Planned strikes by DHL workers in UK as Unite seek to block national action

Harvey Thompson

More than 2,000 DHL logistics workers who sort and deliver components to Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) plants have given “strong backing” for industrial action over pay.

A strike would directly threaten car production at West Midland JLR sites at Solihull, Castle Bromwich, Hams Hall and Midpoint, Tyrefort, as well as Halewood in Merseyside.

The workers had already rejected a pathetic 1.75 percent pay offer to cover the two-and-a-half years from 2020 by a margin of 96 percent. RPI inflation is already running at 6 percent.

A DHL driver (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Drivers and warehouse staff clashed with the company earlier this year over its abuse of the Job Retention Scheme’s furlough payments.

DHL had used the “flexible furlough” scheme during the pandemic, enabling businesses to bring back furloughed employees on a part-time basis and still receive government payment for some of their wages. In August, reports emerged of hundreds of workers having been underpaid, owed as much as £800.

The same month, Birmingham Live received accounts from anonymous former employees at DHL warehouses cataloguing what one called a “bully culture.” One worker said: “We worked throughout the pandemic. They won the new contract because of us. But there is no appreciation. There’s a bully culture here by senior management. It is their way or no way.

“Toilet breaks are timed… There have been instances where employees have been stopped by a senior manager who stood by the toilet and told them to go on their break…

“There was a massive uproar about people who work for Amazon. It’s exactly the same here.”

In October, the company sent letters out to hundreds of other workers announcing that up to 10 percent of their wages would be docked each month from November to next September due to furlough “overpayments”.

DHL is also facing strike action in Scotland and Northern Ireland.

In Scotland, around 90 drivers and warehouse workers based in Bellshill, near Glasgow have rejected an offer of 9 percent over two years because it did not address the “poverty pay” experienced by the workers earning on average £12.50 an hour. Workers are also in dispute with DHL over the failure to improve drivers’ working hours, among other terms and conditions.

At the Bombardier (now Spirit AeroSystems) Wing Logistics Hub in Belfast, a ballot of DHL workers returned a 100 percent vote in favour of strike action over poverty pay and poor conditions. The Unite union reported that staff earn an hourly rate of £9.24, with “some of the longest hours and enjoy the least holidays”.

Workers are determined to take on DHL, the largest logistics company in the world employing 41,000 workers in the UK, a tenth of its 400,000-strong global workforce. Its parent company made a record €1.3 billion profit in the first half of this year. The workers are in a powerful position to do so, forming a vital link in industrial and food supply chains in conditions of a very tight labour market.

However, they face a determined opponent in the Unite union which is working to throttle this movement on behalf of employers they have worked to protect for decades.

Unite General Secretary Sharon Graham made much of the fact that DHL workers at JLR had not received a pay rise since 2018. But this is thanks to the union’s past record in enforcing the dictates of management.

Unite did not lift a finger in August last year when DHL sacked over 1,200 workers in its JLR operations, saying only that they would try to keep job losses “to an absolute minimum”.

Confronted with a growing rebellion in the workforce, driven by the pressures of rising inflation and the experience of intense exploitation throughout the pandemic, Unite is seeking to delay and isolate disputes to prevent the development of a full-scale movement across DHL’s 40,000-strong national workforce.

The JLR fight has been dragged out for months. A dispute over pay was first raised in March 2020. It returned this August in the context of the conflict over furlough payments, with Unite announcing that it would “now begin the process of balloting its more than 2,000 DHL members”. More than two months later, on October 20, after talks with the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service (ACAS), the union announced a ballot for industrial action closing November 15.

Unite has not even released the ballot result, admitting only that the membership has given “strong backing”. The union immediately returned to backroom talks with the employers at ACAS.

At Bellshill, Unite again sought to bury the dispute. After DHL’s initial offer was refused, the union entered talks and presented an “improved offer” (details undisclosed) to its membership. This was rejected by an 88 percent vote, on a 95 percent turnout. Announcing the result on November 17, the union gave no details of proposed strike action, but declared it would be re-entering talks with ACAS the next day.

Not a trace can be found of the dispute in Northern Ireland.

Every effort is made to keep disputes separate, despite all the workers involved being employed by the same company and facing the same issues.

Two other DHL strikes were taken off the table earlier this year.

A strike of 200 DHL lorry drivers at Sainsbury’s regional distribution centre for London and the South East in Dartford was called off in October after workers accepted a 6.2 percent pay increase. This settlement reflects the pressures being put on employers by the shortage of HGV drivers and points to what more would be possible without the union’s sabotaging a broader fight.

It made even more galling the sellout deal at DHL’s Croxteth, Liverpool plant this February, where 120 warehouse workers who had struck for a total of 10 days received a below-inflation 3 percent pay deal for 2021, and a one-off £75 payment.

Unite is following the same playbook used to demobilise the struggles of bus drivers, at Stagecoach, Arriva and the London operators. Faced with a growing fightback over pay and conditions, it divides workers from each other and as far as possible prevents them mobilising in strike action, creating the best conditions to enforce minimal pay offers.

British government makes out of court settlements to 417 Iraqis in tacit admission of war crimes

Jean Shaoul

The Ministry of Defence (MoD) has paid out “several million” pounds in out-of-court settlements to 417 Iraqis in relation to British troops subjecting them to cruel and inhumane treatment, arbitrary detention or assault.

The MoD tried to keep news of the payout as low key as possible, making no public announcement. It was reported only by the Guardian and the Middle East Eye website, with the corporate news media and the BBC, the state-owned broadcaster, remaining silent.

The individual payouts amount to around £10,000 per person. The settlements follow the 2017 High Court decision that ruled in four test cases that Britain had breached the Geneva Conventions and the Human Rights Act during its military operations in Iraq following the 2003 invasion. The High Court awarded four Iraqis a total of £84,000 relating to three separate incidents that involved unlawful detention, assault and hooding.

A British soldier aims his LMG (Light Machine Gun on a shooting range in Basra, Iraq (Credit: Photographer: Harland Quarrington/OGL Open Government License)

According to the Guardian, the official disclosure showed that the MoD had settled 417 “Iraq private law” cases during 2020-21 and 13 such cases relating to Afghanistan. While details of most of the cases remain confidential, one case involved the death of a 13-year-old boy. Many of the claims involved hooding detainees, even though the practice was banned in 1972. Some British soldiers serving in Iraq stated they were not aware of the banning order.

The settlements are a tacit admission that the UK committed war crimes and crimes against humanity. The MoD told the Guardian in a statement, “Whilst the vast majority of UK personnel conducted themselves to the highest standards in Iraq and Afghanistan, we acknowledge that it has been necessary to seek negotiated settlements of outstanding claims in both the Iraq civilian litigation and Afghan civil litigation.”

Martyn Day, senior partner at the law firm Leigh Day that has acted on behalf of the claimants, said the settlements undermined attempts by the government to publicly dismiss accusations of abuse. “The fact that the MoD has now agreed to compensation in so many cases shows how wrong it was for so many politicians to call the claims ‘vexatious’ and ‘spurious.’”

He added, “While we’ve had politicians like [former Conservative government prime ministers] David Cameron and Theresa May criticising us for supposedly ambulance chasing, the MoD has been quietly settling claims. The settlements here cover a mix of cases, instances of false imprisonment, assault.”

The payouts follow numerous reports from human rights organisations, UK public inquiries, parliamentary reports and civil court cases that found extensive evidence of torture, including video evidence of soldiers conducting wanton acts of cruelty. These were committed during combat operations in Iraq that ended in 2009—with most allegations focusing on the conduct of British military interrogators. A parliamentary report suggested that the abuses were not isolated incidents but had a systemic character, while the MoD’s training manuals, on its own admission, contained material that potentially “placed service personnel outside domestic or international law.”

The MoD has said it had received so many complaints from Iraqis unlawfully detained and mistreated by British troops that it was unable to say exactly how much it had paid out to settle claims. Figures released thus far suggest a total of around £25 million in out-of-court settlements to avoid criminal prosecution.

Despite this, there is no prospect that anyone will be prosecuted. All the remaining investigations into allegations of abuse have now ended without any prosecutions being brought.

In 2010, the government set up the Iraq Historic Allegations Team (IHAT) to investigate allegations of 3,405 war crimes committed by British troops between 2003 and 2009. IHAT found evidence of widespread abuse and mistreatment at the hands of British forces, including the killing of unarmed civilians and children. The corporate media immediately denounced the investigations as “witch-hunts.”

In 2017, Theresa May’s government closed down IHAT without any prosecutions, using the excuse that Phil Shiner, a lawyer who had taken more than 1,000 cases to IHAT, had paid fixers in Iraq to find clients. May pledged, “We will never again—in any future conflict—let those activist, left-wing human rights lawyers harangue and harass the bravest of the brave.”

In 2019, the BBC’s flagship Panorama TV programme, working with the Sunday Times, revealed new information about alleged killings in British custody and their cover-up. It cited various egregious cases and concluded that government ministers and the MoD exerted political pressure to end the investigations to protect Britain’s reputation. The investigators said, “There was more and more pressure coming from the Ministry of Defence to get cases closed as quickly as possible.”

The MoD also lodged a series of complaints against the lawyers bringing the civil suits against it. Commenting in the Sunday Times, Ken Macdonald, a former director of public prosecutions, said “it is as though ministers feared the effects of justice.”

Last month, Defence Secretary Ben Wallace said the Service Police Legacy Investigations (SPLI) that had been examining 1,291 allegations by Iraqis of serious criminal behaviour by UK armed forces had now “officially closed its doors.” The SPLI, made up of navy and air force police, took over from IHAT investigations in February 2017. Wallace said the SPLI had pursued 178 allegations through 55 separate investigations without this resulting in any prosecutions. This included five referrals to the military prosecutor, the Service Prosecuting Authority.

While Wallace sought to denigrate many of the claims as “spurious” and lacking credibility, he was forced to admit that some allegations against British troops were credible. He said, “However not all allegations and claims were spurious, otherwise investigations would not have proceeded beyond initial examination and no claims for compensation would have been paid.”

These investigations were always a sham, set up to avoid any prosecution by the International Criminal Court (ICC), which as far back as 2014 had accepted a complaint alleging UK military personnel had committed war crimes against Iraqis in their custody between 2003 and 2008 and ordered a preliminary investigation. This was the first time the ICC had opened an inquiry into a Western state, having focused almost exclusively on African heads of state or officials, while allowing the imperialist powers, the greatest perpetrators of war crimes and human rights abuses, to get off scot-free.

The ICC, which came under massive pressure from the Trump administration, dutifully abandoned its inquiry, arguing that it could only mount a formal investigation and prosecution if the domestic courts and investigative bodies had failed to do so.

The silence of the media, the Labour Party and trade unions on this latest, tacit admission of war crimes confirms their unconditional defence of British imperialism.

Britain, a key player along with the US and the major European powers in numerous overt and covert military operations in pursuit of its geostrategic interests throughout the resource-rich Middle East, is determined to avoid any accountability for its actions. The government has introduced legislation imposing a six-year limit on prosecutions for soldiers serving outside the UK. The Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Act creates a “presumption against prosecution” that gives the green light to future war crimes, including torture and the mass murder of civilians.

The legislation protects the MoD, even more than the armed forces, that has repeatedly covered up war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, putting the government above the law. This is even as the government prepares for new and potentially catastrophic wars against China and Russia, both of which have nuclear weapons, and their ally Iran, amid growing economic and social unrest at home.

27 migrants confirmed dead as dinghy capsizes in English Channel

Chris Marsden & Robert Stevens

At least 27 people died on Wednesday after an inflatable dinghy capsized in rough seas in the English Channel near to the French port city of Calais. The number killed was originally reported as 31 but was revised down by the French government on Thursday morning.

The tragedy took place Wednesday afternoon, with French fishermen reporting bodies floating motionless in the sea. Sky News reported, “Fisherman Nicolas Margolle said he had seen two small dinghies—one with people onboard and another empty. He said another fisherman had called rescuers after seeing the empty dinghy and 15 people motionless in the water.”

French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said that 34 people had been on board the boat. “Amongst the 31 dead, as far as we know five were women and one was a little girl.” Two people were rescued and one was still missing. Of the two survivors Darmanin said, “There are two survivors... but their life is in danger—they are suffering from severe hypothermia.” He described the inflatable the migrants were in as “very frail... like a pool you blow up in your garden”.

A rescue workers van arrives at the port of Calais, northern France, Wednesday, Nov. 24, 2021. At least 31 migrants bound for Britain died Wednesday when their boat sank in the English Channel. (AP Photo/Michel Spingler)

The International Organisation for Migration said the deaths were the biggest single loss of life in the Channel since it began collecting data in 2014.

Responsibility for the deaths rests with the governments of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and French President Emmanuel Macron. Migrants face systematic persecution by London, Paris and all of Europe’s governments after being driven into exile by imperialist wars and terrible hardship. This year more than 25,700 people have attempted the hazardous journey to the UK via the Channel, the world’s busiest shipping lane, in small boats and inflatables. This is a rise of more than 300 percent. Around 25 crossings were attempted yesterday alone.

The scale of death can be seen in the fact that the previous highest number of migrants killed in a single incident in the Channel was five Kurdish-Iranians who drowned in October last year. The 27 deaths are almost double the total of 14 people who have perished this year trying to cross the Channel from France.

People thought to be migrants disembark from a British Border Force patrol boat after being picked up from a dingy in the English Channel in Dover harbour, England, Thursday, Sept. 16, 2021. (AP Photo/Alastair Grant)

London and Paris were at one in insisting that people smugglers were responsible for the deaths and that a harsher clampdown on migration was the answer.

Darmanin gave a press conference from Calais confirming the deaths as the “the biggest (migrant) tragedy that we have seen,” before declaring, “It is an appalling situation for France, for Europe and for humanity to see these people perish at sea because of people smugglers.”

He even boasted that since the start of 2021, around 1,500 arrests have been made including four today linked to the drownings.

“France will not let the Channel become a cemetery,” said President Macron, before promising to “find and condemn those responsible” and calling for an “emergency meeting of European ministers concerned by the migration challenge”.

Prime Minister Jean Castex also insisted that those who died are victims of “criminal smugglers”.

On Wednesday afternoon, Prime Minister Johnson convened a meeting of the government’s emergency COBRA committee. Afterwards Johnson said he was “shocked and appalled and deeply saddened by the loss of life at sea in the Channel… But I also want to say that this disaster underscores how dangerous it is to cross the Channel in this way.”

Further action was needed to stop “gangsters,” he said, 'We've had difficulties persuading some of our partners—particularly the French—to do things in a way in which we think the situation deserves. The operation that has been conducted by our friends on the beaches, supported with £54 million from the UK, to help patrol the beaches, all the technical support we have been giving, they haven't been enough.”

He made clear the government would use the tragic deaths to speed up the passage of draconian anti-immigration legislation through parliament, adding, “And that’s why it’s so important that we accelerate if we possibly can all the measures contained in our Borders and Nationalities Bill, so that we distinguish between people who come here legally and people who come here illegally.” The legislation effectively criminalises migrants and asylum seekers seeking to enter the UK via the Channel.

Home Secretary Priti Patel, author of the legislation, said the deaths serve “as the starkest possible reminder of the dangers of these Channel crossings organised by ruthless criminal gangs. It is why this government’s new plan for immigration will overhaul our broken asylum system and address many of the long-standing pull factors encouraging migrants to make the perilous journey from France to the United Kingdom.”

The Nationality and Borders Bill is described by the Freedom From Torture organisation as “the biggest legal assault on international refugee law ever seen in the UK”.

The opposition Labour Party has no fundamental differences with the Tories, epitomised by Sir Keir Starmer’s denouncing Patel for delivering “absolutely nothing” by not securing “strong enough agreements with France” to do “the work upstream.”

Shadow Home Secretary Nick Thomas-Symonds told the BBC on the news of yesterday’s deaths, “It is unrealistic to think that the entirety of that coastline can be patrolled. We need to be looking at practical law enforcement action away from the coast as well. We need that wider joint law enforcement work with the French authorities to be disrupting further away from the coast.”

In stark contrast, migrant charities pointed the finger of blame squarely at Johnson, Macron and their European counterparts.

Zoe Gardener from the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants told the BBC there is “no requirement on people to seek asylum in the first country they reach. Of course there isn't, otherwise nobody would end up seeking protection in the UK.”

The UK is “very able to offer protection to lots more refugees than we currently do. So if everybody is supposed to stay in France because we're slightly to the west of France, then France can say the same thing to Italy, and then Italy can say the same thing to Libya, and in the end, the entire international refugee protection regime will crumble.”

Activists and members of associations defending migrants' rights gather with posters outside the port of Calais, northern France, Wednesday, Nov. 24, 2021. They are holding placards asking "How many deaths do you need?" and declaring "Calais: Human Rights Violated, Broken, Martyred"

Beth Gardiner-Smith, CEO of Safe Passage International, called on Patel to immediately resign and for Johnson to prevent any further loss of life. “More and more people are risking the freezing, frightening journey across the Channel in small, unstable boats since the government closed safe routes to the UK last year.”

Clare Moseley, founder of Care4Calais, also insisted that the government's focus should be upon creating a “safe and legal” way for people to claim asylum. “People smugglers are a symptom, not a cause of the problem,' she told Sky News. “The underlying issue is the fact that if you want to claim asylum in the UK you have to be physically present here and these people don't have a way to get here. That's why they get in small boats.”

Brazilian authorities, media hide rise in respiratory illnesses in children to promote end of COVID-19 pandemic

Eduardo Parati

As the end of the 2021 school year in Brazil approaches, the campaign to return to classroom teaching is bringing more cases and deaths from COVID-19 among children.

Teenage students receive COVID-19 shots in local schools in Salvador, Bahia (Credit: André Carvalho/Smed/FotosPublicas)

With the spread of the more transmissible COVID-19 Gamma and Delta variants this year, there have been 1,245 COVID-19 deaths among 0-19 year olds as of September 18, with an unknown number since then amid a dramatic drop in testing as vaccinations advance among the adult population. This number of recorded deaths, which had already surpassed the total number of deaths in all of last year—1,203, precedes schools reopening with 100 percent occupancy and the mandatory face-to-face teaching ordered all across the country in the last two months.

A report by the public health agency Fiocruz, published last week, pointed out that despite the stability in the overall number of SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) cases, the number is increasing among children aged 0 to 9 years old, with about 1,500 cases every week. With the insufficient number of COVID-19 tests in Brazil, the number of SARS cases has been used by Fiocruz as a proxy for the real situation of the pandemic in the country.

Although the cases of COVID-19 do not currently represent the majority of SARS cases, their increasing numbers, which can have multiple viral diseases as their cause, show how easily airborne viruses can spread in schools and expose the need for their immediate closure to prevent them from once again becoming centers of pandemic transmission.

Instead, amid record surges in Europe and warnings by Fiocruz that circulation of people is higher now than before the pandemic, the decrease in the number of hospitalizations and deaths from COVID-19 in some regions of the country and the advances in vaccinations are being used by the government to justify “living with COVID-19.”

Since October, state and local governments have been pushing for compulsory in-person education to force parents to leave their children in schools and return to unsafe workplaces to secure corporate profits. At the same time, in the state of Rio de Janeiro, requirements for the use of masks in open environments were lifted, and the same was announced for São Paulo beginning December 11, as part of a propaganda campaign by authorities to convince the public that the virus is under control.

Such propaganda could not be further from the truth. Today, it is impossible to determine precisely the pandemic situation in Brazil. The country ranks 128th in the world in tests per million inhabitants, next to war-torn countries like Iraq and Libya. With testing prioritizing symptomatic cases, the positivity rate is 27.54 percent, far above the 5 percent needed to monitor the transmission of the virus in the population. The official number of new COVID-19 cases has been decreasing, with 58,312 cases reported last week.

Even assuming that the official numbers are reliable, the attempts by the government and the corporate media to promote “living with” the coronavirus mean accepting over 1,000 deaths each week, with 1,365 confirmed deaths last week, in addition to tens of thousands more who will suffer the effects of Long COVID.

Last week, the state of Piauí reported 100 percent occupancy in ICUs, having maintained that rate for the last three months. Instead of reining in the virus, local authorities have announced efforts to expand its in-patient capacity regardless of the high fatality rate of the disease for people needing intensive care. In the city of Serrana, in the state of São Paulo, where the population over the age of 18 was completely immunized seven months ago as part of a study by the government-linked Butantan Institute, the number of cases tripled in October and continued to rise during November.

In the capital of the state of Bahia, Salvador, the city government announced the mandatory return to schools on November 17, following announcements by dozens of states, including those governed by the Workers Party (PT). The city government admitted difficulties in implementing the reopening in the face of strong opposition among parents. Many are refusing to send their children to crowded schools with only weeks left in the school year.

In a backhanded admission of the wide opposition to the return among parents and teachers, on November 7, Rio de Janeiro’s Municipal Secretary of Education Renan Ferreirinha Carneiro went to Folha de São Paulo to defend mandatory in-person classes. In calling for a quick return, Carneiro stated that “in the municipal school system alone, 25,000 students are neither interacting with the school remotely nor going in person.” This number corresponds to 5.5 percent of the students enrolled in the public network of the state capital.

As has been done internationally, Secretary Carneiro fraudulently portrays compulsory in-person education as a fight against exclusion, covered up by lies that “schools have been adapting to the required sanitary and infrastructural conditions.” The exact opposite is true.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, the measures implemented for remote learning were adjusted to the needs of big business interests, providing deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars to mobile phone companies and internet providers for mass education platforms. Meanwhile, millions of students without adequate internet access or digital equipment have been effectively excluded from remote learning.

As to the supposed “adaptations” made in schools, a glimpse of their complete inadequacy was provided by a report from the Paraná State Court of Audit from September, pointing out that 14.3 percent of schools had damaged, very small or awning windows. Such conditions exist in schools all over the country.

Parents and teachers are completely aware of this situation, despite the flood of government and media propaganda in favor of the spread of the virus, and have reported to the WSWS the real conditions in their communities.

Fátima, a mother from the city of Nova Iguaçu in the state of Rio de Janeiro, participated in the Rank-and-File Committee for Safe Education in Brazil (CBES-BR) online meeting on November 2 titled “The need to close schools and the means to end the pandemic.” She reported on the state government’s efforts to dismantle any measures to control the spread of the virus.

She said, “Here in the region, the politicians say that there are no more hospitalized patients and that vaccination is up, and there are almost no more cases of COVID-19, but the reality is different. In every suspected COVID-19 case, the doctors give the medicine and say that it is sinusitis. Anyway, now we have sinusitis outbreaks, because in my mother’s house there were four people with the same symptoms. At my daughter’s school, the agglomeration continues. The pressure to go back has been enormous.”

Luís, also from Rio de Janeiro, is a teacher, who sent a report of the unsafe conditions at the school where he works to the CBES-BR meeting. He described the situation which families are being subjected to.

“[The end of the school year in] the state was a surreal mess. At the end of the day you still have students who haven’t returned due to pre-existing conditions, and students without internet delivering handouts, only now the classrooms are a little more full. Technically, classes will last until December 17, but I am already finishing up the activities of the attending students in order to be able to dedicate myself to the ones who haven’t returned, also thinking about emptying the school soon.”

Their worries are compounded by the long-term risks presented to children exposed to COVID-19, even if they are not as severely affected by the respiratory symptoms as adults and the elderly.

In an interview with the WSWS, immunologist Dr. Anthony Leonardi, who co-authored a recent study on the impact of Long COVID, explained that molecules bound to the virus’s spike protein induce an excessive immune response, which results in damage to the body’s tissues and cells.

Long COVID has the potential of damaging any part of the body, with one of the biggest concerns being neurological damage. “The immune system is responsible for going into all the tissues in the body, except for a few immune-privileged sites. But SARS-CoV-2 doesn’t respect the immune-privileged sites whatsoever. It brings T-cells into the brain. So, we can see the impact of the infection across every physiological system. Because if it distorts the immune system and the immune system is responsible for patrolling the body everywhere, then there are going to be problems everywhere.”

Endemic COVID-19 would bring terrible consequences: “For this virus to become endemic, we would see a lot of maimed people with autoimmunity. And with immune memory, that is not able to fully prevent mild and moderate infections again. In my opinion, the damage could be cumulative.”

Dr. Leonardi criticized efforts to hide the severity of COVID-19 in children, “There’s a terrible assumption that kids are okay with SARS-CoV-2 infection when there’s data coming out that they have lost out on a greater number of healthy years than adults,” he said. “And kids are more likely to be infected than adults and are more likely to be reinfected than adults.”

In their opposition to the mass infection of children and the continued exposure of the population to the deadly SARS-CoV-2, with horrific immediate and long-term consequences for millions, parents and teachers are not alone.

A growing strike movement is developing internationally against the capitalist policies towards the pandemic, which are provoking mass death and impoverishment.

In Brazil, throughout the year, there have been several strikes and protests by nurses, truckers, oil workers, app drivers and other sectors. In September, Jurong shipyard workers went on strike over the company’s refusal to pay wage increases, and last month, more than 4,000 General Motors workers in the ABC industrial region went on strike for two weeks, rejecting contract proposals made by the company and the union.

Education workers went on strike for months during the pandemic to oppose the return to schools to prevent the spread of the pandemic. Recently, there was a demonstration by thousands of municipal teachers in São Paulo against pension cuts.

German government refuses to order lockdowns despite hospitals reaching capacity under crush of COVID-19 infections

Gregor Link

The Robert Koch Institute (RKI) reported a record 66,884 new coronavirus cases on Wednesday. In the past two weeks, about 630,000 people in Germany have officially been infected with the coronavirus and more than 2,700 have lost their lives. With a mortality rate of 0.8 percent reported by Lothar Wieler, president of the RKI, the infections of the past two weeks mean a death sentence for more than 5,000 additional people. In the last 24 hours alone, 335 people died from COVID-19, according to the RKI.

Charité intensiv - Station 43 (Bild: DOCDAYS Production)

Like the nearly 100,000 coronavirus deaths in Germany so far, these people have been the victims of a policy carried out in the interests of the German stock market, which has reached historic highs in recent weeks in tandem with the surging infection figures. If industry, schools, offices and daycare centres are not shut down, another wave of mass death threatens to dwarf the pandemic’s previous course.

“Cumulative reported deaths [in Europe] by spring of next year are expected to reach more than 2.2 million,” the World Health Organization (WHO) predicted in a report presented Tuesday in Copenhagen. So far, 1.5 million people have already officially died from COVID-19 in Europe since the pandemic began. If current trends continue, another 700,000 deaths are imminent by March 2022, according to the WHO.

“The pandemic is not under control,” Gernot Marx, president of the German Association for Intensive Care and Emergency Medicine (Divi), warned in the Tagesspiegel newspaper on Monday. The situation in hospitals in Germany resembles developments a year ago, when 1,000 people were dying daily. Compared to the previous year, Marx said, there are 4,000 fewer intensive care beds available due to the nursing shortage.

According to Divi data, of the 3,675 COVID-19 patients in intensive care, one in two currently requires invasive ventilation—with a strong upward trend. In the past week alone, an additional 1,887 new COVID-19 patients were admitted to intensive care units. Experts put the likelihood of COVID-19 patients dying in an intensive care unit at between 30 and 50 percent. Their length of stay, averaging 14 days, is more than three times greater than for other ICU patients and is expected to increase.

“Exactly what should always be avoided” is what now threatens, concludes the Tagesspiegel: an “overload of the health care system,” with the introduction of triage, the selection of which patients receive life-saving treatment and which do not, giving rise to “dramatic images like those in Bergamo, Italy, in the spring of 2020.”

World Medical Association Chairman Frank Ulrich Montgomery had already warned last week of a “deadly coronavirus winter” and expressed the hope over the weekend that the “waffle about freedom,” which “in reality is a freedom to [accept] illness and death,” will not prevail. Bundestag (federal parliament) vice president Wolfgang Kubicki (Liberal Democrats, FDP) then denigrated the physician at an FDP state party conference in Schleswig-Holstein as the “Saddam Hussein of the medical profession.”

In fact, Wednesday marks the last day that comprehensive shutdown measures could be enacted due to the “traffic light” coalition of the Social Democrats (SPD), FDP and Greens ending the designation of an emergency situation. Instead of closing schools, daycare centres and workplaces, breaking the chains of infection, and rapidly vaccinating and caring for the population, federal and state governments are sticking to their profits-before-lives policies, putting tens of thousands of lives at risk.

In Bavaria, where the incidence rate per 100,000 among school children has now risen to more than 1,300, Minister President Markus Söder explicitly dismissed the “closure of schools” in a government statement on Tuesday. However, international studies have repeatedly shown that school closures are an indispensable part of any real pandemic response.

In the hospitals of southeastern Bavaria, intensive care bed occupancy is currently at 95 percent, despite hospitals already transferring patients to other Bavarian hospitals whenever possible. In the region, “only absolute emergency care is still guaranteed” and all “non-urgent operations,” including tumour cases, have been “postponed until further notice,” reports broadcaster Bayerischer Rundfunk. The hospitals in the Neu-Ulm district have already begun to prepare for the collapse of intensive medical care by establishing a “triage team.”

In Saxony, according to the president of the state medical association, intensive care units could be overwhelmed as early as the end of the week, so that “even large hospitals would have to implement triage.” It is likely that anyone who has to be admitted to the intensive care unit and be given artificial respiration in the state will not be able to be transferred to other hospitals because the situation in surrounding states is similar.

Wherever additional measures have been announced, they are completely inadequate.

On Friday, the Saxony state government decided on a supposed “wave break lock-down,” which, however, does not provide for any closure of the manufacturing sector. Instead, the governing coalition of Christian Democrats (CDU), Greens and SPD amended the Working Hours Act to allow crematoria to burn the victims of their policies on Sundays. Until December 15, the maximum daily working hours may also be exceeded for medical treatment and care and mobile vaccination teams, among others.

In Thuringia, clubs, bars and discos, as well as indoor and outdoor swimming pools, are to close from Wednesday. A night-time curfew between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m. is in effect for the unvaccinated. Christmas markets will be cancelled. But schools, daycare centres and businesses will remain open without any restrictions.

Similar measures are apparently also being discussed at the federal level. Tuesday evening, outgoing Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU) invited her designated successor Olaf Scholz (SPD) and the other leaders of the “traffic light” parties—Annalena Baerbock and Robert Habeck (both Greens) as well as Christian Lindner and Marco Buschmann (both FDP)—to a crisis meeting at the Chancellor’s Office. According to media reports, the discussion was “about further measures in the fight against pandemic.”

Again, the goal is to avoid the urgent need for tough measures. Just last week, the traffic light coalition leaders in the Bundestag had decided to allow the designation of an “epidemic emergency” expire, thus eliminating the legal basis for nationwide school and business closures. Closing recreational facilities or curfews for the unvaccinated are not nearly enough to prevent hospitals collapsing and significantly curb the pandemic.

The same applies to the introduction of a general vaccination requirement. The governing parties have so far strictly refused to do so but are now signaling a possible change of course. Berlin’s mayor Michael Müller (SPD) told RBB Tuesday that he believed there would be no getting around compulsory vaccination. “Only vaccination permanently ensures that we can experience everything as we want to.”

In fact, it has been scientifically proven that vaccination alone is not enough to reduce infection rates and end mass deaths. To contain and eventually eliminate the virus, schools and non-essential businesses must also be closed, first and foremost, and measures such as testing, tracing and isolating all cases must be carried out systematically.

In addition, the vaccination campaign in Germany has been a disaster. The RKI’s recent “COVIMO” report, which surveyed more than 3,000 adults about their willingness to be vaccinated, suggests that this is far higher in all age groups than the vaccination rate realized to date. But instead of ensuring that the entire population receives the desired protection, the federal and state governments have largely shut down public vaccination centres.

Federal Health Minister Jens Spahn (CDU) had recently even issued an order cap of 30 doses per doctor’s office for Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines, claiming that “not all orders could be filled” due to the “short-term” increase in demand. The Moderna vaccine, which is to be delivered instead, is recommended by the Standing Committee on Vaccination (STIKO), in contrast to the Pfizer shot, only for people over 30 years of age, so that the vaccination of younger people is once again in danger of being delayed.

The same indifference of the ruling class to the health and lives of the population is evident in the vaccination debacle as in all other areas of pandemic policy. “Probably by the end of this winter everyone in Germany will have been vaccinated, recovered or died,” Spahn declared at a press conference Monday. With that, he summed up the fascistic indifference of the ruling class to mass death.

By allowing infection numbers to explode while millions remain unvaccinated or boostered, the federal and state governments are increasing the risk of another “escape” variant emerging. Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), warned of this danger in a public statement in late September.

“With the amount of virus currently circulating in the US, especially among unvaccinated people, our greatest concern as public health officials and scientists is that the virus will become even more transmissible and have the potential to evade our vaccines that protect us from serious illness and death. The next elusive variant,” Walensky said, may be “just a few mutations away.”

Germany’s “traffic light” coalition government reaches agreement: Welfare cuts, state armament and militarism

Peter Schwarz

The Social Democratic Party (SPD), Free Democrats (FDP) and Greens in Germany agreed on a 177-page coalition agreement on Wednesday and presented it to the media. After it has been passed by the responsible party committees, nothing should stand in the way of the election of a new federal government under Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) after December 6.

Wrapped in flowery phrases about modernization, transformation, climate protection and solidarity, the program of the “traffic light” coalition (red, yellow, green—for the colours of the parties) is a declaration of war on the working population and a commitment to militarism. The coalition consists of three parties, one which represents in distilled form the interests of the corporations and banks (FDP), another the affluent middle class (Greens) and the third the state (SPD).

The coalition’s COVID-19 policy reveals the class character of the new government most clearly. On the same day that the SPD, Greens and FDP presented their coalition agreement in Berlin, the official death toll exceeded the threshold of 100,000. The number of infected in Germany reached a new daily record total of 67,000. In much of the country, the pandemic is completely out of control, with seven-day incidence rates well over 1,000. Such an incidence rate means that one in every one hundred residents of a district has been infected within the past week.

Press conference of the 'traffic light' coalition partners

The traffic light coalition bears direct joint responsibility for this catastrophe, and not just because the SPD has been in government for eight years. Just six days ago, the coalition used its majority in the federal parliament to allow the COVID-19 emergency to expire on November 25. This means there is no longer a legal basis for imposing lockdowns and similar measures essential to contain the pandemic.

The SPD’s Scholz could not ignore the pandemic at the press conference and announced a series of measures, such as an expansion of the vaccination campaign, the establishment of a permanent crisis team and an expert group in the Chancellery, and a one-time bonus for overwhelmed health care workers. Scientists have long warned that only a combination of all available measures can prevent an even greater catastrophe.

But the traffic light coalition is determined to continue the brutal “profit before life” policy of the grand coalition. It would rather accept tens of thousands of deaths and the mass infection of the youth than endanger the profits of big business.

Perhaps the most important decision in the coalition agreement is handing over the finance ministry to the FDP. Although the ministers will only be named in the coming days, it is certain that FDP leader Christian Lindner will take over this post. Lindner has made a name for himself as a vehement advocate of austerity policies, an opponent of any tax increase for the rich and a representative of big business.

The coalition agreement accordingly states that the debt brake, which strictly limits new government borrowing, will come into force again without restriction from 2023. In Europe, too, Germany should “continue to live up to its pioneering role as an anchor of stability” and ensure compliance with the Stability and Growth Pact, which caps the deficits of European Union (EU) member states. “Financial solidity and the economical use of tax money” are “principles of our budget and financial policy,” the agreement asserts.

Olaf Scholz (Photo credit–Steffen Prößdorf)

Given the huge subsidies for the climate-friendly transformation of corporations, a massive increase in rearmament spending and the planned repayment of the COVID-19 debt, this can only be financed through drastic social cuts. The SPD is responsible for this. The FDP, the smallest of the three coalition partners, received not only finance, but also the justice, transport and education ministries.

The Greens will take over the ministry of economic affairs, which will be expanded to include climate protection, as well as the foreign, family, environment and agriculture ministries. Annalena Baerbock, a Green co-leader, is expected to become foreign minister and Robert Habeck, the other co-leader, to be named Vice Chancellor and minister of economic affairs.

Baerbock is known for her hostility to Russia and China. Accordingly, the coalition agreement describes the “transatlantic partnership and friendship with the USA ‘as’ a central pillar of our international action.” The government’s China policy is to be “coordinated transatlantically,” and cooperation with China will be sought only “on the basis of human rights.”

Like the current government, the traffic light coalition is also striving for a global strategy designed to serve German imperialist interests. Under the heading “Germany’s responsibility for Europe and the world,” Eastern Europe, Ukraine, Turkey, the Middle East, Africa and even the Indo-Pacific are defined as German areas of interest. “We know about the global responsibility that Germany, as the fourth largest economy in the world, bears for this,” the document declares.

In order to bring Germany’s weight to bear, the European Union will be strengthened. A “capable and strategically sovereign EU” is “the basis for our peace and prosperity.” The document continues, “As the largest member state, we will assume our special responsibility ... for the EU as a whole.”

To this end, the rearmament of the German army ( Bundeswehr ) will be accelerated. All restraint is thrown overboard, with the coalition agreement committing to “arm the military’s drones” and nuclear deterrence. “As long as nuclear weapons play a role in NATO’s strategic concept, Germany has an interest in participating in the strategic discussions and planning processes,” the coalition agreement states. We “are committed to maintaining a credible deterrent potential.”

The deal also promises the acquisition of a “successor system for the Tornado fighter aircraft” at the beginning of the 20th legislative period.

The defence ministry will be led by the SPD, which will also head the interior, labour, health, building and development aid ministries. The SPD will also hold the posts of Chancellor and head of the Chancellor’s Office.

The ministry of labour, which the SPD has led for 23 years with a four-year break, is of particular importance in the traffic light coalition’s program. Under the heading “Modern world of work,” the torture instruments associated with the Agenda 2010 welfare reforms will be further developed. In the last red-green coalition under the SDP’s Gerhard Schröder, Agenda 2010 marked the initiation of the most extensive social cuts in recent history.

In connection with these attacks, the coalition agreement adopts a consistent approach. Measures that met with popular anger and outrage will be abolished and then reintroduced in a different form or under a new name.

For example, the unemployment benefit II (better known as Hartz IV) will be referred to as Bürgergeld (Citizen’s Benefit) in the future. “Citizen’s benefit focuses on the potential of people and aids the sustainable integration into the labour market, and enables social participation,” the coalition agreement proclaims in harmonious prose. But the “duty to cooperate” will be maintained. That is, the recipient of the citizen’s benefit will continue to be harassed by the job centre until they accept a low-wage job. Such jobs—mini and midi jobs, temporary work, agency work, fixed-term contracts, etc.—are not being abolished, but “adjusted,” according to the agreement.

The increase in the statutory minimum wage to €12 [$US13.45], which the SPD is celebrating as a great victory, has also turned out to be a sham. The minimum wage is now €9.60 and would rise to €10.45 in the middle of next year anyway. The industry-specific minimum wages are already almost all over €12. In addition, the coalition agreement expressly calls for the retention of work contracts and temporary workers, with which the minimum wage can be undercut.

The same applies to the promise that there will be “no pension cuts and no increase in the statutory retirement age.” The decision to raise the retirement age from 65 to 67 has not yet been completed. And no one can live on the “minimum pension level of 48 percent” of the average income after 45 years of contribution payment guaranteed by the traffic light coalition.

In fact, the coalition agreement specifically stipulates that older people, even if they have long since reached retirement age, will return to work in order to supplement their meagre pensions. To this end, numerous provisions of labour law are to be changed.

To address the housing shortage, the traffic light promises that 400,000 new apartments will be built every year. But the grand coalition already promised in 2017 to build 1.5 million apartments in four years. This target was never met. Even in 2020, when the number of new buildings reached a new record, only 306,000 units were built—and rents are now hardly affordable.

The traffic light coalition promises the introduction of a “basic child benefit” to tackle child poverty. But this merely involves the amalgamation of previous benefits—child benefit, child allowance, educational support—into a single support benefit.

In order to counter the growing social opposition, the coalition will strengthen the police and surveillance state. “The members of the security authorities in our country, who support us every day anew in the defence of the free democratic basic order, deserve our respect and recognition,” says the coalition agreement, and adds, “Intelligence services are an important part of a well-fortified democracy.”

Video surveillance, data retention, surveillance software and other forms of surveillance should not be abolished but made “legally secure.” The “use of agents, warrant officers and other informants from all security authorities” should not be prohibited, but regulated by law. There should be an “independent supervisory body” for “disputes” in the context of classifications by the Verfassungsschutz secret service (Office for the Protection of the Constitution). Instead of draining the swamp of far-right operatives in the state apparatus, the traffic light coalition intends to make March 11 a “national day of remembrance for the victims of terrorist violence.”

The traffic light coalition will also seamlessly continue the inhumane refugee policy of the grand coalition. It wants to allow more immigration—in order to attract workers and counteract the aging of society—while keeping refugees out even more rigorously. “We will reduce irregular migration and make regular migration possible,” the document states.

Climate protection, hailed as a breakthrough by the Greens, turns out to be an additional enrichment program for corporations and banks on closer inspection. It is approached exclusively from the standpoint of creating new sales opportunities for the troubled German export industry.

“As the largest industrial and export economy in Europe, Germany is facing profound transformation processes in global competition in the 2020s,” says the chapter “Climate protection in a socio-ecological market economy.” “We therefore see the task of giving the economic strength of our country a new dynamic.”