPEEM.

Throughout 2020, the municipal educators unions met behind closed doors with the mayor and his representatives in a so-called “Emergency Educational Crisis Committee.” A note by the SINPEEM made it clear that at a meeting on August 18 they “once again discussed the return of face-to-face classes.” Throughout this period, workers were left in the dark and prevented by the unions from preparing a counteroffensive against the government’s criminal plans.

There is a widespread understanding among teachers that the unions only called the strike after strong opposition had grown among rank-and-file workers, threatening to spiral out of control. The World Socialist Web Site reported in early February that teachers were discussing on social media calling “a strike immediately, independent of the union.”

On the eve of the return of in-person planning activities, the SINPEEM and other unions that make up the Forum of Entities Representing Municipal Education Professionals of São Paulo declared a strike. This decision was based not on a vote by the rank and file, but on an anti-democratic clause imposed by the union leadership that gives it the power to “decide to call a strike during the pandemic period.” It also guarantees it the power to end the strike without consulting the workers.

Despite having decreed a strike, the unions have made absolutely no effort to carry it out. They didn’t call any kind of assembly, not even a meeting of union delegates elected at the schools. They didn’t picket school entrances, or campaign for the movement. The growth of the strike in the São Paulo municipal schools happened independently of the union and in opposition to its deliberate boycott.

The anti-democratic orientation adopted by educational trade unions against the interests of the workers has been developing over decades. In the last two years, teachers all over Brazil joined a massive strike movement against the generalized attacks on public education, and particularly on workers’ pensions. This movement was systematically isolated and betrayed by the unions. In São Paulo, the state and municipal teachers had their struggle once again divided, and the SINPEEM and APEOESP broke their strikes anti-democratically.

The lack of credibility of these organizations among educators can hardly be overestimated. However, workers have yet to draw the fundamental conclusions from their experiences. Most importantly, that it is necessary to break politically with the bureaucratic control of the unions and establish independent organizations, democratically elected by the rank and file.

A major impediment to the development of this struggle within the working class is the role played by the pseudo-left organizations, which work to deflect the growing opposition among workers with the impotent program of reforming the unions.

In recent weeks, political factions such as the Morenoites of the Resistência tendency, which operates within the PSOL, have completely exposed themselves before the teachers as the main opponents of their struggle to stop the reopening of schools in São Paulo. In a division of labor to disorient the working class, the Morenoites of the Revolutionary Workers Movement (MRT), associated with the Trotskyist Fraction (FT) and the editors of the Esquerda Diário website, have taken a supposedly critical position toward the maneuvers of the trade unions, but one which leads to the same dead end.

In a February 13 article in Esquerda Diário, the Morenoites declared their surprise at the treacherous position adopted by the APEOESP, “which means maintaining the strike only in appearance, but in practice returning to face-to-face work in the schools.” According to the article, it is “unbelievable that the policy of the largest union in Latin America is just a façade.” In response, they demand the creation of a political pole “unifying the opposition” to pressure the “majority leadership of APEOESP.” This means unifying with the same factions that supported the “unbelievable” betrayal against the workers in the first place.

Based on this same bankrupt policy of “pressuring” both the union and the factions of the pseudo-left, MRT militants joined the factions of the so-called opposition in the SINPEEM and staged a demonstration in front of this union, with banners demanding that the union leadership call a meeting of its members.

Unlike the MRT, the Brazilian Socialist Equality Group (SEG) found the APEOESP’s betrayal not “unbelievable,” but rather entirely predictable. The articles published by the WSWS insistently warned workers of the criminal maneuvers being prepared by these political forces. The same policy of staging a façade opposition to the reopening of schools, while in practice repressing the workers’ struggle, is being adopted by unions worldwide.

The SEG fought to connect educators in São Paulo with their colleagues in Chicago, who through a politically independent rank-and-file committee were posing real opposition to the treacherous policy of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), which in its essential aspects was identical to the one promoted by the APEOESP, SINPEEM and other Brazilian unions.

There is a radical difference between the revolutionary internationalist political principles for which the Brazilian SEG fights, and the reactionary maneuvers of the the MRT Morenoites and similar tendencies.

The Morenoites base their politics on a nationalist outlook, subordinating their politics to the bourgeois national state and an absolute rejection of the independent political mobilization of the working class. A series of articles published in Esquerda Diário on January 28 and February 4 by the MRT’s traditional national leader, Gilson Dantas, has made its petty-bourgeois opportunist foundations very clear.

Dantas states categorically: “Our country lives a reality of low class struggle.” According to him, “after thirty-five years of some democratic stability—an historical record—the great expectation of the working class, above all harried by the union bureaucracy, is that of a way out through the vote. At this moment this is the maximum that the masses aspire to, their political imagination still does not go through ruptures: the fetish of democracy reigns. That is the concrete reality.”

The development of the struggle of the São Paulo teachers in opposition to the deliberate sabotage of the unions comes into direct collision with this reactionary petty-bourgeois perspective of the MRT. Desperate, they rush to ensure that workers remain “harried by the union bureaucracy.”

Quebec’s #MeToo movement denounces the presumption of innocence

Hugo Maltais

On December 15 and 18, the Quebec Court handed down its judgment in two separate high-profile sexual assault cases involving, respectively, producer Gilbert Rozon and media host Éric Salvail. Both were acquitted and the Crown has since indicated that it will not appeal the rulings.

Gilbert Rozon, founder and president of the Just for Laughs Festival until his forced resignation in 2017, was accused of raping a woman in 1979 or 1980 in a private residence after an evening at a nightclub. As for Éric Salvail, until now a prominent figure in the Quebec entertainment industry, he was accused of criminal harassment, forcible confinement and sexual assault of a Radio-Canada colleague in 1993. In both cases, the only evidence produced by the Crown in support of the charges was the testimony of the complainant.

Gilbert Rozon (foreground) and Claude Menier arrive at the Saint-Denis theater on July 18, 2010, for a Just for Laughs gala evening (source: Wikimedia Commons).

The allegations against Rozon and Salvail had given rise in 2018 and 2019 to an intense media campaign orchestrated by the #MoiAussi (#MeToo) movement in Quebec, whose objective was to portray the two men as dangerous sexual predators whose guilt was established before they even went to trial.

In such an atmosphere, the two judgments handed down in December were honest efforts to uphold certain essential democratic principles of criminal law: the presumption of innocence (as a protection against police arbitrariness and state abuse) and the fact that the burden of proof rests with the Crown.

In the presence of conflicting versions of events from the plaintiff and the defendant, the judge cannot simply decide on the basis of the testimony he or she finds most compelling. Even if the court rejects the testimony of the defendant, this does not overturn the presumption of innocence. The onus still falls on the Crown to prove the charge beyond a reasonable doubt, and thus the complainant’s lack of credibility may create a reasonable doubt even when the defendant’s testimony has failed to do so.

In the Salvail case, Judge Dalmau did not give credence to the defendant’s testimony. However, he also found that the plaintiff lacked credibility because of significant contradictions between his testimony and the documentary evidence, a tendency to exaggerate, and significant contradictions with his earlier statements on essential elements of his testimony. This was such that the judge could not rule out the possibility that the complainant had fabricated portions of his testimony. In the absence of evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that Salvail committed the crimes he was accused of, Judge Dalmau acquitted him.

In the Rozon case, Judge Hébert found the plaintiff generally credible while identifying several weaknesses in her testimony, including contradictions and memory lapses that were “difficult to understand.” The judge did not believe the defendant’s version but was unable to reject it entirely. His testimony, although less convincing than that of the plaintiff was plausible, and therefore raised a reasonable doubt in favor of the defendant.

The contents of the two judgments in no way conform with, let alone substantiate, the claims of the #MeToo movement that the justice system is “biased” in favor of sexual abusers, making it necessary to “reform” the criminal law of sexual assault to reverse the burden of proof and introduce a legal obligation to “believe the victims.”

In reality, both judges were empathetic to the plaintiffs. They overlooked small contradictions in their testimony or the omission of certain details, which contradicts the stereotype of sexual assault victims being persecuted by the justice system, mistreated on cross-examination, and scorned by judges who demand bullet-proof testimony on every detail. At the same time, the judges maintained the presumption of innocence in opposition to its detractors. As Judge Hébert wrote, “the watchword ‘believe the victim’ that is associated with the #MeToo movement has no place in criminal law.”

Predictably, the reaction of the mainstream media and #MeToo proponents was hysterical. They demanded changes to legislation on sexual assault in order to end once and for all the presumption of innocence that is hindering their anti-democratic campaign!

This type of demand has the active support of Canada’s ruling elite, which is leading a frontal assault on democratic rights through the criminalization of strikes, the suppression of civil liberties under the pretext of “fighting terrorism,” and the growth of militarism.

In the most explicit example, the Montreal daily Le Devoir, which is close to Quebec indépendantiste circles, published a December 18 editorial by its editor-in-chief Marie-Andrée Chouinard, entitled “À armes inégales” (On an unequal footing).

The title is taken from an expression by Judge Hébert, who stated that “in a criminal trial, the parties are not on an equal footing; the rules of the game favor the defendant.” But Le Devoir completely distorts the meaning of this sentence by omitting the judge’s explanation that “this inequality results from the application of the principle of the presumption of innocence ... and not from any rule that discriminates against the victims of sexual assault.” In a criminal trial, the defendant faces the Crown, i.e., the state, with its vast means and all its repressive powers. It is the Crown that is obviously favored and therefore must be held to a higher standard of proof—“the obligation ... to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Chouinard, after sarcastically acknowledging that the “guiding principle,” the “foundation,” the “dogma” of the presumption of innocence was the basis of the Rozon judgment, makes a direct attack on this principle in the name of “society’s hopes” that the “victims” will be treated better than the defendants. She presents the presumption of innocence as an archaic principle that is no longer sufficiently “refined” or adapted to the “pulse of society.” The affluence and status of the two defendants are used to give this reactionary attack a progressive veneer: “This kingly principle will always tip the balance in favor of the wealthy and the unrepentant.”

This hostility to democratic rights characterizes the #MeToo campaign in Quebec and Canada, which, like its American counterpart, represents the efforts of privileged, feminist layers of the upper middle-class to promote their own social advancement under the guise of a fight against sexual violence.

These efforts are encouraged by the ruling class and its political representatives as a means of diverting attention from the growing inequalities and deep class divisions that permeate society, in favor of identity politics based on race and gender.

In response to the December 15, 2020 arrest of Quebec National Assembly member Harold Lebel on charges of sexual assault, Manon Massé, the co-leader of the pseudo-left Québec Solidaire (QS), tweeted: “We must always believe those who have the courage to denounce.” The fact that Lebel denies these accusations and is presumed innocent until proven guilty is of no importance to Massé.

Also on December 15, a committee of the National Assembly, which includes a member from each of the four parties represented in the Quebec legislature (the Coalition Avenir Québec, the Liberal Party, the Parti Québécois and QS), tabled a report that advocates the creation of a “special court” for sexual assault cases.

This had already been discussed in December 2018, when charges were laid against Rozon. Montreal Police Chief Sylvain Caron said at the time that the “burden of proof” in sexual assault cases may need to be “reviewed.”

In an interview in which he said he was ready to consider the creation of such a special court with separate judges, Quebec Premier François Legault remarked, “Do we want to change that? There is a good discussion to be had, but we must be careful.” As for federal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, he refused to rule out the possibility of “reversing the burden of proof,” saying he was ready to listen to “the opinions of people who know what they are talking about.”

The comments made by the Montreal police chief and legitimized by the governments of Quebec and Canada, together with the hysterical media reactions to the Rozon and Salvail judgments, shed light on the real danger that the ruling class poses to democratic rights.

One need not feel any particular sympathy for Rozon or Salvail to understand that an attack on the presumption of innocence, even if its immediate targets are privileged figures from show business, serves to prepare the ideological ground for a generalized assault by the ruling elite on all democratic rights. This is why class-conscious workers must firmly reject the reactionary campaign of the #MeToo movement.

Australia: Peters Ice Cream workers reject wage-cutting drive

Steve Streitberg

Workers at a Peters Ice Cream factory in Melbourne have rejected a management proposal to slash the wages of casual workers by nearly 30 percent and are currently refusing to work overtime. Around 200 workers are employed at the facility.

Enterprise bargaining agreement (EBA) negotiations between the United Workers Union (UWU) and Peters Ice Cream began in March 2020. The company initially demanded that the third of its workforce at the plant in Mulgrave who are casuals take a $9 per hour rate cut that would bring down their base rate from $31.70 to just $22.50.

Peters workers (Credit: United Workers Union, Facebook)

Permanent workers were offered a five percent pay increase in total over three years. Given inflation, this represents a real wage cut, yet the company was clearly hoping to divide the workforce between those who have ongoing and casual positions. This has failed, however, as Peters’ workers last year voted down the proposed agreement. They did so again in January after the company brought forward a modified proposal to cut casual workers’ hourly base rate by $4.75 per hour, bringing their base rate down to $26.95.

The UWU has not released details of its demands, but a Sydney Morning Herald report indicated that it was pushing for 7.5 percent over three years for permanent workers.

The union imposed a limited indefinite overtime ban from January 22, which a Peters representative indicated would have little impact on production. The ban constitutes “protected action” under the anti-democratic Fair Work legislation that outlaws virtually all industrial action outside of the EBA negotiating period. The Fair Work legal straitjacket was enacted by a previous Labor government with the full backing of the trade unions.

Peters is the largest manufacturer of ice cream products in Australia, employing over 1,000 people with annual revenue of $700 million. It is a subsidiary of the transnational ice cream giant Froneri, the second largest ice cream manufacturer in the world. Froneri, in turn, is co-owned by Nestlé, the world’s biggest food company with a market capitalisation of more than $300 billion, and PAI Partners, a France-based private equity firm that manages assets worth more than $20 billion.

Peters management has insisted that wage cuts are necessary to remain “internationally competitive.” Workers were told that the cost of manufacturing ice cream in Australia is too high. The company, facing competition from cheaper imported products, has threatened workers with job losses if other cost-cutting measures fail.

The slashing of casual wages by Peters forms part of a wider corporate offensive. In Sydney, Coles Smeaton Grange warehouse workers face a protracted and ongoing lockout after repeatedly voting down regressive proposals for a new enterprise agreement in preparation for the closure of the facility.

The UWU has played a rotten role in the Smeaton Grange dispute on behalf of the Coles corporate giant—isolating the workers, refusing to make strike pay available, wearing them down, and working with management to prepare and try to ram through a sell-out agreement.

Workers in other Coles warehouses and elsewhere in the sector across Australia have only been alerted to the Smeaton Grange lockout through the campaigning of Socialist Equality Party members and supporters, who have distributed many of the dozens of articles posted on the World Socialist Web Site.

Peters workers only found out about the Smeaton Grange dispute after speaking with WSWS reporters.

“I’ve been showing your leaflet around at Peters,” one worker explained, defying company orders issued to all workers not to speak out on the ongoing industrial dispute. “People are discussing it. This is typical of Coles and terrible for the workers at Smeaton. Coles, Woolworths, and the UWU have been trying to get rid of permanents and to casualise workers in warehousing for years. It’s pretty bad how their workers are being treated.” The worker has been a casual at Peters since 2019, employed through a labour hire agency.

Another casual worker, who gets only 10–20 hours of work per week, used to be employed in the car industry before it was completely shut down. He explained: “Now they want to cut my wages from $31.70 down to $26, how is that legal? It’s going to be a struggle for me, but more so for all those casuals who already have had their hours reduced. This year is quiet compared to previous years. There is less overtime and less work for casuals. There are lots of casuals, including older female workers on the packers’ line who have been here for 20 years or more and are dependent on this second income for their families. They know they can’t find any other work under the current unemployment conditions.”

The worker added: “I used to speak up at Toyota at union meetings to demand the union defend our jobs. The union doesn’t want to help and neither does the government.”

The situation now confronting Peters workers is a direct outcome of the previous EBA agreed to by the National Union of the Workers (which was subsequently part of a union merger that created the UWU) in 2018. This agreement included no restrictions on the proportion of casual workers employed or the company’s use of labour hire firms. There was also no provision for casual workers to achieve secure full-time employment, with only a toothless clause stating: “Where a casual has been engaged for more than 32 hours per week for 6 months, management and [union] delegates will review the nature of the position in order to determine the ongoing nature of the position.”

The EBA makes clear that the UWU works hand in hand with Peters to meet the company goals. It stated that “parties to this agreement [i.e. the union and management] recognise that in order to increase the efficiency, productivity and international competitiveness of industry, a commitment to training and skill development is required.”

The UWU functions as an arm of management. Peters workers should take the fight to defend wages and conditions out of the hands of the union bureaucracy, by forming a rank-and-file committee led by trusted workers, and turn out to other sections of the working class confronting similar assaults on their jobs, wages, and conditions, beginning with the Coles Smeaton Grange workers.

Any unified struggle will confront not only the opposition of the companies, but the union, governments and the media, all intent on defending the profits and “international competitiveness” of Australian capitalism. A fight for jobs, wages and conditions is necessarily political and has to be based on a socialist perspective for the reorganisation of society to make basic social needs the priority, not corporate profits.