Thyssenkrupp Steel: IG Metall union promotes sale to Indian billionaire

Dietmar Gaisenkersting

Thyssenkrupp coking plant and blast furnace in Schwelgern in northern Duisburg [Photo by Rainer Halama / wikimedia / CC BY-SA 3.0]

Shortly after the IG Metall union and its works council representatives pushed through the elimination of almost one in two jobs at Thyssenkrupp Steel Europe (TKSE), the Indian corporation Jindal International Steel submitted a takeover bid. The trade union apparatus immediately welcomed it. Their concern is not the long-term safeguarding of jobs, as they claim, but solely their own privileges.

The offer does not come directly from the listed Jindal Steel company, but from the unlisted Mauritius-based holding Jindal Steel International. Finance daily Handelsblatt reports: “This company is active in several countries, but its financial position is difficult to assess.”

Jindal sought to win favour in Duisburg—TKSE’s largest site—with grand promises. The direct reduction plant in Duisburg is to be completed, and an additional €2 billion invested in electric arc furnaces. “From Oman, green sponge iron pellets could be delivered to Duisburg to feed the arc furnaces to be built,” enthused Jürgen Kerner, second chairman of IG Metall (IGM) and deputy chairman of Thyssenkrupp AG’s supervisory board.

Naveen Jindal’s company produced 8.1 million tonnes of steel last year, according to the World Steel Association, generating revenue of around €4.8 billion and a profit margin of 19 percent—significantly more profitable than Thyssenkrupp Steel Europe. With 10.3 million tonnes of steel, Thyssenkrupp achieved revenues of €10.7 billion, but with a profit margin of less than 3 percent.

Reports suggest that Jindal initially wants to take a 60 percent stake and later acquire all of TKSE. Czech billionaire Daniel Křetínský, who holds 20 percent of the company and wanted to increase this to 50 percent, has not yet commented on Jindal’s offer. Thyssenkrupp’s steel division is valued at €1.2 billion, but pension liabilities most recently stood at €2.5 billion, which Jindal, like Křetínský, will not take on without compensation. It is therefore assumed that parent company Thyssenkrupp AG will pay extra to rid itself of the steel division.

The takeover of Thyssenkrupp’s steel division is part of the expansion strategy of the Indian billionaire, who since last year has also sat in parliament for the Hindu-chauvinist ruling BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Last year, Jindal Steel International acquired 100 percent of Vitkovice Steel in the Czech Republic. Earlier this year, an attempt to buy the Italian steelmaker Acciaierie d’Italia failed. Besides its plants in India, Jindal also operates mines and factories in the Middle East (especially Oman), Australia and Africa. The group also maintains close business relations with Russia, purchasing coking coal and exporting steel there. The German government, the driving force behind the escalation of the war against Russia, will therefore intervene in the negotiations. The nearly €3 billion in subsidies for “green steel” from the federal and North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) state governments, of which about €1 billion has already been paid, will also be on the table.

Jindal Steel had expressed interest in buying TKSE several years ago. Talks are said to have collapsed by 2023 at the latest over differences on price, influence rights and site guarantees. Naveen Jindal has evidently prepared his offer more carefully this time. He is said to have been in the Ruhr region several times, most recently a few days ago, to present his bid. He reportedly wrote personal letters to IG Metall functionaries on supervisory boards and works councils. Because he pledged to maintain German “co-determination,” giving union functionaries well-paid posts on various committees, the trade union bureaucrats immediately pledged him their support.

On the same day Jindal publicly announced his takeover bid, IG Metall issued a press release in which IGM Deputy Kerner declared, “The employee side is ready to participate constructively in the process.” Tekin Nasikoll, chairman of the Thyssenkrupp group works council, also saw the offer as a “positive signal.” Nasikoll reported, “In a first personal letter to me, the owner family declared their intention to invest in our sites and emphasised the importance of the culture of co-determination.”

In an interview with the Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung a few days later, Kerner added, “It is also positive that Jindal has committed to building the DRI plant in Duisburg and to industrial co-determination, thus taking up the issues of conflict in recent months.”

Kerner believed the offer had been well prepared, “That it comes two weeks after the positive membership vote on restructuring is no coincidence. Because now it is clear that employees, despite cutbacks, are prepared to go along this difficult but necessary path.”

In other words, IG Metall and the works council have, with the billions in cuts contained in the so-called “social contract,” made the steel division ripe for takeover.

So when Kerner, Nasikoll and Co. now talk in connection with the Jindal offer about safeguarding sites and jobs, it is a lie. With the “social contract,” IG Metall demonstrated its indifference to the workforce; IGM enshrined the destruction of 11,000 of 27,000 jobs, along with painful wage cuts for the remaining workers.

There is no “red line” for the IG Metall apparatus and its works council reps when it comes to wages and jobs. But they cry out immediately when “co-determination” is at stake.

What IG Metall calls “co-determination” is in reality the legalised corruption of the union bureaucracy in Germany. By law, trade union officials and the entire IGM apparatus are royally rewarded by the corporations for acting as factory police. Supervisory boards are half-filled with trade union representatives, who receive high five- to six-figure sums annually. Jürgen Kerner received €186,500 in the 2023/24 financial year, while then IGM secretary Markus Grolms, who even chaired the Thyssenkrupp supervisory board for three months in 2018, received €167,500 that year. Works council chairs also receive high, mostly six-figure salaries.

It can become really lucrative when one of them subsequently becomes HR director. IG Metall has the right of nominating this post and rewards its functionaries with these lucrative positions, which bring millions in salary and perks. Thus Markus Grolms became HR director at TKSE from 2020 to January 2025, raking in millions. While Grolms now sits on the supervisory board of Deutsche Edelstahlwerke, he was succeeded as HR director at TKSE by Dirk Schulte, son of former Thyssenkrupp Steel boss and Dieter Schulte, chairman of the German Confederation of Trade Union (DGB).

Most lucrative of all has been Oliver Burkhard’s career. The former IG Metall NRW district secretary rose via the HR directorship at Thyssenkrupp (annual salary over €1 million) to CEO of the arms manufacturer Thyssenkrupp Marine Systems (annual salary up to €4.5 million, or €375,000 per month).

That is why IG Metall has for years insisted on so-called “framework agreements” in every change or sale. When Thyssenkrupp Steel was to merge with Indian steel group Tata Steel in 2017, IG Metall and the works council supported cutting at least 2,000 jobs in return for “saving” the co-determination setup. Shortly thereafter, Grolms initiated the first framework agreement, later extended under Martina Merz. Like her predecessor Guido Kerkhoff, Merz was tasked with breaking up the group on behalf of shareholders and turning it into a kind of holding company. What Merz failed to achieve is now being pursued by Miguel Lopez at Thyssenkrupp.

Lopez is now supposed to safeguard “co-determination” and extend the framework agreement that expires this month. But IG Metall is keeping its campaign on a low flame. The last thing the union and works council apparatus want is a broad mobilisation by the workers.

The disgraceful role of the union bureaucrats is also evident in the current bargaining round for the 60,000 employees of the north-west German iron and steel industry. IG Metall made no percentage increase demand, merely asking that “real wages be secured.” The steel companies gratefully seized upon this invitation and offered a 1.2 percent wage and salary increase in the third round of negotiations. The union then offered to settle for a 2 percent pay rise, below the rate of inflation.

Australian working class faces rental affordability crisis

Vicki Mylonas

A recent report on the housing crisis in Australia reveals a broken system of soaring rental costs, stagnant or declining wages, and the evisceration of public and social housing.

Former-state owned inner-Sydney Millers Point public housing overshadowed by luxury units and office blocks.

The report, “Out of Reach: Australia’s Rental Crisis and the Decline of Social Housing” was produced by Everybody’s Home, a national campaign organisation dedicated to raising attention to the housing crisis. It is based on SQM Research Weekly Rents Index, which tracks advertised rent prices across the country.

The report shows, through a comparison of current rental prices with those of three and ten years ago, that renters are “being pushed to the brink” as housing costs are not only outpacing wages, but are increasing at an ever faster rate.

Every capital city has been impacted, with the steepest increases in places once considered affordable, such as Adelaide and Hobart.

On average across all capital cities, house rent prices have increased 59.8 percent to $858 per week over the past ten years. Units have seen an increase of 52.4 percent to $639 per week.

The sharpest increase has come in the past three years. Since 2022, house rents across the country have increased by an average of $205 per week, or 31.3 percent, and units by $168 (35.7 percent).

In the state capitals:

• Brisbane house rents have reached an average of $754 per week, up 23.9 percent since 2022 and 67.6 percent since 2015. Units have increased to $597.60 per week, a growth of 38.2 percent over three years and 62.9 percent in the past decade.

• The average weekly rent for houses in Perth is now $833.50, up 43.1 percent in three years and 64.4 percent in 10 years. Units have increased to $654.5 per week, a 51.7 percent rise in just the past three years.

• Adelaide house prices have skyrocketed to an average of $660.20 per week, from $365.20 in 2015. This is an 80.8 percent increase, with the last three years seeing a growth of 25.6 percent. Units have increased to $517.60, up 40.1 percent since 2022.

• In Melbourne, weekly house rents have increased to $756.10 per week on average, a rise of 58.3 percent in the last ten years, and 35.3 percent in the last three. The average price for units has increased by 34.6 percent since 2022, to $570.20 per week.

• Average rents in Sydney remain the highest, at $1,075.40 per week for a house, an increase of 55.3 percent in ten years and 32.7 percent in three. Unit prices have also seen a large increase in the last three years, up 36.4 percent to an average of $705.80 per week.

• In Hobart, weekly rent for houses now averages $569.40, a 75.7 percent increase from $324 in 2015.

In every case, these figures vastly outstrip the nominal growth of wages. An analysis of Wage Price Index data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) reveals that in the last ten years, wages have increased by an average of just 28.9 percent.

Since mid-2022, when the Labor government of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese scraped into power under the slogan of a “Better Future,” wages have increased by only 11.5 percent, while average rent prices have soared by more than one third.

Despite the Labor government’s fraudulent claims that they had improved wages and conditions during their first time in office, they have, in fact, presided over the worst fall in working-class living standards in decades. Both the federal and state Labor governments have spearheaded attacks on real wages and social spending.

Since the March quarter of 2022, for example, public sector wages have increased by an average of just 9.33 percent. This is a direct result of punitive wage caps imposed on health workers, educators and other public sector workers with the vital aid of the union bureaucracies, which have shut down numerous mass strikes and pushed through sell-out deals.

The sharp discrepancy between stagnant wages and soaring rental costs has led to ever higher levels of rental stress. A 2024 survey found that up to 70 percent of renting households fit this category, spending more than 30 percent of net income on rent.

The “Out of Reach” report notes that the sharp rises in rent have emerged amid a “national failure to grow and maintain social housing.” The Australian Institution of Health and Welfare (AIHW) has reported that the proportion of social housing to total housing has declined from 4.7 percent in 2013 to just 4.1 percent in 2024, with some experts stating that the current social housing stock is as low as 3.8 percent.

The federal Labor government has promoted its $10 billion Housing Australia Future Fund (HAFF) as the “single biggest investment to support social and affordable housing in more than a decade,” with the aim of building 30,000 “social and affordable” homes over five years. Even if fulfilled, this represents just 5 percent of the estimated affordable housing shortage of around 600,000.

However, after being forced to confess earlier this year that not a single new home had been built under the scheme, Labor now claims that a meagre 5,000 dwellings have been “completed,” more than three years after the HAFF was a central election promise. The government has not stated how many of these were newly built, rather than purchased and refurbished.

Meanwhile, state Labor governments are in fact worsening the housing crisis through the wholesale destruction of public housing.

This includes the planned tearing down of 44 public housing towers across Melbourne, the largest destruction of public housing in Australian history. This will force around 10,000 residents—representing the most vulnerable sections of the population, including migrant families, the elderly and disabled, as well as low-income workers—out of their homes and their communities. A similar operation is being carried out at Sydney’s Waterloo South housing estate.

The reason for the destruction of the public housing towers is twofold—to reduce state government debts through the selling or leasing of public land, and to drive working class residents out of prime inner-city locations to create lucrative new profit opportunities for the billionaire developers and investors.

No solution to the deepening housing crisis will be found through appeals to the governments that are overseeing it, or to any section of the political establishment. What is needed is a fight for a political alternative to capitalism, under which all human need—including for a decent place to live—is subordinated to the demands of big business.

Trump administration prepares mass firings if federal shutdown commences

Jacob Crosse

Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, right, with President Donald Trump in Washington. [AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson]

On Wednesday, the Trump White House issued a memo from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) which directs federal agencies to use the “opportunity” of a possible government shutdown to prepare mass firings.

The memo directs the heads of all the various federal agencies to prepare “Reduction in Force (RIF) notices for all employees in programs, projects, or activities (PPA)” that will run out of funding on October 1, do not have alternate sources of funding and which do not align with Trump’s “priorities.”

Importantly, the memo calls on agency heads to revise their Reduction in Force plans once a budget is passed to retain only the “minimal number of employees necessary to carry out statutory functions,” meaning that even if an agreement is reached before September 30 it is entirely likely there will still be mass layoffs.

Since Trump’s return to the White House just over nine months ago, federal workers have been consistently threatened and targeted with job cuts. Under the guidance of centi-billionaire oligarch Elon Musk and the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE), tens of thousands of government workers have already been laid off, fired or bought out this year. As of April 2025, Challenger, Gray & Christmas estimated that DOGE actions were responsible for 280,253 cuts involving federal workers and contractors, impacting 27 agencies.

Elon Musk gives a Nazi salute at an indoor presidential Inauguration event in Washington, Monday, January 20, 2025. [AP Photo]

It is unclear at this time how many workers could be fired if the government were to shut down. The president has enormous leeway to determine which agencies are “essential” for government functions. There is no doubt that the administration will continue with its “mass deportation operation,” authorizing the immigration Gestapo to continue to terrorize workers, while ordering many other agencies that provide social services for the working class and conduct regulatory actions over corporations to close their doors.

If there is a shutdown, Social Security benefits, which are mandatory, not discretionary spending, would continue to be sent out, but Social Security Administration offices, already facing layoffs and cuts, would likely be shuttered. The longer the shutdown continues, the greater the backlog grows for disability claims, appeals and other service requests since all “nonessential” staff will be furloughed.

Speaking from the White House on Thursday, Trump blamed Democrats for any potential shutdown. “This is all caused by the Democrats, they asked us to do something unreasonable,” he said. “This is what [Senate Minority Leader Chuck] Schumer wants, this is what the Democrats want.”

Trump and the Republicans are accusing Democrats of using the possibility of a shutdown to try and increase spending by “$1 trillion,” which they say is being used to fund healthcare for “illegal aliens.” In reality, the majority of the funding requested by Democrats would restore only partially the $800 billion in Medicaid cuts that were previously passed as a part of Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill.”

Earlier this month, the Republican-controlled House passed a continuing resolution to fund the government through to November 21, but the resolution needs seven votes from Democrats in the Senate to meet the 60-vote threshold to halt a filibuster. So far, only Democratic Senator John Fetterman has signaled he would be willing to vote to keep the government open.

There is mass anger among broad layers of the population over Trump’s attacks on federal and immigrant workers. Millions of people, including many who previously considered themselves Democrats, remain outraged that Schumer and nine other Democrats provided the necessary votes in March of this year to keep Trump’s government operating.

Following the passage of that spending bill in March, Trump and the Republicans continued to run roughshod over the democratic, economic and social rights of the working class while consolidating power within the executive branch. Armed with the funds supplied by the Democrats, the Trump administration continued the genocide in Gaza, launched illegal military strikes on Iran, illegally deployed US Marines to Los Angeles, and National Guard troops to Washington D.C. At the same time Trump withheld already appropriated funding for agencies and organizations such as the Public Broadcasting Service and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Democrats responded to Trump’s threats to carry out mass layoffs with their usual empty rhetoric. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said on Thursday that the Trump administration wants to “continue to fire civil servants who are hardworking, American taxpayers because throughout the year, they’ve been firing civil servants who are hardworking American taxpayers.”

Jeffries added, “We will not be intimidated by these threats coming from the most extreme parts of the Trump administration.” But he proposed no action at all.

Senator Schumer, oozing complacency, said Trump’s threats were “an attempt at intimidation.” He noted nonchalantly that Trump has “been firing federal workers since day one … this is nothing new and has nothing to do with funding the government.”

Lending credence to some of Trump’s pending layoffs, Schumer clarified that “unnecessary (emphasis added) firings will either be overturned in court or the administration will end up hiring the workers back, just like they did as recently as today.”

While a few hundred workers have successfully, for now, managed to regain their positions through court action, tens of thousands of workers have not and remain unemployed.

In response to Trump’s attacks on the federal workforce, the major government trade unions, following the lead of the Democratic Party, have done nothing but file lawsuits in court, even as workers continue to lose their jobs and previously won protections.

In a September 22 statement, American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) President Everett Kelley called on Congress, filled with millionaires and fascists, to do their “duty to fund government agencies on time.”

Kelley said Congress also had an “equally important duty to rein in an-out-control executive branch.” Far from taking any action against the aspiring dictator in the White House, Kelley urged “both parties to come to the negotiating table and find common ground on the key issues facing most Americans.”

Such a statement is politically bankrupt. Neither party represents the interests of workers: both Democrats and Republicans are parties of Wall Street and the Pentagon. Trump is openly preparing a dictatorship, carrying out mass firings of federal workers, and overseeing the mass round-up of immigrants, while the Democrats work to contain opposition and preserve the framework of capitalist rule, and above all, the military-intelligence apparatus. Kelley’s plea for “common ground” is an attempt to bind workers to their class enemies, suppressing the independent struggle that is necessary to defend jobs, wages and democratic rights.

Workers are not confronting a dispute between two parties that have policy differences, but a coordinated attack by both parties of big business in preparation for dictatorship. In preparation for the shutdown, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has summoned all the top military officers to the the capital next week for an unprecedented meeting to further plans for war against the American people.

While Trump slashes jobs, guts health care and escalates repression against his political enemies, the Democrats posture as defenders of democracy even as they vote for Trump’s war budgets, commemorate his fascist minion Charlie Kirk, and prostrate themselves before his supposedly unstoppable power. The demand for “common ground” is nothing but a demand for workers to submit to the destruction of their livelihoods.

New Zealand doctors strike amid worsening healthcare crisis

Tom Peters

Around 6,000 senior doctors and dentists employed in public hospitals across New Zealand held a two-day strike on September 23-24, in opposition to the National Party-led government’s proposal to slash their pay.

Pickets were held outside hospitals and MPs’ offices, including those of Health Minister Simeon Brown in Auckland and Finance Minister Nicola Willis in Wellington.

Striking doctors outside Health Minister Simeon Brown’s electorate office on September 23, 2025. [Photo: Association of Salaried Medical Specialists]

The doctors previously struck for 24 hours on May 1. This was followed by strikes by tens of thousands of nurses and high school teachers, who are facing similar attacks on their wages and conditions as a result of the government’s austerity measures.

The government is determined to impose a benchmark for wage reductions across the public and private sector, to make workers pay for the economic crisis and the record increase in military spending.

Doctors voted 85 percent in favour of the two-day strike after receiving a revised below-inflation pay offer from government agency Health NZ in July. According to the Association of Salaried Medical Specialists (ASMS), it amounted to a pay rise of 1.16 percent per annum for three years for 90 percent of union members.

This is well below the 2.7 percent inflation rate and the actual increase in the cost of living, which is even higher. Food prices increased 5 percent in the 12 months to July and power prices went up about 11 percent in the first half of the year.

Like nurses and other healthcare workers, doctors are also angry about the severe chronic workforce shortages across the public health system. The crisis of under-staffing has worsened under successive governments, including the 2017–2023 Labour Party-led government.

One psychiatrist in Wellington, Jeremy McMinn, told Radio NZ that even with two days on strike, he would still work 56 hours during the week, doing the work of three other doctors on one day.

Deralie Flower, a striking doctor in Auckland, told Stuff that low wages were pushing doctors to move to Australia. “In gynaecology, oncology, for example, we are desperately short of those surgeons in New Zealand. Our country is meant to have 16 and we currently have six,” she said.

Dr Peter Dean, from Hamilton, said the shortage of psychiatrists meant severely unwell prisoners who should be receiving hospital treatment were spending “months on end locked up in cells, defecating, urinating, sitting in their mess, and we have no beds to bring them into.”

At Christchurch Hospital, emergency medicine specialist Dr Dominic Fleischer told One News on September 22: “Patients are dying now, really, because of substandard care. There are patients dying in the waiting room, in corridors, or who leave and literally drop dead in the carpark. That’s all happened, that’s atrocious care… and it hurts the staff when things like that happen.”

The emergency department is constantly in “code red,” indicating severe overcrowding. It can take 45 minutes for ambulance workers to unload a patient when they arrive, Dr Fleischer said. “We need more resources. EDs across the country just need more doctors, more nurses and more space,” he said.

As he did during the last nurses strike, Health Minister Brown responded to the doctors’ strike by spreading disinformation about how much they are paid. He claimed that senior doctors received an average salary of $343,500 a year—a figure that actually includes a large amount of overtime, superannuation contributions and other benefits.

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon called for binding arbitration—letting the doctors’ dispute be adjudicated by a third party—which ASMS has so far rejected.

Luxon told the New Zealand Herald, “we are the biggest spending government ever, in the history of New Zealand, on healthcare.” This year’s budget, however, only increased health spending by 4.77 percent ($1.37 billion)—not enough to address the crisis of unmet need or keep pace with inflation and population growth.

Instead of investing in the public system, the government is promoting further privatisation by paying private hospitals to carry out tens of thousands of medical procedures.

Meanwhile, $12 billion has been allocated to military spending over four years in order to participate in US-led imperialist wars, including the looming conflict with China. The drive to double military spending, which is fully supported by the opposition Labour Party, will be paid for by working people, including through cuts to healthcare and other basic services.

The Labour Party has remained silent on the latest doctors’ strike. Senior doctors repeatedly went on strike in September 2023, during the Labour-Greens government, following an 11 percent pay cut in real terms over the previous two years. That dispute was settled by ASMS for an average pay rise of just 5.7 percent, which was just above the 5.6 percent inflation rate in that year to September.

The union is now calling for the National Party-led government to nearly double the value of its offer from $160 million to $300 million. This would likely mean an effective wage freeze against inflation and would not make up for many years of real pay cuts.

The disputes now unfolding involve more than 100,000 teachers and healthcare workers—over 3 percent of the workforce. Workers are moving to the left and are looking for a means to fight back against the incessant attacks on their jobs, wages and conditions.

The pro-capitalist union leadership, however, is keeping each dispute isolated, imposing strict limits on industrial action, and working with the government to reach sellout agreements that will do nothing to seriously address the crisis in schools and hospitals. The Public Service Association, the country’s biggest union, which has facilitated thousands of job cuts, also openly supports the government’s military spending.