Australia’s highest court gives green light to casualisation

Martin Scott

The High Court of Australia handed down a unanimous ruling on August 4 that a worker’s status as casual or permanent is determined solely by the words of their written contracts.

High Court of Australia (Source: Wikipedia)

Without a single dissenting vote, the country’s supreme court declared that employment contracts “accepted” by workers prevail, even if contradicted by “the real substance, practical reality and true nature of the employment relationship.”

This is a class-war ruling. The judges resuscitated the myth of “freedom of contract,” winding back decades of class struggle against this doctrine. As workers know full well, there is no “freedom” or “equality” of bargaining power in being forced by an employer to sign a contract in order to be employed.

This verdict clears the way for a deepening of the offensive against the working class, which has been accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The ruling gives employers a free hand to define workers as casuals, without even the limited protections afforded by the Fair Work Act, National Employment Standards or enterprise agreements.

Last week’s decision also has far-reaching implications for other insecure forms of work, including the increasingly common practice of sham contracting, rife in the gig economy. Millions of workers are already employed as casuals or supposedly independent contractors, with the highest rates among young workers.

Andrew Stewart, a professor of law at the University of Adelaide, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation: “It’s an open invitation to businesses to hire workers as independent contractors rather than employees—meaning they don’t just miss out on annual leave, but minimum wages, limits on working hours, the right to complain of unfair dismissal, and maybe super and workers’ compensation as well.”

The decision overturned a May 2020 Federal Court finding in the case of WorkPac Pty Ltd v Rossato, which held that a worker, employed as a labour-hire casual but working full-time hours rostered up to a year in advance, should receive the same entitlements as a full-time employee.

Although employed by labour-hire firm WorkPac, Robert Rossato worked for three and a half years at Glencore coal mines in Queensland, under what has now become an increasingly typical arrangement in Australia’s $202 billion-a-year mining industry.

The Federal Court finding was hailed as a “big win” by the Construction, Forestry, Maritime, Mining and Energy Union (CFMMEU), which had launched a class action to recover workers’ unpaid entitlements. This has been quickly revealed as a dead end.

In March, the Liberal-National Coalition government introduced legislation that sought to nullify the Federal Court finding. The Fair Work Act amendment defined casuals as workers given no “firm advance commitment to continuing and indefinite work according to an agreed pattern of work.”

Under the new law, regular casuals can ask for a permanent job after 12 months, but employers have the right to say no.

Casual employment was not defined under the Fair Work Act when it was introduced by the Rudd Labor government in 2009. That opened the door to rampant casualisation.

That reality has been underscored by the High Court ruling. In fact, the Morrison government’s amendment was irrelevant to Rossato’s case, because he had already brought legal action before it was introduced.

However, the March definition now applies retroactively to all workers previously hired as casuals, further giving the green light to casualisation.

The High Court verdict prompted an ecstatic response from the financial press. The Australian Financial Review (AFR) published four celebratory articles on the day of the finding. Its August 4 editorial said it was “a win for black letter law against judicial activism” and a “victory for freedom and primacy of contract.”

The ruling will have immediate ramifications for gig economy workers. In recent months, rideshare and food delivery workers have legally challenged the standard practice of engaging workers as “independent contractors” rather than employees.

These efforts to obtain a minimum hourly wage and some basic rights have been severely limited by the insistence of the Transport Workers Union (TWU) that they be confined to the courts. Like all the trade unions, it has opposed any industrial action.

Already, food delivery company Deliveroo has said it will use the High Court ruling to bolster its appeal against a Fair Work Commission (FWC) ruling in May that rider Diego Franco was an employee, not a contractor, and therefore protected by unfair dismissal laws. A Deliveroo spokesperson said: “The High Court’s decision is a big step in a positive direction.”

On Friday, the FWC itself declared that the Rossato decision called into question whether the “real substance, practical reality and true nature” of the relationship between Deliveroo and Franco could even be considered, or if the FWC could only take into account “the terms of the contract(s) between the parties.”

Despite the threat posed to casual and gig workers, TWU national secretary Michael Kaine was quick to continue the union’s efforts to sow parliamentary and legal illusions. He claimed there was still “legal ambiguity” and called for “regulatory intervention.”

Kaine’s comments are a desperate bid to save face as the Franco verdict unravels, after also being claimed as a major win for the TWU.

Similarly, Australian Council of Trade Unions secretary Sally McManus said the High Court decision showed “there is an urgent need for stronger laws to provide basic rights to casuals.” McManus even appealed to Prime Minister Scott Morrison to “crack down on the rampant casualisation of the workforce.”

McManus is yet again pleading to the government which, less than six months ago, passed legislation to speed up the casualisation of the workforce. This dovetails with her collaboration with the government throughout the pandemic, exemplified by Industrial Relations Minister Christian Porter calling her his “BFF [best friend forever].”

Labor leader Anthony Albanese, who has previously claimed that a Labor government would protect casual workers, has remained silent on the High Court ruling. Labor’s industrial relations spokesperson Tony Burke only vaguely promised to “overturn the government’s scheme.”

The reality is that successive Australian governments, both Labor and Liberal-National, have eviscerated the rights of workers. The drive toward increased casualisation took off under the trade union-backed Hawke-Keating Labor governments of the 1980s and 1990s.

Why Banning Free Porn Would Hurt, Not Help, the US

Addison J. Hosner

The First Amendment is under siege, but not in the way most would expect. There has been an increasing sentiment in the United States to outright ban free pornography. The sentiment is spreading across Europe as well, with countries like Germany taking the banning of certain pornography websites to a national level. No matter your moral stance on explicit adult content, calls for such sweeping regulation should give us all pause as we consider the cascading effect this could have for future regulation on the protections of the freedom of speech and expression.

To be fair, this is far from the first time a nation has banned porn. Currently, 37 countries in the world have sweeping bans against pornography, with many others having heavy censorship and restricted access, including some surprise nations such as the United Kingdom and Australia. But from Playboy Magazine to Pornhub, explicit adult materials have been a part of the American media industry dating back to the early 20th century. By many accounts, the first pornographic film produced in the United States is 1915’s “A Free Ride,” a 9-minute piece of history dating back to the days of World War I. However, today’s pornographic industry isn’t constrained to 35mm film and movie theaters, all you need is the internet and device to access it.

Many Americans conflate their personal morals and objective views of the law of the land. However, one only has to look to The Supreme Court of the United States to understand the difficulty in regulating what some would consider “obscenities.” It has been held that sex and obscenity are not synonymous, and that the State has no business in telling a person sitting alone in their own home what books they may read or what films they may watch. Yet here we are today with calls for regulations to do just that. In fact, in the state of Utah such regulations are already being put in place.

Justifications for banning free porn have ranged from the claim that it’ll protect the minds of innocent children to a concern about addictive and antisocial conduct that may arise from porn consumption. But banning porn won’t fix either of those concerns.

If lawmakers think banning free porn will keep kids from accessing explicit content online, they’ve simply misunderstood how the internet and data transmission works in the 21st century.

Backchannel file sharing websites such as The Pirate Bay, and message boards such as 4chan, allow users to share content anonymously and instantaneously. This ban would be akin to the prohibition of alcohol in the 1920’s and 1930’s. Shutting down free porngraphic websites wouldn’t solve anything, it would just prompt the mass migration of free pornographic content to these backchannels. It might seem like a surface victory for those who think they are doing the right thing, but all they would have accomplished is the creation of another outlet for viewing — one that could easily be exploited by bad actors to spread malicious content to devices which would further security breaches and potentially dangerous exposure.

Instead of banning porn, parents should step up their game when it comes to sex education and handling their kids sexual curiosity.

Claiming the ban would curb addictive and antisocial behavior arising from porn consumption is a clear example of cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias. A recent study by the University of New Brunswick investigating pornography consumption and tolerance found that those who advocate to have porn banned are more likely to have sexist and misogynistic attitudes about women than those who support pornographic adult content. Overall, pornography consumption was either irrelevant in predicting sexism or was associated with greater egalitarianism, quite the opposite of the continued narrative equating pornography consumptiom to the objectification of women. Proponents of banning pornography also turn to arguments of the addictive nature of porn consumption, but then fail to hold the same contempt for social media addiction which is a far more wide-spread issue among children, adolescents, and adults alike. By their logic, we should ban facebook, instagram, cigarettes, sugar, alcohol — where does it stop?

Finally, there’s the moral claim that porn is just wrong. But if all the ban is trying to do is regulate morality, that betrays a misunderstanding of the function of government. In an increasingly sensitive society, the precedent a ban based on moral grounds would set could invite a dangerous and slippery slope of overregulation. Where would it stop? The unforseen consequences of legislation being based on moral principles, many of which gleaned from a religious basis, would result in the degradation of the separation of church and state and the expression of free will. The suppression of pornography on this basis would permit the government to certify and enforce a moral code that reinforces and justifies the political status quo. This is not a world any American should advocate for.

If there is one thing we should have learned by now as Americans, it is that prohibitions have always failed, and a prohibition on pornography would be no different. If we permit the governmental regulation of free speech simply on the basis that speech conditions and influences society, then that would be the end of the freedom of speech as we know it.

UK High Court sides with US against Assange

Thomas Scripps

The UK’s High Court has allowed the United States to appeal on two additional grounds the refusal of Julian Assange’s extradition by a lower court.

Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks still held in Belmarsh maximum security prison, is threatened with extradition on charges under the Espionage Act with a potential life sentence for revealing state war crimes, torture, surveillance, corruption and coup plots.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange [Credit: AP Photo/Matt Dunham]

On January 4, District Judge Vanessa Baraitser blocked extradition, ruling that it would be oppressive by virtue of his mental health and put him at substantial risk of suicide.

Lawyers for the US government sought to appeal the decision on the five grounds:

1. That Baraitser made errors of law in her application of the test under section 91 of the 2003 Extradition Act, which bars extradition if the person’s mental or physical condition would render it unjust or oppressive.
2. That she ought to have notified the US ahead of time, to give the government the opportunity to provide assurances to the court that Assange’s health would be looked after.
3. That the judge should not have accepted or at least given less weight to the evidence of the defence’s principal psychiatric expert, Professor Kopelman.
4. That Baraitser erred in her overall assessment of the evidence on suicide risk.
5. That the US has since provided the UK with a package of assurances about the conditions in which Assange would be held.

The US was initially granted leave to appeal on grounds one, two and five, but denied three and four. At a preliminary hearing yesterday in front of Lord Justice Holroyde and Mrs Justice Farbey, that decision was overturned and grounds three and four were granted as well.

Their decision confirms that the January 4 ruling against extradition was only a tactical pause in an ongoing pseudo-legal manhunt, which is again proceeding apace.

Baraitser’s original decision accepted every one of the prosecution’s anti-democratic, factually unsustainable arguments except on the single point of Assange’s mental health, leaving his fate hanging by a thread. Now the US is being given the opportunity to bulldoze this last remaining obstacle.

As Assange’s legal team argue in their Notice of Objection, none of the points made in the appeal by the US stand up to scrutiny.

On ground one, the US lawyers “identified no errors of law in the approach taken by the District Judge” who applied the relevant “Turner test” in a manner consistent with the recent case of Lauri Love.

On ground two, the court was under no obligation to prompt the US to provide assurances.

On ground five, the new US “assurances” are nothing of the sort—they are conditional and have been given and broken in previous cases. Moreover, they have been introduced at such a late stage that they cannot be properly tested and contradict “the long-held and vitally important principle” that “parties to an extradition hearing should deploy all their evidence and raise all relevant issues at a single extradition hearing.”

Grounds three and four, Edward Fitzgerald QC maintained yesterday, representing Assange, are simply “unarguable.”

Claire Dobbin, representing the US, claimed that since defence expert medical witness Professor Kopelman had failed to record in a preliminary report that Assange was in a relationship with Stella Moris and had conceived two children with her—of direct relevance to the question of his mental health—he was guilty of misleading the court and his evidence ought to have been ruled inadmissible or given far less weight.

But Baraitser did not fail to carry out, in the words of the prosecution’s appeal, an “exacting analysis as to why Professor Kopelman” acted as he did. In fact, Fitzgerald explained, she “was fully aware of the criticism” and had “asked herself the right question” as to whether or not, in the context of his broader conduct, this called into question his impartiality.

In her January 4 ruling, Baraitser stated that she “did not accept that Professor Kopelman failed in his duty to the court when he did not disclose Ms. Morris’s relationship with Mr. Assange.” She described Kopelman’s omission as “an understandable human response to Mrs Moris’s predicament,” which had not led to her being misled.

One does not need to accept that Baraitser came to this decision out of concern for legal principle to point out the bankruptcy of the US’s arguments. As Fitzgerald stated at yesterday’s hearing, “It is unarguable that there is a principle that any lapse, however understandable… renders the whole of an expert’s evidence inadmissible… You have to take it in context and look at the overarching duty” of impartiality.

In her arguments yesterday, Dobbin characteristically asked of Kopelman’s “human response,” “what does that even mean?” Fitzgerald later powerfully set out the extraordinary oppressive circumstances in which Kopelman made his decision: “There had been a surveillance organisation which was taking DNA from the [Assange’s] baby’s nappy, which was saying special attention should be placed on Stella Morris, which was examining measures to either kidnap or poison him [Assange].”

Fitzgerald was referring to UC Global, the company which provided security for the Ecuadorian embassy while Assange was confined there and has since been accused by two of its former employees of having been employed by the CIA.

His comment broke through the veil which separates the courtroom proceedings, in which Assange’s case is assumed to be a fairly argued matter of law, and the reality in which the US is waging a dirty campaign for the WikiLeaks founder’s head. While Kopelman is dragged over the coals for trying to protect Assange’s family from America’s professional thieves and assassins, the US can proceed with a case based in large part on the admitted lies of a convicted fraudster and FBI asset!

On ground four, Fitzgerald cited at length Baraitser’s “clear, comprehensive and, we would say, unassailable” reasoning in coming to her conclusion on Assange’s substantial risk of suicide. The US lawyers’ argument, he concluded, amounted to the barefaced demand that the appellate court “re-evaluate the whole thing and reach a different conclusion from the person who heard all the evidence.”

After an hour’s adjournment, the high court judges accepted the US lawyers’ arguments, acknowledging that “in general this court rightly takes a cautious approach when considering findings of fact… made by the judge below,” but claimed that Kopelman’s actions made this case “unusual”. The final appeal hearing was scheduled for October 27-28.

Moris spoke to journalists outside the court. “What has not been discussed today is why I feared for my safety and the safety of our children and Julian’s life. The constant threats and intimidation that we have endured for years, which has been terrorising us and has been terrorising Julian for over ten years.

“Threats against me, threats against our children, death threats against Julian’s eldest son Daniel. Threats on Julian’s life, threats of a 175-year prison sentence. And the actual ongoing imprisonment of a journalist for doing his job. These are sustained threats to his life for the past ten years. These are not just items of law. This is our lives. We have the right to exist. We have the right to live, and we have a right for this nightmare to come to an end once and for all.”

Yesterday’s decision is a warning. The official Don’t Extradite Assange (DEA) campaign and its carefully targeted and promoted supporters such as former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn have encouraged appeals to the good sense of the Biden administration or the British judiciary. At a meeting in London in February 2020, Tariq Ali told the crowd, “Hopefully as the case moves upwards to superior courts, we will find some judges who are prepared just to be decent.”

This is criminal complacency. Assange’s fate must not be left in the hands of the warmongering Biden or the venal British legal system. His freedom depends on the political mobilisation of the international working class, now entering into struggle all over the world, in defence of democratic rights.

Record number of wildfires burn large swaths of Siberia

Jason Melanovski

A record number of wildfires have burned across Siberia since May, encompassing 16 million hectares of land and marking it as the second-worst fire season since the turn of the century. The wildfires in Russia are larger than all the other large wildfires currently burning in Greece, Turkey, Italy, Canada and the United States, combined.

On Sunday, the Russian government was forced to evacuate two villages as over 155 active forest fires continued to burn in northeastern Siberia’s Sakha-Yakutia region.

In addition to the two evacuated villages, 12 other villages were under threat from the fires as an estimated 4,000 firefighters and other workers struggled to contain the ongoing blazes. In many places, local residents have to help fight the flames because of a severe lack of firefighters. The regional capital of Yakutsk was forced to shut down its airport due to the heavy smoke.

Firefighters work at the scene of forest fire near Kyuyorelyakh village at Gorny Ulus area, west of Yakutsk, in Russia Thursday, Aug. 5, 2021. (AP Photo/Ivan Nikiforov)

Large industrial cities in the Urals, including Yekaterinburg and Chelyabinsk, are covered in thick and toxic smog. In the city of Sarov, in the Nizhny-Novgorod Oblast, a state of emergency was declared this weekend as flames were approaching a national nuclear weapons research center.

It was not until Tuesday that Russian President Vladimir Putin announced some additional federal help and additional firefighters.

Volunteers are attempting to take up the slack where government efforts have failed, but receive little support.

Speaking with the Associated Press (AP), Alexandra Kozulina, an employee of a nongovernmental agency attempting to fight the fires, blamed government inaction for allowing the fires to spin out of control. “I also believe our government should be doing this. I don’t understand why it isn’t happening—whether there isn’t enough money because budgets were cut, or some other reason, but we are doing what is in our power,” she said.

While forest fires are common during the summer months in Siberia, the severity and size of Russian wildfires has increased in recent years due to increasing temperatures and the disappearance of permafrost beneath the soil, which experts have attributed to global warming. Siberia is particularly affected by Arctic temperatures, which are rising more than three times as fast as the rest of the world.

Highlighting the unprecedented nature of this year’s wildfires, NASA reported on Saturday that smoke from the fires had reached the north pole, 3,000 kilometres away, “a first in recorded history.” According to Greenpeace, since the beginning of the year, more than 62,300 square miles were scorched, almost twice the size of Austria. In last year ’s wildfires in Russia, an area the size of Great Britain was scorched.

According to the European Union’s Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAM), the fires themselves will contribute to further warming as they have already released the equivalent of 505 megatonnes of carbon dioxide since June, already surpassing last year’s record total of 450 megatonnes for the entire fire season. There are also fears the fires could further melt Siberia’s permafrost and burn peat moss, releasing even more carbon that has long been stored in the ground.

Alexei Yaroshenko, a forestry expert with Greenpeace Russia, told the Washington Post, “These forests have a very significant role in regulating the environment. Most of the forests in unprotected areas are in the far north. They grow very slowly, they are very sensitive, and if they burn down, the impact on the environment is huge.”

The wildfires in Russia are yet another testament to capitalism’s failure to address the climate crisis, which is itself the product of the capitalist system. While rising global temperatures have exacerbated Siberia’s wildfires, the disastrous response by the Russian government to the annually recurring wildfires has been a major contributing factor. The Kremlin allows forest fires to burn uncontrolled if it deems the cost to fight them more expensive than the damage they cause, or if the fires take place in uninhabited areas.

As of this writing, 69 fires are currently being allowed to burn in Russia. They have already scorched 8,000 square miles, and are nearly 10 times bigger than the Dixie wildfire raging in California.

In 2007, the Russian government significantly altered the country’s forest code, disbanding the federal network responsible for spotting forest fires, cutting the number of forest rangers, and turning many aspects of forest management over to regional authorities.

With little federal oversight and huge areas of forest now in the hands of regional authorities, illegal foresting of trees is flourishing. It is widely believed that intentional arson of forests, designed to create new areas for timber, is behind some of the wildfires.

Environmental activists in the country have attributed much of the illegal foresting to the huge demand from nearby China, which has fueled corruption of government authorities paid to look the other way while timber is illegally harvested for export.

China is the world’s largest importer of lumber. In 2017, China imported nearly 200 million cubic meters of wood from Russia, much of it from Siberia.

Following a public outcry, some of the changes implemented in 2007 were later reversed and the federal agency in charge of monitoring fires was re-established. However, it remains chronically underfunded and understaffed.

According to Konstantin Kobyakov, director of the World Wildlife Fund Russia, in the last 10 years the number of forestry workers has declined from 160,000 to just 22,000 while at the same time the number and severity of fires has increased.

Across the country, this summer only 5,000 firefighters were deployed to fight the country’s widespread fires, which are occurring outside of Siberia as well.

The deliberate underfunding and mismanagement of the country’s forestry workers and firefighters are a direct result of the restoration of capitalism and the destruction of the Soviet Union by the Stalinist bureaucracy three decades ago. While the oligarchy that emerged out of this process has perversely enriched itself, it has overseen a destruction of living standards and social infrastructure unprecedented outside of wartime.

In 2019, Russia, which has a population of 140 million, had approximately 8,500 deaths due to fire. The United States, which also has a decrepit infrastructure and a population of 320 million, recorded 3,704 deaths due to fire despite reporting more than double the number of fires.

In 2018, Russia, which, by territory, is the largest country in the world, had just 5,000 fire stations. By contrast, Poland, a much smaller country with a population of 40 million, had 15,000 fire stations.

Train drivers began nationwide strike in Germany

Marianne Arens

Engine drivers, train conductors and workshop engineers at railway company Deutsche Bahn (DB) have begun a nationwide strike to defend themselves against wage cuts and growing work stress. A ballot showed 95 percent of its members in favour of strike action, the German Train Drivers’ Union (GDL) announced on Tuesday. Turnout was 70 percent. A 48-hour strike started Wednesday morning at two o’clock and ends Friday morning. In freight traffic, the strike already began on Tuesday evening at 7 p.m.

Striking train drivers at Berlin Ostbahnhof in 2015 (Photo: WSWS)

The strike is of great significance for workers in Germany and around the world, because railway workers are resisting DB management’s attempts to pass on the costs of the coronavirus pandemic to them. DB is determined to impose a pay freeze for 2021—while management bonuses will rack up €500 million—something it has already stipulated in agreements with the much larger railway workers’ and transport union (EVG).

DB’s offer to GDL members only provides for a wage increase of 1.5 percent from January 2022, with a further 1.7 percent from March 2023, and a contract term of 40 months. Given the current inflation rate of 3.8 percent, this means a massive reduction in real wages. Inflation is predicted to rise further, with Bundesbank President Jens Weidmann expecting it could be as high as 5 percent by the end of the year.

Company pensions are also to be cut by up to two-thirds and duty rosters made more flexible in order to deploy staff on irregular shift work at even shorter notice than before.

As “essential” workers, train drivers, conductors, engineers and other rail workers have had to bear the full brunt of the pandemic for 18 months already. They can neither isolate themselves nor protect themselves reliably. This was also revealed by a study commissioned by DB and carried out by the Berlin Charité hospital.

DB and the media reported the study using misleading headlines such as “No sign of increased coronavirus risk among train staff.” In reality, the study only shows that train conductors are not exposed to a higher risk of infection compared to train drivers or railway engineers. But overall, the infection rate is enormously high. According to the study, among a total of 944 railway employees tested, 80, or 8.5 percent, were found to have had an acute coronavirus infection within eight months!

Although railway workers are among the main victims of the virus, the DB Executive Board is cynically using the pandemic to denounce the strikers as “lacking solidarity.” The strikes are “completely unnecessary and excessive,” commented Martin Seiler, DB board member for human resources and legal affairs. “As Deutsche Bahn, we are in the midst of the company’s biggest economic crisis and have suffered additional damage in recent weeks.”

“The room for manoeuvre in this round of collective bargaining is set by the pandemic,” stated Florian Weh, chief executive of the German Railway Employers’ Association (AGV Move), which is leading the collective bargaining.

As usual, the right-wing tabloid Bild-Zeitung was particularly blatant with its lurid headlines: “Travel chaos looms!” and “An attack on the whole country.” In a lying appeal, it attacked GDL leader Claus Weselsky from the right: “This strike is lacking solidarity, Mr. GDL boss!”

“In the midst of the pandemic and in the middle of the holiday season,” train drivers could not expect any sympathy, and the health of travelers was “more important than quick wage increases,” Bild wrote. “The strike comes at the wrong time and is becoming a health risk”; it meant “danger from contagions shortly before a possible fourth wave.”

Such statements reek of boundless cynicism. Since the beginning of the pandemic, Bild-Zeitung has been the loudest proponent of the official herd immunity policy and of placing profits before lives. It has organised a veritable smear campaign against serious virologists such as Dr Christian Drosten.

The GDL strike is meeting with great sympathy among all railway workers and throughout the working class. As Weselsky reported at the press conference on Tuesday, “even many civil servants and colleagues from DB companies where the GDL has not even held a strike ballot have expressed their solidarity”.

A train driver taking part in the strike said on twitter that the opposition of the political establishment to a halt in rail traffic during the “lockdown” indicates that it is “an essential job that I am doing. ... But now to strike for at least inflation compensation? No, that’s taking hostages and being anti-social.”

He spoke for many workers when he added, “A large part of the net wage is tax-free supplements. Sick leave? Holidays? Then it all falls away. If I become unemployed or long-term sick tomorrow, I go home with a triple digit [pay check].”

The reason for the barrage in the bourgeois media against the strike is the great sympathy for the strike in the working class. Any industrial action against the austerity dictates of DB, the government or corporations could send a signal and set off a chain reaction.

The pandemic has already caused more than 92,000 mostly preventable deaths in Germany. But governments at the federal and state level and business leaders have not only continued their profits-before-lives policies, but are using the pandemic as a pretext to step up attack on wages and jobs everywhere—at schools, day-care centres, hospitals, bus companies and airports, in the auto and metal industries.

Railway workers face a struggle on several fronts. They face not only DB management and the federal government, which owns 100 percent of Deutsche Bahn, but also the main EVG trade union, which is in the pocket of management and functions as a company union.

To successfully oppose the dictates of DB, railway workers must understand that the GDL too does not represent their interests. To make the strike a success, they must organise themselves into independent rank-and-file committees, reaching out to other transport workers and the whole German and international working class to wage a common struggle against job insecurity, wage theft and job cuts.

The GDL in its present form emerged from a factional conflict with the EVG. To fight against the endless spiral of wage and staff cuts that the EVG helps organise, more and more train drivers and then train conductors and other railway workers have joined the GDL since 2008. The GDL organised several rail strikes, in 2008 and 2014–2015.

However, the GDL is not prepared to launch an all-out strike and take up the necessary political fight against the government, which cannot tolerate a major rail strike, especially during the present election campaign. Claus Weselsky, himself a Christian Democrat (CDU) member, appealed to Federal Transport Minister Andreas Scheuer (Christian Social Union, CSU) at Tuesday’s press conference to relent with an “improved, negotiable offer.” Now was “the time to scrap the sham offers and put your money where your mouth is.”

Weselsky assured Tagesspiegel: “Of course, we would not close our minds to restructuring,” and linked this to the proposal to lay off half the administrative staff. Thus, instead of uniting all railway employees, the union is playing off one section of workers against another.

The GDL ended the dispute in 2015 by signing a four-year sellout agreement, and then agreed to a contract at the beginning of 2019 with a duration of 29 months, which barely compensated for the rate of inflation.

Its current demands are also not likely to improve the situation of railway workers. Its wage demand, like DB’s offer, is far below the rate of inflation. The GDL is demanding an increase of 1.4 percent from retroactive to the beginning of April, with a minimum increase of at least €50, a coronavirus allowance of €600 in 2021, and a further across-the-board wage increase of 1.8 percent on April 1, 2022, with a 28-month contract term instead of 40.

The GDL’s fight against the EVG is not progressive. Much of its “militancy” is because DB has been competing for membership with the EVG by applying the so-called Contract Unity Law (TEG). This was introduced by the grand coalition under the auspices of the SPD to protect the major unions against competition from sectoral unions such as GDL, or UFO and Vereinigung Cockpit in air travel, Marburger Bund (doctors), etc.

The TEG stipulates that in a company with several trade unions, only the collective agreement reached by the trade union with the largest membership is applicable. The GDL is fighting for a majority of members in 71 out of 300 railway companies, and as Weselsky explained, it has gained over 3,000 new members in the last six months. But DB will only grant it collective bargaining rights in 16 companies. It is taking legal action in another 18, but four of the actions have so far failed in court.

Like the EVG, the GDL is expressly committed to the corporatist policy of “social partnership.” If it is recognised as a “social partner,” it is prepared—like the EVG—to agree any shabby deal, as the 2015 and 2019 contracts have shown. It is also prepared to reach an accommodation with the EVG, as Weselsky made clear in an interview with the organisation “arbeitsunrecht.”

He promised that the GDL explicitly only wanted to represent “direct railway staff.” He said: “We are not talking about companies that are outside railway segments, we are not talking about [logistics arm] DB Schenker, for example. That is clearly the territory of our colleagues from Verdi, with whom we have no stress and no quarrel and do not hunt each other’s members, but maintain a peaceful coexistence.”

Democrats begin budget “reconciliation” process with Senate vote

Patrick Martin

The US Senate voted early Wednesday morning to adopt a budget resolution that purports to allow up to $3.5 trillion in social spending, backed by the Biden administration and the Democratic leadership in Congress.

Despite the Republican howls about massive spending and even “socialism,” the blueprint is highly unlikely to be enacted in anything like the form outlined by Senator Bernie Sanders, the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, who took the lead role in the debate on the resolution.

Sanders mocked the Republicans, saying they were “finding it hard to believe that the president, the Democratic caucus, are prepared to go forward in addressing the long-neglected needs of working families and not just the 1 percent.”

He continued with more “left” phrases, claiming, “This legislation will not only provide enormous support to the kids of this country, to the parents of this country, to the elderly people of this country,” but then reached the real purpose of the resolution: “It will also, I hope, restore the belief that in America we can have a government that works for all, not just the few.”

In other words, the purpose of the budget resolution is to spread illusions among working people in the viability of the corporate-controlled political system. It seeks to put a “left” face on an administration that just concluded a deal with Senate Republicans on an infrastructure bill that is tailored to their demands—and backed by Republican leader Mitch McConnell. And Sanders is given a leading role in order to sustain the pretense of what even the New York Times called, in its headline, “Budget Political Theater.”

The budget resolution passed on a 50–49 vote, with all Democrats supporting it and every Republican in attendance voting “no.” Vice President Kamala Harris chaired the session but her tie-breaking vote was not needed because one Republican was absent because his wife is severely ill.

The Senate action sets in motion an extremely convoluted procedure. The resolution must be passed by the House of Representatives, but it does not then go to the White House and it does not become law. It is essentially a procedural motion that sets the terms for subsequent congressional action in which the Senate waives the 60-vote requirement in effect for most legislation, and only a simple majority is required.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer announced Wednesday that the House would be recalled from its summer recess to meet August 23, presumably to approve the same resolution, setting the stage for further action in September. Democratic leaders have suggested that all committee action on the components of the actual spending bill should be completed by September 15.

This budget procedure, known as “reconciliation,” would allow the passage of the actual spending legislation without any Republican support in the Senate, provided all 50 Democrats vote as a bloc. But that is highly unlikely, as two of the most right-wing Senate Democrats, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, have already announced their opposition to the $3.5 trillion top number for total spending.

Only hours after he voted for the budget resolution, Manchin made it clear that this was support only for starting the process, not for the outcome, and that he had “serious concerns about the grave consequences facing West Virginians and every American family if Congress decides to spend another $3.5 trillion.”

He added, “Given the current state of the economic recovery, it is simply irresponsible to continue spending at levels more suited to respond to a Great Depression or Great Recession—not an economy that is on the verge of overheating.” A drive through the devastated former coal mining regions of his state would suggest that West Virginia is undergoing an economic collapse of comparable dimensions, but Manchin is doing the bidding of Wall Street and the energy conglomerates.

Kyrsten Sinema said last month, “while I will support beginning this process, I do not support a bill that costs $3.5 trillion.” She also cited the need for working with “my colleagues” (i.e., Senate Republicans) and the Biden administration going forward.

In the hours preceding the final vote, both Manchin and Sinema and several other Senate Democrats indicated their willingness to break ranks and torpedo an eventual spending bill by voting for Republican-backed amendments to the resolution.

These amendments, under a special procedure that allows rapid-fire introduction and consideration and requires only 50 votes for passage, do not have any legal force, since the resolution is not a law. But they serve as political litmus tests for the two parties and for individual senators in their reelection campaigns.

Manchin supplied that 50th vote for two of these amendments, one supporting funding for health care providers that refuse to participate in abortions, the other banning any spending that supports the teaching of “critical race theory” in the schools.

Sinema sided with Republicans in voting down an amendment proposed by another Democratic senator that called for “protecting family farms, ranches, and small businesses while ensuring the wealthy pay their fair share.” The objection was to the “fair share” language.

A similar Democratic amendment, which backed raising taxes on the wealthiest 0.1 percent of Americans, was defeated when Sinema and the two Democrats from New Hampshire, Jeanne Shaheen and Maggie Hassan, voted against it.

Another Republican amendment, although defeated, underscores the right-wing character of the entire debate. Mitt Romney of Utah, one of the wealthiest members of the Senate, proposes to ban any tax increases at all, excluding both corporations and the wealthy from paying for social improvements. This was defeated on a 50–49 party-line vote.

Some of the right-wing amendments passed by overwhelming votes after they were embraced by the Democratic leadership. The Senate voted by 88–11 to bar transporting immigrants in federal custody away from the border area unless they test negative for COVID-19.

By a 96–3 vote, the senators voted in support of an amendment by Josh Hawley of Missouri—who by rights should be arrested for his role in the January 6 attack on the Capitol—endorsing the hiring of an additional 100,000 police.

Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., thanked Sen.Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., on Tuesday, Aug. 10, for a political “gift.” (AP Photo/Amanda Andrade-Rhoades, File)

Most revealing of all was the response of the Democrats to an amendment by Republican Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama to withhold federal funds for any local governments that “defund the police.” Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey called the amendment “a gift” that would allow the Democrats to “put to bed this scurrilous accusation that somebody in this great esteemed body would want to defund the police.” He said he wanted to “walk over there and hug my colleague.” The amendment then passed by a vote of 99–0.

Schools across Southern US reopen as COVID patients flood hospitals

Emma Arceneaux

School districts across the Southern United States have reopened against the backdrop of a widening coronavirus pandemic that has infected tens of thousands, filling hospitals to capacity and leaving them in desperate need of emergency personnel and equipment. This includes pediatric hospitals, which in many areas have more patients than at any other time during the pandemic.

Within days of reopening, school districts across the region reported thousands of COVID-19 infections and many reverted to short-term virtual instruction. Nevertheless, the ruling class, spearheaded by the Biden administration and Republican-controlled state governments, remains steadfast that in-person schooling must resume, sacrificing children’s lives for corporate profit as their parents go back to work.

Middle school student Elise Robinson receives her first coronavirus vaccination on Wednesday, May 12, 2021 in Decatur, Georgia. (AP Photo/Ron Harris)

Educators and parents are irate and desperate as they watch children subjected to dangerous conditions. On social media, teachers have circulated petitions in an attempt to pressure politicians and superintendents to enforce mitigation strategies at the least or shut down in-person learning altogether.

In the comments section of these petitions, many parents plead desperately for virtual learning options, which have been almost totally scrapped across the country.

One signer wrote on a Texas petition, “Governor Abbott is putting future Texans in danger. He claims to be pro life and care about children. I guess that only applies to unborn children. Many kids that are here now will die because of his direct actions. He should be held accountable for any deaths that occur under his failures.”

Another commented, “What will happen in public schools in Texas during the next Covid outbreak after Governor Abbott says there will be no virtual classrooms? And will he and others be held accountable for the carnage?”

It must be stressed that the policies of the Democratic Party led by President Biden are responsible for emboldening the right-wing attacks on science and public health measures being carried out in Republican states.

Biden’s economic adviser Brian Deese admitted that the real priority in reopening schools is the “labor shortage” due to a lack of “child care and school.” It was under Biden’s administration that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention called for vaccinated people to throw off their masks, despite having definitive proof that vaccinated people contract and spread the virus.

Within days of reopening, districts in the region reported hundreds of cases, outbreaks and school closures. In New Orleans, where masks are required, 116 active cases were reported on Monday, and 638 students and staff were quarantined, even before all campuses have opened. Despite school being in session, the Louisiana Department of Health has yet to resume its weekly K-12 COVID-19 case tracker.

In Mississippi, with many districts not reporting, 841 students and 347 staff have tested positive since August 1. For the week ending August 6, 4,435 students were quarantined.

In Georgia, districts across metro Atlanta reported hundreds of cases only days after school started. Gwinnett County Schools reported 166 cases in just two days. Dr. Cherie Drenzek, an epidemiologist with the Georgia Department of Public Health, told 11Alive that there has been a 100 percent increase in cases of children ages 5-17 over the past two weeks.

As the petitions by educators and parents indicate, there is widespread hostility to reopening schools. In Duval County, Florida (Jacksonville) 96 teachers were absent on the first day of school, up from the 80 that were absent on the first day in the last school year.

Throughout the South, hospitals are overwhelmed. Mississippi, Georgia, Florida and Louisiana accounted for more than 40 percent of all hospitalizations nationwide on August 5, according to the Associated Press. In New Orleans, a heart attack victim was “bounced from six hospitals before finding an emergency room that could take him,” reported National Public Radio.

Mississippi State Health Officer Dr. Thomas Dobbs warned on Twitter on Monday that the state expects 500 new hospitalizations in the coming days but that there will be no room for these patients: “we have ZERO ICU beds at Level 1-3 hospitals, and we have > 200 patients waiting in ERs for a room.” Similarly, Florida surpassed 15,000 hospitalizations on Tuesday, the highest number to date during the pandemic.

Supplies are low in Florida, which requested 300 ventilators from the federal government this week after the state stockpiles were exhausted, according to a Department of Health and Human Services document obtained by ABC. Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, who claimed to be unaware of the request, has banned mask mandates in schools and threatened to withhold funds from school districts which defy him. Florida currently has the highest number of children hospitalized from COVID of any state.

In Texas, while pursuing a similar policy of banning school mask mandates, Republican Governor Greg Abbott pleaded for out-of-state personnel assistance as hospitals are overwhelmed. He also requested that the Texas Hospital Association postpone elective medical procedures. School districts across the state are defying his mask ban, and he faces multiple lawsuits to overturn the ban.

Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson was forced to backtrack after signing a bill into law banning state and local mask mandates. Now that it is enacted, he must wait on the bill to be amended or for the courts to rule the ban unconstitutional. On Tuesday, only eight ICU beds were available across the state.

The Southern US has some of the lowest vaccination rates in the country. According to Our World in Data, less than 40 percent of the population in the states of Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Arkansas and Georgia are fully vaccinated. Florida and Texas have slightly higher rates with 49 percent and 46 percent fully vaccinated, respectively. In Louisiana, only 13 percent of eligible children (12- to 17-year-olds) are vaccinated. Just 25 percent of eligible 12- to 15-year-olds nationwide have been fully vaccinated, according to CDC data.

Pediatric hospitals are also at a breaking point. Dr. Mark Kline, physician-in-chief of Children’s Hospital New Orleans, which serves patients from across the Gulf Coast, told Good Morning America that the hospital is awaiting federal medical personnel to assist with a staffing shortage: “We were thin already, having lost a number of staff over the course of 2020. … Louisiana and the region as a whole have a real dearth of professionals.”

Speaking to WDSU, Dr. Kline said that half of the 18 children currently admitted in his hospital are under two years of age. The test positivity rate for Louisiana children is 25 percent. He noted that he was “very concerned” that schools are opening now and feared “the mitigation measures we have used in the past, including masking, social distancing and hand-washing, aren’t going to be as effective for this virus.”

Nationwide, 93,824 child COVID-19 cases were reported for the week ending August 5, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics, and children represented 15 percent of all new cases.

Exposing the lie that reopening schools during a pandemic is in the best interests of children’s mental and social well-being, data continues to pour in about the long-lasting effects of even “mild” or asymptomatic COVID-19 infections. Speaking on the effects on children of Long COVID, including on school performance, Dr. Avindra Nath, chief of infections of the nervous system at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, told the New York Times, “I mean, they’re in their formative years. Once you start falling behind, it’s very hard because the kids lose their own self-confidence too. It’s a downward spiral.”

Additionally, recent data published in The Lancet indicates that brain damage due to COVID-19 infections can be comparable to stroke for hospitalized patients or lead poisoning for those who have respiratory difficulty but do not require hospitalization.

In the coming weeks, as districts continue to reopen in the South and across the US, educators will once again be thrust into struggle—against the Biden administration that insists schools must be open, against Republican politicians who outlaw mitigation strategies in schools and against the fraudulent organizations that claim to represent educators.

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten and National Education Association President Becky Pringle have insisted that schools reopen fully in-person. Last year, as teachers across the country died in the hundreds, if not thousands, neither organization lifted a finger to mobilize their millions of members in a nationwide strike to prevent school reopenings and needless death. The hundreds of wildcat walkouts and protests across the US were systematically isolated, while local chapters worked diligently to pressure and demoralize teachers who sought assistance. No confidence or hope can be placed in these organizations.