Ford workers at Bridgend in Wales facing 1,000 job losses

Barry Mason

Ford has confirmed its plans to cut nearly 1,000 jobs at its plant in Bridgend in South Wales. It is threatening cuts at its other main UK plant in Dagenham, London, which produces diesel engines.

At Bridgend, some 370 jobs will be lost in the first phase, with a further 620 to go by 2021. This would reduce the current workforce of 1,700 by more than 50 percent. Bridgend currently produces engines for Ford Sigma for Jaguar, now owned by Tata-subsidiary Jaguar Land Rover (JLR).

Ford employs around 13,000 workers in the UK. The job losses are tied to the ending of production of the two petrol engines currently made at Bridgend. There are plans for Bridgend to produce Ford’s new three cylinder 1.5 litre Dragon engine. When initially announced in 2015 the proposal was for 250,000 Dragon engines a year to be produced, but this was reduced to 125,000 when the plans to cut jobs were announced in early 2017. A projected workforce of only 550 is considered large enough to produce the new engine.

Under the One Ford global approach the Dragon engine will be produced in Brazil, China, India, Mexico and Russia as well as Bridgend. The plant in India will play the lead role, with plants competing to produce the engine at the cheapest price at the expense of the workforce.

The reduced workforce and capacity at the extensive Bridgend plant could mean it becoming economically unsustainable and under threat. It opened in May 1980 creating 1,400 jobs, although Ford initially promised 2,500 jobs. Bridgend produced engines for Ford’s Fiesta and Escort models and at its height employed over 2,100 workers.

Ford is stepping up its plans to compete in the cut-throat global car industry. Ford’s European president Steven Armstrong told the Financial Times, “This is not about making the business today more efficient but completely redesigning it.”

The attacks on jobs, wages and conditions are set to be sharply escalated as a result of the Brexit crisis. The FT noted, “The company also warned that its two UK sites—at Bridgend and Dagenham—face ‘significantly more dramatic’ cuts than already planned if the country leaves the EU without a trading deal … If we get wrong result, then expect that results will be significantly more dramatic…”

Sky reported Armstrong saying, “If Brexit went in the wrong direction we would need to take another look to mitigate the impact of that—we will take whatever action is needed. Nothing is off the table.”

Under the 2008 “One Ford Plan,” rather than tailoring production to a country or continent, Ford now produces models to be sold across the world, with parts made in various countries. In 2012, Ford announced it would cease vehicle production in the UK. It closed its Transit Van factory in Southampton and part of its original car production site at Dagenham, with the loss of around 1,400 jobs. It had already ceased assembling cars at Dagenham in 2002. At its peak in the 1970s, the Swaythling plant in Southampton employed 4,500 workers, but this had been cut to just 500 prior to its announced closure. Only three years earlier, in 2009, the workforce had been halved when Ford offered voluntary redundancy.

Henceforth Ford would not assemble any vehicles in the UK and only produce engines in its UK plants in Bridgend, Dagenham and transmissions at its Merseyside Halewood plant.

Every single job loss imposed by Ford and other auto conglomerates has been with the connivance of the trade unions. Ford had originally put forward its plans to cut jobs at its Bridgend plant in early 2017. It proposed to work with the Unite and GMB unions to, “to identify future business opportunities.” The GMB reported that its meetings with the company had shown 1,100 jobs to be under threat over the next five years.

The unions allowed Ford to pit workers at Bridgend and Dagenham against one another to win orders. At the time, BBC Wales reported a leaked internal Ford document showing that Bridgend was “underperforming in comparison to similar sites, including at Dagenham in Essex. Overtime levels at Bridgend are more than double Dagenham’s rates, which adds 6% to the cost of the engines produced…” The document adds that finding future work for Bridgend would be subject to improvements in performance.

In May 2017, Ford announced a global $3 billion cost-cutting exercise to address a drop in its share price.

As the latest cuts were announced, Walesonline reported January 16 that unions would be party to a Ford presentation outlining how the company plans to cut the workforce over the next two years. Bridgend managers were waiting for approval from the US headquarters to be able to offer any “voluntary” redundancies. Walesonline had seen documents showing that “370 jobs will be cut this year through voluntary redundancy; 450 jobs will become surplus to requirements by the time the plant ceases to make engines for Jaguar Land Rover in September 2020; 170 jobs will no longer be needed during the same period due to the decline in demand for the Sigma engine.”

The article noted that the unions were prepared to accept the cuts, provided they were achieved through “voluntary redundancy.” It noted that some workers fear other attacks were planned, including a pay freeze or ending the final salary pension scheme.

A statement given to Walesonline by Ford referred to the role of the unions: “We are starting consultations with our union partners and other key stakeholders to implement a comprehensive transformation plan aimed at strengthening the Ford brand … The strategy will result in fewer jobs—both hourly and salaried—but it is premature to speculate on how many as we have just begun discussions with our Works Council and union partners … [W]e aim to achieve the reduction in labour costs through voluntary employee separations and will be working closely with social partners and other stakeholders.”

This statement demonstrates that the unions are nothing but management partners. Following Ford’s announcement, Unite issued a January 11 press statement by Des Quinn, its national officer for the automotive industry, that could have been written by Ford’s PR department. It stated, “Over the last two decades the UK car industry has experienced a renaissance of which we can all be proud of. [sic] The challenge for government, the carmakers and the unions in the near future is to fight very hard to maintain the environment that made that success possible.”

This is nothing more than a call for workers in the UK to accept lower wages and more exploitative conditions.

Workers at Ford must break free of the stranglehold of the unions and wage an independent, international struggle. New organisations—rank-and-file workplace committees, democratically controlled by the workers and independent of the unions—must be set up based on unifying and mobilising car workers in Britain and internationally in defence of the social right to a secure, well-paid job.

British PM May to reveal “Plan B” as Brexit infighting continues

Robert Stevens 

Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May has been unable to secure any substantial concessions from the European Union on the transition arrangement for Britain leaving the bloc.

May is to give a statement to MPs today on how she intends to proceed after Parliament rejected her proposed Brexit deal with the EU and she survived a vote of no confidence in her crisis-ridden government. May has held phone discussions with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, but the EU is still saying the existing deal is not up for renegotiation.

In recent days, May has met with senior figures from her cabinet and from opposition parties, as well as leaders of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP). Since the 2017 general election, the DUP’s 10 MPs have kept the Tories in power via a confidence and supply arrangement.

Speculation has mounted that May will present only a “holding statement” to parliament, which could be amended by MPs.

There have been no discussions between May and Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who has insisted that May rule out a “no-deal Brexit” before any talks. The government has refused this condition, stating that it has no further plans to discuss with party leaders.

This did not stop Labour’s pro-EU Blairites from meeting cabinet office officials, despite Corbyn sending all MPs a letter calling for no talks with May. Yvette Cooper, who chairs the Home Affairs Select Committee, and Hilary Benn, who chairs the Brexit Select Committee, both defied Corbyn, as did John Mann and Stephen Kinnock, the son of former Labour leader Neil Kinnock.

Liberal Democrats leader Sir Vince Cable, whose party has just 11 MPs, is demanding a “People’s Vote,” i.e., a second referendum, hoping thereby to overturn the result of the 2016 referendum. Cable released a letter to the Observer that he had sent to Cabinet Minister David Lidington in which he estimated that “even without complete consensus across the house, legislation could be passed in six weeks and a referendum could be brought about within 16 weeks.”

May has consistently ruled out a second referendum and warned against efforts to overturn the Brexit vote.

With no breakthrough in the political stalemate, government officials are stepping up planning for a no-deal Brexit. On Sunday, Cabinet Minister Liam Fox warned in the Daily Telegraph that MPs seeking to rule out a no-deal Brexit—targeting former Tory minister Dominic Grieve—were in danger of unleashing a “political tsunami” from voters who support Leave.

With just over two months before the March 29 scheduled Brexit date, May is seeking to wind down the clock and force MPs to vote for her amended deal. In doing so, she is threatening both sides of the Brexit divide—Remain MPs, with a no-deal Brexit in which the UK would be forced to trade on World Trade Organization terms, and the Tories’ hard-Brexit wing, with the possibility of a second referendum and the failure of Brexit.

Although MPs voted for an amendment calling for May to come back to Parliament with a statement that could be voted on this week, the vote was not binding and May has moved the vote to January 29.

Today, Yvette Cooper is expected to move an amendment to the European Union Withdrawal Bill in an attempt to postpone Brexit.

John Rentoul wrote in the pro-Remain Independent, “The importance of Cooper’s bill is that it changes the default setting in law. At the moment, if Parliament fails to act, the UK will leave the EU on 29 March. Cooper’s bill says that, if a deal has not been approved by 7 March, the government would be required to seek an extension of the Article 50 deadline. That would mean asking the EU to postpone the UK’s departure until the end of this year—and EU leaders have said they would agree to an extension if it were to hold another referendum.”

This manoeuvre has the potential to backfire badly. Having taken what pro-Brexit MPs want “off the table,” Rentoul notes, “They would then have to choose between the prime minister’s deal and putting off Brexit for at least nine months.” This may have the effect of forcing Tory MPs who voted with the opposition last week to vote for May’s deal and give her the majority she needs.

The Blairites have stepped up pressure on Corbyn to commit Labour to support a second referendum on EU membership. Corbyn has maintained that he favours removing May through a general election. Only then, he says, would a second referendum be an option.

The pro-Remain Labour right and their cross-party allies have been warned, even in the pro-Remain press, that they may have substantially misread the national mood in believing that a “People’s Vote” is a magic bullet for overcoming the Brexit impasse.

On Saturday, the Guardian released the findings of an unpublished survey commissioned by the pro-EU Best for Britain group. It found that if Labour committed to stopping Brexit, almost a third of those likely to vote for the party would not do so. Just 25 percent of those likely to support Labour would do so if it committed to preventing Brexit. The poll, conducted by Populus, asked 2,000 people their views just before May’s deal was voted down last week.

Another poll by Survation found that if Labour backed a second referendum it was likely to lose votes at a general election.

A further poll published at the end of last week found that people in the UK oppose a new referendum by a margin of nearly two to one. In every region of the country with the exception of London, and there only by a few percentage points, the poll found more support for respecting the vote of the 2016 referendum. This was the case even in Scotland, which voted to remain in the EU in 2016.

Labour MP and Shadow Home Secretary Dianne Abbott warned again on BBC’s “Question Time” programme, “The thing about a second referendum is people should be careful what they wish for. My view, and I voted Remain, is that if we had a ‘People’s Vote’ tomorrow, Leave would win again. You’d just have a lot of angry Leave voters.”

The escalation of the crisis of class rule in Britain prompted fresh speculation regarding the possibility of a snap general election. However, for the Tories this carries the real risk of losing office and is therefore generally considered anathema. May suffered the collapse of her majority in the snap election she called in 2017.

The Blairites follow the Tories in their fear that an election could bring a Corbyn-led government to power that would be unable to control a resurgent movement of the working class, pressing the demand that Corbyn make good on his professed anti-austerity and anti-militarist polices.

The various options being debated—hard or soft Brexit, the Blairites’ “People’s Vote” or Corbyn’s call for a general election—are all concerned solely with securing the strategic interests of British imperialism as it enters a period of enormous political and social instability. The exclusive focus on Brexit conceals what is the central division in the UK as in every country—the yawning gulf between what Corbyn describes as “the many” and “the few”—or, more accurately, between the working class and the super-rich oligarchy.

Despite such rhetoric, Corbyn’s main role, in partnership with the unions, is to block an independent struggle by workers and young people against the class war being waged by the capitalists. This offensive continued last week even as MPs were preparing for the vote on May’s deal, with the government slipping through an announcement that starting on May 15, under a provision of the Universal Credit welfare system, thousands of the poorest pensioners will lose to up £7,000 annually.

Latest US airstrike kills scores in Somalia

Bill Van Auken

A US airstrike Saturday killed at least 52 people in Somalia, according to the Pentagon. As with all such attacks, the US military’s Africa Command (AFRICOM) claimed that all of the victims were members of the al-Shabab Islamist militia.

AFRICOM reported that the strike was carried out near Jilib, a town in the Middle Juba region of southern Somalia near the coast of the Indian Ocean.

It was the bloodiest US airstrike since October, when the US claimed to have killed about 60 fighters near the al-Shabab-controlled community of Harardere in Mudug province in the central part of the country.

The latest bombing came in response to an al-Shabab attack that threatened to overrun a garrison of US-backed Somali government troops.

Al-Shabab reported that its fighters had killed 41 Somali soldiers in attacks on two separate bases in the area.

The US has been waging a war in Somalia for a dozen years, yet has failed to crush al-Shabab, which controls broad swathes of territory in the south of the country and retains the ability to carry out armed attacks across wider areas of Somalia and over the border into Kenya.

Saturday’s airstrike comes in the wake of the internationally reported al-Shabab attack on a hotel and office complex in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi last week that claimed 21 lives.

The Islamist militia has conducted such attacks since Kenya, one of Washington’s closest allies in Africa, sent its army into Somalia to combat al-Shabab. In 2015, al-Shabab gunmen killed 148 students at Garissa University and in 2013 it attacked Nairobi’s luxury Westgate shopping mall in a three-day siege that killed 67 people.

Al-Shabab has managed to recruit inside Kenya, particularly after the country’s crisis-ridden government responded to these first two major attacks by rounding up thousands of ethnic Somalis who were subjected to police abuse. It appears that all six involved in the latest attack were Kenyans.

The US has at least 500 troops, most of them from special operations units, deployed inside Somalia. It has relied heavily, however, on a bombing campaign using drones and US warplanes. Since Donald Trump took office, AFRICOM has doubled the number of airstrikes on Somalia, and previous restrictions on US military commanders ordering such actions have been waived.

The bombing campaign, which has inflicted increasing civilian casualties, has served to stoke anti-US sentiments within a population that has suffered decades of war and foreign occupation and is largely hostile to the corrupt and incompetent government in Mogadishu, which is kept in office only thanks to US and other foreign troops.

Al-Shabab was formed in response to a 2006 US-backed invasion of Somalia by the Ethiopian army, a regime change operation that toppled a moderate Islamist government, the Islamic Courts Union, which had established its control over most of the country.

Ethiopian troops still comprise the bulk of the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM), a 20,000-strong African military force funded by Washington, which occupies the country.

The Ethiopian Defense Forces announced Saturday that they were preparing a major offensive against al-Shabab in retaliation for an attack by the Islamist militia that reportedly killed more than 50 Ethiopian soldiers.

Tensions between Somalis and the Ethiopian occupation force have risen in recent weeks with its intervention in Somalia’s South West State, where it killed 15 protesters, wounded many more and arrested over 300. The protests were provoked by the arrest of Muhktar Robow, the former second-in-command of al-Shabab, who quit the group and became the leading candidate for the presidency of the state.

The government subsequently expelled the United Nations representative in Somalia, Nicholas Haysom, after he raised questions about the involvement of UN-supported Somali security forces in the repression.

The Pentagon issued a review last June calling for cutting the number of special operations troops deployed across Africa in half as part of the Pentagon’s announced strategic shift from the war on terror to the preparation for great power conflicts with so-called “revisionist states” challenging US global hegemony, first and foremost China and Russia.

It appears, however, that the 12-year-old shadow war being waged in Somalia, behind the backs of the American people, will go on. Washington views the country through the prism of its strategic position bordering the Gulf of Aden, a key chokepoint for the maritime transit of oil.

US National Security Adviser John Bolton spelled out Washington’s aims in Africa, asserting in a bellicose speech delivered last month that counter-terrorism had been eclipsed by the objective of confronting “great power competitors, namely China and Russia”.

He accused both countries of pursuing “predatory practices” on the content that “threaten the financial independence of African nations; inhibit opportunities for US investment; interfere with US military operations; and pose a significant threat to US national security interests.” In other words, Beijing and Moscow are becoming impediments to US imperialism’s aim of asserting semi-colonial domination over Africa and its vast resources.

Bolton emphasized the strategic importance of the Horn of Africa, which includes Djibouti—where the US has its main African base (in addition to dozens of smaller ones in the region) and China has set up its only overseas military base—Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Somalia.

Determined to reverse its declining economic dominance in Africa by military means, US imperialism is prepared to continue and intensify the bloodletting in Somalia.

Can the EU Secure its Strategic Interests through the JCPOA?

Manuel Herrera

The EU’s strategic interests with regard to Iran and the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) rest on four main pillars: maintaining stability in the Persian Gulf which is vital for global oil supply and prices; resolving conflicts in the Middle East so as to prevent further refugee movement toward Europe; diversifying energy supplies by increasing Iranian imports and reducing Europe’s significant energy dependence on Russia; and boosting the export of its industrial goods by expanding economic relations with Iran to address weak European growth rates over the past decade. This article will explore these four pillars in pursuit of the argument that the JCPOA is critical to the EU’s strategic-security concerns, and consider the primary challenges that the EU faces in its attempts to preserve the deal.

Military Escalation in the Middle East and Consequences for the EU

The current US approach towards the Middle East - and particularly Iran - is seen with concern in Europe because it heightens the risk of a nuclear arms race and further military escalation in Europe’s backyard. In an already unstable region, US foreign policy towards Iran may force Tehran to resume its nuclear programme, and in the event that Iran is able to develop a nuclear weapon, this could likely trigger a US-Israeli bombing campaign. Iran, with decades-long experience in asymmetric warfare, would then mobilise its allies in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon in retaliation. And, with the Iranian bomb eventually becoming a real prospect, the temptation to emulate would become irresistible in Riyadh, Ankara and Cairo. Although this is a hypothetical scenario, the consequences of the Middle East plunging into a nuclear arms race and major regional war must be considered.

A major war in the Middle East will have an immense spillover effect on the EU. Since the beginning of the Syrian civil war in 2011, about one million displaced Syrians have moved to Europe - this figure will only increase. Also, a military confrontation where Iran is involved could easily disrupt oil and gas exports, in particular from the Gulf, with consequences for global prices. Additionally, any major war with Iranian involvement will paralyse European investments in the country. To Brussels, therefore, the JCPOA is much more than just a nuclear agreement. Its preservation is a strategic imperative.

Challenges Confronting the EU

Despite the chord that links the JCPOA to the EU’s security considerations, the latter has failed to achieve anything significant to preserve the deal so far because of the US withdrawal, and European companies fleeing Iran as a result. This draws from reasons arising from two different geographical contexts. The first reason is the EU’s inability to counter the US position on Iran. Economically, US dominance in the international financial system influences many European business decisions. Geopolitically, the US policy of ‘maximum pressure’ poses a big challenge to the EU policy of cooperation and rapprochement with Iran, of which the JCPOA is the centrepiece.

The second reason relates to Iran’s foreign policy rationalisation based on economic motivations. The Iranian regime has publicly stated that the country will leave the JCPOA if the deal is unable to fulfil its national interests, particularly those that relate to its economy. According to the World Bank, Iran’s annual GDP growth in 2017 was +3.8 per cent, -1.5 per cent in 2018, and is expected to be -3.6 per cent by 2019. Iran ended 2017 with an unemployment rate of 11.7 per cent; the rate increased to 12.1 per cent in 2018. Finally, despite the lack of official public figures on poverty in the country, it is estimated that more than 40 per cent of Iranian households live below the poverty line. If the JCPOA is unable to address these critical economic indicators, Iran may choose to abandon the deal and thereby forego the current limitations on their nuclear programme, which will once again have a negative fallout for security in Europe.

Conclusion

Safeguarding the JCPOA and managing a new relationship with Tehran is the best option for the EU to have a meaningful influence in a region where it has tangible security interests at stake. If the nuclear deal is undermined, instability in the Middle East is likely to deteriorate further. In this case, the EU will be dragged once again into a confrontational course with Iran and definitely suffer from regional de-stabilisation and escalation. In order to preserve the JCPOA, therefore, the EU must maintain commercial interactions with Iran, particularly through small and medium companies that do not operate in the US market. For example, Central and Eastern Europe have many local companies (most of which build medical equipment) that do not have a presence in the US market and thus have no reason to fear US secondary sanctions. Finally, the EU could also work on allowing Iran to export its oil to Europe and enable European financial institutions to process payments through alternative mechanisms such as ad hoc payment schemes or entities that channel Iranian payments.

The EU will have to necessarily undertake a set of targeted measures to help secure the JCPOA, and, as a consequence, its own strategic-security interests, in the face of opposition from the US, and a less than favourable regional environment. The silver lining despite this grim outlook is that ultimately, it is not all out of options.

East Africa Social Science Translation (EASST) Visiting Fellowship 2019 for East African Students

Application Deadline: 1st March 2019 11:59 pm U.S. Pacific Time.

Offered annually? Yes

Eligible Countries: Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Ethiopia, or Rwanda

To be taken at (country): USA

About Scholarship: The EASST Visiting Fellowship seeks to equip East African social scientists with the skills needed to carry out rigorous evaluations of social or economic development projects in East Africa. During a four-month fellowship, researchers will be based at the University of California, Berkeley during the Fall academic semester.
Our EASST fellows are able to audit courses, present research, attend seminars, develop curricula and design collaborative research projects. Fellows receive a living stipend, round-trip economy class air travel to Berkeley, CA, and the opportunity to receive seed funding promote impact evaluation at their home institution in East Africa.

Type: Research, Fellowship

Who is qualified to apply?

• Be a resident of an East African country participating in EASST (i.e. Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Ethiopia, or Rwanda);
• Have a PhD or Masters (completed within the last 5 years), or be enrolled in a doctoral program, in economics, statistics, epidemiology/public health, or other social science discipline;
• Have conducted an impact evaluation study (either randomized or quasi–experimental), or have an interest in micro-level data collection and quantitative analysis;
• Should hold a staff position at a research institution, university or other recognized national institution in East Africa that has an element of quantitative social science research;
• Will return to a university or research institute in East Africa for at least 1 year after the fellowship;
• Be computer literate and fluent in English.

Number of Awards: Several

What are the fellowship benefits? Fellows receive a living stipend, round-trip economy class air travel to Berkeley, CA, and the opportunity to receive seed funding promote impact evaluation at their home institution in East Africa.

Duration of Fellowship:  Fall 2019 (September – December) or Spring 2020 (January – May).

How to Apply: To apply, please review application information available through the Request for Applications, below. All materials should be submitted using the online platform in the Submittable link below

Visit the Scholarship Webpage for Details

“Made in China 2025” at centre of US-China economic war

Gabriel Black

The current negotiations between the US and China over a deal to end the Trump administration’s escalating trade war measures confront a major stumbling block—Beijing’s “Made in China 2025” program, which aims to elevate Chinese competitiveness in key hi-tech industries. The US regards the initiative as a major threat to its own global economic and strategic domination.

China’s meteoric rise has been based on the gross exploitation of hundreds of millions of workers. Shenzhen, the prized miracle of China’s economic “reform,” is the greatest sweatshop in history. The larger Pearl River Delta area, which includes Hong Kong, contains 120 million people. Many of them rural migrants, these workers have been stuffed into factories, assembling and producing goods in some of the world’s most difficult and demeaning conditions.

The Chinese Communist Party bureaucrats, and the oligarchs for whom the CCP speaks, have grown enormously wealthy by providing cheap labour to major global corporations. The Chinese state banks sit on an estimated $3 trillion of foreign reserves. Chinese capitalism, however, has reached a crucial juncture. Either the country remains stuck assembling and producing the world’s goods, in what economists call the “middle income trap,” or it can try to become an owner and designer of leading global commodities.

For the Chinese ruling class this is a life or death question. Amid mounting economic problems, it has no alternative but to take part in the highly profitable but cutthroat global competition to develop and sell high end goods. It is not surprising therefore that the US is determined to prevent such a challenge through all available means.

The “Made in China 2025” program, which was announced in 2015, provides state subsidies and support to encourage the domestic production of at least 70 percent of the components of 10 key high-tech industries. The program targets next generation information and telecommunications technology, particularly 5G, as well as advanced industrial and medical robotics, artificial intelligence, and electric cars—for which China, as the world’s largest oil importer, is desperate.

For all the hype in both the Chinese and US media, however, China has a long way to go. Though Chinese manufacturing has grown enormously, going from less than 10 percent of global value added in 2005 to 25 percent in 2015, it remains dependent on foreign companies for the most cutting-edge, high-tech products. For example, China consumes 60 percent of the world’s semiconductors, but it only produces 13 percent of the supply. The United States dwarfs Chinese chip makers, with China importing more than $200 billion worth of chips. The top US suppliers of chips—Intel, Broadcom and Qualcomm—are each at least 10 times the market capitalization of China’s biggest chip maker Shenzhen Huiding Technology.

Another example is robotics. China has the largest market for industrial robots in the world—with over 430,000 in operation. However, as Qu Daokui, deputy director of China’s State Engineering Research Center for Robotics notes, “Only a quarter of the robots in the Chinese market are domestically made and the three core parts and components of domestic robots have long relied on imports.”

In the past 10 years, China’s GDP and GDP per capita have trebled, but Chinese corporations lag behind on the world stage. Quantitatively, China’s companies are some of the biggest in the world, as a list of the largest corporations by revenue shows. However, these companies are frequently oriented towards China’s own domestic market in contradistinction to other top companies that sell their goods globally. For example, of the top 50 corporations in the world, 11 are Chinese. However, their focus is overwhelmingly domestic: construction, electricity, railway, insurance, SAIC, China’s domestically focused car company, and oil.

The US and its allies are determined to restrict the ability of Chinese corporations to break into global markets. Using the pretext of national security, the United States, Australia and New Zealand have blocked China’s cell phone giants, Huawei and ZTE, from developing 5G networks, including in collaboration with major companies like AT&T. Legislation was signed into law last year making it illegal for US government employees to use Huawei or ZTE phones.

In a further move against Huawei, Washington instigated the detention of its chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou by Canadian authorities and is pushing for her extradition to face charges of breaching unilateral US sanctions on Iran. The extraordinary step based on sanctions that have no international standing is another indication that the US will stop at nothing to undermine China.

While facing huge hurdles overcoming US-led opposition to it “climbing the technology ladder,” China has invested enormous sums trying to do so. Last year the National Science Board of the United States stated that China was poised to overpass the US in R&D spending by the end of the year. China has increased its spending an average of 18 percent per year between 2005 and 2015.

China is training large numbers of scientists and engineers. A National Science Board report found, “Between 2000 and 2014, the number of S&E bachelor’s degrees awarded in China rose more than 360 percent to 1.7 million. The US had more moderate growth (54 percent) over the same period.” Likewise, it showed that peer-reviewed science and engineering articles rose 8 percent every year between 2006 and 2016, while the US had an annual increase of just 1 percent.

The relationship between these quantitative indicators of technical growth and actual achievement is complex. China, for example, has surged in the number of patents that it files—surpassing the United States several years ago. However, US patents were about two times more likely to be accepted than Chinese patents, according to a report from the St. Louis Federal Reserve. Other measures, such as the Nature Index, which measures country-by-country contribution to the leading science journals, shows an unmistakable trend: a substantial development of the scientific output of Chinese universities.

Contributions to Top Scientific Journals by top five countries, source: Nature

In this context, the Trump administration has sought to restrict Chinese students entering the United States. Since last June the State Department has restricted visas for Chinese graduate students in sensitive areas of research—changing them from five-year to one-year visas, with increased scrutiny for acceptance.

The Trump administration’s focus on “Made in China 2025” is also bound up with US preparations for war. Beginning with the Obama administration’s “pivot to Asia,” and accelerated under Trump, the US has been engaged in a huge military build-up and strengthening of alliances and basing arrangements throughout the Indo-Pacific against China.

The US is determined to maintain its technical edge in military hardware and warfare systems by undermining China’s own technological development including through its “Made in China 2025,” a crackdown on China’s alleged intellectual property theft, and restrictions on Chinese citizens, including students, in the United States.

FBI director Christopher Wray bluntly told the US Senate last year, “One of the things we’re trying to do is view the China threat as not just a whole-of-government threat, but a whole-of-society threat on their end. And I think it’s going to take a whole-of-society response by us.”

As in the 1930s, trade war and other forms of economic rivalry and conflict are intimately bound up with the drive to war—in this case between nuclear armed powers. The intense hostility in Washington to “Made in China 2025” is another indication of the advanced character of the war preparations currently underway.

Canada ramps up anti-China campaign as US threatens action against Huawei

Roger Jordan 

Canada’s Liberal government and corporate media have ratcheted up their denunciations of China ahead of next week’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Launched with the arrest December 1 by Canadian authorities of Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of Huawei, China’s largest technology firm, the campaign is aimed at bringing the Canadian ruling elite fully into line with US imperialism’s aggressive course of confronting Beijing, both economically and militarily.

On Thursday, Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland declared that the Canadian delegation to Davos would raise the issue of two Canadians in Chinese custody with other attendees and appeal for them to speak out publicly against Beijing. Her reference is to former diplomat Michael Kovrig and businessman Michael Spavor, who were detained in China in the days following Meng’s arrest and accused of endangering national security.

A third Canadian, Robert Schellenberg, who was recently sentenced to 15 years in prison on a drug conviction, had his sentence hastily increased to the death penalty last Monday in what the Canadian government says is further retaliation for Meng’s arrest. Both Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Freeland have issued statements appealing for clemency for Schellenberg, with prime minister denouncing the application of the death penalty as “arbitrary.”

Freeland boasted that Canada has already secured public statements denouncing China from the United States, Britain, the European Union, France and Germany, among others. For its part, China attacked Canada for internationalizing the issue of the three detained Canadians and demanded that Ottawa respect the sovereignty of China’s courts.

Meng’s arrest, coming the same day as US President Donald Trump met Chinese President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the G-20 summit to negotiate a solution to the US-China trade conflict, was unprecedented in its brazenness. Even former Liberal Deputy Prime Minister John Manley acknowledged that it may have been wiser to have quietly warned Meng not to fly through Canada so as to evade the US extradition. The Trump administration, which instigated Meng’s arrest, is calling for her extradition on trumped-up charges of bank fraud related to Washington’s illegal sanctions against Iran. If deported and convicted, Meng could face 30 years in prison.

The Canadian government feels it can act so provocatively because its demonization of China is part of a broader offensive against Beijing led by US imperialism. On Thursday, a report revealed that the US is considering charging Huawei with stealing trade secrets, in what would mark a major escalation of Washington’s conflict with Beijing. German officials also indicated that Berlin is considering banning Huawei from its 5G network.

These moves come in the context of the intensification of Trump’s drive to economically isolate China. Tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese imports have been imposed by Trump, as well as a ban on US government agencies doing business with Huawei over national security concerns. This has been accompanied by comments from supporters of Trump’s aggressive strategy calling for the US economy to “decouple” from trade with China, a policy that recalls the protectionism of the 1930s that played a major role in setting the stage for World War II.

The US ruling elite, supported by its Canadian ally, is determined to prevent China’s rise as an economic rival, which is calling US global hegemony into question. In doing so, Washington is not merely relying on economic means, but is more than ready to resort to all-out war. Last October, Vice President Mike Pence delivered a bellicose speech in which he railed against Chinese expansion and vowed that the US was preparing for a direct military conflict with China—a conflict which would be fought with nuclear weapons.

Having served as US imperialism’s closest military-strategic partner for over seven decades, Canadian imperialism is playing a key role in this aggressive agenda. It has been intimately involved in US military operations in the Asia-Pacific since the Obama administration’s “pivot” to Asia. This includes a secret agreement with the US military on the joint management of resources, and the deployment of Canadian ships and personnel to the highly volatile South China Sea and Korean Peninsula. In 2017, the Liberal government also identified China as a “global threat” in its new defence policy.

However, factions of the US and Canadian establishments, led by the military-intelligence chiefs and the corporate media, remain dissatisfied with Canada’s supposed failure to go far enough in confronting Beijing. Underscoring the bipartisan character of the anti-China campaign in the US, Senator Mark Warner, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Republican Senator Marco Rubio have both warned Canada that its failure to ban Huawei from its 5G network as the US, Australia and New Zealand have done would result in a downgrading of intelligence sharing between Washington and Ottawa.

Ward Elcock, former director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, the country’s primary spy agency, told the Globe and Mail Thursday that such threats from the US must be taken seriously. The same Globe article noted that assistant director of intelligence at CSIS, Michael Peirce, issued a warning to Canada’s research universities last October about doing business with Huawei.

For some, even banning Huawei, which would cost Canadian telecommunications providers hundreds of millions of dollars to replace Huawei-made equipment, wouldn’t go far enough. Writing in the Toronto Star, business columnist David Olive urged the Trudeau government to break off diplomatic ties with Beijing over their detention of Kovrig and Spavor. “China needs to know in forceful ways that its continued brutal treatment of Canadians will come at a heavy price,” Olive wrote. “This is a time for severing diplomatic relations with China. It’s also appropriate for Ottawa to revoke its approval of the $40-billion LNG Canada mega-project in B.C. unless state-owned PetroChina relinquishes its stake in the consortium.”

In the neoconservative National Post, Kelly McParland attacked China for its “boorish, threatening and ill-tempered” behaviour.

The bourgeois press has further inflamed the dispute between Canada and China since Meng’s arrest. Both the National Post and the Globe explicitly welcomed her detention as an opportunity to shift public opinion on Canada’s policy to China. Although important sections of the ruling elite have been pushing for some time for a free trade agreement with Beijing to open up new markets for Canadian energy and raw material exports, the past several months have demonstrated that the overwhelming majority of the establishment stands full square behind Washington’s provocative anti-China drive.

Incapable of appealing to the international working class to oppose the imperialist onslaught against China, the regime in Beijing, which represents the interests of a wealthy capitalist oligarchy, has reacted by whipping up reactionary nationalism. At a press conference Thursday, Chinese ambassador to Canada Lu Shaye vowed that Beijing would retaliate against Canada if it bans Huawei. “I hope Canadian officials and relevant authorities and bodies will make a wise decision on this issue,” said Lu. “But if the Canadian government does ban Huawei from participating in the 5G networks, I believe there will be repercussions.”

Responding to the Trudeau government’s call for the release of the arrested Canadians, Lu denounced Canada for “white supremacy” and “Western egotism.” Beijing also issued a travel warning for Chinese visitors to Canada.

Tesla, Nissan announce mass layoffs, Fiat Chrysler jobs threatened

Marcus Day 

Signaling an expansion of the global onslaught on jobs, automakers Tesla, Inc. and Nissan Motor Co. announced plans for layoffs in the United States on Thursday and Friday. Altogether, nearly 4,000 workers' jobs are on the chopping block at the two companies.

The job cuts come as part of a wave of planned sackings and cost cuts throughout the industry. The auto giants are seeking to terrorize an increasingly insurgent workforce into submission, as the companies confront slumping sales, a looming economic crisis, significant financial pressure from rising commodity prices and the impact of escalating trade wars, and the ever-present pressure by Wall Street and the big banks to reduce costs.

Nissan, based in Japan and the world’s sixth-largest automaker, has been plagued in recent months by the scandal surrounding the arrest of its former chairman, Carlos Ghosn, based on allegations of unreported earnings. Behind Ghosn’s arrest, maneuvers and conflicts are taking place among the company’s directors over a possible merger with Renault, one of Nissan’s two partners.

The cuts announced by the company Thursday will reportedly target nearly 700 contract workers at its Canton, Mississippi, assembly plant. Nissan will eliminate one shift each involved in the production of vans and pickup trucks. The job reductions in Mississippi come less than a month after Nissan stated that it would lay off some 1,000 workers at plants in Aguascalientes and Morelos in Mexico.

Tesla, the California-based electric vehicle manufacturer, revealed Friday that it plans to cut its workforce by seven percent, or approximately 3,150 jobs according to industry analysts' estimates.

Tesla has struggled to meet production targets of its “low-cost” Model 3 sedan over the past year, and shares dropped 13 percent on the announcement. The company has also revealed its intentions to drop prices slightly on its entry-level car, in an effort to offset the phasing out of consumer tax credits.

CEO Elon Musk, in the email announcing the cuts, alluded ominously to the speed-up, which will face the remaining workers, who are already under enormous and nearly intolerable pressure.

“Tesla will need to make these cuts while increasing the Model 3 production rate and making many manufacturing engineering improvements in the coming months,” he wrote, adding, “There isn’t any other way.”

In the face of mounting attacks autoworkers, long suppressed by the pro-company unions, are moving into open rebellion, as demonstrated by the ongoing wildcat strike wave by tens of thousands of maquiladora workers just across the US border in Matamoros, Mexico. Opposition is developing among the working class internationally, with spontaneous walkouts and job actions occurring recently at General Motors’ Oshawa, Ontario assembly plant and at the nearby parts supplier Inteva.

In November, General Motors fired the opening shot in the latest jobs massacre when it announced plans to idle four factories in the United States, one in Canada, and two as-yet unnamed plants overseas, wiping out approximately 15,000 jobs. The announcement followed GM’s closure of its assembly plant in Gunsan, South Korea, last May, laying off thousands. Industry analysts have indicated in recent weeks that a number of GM engine and engine component plants may soon also face cuts, such as plants in Romulus and Flint, Michigan.

Last week, Ford announced plans to shutter plants and slash thousands of positions at its operations in Europe, as part of a $14 billion dollar cost-cutting plan. In addition, the company earlier indicated plans to significantly reduce its global salaried workforce, and is cutting shifts at its US operations.

On Tuesday, Ford also revealed the first stages of its long-signaled intentions to form an alliance with Germany’s Volkswagen, in a move that bodes even more sackings and plant consolidations.

The same day Ford announced its plans for reductions in Europe, Jaguar Land Rover, the United Kingdom’s largest automaker, confirmed its previously indicated aim to slash some 4,500 jobs.

The global character of the attack on jobs underscore the importance of the February 9 demonstration against layoffs and concessions at General Motors’ headquarters in Detroit. The action has been called by the Steering Committee for the Coalition for Rank-and-File Committees in order to launch a counter-offensive by workers to reverse decades of attacks on their living standards.

Fiat Chrysler, the smallest of the Detroit Three automakers, has yet to indicate mass layoffs on the order of GM and Ford, having drastically reduced its US footprint and ending car production following the 2009 bailout and bankruptcy restructuring. However, it faces enormous pressures to cut costs in the wake of the imposition of $800 million in fines and other charges to settle lawsuits relating to the rigging of diesel emissions tests.

Autoworkers at the company’s Belvidere Assembly Plant, just outside Rockford in northern Illinois, have contacted the World Socialist Web Site Autoworker Newsletter to report the layoff of an entire shift is imminent.

“We are up in the air right now about C shift going away,” said Steve, a C shift worker at the plant. “We are in limbo and only building like 400 cars per shift and when the number is met they are short shifting.”

“I know FCA is holding out and going to pit plants against each other for future product and seek more concessions because it is a contract year. Our local union knows this and they usually concede to the company.”

“There are a lot of pissed off workers here about the collusion between the UAW and Big Three,” he continued, referring to the corruption scandal in which the UAW was shown to have taken millions in bribes from the company. “They told us recently when taking suggestions for future contract negotiations that we cannot submit anything about pay. But a majority want COLA back and no more tiers.”

Roughly 5,000 work at the plant, producing the Jeep Cherokee. The layoff of an entire shift, over 1,500 workers, in the economically depressed Rockford area would pose catastrophic consequences for workers and their families.

John, another worker on C shift, said, “Employees will be displaced, all while sales are up, profits are up, but yet they tell us it’s because of slumping sales…Right now, we’re not sure when this is supposed to take place, but we’re hearing sometime in March.”

“The workers get screwed so the CEOs and their shareholders stay profitable,” Steve continued. “That’s the corporate oligarchy we live under.”

“All I can say is it won’t work in the end... Oligarchs will lose!”

Referring to the yellow vest protests by workers against inequality in France, he said, “I believe we need a massive global movement/protest to turn the tide. [I’m hoping that] the government shutdown along with all the other protests going on would start our own massive yellow vest movement across the country.”

Whether at Fiat Chrysler, GM, Ford, Nissan, or the many parts and supplier companies, workers must reject the demand that they suffer the continued destruction of their jobs and livelihoods.

Workers should look to the courageous example of those striking at the maquiladora sweatshops in Matamoros, Mexico, where workers are rejecting the despised and corrupt unions and are in the initial stages of forming their own organizations.

Across the auto and auto parts plants throughout North America, workers should organize meetings and act to elect and organize rank-and-file factory committees, independent of the unions, linking their struggle with striking Los Angeles teachers and government workers as well as reaching out across borders to their brothers and sisters in other countries.

Above all, workers must recognize they are in a struggle against not just one or another greedy corporation; they are locked in conflict with the entire capitalist system and the political parties and organizations which defend it. In order to secure the needs of the working class, a new political strategy is needed, i.e., socialism, which means the fight for social equality, not the profit interest of the corporations and super-rich.

Science and social crisis in 2019

Bryan Dyne

In the opening days of the new year, a series of major scientific breakthroughs have demonstrated humanity’s immense capacity for understanding the world and using this knowledge to solve the many social ills plaguing modern life:

• On January 1, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft flew past the Kuiper Belt object Ultima Thule. It was the second astronomical body observed by New Horizons, after Pluto, and the most distant asteroid ever observed by a robotic explorer launched from Earth. The data sent back by the probe, through the combined efforts of an international team of hundreds of scientists and engineers, has already begun to inform the research describing the early history of our Solar System.

• On January 3, the China National Space Administration (CNSA) lunar exploration mission Chang’e 4 achieved the first soft landing on the far side of the Moon and successfully deployed its rover Yutu-2. The scientific payloads were developed and are operated in tandem with researchers in China, Germany, the Netherlands, Saudi Arabia and Sweden. It sent back the first closeup images of the less explored half of the Moon via a relay satellite positioned so as to be able to communicate with Earth and the lander simultaneously. Both New Horizons and Chang’e 4 are among the dozens of spacecraft, landers and rovers that are currently studying the Earth, Sun, Moon, Mars, Venus, Jupiter, asteroids, comets and even the regions immediately outside our Solar System.

• On January 4, plant scientists from the United States Department of Agriculture and the University of Illinois showed that it is possible to make genetically engineered plants that fix a “glitch” in photosynthesis. This flaw sometimes causes plants to produce toxins within themselves that must be expunged. Crops grown without this flaw could improve their productivity by 40 percent, which has the potential to help mitigate climate change and abolish world hunger.

• On January 14, scientists operating Chang’e 4 announced the successful germination of food and clothing crops on the Moon, under the very low gravity of that body and after being bathed in solar radiation. Cotton, potato and rapeseed were all grown inside a miniature, artificial self-sustaining environment that was launched as part of the spacecraft’s scientific payload. While the experiment has reportedly reached the end of its lifespan, it was a critical step towards establishing and maintaining human life on the Moon, Mars and beyond.

• Concurrently, machine learning and artificial intelligence are becoming more and more integrated with aspects of modern life, including medicine, transportation and manufacturing. Computer scientists are constantly exploring new ways to use this technology and they have encountered as yet no limits. Whole cities are steadily becoming powered by AI. Self-driving cars are on the verge of mass implementation.

Each of these advances demonstrates the potential to alleviate the need for backbreaking labor, to vastly reduce the time and human resources needed to build homes, schools and hospitals, to roboticize farming and transportation and to develop breakthroughs in medicine and human health. They are powerful rebukes to the incessant contemporary glorification of irrationalism, whether through the cultivation of backwardness and religious prejudice or the promotion of postmodernism and its rejection of objective truth. They stand as a mighty vindication of the materialist understanding of the world, that there are objective laws of nature and that humans can comprehend them and through practice based on that understanding, shape the world to improve human life.

These breakthroughs, on the other hand, contrast sharply with similar developments in society that have heralded 2019:

• The most recent data collected from UNICEF, the World Health Organization and the World Bank show that one in nine human beings, 815 million people, face malnourishment or hunger and 9.1 million people starve to death annually. These figures include 150 million children who are hungry and 3.1 million children who starve to death each year.

• There are currently 68.5 million people fleeing war, persecution and oppression. The UN estimates there are an additional 210 million people who have been displaced as a result of climate change.

• Fascist and extreme right ideologies are once again being promoted by the political establishments in every country. Far-right parties are part of the governments in Italy, Austria, Brazil, Poland, Hungary, Japan, Finland, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, the Philippines and Greece. The Alternative for Germany (AfD) has been welcomed into German parliament committees and their policies on refugees and internal security have been adopted by the German state. In France, President Macron has openly praised the country’s World War II-era fascist dictator Marshal Philippe Petain.

• Thousands of scientists at NASA, NOAA, the NSF, the USDA and the National Institutes of Health are currently furloughed as a result of the government shutdown. Dozens of long term experiments that are critical to monitoring Earth’s climate, agriculture and public health are being increasingly disrupted. This disaster for scientific research comes as both Democrats and Republicans agree that the latest developments in modern technology, including drones and sensors, should be deployed against desperate refugees fleeing US-backed oppression and poverty in Central America.

These are only some of the contradictions of life in the 21st century. Even as technology is used to probe deep space, develop higher forms of global coordination and unlock the potential of key biological processes, it is being used to increase militarization, censorship and oppression at home and abroad. Every advance made in space exploration is intertwined with increased militarization internationally and the growing threat of world war. For every rocket that is aimed to study the cosmos, many more are developed and built to destroy either a part or the whole of humanity. Crop science is not used to feed the tens of millions of starving humans on six continents but to increase the profits and market dominance of a few agriculture conglomerates and to develop biological and chemical warfare. Science under capitalism is used to increase, not decrease, social inequality.

Artificial intelligence plays a particularly sinister role. It is being increasingly used by companies such as Amazon, Uber and Lyft to track every move employees make and force them to work longer and harder. Tens of thousands of jobs will be eliminated as automation becomes more and more commonplace. And it has been deployed on a mass scale by Google, Facebook and other tech companies in conjunction with US military and intelligence agencies to impose censorship on left-wing, anti-capitalist and socialist publications, track down immigrants with facial recognition, spy on virtually every human being and make war against the world’s population on an ever increasing scale.

Both factions of the US ruling elite are at war with science. Trump and the Republicans deny climate change and openly promote religious obscurantism. Official liberalism and academia are in thrall to the postmodernists who reject any conception of objective truth and the application of science to human thought, society, and culture, denying in particular the revolutionary role of the working class.

In contrast, Marxists insist that science can and must be applied to society itself, above all, to the socio-economic structures in which humanity is currently trapped. This means cutting through the ideological domination of the corporate elite, and studying the unfolding events from the standpoint of the class forces at work. This means taking up a study of Marxism, which bases its revolutionary politics on an analysis of objective reality and class interests, and it means a turn toward the working class, the only progressive, revolutionary and international social force on the planet.

The working class offers humanity an alternative to the war, poverty, and social misery that are endemic to capitalism. It is noteworthy that, in the ongoing Los Angeles Teachers strike, educators are demanding not only better pay and smaller class sizes, but the defense of public education from a capitalist oligarchy intent on gutting it. While the ruling elite is set on dragging society backwards, the working class, in the struggle for socialism, offers it a way forward.

Only in a socialist society can the vast scientific and technological achievements of mankind be transformed from cudgels for enforcing class exploitation and fighting war, to the instruments of securing a prosperous and fulfilling life for all people.