According to a 2012 American Psychological Association report, girls growing up in underserved populations face increased risk of mental illness, depression, anxiety, and poor self-esteem – all of which can negatively affect girls’ success in the classroom, workforce, and relationships. The MENA-USA Empowering Resilient Girls Exchange (MERGE) inspires participants to learn about their own mental health and develop emotional resilience, and, in turn, share this knowledge with their communities through a public-facing website.
MERGE is a series of eight-week open enrollment virtual exchanges for 15–19-year-old girls in the United States and the Middle East/North Africa. In the first week, participants explore, learn, and share practical approaches to building resilience within themselves and their communities. Participants are introduced to each other and their small group facilitator through a variety of cultural exchange activities. The next five weeks are devoted to introducing a range of stress-relief and coping techniques, which the participants experiment with individually and in small groups. Specific techniques include journaling, exercise, meditation, positive thoughts and affirmations, and nutrition. Participants will learn the science behind each strategy and why building these skills in themselves and their communities is beneficial. During the exchange’s final two weeks, participants will work in five-person teams, with the guidance of their facilitator, to showcase their newfound knowledge by creating an entry for the program’s culminating mental resilience strategies website.
What Type of Award is this?
Workshop
Who can apply?
MERGE participants must:
Reside in the United States or a MENA region country (Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Palestinian Territories, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, or Yemen);
Identify as a girl or young woman;
Be between the ages of 15 to 19 as of September 26, 2022;
Speak English at an intermediate level or higher;
Be available during the program dates listed above;
Have access to a reliable, internet-connected device (smartphone, tablet, laptop, etc.) that can be utilized for at least three (3) hours a week for the duration of the program;
Have an interest in mental health, community building, and international exchange.
MERGE facilitators must:
Reside in the United States or a MENA region country (Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Palestinian Territories, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, or Yemen);
Identify as a woman;
Be between the ages of 22 to 29 as of September 26, 2022;
Speak English at an advanced level or higher;
Be available during the training and program dates listed below;
Have a reliable laptop or computer and internet connection that can be utilized for the duration of the program;
Have experience with and a passion for mentoring young women, mental health, and international exchange;
Have demonstrated experience in building virtual community or facilitating online events.
Which Countries are Eligible?
Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Palestinian Territories, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, or Yemen
How Many Positions will be Given?
Not specified
What is the Benefit of Award?
By participating in MERGE, you will receive a Certificate of Completion in leadership and mental health awareness, access to the U.S. Department of State’s International Exchange Alumni network, and eligibility for unique project funding opportunities of up $1,000 from the Stevens Initiative Alumni Small Grants program.
Facilitators will be compensated with a stipend of $1000 USD for their work at the end of the program.
How Long is the Program?
8 weeks. Cohort III will take place from September 26 – November 18, 2022, while Cohort IV will start in February 2023.
30th September 2022 9AM HST (Honolulu Standard Time)
Eligible Countries: All
About the Award: As a part of Johnson & Johnson‘s commitment to building a diverse WiSTEM2D Community, we are pleased to launch the Johnson & Johnson WiSTEM2DScholars Program, an award to support women pursuing research in STEM2D.
The J&J WiSTEM2D Scholars Award Program will help develop female leaders and support innovation in the STEM2D disciplines (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math, Manufacturing, Design) by funding six women at critical points in their research careers through a Scholar’s Award.
The six inaugural awards will be available in 2021 and aim to fund one woman per area of STEM2D concentration in the early career stage where they have concluded their advanced degree training but are not at the level of tenure in their accredited university or design school institution. The early-career support is aimed to be a catalyst for women to become leaders in their organizations and fields. The program will help build a larger pool of highly-trained researchers to meet the growing needs of academia and industry.
The J&J WiSTEM2D Scholars Award Program will play an influential role in achievements made in the areas of STEM2D and the future.
Fields of Study: The eligible STEM²D disciplines are: Science, Technology, Engineering, Math, Manufacturing and Design.
Type: Award
Eligibility:
You must be a woman working in the field(s) of Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, Manufacturing and Design (STEM2D).
You must be an assistant female professor or global equivalent faculty position at the time of application at an accredited academic university, institution or design school.
The female scholar should have a minimum degree for the appropriate field:
Science; MD, PhD
Technology; PhD
Engineering; PhD
Math; MS, PhD
Manufacturing; PhD
Design; MA, MS, MDes, MArch, MFA, MLA, PhD
Number of Awards: 6
Value and Duration of Award: The Scholars Award is a 3-year award in the gross amount of $150,000, which will be paid to the University (the “Recipient”) for the benefit of the J&J Scholar and her research, with the understanding that the Recipient will administer the funds. The Scholars Award will be paid in three (3) installments of US $50,000 per year over the 3-year award period, subject to compliance with the terms and conditions of the program’s Agreement.
Netflix is pleased to invite you to submit an application for the Netflix Creative Equity Scholarships for Nigeria, West & Central Africa.
The Netflix CESF is intended to provide financial aid in the form of full scholarships at partner higher educational institutions in Nigeria, Benin, Ghana and Gabon to help ambitious creatives from West and Central African countries obtain official qualifications and training.
Netflix’s global Netflix Creative Equity Fund, which was launched in 2021 and will be distributed to various initiatives over the next five years with the goal of building a strong, diverse pipeline of creatives around the world, includes a $1 million scholarship fund for students from Sub-Saharan Africa.
What Type of Award is this?
Grant
Who can apply?
Netflix is pleased to invite you to submit an application for the Netflix Creative Equity Scholarships for Nigeria, West & Central Africa. The scholarship fund is open to individuals who meet the eligibility criteria below:
Applicants must be citizens of and currently living in a West or Central African country (Excl. DRC)
Applicants must take courses related to television and film at one of the partner institutions
Applicants must be already registered as a student in the partner institutions namely (priority to students who are 1 or 2 years away from graduation):
National Film and Television Institute in Ghana National film institute Jos in Nigeria Institut Supérieur des Métiers de l’Audiovisuel (ISMA) in Benin Institut Philippe Maury de l’audiovisuel et du Cinéma – IPMAC-Groupe EM GABON-UNIVERSITE in Gabon Pan-Atlantic University in Nigeria
Which Countries are Eligible?
West & Central African countries
How Many Positions will be Given?
Not specified
What is the Benefit of Award?
The scholarship fund will cover tuition, housing, study materials, and living expenses at selected partner schools in Nigeria, Gabon, Ghana & Benin where beneficiaries have been accepted to pursue a programme of study in the television and film disciplines in the 2022 academic year.
How to Apply for Program?
Please take note of the following guidelines before you start the application:
An initial screening process will determine your eligibility to submit your application.
The deadline to submit your application is Sunday 4th September, 2022 at 11:59pm (GMT)
Applicants may be contacted and asked to submit further information if deemed necessary by the agency conducting the preliminary selection process (Dalberg) on a case by case basis following the deadline of submission.
Relief depicting slaves in chains in the Roman Empire, at Smyrna, 200 CE. Photograph Source: Jun – Flickr: Roman collared slaves – CC BY-SA 2.0
Some 40 million people are enslaved around the world today, though estimates vary. Modern slavery takes many different forms, including child soldiers, sex trafficking and forced labor, and no country is immune. From cases of family controlled sex trafficking in the United States to the enslavement of fishermen in Southeast Asia’s seafood industry and forced labor in the global electronics supply chain, enslavement knows no bounds.
As scholars of modern slavery, we seek to understand how and why human beings are still bought, owned and sold in the 21st century, in hopes of shaping policies to eradicate these crimes.
Many of the answers trace back to causes like poverty, corruption and inequality. But they also stem from something less discussed: war.
In 2016, the United Nations Security Council named modern slavery a serious concern in areas affected by armed conflict. But researchers still know little about the specifics of how slavery and war are intertwined.
We recently published research analyzing data on armed conflicts around the world to better understand this relationship.
What we found was staggering: The vast majority of armed conflict between 1989 and 2016 used some kind of slavery.
Coding conflict
We used data from an established database about war, the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP), to look at how much, and in what ways, armed conflict intersects with different forms of contemporary slavery.
The Uppsala database breaks each conflict into two sides. Side A represents a nation state, and Side B is typically one or more nonstate actors, such as rebel groups or insurgents.
Using that data, our research team examined instances of different forms of slavery, including sex trafficking and forced marriage, child soldiers, forced labor and general human trafficking. This analysis included information from 171 different armed conflicts. Because the use of slavery changes over time, we broke multiyear conflicts into separate “conflict-years” to study them one year at a time, for a total of 1,113 separate cases.
Coding each case to determine what forms of slavery were used, if any, was a challenge. We compared information from a variety of sources, including human rights organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, scholarly accounts, journalists’ reporting and documents from governmental and intergovernmental organizations.
Alarming numbers
In our recently published analysis, we found that contemporary slavery is a regular feature of armed conflict. Among the 1,113 cases we analyzed, 87% contained child soldiers – meaning fighters age 15 and younger – 34% included sexual exploitation and forced marriage, about 24% included forced labor and almost 17% included human trafficking.
A global heat map of the frequency of these armed conflicts over time paints a sobering picture. Most conflicts involving enslavement take place in low-income countries, often referred to as the Global South.
About 12% of the conflicts involving some form of enslavement took place in India, where there are several conflicts between the government and nonstate actors. Teen militants are involved in conflicts such as the insurgency in Kashmir and the separatist movement in Assam. About 8% of cases took place in Myanmar, 5% in Ethiopia, 5% in the Philippines and about 3% in Afghanistan, Sudan, Turkey, Colombia, Pakistan, Uganda, Algeria and Iraq.
This evidence of enslavement predominately in the Global South may not be surprising, given how poverty and inequality can fuel instability and conflict. However, it helps us reflect upon how these countries’ historic, economic and geopolitical relationships to the Global North also fuel pressure and violence, a theme we hope slavery researchers can study in the future.
Strategic enslavement
Typically, when armed conflict involves slavery, it’s being used for tactical aims: building weapons, for example, or constructing roads and other infrastructure projects to fight a war. But sometimes, slavery is used strategically, as part of an overarching strategy. In the Holocaust, the Nazis used “strategic slavery” in what they called “extermination through labor.” Today, as in the past, strategic slavery is normally part of a larger strategy of genocide.
We found that “strategic enslavement” took place in about 17% of cases. In other words, enslavement was one of the primary objectives of about 17% of the conflicts we examined, and often served the goal of genocide. One example is the Islamic State’s enslavement of the Yazidi minority in the 2014 massacre in Sinjar, Iraq. In addition to killing Yazidis, the Islamic State sought to enslave and impregnate women for systematic ethnic cleansing, attempting to eliminate the ethnic identity of the Yazidi through forced rape.
The connections between slavery and conflict are vicious but still not well understood. Our next steps include coding historic cases of slavery and conflict going back to World War II, such as how Nazi Germany used forced labor and how Imperial Japan’s military used sexual enslavement. We have published a new data set, “Contemporary Slavery in Armed Conflict,” and hope other researchers will also use it to help better understand and prevent future violence.
Mostly unnoticed by the public, the EU Commission, in coordination with EU governments, has been working on abolishing regulations ensuring the privacy of digital communications. Under the guise of combating online child abuse, a regulation is to be agreed upon that imposes a duty upon all network-providers to search all communication content for depictions of child abuse or child grooming attempts by adults, if ordered by the authorities.
Protest against chat controls outside the European Commission offices in Berlin in May 2022 [Photo by CC0 by Jakob Rieger] [Photo by CC0 by Jakob Rieger]
As reported by netzpolitik.org, even a user’s devices could be searched for depictions of child abuse if such an order were made. Under these so-called “client-side-scans” (CSS), a check will be run on all outgoing messages on the sender’s device to see if any child abuse images have been included. If a supposed hit is triggered, an automatic alert would be sent to the control point, which can then involve the relevant authorities in the case.
Client-Side-Scanning abolishes the privacy of digital communications, which is normally guaranteed by end-to-end encryption, because messages are checked prior to encryption regardless of any reasonable suspicion. Apple has planned a similar procedure on its devices, against protests by recognized IT security researchers. In a study, the latter concluded that CSS represented a danger to privacy, IT security, freedom of expression and democracy as a whole.
The current draft legislation does not prescribe any definitive technical procedures that would be part of a binding protocol. The ordering of such procedures is being left to a still-to-be-established body, which should be integrated into Europol and can impose orders on individual providers. This will create a Europe-wide, police surveillance centre, with far reaching powers to abrogate the privacy of communications.
Civil rights organisations are highly critical of the current draft. The chat-controls are incompatible with European fundamental rights, neuter the effectiveness of end-to-end encryption, making it obsolescent, thereby directly putting into question the anonymous use of the internet. Even child protection agencies such as the German Child Protection Association regard the measures as going too far.
Regardless of the concrete enforcement of these chat-controls, they represent a grave breach of human rights. Like other legislative endeavours, the stated aim of limiting the spread of child abuse images is a pretext. Rather, it is about building a surveillance apparatus with wide-ranging censorship powers, which can then be extended at will.
The extension of once-created instruments of censorship is nothing new at the EU level. The “upload-filters,” introduced as part of EU copyright reforms, were originally planned within the context of the TERREG guidelines to filter out terrorist content, and only failed due to public opposition.
The claim that chat-controls were necessary to fight against child abuse makes it easier to obtain agreement to this fatal technology, which it would otherwise not be possible to introduce.
A clear indicator that the combatting of child abuse is a pretext can be seen in cases in Germany where those spreading and producing child abuse images are investigated and arrested, but no efforts are made to delete these images from the internet, although they could be quickly taken off-line.
Systems to search for such imagery can easily be re-purposed for alternative uses. They can also detect other content, as the technology does not differentiate between offending images or ones that are merely politically inconvenient.
Even in cases where such systems are not re-purposed, they cannot be checked to see if they are only searching for child abuse images, and are not flagging legal content, since the source material for the filters are not made publicly accessible.
A further danger for freedom of expression is in cases where content is wrongly flagged, a “false-positive.” The search engines used are not perfect and can be manipulated. A good example of this is Apple’s “NeuralHash” for detecting photos using image checksum algorithms for cross-referencing. Software already exists which can alter an image so that it has the same checksum as a second, completely different, image.
This can lead to perfectly harmless legal images being flagged by the system and the authorities notified. This is particularly odious, as in cases of child abuse images, mere suspicion is sufficient to destroy the reputation and life of the accused. Add to this the capabilities of the security agencies with sufficient powers to plant material on a target device or manipulate a harmless image so that it triggers a flag when sent.
This forced monitoring of communications would also affect the many open source and decentralized apps. While these cannot be tracked with the same ease, the EU could nevertheless ban or block them at network level. Those hosting such software could be fined exorbitant amounts.
These plans toward chat-controls show the hypocrisy of the ruling class: It uses child abuse as a pretext to establish a surveillance and censorship infrastructure, abusing victims of abuse a second time.
Considering the tremendous social polarization and increased living and energy costs due to the Ukraine war, chat-control measures are being used in order to suppress the expected opposition and protests with undemocratic measures.
It can be foreseen that once these measures are in place, the systems will be extended to flag up images of police-brutality, demonstrations, or non-sanctioned protests, as well as anti-capitalist material or merely satirical content, and automatically inform the authorities.
Moreover, these plans reveal the true character of the EU. These institutions, whose goals, according to official propaganda, are the unification of the continent under the umbrella of freedom and democracy, is developing the surveillance methods of a dictatorship. The EU is a capitalist state alliance, which helps its members impose anti-democratic measures.
In Germany, too, ministers are demanding access to encrypted communications, which have the same scope and remit as these chat-controls. The United Kingdom, which has left the EU, is pushing similar measures with its own Online Safety Bill, which threatens encrypted communications. Furthermore, the UK government plans to scrap fundamental data protection legislation.
All trust in Germany’s “traffic-light” coalition of the Social Democrats (SPD), Liberal Democrats (FDP) and Greens, whose coalition agreement made bold promises about digitalization conforming with the constitution, would be completely misplaced.
The Greens, who during the election campaign had voiced strong opposition to supplying weaponry to war-torn regions, have, within only six months, become the most hawkish proponents of delivering such heavy weapons. The Greens and SPD will suppress democratic rights just as aggressively when faced with mass resistance to the economic and social fallout of their war policies.
It would therefore be of little significance if Germany were to reject the chat-controls or abstain in the EU vote, as hinted at by representatives of the FDP and SPD. Their representatives probably expect they will be out-voted and would follow similar measures anyway, since the necessity for censorship arises out of their own policies.
Even so-called civil society actors must be regarded critically. They are not mobilising any social resistance against chat-controls but are engaged in constructive collaboration with the EU Commission. Despite the current EU Commissioner’s refusal to meet with them, they remain loyal to the EU, like a monarch’s subjects, and thus legitimise their actions.
The actions of “Digital Society” are typical. Along with other organisations, it has formulated a list of “Principles for the fight against child abuse.” When the EU recently ratified the Digital Services Act, it did not oppose the measures it contained to curtail freedom of expression in times of crisis but merely complained that the EU Parliament had been insufficiently involved.
The first locally-acquired case of monkeypox in New South Wales (NSW) was reported by state health officials on Sunday, bringing the total number of infections recorded in Australia’s most populous state to 42.
Community transmission is already prevalent in Victoria, with half of the 40 infections recorded up to August 19 contracted within the state.
The outbreak is growing under conditions where Australians are dying from COVID-19 at a higher rate than ever. In July, 1,949 COVID-19 deaths were reported, making it the most deadly month on record. A further 1,638 people have died this month, at a rate of more than 70 per day.
This 2003 electron microscope image made available by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows mature, oval-shaped monkeypox virions, left, and spherical immature virions, right, obtained from a sample of human skin associated with the 2003 prairie dog outbreak. [AP Photo/Cynthia S. Goldsmith, Russell Regner/CDC]
The first two cases of monkeypox in Australia were reported on May 20. By June 27, 13 infections had been found, and by August 5, the total had reached 57. In the next 13 days, an additional 32 cases were reported, bringing the total to 89 on August 19.
These figures represent a fraction of the true spread of the virus, in part because its long incubation period of up to three weeks means testing lags far behind infection.
While the total number of cases reported in Australia remains low on a global scale, the emergence of local transmission and the rapidly rising rate of infection are cause for serious concern.
Infectious diseases specialist Sanjaya Senanayake told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC): “[N]ow there is local transmission and we see what’s happening in Europe and the Americas as well. I think we have to be very worried about this… As we’ve seen with COVID, if you allow enough people to get infected where the virus replicates, who knows what it might do?”
As is the case around the world, Australian health authorities have downplayed the global monkeypox outbreak and promoted the misconception that the virus can only be transmitted through sexual contact between men. NSW Health’s online fact sheet on monkeypox recklessly declares: “Most people are not at risk of monkeypox.”
Appearing Monday on ABC TV, Heath Paynter, deputy CEO of the Australian Federation of AIDS Organisations blithely proclaimed: “Only gay and bisexual men need to be worried about this, the general population isn’t at risk.”
These are dangerous lies. While prolonged close contact (such as during sex) appears to be the primary means of transmission, monkeypox is not a sexually transmitted disease, and certainly not one confined to men. Infection can be spread via aerosols, respiratory droplets and fomites—contaminated fabrics, bedding and other surfaces.
Globally, more than 43,000 infections have been detected in 95 countries and at least 12 people have died outside of Africa. While the vast majority of cases worldwide have been detected among men who have sex with men, this is only an accidental product of the community in which the outbreak first emerged.
The failure of health authorities worldwide to contain the outbreak is already leading to infections outside this demographic. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), at least 362 women and 35 children under the age of five have been diagnosed with monkeypox as part of the global outbreak. More than 250 infections have been recorded among health workers.
The most common symptoms are fever, aches, fatigue, swollen lymph nodes and pimple-like skin lesions, which take two to three weeks to heal. While Australian health authorities insist “illness is usually mild,” the ulcerating lesions can cause severe pain.
A 50-year-old Melbourne man who contracted the virus told the Age: “Imagine the absolute height of pain of ulcers in your mouth and multiply that by 20.”
The virus can also result in complications including eye infection, blindness, skin infection, sepsis, encephalitis, rectal abscess and pneumonia. These occur most commonly in children and people who are immuno-compromised.
In West Africa, monkeypox has a case fatality rate of 3.6 percent. Deaths on this scale are preventable, and severe infections treatable, with ready access to antiviral drugs and high-quality medical care. However, with Australia’s health system already on its knees as a result of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and decades of funding cuts, the impact of monkeypox has the potential to be devastating.
Because mass vaccination against smallpox, to which monkeypox is closely related, was never carried out in Australia, there is almost no immunity, even among older sections of the population.
In an article published last month in the Medical Journal of Australia, Professors Raina MacIntyre and Andrew Grulich, of the Kirby Institute, warned: “Stigmatising people with monkeypox and people who may be perceived at high risk must be avoided, as this may lead to decreased testing and reduced engagement with health advice.”
Yet this is precisely the course Australian health authorities are following. Public health notices about monkeypox are peppered with references to “multiple sexual partners” and “sex on premises venues.”
Adding to the confusion, NSW Health’s fact sheet warns: “People who have recovered from monkeypox should use condoms when engaging in sexual activity for 8 weeks after recovery,” although, as the agency’s Executive Director of Health Protection, Dr. Richard Broome, explains, “condoms are not effective at preventing the transmission of monkeypox.”
The public health response to the monkeypox outbreak has been almost entirely placed in the hands of sexual health and HIV clinics. It is unquestionably important that men who have sex with men—the demographic that is currently most affected—are able to access medical care without prejudice.
However, as the virus inevitably spreads throughout society, the absence of any broader, coordinated response will mean that infections will go undetected until they are at an advanced stage, and people will not receive the medical treatment they require. This will be a particular danger as monkeypox begins, if it has not already begun, to spread through schools, which have also been key vectors of the coronavirus pandemic.
A third-generation vaccine for smallpox and monkeypox, marketed as Jynneos, has been available since 2013 and is considered to be around 85 percent effective at preventing infection after two doses. However, only one company, Bavarian Nordic, produces the vaccine and global stocks are in short supply.
Just 22,000 doses have arrived in Australia, with a mere 78,000 more expected before the end of the year. NSW has received only 5,500 doses, while Victoria has 3,500 and Queensland a pitiful 300. In total, just 450,000 doses have been ordered.
Australasian Society for HIV, Viral Hepatitis and Sexual Health Medicine (ASHM) President Dr Nick Medland told the Saturday Paper: “The message can’t be ‘get vaccinated’ if we haven’t got enough vaccines yet.”
Post-exposure vaccination can be effective if administered within around four days of exposure, long before symptoms appear, meaning accurate contact tracing is vital. The current campaign of misinformation about the risk factors and vectors of transmission will mean people who have been exposed will not be identified and will not receive the vaccine, even as it becomes more widely available.
As continues to be the case with COVID-19, “vaccine nationalism” and the subordination of medical science to corporate profit has played a filthy role in allowing this global outbreak to develop. Since 2013, the US has allowed more than 28 million doses of the Jynneos vaccine in its “strategic national stockpile” to expire, rather than use them to stop growing outbreaks in parts of Africa where monkeypox is endemic.
Between the start of 2022 and the tenth of August, 2,947 cases of monkeypox, and 104 deaths have been reported in Africa, including in two countries where the virus is not endemic. Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, almost 13,500 monkeypox infections and at least 394 deaths have been reported, as the “outbreak in Africa continued to grow from one country to another with little international attention,” the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention reported.
In Australia and internationally, the response of capitalist governments to monkeypox has been to replicate every aspect of the homicidal pandemic policies responsible for 6.5 million global deaths, according to official figures, and a real toll likely in excess of 20 million. Within Australia, the open adoption of the “let it rip” COVID policy last December has resulted in more than 11,000 deaths and almost ten million infections.
As the response to monkeypox demonstrates, this criminal policy, enforced by the entire political establishment, has struck a blow at decades of public health practice and standards. It has set a blueprint for similar responses to all future outbreaks of infectious disease, aimed at blocking the necessary public health measures in the interests of government budget austerity and ensuring full profit-making operations continue.
The alternative for the working class is to take up a struggle for a scientific approach to monkeypox and COVID-19, in which all necessary resources are devoted to the protection of human health and lives throughout the world. This is inseparable from the fight for socialism and for global production to be reorganised under democratic workers’ control to serve human need rather than corporate profits.
Amid an explosive geopolitical crisis, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and militant struggles of workers for higher wages, the ruling class is responding with increasingly ruthless attacks on jobs.
On Monday, Ford Motor Company revealed plans to lay off 2,000 salaried workers and 1,000 contract employees, effective September 1. The cuts will take place in the US, Canada and India, with a “significant percentage” of them in Michigan, according to a company spokesman.
Last month, Bloomberg reported that Ford was planning as many as 8,000 layoffs this year, targeting white-collar workers and positions in its internal combustion engine business. “We absolutely have too many people in some places, no doubt about it,” Ford CEO Jim Farley said at an auto conference in February.
The salaried job cuts are a prelude to a wider attack on workers’ jobs. The global auto giants are engaged in a furious effort to dominate the market for electric vehicles and other new technologies and are restructuring their operations internationally, slashing costs and seeking to extract even more profit from workers.
Stellantis (formed from the merger of Fiat-Chrysler and the PSA Group) has already carried out indefinite layoffs this year at its Belvidere Assembly plant in Illinois and the Warren and Sterling Stamping plants in Michigan, and is planning to cut the second shift at its Windsor, Ontario plant by the end of 2022.
Ford, meanwhile, previously announced that it would be ending production at its factories in Saarlouis, Germany and Chennai, India, provoking enormous anger among workers in both locations, including wildcat plant occupations in the case of Chennai. In Europe, Ford has been testing out a definite strategy to shed labor costs. It has worked with the trade unions to pit workers at different plants in a fratricidal competition to see who will accept the most concessions, dangling the promise of investments in EV production in return.
Although the shift towards EVs has been a significant factor in the restructuring of the auto industry, the attacks on autoworkers’ jobs are part of a broader process underway throughout the world economy. The ruling class, feeling itself increasingly under siege, is initiating a deliberate jobs massacre as it seeks to counteract a growing movement among workers internationally against exploitation and the disastrous impact of the pandemic and soaring inflation.
Fifty percent of US executives surveyed in early August said that their companies are reducing headcount, according to professional services firm PwC. Nearly half also said they were either implementing hiring freezes, rescinding job offers or reducing or eliminating signing bonuses.
Mass layoffs have spread most quickly in the tech industry, the subject of frenzied speculative investment in recent years, with at least 38,000 job cuts as of mid-August, a Crunchbase News tally found. Layoffs have taken place at both America’s largest tech giants--including Apple, Microsoft, Meta (Facebook’s parent) and Twitter--as well as a wide range of online businesses such as Carvana, Peloton, Wayfair, Shopify, Netflix and others. Management at Google’s Cloud business unit told employees that if sales and productivity were not up next quarter, “there will be blood in the streets,” Business Insider reported earlier this month.
There are signs that job cuts are now spreading beyond the tech sector to major retail firms as consumer spending slows. Walmart was reported to be laying off 200 corporate staff at the beginning of August, while Best Buy has been cutting hundreds of jobs at its stores after lowering its sales forecasts in July.
The attacks on workers’ jobs are taking place despite a surge in corporate profitability since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, with enormous sums being continually funneled to Wall Street and super-rich investors. General Motors announced last week that it was restoring its quarterly dividend and increasing its share repurchase program from $3.3 billion to $5 billion, following Ford’s moves to restore its dividend last month.
Mass layoffs are building even as workers’ real wages continue to decline year-on-year, eaten up by inflation, which has been substantially accelerated by the US-NATO proxy war against Russia. In July, real average hourly earnings in the US fell 3 percent compared to the year before, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The Federal Reserve, along with the central banks of many other advanced economies, has begun swiftly raising interest rates, aiming to trigger an economic slowdown and mass layoffs.
While this action is taken in the name of “combatting inflation,” the central bank is totally uninterested in doing anything to address the cost-of-living crisis.
The overwhelming factor driving the increase in prices, according to an April 2022 study by the Economic Policy Institute, has been corporate price-gouging, which feeds directly into profit margins. The study found that rising corporate profits contributed six times more to rising prices than rising labor costs.
Real hourly wages for a typical worker have collapsed. But instead of doing anything to prevent price-gouging by corporations, the Fed is working to further fuel corporate profits by reducing workers’ bargaining power by artificially increasing unemployment.
With increasing signs of a global recession, the aim of the financial aristocracy is to place the full burden of its socio-economic crisis on the backs of workers, using the threat of unemployment and destitution as its cudgel. In a recent survey conducted for Bloomberg News, nearly two thirds of respondents said they didn’t feel comfortable asking for a raise and that employers have more leverage, a 5 percent increase from January.
The efforts of the ruling class to make the working class pay for a crisis it has no control over and is not responsible for, and even use it as an opportunity to increase workers’ exploitation, is of a piece with the policies of the bourgeoisie for the past two and a half years. The ruling class responded to the COVID-19 pandemic by engineering a bailout of trillions of dollars. Measures to slow, let alone stop, the spread of the virus, insofar as they conflicted with capitalist profit interests, were successively abandoned, resulting in more than 20 million deaths worldwide and countless more debilitating infections.
But all of the catastrophic experiences of the past two years—the pandemic, skyrocketing inflation, increasingly unbearable working conditions—have at the same time generated profound social anger and grievances in the working class, with ever-growing sections of workers being drawn into strikes and other struggles.
One day before the six-month anniversary of the imperialist-provoked Russian invasion of Ukraine, US officials told the Associated Press that the White House is about to announce another $3 billion in spending to aid and train Ukraine’s military. This comes on top of $10.6 billion in direct military funding provided by the Pentagon since the beginning of the war, as well as over $17 billion for US weapons manufacturing for Ukraine.
Based on anonymous US officials, the AP reported Tuesday that the new package is intended to provide weapons and ammunitions that may not arrive in Ukraine for a year or two. In other words, it is designed to fund the new “forever war” by US imperialism in Ukraine, which has already killed tens of thousands of Ukrainian and Russian soldiers and thousands of civilians, while displacing over a fourth of the country’s population.
Speaking in a similar vain, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg stated on Tuesday, “Winter is coming, and it will be hard, and what we see now is a grinding war of attrition. This is a battle of wills, and a battle of logistics. Therefore we must sustain our support for Ukraine for the long term.”
Stoltenberg made these remarks at the second online Crimea conference organized by the Ukrainian government of Volodymyr Zelensky. The event was attended by leading imperialist backers of the proxy war against Russia, including Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.
It was held within the framework of the “Crimean Platform” initiative, launched by Zelensky in March 2021 as part of Kiev’s official military strategy to “recover Crimea.” The campaign to “take back” the Black Sea peninsula is one of the most important provocations that prompted Russia’s invasion in February.
At the conference on Tuesday, Zelensky insisted again that “retaking” Crimea was the principal military aim of Ukraine. He said, “I know that Crimea is with Ukraine, is waiting for us to return. I want all of you to know that we will return. We need to win the fight against Russian aggression. Therefore, we need to free Crimea from occupation.”
Zelensky then stated, “Ukraine’s restoration of control of Crimea will be a historic anti-war step in Europe,” adding that he was “sure” that Crimea, like the rest of Ukraine, would one day become part of the European Union. In fact, what Zelensky describes as a “historic anti-war step in Europe” is widely seen by military experts as the potential trigger for a nuclear conflict with Russia. In July, Russia’s former president and deputy head of the Russian Security Council, Dmitry Medvedev, warned that an attack on Crimea by Ukraine would result in a “judgement day” response by Moscow.
The aggressive remarks by Zelensky were clearly intended to further fuel the war with Russia and herald major attacks on Crimea by Ukraine. In a deliberate effort to escalate the war with Russia, since August 9 Ukraine has already launched a series of strikes on Crimea, including on Russia’s Saki airbase, where at least 7 Russian fighter jets were destroyed, as well as a major ammunition depot in the north of the Black Sea peninsula. The headquarters of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol, Crimea’s capital, was the subject of a failed drone attack on Saturday.
While carried out by Ukrainian forces, the attacks bear the unmistakable imprint “made in Washington.” Since the imperialist-orchestrated coup in Kiev in February 2014, which ousted a pro-Russian government and prompted the Russian annexation of Crimea, the US has spent tens of billions of dollars on arming and training Ukraine’s military and paramilitary forces for a war against Russia.
So far, the extraordinarily provocative strikes have failed to obtain the desired retaliatory response by the Kremlin. Indeed, the official statements from Moscow, despite earlier threats by leading Russian officials to respond to attacks on Crimea, including with nuclear weapons, have been markedly muted. The Russian press has clearly tried to downplay the significance of the strikes.
Far from easing tensions, however, the refusal by the Kremlin to be goaded into a further escalation of the war has only led Washington to engage in evermore overt provocations. On Saturday evening, Daria Dugina, daughter of the far-right ideologue Alexander Dugina and herself a right-wing Russian nationalist journalist, was assassinated in a car bomb in central Moscow. Her father was supposed to be in the car with her but had decided to take a different vehicle at the last minute.
While Kiev and Washington have denied their involvement in the assassination, it bears all the hallmarks of the murder squads of the CIA and its far-right allies in Ukraine. Dugina is both a prominent supporter of the war and an influential figure in far-right Russian politics. His daughter was known for sharing his views and assisting him in much of his work.
The aim of the assassination clearly was to pressure the Kremlin into a military response that would provide the imperialist powers with the necessary justification to further broaden and escalate their war against Russia.
The Washington Post, a mouthpiece for America’s super-rich and the CIA, gleefully noted on Monday that “the killing immediately heightened a sense of vulnerability among Russia’s most elite and visible promoters of the war in Ukraine, who now realize that they might be targets and that the government is potentially unable to protect them.” The paper added that the assassination “also raised the prospect of a serious escalation in the war as Putin comes under increased pressure, including from Dugina’s grieving father, to hit Ukraine hard.”
Without openly blaming Kiev, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin expressed his condolences to Dugina’s family and posthumously awarded her a medal for her “courage” and “patriotism.” Some of Russia’s best known oligarchs, state television anchors and politicians attended Dugina’s memorial in Moscow on Tuesday, and they openly accused Kiev for the attack. Dugina said that his daughter had died a martyr for Russia and that “this ultimate sacrifice, the highest price we pay, can be justified only by victory.”
In a message to the memorial, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov called the attack a “vile and inhumane crime.” At a press conference later that day, Lavrov said “there can be no mercy for those who organised, ordered and carried out [the bombing].”
The Russian secret service (FSB) claims to have identified Natalya Vovk, a 43-year-old Ukrainian journalist who served in the fascist Azov Battalion, as the killer of Dugina. According to the FSB, the woman came to Russia in July, along with her child, moved into the same building as Dugina, and had planned to kill both her and her father in the attack. The FSB claims that Vovk is now in hiding in Estonia.
Talinn dismissed these claims, with Urmas Reinsalu, Estonia’s foreign minister, stating, “We regard this as one instance of provocation in a very long line of provocations by the Russian Federation, and we have nothing more to say about it at the moment.” Estonia, like Lithuania, is now in the process of destroying decades-old Soviet monuments to the victory of the Soviet people against Nazi Germany in World War II.
While the Western press and Ukrainian government now breathlessly warn of an escalation of Russian attacks, including on Kiev on August 24 and 25, whatever escalation of the war may now occur will be the result of their deliberate efforts to provoke a military response by the Kremlin.
