Nigeria’s trade union leaders sabotage general strike over minimum wage

Jean Shaoul

On the second day of a nationwide general strike calling for a higher minimum wage, the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) and Trade Union Congress (TUC) leaders suspended the strike “for a week” and rushed into talks with the government and the employers’ association. 

The unions are intent on suppressing massive opposition within the working class to Nigeria’s atrocious living conditions, intensified by the ruling class’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the soaring of prices due to the US-NATO war against Russia in the Ukraine and the government’s disastrous austerity policies. They are shoring up the country’s capitalist regime, which is facing its worst economic crisis in decades.

Workers across Nigeria began indefinite strike action on June 3 in a long-running battle to establish a liveable minimum wage for those holding down a regular job—92 percent work in the “informal sector” where they earn far less—and to oppose an increase in electricity prices. The strike shut down the power grid shortly after 2 a.m., throwing the whole country into darkness. Many flights were cancelled from Lagos, the busiest airport, and from the capital, Abuja. Schools, offices and hospitals remained closed.

With the minimum wage of N30,000 per month, agreed in 2019, having expired in April, the unions had sought N494,000 per month to keep up with the skyrocketing cost of living following President Bola Tinubu’s free market reforms. The government and the employers’ association were reportedly considering 62,000 naira ($40) per month, a starvation-level payment about which the NLC had previously declared, “The Government’s counteroffer mocks the excruciating hardship brought on workers by its insensitive and oppressive economic policies.”

Nigeria's President, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, center first row, poses for a group photo with other West African leaders before an ECOWAS meeting in Abuja, Nigeria. Thursday, August 10, 2023. West African heads of state began meeting Thursday on next steps after Niger's military junta defied their deadline to reinstate the nation's deposed president. [AP Photo/Gbemiga Olamikan]

Information Minister Mohammed Idris said that the unions’ demand would increase the government wage bill by 9.5 trillion naira ($6.3 billion), which is “capable of destabilising the economy.”

The N494,000 was already lower than the N600,000 the unions had used in public speeches, while the government barely moved on its offer. Shittu Lawal, a civil servant in the northern city of Kano, told the BBC he wanted at least N100,000 a month. “Even 100,000 naira won’t be enough as prices in the market have gone up but it will be better than what we have now. I spend 500 naira to get to work every day which is not easy, we will return to work now and continue to push for more,” he said.

The unions have refused to restart the strike, claiming that the government was considering their latest demand of N250,000 per month, less than half the amount demanded by workers. In the same breath, they noted a “wide gulf” between that and the N62,000 a month apparently on offer from the president, an amount state governors have already rejected and which press reports had earlier said the unions had accepted. 

The strike is the fourth major action since Bola Tinubu of the ruling All Progressives Congress became president in May last year, after winning less than 50 percent of the vote in an election marred by fraud and other irregularities and a 27 percent voter turnout that sparked angry protests and a dawn to dusk curfew in Kano state. There is widespread anger over mass unemployment, endemic poverty—some 87 million of Nigeria’s 229 million and predominantly young population live in poverty--and unprecedented social inequality in Africa’s largest country. 

Nigeria Labour Congress protest on the street in Lagos, Nigeria, , July 26, 2022. [AP Photo/Sunday Alamba]

Inheriting an empty treasury and a huge debt burden from his predecessor Muhammadu Buhari, who stepped down after his eight-year tenure, Tinubu moved swiftly to implement the demands of Nigeria’s creditors, including the removal of the fuel subsidy, introduced decades ago because despite being a major oil producer, Africa’s largest, Nigeria has little oil refinery capacity. The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) floated the naira, previously pegged to the US dollar, to unify the exchange rate on the official and black markets. By February, the currency had fallen by 70 percent, forcing the CBN to authorize armed raids on currency exchanges across the country and arrest two executives from Binance, a cryptocurrency exchange platform, and the government to seek additional loans. The government, at both federal and state level, spends more on debt servicing than on public infrastructure and services. 

With Nigeria dependent upon the import of most of its essential commodities, including food and medicine, the devaluation led to soaring inflation, 34 percent in April, the highest since March 1996, with food inflation reaching 41 percent, up from 25 percent a year ago. According to the International Monetary Fund, “per capita income has stagnated. Real GDP growth slowed to 2.9 percent in 2023, with weak agriculture and trade… despite the improvement in oil production and financial services.” The International Monetary Fund anticipates that Nigeria, once Africa’s largest economy, will slip to fourth place behind Egypt and Algeria.

Nigeria’s monthly minimum wage of N30,000, equal to $84 in May 2019 and $65 when Tinubu became President in May 2023, has fallen to just $20 today. Children are going to bed hungry while the sick have to forego medication. People have died in stampedes for free sacks of rice. 

The removal of the fuel subsidy, with 75 percent of Nigeria’s electricity supply coming from diesel and petrol-powered generators, tripled the cost of fuel, putting electricity and transport out of reach and driving up manufacturing costs.

Ethnic and religious conflicts have disrupted agriculture, including armed conflicts with jihadist groups in the northeast and Biafran separatists in the southeast, herder-farmer conflicts in north-central, the widespread operations of criminal gangs as well as kidnappings to extort a ransom. Nigeria, once a large net exporter of food, now has to import some of its food products.

In July last year, Tinubu declared a state of emergency. Since then, the situation deteriorated further. The Central Bank repeatedly raised interest rates to an unprecedented 26.25 percent in a bid to stabilize the naira and curb soaring inflation.

Every year, four to five million young Nigerians enter the job market and struggle to find work. According to official statistics, the unemployment rate had risen to 33.3 percent in 2020 and is now estimated at about 40 percent by the consultants KPMG, prompting a surge in the number of young Nigerians trying to emigrate.

In some states, there have been cost-of-living protests with demonstrators blocking roads. Kano state’s Governor Alhaji Abba Kabir Yusuf admitted earlier this year that people were starving.

The cost-of-living crisis has provoked major protests in at least 12 other African countries, including Kenya, South Africa, Tunisia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Algeria, Sudan and Uganda. In a review of about 59,000 reports about protests in Africa collated by the Armed Conflict Location and Data Project between January 2016 and May 2024, more than 7,000 protests—most of which took place after March 2020--were driven by food, pay (wages and salaries) and price concerns.

New SARS-CoV-2 variant predominates in the United States

Bill Shaw

The SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 continues to evolve, with a new variant becoming predominant in the United States. Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed that the new viral variant, called KP.2, made up 28.5 percent of COVID-19 cases by May 11. It maintained that level as of May 25. 

The viral variant with the next highest percentage of cases is also new. It is called KP.3, and as of May 25, it makes up an estimated 12.7 percent of cases.

The previously predominant variant was JN.1. It now makes up only 8.4 percent of cases in the US. Wastewater surveillance data also demonstrates a rapid increase in the prevalence of KP.2, although in wastewater as of May 11, JN.1 still predominates.

To date, only one study has examined the properties of the KP.2 variant. Published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases under the category of “Correspondence”, it is a brief study that provides early results about the variant obtained as quickly and rigorously as possible to inform policy and the public.

First, the researchers used surveillance data to estimate the reproduction number or Re of the virus. The reproduction number is the number of new infections that are expected to occur from each existing infected individual in the population. A value greater than 1 means that the virus will spread exponentially.

The researchers estimated Re values for the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada of that are 1.22, 1.32, and 1.26 times higher than the Re values for the previously predominant JN.1 virus, respectively. They reported only the relative Re with respect to JN.1, not the absolute Re number.

This result means that the new KP.2 variant is more infectious than its predecessor, making it more likely to spread among the population. Notably, in the United Kingdom, JN.1 had a Re that was 1.261 times higher than its predecessor prior to becoming the predominant strain. Thus the virus continues to become more contagious.

Artist’s conception of the spike proteins that allow SARS-CoV-2 to invade human cells. [Photo by Emanresucamit / CC BY-SA 4.0]

Notably, the study was done prior to KP.2 becoming the predominant viral variant in the U.S. On the basis of their findings, the researchers correctly concluded that KP.2 had high potential to become the predominant strain worldwide. Indeed, their prediction has come true already in the United States.

The researchers also conducted neutralization assays to study the degree to which existing immunity to SARS-CoV-2 variants, whether through infection or vaccination, was protective against KP.2. These assays use blood serum obtained from vaccinated and previously infected individuals. In this study, the sera collected contained antibodies against the previous strains of virus including XBB 1.5, EG.5.1, HK.3, and JN.1.

The researchers then combined the serum with cultures of cells that are infected with the same strains of the virus. They then quantified how much serum was required to neutralize the virus, using the 50 percent neutralization titer or NT50. Lower values of NT50 mean that greater quantities of serum are required to neutralize 50 percent of the virus.

The researchers found significantly lower NT50 values for the KP.2 variant. The significance of this result is that pre-existing immunity to previous variants is less protective against KP.2. Therefore, KP.2 has an increased immune escape ability as well as greater infectiousness.

The net effect is that the recent predominance of KP.2 is in line with its known properties per the lone study to examine it thus far.

Although the “herd immunity” approach to the pandemic has already been overwhelmingly discredited, it is demolished even further by the emergence of KP.2, yet another highly infectious SARS-CoV-2 variant that is escaping pre-existing immunity to previous variants.

So long as the criminal “let it rip” policy of the ruling class is in place, SARS-CoV-2 will continue to evolve new variants with varying levels of infectiousness, severity of infection, and probability of causing Long COVID. Scientifically, there is no reason to expect that future variants will be less dangerous: each new variant poses a risk that the virus will be more deadly and cause more long-term disability.

Therefore, each new variant immediately poses the same set of urgent questions as the last variant. How infectious is it? How severe is the infection? How much protection does pre-existing immunity provide? What is the probability of developing Long COVID after infection?

The indifference of the ruling class to the suffering and death caused by the virus is demonstrated by the dismantling of the public health system to let a novel virus continue to evolve into potentially more dangerous forms. The CDC’s COVID Data Tracker web site illustrates this disregard for human life, saying, “New variants of SARS-CoV-2 are expected to continue to emerge.” In other words, the ruling class is willing to risk newer and potentially more deadly variants to evolve, no matter the consequences.

Australian COVID-19 infections rise to highest level in more than a year

Martin Scott

Recent weeks have seen successive rises in reported COVID infection numbers across Australia, with figures in some states indicating virus levels not seen since early 2023.

The growing wave of COVID, along with high rates of influenza and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), has increased pressure on the already dangerously under-resourced public hospital system. Amid an influx of additional patients and a surge in staff illness, authorities in some parts of the country have been forced to cancel elective surgeries and temporarily reinstitute masking in health facilities.

Australia is “right in the middle of another big wave” of COVID, according to Professor Adrian Esterman, chair of biostatistics and epidemiology at the University of South Australia.

Former Australian Medical Association (AMA) president, Dr. Andrew Miller, speaking on WAMN News about the “massive surge of COVID,” said governments “prefer to believe the lie that it’s all just gone away and we can forget about it.”

That is putting it mildly. State and territory governments, all of them Labor except Tasmania, and above all Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s federal Labor administration, have consciously and deliberately eviscerated COVID testing and reporting, along with all mitigation measures, in order to promote the criminally reckless conception of “living with the virus.”

Victorian State Premier Dan Andrews (left), Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Queensland State Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk at National Cabinet meeting on September 30, 2022 that ended compulsory isolation for those infected with COVID-19. [Photo: Anthony Albanese Facebook]

Precisely quantifying the growing spread of COVID is therefore impossible, because officially reported data is dated, incomplete, inconsistent, and reflects only a tiny sliver of the real state of affairs.

Esterman told the Guardian, “We’re looking at six to ten times as many people actually infected as the case numbers are showing.” This estimate would indicate that between 86,000 and 145,000 people were infected with COVID in the past seven days alone.

But what is inarguable is that, in virtually every state and territory, by every measure that exists, infection numbers are rising.

In Victoria, more than 3,000 COVID infections were reported last week, with 412 hospitalised, up from 319 a week earlier, and 160 at the start of May. The most recent published data show 104 COVID deaths in a four-week period, but as this ended on May 21, before the impact of the current surge of infections, the figure is likely to rise sharply in the coming weeks.

Partly as a result of the surge in COVID cases and a 65 percent increase in influenza infections in the second half of the month, the Victorian ambulance service declared “code orange” 20 times in May, and every day in the last week of the month. Under a “code orange,” the second most serious emergency classification, the whole health system is warned about ambulance demand and staff are called upon to work extra shifts.

Last Monday, the Victorian Department of Health raised its caution level across the public health system, advising hospitals that they can mandate mask wearing “if they wish,” and warning that they may need to discharge patients earlier in order to free up beds for the anticipated influx.

The fact that such a basic precautionary measure as requiring masks in hospitals was removed in the first place, not just for patients and visitors, but for staff, is a damning indictment of the state Labor governments and health authorities. This could not have been carried out without the collaboration of the bureaucrats in charge of the health unions, who not only allowed this attack on staff and patient safety, but cheered it on.

Esterman noted that the continuing surge in COVID cases was “a major concern, especially since many hospitals have stopped mandatory face masks for their staff.”

The Australian Capital Territory government announced on Tuesday that mask mandates for patients and visitors would be temporarily reinstated, along with restrictions on visitor numbers, under an “amber alert.”

This was as a result of surging weekly COVID infection numbers, which have quadrupled to 270 since last month, and seen 53 people hospitalised with the virus. As well, 231 cases of RSV were recorded in Canberra last week, more than half in children under five.

In South Australia (SA), 2,429 COVID infections were recorded in the week ending June 4, the highest since November last year.

A “code yellow” was declared for the state’s hospitals last week, meaning the cancellation of some elective surgery. With 200 more patients than this time last year, and 237 health workers off sick with COVID, SA Health Chief Executive Robyn Lawrence said pressure on the health system was “the worst she’d ever seen.”

On June 1, every public emergency department was rated as “busy” or “very busy,” with wait times of up to 4.5 hours.

In New South Wales (NSW), 5,220 COVID cases were recorded in the week ending June 1, a 22 percent increase over the previous week. This is the highest level recorded in more than 12 months, a particularly significant fact given that recorded infection numbers dropped sharply last October with the shutdown of the rapid antigen test reporting portal.

Around 800 patients presented to NSW emergency departments with COVID in that week, and just under 300 were admitted to hospital. These are also the highest figures in more than a year.

Meanwhile, influenza infections rose by 30 percent to 5,230 last week, with the test positivity rate increasing 9.6 percent, while 2,627 cases of RSV were recorded, more than 1,000 among children under five.

In Queensland, 1,895 people contracted COVID and 283 were hospitalised in the week ending June 2. In the same period, 1,242 RSV infections were recorded, with 76 requiring hospitalisation, along with 948 cases of influenza, 46 of them requiring hospital care.

In Western Australia, 1,191 cases of COVID were recorded in the fortnight ending May 26, a 9 percent increase on the previous reporting period and the highest figure recorded since January 2023.

In the week ending June 2, 129 COVID infections were recorded in the small island state of Tasmania, along with 95 cases of RSV and 66 of flu.

Throughout the country, vulnerable elderly aged care residents continue to be subjected to infection and reinfection with COVID. There are currently 499 outbreaks in aged care facilities, with 3,051 residents infected, as well as 1,362 staff. These are the highest infection figures since early 2023.

In the week ending June 6, 49 new resident deaths from COVID were recorded. More than 5,700 COVID deaths have been recorded in aged care facilities since December 2021.

Despite the federal government’s claim that aged care residents are a “high priority” for COVID vaccination, just 41.6 percent have received a booster dose in the past six months.

SA Chief Public Health Officer Nicola Spurrier sought to blame this on the families of aged care residents. She said: “I actually find it difficult to understand if you have a loved one in an aged care facility, why people are not being a bit more proactive about protecting them.”

This statement exemplifies the position of all the governments and health authorities, that the time for a public health response is long gone, and avoiding infection by the “forever pandemic” is entirely a matter of personal responsibility and choice.

This is totally at odds with the interests and needs of ordinary people, and instead represents the demands of big business that nothing, including protecting human health and lives, can be allowed to stand in the way of profit. It is on this basis that more than 24,500 people—according to understated official figures—have been allowed to die from COVID, more than two-thirds of them under the Albanese government.

This social murder, overseen by Labor governments at state and federal level, has been supported without question by the entire political establishment, including the Greens. Also complicit are the corporate media, in which news of the ongoing pandemic is almost totally suppressed, in line with the fraudulent position that the deadly virus is something that can be “lived with.”

Critical to this conspiracy are the trade union bureaucracies, in health and all other sectors. Since the earliest stages of the pandemic, the unions have opposed any public health measures that could possibly impact the profits of big business, and ensured workers have remained on the job, whatever the risk to their health and lives. That is one expression of their role as a police force of big business, continuously enforcing attacks to workers’ jobs, wages and conditions.

US maternal mortality rate the highest among high-income countries

Benjamin Mateus

The release of a critical report by The Commonwealth Funds this week only further underscores the decrepit state of healthcare in the United States, the center of world capitalism. The study, titled “Insight into the US Maternal Mortality Crisis: An International Comparison,” found that in 2022 maternal mortality for the US at 22.3 maternal deaths for every 100,000 live births continues to be the highest among high-income nations. And as the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has previously noted, more than four in five of these deaths could have been prevented. 

The US has by far the highest maternal mortality rate among high-income countries. [Photo: Commonwealth Fund]

By comparison, Chile and New Zealand, the next closest countries in this category, are substantially lower at 14.3 and 13.6 deaths per 100,000, respectively. For many European Union nations, the rates are three-fold lower. In Norway, the maternal mortality rate in 2022 reached zero deaths per 100,000. 

Although the US figures are down considerably from their 2021 highs at 32.9 deaths per 100,000 (a 33 percent decline), this has more to do with the decline in rates of COVID deaths among pregnant women. Numerous studies indicated that COVID significantly contributed to preeclampsia, preterm births, stillbirths and other adverse outcomes. Still, when compared to 2020, when the rate was 23.8 maternal deaths, the figures have remained essentially unchanged since the pre-pandemic period.

Perhaps what is most remarkable is that 65 percent of these deaths occur after delivery. Twelve percent occur in the first week after birth. Contributing factors during this early period include severe bleeding, elevated blood pressures and infections. Another 23 percent of deaths take place between days seven and 42, while 30 percent are in the late postpartum period, between days 43 and 365. Causes for these deaths are usually attributable to a condition called cardiomyopathy, when the heart muscles grow weak.

The bulk of maternal deaths occur after delivery of the baby. [Photo: Commonwealth Fund]

Researchers have been scratching their heads to identify the causes for these alarming outcomes. Certainly, conditions like obesity and other chronic diseases compounded by increasing cesarean sections have contributed to severe maternal comorbidities. However, as Dr. Lindsay Admon, an obstetrician-gynecologist at the University of Michigan Medical School, told Scientific American, “Focusing too narrowly on demographics, labor and delivery paints an incomplete picture of maternal health.”

As the report observed, “[Over] the past decade, maternal mortality during labor and delivery has decreased in US hospitals across people of all ages, races and ethnicities, which researchers say is a result of improved birthing protocols. This reduction in deaths during childbirth itself implies that other factors are driving the overall rising rates of maternal mortality.”

Indeed, while efforts have been placed on ensuring safer deliveries, little has been done to improve outcomes before and after deliveries.

When one reviews maternal mortality by state, there is an obvious correlation between states like Arkansas (43.5 maternal deaths per 100,000), Mississippi (43.0), Tennessee (41.7), Alabama (41.4), and Louisiana (39.0) and high rates of poverty. An eye-opening report from last month published by Lending Tree, an online lending marketplace, found that six of 10 states that offered the worst access to prenatal and maternal care were in the South. Among these were Alabama, Texas, Florida, Georgia, Arkansas and Tennessee. In particular, Alabama ranked lowest in the number of maternal care providers per capita. Mississippi also has the highest infant mortality rate in the country. 

In another concerning difference in the international comparison study, Commonwealth Funds found that the number of providers per 1,000 live births in the US was one of the lowest among the high-income countries. Although the number of obstetricians per capita was the same for the US and Sweden, which has almost ten-fold lower maternal mortality, Sweden has 69 midwives per 1,000 live births, compared to the US with only four midwives per 1,000 live births.

The US supply of midwives is among the lowest of the advanced countries. [Photo: Commonwealth Fund]

These differences have a historical context. Although, as an institution, midwifery survived in Europe, in the US it was displaced in the early 20th century when pregnancies were “medicalized” and births began to take place more and more in hospital settings. A 2014 State of the World’s Midwifery Report demonstrated that well-educated midwives operating under international standards could provide more than 80 percent of the essential care for women and their newborns.

In a Lancet Global Health report from 2021, the authors noted that “[in] high-income settings, midwife-led continuity of care has been associated with positive outcomes, including fewer preterm births, fewer fetal losses at any gestation, and high rates of positive experiences reported by women.”

The authors of the Commonwealth Fund study said, “Midwives are clinicians trained to provide a wide range of services—helping to manage normal pregnancies, assisting with childbirth, and providing care during the postpartum period, among others.” 

Such services over the months that pass after delivery can greatly facilitate long-term health assessments such as symptoms of heart overload that may manifest with swelling and fatigue, early signs of thromboembolic events, or even assessment of postpartum depression or domestic violence that could herald tragic consequences. Optimally utilizing midwives could avert 41 percent of maternal deaths, 39 percent of neonatal deaths, and 26 percent of stillbirths. 

Furthermore, the Commonwealth study added, “By placing a priority on natural reproduction processes and relationship-building, midwives also can help address the social needs of mother, baby, and family.”

Yet, in the US, the trends are diametrically opposed to these conceptions. The cost of delivery continues to climb, and access to obstetric services continues to dwindle. A 2022 March of Dimes report indicated that 5 percent of counties across the country had less access to obstetric services than two years before. “These areas of combined low or no access,” they wrote, “affect up to 6.9 million women and almost 500,000 births in the US,” or one in eight children born per year.

Another issue that exacerbates maternal mortality rates is the lack of any federally mandated paid leave policy that could help women adjust to the physical and mental demands placed on new mothers while being guaranteed their income and job security. The Bureau of Labor Statistics indicated that in 2023, only 27 percent of civilian workers had access to paid family leave. Even these statistics conceal the fact that access to paid leave is lowest among workers with the greatest needs.

Paid leave has many positive correlations: a decline in infant mortality, decreased risk of preterm birth and low birth weight, lower rates of rehospitalizations, higher rates of attending pediatric and postpartum visits, improved vaccination rates, higher rates of breast feeding, improved parent and child health and interrelationships. There are long-term benefits for the entire family unit, with lowered rates of depression among mothers and better cognitive and coping skills for children. 

The study also highlights that while maternal mortality is higher in the US than other high-income countries, it is highest among black women. One can also say that it is highest among all racial categories in the US, or, in other words, no one is spared. Clearly, the disproportion among black women is considerable at 49.5 per 100,000 while among whites it is 19.0 per 100,000 live births—also higher than any other high-income country. 

The socioeconomic factors that contribute to these outcomes are multifactorial and regional. The Southern states where access to obstetric care is worst also have a higher proportion of African Americans. Nearly all of the health conditions discussed above are worse in that region of the country. But fundamentally, the issue of maternal mortality is a class issue, and the class differences are pervasive across countries whatever the race or racial divisions in the populations.

A 2021 report by Gopal K. Singh from the US Department of Health and Human Service, published in the International Journal of Maternal and Child Health and Aids, looked at trends and social inequalities that contributed to maternal mortality in the  US over five decades. Although there had been a notable decline in mortality from 1970s into the 1990s, that trend has ended, along with the broader decline in the global economic standing of the US.

The trends among racial groups have also persisted over the last two decades. The authors found that increasing maternal age increased maternal mortality for all racial groups but was most marked for black women 40 years old and older. Also, higher maternal education was protective of health, while unmarried status increased risk of death. Additionally, those living in small towns and large rural areas had higher mortality rates. But the overriding factor, among women of all races, was poverty.

Singh found that “between 2002 and 2018, both absolute and relative disparities in maternal mortality by deprivation level widened. Higher deprivation levels were generally associated with higher maternal mortality risks among both white and black women in each period. For example, in 2014-2018, black women in the most-deprived area group had a 70 percent higher maternal mortality risk than black women in the most affluent area group. For white women, the corresponding relative risk of mortality was 104 percent higher in the most-deprived group compared to the most-affluent group.” Although Singh notes that within each deprivation group racial disparities in maternal mortality existed, these factors are best understood through the perspective of class and the historical development of social life in the United States.

Australian Rich List shows acceleration of wealth accumulation over 40 years

Mark Wilson

The 2024 edition of the annual Rich List published by the Australian Financial Review (AFR) reports that the 200 wealthiest Australians now control $625 billion, up by 11 percent from last year’s figure of $563 billion. This astounding amount of wealth represents approximately a quarter of the Australian annual gross domestic product as of 2023.

An astronomical rise in personal fortunes over the past four decades is accelerating again after a slight slowdown last year. The first Rich List, published in 1983, contained total fortunes of $4.6 billion, or less than $20 billion in today’s dollars, adjusted for inflation.

This year’s list boasts of 150 billionaires. In 1983 only one group, the Murdoch family, was worth more than $200 million and only eight had more than $100 million.

Increasingly, Australia’s billionaires primarily derive their fortunes from some of the most parasitic activities, either based on extracting minerals and fossil fuels or on property and financial speculation. First and foremost were mining and property, followed by finance market-backed technology start-ups.

Among the fresh entrants to this year’s list are “three newly-discovered billionaires in the form of Estonian-based online gaming mogul Tim Heath, the brain behind the CoinSpot cryptocurrency exchange Russell Wilson and the flashy Lamborghini-loving founder of the LMCT+ online promotions business Adrian Portelli.”

Another crypto gambling billionaire, Ed Craven, and “fintech entrepreneur” Jack Zhang also joined the list. Zhang’s Airwallex, which offers big businesses faster payment transfers than banks, is headquartered in Singapore, a low-tax location, and its holding company is registered in the Cayman Islands, a tax haven.

Topping the list for the fifth year in a row was iron ore magnate Gina Rinehart, who now has a net worth of over $40 billion for the first time. Her 8.5 percent increase in wealth came despite an $800 million decrease in net profits for Hancock Prospecting, the private mining company founded by her father in 1955. Her expanded worth was instead driven by “higher valuations across the mining industry” on share markets.

Gina Rinehart and Harry Triguboff [Photo: Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade / Meriton]

Others in the top 10 whose fortunes are based on extraction include former Glencore CEO Ivan Glasenberg (No. 9) and Clive Palmer (No. 6), who reaped almost $447 million in mining royalties last financial year from his private company Mineralogy.

These outcomes underscore the continuing reliance of mining, Australian capitalism’s biggest single revenue source, on exports to China, even as the US and its allies, including the Albanese Labor government, step up their economic and military confrontation with China.

Rinehart was far from the only one on the list who obtained an increase in personal wealth despite falling profits in their companies. Property tycoon Harry Triguboff secured an 11 percent increase in his wealth up to $26.5 billion, moving him to a distant second place on the list.

Despite “higher property management and building costs” causing a $30 million decrease in net profits for his property empire Meriton, his personal revenue still rose by over $130 million. According to the AFR, that was because his “extensive build-to-rent portfolio allows him to arbitrage between selling completed apartments and keeping them.”

As a result of such profiteering throughout the property market, around 2 million rental households in Australia are experiencing negative cash flow, where their soaring rents and outgoing costs are higher than their income, fueling a worsening housing affordability crisis.

The tech sector grew in prominence on the list, up from 13 percent to 17 percent of the total wealth, the third highest source behind mining and property. Mike Cannon-Brookes, the co-founder of software company Atlassian, appears on the list with his separated wife Annie. Their combined wealth has increased by over $5 billion in the past 12 months and now stands at over $24 billion.

Eleven individuals made the list for the first time. Astonishingly, six are already billionaires, highlighting the extraordinary speed at which the wealth of the ultra-rich can increase.

Also making the list for the first time was the Murphy family (No. 193), who are behind the company Canstruct, which earned $1.82 billion over five years from the refugee detention camp on the Pacific island of Nauru, a barbaric facility that the Labor government has reopened.

This pattern points to the separation of vast wealth accumulation from the process of production and fulfilling genuine social need. Instead, the rich are relying evermore on speculative investment and property ownership. This trend represents an intrinsic response of the capitalist system to falling rates of profit, a response that leads to instability and breakdowns like the 2008 financial crisis.

The AFR lauds the wealth of those on the Rich List as exemplifying “risk-taking” and “hard work.” It smugly dismisses criticism of the list as “envy.” In reality, the hundreds of billions of dollars collectively controlled by those on the list have been extracted from the labour power of the working class, the true source of wealth in society.

At the same time that a tiny fraction of the richest people continue to pile on extraordinary amounts of wealth, Australian workers have seen cuts to their living standards larger than at any other time in the last 50 years.

The Australian Council of Social Services (ACOSS) recently reported that of the approximately 5 million Australians receiving income support payments, almost three quarters of them are “eating less or skipping meals due to the low rate of payments and rising cost of living.”

By the standards of poverty set by ACOSS, which is just $489 per week for a single adult or $1,027 per week for a couple with children, 13.4 percent of Australians live in poverty, that is, over 3 million people.

It seems that the AFR, nervous about the hostility to the ever-growing cost-of-living crisis for working-class households, decided this year to portray the ultra-rich in a more mundane light, playing down the celebratory tone of recent lists.

In one jarring comment, a rich lister valued at almost $800 million commented that he valued his wealth because it allowed his family to be provided with “the bare essentials in life.”

The class divide is the fundamental one in Australia and every other capitalist country. The interests of the working class are irreconcilably at odds with those of the capitalists and the uber-wealthy.

The $625 billion controlled by the 200 richest Australians could fund essential social services. Federal spending on health in 2022‒23 was around $105 billion, just one-sixth of the worth of the Rich List.

The Labor government is continuing to cut social spending in real terms, while giving the wealthy the vast majority of the more than $200 billion in income tax cuts legislated for the next decade, and expanding military outlays, including $368 billion for nuclear-powered submarines as part of the AUKUS military pact to prepare for war against China.

Boeing in “panic mode” as airline company’s crisis continues

Bryan Dyne

A recent report in the Guardian reveals that managers and executives at Boeing responsible for operating the company’s plant in Everett, Washington, are in “panic mode” as quality and safety concerns continue to emerge about the planes produced by the aerospace giant.

One of the main issues revealed is that the facility is “full” of 787 Dreamliner aircraft that are faulty, according to a mechanic with more than 30 years at Boeing. The jetliner’s fuselage is produced by Boeing supplier Spirit AeroSystems and assembled at Boeing’s factory in South Carolina.

“There is no way in God’s green earth I would want to be a pilot in South Carolina flying those from South Carolina to here,” continued the mechanic. “Because when they get in here, we’re stripping them apart.”

Boeing employees walk a Boeing 787-10 Dreamliner down towards the delivery ramp area at the company’s facility after conducting its first test flight at Charleston International Airport, Friday, March 31, 2017, in North Charleston, South Carolina. [AP Photo/Mic Smith]

The Guardian also reported that managers “will hound mechanics” not to report safety and quality concerns, demanding that planes are put into service to ensure corporate profits rise.

Once considered among the safest aircraft manufacturers, Boeing is now facing an essentially continuous deluge of whistleblowers and leaks making clear that the primary concern of the company’s managers and corporate heads is not the safety of the flying public but the bottom line for their shareholders and themselves.

The dangers of such an attitude were dramatically exposed this past January, when a door plug blew out of a 737 MAX 9 jetliner shortly after takeoff, injuring dozens on the flight. It was only luck that the incident occurred at a relatively low altitude, that no passengers were killed by being sucked out of the plane.

Since then, dozens of incidents have been reported on Boeing planes, from panels coming off, landing gear not deploying correctly and fires on board aircraft. Even the company’s new manned spaceship, the Starliner, had been delayed for months for various critical problems discovered by NASA before it finally launched on Wednesday.

The January door blowout also brings to mind the two 737 MAX 8 crashes in October 2018 and March 2019, when 346 passengers and crew were killed. Subsequent reports found that Boeing deliberately hid internal software issues from pilots, regulators and all those on board their planes, problems that Boeing knew were incredibly dangerous.

None of Boeing’s senior executives were ever tried for murder for knowingly encouraging the deadly planes to be developed and produced. The most Boeing suffered was a $2.5 billion plea deal to avoid criminal liability for fraud and for the 346 deaths.

The ongoing issues with the 787 Dreamliner are especially significant because of the fate of Boeing whistleblower John “Mitch” Barnett. On March 9, Barnett was about to give a third day of a deposition about his time as a quality manager for Boeing and his criticisms of the company’s attitude toward safety on the 787 project and the factory in South Carolina, when he was found dead by a “self-inflicted gunshot wound” to his head in his rental car in his hotel parking lot.

Barnett had been let go by Boeing in 2017, which he alleged was retaliation for concerns he had raised internally about quality problems of the production of the Dreamliner aircraft. Since then, he had been interviewed many times about the dangers he saw for anyone flying on a 787 jet.

A family friend quoted Barnett as telling her, “If anything happens to me, it’s not suicide.”

Among the many problems Boeing currently faces is the fallout of an audit done in March by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which found numerous instances where manufacturing and quality control were well below federally mandated requirements.

One of the FAA’s auditors, Najmedin Meshkati, especially called out the 1997 merger of Boeing and McDonnell Douglas, which “under the direct watch of its leaders and board of directors,” are “complicit in and ultimately responsible for its present problems.”

McDonnell Douglas gained infamy in the 1970s for the production of the DC-10, which remains to this day one of the deadliest aircraft ever produced. In its original design, the rear cargo door did not always lock properly, inducing explosive decompression that collapsed the floor of the plane’s main cabin. The DC-10 suffered 55 accidents over its lifetime, which have caused a total of 1,261 fatalities.

Boeing’s contempt for safety is also highlighted the ongoing contract talks with 32,000 machinists, part of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM), at the Everett plant. One of the main demands of the workers is the restoration of the many hundreds of positions dedicated to maintaining safety and quality that Boeing has eliminated over the past decade. Boeing has so far refused this demand.

The contract for the machinists expires on September 12, and a strike authorization vote is scheduled for July 17.

The elimination of so many safety and quality positions speaks to the underlying class nature of Boeing’s position. While the merger with McDonnell Douglas certainly accelerated the process, the decline of American capitalism ultimately underscores the degeneration of Boeing. The drive by every corporation is for profits—in Boeing’s case, market share against European rival Airbus—and human lives are just the cost of doing business.

Modi and his Hindu supremacist BJP cling to power after major Indian election losses

Keith Jones

Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) are clinging to power after suffering a major reversal in India’s general election.

Results of the seven-phase election, which began April 19 and concluded Tuesday with the tabulation of votes, are yet to be finalized. However, it is certain that the BJP, which won back-to-back majorities in 2014 and 2019, will fall 30 or more seats short of the 273-seat threshold needed to give it a majority in the 543-seat Lok Sabha (People’s Assembly).

Its continued rule is now dependent on its National Democratic Alliance (NDA) partners. The final tally for the BJP-NDA will be in the 290 to 296-seat range. This is a far cry from the 353 seats they captured in 2019 and from the 400 seats that Modi and his chief henchman, Home Secretary Amit Shah, boasted the BJP-led NDA would win at the campaign’s outset.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi is greeted by supporters as he arrives at Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) headquarters in New Delhi, India, Tuesday, June 4, 2024. [AP Photo/Manish Swarup]

Significantly, the NDA’s losses were heavily concentrated in the BJP column. The dominant partner in the NDA captured some 60 fewer seats in 2024 than in 2019. Meanwhile, gains and losses among the BJP’s NDA partners effectively cancelled each other out.

The Congress Party-led opposition electoral bloc—the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance or INDIA—appears to have won more than 230 seats.

It made a calibrated and thoroughly demagogic appeal to popular anger over mass joblessness, chronic hunger, ever widening wealth and income inequality, the BJP’s victimization of Muslims and other minorities and its repression of political opponents.

Congress Party leader Rahul Gandhi, himself the son, grandson and great grandson of Indian prime ministers, repeatedly attacked Modi for his “crony capitalist” ties with Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani, respectively India’s and Asia’s richest and second richest billionaires.

A rag-tag coalition of more than 30 parties, INDIA aims to provide the bourgeoisie with a right-wing governmental alternative to Modi and the far-right BJP. It would be no less beholden than the Modi regime to big business and, like it, committed to increasing worker exploitation through pro-investor “reform” and to the anti-China Indo-US Global Strategic Partnership that is the cornerstone of India’s foreign policy.

Led by the Congress, till recently the bourgeoisie’s preferred party of national government, the INDIA alliance is comprised of more than two-dozen ethno-regional and caste-ist parties—many of them erstwhile BJP allies, like the Uddhav Thackeray wing of the fascistic, Maharashtra-based Shiv Sena. It also includes the two Stalinist parliamentary parties, their Left Front allies and the Maoist CPI (M-L).

Given the right-wing record of its constituents, INDIA’s claims to offer a “progressive,” secular and “pro-people” alternative to the BJP were, to say the least, not credible and no doubt were viewed as such by many. Nevertheless, large swaths of India’s workers and toilers appear to have seized on it as a means to voice their opposition to the Modi government, and they have done so in the face of an immense campaign, trumpeted by the corporate media, to intimidate the population with claims that Modi and the BJP were being propelled to a historic triumph on a tidal wave of popular support.

The Congress’s share of the vote increased by 1.7 percent to 21.2 percent from its historic 2019 low of 19.5 percent, even though, in deference to its INDIA allies, it contested some 80 less seats. According to the latest projections, it will capture 99 seats, more than double its score from 2014 (44) and almost double that from 2019 (52).

Speaking Tuesday afternoon, Congress Party leader Rahul Gandhi claimed the country had voted to “save the Constitution” in the face of the BJP government’s efforts to rig the elections by using the intelligence and police agencies and judiciary to harass, smear and jail opponents. “The country,” he declared, “has said that we don’t want Mr. Narendra Modi and Mr. Amit Shah.” Gandhi went on to announce that the INDIA leaders would convene in the capital, New Delhi, on Wednesday to discuss whether to make a bid to form the government when parliament reconvenes.

The latter statement is likely to prove to have been nothing more than post-election hyperbole. The BJP has emerged from the polls bloodied. The cult it has constructed around Modi as a beloved “Hindu strongman” and “holy man” has taken a hit. Nevertheless, Modi and his BJP continue to be seen by the dominant sections of the Indian ruling class as the most ruthless, and hence, best instrument for pushing through further austerity, privatization, deregulation and other “pro-investor” reforms in the face of mass opposition, and to pursue their great-power ambitions on the world stage.

Some among them, may wring their hands over the BJP’s “excesses” and worry that its Hindu supremacism incites opposition and could destabilize the institutions of the Indian state. But the Indian bourgeoisie, terrified of the threat from below, has long deployed communalist and caste-ist appeals as a means of channeling social anger and frustration at chronic poverty and social inequality along reactionary and divisive lines.

The Indo-US anti-China strategic partnership

A striking feature of the election campaign was the absence of any discussion of the global war initiated by US imperialism of which the NATO-instigated war with Russia over Ukraine, the imperialist-backed Israeli genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza and Washington’s military-strategic offensive against China are the three main fronts.

India is providing critical support for Washington in this war, especially in regards to its drive to strategically encircle China and economically thwart its rise. Under Modi, India has been transformed into a US frontline state, evermore tightly bound to Washington through an expanding web of bilateral, trilateral and quadrilateral military-strategic ties with the US and its principal Asia-Pacific allies, Japan and Australia. Indian ports are now open for routine use for repair and resupply by US, British, French and Japanese ships.

India is also deeply implicated in the US scheme to reorder the Middle East. It is part of the I2U2 (India, Israel, US, UAE) grouping which Washington wants to transform through war, diplomatic intrigue and infrastructure development into a “Mideast economic corridor,” so as to weaken and subjugate Iran and counter Russian and Chinese influence in the region.

While New Delhi has not submitted to US demands to break its strategic ties with Russia, it is working with Washington to lessen its dependence on Russia armaments and otherwise intensify its collaboration with Washington globally. More fundamentally, the support New Delhi is providing US imperialism in the Indo-Pacific arena is emboldening the US to pursue its drive for global hegemony everywhere. Last summer the Indian military announced it was answering an urgent Pentagon request as to what support it would provide in the event of a US-China war over Taiwan.

Yet none of this was the subject of any debate in what was trumpeted as the world’s largest exercise in democracy.

Insofar as there was any discussion of India’s foreign policy, it largely revolved around the Congress Party’s attacks on Modi for being “too soft” on China. This under conditions where for the past four years, India and China have been locked in a military stand-off along their disputed Himalayan border, with the Modi government forward deploying tens of thousands of troops, tanks and war planes.

There are two reasons for the conspiracy of silence over the Indo-US strategic partnership and India’s role in the developing global war. First, the Indian ruling class and its political parties all stand four-square behind the reckless strategy of transforming India into a great power by clutching at the bedraggled coattails of US imperialism as it desperately seeks to offset its economic decline through aggression and global war.

Second, they are keenly aware that among the Indian masses there is enormous latent anti-imperialist sentiment and fear that it would be galvanized were the working class and oppressed toilers to gain any insight into the extent to which India has been transformed into a satrap for US imperialism and the threat this poses to the people of the region and world.

A particularly pernicious role in all this is played by the twin Stalinist parties—the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPM and the smaller, but older Communist Party of India (CPI)—and the Maoist CPI (M-L). They profess to be opposed to the Indo-US strategic alliance. But so as not to embarrass their INDIA partners and even more importantly arouse working class opposition to their partnership with the enablers of US imperialism, they confine their “opposition” to the occasional press release. For like reasons, the Stalinists called off the protests they belatedly organized last November against the Israeli assault on the Palestinians of Gaza.

Another critical question that was excluded from the election campaign was India’s ruinous “profits-before-lives” response to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Officially India acknowledges some 533,000 COVID-19 deaths, but the real figure, as indicated by excess deaths, is in the order of 10 times that. The pandemic laid bare the Modi government’s utter indifference to the well-being of working people and the deplorable state of the public healthcare system. But the opposition parties said next to nothing about this as they were entirely complicit in India’s pandemic policy. In the states where they formed the government, they press-ganged people to return to work even as the virus spread like wildfire.

The Modi government: A regime of extreme crisis

As the WSWS previously noted, there were indications that as the seven-phase election unfolded, the BJP became apprehensive as to its outcome. After the first phase in the voting, the BJP largely ditched its promises of economic development and celebratory proclamations of India’s “world-beating” economic growth and increasing influence on the world stage. Instead, Modi, Shah and Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, its chief campaigners, doubled down on the most reactionary and vile communal appeals. This included claims the opposition parties wanted to steal the wealth of India’s “mothers and daughters” so as to give it as to “infiltrators,” “jihadis,” and those who have “large numbers of children”—all code words for Muslims.

This appears to have backfired. In several states in the north Indian Hindi belt, the BJP’s traditional heartland, it suffered significant losses. This was especially true in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, and where Modi’s protégé the Hindu priest and criminally-indicted instigator of anti-Muslim violence Yogi Adityanath has ruled with an iron fist. In UP, the BJP-NDA lost 26 seats and saw its vote share fall by almost 10 percentage points.

Among the BJP MPs to go down to defeat was the representative for Faizabad (Ayodhya), where the temple to the mythical Hindu god Lord Ram has been constructed on the site of the razed Babri Masjid, a 16th century mosque illegally demolished 30 years ago by fundamentalist fanatics mobilized by the BJP and its RSS allies. In January, Modi inaugurated the temple as part of a nationally televised spectacle that was meant to both launch the BJP re-election campaign and signal India’s “rebirth” as a “Hindu nation.”

Given the right-wing character of the forces involved, including the so-called Left parties, the Indian elections could give only a pale and highly distorted indication of the mass but as yet inchoate anger, against the BJP and indeed the entire rotten Indian capitalist social order. Recent years have seen myriad bitter working class struggles, including by autoworkers, Maharashtra State Road Transport Commission (MSRTC) workers, teachers and healthcare workers, as well as major peasant-farmer agitations, and repeated massive one- and two-day protest general strikes. But these struggles have been systematically isolated by the trade unions and politically bound by them and the Stalinist CPM and CPI to the right-wing anti-BJP bourgeois opposition.

The elections have underlined that far from being an unstoppable force, the Modi government is a regime of extreme crisis that sits atop a political and social volcano.