Workers in Vietnam forced to work to maintain profits of US companies

John Braddock

A revealing article in the New York Times last month gave some insight into the way in which US corporations dictate the conditions under which the lives of workers around the globe are sacrificed for capitalist profit.

Garment workers in Vietnam [Credit: Chau Doan/United Nations Industrial Development Organization]

“Retailers’ Latest Headache: Shutdowns at Their Vietnamese Suppliers,” by Sapna Maheshwari and Patricia Cohen, published on September 29, details how COVID shutdowns in the Southeast Asian country are affecting apparel and footwear supplies to US retailers as they head into their “all-important holiday season.”

Vietnam is the second-biggest supplier of apparel and footwear to the US after China. The pandemic, however, has forced many Vietnamese factories to close or operate at reduced capacity. American firms are facing disruptions of supplies, along with higher prices from shortages, labour restrictions and skyrocketing shipping costs.

One US retailer, Everlane, told the Times it was facing delays of four to eight weeks, depending on when factories it worked with in Vietnam had closed. Nike cut its sales forecast last month, citing the loss of 10 weeks of production since mid-July. Vietnam supplies 40 percent of Everlane’s stocks, along with brands such as Gap and Old Navy, while the country’s contract factories manufactured 51 percent of Nike’s footwear last year.

Acutely concerned about the threat to profits, US businesses are ramping up political pressure in both Washington and Vietnam. Executives from 90 companies, including Nike and Fruit of the Loom, wrote to the Biden administration in August to accelerate vaccine donations, saying that “the health of our industry is directly dependent on the health of Vietnam’s industry.” The apparel industry employs about three million workers in the US.

Steve Lamar, president of the American Apparel & Footwear Association told the Times some US companies had been setting up vaccination sites at their Vietnam suppliers to help administer COVID shots. They were, he openly admitted, trying to keep manufacturing going through a “three-in-one place” policy, “where workers eat, sleep and work at factories” [emphasis added].

Put bluntly, highly exploited Vietnamese sweatshop workers are being effectively imprisoned by the profit demands of US corporates.

Jason Chen, owner of the Singtex garment factory, said: “This year in the USA, everybody wants to go shopping. Some goods cannot be delivered in the right time. So it really will affect the holiday.” The company’s 350-person factory in Binh Duong Province is operating with 80 people who live permanently on the premises, which is allowed by the government in a bid to minimize the hit to exports.

Throughout 2020, the Vietnamese government successfully kept infection rates low through a preventative public health strategy prioritizing contract tracing and targeted quarantine measures. Early in the pandemic, Vietnam remained mostly open, allowing the economy to function. Computer chip manufacturer Intel and others increased production by up to 30 percent in the first half of 2020.

With the arrival of the Delta variant last April, new case numbers surged, with a single day record of 9,684 cases on August 8. Ho Chi Minh City and 18 southern provinces went into lockdown in mid-July. The provision of components to global supply chains was severely disrupted.

Samsung was forced to cut back production while Apple’s new iPhone 13 is facing longer-than-expected delivery times due to constrained supplies of camera modules from the manufacturing facility in southern Vietnam. The trade ministry has warned that Vietnam risks losing overseas customers because of shuttered factories.

In three months, the virus has infected 770,000 people and killed over 20,000. While daily case numbers have trended downward since their peak of over 14,000 in late August, on October 10 there were still 3,528 new cases registered, with the 7-day average running at 4,441. To date, the country has registered a total of 840,000 cases and 20,555 deaths

Only 9.3 percent of the population remains fully vaccinated, with short supply blamed for the delay. About 80 percent of fatalities and half of all infections have occurred in Ho Chi Minh City, a metropolis of 10 million people. Overwhelmed hospitals and food shortages highlight an emerging social disaster.

The Ho Chi Minh City lockdown was lifted at the end of September. The Stalinist Communist Party government is now trying to speed up vaccinations and reopen the country with priority for big cities, vulnerable locations and industrial zones. More people are able to leave their homes, restaurants can serve take-away meals and other businesses have opened. A mass exodus of migrant workers has fled to their home provinces in a desperate bid to escape the gathering crisis.

Amid growing imperialist pressure on Vietnam to drop restrictions, US Vice President Kamala Harris visited Vietnam in August. While the focus of her tour was to intensify Washington’s confrontation with Beijing, Harris promised the US would send an additional one million vaccine doses to Vietnam, on top of five million already donated, along with $23 million in emergency aid and 77 freezers to store vaccine. This is a paltry amount given the dire situation facing a population of 97.3 million.

So-called “vaccine diplomacy” has nothing to do with concerns over the health and well-being of the people. Ruling elites around the world are pushing to get vaccine rates at a level pronounced “safe” enough to remove all restrictions and “open up” the economy. It is a strategy to get thousands of highly exploited workers back into factories as soon as possible in order to start ramping up profits again.

The plight of the Vietnamese workers is a product of the directives coming from big business over an escalating supply chain crisis impacting everything from auto production to strategic materials such as semiconductors and computer chips. Virtually every manufacturing firm is dependent on the supply of raw materials, such as steel and copper, tin and parts from across the globe.

Fortune declared that addressing global supply-chain blockages in Southeast Asia is vital “to avoid dampening foreign investor appetite for the dynamic region.” The Times similarly warned about the “longer-lasting impact on future investment decisions in Vietnam and other emerging economies.” Companies deciding where to invest, it noted, “have always evaluated a broad slate of conditions, like taxes, regulatory requirements and labor force availability.”

Vietnam is very much at the centre of the relentless search by finance capital and transnational corporations for access to cheap labour and high profits. Over the recent period it has become an important part of the tech supply chain, with companies including Samsung, Intel and Apple suppliers relocating from China amid rising costs and trade and geopolitical tensions. Tariffs on China instituted under former US President Trump accelerated the shift.

Even as factories in Ho Chi Minh City and elsewhere are now preparing to resume production, however, American companies are looking outside Vietnam, according to the Times, to find partners elsewhere and even returning to Chinese factories that they had worked with previously.

IMF concerned over inflation and push for higher wages

Nick Beams

The International Monetary Fund has warned of growing inflationary pressures in the global economy, making clear its greatest concern is that rising prices will lead to a push for higher wages.

The warnings are contained in the latest projections in the Fund’s twice-yearly World Economic Outlook report prepared for the IMF-World Bank meetings being held in Washington this week and in comments by IMF chief economist Gita Gopinath.

Kristalina Georgieva [Credit: Friends of Europe]

In a blog post, Gopinath said the global recovery from the pandemic continued but it was being “hobbled” by the spread of the Delta variant. “Health risks abound, holding back a full return to normalcy. Pandemic outbreaks in critical links of global supply chains have resulted in longer than expected supply disruptions, feeding inflation in many countries. Overall risks to economic prospects have increased and policy trade-offs have become more complex,” she wrote.

These trade-offs refer to the monetary policy of the US Fed and other major central banks. On the one hand, rising inflation leads to a push for a tighter monetary policy but, on the other, it threatens to destabilise financial markets, which have become ever more dependent on the inflow of cheap money, and to bring about a recession.

“Monetary policy,” Gopinath commented, “will need to walk a fine line between tackling inflation and financial risks and supporting the economic recovery.

“While monetary policy can generally look through transitory increases in inflation, central banks should be prepared to act quickly if the risks of rising inflation become more material in this uncharted economic recovery.”

She elaborated further on this issue in comments made to the Financial Times, saying central banks should act if there were signs that companies, households and workers started to expect higher inflation to continue, with energy prices of particular concern.

“What [central banks] have to watch out for is the second-round effects [with] these increases in energy prices feeding into wages and then feeding into core prices. That’s where you have to be very, very vigilant,” she said.

The IMF report insisted that central banks should act to curb inflation—and by implication the push for higher wages—through the tightening of monetary policy even if employment was still weak.

“A spiral of doubt could hold back private investment and lead to precisely the slower employment recovery central banks seek to avoid when holding off on policy tightening,” it stated.

Gopinath’s blog post also pointed to a “great vaccine divide” and a “dangerous divergence” in economic prospects. While aggregate output for advanced economies was expected to reach its pre-pandemic path by 2022, emerging market and developing economies (excluding China) would remain 5.5 percent below pre-pandemic projections in 2024.

While almost 60 percent of the adult population in advanced countries were fully vaccinated, about 96 percent of the population in low-income countries were unvaccinated.

According to Gopinath, if COVID-19 were to have an impact into the medium-term “it could reduce global GDP by a cumulative $5.3 trillion over the next five years relative to our current projections.”

She called for the stepping up of efforts to ensure equitable vaccine access for every country in order to secure better economic prospects for all.

However, there is no sign of this taking place.

In its financial stability report, the IMF warned that financial markets and emerging economies were vulnerable to a sudden increase in borrowing costs if central banks needed to lift interest rates because of rising inflation.

It said an abrupt and sustained rise in interest rates from low levels, particularly in the US, “could trigger a tightening of global financial conditions” that would interact with existing financial vulnerabilities and lead to a “sharp fall in asset valuations.”

The IMF-World Bank meeting—a virtual gathering due to the pandemic—began in unprecedented circumstances with the very real prospect of the fund’s managing director, Kristalina Georgieva, being removed from her post as proceedings were about to begin.

Georgieva was under examination by the IMF’s executive board. An investigation by the US law firm WilmerHale claimed during her time as a senior executive at the World Bank, prior to her appointment as the fund’s chief in 2019, she manipulated data to lift China’s rating in the bank’s 2018 Doing Business report.

Georgieva rejected the findings and her supporters, including former World Bank chief economist Joseph Stiglitz, denounced the WilmerHale findings as a “hatchet job.” International economist Jeffrey Sachs said she had been targeted because she was “not a sworn enemy of Beijing.”

Within the IMF, Georgieva received support from European countries led by France which had played the central role in securing her IMF appointment in 2019.

Faced with a prospect of another conflict with Europe the US, the fund’s largest shareholder decided to back down, at least for the present.

On Monday, after a series of eight long meetings, stretching over a week, the 24-member IMF executive board issued a statement saying it had “full confidence” in her ability to carry out her duties as managing director.

However, according to a report in the FT, citing people briefed on the discussions, the decision was close. While the executive board statement expressed confidence in Georgieva it left open the possibility for future moves against her. It stated that the evidence presented “did not conclusively demonstrate” that she had played an “improper” role in lifting China’s ranking in the Doing Business report.

While forced to back down, the US has made it clear that so far as it is concerned the conflict is not over.

In a phone call to Georgieva on Monday, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said the WilmerHale report had raised “legitimate issues and concerns” but that “absent further direct evidence with regard to the role of the managing director there is not the basis for a change in IMF leadership.”

Yellen effectively put Georgieva on notice. She said the US Treasury would “monitor, follow up closely, evaluate any new facts or findings” and that the issue highlighted the “need for shareholders to be vigilant in defending the integrity of both the bank and the fund.”

The issue was never about a few points in the Doing Business report but centred on China’s increasing role in global institutions which is seen by the US as undermining its dominance. At present the US is the dominant shareholder in the fund holding more than 16 percent while China, the world’s second largest economy and rapidly approaching the size of the US, holds around 6 percent.

Across the entire political establishment, there is vociferous opposition in the US to any move to increase China’s influence in the IMF and other global institutions. It was summed up in a recent editorial in the Wall Street Journal in which it said China’s economic rise would give it more sway in global bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank, but China had “the habit of turning these institutions to serve the interests of the Communist Party.”

Mitsuba auto parts workers occupy factory in Turkey to oppose sackings

Barış Demir

One hundred and twenty workers at the Mitsuba Otomotiv in Gebze, Kocaeli, stopped production on Monday and occupied their factory after nine workers were dismissed for joining the Birleşik Metal-İş union.

Amid an international upsurge in the class struggle, Mitsuba workers demanded the rehiring of their sacked colleagues and recognition of the union. However, the Birleşik Metal-İş union betrayed them, reaching an agreement with Mitsuba yesterday. Mitsuba will recognize the union and pay legally-mandated compensation, but still refuses to rehire the sacked workers.

This important struggle by workers against Mitsuba, a global auto parts giant headquartered in Japan, reflects growing working class opposition to falling living standards during the pandemic.

Mitsuba workers shout slogans while occupying their factory. [Credit: @birlesikmetal on Twitter]

Mitsuba workers went on a wildcat strike as the September 2021-2023 contract negotiations began, covering approximately 150,000 workers in the metal industry, one of the main sectors of the Turkish economy. The Turkish Employers Association of Metal Industries (MESS) and the Türk Metal union met yesterday.

The talks, expected to last two months, take place in the shadow of the pandemic and of rising cost of living, as workers are forced to go to work to maintain the profits of big business.

Contract negotiations involve global companies and Turkey’s largest industrial enterprises, including Fiat (Tofaş), Renault, Ford, Mercedes and Man in automotive, and Arçelik, Bosch and Siemens in white goods and electronics. While MESS represents the companies, three unions (Türk Metal, Birleşik Metal-İş and Özçelik-İş) sit at the negotiating table.

The trump card of MESS, as in previous contracts, is that the government and unions are on its side. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government has banned all major strikes for years on the grounds of their “threatening national security,” and unions fear the militant struggle of the workers and possible strikes as much as the companies.

The unions have announced their wage demands. For the first six months of the year, Türk Metal demands a 29.57 percent raise; Birleşik Metal-İş 30.89 percent; and Özçelik-İş 31 percent. They demand a raise equal to the inflation rate plus 3 or 4 percent for the other six months.

These rates, which the unions declare as their starting point in bargaining, are well below the economic losses suffered by the workers during the pandemic. Workers know the company will bargain these demands down during the negotiations, and that if the government bans a possible strike, the official arbitration board will condemn them again to poverty wages.

The annual inflation rate as calculated by the official Turkish Statistical Institute (TÜIK), which is a gross underestimate, rose to 19.58 percent as of September 2021. However, real annual inflation in September was 44.7 percent, according to a study by the independent Inflation Research Group. In other words, even the initial wage rise demands of the unions are below the real rise in prices.

To the daily Evrensel, workers spoke angrily about contracts proposed by these pro-company unions. A Kroman Çelik worker and member of Birleşik Metal-İş said, “Even if the raise proposed by the unions today were adopted without negotiation, the average [metal workers] wage would remain below 7,000 Turkish liras even in the largest iron and steel factories.”

A worker at Dostel Makina said, “Although it is said that the ‘announced inflation figures do not reflect the truth,’ it is not correct to take the official inflation as a base. For example, taking the poverty line as a base can be a target. However, even the wage increase demanded today has been overwhelmed under the real inflation.”

One Ford autoworker asked, “While the boss increases their profit by 114 percent in the pandemic, are we going to face him with this draft contract?” He continued angrily: “Just shame on you! Türk Metal once again showed that it is a boss union, a yellow union! As metal workers, we never and ever accept this draft.”

Iron and steel companies traded on Borsa Istanbul increased their profits by 1,158 percent in the first quarter of 2021. It has been 173 percent for auto companies for the same period.

Both companies and union officials are well aware that workers are determined to go on strike in the event of a dispute. They know that such a strike could spark an explosion in the class struggle, and for this, they rely on the government’s strike ban threats.

The government also fears that a possible strike in the metal industry, which is the backbone of Turkey’s economy, will have an explosive effect, coupled with increasing social opposition to the homicidal official response to the pandemic. Already, the Turkish economy is in a deepening crisis, and workers’ living conditions are in deep decline.

President Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) has issued at least 17 strike postponement decrees since coming to power in 2002. Strikes by 194,000 workers have been postponed—that is, effectively banned. These include strike actions in the metal industry in 2018.

Unions that the government and MESS rely on to contain anger at factories are already discredited among workers. In recent years, the unions have approved one contract after the other, despite workers’ willingness to strike.

Metalworkers’ anger against the unions erupted in wildcat strikes of more than 20,000 workers in 2015, mainly at Renault, Tofaş (Fiat) and Ford. They rebelled against Türk Metal, the largest union in the sector, forming their own action committees. While the unions counseled resignation, Birleşik Metal-İş, a union affiliated to the Confederation of Revolutionary Trade Unions (DİSK), blocked workers from taking solidarity strike action.

The unions have intensified their cooperation with management during the pandemic, revealing their role as an industrial police against the workers. Forced to work in extremely dangerous pandemic conditions for a year and a half, workers are angry that they and their families are placed at great risk every day. While large-scale outbreaks occurred in hundreds of factories, they were trivialized or covered up.

During the pandemic, the unions only sought to contain workers’ opposition. In March 2020, as the pandemic began, DİSK threatened to invoke the constitutional right not to work in dangerous conditions if the government did not take necessary steps in 48 hours. Despite the deaths of thousands of workers and their family members due to the COVID-19, however, the union did not call a strike. Birleşik Metal-İş chairman Adnan Serdaroğlu personally admitted in August that 20 percent of his union’s members contracted the disease.

This role played by trade unions for decades is not unique to Turkey. There is a growing opposition and militancy among workers worldwide against attacks on their health, working and living conditions amid the pandemic. In particular, US autoworkers have shown their will to fight, repeatedly rejecting pro-company contracts imposed by the unions and forming their own independent rank-and-file committees at Volvo, Dana, and most recently Deere, with the assistance of the World Socialist Web Site.

Metal workers in Turkey also oppose working in dangerous environments during the pandemic as well as the tier system where the newly-hired receive almost minimum wage, and are ready to strike in order to gain decent wage increases and benefits.

US State Department Electronic Diversity Visa Lottery (DV-2023)

Application Deadline: 9th November 2021 12:00PM EST (GMT -5)

Offered Annually? Yes

Eligible Countries: For DV-2023, natives of the following countries are not eligible to apply, because more than 50,000 natives of these countries immigrated to the United States in the previous five years:

Bangladesh, Brazil, Canada, China (mainland-born), Colombia, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, India, Jamaica, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, South Korea, United Kingdom (except Northern Ireland) and its dependent territories, and Vietnam.

Persons born in Hong Kong SAR, Macau SAR, and Taiwan are eligible.

About the Award: The Department of State administers the Congressionally-mandated Diversity Immigrant Visa Program annually. Section 203(c) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) provides for a class of immigrants known as “diversity immigrants” from countries with historically low rates of immigration to the United States.

For Fiscal Year 2023, 55,000 Diversity Visas (DVs) will be available. There is no cost to register for the DV program. Applicants who are selected in the program (selectees) must meet simple but strict eligibility requirements to qualify for a diversity visa.

Applicants who are selected in the program (“selectees”) must meet simple but strict eligibility requirements to qualify for a diversity visa. The Department of State determine selectees through a randomized computer drawing. The Department of State distributes diversity visas among six geographic regions, and no single country may receive more than seven percent of the available DVs in any one year.

The entry form will only be available for submission during this period and this period only. Entries will NOT be accepted through the U.S. Postal Service. Before beginning the entry process, you can verify that your picture(s) comply with all requirements in the Photo Tool.

Type: Contests/Awards

Eligibility: 

Requirement #1:

• Individuals born in countries whose natives qualify may be eligible to enter.
• If you were not born in an eligible country, there are two other ways you might be able to qualify.
• Was your spouse born in a country whose natives are eligible? If yes, you can claim your spouse’s country of birth – provided that both you and your spouse are named on the selected entry, are found eligible and issued diversity visas, and enter the United States simultaneously.
• Were you born in a country whose natives are ineligible, but in which neither of your parents was born or legally resident at the time of your birth? If yes, you may claim the country of birth of one of your parents if it is a country whose natives are eligible for the DV-2022 program.

Requirement #2:

• Each DV applicant must meet the education/work experience requirement of the DV program by having either:
• at least a high school education or its equivalent, defined as successful completion of a 12-year course of formal elementary and secondary education;

OR

• two years of work experience within the past five years in an occupation that requires at least two years of training or experience to perform. The Department of State will use the U.S. Department of Labor’s O*Net Online database to determine qualifying work experience.

Number of Awards: Not specified

How to Apply for US State Department Electronic Diversity Visa Lottery: 

• Applicants must submit entries for the DV-2023 program electronically at dvlottery.state.gov between noon, Eastern Daylight Time (EDT) (GMT-4), October 6, 2021, and noon, Eastern Standard Time (EST) (GMT-5), to November 9, 2021.
• Do not wait until the last week of the registration period to enter, as heavy demand may result in website delays.
• No late entries or paper entries will be accepted.
• The law allows only one entry by or for each person during each registration period.
• The Department of State uses sophisticated

Visit the Program Webpage for Details

Award Providers: US Department of State

Important Notes: As indicated in the US State Department Electronic Diversity Visa Lottery instructions, for the purposes of eligibility some countries include components and dependent areas overseas.  If you are a native of a dependency or overseas territory, please select the appropriate country of eligibility.  For example, natives of Macau S.A.R should select Portugal, and natives of Martinique should select France

TRAJECTS Master and PhD Scholarships 2021

Application Deadline:

• Master: 5th November 2021
• PhD: 30th November 2021

Tell Me About TRAJECTS Master and PhD Scholarships:

TRAJECTS is a DAAD-funded project that seeks to create and/or strengthen research and teaching capacities on Just Transitions in Energy, Climate and Sustainability, especially in the Global South.

Within this framework, Master scholarships aim to strengthen the research capacity of our partners in the Global South and to increase the number of students contributing to research questions relevant for TRAJECTS as well as their individual interests and future careers.

Similarly, PhD scholarships aim to strengthen the research capacity of our partners in the Global South, and generate long-term local capacity to deal with academic and practical questions related to Transitions to Sustainability.

What Type of Scholarship is this?

Master, PhD

Who can apply for TRAJECTS Master and PhD Scholarships?

Master

• Last degree certificate must not be older than six years when applying for the scholarship
• Enrolment as Master student at UMS/ UCT/ UNAL
• Newly enrolled or 1st-semester student at the beginning of the funding period – funding granted initially for max 4 semesters and max. until the end of the 4th semester (subject to a semesterly check of academic achievement)
• Exceptional cases of funding of students in the 2nd or higher semester at the beginning of the funding period can be considered (subject to the decision of the scholarship committee)
• Exceptional cases of funding beyond the end of the 4th semester can be considered (subject to decision of the scholarship committee)

PhD

• English language proficiency
• Last degree certificate should not be older than six years when applying for the scholarship
• Acceptance/Enrolment as PhD student at UCT/ UNAL
• Newly enrolled or 1st year PhD student at the beginning of the funding period – funding granted initially for max 6 semesters and max. until the end of the 6th semester (subject to a yearly check of academic achievement).
• Exceptional cases of funding of students in the 2nd or higher year of PhD studies at the beginning of the funding period can be considered (start max. three years ago and subject to the decision of scholarship committee).
• Exceptional cases of funding beyond the end of the 6th semester can be considered (Subject to the decision of scholarship committee).

How are Applicants Selected?

After the final deadline of the call for applications, eligible candidates will be evaluated and ranked by the respective host institution. Special attention will be given to attain the diversity goals of TRAJECTS.  At least 30% of short-listed candidates must contribute to increasing the diversity of TRAJECTS scholars (scholars who have scored points for the criterion “member of and underrepresented /disadvantaged group” and/or “financial need”).

Shortlisted candidates, will be invited to participate in a digital interview with members of the scholarship committee. The interviews will be conducted per host institution in the respective local language. Other eligible, but not short-listed candidates will be transferred to a reserve list. After the interviews, the scholarship committee will select 10 candidates for a TRAJECTS Master scholarship.

All applicants will be informed by email: Candidates will be nominated; ineligible applicants will be rejected and applicants on the reserve list will be informed about their status. If a candidate does not accept a scholarship, the next person on the reserve list will be nominated.

Which Countries are Eligible?

African countries

Where will Award be Taken?

• The master scholarships will be provided at TRAJECTS main hub Universidad Nacional de Colombia UNAL (6 scholarships), the African sister hub University of Cape Town UCT (12 scholarships) and the implementing partner Universidad del Magdalena UMS (12 scholarships).
• The PhD scholarships will be provided at TRAJECTS main hub Universidad Nacional de Colombia UNAL (2022-24: 6 scholarships; 2023-25: 6 scholarships) and the African sister hub University of Cape Town UCT (2022-24: 2 scholarships; 2023-25: 2 scholarships).

How Many Scholarships will be Given?

During TRAJECTS (2021-2025), we expect to support:

• 30 scholarships for Master students with a duration of two years, divided into three cohorts in the duration of the project: 1st cohort 2022-23, 2nd cohort 2023-24, 3rd cohort 2024-25. In each cohort, 10 students will be funded.
• 16 scholarships for PhD students with a duration of three years, divided into two fully-funded PhD cohorts in the duration of the project: 1st cohort 2022-24, 2nd cohort 2023-25.

What is the Benefit of Scholarship?

Master

• Monthly allowance: Monthly stipend of 400.- Euro for maximum of 2 years (24 months), starting earliest on January 1st 2022, ending latest on December 31st 2023.
• Travel costs: Limited funds of in total 2.500.- EUR per cohort and year are available for Master candidates coming from third countries to support international travel between the home and the host country. Travel costs will be paid based on real costs up to a budget limit per eligible grantee to be calculated depending on the number of eligible grantees.
• Individual Material Expenditure Allowance for Research: Real costs up to the budget limit of 500,- EUR per Master grantee (for the whole funding period of 24 months).

PhD

• Monthly allowance: Monthly stipend of 500 Euro for maximum 3 years (36 months), starting earliest on January 1st 2022, ending latest on December 31st 2024.
• Travel costs: For PhD candidates coming from third countries funds are available to support international travel between the home and the host country, costs for visa and/or health insurance. Travel costs will be paid based on real costs up to a budget limit per eligible grantee to be calculated depending on the number of eligible grantees.
• Family support: Limited funds are available for PhD candidates coming from third countries to support accompanying children. Only children for whom the grantee does not receive national child benefits are eligible for this funding. Max. allowance: 204,-EUR/child/month – amount subject to availability of funds.
• Individual Material Expenditure Allowance for Research: Real costs up to the budget limit of 2.000,- EUR per PhD grantee (for the whole funding period of 36 months).

How to Apply for TRAJECTS Master and PhD Scholarships:

APPLY HERE for Master Scholarships

APPLY HERE for PhD Scholarships

Visit TRAJECTS Master and PhD Scholarships Webpage for Details

Who Won Germany’s Election in 2021?

Thomas Kilkauer & Meg Young

Germany’s recent election had a few surprises and will lead to a new government. Overall, Germany’s recent election, held on 26^th September 2021 had a participation rate of 76,6% compared to 76.2% in 2017. In other words, ¾ of Germans voted.

All in all, 25.7% voted for the center-mildly-progressive social-democratic party SPD. With that, the SPD overtook Germany’s conservatives and strong-state favoring CDU – Angela Merkel’s political party – sitting at 24.1%.

The environmental Green party received less than expected ending up with 14.8%. While Germany’s truly neoliberal party, the FDP, did surprisingly well with 11.5%.  Germany’s Neo-Nazi party, the AfD lost a little bit of support arriving at 10.3%, but has established itself as a 10%-party. Finally, Germany’s socialist party, the Linke, received just 4.9% but entered the parliament because the party managed to get three candidates elected in local constituencies. This rule renders the 5% barrier obsolete. And, with a raft of micro-parties shared the remaining 8.7%.

Germany’s electoral system gives every German two votes: one vote is for the local candidate in a specific electorate (first past-the-post system) while the second vote is calculated on proportional representation.

In terms of a regional distribution of voting, Germany can roughly be divided into three regions. Central and north Germany voted social-democratic (shown as red), the two southern states Baden-Württemberg and Bavaria voted for conservative (shown as black), while two former East-Germany states – Thuringia and Saxony – voted for the Neo-Nazi party AfD (shown as brown). The map is lightened up by a few green spots as Germany’s environmental Green party does well in cities and in so-called university towns. Again, education plays a major role.

AfD and CDU voters tend to be less educated than neoliberal FDP, many SPD, and the vast majority of Green voters. Geeen voters have the highest proportion of university educated supporters and devotees with PhDs. Perhaps the English philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) was not entirely wrong when saying, conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives. Donald Trump was not wrong either when saying, I love the poorly educated. Germany’s conservatives and Neo-Nazis love them too.

While corporate mass media pre-celebrate the SPD’s Olaf Scholz as Merkel’s successor and winner of the election, the electoral numbers tell a rather different story. To understand German politics one might group the six parties that have entered Germany’s parliament into two blocs:

1) There is a Neo-Nazi-reactionary-neoliberal-conservative bloc consisting of the Neo-Nazi AfD, the neoliberal FDP, and Merkel’s reactionary CDU;

2) The second bloc is made up of the environmentalist Green party, the traditional and moderately social-democratic SPD (Olaf Scholz’s party), and the radical-social-democratic or semi-socialist Die Linke (most likely this would be Rosa Luxemburg’s party – if right-wing death squad and SS predecessors would not have killed Rosa Luxemburg in 1919).

When looking at German politics from the perspective of these two blocs, one sees that the first bloc – the Neo-Nazi-reactionary-neoliberal-conservative bloc – received 45.9% of popular support. By contrast, the environmental-social-democratic bloc received microscopically less, sitting at 45.4%. In other words, more Germans voted for the Neo-Nazi-reactionary-neoliberal-conservative bloc than for the progressive bloc.

Most interesting is the fact that Germany remains a country in which twice as many people voted for the ideological successors of those who had once built Auschwitz compared to those who were, next to Jews, inmates in Auschwitz: communists like Hermann Langbein who survived Auschwitz and wrote one of the best books ever written on Auschwitz. This is, of course, not to say that all AfD voters are Neo-Nazis and that all those who run the AfD are Neo-Nazis. The AfD has very cleverly given itself the public image – mostly represented by the Swiss-resident and lesbian Weidel – of being just another populist party. In the end, 10% voted for the AfD while barely half (4.9%) voted for the ex-communist and semi-socialist Die Linke.

In terms of who changes their vote, Merkel’s CDU lost about two million voters to the SPD. The SPD has been highly successful in attracting the so-called “grey vote”. These are the people over 60 years of age. This used to be the traditional voting reservoir of Germany’s conservatives (the CDU).

They make up 40% of German voters, and they favoured the social-democratic SPD. On the other side of the coin, almost 20% of young voters between the age of 18 and 29 voted for the staunchly neoliberal FDP. Surprisingly, the AfD’s reservoir is not just old men but also men between the age of 30 and 44. Overall, the AfD remains twice as strong in former East-Germany compared to the rest of Germany.

While the SPD gained strongly from the CDU, it also gained 420,000 votes from the AfD; 520,000 from the neoliberal FDP; 820,000 from the Linke, and 700,000 from the environmental Greens. The bloodletting of the Linke to the SPD constitutes a severe hit for Germany’s socialists.

Overall, the SPD has been successful in attracting conservative voters from whom it gained roughly 3 million votes (CDU, AfD, FDP) compared to just 152,000 votes from Greens and the Left. In other words, the SPD won by attracting conservative voters – not by attracting environmental voters and left-wing voters. And, the SPD also won by attracting voters who previously had not voted at all. From those, the SPD received a further 1.25 million votes.

All this is translated into political reality through the distribution of seats in Germany’s parliament, the Bundestag. Replacing Merkel’s CDU as the strongest party in the parliament, the SPD gets 206 seats. Merkel’s CDU gets 196 seats – just ten seats less than the SPD. The environmental Greens gets 118 while the neoliberal FDP gets 92.

The Neo-Nazi AfD will have 83 seats and the semi-socialist party, the Left, will have just 39 seats. In other words, Germany’s Neo-Nazis are twice as strong as the ex-communists. By historical comparison, Germany’s last democratic election prior to Nazism was the November 1932 election. Despite rampant Nazi terrors, Hitler received 44% and the communists only 12%. Today’s Neo-Nazis are nowhere close – Germany today is not like Weimar in 1933.

Compared to 2017, Germany’s conservative lost 50 seats; the SPD gained 53 seats; Neo-Nazis lost eleven seats; neoliberal FDP gained 12 seats; the Left lost 30 seats; and the environmental Greens gained 51 seats. Four issues have been remarkable:

+ Firstly, the heavy losses of the CDU – even in local constituencies – came as a shock for the CDU and its unloved candidate Armin Laschet.

+ Secondly, the strong decline of the Linke came as a surprise just as the strong gains of the selfish, individualistic, neoliberal, “give-me-my-BMW-now” FDP.

+ Thirdly, the Greens were seen as a strong contender to replace Merkel in the weeks and months before the election. Suddenly, the party lost support.

+ Lastly, some argued, the Green’s Robert Habeck would have done better than Annalena Baerbock. Virtually, the same is said about the conservatives where Bavaria’s Markus Söder remains vastly more popular than Armin Lachet.

If one takes the aforementioned right-vs.-left bloc as a guide, Germany’s conservatives have a slight majority of parliament seats (371) compared to the progressives’ 363 seats. Yet, it is just eight more seats, nevertheless, it is a majority. Yet, the CDU remains unlikely to govern Germany as two options for coalition making are discussed.

German politics operates with party-indicating colours: SPD (red), Linke (red), Greens (green), FDP (Yellow), the AfD (mistakenly seen as blue but should be brown), and Merkel’s conservatives (black).

Merkel’s CDU shies away from a coalition with the AfD. This is based on a historical precedent. In 1933, German conservatives (black) supported Adolf Hitler (brown) in a multi-party coalition. In the 1930s, Hitler was never elected. Hitler never had 50% of voter support in a free election. In any case, German conservatives have become extremely reluctant to entertain a coalition with Germany’s Neo-Nazis, the AfD. This takes out 83 seats leaving Germany’s conservative bloc with just 288 seats – well below a majority to run a government. As a consequence, a progressive coalition is the more likely option. There are two options currently discussed:

1) The so-called traffic light coalition consisting of SPD (red), FDP (yellow) and Greens (green); and

2) The so-called Jamaica coalition based on the flag of Jamaica: CDU (black); Greens (green); and FDP (yellow)

Since the CDU is in the process of blaming, internal fights, and a deep crisis, recent polls have shown that Merkel’s party has further declined in popularity. Its leader, Armin Laschet, is today more unpopular than a month ago. As a consequence, most people expect a traffic light coalition. SPD, FDP and Greens do know that a continuation of a CDU/SPD coalition, this time not with Merkel but with Olaf Scholz as chancellor, is still possible. A CDU/SPD coalition would have a 401 seats strong majority. Yet, after many years of that – under Merkel’s leadership – Germans do not want a continuation of a CDU/SPD government. They want something different.

Behind the right-wing, anti-immigrant marches in Chile

Mauricio Saavedra

The recent series of violent marches in Chile against economic refugees, mainly from Venezuela, is the end product of a four-year anti-immigrant campaign whipped up by the right-wing government of the country’s billionaire president, Sebastian Piñera. The most serious incidents occurred September 25 when a mob of 5,000 marched through the northern port city of Iquique. By the end of the day, the mob lit a large bonfire in the middle of a square and burnt the Venezuelans’ documents, prams, toys, clothes, tents and whatever other little possessions they had.

Residents take part in a march against migration, in Iquique, Chile, Saturday, Sept. 25, 2021. (AP Photo/Ignacio Munoz)

Based on reports, not one arrest was made even though there was a real danger of asylum seekers being lynched. The events indict the capitalist state, which has sanctioned and fostered the expressions of national chauvinism and xenophobia for electoral purposes.

That at a certain point fascist and ultra-nationalist dregs took the lead is obvious. Yet in the throng were also state officials. It has come to light that involved in the march were figures such as the mayor of Colchane, the director of a private school, and the government-appointed director of the Iquique Free Trade Zone, Felipe Hübner Valdivieso. More were surely lurking in the crowd.

Earlier in September, the government announced it would start expelling so-called “illegal migrants” on the basis of a new Migration Law enacted in April that facilitates deportations.

The Piñera administration had already deported 321 refugees this year and intended to carry out 1,500 more deportations before the United Nations intervened to urge their suspension. This is because human rights and migration advocates revealed that Department of Immigration and the PDI carried out mass raids on immigrants, launched mass arrests without warrants, held them incommunicado, denied them legal representation and proceeded to expel them en masse disregarding constitutional norms and guarantees, including due process.

“The Chilean government must immediately stop these collective expulsions of immigrants, as they have the right to an individual assessment of their cases,” the UN office for Human Rights in South America stated.

“Deportations cannot be carried out in a summary manner, but require an individual assessment, taking into account the humanitarian considerations,” added Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants, Felipe González Morales.

Only the day before the march, Carabinero officers violently evicted 100 refugee families from Plaza Brasil, a public square in Iquique, on the grounds that their makeshift camp represented a health risk.

In announcing the reactivation of evictions, Interior Minister Rodrigo Delgado cynically remarked that it was “not permitted to use public spaces for leisure and recreational purposes to set up temporary housing.”

Several thousand undocumented Venezuelans, Haitians, Colombians, Peruvians and Bolivians who have entered through Chile’s increasingly militarized borders have been stranded in Iquique and Arica—the northernmost town bordering Peru—for months. Homeless, destitute and denied government assistance, they’ve had to set up donated tents on public squares, on the beach or on barricaded streets without the most rudimentary amenities. The camp in Plaza Brasil had been occupied since 2020.

On Friday September 24, cops “started to tear down our tents and here we were, standing on a corner, looking to see what we could grab, where we could spend the night with our children. Because we really have nowhere to sleep, we have nowhere to stay,” Venezuelan refugee Mariana Contreras told El Ciudadano.

“We witnessed the beating of minors and pregnant women,” wrote social and human rights groups in a communiqué that called for the guarantee of refugee rights that the Piñera government has brazenly trampled underfoot. In contrast to the Carabineros’ velvet glove approach towards Saturday’s marchers, up to 14 asylum seekers were detained.

Aided by the media monopolies Grupo Copesa and El Mercurio, with their inflated and salacious reports of supposed migrant crime waves, drug trafficking and delinquency, the Piñera government is attempting to recreate the same foul political atmosphere that brought it to power with the support of the extreme right in 2018. Piñera has calculated that by dehumanizing migrants—the poorest and most vulnerable section of the working class and oppressed—he may be able to increase his diminishing chances of winning the November presidential election.

March after police kill a Haitian migrant, Aug 2021 (Photo: Twitter / Coordinadora de inmigrantes)

During the last election cycle, right-wing and parliamentary left candidates ran on a platform calling for restrictions on migrant intakes, particularly excluding nationals from poverty-stricken Haiti and Venezuela. Piñera accused migrants of “importing evils like delinquency, drug trafficking and organized crime.”

The outgoing government of Socialist Party president Michelle Bachelet set the stage for this anti-immigrant crackdown with a draft immigration bill that purportedly sought to update Chile’s decades-old migration law, but in reality focused on strengthening border security.

The fact is that the Haitian migrants and refugees detoured into Chile in 2016 and 2017—an estimated 150,000 Haitians arrived during this period—because their destination of choice, the US, was closed off by the resumption of mass deportations by the Obama administration, which only escalated under Trump.

Once in power, Piñera put his program into practice with two executive decrees that particularly targeted Venezuelans and Haitians who were confronting a worsening economic and political situation caused primarily by Washington’s decades-long imperialist meddling.

The first decree ended the system that had previously allowed Haitians to go from being “tourists” to regular migrants once they obtained a job, and then to seek family reunifications. Now Haitians had to obtain a maximum 90-day tourist visa before entering the country and show bank statements, a criminal record check and a hotel reservation or notarized letter of invitation. Family reunification applications were limited to 10,000 and had a duration of 12 months, making a mockery of the concept. The calculated objective was to make conditions so unbearable and discriminatory that Haitians would leave.

The second decree affected the Venezuelan exodus. Piñera unveiled his “Democratic Responsibility Visa” with anti-communist rhetoric directed against the bourgeois nationalist regime of President Nicolas Maduro in Caracas. Yet the purpose of this visa was also to stem the influx of Venezuelans by requiring a visa before entry for a 12-month stay, renewable once.

To put the issue into perspective, there were an estimated 489,000 migrants in 2017, increasing to 1.3 million in 2018; 1.45 million in 2019 and 1.46 million in 2020. In four years, migrants went from 2.65 percent of the population to roughly seven percent, but their numbers have remained stagnant since. Along with the anti-immigration policies, the 2019 mass anti-capitalist movement and the pandemic ground regular migration to a halt.

Migration nonetheless continued but through precarious and vulnerable irregular entries. Between January 2018 and January 2021, there were over 35,400 entries through unauthorized crossing points. In the first six months of this year this number increased to 23,675.

It is these desperate people, many of whom have travelled thousands of miles through the Amazon jungle and Andean plateau just to reach irregular border crossings into Chile, who are targeted in this cynical political exercise.