To Be Taken At (Country): Underpinning HEINEKEN’s long-standing commitment to Africa, projects are only carried out in the Sub-Saharan African countries in which HEINEKEN is operating.
About the HEINEKEN Africa Foundation Grants: For each project a partnership is created between the HEINEKEN Africa Foundation, the local HEINEKEN brewery and a local or international (N)GO. The Foundation provides funding and administrative assistance. The local brewery supports through means of manpower, expertise and monitoring. The (N)GO is responsible for the implementation and continuation of the project.
Type: Grants
Eligibility: An eligible HEINEKEN Africa Foundation Grants project proposal:
focusses on Mother & Child care or WASH (water, sanitation and hygiene)
directly improves the health situation for needy communities living in the environment of a HEINEKEN Sub-Saharan African organization. See where where HEINEKEN operates in the Program Webpage.
cooperates with global and/or local partners (NGOs/GOs/overseas development ministries/international organizations)
has measurable positive results
has a sustainable follow-up or clear conclusion
is approved and motivated by the General Manager of the related HEINEKEN operation
is submitted to the HAF General Manager by the local HEINEKEN operating company
does not exceed the maximum requested amount of EUR 75,000 per year (with a 3-year maximum)
The HEINEKEN Africa Foundation excludes projects that:
may lead to a direct commercial benefit for the local HEINEKEN operation
replace health benefits currently provided to HEINEKEN employees and their family members
focus on adolescents (in the age of primary and secondary school)
are research projects, scholarships and medical or health-related events and conferences
Number of Awards: Not specified
Value of Award: Maximum requested amount of EUR 75,000 per year (with a 3-year maximum).
How to Apply for HEINEKEN Africa Foundation Grants:
Project proposals can only be submitted by the local HEINEKEN operating companies in close collaboration with a (N)GO. By making use of HEINEKEN’s local infrastructure and network we believe that we can make a bigger impact.
Do the Ukraine war and the action of the United States, the EU and the UK spell the end of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency? Even with the peace talks recently held in Turkey or the proposed 15-point peace plan, as the Financial Times had reported earlier, the fallout for the dollar still remains. For the first time, Russia, a major nuclear power and economy, was treated as a vassal state, with the United States, the EU and the UK seizing its $300 billion foreign exchange reserves. Where does this leave other countries, who also hold their foreign exchange reserves largely in dollars or euros?
The threat to the dollar hegemony is only one part of the fallout. The complex supply chains, built on the premise of a stable trading regime of the World Trade Organization principles, are also threatening to unravel. The United States is discovering that Russia is not simply a petrostate as they thought but that it also supplies many of the critical materials that the U.S. needs for several industries as well as its military. This is apart from the fact that Russia is also a major supplier of wheat and fertilizers.
Seizing Russia’s funds means that the faith in the United States as the world’s banker and in the dollar as the global reserve currency is in question. Why should countries maintain any trade surplus and bank it abroad if that surplus can be seized at will through sanctions imposed by the West? The promise of a dollar as the world’s reserve currency was that all surpluses in dollars were safe. With the seizure of the Afghan central bank’s $9.5 billion, and allocating $7 billion out of it, the United States has shown that it considers the dollar reserves of another country, held by the United States’ central bank, as its money. It may be an economic asset in the books for a country to maintain its currency reserves with the U.S. central bank. But it is effectively a political liability, as the U.S. government can seize this asset at will. The United States has earlier shown its capability of imposing sanctions against countries such as Iraq, Libya and Venezuela and seizing their assets that resulted in far-reaching negative impacts for these countries. The seizure of Russia’s foreign exchange reserves by a handful of Western countries—ex-colonial and settler-colonial states—shows that the so-called rules-based order is now based on weaponizing the dollar and the West’s control over the global financial system.
Economists—Prabhat Patnaik and Michael Hudson—and financial experts such as Zoltan Pozsar of Credit Suisse are now predicting a new regime in which another currency or some other variant system will emerge as the world’s new reserve currency. According to Pozsar, “When this crisis (and war) is over, the U.S. dollar should be much weaker and, on the flipside, the renminbi much stronger, backed by a basket of commodities.”
What has led to these predictions? After World War II, the Bretton Woods agreement led to the dollar becoming the world’s reserve currency. It replaced the British pound and was pegged to gold at a conversion value of $35 to an ounce of gold. In 1971, then-President Richard Nixon ended the Bretton Woods system and removed the “convertibility of U.S. dollars to gold,” which meant that the dollar was now backed only by the U.S. government (or U.S. Treasury) guarantees. The dollar as reserve currency had three things going for it in the postwar years: It was backed by the United States, which was the world’s largest industrial producer; the United States was the preeminent military power even if challenged by the Soviet Union; and it was backed by West Asian oil, the largest traded commodity, being priced in dollars.
The denomination of West Asian oil, particularly of Saudi Arabia, was critical to the United States and was determined by its military power. The coup in Iran against then-Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953, the 1958 coup in Iraq, and many other political events in West Asia can be understood more easily if the world understands the importance of oil for the United States. This was the basis of the Carter Doctrine, extending the Monroe Doctrine equivalent to the Persian Gulf region—and reflected the United States’ interest in the region and its lack of tolerance for interference by any outside power there. U.S. foreign policy in West Asia has been captured on bumper stickers and antiwar protest signs for decades with variations on the phrase, “Our oil is under their sand.” The United States’ control over West Asian oil combined with its industrial and military power ensured that the dollar remained as the world’s reserve currency.
The fall of the United States as the world’s industrial power has gone hand in hand with the rise of China. A measure of China’s industrial rise can be seen from a simple comparison provided by the Lowy Institute using International Monetary Fund data on global trade. In 2001, more than 80 percent of countries had the United States as their major trading partner as compared to China. By 2018, that figure had dropped to a little more than 30 percent—128 out of 190 countries “[traded] more with China than the United States.” This dramatic change has happened in fewer than 20 years. The reason for this change is industrial production: China overtook the United States in 2010 to become the largest industrial producer in the world. (India is the fifth-largest industrial producer but manufactures only 3.1 percent of the world output as against 28.7 percent of the manufacturing output produced by China and 16.8 percent produced by the United States toward the world’s industrial production.) It is not surprising that world trading patterns follow industrial production.
Two recent events are important in this context. China and the Eurasian Economic Union consisting of Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Belarus and Armenia seem to be moving toward a new international and monetary system. India and Russia also seem to be working out a rupee-ruble exchange based on India’s need to import Russian arms, fertilizer and oil. India had already created a similar system earlier for buying Iranian oil in rupees. This might also give a fillip to increasing India’s exports to Russia. Saudi Arabia has recently indicated that it might also designate its oil sales to China in yuan and not dollars. If this happens, this would be the first time since 1974 that Saudi Arabia would sell any oil in a currency other than the dollar. This would give an immediate fillip to the yuan, as more than 25 percent of all of Saudi Arabia’s oil is sold to China.
The United States dominates the services, intellectual property (IP) and information technology (IT) markets. But the markets for physical goods, unlike for services such as IP and IT, are based on a complex model of supplies and, therefore, have complex global supply chains. If the Western economic war means taking out Russia’s supplies from the global market, many supply chains are in danger of unraveling. I have already written about the energy war and how the European Union depends on gas piped from Russia to Europe. But many other commodities are critical for those sanctioning Russia and those who may now find it difficult to trade with Russia due to the West’s sanctions.
Strangely enough, one of the key elements in the supply chain for manufacturing chips depends on Russia. Russia is a major supplier of sapphire substrates (using artificial sapphires) that go into the manufacturing of semiconductor chips. The other critical item for chip makers is neon, of which the two major suppliers are located in the southern Ukraine cities of Mariupol and Odessa. They together produce “between 45 percent and 54 percent” of the global neon supply.
I have already highlighted earlier the danger posed to the EU’s climate change plans as a result of the Ukraine-Russia conflict, which could also jeopardize its plan to shift to gas as a bridge fuel. Using batteries as the key storage element in the renewable energy route also has a substantial Russian weakness. Nickel is critical for electric batteries, and Russia is the third-largest supplier of nickel in the world. With the United States and the EU imposing sanctions on Russia, this may lead to China, already emerging as the world’s largest battery supplier, rising to an even more dominant position in the world battery market.
The other supply chain issues that could come up as a result of the Russia-Ukraine war involve palladium, platinum, titanium and rare earth elements. All of these minerals are required by advanced industries and are likely to be caught up in supply chain bottlenecks worldwide. They are also on the list of 50 strategic minerals that the United States needs since they are critical to its security. A look back at how the global supply chains seized up during COVID-19 should provide the world with a sense of what the coming crisis could look like and why it could be a lot worse than what was witnessed during the pandemic. Sanctions are easy to impose, much harder to lift. And even after the lifting of sanctions, the supply chain will not come together seamlessly as it did before. Remember, these global supply chains have been incrementally configured over decades. Undoing them using the wrecking ball of sanctions is easy; redoing them is a lot harder.
The food supplies to the world will be hit even harder. Russia, Ukraine and Belarus produce a significant amount of fertilizers needed by farmers everywhere. Russia and Ukraine are among the biggest exporters of wheat. If Russian wheat is sanctioned and Ukraine’s harvest is hit due to war, the world will not find it easy to thwart a severe food shortage.
There is no question that the world is on the cusp of a major economic change. This turning point will either lead to the complete destruction of the Russian economy, even if Russia achieves a quick peace with Ukraine and there is no NATO-Russia war. Or it will reconfigure a new economic order that has been in the offing: a world order with cooperative solutions instead of military and economic wars for resolution.
Fully 36 years after their horrific crime, a Chilean Court sentenced 10 retired members of the Army for dousing in petrol and setting alight 19-year-old photographer Rodrigo Rojas and 18-year-old student Carmen Gloria Quintana, and leaving them to die.
Rodrigo Rojas de Negri (Museo de la Memoria y Derechos Humanos)
The “Caso Quemados” (case of the burnt ones) occurred on July 2, 1986 in the working class commune of Estación Central in Santiago amidst ongoing demonstrations against depression-level unemployment, mass poverty and bloody repression brutality meted out by the military dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet.
After burning alive Rojas and Quintana, the military patrol headed by Captain Pedro Fernández Dittus dumped the charred bodies in an irrigation ditch on the outskirts of Santiago, hoping the youths would die from the injuries. Rodrigo Rojas suffered second and third degree burns to the head, neck, trunk and extremities, involving approximately 65 percent of his body surface, dying from his injuries four days later; Carmen Gloria suffered burns to 62 percent of her body surface and had to undergo 50 operations over the course of months.
A cover-up was then organized lasting almost three decades. It included witnesses being kidnapped, and threatened with being “disappeared,” while human rights lawyers and courageous justices were threatened with abduction and worse.
The case was reopened in 2013 by roving judge Mario Carroza, assigned to investigate human rights cases. Fresh evidence was brought to light in 2015 when a former conscript after 29 years broke a military pact of silence, allowing Judge Carroza to sentence the patrol in 2019.
Funeral for Rodrigo Rojas de Negri (Credit: Paulo Slachevsky)
Last March 21, the fourth chamber of the Court of Appeals increased the sentences against retired officers Julio Castañer, Iván Figueroa and Nelson Medina from 10 to 20 years prison for the aggravated homicide of Rodrigo Rojas and the frustrated homicide of Carmen Quintana.
Significantly, the justices also rejected the legal exception of res judicata (the case had already been adjudicated) applied to Fernández Dittus and sentenced him to 20 years imprisonment as “the author of the crimes of consummated homicide of Rodrigo Rojas de Negri and frustrated homicide of Carmen Gloria Quintana Arancibia.”
The emblematic case was originally sealed in 1994—three years into civilian rule—after the Supreme Court upheld a 1986 Military Court ruling that convicted Captain Fernández Dittus as the sole person responsible for unnecessary violence resulting in death and negligence for not rendering aid to the victims. He was sentenced to a mere 600 days in prison and served less than a year of that sentence.
In their 59-page ruling, the Appeals Court judges explained that res judicata did not apply in this instance because the “initial investigation was spurious or illegitimate because of the way it was conducted; that is, without a real intention to clarify the facts and responsibilities in accordance with the historical truth… a character that is reflected in a series of circumstances that are noticeable from the first moments of the process.”
The ruling continues:
This is corroborated by the fact that (the investigation) was evidently closed without being truly exhausted, proof of which is that in the current trial the investigation carried out has made it possible, despite the greater time that has elapsed, to have clarity as to how the events really occurred, i.e., not as a consequence of a kick to a Molotov bomb by Mrs. Carmen Gloria Quintana, which would have initially left both victims with slight injuries, but because the accused were soaked in fuel by State agents, then ignited, extinguished and finally abandoned to their fate with injuries so serious that they ended up costing the life of one of them; all in the context of systematic human rights violations.
The judges explained that the original investigation disregarded official external reports implicating the Army and gave “total credibility… to the testimonies of the soldiers several of whom affirmed in the present investigation to have lied on instructions from their hierarchical superiors.”
Carmen Gloria Quintana in 1987 (Wikimedia Commons)
“The whole journey has been very painful,” Veronica de Negri, Rodrigo’s mother, told the news site La Voz de los Que Sobran in an interview that aired on March 23. “The most painful thing is that these criminals are still in their homes as long as there is no ruling from the Supreme Court.”
De Negri made the important observation that her struggle “is not only about Rodrigo and Carmen, it is about all the victims of the dictatorship, of the Concertación, of Piñera. Human rights were not only violated under the military dictatorship.”
In the two and a half years since the massive anti-capitalist 2019 demonstrations rocked the country, more than 8,000 mainly young people suffered some form of state violence, including sexual abuse and torture. Over 500 suffered eye injuries, and over 50 died at the hands of Carabineros and the Armed Forces.
Her opposition to state terrorism was also a salvo against the new pseudo-left administration of President Gabriel Boric who has unleashed anti-riot police and Carabinero Special Forces against student demonstrations protesting paltry subsidies. Revealing sooner rather than later that his government will continue the brutal practices of his predecessor, in the last three weeks one student was shot with live ammunition by riot police, one student was severely beaten by lumpen informant types and remains in critical condition and a special forces vehicle ran over a female protester.
The Western powers’ success in goading Putin to launch a reactionary war in Ukraine has intensified economic and geopolitical rivalries around the globe, including in the far north. The major powers view the Arctic, with its vast natural resources and trade routes opening up due to climate change, as a key battleground.
Canada has a direct rivalry with Russia in the region over competing territorial claims behind which lie key economic and geostrategic interests for both countries. It therefore comes as no surprise that Canadian imperialism, which is playing an extremely provocative role in pushing for a US-NATO attack on Russia that would trigger a third world war, is seizing on the conflict to expand its military presence in the Arctic.
Canadian Army reservists conduct large-scale exercise at Fort Pickett (Credit: Virginia Guard Public Affairs)
Minister of National Defence Anita Anand is planning a trip to the Canadian Arctic to reinforce Ottawa’s sovereignty and security claims in the region. In mid-March, her office informed the premiers of the Northwest Territories, Nunavut, and Yukon that she will tour the territories to highlight the diplomatic and military issues in the region.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine, which was provoked by the US-NATO imperialist powers’ eastward march after the Stalinist dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, has provided the Canadian bourgeoisie with the perfect opportunity to proceed with long-planned military spending hikes. Anand made this clear in her speech at the 90th Ottawa Conference on Security and Defence on March 11. The conference was attended by high ranking Canadian military and NATO figures such as the Chief of Defence Staff General Wayne Eyre.
Anand stated, “The work is happening now to ensure that we are prepared for any eventuality, including in terms of Arctic sovereignty.” Eyre bluntly remarked that NATO’s northern flank “is a key area of concern” for the Canadian military. Since the conference, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg has reiterated the call for all NATO members to spend a minimum of 2 percent of their GDP on defence. Canada currently spends 1.39 percent on defence-related spending, up from 1.01 percent in 2014. The Trudeau government pledged in 2017 to increase military spending by over 70 percent within a decade.
But this is only a down payment for the war-mongering Canadian ruling class. Last August, the Trudeau government signed an agreement with the Biden administration to modernize the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), a Cold War-era binational continental defence structure established between Washington and Ottawa. A key goal of modernization for many senior military and foreign policy officials is to bring Canada into Washington’s ballistic missile defence shield, which seeks to make a war fought with nuclear weapons “winnable.”
Anand told the conference that Canada intends to announce a spending plan for the modernization of NORAD soon. The cost of modernizing NORAD’s radar systems, which were last updated in the 1980s, is estimated to be more than $11 billion. This equates to almost half of Canada’s current annual defence budget. It is likely that the final cost will be much greater, as much of the technology is still in development. The proposed updates will include “over-the-horizon” and advanced maritime capabilities, which will be able to launch “first-strike” attacks on missile launching sites.
Several Arctic military exercises—all of which were scheduled long before the war in Ukraine—are either currently underway or have recently been concluded. Operation Noble Defender was announced by NORAD in a press release dated February 15, 2022. The operation ran from March 14 to 17 and involved hundreds of personnel from Canada and the US, dozens of Canadian CF-18 and American F-22 fighters, refueling and other support aircraft. Ron Hubert, an associate professor of political science at the University of Calgary, told the CBC that the fact that “NORAD is going out of its way to make sure that you have an awareness of it, that that is being shared is obviously part of the signaling that we are giving to the Russians right now.”
Another recent show of military force in the northern polar region was Arctic Edge. The US Northern Command announced the biennial exercise on February 8. Running from February 28 to March 17, the exercises included more than 1,000 US and Canadian personnel training for warfare in the Arctic.
The annual Canadian military Arctic exercise, Operation Nanook, is slated to take place this August in Cambridge Bay and Pond Inlet on the northern coast of Baffin Island. First undertaken in 2007 at the behest of the bellicose former right-wing Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper (who personally attended annually until the end of his term in office), the exercises are ultimately intended to project force in the Canadian Arctic to bolster Canada’s sovereignty claims and take aim at Russia. While soldiers from Denmark and the US have participated over the past decade, they have not done so as members of NATO.
While Canada enjoys a close military-strategic partnership with US imperialism stretching back over eight decades, there is a longstanding dispute between the two countries over the border in the Beaufort Sea. Ottawa and Washington also disagree over the status of the Northwest Passage sea route through the Arctic Ocean. Canada claims that it is part of its internal waters, while the US, in its interpretation of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS)—which it has never ratified, claims that the passage is international.
The American contention for international waters would give its ships customs-free transit through the Arctic, something that would be economically beneficial for its commercial ships, and militarily advantageous for projecting force against Russia in the region and resupplying its northernmost airbase at Thule, Greenland. The Canadian government wants to control access to the straits and collect any dues to affirm their sovereignty claims over the region.
The Northwest Passage was ice-free for the first time in recorded history in 2007, opening a long inaccessible route to international trade that is also much shorter than current intercontinental shipping lanes. Twenty million tons of cargo passed through the straits in 2018, double the amount from the previous year. A recent study published in the journal Nature Climate Change suggests summers in the Arctic Ocean could be entirely ice-free by 2035 . Manmade climate change is rapidly shrinking the area covered by arctic sea ice—about 2.8 percent per decade since NASA’s National Snow and Ice Data Center began keeping records in 1979. Sea ice coverage in the Arctic Ocean is down by about 40 percent since then. This dramatic loss of sea ice will have a domino effect on the acceleration of climate change.
The Canadian Arctic comprises 40 percent of the country’s total land mass. It is home to vast stores of untapped mineral and energy wealth. It is estimated that 13 percent of the world’s undiscovered oil reserves lie under the Arctic seabed. Major mining operations by publicly traded companies such as Agnico-Eagle operate in the territories, extracting precious metals such as gold, silver, copper and zinc.
The Mary River open pit iron ore mine, owned by Baffinland Iron Mines at the northernmost tip of Baffin Island in Nunavut, is another example of a strategic resource in the region. Canada was the 8th largest producer of the metal in 2020, ahead of the United States, which was ranked 9th, but falling behind China, 3rd and Russia, 5th.
The mine was the site of Inuit protests in February 2021 because of the impact it has had on the environment and hunting, one of their chief means of securing an existence in what is still largely an undeveloped region. Residents of this remote region are generally impoverished and struggle to afford food, which costs on average three times as much as in the southern parts of Canada.
Concerns surrounding the sale of Hope Bay gold mine in Nunavut last year shows the lengths to which the Canadian government will go to protect what it considers to be its “national security interests” in the Arctic. The mine, which lies on the Victoria Strait in Nunavut, was bought by Agnico-Eagle in January 2021. The Canadian government blocked its sale to the Chinese state-owned Shandong Gold Mining Co. Ltd on “national security grounds” the previous month.
Over recent years, China has shown an interest in both the Northern Sea Route, which runs along the Russian Arctic coast, and the Northwest Passage, a fact that no doubt underlies Canada’s jealous guarding of its privileges in the region. As Jody Thomas, Trudeau’s national security adviser, put it in comments to the Ottawa Conference on Defence and Security in March 2021, “We should not underestimate at all that threat of resource exploitation in the Arctic by China in particular. China has a voracious appetite and will stop at nothing to feed itself, and the Arctic is one of the last domains and regions left and we have to understand it and exploit it more quickly than they can exploit it.”
Canada’s sovereignty claims to the Arctic Archipelago were first made under the so-called “Sector Principle,” first raised in the Canadian Senate by Senator Pascal Poirier in 1907. The basic premise of the claim was that since most of the islands had been discovered by British explorers, all of the islands to the North of Canada between 141 and 60 meridians of west longitude up to the North Pole were in the possession of Canada. This arbitrary claim was made at a time when the imperialist powers were preparing to bloodily re-divide the world in World War I. Denmark, Norway and the US all made claims and sent explorers to the Arctic region. While Norway withdrew its claims, Canada’s ruling elite continues to have disputes with the US in the Beaufort Sea and with Denmark over Hans Island in the middle of the Nares Strait between Ellesmere Island and Greenland.
More recent attempts to bolster Canada’s Arctic sovereignty claims resulted in the forcible relocation of Inuit in parts of Baffin Island and Northern Quebec to barren, inhospitable islands of the north. The relocations were coercively enforced by the federal Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) in 1953 and 1955. Government officials, the Hudson’s Bay Company and the Anglican and Roman Catholic Churches agreed upon this course of action the previous year as a means of populating the north. The Inuit were relocated to Grise Fiord on Ellesmere Island and Resolute on Cornwallis Island as a means of asserting the argument of “effective occupation” in relation to Canadian sovereignty claims. While an internal RCMP report from 2006 denies it, the Inuit claim that at least 20,000 Inuit sled dogs were killed during the 1950s and 1960s to force them to quit their traditional cultural practices and relocate to the new communities.
Tens of thousands of doctors drew attention to their precarious situation on Thursday with a nationwide warning strike. Around 4,000 took part in the central rally on Frankfurt’s Römerberg. Almost 500 municipal hospitals throughout Germany were on strike, except for Hamburg and Berlin.
1 Rally of striking hospital doctors at Frankfurt's Römerberg, 31 March 2022
The doctors’ warning strike reveals a striking contradiction. Thousands of doctors made it clear that after two years of the pandemic they are working at their limit and are no longer prepared to carry on like this. They are demanding fundamental changes in a health system that is itself ill and going more and more to the dogs.
However, it is clear this is not the fight their trade union, the Marburger Bund, is waging. The Marburger Bund is a conservative professional organisation. It refuses to fight for fundamental changes to the dire conditions in hospitals and the health care system more broadly alongside other sections of the working class. On the contrary, it is trying to settle the conflict with the municipal employers as quickly as possible.
"2 years of coronavirus, this is your thanks?" reads one cardboard sign. VKA (the municipal employers association) = Completely Knackered Doctors, reads the other (Photo: 3 Waleed and Nisreen (WSWS media)
The conditions facing health care workers are part of a broader destruction of wages and working conditions impacting nurseries and schools, aviation, basic industry and virtually every other sector. To wage an effective struggle, doctors must break out of the straitjacket imposed by the unions and forge links with workers in federal and local governments and the state.
Like nurses, teachers, bus drivers and auto workers, doctors must build independent rank-and-file committees against the “profits before lives” policy of the ruling class. These committees should reach out to other sections of workers to carry out the broadest possible mobilization in defence of health care. Workers must fight for health care system in which it will be possible to work in a humane way that is safe, reasonable, healthy and employing cutting-edge science and technology.
The posters carried by the participants in the Frankfurt demonstration were a testimony to the enormous anger felt by doctors in the face of conditions that have dramatically worsened over the two years of the pandemic. One poster read, “In hospital: exhausted and badly paid!” Others read: “Doctors fight against 70-hour week,” “Work until you drop,” “You burn us out,” “Work-work balance?,” “Fair time recording: enough is enough!,” “Work until the doctor drops,” or: “Without doctors’ health—no healthy patients.”
Other slogans were: “No one is asking for champagne, just 2 weekends off,” “Yes, I am overworked—the hospital doesn’t care,” or: “...and who will look after you in the next pandemic?!”
A young couple, Waleed and Nisreen, emphasised, “For us, working conditions are most important. We have to be healthy ourselves to be able to take care of people,” Waleed explained. “Nisreen is having a baby now, and we are both doctors and we are wondering how we will do it. As a person and as a doctor—how do we go on?” Nisreen pointed out that it was simply impossible for young parents to work through three weekends a month. She also said she was afraid of contracting coronavirus.
Waleed and Nisreen (WSWS media)
“Medical workers are the cardiac mainstays of society,” Waleed continued. “To me, the pay scale is just unfair, if you take into account the training and compare us to other professions for a change.” But what was most important to them both, he said, was to see a rapid improvement in working conditions: “The situation has worsened in the last two years. Doctors are treated so badly—something simply has to change.”
Hanno from Braunschweig explained that doctors in municipal hospitals were mainly concerned with a clear limitation of night duties, on-call duties, and rest periods. “We are demanding fair working conditions,” Hanno explained. “It must be guaranteed that each of us gets at least two weekends off a month.”
Hanno from Braunschweig (WSWS media)
Recently, a survey of 3,300 doctors by the Marburger Bund found that workloads had increased significantly for 71 percent of respondents during the pandemic. Ninety-one percent of clinicians felt regularly exhausted by their work; 31 percent said this was “always” the case, and 60 percent that it was “increasingly” the case.
“We are concerned about our working conditions,” said Kent, who had come with a group of colleagues from Bremen. “They are so bad that we hardly get any new recruits at the hospitals. When I’m on duty at the weekend, I work through from Friday morning to Monday morning. I’m on call then, but for me that often means working through.”
His colleague Ekhard explained: “The employers don’t allow us the rest periods. If it was not possible to rest during the night and we go home after working through the night, this is deducted from our salary.” He added, “The medical profession is the only profession where you earn minus hours through overtime, which you then have to work off at the weekends. This is modern slavery, nothing else.”
On the coronavirus pandemic, doctors reported, “Right now, we have extremely high absenteeism. A third of the staff is missing because of the Omicron variant. They all have families; they have children at home who can’t avoid getting infected at school. But at the hospital, staffing is so thin there is no cushion. Then beds are closed, wards are closed, and treatments are cancelled.”
The Marburger Bund has been negotiating with the VKA about the conditions of almost 60,000 doctors in municipal hospitals since 14 October 2021. No progress has been made in four rounds of negotiations and two exploratory talks. VKA chief negotiator Wolfgang Heyl described the financial costs of this as “unbearable.”
However, the demands raised by the Marburger Bund in no way address the explosive situation. It is only calling for reliable rest periods, a general limitation of on-call duty to a maximum of twelve on-call shifts and two guaranteed weekends off per month. In addition, it calls for a 5.5 percent increase in salaries under conditions where inflation had already reached 7.3 percent in March. The 2020 contract already mandates two free weekends, but this does not reflect the reality.
Susanne Johna, national chairperson of the Marburger Bund, criticised the VKA’s “attitude of refusal” in Frankfurt. But this is merely a cover. In the fact that the union is fully prepared to reach a rotten agreement with the municipal employers. Moreover, the Marburger Bund is working to maintain the isolation of doctors and is fundamentally unwilling to extend the fight to other sections of workers.
Group from Rosenheim, Bavaria. Their posters read from the left, “I’m a doctor, not a Duracell bunny”, “The VKA diet=losing 32 weekends a year”, and “Tired doctors make mistakes”.]
At the end of November, the unions Verdi (public service), GEW (education) and IG BAU (construction) agreed to a foul sell-out that condemned over a million workers nationwide to forego any wage increase for 14 months, until 1 December 2022 (!).
The COVID-19 pandemic has killed millions and profoundly destabilized global capitalism, accelerating the economic, social, and political crisis in France. It is once again on the rise again in France with more than 200,000 new cases and hundreds of deaths every day. Nevertheless, the candidates in the upcoming presidential election are strikingly silent on the human toll of COVID-19.
France has seen over 26 million infections, or nearly 40 percent of the population, and 142,000 deaths. Across Europe there have been 179 million infections and 1.8 million deaths. Among workers, the pandemic has impacted every family. Everyone has a relative, child or friend who has been more or less seriously infected with COVID-19. In the last seven days alone, France has recorded 1 million cases and 815 deaths from the virus.
A Medical worker watches a patient affected with COVID-19 inside a Marseille hospital, southern France [Credit: AP Photo/Daniel Cole]
The resumption of the epidemic can be explained in part by the arrival of the BA.2 variant, aided by the lifting of health restrictions since February 16. The BA.2 is more virulent than the Omicron variant, which infected around 14 million people in France between December and February.
In the presidential campaign, the suffering of millions mourning the loss of loved ones, living with the short- and long-term effects of the virus, or fighting for their lives against the illness counts for absolutely nothing. Everything is subordinated to the maintenance of economic activity, or to be more precise, to the need to maintain the flow of trillions of euros directly into the pockets of the banks and the financial aristocracy.
At a press conference presenting his re-election platform, Emmanuel Macron did not say a word about the pandemic, only mentioning “a crisis of meaning among many health professionals” when discussing his plans for health care. It was as if the pandemic had never happened. The word “COVID” does not even appear in Macron’s presidential program.
The other candidates, regardless of their political coloration, are silent on the enormous human cost of Macron’s criminal management of the pandemic and do not warn of the deadly danger posed by the resumption of the pandemic and Macron’s lifting of all health restrictions. This is in stark contrast to the warnings from scientists and doctors that the pandemic is not over.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned on Wednesday, March 9, that “the pandemic is far from over, and it will not be over anywhere until it’s over everywhere. The virus continues to evolve, and we continue to face major obstacles in distributing vaccines, tests, and treatments everywhere they are needed. ... [S]everal countries are drastically reducing testing. This inhibits our ability to see where the virus is, how it’s spreading and how it’s evolving.”
The silence of other candidates allowed Marine Le Pen of the neo-fascist National Rally (RN) party to make hollow criticisms of the government’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic.
Asked about the policy she would have applied since March 2020, the former RN leader said she would have done “radically differently on the entire health crisis.” Le Pen claimed she would not have “lied about the masks” or “about the tests,” referring to “statements by Emmanuel Macron and the government on the subject, which have changed over time.”
This is hollow posturing. Le Pen’s goal is not to eliminate the transmission of the virus and stop the pandemic. Her party and other neo-fascist parties have been the driving force behind protests demanding the end to all health restrictions. A real international eradication strategy, like the one China is pursuing, though on a national level, can only be achieved through the conscious, international mobilization of the working class against the ruling elites who are pursuing a policy of mass infection.
The pseudo-left LFI, the New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA), and Workers’ Struggle (LO) backed the demonstrations against vaccination and the health pass in the summer of 2021. This winter, they endorsed the “freedom convoys,” inspired by far-right demonstrations in Canada linked to the neo-Nazi forces that staged the January 6, 2021 coup attempt to keep Trump in the presidency despite his election loss to Biden.
These organizations, while acknowledging the presence of the far right in these mobilizations, falsely claimed that they defended the interests of workers against austerity.
With blatant disregard for the deaths and various illnesses that COVID-19 infections will cause, Podemos is promoting mass infection. Infected people who develop mild symptoms will go to work or school to infect others. Testing or isolation at home will no longer be mandatory. Only high-risk individuals will continue to be subject to the previous health measures. The only obligation that remains for the time being is the wearing of masks in indoor public places, as well as in transport.
Over the past week, neo-fascist French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen has been rising rapidly in the polls, while incumbent Emmanuel Macron has been falling rapidly. Le Pen’s vote stands at around 21 percent, up 2 to 4 points depending on the polls, while Macron’s fell by 4 points to 27 percent.
Far-right leader Marine le Pen attends a press conference in Toulon, southern France, June 17, 2021. (AP Photo/Daniel Cole)
The result of these polls has triggered worried speculation in ruling circles, starting with Macron himself. The head of state absurdly insisted that he bore no responsibility for the rise of the far right in France.
“I have never trivialised the National Front,” Macron said at a campaign stop in Fouras, referring to the former name of Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally party. Asked afterwards about a possible neo-fascist election victory, he refused to comment on “something that does not exist.”
Macron was contradicted by his own former prime minister, Edouard Philippe. “Of course, Marine Le Pen can win,” Philippe told Le Parisien. He continued, “I fear a high abstention, which is never a sign of good democratic health.”
Philippe added that the presidential campaign of far-right polemicist Eric Zemmour, who this week caused a scandal by calling for the “extermination of scum” in France, is helping Marine Le Pen. Philippe said, “I also note that the very aggressive nature of Eric Zemmour, the often outrageous nature of his remarks, seem to soften her by comparison.” However, he added, “If she won, things would, believe me, be seriously different for the country.”
Business leaders have already made it clear that they believe Macron’s candidacy is far weaker than it appears and that they also fear the consequences of a possible Le Pen victory.
Quatennens added that the LFI leadership would organise a “consultation” of LFI members and supporters, hoping to determine how best to package a call to vote Macron. However, he said that LFI is concerned that it will not be able to influence its voters: “People will do what they want. And that’s why we are going to consult the base. To find out what they want to do. But let’s be clear: voting RN [National Rally, Le Pen’s party] will not be an option.”
Powerful reserves of opposition exist among workers and young people, directed against both Macron and Le Pen. But this opposition cannot find expression without breaking the political straitjacket imposed on it by reactionary pseudo-left parties like LFI.
Indeed, in the Macron-Le Pen run-off in the 2017 elections, two-thirds of LFI voters were hostile to both Macron and Le Pen. It was by appealing to this opposition that the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) of France launched the call for an active boycott of the second round in 2017, and for the building of a politically independent movement in the working class against the winning candidate, whoever that might be.
Indeed, the increasing danger of the installation of a neo-fascist government only underlines the warning issued by the SEP in 2017: The turn of the ruling elites towards fascistic dictatorship cannot be opposed from within the framework of the institutions of the capitalist state.
This requires mobilizing workers internationally in a struggle against capitalism and imperialist war, in opposition to all of the political forces that try to bind them to a bankrupt capitalist system.
Macron’s presidency has seen an international eruption of class struggle. The first major strikes in decades in the US in auto factories, schools and mines, and struggles like the “yellow vests” in France and the 2019-21 Algerian protests (called Revolution of Smiles or Hirak Movement) have launched a wave of strikes and protests that are now shaking every continent in the world. The LFI, the NPA, the CGT union apparatus and their counterparts internationally have gone in a diametrically opposed direction in response to the explosive entry of the masses into political struggle.
The evolution of the ruling elite, including its supposedly “left” fractions, has been to the right, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. LFI and its allies aligned themselves with neo-fascist-dominated anti-health pass protests that opposed a scientific fight against the transmission of the virus. Now they are all supporting the intervention in Ukraine by France and NATO, which are arming far-right Ukrainian nationalist militias against Russia.
