Full FDA authorization of the Pfizer COVID vaccine: No panacea for the COVID catastrophe

Benjamin Mateus

On Monday, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced that Pfizer’s COVID-19 mRNA vaccine was granted full authorization for the prevention of COVID-19 disease in people 16 years of age or older. The vaccine, now being marketed under the new name Comirnaty, will still be available to those aged 12 through 15 under the initial emergency use authorization.

In the press brief announcing the approval, acting FDA commissioner Dr. Janet Woodcock said, “The FDA’s approval of this vaccine is a milestone as we continue to battle the COVID-19 pandemic. While this and other vaccines have met the FDA’s rigorous, scientific standards for emergency use authorization, as the first FDA-approved COVID-19 vaccine, the public can be very confident that this vaccine meets the high standards for safety, effectiveness, and manufacturing quality the FDA requires of an approved product.”

In concert with the FDA announcement, President Joe Biden released a statement from the White House urging business leaders, as well as state and local officials, to begin mandating vaccines for their employees. The Pentagon followed suit hours later declaring they would now enforce the vaccine mandates for 1.4 million soldiers and another million civilian employees.

Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, told the Los Angeles Times, “You’re going to see a lot more groups being more comfortable saying a shot is required. They’ll be more firm about helping people understand that, pure and simple, it is much safer to get the vaccine than to get the disease.”

As important as the vaccines have been to stem severe disease and death from COVID-19 infections, the FDA’s full approval for Pfizer does not mean any real progress in ending the pandemic. Vaccination alone is not enough; it must be combined with a massive public health campaign, including lockdowns as well as masking and social distancing, with the goal of eradication, not mitigation of SARS-CoV-2.

At the recent event hosted by the World Socialist Web Site, “For a Global Strategy to Stop the Pandemic and Save Lives ,” Dr. Michael Baker, renowned epidemiologist with the University of Otago in New Zealand, warned, “We cannot vaccinate our way out of the pandemic. Even if we had global vaccine access and high coverage, we would still have circulating virus. So, we need to combine vaccine with public health measures.”

Given the contagiousness of the Delta variant, vaccination will have little impact in suppressing the growth of the “circulating virus.”

Critical modeling analysis conducted by Dr. Malgorzata Gasperowicz, a developmental biologist and researcher at the University of Calgary, Canada, demonstrated that given the present efficacy of the vaccines against the Delta variant, only in combination with moderate public health measures could the growth of the pandemic in the US be brought under one, where, over a period of several weeks, the community outbreaks would be brought to zero.

In the current formulation by the White House, the CDC, and the entire political spectrum, the vaccine-only mandate gives free rein to the virus, which will have the final say on the matter, acting on the basis of well-known epidemiological laws. Whether it is the let-it-rip approach advocated by Republican governors, or the mitigation but not eradication approach of Biden and the Democrats, the virus will be able to expand exponentially, as will hospitalizations and deaths.

In two short months since the US saw the lowest case and death count, the seven-day moving average has now climbed to 150,000 infections per day with more than 850 people dying each day. On August 24, more than 1,100 people succumbed to the infection.

And the current drive to fully open all schools for in-class instruction will only accelerate the present massive surge of infections. The week ending August 19 saw 180,000 COVID-19 cases among children, a 50 percent increase over the previous week, and coming weeks will surpass the highs of the winter, when more than 211,000 children were infected in the week ending January 14, 2021. As evidence through the last 18 months has now clearly demonstrated, children in schools function as a primary catalyst for the waves of infections within communities.

Equally concerning is the mounting evidence that over time the COVID-19 vaccines, and in particular, the Pfizer jab, are demonstrating waning efficacy after a few short months. A recent study from the University of Oxford, in the UK, using data obtained from the Office for National Statistics, found that three months after vaccination, the efficacy against symptomatic infections for the Pfizer vaccine had slipped from the mid-90s to 75 percent. The efficacy of AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine dropped but at a much slower rate. Extrapolating the data, Oxford projected that Pfizer’s efficacy would eventually drop below 50 percent, the level typically required to win FDA approval in the first place.

The threat the Delta variant poses is best exemplified by the present experiences in Israel, which has fully vaccinated more than 60 percent of its population. It is currently facing a surge of new infections that are also matching previous winter highs. And with these infections, the death toll appears to be keeping pace with trends during previous waves.

A spokesman for Pfizer, in response to a question from the press, declared, “These latest data from Israel are consistent with the epidemiological trends we have been observing and reinforce the need for a booster dose to re-establish maximum protective efficacy.”

Since the Israeli government launched a campaign to offer those aged 60 and older a third shot on July 30, approximately 60 percent in this group have received the booster. In the older group, it appears the rates of infection are declining once more, making many in the media and other countries take notice. Yesterday, Israel extended the eligibility for a third dose to those 30 years and older who had received the second dose at least five months prior.

With the granting of full approval, the FDA helps clear the way for an influx of people clamoring for booster shots, as physicians will now have more discretion to offer COVID-19 vaccines.

While little has been said in the American media or by the Biden administration, when such additional vaccination campaign measures are implemented across the US and Europe, many middle- and low-income nations will be left in the lurch, as they are once more pushed to the back of the line, unable to give most of their citizens even a first shot while people in the wealthy countries get a third one.

On September 20, the Biden administration will begin offering boosters for fully vaccinated individuals who received their second dose more than eight months before. However, the current approval, plans for mandates, and then boosters, will do little to stem the present disastrous wave as schools are beginning to admit students by the millions for in-person instruction. No vaccine campaign can win a foot race against the Delta variant without strict mitigation measures and lockdowns to check its spread.

Troubling evidence has only confirmed the dangers this virus poses. In a recent analysis conducted by investigators during of the outbreak in Guangdong, China in May, and June of 2021, they found that those infected with Delta strain are more likely to infect others before they become symptomatic than people infected with the earlier version that first emerged in Wuhan.

People infected with Delta shed viral particles for almost two days before developing symptoms. Previous data placed the window for asymptomatic shedding at less than one day. Additionally, a recent study from South Korea confirmed that the viral load shed by infected individuals when they first develop symptoms was 300 times higher than with the original virus and remained higher throughout the window of communicability.

The rise in the number of breakthrough infections suggests that the neutralizing antibodies in people who are fully immunized are not providing sufficient protection against the Delta variant. The main target for the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccines is the receptor binding domain (RBD) and the N-terminal domain (NTD) in the virus’s spike protein.

A just published study from Osaka, Japan, suggested that if the Delta variant acquires additional mutations beyond the ones it already possessed, it could develop the ability to escape vaccine-induced immunity. The acquisition of other mutations is expected, highlighting the importance of tracking these mutations where they start.

According to a report providing explanation of the Osaka study published yesterday in News - Medical, “Additional mutations … of the Delta variants may make it fully resistant to the immune sera of vaccinated individuals. … Thus, the Delta variant is likely to acquire further mutations with increased infectivity and resistance.”

The authors concluded that though “a third round of booster immunization with the SARS-CoV-2 vaccine is currently under consideration, our data suggest that repeated immunization with the wild-type spike may not be effective in controlling the emerging Delta variants.” They call for the development of a new vaccine directed against the spike protein of the Delta strain.

The implication of these findings means the need to rewind the pandemic clock and develop and produce new vaccines against the Delta variant and once more initiate a new vaccination campaign—in other words, vaccination without an all-encompassing public health response can become a never-ending treadmill, with new vaccinations required to guard against ever more virulent and dangerous variants of the virus.

Spain proceeds with school reopenings despite high infection rates

Alice Summers

Though over 10,000 coronavirus cases are recorded in Spain every day, the Socialist Party (PSOE)-Podemos government plans to send all children back to in-person education at the start of September.

The decision to fully reopen schools, even as the virus still circulates widely, poses immense dangers to children, educators and parents across Spain and internationally. The start of the new school term last autumn precipitated an enormous upsurge in infections and deaths. Before schools even reopen, however, average daily cases this year are now more than double what they were a year ago.

Soaring infection rates are hitting younger age groups particularly hard. Among school-aged children ages 12 to 19, the 14-day incidence rate exceeds 600 per 100,000 people. In five of Spain’s 17 regions, this measure surpasses 1,000 per 100,000, meaning more than 1 percent of young people in these areas is suffering from COVID-19. These figures are significantly higher than the rate for the population as a whole, which stands at a still dangerously high 292 per 100,000.

Though official case numbers have fallen for the last several weeks, an average of around 10,000 people are still being infected every day. Deaths are continuing to climb. Last Friday closed with the highest weekly deaths in Spain’s fifth wave, with 660 deaths.

According to the Instituto de Salud Carlos III, in the three weeks from July 26 to August 15, 82,587 children and adolescents aged between 5 and 19 were infected with the virus. Using a recent study published in The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health showing that around 4.4 percent of children aged 5 to 17 infected with coronavirus contract Long COVID, this amounts to roughly 3,600 of them suffering persistent COVID.

Under these conditions, the PSOE-Podemos government’s reckless reopening of schools in only two weeks endangers the lives of tens of thousands of children. It is not the result of a mistaken policy, but part of an international drive based on the policy of the capitalist class to force parents back to work in unsafe conditions to further extract profits from the working class and finance skyrocketing corporate and bank bailouts.

Sending students back to school last year led to three new waves of infection. In June last year, Prime Minister Sánchez made the now-infamous statement: “We have defeated the virus.” At that time, excess deaths due to the pandemic stood at 48,000. Over the following year, as the PSOE-Podemos government reopened schools in September, over 52,000 people would die needlessly. The colossal surge led to a quarter million infections each day last January.

The PSOE-Podemos government’s staggering indifference to human life confirms the British Medical Journal ’s characterization of the ruling elites’ pandemic policy as “social murder.” Responsibility lies above all with the “left populist” Podemos party. Having promised radical change and an end to austerity, Podemos became the PSOE’s chief co-conspirator in the ruling elite’s pandemic policy.

The reopening of schools takes places as even so-called mitigation measures (nightly curfews, mask mandates, banning of gatherings of more than 10 people) are lifted. Last month, at the appeal of the far-right Vox party, Spain’s Constitutional Court ruled that COVID-19 lockdown measures imposed from March to June 2020 were unconstitutional.

Soon after, several regional courts ruled against nightly curfews, most recently last week in Catalonia. There, the courts ended the COVID curfew, banning the Catalan government’s grossly inadequate attempt to lower the incidence rate through nightly curfews in 148 cities and towns in the region.

The PSOE-Podemos government is not only forcing parents to send children back into unsafe schools, but is even scaling down, or even removing outright, the minimal social distancing measures that existed last school year. While masks will remain compulsory for all children above 6 years of age, social distancing, nominally still maintained, has been reduced to only 1.2 metres (4 feet).

This reduction in required social distancing will allow schools to reopen at full pre-pandemic capacity, junking already inadequate class-size limits imposed in previous terms. Infant schools will accommodate up to 25 pupils per class (compared to 20 last term), and primary schools up to 30 (up from 25). Secondary schools and post-16 education centres will return to class sizes of 30 and 35, respectively.

This takes place as only 18 percent of adolescents aged 12 to 19 have received at least one COVID-19 jab. No vaccines have yet been approved for children under the age of 12. This will leave the most vulnerable to infection, serious illness, and even death.

Moreover, thousands of children and teenagers infected over the summer will begin the school term with lasting COVID-19 symptoms: extreme fatigue, chest pain, headaches, stomach aches, problems with concentration, dizziness and heart palpitations. Tens of thousands more will contract the virus as schools open and children are herded into crowded classrooms.

If the PSOE-Podemos government can proceed with this criminal policy, the political equivalent to calling for children to be sent into burning buildings, it is above all due to the role of the trade unions and pseudo-left parties which work as foot soldiers for Podemos.

Spain’s two largest unions, the Workers Commissions (CC.OO) and General Union of Labour (UGT), have said nothing. Their main focus in recent months has been to oversee billions of euros in corporate bailouts being funneled from Brussels to Spain’s corporations and banks, while negotiating plant closures and tens of thousands of redundancies.

Likewise, the pseudo-left Workers Revolutionary Current (CRT) has maintained a complicit silence on the so-called “fifth wave” of the pandemic, which has infected more than 900,000 people and killed over 2,000. Over the last month, it has not published a single article on its Izquierda Diario website addressing the risk of COVID and the threat to children as schools reopen.

Their only recent coverage of the pandemic has been two articles solidarising themselves with anti-“health pass” protests in France called with the support of the far-right. While French President Emmanuel Macron’s policy is anti-scientific and insufficient to halt the spread of the pandemic, the CRT’s opposition to it does not stem from a principled call for a scientifically-guided struggle to eradicate the virus. In reality, it is aligned with the ruling class’ “herd immunity” policy in all its fundamentals, denouncing social distancing as “authoritarian” and “repressive.”

Throughout the pandemic, the Morenoites have denounced social distancing measures such as lockdowns as “authoritarian and palliative.” Last September, the CRT defended the policy of reopening schools, calling for a “safe” return to education centres, all while acknowledging that the safety of teachers and students “cannot be guaranteed.” During the “fifth wave,” they launched a politically criminal campaign encouraging youth to pour back into nightclubs and bars.

Ukraine holds “Crimean Platform” summit

Jason Melanovski

The inaugural “Crimea Platform” summit was held Monday in Kiev in an attempt by the government of President Volodymyr Zelensky to build international support for a military offensive against Russia to “return” the Crimean peninsula to Ukraine.

Officials from 44 countries and blocs took part in the summit, including representatives from all 30 NATO members.

Zelensky opened the conference by denouncing Russian “aggression,” and accused Moscow of militarizing the peninsula and persecuting Crimean Tartars, a Muslim minority living on the peninsula in the Black Sea.

“I will personally do everything possible to return Crimea so that it becomes part of Europe together with Ukraine,” Zelensky stated.

In addition to taking part in a large number of photo ops on a stage standing next to Zelensky, the participants of the summit issued a Joint Declaration which stated: “Participants in the International Crimea Platform do not recognize and continue to condemn the temporary occupation and illegal annexation of Crimea, which constitutes a direct challenge to international security with grave implications for the international legal order that protects the territorial integrity, unity and sovereignty of all States.”

The declaration also included a call for Russia to join the initiative and engage in talks over giving Crimea back to Ukraine, a suggestion which was predictably ridiculed by Moscow.

The event was the culmination of a strategy approved by Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council in March which is aimed at retaking Crimea and reintegrating the strategically important peninsula.

As part of its “3 pillars” strategy for “retaking” Crimea, Zelensky’s administration sought “full Ukrainian sovereignty” over not just Crimea but that of the port city of Sevastopol as well, which serves as the home of the Russian Navy’s Black Sea Fleet. The provocative announcement of this strategy triggered a major military crisis in the Black Sea this spring.

Crimea, a peninsula in the Black Sea, was annexed by Russia in March 2014, following a US-backed, far-right coup in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine. A referendum was held at the time on integrating Crimea to Russia and received support from over 95 percent of the Crimean population.

Crimea was previously part of Russia, but was transferred by decree to the Ukrainian SSR in 1954 by Nikita Khrushchev.

Following the Stalinist dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the port of Sevastopol had been leased to Russia by several successive Ukrainian governments. Its potential loss following the US-backed ousting of the President Viktor Yanukovych in 2014 was widely seen as one of the primary motivators in Russia annexing the militarily strategic peninsula.

Both Zelensky and the Crimea Platform’s participants are well aware that Moscow would never willingly place its only major warm water seaport back in the hands of a right-wing NATO-affiliated government, imbuing the entire conference with a high degree of political provocation.

While the Ukrainian government gloated over the number of attendees—including the presidents of Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Moldova, Slovenia and Finland—French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel were conspicuously absent from the summit.

Merkel’s absence was particularly glaring as she had just left the country the previous day after meeting with Zelensky in an attempt to control the fallout between the two countries over the completion of the $12 billion Nord Stream 2 pipeline that will carry Russian gas directly to Germany through the Baltic Sea. The pipeline’s completion threatens to significantly undercut Ukraine’s importance to European energy markets and deprive it of approximately $2 billion in annual gas transit fees.

Prior to meeting with Zelensky in Kiev, Merkel had met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow to discuss Nord Stream 2 and the ongoing civil war in eastern Ukraine between the Ukrainian military and Russian-backed separatists that has claimed the lives of over 14,000.

The United States, which has been Ukraine’s biggest military supporter since 2014 providing the country $4.9 billion in military aid, sent its Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm. The real purpose of her visit in Kiev was to meet with both Ukraine’s and Germany’s energy ministers to smooth over strained relations between Kiev and Washington over Nord Stream 2.

The Zelensky government was essentially blindsided when the Biden administration announced in July that it had come to a deal with Berlin not to oppose Nord Stream 2’s completion.

Zelensky is currently scheduled to travel to Washington to meet with Biden on August 31. Last week, in an interview with the Washington Post, Zelensky again expressed his disagreement with the Nord Stream 2 deal.

In line with the course taken by the Biden administration, German Economy and Energy Minister Peter Altmaier made clear that the purpose of meeting with Granholm and Ukrainian officials was not to put Germany’s participation in the pipeline in question, stating, “From today’s perspective we shouldn’t reject any suggestions, but also not create any insurmountable obstacles [for the completion of the pipeline].”

The entire Crimea Platform summit was predictably met with disdain in Moscow where Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov denounced the summit as an “anti-Russian event.”

Following the meeting spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry Maria Zakharova called it a “political performance that is removed from reality.” She warned that Russia “will be forced to view participation of separate countries, international organizations and their representatives in the Crimea Platform as encroachment on Russia’s territorial integrity which will inevitably have its effect on our relations.”

Zakharova’s comments make clear that the continued attempts by an increasingly authoritarian Zelensky government to gain support for an aggressive offensive to “retake” Crimea are a reckless provocation that threatens the outbreak of a full-scale war between Russia and Ukraine.

While Zelensky was initially elected in 2019 on the basis of a rejection of the far-right militaristic nationalism espoused by his predecessor Petro Poroshenko, Zelensky has increasingly decreed authoritarian anti-Russian measures by prosecuting political opposition and banning media outlets it dubs “Russian propaganda.”

On the eve of the Crimea Platform summit, the Zelensky government last week banned the popular opposition website strana.ua by decree. The site was one of the few major media outlets in Ukraine that reported on the violent exploits of the country’s various militant far-right nationalist groups and corruption within the Ukrainian government

Earlier in February, Zelensky undemocratically shut down three popular predominantly Russian-speaking television stations—ZiK, 112 Ukraine and NewsOne—all of which were affiliated with the rival oligarch and pro-Russian opposition leader Viktor Medvedchuk.

Medvedchuk was later arrested and charged with “high treason” by the Ukrainian government.

Hypocritically, the Crimea Platform denounced Russia for supposedly limiting “fundamental freedoms” in Crimea, “such as the right to peaceful assembly, the rights to freedoms of expression and opinion, religion or belief, association, restrictions on the ability to seek, receive and impart information, as well as interference and intimidation that journalists, human rights defenders and defense lawyers face in their work.”

Since coming to office, the Zelensky government has made clear that, in Ukraine, such “fundamental freedoms” do not apply to anyone that does not blindly support the nationalist and right-wing course of the government in Kiev.

Australian economy hit by rapid fall in iron ore price and Delta spread

Nick Beams

The state of the Australian economy has been thrown into the spotlight as a result of a dramatic fall in iron ore prices and a surge in Delta variant coronavirus infections in its two most populous states, New South Wales and Victoria.

In March, the Australian economy passed the level it had reached prior to pandemic, amid claims that it weathered the economic storm created by the arrival of COVID-19 in 2020. But it has been all downhill since then.

An iron ore train at Brockman 4 mine, Western Australia (Source: Wikipedia)

The most significant indication of the mounting economic problems now unfolding is the dramatic fall in the price of iron ore. This commodity is Australia’s largest export earner and a key component of the federal government budget because of the tax revenue it obtains from iron ore sales.

The iron ore price has crashed by 40 percent in the past month, falling from its peak of $233 a tonne to a level of around $133.

This is the result of cutbacks in Chinese steel production. China accounts for about 75 percent of the world’s iron ore inputs, with Australia its chief supplier.

Policymakers in Beijing have said they want to keep the production of steel in 2021 to the same level as in 2020, in part because of the need to reduce emissions.

According to comments to news.com.au by Vivek Dhar, the Commonwealth Bank’s mining and energy economist, the achievement of this goal requires a reduction of steel output at an annualised rate of 12.2 percent in the period from August to December. In July, China’s crude steel production contracted 8.4 percent on an annual basis, “signaling that output cuts are not just being talked about, but happening,” he said.

Steel production will also be hit by Chinese government efforts to rein in debt, particularly for infrastructure and property development. Dhar pointed out that demand for steel from these areas had weakened. This reaffirmed that “market anxieties that China’s steel output cuts for the remainder of the year are inevitable. The infrastructure and property sectors account for 20–25 percent and 25–30 percent respectively.”

The effect on the Australian economy and the federal government’s budget is expressed in the fact that, according to estimates, for every $US10 ($A14) fall in the price of iron ore Australia’s gross domestic product (GDP) in money terms falls by $A6.5 billion and government tax receipts by $A1.3 billion.

Commenting on the iron ore price crash in a client note, Morgan Stanley wrote: “A correction of the high iron-ore price was widely anticipated by us, but, despite iron ore’s volatile boom-bust history, we are somewhat surprised by how fast this is happening.”

The Australian economy has also been hit by a sharp decline in service industry exports, especially in the education sector where the flow of international students into the country’s universities has been cut off due to the pandemic.

According to the latest data, Australia’s exports of services have fallen back to 2006 levels when the economy was around two-thirds the size it is now. Overall exports are down by 10 percent with the contribution of exports cutting 1.5 percentage points from GDP growth since the start of 2020.

Depending on what the quarterly figures for GDP growth for the June quarter show—they are to be released next week—the economy is heading for a technical recession, defined as two quarters of negative growth. This is because, according to the treasurer Josh Frydenberg, the economy is set to contract by at least 2 percent in the September quarter as a result of the renewed upsurge of the pandemic.

Its impact has already been seen in the employment numbers. The official unemployment rate for July was 4.6 percent, the lowest since 2008. But rather than indicating economic health this was the result of tens of thousands of people withdrawing from the labour market. When the official figures are adjusted for the effects of the pandemic the level of unemployment is calculated to be at least 6 percent.

However, the official Bureau of Statistics jobless levels are notoriously understated as they count as employed those who have worked for just one hour a week. According to the Roy Morgan survey, the real level of unemployment is 9.7 percent, with the underemployment rate, based on people who want more hours, at 9.1 percent.

In an analysis of the employment data, Guardian economic columnist Greg Jericho wrote: “Hours worked in New South Wales in July fell 7 percent—some 40.5 million fewer hours in total, the third biggest drop in the history of the state. There was also a 0.9 percent drop in the number of people employed in NSW and a massive 28 percent increase in the number of people underemployed.”

The picture is the same on the wages front. Wages grew by only 0.4 percent in the June quarter. For these months lockdowns due to the pandemic were largely absent, but the quarter still recorded the lowest wages growth apart from the period of shutdowns in 2020.

Much of the fall is due to the activity of governments, state and federal, Liberal and Labor, with the support of the trade unions. The annual growth of public sector wages is now just 1.3 percent, the lowest ever recorded. When inflation is taken into account, real wages are declining in line with a trend that was apparent well before the pandemic hit.

In the wake of the first wave of the pandemic in 2020 there was much talk about how the Australian economy had bounced back, showing its underlying strength. That is not going to take place in the present situation.

According to a report in the Australian Financial Review , economists are now “playing down the chances of a repeat of the strong economic rebound seen when stay-at-home orders were previously lifted, leading to concerns of a cash flow canyon for many small and medium businesses.”

The Council of Small Business Organisations has warned that, without assistance in any post lockdown situation, businesses have to shed staff in order to survive because of reductions in their cash flows.

The rapidly worsening economic situation has immediate political implications. It will provide grist to the mill of governments and business organisations pushing for an end to lockdowns and other public health measures, and the opening of the economy regardless of the impact of the health of workers and their children.

This agenda must be opposed by the working class with a political struggle for a comprehensive program based on science: mass vaccinations combined with the necessary public health measures aimed at the eradication of the virus, together with full compensation for workers and small businesses paid for by making massive inroads into wealth which has been continued to be accumulated by the corporate and financial elites during the pandemic.

Australia: 7,000 Toll truck drivers to strike over pay and conditions

Martin Scott

Around 7,000 Toll truck drivers will strike for 24 hours on Friday. The nationwide strike was called on Monday after 94 percent of Transport Workers Union (TWU) members at the company voted in favour of industrial action.

The dispute is over a new enterprise agreement (EA), currently being negotiated between Toll and the TWU. The previous EA expired in June 2020, but bargaining was deferred until April 2021 in a union-management deal that also allowed the company to slash jobs in the event of any downturn in volume as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. In exchange, workers were granted ten days paid pandemic leave.

Toll facilities in Burnie, Tasmania (Source: Toll Group)

In fact, Toll’s annual revenue increased by almost one third to $6.3 billion for the year ending March 2021, while workers were subjected to a pay freeze as a result of the delayed negotiations.

The company responded to the workers’ vote to strike with a marginally increased pay rise offer, up from 1.5 percent in 2021 and 1.75 in 2022 to 2 percent each year. The TWU has made no explicit mention of this bump, merely characterising the pay offer as “unacceptably low,” indicating that it may push workers to sign on to a figure short of the meagre 3 percent the union has previously demanded.

In key disputes over recent months, including at General Mills and McCormick Foods, unions have presented 3 percent (or “almost” 3 percent) annual pay rises as victories. In current negotiations with Australia Post, the Communications Electrical and Plumbers Union (CEPU) has proudly noted that it is twice the national average.

These claims serve only as an indictment of the massive assault being carried out against the Australian working class, accelerated by the pandemic and enforced by the trade unions.

In real terms, 3 percent is a pay cut, especially given that Toll workers, like those at Australia Post, did not receive a pay rise at all last year. The Australian Bureau of Statistics last month announced a 3.8 percent rise in the Consumer Price Index, which vastly underestimates increases in the cost of living, for the year to June 30.

The union is also calling for a 0.25 point increase in employer superannuation contributions to 15 percent.

Toll has backed down on moves to implement a “B rate” tiered wage system under which new hires would receive up to 30 percent less than the rates paid to existing workers. The company’s proposal to introduce fixed term contracts, a proposal which has not been rescinded, still threatens secure, full-time jobs.

While the company has walked back a plan to stop paying overtime rates to part-time drivers working less than 38 hours per week, Toll still plans to pay ordinary rates if these workers “volunteer” for overtime.

The TWU complains of the company’s “rejection of limits on outside hire and real commitments to full utilisation,” but in reality this simply means the retention of conditions signed off on by the TWU in previous EAs.

Clause 17 of the 2017 agreement states, in part: “Toll commits (a) to the full-time engagement of its Transport Workers wherever possible; (b) subject to reasonable practical requirements, such as adequately servicing industry peaks, to promote job security through the full utilisation of full-time permanent Transport Workers/Owner-Drivers before the engagement of part-time Transport Workers/Owner-Drivers, or casual Transport Workers/Owner-Drivers or Outside Hire.” [Emphasis added]

In other words, Toll is “committed” to nothing. Under the current union-management agreement, the company has carte blanche to declare that “reasonable practical requirements” mean it is not “possible” to offer overtime hours to full-time drivers in preference to cheaper part-time, casual, contract, or outsourced labour.

The fact that so many of the union’s claims relate to overtime payments is itself an indictment of the union’s role over decades in creating a situation in which workers cannot live on their base rates and are forced to consistently work dangerously long hours to make ends meet.

The proliferation of casual, contract, labour-hire and other insecure forms of work has been facilitated by the unions since it began under the Hawke-Keating Labor government Accords of the 1980s and 1990s.

In recent years the TWU has promoted illusions that the rampant abuse of these work arrangements could be fought in the courts or through parliamentary reforms. The bankruptcy of this perspective of appealing to the bourgeois state was borne out earlier this month when the High Court ruling upheld the primacy of “freedom of contract” over the “true nature of the employment relationship.” Far from protecting workers’ conditions, the High Court has now enshrined in law that workers are completely at the mercy of their employers and their contracts.

Following the principle of “never let a good crisis go to waste,” Toll Global Express President Alan Beacham said: “Threatening industrial action at a time when our country is in the middle of a global pandemic is playing politics with people’s lives and jobs.”

This suggestion that drivers should be deprived of the basic right to defend their working conditions because of a pandemic that they have been forced to work through is particularly filthy given that the Global Express courier division is being sold “in the middle of a global pandemic.” Toll has refused to guarantee that Global Express workers’ pay and conditions will be maintained after the sale to private equity firm Allegro Funds.

Federal Health Minister Greg Hunt used Wednesday’s parliamentary “question time” to divert responsibility for the disastrous vaccine roll out onto Toll workers.

Hunt said: “I would also note that there is one element which may affect distribution over the coming days. There is the risk of a transport strike on Friday—and we hope that there is no impact on distribution.”

The TWU continues to insist that, as the union outlined at it’s national council meeting in May, Toll, and Australia’s other multi-billion dollar fleet operators are victims of “the major retailers, the manufacturers, the oil companies, the banks, who sweat the trucking companies and the owner drivers.”

TWU New South Wales (NSW) state secretary Richard Olsen said this week: “We should not forget that the squeeze comes from clients at the top like Amazon whose profits ballooned 224 per cent to $11 billion in just the first quarter this year. The TWU fight is about holding these companies to account and stopping the “race to the bottom” that sees bankruptcies and a lowering of standards for the small business operator.”

This utterly disingenuous attempt to equate major logistics companies with troubled small businesses serves only as a cynical attempt to justify the close alignment of the TWU with management.

It is also an entirely nationalist agenda that “Australian” companies (notwithstanding the 2015 sale of Toll to Japan Post) must be defended against their purportedly more competitive and powerful international rivals. This only serves to pit workers in Australia against the working class internationally. The assault on the wages, conditions and very lives of transport workers is being conducted throughout every country and it is among these workers that support must be fought for, not the Australian ruling class.

Alongside the Toll dispute, 6,000 drivers at StarTrack and FedEx and 2,000 workers at Linfox are also in the process of voting on whether to carry out strike action. Workers at all of these major logistics companies confront similar issues and the TWU’s staggered approach to the disputes can only be seen as a ploy to isolate workers and limit the impact of strikes on the supply chain as a whole.

The conduct of Australia’s unions, including the TWU, over the last 15 months stands as a stark warning for workers of the perfidious role played by these organisations. From the outset of the pandemic, the unions have been at the forefront of a major assault on the working class.

Australian Council of Trade Unions boss Sally McManus and her “best friend forever,” then Attorney-General Christian Porter, were the architects of the JobKeeper wage subsidy, a $90 billion handout to big business which granted employers unprecedented powers to restructure their workforces.

When NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian belatedly announced tightened movement restrictions for workers in Sydney’s COVID-19 “hotspots,” the TWU was among the most eager and vociferous defenders, not of workers’ health and safety, but of the unimpeded operations and profitability of big business.

Within hours of the July 17 announcement, the TWU demanded: “ALL essential transport workers must be automatically exempt from panicked snap restrictions from the NSW Government.”

This callous subjugation of the health of workers, their families, and the population as a whole to corporate profit interests is a sharp demonstration that workers cannot entrust their fate to the TWU or any other union.

The Great Game of Smashing Countries

John Pilger

As a tsunami of crocodile tears engulfs Western politicians, history is suppressed. More than a generation ago, Afghanistan won its freedom, which the United States, Britain and their “allies” destroyed.

In 1978, a liberation movement led by the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) overthrew the dictatorship of Mohammad Dawd, the cousin of King Zahir Shar. It was an immensely popular revolution that took the British and Americans by surprise.

Foreign journalists in Kabul, reported the New York Times, were surprised to find that “nearly every Afghan they interviewed said [they were] delighted with the coup”. The Wall Street Journal reported that “150,000 persons … marched to honour the new flag …the participants appeared genuinely enthusiastic.”

The Washington Post reported that “Afghan loyalty to the government can scarcely be questioned”. Secular, modernist and, to a considerable degree, socialist, the government declared a programme of visionary reforms that included equal rights for women and minorities. Political prisoners were freed and police files publicly burned.

Under the monarchy, life expectancy was thirty-five; one in three children died in infancy. Ninety per cent of the population was illiterate. The new government introduced free medical care. A mass literacy campaign was launched.

For women, the gains had no precedent; by the late 1980s, half the university students were women, and women made up 40 per cent of Afghanistan’s doctors, 70 per cent of its teachers and 30 per cent of its civil servants.

So radical were the changes that they remain vivid in the memories of those who benefited. Saira Noorani, a female surgeon who fled Afghanistan in 2001, recalled:

Every girl could go to high school and university. We could go where we wanted and wear what we liked … We used to go to cafes and the cinema to see the latest Indian films on a Friday … it all started to go wrong when the mujahedin started winning … these were the people the West supported.

For the United States, the problem with the PDPA government was that it was supported by the Soviet Union. Yet it was never the “puppet” derided in the West, neither was the coup against the monarchy “Soviet backed”, as the American and British press claimed at the time.

President Jimmy Carter’s Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, later wrote in his memoirs: “We had no evidence of any Soviet complicity in the coup.”

In the same administration was Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s National Security Adviser, a Polish émigré and fanatical anti-communist and moral extremist whose enduring influence on American presidents expired only with his death in 2017.

On 3 July 1979, unknown to the American people and Congress, Carter authorised a $500 million “covert action” programme to overthrow Afghanistan’s first secular, progressive government.  This was code-named by the CIA Operation Cyclone.

The $500 million bought, bribed and armed a group of tribal and religious zealots known as the mujahedin. In his semi-official history, Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward wrote that the CIA spent $70 million on bribes alone. He describes a meeting between a CIA agent known as “Gary” and a warlord called Amniat-Melli:

Gary placed a bundle of cash on the table: $500,000 in one-foot stacks of $100 bills. He believed it would be more impressive than the usual $200,000, the best way to say we’re here, we’re serious, here’s money, we know you need it … Gary would soon ask CIA headquarters for and receive $10 million in cash.

Recruited from all over the Muslim world, America’s secret army was trained in camps in Pakistan run by Pakistani intelligence, the CIA and Britain’s MI6. Others were recruited at an Islamic College in Brooklyn, New York – within sight of the doomed Twin Towers. One of the recruits was a Saudi engineer called Osama bin Laden.

The aim was to spread Islamic fundamentalism in Central Asia and destabilise and eventually destroy the Soviet Union.

In August, 1979, the US Embassy in Kabul reported that “the United States’ larger interests … would be served by the demise of the PDPA government, despite whatever setbacks this might mean for future social and economic reforms in Afghanistan.”

Read again the words above I have italicised. It is not often that such cynical intent is spelt out as clearly.  The US was saying that a genuinely progressive Afghan government and the rights of Afghan women could go to hell.

Six months later, the Soviets made their fatal move into Afghanistan in response to the American-created jihadist threat on their doorstep. Armed with CIA-supplied Stinger missiles and celebrated as “freedom fighters” by Margaret Thatcher, the mujahedine ventually drove the Red Army out of Afghanistan.

Calling themselves the Northern Alliance, the mujahedin were dominated by war lords who controlled the heroin trade and terrorised rural women. The Taliban were an ultra-puritanical faction, whose mullahs wore black and punished banditry, rape and murder but banished women from public life.

In the 1980s, I made contact with the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, known as RAWA, which had tried to alert the world to the suffering of Afghan women. During the Taliban time they concealed cameras beneath their burqas to film evidence of atrocities, and did the same to expose the brutality of the Western-backed mujahedin. “Marina” of RAWA told me, “We took the videotape to all the main media groups, but they didn’t want to know ….”

In1996, the enlightened PDPA government was overrun. The Prime Minister, Mohammad Najibullah, had gone to the United Nations to appeal to for help. On his return, he was hanged from a street light.

“I confess that [countries] are pieces on a chessboard,” said Lord Curzon in 1898, “upon which is being played out a great game for the domination of the world.”

The Viceroy of India was referring in particular to Afghanistan. A century later, Prime Minister Tony Blair used slightly different words.

“This is a moment to seize,” he said following 9/11. “The Kaleidoscope has been shaken. The pieces are in flux. Soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us re-order this world around us.”

On Afghanistan, he added this: “We will not walk away [but ensure] some way out of the poverty that is your miserable existence.”

Blair echoed his mentor, President George W. Bush, who spoke to the victims of his bombs from the Oval Office: “The oppressed people of Afghanistan will know the generosity of America. As we strike military targets, we will also drop food, medicine and supplies to the starving and suffering … “

Almost every word was false. Their declarations of concern were cruel illusions for an imperial savagery “we” in the West rarely recognise as such.

In 2001, Afghanistan was stricken and depended on emergency relief convoys from Pakistan. As the journalist Jonathan Steele reported, the invasion indirectly caused the deaths of some 20,000 people as supplies to drought victims stopped and people fled their homes.

Eighteen months later, I found unexploded American cluster bombs in the rubble of Kabul which were often mistaken for yellow relief packages dropped from the air. They blew the limbs off foraging, hungry children.

In the village of Bibi Maru, I watched a woman called Orifa kneel at the graves of her husband, Gul Ahmed, a carpet weaver, and seven other members of her family, including six children, and two children who were killed next door.

An American F-16 aircraft had come out of a clear blue sky and dropped a Mk82 500-pound bomb on Orifa’s mud, stone and straw house. Orifa was away at the time. When she returned, she gathered the body parts.

Months later, a group of Americans came from Kabul and gave her an envelope with fifteen notes: a total of 15 dollars. “Two dollars for each of my family killed,” she said.

The invasion of Afghanistan was a fraud. In the wake of 9/11, the Taliban sought to distant themselves from Osama bin Laden. They were, in many respects, an American client with which the administration of Bill Clinton had done a series of secret deals to allow the building of a $3 billion natural gas pipeline by a US oil company consortium.

In high secrecy, Taliban leaders had been invited to the US and entertained by the CEO of the Unocal company in his Texas mansion and by the CIA at its headquarters in Virginia. One of the deal-makers was Dick Cheney, later George W. Bush’s Vice-President.

In 2010, I was in Washington and arranged to interview the mastermind of Afghanistan’s modern era of suffering, Zbigniew Brzezinski. I quoted to him his autobiography in which he admitted that his grand scheme for drawing the Soviets into Afghanistan had created “a few stirred up Muslims”.

“Do you have any regrets?” I asked.

“Regrets! Regrets! What regrets?”

When we watch the current scenes of panic at Kabul airport, and listen to journalists and generals in distant TV studios bewailing the withdrawal of “our protection”, isn’t it time to heed the truth of the past so that all this suffering never happens again?

The Moral Implications of Bloodlust, White Supremacy, Christian Nationalism

Wendell Griffen

It is hard to be dispassionate when people have died fighting for a cause. Objectivity seems especially hard when it comes to the outcome after 20 years of United States-led war in Afghanistan.

The U.S. invaded Afghanistan after Al Qaeda terrorist followers of Osama Bin Laden commandeered and crash-bombed four commercial airliners on Sept. 11, 2001, killing 2,977 and wounding more than 6,000 people in New York City, Washington, D.C., and in Pennsylvania. When intelligence assessments traced the terrorists to Afghanistan, Congress authorized President George W. Bush to use military force.

The “war on terror” began in Afghanistan because that was where Osama Bin Laden lived. Bin Laden finally was found in Pakistan and killed in 2011, 10 years after the Taliban regime that governed Afghanistan was defeated by U.S. forces at the end of 2001.

For the next 20 years, Taliban fighters matched wits and tactics while waging guerilla warfare against a multi-national military force led by the U.S. that was better equipped, had more personnel and was better financed. In total, 2,448 U.S. service members have died. Tens of thousands more were injured. The U.S. spent more than $2.26 trillion — including more than $500 billion for interest — for the military effort in Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan since 2001.

The result of those sacrifices is more than disappointing to U.S. families who lost loved ones, to veterans who lost comrades, to veterans who are permanently maimed and scarred in ways that only war can cause, and to people who care for them. The sorrow and anguish felt by men, women and children in Afghanistan who hoped the U.S.-led war would defeat the Taliban goes beyond disappointment. For those persons, the outcome of the war in Afghanistan is so heartbreaking that we will never have enough money and words to tally and talk about it.

Yet, the war in Afghanistan reminds us that those who do not learn from past mistakes are likely to repeat them. Years ago, scholar Akhilesh Pillalamarri wrote that Afghanistan has long been known as the graveyard of empires. Nevertheless, the U.S. repeated the respective mistakes of the British and Soviet empires in the 19th and 20th centuries by invading and trying to occupy the country.

In doing so, U.S. political and military leaders disregarded other truths. Despite U.S. outrage about the 9/11 terrorist attacks and determination to seek revenge on Osama Bin Laden and the Al Qaeda network that operated from Afghanistan, Afghanistan never was our society to rule, let alone transform into an inclusive liberal democracy. Foreign troops and weapons never would outlast Afghan mores, customs, history, ancestral warrior pride and centuries of refusal to be ruled by foreign invaders, especially when the invaders propped up corrupt and incompetent indigenous rulers and Afghan military personnel who would not fight for the future of their society even with overwhelming military, logistical and diplomatic advantages.

A combination of bloodlust, Western hubris, white supremacy and racism, conservative Christian nationalist imperialism, and capitalist greed also must be admitted. The monetary cost of wars always produces wealth for people who profit in supplying weapons and war materiel.

For these reasons, it was not enough to invade Afghanistan in 2001.

It was not enough to chase Bin Laden from Afghanistan.

It was not enough to displace the Taliban from political power 20 years ago.

It was not enough to eventually find and kill Bin Laden in 2011.

It was not enough to capture, kill, torture and hold his lieutenants indefinitely in Guantanamo and other sites around the world, but never in the United States.

No matter how many troops were deployed, how many drone missions were flown, and how many U.S. military personnel were killed and wounded, bloodlust, cultural incompetence, disregard for military and political history, hubris, white supremacy and racism, Christian national imperialism, capitalist greed and national pride transformed the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan into a 20-year fiasco that bedeviled the presidencies of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden.

History will not be kind to the political and military leaders who counseled the nation to commit itself to that misadventure. And history will not be kind to religious leaders in the United States who cheered and counseled the nation to go along with it.

Religious leaders did not warn the nation about the moral and mortal dangers of bloodlust. Some religious leaders even blessed the bloodlust even as they offered pastoral support to grieving families and to people maimed and scarred by the physical, emotional, social and spiritual wounds of warfare.

Religious leaders cannot blame the Central Intelligence Agency, State Department, Pentagon and political parties for failure to discern and denounce the patriarchy, misogyny and militarism that drove so-called Christian evangelical conservatives to champion war in Afghanistan a decade after Bin Laden was killed. Meanwhile, the same Christian evangelical conservatives railed against the Taliban and other Muslim extremists. Prophetic discernment should have led more clergy in the United States to know and declare that these forces are merely different sides of the same hateful faith coin.

The failure of prophetic discernment and activity concerning the war in Afghanistan did not honor the tradition of the Hebrew prophets. It did not honor the tradition of prophetic men and women who condemned bloodlust in later centuries. It did not honor the tradition of prophetic people who challenged the imperialist aims of the Crusades.

That failure also disregarded the example of clergy who challenged the war in Vietnam three decades before 2001. Over the course of 20 years, religious leaders in the U.S. did not challenge public thinking about the war in Afghanistan the way Clergy and Laity Concerned About Vietnam challenged the public 50 years ago. Religious leaders refused to follow the prophetic examples of William Sloan Coffin, Martin Luther King Jr., Father Theodore Hesburgh, and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel in calling on political, military and opinion leaders to ponder the tragic mistakes that were being made in Afghanistan.

Instead, Billy Graham, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Tony Perkins, Phyllis Schlafly, Richard Land, Robert Jeffress, Paige Patterson, James Dobson and Franklin Graham were considered by journalists, including religious writers, as exemplars of strong religious leadership. Meanwhile, the same journalists — including religious writers — dismissed Jeremiah Wright Jr., Jim Wallis and Congresswoman Barbara Lee of Oakland, Calif. (and Allen Temple Baptist Church), who cast the only vote in the U.S. House of Representatives against the Authorization of Military Force in Afghanistan that set the stage for what became known as the Forever War. To make matters worse, U.S. religious leaders and congregations courted Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and other politicians and distanced themselves from Wright, Wallis and Lee.

Somehow, religious leaders lost the moral, spiritual and ethical ability to understand that times of societal turmoil — such as during a war — demand that we not only function as pastors and priests, but that we also discharge the duties of prophets.

Other realities are more sobering, if not chilling.

Many religious leaders cringe — like cowards — at the thought of being prophetic.

More religious leaders prefer pietistic popularity and abhor prophetic perseverance than we dare admit.

Too many religious leaders — clergy and laity — are more committed to being comfortable than conscientious about love, justice and peace.

Too many religious leaders equate love of empire with love for God.

Too many religious leaders love empire more than God.

The failure of prophetic discernment and activity concerning the war in Afghanistan was more than disappointing.

It was dishonorable.

One wonders whether faithful people in the U.S. can learn from these realities. If not, the tragic outcome of the war in Afghanistan will not only disappoint and haunt the nation.

It will doom it.