About the Award: The MMEG mission is to assist women from developing countries who are pursuing their education with the aim of improving the lives of women and children in their countries. We are one of the few organizations who provide financial assistance to such women. In past years, grants of up to US$15,000 have been awarded in the US/Canada program, and US$7,000 in the Africa, Latin America and Trinity programs.
Type: Grants, Masters
Eligibility:
General: Applicants must meet the following eligibility criteria:
Be at least 25 years old at time of application deadline (see specific regional program application below);
Be a national of a country listed on the MMEG Country Eligibility List;
Be enrolled at an accredited academic institution when submitting application; and plan to be enrolled for a full academic term after award of the grant by the Board;
Not be related to a World Bank Group, International Monetary Fund or Inter-American Development Bank staff member or spouse;
Africa: In addition to the above criteria, an applicant must:
already be enrolled part time (minimum of 2 courses per semester or term) or full time at one of the universities listed below, AND be enrolled for the following academic year (January-December or September to May) at one of the following universities:
University of the Witwatersrand,
University of Cape Town
University of Stellenbosch
University of Pretoria
University of the Free State
Applicants applying from eligible countries other than South Africa must already hold a study permit for South Africa.
Estimated expenses should be calculated and expressed in Rand
Number of Awards: Not specified
Value of Program: Approx. US$7,000
How to Apply: Remember to read the Application Checklist & FAQs before applying, and select the “Africa program” in the first question of the application. If the program name does not appear, the program may be closed to new applications.
Norwegian Air Shuttle has announced plans to lay off 1,191 workers in Spain, affecting 85 percent of its workforce in the country. In parallel, it will close its bases in Barcelona, Gran Canaria and Tenerife, following the closure of its bases in Madrid and Mallorca prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.
This is just the latest redundancy scheme announced by large corporations in Spain. Over 30,000 workers are expected to be laid off in the coming months, including in factories, offices, shops and shopping centres. The trade unions are collaborating with management, as in Corte Inglés where over 8,000 workers will be made redundant.
A Norwegian Air jet taking off from Manchester Airport (credit: Wikimedia Commons)
Norwegian ceased its operations in Spain in March 2020 when lockdowns, confinements and travel restrictions began. Since then, it has kept its entire staff furloughed, which will now give way to the redundancy scheme. The only exception is for 215 pilots and cabin crew members at its two operational bases in Malaga and Alicante for the summer season.
The two main unions at the company, the United Workers Union (Unión Sindical Obrera—USO) and Spanish Union of Airline Pilots (Sindicato Español de Pilotos de Líneas Aéreas—SEPLA) feigned surprise at the announcement. In what is now a refrain of Spain’s trade unions each time a mass redundancy scheme is announced, a union source at Norwegian told La Vanguardia, “we knew an ERE [redundancy scheme] was coming, but we did not imagine this size.”
These statements reveal the reactionary role of the trade unions as appendages of management. The redundancy scheme was anticipated and SEPLA and USO did nothing to defend jobs. Instead, they met with the company last November to try to “calm” the furloughed workers. Norwegian official sources told the press, “there are regular meetings [with the trade unions] with a certain periodicity since the pandemic began.”
In January, Norwegian proposed to lay off 485 workers by cancelling their long-haul flights. USO made clear they were prepared to accept this. Its representative Ernesto Iglesias told the press he “hope[d] that in the next few days the airline will present its redundancy scheme proposal and detail its plans for the short-haul fleet where they also announce layoffs.” The unions did not even call token protests or short duration stoppages, waiting for the company to formalise the layoffs on April 26.
The magnitude of the redundancy scheme was predictable. Norwegian is in a global restructuring process and in recent months has been carrying out similar actions in all the countries it operates in. The trade unions in those countries have, like USO and SEPLA, done nothing to defend jobs.
In the UK, after eliminating long-haul flights, Norwegian laid off 1,100 pilots and cabin crew members at London Gatwick (LGW) airport. The Unite union, which represented 700 of those workers, said only that they were not consulted about the job losses and that workers were owed outstanding wages and redundancy pay.
Beyond offering to provide legal support to workers, Unite did nothing more than appeal to the Tory government while launching a nationalist campaign to prevent workers from waging a necessary united struggle across borders. “Unite has warned ministers that the kind of support for the industry seen in competitor nations is desperately needed here. It is now absolutely imperative that government steps in,” said its regional officer Jamie Major.
Facing no opposition, Norwegian management went on the offensive. In February, the company’s bailed-out UK branch told over 1,000 laid-off employees that it could not afford to pay them their final wages or other redundancy payments. In a final insult, Norwegian told the workers they could hold on to their uniforms and branded cabin bags as a “keepsake” of their time with the airline.
In Italy, Norwegian's 322 employees were fired in mid-February, again without notice, after its Italian subsidiary went into liquidation. The company did not even bother to activate the public aid that workers can benefit from in the event of dismissal.
The Italian Federation of Transport Workers (Federazione Italiana Lavoratori Trasporti—FILT), the Italian Confederation of Trade Unions (Confederazione Italiana Sindacati Lavoratori —CISL) and Italian Union of Transport Workers (Unione Italiana dei Lavoratori dei Trasporti—UILT), issued a statement of surprise: “Norwegian, unexpectedly and without even consulting with the unions, has decided to leave hundreds of its Italian-based employees on the street, along with their families, in the midst of a global pandemic”. Their only response was to hold a rally in front of the Norwegian embassy.
The following day, Norwegian laid off 286 employees in France, when its French subsidiary declared bankruptcy. The unions again claimed to be caught unawares. Workers were informed in a simple text message. As in the Italian case, the company virtually disappeared, still owing salaries and compensation to its workers. To this day they remain unpaid, despite the firm receiving €8 million in aid from the French state.
The trade unions limited themselves to taking the company to court. According to Alexandra Lafargue, union representative of the UNAC cabin crew union in France, they were unable to even apply for unemployment insurance because the liquidators in Ireland—where Norwegian based its French and Italian subsidiaries—“did not give us any documents”.
In the United States, Norwegian laid off 514 employees. The airline’s subsidiary in the US had been widely criticized for using an agency based in Singapore, OSM Aviation, to hire employees with low-salaries and on short-term contracts.
In Finland, the company has fired 283 workers in similar fashion. In Sweden, it has reduced the workforce from 733 to 59 employees, and in Denmark, from 734 to 55. In Norway, where the airline has received financial aid from the government worth hundreds of millions of euros, it is for now maintaining its structure and some 2,000 jobs.
Norwegian co-founder Bjorn Kjos and OSM Aviation owner Bjorn Tore Larsen plan to operate with a new low-cost airline in the US by December, Norse Atlantic. Reflecting the mass desperation in the industry due to the huge number of layoffs worldwide, the Wall Street Journal reported that on its first day Norse received 20 job applications a minute. In one week, it received 8,000 applications.
Norse has already received the approval of Sara Nelson, the international president of the Association of Flight Attendants (AFA)-CWA, AFL-CIO. Despite the mass redundancies imposed by Norwegian in many of its global bases. Nelson said of Norse Atlantic, “We believe that Norse can provide good jobs as flight attendants to respect labour rights in the US and Europe”. Nelson added that the airline was happy to work with the AFA.
No wonder. The AFA has presided over tens of thousands of job cuts in America, including American Airlines (25,000), United Airlines (36,000), and Delta Air Lines (17,000). Their only response has been to plead for another government-backed corporate bailout for the airlines, like its European counterparts.
The mass and global jobs cull at Norwegian Air Shuttle reveals the complete inability of the trade unions to defend jobs, salaries and conditions. To fight back, workers must turn to the only allies they have—their colleagues in other airlines and airports, including the tens of thousands of other workers under redundancy schemes, and the wider international working class.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu authorized Israel’s heaviest airstrikes on Gaza City yesterday, insisting that the war will go on “as long as necessary” and that attacks on Gaza would continue in “full force.” Israel “wants to levy a heavy price” from Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood group that rules Gaza, he added.
Netanyahu proceeds with his criminal war on a largely defenceless people with the full backing of US President Joe Biden, who has repeatedly declared for “Israel’s right to defend itself.” On Sunday the US, for the third time in a week, blocked the United Nations from issuing a toothless call for a cease-fire.
A Palestinian man reacts over the body of his father as others carry him to the morgue after he was killed in an Israeli airstrike that destroyed the upper floors of a commercial building and caused damage to the nearby Health Ministry and prime health care clinic, in Gaza City, Monday, May 17, 2021. (AP Photo/Khalil Hamra)
This was despite a warning from UN secretary general António Guterres to the imperialist powers that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict threatened to spiral out of control, fostering extremism and communal violence not only in the occupied Palestinian territories and Israel but across the region. On Sunday evening, Biden said he was telephoning Netanyahu but refused to call for a cease-fire.
Joining the US for the first time in all but openly siding with Israel are the four Arab states who have signed the Abraham Accords normalizing relations with the Netanyahu government—the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan. “In what appeared to be a state-backed response, the hashtag ‘Palestine is not my cause’ circulated in the UAE, Bahrain and Kuwait over the weekend,” the Guardian reported.
The attacks on Gaza overnight Sunday/Monday were more intense, covering a broader area and lasting longer than the bombardment the previous night in which 42 Palestinians were killed. A reported 54 fighter jets dropped 110 precision munitions on 35 targets in 20 minutes. Casualties in Gaza already stand at over 200, including two doctors, at least 35 women and 58 children, and about 1,300 wounded since Israel started its bombardment of the besieged enclave last Monday. Over 700 homes and 80 buildings have been destroyed, displacing 34,000 people who now lack the most basic necessities of life, including food. There have been 10 deaths in Israel, including two children and a soldier, killed by some of the 3,100 projectiles launched from Gaza.
Civilians have borne the brunt of the Israeli attacks. The Palestinian news agency Wafa reported that the raids had targeted houses and government buildings, including a four-storey home near al-Shifa hospital, Gaza's main medical facility. According to other local media reports, the airstrikes also hit the main coastal road west of the city, security compounds and open spaces, while Gaza’s power distribution company said the airstrikes had damaged a feeder line from the only power plant to much of southern Gaza City.
Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesperson Brig.-Gen. Hidai Zilberman reported that IDF warplanes had hit 15 kilometers of Hamas’s underground tunnel network for the third time, as well as nine residences it claims belonged to high-ranking Hamas commanders. This follows the destruction of the homes belonging to Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar and his brother Muhammed, several other homes of Hamas officials and commanders.
Islamic Jihad reported that an Israeli air strike had killed Hussam Abu Harbeed, one of the group’s leaders. Hamas has previously confirmed that Israel had assassinated 20 of its leaders, although the IDF claim that the total of senior militant leaders is far higher.
The Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad al-Maliki and B’tselem, the Israeli human rights group, have accused Israel of committing war crimes in Gaza against civilians, pointing to the bombing of a house in a refugee camp that killed 10 people, leaving only a baby alive out of an entire family gathering, a building housing media organisations, including the Associated Press and Al Jazeera, and a 13-story office and apartment building. The IDF has posted before and after pictures, boasting of its crimes.
The IDF is targeting so-called “military” locations in the full knowledge that civilian deaths are inevitable. The Guardian quoted the Israeli army spokesperson’s office who said that on Monday Israel hit Hamas’s “underground military infrastructure.” The newspaper said the spokesperson’s office revealed that as a result of the strike, “the underground facility collapsed, causing the civilian houses’ foundations above them to collapse as well, leading to unintended casualties.”
Israeli security forces have also escalated their terrorization of the Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. According to the Palestinian Authority (PA) Ministry of Health, 21 Palestinians have been killed since May 7, along with 3,728 wounded, of whom at least 441 were hit by live ammunition. Most were killed or wounded during the demonstrations, culminating in the Nakba Day protests, that have swept across the occupied territory, making it the worst single day of fatalities since April 2002.
Palestinians initially took to the streets in protest against Israel’s storming of the al-Aqsa Mosque during Ramadan and the planned evictions of Palestinian families from the Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan neighbourhoods adjacent to the Old City in occupied East Jerusalem. This is part of Israel’s broader programme of ethnic cleansing to remove Palestinians.
Palestinian villagers have also faced escalating violence at the hands of armed settlers who have mounted attacks under the protection of soldiers who shoot those who oppose such pogroms with rubber-coated bullets or live ammunition. The IDF has now deployed 24 battalions to the West Bank, nearly double the usual number, replacing the Border Police sent to crush the growing Palestinian unrest within Israel.
Netanyahu and Israel’s political leadership have given the go-ahead to his fascistic allies to send gangs of gun-toting settlers, right-wing football hooligans and ultranationalist bigots to the towns and cities where Palestinian citizens of Israel reside. The violence, which continued over the weekend in towns and cities across the country, including East Jerusalem, has led to the deaths of a dozen people and the arrest of nearly 1,000—850 of whom are Palestinians. In Lod, the authorities have declared a state of emergency, imposed a nighttime curfew and banned non-residents from entering the town after the killing of a Palestinian by a Jewish supremacist.
The High Follow-up Committee for Israel's Palestinian citizens have called a general strike to be held on Tuesday over the conflict at the Al-Aqsa Mosque and violence by settlers in the mixed-population cities.
So far, the state prosecutors have only pressed charges against the Palestinians. Of the 116 indictments, most are for assaulting police officers, Ha’aretz was informed that they plan to press more charges “soon,” supposedly including against Jewish citizens involved in anti-Palestinian violence.
On Friday, the police arrested Sheikh Kamal Al-Khatib, the deputy head of the northern branch of the Islamic Movement in Israel, in the northern town of Kfar Kana on suspicion of incitement, prompting angry clashes that resulting in the wounding of 28 people, four of them seriously.
According to Ha’aretz, the police have handed over the most serious cases of violence to Israel’s domestic spy agency Shin Bet. This follows Netanyahu’s pledge that the police should not fear any investigation of their actions in suppressing the riots and clashes.
The French government is moving forward with its plans to almost completely end coronavirus restrictions by June 30. It is in acting in response to pressure from financial and business circles to fully resume economic activity to guarantee the continued accumulation of profits amidst a continuing spread of the deadly virus.
This reopening is also part of a fierce competition between European countries over creating the most business-friendly environment in the shortest time, ensuring they can profit from the summer tourist season.
French President Emmanuel Macron delivers his speech on the Future of Europe and to and to mark Europe Day, at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, eastern France, Sunday, May 9, 2021. (AP Photo/Jean-Francois Badias, Pool)
Across Europe, the same policy is underway. At the end of April, bars and restaurants began reopening for outdoor service in Italy, along with cinemas, concert halls and theatres. Tourists from across Europe can now also travel to the country as of the middle of this month. The six-month state of emergency in Spain ended on May 9. In the UK, Prime Minister Boris Johnson is proceeding with plans announced in April to end lockdown measures completely by June 21.
In France, as was the case for Macron’s reopening of primary and secondary schools after a short break on April 6 and May 3, the next steps in the reopening of May 19, June 9 and June 30 are fixed and will proceed regardless of the development of the pandemic.
On May 19, the nightly curfew will be moved from 7:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m., nonessential shops will reopen, and cafés and restaurants will resume outdoor dining. Museums, cinemas, theatres and public monuments will also reopen. Physical activities, both indoor and outdoor, will be allowed again, except for contact sports.
On June 9, the curfew will be pushed back to 11:00 p.m. Restaurants will reopen completely. Contact sports will resume outdoors. Large events (such as trade fairs) will be allowed again, and the recourse to online working from home will be restricted.
After June 30, only nightclubs will remain closed, and only the compulsory wearing of masks and some other social distancing protocols will remain.
The Minister of Education Jean-Michel Blanquer has been a particularly aggressive opponent of lockdown measures in Macron’s government and boasts of the fact that the French school system has been one of the least subject to school closures in Europe and America.
In the face of a surge in the virus and anger among parents, teachers and students, the government was compelled to change its policy and allow for classes to close as soon as a single coronavirus case was detected, as opposed to three previously. It has also finally released more detailed statistics, indicating that 5,000 classes were closed on May 7, as well as 32 entire schools. On that date, 9,536 pupils were infected over seven days, in addition to 768 staff members. Apparently using the public holiday on May 13 as a pretext, the ministry has not published any data this week.
This information is however crucial, as schools were the first to reopen and could provide essential data to assess the circulation of the virus.
The government’s national coronavirus report published on May 15 shows 15,685 additional cases. The seven-day average is listed at over 13,600, but this data is probably underestimated due to the drop in testing during the long weekend last week. The effective reproduction rate of the virus has been reduced more significantly over the past week and is now between 0.7 and 0.8. This is sufficiently low enough to enforce a rapid decline of the virus. But the incidence rate remains at 166 cases per 100,000, which means that the virus is still circulating very actively.
While more than 107,000 people have died, the daily average of deaths over seven days only dropped below 200 a few days ago. The rate of hospital admissions is decreasing as well as the number of people admitted to intensive care, but both remain at high levels. The occupancy rate of intensive care beds remains above 100 percent in Île-de-France, the region surrounding the capital of Paris, and in the North. No region has a rate below 50 percent.
Public Health France stated that “hospital pressure remains high, particularly in urgent care services in most regions, necessitating the utmost vigilance in the coming weeks given the gradual relaxation of collective measures.”
The rate of vaccination is now accelerating, but only 13 percent of the population has been vaccinated as of May 11. Macron has just welcomed the passage of the first 20 million doses injected this weekend. Yet only 30 percent of French people have received a first dose, which is wholly insufficient to block the circulation of the virus.
According to the Pasteur Institute, because the more contagious variants of the virus make up almost all cases, “more than 90 percent of adults would need to be vaccinated for a complete ending of restrictions to be possible.” This comment reads as an implicit indictment of the irresponsible health policy pursued by Macron and the European Union.
Given the timetable for the lockdown, there will undoubtedly be a rise in cases during the month of June as the reopening expands.
The government’s refusal to pursue a “zero coronavirus” policy and its policy of alternating extremely limited lockdowns with the explicit demand by Macron for the population to “live with the virus” have kept the hospital system under enormous pressure since the late summer of 2020. This is leading to a general exhaustion of the nation’s health care staff. The treatment of other conditions has been degraded, and the general health of the population is deteriorating.
In spite of this, the government is pursuing its policy of austerity and restructuring of the hospital sector, with new cuts to the number of beds planned, notably in Paris, Nantes, Rennes, Tours and Nancy.
The situation in the hospitals is dramatic, with emergency rooms being understaffed and overflowing for years, which was highlighted when hospital staff went on strike in 2019. In intensive care, studies show that half of doctors and a third of nurses are suffering from severe exhaustion. This can be explained by long working hours and night shifts.
Conditions are also very poor in the rest of the hospital system, as well as in the overall health care and social system, such as institutions for the elderly.
The policy being pursued across France and the European Union poses enormous dangers for the working class. The ruling class is recklessly pursuing a policy that will permit the virus to spread, under conditions where even more contagious variants, such as the one now ravaging India, are already present in Europe. Moreover, it is creating the conditions for even more contagious and possibly vaccine-resistant strains of the virus to evolve, potentially also jeopardising the immunity currently obtained within the vaccinated population.
For a long time now, hospital workers nationwide in Germany have been seething over intolerable conditions; expressed in the outbreak of numerous strikes and protests. The situation, which was already hardly bearable due to staff shortages, work pressure and poor pay, has been further aggravated by the pandemic that has now been going on for more than one year with no end in sight.
Last Wednesday, “International Nurses’ Day,” there were protests all over the country, where nurses, other hospital workers and those at care facilities gave vent to their justified anger. “Our working conditions have become unbearable under coronavirus!” declared one care worker at a rally in Hamburg, according to broadcaster NDR.
Protest by care workers in spring 2020. Some of their banners read: “No profits from health”, “Together strengthen care”, “More of us is better for all”, “Better pay”, “Solidarity with all employees”. (Twitter / Krankenhaus statt Fabrik, 24.04.21)
Due to the government’s murderous “profits before lives” policy, which has already led to more than 85,000 deaths in Germany, hospital intensive care units have been at their limit for more than a year. The already overstretched staffing levels have been further strained by absences due to illness and dismissals during the last months.
In Münster, 1,000 people gathered to demand better conditions in nursing. Among other things, they demanded a 35-hour week at full pay, more security of duty rosters and a starting salary for nursing staff of 4,000 euros a month gross. In the capital, Berlin, several hundred workers from the state-owned Charité and Vivantes hospitals protested.
At Nuremberg hospital, non-medical and nursing staff went on strike for 24 hours last week. The strikers are demanding a significant wage increase. Years ago—as in almost all hospitals—the so-called “service area” was outsourced and transferred to a separate company to circumvent paying wages at the (higher) agreed public service rate. Currently, salaries are only just above the minimum wage of 11.15 euros an hour, which is barely enough to make ends meet. The employer’s current offer of twelve euros per hour was rightly perceived as a provocation by the 800 employees of the service company.
Hospital management immediately rejected the demand for higher wages citing “industry-standard” salaries. Nuremberg’s mayor Marcus König (Christian Social Union, CSU) and Harald Riedel (Social Democratic Party, SPD), responsible for finances, agreed and explained that the demand was not financially feasible.
In addition, there are protests being held against dismissals. At numerous locations, workers at Sana hospitals are protesting against the elimination of more than one thousand jobs at Germany’s third-largest hospital group. Amid the third wave of the pandemic, the group wants to continue implementing its radical austerity measures while driving up profits for shareholders. Except for the cleaning sector, all business areas of the subsidiary DGS Pro-Service GmbH are to be closed. Those affected by the redundancies include ward assistants, the hospital collection and delivery services, porters and security workers. This is not only catastrophic for those being threatened with dismissal but for the remaining staff and the patients, it means increasing work pressure and poorer quality of care.
The importance of sufficient hospital staffing is made clear by a recent study from Australia published in the medical journal The Lancet. A minimum nurse-patient ratio can “save lives and reduce costs,” the authors explained. According to the study, strict minimum nursing levels reduce the number of deaths and readmissions. “These findings are even more relevant in the context of COVID-19, which has pushed already overworked and burnt-out nurses in hospitals to the brink,” said the study’s lead author Matthew McHugh.
While workers are threatened with layoffs, poor wages and working conditions, the health companies are posting record profits. For the big hospital operators like Helios or Asklepios, 2020 was extremely profitable. The German Helios hospitals alone earned 600 million euros before taxes last year, the Spanish hospitals of the internationally operating group also made 400 million euros.
The parent company Fresenius even reported a total pre-tax profit of 4.6 billion euros for last year. CEO Stephan Sturm said that 2020 had been “well managed.” For the shareholders, the highest dividend ever paid by Fresenius was announced, at almost half a billion euros.
To increase this further, plans for more cuts are already in place. According to a report by ZeitOnline, Sturm recently stated in regard to Helios that there would be “a targeted reduction in physician capacities” in order “to secure our profitability.” When asked, the group states that it had taken a close look at every department in every hospital, indicating that it is a matter of several hundred jobs in total. Sturm told banking analysts that it could even come to the “sale of hospitals” to further reduce costs.
As the Zeit Online article makes clear, state aid has provided a windfall for shareholders. Thanks to the system of flat-rate payments to hospitals for keeping a certain number of beds free for coronavirus cases, most of the clinics in the group were able to achieve more turnover than had been calculated before the pandemic. The hospital chain received more state aid—740 million euros—than any competitor.
To enforce the dismissals, low wages and poor working conditions, the corporations and governments work closely with the trade unions, whose representatives sit on supervisory boards and similar bodies, support the cuts and sometimes even actively implement them. At the same time, they try to divert any protests against these conditions into harmless channels. This can be seen very clearly in Berlin.
In recent months and years, there have been repeated strikes and protests by workers at the state-owned Charité and Vivantes hospitals. Last Wednesday, hundreds protested in front of the City Hall. The hospitals employ over 36,000 workers across Berlin.
The Verdi trade union is now demanding a “relief collective agreement” for employees in the nursing sector, which should provide for more staff on the wards. The management boards of Vivantes and Charité are supposed to sign an agreement on new staffing levels within 100 days, otherwise, Verdi will call a strike.
Since workers have been demanding more staff for years, it is not surprising that a petition was soon signed by almost 8,400 workers. The petition is to be handed over to Mayor Michael Müller (SPD). The demand for a “relief collective agreement” by Verdi is part of its well-known manoeuvres. In 2016, hospital workers were simply cheated with the “historic” collective agreement for more staff negotiated by Verdi. Even union representatives had to admit time and again that staffing targets were barely met.
By setting a 100-day deadline, Verdi wants to ensure calm in the hospitals and make sure no protests break out in the current tense situation, with enormous pent-up anger among workers. At the same time, the union is working behind the scenes with the SPD-Left Party-Green Party Senate (Berlin state executive) to prepare another sell-out. In this context, it is significant that the person responsible for the catastrophic situation at the hospitals, as well as for the unscrupulous coronavirus policies in the German capital that have cost thousands of lives, appeared at the Verdi rally, health senator (state minister) Dilek Kalayci (SPD).
At the Vivantes facilities, the union is also demanding the public service collective agreement (TVöD) be paid to those working for subsidiary companies. While nursing staff are paid according to TVöD, employees in the areas of cleaning, transport or catering, for example, receive significantly less. Here, too, there have been repeated strikes. Verdi, in close coordination with the SPD, the Greens and the Left Party—Finance Senator Matthias Kollatz (SPD) is head of the Vivantes supervisory board—will do everything to suppress further protests and cement the miserable conditions.
This is exactly what Verdi has done at the Charité service company CFM (Charité-Facility-Management). After the workers there were outsourced 14 years ago and had to put up with low wages, there have been countless strikes and protests. Verdi sold all of them out without achieving any improvements for the workers. After protests grew at the Charité and elsewhere, Verdi and the Senate initiated the buyback of CFM in 2019 and concluded a collective agreement for CFM workers this year.
After a three-month arbitration process under former Brandenburg Minister-President Matthias Platzeck (SPD), a uniform collective agreement was adopted for the approximately 3,000 CFM employees, replacing several different regulations on working hours and wages. The result does not even begin to meet the workers’ demands. Even Verdi negotiator Marco Pavlik had to concede that the agreement was “clearly far away from the level of TVöD.”
In reality, the improvements for CFM workers are minimal, and for some groups the contract even increases their weekly working hours. It is therefore hardly surprising that both the management and the Senate were delighted with the deal. Berlin’s Mayor Müller explicitly praised the agreement as strengthening “workplace co-determination,” i.e., the corporatist role of the unions. Part of the agreement is a slush fund of 100,000 euros per year to “further develop trade union work in the company,” as Pavlik noted. This is to ensure that Verdi retains control despite the lack of support from the workers.
The essentially anti-working class role of the unions can be seen internationally. In the US state of Massachusetts, hundreds of nurses have been on strike for weeks. They face not only the ruthless management of Tenet Healthcare, which has threatened to fire strikers, but also the trade unions, which are isolating the strike, and the Democratic Party. In Connecticut last week, the Democrats, unions and management conspired to reach a rotten deal to prevent a strike by workers from 26 nursing facilities across the state, a deal that did not meet the workers’ legitimate demands.
As Canada’s deadly third wave of the COVID-19 pandemic rages on, workplace outbreaks continue to mount across the country. From oil workers to meatpackers and logistics workers, working people and their loved ones are being needlessly put at risk because governments at all levels, acting on behalf of the ruling elite, insist that the economy remain “open” to generate corporate profits.
In the largest workplace outbreak yet recorded in Canada, a staggering 1,361 workers at Canadian Natural Resources Ltd.’s Horizon tar sands oil site near Fort McMurray, Alberta, have tested positive. Two workers have died. This is just the largest of dozens of outbreaks in the oil sector, which has become a hotbed for infections due to the hard-right United Conservative Party (UCP) government’s determination to keep energy businesses operating at full tilt so that Big Oil can continue to rake in profits.
CNRL's Horizon oil tarsands facility. (Wikipedia)
Cases skyrocketed at the CNRL Horizon site throughout April as the company proceeded with maintenance work, despite warnings that the large number of transient workers travelling to the site would create perfect conditions for the virus to spread. “I know I got it there,” a 65-year-old contractor told Global News. “I was scared, yeah… the thing is dying alone, nobody there to say bye to or nothing like that. It was scary. I thought I was done.”
In Quebec, workplace outbreaks peaked at 678 in late April and have since fallen back to a still high 561. Major economic sectors particularly affected include metal producers, lumber, clothing and textile products industries, slaughterhouses, grocery stores, and house construction. A massive outbreak is currently under way at the du Breton pork slaughterhouse in Rivière-du-Loup, where at least 104 out of the approximately 500-strong workforce have been infected.
In British Columbia, the major Site C dam construction project in the province’s north declared an outbreak at the end of April after 40 workers tested positive within two months. Nine businesses closed last week in the Lower Mainland due to workplace transmission, including eight in the Fraser Health region, and one in Vancouver Coastal Health. Since the beginning of April, over 100 businesses have temporarily closed in the Lower Mainland due to workplace outbreaks.
In Ottawa, local health authorities reported 16 active workplace outbreaks last week, including at construction sites, manufacturing plants, warehouses, and offices. In line with the conspiracy of silence enforced by the provincial Conservative government and local health authorities across Ontario, Ottawa Public Health has refused to identify any of the worksites or to provide information on how many infections were recorded at each location. Underscoring the utter indifference shown by big business towards the lives of working people, Medical Officer of Health Dr. Vera Etches reported, “Our team is now being inundated from workplaces where more than two people have tested positive. We’re also seeing outbreaks in offices where people could have potentially worked from home.”
In Toronto, where public outrage has forced local health authorities to begin naming workplaces with COVID-19 outbreaks, 18 new locations were added to their list when it was updated last Friday. These included a Serano bakery, a Sobeys grocery store, a Bombardier Aerospace facility, and the Roots Leather Factory.
A Cargill poultry plant in London, Ontario suspended production for 10 days in April after at least 118 workers became infected. The plant employs about 900 workers and processes 100,000 chickens a day for the fast-food titan McDonald’s. The Middlesex-London Public Health Unit noted that one of the new, more contagious variants may have been driving the outbreak at the facility.
A spokesman for Cargill said that workers were paid for 36 hours while the plant was idled, in accordance with an agreement made with United Food and Commercial Workers Local 175. The typical workweek for a worker at Cargill’s London plant is more than 50 hours. This means most workers will have received little more than half of their regular pay for the week-and-a-half the plant was shuttered.
“The mood at the plant is that management doesn’t care about them. They let it go on for a while and in my opinion they only took steps when the worker discontent started to reach levels where it wasn’t manageable for them anymore,” a worker told the London Free Press on condition of anonymity.
“If you could see the boning department, they are packed in like sardines. There is a plastic sheet separating everyone ... Everyone is wearing a blue surgical mask and a plastic face shield. However that doesn’t seem to have helped much.”
Cargill is the largest privately owned corporation in America. Employing over 155,000 workers across 70 countries, the corporation has been a mainstay in agricultural commodities for well over a century. Annual revenue for the corporation averages around $115 billion USD and profits $3 billion USD. Profits were up 17 percent year over year, according to a report published in July 2020 by BNN Bloomberg.
As profits soared during the pandemic, Cargill paid out massive dividends to the 125 family members who own the company. Dividend payouts rose 76 percent from the previous year, totaling $1.13 billion, from $643 million in 2019. Poultry products are a significant contributor to Cargill’s bottom line.
Cargill’s affirmation of its commitment to worker health and safety rings hollow after major outbreaks at Cargill meatpacking plants across North America. The Guelph Cargill facility, whose workforce is also represented by UFCW Local 175, reported 87 confirmed cases among its staff last December.
Until COVID-19 ravaged the workforce at CNRL’s Horizon site, Canada’s largest workplace outbreak since the pandemic began was at Cargill’s High River, Alberta meatpacking plant. Of the 2,000 workers employed at the Cargill plant, 935 tested positive for COVID-19 last spring and three workers died. Another 600 close contacts also were infected.
This overview of recent workplace outbreaks in Canada, which is by no means comprehensive, gives a sense of the tremendous human cost of the ruling elite’s homicidal back-to-work drive. This policy has been overseen by the federal minority Liberal government, which relies on the support of the social-democratic NDP for its majority in parliament. In its throne speech last September, the Trudeau Liberal government stipulated that any future COVID-19-related shutdowns should be “short-term” and “local” in nature.
Doug Ford’s Ontario Conservative government drafted a “Fall Pandemic Preparedness Plan” in this spirit. Expressing the prioritization of profits over lives even more nakedly, it declared, “The return to an earlier stage of provincial reopening, or even regional approaches to tightening would be avoided in favour of organization-specific or localized change.” In other words, non-essential workers must remain on the job in order to ensure the flow of profit to the capitalists.
This policy, and its corollary—the reopening of schools so parents could be forced back to work under unsafe conditions amid the pandemic—fueled Canada’s second wave, which claimed over 10,000 lives last winter, and this spring’s ongoing third wave.
Even when Ford was grudgingly forced to impose province-wide “lockdown” measures in late December and again this April due to dramatic surges in COVID-19 cases, workplaces—especially manufacturing, resource industries and construction—were almost entirely excluded from the restrictions. Underlining that the disregard for workers’ lives is common to all the establishment parties, BC’s New Democrat Premier John Horgan has pursued a similar course and tried to blame young workers for the surge in COVID-19 cases, remarking in early April, “Don’t blow this for the rest of us.”
The trade unions have played a pivotal role in implementing the ruling class’ back-to-work/back-to-school policy. Throughout the pandemic their focus has been on suppressing worker opposition to dangerous working conditions and further expanding their corporatist relationship with big business and government. This anti-worker policy is typified by the Canadian Labour Congress’ claim, announced in a banner atop its homepage, that “In Canada, we’ve weathered the pandemic by sticking together and supporting each other.”
At the Cargill plant in London, the UFCW did nothing to protect the workforce. Tim Deelstra, a spokesman for UFCW Local 175, remarked on the closure of the plant in mid-April, “We support this decision by the company.” In other words, the UFCW never even called for the plant to close, let alone organized worker job action to shut it down. It simply waited until the company determined that the situation was so bad, with so many workers unable or unwilling to report to work, that it had no other option.
A vast social chasm separates ordinary workers from the union bureaucrats and their six-figure salaries. UFCW Canada National President Paul Meinema made $219,170 in 2019 when the average hourly wage for a butcher at Cargill with three years of experience was $20.10.
At CNRL’s Horizon tar sands site in Alberta, the unions are playing a similar role. Alberta Federation of Labour Gill McGowan made a pathetic appeal to the hard-right United Conservative government of Jason Kenney to close down the CNRL site and others with major outbreaks. Workers “and their leaders in their respective unions,” said McGowan last week, “have told me …, yes, they want to work—but they want to work in conditions that are safe, and as it stands right now, conditions are not safe in most if not all oilsands-related construction projects.”
The AFL president’s remarks unintentionally provide a damning indictment of his organization’s policy. Even though over 1,300 workers have already been infected at the CNRL site and McGowan admits that “conditions are not safe in most if not all oilsands-related construction projects,” he has nothing to offer workers but a humble appeal to the very government that has insisted on keeping the energy sector open throughout the pandemic, dismissed the virus as a “flu,” and blamed the population for having North America’s highest per capita number of COVID-19 infections.
Childhood advocacy organization Zero to Three recently released its annual State of Babies Yearbook: 2021. The report paints a grim picture of how most of America’s infants fared in 2020, both prior to and during the pandemic.
State of Babies Yearbook: 2021 opens with a clear and vitally important statement: “Telling the story of America’s babies is more important than ever… even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the littlest among us did not have the supports they need to thrive.”
A child and mother (Photo: Creative Commons)
The statistics are jarring. Twenty-one percent of babies now live in households where there is no working parent. More than 40 percent of babies in the US now live in households near or below the federal poverty line (FPL). The report notes, “Infants and toddlers represent only 3.5 percent of the nation’s population […] but 6 percent of those in poverty.”
The precarious welfare of American babies begins before birth; nationwide, 6.2 percent of mothers either receive no prenatal care or receive it late in their pregnancy. In some states, that rate nearly doubles. In New Mexico, for example, the rate is 11.3 percent.
During the time examined by Zero to Three, the United States continued to lead the industrialized world in maternal mortality rates, with 17.4 deaths per 100,000 mothers. Given that many US states do not provide extensive maternal mortality data, this rate could be much higher. Infant mortality has remained unchanged in the US with 5.7 deaths per 1,000 live births. Like the prenatal care rates, the infant mortality rate varies widely between states; in Mississippi, it rises to a shocking 8.3 deaths per 1,000 live births.
The vast wealth of the American ruling class has not produced better living conditions for the country’s smallest and most vulnerable residents. According to the report, the US ranked 33rd for childhood poverty among 37 wealthy countries between 2018-19.
While Zero to Three clarifies that households with infants struggled prior to the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, its 2021 yearbook shows a precipitous drop in most measures of infant health and well-being, with the sharpest losses experienced by low-income families.
The pandemic interrupted the availability of food and caused the rate of food insecurity to spike. Fifteen percent of US families reported high food insecurity prior to the pandemic, increasing to 26.8 percent in the past year. Food insecurity for low income families rose from 29.2 percent pre-pandemic to a staggering 45.4 percent today.
Widespread unemployment increased the numbers of families eligible for programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) programs. At the same time, WIC participation by eligible families fell from 85.9 percent to 79.3 percent during the pandemic.
The pandemic has also disrupted health care for low-income families, with the percentage that missed well-baby or well-child visits more than tripling to 37.8 percent during the pandemic. This has resulted in 18.1 percent of families reporting missed vaccines for their children.
Before the pandemic, access to affordable, quality child care eluded most American families, particularly low-income families. Since the pandemic, closure of child care facilities has made access even more scarce. This has, in turn, affected employment. Fifty percent of parents who had not returned to the workforce by October cited lack of child care. According to Zero to Three’s data, 82.6 percent of such families were denied unemployment benefits.
Parents who work from home often care for an infant or toddler while working. In many cases, they also oversee older children’s online schooling. As a result, the report claims, “parents are forced to prioritize financial responsibilities and basic needs over engaging their young child in activities that boost early childhood learning and cognitive development.”
State of Babies Yearbook’s admirable work is weakened by its insistence upon a racialist analysis and conclusions. “Simply stated,” they write, “race matters.” According to them, maternal and infant mortality and morbidity variations can “only” be understood through the lens of race. In fact, the disparities cited correlate more strongly with wealth, with poor states and rural populations over-represented in maternal and infant mortality.
The alarming statistics facing American infants can only be understood properly as the product of the accelerated decay of capitalism. Racism certainly exists in the United States, but it exists in service to capitalism, not vice-versa.
The bourgeoisie inevitably use such racialist formulations to triage social spending under a pretense of progressivism. Instead of policies that further social equality, the bourgeoisie instead creates an equity of poverty among American workers.
The Biden administration’s American Rescue Plan (ARP), signed into law on March 11, is one such feint. In a statement on the White House’s website, the Biden administration shamelessly panders to identity politics, claiming that the exodus of women from the labor force due to child care deficiencies is “undoing decades of progress improving women’s labor force participation rate.”
These “decades of progress” benefited the upper layers of the middle class and the bourgeoisie at the expense of workers. In 1996, Biden voted for the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), which forced hundreds of thousands of poor women to either stop working or to work for poverty wages without child care.
The ARP has been hailed by the pseudo-left and liberal press because it contains $39 billion in one-time funding for child care supports, in addition to other short-term stimulus programs. This funding, totally inadequate to address the immense crisis detailed in the State of Babies report, is itself a theatrical flourish. These funds will be pared down to laughable amounts, which Biden knows and counts upon. The proposed credits for child care will primarily benefit the more well-off layers of the middle class, who can afford to pay for child care up front, instead of the many poorly-paid “essential workers” who were forced out of the labor pool by lack of child care.
There is growing nervousness in financial markets over the effect of inflation on the massive asset bubble that has developed in the past year as a result of the multi-trillion interventions by the US Federal Reserve and other central banks.
Wall Street sign (Sjoerd van Oosten/Creative Commons)
Inflation warning signals have started to flash with the report last week that US consumer price inflation rose by 4.2 percent in April from a year earlier.
While the Fed has insisted its ultra-easy monetary policies, which have fueled the asset boom, will continue for the foreseeable future, there are fears that either interest rates in the bond market will start to rise or that the central bank will be forced to slam on the monetary brakes if price rises prove to be structural rather than “transitory” as it has maintained.
Speaking at a conference last Tuesday, Lael Brainard, a member of the Fed’s Board of Governors, said the central bank had to be “patient” in pursuing its policies and made it clear the Fed was not even beginning to contemplate removing its support for financial markets.
Having just overseen the Fed’s Financial Stability Report, which pointed to “vulnerabilities” in the financial system as investors engaged in increasingly risky strategies in the search for yield, Brainard was acutely aware that even the suggestion of an interest rate rise could have adverse consequences for the stock market and other financial assets.
Speaking in the wake of figures showing a marked slowdown in labour market growth—April data revealed the US economy added only 266,000 jobs in April, well below expectations—she said: “The outlook is bright, but risks remain, and we are far from our goal. The latest employment report reminds us that realised outcomes can diverge from forward projections and underscores the value of patience.”
On inflation, speaking before the latest numbers came out, she said remaining “patient” during a “transitory surge” in prices associated with re-opening would ensure that underlying momentum was “not curtailed by a premature tightening of financial conditions.”
In other words, the Fed would not do anything to “spook” the financial markets and set off a major sell-off. The Fed is haunted by the prospect of a return of the conditions of March 2020, when markets froze, and the events of February 25 this year, when a tremor went through the financial system because 40 percent of a Treasury bond issue was not able to be sold.
Seeking to reinforce the belief in the financial markets that the Fed will not move to tighten its monetary policies, Brainard said supply-chain frictions and other “reopening frictions” were not likely to generated persistently high inflation on their own.
“A persistent material increase in inflation would require not just that wages or prices increase for a period after reopening, but also a broad expectation that they will continue to increase at a persistently higher pace.”
In another effort to reassure the financial markets that persistent inflation would not develop, requiring action by the Fed, she said past experience suggested that many businesses would compress margins and rely on automation to reduce costs.
She cited a survey conducted last December which reported that around half of chief financial officers from large firms and about one-third from smaller firms were “using, or planning to use, automation or technology to reduce reliance on labour.”
But the assurances from the Fed have not quelled fears in financial markets that the central banks “tolerance” of higher inflation may lead to a sudden tightening. The chief economist at the global financial firm ING, James Knightley told the Financial Times: “If you’ve let things run too hot for too long, that leads to over-tightening.
“This new framework could open the door to more prolonged periods of loose monetary policy that need to be corrected more quickly and aggressively than the market is pricing.”
And there is the added fear that the class struggle will be a major factor as workers, confronted with rising prices under conditions where their real wages have been cut, will start to push for pay increases to make up for what they have lost.
As the Wall Street Journal noted, in an article published over the weekend, while prices rose 4.2 percent in April the Labor Department reported that the hourly pay for production workers increased by only 1.2 percent over the same period.
“The department also said that, after adjusting for inflation, wages of production workers and non-managers fell 3.3 percent in April from a year earlier, the largest such decline since an inflation shock and recession in 1980.”
The Journal article pointed out that a fall in inflation-adjusted wages hits low- and moderate-income households especially hard because they devote a large portion of their pay to covering basic living costs and that if inflation persists and is fueled by the policies of the Fed and the Biden administration “it could raise questions about the costs and benefits of those policies for working Americans.”
This is a roundabout way of saying that the persistence of inflation could see workers be propelled to take matters into their own hands and undertake independent action. The Biden administration is certainly aware of this prospect which lies behind its promotion of the trade unions in order to suppress such action.
Another factor which could stimulate independent action by workers is the growing understanding of the extent to which the financial oligarchs have benefited from the pandemic while the working class, in the US and around the world, has suffered death, disease and worsening living standards.
It is estimated that some $9 trillion has been spent by governments in rescue funds. But this massive outlay of money has largely ended up in the hands of the super-rich. According to the annual wealth rankings published by Forbes magazine, the number of billionaires increased to more than 2700 over the past 12 months as their total combined wealth rose by $5 trillion to $13 trillion.
