Trade union, works council and CEO impose cost-cutting programme on Volkswagen workforce in Germany

Dietmar Gaisenkersting

At a Supervisory Board meeting last week, representatives of the owners and trade unions at Volkswagen (VW) unanimously agreed to launch a cost-cutting programme in competition with US-based electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla. The burden of this is to be borne by the workforce at VW itself and throughout the parts supplier chain.

The Supervisory Board’s decision had been preceded by months of dispute between company CEO Herbert Diess and General Works Council Chairman Bernd Osterloh. Five years ago, when the top manager was poached from BMW, Osterloh had proudly declared that Diess was “our man.” But in the end, the IG Metall trade union and the works council no longer trusted him to successfully lead the fight against competitors from China, Europe and the US, especially Tesla.

The jobs, wages, working conditions and the health of the workers were never the question. Diess, Osterloh and their respective entourages agree that the transformation to electric vehicles and competition with other automakers are all about shareholder interests. Their goal is to establish Volkswagen as a “global champion” in the international battle for markets and profits, driving other competitors out of the market.

Volkswagen Wolfsburg industrial plant in Wolfsburg, Germany, 2006. (Photo: High Contrast/Wikipedia)

The works council and IG Metall are the driving force behind this, even if it means the destruction of tens of thousands of jobs and an intolerable increase in productivity.

To divide the workforce and suppress any resistance, they proceed according to the St. Florian principle: “Spare my house, set another on fire!” Jobs at VW have priority over those in the supplier industries, jobs in Germany over those abroad, and jobs at the main Wolfsburg plant over those at other locations. Accordingly, IG Metall had already organized the closure of the Opel plants in Antwerp and Bochum, before it was the turn of the main plant in Rüsselsheim, which is now being shut down one slice at a time.

The basis of the “reconciliation” between Diess and Osterloh was the promise that Wolfsburg would be developed into a factory for the highly automated production of electric vehicles, setting new standards for the automotive industry. So far, the VW Group had mainly converted plants in Brussels, Hanover, Zwickau, and Emden to the new technology. Works council leader Osterloh had therefore been calling to produce an electric vehicle in Wolfsburg for months.

The world’s largest auto factory, with around 60,000 employees, Wolfsburg is currently only running at about half capacity. Originally, production of one million cars a year was planned there. But according to Osterloh, it would only be just under 500,000 in 2020 because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Last week, production was partially halted in Wolfsburg and other plants because of bottlenecks in supplying semiconductors and a shortage of seat foam for the Golf 8. Despite the rampaging pandemic in Germany, however, the shutdown over the holidays is to be somewhat extended only in individual areas to ramp up production again as quickly as possible and press ahead with the restructuring plans.

Last Monday, the Supervisory Board agreed, “Wolfsburg will become a showcase location for the highly automated production of e-vehicles.” A new electric vehicle with improved battery technology and more modern software is to be built there as early as 2025, or by 2026 at the latest.

What this means for the workforce can only be guessed at present, as the management and works council are not giving away any concrete details. VW plans to produce the vehicles almost fully automatically and to cut production times in half. Cars are to come off the production line within ten hours, like at Tesla’s new factory in Grünheide near Berlin. Currently, VW workers in Zwickau need around 20 hours for Volkswagen’s ID.3 electric car.

This offensive is exactly to the liking of Osterloh and the shareholders. The head of the works council had already proudly reported to Welt am Sonntag at the beginning of September, “In the meantime, we’re in the middle of electrifying our fleet.” He saw a good chance that VW could overtake US manufacturer Tesla in terms of unit sales and software. “If Tesla sets up three factories where you can build between 300,000 and 500,000 cars, then we’re talking about a unit output of between 900,000 and 1.5 million,” Osterloh said. “We want to achieve that in 2023 as well, probably sooner.”

At Monday’s supervisory board meeting, Diess announced he wanted to shape the framework conditions in Wolfsburg “so that we can keep up with Tesla, maybe even overtake it at one point or another.” And on Tuesday, in a speech broadcast throughout the group to some 15,000 VW managers, he enthused, “This will allow us to keep up with Tesla and will even be better in terms of production costs.”

Achieving that will require widespread attacks on workforces throughout the supplier chain, at all VW plants and in Wolfsburg itself. Tens of thousands more will be added to the 20,000 VW job cuts already agreed upon this year—on which IGM and the works council expressly agree.

After a kind of “formal apology” to Diess (according to finance daily Handelsblatt ), the supervisory board announced there would only be a necessary reduction in staff “via the proven personnel instruments,” i.e., through collaboration with the unions and works council. It resolved to reduce fixed costs, including wage costs for permanent workers, by 5 percent by 2023. In production, which is already highly rationalized, this is only possible with further staff reductions. To guarantee this, Diess’ favourite, Arno Antlitz, who has been head of finance at the VW brand for ten years, has been appointed CFO of the entire group.

The suppliers are to bleed even more. Here, costs are to be cut by seven percent within two years. That means adhesion contracts for the suppliers, for which the workers there will pay with jobs, wage cuts and increased productivity. To this end, the supervisory board appointed Murat Aksel as the new head of purchasing. Aksel, like Diess, comes from BMW, where he was a feared cost-cutter in purchasing.

Thomas Schmall, who will take over the newly created board-level “Technology” department, is regarded as “Osterloh’s pupil,” according to Handelsblatt. Like Osterloh and Diess, he is in favour of the company’s own battery cell production and an acceleration of the switch to electric mobility.

The financial markets, i.e., investors and shareholders, have understood the message. Within two days, VW shares rose by around 12 percent and have remained at that level ever since.

In his Wednesday morning newsletter, former Handelsblatt editor-in-chief Gabor Steingart cheered the proposals, saying, “Germany’s auto industry has finally taken up the pursuit of electromobility—powerfully and across the group.” He said this applied both to the VW, BMW, and Daimler groups—which alone are investing €70 billion in electric vehicles over the next five years—and to the supplier chain, such as Bosch and Continental.

International investors were not just betting on Tesla, Steingart said. “They are betting on the beginning of a new era.” Those who resolutely bet on the electrification of their product range will be rewarded, he added. “Herbert Diess’ E-strategy and its backing in VW’s supervisory board has encouraged the stock market to skyrocket this week.”

This is being done on the backs of the workforce. In the summer, WSWS wrote that the leadership dispute at VW was ushering in a new phase of close cooperation between management and the union, “designed to prepare the group for a global economic war and aimed directly at employees.”

That came to fruition with last Monday’s decision by the supervisory board. The developments of last week have once again highlighted the special role of IG Metall and the works council led by Bernd Osterloh. In all corporations, the works council representatives are stooges of the management; at VW, they help steer the global corporation. The special arrangements at VW, where the Social Democratic Party-led Lower Saxony state executive is a major shareholder, means they determine who steers the group and in what direction. And they do this not in the interests of the workforce, but of the shareholders. This was once again borne out by the events of last week.

The COVID vaccine rollout: A demonstration of capitalist incompetence

Benjamin Mateus

The COVID vaccine rollout last week has been nothing short of a disastrous unorganized publicity stunt.

While Vice President Pence and members of Congress received their Pfizer COVID mRNA-vaccine over the weekend, a staged event to assure “vaccine hesitators” that top officials were undergoing the same procedure, officials across multiple states had learned they would be getting fewer doses of vaccine in their second shipment. Some 2.9 million doses were initially sent this week, but states were told that only 2 million doses would be forthcoming the week after.

After receiving 49,725 initial doses in the first week of the vaccine release, Wisconsin state health officials were told they would be receiving only 35,100 doses the following week. “This is unacceptable. Wisconsin citizens deserve the vaccine the federal government promised,” Governor Tony Evers complained.

Vice President Mike Pence receives a Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine shot at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on the White House complex, Friday, Dec. 18, 2020, in Washington (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

Dr. Ben Weston, medical services director of Milwaukee County’s Office of Emergency Management, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, “Certainly, the more vaccine we can get, the better. We have lots of health care workers that we need to vaccinate. We have lots of folks that are at high risk, either living or working in long-term care facilities. And we have lots and lots of EMS providers who are on the front line, dealing with patients in uncontrolled environments.” Wisconsin was severely hit by the surge in October and November, pushing hospitals to their brink.

State governments in Oregon, Florida and Michigan have made public statements decrying reduced allotment of vaccine doses. Many of these states have moved to readjust their vaccination plans as they are left in the dark about these shortages.

According to a senior Washington official, the US will not meet its goal to vaccinate 20 million people by New Year’s Eve. The revised estimate, per General Gustave Perna, the Army officer in charge of the government’s vaccine distribution program, is that states should receive the 40 million doses a week later than predicted.

He told reporters on Saturday, “I did not understand with exactness all the steps that have to occur to make sure the vaccine is releasable. I failed, I am adjusting, and we will move forward from there.” He further added, “There is a delay between what is available and what is releasable because we’re talking about hundreds and thousands and millions of doses that we want to make sure are right.” With 2,583 deaths each day on a seven-day average, the one-week delay will see another 18,000 people succumb to the pandemic.

As of December 18, and less than a week into a national effort to vaccinate the population against the SARS-CoV-2 virus, according to a New York Times survey, approximately 130,000 people have received the first dose of Pfizer’s vaccine. This is certainly an underestimate but demonstrates that delivery of the vaccine still requires coordinating the logistics of bringing millions of people to thousands of vaccine sites and then for a second shot within a month.

On the same day, the FDA issued an emergency approval for the second vaccine against the coronavirus, developed by Moderna. Like Pfizer, Moderna has employed mRNA technology and requires two doses each spaced a few weeks apart. However, the Moderna vaccine doesn’t have the same rigorous ultra-cold temperature requirements.

Pfizer, which had to reduce initial vaccination estimates from 100 million down to 50 million doses, in part due to complex supply chain issues for their vaccine production, has pushed back against any claims that it is having difficulties producing their therapeutics, promising an optimistic 1.3 billion doses for next year. Moncef Slaoui, the chief scientific adviser to Operation Warp Speed, noted in an interview that the federal government was reaching to close the deal on the second 100 million doses for the second quarter of 2021. The $1.95 billion contract for 100 million doses signed last July allows the United States the option to buy up to 500 million more doses.

During an interview with CEO Albert Bourla on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” today, a reply to host Meg Tirrell’s question placed these publicized assurances into doubt. She began her query by stating that Operation Warp Speed had offered to assist Pfizer in increasing its manufacturing capacity by using the Defense Production Act to obtain raw material supplies. “How would that affect Pfizer if the Defense Production Act were used to help you?”

Bourla replied, “I think it would be very positive, and I think it will allow us to maximize what we can do. We are asking them right now … and I hope that they will do it soon because, particularly in some components (of the vaccine), we are running at critical supply limitations (emphasis added). But I think they will do it, so that would be no problem.”

On December 3, a Pfizer spokeswoman told the Wall Street Journal, “Scaling up the raw material supply chain took longer than expected.” These materials are sourced through the US and Europe and require a certain quality control to ensure standards are met. Pfizer has only stated that some of these batches initially received were unusable, which led to revised lower estimates. The pharmaceutical giant did not clarify where these shortfalls occurred but they included several medical-grade substances.

The original deal made between Pfizer and the US required the delivery of 20 million vaccines a month beginning in November. However, Pfizer will spread this allotment over the first four months of 2021. According to Bloomberg, “Pfizer has so far allocated about 10.4 million doses to the US, the (senior administration) official said. From the first tranche of 6.4 million, 500,000 doses were set aside as a reserve, and 2.9 million were shipped out this week. The remaining 2.9 million will be sent in three weeks as the second dose of the vaccine’s two-shot regimen. The US will begin delivering the second allocation of 4 million doses next week, again sending out half while holding back half for second doses.”

There is no public scrutiny over these processes. Once new weekly allotments are released to the federal government, they will, in turn, ship these to the states once the states determine where they must be sent.

Ed Yong, a science writer for The Atlantic, told NPR, “It’s going to be a slow process, and there are a lot of possible roadblocks in the way in terms of producing the vaccine, distributing it, allocating it. Don’t think of the vaccine as a light switch—that the minute it starts going into people’s arms, normalcy resumes. It’s going to take a while for things to get under control.”

There is no national vaccine infrastructure in the US, and the minuscule amounts of monies that have been allocated to vaccine distribution are utterly insufficient. As of this writing, lawmakers were continuing to clash in Congress over a nearly $1 trillion funding package that would help state health departments secure the billions in resources needed to finance their vaccination campaigns.

A recent publication by the Commonwealth Fund, How prepared are states to vaccinate the public against COVID-19? Learning from Influenza and H1N1 vaccination programs, reported that people with health insurance, a usual source of care and no cost barriers were much more likely to receive their annual flu shots. However, individuals with chronic health conditions who frequently access health care and have the highest national vaccination rates are still vaccinated well below the national target of 70 percent, hinting at the difficulties that lie ahead for the COVID vaccine.

Age, income, and education played a significant role in vaccine uptake. The report pointed out that though racial inequities in vaccination rates have persisted, vaccination access is linked to insurance coverage and financial barriers common among the working class of all races.

The arrival of Moderna’s vaccine sets the stage for another 5.9 million doses of a COVID vaccine to be available next week in the US. Moderna has promised 20 million doses by the end of the year and up to 125 million doses through the first quarter of 2021. However, the biopharmaceutical company has never brought a drug to the market and lacks extensive manufacturing facilities of its own. In May, they turned to Swiss manufacturing behemoth Lonza AG, striking a deal to produce 1 billion doses per year in the US and Switzerland.

There are certainly not enough vaccines presently even for the 21 million health care workers across the US. States are continuing to grapple with the pandemic as hospitals face record numbers of COVID patients and staffing shortages, which adds unnecessary complexity to state vaccination rollouts.

The pandemic has also disproportionately devastated the working class, particularly those who are older, or suffering from chronic health issues, putting them and their families at risk, while the wealthy are negotiating backroom deals with their physicians and health care systems to access the vaccine. Wealthy countries have also captured nearly all future doses of the vaccines, leaving most of the world without access to these life-saving therapeutics for possibly years to come.

COVID outbreak and China tensions expose Australian government bid to claim “recovery”

Mike Head

Frantic efforts are being made by the Australian government and corporate media to talk up prospects of “economic recovery,” despite continuing mass unemployment, rising tensions with China—the country’s biggest export market—and the raging global COVID-19 pandemic.

In releasing the government’s “mid-year economic and fiscal outlook” (MYEFO) last Thursday, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg did his best to promote the economic prospects of consumer travel and spending. He declared: “Australians are approaching Christmas with optimism and hope.”

This was despite the government’s own statistics showing that more than three million workers remain dependent on poverty-line JobKeeper wage subsidies or JobSeeker dole payments, both of which have been slashed and are due to be cut again on December 31.

Australian Treasurer Josh Frydenberg (Source: Wikimedia)

The vastly understated official unemployment figures released the same day showed the seasonally-adjusted jobless rate dropped slightly from 7 to 6.8 percent in November. Yet that still left almost a million workers seeking jobs and nearly 2.5 million classified as “under-utilised” (unemployed or under-employed, that is, trying to get extra hours).

A more accurate picture was provided by the Roy Morgan monthly employment survey. It estimated the total under-utilisation rate at 21 percent, or just under 3 million people. Employment rose in November—largely due to the lifting of pandemic restrictions in Victoria, the state previously worst affected by COVID-19—but about 40,000 people dropped out of the workforce.

New proof of the vulnerability to the pandemic came with an outbreak in Sydney just as Frydenberg released the annual budget update. The cluster quickly exposed one of the most blatant profit-driven assertions in the update: that the coronavirus is under control and there will be no more lockdowns or border controls.

Despite the renewed danger of infections spreading, Frydenberg said it would be “premature” and unnecessarily damage consumer and business confidence if any safety restrictions were imposed in response to the Sydney outbreak.

Nevertheless, popular concern over the deadly and infectious virus compelled most state and territory governments to reintroduce travel restrictions, denting big business hopes for a lucrative Christmas tourism and retail boom.

While Frydenberg promoted hopes of a national vaccine “rollout” by “late 2021,” he admitted there were “downside risks to Australia’s economic recovery.” These included “the timing, distribution and effectiveness of the vaccine in stopping the spread of the virus globally, trade tensions that limit Australia’s access to export markets, and domestic economic uncertainty.”

Just a day before the MYEFO release, the Liberal-National government announced it would ramp up its conflict with Beijing by referring China to the World Trade Organisation to challenge anti-dumping tariffs imposed on Australian barley imports. This is one of a growing number of disputes—from wine to coal—now threatening Australian exports worth more than $6 billion a year.

The government has increasingly committed Australia to back the US confrontation with China. Yet the MYEFO underscored the ongoing reliance of key sections of Australian capitalism, and overall government revenues, on China—especially for iron ore sales. Higher ore prices, fueled by the Chinese regime’s stimulus measures and supply problems in Brazil, are expected to boost Australia’s gross domestic product (GDP) by $25 billion this financial year and increase company tax receipts by $1.3 billion this year and $4.8 billion next year.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison and the media falsely reported the MYEFO as showing a significant improvement in the economic scenario—primarily because of the ending of Victoria’s restrictions—since the annual federal budget was belatedly handed down on October 6.

Headlines such as “Recovery gathering pace” highlighted a $16 billion drop in the predicted federal government deficit for this year, from $213.7 billion to $197.7 billion, and a decrease in the four-year deficit total from $480 billion to $456 billion.

However, these remain the highest deficits ever recorded in peacetime. Federal government debt is still set to soar over $1 trillion by the end of the 2020s—a measure of the depth of the worst global economic breakdown since the 1930s Great Depression. State governments are also running large deficits, causing global credit ratings agencies to strip their AAA rankings from both New South Wales and Victoria, the two most populous states.

Even the cut in the forecast federal deficit was almost entirely due to the winding back of the JobKeeper and JobSeeker payments, which have barely kept millions of working-class households out of destitution since March. There will be an $11 billion drop-off in JobKeeper and a $3.7 billion cut in welfare payments this financial year.

In other words, almost all the budget “improvement” is at the expense of working people. The resulting social crisis will intensify as mortgage, rent and small business insolvency moratoria are ended in the New Year, throwing millions more workers and family business operators into poverty.

This is a foretaste of the financial stress and social misery to come as the government implements “budget repair”—that is, imposes deeper austerity measures to extract the cost of the government deficits and debts by slashing social programs, including public health and education.

The MYEFO upgraded economic growth for this financial year to 0.75 percent, from minus 1.5 percent in the October budget. But that presupposes an end to a recession that produced the sharpest ever quarterly fall in GDP—7 percent from July to September. And the budget update confirmed negative net overseas migration and slower population growth because of the worldwide pandemic.

Even by the rosy predictions issued by Frydenberg, unemployment is yet to peak and non-mining private investment will plunge by a staggering 14.5 percent this financial year.

That is despite the federal, state and territory governments pouring about $300 billion in subsidies and incentives into the hands of business, mainly big business, this year. As well, the Reserve Bank has locked in record low interest rates of 0.1 percent for three years, and providing the financial markets with $100 billion of “quantitative easing.”

For all the upbeat propaganda, key corporate media outlets are lashing the government for not moving fast enough to unleash “budget repair” and “industrial relations reform” to further cut workers’ wages and conditions.

The Australian Financial Review editorial on Saturday accused the government of evading its “political challenges” by failing to chart a course to “wind back” spending. It also demanded “structural reform,” deeper cuts in the company tax rate and more aggressive moves to tackle the “quagmire of an industrial relations system.”

Likewise, the Australian editorial on Friday insisted that overcoming the budget deficits would require “structural reforms including in the hard-fought areas of industrial relations and tax.”

Another warning of the ruthless plans of the ruling elite came from the only expansion of social spending announced in the MYEFO. That was $850 million to fund the creation of another 10,000 “home care packages,” which are designed to keep elderly people out of residential nursing homes.

Over the past year, the government now claims to have funded 50,000 such packages. But that still leaves up to 100,000 people on waiting lists, often for more than 12 months. The MYEFO pittance is a continuation of the contempt for the lives of retired workers displayed by the fact that so far 685 of the country’s 908 COVID-19 deaths, or three-quarters, have occurred in chronically under-funded and poorly-staffed aged care facilities.

Trump held White House meeting on martial law plan to overturn election

Patrick Martin

President Donald Trump and his top aides reviewed a series of proposals for overturning his defeat in the presidential election at a meeting Friday night in the White House. This included discussion of a proposal that he declare martial law and order the seizure of voting machines in key battleground states, according to numerous press accounts.

The New York Times first reported on the meeting, which involved Trump, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, White House Counsel Pat Cipollone and two prominent advocates of an election coup, former Trump campaign attorney Sidney Powell and former Trump national security advisor Gen. Michael Flynn. Additional details were reported by CNN, ABC, NBC and other news outlets.

It was the first meeting at the White House for Flynn since Trump pardoned him on two counts of perjury for lying to the FBI during the investigation, in the early days of the Trump administration, that led to his firing as national security advisor. It was the first White House visit for Powell since she was dismissed by the Trump campaign after voicing a series of bizarre conspiracy theories in which Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez (dead since 2013) was held responsible for manipulating the 2020 US presidential election.

Michael Flynn leaving federal court in Washington, DC, 2019. [Photo credit: AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta, File]

Trump’s welcoming such discredited figures into the White House undoubtedly expresses mounting desperation, but also an utter refusal to concede the result of the election, won by Biden with a margin of more than seven million votes. While acting like a cornered rat, Trump, as president of the United States for another month, still possesses immense powers, particularly over the US military-intelligence apparatus.

General Flynn visited the White House one day after suggesting, in an interview on the rabidly pro-Trump Newsmax network, that Trump should declare martial law, order voting machines in six key states seized by federal authorities, and conduct a second election in those states under military supervision. This would, of course, mean armed soldiers insuring that the voters of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin got it “right” this time, i.e., that the electoral votes of these states, officially delivered to Democrat Joe Biden on December 14 as a result of each state’s balloting, were instead awarded to Trump.

According to the press accounts, Trump asked General Flynn about his proposal for martial law and a second election. Meadows and Cipollone, and other unidentified White House officials, reportedly opposed Flynn and said the president did not have the authority to take the proposed actions. Powell, who was Flynn’s lawyer in his perjury case before joining the effort of the Trump campaign to overturn the election results, was said to have denounced the White House officials for being insufficiently devoted to Trump’s interests.

The meeting was characterized as ending in a “screaming” match, without a clear decision as to what course Trump would take. At one point, Trump suggested he might appoint Powell as a special counsel to investigate the presidential election, a proposal that was opposed by White House officials and even by Trump’s principal election lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who is recovering from the coronavirus and participated in the meeting remotely.

Attorney General William Barr has resisted Trump’s demand to name a special counsel to investigate Hunter Biden, son of the president-elect, and presumably would oppose a similar appointment of Powell to investigate the election, but he is leaving the department under pressure from Trump, effective Wednesday, December 23. His interim successor, the current deputy attorney general, Jeffrey Rosen, could well be asked to make such appointments after Barr’s departure.

On Sunday, as details of the meeting and the illegal and unconstitutional proposals that were discussed became more widely known, Trump went on his Twitter account to denounce the press reports as “Fake News.”

According to the Times account, one of measures discussed at the meeting was a proposal by Giuliani that Trump issue an executive order to seize control of voting machines in the contested states so they could be examined for “fraud.” Giuliani reportedly discussed this option with the acting deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Kenneth Cuccinelli, last week, but Cuccinelli said the DHS did not have the authority to do so. An executive order would supposedly remedy that, but the president, as head of the federal government, does not have the power to take such action against the states, which actually administer elections under the US constitutional structure.

It is remarkable that Cuccinelli, a rabid anti-immigrant bigot and semi-fascist, who was a notorious law-and-order demagogue during his four years as state attorney general in Virginia, is now presented as a moderating force in the internal deliberations of the Trump administration.

In the only Sunday television interview program to take up the issue, CNN’s “State of the Union” began with host Jake Tapper declaring: “For anyone wondering just how much damage an outgoing president can do in the final month in office, we’re beginning to get something of an idea. On Friday in the Oval Office, the president reportedly discussed with disgraced pardoned former General Michael Flynn Flynn’s deranged proposal to have Trump declare martial law to force new elections in states that Biden won, so as to overturn the election results.

“Trump is also reportedly talking about giving the powers of a special counsel to attorney Sidney Powell, whose crackpot conspiracy theories about the election have been laughed out of courtroom after courtroom.”

Tapper asked a guest on the program, Republican Senator Mitt Romney, about the martial law plan, which Romney dismissed, saying, “It’s not going to happen. That’s going nowhere. And I understand the president is casting about, trying to find some way to have a different result than the one that was delivered by the American people.”

The only representative of the Biden transition to discuss the issue Sunday, Pete Buttigieg, Biden’s nominee for secretary of transportation, was far less categorical, merely stating that Biden would take office on Inauguration Day as scheduled, adding, “I just hope that, across the party and across the country, there’s an understanding about how important it is that we remain committed to democracy.”

Remarkably, there was no substantive discussion on any other Sunday television interview program about the White House discussions on martial law, nor did the Biden campaign issue any statement or comment on the issue of Trump’s continuing refusal to concede the election. Biden’s policy ever since November 3 has been to downplay Trump’s threats to overturn the election while reaching out to the military-intelligence apparatus and Wall Street to reassure them that the incoming Democratic administration will uphold their interests.

Trump continued to rail against the election results over the weekend on Twitter, declaring Saturday that it was “Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 Election,” and calling for supporters to attend protests in Washington on January 6, 2021, when Congress officially counts the electoral votes cast by the 50 states and the District of Columbia. “Be there, will be wild,” he tweeted, reiterating claims that he won a landslide victory in the election, and adding, “Now Republican politicians have to fight so that their great victory is not stolen. Don’t be weak fools!”

A half-dozen Republican congressmen have said they will object to electoral votes being cast for Biden by states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia, and one senator, incoming Alabama Republican Tommy Tuberville, said he would provide the support from at least one senator required to force a vote on the objection. The objection would still fail, both in the Democratic-controlled House and in the Senate, where more than a dozen Republicans have said they accept Biden’s victory.

Meanwhile, the syndicated television program Inside Edition reported that Trump “has reportedly told his staff he’s not leaving the White House, flat out refusing to accept the results of the 2020 election…”

During the summer, after he had clinched the Democratic presidential nomination, Biden told interviewers that his “greatest fear” about the election was that Trump would refuse to acknowledge the decision of the voters and would refuse to carry out a peaceful transfer of power. Since the election, however, Biden has remained virtually silent on the issue, entrusting the transition to the national security apparatus and avoiding any appeal to the American population, for fear of triggering a political upheaval the Democrats could not control.

One indication of the mood in Washington—where the prospects of a Trump coup are the subject of heated discussions on a daily basis—is a little noticed amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) introduced by Democrat Chrissy Houlahan, a former Air Force officer, with Republican support. It would require that if the president invokes the Insurrection Act of 1807, as Trump threatened to do last June during the protests against the police murder of George Floyd, military and paramilitary units will be required to wear their names and insignia so they can be identified as they take to the streets.

Trump has threatened to veto the NDAA, although not over this amendment, which does almost nothing to restrain the possible use of the military against the American people.

Britain’s dangerous new COVID-19 strain: A warning to take urgent action now!

Robert Stevens

With 1.7 million people already dead worldwide and hospitals overwhelmed, scientists are sounding the alarm about a new, more infectious strain of COVID-19 that has emerged in Britain and is leading to a major surge in infections there.

The new strain of COVID-19 is believed to be responsible for the doubling of daily new COVID-19 cases in the UK this month. The country recorded 35,000 new cases on Sunday, its highest ever, up from an average of just 15,000 two weeks before.

The massive spread of this new strain of COVID-19 stands as yet another indictment of the Johnson government’s reckless and criminal response to the pandemic. By abandoning all efforts to eradicate the virus, the government left the population vulnerable and exposed to a deadly threat the consequences of which are still unknown.

A man wears a face mask to protect from coronavirus as he walks past Westminster underground station, in London, Tuesday, Dec. 15, 2020 (AP Photo/Alberto Pezzali)

The new strain appears to be 70 percent more infectious than the variants currently spreading throughout Europe and America.

While the new variant of the disease was first detected in September, by November a quarter of new cases in London were attributed to it. By mid-December, this had reached three quarters of all new cases.

Beyond making it into every part of the UK, the new variant has already spread to the Netherlands, Denmark and Australia, according to the World Health Organization. “The new variant is out of control,” UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock said.

“This new variant is very concerning and is unlike anything we have seen so far in the pandemic,” Jeffrey Barrett, director of the COVID-19 Genomics Initiative at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, told the Financial Times .

On Saturday John Edmunds, a member of the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) committee, described the emergence of the new strain as the “worst moment of the whole epidemic as far as I’m concerned.” He warned of the “extraordinary infectivity of the new strain.”

Edmunds urged, “We will need much more severe measures to bring the incidence down. Worse than that we are starting from a very high incidence already with hospitals stretched and [National Health Service] staff under strain. It is a very perilous situation.”

On Sunday, countries throughout Europe and the world announced they would no longer admit travelers from Britain, including Austria, Belgium, Italy, Ireland, Germany, France and the Netherlands. On Saturday, Johnson introduced a new “Tier 4” level of restrictions, affecting 16.4 million people, including around 9 million people in all 32 London boroughs and much of southeast England.

The new variant of COVID-19 involves mutations in the structure of the virus. Barrett noted that 23 letters of the virus’s genetic code had changed, including 17 that could potentially impact the way the virus behaves and spreads.

Scientist Laruie Garret noted that COVID-19 has undergone three major changes so far this year. “Why is it happening? Because there’s so much virus in the world now, spreading fast, [increase]ing likelihood of random mutations. Is the new mutant in the US? Who knows?”

The emergence of this deadly new strain of COVID-19 underscores the criminal irresponsibility of the Johnson government and its “herd immunity” policy in response to the pandemic.

In March, Sir Patrick Vallance, the government’s chief scientific adviser, stood alongside Johnson and declared, “It’s not possible to stop everyone getting it, and it’s also not desirable.” On March 5, Johnson outlined his government’s response to the pandemic by saying, “perhaps you could take it on the chin, take it all in one go and allow the disease, as it were, to move through the population, without taking as many draconian measures.”

In August, former Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn explained that in March he was briefed by the British government that its aim was to “build up herd immunity by allowing people to die,” a policy that was justified through what he called “Eugenic formulas.” Corbyn kept silent about the government’s homicidal intentions for six months.

The result of this policy has been a disaster. Nearly 70,000 people are dead in the UK. The country has a per capita mortality rate even higher than the United States, and 50 percent higher than Europe as a whole. And now, nearly a year after the pandemic first emerged, it is spreading, in the words of the government, “out of control” in the form of a new strain of the disease.

For weeks, the Johnson government has sought to use the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines – which will become available to the general public within a matter of months – to distract attention from its total failure to take any serious measures to contain the disease. The media was happy to play along, seeking to drown out the constantly rising death rate with nonstop coverage of the vaccine roll-out.

Johnson claimed Saturday that “the situation has deteriorated since I last spoke to you three days ago”—the day he declared that there would be no retreat from plans for shops to open 24 hours a day and for “bubbles” of three households to meet for five days over Christmas. The government had first learned about the new strain “earlier this week,” he added.

These are bare faced lies.

The government spent the last week stonewalling demands from scientists to abandon its deadly plans and had even threatened several London local authorities with legal action for planning to close schools three days before the official end of term to prevent a further spike in infections. Moreover, Maria Van Kerkhove, COVID-19 technical lead at the World Health Organisation told the BBC on Sunday that the UK had been aware of the new viral strain circulating in “south-east England since September.”

While definitive information is yet to surface as to the origins of the mutation, the premeditated and criminal inaction of the Tory government allowed it to spread unchecked. The new strain was detected at the same time as the government insisted on reopening schools followed by students being sent back to colleges and university campuses one month later.

These policies were sanctioned because the government wanted to ensure the profit margins of the corporations in the vital Christmas spending spree and because they wanted no challenge to the narrative that defeating the virus was only a matter of time.

The placing of profits above human safety and lives has instead led to an even more infectious strain of the virus spreading halfway around the world in a matter of weeks.

The murderous actions of the Johnson government are echoed by its counterparts in every country.

In the United States, 320,000 people are dead. In France 60,418 are dead, and 26,414 in Germany. Whether it is Trump or Biden, Merkel or Macron, noone can believe a word that these representatives of the ruling class say. Their entire response from the beginning has been dictated by the interests of the corporations and a super-rich oligarchy. Whatever the political coloration of the government, the policy is the same: Profits are what counts, and the lives of millions of workers are expendable.

Almost 1.7 million lives have already been lost globally, and thousands more are dying every day. There is no time to lose! Emergency measures must be taken to bring the virus under control!

The Socialist Equality Party in the UK, together with its sister parties in the International Committee of the Fourth International throughout the world, demands the immediate closure of all nonessential businesses and schools. This must be accompanied by full compensation for lost wages and small business income.

Trillions of dollars must be invested in health care infrastructure to treat, contain and eradicate COVID-19, and ensure society is protected from the threat of infectious disease in the future.

The claim that there is no money for these necessary emergency measures to save lives is a lie. The social resources required for the most vital public health needs of the population are monopolized by a financial elite whose interests are diametrically opposed to the needs of society.

Bipartisan US “relief” bill stiffs workers and unemployed, gives billions more to business

Jacob Crosse

Late Sunday night, congressional leaders from both parties signaled their acceptance of a roughly $900 billion coronavirus relief bill that includes generous handouts to large companies while leaving jobless workers and their families with crumbs. The bill is expected to pass both the House and Senate by Monday afternoon and be attached to a $1.4 trillion omnibus spending bill. President Donald Trump has signaled his intention to sign the bill into law.

The package, which Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called a “strong shot in the arm,” does nowhere near enough to make whole the over 10 million people who have lost their jobs since March and the millions whose hours or wages have been reduced.

The bill does not provide health insurance for the estimated 15 million who have lost it during the pandemic. It will not house the over 162,000 who have been evicted during the pandemic, nor does it provide enough money to cover the nearly $6,000 in average back rent owed by some 12 million people, according to Moody’s analytics.

It’s been nearly nine months since congress passed the CARES Act, a windfall for the financial oligarchy that provided about $6 trillion in low-interest loans and cash subsidies to major banks and corporations, while providing limited relief for the general population in the form of a $1,200 stimulus check for those earning under $75,000, limited protection against eviction, and a $600 weekly federal unemployment benefit.

The new bill slashes the federal supplemental jobless benefit to only $300 a week and cuts the duration of the program to a mere 11 weeks. It reduces the one-time stimulus check to $600 from the CARES Act’s $1,200.

A temporary holdup in the bill’s passage was ironed out over the weekend after a deal was struck between Republican Senator Pat Toomey and the Democrats over several Federal Reserve programs created in the CARES Act that were set to expire at the end of the year. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin had already ended the programs on his own, but the language Toomey included in the package would have required congressional approval to restart the programs in case another crisis for the financial oligarchy arose that required additional billions in immediate funds.

The Democrats demanded the removal of the proposed check on the supposed “independence of the Fed,” a fiction used to conceal the fact that the US central bank is an instrument of the corporate-financial oligarchy and does its bidding.

The Democrats had little problem abandoning federal aid to cash-starved states and cities, money for food programs under conditions of mass hunger, serious money for COVID-19 testing, tracing and PPE, and other desperately needed social funding they had included in the so-called Heroes Act passed by the House in May. But on the issue of unlimited Fed money to prop up the financial markets, they dug in their heels and refused to sign onto the deal until Toomey backed down.

In a tweet Sunday, Schumer boasted that Toomey had “dropped his dangerous language tying the Fed’s hands.”

While the text of the bill has yet to be released, it undoubtedly includes, largely buried in the fine print, innumerable gifts for the politically-connected and well-off. One such boon already unearthed is the inclusion of the so-called “three martini lunch” provision, which allows businesses, previously allowed to deduct 50 percent of meal expenses from their federal taxes, to increase the tax write-off to 100 percent. Unnamed tax experts assured the Washington Post that the handout should not exceed “a few billion dollars a year.”

Another provision included in previous summaries of the bill allows “intelligence and defense contractors to have flexible contracts during the COVID-19 pandemic.” While the precise meaning of this provision remains unclear, it is no doubt a gift to large defense industry corporations and has nothing to do with providing vaccines, food or housing to millions of people in need.

Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi shot down two packages earlier this year presented by the White House and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell that contained some funding for state and local governments, compared to the zero dollars in the current package.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Ky., talks with reporters after he spoke on the Senate floor Monday, Nov. 9, 2020, at the Capitol in Washington [Credit: AP Photo/Susan Walsh]

The bipartisan bill does not include a liability shield for corporations and businesses that infect their workers and customers with the coronavirus, which had been a central demand of Senate Republicans. However, as Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin acknowledged in a speech earlier this month, 38 states have already passed such legislation.

The largest chunk of the package, $284 billion, will be dedicated to refunding the misnamed Paycheck Protection Program (PPP). Ostensibly created to provide low-interest loans that could be turned into grants to allow small businesses to continue paying their employees, in reality large businesses were handed millions in loans, consuming a disproportionate share of the funding, untold thousands of small businesses received nothing, and Wall Street banks pocketed billions in loan fees.

Over 100,000 legitimate small businesses, many of which were unable to navigate the paperwork or had their PPP loan applications rejected, have shut down permanently since March. One business that was able to take advantage of the PPP, according to a report earlier this year by the New York Post, was a political consulting group co-owned by “progressive” Representative Ilhan Omar’s husband, Tim Mynett, which was granted a $134,800 loan. In addition to the six-figure loan, the E Street Group LLC was the beneficiary of $500,000 in Economic Injury Disaster Loans.

Other major provisions of the bill include:

• $20 billion for the purchase of vaccines along with $8 billion for vaccine distribution and $20 billion to assist states with testing and contact tracing.
• $45 billion for transportation, including $14 billion for transit systems, $10 billion for highways, $2 billion for buses, $2 billion for airports and $1 billion for Amtrak.
• $16 billion for major US airlines, which already received $25 billion from the CARES Act and proceeded to lay off some 90,000 workers. The new money reportedly comes with a stipulation that airlines will have to return 32,000 furloughed workers.
• $1.4 billion in new funding for Trump’s border wall, including “new border security technology.”

The miserably inadequate level of social assistance in the bill is already arousing popular anger. On social media, one jobless worker wrote a message to Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the supposed leaders of the “progressive” wing of the Democratic Party, declaring: “$600 stimulus. Thanks for not delivering on what you’ve promised for 8 months. Don’t tell us you care, you don’t.”

One Twitter user wrote, “congress has agreed to a $900 billion stimulus deal & Americans that [are] struggling [are] only getting a one time check of $600… $600 now and an eviction notice the next month. Happy Holidays Everyone!”

Another sardonically added, “thank you congress for finally passing a $600 stimulus check that will go directly to landlords.”

As with the CARES Act, the $600 checks will not be sent to adult dependents, meaning millions of college students won’t be receiving them. Immigrants without a Social Security number are also not eligible to receive checks. Federal unemployment benefits that some 12 million people are using through the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance and the Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation programs have been extended for only 11 weeks, as opposed to the 16 weeks previously announced, and at only $300 a week.

A mere $25 billion is slated for rental assistance, and it is not known how much of this will actually go to tenants, who collectively owe some $70 billion in back rent, according to Moody’s.

A renewed eviction moratorium is reportedly in the bill. However, it appears to be only a one-month extension, ending on January 31, leaving up to 20 million people facing eviction.

Bridge the digital divide: Enable kids to have access to education in the new normal

Aditya Doiphode

The pandemic and the extended lockdown in India has hit the poor disproportionately hard. They have a higher risk of infection, significant loss of income and livelihoods, and immense learning losses for their children as the schools were closed for 7+ months.

During this period, government schools have been struggling with identifying new ways of working and trying to enable distance learning for students. Yes, it is neither easy nor straightforward as students from the most impoverished communities can only access digital learning on their phones and usually on low-tech platforms. A recent survey suggests that more than 50% of families surveyed did not have any digital devices through which their children could access online education. Even for kids with a smartphone, there are a lot of challenges. With incomes drastically reduces due to the current economic crisis, parents who are daily wage earners face a tough choice between purchasing mobile data for their child’s education or buying food for the coming days. With the loss of learning, the students most affected have the risk of slipping through society’s cracks, and their vulnerabilities have significantly heightened due to their socio-economic situation. At such a time, it is crucial to double down on efforts to ensure that the learning journey of the students continues. A critical requirement for enabling this is access to digital devices for the students.

The Way Forward:

It makes sense to have a staggered approach to uplifting the education system in India. There is a need to have a short, medium, and long term strategy.

In the short term, it is essential to provide immediate support, including food and direct benefits. To enable this, there needs to be direct money transfer into the neediest parents’ bank accounts (a fundraiser can support this). There need to be partnerships with feeding India and Zomato for deliveries of groceries. It is essential to identify community champions and empowering them to take up work like grocery distribution and implementation. It is also vital to share import information like relief schemes introduced by the govt, information on Covid-19 safety measures and a list of nearby food distribution centers, raise e-coupons, etc.

In the medium term, it is crucial to reach out to children and provide them an education which they would lose because of the lockdown. As the schools are still shut, there are chances that kids would have a loss of an entire academic years’ worth of learning. To combat that, we need to reach out to kids through their parent’s phones and the internet. Still, the challenge here is to provide them quality education through exciting, attractive, and relevant material. It is vital to make the parents understand the quality of education offered. This helps with getting their support for these initiatives.

Long Term Measures: Here, the focus needs to be on training teachers to facilitate a wholesome learning experience for the students. This training would help the teachers teach better even when we get back to normal, hopefully shortly. Teachers need to have a more in-depth knowledge of the subjects they teach to become true educators to their students.

These are a few ways in which these needy students can be given the education they deserve. There are NGO’s working on improving the education infrastructure to facilitate better education in government schools and incentivize education by providing better quality education.

This is the time for society to come together and help each other. Through partnerships and the right approach, we can directly support communities and rebuild systems that will emerge stronger, faster, and better.

Yes, we are in crisis, but in each crisis lies an opportunity for us to rebuild, revitalize and reorganize the system towards a better future.

Third worker dies of COVID-19 at a Bakkavor food plant in the UK

Robert Stevens

Two workers have died and dozens of workers have tested positive for COVID-19 at the Bakkavor Salads plant in Tilmanstone near Dover, Kent.

Food manufacturer Bakkavor is a UK-based conglomerate employing 17,000 workers in 23 factories. It supplies fresh prepared meals, salads, desserts, pizza and bread to British supermarkets including Tesco, Sainsburys, Marks & Spencer and Waitrose. The company also operates in the United States, where it had five plants in 2019, and China, where it had nine. In 2018, it reported revenues of £1.86 billion and pre-tax profits of £67 million, up 36 percent over the previous year.

The Bakkavor Salads plant in Tilmanstone near Dover, Kent (credit:: Google Maps)

On December 1, it was reported that a worker at the Tilmanstone plant had died after contracting the virus. The plant employs 800 workers, and the death was reported under conditions in which COVID-19 infections were soaring among the workforce. The GMB trade union reported that cases among the workforce at the time “rocketed from 35 in the first week of November to 79 by end of the month. At least 97 staff have been instructed to self-isolate.”

Just two days later, on December 3, a second worker at the plant was reported dead from COVID-19. By this time, 99 workers had been affected, according to the GMB.

No details were made public about the workers who died at the Tilmanstone plant.

Those deaths brought the total number of fatalities among Bakkavor’s workforce to three, following the death of an employee at a bakery run by Bakkavor in Devizes, Wiltshire in southern England. On August 12, the Wiltshire Gazette and Herald reported that the worker was a “68-year-old Devizes man, who had worked at the bakery for many years. He died in the Great Western Hospital in Swindon in April.”

The newspaper reported, “His family believe he contracted the virus at work after he was sneezed over by another employee who later also became ill.”

As to why the death only became public knowledge in August, the newspaper explained, “The company said it was unaware of the sneezing allegation and that it had not reported the death as at the time this was the responsibility of the hospital. Wiltshire Council's public health department was not aware of the death until told by the Gazette this week.”

Infections were increasing at the plant as the death came to light, with the Gazette reporting, “Last week five coronavirus cases were reported at Bakkavor on the Hopton Industrial Estate… By Friday [August 8] this had risen to seven and now the figure is 13”.

In August, an outbreak was reported at another Bakkavor plant, a dessert making facility in Newark, Nottinghamshire. An initial 20 staff were found to be infected. By August 18, after testing 1,262 of the 1,600-strong workforce, 98 were confirmed infected and 59 of these were reported to be already back in work.

The BBC quoted Richard Wiles, who works next to the Bakkavor plant. He said, “The workers have been upset for quite a while that they don't think enough has been done to protect them… It seems there has been a slow, modern British response to this and cakes have come before Covid safety.”

In the case of all three deaths, the company and local Public Health England authorities have insisted that safety is paramount in their plants and that there is no evidence to prove that infections originated on their premises. None of the bromides from Bakkavor about how safe their operations are can be taken at face value.

While it is obvious that infections originated outside workplaces, with many plants sited in areas in which the virus is surging, if workplaces are unsafe—as has been proven time and again to be the case in the UK and internationally, particularly in the meat packing and food processing industry —then the virus then spreads like wildfire within them.

Workers are caught between a rock and a hard place, knowing that if they do not attend work they risk losing their pay. In May, it was reported that two workers were infected at a Bakkavor plant in Spalding in Lincolnshire. A family member of an employee at the plant told Lincolnshire Live, “The employees are scared. If they were to take time off to protect themselves, they would not receive any pay unless they are confirmed ill. So many of the employees are forcing themselves into work so they can still afford to live… A lot of these people have families who are older and are at risk. We are needing help to sort something out for the workforce of Bakkavor."

Bakkavor has three plants in north London, employing around 4,000 workers. Many are immigrants from Sri Lanka and Gujarat and Goa in India.

In April, ITV obtained footage shot in a staff meeting at one of the plants, Bakkavor Meals, in Elveden, north London. Sean Madden, Bakkavor’s head of operations at Elveden, was secretly filmed as he addressed staff. Workers were told that it is impossible to socially distance and many employees seen in the footage were not socially distant from one another.

Madden speaks to the workers only a few feet away from another man standing next to him. Holding a facemask, he states, “When you come into the factory because we can’t socially distance in here, we want you to cover over your mouth and nose like this” [as he puts his face mask on].

Stating that workers need to be in the plant and on the production lines, he continues, “You know if we look at 45 percent of people who are off sick, maybe 5 percent of those have coronavirus. The other 40 percent of people, they just don’t want to come.”

He then threatens, “If we need to get rid of 200 people’s jobs next month, I’m going to look at who turned up to work and I’m going to look at who didn’t bother turning up to work. The people who didn’t bother turning up to work, you know, they will be the first people that we have to get rid of unfortunately.”

With the plant employing many workers from the Indian sub-continent, Madden’s threat was repeated in Hindi.

Some executives at companies including Bakkavor, Foxtons, Persimmon, Severn Trent and Burberry took pay cuts earlier in the year as token gestures. This was under conditions in which hundreds of thousands of workers were being laid off as the pandemic worsened. The Financial Times noted, “Bakkavor were among the groups that cut payouts to investors as a result of coronavirus.” Some of the top-paid directors at the firms “took a symbolic cut of 20 per cent— the amount that furloughed staff lose under the government scheme up to a cap of £2,500.” However, things soon got back to normal, with the FT reporting in June, “Bakkavor is… expected to revert to full pay from July…”

While Bakkavor refused to close its operations despite outbreaks of a deadly virus at multiple plants, and three deaths, it moved quickly to protect its profits in August by announcing the closure of one of its plants in Spalding—affecting 500 workers. It was shut with no opposition from the trade unions, with the firm announcing, “We've been working closely with our colleagues... and Unite throughout the consultation process and can confirm that no viable solutions were put forward to our ongoing challenges.”

Bakkavor’s plants only remain open because of the pernicious role of the GMB. The union claimed it had “lodged a formal collective grievance” on behalf of its members at Tilmanstone after the death of the first worker, stating that “we believe the health and safety of our members has been seriously compromised at the factory.” It added that “25% of the workforce [at Tilmanstone] has been affected by this outbreak—unfortunately Public Health England does not feel that this is enough to step in.”

Nothing was done, with the union, even after the death of the second worker, saying only that it “requested the factory close to allow mass testing of employees and a deep clean of its factory. Once this has been done, the factory can reopen, with staff returning to work safe in the knowledge every step has been taken to ensure they are working in the safest possible environment.”

On December 4, the day after the announcement of the death of the second worker, the GMB said it “has claimed a massive victory as the fresh food giant agreed full pay for staff off work and a rollout of mass testing at the Tilmanstone salads factory.”

Only a rotten pro-company outfit could describe any of this as a “victory”. The testing of an initial 375 staff confirmed that the plant was rife with infections as 48 employees tested positive, and another 44 went into self-isolation.