Australian Labor government in growing crisis over budget and IR bill

Mike Head

Just over five months after scraping into office with less than a third of the primary vote, Australia’s Labor government is already in a deepening political crisis, currently centred on the industrial relations bill that it is scrambling to push through parliament.

Anthony Albanese and Tony Burke [Photo: Parliament of Australia]

Despite there being only a handful of parliamentary sitting days left for 2022, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Workplace Relations Minister Tony Burke insist that all 250 pages of the fraudulently named “Secure Jobs Better Pay” bill must go through both houses of parliament before the end of the year.

Why the rush? That can be explained only by the fear in ruling circles of mounting discontent throughout the working class over the sky-rocketing cost of living.

The government and its partners in the trade union bureaucracy are cynically depicting the bill as a means to lift wages. The exact opposite is true. It is a mechanism to bolster the capacity of the unions to suppress strikes, enforce a new wave of workplace restructuring and confine pay rises to less than half the official inflation rate, which is expected to surge to 8 percent by the end of the year.

Labor’s first budget, handed down on October 25, was a political turning point. It tore up what was left of Labor’s phoney May election promises of a “better future,” “higher wages” and a dramatic cut to electricity bills.

The budget was explicitly based on real wages continuing to fall for at least two more years, with mortgage interest rates continuing to increase, more than 150,000 jobs being lost in the same period, and prices for food and other essentials soaring—fueled by domestic electricity and gas hikes of 56 percent and 40 percent respectively.

Millions of working-class households are facing lower living standards, financial stress and the possibility of home mortgage defaults.

Even according to the media polls, this was the most unpopular budget since the “emergency” austerity budget of 2014. Then the Liberal-National Coalition government imposed deep spending cuts, igniting mass opposition that led to the replacement of Prime Minister Tony Abbott the following year.

All Labor’s claims to want to “get wages moving” are lies. Burke has repeatedly declared for months that annual wage rises must be kept to around 3.5 percent. Echoing the orders of the financial markets, transmitted through the Reserve Bank of Australia, he has described this cap as an “anchor point.”

As the WSWS has explained in detail, the IR bill is designed to block strikes by workers, not permit them. It reinforces the reactionary anti-strike laws first imposed by the Hawke and Keating Labor governments and the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) in the 1980s and 1990s.

In particular, the bill enhances the powers of the pro-business Fair Work Commission, the industrial court created by Labor and the unions, to prevent or ban industrial action. Most of all, by proposing a regimented, union-controlled form of “multi-employer bargaining,” the bill seeks to expand the dwindling union coverage over sections of workers, so that the union bureaucrats can suffocate workers’ struggles.

The various amendments that the government is making to the bill in a bid to retain the support of employers underscore that agenda. Burke has inserted into the bill multiple new restrictions on workers taking any industrial action. One would impose a six-month “grace” period before multi-employer bargaining could commence. Another would require a majority vote in each workplace before industrial action could be taken. Last night the government tabled some 150 amendments in a bid to satisfy employers and ram the legislation through parliament.

Anxious to reinforce their industrial policing role, the union apparatuses are bombarding union members with emails and social media messages imploring them to send messages to senators urging them to vote for the bill. A November 7 mass email by the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) claimed: “The ‘Secure Jobs Better Pay’ bill is an absolute game changer for our wages” (emphasis in original).

Ludicrously, the email said the bill would “provide an improved mechanism to fix the wages crisis and ease the cost-of-living burden.” In reality, the legislation aims to shore up and extend the union-controlled enterprise bargaining system, which has straitjacketed workers since the 1990s, producing the lowest levels of industrial action in Australia’s post-World War II history.

The emerging opposition of workers, reflected in the first widespread strikes for a decade by school and TAFE teachers, nurses, and health, aged care and child care workers, is compounding an historical political crisis.

May’s election produced the smallest vote in a century for the two traditional parties of capitalist rule—Labor and the Liberal-National Coalition. This is the product of decades of intensifying corporate-driven attacks on working-class jobs and social and working conditions by successive governments, both Labor and Coalition.

Because the vote for the hated Morrison Coalition government fell the most, Labor was elected despite its support dropping to near record low levels in working-class electorates. It is depending very heavily on the unions to stifle the opposition of educators, health workers and other workers to low pay, intolerable workloads, unsafe pandemic conditions and budget cuts. 

These union apparatuses, however, are widely discredited. Their membership has collapsed to about 14 percent of the workforce, and just 5 percent among young workers. That is a direct result of betrayal after betrayal of workers over the past four decades, with the unions enforcing the anti-strike laws on behalf of employers and governments.

Sections of business are opposing the “multi-employer bargaining” provisions in the IR bill. That is because they have drawn the conclusion that the unions’ capacity to serve this policing role is increasingly exhausted, so employers must impose their dictates on workers without them.

This is under conditions in which, in the name of “budget repair,” working-class households are being made to pay for the massive handouts—over $400 billion—in corporate bailout packages in the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, on top of the pouring of billions into the financial markets since the 2008‒09 global financial crisis.

The Labor government is seeking to impose on workers the full burden of the world economic crisis triggered by the refusal of capitalist governments to take the necessary action to end the pandemic, and the US-instigated war against Russia in Ukraine, which threatens humanity with the spectre of a nuclear World War III. This offensive will be intensified to finance vastly expanded military spending to prepare for a potentially catastrophic US-led war against China.

Already, the criminal “let it rip” pandemic policies of governments—also enforced by the Labor and union bureaucracies—have exposed the readiness of the capitalist class to sacrifice lives for corporate profit and private wealth accumulation.

A warning must be sounded. The immediate response of the Australian political establishment as the pandemic first hit was to close ranks and resort to anti-democratic methods, deeply fearful of mass unrest. Prime Minister Scott Morrison and the state and territory government leaders—most from the Labor Party—formed a wartime-style “National Cabinet,” a de facto national unity regime bound by strict secrecy and confidentiality.

At the same time, the governor-general secretly centralised in the prime minister’s hands joint control of five extra key portfolios, covering federal emergency measures, government finances, border control, and the federal police and domestic intelligence apparatus. 

Albanese’s government has retained the National Cabinet as a mechanism of rule and is attempting to obscure and bury the anti-democratic implications of Morrison’s secret ministries. Labor has particularly sought to shield the governor-general, who has potentially dictatorial powers in times of political crisis, as shown in the 1975 dismissal of the Whitlam government.

COP27 climate summit overshadowed by US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine

Bryan Dyne

The beginning of the United Nations climate summit COP27, being held in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, has been overshadowed by the drive to increase oil and natural gas production in the United States and Europe as a result of the US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine. Since the war began, the Biden administration in particular has pledged to deliver tens of billions of cubic meters of natural gas to Europe, promising a corresponding increase of greenhouse gas emissions and exposing the environmentalist pretensions of his administration and the American government as a whole.

As has been known for decades, and what was again made clear during the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, there is an urgent need to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to abate and reverse global warming. Thousands of workers and toilers die and millions are displaced around the world each year, especially in the most impoverished regions, as a result of the more or less unregulated release of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere as the world’s corporations and nations compete with one another for global dominance.

Britain's Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, speaks during the COP27 U.N. Climate Summit, in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, Monday, Nov. 7, 2022. [AP Photo/Nariman El-Mofty]

The colossal floods that began across Pakistan in June are among the most advanced expression of the climate crisis. Torrents of water that came from glacial melting in the Himalayas and unusually heavy rain have killed at least 1,700, injured more than 12,000 and displaced at least 33,000,000.

Climate models predict that such disasters will become increasingly regular if the current warming trend continues. And floods, hurricanes, wildfires, polar vortexes and other forms of extreme weather are known to be the precursors to even more lethal climate-induced catastrophes.

None of these issues, however, are being seriously addressed at COP27. There have been many speeches by various figures, including heads of state, calling for “climate justice,” code for increased funding to combat the effects of climate change in developing nations. UN Secretary General António Guterres warned that the world is on a “highway to climate hell with our foot on the accelerator.”

But as with all previous climate summits, from last year’s COP26 at Glasgow, Scotland to the 2015 Paris Accord and the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, none of the various speeches and agreements deal with the underlying cause of the climate crisis: capitalism and the drive for private profit.

The ongoing war in Ukraine serves as an example of this process. Just one day after the Russian military was provoked into its invasion, a US-based liquefied natural gas (LNG) lobbying group, called LNG Allies, wrote a letter to the Biden administration demanding at least $300 million in new infrastructure to establish “virtual transatlantic gas pipelines” in order to bolster domestic production.

The letter also called on the Department of Energy to “immediately approve” applications to further export LNG under the guise of helping to prevent “energy insecurity” in Europe. The administration moved swiftly, approving two such applications in March and a further two in April. It noted then that it expected US exports of the commodity to increase by 20 percent by the end of 2022.

These shifts were paralleled by an announcement between Biden and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen that the US would provide an additional 15 billion cubic meters of LNG in 2022 to help “end [the European Union’s] dependence on Russian fossil fuels.” According to an article in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, about half of US gas production will be used as exports when the ongoing fossil fuel infrastructure plans are complete.

This has resulted in a financial bonanza for gas companies. Cheniere, which is based out of Houston, Texas, has so far increased its profits by $3.8 billion this year. Sempra, which provides natural gas to nearly 40 million people in California, Texas and Mexico, had its stock value spike by more than 25 percent in the weeks after the war began.

Militaries themselves are also immense emitters of greenhouse gases. A report from Boston University published in 2019 entitled “Pentagon Fuel Use, Climate Change, and the Costs of War” by Neta Crawford, co-director of the Costs of War project, found that the US military is among the largest polluters in the world, releasing more greenhouse gases than whole countries, including Sweden and Denmark. It explicitly noted that the wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and Syria have released at least 400 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, about a third of the total released by the Pentagon since 2001.

No reference was made to these facts, however, at COP27. Instead, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky provided a diatribe against Russia, claiming that “deliberate Russian actions” have “brought about an energy crisis that has forced dozens of countries to resume coal-fired power generation.” He continued, again referring to Russia, “There are still many for whom climate change is just rhetoric or marketing, not real action.”

In reality, no government, from Russia, to Ukraine, to the United States, has a plan of “real action” to deal with climate change. Recent estimates suggest that $100 billion is needed each year to reverse global warming, a number which has never been achieved. Yet tens of billions of dollars have been been provided to fund the Ukrainian military’s purchase of advanced weapons from the US and its allies needed to fight against Russia. And that is nothing to say of the trillions that have been used to bail out US banks and corporations since 2008.

These staggering sums being spent on war and bailouts did not stop John Kerry, former Democratic presidential candidate and current Special Presidential Envoy for Climate under Biden, from stating Tuesday that “No government in the world has enough money to affect the transition.” He continued, “The entity that could help the most is the private sector with the right structure.”

Kerry, in two sentences, expresses the orientation of the entire capitalist social order. There is no money to deal with the vast pressing social problems of the day—climate change, social inequality, COVID-19—but unending sums for war and the enrichment of the financial oligarchy. And any initiatives that are set up to ostensibly deal with these issues must be subordinated to private profit.

Cuba’s Victory at the UN

W.T. Whitney Jr.

Photo by Yerson Olivares

For the thirtieth consecutive year nations of the world have voted overwhelmingly to approve a Cuban resolution calling for an end to the U.S. economic blockade. The most recent vote, on November 3, had 185 nations favoring the resolution, the United States and Israel opposing, and Ukraine and Brazil not voting.

Cuba has withstood the blockade for 60 years, a duration equal to one-fourth of the years of U.S. national existence.  Cuba has lacked the resources and powerful allies that would have been necessary to force the U.S. government to backtrack.

Cuba has relied on ideals, high principles, and supportive consensus, as epitomized by the yearly votes in the General Assembly. These majorities have attested to the blockade’s cruelty, immorality, unfairness, and illegality under international law. An opportunistic and powerful U.S. ruling class does not budge.

The U.S. blockade won’t end soon because the Helms Burton Law of 1996 put that decision into the hands of Congress, where U.S. policy on Cuba is on automatic pilot.  The blockade might disappear if outcomes envisioned by U.S. State Department official Lester Mallory in April 1960 have their intended effect. The U.S. government regards the blockade as a tool for achieving “economic dissatisfaction and hardship,” “hunger,” “desperation,” and “overthrow of government.”

All but the last of these policy goals are being realized. What follows here is a look at U.S. methods, testimony from Cuba, and evidence provided by the Cuban president that corruption is accentuating. Pervasive corruption, assumed to be the product of desperation and destabilization, may signal that crisis is at hand in Cuba.

Disruption

At a press conference on October 19, Cuban foreign minister Bruno  Rodríguez explained operational aspects of the blockade leading to the Mallory results. He noted that Cuba had suffered the loss between August 2021 and February 2022 of $3.8 billion, which “is a historical record for such a short time.”  Losses over six decades amount to $154 billion. With inflation, that’s $1.39 trillion.

The U.S. government designates Cuba as a terrorist-sponsoring nation. That means foreign companies and financial institutions face severe U. S. penalties if they handle dollars in transactions with Cuba. Dollars are the principal currency used in international monetary transactions. As a result, Cuba’s income from exports is reduced and international loans are largely unavailable.

Without much money to pay for imports, Cuba experiences shortages of food, spare parts, raw materials for drug manufacture, and all kinds of supplies and equipment. Rodríguez mentioned long lines and “anxiety among the population.” The blockade affects “every Cuban family” and the government cannot “guarantee medicines that an ill person requires.”

“Cuba can in no way … buy technologies, equipment, spare parts, digital technologies or software containing more than 10 per cent US components.” Other difficulties aggravate adverse blockade effects, among them: inflation, hurricane damage, lingering effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, and fire recently at oil storage facilities in Matanzas that decimated fuel reserves.

Blockade restrictions “gravely hinder our fuel purchases by making them … [up to] 50 percent more expensive.” Electrical power generation “is going through an extremely serious situation” because of unavailable replacement parts. Blackouts bedevil Cubans every day and restoration of electrical power in hurricane-damaged Pinar del Rio has been slow.

First hand report

Richard Grassl, friend and political colleague, visited Cuba recently with his wife, who is Cuban. He recalls conversations touching on shortages, distress, and uncertainty as to who or what is responsible.

10/16      Talked to first cousin of wife …  He told me I will learn the real Cuba this time.  He says not to believe what the Cuban government says about the US blockade.  There are many lies.  My wife’s nephew says the economy is “nothing. Many Cubans think the blockade [itself] is secondary to issues of daily living like [shortages of] food, medicine, water and lack of opportunity because there is no money.

10/17     I asked him from where most food for Cubans comes from and about food imports.  He said most food comes from Miami.  [President] Diaz-Canel gets some blame for the situation.

10/18    There is not much social distancing as the times are urgent.  Food, consumer goods, fuel, construction materials are very expensive.  Eggs are $8USD / dozen.  The exchange rate is 80 CUP / USD which is 4x higher than before Covid-19.   No one talks about the blockade.  The problem is scarcity of money.

10/19     I talked with a friend.  He says the US has so much and we have so little.  He asks why cannot there be trade?  …  At several bodegas and public markets, many people, perhaps hundreds, waited all day for cooking oil, rice, beans, chicken etc. at prices subsidized by government.

10/20     I talked to another cousin from Matanzas who said the economy is “on the floor”.  It is very hard with little money.  A round trip from Matanzas to Havana (500 km) was $500 CUP/person one way or $2000 round trip for both persons by bus.

Corruption and blockade

Former Cuban President Fidel Castro delivered a wide-ranging speech on November 17, 2005 notable for highlighting corruption: “This country can self-destruct; this Revolution can destroy itself, but they can never destroy us; we can destroy ourselves, and it would be our fault.”

Similarly, President Miguel Díaz-Canel on October 26 convoked a meeting of Cuba’s Council of Ministers at which a plan was unveiled with “more than 40 directives aimed at confronting crime, corruption, and lack of social discipline.” The report appearing on the presidential website characterized the President’s remarks as “a forthright analysis of illegalities, stealing and price-gouging imposed on a population with no economic means.”

Both earlier and now, the toxic mixture of shortages of goods and money has led to stealing and lawlessness. It’s a destabilizing process entirely consistent with how the blockade was supposed to operate. President Díaz-Canel’s words are useful here for documenting the existence and reach of corruption.

He explained to the Council that, “neither the Party or the government can remain on the sidelines of what’s happening in society.” Therefore, “we must not allow those who neither work nor contribute, and are beyond the law, to acquire more and have more possibilities for life than do those who actually contribute. We have it backwards now and are breaking with the ideas of socialism.”

Díaz-Canel pointed out that, “Many of these things are the result of us not attending to the powers and responsibilities assigned to our institutions.” [Corrupt activities] “take place in full view of the Party centers, the administrative institutions, and leadership bodies.”

The President asserted that anyone able to work who is not doing so is not so vulnerable as to require “welfare assistance.” In fact, “the building of socialism does not depend upon a welfare system. What we have to seek out, instead, is social transformation.”

Díaz-Canel observed that, “We don’t do away with taxes here so that the rich get richer and poorer people have less. Here, we do have taxes so that those who have more give something up so that those who have less are better off.”  “That’s socialism,” he explained.

While celebrating another Cuban victory in the UN General Assembly, supporters of revolutionary Cuba, we think, ought to recognize that

the survival of Cuba’s government is now at unprecedented risk, thanks to the U.S. blockade. U.S. supporters of Cuba’s revolutionary project would do well to elevate actions of resistance against their own government to a new level, with new intensity. That’s because realities in Cuba appear to have altered, ominously so.

Already new mobilization may be underway. In the days prior to the General Assembly’s vote on November 3, dozens of rallies for ending the blockade took place in cities and towns throughout the United States (two of them in Maine, the author’s home state), with particularly big ones in Los Angeles, Portland Oregon; and New York. There, an impressive march took place between Times Square and the United Nations Plaza.

Fatigue emerges as key issue as US airline pilots reject contracts, authorize strike action

Claude Delphian

Southwest Airlines pilots picket outside the terminal at Dallas Love Field on Tuesday, June 21, 2022, in Dallas. [AP Photo/David Koenig]

A 72-hour span last week saw a series of votes by airline pilots which set the stage for a showdown with the US airlines. On Monday, 15,000 Delta Airlines pilots voted by 99 percent to authorize strike action. On Tuesday, pilots at United Airlines voted to reject a tentative agreement by 94 percent. On Wednesday, officials in the Allied Pilots Association (APA) at American Airlines voted down a new deal by a vote of 15–5.

These votes were a powerful sign of the determination of pilots and air crews to fight against worsening conditions. Pilots and flight attendants also held informational pickets at airports across the United States earlier this year. Around the world, flight crews went on strike recently at Eurowings in Germany and Ryanair in Spain.

One of the main factors driving pilots’ opposition is the issue of fatique. During the month of June, there were quadruple the usual number of fatigue-related pilot call-ins at American Airlines. Pilots are directly responsible for the safety of flights and are obligated to report to work fit for duty, which means using their own sick leave if they feel they cannot perform their duties up to standard on a particular day.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) requires a minimum rest period of nine hours between shifts for pilots, who are also limited to 30 hours of flight time per week. But when the commute to work, meals and other life requirements are added into the equation, this leaves little time for uninterrupted sleep and sabotages workers’ abilities to follow their FAA-mandated training to avoid fatigue on their own time.

For pilots, the duty period can range between 12 and 14 hours, with most flight times during that period lasting eight or nine hours. The FAA says that it strictly enforces these regulations in order to “ensure continued safety,” but adhering continuously to the bare minimum for rest periods is still wearing on aviation workers’ abilities to work safely.

Dennis Trajer, the communications chair at the Allied Pilots Association (APA) union at American Airlines, says that pilots across the industry are far more fatigued than previously because they are being “recklessly utilized” by airlines looking to capitalize on increased travel demand after remaining COVID-19 restrictions were lifted by governments around the world.

Trajer told Fox Business that airlines are scheduling more flights than they have trained and current flight crews, which increases fatigue, sick calls, and therefore delayed flights or outright cancellations. On some days in June, there were ten times the usual number of sick calls, which Trajer states is a “warning sign that the system is under unnecessary duress.”

“This reckless utilization decreases reliability and can narrow the margin of safety,” Trajer said. “We are holding the line on the margin of safety, but a functional safety culture should not have such pressures.”

According to collected reports made to the Aviation Safety Action Program (ASAP), the number of fatigue reports “have been climbing exponentially” since the summer of 2021 when airline travel returned to normal and there have been “no meaningful attempts by management to mitigate them.”

“Our contention is that our schedules shouldn’t drive such a large increase in fatigue calls, nor should our pilots be the absolute last line of defense in the fatigue error chain,” said Southwest Airlines Pilots Association (SWAPA) President Casey Murray. “Safety shouldn’t fall upon an already overworked pilot to recognize the level of his/her fatigue.”

In a letter to Southwest Airlines management in April, SWAPA said that the rates of tired pilots spiked by 600 percent in October 2021 and rose again by 330 percent in March 2022. “April is already setting fatigue records. Fatigue, both acute and cumulative, has become Southwest Airlines’ number-one safety threat.” Pilot fatigue causes “impaired judgment, lack of concentration, reduced in-flight attention, and heightened emotional activity leading to poor cognitive processing, along with decreased reaction time and slower hand-eye coordination, to name a few,” warned the letter.

Scheduling issues such as reassignments are contributing to pilots’ exhaustion. “Our Pilots have been unable to obtain hotel rooms for proper rest following excessive reassignments and the resultant delays.” There were more than 100 documented cases over the past year that pilots “were not provided with the federally mandated minimum rest opportunity.”

According to SWAPA, reassignment rates increased by 85 percent and have risen even further by between 30 percent and 50 percent in 2022. “Since last summer, our Pilots have lost more than 18,000 days off when the Company forced them to work on a day when they weren’t previously scheduled.” “This constant failure leads to delays, resulting in more reassignments.”

Delta’s Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA) spokesperson, Evan Baach, pointed to a “record amount of overtime” by the airline’s pilots, with more overtime flown in 2022 than in 2018 and 2019 combined.

One pilot told CNN that he began experiencing heightened fatigue mid-flight in November. “Both of us were yawning and eye rubbing halfway through our 6+ hour flight… I was physically unable to keep up,” despite having “appropriate, average sleep the night before.”

“But ‘we’ press on—don’t we?” the pilot said. “Our threats are threefold of the pre-COVID environment. We’ve been facing delays, shortages, planning and staffing issues that are NOT being taken into account in building schedules. Why? Because we pilots are counted upon to make it work.”

Massive job losses for workers, tens of billions in bailouts for the airlines

With the passage of the CARES Act in 2020, airlines received $54 billion in federal bailouts ostensibly to avoid mass layoffs and bankruptcy. Despite this federal aid, airlines began to massively furlough and lay off workers during the time when air travel was at a historic low. These bailouts were supposed to “ensure they were ready for the recovery by retaining and keeping pilots trained [and] current, so they could fly immediately as demand returned,” Trajer said.

In North America, there is a pilot shortage of about 8,000 trained and current pilots that is expected to worsen over the next decade. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, 188 communities have already lost over 25 percent of their air service, according to Regional Airline Association CEO Faye Malarkey Black. Boeing described the demand for pilots in its latest Pilot and Technician Outlook report saying 602,000 pilots will be needed for international commercial flights with 128,000 needed just for the North American demand.

The pilot shortage and fatigue issues go hand in hand. They also are not limited to the United States. In August there was a report that two Ethiopian Airlines pilots missed their scheduled landing because they both fell asleep at the same time. They only awoke when an alarm went off as the autopilot disengaged after they passed their destination.

Staffing issues in the industry are not limited to pilots. Air traffic controllers for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) are at their lowest staffing numbers in decades, with mandatory six-day workweeks being the norm in most facilities across the US.

The lessons of the railroad struggle

The conditions which pilots face are strikingly similar to those faced by rail crews in the United States. Rail conductors and engineers across all major railroads are on call 24/7 and experience constant schedule uncertainty which leaves workers unable to schedule doctors’ appointments or spend time with family. Both industries are under the jurisdiction of the anti-worker Railway Labor Act, which severely curtails workers’ democratic right to strike, and both pilots and rail workers have been working under an old contract for three years. As with the pilots, engineers voted by 99.5 percent to authorize strike action, but instead have been presented with a sellout contract by the rail unions which resolves none of their demands.

The experience of railroaders is a serious warning for pilots. While railroaders are unanimous in their determination to fight for better working conditions, they face not only a ruthless management but a corrupt union bureaucracy, working hand-in-glove with Washington to force through a substandard contract and prevent strike action. Even though the terms of the Railway Labor Act were exhausted on September 16, the rail unions have continued to keep workers on the job under endless “status quo” extensions while deliberately ceding the initiative to Congress by delaying until after the midterm elections. There can be no doubt that similar behind-the-scenes talks between pilots union officials and the White House are already underway.

Ukrainian officials discuss Kiev evacuation as danger of total power loss grows

Andrea Peters

The mayor of Kiev, Vitali Klitschko, warned Sunday that Ukraine’s capital city could lose all electricity, heat and water during the rapidly-approaching winter. Facing the prospect of a total blackout as temperatures drop well below freezing, officials have drawn up plans to evacuate the city’s population, which stood at nearly 3 million before the war.

A tower of the National Bank of Ukraine is seen during a blackout in Kiev, Ukraine, Sunday, Nov. 6, 2022. [AP Photo/Andrew Kravchenko]

Concerned about ensuing panic as news of the preparations, reported in the New York Times, spreads, Roman Tkachuk, head of Kiev’s Municipal Security Department, has since insisted that mass evacuation is just one of many scenarios that city administrators are working on and there are no immediate plans to implement such a measure. He warned against believing “misinformation.”

In a recent on-the-air telethon, however, executive director of DTEK, one of Ukraine’s largest energy investors, told listeners that a total loss of power to Kiev was entirely possible and it would necessarily raise the need for an evacuation of at least a “certain part of the population.” The regional head of the Kiev area made similar comments a week earlier.

Nothing more has been revealed as to how the Ukrainian government intends to move millions of people out of Kiev under conditions in which neither a traffic light is on nor a train moving. As for where it intends to send them, this is also unclear.

The country’s capital is currently experiencing, along with six other regions, rolling blackouts, as 40 percent of Ukraine’s energy supply has been damaged or knocked offline. In the event of total loss of all electricity, its water and sewage systems will also fail.

In his recent remarks, Mayor Klitschko told the capital city’s residents that they should stock up on warm clothes and power banks, the latter of which can cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars. The former boxer turned right-wing politician also advised people to make preparations to stay with friends and family outside of Kiev who are not dependent on the country’s power grid and have wells and wood-burning stoves.

Kherson, a port city in Ukraine’s south that is currently occupied by Russian forces, lost all utilities over the weekend. Moscow claims that Kiev, which is preparing an offensive to retake the city, attacked power lines and a nearby dam. Russian officials say that service has now been partially restored.

Bakhnut, in the eastern region of Donetsk, where heavy fighting is occurring, is also without water and electricity. Thousands of others trapped in the warzone are trying to survive in blown-out buildings, improvising makeshift stoves to stay warm. CEO of Ukrainian energy supplier Yasno, Sergei Kovalenko, told the press that Ukraine is facing a projected 32 percent power deficit.

In his nightly address on Sunday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who has now perfected the look of the brave and the innocent, insisted that the desperate situation facing millions of his countrymen is simply the result of Russian “terrorism.” “We must get through this winter and be even stronger in the spring than now,” he declared.

Moscow’s criminal, desperate and increasingly savage assault on Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure, however, is the logical outcome of the US-NATO use of Ukraine as a cat’s paw in its bid to draw Russia into an unwinnable and disastrous war. While Washington and its allies have found tens of billions of dollars of military funding and weaponry to transfer to Kiev, so far a coalition of 17 EU countries has only managed to come up with 500 generators for the country. The resources necessary to ensure the survival of tens of millions of Ukrainians over the course of the winter are simply, it would seem, unavailable.

Spanish daily El Pais published a story on November 6 detailing conditions in Irpin, a town of just over 65,000 outside of Kiev. Mayor Oleksandr Markushin told the newspaper that his city is in urgent need of repairs to roofs, doors and windows, water-pumping facilities and building foundations. It also needs generators. Schools and medical facilities cannot operate. Residents are desperately awaiting help from Kiev. In two weeks time, they hope a charity will deliver some aid.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) predicts that another 800,000 Ukrainians will flee the country this winter due to the energy crisis. They will join the ranks of the 7.6 million who have already left. Of these, according to a recent UNHCR survey, 68 percent are “not yet economically active” and 47 percent are reliant on “assistance programs as their primary source of income.” Nonetheless, Western countries are cutting benefits for refugees.

Poland, which has taken in 1.5 million Ukrainians since the outbreak of the war, just announced that as of January 2023 those seeking shelter in the country will be required to cover half of the cost of their accommodations, which are currently being funded by the government. In May 2023, they will be on the line for 75 percent of the total.

In addition, Ukrainian migrants must sign up for a PESEL number, which will allow the Polish government to electronically track their movements back and forth across the country’s borders. Because various forms of state-sponsored support are tied to when a person entered Poland, the system will allow officials in Warsaw to limit refugees’ eligibility on the basis of the fact that they previously exited the country.

Further west, Britain’s “Homes for Ukraine” program, which pays families £350 a month to house refugees, is falling apart and may be axed entirely by the right-wing Tory government. Hosts initially signed up to take in Ukrainian refugees for six months, and this deadline is now approaching. However, the vast majority of people have nowhere else to go because officials throughout the country are unable to find new families to shelter them. One government representative from South Cambridgeshire told the Guardian on October 30: “I have about 1,600 people on my housing list at the moment and some of the London boroughs have tens of thousands.”

Several thousand Ukrainian refugees in Britain are now reportedly homeless. Currently, there are discussions in London about permanently halting “Homes for Ukraine,” as part of a massive austerity program the government of Rishi Sunak—net worth $800 million—is preparing.

On Monday, the Irish Ambassador to Ukraine, Therese Healy, told Ukrainians wishing to seek shelter in Ireland that they could not expect a government welcome. “I wish to highlight that available state-provided accommodation is now very restricted,” she warned. The situation, Healy claimed, exists “despite our very best efforts and wishes.”

In Germany, local officials in the eastern city of Cottbus recently told Deutsche Welle that the federal government has failed to fund any of the ongoing costs associated with providing long-term accommodations, education and medical care for a high-need population. There are not enough interpreters. Health care facilities are overloaded.

Elsewhere in Germany, according to the New York Times, sports stadiums are still being used as housing centers. There are few other available solutions and little money. “Corona isn’t over. We have an energy crisis. Our population is consumed by economic troubles,” Zeno Danner, the district administrator of Konstanz, told the newspaper, which described the crisis as posing “nettlesome” questions.

In New Zealand, the situation for Ukrainian refugees is so bad that charities working with the population report that many are considering and making plans to return to the war-battered country. Refugees are struggling to make ends meet, as well as to find medical care and English-language classes, problems widely reported everywhere. Of the mere 4,000 visas that the New Zealand government promised to grant Ukrainians, just 1,000 have been issued and only 400 people have arrived shoreside.

For its part, the United States has limited special visas for Ukrainian refugees to 100,000. Individuals must have a family member in the US already who is willing to sponsor them and prove that they will pose no financial burden on the state.

Mass layoffs in tech spread to Meta, corporate parent of Facebook

Kevin Reed

Meta Platform, Inc., parent of the popular social media platform Facebook, will begin mass layoffs on Wednesday in what will likely be the biggest of the growing job cuts among high tech firms.

A report in the Wall Street Journal on Monday, based on sources familiar with the impending layoffs, said that “many thousands of employees” among the Meta staff of 87,000 will lose their jobs this week. Representatives from the $86 billion global tech monopoly, based in Menlo Park, California, declined to comment on the report.

This Oct. 23, 2019, file photo shows Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifying before a House Financial Services Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington. [AP Photo/Andrew Harnik]

The layoffs will be the largest staff reduction ever in the 18-year-old company founded and still run by billionaire Mark Zuckerberg. The news comes after several recent reports that Meta was already making job cuts. Meta owns Facebook (2.9 billion users), Instagram (2 billion users) and WhatsApp (2 billion users), the number one, three and four most popular social media platforms in the world.

During an earnings call with investors on October 26, Zuckerberg said the company would “focus our investments on a small number of high priority growth areas,” and that means “most of our teams will stay flat or shrink over the next year.” Zuckerberg said Meta would end 2023 “either roughly the same size, or even a slightly smaller organization.”

In mid-September, the Wall Street Journal reported that Meta had begun “quietly nudging out a significant number of staffers” in a drive to cut costs by 10 percent. The report said that the cuts were “expected to be a prelude to deeper cuts,” and that the majority of the cost reduction would “come from reduced employment,” according to unnamed individuals familiar with the plans.

As far back as July, Zuckerberg told employees during a call that the company was facing one of the “worst downturns that we’ve seen in recent history” and that workers should prepare to do more work with fewer resources. He added, “Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here.”

The mass layoffs at Meta/Facebook follow by several days the jobs massacre at Twitter in which half the staff of 7,500 was eliminated by the billionaire and wealthiest man in the world Elon Musk shortly after he assumed private ownership of the microblogging platform. The layoffs were precipitated by a previously existing financial crisis that was exacerbated when advertisers began pulling out of Twitter after Musk took over the company and fired its executive leadership and board of directors.

According to a Crunchbase News summary, 45,000 tech jobs had been eliminated before the cuts at Twitter were announced. Among the tech firms to announce layoffs recently include the rideshare company Lyft (650 jobs or 13 percent), payment processor Stripe (1,120 jobs or 14 percent), Shopify (1,000 jobs or 10 percent), Snap (cutting 1,000 jobs or 20 percent) and Coinbase (1,100 jobs or 18 percent).

Along with Meta, the larger tech corporations Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Google parent Alphabet have announced a combination of cost-cutting programs and hiring freezes. These five companies combined have lost approximately $3 trillion on the stock market since the beginning of the year and quarterly earnings reports last week drove their collective share values down by $218 billion last Friday alone.

Deliberately driving up unemployment to beat back rising demands for wage increases, the economic slowdown is being brought on by the Federal Reserve. The Fed’s six consecutive interest rate increases, including another 0.75 percentage point rise on November 2, is rapidly impacting the tech industries. These are among the first sections of the working class to be hit by what is coming throughout the rest of the economy in the coming months.

According to an assessment in the Journal on October 28: “Tech companies that enjoyed strong growth in the early days of the pandemic are feeling the effects of a new reality of high inflation, rising interest rates, currency headwinds and other issues on their income statements. The slowdown in personal-computer sales and digital advertising seen earlier this year appears to be spreading to areas such as cloud computing that were thought to be resistant to economic weakness.”

The response of the financial oligarchy to the situation is to press the demand for tech workers to pay the price. Zuckerberg and the leadership of Meta are following a script laid out by investor and Altimeter Capital Chief Executive Brad Gerstner.

Gerstner, whose firm has $18 billion under management including 2.5 million Meta shares, issued an open letter to Zuckerberg on October 24 in which he said the company should slash its staff and cut back on its technology development plans such as the much-touted metaverse project.

The investor called for a reduction of the Meta staff by 20 percent or a devastating 17,000 employees. Referring to the change in the borrowing environment, Gerstner wrote, “Like many other companies in a zero-rate world—Meta has drifted into the land of excess—too many people, too many ideas, too little urgency.”

He continued, “It is a poorly kept secret in Silicon Valley that companies ranging from Google to Meta to Twitter to Uber could achieve similar levels of revenue with far fewer people.”

A measure of the ruthlessness of the billionaire elite in demanding the destruction of jobs in tech industries was the fact that the value of Meta stock rose by 3 percent on Monday following the Wall Street Journal report. The shares have lost more than 70 percent of their value so far in 2022.

John S. Knight Journalism Fellowship at Stanford University 2023/2024

Application Deadline: 1st December, 2022 11: 59 pm

Offered annually? Yes

Eligible Countries: All

To be taken at (country): Stanford University, USA

About the Award: A John S. Knight Journalism Fellowship has two primary components: Exploring and testing ideas for addressing a problem in journalism that is important to you, and identifying mindsets and tools needed to become a more resilient leader and change agent.

We are seeking fellows who:

• Are fiercely committed to the future of journalism, in all of its messy uncertainty
• Aren’t satisfied with the “way things have always been done”
• Are eager to grow as journalists, as leaders, as people – they believe their best work and best selves are in front of them
• Embrace diversity
• Are excited about the prospect of being coached through a deep examination of their mindsets and perceptions of themselves and their place in journalism
• Like the idea of being “in fellowship” with a cohort of other journalists from varied professional and personal backgrounds
• Are ready to set aside current work responsibilities and dig into a 10-month journey of professional and personal exploration.

During the 10-month fellowship, we provide our JSK Fellows individualized coaching, a cohort of their peers and guidance that sparks professional and personal transformation. In addition, fellows will have the time and freedom to tap into and explore the resources of this world-class university. We are especially interested in empowering those who are working to serve underrepresented communities.

Type: Fellowship

Eligibility:

• U.S. and international journalists with digital-native and legacy news organizations, independent journalists, journalism entrepreneurs and journalism innovators.
• Applicants need to have at least five years of full-time professional work experience. We do not require applicants to have a college degree, or experience in traditional newsrooms.
• We generally do not accept applications from people working in public information or public relations jobs, for trade and house newsletters or magazines, for government agencies, or in academic positions.
• Our fellowship does not fund or support book projects or reporting projects, and we are not a business accelerator.

Selection Criteria: Applicants must demonstrate their ability and desire to work collaboratively and respectfully with people with a range of ideas and perspectives.

Number of Awardees: 20

Value of Fellowship:

• During our 10-month fellowship, we provide JSK Fellows with individual coaching, tailored workshops on leadership, a cohort of their peers, and guidance that sparks professional and personal transformation.
• Fellows also have the time and freedom to explore the resources of a world-class university. We help fellows to develop the leadership resilience and mindsets needed to effectively lead and navigate change for decades to come.
• JSK Fellows are welcomed as members of a global community working to improve journalism and gain new friendships, professional connections, and skills that will continue beyond the fellowship. We invest in each of our fellows as journalists — and as people — for life.
• We provide a stipend of $95,000, plus a housing supplement to help with your rent. In addition, for fellows with children up through high school graduation, we provide an additional supplemental payment. We also cover the cost of Stanford tuition for fellows and Stanford health insurance for fellows, spouses and children. We also help fellows find rental housing near campus.

Duration of Fellowship: 10 months (September to June)

How to Apply: Apply via link below

Visit Fellowship Webpage for details