Rising rents put low income US renters in severe jeopardy

Debra Watson

The recent severe cold spell in large parts of the US will be remembered most due to the frequent reports of homeless citizens freezing to death, because they could not find housing, or even emergency shelter. Half a million homelessness are living on the streets of major US cities this winter, according to official counts.

Millions more face a precarious housing situation, threatened not only by a lost job or illness, events that often lead to a foreclosure or eviction, but a general decline in living standards related to widening income inequality in the US.

Precipitous increases in rent and stagnant and declining wages are creating an unsustainable squeeze on lower income households. The number of those who must spend the majority of their monthly income on rent is rising and along with that the portion of the monthly income they spend on rent is rising too.

A December report on the housing crisis that appeared in a publication of the Board of Governors of the US Federal Reserve, called FEDS Notes, reports on the distress for families in the lowest US income quintile brought on by a squeeze in monthly income from rising rents and stagnant or falling wages.

In general, these families earn under $25,000 annually. The lowest-paid fifth of US households includes workers making more than minimum wage. In Michigan a minimum wage job for a worker employed every week for the whole year yields about $18,000. Rent increases have rapidly and relentlessly outstripped stagnant or declining annual wages for workers at the lowest income levels.

Written by researchers from the US Federal Reserve and the Brookings Institution, the December report notes that the portion of monthly income that low-income households must spend on rent has been rising through the last several business cycles. “Rent burdens have increased over the past 15 years, due to both increasing rents and decreasing incomes,” they say.

The squeeze is relentless. Families at the bottom end of the pay scale have not been able to get out of the squeeze in the business recovery after a recession. They note: “This increase in rent burdens over the past 15 years occurred through each business cycle period including both the period prior to the financial crisis (2000-2006), the economic downturn (2006-2009) and the subsequent recovery (2009-2015). Although rent-to income ratios are greatest among low-income households, the share of income spent on rent also rose among higher income renters.”

They also explain the main economic sources of the plight of low-income renters: “Of the overall decline in residual income since 2000, around two-thirds came from declines in income among renters and one third resulted from rising rents.”

The FEDS Notes release in late December used statistics from the US Census Bureau American Community Survey. Their report provides a window into the desperate circumstances working class families, especially those at the low end of the income scale, now face when seeking housing.

They note the deterioration of renter family’s ability to cope with the ever-rising rents. “The median renter in the lowest income quintile pays 56 percent of monthly income on rent,” exceeding HUD’s standard for rent burdened, paying more than 30 percent of income on rent and severe rent burdened, paying more than half of income for rent. “Though the rent burden has increased at every income level, it is especially acute at the lower end of the US income scale,” they say.

“Such renters have little left for paying everything else,” according to the report. “In the lowest income quintile in the US a family has just $476 left after housing costs for all other basic needs,” noting Census bureau estimates that a family needs nearly three times this—$1,400—for these basic needs.

Last fall Freddie Mac Multifamily presented detail that throws light on the trend of rising rents. Researchers there noted how rapidly rents in multi-family units they finance are going up. Increases on rents on existing properties in apartments were squeezing low-income renters, following a general trend in US rental housing reported elsewhere by housing advocacy groups.

The Federal Mortgage Home Loan Corporation (FMHLC) or Freddie Mac, is one of two major US housing finance entities, along with Fannie Mae.

Some sixty to eighty percent of affordable rental apartments in privately owned multi-family apartment buildings financed by mortgage lender Freddie Mac have been eliminated in the US since 2010.

Very low income households, used in the Freddie Mac report, are defined for various US government agencies as families making half or less than the median income in a particular geographical area. This is a step above HUD’s Extremely Low Income designation, and falls in the same range as the lowest quintile households covered in the FEDS Notes report.

In the Detroit metropolitan area in 2016, very low income was about $24,000 for an individual renter. By comparison, extremely low income individuals have annual incomes of about $14,000.

Along with a dearth of building in the low-income rental market—most new apartments are built and command rents only affordable to the much better off—the report notes that housing construction costs are also a factor and have been exacerbated by the hurricane destruction in Texas, Florida and Puerto Rico.

Freddie Mac researchers compiled figures back to 2010 on lending to multi-family projects, that is apartment buildings they financed twice during that period: “[W]e analyzed the affordability of the exact same units at two different, but close, points in time.”

Families denoted as VLI necessarily had not moved out as rents increased year by year. Instead the same population living in the buildings ended up paying what amount to unsustainable housing costs, paying rents exceeding the HUD affordability benchmark.

The Freddie Mac researchers used two sets of data to look into affordable housing for very low income renters. The first used internal numbers on a relatively small set of data to examine how it compared with overall trends in rental housing adversely impacting lowest income renters being reported elsewhere.

In the 97,000 rental units in multi-family buildings Freddie Mac financed in 2010 and then again in 2016, the percentage of units affordable for very low income households dropped by more than half, from 11.2 percent to 4.3 percent nationwide. These were refinances of the exact same units.

Some states were hit hard. For example, in Colorado in 2010 about a third—32 percent of the 5,100 rental apartments financed with Freddie Mac loans were affordable for very low income households. By 2016 the same buildings were re-financed by the agency and only 7.5 percent of the very same apartments were VLI affordable.

An expanded part of their analysis looked at all multi-family housing projects they originated from 2010 to 2016 and found an even greater decline of 78 percent between 2010 and 2016 of apartments deemed affordable to very low-income renters when Freddie Mac lent to the owners. Rent increases had wiped out affordability at tens of thousands of units by 2016.

It is remarkable that warnings usually heard from housing agencies and advocacy groups—that is groups dedicated to advocating for the vulnerable—are the subject of earnest reports advanced by financial entities at the commanding heights of the US economy. The Federal Reserve is a key player in fueling the general investment frenzy leading to the stock market rise and contributing to driving up rents.

The few solutions being offered are less than inadequate. Freddie Mac indicates in its report that one approach to addressing the problem is to look to financing manufactured homes—that is, into one of the most dangerous housing options one can find! This parallels the sclerotic federal and state efforts, often advanced by sections of the Democratic Party, to provide funding for assistance. Even existing programs, woefully underfunded, face decimation under the Trump administration to pay for tax cuts to the wealthy.

Bangladeshi teachers end “fast-unto-death”

Nancy Hanover

Several thousand Bangladeshi teachers, who began a “fast-unto-death” on December 31 at the National Press Club in the capital of Dhaka, called off their protest on Friday January 5.

“Over the past 12 years, I have been working without any pay and living in inhumane conditions,” said Sohrab Hossain, one of the teachers. “It is better to die here than return home with empty hands,” he told a representative of the European Pressphoto Agency last week.

Since December 26, thousands of teachers have been engaged in a round-the-clock sit-in protest outside the Press Club despite shivering cold temperatures. When the sit-in failed to secure their demands, they began a hunger strike five days later. Their chief demand was to gain coverage under the government’s Monthly Payment Order (MPO) system.

Over the course of the six-day hunger strike 117 of the teachers required hospitalization.

Nearly 80,000 Bangladeshi teachers and employees at 6,000 government-recognized schools work without government pay, house rent or medical allowance. And this state of affairs has existed, according to the protestors, for 15 or even 20 years in some cases.

Sohrab said he received just over $12 a month at the madrassa school where he works, requiring him to take on private classes and employment at a store in the evenings to survive. Those who gain access to the MPO system receive the country’s minimum wage of $137 a month from the government, reported news4europe.

On Friday, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina promised to meet these demands. Non-MPO Educational Institutions’ Teachers and Employees Federation Secretary Binoy Bhushan Roy accepted the prime minister’s assurances and shut down the protests. The acting president of the Federation Golam Mahmaudunnabi Dollar declared, “We believed that she [the prime minister] would listen to us. We are going home today.”

Earlier in the week, the group had rebuffed offers by the Education Minister Nurul Nahid, stating that the government had falsely promised job regularization 22 times in the past, without doing so. Prime Minister Hasina’s Awami League coalition faces national elections at the end of 2018 or early 2019.

Mohiuddin Alamgir noted in the Bangladesh paper New Age, “Teachers from primary schools to colleges have frequently been observing hunger strikes, abstaining from work, holding sit-ins and taking part in processions over the last couple of months and have warned of continuation of such demonstrations until their demands were met.”

There are three basic educational systems in Bangladesh. The majority are public schools, which serve about one million children. This is followed by private English medium schools, serving 700,000 students. and religious-based Madrassas, which have about 250,000 attendees.

According to a 2016 report “Educational System in Bangladesh,” a major factor “discouraging” teachers is the “lack of the most basic facilities such as chairs and tables, water, electricity, and even toilets are absent in many schools outside the city corporation areas. In many cases there are even no buildings. Five percent of schools do not have toilet facilities in Bangladesh while another 14% have to make do with just one.” The report also pointed to the high class sizes, an average of 54 students to one teacher in public schools and slightly lower ratios in private schools and madrassas.

The government’s promised increases in education spending have not materialized. Last year the already minuscule spending on education and health (about two percent of the gross domestic product) was cut by 10 percent, despite the claim of a 14 percent increase.

At least 80-110 million Bangladeshi people live on less than $2 a day, according to the Financial Express. The Hasina government has responded to a deteriorating financial situation—declining remittances from overseas workers, food price rises and lower export growth—by assaulting garment workers striking for higher pay, demanding the removal of Rohingya refugees and pushing a 14-year plan to build 100 cheap labor zones.

Zimbabwe graphite miners strike at former German-owned mine

Dietmar Henning

More than 200 workers at the Lynx graphite mine near Karoi in northern Zimbabwe have been on strike since the end of December to protest the fact they have not received their wages for more than a year.

Workers have reportedly vowed to continue their strike and have blockaded six trucks that sought to remove graphite from the mine until they get paid and see an improvement in working conditions.

Until September 2017, the mine in Karoi was a joint venture between the Zimbabwe Mining Development Corporation (ZMDC) and the German firm Graphit Kropfmühl GmbH. The mine has operated since 1965 and employs a total of 260 workers.

Four months ago, after more than 50 years of production in Zimbabwe, Graphit Kropfmühl ceded its 50 percent share to ZMDC for the symbolic price of one US dollar. “Fruitful cooperation is no longer possible,” explained Graphit Kropfmühl Managing Director Thomas Junker at the time to the Passauer Neue Presse.

A worker who wished to remain anonymous told the Zimbabwean News Daythat workers had not received their wages for 13 months. “We live in the dark because there is no electricity in the mine. It was shut down because the company did not settle its debts of several hundred thousand [dollars] with Zesa”, Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authority) the state electricity supplier. The worker reported that he and his colleagues were now forced to drink untreated water from the mine’s reservoir due to the lack of electricity.

“Some suppliers came and seized property from the mine because their debts were not paid,” the worker continued. “In December, 14 containers were suddenly loaded with graphite, but there are no wages for us.”

Money was being used to pay people who “manage the mine at the expense of the suffering miners,” the worker suspected. “We do not know what they are using the proceeds for, since they claim the company is in the red.”

An unnamed representative of Lynx Mine, who had no official approval to speak to the media, said the current situation was due to falling world market prices for graphite. “We used to get $600 a ton, but right now it’s only $340.”

Production had been discontinued in September due to a lack of capital. On October 1, the Zimbabwe-based Sunday Mail reported that Lynx Mine was negotiating with investors for a $5 million investment to secure long-term production. Lynx Mine CEO Cris Chitambira told the newspaper that this meant the mine could produce 500 tonnes a month.

Graphite is mainly needed to produce batteries, fuel cells and plastics, but also in other products of the chemical industry. Together with lithium, graphite is one of the future “strategic minerals” of the world economy, mainly due to the switch to electromobility in the automotive industry. The worldwide graphite market is currently estimated at an annual volume of one million tonnes. The Lynx mine in Karoi has reserves for the next 12 to 18 years.

Graphit Kropfmühl is a Bavarian-based company with over 140 years history. Since 2008, the company has been part of the global AMG Group which is headquartered in the Netherlands, probably for tax purposes, but is run out of the US.

AMG group employs around 3,000 people worldwide in the precious metals and rare earths business. In addition to sales offices in Russia and Japan, a 2015 corporate brochure lists locations in Germany, the United Kingdom, France, the USA, the Czech Republic, China, Mexico, Brazil, Sri Lanka, Congo, Mozambique and Zimbabwe.

While workers in Zimbabwe are struggling under inhumane conditions, deprived of wages, five weeks ago Graphit Kropfmühl celebrated “a new record turnover, a comprehensive concept for the future and secure jobs,” according to the regional press. The managing director of the graphite group at AMG, Thomas Junker, is quoted as saying: “The year 2017 continued the company’s success story.”

According to the Passauer Neue Presse the annual “St Barbara’s festival of the large Kropfmühler graphite family” was a “sign of the close links between the workforce and the management.” Of course the African workers who mine the graphite do not count as part of the family; they are left to fend for themselves.

Far from seeking to mobilize the working class to defend the Lynx miners the general secretary of the Zimbabwe Diamond Workers’ Union, Justice Chinhema, has made an empty appeal to management to quickly resolve the workers’ complaints. “We hope that management will address the issues raised by the workers, such as paying wages and improving working conditions,” he pleaded. He himself had addressed these questions several times with the responsible ministers and the ZMDC, but to no avail, he said.

When Zimbabwe’s former President Robert Mugabe was overthrown and replaced by Emmerson Mnangagwa just over a month ago, the mass of the Zimbabwean population had responded with joyful celebrations. Many hoped that the social decline and the suppression of democratic rights would now come to an end.

The World Socialist Web Site warned that those who believed Mugabe’s downfall would bring an improvement in their lives will be cruelly disappointed. “The military and the faction of the ruling ZANU-PF led by Emmerson Mnangagwa have used Mugabe’s 37 years as head of state to channel social discontent against him and his wife Grace and the nouveau riche.” Mnangagwa’s reign will do nothing to change the miserable social conditions workers confront. The current struggle of the Lynx miners confirms this.

The working class must maintain its political independence from all representatives of the national bourgeoisie and the imperialist powers. This applies to all the current political parties and their supporting trade union federations. Zimbabwean workers will find their real allies in the workers of Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe and the Americas.

UK workers confront rising job losses in 2018

Tony Robson

The closing months of 2017 and the beginning of this year saw a wave of redundancies in the UK, totalling in the thousands, as major corporations and banks announced job losses. The layoffs are part of long-term cost cutting to downsize workforces and close factories and high street branches of supermarket and other retail chains.

Mass redundancies have also resulted from companies being driven into bankruptcy or near administration, as larger corporations strengthen their monopoly position under conditions of declining investment and markets.

• General Electric will cut 1,100 jobs from its UK power division, which produces wind turbines for energy generation. This represents a six percent reduction of its national workforce of 18,000, with the majority of job losses in Rugby and Stafford. This is part of a global restructuring program by the US company to shed 12,000 jobs.

• Britvic, the UK’s second largest manufacturer of soft drinks, has announced the closure of its Norwich factory with the loss of around 240 jobs by the end of 2019. The Carrow Row Works is co-owned with Unilever, which is conducting a review of all options, including closure of the site, which has produced the world-famous Colman’s Mustard brand from 1860. This will put 113 jobs at risk.

The company aims to transfer production of its Robinsons and Fruit Shoot brands to other sites in the UK. “Significant productivity and efficiency savings,” executives said, would result from transferring production to its sites in Rugby, east London and Leeds.

• Sainsbury’s, the UK’s second largest supermarket, is cutting 2,000 jobs, including 1,400 payroll and HR staff and 600 support staff. The company, which employs 119,000 full-time workers nationally, has a three-year plan to cut costs by £500 million by March 2018 and has employed McKinsey consultancy to manage “head count reduction.”

• Tesco, the largest UK supermarket had already announced 2,300 jobs cuts, which include one in four of its head office staff and 1,100 at its call centre in Cardiff, which is due for closure this year.

• Asda has plans to make 800 workers redundant or accept pay cuts. Already this year the supermarket chain, owned by the world’s largest retailer, Wal-Mart, has made hundreds of redundancies at 18 stores described as underperforming.

• Toys R Us UK is to close 26 of its stores, around a quarter of the total, starting in the Spring 2018, threatening at least 800 jobs. Its US parent company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy last year. The UK subsidiary faced administration in December until a last-minute deal involving a bailout of its pension scheme by the state-backed Pension Protection Fund. This enabled it to win support from its creditors for the restructuring program.

• Palmer & Harvey (P&H), the grocery wholesaler, went into administration in November resulting in 2,500 redundancies. Attempts by the administrators to hive off sections of the company failed, with a further 400 jobs lost just two weeks before Christmas.

• Babcock International Group at Rosyth dockyards in Fife, Scotland has announced around 250 jobs to go as the contract to complete two Royal Navy aircraft carriers nears completion.

• Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) and Lloyds, the UK’s third and fourth largest banks, along with the country’s second largest building society Yorkshire Building Society, have announced another round of branch closures. RBS plans to close 1 in 4 of its branches, totalling 259 with 680 job losses. This is in addition to the 200 redundancies and 100 branches slated for closure earlier in the year. Lloyds Banking Group and the Yorkshire Building Society are to close 49 and 13 branches, with the loss of 99 and 250 jobs respectively.

• Around 230 jobs are scheduled to go by the summer at the Cleveland Potash mine in Boulby in northeast England. Cleveland Potash is owned by the multinational company, ICL, one of the world’s largest fertilizer companies. The job losses will go as the mine switches from mining dwindling supplies of Muriate of Potash to producing the polyhalite fertilizer, polysulphate. Currently there are around 700 jobs remaining at Boulby. 220 jobs were there lost in 2015 as potash production was cut back. The area already has high levels of unemployment. In 2015 steel production ended at nearby Redcar with the loss of over 2,000 jobs.

The official indifference to the livelihoods under threat was epitomised by Britvic. Local media sources reported that the company confirmed the closure of the factory with the workforce on the same day as the annual Christmas dinner. This followed a consultation process with the Unite and the GMB unions.

At no point have Unite, GMB, the retail workers union, USDAW, or any other, even mooted a fight in defence of a single job. At Britvic, Unite food and drink sector national officer Julia Long said, “It is bad news for the wider Norfolk economy, especially as we face challenging economic times in 2018,” adding only, “Unite will work tirelessly with all key stakeholders to see what can be done, even at this eleventh hour.”

At Babcock, Gary Cook, the Scotland chair of the Confederation of Shipbuilding and Engineering Unions, which incorporates the GMB and Unite unions, centred his plea for the redundancies to be carried out on a voluntary and nationalist basis. “First and foremost, achieving these redundancies on a voluntary basis is entirely within Babcock’s gift and it is the least this employer can do to recognise the massive contribution of the workforce to the delivery of the aircraft carrier programme.”

Unite national officer Rob MacGregor said regarding the job losses at Lloyds Banking Group, “Having returned to profitability Lloyds needs to stop ignoring its corporate social responsibilities.”

Such invocations of corporate social responsibility are aimed at disarming workers and providing justification for the continuing inaction of the unions. Lloyds was one of the recipients of the Labour government’s £1 trillion bailout of the banking sector following the world financial collapse of 2008. It received over £20 billion of taxpayers’ money and was taken into 43 percent state ownership. Last year it was transferred back into private hands and soon after posted a doubling of its pre-tax profits for the third quarter of 2017.

Volkswagen plans to dismiss all temporary contract workers in German plants

Dietmar Henning

On 4 January, the Tagesschau newspaper reported that the Volkswagen Group plans to dismiss its entire temporary contract workforce by 2020. The move is a consequence of the “Future Pact” agreed by VW, the IG Metall union (IGM), and the German automaker’s works councils one year ago.

A statement by the company read, “Unfortunately, we cannot continue to take over (temporary contract) staff as in previous years…Volkswagen and the entire auto industry is undergoing profound changes for which the Volkswagen brand has prepared with its Future Pact.”

The decision applies to the 400 temporary workers currently employed in the company’s main plant in Wolfsburg as well as temporary workers in other VW factories. In December temp contract workers demonstrated at the company’s commercial vehicle plant in Hanover to oppose 200 impending job cuts. In the end, 60 temp workers received contract extensions, 47 were transferred to the VW plant in Kassel and over 90 lost their jobs.

The 200 temporary workers had been hired at the Wolfsburg plant in 2015 through VW’s own temporary employment agency, Autovision, and transferred to the VW plant in Hanover in the spring of 2017. The temporary workers had hoped they would obtain full time positions based on the company’s “good order situation.” The fact that they have been thrown in the streets, despite the company’s full order books, has provoked widespread anger.

To add insult to injury, the laid-off workers are going to be replaced by other temporary workers currently employed in the VW plant in Osnabrück. Three hundred of these workers were previously employed at the VW factory in Emden. They were transferred to Osnabrück last April as part of the “Future Pact” plan. One hundred of the workers returned to Emden at the beginning of the year and those who are now working in Hanover are supposed to return to Emden in 2019.

The shunting of workers from plant to plant and city to city serves, above all, to disorient and discipline them. With the assistance of IG Metall and the works council, the company is able to hang the Damocles sword of job losses over the heads of these workers.

As a consequence of the Future Pact around 30,000 jobs are due to be slashed during the next few years, or more than one seventh of the company’s total workforce of 200,000 worldwide. In Germany, 23,000 jobs are to be axed. While temporary workers are the first to lose their jobs, the same fate awaits workers employed by other automakers such as Porsche or plants formerly owned by GM-Opel.

VW personnel manager Karlheinz Blessing and works council chief Bernd Osterloh—both longtime functionaries of the Social Democratic Party and IG Metall—have worked closely to prepare and enforce the bloodletting of jobs.

Blessing joined the SPD in 1974 and was active in its youth movement in Baden-Württemberg. In 1984, he was promoted inside the union to become office manager of IGM chief Franz Steinkühler. In 1991, Blessing moved from the IGM headquarters to the SPD headquarters and for two years was federal director of the SPD. He was then appointed head of personnel at the Dillinger Hütte steel works and earned his spurs slashing jobs in the steel industry of Saarland.

SPD and IGM functionaries sit on both sides of the negotiating table in the VW headquarters in Wolfsburg to finalise the company’s job cuts. Osterloh defended the latest dismissals in a detailed interview with the Wolfsburger Allgemeinen Zeitung. “The Future Pact is a success. We have already realised savings of around two billion euros.” Volkswagen is also on course with its retirement scheme, Osterloh declared, noting that “9,200 colleagues have opted for early retirement.” The Future Pact, he said, ensures “that the VW brand has the financial power to invest in its future products.”

Osterloh claimed the dismissal of temporary workers was less a consequence of the Future Pact and more a result of declining capacity utilization, even though the company chalked up record sales in 2017.

In the first half of 2018, the VW Works Council chief “called upon the company to consider how we deal with temporary work in future,” suggesting, “In future, Volkswagen should employ people directly for a limited period of time,” instead of through a temp agency. “Then at least the plant management can discharge colleagues when their contracts expire,” he declared.

In his interview Osterloh also indicated that the company planned to reduce the number of apprenticeships. In any event, the company’s plans to switch to electric-powered vehicles, together with more automation, means the current job cuts are only the beginning. Significantly less workers are needed to produce electric motors, Spiegel Online wrote recently, citing representatives of IGM, that at VW “10 to 15 plants will become redundant.”

These developments form the background to the current negotiations in the German metal and electrical industry. Wage contracts covering 3.9 million steel, auto and engineering workers expire at the end of January.

IGM officials are proposing a reduction in weekly working hours to 28 from 35—with a right to return to full-time hours after two years—for shift workers and those caring for children or other relatives. However, only workers in the lowest pay groups would receive any sort of compensation for shorter work hours. Meanwhile, IG Metall is calling for a 6 percent wage increase.

There is popular support for reduced working hours. The union regularly sanctions “exceptions” to the 35-hour week, including weekend work, when production needs demand it. IG Metall’s proposal, however, has little to do with improving “work-life balance” for workers caring for children and elderly parents. Its chief concern is mollifying the rank-and-file opposition that will erupt over the coming restructuring and downsizing of the auto industry and its impact on thousands of full-time workers.

In December, IG Metall and the works council reached a job-cutting deal, cynically referred to a “social framework agreement for a sustainable future” with the French PSA Group, which is planning to eliminate as many as 4,500 of the 19,000 jobs at Opel plants in Germany, which PSA took over from General Motors. The scheme includes early retirement packages, increased “internal mobility” and shorter hours under a scheme dubbed a “new mobile working programme,” supposedly to “contribute to the employees’ work-life balance.”

Under IGM’s proposal for VW, part-time workers presently working longer than 28 hours would be compensated for their lost hours and would make more money than part-timers currently working 28 hours. The latter would also not have a right to full-time employment, in contrast to those who benefit from the contractually agreed reduction in working time.

VW is rejecting the proposal based on its specious concern about upholding the “equal treatment of workers.”

For years VW and many other German companies, with the assistance of IGM and the works council, have carried out a systematic campaign to split workers in terms of hours worked and remuneration. In addition to temporary contract workers, VW employs agency workers and various other types of contract workers—often doing similar or the same work as full-time workers but for very different wages.

IG Metall has reacted with phony howls of disapproval and has announced a “wave of warning strikes” by VW, Porsche and other workers as the countdown to the January 31 wage contract expiration nears. This is, however, part of a well-established pattern. Any protests will be minor and ineffectual, while being limited to a select group of workers to prevent a broader mobilization of the working class.

It is clear the attack on temporary workers is the prelude to massive job cuts and attacks on other social gains of the working class. Rank-and-file workers must oppose the conspiracy of the auto companies, IGM, the works council and the SPD and build factory committees to unite full-time, part-time and temporary workers in a common fight against layoffs and the rollback of their conditions. The wildcat strike by Ford Romania workers and last year’s strikes by VW workers in Slovakia and Fiat workers in Serbia show the growing international opposition of workers to poverty wage wages and the possibility to unite the autoworkers across borders to fight the global automakers.

German foreign minister demands aggressive assertion of great power interests

Christoph Vandreier

Exploratory talks on forming a new government between the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), Christian Social Union (CSU) and Social Democratic Party (SPD) have been long and drawn out because all three parties know full well that their plans for increased militarism, strengthening the repressive state apparatus and further social attacks are broadly despised among the population. However, even though these parties have agreed to not speak publicly about the state of the talks and to draft the new government’s programme behind the backs of the population, a clearer picture is emerging.

While the CSU demanded a massive military rearmament at the end of last year, Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel (SPD) set the tone in the new year in an interview with Der Spiegel last Thursday. He advocated a great power policy for Germany, directed against Russia and China in particular, but also the United States.

The combination of his aggressive language and absurd attempt to pose as a victim, recalled nothing so much as the argument of “enforced self-defence” used by Wilhelm II to justify to the Reichstag Germany’s entry into the First World War. Gabriel stated, “Vegetarians have it tough in a world full of carnivores,” and bluntly called for rearmament and a militarist policy.

Germany could no longer depend on “France, Britain and especially the Americans enforcing our interests around the world,” Gabriel declared. The assumption that the US would come to Germany’s aid in the event of war should not be overstretched, he continued. “In an uncomfortable world, we can’t afford as Europeans to take it easy and wait on the US,” he said.

The entire world is already taking advantage of Germany, he added. “In reality, Moscow, Beijing and Washington also have something in common: they don’t value the European Union at all, they abuse it,” Gabriel insisted. Authoritarian states were making fun of the EU because its member states were failing to place their own national interests above those of the international community.

The portrayal of a moral, integral “vegetarian” EU, which has to assert itself in the shark-infested waters of global politics, is obviously nonsense. Germany and other EU states are pursuing an aggressive foreign policy, waging brutal wars in Afghanistan, Syria, and Mali, and menacing Russia with a major build-up of troops on its borders.

Gabriel’s rhetoric is aimed at initiating a further escalation of German militarism and freeing Berlin from any restrictions. Europe was “not adequately” projecting “strength, technology, and political and military influence,” according to the Foreign Minister. It had to therefore rearm and extend its influence: “We have to show that those who view us in such a way have made a mistake, that we can agree, that as a community of democratic and free states, we are economically successful and are gaining influence politically. For this, Europe also has to project its power.”

For example, Europe should challenge China in Africa, and Russia in the Balkans. “China is steadily gaining so much influence in the south and east that some European states no longer dare to take decisions against Chinese interests. It is noticeable everywhere: China is the only country in the world with a real geopolitical strategy.”

Gabriel wants to counter this with a major European military build-up, under German leadership. Although he criticised the CSU proposal for Germany to unilaterally increase its defence budget to 2 percent of GDP, he called for the same policy to be pursued in cooperation with France. This was the only way for Germany to make its voice heard on the world stage.

According to the Foreign Minister, such a policy should not be based on values, but oriented towards interests. “To date we have frequently defined European values, we are much too weak with the definition of common interests,” he said. Under these conditions, Germany could not be successful “in a world of loud, tough-talking states representing their interests.”

In a keynote foreign policy address in December, Gabriel declared that “there is no longer a comfortable place on the sidelines of international politics” for Germany. In the speech, he warned against a “fixation on law as the form for overcoming political challenges.” He called for “political-strategic thinking,” whose gaze did not drift “to the horizon of moral norms and imperatives.”

In his speech, as in the recent interview, Gabriel referred explicitly to the political scientist Herfried Münkler. The professor at Berlin’s Humboldt University has become the most important spokesperson for the Foreign Ministry. In his new book about the Thirty Years War, Münkler calls for “the placing of morals under the guardianship of strategic thinking.” Prior to that, he called for Germany to become Europe’s hegemon and “disciplinarian.”

The consequences of such policies, which are based on Germany’s imperialist interests, were summed up by Münkler’s colleague, Jörg Baberowski. The professor for Eastern European history at HU stated in October 2014 at a discussion on “Germany: an interventionist power,” referring to the war in Syria, “if one is not willing to take hostages, burn villages, hang people and spread fear and terror, as the terrorists do, if one is not prepared to do such things, then one can never win such a conflict and it is better to keep out altogether.”

The right-wing extremist professor, who came to prominence not only for such glorifications of war, but also due to his downplaying of the Nazis’ crimes and agitation against refugees, was explicitly supported last year by SPD politician and HU president Sabine Kunst and defended against criticism from students.

The militarist and inhumane agenda, developed by professors like Münkler and Baberowski, is now official foreign policy. This confirms the warnings made by the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE), which has systematically resisted right-wing and militarist ideology at HU in recent years. The youth organisation of the International Committee of the Fourth International has organised meetings, written articles and distributed leaflets which have pointed to the significance of the work of Münkler, Baberowski and others for the revival of German militarism.

In the foreword to the book “Scholarship or war propaganda,” which has documented the conflict at the HU, we wrote two and a half years ago that the book dealt with “the relationship between scholarship and politics in periods of militarism, mounting international conflict and growing social tensions. It focuses on the question: Will the universities remain centres of scholarship and free criticism? Or will they once again become state-directed cadre-training centres for right-wing and militarist ideologies, as previously in German history?”

The ruling elite, which confronts mass opposition to its war policies, is very conscious of the significance of this conflict. In the interview with Der Spiegel, Gabriel expressed disappointment that there were an insufficient number of such cadre-training centres, stating, “Unfortunately, we have no experience and no real structure for strategic considerations: there is not a think tank culture here. One of the tasks of foreign policy will be to develop this intellectual capacity in Europe and Germany.”

Gabriel’s plans for a German great power policy not only vindicate the IYSSE’s struggle at the HU. They underscore the necessity of constructing the IYSSE as an international youth movement for socialism, uniting youth and young workers around the world in a struggle against capitalism and war.

Puerto Rico, more than 100 days after Hurricane Maria: The class issues

Genevieve Leigh

Over a hundred days have passed since Puerto Rico was hit by Hurricane María, the most powerful storm to make landfall on the island in nearly a century. The prevailing devastation in the US colonial territory is a grim illustration of the attitude of the ruling class, not only to the workers and youth of Puerto Rico, but to those on the US mainland as well: one of complete indifference and contempt.

Every aspect of life for Puerto Ricans has been affected. The ongoing blackout referred to on the island as “apagón” is the longest and largest power outage in modern US history. Downed power lines still litter the streets from Aguadilla to San Juan, while bundles of wires and debris line the sidewalks. Only 55 percent of the island has had power restored, and even these “recovered” areas experience frequent blackouts from the highly unstable electrical grid.

Lack of power means that hundreds of thousands of people are struggling to survive without basic necessities, including running water, refrigeration, washing machines, ovens and internet. In the year 2018, in a territory of the “most advanced” capitalist country in the world, old fashioned washboards are being sold in every corner market.

Thousands of businesses remain closed, many of which will never reopen. With an official unemployment rate of 10.8 percent, nearly 118,000 people are out of work—a number many are predicting will skyrocket as small businesses continue to shut down and ramifications of the recent tax bill take effect.

Areas outside of the wealthy tourist destinations are drowning in garbage. Damage from the hurricane created 6.2 million cubic yards of waste and debris—enough trash to fill about 43 football stadiums with piles of waste eight stories high—overflowing the landfills which were well beyond capacity before the storm hit.

Over 250,000 homes were lost to the storm. An unprecedented flood of foreclosures is expected in the coming months. Thousands of homes and cars were left abandoned by the 200,000 people who have emigrated from the island to the mainland, many taking with them only what they could carry.

Up to 300,000 more are expected to follow. The consequences of this mass emigration will be immense both on the island and the mainland. Already there have been reports of a shortage of maternity doctors for laboring mothers in Puerto Rico; and on the mainland, school systems in areas with high numbers of Puerto Rican refugees are strained for resources to provide for the influx of new students.

As has been the case with every natural disaster in the US from Katrina in 2005, to the string of hurricanes in 2017, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has proven completely incapable of providing even a semblance of adequate relief.

After FEMA food and water finally arrived after weeks of delay due to legal restrictions bound up the island’s colonial status, the distribution process was completely botched. A WSWS reporting team found that nearly everyone on the island had a story about failed FEMA efforts: one worker in Bayamón said that it took over 30 days for the first aid packages to arrive in her town. A waitress in San Juan told our reporters that she stood in lines of 500 people nightly to receive small packages of food, which regularly run out before all those in need are served.

In the midst of the unfolding catastrophe, FEMA granted a newly created Florida company a contract worth more than $30 million to provide residents with emergency tarps, which quickly became one of the most coveted resources on the island, providing the only protection from the elements for hundreds of thousands of residents who lost their roofs in the storm.

The company, Bronze Star LLC, never delivered those urgently needed supplies, which to this day remain in demand by hurricane victims on the island.

The complete absence of planning for the hurricane and the lack of any significant response to the devastation by the local and federal government has had deadly consequences. Hundreds, if not thousands, of people died needlessly in the weeks and months following the hurricane, in darkened hospital rooms and unpowered homes, unable to receive basic medical treatment.

The recent announcement from Puerto Rico’s Governor Ricardo Rosselló that his administration will now investigate all post-hurricane deaths is an acknowledgement of what can no longer be concealed and everyone on the island already knows, that the scale of fatalities was at least 10 times the number officially claimed.

Exactly how many lives were lost as a result of the incompetent and criminally indifferent response of the Trump administration and both parties will likely never be known.

While the immediate cause of this crisis was a natural phenomenon, the destruction wrought by María during the 72 hours it tore through the island would not have been imaginable without the century of destruction wrought by the US ruling class since its seizure of the island from Spain in 1898.

Natural disasters reveal social inequality and lay bare the class character of society. In the case of Puerto Rico, Hurricane María exposed before the world the extreme poverty and social decay prevailing in what has been described as Washington’s “perfumed colony.”

The semi-colonial status of Puerto Rico has allowed the ruling class to carry out a full scale assault on Puerto Rican workers, leaving the vast majority of the island to live in desperate poverty. In addition to serving as a major base of operations for the US military, the island’s economy has been driven into the ground in order to provide cheap labor and a tax haven for US-based multinational corporations. Residents of the island cannot vote for president, send only one non-voting delegate to Congress and receive reduced welfare and other federal benefits.

Political life on the island has been dominated by sections of the local ruling class which attempt to channel the legitimate mass anger of workers behind three basic outlets: arguing either to maintain the status quo of the “free associated state,” to incorporate Puerto Rico as a US state, or to pursue national independence.

The essential question of Puerto Rico’s status, however, like that of the US and every other country, will be decided not in a three-way contest between these factions of the local ruling elite, but rather in a struggle to determine which class will rule the island; whether its economy will be developed to serve the interests of a thin layer of privileged businessmen and the comfortable middle class, or those of the masses of workers and poor.

The struggle of the Puerto Rican workers and oppressed has erupted repeatedly in opposition to both class exploitation and semi-colonial oppression, with mass strikes and protests against privatizations, layoffs and austerity measures, struggles of students against the gutting of public education and the militant protests that forced the US Navy to halt its use of the island of Vieques as a bombing range.

The effort by the local government and the ruling elite in Puerto Rico to cover over this reality of social inequality and class struggle is best expressed in their post-Hurricane Maria slogan “Puerto Rico se levanta” (Puerto Rico rises up) which has been plastered on billboards and businesses in every city and town. Their aim is to obscure the class divisions on the island by promoting a unified Puerto Rican identity.

Contrary to their claims, however, there is, in fact, no single “Puerto Rico.” As with the United States and every other country in the world, there is a Puerto Rico of the rich living in air conditioned high rises unmolested by the devastation from the storm, and a Puerto Rico of the working class struggling on the edge of subsistence, without power, without water and drowning in debris and garbage.

As the working class of Puerto Rico was living through this catastrophe with little to no assistance, the US congress was preoccupied with passing a historic tax bill, which will funnel trillions of dollars to the richest layers of society.

And what of the Democratic Party? No demonstrations were called, no new relief funds proposed, no demands made for the cancellation or repudiation of the debt. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders was dispatched for a brief visit during which he concealed the fact that the brutal austerity measures implemented over the last two years were, in fact, a direct product of Democratic Party policies.

Obama’s Financial Oversight Board, a dictatorship of the banks created in 2016 to squeeze the islands’ $70 billion debt out of its impoverished workers, made drastic cuts to education, pensions and social services. Before the storm, the poverty rate stood above 40 percent (twice as high as the poorest US state), the electrical grid was barely functioning, and unemployment was at 10 percent.

The unfolding crisis in Puerto Rico is far from unique. It parallels every other social crime committed against the working class throughout the world: Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana, the Grenfell fire in London, the poisoning of the water in Flint Michigan, the bankruptcy of Detroit. In every instance the response is the same. A pittance is thrown to working people, who are left to die or recover on their own, while billions of dollars and resources are hoarded by an ever smaller minority. “Natural” disasters are seized upon by banks, corporations and politicians as opportunities to push through new lucrative financial schemes and backroom deals.

The issues brought to the surface by Hurricane María in Puerto Rico are class issues. The fate of the working class of Puerto Rico is the fate of the entire working class, in the United States and internationally. In a country where three billionaires control more wealth than half the population, with a $700 billion annual military budget used for the destruction of peoples around the world, it is absurd to believe the lies that “nothing more could be done” to provide for an island no larger than the state of Connecticut.

The Socialist Equality Party calls for the immediate implementation of a massive public works program to rebuild the island; to ensure that every person has a safe and comfortable home; access to health care, to clean water and to free quality education. We call for the immediate abolition of the debt of Puerto Rico accrued through decades of colonial oppression and parasitic and corrupt financial schemes. We call for the immediate expropriation of the wealth of the financial aristocracy to fund these demands. The productive forces monopolized by the ruling elite around the world must be mobilized and organized to meet social need everywhere, by transforming them into public utilities.

The greatest ally of Puerto Rican workers and youth are their fellow workers in Flint Michigan who have also been denied access to clean water, and those in London who have become refugees in “their own” country after the Grenfell fire, and in Detroit where the working class has suffered the same consequences of a debt crisis they did not create. The solution for all of the problems facing these workers can be achieved only through a unified and conscious political struggle of the international working class against the capitalist system and for socialism.

The fight for a socialist solution to the crisis capitalism has created in Puerto Rico, and for the unification of the struggles of Puerto Rican workers and youth with those of working people all over the planet, requires, above all, the building of a new revolutionary leadership. This means joining and building the Socialist Equality Party and the International Youth and Students for Social Equality in Puerto Rico.

Iran: Anti-government protests abate in face of mass repression

Jordan Shilton & Keith Jones

The wave of anti-government protests by unemployed youth and impoverished workers that swept across Iran for at least five days beginning December 28 has now abated.

While the clerical political establishment has staged a week of large counter-demonstrations and security forces are proclaiming that the challenge to Iran’s bourgeois nationalist regime has been successfully quelled, none of the acute socio-economic problems that propelled tens of thousands to take to the streets of more than 80 cities and towns have been attenuated, let alone resolved. It is only a matter of time before working class anger and opposition bursts forth anew.

The Iranian regime responded to the protests, which were driven by anger over food-price increases, mass joblessness, pervasive social inequality and years of government austerity, with repression. Police and security forces killed over 20 protesters and arrested many hundreds more.

The government has justified the security crackdown with spurious claims US imperialism and its allies fomented and manipulated the unrest.

Yesterday, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) issued a statement saying, “Iran’s revolutionary people along with tens of thousands of Basij forces (IRGC affiliated militia), police and the Intelligence Ministry” have broken the protest movement. Iranian authorities admit to arresting more than a thousand people, although they claim many have now been released after swearing to forego further “anti-state” activity.

The government and its supporters have tried to equate the protests with the 2009 Green Movement, which, egged on by the US and European imperialist powers, challenged the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. But that movement was aimed at bringing to power the faction of the bourgeois elite most eager for rapprochement with Washington and drew its support overwhelmingly from the most privileged sections of Iranian society.

The current movement, whatever its political confusion, erupted against poverty and social inequality, mobilizing elements from the most oppressed layers of the population. Particularly noteworthy was its rapid spread to smaller district cities and towns that have traditionally provided a base of support for the regime, but have been ravaged by lack of investment and drought in the surrounding countryside. Moreover, the events of the past week-and-a-half were preceded by months of worker protests, sit-ins and strikes against job cuts and the failure of employers to pay back wages and benefits.

Iranian authorities have seized on the utterly hypocritical and fatuous claims of the Trump administration, fronted by a barrage of tweets from the president himself, of “support” for the protests to lend an air of truth to their charges of imperialist subversion. On Friday, the US forced a UN Security Council debate on developments in Iran.

The efforts of the billionaire would-be despot Trump to cast himself as a friend of the Iranian people would be risible were the US demonization of the Islamic Republic not bound up with its predatory war plans against Iran. Not only has Trump moved to blow up the Iran civil nuclear deal with the world’s major powers, the recently released US National Security Strategy places Iran on a par with North Korea as a “threat” to American dominance that must be countered and vanquished.

The key mobilizing theme of the Iranian regime’s rallies against the internal unrest has been opposition to the threats and bullying of Iran by the US and its regional allies, Israel and Saudi Arabia. The rallies have also targeted Britain, which held Iran in semi-colonial bondage in the first half of the 20th century, only to be supplanted by the US after the CIA restored the Shah to power in 1953. London has been Washington’s staunchest ally in the quarter-century of ruinous US wars in the Middle East. The pro-government rallies have resounded with chants of “Death to America,” “Death to Britain” and “Death to Zionism.”

The anti-imperialist sentiments of many of the pro-government demonstrators, fueled as it is by decades of US aggression against Iran and the people of the Middle East, were no doubt genuine. But the Islamic Republic’s bourgeois-clerical elite—as underscored by numerous overtures to Washington stretching back to at least 1989—would be more than willing to reach an accommodation with the US if only it abandoned its drive for regime-change and recognized Tehran as a junior partner in stabilizing the Middle East.

A key aim of the anti-working class austerity policies of the current Iranian government led by President Hassan Rouhani is to woo European and ultimately US investment. Since coming to power in August 2013, the Rouhani administration has accelerated privatization and slashed social spending, while rewriting the rules governing investment in the oil sector to satisfy Total, Shell, Eni, and other European energy giants.

The government’s proposed budget for next year would cut $5.3 billion in income support for poorer Iranians, raise gasoline (petrol) prices by as much as 50 percent, expand privatization of education and cut infrastructure spending by $3.1 billion. This in a country where, according to a report published in the IRGC’s own political organ, Sobhe Sadeq, 50 percent of the people live below the poverty line.

A study conducted by BBC Persian found Iranians are 15 percent poorer than they were a decade ago. The consumption of bread, milk and red meat has dropped by 30 to 50 percent, as growing numbers of families can no longer afford them. Meanwhile, as around the world, the income and wealth chasm between the richest 1 and 10 percent of Iranians and the rest of the population has widened.

The eruption of the anger of the long-suppressed Iranian working class at the end of 2017 took the regime by surprise. As the protests expanded across Iran on the weekend of December 30-31 and took a pronounced anti-government turn, with participants taking up slogans challenging the institutions of the Islamic Republic and clashing with security forces, Iran’s security apparatus was rapidly mobilized. Important social media platforms were suspended, and police, Basij and, in some cases, IRGC units deployed.

Repression alone, however, does not account for the sudden ebbing of the protests. The overwhelmingly young and predominantly working class demonstrators lacked a clear and worked-out political perspective.

As the regime was quick to exploit, monarchist and ultra-right-wing elements tried to latch onto the protests and misdirect them. This included not only raising reactionary slogans, but no doubt also encouraging protesters into precipitous attacks on government property and security forces.

That such elements could find any support is not the fault of the working class, but of the regime. For decades, Iranian workers have been denied any form of genuine self-organization and political self-expression.

The Islamic Republic was consolidated though the derailing of the mass anti-imperialist movement that overthrew the blood-soaked, US-sponsored regime of the Shah in 1979. After executing a few exemplars of the Shah’s tyrannical rule, the Ayatollah Khomeini and his supporters concentrated their energies on defusing the threat from the working class of socialist revolution. While some social concessions were made, this operation principally and increasingly took the form of savage suppression of all socialist and left parties and of the workers’ councils that had emerged in the many worker-occupied factories.

The attempt of ultra-right elements to leverage the protests that erupted December 28 and, above all, the lack of a clear counter-perspective articulating opposition to imperialism and all factions of the Iranian bourgeoisie caused broader sections of the working class, as well as middle class layers otherwise sympathetic to the protesters’ social grievances, to remain on the sidelines amid the mounting repression.

One indication of the character of the debate now taking place in Iran is the discussion reportedly raging on social media under the rival hashtags, “We will not become Syria” and “We will become Tunisia.”

The regime also, it should be underlined, rushed to reassure the public that the popular anger over price rises and poverty had been heard, even as it slandered the protests as foreign-fomented. Both government spokesmen and leading members of the Majlis (Iranian parliament) have promised that changes will be made.

“As concerns petrol prices, we must absolutely take into account the situation of the people because the tensions are absolutely not in the interests of the country,” said Majlis Speaker and leading Principlist Ali Larijani last week.

All factions of Iran’s deeply divided ruling elite have united to support the suppression of working class unrest. But, in a stark indication of the depth of the crisis, the various factions are now fighting over who is to blame for the deep-rooted popular alienation and anger. There are unconfirmed media reports that former president Ahmadinejad was arrested over the weekend. Some of Ahmadinejad’s rivals have accused him of initially lending support to the protests as a means of advancing his own factional interests.

Infighting within the regime and above all the ever-widening class divide, under the impact of the world economic crisis and US bullying and aggression, ensure that sooner rather than later working class anger and opposition will re-erupt.

French chemical industry unions back contract violating minimum wage laws

Alex Lantier 

On Friday, it emerged that the French Democratic Labor Federation (CFDT) union had approved a base contract for chemical industries letting employers pay workers less than the minimum wage. This essentially illegal measure is a warning: the policy of the European Union (EU), inside which French President Emmanuel Macron's government functions as a key ally of Berlin, is to trample basic social rights won by the working class over generations of struggle in the 20th century.

The Stalinist General Confederation of Labor (CGT), the French Managers Confederation (CFE), and Workers Force (FO) unions issued a statement Friday reporting that the CFDT had signed an industry-wide contract on December 21 for a 1.1 percent wage increase paid in two increments. It would set the lowest hourly salary at 9.82€ on January 1 and then 9.86€ on April 1. Both are less than the 2018 minimum wage (SMIC) of 9.88€, set by a 1.24 percent increase approved on December 15—before the CFDT signed the chemical contract.

Moreover, using the Socialist Party's (PS) 2016 labor law and Macron's labor law decrees, the state, the oil bosses and the CFDT are concocting a pseudo-legal framework to ram through drastic cuts to workers' wages and conditions. Since 2009, the cumulative impact of EU wage and pension cuts in Greece was to slash incomes by 40 percent. Now, similar attacks are being prepared against workers in Europe's largest economies.

According to the CGT-CFE-FO statement, the CFDT contract will “integrate into the calculation of the minimum wage bonuses paid for seniority and working conditions (work at night, on Sundays and holidays, etc).” Up to now, such bonuses, representing up to 35 percent of total pay, were paid on top of a base salary at least equal to the SMIC minimum wage. But with the new contract, bosses can count those bonuses as part of the sub-SMIC wage agreed to by the CFDT, paving the way for wage cuts of 35 percent or more.

This announcement came only days after reports that automaker PSA Peugeot-Citroën plans to use a provision of Macron's labor decrees to impose union-approved mass job cuts at its French plants, while it slashes thousands of jobs at plants at its Opel-Vauxhall subsidiaries in Germany and Britain. The goal is to move PSA onto a largely temp workforce paid at the minimum wage, or less.

These measures are a warning to the working class across Europe and internationally. The only way to defend wages and jobs is to reject the pseudo-legal framework erected by the EU and the ruling class, and various bought-and-paid for union bureaucracies. As anger rises in France against the “president of the rich,” workers face the task of organizing independently of the trade unions for a political struggle against the illegitimate measures imposed by companies and national states.

The experience of the French labor law shows that such struggles will bring the working class into an irreconcilable conflict with the state with revolutionary implications. The PS imposed the labor law in 2016, in the face of over 70 percent popular opposition, by using the state of emergency to mount vicious police repression of mass protests against the law. Backed by petty-bourgeois parties like the New Anti-capitalist Party (NPA) and Unsubmissive France (LFI), the CGT capitulated in the face of PS threats to ban its protests and called off further action against the law.

Then Macron—elected by default in a run-off pitting him against neo-fascist candidate Marine Le Pen, and whose parliamentary majority emerged from elections in which less than half of French voters participated—imposed decrees preparing a historic assault on the working class. Now, having handed over trillions of euros to the banks and the financial aristocracy since the 2008 crash, French and European authorities aim to pauperize broad sections of the working class.

Such policies have not a shred of democratic legitimacy. Since the September German elections produced a hung parliament, European officials have been promising that a Paris-Berlin axis will oversee a new dawn for Europe. Martin Schulz, the defeated candidate of the Social-Democratic Party (SPD)—which worked with the PS, the Italian Democratic Party and others to formulate the French labor law—said last month that he was fighting for a “European framework for a minimum wage.”

In fact, the CFDT chemical industry contract shows how the PS and Macron, together with social-democratic parties across Europe, conspired behind the backs of the people to eliminate the minimum wage with the stroke of a pen.

The French chemical contract uses two key provisions of the PS labor law and Macron decrees: first, industries and firms can obtain exceptions to the national Labor Code; second, employers can impose a contract if they can obtain the agreement of unions representing 30 percent of the workers. So, with just over 33 percent of the chemical industry workforce, the CFDT approved a contract granting an exception to Article 141 of the Labor Code. That is the article that mandates the SMIC minimum wage in France.

Similar end runs around minimum wage laws are doubtless being prepared in firms and industries across France, and beyond.

Workers can place no confidence in the CGT, FO, or other union bureaucracies critical of the CFDT contract to organize opposition to the chemical industry contract. The PS labor law and Macron decrees provide a juridical expression to their common evolution into organs of the state, financed by the employers, that have lost their working class base and instead serve to plan and provide pseudo-legal sanctions for attacks on their own members.

Their criticisms of the CFDT are factional maneuvers primarily designed to shield them from rising social anger in the working class, while they pursue a nationalist policy of trying to boost French competitiveness on the world market at workers' expense.

All of them are hostile to mobilizing the working class politically against the historically regressive policies of Macron and the EU. As it joins FO in criticizing the CFDT chemical contract, the CGT is also provocatively denouncing a rail strike against job cuts called by FO in southern France as a “populist” gimmick that is “counterproductive because it aims to foment hatred against the rail workers.” As for FO, much of its leadership, including FO leader Jean-Claude Mailly, openly endorsed Macron's decrees last autumn.

The only way forward is the construction of independent workers organizations and committees in workplaces and working class neighborhoods to discuss and mobilize opposition to the various attacks emerging from Macron's decrees and approved by the unions. A key element of their work would be to coordinate their struggles internationally with those of workers facing similar job and wage cuts across Europe.

This raises also the the urgent necessity of building a new leadership in the working class: sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International in every country, fighting austerity and dictatorship. The ICFI will fight to promote the growth of independent workers organizations and link them to an international socialist movement to take state power and replace the bankrupt EU with the United Socialist States of Europe.