Hundreds of workplace outbreaks of COVID-19 along US West Coast

Kayla Costa

Cases of COVID-19 are surging across the United States, resulting in thousands of deaths and hospitalizations every day. On Friday, new single-day records of over 300,000 new cases and 4,100 deaths were reported in the United States. The situation is particularly dire in the state of California, where medical workers are now being forced to ration care due to understaffing and insufficient capacity.

Hospital staff members enter an elevator with the body of a COVID-19 victim on a gurney at St. Jude Medical Center in Fullerton, Calif. (Image credit: Jae Hong/AP)

The mainstream media and politicians are making their best efforts to argue that the rampant spread of the virus falls on the shoulders of individuals, who they claim have been “irresponsible” and not following physical distancing and mask mandates.

However, this narrative ignores the spread of the virus throughout large workplaces and businesses, where workers have been forced back into unsafe conditions to ensure the continuation of capitalist profit making. Data collected from three West Coast states—California, Oregon and Washington—provide a snapshot of this reality.

In Los Angeles County, the Department of Public Health lists 511 active outbreaks at workplaces, directly connected to the infections of 10,000 employees. This data, according to Los Angeles magazine, “accounts only for commercial settings that are not schools, homeless shelters, health care facilities, jails, or related categories—though certainly those institutions are also themselves workplaces.” Further, it only shows cases that are linked through contact tracing within a 14-day period and which are reported by businesses.

The workers infected labor in some of the lowest-paid and least safe conditions within the service, logistics and food processing industries:

• Seven Costco warehouses have at least 15 infected workers, with one in Culver City reporting 71 active cases.
• Over 215 workers are infected across multiple Target store locations.
• Four Amazon warehouses reported nearly 200 cases.
• A single 99 Cents Only Stores location reports 113 confirmed cases.
• A logistics warehouse for retail brand Fashion Nova reports 203 cases.
• One hundred and fifty-one cases were detected at a FedEx Ground center in Pacoima, with 505 total cases across nine FedEx facilities.

There also have been infections recently among workers at McDonald’s, Chick-Fil-A, In-N-Out Burger, Best Buy, Nordstrom, Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, Apple stores, CVS and a long list of other businesses. Even cast and crew members in the media production industry have confronted the spread of the virus with hotspots at Warner Brothers, NBC, Netflix and CBS.

Similar reports were released by the health departments in the states of Oregon and Washington, which are located north of California. The most recent weekly report by Oregon Health Authority (OHA) reveals 128 active outbreaks. Some of the workplaces with the highest number of infections include:

• Amazon fulfillment centers, with 180 total cases in a Troutdale facility and 112 reported in Salem
• Amy’s Kitchen, an organic food supplier, with 112 cases
• Walmart Distribution Center in Hermiston, with 104 cases
• Fred Meyer Distribution Center in Clackamas, with 96 cases
• Masami Foods, Inc near Klamath Falls with 39 cases

At least 15 cases per facility were reported at dozens of other retail, service, agriculture and logistics job sites. To date, 70 deaths and 14,549 confirmed cases are reported and directly linked to workplace spread.

In Washington state, the most recent weekly update from December 28 reported 180 active cases linked to workplace outbreaks in the week prior, with 2,289 cases total since the start of the pandemic. Washington State Department of Health only tallies active cases by industry, with food service, homeless shelters, construction, childcare and K-12 schools, agriculture and manufacturing having the highest numbers of reported cases.

While not listed in that specific summary, 174 employees of a Cotsco warehouse store in Union Gap, a suburb in Yakima county, have so far tested positive in an outbreak that was first reported on December 24. At the time, Yakima Herald reported 68 store employees testing positive in the week prior. In a span of a week and a half, the virus had spread from 18 percent of the employees to almost half.

The Costco warehouse remains open, threatening to infect more workers and shoppers. The city commissioners are intent on not only allowing Costco to remain open, but also criticizing Democratic Governor Jay Inslee from the right and demanding even more schools, churches and businesses reopen.

Yakima is a county with a high percentage of essential workers, more than 60 percent of the population, and an infection rate that is 25 times above the state average. Many immigrant workers have jobs in service and agriculture, and have been forced to work in unsafe conditions since March. In response to these deadly conditions, fruit-packing and agricultural workers in Yakima County went on strike against six different companies last May.

It should be noted that in each of these states, the highest number of reported infections are concentrated in long-term nursing facilities and correctional centers. Nursing facilities contain the most vulnerable population—the elderly or those unable to care for themselves—and, as with the broader health care system, are chronically understaffed and short on supplies.

In prisons, most of them privately owned and operated, thousands of poor and working class incarcerated people are denied basic health precautions like social distancing, ventilation and protective gear, while living in appalling conditions.

To provide a brief picture of how bad the situation is facing the population behind bars, the top five “workplaces” with the most active cases in Oregon are all prisons, with those five alone reporting 1,819 confirmed cases. California’s 35 prisons have reported more than 40,000 total cases among inmates and staff, with a staggering 25 percent of all inmates infected at Central California Women’s Facility in San Joaquin Valley.

While the reported number of cases at job sites across the West Coast reveal an increasingly desperate situation facing workers, the official tallies remain an underestimation of the true scale of workplace-based infection without mass testing and contact tracing. When positivity rates surpass 5 percent, arcane contact tracing systems become overwhelmed and contact tracing officials are unable to quickly follow up with every positive case and locate the source of spread. Further, all data depend on self-reporting by businesses, and many workers know that infections have been consciously concealed by management to ensure there is no disruption of operations.

However, the information that is available serves to undermine the false narrative perpetuated by the Democratic Party, which dominates West Coast politics, that infection is caused solely by individual behavior and that it is “safe” to reopen non-essential businesses and schools despite the rise of cases. Until vaccines for the coronavirus have been widely distributed, urgent measures must be taken to reduce the spread to the lowest level possible and save hundreds of thousands lives.

The Socialist Equality Party advances a program of working class action. Workers must demand the closure of all schools and non-essential workplaces, with full compensation for all affected workers and small businesses. Essential workers must be provided with the most advanced protective measures possible and must oversee the health and safety measures in their workplaces until they can get the vaccine. These efforts must be combined with the implementation of mass testing and contact tracing and a massive infusion of funds into the healthcare system to ensure free, high-quality care, to be paid for by the reallocation of the trillions handed out to the major banks and corporations over the last year.

Human society has at its hands the science, public health knowledge and technology to carry out these policies, but the principal obstacle is the financial oligarchy and capitalism, which subordinate social need and human life itself to its endless pursuit of profit.

Elon Musk becomes world’s richest person as pandemic death toll breaks records

Jessica Goldstein & Tom Hall

Last week, Tesla and SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk surpassed Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to become the richest human on the planet, with a net worth of $189 billion.

Bezos and Musk have become the standard bearers for the massive enrichment of the world’s billionaires over the course of the pandemic. Since the beginning of last year, the world’s 500 richest individuals have increased their wealth by $1.8 trillion, and the world’s billionaires now control more than $10 trillion dollars in wealth for the first time in history.

Elon Musk at Tesla Factory, Fremont, CA, USA. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Bezos and Musk alone account for a significant portion of this increase. Since March 2020, Jeff Bezos has increased his wealth by approximately $72 billion, according to Forbes. However, Musk’s wealth increased by $165 billion over the course of a year which has been marked by extraordinary levels of mass suffering and death in the US and all around the world.

The same day that Musk became the world’s richest person, 4,245 people died from COVID-19 in the US, according to Worldometer. By the end of the year, according to the US Department of Labor, 10.7 million American workers remained officially unemployed, and according to analysis of Census data by the Economic Policy Institute, 50 million Americans, including 17 million children, had gone hungry due to the effects of the pandemic on the economy.

It is worth noting, before going further, that the response of the newly crowned world’s richest man to last week’s historically unprecedented coup attempt by President Donald Trump was to fire off a series of idiotic non-sequitur memes on Twitter. Musk treated the event, which involved high-level state involvement and reportedly aimed at kidnapping and even murdering high-ranking Democrats, as the occasion for snide jokes.

The best possible interpretation one can put on this is that Musk, who now controls wealth greater than the annual GDP of Iraq, is an uncultured ignoramus. This is certainly true. But given Musk’s close relationship to the Trump administration—he sat on the president’s business advisory council in 2017 and praised Trump’s support for his business ventures in the 2020 elections—it may well indicate his support for the attempt to violently overthrow the US Constitution, or at least a “wait and see” attitude.

Moreover, Musks’ tweet earlier last year clumsily attacking Karl Marx is an indication of the intense nervousness, both of Musk and the corporate financial oligarchy as a whole, that the unprecedented levels of inequality in American and world society will inevitably produce a revolutionary response by the working class. Trump himself has presented himself for years as the only bulwark standing between the United States and socialism.

But regardless of Musk’s immediate calculations, the drive towards fascism is the inevitable outcome of the staggering levels of inequality which exist in the United States and around the world, which is incompatible with democratic forms of rule. The response of both parties to the pandemic, which has been to funnel trillions into Wall Street while forcing workers back into unsafe workplaces, can be summed up as sacrificing hundreds of thousands of human lives to the profits of Wall Street.

Musk is not merely a beneficiary of these policies but played a leading role in implementing them. Last May, Musk violated local lockdown orders and kept Tesla’s assembly plant in Fremont, California, running full speed ahead.

At the time, Musk owned “only” $40.1 billion and was the 22nd-richest person in the world. Despite this brazen violation of the law, California Democrats did nothing. Trump tweeted in support, “California should let Tesla & @elonmusk open the plant, NOW. It can be done Fast & Safely!” This was a major milestone in the reopening of the US auto industry, after it had been closed for months after a wildcat strike wave in mid-March.

Perhaps more than anyone else, Musk personifies the parasitic character of the corporate-financial oligarchy which dominates society.

Musk’s wealth is almost purely a product of the stock market bubble. Musk’s actual business ventures are comparatively insignificant. The main source of his wealth is his stock in Tesla, an electric vehicle company which controls less than one percent of the global auto market. Tesla delivered 499,550 cars in 2020, short of its annual target of 500,000 vehicles, according to the Motley Fool website.

In contrast, Toyota produced 8.8 million vehicles globally in the 2019 to 2020 fiscal year, Ford vehicle wholesales reached 1.18 million individual units as of the third quarter of the last year and General Motors sold 2.5 million total vehicles worldwide in 2020.

Nevertheless, shares of Tesla, the California-based electric carmaker, closed at $816.04 on Thursday, an increase of 8 percent from the day before and 20 percent overall in the first week of 2021. In the last year, its stock price has skyrocketed over 720 percent. The company itself has reached over $760 billion in market value, according to BBC News— “more than the total market value of carmakers Toyota, Volkswagen, Hyundai, [General Motors] and Ford combined.”

Moreover, Tesla is not even particularly profitable. Last month Musk sent a desperate email to management demanding that Tesla find ways to cut costs in any way possible. “When looking at our actual profitability, it is very low around 1% for the past year. Investors are giving us a lot of credit for future profitability but if, at any point, they conclude that’s not going to happen, our stock will immediately get crushed like a souffle under a sledgehammer!”

The rise of Tesla stock out of all proportion to its actual productive activities is so unreal that BBC technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones put it bluntly: “To believe the electric car-maker’s worth could rise so rapidly in just 12 months is the ultimate example of irrational exuberance.”

However, and this no doubt plays a significant role in Wall Street’s embrace of Tesla, its 48,000 workers are among the most exploited in the industry. Factory workers at its main plant in Fremont, California, make between $14–23 an hour, according to Glassdoor.com, barely enough to afford the monthly rent of a two-bedroom apartment in the Bay Area city. They work as much as 12 hours a day, under conditions which have led to such a high rate of injury for workers that Musk’s plant has been documented as one of the most dangerous places to work in the US by the National Council for Occupational Health and Safety.

As for rocket company SpaceX, it is the forum in which Musk gives vent to aristocratic delusions to personally one day own the entire planet of Mars. On the same day that he became the wealthiest person, Musk proposed selling most of his possessions, with the exception of all his stock, in order to build a colonial city on the Mars through SpaceX. The terms of service for SpaceX’s satellite-based broadband internet services reportedly contains provisions—of dubious legality—requiring that subscribers acknowledge Mars as a “free,” “self-governing” planet.

Musk also effectively proposed indentured servitude as a way for future colonists to book passage for the Red Planet, declaring in an interview with Axel Springer that he planned to send people to Mars with “loans available for those who don’t have money” for space travel and jobs for working off the immense debts. The US manned space program, meanwhile, has been largely reduced to a marketing and moneymaking venture for Musk and others.

The rapid rise of Musk is the embodiment of a social and economic order, capitalism, which has become so alienated from the needs of society that “it must provoke social protest and uncompromising political opposition,” as the World Socialist Web Site said in its New Year’s statement. Society can no longer tolerate the piling up of such huge amounts of wealth, which finds its source in the exploitation of the working class, in the hands of so few.

The response of the working class must be to develop an independent political movement to expropriate this wealth and use it in the interests of society, instead of the selfish interests of the ruling class. This is the program of socialism.

Genetic Engineering, Agriculture and Brexit: Treachery in Our Midst

Colin Todhunter

The UK government has launched its public consultation on the deregulation of gene editing in England. To kick things off, somewhat predictably Environment Secretary George Eustice recently spun a staunch pro-industry line at the Oxford Farming Conference by stating:

“Gene editing has the ability to harness the genetic resources that Mother Nature has provided in order to tackle the challenges of our age. This includes breeding crops that perform better, reducing costs to farmers and impacts on the environment and helping us all adapt to the challenges of climate change.”

In the wake of Brexit, he attacked the EU’s stance on genetic engineering in agriculture by saying:

“Its potential was blocked by a European Court of Justice ruling in 2018, which is flawed and stifling to scientific progress. Now that we have left the EU, we are free to make coherent policy decisions based on science and evidence. That begins with this consultation.”

Eustice’s statements form part of a long-term pro-genetic engineering-deregulation propaganda campaign. It follows on from Boris Johnson’s first speech to parliament as prime minister in 2019 in which he proclaimed:

“Let’s start now to liberate the UK’s extraordinary bioscience sector from anti-genetic modification rules and let’s develop the blight-resistant crops that will feed the world.”

The type of ‘liberation’ Johnson advocates forms part of the usual neoliberal evangelism which this time revolves around the adoption of unassessed genetically engineered crops and food, while overseeing the gutting of food safety and environmental standards, especially in light of a potential post-Brexit trade deal with the US.

It is no secret that various Conservative-led administrations have wanted to break free from the EU regulatory framework on genetically modified organisms (GMOs) for some time. In 2014, Genewatch exposed collusion between the government and global agribusiness giants to force GMOs into Britain above the heads of a highly sceptical public.

In response to Eustice’s comments, GMWatch stated on its website that deregulation would result in no or few safety checks and probably no labelling for gene-edited products. This is despite dozens of top scientists having warned that they could be dangerous for human health and the environment in a 2017 Statement on New Genetic Modification Techniques.

Commenting on the government’s recent press release sent out to journalists to publicise the consultation process, the Beyond GM campaign group said:

“… the mendacious propaganda material on the benefits of genome editing… which was sent to journalists throughout the country… will be widely taken up as fact, preventing any intelligent public debate during the consultation period.”

The press release is in GMWatch’s view “a pack of lies from beginning to end” based on unsubstantiated ‘jam tomorrow’ claims that gene editing has the potential to protect the nation’s environment, pollinators and wildlife. These claims ignore the reality that the first gene-edited crop to be commercialised (Cibus’s SU canola) is gene edited to survive being sprayed with toxic herbicides. GMWatch argues that there is no gene-edited crop available anywhere in the world that offers environmental benefits.

It is telling that all the claimed advantages of gene-edited crops of the future are already available in the form of agroecological farming methods and high-performing conventionally bred crops. Agroecology offers system-wide solutions that tackle the now well-documented system-wide health, nutrition, social and environmental problems inherent in the model of industrial agriculture supported by corporations behind the genetic engineering project.

However, the UK government shows no interest in these solutions.

GMWatch notes that the government press release claims that gene editing is not genetic modification. The industry has put much effort into spinning this next generation of genetically engineered crops in this way. It wants at all costs to avoid the bad press and negative public perception that has surrounded the first generation of transgenic GMOs by avoiding the GMO tag.

However, gene editing most certainly falls within the definitions of GMOs from technical, scientific and legal (in the EU) standpoints. In fact, the EU and existing UK definition of a GMO does not depend on whether it contains foreign DNA. EU law defines a GMO as an organism in which “the genetic material has been altered in a way that does not occur naturally by mating and/or natural recombination”. Regardless of what the government says, gene-edited organisms fall under this definition.

Moreover, the government is wrong to claim that gene-edited organisms do not contain foreign DNA. This can happen intentionally (in the case of certain types of gene-edited organism) and unintentionally, as a result of the inherent inaccuracy and imprecision of gene-editing procedures. To support this claim, a compilation of peer reviewed evidence has been posted on the GMWatch website in the article ‘Science supports need to subject gene-edited plants to strict safety assessments’.

As for the government’s claim that gene-edited organisms only contain “changes that could be made more slowly using traditional breeding methods”, GMWatch says:

“We look forward to their proof that the unintended outcomes of gene editing could happen in traditional breeding. They include large deletions, insertions and rearrangements of DNA, as well as unintended incorporation of foreign DNA and entire genes.”

Long-time campaigner Jim McNulty of the Genetic Engineering Network is scathing in his assessment of how the UK government is currently acting. He says:

“When we look at this administration, filled to the roof with fraud, corruption and cronyism, we now have Boris Johnson trying to make or break the rules on new gene-editing techniques.”

He adds that the Brexiteers in government wasted no time in setting their pro-GMO agenda:

“Within a week of leaving the EU, the UK moved quickly to challenge and compete with our former European partners. The US is refusing to regulate the new genetic engineering techniques, just like they did with the first wave of transgenic GMOs. We in Europe, in the mid-90s, were faced with untested, unstable and unregulated GMOs in soy and maize going into two thirds of EU food products.”

It was a mammoth task to bring politicians, supermarkets and all government bodies on board to regulate the original wave of GMOs.

McNulty explains:

“We succeeded because in the UK, Germany and France campaigners and activists demanded action. The media, retailers and politicians buckled under the massive pressure of public opinion that we created to bring that about.”

The US also felt the pressure:

“Because the EU and its markets were the prize and there was so much anti-GM sentiment, GMOs were driven out and EU lawmakers have never changed their position. Science and public opinion won.”

McNulty argues that we now see treachery in our midst: a former member state has seen fit to bury 25 years of evolving laws and regulations founded on a science-based approach and the precautionary principle.

Germany leads Europe in daily coronavirus deaths

Peter Schwarz

On Friday morning, the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) reported 1,188 new deaths within 24 hours. This figure is higher than the previous German record set on Dec. 30, when 1,129 people died from the pandemic in one day. Also, more than a thousand deaths were reported on Wednesday (1,019) and Thursday (1,070). According to Worldometers, over 39,000 people have died so far in Germany.

In fact, the real total is likely to be much higher. The RKI warns that it has received only incomplete figures for COVID-19 infections and deaths due to the Christmas and New Year holidays. Worldometers, which relies on other sources, reported as many as 1,198 deaths on Wednesday morning. Even the UK, where infection numbers are going through the roof, currently has fewer victims than Germany. Worldometers registered 830 deaths in the UK on Tuesday and 981 on December 30. However, these numbers are also likely to rise again soon.

Central train station in Frankfurt, Germany, Thursday, Oct. 8, 2020. (AP Photo/Michael Probst)

How did it get to this situation?

In the first months of the pandemic, Germany seemed to come through the crisis somewhat better than its neighbours. In light of the catastrophic situation in Italy, the German government took initial protective measures relatively early. However, neither the federal nor state governments were prepared to protect the population against the danger of infection, although they were fully aware of the risks. The interests of the economy, i.e., the profits of major corporations and banks, always took precedence over people’s lives.

This was already evident in March, when the government approved a €756 billion emergency package, €600 billion of which went to large corporations, with only pittances for workers, the self-employed and small businesses. This measure, combined with the trillions pumped into financial markets by the European Central Bank, has seen share markets climb from one record level to another in the midst of the deepest health, social and economic crisis the country has seen. As coffins pile up in morgues, champagne corks are popping on the stock markets.

Since then, the government’s main focus has been on keeping the economy running in order to recoup the billions it handed out to the rich, irrespective of the deadly consequences for workers. The closure of nonessential businesses was not even considered, even though it would have greatly reduced the risk of contagion not only in the businesses themselves, but also in crowded public transportation systems. Only service establishments with high levels of public traffic—restaurants, department stores, hair salons and the like—were temporarily closed.

A prerequisite for continued production was keeping schools open so that parents could continue to work. The same politicians who for years had systematically run the education system into the ground now shed crocodile tears over the lack of educational opportunities for poor children as the schools were turned into custodial centres and hotbeds of infection.

A small fraction of the billions handed out to the rich would have been enough to make schools safer, as well as to purchase the necessary electronic equipment and hire enough tutors to ensure quality home schooling under the guidance of experienced teachers. But there was no money for this. All initiatives by teachers, parents and students to this end were systematically stifled.

The public was consistently lied to. Although it was known at an early stage that children and adolescents show fewer symptoms, but spread the virus just as rapidly as adults, politicians, journalists and even some scientists stubbornly claimed that children posed no danger and could even act as a countermeasure to the spread of the virus. In the meantime, numerous scientific studies have refuted this lie, which nevertheless continues to be spread.

At the end of December, the journal Science published a study by an international team from the University of Oxford that used infection data from 41 predominantly European countries to calculate the effectiveness of anti-coronavirus measures during the first wave of infection. The study concluded that the closure of schools and universities and the limiting of personal contact to a maximum of 10 people could reduce the number of replications of the virus by up to 40 percent. Closing nonessential stores, restaurants and pubs reduced the reproduction rate by 25 percent, while additional restrictions only reduced it by a maximum of 10 percent.

The internationally renowned Berlin virologist Christian Drosten also maintains that open schools are a major driver of the pandemic. In his latest podcast, he explains that the highly contagious mutation of the virus first discovered in England was most likely spread through schools. The new mutation of the virus took off “with a lot of tailwinds in schools” and then “spread to the rest of the population.”

More than a thousand European scientists have signed the appeal, “Calling for Pan-European commitment for rapid and sustained reduction in SARS-CoV-2 infections,” which advocates a radical, Europe-wide lockdown to bring the seven-day incidence (the number of infections per 100,000 population in a week) below 10 to save hundreds of thousands of lives. German signatories include RKI President Lothar Wieler, Max Planck President Martin Stratmann, German National Academy President Gerald Haug, virologists Sandra Ciesek and Christian Drosten, and the presidents of several research organisations.

Yet governments and their advisers in industry continue to treat these scientific recommendations with contempt. They are literally willing to walk over dead bodies. On Tuesday, a conference call between the chancellor and the heads of government of the German states decided to merely extend the completely inadequate measures introduced in December until the end of January. Production in the factories continues unrestricted. Schools and day-care centres remain officially closed, but with so many exceptions that they continue to operate virtually unrestricted.

Even the modest measures intended to ease the conditions of parents turn out on closer inspection to be a sham. For example, government leaders have promised that parents with children up to 12 years will each get 10 days and single parents 20 days of extra paid leave to care for their children.

This pay, however, amounts to just 67 percent of net pay and is only provided if there is no other reasonable care option for the children. A reasonable care option is considered to be when one parent works in a home office. If day-care centres offer emergency care, parents are obliged to accept this option and thereby expose their children and themselves to the risk of infection.

Meanwhile, the campaign to fully open day-care centres and schools as soon as possible is gathering momentum in political circles and in the media, regardless of the risks involved.

Speaking on Deutschlandfunk radio on Wednesday, German Family Minister Franziska Giffey (Social Democratic Party, SPD) called for the quickest possible return to schools and day-care centres. The current restrictions are in place until the end of January, “and I think it must stay that way,” she said. When a relaxation of the lockdown was possible, then the children in day-care centres and schools are the first priority.

The premier for the state of Baden-Württemberg, Winfried Kretschmann (Green Party), announced that elementary schools and day-care centres would be fully reopened as early as January 18. He was supported by his Education Minister Susanne Eisenmann (Christian Democratic Union), who has been a vehement advocate of in-person teaching in elementary schools during the pandemic.

ARD’s Tuesday Tagesthemen news program featured an extensive interview with epidemiologist Klaus Stöhr who proceeded to attack all those scientists who advocate a radical lockdown. Stöhr argued against lowering the seven-day incidence below 120. He said recent weeks have shown “that 120 to 130 cases per 100,000 could be managed.” Hospitals everywhere had not been overloaded, he claimed, and the economic impact of such lockdowns was “undoubtedly significant.”

Stöhr was not chosen at random. He spent years working for Novartis, the Swiss pharmaceutical giant that profits billions off people’s health. In 2019, Novartis posted net income of $11.7 billion on sales of $47.4 billion. As recently as mid-October, Stöhr had defended the murderous strategy of herd immunity in the weekly Die Zeit, recommending Sweden as a role model, although the disastrous consequences of the Swedish policy were already known at the time. With a seven-day incidence of 400, the country now ranks among the worst affected European countries.

On December 22, Stöhr called the pandemic development a “natural event” that was “unstoppable.” He recommended that the reproduction number, i.e., the infection rate, should not be higher than 1, “but also not much lower.” He said he thought it was “unreasonable to close schools and kindergartens when you know the main impact [is] on the elderly.” He criticised the measures taken in the summer, arguing that if they had not been introduced, there would now be many more young people who are no longer infectious.

This murderous policy of herd immunity, which cold-bloodedly accepts the death of tens of thousands, is the policy of the entire ruling class. It is supported by all parties represented in the Bundestag and put into practice in the states by political coalitions of all stripes. The Left Party, the Greens and the SPD are no less ruthless than the Free Democratic Party, the CDU and the CSU (Christian Social Union).

As in the case of refugee policy, it is the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) which acts as pioneer. The demonstrations against coronavirus restrictions supported by the AfD provide an excuse for all the other parties to move further and further to the right.

Resistance to the policy of open schools and day-care centres is growing among parents, teachers and students, but to successfully fight against it they need an independent perspective.

The crucial task is to build a cohesive network of independent action committees to guarantee safety and health. These action committees must fight to unite all workers—teachers, school bus drivers, janitors, as well as manufacturing, health care, logistics, retail and food processing workers—in a nationwide general strike to halt regular school operations and production in nonessential businesses.

Indonesia: Soaring COVID-19 cases as government scrambles to roll out vaccine

Robert Campion

The spread of COVID-19 continues to accelerate out of control in South East Asia’s largest country and economy.

In what has been dubbed an “endless first wave,” the surge in Indonesia climbed to a record 9,321 new infections on Thursday, bringing the official total to 797,723. The number of deaths rose by 224 to 23,520. The number of new cases on Thursday also broke the record set just the previous day of 8,854.

UNICEF aid workers in Indonesia (Credit: UNICEF)

In late November the total cases reached the milestone of 500,000. In other words, over a third of the total cases have occurred in the past month and a half alone since the outbreak was first recorded in March.

The increase in cases is not attributed to any increase in testing, which, according to “Our World In Data,” has remained very low at just 12 tests per 100,000 people, lower than the neighbouring, less-developed Philippines.

The accelerating number of cases is the product of criminal neglect on the part of the capitalist government, which has systematically sought to downplay the pandemic threat in order to safeguard corporate profits.

Contact tracing has been minimal and disorderly, while lockdowns have been resisted throughout, placing the full burden of the virus on the working class.

The percentage of people tested who were found to be positive spiked above 20 percent for several days in late December, according to Reuters. World Health Organisation guidelines establish a positivity rate above 5 percent as indicating that the virus is out of control and requiring lockdown measures and more extensive testing. By all reports, Indonesia has been consistently well above this threshold since the beginning of the outbreak.

Health officials have begged the government for immediate measures to contain the spread and prevent the hospital system being overwhelmed.

Epidemiologist, Pandu Riono, from the University of Indonesia made the prediction Monday that hospitals would soon collapse from a rapid rise in patients. “The problem is that in the next few weeks, all hospitals in Java will collapse, including Jakarta,” he said.

Secretary general of the Indonesian Private Hospital Association (ARSSI), Ling Ichsan Hanafi, stated in an interview with the Indonesian newspaper Tempo on Friday that the isolation beds and ICU rooms in Jakarta’s COVID-19 referral hospitals had reached an occupancy rate of 95 percent. There are 101 referral hospitals in Jakarta with 7,300 isolation beds and 958 ICU beds.

Calling for greater hospital capacity, he warned, “even new referral hospitals will likely be fully occupied once open… [because of] the rapid addition to patients’ numbers.” He also noted that there was a general increase in severe symptoms among new patients.

In response, the government announced a two-week, social restriction beginning on Monday, 11 January, across Java (including the capital, Jakarta), as well as the island of Bali.

The belated measures encompass 22 towns, regencies and regions. Three quarters of workers are instructed to work from home, shopping malls will have restricted operating hours and restaurants will operate at 25 percent capacity. A blanket closure will also be applied to the school system.

The measures come on top of the closure of borders to most foreign travelers in order to prevent the spread of the more highly infectious SARS-CoV-2 variant, which has already been reported in Australia and Singapore. At present, the travel ban is set to expire on January 14.

Amid rising public anxiety and anger, the government announced that its vaccination program would commence on January 13 with President Joko Widodo to receive the first shot of the CoronaVac vaccine. Priority is being given to health care workers and politicians, followed by others in the workforce between the ages of 18 and 59 years old. All vaccine shots are to be paid for by the government.

The national drug agency is yet to finalise its phase-III trials and issue an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for the vaccine produced by Sinovac. However, owing to its effectiveness overseas, the government is gambling that the EUA process can be expedited, given that the testing protocols are similar. Initial findings in a small study in Turkey show an effectiveness of 91.25 percent after a trial of 7,000 volunteers, and 78 percent effectiveness in Brazil from a trial of 12,000.

Both are well above the 50 percent threshold for emergency effectiveness set by the WHO and also demonstrate success among elderly patients, making it more reliable in this age group than prior vaccine candidates.

Indonesia is unable to access the more expensive and effective Moderna and Pfizer vaccines which require a distribution network capable of storing the drugs at -20 and -70 degrees Celsius respectively. The Sinovac vaccine is able to be stored in normal refrigerators at 2 to 8 degrees Celsius.

There are currently three million Sinovac doses in Indonesia’s possession, with 1.2 million already distributed to 24 provinces throughout the archipelago, according to the health ministry. It is planned for the other 1.8 million to be distributed by Thursday.

As with most COVID-19 vaccines, immunity is achieved through administering two shots weeks apart. So to achieve the government’s goal of herd immunity by inoculating two-thirds of the population requires 427 million doses, allowing for a 15 percent wastage rate.

The country is set to receive another 125.5 million doses from Sinovac in the initial phases, as well as 203.5 million from other sources, notably from AstraZeneca and Pfizer.

The government has set the goal of achieving herd immunity in 15 months, but has not outlined a distribution schedule. To achieve that target would require an uninterrupted vaccination rate of 12 million a month (400,000 a day). It is also unclear from the lack of testing if the vaccines, while preventing complications, can prevent the spread of disease.

Health experts have treated the target with scepticism, envisioning a much longer timeline. “Fifteen months after vaccination, this is an ambitious goal for our enormous population,” said Hermawan Saputra of the Indonesian Public Health Expert Association. He told CNN Indonesia that it could take up to three years.

EU responsible for refugee disaster in Bosnia: People without food, in sandals in the snow

Jan Ritter & Max Linhof

Without food, wearing just sandals in the snow and lacking a roof over their heads, more than 3,000 migrants must brave sub-zero temperatures in the northwest of Bosnia-Herzegovina. This catastrophic situation—like the conditions in the Greek refugee camp Kara Tepe on Lesbos and the mass deaths in the Mediterranean—is a result of the European Union’s criminal refugee policy.

European governments are abandoning these desperate people to their fate. On January 5, the German government announced it was not planning to take in any refugees from Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Refugees in Lipa on the Bosnian-Croatian border (AP Photo/Kemal Softic)

Near the town of Bihać, with 43,000 inhabitants, a few kilometres from Croatia’s external EU border, the temporary tent camp for refugees in Lipa, with about 1,300 residents, was closed on December 23 because of a failure to make it winter-proof.

The camp had been in operation since April and never had a functioning electricity and water supply. The thin unheated tents barely offered protection from the cold. Shortly before the eviction, several tents and containers went up in flames. Since then, the Lipa residents have literally been fighting for survival.

Anja, 25, from Switzerland, who has been working for the Spanish aid organisation “No Name Kitchen” in Bihać since November and asked to remain anonymous out of concern for her own safety, told Die Zeit, “After the fire, they were on their own and occupied empty houses outside the camp. Some have even converted toilet containers into homes.”

Conditions in the camp, run by the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), were already unbearable before the onset of winter and then deteriorated massively with the fire and onset of the frost. Everything is lacking. Add to this the constant threat of infection amid the deadly COVID-19 pandemic, which is also out of control in Bosnia-Herzegovina. According to Worldometers, more than 113,000 people have already contracted coronavirus in this country of just under 3.5 million people, and more than 4,200 have died from the virus.

At the turn of the year, the refugees were given hope of being moved to a heated camp in Bradina, in an old barracks. On December 29 they were put on 20 buses, only to disembark again after 30 hours in the same place they had boarded: the burnt-down camp in Lipa. Yet on the outskirts of Bihać, a few kilometres away from the Lipa camp, stands the fully equipped Bira reception centre, which has been empty since mid-2020, where there is heating, electricity, running water and safe sleeping space for 1,500 people.

In the meantime, some emergency tents have been rebuilt by the Bosnian military in Lipa. But this is only a drop in the ocean, as Anja reports:

“There is no running water and no electricity. The tents also offer little protection from the cold. Temperatures are often below zero, as Lipa is at a relatively high altitude. In protest against these conditions, some of the residents went on hunger strike on New Year’s Day. According to our information, several hundred people are taking part. They apparently ended it only yesterday. People have written banners with slogans like ‘We want freedom’ and ‘We are not animals.’”

There are hardly any tarpaulins, sleeping bags or blankets to protect them from the winter temperatures. As Sumka Bucan from the aid organisation Care told the Hamburger Morgenpost, “The closure of the camp in Lipa one day before Christmas was already inhumane, but now the former residents find themselves in a life-threatening situation. Without heating and adequate clothing, 1,300 migrants must sleep outside because they no longer have a place of refuge. Some of them were left in the snow with sandals on.”

Meanwhile, the Danish Refugee Council (DRC) regularly helps frostbitten people, as the aid organisation’s country director Nicola Bay told the Süddeutsche Zeitung. “The situation there is absolutely unstable and dangerous. ... It has snowed a lot in the past few days and now the roof is threatening to collapse under the mass of snow.”

Lipa refugee camp (AP Photo/Kemal Softic)

Speaking to Euronews German, a resident of the camp, wearing sandals and a pair of shorts, says, “We live like animals. Even the animals live better than us.”

Some of the camp’s 1,300 residents have since sought shelter in empty factory buildings or other ruins in the area. Window openings are often only sealed with plastic bags. In the so-called “Jungle” on the outskirts of the city, more migrants live in tents and under tarpaulins.

According to research by Tagesschau.de, in addition to the 1,300 residents of the camp, another 2,000 migrants live in the area around Lipa and Bihać without a roof over their heads. In total, more than 3,300 people are exposed to the cold, hoping to find a decent life in the EU after their arduous journey via the “Balkan route.”

Anja tells Die Zeit that her NGO is often approached by other refugees on their journey to the camp. “We haven’t eaten for five days, please give us something too,” they ask her. “We are forbidden to distribute food and clothing, since then we have been doing it secretly. Refugees are seen as criminals, so those helping them are also regarded as criminals.”

In addition, migrants confront xenophobia and racism. They are forbidden from taking certain buses and from entering certain petrol stations and cafés. On the Croatian side of the border, brutal pushbacks are systematically carried out under the aegis of the EU. In doing so, European governments are increasingly relying on fascist forces to fend off and outright terrorise war refugees and other migrants at the EU’s external borders.

Detainees protest inhuman conditions on Australia’s Christmas Island

Max Boddy

On Tuesday evening a protest erupted inside Australia’s notorious immigration prison on Christmas Island, a remote outpost in the Indian Ocean. A number of male detainees, who denounced the “indefinite cruelty” they faced in the facility, set mattresses on fire, as well as some buildings.

Footage posted on social media showed a man on the roof of one compound saying, “we can’t see our children, we can’t see our family.” He said some detainees had been locked up for “five or six years,” declaring “enough is enough.”

Screenshot of video showing refugees protesting at Australian-run detention centre on Christmas Island. (Credit: The Guardian, YouTube)

Other footage shows a detainee saying: “This is how frustrated people are in detention… Arab people, white people, African people, they’re sick and tired of [Home Affairs Minister] Peter Dutton and Scott Morrison, the prime minister of Australia, they’re treating us like a dog… We are human beings.”

According to witnesses, between 10 and 20 detainees were still staging a sit-in on Wednesday. At least two detainees had been on top of a roof on Tuesday night inside the facility, which currently houses about 230 detainees.

Tensions have been building inside the detention centre for months. In August, the Liberal-National government fully reopened the facility—formerly used to incarcerate thousands of refugees—in order to detain indefinitely non-citizens who had previously served prison sentences but who could no longer be deported because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Many of the detainees are locked inside the compounds for 22 hours a day. They have been denied workable internet or mobile access, so they are unable to speak with their families. Many of the detainees suffer physical and mental health problems, and the facility lacks specialist treatment services.

“Everybody wants to be reunited with their family, and this is how we get treated. It’s mental torture,” Rey, a detainee involved in the incident told the Guardian. He said that the incident was sparked only after the prisoners were denied the right to peacefully protest. “Everyone just had enough, of all the empty negotiations and empty words,” he said. “We always tell them what needs to be fixed on the island, and we’re always ignored.”

“We’re locked inside our compound for 22 hours a day, all our movements here are controlled, everything is locked down and we get escorted from building to building like prisoners.”

Location of Christmas Island (Credit: Wikimedia)

The Australian media immediately branded the incident a riot, seeking to poison public opinion, cover up the causes of the unrest and justify retribution against the protesters. The Australian Border Force (ABF), the para-military government organisation in charge of imprisoning and deporting refugees, said an “operation is underway to restore order” at the centre. This included sending a “special response team” to the island on Wednesday.

Neither the ABF nor the media have provided any information on the measures being taken to suppress the protest and punish the participants, and social media videos and messages from detainees appear to have been shut down.

This development has all the hallmarks of similar so-called riots inside Australia’s immigration detention centres over the past three decades. Governments, both Liberal-National and Labor, have often known of discontent building for months, forcing those imprisoned to act out of desperation. That is met with harsh law and order responses, which have resulted in injury and death.

This incident is the direct result of the torturous treatment of those imprisoned. Morrison’s government has transferred detainees from facilities on the Australian mainland to Christmas Island, under the guise of relieving capacity pressure as a result of COVID-19 distancing measures.

When concern was raised in a tweet by Amnesty International that the refugees being transferred to Christmas Island should be allowed to live in the community, ABF twitter responded by stating: “No refugees are being transferred to CI [Christmas Island]. The cohort consists of those who have been convicted of crimes involving assault, sexual offences, drugs and other violent offences.”

This has been the tactic, adopted by successive governments and the media, to tar these detainees as violent criminals. In reality, they are the victims of anti-democratic and draconian immigration laws.

Referred to as the “501” cohort, these are permanent residents of Australia whose visas have been cancelled on the grounds of “bad character” under section 501 of the Migration Act. They are imprisoned until deported, even though they may have been convicted of only minor offences, and have served their time in prison. Many have lived in Australia for much of their lives and have long-established families in the country.

Under amendments to the Act in December 2014, the “bad character” clause was expanded to include those who have served prison sentences totaling 12 months or more. This meant people who had served sentences for crimes such as shoplifting and drug possession were imprisoned, facing deportation.

This quickly led to a larger number of permanent residents, including a significant number of New Zealand nationals, being deported from the country.

When speaking to the Guardian, Rey said the conditions are “worse than jail.” He explained: “In jail, you know when you can go home, in detention they don’t have a timeframe for you to go home. You wait around, and you don’t know what’s happening.”

Grievances that detainees had reportedly raised with the ABF include access to the exercise area (at present each compound has only a two-hour rostered time a day); the price of cigarettes; access to personal property; and the lack of proper access to a mobile network. Other issues included the use of handcuffs for transfers from detention centres and the chronic ill-health, both physical and mental, of long-term detainees.

Australia became the first country in the world to indefinitely imprison people without valid visas, when the Keating Labor government introduced the mandatory detention regime in 1992. It received bipartisan support and has been deepened by every government since.

The last Labor government, that of Prime Ministers Rudd and Gillard, also oversaw the imprisonment of people whose visas had been revoked under section 501, forcing them into substandard and atrocious conditions in detention centres. In 2008, while the Rudd Labor government was in office, a Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission report called the facilities a “disgrace” and demanded they be “demolished.”

Instead the Labor government extended the detention system, reopening prison camps on Nauru and Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island, as well as Christmas Island.

Christmas Island also has housed a Tamil refugee family, imprisoned there since August 2019, after a last-minute court injunction prevented their deportation. In a deliberately punitive move, they were flown to Christmas Island, some 5,000 km from their hometown of Biloela, in rural Queensland.

Nadesalingam Murugappan, known as Nades, Kokilapathmapriya Nadesalingam, known as Priya, and their five-year-old Kopika and three-year-old Tharnicaa. (Credit: Facebook@solidaritywithBiloela)

As with the detained former prisoners, the removal of Priya Murugappan, her husband Nades and two infant children was designed to cut them off from their sources of personal and political support. Residents of Biloela have been waging a sustained fight for their release, which has been stopped at every turn by the government. According to reports, they were housed in a different facility to where the protest has taken place.

The brutal treatment of asylum seekers and visa holders in Australia is a warning to the working class and must be opposed. As health, economic and social tensions mount and workers enter into struggle against the continued assault on basic working and living conditions, such measures will be turned against working people more broadly.

British Gas workers begin five-day strike

Robert Stevens

Gas and electrical engineers employed by British Gas are striking for five days in opposition to plans by company owner Centrica to impose an inferior contract, including pay cuts of around 20 percent worth thousands of pounds.

The strike by the 7,500 GMB union members began Thursday and concludes at midnight next Monday. The company demanded that that its workforce of around 20,000 sign the contracts by December 23 or be let go in a “fire and rehire” threat. Centrica is one of many corporations who have grasped the opportunity presented by the pandemic to carry out long-planned restructuring operations.

A British Gas van (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Those involved are 4,000 service and repair gas engineers, 1,700 smart metering engineers, 600 central heating installers, 540 electrical engineers and 170 specialist business gas engineers.

The GMB did everything to avoid a strike over seven months. Centrica announced last June that it intended a major restructuring, including shedding 5,000 jobs and ending a range of what it claimed were 7,000 different work contracts across the industry. It said it was prepared to use a section 188 notice if unable to negotiate the changes it wants. Under a section 188 notice, a company can sack and reinstate its employees on different terms and conditions.

Centrica favoured the path of enforcing its plans using its trusted partners in the trade union bureaucracy. Prior to announcing its proposals, the company was holed up for two weeks of talks with the Unite union. Further redundancies would be an “option of last resort if it turns out we can’t work together to achieve this.”

In response, the GMB, which has 10,000 members working for British Gas, organised a consultative ballot. Such ballots are a favoured means of the union bureaucracy to avoid taking any immediate action against companies. Even under the UK’s restrictive anti-strike laws, a strike can still commence after an industrial action ballot—but not a consultative ballot—after a 14-day period. The result was announced on August 19. On a turnout of two thirds, British Gas and P H Jones employees (a heating installation subsidiary of British Gas) voted 95 percent in favour of industrial action. The GMB’s notice of the ballot result called on the Centrica Board to “wake up and smell the gas,” adding, “British Gas was an historically proud British institution—but Centrica’s beleaguered management are betraying a once great brand—and their entire workforce.”

Noting concessions already made, GMB National Secretary for Commercial Services Justin Bowden pleaded, “GMB members have spoken loud and clear in delivering their verdict, now it’s time for the company to listen and get real.”

In defiance of a massive mandate to fight, the consultative ballot served its purpose for the GMB leadership who waited for more than three more months to announce, on November 20, that it would soon hold an actual ballot for industrial action. Another five days passed, with the union announcing on November 25 that a ballot would be held on December 1. It said, “The ballot will open on Tuesday, December 1st, 2020 and close Thursday, December 17th—with the first possible strike action to take place anytime from New Year's Eve. Further strikes could be called throughout the winter.”

Two ballots took place, each a week apart in being announced, with both returning large majorities for strikes. The gas and electrical engineers voted by 86 percent to reject the new contract and other GMB members at British Gas voted yes by a higher majority of 89 percent.

The GMB’s aim was to use these results as leverage for further talks. Bowden said on December 8, during the balloting period, “GMB has written to Centrica Chairman Scott Wheway calling for the fire and rehire threat to be permanently removed and for British Gas to return to the negotiating table.”

The company refused to move on the basics of its plans, setting December 23 as the new deadline for workers to accept the cuts or lose pay and protections ahead of being sacked.

The union responded that this “made strike action unavoidable.” Bowden complained on December 17, “Centrica and British Gas CEO Chris O’Shea is entirely to blame for this disruption in the depths of winter. He provoked his loyal workforce into strike action with his threats and deadlines to either accept very substantial cuts in pay and conditions or be sacked. His idea of compromise—to reduce a 20% cut in pay down to 10% and then lambast and attack the shop stewards for not selling his proposals, has been overwhelmingly rejected by the gas, electrical and smart engineers. British Gas must now remove from the table entirely the fire and rehire demand and all the deadlines.”

As it announced strikes, the GMB trumpeted the efforts of a “cross-party group of 140 MP’s”, the vast majority from the Labour Party, who “wrote to Centrica boss Chris O’Shea to call on him to withdraw his threats—while the Prime Minister agreed fire and rehire is an exploitative negotiation tactic.” This must be the first time that Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson, a devoted Thatcherite, has ever been cast as a fervent defender of workers’ rights!

The letter was so tame and pro-business that it could be signed by myriad Blairites including Rachel Reeves, Stella Creasy, Chris Bryant and Wes Streeting. The main concerns of the signatories was that Centrica’s actions threatened to inflame the class struggle in the midst of a pandemic in which tens of thousands of people have died and hundreds of thousands have been laid off, with workers incomes and living standards decimated.

The MPs stated, “Using the statuary requirements to consult on redundancies through an s188 notice as a threat before negotiations had even started, set their negotiations off on an unnecessarily confrontational footing.”

Praising hitherto cosy relations between management and the unions, the letter added, “This is especially disappointing given the years of comparatively good industrial relations before your appointment as chief executive.”

Centrica had “tarnished the reputation of a great British company,” but it could still carry out the necessary restructuring in alliance with the unions. “It is clear that changes need to be made in Centrica and we understand the unions have been attempting to work with you to achieve a recovery for the business. The best way forward is a negotiated agreement so that changes are made with workers and not to workers.”

The union’s campaign demanding, “British Gas should start behaving like a British company” saw a video produced showing Tory cabinet ministers, right-wing Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer and members of his shadow cabinet speaking out against “fire and rehire tactics.”

On December 8, Centrica issued a “modernisation update”, declaring “Trade Union votes to accept new terms.” It revealed that “Since July we’ve spent over 300 hours in constructive negotiations with our four recognised Trade Unions; UNISON, GMB, Unite and Prospect… The objective of the talks was to try and reach a negotiated settlement that would see over 80 different employee contracts, with more than 7,000 variations in terms, reduced to four standard contracts across the company.” It added, “following a period of tough negotiations with significant concessions made, our Trade Unions put revised proposals to their members for ballot.”

The GMB's Justin Bowden calls on union members to "help us save this business".

These resulted in 7,000 front-line office workers accepting the deal. The majority of these are in the UNISON public sector union. The update noted that “Our GMB represented office employees voted by 72% to accept the final offer with a 63% turnout.” Four thousand Centrica Storage Unite members “accepted the final offer and our 4,000 non-unionised UK colleagues are in the process of accepting our proposals by signing new contracts.”

Centrica said, “despite shaping the proposals with us and UNISON over several months, the GMB changed their mind at the last minute and recommended that their members reject those same proposals.”

Centrica pledged to meet with the “GMB leadership” and called on them to “join the other unions that recommend the negotiated proposals which offer the best rates in the market in return for productivity improvements.”

The GMB overriding concern is that the dispute is jeopardizing the future of Centrica as a profitable firm. On November 28, the GMB put out a video in which Bowden said the firm now had “less customers, less workers, more subcontractors and a plummeting share price which has bounced Centrica out of the FTSE 100.” Even as Bowden called on GMB members to reject the final offer, he called on them to “help us to save this business”.

The GMB has organised emergency cover to be in place during the strike so its impact is lessened.

Gas workers face a terrible decline in living standards if these conditions are imposed throughout British Gas. They are not just fighting the company but face staunch opponents in the union bureaucracy.