Continental: Massive cutbacks with the help of the trade unions

Marianne Arens

After months in which workers at automotive products manufacturer Continental have been opposing the threat of job cuts with continuing actions, on April 20, the Continental Executive Board in Hannover and the unions went public with an agreement.

Protest against the closure of the Continental plant in Karben, Hesse, 15 April 2021 (Photo WSWS)

What the IG Metall and IG BCE unions, as well as the media, are praising as a “solid negotiation result” and a “great success” is the sealing of a long-planned attack. To save at least €1 billion a year, 30,000 jobs will be eliminated throughout the company and in Germany alone 13,000 jobs will be cut.

Several plants are to be closed and the closures will only be delayed for a short time. The closure of the tyre manufacturing plant in Aachen, for example, has been postponed from the end of 2021 to the end of 2022. Last September, there were still 1,800 employees in Aachen and of these, hundreds are now already being laid off via severance agreements and non-renewal of temporary contracts. By the end of the year, only 500 workers will remain to wind up operations at the plant.

A massive cutback is also being threatened in Regensburg, where up to 2,000 employees will lose their jobs. At the same time, Regensburg is to become the headquarters of the outsourced Conti-Antriebstechnologie (drive technology), now called Vitesco Technologies. Only electromobility work is to be done here. This was confirmed by Supervisory Board Chairman Wolfgang Reitzle and Executive Board Chairman Nikolai Setzer at Continental’s annual general meeting on April 29. In the longer term, Continental, or Vitesco Technologies, intends to exit the combustion engine industry altogether.

In Karben, Hesse, the announced closure of the electronics plant is also only being postponed—from 2023 to 2025. After 2023, only 337 of the current 1,088 employees, or just under a third, will remain. Just 150 workers will wind up in what remains of Continental Automotive GmbH and only 187 employees will continue to work for Continental Engineering Services (CES).

These minor delays are the “great success” about which the IG Metall works council representatives boast. Meanwhile, they hope “that CES [at the Karben site] will grow again.” CES has set the target of doubling sales within five years, however, this will only serve to put massive pressure on employees to forgo any bargaining demands in the meantime.

Jobs are also being cut at numerous other Continental locations, and plants such as at Babenhausen near Frankfurt (2,570 jobs) or Roding in Oberpfalz (520 jobs) are affected by closures. In this way, Continental aims to maintain its competitiveness on the world market and bolster its shareholders’ profits.

With 230,000 jobs, Continental is the world’s second-largest automotive supplier. Its largest shareholder is the Schaeffler family and the Schaeffler Group is the sixth-richest German business enterprise. The media made much of the fact that shareholders at Continental’s annual general meeting on Thursday decided to forgo a dividend for 2020. As recently as last summer, Continental paid out €600 million in dividends to its shareholders, despite the pandemic.

Continental and Schaeffler are among companies using the coronavirus pandemic as a pretext to push through long-planned cutbacks. In their drive for profits, they will concentrate production, relocate it to the most cost-effective sites and irreversibly destroy tens of thousands of previously well-paid jobs. IG Metall and IG BCE stand on their side in this.

The trade unions have taken on the task of pushing through the massive job cuts. IG Metall deputy chair Christiane Benner is also deputy chair of the Continental supervisory board. She has been involved in the plans for the mass redundancies and closures since the end of 2019. The trade unions, with their network of works council representatives and shop stewards at all sites, are ensuring that they are enforced. Through tightly controlled, limited protest actions, they seek to dissipate and blunt workers’ anger to ensure it does not interfere with management’s plans.

This is exemplified by the role of IG Metall at Continental. In Karben, the works council announced only a fortnight ago that IG Metall was preparing a ballot and an indefinite strike to defend the jobs. “Let’s be clear,” the union wrote in its flyer, “IG Metall and the works council want to preserve the plant and the jobs at the Karben site.”

Two weeks later, this is all water under the bridge. Now, it is announced as a great success that at least 750 workers will lose their jobs in Karben by the end of next year and a total of 900 employees by 2025. For 12 years, the unions have been imposing one round of concessions after another on the workers arguing that this would defend jobs. The World Socialist Web Site has repeatedly warned that far from defending jobs the collaboration of the unions with management and the imposition of concessions has expedited the attacks on jobs. The WSWS wrote, “In the end, however, the union’s signature will set the seal on the closure, coupled with its familiar methods of pressuring workers to take early retirement, severance pay and a transfer into a subsidiary company, which in turn leads to unemployment after a few months.”

This is exactly what happened. Now the plant closures are being carried through, accompanied by a set of measures that the unions are selling as the “success of our struggle,” It was thus possible to keep the consequences of the plant closure “bearable” for the workers, as Francesco Grioli from the IG BCE executive board put it.

In addition to part-time work for older workers and severance packages, the well-known “transfer companies” will be set up, which have been notorious for 30 years as transfer stations into unemployment. In addition, a “solidarity fund” is to be set up for laid-off temporary and fixed-term workers, which IG Metall itself admits is “not big.”

It goes on to say in its statement on the Karben plant, “For the members of IG Metall who worked as permanent employees, we negotiated significantly higher severance pay.” This privileging of union members is probably the most overt proof that IG Metall is deliberately dividing the workers. Those who do not declare their support for the union, or even dare to criticise it, should know from the outset that they will be the first to be dismissed and under the worst conditions.

Nationwide demonstrations in Brazil after police slaughter 27 in Rio favela raid

Miguel Andrade

On Thursday, for the third day in a week, Brazilians took to the streets of Rio de Janeiro and other state capitals to protest against a police raid in the Jacarezinho favela in Rio de Janeiro’s working-class northern zone on May 6 which left 28 dead, the largest number for a single police operation since 1989. That was the first year under the current Brazilian Constitution, which ended, on paper, the death squad operations of the 1964-85 US-backed military dictatorship.

The massacre was put at the center of traditional May 13 marches nationwide that commemorate the abolition of slavery in 1888 and protest against social inequality and police violence. Demonstrations demanding the end of police massacres had previously been held in São Paulo on Saturday and on the evening following the intervention in northern Rio, drawing thousands of residents.

Relatives and residents protest a day after a deadly police operation in the Jacarezinho favela of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Friday, May 7, 2021. (AP Photo/Silvia Izquierdo)

The raid was presented by police as an operation to arrest 21 suspects for recruiting child soldiers for drug trafficking. The Jacarezinho favela is considered the main stronghold of Rio’s Red Commando drug gang.

Of the 21 suspects, only three were arrested, and another three were killed. Another 24 of the dead had no relation to the case, with nine having no charges against them whatsoever. In addition to the 24 residents, one police officer was killed under still unclear circumstances, allegedly shot in the head at the beginning of the operation, which served as a pretext for the police to unleash an 11-hour reign of terror which washed the streets with blood.

Starting at 6:00 a.m., 250 officers swarmed the favela supported by helicopters and armored personal carriers. Police broke into houses, killing altogether peaceful or surrendering residents in front of family members and children, leaving defaced bodies exposed in the street to intimidate residents. The surviving suspects were forced to carry the bodies into the police APCs, a common form of psychological torture employed by Brazilian police units, as the police sought to destroy evidence of its crimes in the raid.

In the period since 1989, after the ostensible dismantling of state terror operations, the only episode to leave more dead in Rio occurred in 2005 in the cities of Nova Iguaçu and Queimados, in Rio’s northern industrial suburbs. The 2005 mass murder was carried out by the so-called militias, the off-duty police gangs which terrorize working-class areas under the pretext of fighting off Red Commando and other drug-trafficking gangs. These militias enjoy the support of far-right politicians, such as President Jair Bolsonaro who spent 28 years as a congressional deputy until 2018, 13 of them as part of the Workers Party (PT) ruling coalition.

The operation went ahead in open defiance of a Supreme Court ruling banning favela raids unless authorized by the Rio State Attorney’s Office (MP-RJ), which was only informed of the operation three hours into the slaughter. The ruling was delivered in June at the request of the Socialist Party (PSB), whose attorneys claimed the police were using the cover of COVID-19 measures to escalate deadly and illegal favela operations.

The court ban has done little to reduce the number of people murdered by the police in Rio de Janeiro. Almost 6,000 Brazilians are killed by police every year. In less than a year since the court ban on raids, over 970 people have been killed by Rio police.

The bloody raid in Jacarezinho is a sharp and tragic exposure of the fascistic views and methods being cultivated by President Bolsonaro within the 27 state-controlled Military Police corps. The COVID-19 pandemic has already inflicted over 430,000 deaths while plunging 60 percent of Brazilians into food insecurity, even as billionaires increased their wealth by 72 percent. Bolsonaro is engaged in a conspiracy on multiple fronts to gain dictatorial powers. State-controlled police forces, acting in defiance of bourgeois-democratic institutions, are among his most faithful constituencies.

Barely a month ago, Bolsonaro coordinated with his closest allies the sacking of the entire Armed Forces command in a bid to align them to his coup plotting. Simultaneously, government-loyalist House members attempted to instigate a mutiny of the Bahia state military police against Governor Rui Costa. In March, over a dozen youth were arrested or subpoenaed in relation to violations of “national security,” based exclusively on state police monitoring of social media, an action entirely alien to the enforcement of “national security” laws. Police in the capital Brasília also arrested on national security grounds five youth after they briefly unfurled a banner calling Bolsonaro’s COVID-19 policy “genocide.”

On May Day, police broke into an apartment in Brazil’s third largest city, Belo Horizonte, and arrested its occupants during a fascist march of Bolsonaro supporters, based exclusively on the fact that demonstrators had pointed to a resident opposing the march from his balcony. On May 5, Bolsonaro threatened to decree as illegal any social distancing measure and warned, “Do not dare to challenge it.”

The blood-soaked intervention in Rriowas met with a flurry of praise from President Bolsonaro, Vice President Gen. Hamilton Mourão and Bolsonaro’s close ally, Rio Governor Claudio Castro. The alignment with Bolsonaro and the fascistic reasoning behind the raid were proudly expressed by deputies who spoke to the press after it ended. Deputy Felipe Cury railed against any attempt to hold the police accountable for the massacre, declaring, “There are no suspects. They are all criminals, bandits, drug dealers and murderers, because they tried to kill officers.”

Another deputy, Rodrigo Oliveira, made clear court orders would mean nothing to the police. He said, “The police will always be present. We will go anywhere. Because of judicial activism, we have been restrained from entering the communities. This makes gangs stronger.” After deputy Cury justified the slaughter with the death of an officer at the beginning of the raid, Oliveira extended the threat to all those demanding the most basic democratic rights, telling the press, “I would like to make it very clear that the blood of this officer, who died today for society’s sake, is on the hands of these people.”

In a fascistic rant, Oliveira explicitly included among those with “blood on their hands” what passes for the “left” in Brazil, particularly the pseudo-left Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL). PSOL’s main leader in Rio, House member Marcelo Freixo, responded to the action with the usual apologies for the state repressive apparatus and calls for the strengthening of intelligence as a means to reduce police lethality. Oliveira mocked such calls, stating that “some pseudo-specialists in security” had “invented the logic that the greater the intelligence and knowledge, the lesser the reaction of gangs.” In other words, the police have no intention of hiding their contempt for democratic rights behind the pseudo-lefts apologies.

Later, on May 9, Bolsonaro remarked that “the press and the left, using the word ‘victim’ for drug dealers who steal, kill and destroy families” are actually “offending the people,” concluding with an homage to the slain officer. On May 11, Castro delivered a fascistic rant centered on the raid, declaring his mission, as well as that of the police, was to “liberate our people, including from you”, referring to PSOL.

For his part, Rio mayor Eduardo Paes endorsed the fascistic threats of the police deputies, depicting the Supreme Court raid ban as an attack on the legitimacy of the police, which “says the state cannot enforce the law in a given territory.”

Paes’s immediate alignment with Bolsonaro barely five months after taking office is at the same time a sharp exposure of the pro-military policies of the self-styled opposition to Bolsonaro in the PT and PSOL. Both parties supported him against Bolsonaro’s favored candidate for mayor, millionaire evangelical preacher Marcelo Crivella, depicting Paes as fundamentally opposed to Bolsonaro’s fascistic agitation, embodied by Crivella.

It is also an exposure of both parties’ programs of opposing Bolsonaro with nationalist and militaristic agitation, promoting the investigative police divisions, calling the “civilian police” a “constitutionalist” stronghold against Bolsonaro, as opposed to the Military Police—a gendarme force tasked with street patrols, riot control and which is responsible for the majority of police murders.

For decades, both parties have opposed police violence with the central demand of “demilitarization” of the police, i.e., dissolving the gendarmerie into the civilian police corps tasked with investigations. In order to disorient the opposition to Bolsonaro, the PT and PSOL launched over 150 police candidates in the 2020 mayoral elections. While increasingly turning to the Military Police, both parties defended themselves by claiming the majority of the candidates had been drawn from the nonmilitary, “constitutionalist” branches, into which the Military Police should be dissolved. That was precisely the division which carried the latest, and deadliest, ever favela raid.

Workers and youth opposed to police violence in Brazil must draw the appropriate political conclusions. The Jacarezinho raid is a sharp warning of what is being prepared by the ruling class in anticipation of mass struggles. The operation came on the heels of a nationwide murder rampage by the Colombian police forces, trained by US imperialism in the same “war on drugs” pursued by the Brazilian ruling class against the workers. This “war” was vastly escalated under the 13-year PT rule, setting the stage for the reemergence of the military at the center of political life.

Israel’s war crimes and the hypocrisy of “human rights” imperialism

Bill Van Auken

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s appearance Wednesday at a State Department press conference provided an object lesson in the absolute cynicism of the “human rights” imperialism with which he is identified.

Blinken used the event, which was ostensibly called to present a report on “international religious freedom,” to denounce China for committing “crimes against humanity and genocide against Muslim Uyghurs.”

Smoke rises following Israeli airstrikes on a residential building in Gaza City, Thursday, May 13, 2021. (AP Photo/Hatem Moussa)

He was echoed by the State Department’s point man on “religious freedom,” Daniel Nadel, who declared, “[I]t is absolutely clear what horrors are taking place in Xinjiang, being perpetrated by the PRC Government. And we will continue to speak out because we must.”

These two representatives of US imperialism spoke as airstrikes in Gaza were claiming scores of victims, including 17 children, while terrorizing the entire population of the impoverished occupied territory by toppling high-rise buildings with missiles.

Within Israel itself, the corrupt and unstable right-wing government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is unleashing the kind of repression previously reserved for the occupied territories of Gaza and the West Bank against an unprecedented revolt by Palestinian Israeli citizens. Several hundred protesters have been injured by riot police and mounted units. The government is sending border troops and possibly even regular army units to suppress internal resistance, while Netanyahu said Thursday he is prepared to institute “administrative detention” against “rioters,” allowing for indefinite imprisonment without charges or trials.

No one at the State Department is particularly troubled by or compelled to “speak out” against these war crimes and “horrors.”

On the contrary, Blinken and other US spokesmen endlessly mouth the mantra that “Israel has the right to defend itself,” while insisting that there can be no comparison between the Zionist state’s “targeting the terrorists” and the “terrorist” Hamas “indiscriminately raining down rockets” on Israel.

President Joe Biden declared on Thursday that “there has not been a significant over-reaction” on Israel’s part, providing an unmistakable green light for the escalation of the slaughter of Palestinians and an assurance that the flow of US money and arms that makes it possible will continue uninterrupted.

Indeed, there is no comparison between the primitive Gaza rockets and the high-tech killing machine of the Israel Defense Forces. As in virtually every such confrontation over the past 15 years, the deaths of Palestinians in Gaza outnumber those of Israelis by more than 10 to one. Once again, basic infrastructure in what has justifiably been described as the world’s largest open-air prison is being smashed to pieces, condemning the population to even deeper poverty.

Secretary of State Blinken and his deputy tacked onto their defense of Israel’s airstrikes a pro forma statement that Palestinians have the right to “safety and security.” Yet that right is systematically denied by the Israeli occupation, which routinely shoots, kills and maims Palestinians, imprisons them—including children—without due process, seizes their land and bulldozes their homes to make way for the malignant spread of Zionist settlements and denies them freedom of movement.

The US used its veto power in the United Nations Security Council this week to suppress even a nonbinding resolution supported by the rest of the body’s members because it suggested that curbing the most egregious of these crimes was necessary to prevent a march to war.

Can there be any doubt as to the reaction of Blinken and his State Department cohorts if Beijing were carrying out in Xinjiang even a fraction of the violence meted out by the Israeli state? Washington has already insisted that China’s policy toward the Uyghurs constitutes “genocide,” a deliberately inflammatory allegation.

While undoubtedly Beijing employs methods of state repression in Xinjiang as it does elsewhere in China, there exists no evidence to support the charge of genocide, and Washington, whose victims over the course of 20 years of uninterrupted wars in Afghanistan and the Middle East number in the millions, is hardly in a position to point the finger.

But the State Department pursues the strategy outlined by chief Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”

This propaganda campaign against China receives unstinting support—and embellishment—from the corporate media. Case in point was the November 2019 article written by Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt titled, “In China, every day is Kristallnacht.”

The reference is to the bloody events of November 9-10, 1938 in which Nazi stormtroopers launched a vicious pogrom against Jews across Germany. A total of 1,400 synagogues were set ablaze. Thousands of Jewish businesses were destroyed, homes looted, people attacked and cemeteries desecrated. Approximately 30,000 Jews were locked up in concentration camps and around 1,500 murdered, initiating a process that would end in the extermination of millions.

The best that Hiatt could come up with to support the charge that something similar is happening “every day” in Xinjiang was testimony from one Bahram Sintash that mosques had been demolished and cemeteries bulldozed.

Sintash is an operative of the Uyghur Human Rights Project, a branch of the World Uyghur Congress and American Uyghur Association, both of which are funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), an agency created to carry out publicly funding operations that were previously conducted covertly by the CIA. The NED boasted in 2020 that it had provided nearly $9 million to Uyghur separatist groups since 2004. Tied to extreme right-wing forces in the US and internationally, these groups seek to carve out an ethno-state in Xinjiang and openly call for the “fall of China.”

In other words, the evidence of “genocide” is supplied by elements directly funded by Washington, a circular state propaganda operation in which papers like the Post and the New York Times serve as willing conduits.

Meanwhile, those who expose the crimes of Israel are branded as “anti-Semites” in an exercise that twists that term beyond recognition into a calumny against anyone who expresses the disgust and anger felt by people all over the world, including millions of Jews, over the ongoing war crimes in Gaza. Indeed, this definition is itself anti-Semitic, identifying Jews everywhere with the criminal policies of a state that rules in the interest of a narrow Israeli financial and corporate oligarchy.

The vast gulf separating the indifference of US imperialism toward these crimes and its “horror” and invocation of “human rights” in relation to Xinjiang proves once again that all morality is class morality. The moral indignation of imperialist operatives like Blinken is activated only when it is needed to justify wars of aggression and plunder and advance the interests of the US financial oligarchy.

That the filthy banner of “human rights” previously raised to justify wars in the Balkans, the Middle East and North Africa is now being unfurled as part of the preparations for “great power” conflict with China and Russia is a measure of the extreme tensions and dangers in the global situation. The events in Gaza and the increasingly uncontrollable crisis in Israel itself have the potential to set a match to this tinderbox, paving the way to a catastrophic war.

Mismanagement of the COVID-19 Crisis Increases Food Insecurity in India and Brazil

Ruhi Bhasin

As Indians continue to scramble for survival through a deadly second COVID-19 wave and deal with an inadequate health care system that has failed them at every step, for a majority of the country living in rural areas and in slums in urban centers, food insecurity is proving to be a bigger struggle than protecting themselves against the deadly virus.

In one of Asia’s largest slums, Dharavi, Mumbai, putting food on the table is proving to be a pressing challenge for the population of about 1,000,000 living in one of the most densely populated areas in the world. “Hunger is a major problem,” says Nawneet Ranjan, founder of the nonprofit Dharavi Diary (Gyanodaya Foundation), who has been working in Dharavi for the last several years. “In the last six or seven years that I have worked here, I have never seen anything like this,” he says, referring to the helplessness being felt by the marginalized sections of India’s societies who have been facing increasing food insecurity, especially during the second wave. “Food is a bigger priority than sickness,” he explains. He has recently started a crowdfunding effort to provide the residents of Dharavi with food supplies, especially the most vulnerable sections like single mothers, the elderly and the transgender population.

During the second week of May, India recorded more than 400,000 daily infections and more than 4,000 deaths, surpassing earlier records, and has overtaken Brazil as having the second-largest number of COVID-19 cases in the world (after the United States of America).

In the Global Hunger Index 2020 report, India’s hunger crisis was considered “serious.” India was in the 94th position among 107 countries ranked for their management of hunger; “[t]he situation is grim and the country is battling widespread hunger,” an October 2020 Down to Earth article reported.

A study by the Azim Premji University’s Center for Sustainable Employment released on May 5 estimated that “[t]he first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic shoved a staggering 230 million (23 crore) Indians below the poverty line,” states an article in Business Today.

An Impossible On-the-Ground Reality in India for the Poor and Informally Employed

As with the case of the health care system in India, those facing hunger have had to largely depend on nonprofits or citizen efforts, which have come forward to provide food, medical supplies and other help for those already struggling to make ends meet before the pandemic.

“People have lost jobs again. During the first wave of the pandemic in India, people from the slums went back to their villages. But there were no work opportunities there, so they came back to cities once things became better,” says Ranjan. The number of COVID-19 cases had started to subside by December 2020, at the end of India’s first wave. “They came back, and the second wave hit a few months later, and this time it was worse because they had already sold everything they had during the first wave,” he adds. During the first wave, thousands of people who were employed in the informal sector, such as domestic workers, drivers, cooks or factory workers, were caught unawares as the BJP-led government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced one of the harshest lockdowns with short notice, leaving them completely unprepared. This led to the “exodus” of people who were left with no other choice but to walk thousands of kilometers in an attempt to reach their homes in rural parts of India.

“There is no testing here. The disease is spreading rapidly, but there is no acknowledgment among the people that they might be affected by the virus. They don’t want to go to government hospitals, so they avoid getting tested. Unlike the first wave, they can’t even go back to rural areas as the virus has spread there also,” says Ranjan.

According to Ranjan, besides avoiding getting tested, there is also resistance to getting vaccinated and a lack of knowledge about how to book vaccination appointments. “[Some people] either don’t want to get vaccinated or don’t know how to since they don’t have access to the internet to book appointments.”

The situation is far worse in rural areas where there are next to no health care facilities.

While the central government has been criticized for the lack of nationwide lockdown to combat the spread of COVID-19, some state governments have imposed lockdowns—which might be helpful for public health, but for the informally employed, these have added difficulties. In the Kolhapur district of Maharashtra, people left without work can only head out and look for temporary employment before 11 a.m., since a statewide lockdown takes effect between 11 a.m. and 7 p.m. “In Kolhapur, people depend on the manufacturing industry for employment, which mainly includes the textile and automobile industry. With the lockdown in place, these factories have stopped operating and people no longer have any means to earn a living and feed themselves,” says Sanket Jain, a journalist in India who writes about rural issues and has been working in rural areas to make education more accessible to children.

Jain explains why there is sometimes resistance by this population to get tested for COVID-19. “Looking at the oxygen crisis, they are really scared and are in denial about their symptoms. They don’t have money to afford food—how will they afford oxygen cylinders?” he says.

“They are mainly surviving on certain government benefits and the food supply they are provided by nonprofits,” Jain says. “Most of them only survive on eating rice and make it last for as many meals as they can,” he adds, further pointing out that many families are down to eating one meal a day.

In both the rural areas and in urban slums, social distancing is something that people do not have the luxury to follow, and the lack of clear communication from the government about the importance of wearing masks and other safety protocols required to control the spread of the virus has contributed to its spread.

Mismanagement and Surging Hunger in Brazil

Food insecurity has worsened across the world during this pandemic as more than 155 million people faced acute food insecurity in 2020, which is a jump of 20 million people from 2019.

Describing the situation for the vulnerable and “poor communities,” Oxfam International says that the message from them is clear: “[h]unger may kill us before coronavirus.”

According to the organization, “new hunger hotspots are also emerging. Middle-income countries such as India, South Africa, and Brazil are experiencing rapidly rising levels of hunger.”

The gross mismanagement of the handling of the COVID-19 situation on the ground and lack of action based on scientific data during the pandemic by Brazil, much like in India, has not only led to the loss of lives from the virus on a massive scale but has also led to food insecurity emerging as another factor people have to fight against in order to survive.

With minimal government support, hunger has crippled those who were already struggling before the pandemic in Brazil and in India. The increased unemployment—especially among those employed in the informal sector—has been one of the main factors for hunger as the virus surges unchecked in both these countries.

Brazil’s former president Dilma Rousseff has described the handling of the current COVID-19 crisis by President Jair Bolsonaro as “repulsive” and “genocidal” in a Guardian interview, further stating that this mismanagement had left the country “adrift on an ocean of hunger and disease.”

“A survey by the Brazilian Research Network on Sovereignty and Food and Nutritional Security shows that more than 116 million people are facing food insecurity. Of these, the survey says, 43 million (20.5 percent of [the] population) do not have enough to eat and 19 million people (9 percent) are just starving,” states an article in the Wire.

In 2020, “the director of the World Food Program’s Brazil office, Daniel Balaban, warned that Brazil was moving quickly toward returning to the world hunger map, which it left in 2014. Countries figure on that list when more than 5 percent of their population live in extreme poverty,” states Agence France-Presse.

The stories of hunger in Brazil are very similar to those in India where people are struggling to survive in the face of an indifferent government. Brazil had made great strides in overcoming hunger “in the first decade of this century, when one-sixth of the population was lifted out of poverty. For many now in Rio, its return is devastating,” states a Reuters article.

A video report by Gustavo Basso for DW shows Celia Gomes talking about her struggle with feeding her four children on a daily basis. “I wake up with a feeling of being in agony. I jump out of bed and the first thing I do is thank God I am alive. I look at my children and think to myself, ‘today I will bring home some food for them.’ I leave the house early to fetch bread. There are days when I can’t manage to bring them any.” People in Brazil have also had to look to nonprofits for help to overcome hunger, much like in India.

The Government Response

In India, the Modi government has failed to respond to the crisis in every manner possible. Despite early warning signs of an uptick of cases, the government allowed the holding of superspreader events like the Kumbh Mela and the organizing of political rallies in several states. As the health care system became overwhelmed by the rising number of cases and India faced a shortage of ICU beds, oxygen supply and adequate testing, the Modi government distanced itself from the blame, instead prioritizing a parliament renovation plan over saving lives. With no end to the second wave, experts don’t see any respite for India any time soon, with a third wave already being predicted even as the country is far from managing its second wave.

Meanwhile, in Brazil, Bolsonaro faces possible impeachment over his handling of the crisis. He has referred to the COVID-19 virus as a “little flu” and continued to ignore or take inadequate measures to control the situation, in the face of rising fatalities.

With the leaders in both countries refusing to accept the urgency of the situation before them, the marginalized populations already struggling are having to fight a dual fight: against the virus and against hunger.

Greek workers protest draconian employment legislation

John Vassilopoulos

Workers in Greece are protesting draconian new labour laws imposed by the conservative New Democracy (ND) government.

Two national strikes took place in Greece last week. The first of these, called by the private sector General Confederation of Trade Unions (GSEE), took place on May 4. On May 6, the ADEDY public sector federation called out its members. The May 6 strike was endorsed by the Athens Workers’ Centre which represents private sector workers in the capital.

Workers holding the banner of the National Research Foundation Union at the May 6 demonstration in Athens reading, “Hands off the 8 hour day—Permanent and steady and employment—Social insurance for all” (credit: foititesksana-Instagram)

The strikes were called in response to the anti-working-class labour bill submitted to parliament on Wednesday, which will allow employers to increase the working day from a standard eight hours to 10 hours, without paying additional overtime. The government plans to pass the law in June.

On both days there were work stoppages on public transport with intercity and suburban rail services completely suspended May 4, and the Athens Metro, trolley and tram services brought to a standstill two days later.

The statutory eight-hour day has long been a dead letter in Greece. A survey conducted by GSEE at the start of the year found that over half of respondents work more than the standard working hours on a weekly basis. Of those, a quarter stated that they work one to three hours extra while 17 percent work between three to six hours extra. Significantly, 40 percent of those working overtime do not get paid for it.

The government is presenting this measure as favourable to workers since it is nominally a “voluntary” arrangement with workers being able to claim the additional hours as ‘time off in lieu’. Speaking to Skai TV last month, Labour Minister Kostis Hatzidakis said, “We are giving greater flexibility to workers without lowering their income.”

GSEE’s survey revealed that there is little support among Greek workers for the new measure with 73 percent stating that they prefer financial compensation for their overtime instead of time off in lieu.

In his speech marking May Day, ADEDY president Dimitris Bratis warned the government was preparing “to abolish the most emblematic and important gain of the [labour] movement, the eight-hour day.”

This is so much hot air. The unions long ago played a major role in overseeing the extension of the working day. A law passed in 2011 by the social democratic PASOK government, with no opposition from their partners in the ADEDY/GSEE unions, allows for extending the working day up to 10 hours in workplaces where this has been agreed as part of a collective contract. Major corporations where this is enforced include telecommunications company OTE, Alpha Bank, cigarette manufacturer Papastratos, and drinks manufacturer Ivi.

What is animating the union bureaucracy is that the new law undermines their own position, given that the scrapping of the eight-hour day can now be imposed on workers through individual “agreements” in unionised and non-unionised workplaces alike.

Ultimately, the new measure is designed to implement working practices which maximise the extraction of surplus value by intensifying exploitation during peak times. Time off in lieu arrangements—instead of paying higher overtime rates—ensure that even more profit goes to line the pockets of the corporations

Another measure within the bill which facilitates this process is an increase in the limit of legally permitted overtime. Currently set at 96 hours a year in manufacturing and 120 hours in all other industries, the new bill aims to impose a 150-hour limit per year across all companies.

The bill also undermines the right to strike by stipulating that a “minimum guaranteed service” of 33 percent in all public utility service providers—such as the Athens Metro—must be provided during industrial action.

The new bill is one of many similar measures being undertaken by ruling elites internationally, who are seeking to intensify their exploitation of the working class in order to pay for the raft of corporate bailout measures implemented during the pandemic. Greece’s economy, heavily reliant on the tourist industry and hit especially hard by the pandemic, shrank by 10 percent in 2020. During the same period national debt has ballooned to 205.6 percent of GDP, the highest in the eurozone and over 25 percent higher than it was at the end of 2014—at the height of the Greek debt crisis.

Greece’s ruling elite is set to receive €31 billion euros from the EU’s 750 billion euro post-pandemic stimulus fund over the next six years as part of an investment programme dubbed “Greece 2.0”, which is worth a total of €57 billion. The EU is advancing post-pandemic funds to member states over a seven-year period, conditional on austerity measures akin to those imposed by successive Greek governments over the past decade. These were mandated by the EU and International Monetary Fund following the 2008/09 global financial crisis, with Greece transformed into a test case for brutal austerity throughout the continent.

The Greek ruling class has become so adept at imposing vicious social cuts that its “Greece 2.0” plan was described by an EU official speaking to the Financial Times as “one of the best we have seen so far,” adding that “the [financial bailout] programme experience [has] help[ed] a lot.”

The opposition pseudo-left Syriza (Coalition of the Radical Left) endorsed the May 6 strike, with party leader and former prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, and other senior Syriza officials attending the main march in Athens. Tsipras stated, “this will be a monumental fight to defend the right of workers and the popular majority to life and dignity. And it is a fight that we will give to the end.” These words were uttered by the scoundrel who was swept to power in January 2015 on an anti-austerity ticket only to junk this mandate within weeks.

Following the July 2015 referendum, in which workers overwhelmingly rejected a third austerity package, Syriza, along with its junior coalition partner the far-right Independent Greeks, agreed to a bailout package with the EU/IMF a few weeks later. The next four years saw Syriza impose austerity that was even more savage than that enforced by the previous social democratic and ND-led administrations. In 2018, Syriza implemented legislation raising the threshold for a strike vote from a third to at least 50 percent of a union’s membership.

The Stalinist Communist Party of Greece (KKE) also endorsed the May 6 strike, with trade unions affiliated to its All Workers Militant Front (PAME) taking part in the rally on the day. In an interview, KKE general secretary Dimitris Koutsoumbas stated that “the massive strike demonstration for May Day was the first answer by workers who do not want to become the ‘slaves of the 21st century’”.

In fact, there were many such “answers” by Greek workers in countless general strikes over the previous decade against austerity, all of which were systematically betrayed by the unions. PAME played an instrumental role in this. By posturing as the militant wing of the trade union bureaucracy it ensured, by allowing workers to let off steam while the measures passed regardless, that none of the strikes got out of the bureaucracy’s control.

The lesson of the past decade in Greece is that no confidence can be played in the trade union bureaucracy and their pseudo-left cheerleaders. To take the fight forward workers must set up their own rank-and-file committees—independent of the unions—and in solidarity with their brothers and sisters throughout the continent who are currently facing the same onslaught on their living standards and working conditions.

Germany’s Left Party sets its course for government and NATO

Johannes Stern

The Left Party is participating in the September 26 federal elections with its parliamentary group leader Dietmar Bartsch and party leader Janine Wissler as lead candidates. This was announced by party co-chair Susanne Hennig-Wellsow at a press conference on Monday. The party’s executive committee had “expressed confidence in two strong candidates with almost 87 percent” support, she explained. The two embodied “our claim to break out, to change this country. A progressive majority to the left of the Union [Christian Democrats, CDU/CSU] is possible.”

Dietmar Bartsch (Foto: Die Linke / flickr)

The party’s right-wing, pro-capitalist orientation could not be formulated more clearly. The Left Party is avowedly seeking a government alliance with the Social Democrats (SPD) and Greens—parties of war and austerity—at the federal level. Such a coalition would not pursue “progressive” or even “left” policies but continue to advance the policies of social attacks, stepping up the repressive powers of the state at home and abroad and the murderous pursuit of “herd immunity.”

A glance at the leading candidates of the SPD and the Greens is enough to prove this. The SPD’s candidate for chancellor, Olaf Scholz, (currently federal finance minister), is the architect of the billions handed over to the big corporations and banks and the massive military spending of recent years. Only a few weeks ago, under his aegis, the defence budget was increased by another 5 percent, to now over €50 billion. At the SPD party conference last weekend, he defended the political course of the grand coalition with the Christian Democrats, whose “profits before lives” policy has already led to more than 85,000 deaths in Germany from COVID-19.

The Greens’ candidate for chancellor, Annalena Baerbock, is in no way inferior to Scholz. She is also an outspoken militarist who calls for more aggressive action against Russia and China in nearly every interview and beats the drum for strengthening NATO, building a European Army and higher defence spending. “We have to be honest about that. Yes, in some areas you must invest more to make guns shoot,” she told the S ü ddeutsche Zeitung .

The phrases about social solidarity Bartsch and Wissler spouted at the press conference cannot hide the fact that the Left Party is pursuing a thoroughly reactionary and anti-working-class policy. Wherever it governs at state level together with the SPD and the Greens, it cuts social spending, pushes through privatisations, arms the state apparatus and brutally deports refugees and migrants.

Against this background, Bartsch’s claim that the Left Party was “the advocate” of “nurses, educators and teachers, the parcel carriers, the supermarket workers” and the “millions who have to slave away on low wages” can only be described as a cynical provocation. To give a current example: In Bremen, amid the pandemic, the SPD-Left Party-Green state government is planning to cut more than 400 full-time jobs at the Gesundheit Nord hospital group. The health senator (state minister) Claudia Bernhard who is organising the cutbacks is a member of the Left Party.

The right-wing, pro-capitalist character of the Left Party has become increasingly overt since the coronavirus pandemic began. In March 2020, it voted in the Bundestag (federal parliament) for the “ Coronavirus emergency packages “ launched by Scholz and the grand coalition, which tossed hundreds of billions down the throats of the big corporations and banks. Since then, it has pursued a ruthless policy of opening up the economy wherever it is in government, to recover these gigantic sums from the working class.

Leading Left Party politicians, such as the Thuringia state Prime Minister Bodo Ramelow, have explicitly backed the murderous strategy of “herd immunity.” Others, above all, former federal parliamentary group leader Sahra Wagenknecht, are stirring up nationalism in the style of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) and agitating against immigrants and refugees.

This course is supported by the lead candidates for the general election. At the press conference, Bartsch praised Wagenknecht’s book Die Selbstgerechten ( The Self-Righteous ), which was celebrated by the AfD, saying: “Ms. Wagenknecht has certainly written a book that is exciting in many ways.” He said she would “play an important role in this election campaign” as the lead candidate in North Rhine-Westphalia. She addressed “strategic issues that are worth talking about,” and he was happy “if she engages in this election campaign with enthusiasm.”

Bartsch, like no other, stands for the reactionary orientation of the Left Party. He was a member of its precursor organisation, the SED/PDS, when the Stalinists reestablished capitalism in East Germany 30 years ago. Subsequently, as the party’s federal treasurer (1991–97) and executive director (1997–2002), he helped launch the first government alliance with the SPD in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. This led to massive social attacks and the privatisation of state-owned and municipal institutions. It served as a model for all further government participation by the Left Party.

In his role as parliamentary party leader in the Bundestag, Bartsch has played a key role in the return of German militarism in recent years. In April 2014, he was one of the five Left Party members of parliament who voted in favour of sending a German frigate to the Mediterranean to destroy alleged Syrian chemical weapons. During the last Bundestag elections in 2017, in an interview with the German Armed Forces Association (DBwV), he presented the Left Party as consistently representing the interests of soldiers.

Now, Bartsch is dropping all pretence in the election campaign and signalling his party’s support for the ruling class on the central issues of foreign and war policy. In his first TV appearance as a lead candidate on the Tagesthemen news broadcast on Monday evening, he said that possible coalition negotiations with the SPD and the Greens would “not fail” on the question of NATO.

Asked by presenter Ingo Zamperoni whether “NATO could persist, with the Left Party in government,” Bartsch replied: “Everyone in the world knows that the Left Party will not wait until NATO is dissolved before it sits down at the table. That’s absurd to accuse us of that.”

In her first extensive interview as a leading candidate with Deutschlandfunk radio on Tuesday morning, Wissler also immediately made clear that the alleged “red lines” in the party and election programme were not worth the paper they are written on. Asked if she was “really quite clear” that “for us, there is only a coalition without NATO,” Wissler replied: “I’m certainly not saying that for us there is only a coalition if and when [Germany quits NATO], but the Left Party is going into the election campaign with our positions.” Her party did not want “Germany out of NATO.” It wanted to “dissolve” NATO and replace it “with a collective security alliance.”

That is unmistakable. For Wissler, too, an SPD-Left Party-Green federal government would not fail on the question of NATO. At the same time, a new “security alliance” would not be a peace project, but the framework within which German imperialism would pursue its geostrategic and economic interests more independently. Such plans have long been discussed in foreign policy circles. The demand was “nothing that the Left Party invented,” Wissler stressed. “These debates” had also taken place “precisely at the beginning of the 1990s,” whether it “was necessary to have a new security alliance.”

It is no coincidence that alongside the reformed Stalinist Bartsch, Wissler plays the leading role in bringing the Left Party onto a course for government and war in the election campaign. She comes from the pseudo-left grouping Marx21, which, contrary to occasional claims in the bourgeois media, does not stand in the tradition of Trotskyism, but in the anti-Trotskyist tradition of “state capitalism” and the International Socialist Tendency (IST) founded by Tony Cliff .

Cliff had already broken with the Fourth International shortly after the end of the Second World War and described the Soviet Union as “state capitalist” despite the socialised property relations created by the October Revolution. Like other varieties of “state capitalism,” Cliff’s position concealed a “left” form of anti-communism and an accommodation to imperialism. At least since the reintroduction of capitalism by the Stalinist bureaucracy, the state capitalists, and wealthy middle-class layers whose interests they articulate, have been openly in the camp of imperialism.

This is particularly visible in Germany. Christine Buchholz, one of the best-known representatives of Marx21, has sat on the defence committee of the Bundestag for more than a decade and is thus directly integrated into German war policy. Together with the Defence Minister, she visits German troops in the theatres of operations in Africa. The imperialist offensives in the Middle East and against Russia were and are also supported by Marx21.

Among workers and young people, the right-wing policies of the Left Party are hated. In recent election polls, it currently stands at only 6 percent, down from 9.2 per cent in 2017.