More brinksmanship in Brexit talks as deadline extended again

Robert Stevens

The British government and European Union (EU) failed to reach agreement Sunday on a trade deal to follow Britain’s exit from the bloc in less than three weeks, on January 1, 2021.

As talks floundered and the deadline set on Wednesday by UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen loomed, both agreed to extend negotiations yet again.

The decision was made in an afternoon phone call yesterday between the two after hours of talks over the weekend in Brussels. Johnson and von der Leyen issued a joint statement reading, “Despite the fact that deadlines have been missed over and over we think it is responsible at this point to go the extra mile.” It concluded, “We have accordingly mandated our negotiators to continue the talks and to see whether an agreement can even at this late stage be reached.”

Prime Minister Boris Johnson briefs members of his Cabinet from his office in Downing Street, after his call with the President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen after further talks on Brexit (Credit: Andrew Parsons/Flickr)

Earlier Sunday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel came out in support of extending talks.

Following his call with the EC president, Johnson reiterated, “I’m afraid we’re still very far apart on some key things, but where there’s life, there’s hope. We’re going to keep talking to see what we can do… The UK certainly won’t be walking away from the talks.”

In the run up to the extension, both sides stepped up their grandstanding to exert maximum pressure. Various reports stated that progress had been made but sticking points remained on Brussels demands that the UK was unable to accept. On Friday, Johnson said it was “very, very likely” that the talks would end in failure and that the UK was continuing preparations for a “no-deal Brexit” trading on World Trade Organisation terms from next month.

While extending the talks, the EU is seeking to ensure that its 27 member states do not offer the UK any concessions that would replicate EU membership benefits. “According to a diplomatic note seen by the Financial Times ,” the newspaper reported Saturday, “EU member states were warned by Brussels not to do anything that would ease the consequences of a no-deal end to the Brexit transition period on January 1.” “One EU official familiar with the discussion said Brussels was under ‘no illusion’ that a no-deal Brexit would be highly unpredictable, reported the FT, adding that the source said, “Everyone understands there are no guarantees the British come back to the table.”

Last Thursday the EU laid out a series of proposals to the UK that would allow, in the event of a no-deal, airlines to continue flying normal routes between the EU and UK and hauliers to continue to cross the English Channel. The FT reported that the “decision not to include the so-called ‘fifth freedom’—allowing intra-EU airfreight movements”—in the proposals offered to Britain, “and to deny ‘cabotage’ rights that would allow British trucks to make drop-offs around Europe were explicitly designed to keep up the pressures, diplomats were told.”

On Saturday, the FT reported, “Although both sides have sounded increasingly pessimistic over the prospects for a deal ahead of the end of Britain’s Brexit transition period on January 1, the talks have narrowed to one main outstanding issue.” Saturday’s negotiations had “centred on trying to accommodate the EU’s demands for a mechanism that would make tariff-free trade dependent on the two sides maintaining a regulatory ‘level playing field.’”

On Sunday, UK Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab attacked the demand saying, “I don’t think we want a nuclear style reaction where tariffs go up, where we’re back in the same soap opera or drama every couple of years just because there’s a particular issue in a particular sector.”

In a move underscoring the heightening of tensions between Europe’s major powers, the UK’s Ministry of Defence said that in preparation for no agreement on fishing rights in the ongoing talks, four 80-metre machine gun-armed Royal Navy vessels had been placed on standby to guard British waters from EU trawlers, mainly from France, from January 1. The Daily Express front page headlined, "Gunships to guard our fish”. The Daily Mail’s read, “We’ll Send In Gunboats,” with the accompanying article reading, “In a dramatic ratcheting-up of No Deal contingency planning, Wildcat and Merlin helicopters are also being placed on standby to help with coastal surveillance. And military personnel have been seconded to the Joint Maritime Security Centre to help deal with any clashes in fishing grounds.”

On Sunday Raab continued the offensive over the fishing issue, telling Sky’s Ridge on Sunday show, “The bottom line is actually if we do leave on WTO terms we'll be an independent coastal state. Of course we're going to enforce our waters around fisheries and whatever else. And of course for the French and others, that will mean—you know, forget those outlandish terms that they were asking of us—their fishing industries would have zero access guaranteed.”

He added, “I think the EU is concerned that actually Britain might do rather well once we leave the EU and is worried about the competitive advantage, even on the normal global rules that apply.”

The hardline pose struck by Johnson led to consternation among senior figures in his Conservative government. Conservative chair of the Commons defence committee, Tobias Ellwood, a former captain in the Royal Green Jackets infantry regiment, declared, “I think these headlines are absolutely irresponsible. We need to be focusing on what is already in the bag—98 percent of the deal is there, there are three or four outstanding issues.”

While Johnson leads a party with a substantial pro-Brexit majority, with many having no qualms about exiting without a deal, those such as Ellwood are supportive of securing a deal with the EU, echoing majority opinion in business and financial circles that this is vital for their strategic interests.

The opposition Labour Party are pledged that if a deal is struck, they will not oppose it in parliament. On Sunday, a party spokesman said, “The Conservatives promised the British people that they had an oven-ready deal and that they would get Brexit done. The government needs to deliver on that promise, get us the deal and allow us to move on as a country.”

The EU’s fears of the dire implications of a hard-Brexit were outlined Sunday by Spain's foreign minister, Arancha Gonzalez, in an interview with Sky News. Failure to reach a trade deal should be avoided “at all costs,” she warned. “No-deal in the current circumstances would be extremely negative for our economies. And if you go by what economists are saying, and there is plenty of literature on that, the UK would suffer even more than the European Union. We both will suffer, more on the UK side, which I think is something we should try to avoid at all costs.”

Later Sunday, both sides let it be known that talks could go right down to the wire. The FT quoted a “senior British official” stating, “We have time on our side to ratify—we can go up until Christmas.”

US recognizes Morocco’s annexation of Western Sahara

Jean Shaoul

President Donald Trump has hailed Morocco’s agreement to begin normalizing relations with Israel in return for US recognition of Morocco’s illegal annexation of the Western Sahara, which Morocco has long demanded.

Ending years of official US support for a UN-brokered resolution of the long-running conflict, Trump tweeted December 10, “Today, I signed a proclamation recognizing Moroccan sovereignty over the Western Sahara. Morocco's serious, credible, and realistic autonomy proposal is the ONLY basis for a just and lasting solution for enduring peace and prosperity!”

Separately, he added, “Our two GREAT friends Israel and the Kingdom of Morocco have agreed to full diplomatic relations—a massive breakthrough for peace in the Middle East!”

A Polisario tank division, 2012 (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

The US became the first country to formally recognize Morocco’s sovereignty over Western Sahara, the former Spanish colony with considerable mineral and phosphate deposits, as well as rich Atlantic fisheries and potentially significant offshore oil reserves.

Trump’s tweet follows his recognition of Israeli sovereignty over Syria’s Golan Heights, seized during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, and his decision to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. This time he has recognized the annexation of an entire country in defiance of several UN Security Council resolutions.

All three instances constitute flagrant violations of international law, which outlaws the acquisition of territory by force. Such annexations were declared illegal under the Geneva Conventions enacted in the wake of the Second World War to prevent the repetition of actions like those carried out by Germany’s Nazi regime. Trump has thumbed his nose at the entire post-World War II international order and the international rule of law, and signaled that militarism, territorial expansion, and colonialism are the order of the day.

In 1975, Morocco forcibly annexed the vast but sparsely populated territory of Western Sahara in contravention of an International Court of Justice ruling and without consulting the local Sahrawi people. This followed secret talks between Madrid, the occupying power, Rabat and Washington in which Spain agreed to cede control to Morocco. The Polisario Front, the military wing of the self-proclaimed national-bourgeois Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR), declared independence for Western Sahara and fought a 16-year war with support from Libya and Algeria against Morocco and Mauritania.

Mauritania also laid claim to part of the territory but withdrew its claims in 1979. The war ended with a 1991 ceasefire, dividing the country, with Morocco holding 80 percent of the territory.

In 1991, the UN mission to Western Sahara was established to resolve the dispute via negotiations and organize a referendum on the territory’s future—to remain a part of Morocco, become an autonomous province or become independent. It dragged on for decades without ever holding a referendum, leaving the territory under the de facto control of Morocco.

Since then, there have been several UN Security Council resolutions supporting Western Sahara’s self-determination. In 2007, Morocco announced its Autonomy Plan for Western Sahara that proposed making Western Sahara a semi-autonomous region under Morocco’s sovereignty, which the Polisario rejected in favor of a referendum for an “independent Sahrawi state” in Western Sahara. The UN mission’s mandate was renewed by the Security Council less than six weeks ago on October 30, with US support.

Last month, fighting broke out between Moroccan military forces and the Polisario after Rabat sent troops to reopen a highway linking Morocco, the Western Sahara and Mauritania that was occupied by protesters. This brought an end to the 1991 ceasefire—a move that had the potential to lead to a renewed outbreak of hostilities with Algeria, which has supported the Polisario and is home to 175,000 Sahrawi refugees.

While Algeria adopted a relatively muted stance over the outbreak of hostilities, Prime Minister Abdulaziz Djerad has denounced Trump’s decision, saying it was designed to destabilize his country, which borders the Sahel that has become a powder keg after the US and European-led wars in Libya and Mali.

The African Union—which 30 years ago recognized Sahrawi independence, prompting Morocco to leave the organization until rejoining recently—adopted a notably disinterested stance on Rabat’s military operation, merely calling for restraint. Several Gulf Arab states publicly backed Morocco.

Hours after Trump’s tweeting of US recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara, including the Polisario-controlled areas of the territory, Washington announced a $1 billion arms sale to Morocco including the sale of at least four large aerial drones and precision guided weapons.

The announcement of the normalization of relations between Israel and Morocco, reportedly brokered by the United Arab Emirates, comes after over six decades of backroom talks between the two countries on issues ranging from trade and security to intelligence-sharing. In the 1950s, King Hassan II permitted the mass emigration of Jews to Israel—Moroccan Jews now form one of the largest Jewish communities in Israel—and bought weaponry and surveillance technology from Israel. Morocco also shared intelligence with Israel, to the extent that in 1965 the king sought Mossad’s help in locating and disposing of the anti-monarchist, nationalist leader Mehdi Ben Barka, whose tortured body was never found.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu celebrated Trump’s announcement as “another great light of peace,” predicting “a very warm peace” given Israel’s longstanding relations with Morocco. At pains to keep his Blue and White coalition partners out of the discussions, who only heard the news from US officials, he is seeking to bolster his position in the face of criminal proceedings, a disintegrating coalition, and potentially fresh elections.

King Mohammed VI, who controls much of Morocco’s economy and its wealth through a complex web of companies, speaks for the Moroccan elite at the expense of the broad mass of its largely youthful population, with social discontent over unemployment and poverty rising. It is this that determines his orientation towards US imperialism and the Gulf petro-monarchies.

Trump’s recognition of Morocco’s sovereignty over Western Sahara was the quid pro quo for Morocco’s formal recognition of Israel, following the path laid by the UAE, Bahrain—a de facto colony of Saudi Arabia—and Sudan. Like Bahrain, Morocco, which has had close relations with Saudi Arabia and sent troops to support its war against the Houthi rebels in Yemen, will have received a green light from Riyadh.

Notwithstanding King Mohammed VI’s call to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas professing the contrary, another Arab regime has very publicly signaled that the Palestinian issue is no longer of any consequence. Saudi Arabia’s Arab Initiative, endorsed by the Arab League in 2002, that made normalization of relations with Israel dependent upon its full withdrawal from the Occupied Territories, a “just settlement” of the Palestinian refugee problem based on UN Resolution 194, and the establishment of a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital, the so-called “two state solution,” is a dead letter.

The fate of the Palestinians, which for decades defined the Arab states’ attitude towards the Zionist state, has been unceremoniously dumped.

The agreements have nothing to do with peace—none of the four states that have agreed to normalize relations with Israel have ever been at war with the country. They are bound up with the Trump administration’s broad anti-Iranian axis, being formed in preparation for a potentially catastrophic war aimed at regime-change in Tehran, rolling back Chinese and Russian influence in the region and reinforcing US hegemony over the resource-rich Middle East and North Africa. Morocco severed diplomatic relations with Tehran in 2018, accusing it of backing the Polisario.

To this end, Trump has offered the necessary bribes and sweeteners: F35 fighter jets for the UAE, US protection for Bahrain, and the removal of Sudan from the US list of state sponsors of terrorism that will enable the country’s rulers to access international finance.

Open schools and businesses in Germany are leading to record infections and mass death

Marianne Arens

The coronavirus pandemic has long run out of control in Germany. New record numbers are being reported daily. On Friday, the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) reported the second consecutive daily record, with almost 30,000 new infections registered in 24 hours. Also, almost 600 COVID-19 patients died again in one day. This brings the total number of deaths to 21,000, and another 10,000 could be added by the end of the year. About 4,400 coronavirus patients are fighting for their lives in intensive care units.

A pupil drives by a subway train in Frankfurt, Germany, Wednesday, Nov. 25, 2020. (AP Photo/Michael Probst)

With these explosive figures, Germany has catapulted to the top of the European infection rankings. In terms of daily infection figures, it now ranks ahead of France, Britain and Italy. In Europe, 446,000 people have died of COVID-19 so far, which is more than a quarter of the almost 1.6 million coronavirus deaths globally. Twenty million people worldwide are currently fighting the SARS-CoV-2 lung disease, and 70 million have been infected since the beginning of the pandemic.

The scale of this “winter of death” confirms all warnings of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) and the World Socialist Web Site. Already in the spring, we called on workers to form rank-and-file safety committees to take protection from the pandemic into their own hands independently of the trade unions. Long before the beginning of the autumn semester, the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (Socialist Equality Party, SGP), the WSWS and the IYSSE youth and student organization called on students, teachers, educators and parents to take action for their own protection and that of their children.

“By returning to face-to-face teaching amidst rising infection rates, governments of all stripes are putting the health and lives of countless teachers, students and parents at risk,” we wrote in our August 14 statement titled “Stop school openings! Prepare for a general strike!” We predicted: “The mass deaths of teachers, parents and even students will be condoned in order to force workers back to work and secure the profits of the rich.”

This warning has been tragically confirmed.

On Thursday, Lothar H. Wieler, the head of the Robert Koch Institute called the spread of the coronavirus infection throughout the population “alarming.” There are now about twice as many outbreaks in nursing homes and homes for the elderly as in the spring. The measures officially ordered so far are wholly insufficient, he said. The number of deaths would continue to rise in the coming weeks, Wieler confirmed, and more and more intensive care units will reach their limits.

This was confirmed two days ago when the University Hospital of Augsburg halted all admissions for non-urgent treatment. The hospital was at full capacity with 163 COVID-19 patients, 33 of them in intensive care, the medical director of the hospital, Michael Beyer, told the Bavarian Broadcasting Corporation (BR). A doctor from the University Hospital pointed out that now, considerably more young patients were having to fight for their lives. “They are around 30, around 40, have no pre-existing conditions whatsoever and sometimes conduct this fight unsuccessfully.”

The unsafe opening of schools after the summer vacations has played a decisive role in the spread of the pandemic. Numerous serious scientific studies now prove this. Most recently, a large-scale study commissioned by the Austrian Ministry of Education clearly showed that schoolchildren are infected practically as frequently as adults. Since the autumn of 2020, the study has observed around 14,800 school children aged between 6 and 15 years and compared them with 1,200 teachers in terms of SARS-CoV-2. The only difference, the study found, was that children show fewer symptoms. As a result, coronavirus infection was less frequently detected in them. Nevertheless, children could pass on the virus to other social layers with devastating consequences.

This was also confirmed by a research group at the Karlsruhe University KIT. The group investigated the effectiveness of various measures to contain the pandemic in the spring. Like other researchers in Vienna and Oxford, this group concluded that “a significant effect” could be observed following school closures. The sooner schools were closed in the spring, the more the effect of falling case numbers became apparent, as Dr. Niklas Kühl, head of the research institute in Karlsruhe, explained. “If we had waited one day longer in the spring in Germany before closing schools, this would have meant 125,000 additional infections, according to our analyses, and closure seven days later, even 400,000 additional cases.”

These findings have been known for a long time. However, the positions of the scientists are being suppressed and they are put under pressure, so they do not speak about their results too loudly. Christian Drosten, head of virology at the Charité hospital in Berlin, pointed this out on December 8 in his coronavirus update on broadcaster NDR. There was a “basic climate” among scientists, he said, which consisted of the following: “You simply cannot say what it is like anymore because otherwise you will be burned, put in a corner, attacked in the media and, unfortunately, also by some voices within the scientific community ... This basic mood has already spread among many people. And I know from many of my colleagues that in the last few weeks they have had the feeling: better not say anything, there will only be trouble.”

The pressure placed on scientists is part of the campaign to keep schools and businesses open, which has been accompanied from the outset by countless unscientific studies, open lies in statements by corrupt experts. The refrain is: the economy must continue to run and make profits under all circumstances.

Given the catastrophic effects, resistance to this policy is growing. At dozens of schools, students have gone on strike or joined protests. According to broadcaster ZDF’s political barometer, on Thursday, 73 percent of all respondents were in favour of a lockdown as in the spring, during which schools, day-care centres and businesses would also be closed. A clear majority is also of the opinion that the measures taken by the German government “did not go far enough.”

When the same politicians who have sacrificed human lives for months on the altar of profit now announce “tough measures,” they are only trying to bring this overwhelming opposition under control. The measures adopted so far are not even remotely capable of preventing the catastrophe.

Instead of the immediate closure of schools, day-care centres, and non-essential businesses, they are merely discussing an extension of school vacations and placing further restrictions on private contacts, which most people have reduced to a minimum anyway. Even the closure of shopping centres is only being considered in a few German states before the holidays in order not to jeopardize the profitable Christmas trade.

“This winter of death in Europe shows the bankruptcy of capitalism. If hundreds of thousands of lives are to be saved, the working class must intervene independently into political life in opposition to the social system that has led to this horrific disaster by blocking a rational, scientific policy,” the WSWS wrote yesterday in a perspective, calling for building “a network of independent action committees to prepare a Europe-wide general strike to enforce the closure of schools and non-essential industries.”

US retail giants shut off pandemic hazard pay to workforce while funneling billions into share buybacks

Ray Coleman

The Brookings Institution, a Washington, DC-based think tank, released a report in November examining how the largest store chains in the United States have cut off critical pay support for workers even as cases of COVID-19 are spiking.

The study, titled “Windfall Profits and Deadly Risks,” examined pandemic hazard pay at Amazon, Walmart, Target, Kroger, Costco, Albertsons, Ahold Delhaize (which owns the grocery store chain Giant Foods), Walgreens, CVS Health, Home Depot, Lowe’s, Best Buy, and Dollar General. These 13 companies, ranging from big-box stores to grocery chains to electronics stores and pharmacies, are all among the 20 largest retail companies in the US and collectively employ over six million workers.

They account for more than one third of employment in the US retail sector, which had about 15 million workers in 2019, equal to about one in 10 workers.

Wages in retail were already at or below poverty level before the pandemic. The median starting wage for retail jobs such as cashiers and stock clerks at companies like Kroger and CVS is between $11 and $12 an hour. At the 13 companies examined by Brookings for the report, only Amazon and Costco had a starting wage of $15 or more before the pandemic started. Since the pandemic started, Target and Best Buy have raised their starting pay to $15.

All the companies in the report implemented so-called “hero pay” or “Appreciation Pay” as COVID-19 was beginning to spread, which amounted to an average of only $1.11 an hour over the course of the entire pandemic.

Eight of the 13 companies paid their workers less than $1 an hour extra during the pandemic when spread out over the entire course of March to today. At Albertsons, employees have earned an average of just $0.83 per hour extra when spread out over the course of the pandemic. At CVS Health, hazard pay spread out since March has amounted to a meager $0.21 per hour in additional pay for cashiers and clerks. “Amazon and Walmart could have quadrupled the hazard pay they gave their frontline workers and still earned more profit than the previous year,” the report states.

However, almost every company ended additional hazard pay by early summer as lockdown measures across the country were being relaxed. According to the report, on average, workers have been on the job for 133 days since last receiving hazard pay. The report declares: “The numbers are stark—they paint a picture of most companies prioritizing profits and wealth for shareholders over investments in their employees.”

On average, the companies paid workers hazard pay for only 79 days of the pandemic. When averaged out over the past nine months, the average wage increase was miniscule. Workers received an additional $0.95 an hour at Amazon and $0.63 more at Walmart, about a 6 percent raise.

Almost all of the companies studied phased out their hazard pay by June, however. As the US case numbers continue to escalate into uncharted territory, not one of the 13 companies studied has reinstated hazard pay for frontline workers.

“I started receiving hazard pay when the local government began socially distancing everything,” an Amazon worker in Baltimore told the World Socialist Web Site. “As soon as everyone else started being told to go back to work, Amazon took its hazard pay away ,” he said. The company eliminated its minor pay increases in May, when COVID-19 cases were hovering around 20,000 a day in the United States. For the past several weeks, the United States has reported more than 200,000 cases daily and has surpassed 300,000 deaths from the disease. “I know Amazon can pay us more,” the worker added, concluding that the current conditions at work were “an insult.”

In fact, hazard pay has been cut even as profits boomed. On average, the 13 major retail companies Brookings examined posted $16.9 billion more in profits in 2020 than 2019, a 39 percent rise. Since the pandemic started, the stock prices of these companies have gone up 33 percent. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ net worth has ballooned by over $70 billion, and the Walton family, relatives of the Walmart founder and the richest family in the US, have added $45 billion to their net worth. Amazon and Walmart have posted a combined profit growth of $10.9 billion this year.

Even as they wound down hazard pay, these companies poured billions into share buybacks this year. Ahold Delhaize poured $862 million of its profits into stock repurchases, 50 percent more than what it spent on all COVID-19-related costs in the first three quarters of the year. Nine of the companies studied bought back shares in 2020. After ending hazard pay for its workers, Walmart announced a $500 million share repurchase program.

Kroger, which ended hazard pay in May, spent $211 million in stock buybacks during the second quarter. The grocery chain announced a further $1 billion in stock buybacks in September.

In general, the US retail sector has been performing better-than-expected during the pandemic, being one sector of growth in the market. When states imposed lockdowns closing non-essential businesses during the first wave of the pandemic, large retailers were declared essential businesses and remained open. While around 400,000 small businesses were permanently closed by June, large retailers like Walmart and Amazon possessed dominant e-commerce capabilities that left them positioned to capture the sudden explosion in online shopping as people tried to avoid unnecessary activity outside their homes.

With an influx of demand from changing buying habits during the pandemic, big retail companies have been hiring rapidly. As the Brookings report acknowledges, jobs at these companies have become one of the few avenues for employment in some communities and for workers in the retail sector whose stores have been closed or which have laid off staff.

“This pandemic has made all the problems Kroger has even worse,” a Tennessee Kroger worker told the WSWS. “The stress that we were under before the pandemic is heightened because people keep calling out sick,” he explained. According to a late October report by Occupational Safety and Environmental Medicine, up to 20 percent of all grocery workers have had COVID-19 in the United States.

“The managers and bosses are keeping us workers in the dark,” about the dangers of COVID-19, a Giant worker in Virginia told the WSWS. According to this worker, his managers forced workers to share hand sanitizer, even as the company had “been increasing… profits with special products, including their own brand of hand sanitizer.” He explained: “appreciation bonuses were $277 after tax. Workers are afraid to demand hazard pay” out of fear they would lose their jobs. This worker said his official bargaining representative, the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 400, “never responded” when he asked about hazard pay. The worker explained that he hasn’t heard from the UFCW “in months.”

In the case of Dollar General, Brookings wrote, “The company could have given its frontline workers COVID-19 bonuses worth 10 times the amount it gave them in the spring and still have earned more profit than the previous year.” In the second quarter of 2020, Dollar General spent eight times as much money on stock repurchases than it did on pandemic compensation for frontline workers. Most recently, the company announced that it would be buying back $2.5 billion worth of stock by the end of fiscal 2021, which is 14 times the amount it committed to workers in the form of pandemic compensation.

NLRB says Google illegally spied on and fired workers in 2019

Kevin Reed

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) filed a consolidated complaint on December 2 accusing Google of violating US labor laws by “interfering with, restraining, and coercing” the “protected, concerted activities” of a group of employees who were organizing and participating in workplace activism in late 2019.

The partially redacted complaint states that managers and representatives of Google’s Global Investigations department took the illegal measures against the employees—including electronically surveilling and interrogating, threatening, disciplining and firing them—at thecompany’s facility in the San Francisco area between September and December 2019.

Googleplex is the corporate headquarters of Google and its parent company Alphabet in Mountain View, California

The submission, entitled “Order Consolidating Cases, Consolidated Complaint and Notice of Hearing,” brings together six prior NLRB complaints against Google, three of which were filed by the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and the AFL-CIO, in order to “avoid unnecessary costs or delays.” The hearing date has been set for April 21, 2021 before an administrative law judge in San Francisco.

The complaint was signed and submitted by Jill H. Coffman, Regional Director of NLRB Region 20, and spells out the specific illegal actions taken by the company and their dates of occurrence. According to Alan Hyde, a labor law expert at Rutgers Law School in Newark, the company will likely settle the case. Hyde told the New York Times, “Google is not very popular in Washington right now with either Republicans or Democrats.”

However, company spokesperson Jennifer Rodstrom told the Times, “We’re confident in our decision and legal position. Actions undertaken by the employees at issue were a serious violation of our policies and an unacceptable breach of a trusted responsibility.”

Although some of the victimized employees’ names are redacted, the document contains the names of three Google employees who have been publicly identified previously in media coverage of the incidents. Two managers who are accused of violating the employees’ rights are named, while the identities of nine others are concealed.

The complaint states that on September 3, 2019, and “at various times thereafter,” Google management “virtually surveilled employees protected concerted activities by, on numerous occasions, viewing an employee slide production in support of the HCL union drive.” HCL America Inc is a subsidiary of the global company HCL Technologies based in India.

The firm was contracting 80 tech employees to Google at its Bakery Square facility in Pittsburgh. The tech workers voted to unionize on September 24, 2019 and affiliated with the United Steel Workers, an AFL-CIO union.

The complaint goes on to state that on November 13, 2019 employees were interrogated by members of Google’s Global Investigations department “about their protected concerted activities by asking them about their access of employees’ calendars and MemeGen Takedown Documents.” The interrogations were apparently trying to find out if the employees were accessing a company-wide calendar and the internal communications tool at Google known as MemeGen for the purposes of organizing their legally protected activities.

In a meeting with employees on December 18, 2019, Director of Detection and Response, Heather Atkins, and other Google management personnel “threatened employees with unspecified reprisals by requiring employees to raise workplace concerns through official channels including Code of Conduct alias or go/my-concerns.”

The document then explains that Google’s Data Classification Policy was utilized and enforced “selectively and disparately by applying it against employees who engaged in protected, concerted activities.” Among these was the implementation of a “Calendar Access rule prohibiting employees from accessing other employees’ calendars without a business purpose.”

The NLRB states that the purpose of the rule is “to discourage its employees from forming, joining, assisting a union or engaging in other protected, concerted activities.” At this point, Google went on an offensive against several employees who were engaged in “concerted activities with other employees for the purposes of mutual aid and protection” by posting workplace concerns on MemeGen and accessing the calendars of others.

Then, on November 6, 2019, Google employees Rebecca Rivers and Laurence Berland were placed on administrative leave for “accessing calendars and documents regarding the MemeGen Takedown Process” and, on November 25, Google fired Berland.

According to news reports Berland was targeted because he had researched the relationship between Google and IRI Consultants, a firm known for aggressive antiunion efforts, and used the internal calendar platform to learn about meetings between the companies.

The company also put employee Katherine Spiers on administrative leave on November 25, 2019 and fired her on December 13 for writing computer code for a pop-up message. Spiers’ pop-up message “would automatically appear when an employee visited Respondent’s Community Guidelines and other web pages” and told the employees about an earlier NLRB case against Google.

Significantly, other unnamed employees had also been disciplined and fired by Google, but the NLRB complaint does not take up their cases and does not consider these actions to be a violation of employee rights.

As explained here on the World Socialist Web Site at the time of the firings of Rivers and Berland, the assault by Google on the rights of employees is connected with the growth of political activism and opposition by the staff to the company’s collaboration with the US military in Project Maven in 2018.

A statement released by Berland on the NLRB action said, “This complaint makes clear that workers have the right to speak to issues of ethical business and the composition of management. This is a significant finding at a time when we’re seeing the power of a handful of tech billionaires consolidate control over our lives and our society. Workers have the right to speak out about and organize, as the NLRB is affirming, but we also know that we should not, and cannot, cleave off ethical concerns about the role management wants to play in that society.”

While Berland has taken a courageous stand against Google and deserves the support of the entire working class, Google employees and other sections of tech workers must be warned about the role of the NLRB and the AFL-CIO in this conflict. That an entire year has gone by since the firing of Berland, Rivers and Spiers—not to mention the fact that the other workers who were caught up in the conspiracy by Google to purge the company of activists have been left high and dry—is an indication that the intervention of the official American unions and the NLRB is to sidetrack and bury in endless litigation the struggle of Google workers.

For more than a half century, the AFL-CIO and NLRB have partnered together with employers and corporations to isolate, strangle and demoralize workers who have taken up the most elementary forms of class struggle in defense of wages, benefits, working conditions and basic rights in the workplace. Time and again, the AFL-CIO has called on workers to put their faith in appeals to the NLRB and courts. The outcome of such appeals has always been bitter defeat and demoralization.

School students in Germany protest and enforce online teaching to combat coronavirus infection

Gregor Link

In response to the German government’s murderous coronavirus policy, which puts profits before health and lives, students and pupils in Germany are taking the fight against the pandemic into their own hands. Many school student initiatives are preparing strikes and protests and in the city of Bremen pupils from two high schools, with the support of teaching staff, have taken emergency action to combat the disease and save lives. The World Socialist Web Site spoke with Meret Göhring, who attends the Leibnizplatz high school in Bremen.

A chalkboard reads 'It's Corona Time' in an empty class room of a high school in Frankfurt, Germany, March 13, 2020 (AP Photo/Michael Probst, file)

“Our secondary level 2 has been on strike since Tuesday evening,” she said. “As a student council, we worked closely with teachers to ensure that pupils could attend face-to-face classes on a voluntary basis only for the last three days. With this measure we managed to cut the number of classroom contacts by almost half.

“We knew the teaching faculty was behind us and also had encouragement and the unofficial support of the upper school leadership. Teachers in our upper school have been digitally streaming their classes via Zoom. That initially took place on Wednesday without approval until the upper school administration officially stated in the afternoon that no absences could be logged if pupils attended class online from their homes.”

In Frankfurt, where the head of the health department is publicly downplaying the pandemic, 300 students took part in a school strike last week and held a rally in the city centre to demand safe education. The protest adhered to the prevailing coronavirus prevention requirements.

The Hesse state student initiative unverantwortlich.org (irresponsible.org), which has published photo statements from students, also organised a school strike on Friday. In a social media post, the group had called on all students not to go to class and instead participate in an online rally, which took place from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.

“It’s all about profits and allowing parents to continue going to work,” explained moderator Ronja. “We are being told that economic interests are more important than the well-being of the people. Lufthansa is laying off 50,000 staff and still receives €9 billion. At the same time, there is supposedly no money for air filtration systems in classrooms.”

In Bremen, there have already been several strikes and protests: “For weeks, students and teachers have been demanding smaller learning groups to reduce the risk of infection,” writes Bremen’s Kurt-Schumacher-Allee (KSA) high school on its website. “The student body of our upper school is committed to achieving this.”

In consultation with the school administration, the pupils’ council has organised alternating classes throughout the upper school for the past two weeks. Speaking to a Bremen regional magazine Buten un binnen, one teacher, Desiree Baumann, said teaching staff were “very grateful to the students for this action”—many teachers were “pleased with the initiative” due to the risk of infection in what were often run-down and dilapidated classrooms. The school’s principal Christian Sauter said he was “impressed by the breadth of the pupils’ ideas and responsibility.” He thought the pupils’ intervention was “terrific.”

As Meret reports, the mood among teachers has also quickly reached boiling point: “The teachers are 99 percent behind us students. As soon as you approach them outside of the context of the classroom, they open up and one realises we’re all on the same page. But we cannot openly confirm the backing from teachers by name because they could get in trouble with the school board.”

In fact, school authorities have reacted with open hostility to the pupils’ intervention, which has met with the support, admiration and gratitude of teachers and principals. Bremen’s education senator, Claudia Bogedan (SPD), for example, let it be known that half-size groups would be introduced only after the infection rate exceeded 200 (per 100,000 persons) and a quarter of the class was already in quarantine. “Blanket” alternate teaching, Bogedan told the press, was “disproportionate given the current incidence figures.” The seven-day infection rate in Bremen is currently 108, according to the Robert Koch Institute (RKI). This is more than double the threshold the RKI and WHO set in spring to identify Europe-wide COVID hotspots.

“The school authorities are completely opposed to it (i.e., alternate teaching to reduce class sizes) and the closure of schools is out of the question,” Meret declared. In the case of the Lloyd Gymnasium in Bremerhaven, the authorities went so far as to politically intervene and counter the independent initiative undertaken by pupils. Luca Lennox Püchel, a member of a pupils’ initiative in Bremerhaven, told Buten un Binnen that the pupils’ council had worked out and decided on similar measures but that the school authorities had insisted on maintaining compulsory attendance. It was “incomprehensible,” declared the pupils’ representative, that “a magistrate cancels a student action in a press release without talking to us first.”

The arrogant reaction of the authorities expresses their fear of the growing resistance on the part of pupils, students, teachers and workers in Germany and throughout Europe. In Bremerhaven, around 200 pupils at Lloyd Gymnasium enforced a day of home teaching earlier this month. Previously, in another strike action, about 700 students at the Carl von Ossietzky school boycotted face-to-face classes.

At the same time, the very same authorities are sabotaging measures for remote teaching: “Because we still haven’t received the iPads promised by the school authorities, many students are forced to continue going to school. Class examinations are continuing. There are cases where we have to write four tests per week. I myself have had to write exams continuously for four hours.” All of this, he said, is taking place under the permanent risk of contagion and freezing temperatures in classrooms with open windows.

“The prevailing polices show no consideration for pupils and their families,” says Lennart (17) from Achim, near Bremen. Lennart is in the 12th grade at the Cato Bontjes van Beek Gymnasium. “We are in attendance every day with the whole school, although the infection rate in our district is almost 200,” he reports. “The fact that in-person classes just keep going under these conditions is mind-boggling. Learning is only partially the focus. Mainly, it’s about putting pupils somewhere so their parents can go back to work.”

In her government statement Wednesday, Merkel reiterated that closing schools was out of the question for the German government. Referring to “global contexts” and “economic power relations in the world” that were being refashioned in the wake of the pandemic, she threatened, “We have drawn the conclusion from the experience of last spring: we will do everything in our power to keep day-care centres and schools open. We will do everything we can to keep nurseries and schools open.”

In their conference call on Sunday, the German chancellor and the state premiers decided not to close a single company outside the retail sector despite the dramatic situation. All that was left was a request to the corporate leaders to extend any company vacations. There will also be no unified school closures. So that workers can continue to go to the factories to increase the profits of the rich, only those children for whom this is “possible” are to stay at home. All others are to be able to continue to be cared for in school and day-care centres.

Under the circumstances, Lennart said, comprehensive emergency measures were vital: “I can only support the strikes against in-person teaching. Schools must be closed and opportunities for online teaching expanded. Too many lives are at stake.”

As Meret points out, it is of utmost importance that pupils organise independently. “Politicians are simply unwilling to do what is in our interests—so we have to do it ourselves,” Meret concludes. “With our pupils’ strike, we have achieved more protection against infection with a few hours of preparation than all of the measures taken by Bremen’s politicians in recent months. No one will stand up for us pupils other than ourselves. This is a conclusion reached by more and more people.”

Uniting all students in the fight for safe education, Meret said, showed enormous potential: “But our strike also shows that it is possible if we stand together. If all pupils stayed home for a few days, it would send a very strong signal.”

India moves to strengthen strategic relations with Sri Lanka and the Maldives

Rohantha De Silva

India’s National Security Advisor Ajit Doval visited Colombo late last month to participate in a Trilateral Maritime Security Cooperation meeting. Secretary to the Ministry of Defence, Major General (Rtd.) Kamal Gunaratne, represented Sri Lanka, and Mariya Didi, the Minister of Defence, represented the Maldives at the meeting.

Revived after six years, the gathering, which involved India, Sri Lanka and the Maldives, further highlights the Modi government’s efforts to strengthen strategic relations with its smaller neighbours.

India's National Security Advisor Ajit Doval at the Pentagon in 2017 (Wikimedia)

New Delhi’s moves take place under conditions where its strategic rival China is courting Colombo. Sri Lanka has become another focal point in the geopolitical struggle between India and the US, on one side, and China, on the other.

The main aim of Doval’s visit was to encourage maritime cooperation in order to counter Chinese influence in the Indian Ocean region. Sri Lanka and the Maldives are strategically located adjacent to crucial sea lanes in the Indian Ocean.

The trilateral meeting discussed maritime cooperation on “domain awareness,” humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, and joint military exercises. The Sri Lanka Defence Ministry will coordinate all maritime security projects. The meeting also decided to establish a deputy-level working group that would meet biannually.

Since President Ibrahim Mohamed Solih came to power in 2018, the Maldives government has functioned as a proxy of New Delhi and Washington. New Delhi is now working to bring Colombo into line with US and Indian geo-political ambitions.

Washington has stepped up its activities in South Asia to strengthen its military and strategic partnerships against China.

In October, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo visited Sri Lanka and Maldives, following his trip to India with then US Defence Secretary Mark Esper. In November, India held the 2020 Malabar joint naval exercises with the US, Japan and Australia.

With the blessing of India, the US and Maldives signed the “Framework for U.S. Department of Defense-Maldives Ministry of Defence Defense and Security Relationship” agreement on September 10.

Under this deal, the two countries will “deepen engagement and cooperation in support of maintaining peace and security in the Indian Ocean,” including military-to-military dialogue at senior level and joint activity. Stripped of the diplomatic jargon, Maldives is now integrated into Washington’s war plans against China.

Last month’s Trilateral Maritime Security Cooperation meeting was also used to further cement relations between Colombo and New Delhi on other key issues.

A Sri Lankan presidential statement on November 28 declared that the discussions were “highly fruitful” but provided no clear details. The Citizen, an Indian website, reported on November 30 that President Rajapakse was keen to honor the Memorandum of Cooperation on the Eastern Container Terminal (ECT) signed in May last year.

The long-pending tri-nation project—involving Sri Lanka, Japan and India—to develop and run the strategically located facility at Colombo port is due to commence. Under the agreement a Terminal Operations Company (TOC) is to be established to conduct all operations. Sri Lanka would retain a 51 percent ownership, with the other joint venture partners holding the remaining 49 percent.

With between 70 and 80 percent of Colombo port traffic involving Indian transshipment, it is critical for New Delhi to have a foothold in Colombo port. The Chinese-owned Colombo International Container Terminal (CICI) is involved in the ECT.

The original ECT development proposal by India was announced in 2016 by then Sri Lankan Minister of Ports Arjuna Ranatunga, but was scuttled by President Maithripala Sirisena. Fifteen joint venture projects, with memoranda of understandings, were signed in 2017 and are still pending, raising concerns in New Delhi.

Rajapakse and Doval have reportedly agreed to the expeditious development of infrastructure projects with Indian assistance. Reeling under a growing foreign debt crisis, Rajapakse has called for increased investments, not loans, and is seeking financial assistance from Beijing, a point of contention with Washington and New Delhi.

During his visit, Doval also agreed to build low-cost housing, having already constructed some in Sri Lanka’s Tamil-speaking North and East, and the central tea plantation areas.

Sri Lanka has boosted its political, military and economic relations with India in the past few months. On October 24, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Sri Lankan Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapakse held their first online bilateral summit. While Colombo requested a delay in debt repayments and a $US1 billion currency swap arrangement, Modi was non-committal.

During his trip, Doval held an unscheduled meeting with Tamil National Alliance leader R. Sampanthan. According to the Citizen website, Sampanthan raised the Sri Lankan government’s intention to abolish or weaken the provincial councils, which are central to the TNA’s push for greater devolution.

The website reported that Doval and Sampanthan discussed economic development in the North and East but that they wanted talks on the provincial councils kept under wraps, because they did not want the issue “to come between the two countries.”

While the provincial councils, which were part of the 1987 Indo-Lanka accord, do not address the oppression of the island's Tamil minority, they regard any concessions to the Tamil elite as a “betrayal” by sections of the Colombo ruling elite, including the military hierarchy.

Apart from the Maldives and Sri Lanka, New Delhi has also increased its activities in Nepal, a country that has developed closer relations with China during the last few years.

On October 21, Kumar Goel, chief of the Indian external intelligence agency, Research & Analysis Wing, made a two-day trip to Nepal. This was followed by Indian army chief General Manoj Mukund Naravane’s visit to Nepal for three days on November 4, and on November 26, Indian Foreign Secretary Harsh Vardhan Sharing visited Kathmandu for two days of talks.

India is a strategic partner of the US, and also part of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, (QUAD) with the US, Japan, and Australia. This anti-China military alliance has hardened in recent times and is working for joint military planning and action against China.

The belligerent stand of Washington against China has greatly increased the danger of an eruption of military conflict between the two-nuclear armed powers.

Biden’s choice for US trade representative signals anti-China stance

Peter Symonds

In his choice of US trade representative, President-elect Joe Biden has made clear that he will continue the aggressive anti-China confrontation launched by the Obama administration a decade ago and stepped up under Trump. While the appointee is responsible for US trade policy internationally, Biden’s nomination of Katherine Tai last Friday targeted China in particular.

In justifying his decision, Biden praised Tai’s record as “the chief trade enforcer against unfair trade practices by China, which will be a key priority in the Biden-Harris administration.” He highlighted her role as the chief legal counsel for the US at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) between 2011 and 2014, where she marshaled international support, including from the EU, Japan and Australia, against Chinese limits on the export of rare earths.

Katherine Tai (Photo: Inter-American Dialogue/Flickr)

China imposed a ban on the export of rare earths to Japan in 2010 amid sharp tensions over the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu islets in the East China Sea, which are controlled by Tokyo but claimed by both countries. The conflict was exacerbated by the Obama administration’s belligerent stance towards Beijing, which was made explicit in its “pivot to Asia” announced in November 2011. China’s export restrictions on rare earths were later extended to the US and Europe, then dropped in 2015 after an adverse WTO ruling.

A Hong Kong-based trade lawyer Benjamin Kostrzewa, who worked on the WTO rare earths case with Tai, described her as “having an iron-fist-in-a-velvet-glove approach.”

Biden said Tai would work closely with his economic, national security and foreign policy officials. “She understands that we need … to be considerably more strategic than we’ve been in how we trade, and that makes us all stronger, how we’re made stronger by trade,” he declared.

Tai, whose parents were born in China and raised her in Taiwan, is closely connected to the Democrats and currently serves as the chief trade lawyer for the ways and means committee in the Democrat-dominated House of Representatives. She has been part of the push by the military establishment to ensure key supply chains are based in the US.

Tai has not just been active on trade issues. She has also been involved in recent months in mobilising Democratic Party support for the escalating US propaganda campaign over alleged Chinese human rights abuses of Muslim Uyghurs in the western province of Xinjiang.

As vice-president, Biden played an active role in the Obama administration’s pivot to Asia—a determined across-the-board diplomatic, economic and military strategy aimed at undermining China and preventing it from threatening the global hegemony of US imperialism. Under Obama, the US military refocused 60 percent of naval and air assets to the Indo-Pacific and drew up its AirSea Battle strategy for war with China.

As part of these war plans, the Obama administration strengthened military alliances, strategic partnerships and basing arrangements throughout Asia and deliberately aggravated dangerous hot spots including on the Korean Peninsula and in Indo-China. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton transformed what had been longstanding maritime disputes in the South China Sea between Beijing and its neighbours into a major international flashpoint, further inflamed by the provocative dispatch of US warships into Chinese-claimed waters.

On the economic front, Obama pushed the formation of the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP)—a trade and investment bloc that deliberately excluded China and was held up as the “gold standard” in particular for protecting US intellectual property rights. Trump immediately ditched the TPP on assuming office and replaced it with aggressive “America First” trade war policies that targeted China, but also affected US allies in Europe and Asia.

Biden has already indicated that he will not immediately wind back Trump’s punitive tariffs of up to 25 percent on $370 billion worth of Chinese products exported to the US, or take action to change the Phase 1 trade agreement reached by Trump this year that commits China to buying an additional $200 billion in US goods and services in 2020–21. In an interview earlier this month in the New York Times, Biden declared: “I’m not going to make any immediate moves, and the same applies to the tariffs. I’m not going to prejudice my options.”

Biden said his main priority was going to be to marshal US allies in Europe and Asia and on that basis to “develop a coherent strategy.” His goal, he declared, “would be to pursue trade policies that actually produce progress on China’s abusive practices—that’s stealing intellectual property, dumping products, illegal subsidies to corporations” and forcing “tech transfers” from American companies to their Chinese counterparts.

These unsubstantiated allegations against China highlight the central concern in the American ruling class—that China will not simply function as a huge cheap labour platform for American corporations, but will challenge US domination in hi-tech areas that are critical to the maintenance of its economic and strategic global supremacy. Trump has already taken action in the name of “national security” to attempt to undermine Chinese hi-tech rivals such as Huawei. Biden is signaling that he will accelerate the US economic offensive in hi-tech.

Biden indicated last month that he intends to invest $300 billion in research and development and other areas to ensure that American corporations are not eclipsed by China or any other rival. In his New York Times interview, Biden declared: “I want to make sure we’re going to fight like hell by investing in America first,” before listing energy, biotech, advanced materials and artificial intelligence as areas for large-scale government investment in research.

Biden stated his determination to maintain US global dominance in an essay entitled “Why America Must Lead Again; Rescuing US Foreign Policy After Trump” in the March/April edition of Foreign Affairs.

“The Biden foreign policy agenda will place the United States back at the head of the table, in a position to work with its allies and partners to mobilize collective action on global threats. The world does not organize itself… If we continue his [Trump’s] abdication of that responsibility, then one of two things will happen: either someone else will take the United States’ place, but not in a way that advances our interests and values, or no one will, and chaos will ensue.”

Biden then made absolutely clear who he is talking about. “China represents a special challenge,” he stated, “The United States does need to get tough with China.”

Regardless of who is finally installed in the White House next month, the US economic warfare and military build-up against China will continue apace. Biden is assembling an administration that will be every bit as aggressive in its confrontation with China as that of Trump—a path that is plunging the world towards a catastrophic war.