Switzerland adopts draconian police law

Marianne Arens

The new anti-terror law adopted by Switzerland last weekend is one of the harshest police laws in all of Europe. Its adoption in a referendum highlights the urgency of building a genuine workers’ party in Switzerland that defends as a matter of principle the democratic rights of working people.

The “Federal Law on Police Measures to Combat Terrorism” (PMT) blatantly disregards the principles of the so-called “democratic rule of law.” For example, it flouts the civil-democratic separation of powers because it allows the federal police to intervene against so-called “dangerous persons” even without sufficient evidence for criminal proceedings and without an order from a judge.

The law also disregards the principle of personal data protection, allowing police officers to retrieve and exchange “particularly sensitive personal data” amongst themselves. This explicitly includes, among other things, “data on religious and ideological views or activities.”

Striking construction workers block the Mont Blanc bridge in Geneva, October 2018.

The envisaged police measures range from the requirement of regularly reporting to an authority, contact bans, a ban on leaving the country, and passport revocation to up to nine months of house arrest. They can be imposed on juveniles as young as 15 and in some cases on children as young as 12 who are deemed “dangerous persons” in the eyes of the police. For people without a Swiss passport, “deportation detention,” or custody pending deportation, is also provided for. And anyone who disobeys police orders can be punished with a prison sentence of up to three years.

The law is officially justified by the attack on the Charlie Hebdo editorial office in Paris, France in 2015. It is supposed to give Swiss police the ability to “take preventive action against terrorist threats.” But it defines “terrorist activities” so vaguely that it could readily include unruly youths and social protests. In particular, it could apply to political activists who are explicitly working to change social conditions.

The law states, “Terrorist activity is defined as efforts to influence or change the order of the state by committing or threatening to commit serious crimes or by spreading fear and terror.”

This definition of terrorism is highly problematic and has been sharply criticized by legal experts. These include, for example, Nils Melzer, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, who has also vehemently defended Julian Assange. Melzer calls the definition “beyond good and evil,” because it no longer necessarily defines terrorism as a violent crime.

To this end, the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights, Northern Irish law professor Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, also stated in an interview with the Republic newspaper: “This definition of terrorism is used by authoritarian states to suppress opposition.”

In fact, this definition of “terrorist activity” would also fit striking and protesting workers blocking access to their businesses, or angry tenant groups demanding the expropriation of real estate sharks. It could also apply to socialist politicians and labour leaders whose stated goal is to abolish capitalism, since even the statements of these groups could “spread fear and terror” among shareholders, business representatives and state officials.

A committee including the Young Greens, the Jusos (youth organization of the Social Democrats), the Young Green Liberals and the Pirate Party, as well as non-governmental organizations and civil rights initiatives, has launched a referendum against the “arbitrariness paragraph.” As they explain, the law is “an attack on the security of the Swiss population. It suspects and endangers blameless citizens: anyone can be placed under house arrest for up to nine months without having committed a crime…Those affected can only defend themselves by proving that they will never commit a crime in the future. This is simply impossible.”

The Social Democratic Party (SP) issued a “No” slogan. However, it has entirely failed to conduct any public campaign against the law to warn and mobilize the working population. After all, this party holds seats in the government, including the seven-member Federal Council. In this all-party coalition, the SP also works unanimously with the far-right SVP.

The law was approved by 56.6 percent in the vote last Sunday, June 13. Turnout was relatively high by Swiss standards, at 59.5 percent, and all cantons except the City of Basel voted in favour of the new police law.

But what does a voting majority mean in Switzerland? In fact, a total of only 1.85 million, just over one-fifth of the country’s 8.6 million inhabitants, voted in favour of the “Arbitrariness Law.” About 2.2 million inhabitants do not have a Swiss passport. Most importantly, a large segment of the working class has no voting rights at all and could not participate in the referendum. Switzerland has a multinational working class, with Italians, Tamils, Germans, Turks, Bosnians, workers from the Maghreb and others working alongside Swiss workers.

The law clearly expresses a deep-seated fear on the part of the Swiss bourgeoisie and authorities of any stirrings within the working class. Switzerland is one of the richest countries in the world, but it is heavily dependent on the world economy. Its wealth is profoundly unequally distributed. Social antagonisms are strained to the breaking point, and the pandemic has laid them bare.

The bourgeoisie continues to profit from Switzerland as a banking centre and respectable tax haven, as well as from upscale Alpine tourism. Switzerland also maintains small, highly specialized industries that are, however, particularly dependent on the weal and woe of the EU.

During the pandemic, Switzerland, like Sweden, refused to close businesses and schools. Although the second wave of the pandemic saw a steep rise in the number of infections and deaths, Switzerland was the only Alpine country to allow the ski season to open last winter. Nearly 10,870 COVID-19 patients have died in the pandemic, more than half of them this year alone. No doubt many victims might still be alive had the federal and cantonal governments not so irresponsibly enforced their profit-before-life policies.

The working class is bearing the brunt of the pandemic in two ways: first, those who work in hospitals or nursing homes, for production, in construction, at the supermarket checkout, for the rail system or in restaurants have few options to protect themselves from COVID-19.

At the same time, the working class has been particularly affected by pandemic job losses. According to figures from the Swiss Federal Statistical Office, employment figures show a fourth quarter of sharp decline in early 2021, with job cuts last year in manufacturing (-14,000 jobs), construction (-6,000 jobs), and hospitality (-35,000 jobs). Recently the airline Swiss again announced mass layoffs.

With its new, harsh police law, the Swiss bourgeoisie is consciously preparing for an imminent social explosion. The working class must prepare for the same!

Ebrahim Raisi wins Iran’s rigged election presaging repression to secure regime’s survival

Jean Shaoul

Ayatollah Ebrahim Raisi, Iran’s chief justice and a prominent conservative connected to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), is set to succeed the centrist President Hassan Rouhani at the end of his two-term limit in August.

Friday’s elections put the hardline or principalist faction in control of all branches of the state apparatus, reflecting the bourgeois clerical regime’s ever-increasing reliance on the IRGC, which also controls much of the economy, to suppress the Iranian working class and ensure its survival.

The election victory comes in the wake of Rouhani’s failed gambit of staking all on the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)—the nuclear deal with US and European imperialism that failed to deliver the promised economic benefits—and amid talks aimed at reviving the deal in Vienna.

Ebrahim Raisi Mehr (credit: News Agency, via Wikimedia Commons)

The accord was not a treaty but an “executive agreement”, because President Barack Obama could not have secured a two-thirds majority in the US Senate. This enabled his successor, President Donald Trump, to unilaterally abandon the Accord in 2018 and reimpose and add more crippling sanctions on Iran’s oil exports. These cost the country at least $200 billion as part of Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign to destabilise the country.

Rouhani and the reformist and centrist factions around him have placed the full burden of the sanctions and the coronavirus pandemic on the working class. The pandemic has had its most deadly impact in the Middle East on Iran, with nearly 83,000 people dead, according to the widely discredited official figures, thanks to US sanctions that have gutted the country’s healthcare system, as well as the venal criminality of the Iranian bourgeoisie that has devastated the lives of the Iranian people. The value of the rial has plummeted, leading to an annual inflation rate of nearly 50 percent, hours-long electricity blackouts and a poverty rate of 50 percent, with nearly half the population, 20 million people, living in extreme poverty.

Rouhani’s lethal crackdown on the protests over a rise in gas prices in 2019-20 in which at least 1,500 were killed exposed the reformists and moderates’ agenda as no less reactionary than that of the principalist faction.

The 60-year-old Raisi, who lost to Rouhani in the 2017 elections, fought the election on an anti-corruption platform, an empty slogan that played on decades of bitter experiences with Iran’s elite, while advancing a socially conservative program. His victory, with around 18 million of the 28.9 million ballots cast, or 62 percent of the vote, equates to just one third of those eligible to vote, hardly a ringing endorsement of his legitimacy or that of the regime.

Mohsen Rezaee, a former IRGC commander in chief, won around 3.4 million votes. Abdolnasser Hemmati, the former central bank governor from Iran’s moderate reformist wing, came third with around 2.4 million votes. The fourth candidate, Amirhossein Ghazizadeh Hashemi, won around 1 million votes. There were some 3.7 million “white” ballots, cast without any candidate’s name written in, protesting the lack of candidates who represented their views.

Just under 50 percent of Iran’s 59 million eligible voters from a population of 84 million cast their ballots, after voting closed early Saturday morning following the government’s extension to the balloting to accommodate “crowding” at several polling places. This was the lowest turnout since the 1979 revolution that ended the rule of Washington’s client, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

Raisi’s victory was always assured, given that the Guardian Council, Iran’s constitutional watchdog, had only approved conservative candidates aligned with the 81-year-old Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the IRGC, rejecting all but seven of the nearly 600 candidates who had put their names forward.

The 12-member council, six of whom were chosen by Khamenei, disqualified prominent political figures such as Ali Larijani, a former speaker of the parliament who was expected to be Raisi’s main rival; current vice president, Eshaq Jahangiri, closely aligned with Rouhani; and Mohsen Hashemi Rafsanjani, the son of former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. Such was the disquiet about the blatant rigging of the election that Khamenei acknowledged that it had been a mistake to eliminate some of the disqualified candidates, although he had earlier rejected Rouhani’s request to intervene against the removal of Larijani and Jahangiri’s names from the approved list.

This left Hemmati, who had to stand down as head of Iran’s central bank, to run as Raisi’s main moderate challenger. Days before the election, Mohsen Mehralizadeh, a former provincial governor and vice president from the moderate reformist faction, stood aside in a bid to boost votes for Hemmati. Former nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili and hardline legislator Alireza Zakani dropped out to consolidate the hardline vote behind Raisi, leaving just four candidates in the race. The reformist faction threatened to mount a boycott because of the exclusion of all their candidates, a campaign that was only partially successful.

Raisi, who wears a black turban identifying him in Shiite tradition as a direct descendant of Prophet Muhammad, is seen as a likely successor to the Supreme Leader. He will be Iran’s first serving president sanctioned by the US government before even entering office.

Raisi was sanctioned by the Trump administration in November 2019, along with eight other officials close to Khamenei, for his role as Tehran’s deputy prosecutor general in the mass execution of thousands of political prisoners in 1988. Most of those executed were members of the Mujahideen al-Khalq, the Communist Party and other regime opponents. The sanctions also relate to his role as the senior prosecutor and chief judiciary during the lethal crackdowns on antigovernment protests in 2009, 2017 and 2019. According to human rights groups, at least 7,000 protesters were arrested, tortured and sentenced to harsh prison terms by the Raisi-led judiciary following the 2019 protests.

American sanctions against Raisi, as well as most of the other 1,600 imposed by Trump, are based not on the 2015 nuclear deal but on America’s counterterrorism laws, for the explicit purpose of preventing an incoming president from canceling them as part of a return to the nuclear deal. While President Joe Biden has lifted a handful of sanctions as a goodwill gesture, he will need congressional legislation to remove most. Raisi’s victory takes place amid the ongoing talks in Vienna to revive the deal and lift the crushing US sanctions on Iran that all factions of the ruling elite are desperate to relieve. According to Mikhail Ulyanov, the Russian representative to the talks, the negotiations are approaching the final round, with only a few secondary issues remaining.

Raisi has declared his support for the negotiations and a signed agreement “if it serves the interests of Iran,” indicating that Khamenei is determined to reach an agreement. It has been suggested that Khamenei has postponed signing any agreement until after the election but still during Rohani’s government, to place responsibility for the agreement on Rohani without compromising Raisi’s “conservative purity.” This will enable him to claim that he inherited the agreement should it fail to deliver the much sought-after economic rescue. Tehran insists that the sanctions relief in the 2015 agreement was limited in that it did not allow Iran to carry out a range of international financial transactions, including through the SWIFT system used by financial institutions to transfer money and settle international debts.

Washington wants Iran’s agreement to commit to return to the negotiating table as soon as the old deal is restored and begin hammering out the terms of a wider agreement that would be “longer and stronger.” Tehran has refused to agree to any changes that would limit its nuclear production even further, or to accept any limits on their missile capabilities and their support of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, the Shiite militias in Iraq, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.

The replacement of the centrist Rouhani with a member of the principalist faction will not resolve Iran’s deep-going political, social, and economic crisis. The real fear of the Iranian bourgeoisie is of an eruption of class struggle driven by declining living standards and a dramatic increase in social inequality as those at the top have enriched themselves, while working people have faced death, disease, unemployment and impoverishment.

US hotel chains plan to lay off hundreds of thousands of housekeepers in post-pandemic restructuring

Alex Findijs

Major US hotel chains are making use of the collapse of business during the COVID-19 pandemic to permanently eliminate hundreds of thousands of housekeeping jobs.

An estimated 3.1 million hospitality and leisure workers have been laid off since March of 2020, accounting for 39 percent of the total number of unemployed in the United States. These are among the lowest paid and most oppressed sections of the working class.

The largest US hotel chains lost an estimated $14 billion in revenue in 2020, according to Travelweek Group, which estimates it will take three years for the industry to recoup the shortfall. As in other sectors of the economy, hotel industry companies are seizing on the crisis to drive up profitability by reducing labor costs.

Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills, California (Image Credit: Minnaert/Wikipedia)

Hilton Chief Executive Chris Nesetta told investors in February, “The work we’re doing right now in every one of our brands, including Tru and Hampton, everything else is about… creating more labor efficiencies, particularly in the areas of housekeeping, food and beverage and other areas.”

He continued, “When we get out of the crisis, those businesses will be higher margin and require less labor than they did pre-COVID.”

The same strategy is being adopted by other firms. Park Hotels and Resorts, which owns dozens of high-end and luxury hotels around the world, informed investors that it would be protecting profitability through a permanent reduction in full-time staff, saving an estimated $70 million in labor costs every year.

This restructuring is taking the form of a transition to “opt-in” housekeeping, in which rooms will be cleaned daily only if specifically requested. Daily cleanings are to be largely replaced by cleanings only after check-out.

This impact on hundreds of thousands of cleaning staff who work at hotels will be brutal. The union Unite Here, which represents 300,000 hospitality workers, estimates that ending daily cleanings will likely eliminate at least 39 percent of cleaning jobs at hotels, some 181,000 jobs.

But instead of mobilizing workers to oppose the planned cuts, Unite Here is focusing its efforts on working with management to promote the “Save Hotel Jobs Act,” which would provide millions of dollars in public funds to hotels to cover payroll costs for rehired workers. There is no language in the bill guaranteeing that all laid-off workers will be reinstated, implying on the contrary that only some workers will be rehired.

This is yet another attempt by the trade union bureaucracy to prevent workers from mobilizing their industrial power against the corporations and instead channel opposition behind the Democratic Party, itself a party of Wall Street and the corporate elite. The Biden administration has made clear its support for the early termination of supplemental unemployment benefits being implemented mainly by Republican-controlled states and announced its intention to end the program nationally on September 6. It is overseeing as well the ending of pandemic restrictions of evictions at the end of June.

These policies are calculated to blackmail workers into returning to unsafe factories, schools and work locations under threat of starvation and homelessness, as all safety measures imposed during the pandemic are lifted, in defiance of warnings by epidemiologists of the potential for new outbreaks and hundreds of thousands of more deaths from more deadly variants of the coronavirus.

When workers do return, they will be confronted with lower wages, longer hours and greater speedup.

The changes being prepared by the hotel magnates will mean increased workloads and more dangerous workplace hazards. By cleaning rooms every day, housekeeping staff are able to mitigate the buildup of garbage and dirt in rooms. Under the new model, the health and safety of cleaning staff will be put at risk as they are forced to do more cleaning in less time.

The job cuts will affect some of the most exploited workers in the country. The average wage for a hotel cleaner is around just $25,000 a year, below the federal poverty line of $26,200 for a family of four.

More than 86 percent of hotel cleaners are female and 25 percent are Hispanic, the second largest demographic. Many are immigrants from Mexico or South America. The average age of these workers is about 45, making a career change much more difficult.

The hotel chains, worth billions of dollars, have been given huge federal bailouts under the 2020 CARES Act and other bipartisan pandemic programs. The two big business parties placed no restrictions on their using the billions in taxpayer money to prepare a further attack on the jobs and living standards of their workers.

Hundreds of millions of dollars were given to hotels under the misnamed “Paycheck Protection Program,” presented to the public as a lifeline for small businesses and their employees. Loans to units of major national chains covered at least 2.5 times their monthly payroll costs through forgivable loans.

These government handouts have enabled hotel chains to increase their profitability despite the sharp decline in business over the previous 15 months. According to the industry website Hotel Management, hotel profit margins were 30.6 percent in April of this year, with a profit of about $35.45 per room. With the number of vaccinated Americans rising and pandemic restrictions being lifted, the industry is experiencing a sharp rebound in occupancy.

In an industry with 5.29 million rooms in the US, which generated upwards of $200 billion in revenue in the years before the pandemic, there is more than enough money to provide decent wages and benefits to all hotel staff.

According to STR, a business data firm, the hotel industry in the US generated $59 billion in earnings before interest and tax in 2017.

Instead, the industry is seizing upon the pandemic to permanently remove a large segment of its workforce. In doing so, it hopes not only to cover losses from the pandemic, but permanently raise its profit margin and increase the fortunes of its major investors and bankers.

This is welcome news to the vultures in the fast food and other service industries, who are gratified by the prospect of hundreds of thousands of low-paid workers suddenly finding themselves in desperate need of a job.

Australian High Court declares “foreign interference” laws to be constitutional

Mike Head

For the second time in a month, Australia’s supreme court last week handed down a far-reaching ruling, dismissing a legal challenge to the reactionary “foreign interference” legislation, introduced by the Liberal-National government in 2018, with the full backing of the opposition Labor Party.

The laws are directed primarily against any political links with China, in line with the escalating anti-China witch-hunt. But they have a far wider anti-democratic scope, with the potential to silence or intimidate dissent.

The Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme Act (FITS Act) requires registration with government authorities of any political activity in cooperation with a “foreign political organisation.” Failure to register can result in imprisonment for up to five years.

High Court of Australia (Source: Wikipedia)

The High Court’s latest decision goes far further than last month’s ruling by declaring that the laws are constitutional, that is, they do not violate the implied freedom of political communication. By 5 votes to 2, the judges insisted that even though the FITS Act undeniably restricts political communication, it is for a “legitimate” purpose—that of preventing “foreign influence” in government and politics.

In May, the High Court unanimously upheld raids and seizures conducted by the Australian Federal Police against John Zhang, a Chinese-born Australian citizen and parliamentarian’s staff member, which had been accompanied by blazing headlines about “Chinese agents” inside the New South Wales state parliament. The police obtained the search warrants on the grounds that Zhang was suspected of committing a criminal offence, under the other main provision, the Espionage and Foreign Interference Act (EFI Act), of “recklessly” seeking to influence Australian politics on behalf of the Chinese government.

Last week, the court rejected a plea by a right-wing group called LibertyWorks, which objected to having to register a 2019 conference in Sydney under the FITS Act. The gathering featured speakers such as former Prime Minister Tony Abbott and British Brexit campaigner Nigel Farage. LibertyWorks had linked up with the American Conservative Union to organise the gathering.

Even though the organisations involved are extremely right-wing, the ruling against them sets a precedent that can be used against any organisation, party, academic institution, publisher or individual that holds a political event or campaign in collaboration with an overseas group.

After the Sydney event, the Attorney-General’s Department asked LibertyWorks for extensive documentation about the conference, to determine if it should be registered under the FITS Act. The group did not respond, instead taking its case to the High Court.

The majority judges issued rulings essentially backing the federal government’s case that the limits on democracy were needed to protect parliamentary democracy itself!

That finding was assisted by the fact that LibertyWorks itself accepted that the FITS Act “is protective of Australia’s political and electoral processes.” The judges said “that important purpose” was not outweighed by a “modest burden” on freedom of political communication.

LibertyWorks also agreed with the scare-mongering assertions of the government and the political spy agency, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), that “espionage and foreign interference activity against Australia’s interests” was “occurring at an unprecedented scale.”

The narrow argument of LibertyWorks was that the FITS Act had a “chilling effect” on its activities, because of “onerous” registration requirements, such as constantly supplying the foreign influence register with updated information and records of activity.

Under the Act, the register secretary, who is the head of the Attorney-General’s Department, may issue notices compelling registrants to produce any “information” or “documents” that the secretary “reasonably believes” could relate to an arrangement with a foreign political entity.

The FITS Act also created offences, such as failure to register or renew registration, and failure to produce documents or fulfill responsibilities under the scheme, with prison terms ranging from six months to five years. Nevertheless, the majority judges said this did not directly affect political communication.

One majority member, James Edelman, said the register did not impose a “substantial” or “deep” burden on political communication, even though it required records of political activity to be kept for up to ten years. He gave a flavour of the political atmosphere of US-led allegations against China, in which the case arose. Edelman said FITS “acts as a prophylactic to any sinister foreign influence on Australian political processes, in circumstances of a growing global trend of foreign influence operations.”

Another majority judge, Simon Seward, whom the government appointed to the court last December, went even further. He called into question the implied freedom of political communication itself, essentially advocating that the court reconsider the existence of the doctrine, which it adopted 30 years ago.

That weak, implied freedom is the only safeguard of the right to political communication, because the Australian constitution, a colonial-era document adopted in 1901, contains no bill of rights or explicit guarantees of basic civil liberties.

In their judgments, the two dissenters, Stephen Gageler and Michelle Gordon, pointed to some of the FITS Act’s fundamentally anti-democratic content.

“To be forced under pain of criminal sanction to register under a statutory scheme as a precondition to being permitted to engage in a category of political communication at all is to be subjected to a prior restraint on political communication,” Gageler wrote. He said such “restraint” on political activity undercut a “common law freedom” that dated back to the overturn of the absolute monarchy in Britain during the 17th century.

Both Gageler and Gordon objected to the power given to the register secretary to secretly share information about registered groups with intelligence and police agencies.

Gordon said the FITS Act “overreached” by creating a separate repository of “scheme information,” which was not made public, for sharing with the security agencies. She noted that the secretive register contradicted the official purpose of the legislation, which was to “improve the transparency” of activities linked to a foreign entity.

Gordon said the secretary had issued a notice under the Act requiring LibertyWorks to provide, among other things, documents that would identify the names of participants, and speakers, at its Sydney event. “Such a disclosure could discourage persons from participating in political discussion out of fear that their political views (especially if controversial) may be made public, or conveyed to law enforcement bodies, and have consequences for them,” she noted.

Also demanded were copies, transcripts, video or audio recordings of speeches made by the speakers, summaries of topics covered at the conference, and material produced or distributed promoting the event.

The LibertyWorks event was part of the efforts to develop a Trump-style fascistic movement in Australia, under conditions of collapsing support for the longstanding parties of capitalist rule, Labor and the Coalition. But by targeting this event under the “foreign interference” laws, the authorities sought to clear the way for their use against left-wing and oppositional organisations.

Introduced under intense pressure from Washington to set a global lead for the adoption of such measures, the foreign interference legislation outlaws any supposedly “covert or deceptive” activity” in support of China or any other foreign entity. In last month’s Zhang case, the High Court ruled that the use of an encrypted social media platform—of the sort millions of people use for privacy reasons—could constitute “covert” conduct.

The foreign interference legislation is aimed, above all, at criminalising opposition to Australia’s role in the US-led preparations for war with China. It can also be used to illegalise the activities of publishers and whistleblowers exposing war crimes and government wrongdoing, as part of the efforts to suppress the emerging struggles of the Australian and global working class.

As the WSWS warned in 2018, the legislation constitutes a sweeping attack on free speech. Never before has it been a crime, punishable by up to 20 years’ imprisonment, to work with an overseas group or individual, to seek political change, whether on issues relating to war, the environment, refugees, social inequality or any other political questions.

Stellantis relaxes workplace safety protocols as COVID-19 Delta variant spreads

Shannon Jones

Global carmaker Stellantis says that it is dropping temperature screening at its US auto plants starting Monday along with the relaxation of other limited COVID-19 related safety protocols put in place last year in the wake of wildcat job actions by autoworkers concerned by the unchecked spread of the deadly virus.

Since the outbreak of the pandemic, hundreds of autoworkers have been infected by COVID-19 and scores have died, although the actual number of deaths is unknown due to the cover-up of data by the car companies in collusion with the United Auto Workers (UAW) union. In many cases workers have only become aware of deaths through Facebook or through second- and third-hand sources.

New Stellantis Covid safety protocols

According to a memo distributed by Stellantis management, along with temperature checks, ten-minute cleaning times before shifts as well staggering shift times to prevent thousands of workers from filing past one another, are also ending. Mask wearing is being continued, at least for the present time. Self-reporting of possible COVID-19 symptoms will also continue.

The elimination of a range of safety protocols is clearly a step toward the elimination of all COVID-related safety measures, in particular the self-quarantine of workers exposed to COVID-19, seen by management as a drain on production and profits. The auto companies have refused to recognize the transmission of COVID-19 inside the plants and have bitterly resisted paying sick leave benefits to workers infected or exposed to the virus. This has led to a situation in which symptomatic workers have felt intense pressure to cover up their illness and report to work in order to get paid, increasing the danger to others. The latest measures announced by Stellantis are aimed at further ramping up the pressure.

In announcing the elimination of its safety protocols, Stellantis provided no figures on the number of cases at its plants or the percentage of workers who are fully vaccinated. As recently as April, plants such as Sterling Heights Assembly Plant, north of Detroit, had hundreds of workers infected or out on quarantine. The announcement by Stellantis comes as the highly contagious and more deadly Delta variant of COVID-19 has been detected in Michigan, the center of Stellantis production in the US. To date, there have been nearly 900,000 confirmed cases and 20,000 deaths in Michigan.

The elimination of all safety measures is clearly being planned. In fact, Volkswagen has announced that it is eliminating its masking requirements on June 21 at its US plants, the first carmaker to do so. A number of auto parts suppliers have already moved to eliminate masking requirements.

Stellantis workers at Warren Truck Assembly plant in suburban Detroit (WSWS Media)

A worker at the Detroit Manufacturing Complex-Mack reported that the scheduling changes by Stellantis related to dropping safety measures will add 40 minutes of production to each shift because of the elimination of 10-minute cleanup time and half-hours set aside to stagger shifts.

As it currently stands, the worker reported, the first shift ends at 2 p.m., but the second shift does not come in until 2:30, then has 10 minutes for cleanup—a total of 40 minutes of lost production. Starting Monday, the afternoon shift will now start at 2 p.m. with no stagger and no cleanup.

Assuming a three-shift, eight-hour schedule, the changes amount to an added 120 minutes of production per day of operation, or two hours.

The United Auto Workers had no immediate reaction to the announcement by Stellantis management. In a statement on June 9, the COVID-19 Joint Task Force comprised of the UAW, Ford, Stellantis and General Motors said it was recommending the continuation for now of some existing safety protocols, including masking, “out of an abundance of caution.” However, the UAW-management task force said temperature screenings at facility entrances would be phased out “along with other minor adjustments to entry and exit procedures.” The state of Michigan has fallen in line behind the ill-advised recommendation of the US Centers for Disease Control that masking requirements be dropped in most settings for vaccinated individuals.

Since the there is no way to tell who is vaccinated and who not, these guidelines mean an effective end to most masking requirements. States across the country, including California and New York, have now ended virtually all COVID-19 related health restrictions, guaranteeing the continued spread of the virus and death under conditions where genuine herd immunity has been nowhere achieved in the US. Some rural areas have vaccination rates of less than 30 percent.

A former Stellantis worker told the World Socialist Web Site Autoworker Newsletter, “My teammates sent text messages saying that they are not comfortable with the changes, seeing as everyone has not been vaccinated. We know it’s all about the money.”

The delay by automakers in collaboration with the UAW in implementing the CDC recommendation to end mask requirements and other health measures has nothing to do with an “abundance of caution” over protecting workers’ lives.

Indeed, at every point in the pandemic, the auto companies, with the support of the UAW, have prioritized profits over lives. This was apparent to autoworkers from the start. As COVID-19 cases spread rapidly in March 2020, autoworkers in Europe and North America staged a series of wildcat job actions demanding a shutdown of nonessential production. Workers at several Detroit-area Fiat Chrysler/Stellantis factories initiated work stoppages in defiance of the UAW.

As a result, all major automakers were forced to declare a temporary halt to operations. Production only resumed two months later, despite the continued spread of the pandemic, through the collaboration of the UAW and the use of threats and lies. This included the implementation of a series of inadequate safety protocols. Despite this, many workers opted to stay home rather than risk infection in the factories. All the automakers have experienced difficulty finding adequate numbers of temporary workers willing to risk infection for the paltry $16.67 starting wages paid by the Detroit automakers.

Given this mood of opposition, auto companies are proceeding cautiously with eliminating remaining safety measures. However, moves to eliminate even cosmetic safety measures will follow in due course. Management can be sure in advance they will face no opposition from the UAW.

Supreme Court upholds Obamacare, ruling opponents have no standing to sue

Patrick Martin

In a decision announced June 17, the US Supreme Court struck down the latest right-wing challenge to the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). The court handed down a 7-2 ruling that avoided the substance of the law and instead found that the states and individuals who brought the suit lacked standing because they could not demonstrate that the ACA had caused them any material injury.

The initial lawsuit, Texas v. California, was brought by 17 states and two individuals. States supporting the ACA countersued in California v. Texas, and both suits were disposed of by the court’s decision. The ruling was authored by Justice Stephen Breyer, one of the five justices who first upheld the constitutionality of the ACA in 2012.

United States Supreme Court Building at Dusk (Credit: Wikimedia Commons/Joe Ravi)

The law was also upheld in a 2015 ruling in King v. Burwell, where the margin was 6-3. The law has thus received growing support on the court over the past decade, even as the court’s membership has shifted steadily to the right, particularly with the appointment of three new justices by President Donald Trump.

That alone makes clear that support for the ACA is not the outcome of a liberal or “progressive” political outlook. It is tied much more to the increasing dependence of giant health care, insurance and pharmaceutical companies on the flow of money from the federal government, and Wall Street looking askance at the prospect of that spigot being shut off.

Countless commentaries have been published over the last few days on the intricate legal technicalities and behind-the-scenes conflicts among the justices that produced the latest ruling. However informative, they miss the main point, which was stated bluntly in a headline in the Capitol Hill publication Roll Call: “Industry cheers Supreme Court ruling on health care law.”

As the ensuing article explained: “Several health care industry groups had urged the Supreme Court to uphold the law in amicus briefs filed before the November oral arguments. Hospitals, physicians, insurers and others stood to lose financially if the law had been overturned.”

Virtually every corporate group associated with health insurance and health care applauded the Supreme Court ruling.

Matt Eyles, president and CEO of America’s Health Insurance Providers, the trade group of the health insurance industry, issued a statement saying, “We believe the Supreme Court rightly concluded this case does not belong in court, as the challengers have not suffered any injury. The ACA remains the law of the land.”

He noted the more than one million people who have signed up for coverage during the special enrollment period provided by the Biden administration, on top of the more than 11.3 million already enrolled through state and federal exchanges.

These constitute, to be blunt, 12 million more paying customers for the insurance companies represented by AHIP. That was the real function of the Affordable Care Act from the very beginning. It strengthened the private, profit-gouging components of the retrograde US health care system, in which health care is not a human right of all people, but a commodity offered for profit and available only to those who can pay.

For the same reason, Chip Kahn, president of the Federation of American Hospitals, issued a statement in which he said: “The tens of millions of Americans who depend on the ACA for affordable health coverage can breathe a sigh of relief—their access to care was upheld today by the Supreme Court.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has shown the true value of this law, with a record number of consumers now getting affordable coverage through ACA exchanges.”

Again, the hospital industry is breathing “a sigh of relief” because the ACA has been a windfall to their bottom line. They are dependent on the “record number of consumers” whose hospital care is being paid for under the ACA, either through insurance policies patients have purchased on the exchanges or through the expansion of the federal Medicaid program, carried out in 38 of the 50 states under the ACA.

The stock prices for health insurers Centene Corp. and Molina Healthcare, which have a major presence on the ACA exchanges, jumped sharply in response to the court ruling.

The American Benefits Council, which represents large companies that provide health insurance coverage for employees, applauded the “cautious certainty” that would now be preserved for its member companies by the Supreme Court ruling. In a statement, the group’s president, James Klein, said, “We hope the court’s ruling re-establishes the ACA as settled law that can be relied upon—and improved.”

Many corporate employers have dumped sections of their lower-paid workers into the ACA marketplaces, viewing this as cheaper than continuing to provide employer-paid insurance.

The Affordable Care Act was never a progressive social reform, let alone a step to establishing access to health care as a basic right. It was devised in conjunction with the insurance companies, the profit-making hospital chains and medical device and pharmaceutical industries to provide a growing market, while shifting the burden of paying for health care as much as possible onto the backs of working people.

The health care exchanges, far from attracting tens of millions of people, as Obamacare propagandists had predicted, still have only 12.3 million people enrolled after seven years, fewer than the 18.8 million people newly enrolled in Medicaid under the ACA because of expanded eligibility and outreach.

The latest Supreme Court decision thus represents a victory for the dominant faction of corporate America over a more right-wing faction that has sought to overturn the ACA primarily on ideological grounds, seeking to whip up fears of “socialized medicine,” when the ACA is anything but.

The legal basis of the latest challenge to the ACA was threadbare, to say the least. In 2017, Trump’s tax cut for the wealthy legislation reduced to zero the penalty paid by those who were without health insurance and refused to enroll in the subsidized market provided by Obamacare.

Texas and 17 other states argued that since the ACA mandate had been upheld by the Supreme Court in 2012 as a legitimate exercise of Congress’s power to tax, the elimination of the tax meant that the ACA itself should now be considered unconstitutional. This particularly muddled argument found favor with an ultra-right federal district judge in Texas, who was then overturned on appeal, a ruling that was then appealed to the Supreme Court.

The case was further confounded as the Trump administration first supported the overturning of the mandate without the full overturning of the ACA, then shifted to advocating that the ACA as a whole be struck down, in arguments made to the court last November. Then the incoming Biden administration reversed the position of the federal government and urged the court to reject the challenge to the law.

The 7-2 ruling avoided any discussion of the underlying argument about the meaning of the word “tax” and whether the ACA rose or fell based upon it. Instead, Breyer wrote that neither the two individuals nor the states that brought the case had suffered any injury from the law, and therefore lacked standing to file a suit against it.

The two individuals, he argued, were no longer required to pay a tax penalty. They suffered no injury at all. The states claimed that the ACA mandate was encouraging people to apply for Medicaid (as is their right) for which the states must pay their share, less than 10 percent of the cost. But once the mandate was eliminated, they could not demonstrate that connection, and so lacked standing to sue.

The overwhelming consensus within the US ruling elite in favor of the ACA is demonstrated by the shift of Clarence Thomas, one of the most right-wing justices, from a vote to overturn the ACA in 2012 and 2015 to a vote to retain it—albeit on this technical ground—in 2021.

Mass demonstrations erupt across Brazil as COVID deaths pass 500,000 mark

Tomas Castanheira

On Saturday, Brazil saw a second round of national mass protests against the government of fascistic President Jair Bolsonaro and his response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The demonstrations were even larger than those that took place last May 29, this time gathering, according to their organizers, 750,000 people across the capitals of every state as well as dozens of other Brazilian cities, and even in other countries.

What brought hundreds of thousands into the streets was graphically expressed by the grim milestone of 500,000 deaths from COVID-19 reached by Brazil also on Saturday. The staggering number of deaths from by the pandemic is the result of a conscious policy of social murder that continues in full swing.

Demonstrators protest against Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic on Paulista Avenue, in Sao Paulo, Brazil, Saturday, June 19, 2021. (AP Photo/Marcelo Chello)

Since the beginning of 2021, Brazil has experienced an overwhelming wave of COVID-19 cases and deaths. More than 300,000 deaths and 10 million cases were recorded in the first six months of this year alone.

This explosion of infections was driven, first, by the widespread adoption of the policy of total reopening of economic activities and schools in opposition to the recommendations of public health experts and serving the interests of capitalist profit. Also, an important factor was the spread of the more contagious P.1 variant of the coronavirus, which appeared in Amazonas, itself a terrible product of the ruling class’s experiments with herd immunity.

The wild spread of the coronavirus caused the overflow of intensive care units in every Brazilian state, leading to “the greatest health and hospital collapse in the history of Brazil,” according to the public health institution Fiocruz. Between the end of March and the beginning of April, the country reached averages of more than 3,000 deaths per day and set a record of 4,200 deaths in a single day.

The mass deaths and the inhumane conditions to which many patients were subjected—dying while waiting for an ICU bed or suffocating from lack of medical oxygen—had a strong impact on the consciousness of large sections of the Brazilian population. At Saturday’s protests, once again, many of the demonstrators carried placards bearing the names of relatives and friends who died from COVID-19, deaths that they blame directly on Bolsonaro’s homicidal policy.

The uncontrolled pandemic in Brazil has had a murderous impact on its neighbors in South America. Uruguay, for example, on Brazil’s southern border, after a relatively controlled first wave in 2020, has had an explosion of cases driven by the P.1 variant and a reopening policy that led the country in April to the highest number of daily deaths per capita in all of South America. Countries such as Peru, Bolivia and Venezuela, bordering Brazil to the north, have also seen their cases soar as a result of the Brazilian variant.

Colombia and Paraguay, countries which have also been rocked by mass protests in opposition to their governments’ disastrous handling of the pandemic, are experiencing horrific hospital collapses that doctors largely attribute to difficulties in handling the new Brazilian variant.

After some weeks of decreasing cases and deaths, Brazil is once again experiencing a new rise in numbers. The country is in an extremely critical moment of the pandemic’s development. Institutions such as Fiocruz and leading scientists claim that Brazil is now entering a potentially more devastating third wave of the pandemic.

In an interview last week with O Globo, neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis, who had precisely predicted that Brazil would reach averages of more than 4,000 deaths per day and surpass 500,000 deaths by July, once again warned that if measures are not immediately taken to strictly shut down economic activities and effectively control the virus, “We will pass the US and become the country with the highest number of deaths from COVID-19 in the world, even though we have a smaller population.”

Describing the current situation in Brazil, Nicolelis cited as critical factors: the “hospital collapse that has not been remedied,” the “multiple variants of the virus entering the country,” the slow progress of vaccinations, and the relaxation of isolation measures, grotesquely symbolized by the hosting of the Copa América soccer tournament in the country.

All the malign elements of the political response to the pandemic that caused 500,000 deaths in Brazil and countless others across the continent continue to be criminally implemented by the Brazilian ruling elite.

The fascistic Bolsonaro, with his sociopathic calls for the continuation of the economic reopening regardless of how many deaths it causes, expresses this policy most bluntly. But no political party in Brazil’s political establishment offers a consistent alternative to the bleak prospects of the pandemic foretold by Nicolelis and other scientists.

This has been exposed by the total failure of the states governed by the Workers Party (PT) and its allies the Brazilian Socialist Party (PSB) and Communist Party of Brazil (PCdoB) to control the pandemic. Instead, all of them have continued to promote the unsafe reopening of economic activities and schools.

The mass demonstrations that have taken place in the last weeks in Brazil express the growth of an uncontrollable social opposition in the country. In response, the so called opposition to Bolsonaro within the political establishment is desperately trying to deflect this anger from clashing with the capitalist political system.

The Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry (CPI) set up to investigate the government’s handling of the pandemic is striving to present itself as a definitive settling of scores with the crimes committed by the Brazilian state over the past year. Leading members of the CPI have published a note in response to the surpassing of 500,000 deaths (clearly in response to the pressure from mass protests). It states, “We did not arrive at this devastating, inhumane picture by chance. There are guilty elements and they, as far as the CPI is concerned, will be exemplarily punished.”

At the same time, the PT and its allies who called for the demonstrations on May 29 and on Saturday are struggling to divert these protests into empty appeals to the state, subordinating them to a political alliance with the most reactionary forces of the bourgeoisie to replace Bolsonaro.

Last Saturday’s protests were marked, in addition to the increased number of demonstrators, by increased efforts by their leaders to turn them into political rallies aimed at preparing for the 2022 elections.

Former President Luís Inácio Lula da Silva of the PT, who is being promoted as the most likely candidate to confront Bolsonaro in the next elections, publicly considered participating in the demonstrations. Although, in a staged maneuver, he stayed away in order not to turn “a political act into an electoral act.” Instead, he sent for this very purpose the PT’s Fernando Haddad, who lost the 2018 presidential elections to Bolsonaro.

Socialism and Freedom Party (PSOL) leader Guilherme Boulos, who is intimately involved in the PT’s electoral maneuvers and the forging of alliances with right-wing political forces against Bolsonaro, was also present and speaking at the demonstration in São Paulo.

In addition to the presence of the PT, with its leaders and supporters holding flags, Saturday’s demonstrations also had a participation by the Unified Workers Central (CUT—which is controlled by the PT), and other trade union federations, which this time formally backed the protests.

The participation of the unions was an apprehensive response to the growth of a political opposition within the working class, which these reactionary organizations subordinated to capitalism are desperately trying to suppress.

This was exposed by the bureaucratic maneuvers by the unions to demobilize workers on the eve of the protests. On June 18, the day before the demonstrations, the unions called for a “national day of mobilization in workplaces.” The “mobilization” was a complete fraud. Despite the immense attacks faced by workers, which fueled recent struggles in different sections of the working class, the unions openly refused to advocate a strike on this day.

The president of the Union Force (Força Sindical—the second largest federation in Brazil) Miguel Torres, said to Carta Capital that the “strike issue is very controversial.” Torres declared that “he doesn’t see conditions for a strike, because of the pandemic, the high unemployment and the contract suspensions.” That is, the very issues pushing workers into struggle preclude any action!

The unions are continuing what they have systematically done throughout the pandemic: collaborating to keep workplaces open, sabotaging workers’ strikes and struggles, and forcing them to continue producing profits for the capitalist class regardless of the deadly dangers posed by the pandemic.

This reactionary role of the unions is joined with the efforts of the PT, the PSOL and their pseudo-left satellites to prevent the social opposition from developing on a path capable of truly confronting the COVID-19 pandemic and the social problems of the working class, which involves confronting the interests of the capitalist class and its state.

These political forces strive to prevent Brazilian workers from recognizing the identity of their interests with those of their class brothers and sisters throughout Latin America and internationally.

A scientific response to the COVID-19 pandemic cannot be effective within the framework of a single country. Both the fight to stop the coronavirus, which crosses borders without the need for a passport, and an effective campaign to vaccinate the entire population are essentially global questions. Their realization is impossible without a struggle against the capitalist nation-state system and private property, and without the advance of socialist policies.