East Timorese government promotes new “free trade zone”

John Lucas

East Timor last month formally launched a Special Economic Zone (SEZ) project, establishing autonomous free trade areas in parts of the impoverished country. The creation of the zone is the government’s first step towards establishing Timor as a cheap labour platform for transnational corporate investors.

The SEZ covers two areas of East Timor—the western enclave of Oecuse, which lies within the Indonesian territory of West Timor, and Atauro Island, 20 kilometres north of the capital Dili.

Atauro Island, a former prison centre under Portuguese and Indonesian rule that has a population of 8,000, is to be developed as a tourist and casino gambling centre. Oecuse is the focus of the project’s efforts to establish export-oriented manufacturing industries, including textiles, and cash-crop agriculture.

The Oecuse region is Timor’s most isolated and among its poorest. Most of its 60,000 people survive through subsistence farming. Unemployment is more than 50 percent, according to the government’s own figures, and the majority of young people are forced to migrate to Dili and other areas and seek work in the so-called informal sector of the economy, as street vendors, house maids, restaurant staff, and construction, transportation, and warehouse workers. Wages are as low as $US40 a month.

The government is now promoting Oecuse as a cheap labour, tax-free area for foreign investors, backed by planned multi-billion dollar public investments in pro-business infrastructure. Official documents have modelled the SEZ on free trade zones in countries like Bangladesh and Thailand.

Former Fretilin Prime Minister Mari Alkatiri is president of the “Authority for the Special Administrative Region of Oecuse.” In a speech delivered last July, he declared that the SEZ was based on a so-called “social market economy.” Alkatiri devoted part of his speech to denouncing “Marxist socialism” and “anti-capitalism [that] ignored that the market was the operative factor of economic development.” Underscoring the pro-business perspective behind the new free trade zone, Alkatiri concluded that what was required was “the expansion of the market to make it more attractive to investment,” adding that “none of this can be achieved with the welfare state.”

Alkatiri has since made clear that the SEZ is merely a pilot project that is to be followed by converting all of East Timor into a free trade zone. “All that I will do is so that Oecuse will be a reference for the whole country,” he told the Portuguese news agency Lusa last month.

Alkatiri is the leader of Fretilin, the main element of the resistance movement against the Indonesian military occupation of Timor between 1975 and 1999. He was elected the state’s first prime minister in 2002, only to be ousted four years later in a regime-change operation orchestrated by the Australian government, after being seen as too close to rival powers China and Portugal. Alkatiri has since joined hands with the prime beneficiary of the 2006 coup, Xanana Gusmão, while Fretilin now has four of its leading members in the ruling coalition led by Gusmão’s CNRT party. (See: “East Timorese prime minister resigns, ‘national unity’ government formed”)

Former bitter rivals within the Timorese ruling elite have come together on the basis of establishing the country as a cheap labour platform. What has emerged is a tragic lesson in the dead-end of bourgeois nationalism and the myth that the creation of an “independent” East Timor could advance the social interests and democratic rights of the working class and rural poor. In 2002, with the formal adoption of Timorese independence, the World Socialist Web Site noted: “‘Independence’ has become synonymous with attracting transnational investment, setting up free trade zones and meeting the dictates of the IMF and World Bank.”

As the unelected head of the SEZ, Alkatiri enjoys sweeping powers in Oecuse. The free trade zone law adopted by the Timorese parliament not only gives Alkatiri the right to create a separate taxation and regulatory system for Oecuse but also throws out the window existing constitutional restrictions on foreign nationals and overseas companies owning Timorese land. This law states: “The state guarantee the right to use and enjoyment of land for development of investment projects… The land is ceded to investors according to their respective needs and terms for duration of contracts, according to each type of economic activity.”

While the free trade zone projects are only now being developed, two SEZ offices have been set up, in Jakarta and Macau, as part of the government’s bid to woo corporate investors. Alkatiri has travelled around the world in the last two years, consulting with World Bank officials in Washington and meeting with potential investors in Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, South Korea, Portugal, Cuba, and China. In April last year, he accompanied Gusmão on a week-long tour of China, which included visits to that country’s Special Economic Zones.

According to Alkatiri, he received three investment proposals from Chinese companies that wanted to control the entire SEZ project. These were declined, however, with the government apparently looking to diversify investment in Oecuse. Alkatiri has nevertheless promoted “a banana plantation on an area of 400 hectares that would export to China and another for pineapple production on a 100 hectare plot.”

As outlined in the SEZ’s “master plan,” the first priority is to develop pro-investment infrastructure projects such as roads, bridges, power plant, water irrigation, telecommunications, airport and seaport facilities, and public transport. Total public investment by 2025 is projected at US$2.75 billion.

Indonesian and other companies are already working on the ground, constructing roads, bridges, irrigation facilities, and a 20-megawatt power plant. Negotiations are now underway with a Singaporean company to build a 50-room hotel, which should be ready by October.

It remains to be seen whether the government’s grandiose plans of a massive influx of investment ever eventuates. Official SEZ documents notably feature a range of identified risks to the project, including “political and social unrest” in Oecuse and a “global recession or a marked slowing down of growth in key markets such as China, India and the US” that would “greatly impact the feasibility of the [SEZ] initiative.”

The Timorese government is nevertheless pressing ahead, desperate to find some means of avoiding outright state bankruptcy as the massive Greater Sunrise oil and gas reserve remains undeveloped and the Bayu-Undan field, which currently funds more than 90 percent of total state revenue, is expected to run dry within a decade.

Mass layoffs shake India’s IT industry

Jai Sharma

Major Information Technology (IT) firms have laid off thousands of workers in India in recent months, throwing them onto the streets with meagre or no severance pay and giving a serious jolt to the notion, long-promoted by the Indian ruling class, that a job in this sector was a ticket to a secure and comfortable middle-class life.

The mass firings have been most widespread in the southern city of Bangalore, the so-called Silicon Valley of India. Both Indian and foreign-based IT companies, including Infosys, IBM, TCS (Tata Consultancy Services), Citrix, Yahoo, and Samsung, have slashed their workforces.

In the middle of last month the Times of India published an article titled “15,000 pink slips in the tech corridor and still counting.” It quoted an industry analyst as saying: “The frequency of layoffs has increased. From IBM, Dell, Cisco to HP, almost all the big companies have cut jobs. The latest being the TCS layoffs, which have culminated in techies hitting the streets to protest.”

The analyst was referring to massive job cuts at TCS, India’s largest IT company. TCS was initially said to have fired as many as 30,000 Indian employees—about 10 percent of its worldwide workforce.

This was quickly denied by company management who insisted that “only” 3,000 to 5,000 persons have been fired for “under-performance,” a term the company cynically uses to cover up its cost-cutting to boost profits. It is highly likely these three to five thousand are only a first volley, TCS management having decided that staggered layoffs will reduce the risk of opposition.

The wave of job cuts has prompted Indian IT workers to form support organizations with a view to discussing ways to fight back. Until recently there was little support among IT employees for anything that could be seen as a worker- or class-based organization, the employers having spared no small effort in promoting the conception that the IT workers should view themselves as middle-class professionals.

Two such organizations that have recently sprung up are the IT/ITES Employee Center (ITEC) in Bangalore and the Forum for IT Employees (FITE) in Chennai (formerly Madras).

In Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, and New Delhi, affected TCS employees and some of their colleagues who were also apprehensive about their own jobs have held demonstrations and meetings to discuss their next course of action.

In Chennai, police prevented a scheduled protest outside the local TCS headquarters from taking place. In New Delhi, a couple of workers whose jobs were targeted for elimination refused to “resign” and have instead filed court cases against their employer challenging their termination. In Bangalore, laid-off employees and several of their colleagues wore masks of the TCS CEO when they staged a demonstration near city government offices.

The sacked TCS workers have also held meetings with the labor commissioner and with the representatives of the major Stalinist-led union federations, the Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU) and the All India Trades Unions Congress (AITUC).

The Stalinist unions have issued hollow statements of support, urged the IT workers to join their ranks, and advised them to lobby ministers in India’s Union and state governments. All of these ministers are at the beck and call of big business and implacable enemies of the working class.

In addition to the aforementioned layoffs, the US transnational IBM last year fired thousands of its Indian employees and has recently announced more mass layoffs.

Samsung is said to have fired around 1,500 Indian employees due to falling profits in its mobile phone division. eBay is reportedly planning on laying off 2,400 employees worldwide out of which 1,000 would be in India.

In 2014 Yahoo fired a majority of its Bangalore employees and moved others back to its US headquarters.

Another large Indian IT company, HCL Technologies, has been systematically reducing its workforce under the guise that employees’ skills are obsolete or no longer fit the company’s needs. In 2013 HCL refused to issue formal “joining-letters” to many of the fresh graduates it had recruited through campus interviews.

A young IT employee recently laid off from his job commented: “Even in my wildest dreams, I had not imagined I would be thrown out of my job. ... My world turned topsy-turvy in just 20 minutes when I was summoned in the afternoon and given the marching orders. I did not know how to react. I could see some of my sacked colleagues crying aloud, some begging with the HR personnel to give them time and some reacting angrily.”

Since the 1990s the rapid growth of India’s software development and Business Process Outsourcing (call center and back office) industries has been hailed by the Indian elite as a means of propelling India into the club of developed countries.

Successive Indian governments, both at state and national level, have lavished support on the IT and IT-enabled sector, including providing innumerable tax breaks and cheap and easy land acquisition, and setting up Special Economic Zones (SEZ) with tax holidays and exemptions from standard labor and workplace laws.

India’s IT and BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) sector reportedly employs up to 3.1 million persons directly and generates some $120 billion in revenue annually, including more than $70 billion in foreign revenue. In 2012, the IT services and BPO sectors constituted, according to some estimates, as much as 7.5 percent of India’s total GDP.

However, India’s IT sector is increasingly being hammered by the world capitalist crisis, by anemic growth in the US and Europe and increasing competition from other countries with abundant cheap labour. Like many of India’s other industries, its IT sector is also being undermined by the deplorable state of public infrastructure, everything from the speed of transport and reliability of utilities to the low quality of the education provided by all but India’s premier universities and technical institutes.

India’s IT and BPO sector has steadily lost business to other Asian countries, especially the Philippines, where salaries are even lower, as well as to Eastern Europe.

According to a recent study by the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India (ASSOCHAM) and the global financial services company KPMG, India is losing about 70 percent of all “incremental” (new, not-previously contracted) voice and call center business to Asia and Eastern Europe. ASSOCHAM’s principal recommendation to India’s BPO firms is that they slash their costs still further by relocating their facilities to smaller Indian cities and towns.

India’s giant IT companies such as Infosys, TCS and Wipro have long operated as what are termed “body shops,” sending cheaply paid Indian engineers to work on IT projects in the West while pocketing huge profits. This “model” is also now increasingly unravelling due to a drop in investment and the imposition of new restrictions on temporary work visas by countries such as the US and UK.

Indian IT companies have responded to their loss of projects in the West by putting the squeeze on their employees. One oft-used tactic is to lay off experienced, better-paid workers and replace them with newer ones earning far smaller salaries. So abysmal are Indian pay scales that software engineers making $16,500 per year are considered “high-earners.”

India’s IT workers are increasingly realizing that they are not much different from assembly line workers in manufacturing who have long faced brutal working conditions and arbitrary firings. And like other workers, the problems of IT workers can only be addressed through the development of class struggle, that is, through the building of an independent political movement of the working class that systematically challenges the diktats of big business and fights for a workers government, which will radically reorganize socioeconomic life so production is organized to meet social need, not enrich a tiny minority of capitalists.

Opposition to Japanese government’s lies on “comfort women”

Ben McGrath

Opposition to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s attempt to whitewash the history of the Japanese military’s war crimes has emerged in Japan and also the United States. Earlier this month, a group of American historians issued a statement criticizing the Abe government’s attempts to pressure a US publishing company McGraw-Hill to amend its textbook’s treatment of so-called “comfort women.”

During the 1930s and 1940s, some 200,000 Korean, Chinese and other women were coerced into sex slavery in “comfort stations” established for Japanese officers and soldiers. Abe and other right-wing nationalists falsely claim that the women were not forced but willingly acted as prostitutes. This revision of history is bound up with the government’s plans to remilitarize and to end the current constitutional restrictions on the dispatch of the Japanese military in overseas interventions and wars.

Abe’s efforts to rewrite history could cloud plans for him to address a joint session of the US Congress, which, according to the Japan Times last weekend, could take place in late April. He would become the first Japanese prime minister to speak to Congress since 1961 when Hayato Ikeda addressed the House of Representatives. Abe’s grandfather, Nobsuke Kishi, also spoke before Congress as prime minister in 1957.

A bipartisan group of US lawmakers who visited Japan last week raised questions about Abe’s view of history. Democrat Congresswoman Diana DeGette warned that the issues surrounding World War II “could really put some cracks in the relationship… It’s really important that Japan not be seen as backtracking… on the comfort women issue and some other issues around the end of the war.”

Republican congressman James Sensenbrenner told the Wall Street Journalthat Abe’s “revisionist history” was hurting “Japan’s standing with its neighbors. That has to be cooled down.” His warning reflects concerns in Washington that the Abe government’s whitewash of Japanese war crimes was undermining relations with South Korea, the other major US ally in North East Asia.

Regardless of these misgivings, Abe’s congressional address appears to be going ahead. The Obama administration regards Tokyo as a crucial ally in its “pivot to Asia” and military build-up throughout the Indo-Pacific region against China.

It should be noted that the criticisms of Abe’s stance on Japan’s atrocities are rather hypocritical. The US political establishment remains silent on its own crimes during World War II, including the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians in the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the firebombing of Tokyo and other Japanese cities.

Within Japan, right-wing nationalist groups continue to wage a vicious campaign against the Asahi Shimbun after it retracted a series of articles last August based on the testimony of Seiji Yoshida, a former soldier, who claimed to have forcibly rounded up “comfort women” on Korea’s Jeju Island. Yoshida later admitted that he had made up parts of his story, which has been seized on to claim there is no evidence that women were coerced into sex slavery and to demand the retraction of Japan’s 1993 Kono statement—a formal, but limited apology over the abuse of “comfort women.”

In an interview last month with the Asia-Pacific Journal, Yoshiaki Yoshimi, a leading historian on comfort women, said in, “As early as 1993 at the latest, no one took seriously Yoshida’s testimony claiming that he had witnessed the Japanese Army’s forcible relocation of women in Jeju Island. The Kono Statement was not based on Yoshida’s testimony. Nor do scholars researching the comfort women issue draw on it for their argument. In short,Asahi’s retraction of Yoshida’s testimony due to its falsity should not affect the discussion.”

Other former Japanese soldiers have provided evidence of the military’s system of sexual slavery. Masayoshi Matsumoto, currently 92, has spoken out against the crimes he witnessed as an army medic. “I feel like a war criminal. It is painful to speak of such things and I would rather cover it up. It is painful, but I must speak,” he said in a 2013 interview with Reuters.

In a more recent interview in the Asia-Pacific Journal in October 2014, Matsumoto described working at a base in Yu County in Shanxi Province in China during the war. “Our battalion had approximately one thousand men. We took about 5 or 6 ‘comfort women’ with us. I was a corpsman…I had to help the army doctor to do tests for venereal disease on comfort women.”

After describing the instruments and testing methods, Matsumoto said, “These [women] had definitely not arrived there of their own will. Nobody would be willing to travel to such a remote area. The money was handled by Japanese civilians employed by the military, who took care of the women.”

Matsumoto made clear that rape of captured village women was rampant and that the setting up of the “comfort stations,” where soldiers forced women to have sex, was an attempt to curb the spread of disease among the troops. Matsumoto described finding several women in a captured village.

“When we raided a village, there happened to be some villagers left behind. Normally during a raid all the villagers would flee. Among them were seven or eight women. The soldiers grabbed them and took them away to the barracks. Knowing that they would be killed if they resisted, these women came along without resisting. The women were made to live inside the barracks, and whenever the soldiers felt like it they would visit them to have sex,” he said.

Matsumoto explained why he spoke out: “While reading all kind of things, I realized that if we don’t face our past squarely, we’re bound to repeat the same mistakes. When I look at Abe, I think he’s starting to do exactly that. Someone needs to speak up.” Asked about Abe’s claim that there was no coercion of women, Matsumoto responded: “Such a thing is not true! It’s…nonsense. A lie.”

The evidence proving that the Japanese army engaged in the wide-scale and systematic coercion of women into its “comfort stations” is not limited to such personal accounts, but has been found in wartime documents unearthed by historians. Nevertheless Matsumoto’s first-hand testimony is not only telling refutation of Abe’s lies but also points to the fact that the whitewashing of war crimes is the preparation for new ones.

Germany and Austria discriminate against Kosovo refugees

Markus Salzmann

In the course of the past six months, according to media reports, 50,000 people have left Kosovo, some 35,000 in the last month-and-a-half alone. Their main destinations are Germany, Austria and Scandinavia.

The exodus is the result of the catastrophic economic and social situation in Kosovo, which is making life unbearable for the majority of the population. “Kosovo is the poorest country in southeast Europe,” migration researcher Besa Shahini, from the European Stability Initiative think tank, told Der Spiegel. “The numbers of refugees have been increasing continuously for several years, so in that respect it is not a new phenomenon.”

Average wages in Kosovo are €220 per month. Without remittances from Kosovars who have found work abroad, many families would be unable to survive. The official unemployment rate is 27 percent, but the real rate is estimated at more than double that. Youth unemployment is thought to be around 70 percent. According to figures from the World Bank, around a third of residents are living below the poverty line, on less than €1.50 per day.

The annual income per head in 2013 was somewhat more than €2,500. This is not even half the figure of the European Union’s (EU) poorest state, Bulgaria, and roughly one-tenth of the EU average.

Deutsche Welle reported on an unemployed father, Fitim S., who travelled with his family to Germany. He said he did not even receive social welfare in Kosovo of €80 per month, because, according to the justification, he has a house and did not have to pay rent. “We were told that we could get asylum in Germany,” said the desperate father.

The British Daily Telegraph quoted a woman in Kosovo, who stated, “It is sad for Kosovo, but there is no hope here for the people. They are leaving the country because they are desperate.”

There is no organised medical care. Health care from a doctor or at a hospital can only be obtained in exchange for cash. The country, with a population of 1.8 million, is dominated by criminal clans that are closely connected to the major political figures in the country and enrich themselves through prostitution, people trafficking, and the drugs and arms trade. Corruption is rampant.

“Those with no connections or associations with the clans in the political parties have no career prospects,” states Der Spiegel. “Many people in Kosovo are just fed up with the situation and simply want to escape,” said Iliriana Kaçaniku, who works as an expert on EU integration at the Kosovo Foundation for an Open Society (KFOS). Kosovo is one of Europe’s most corrupt countries. On Transparency International’s index, the country is in 111th place.

Since Kosovo’s independence in 2008, the European powers have not improved the situation at all, but are themselves deeply implicated in the network of corruption and the black market. The Eulex mission, aimed at establishing an independent judiciary, is discredited.

The daily Koha Ditore uncovered that a number of corrupt state prosecutors and judges involved with Eulex had called a halt to prosecutions or handed down milder punishments in exchange for money. German news magazineDie Zeit named the Italian judge Francesco Florit, who allegedly received €300,000 in exchange for clearing a man charged with murder.

The catastrophe in Kosovo is the direct result of the intervention by the major western powers. They deliberately provoked the ethnic conflicts in Yugoslavia for their own interests.

In 1991, Germany’s foreign policy backed the breakup of the Yugoslav state by rushing to recognise Slovenia and Croatia as independent states. The United States followed suit and forced the independence of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The result was the extremely bloody four-year Bosnian war, in which the western powers intervened with their own troops.

The NATO states subsequently used the separatist strivings in Kosovo they had promoted in order to move against Serbia. In 1999, US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright presented the Serbian government with an unacceptable ultimatum at the Rambouillet meetings. When it was rejected, NATO went to war with Serbia.

Even then, Albright and German foreign minister Joschka Fischer relied on the support of dubious elements like Hashim Thaci, currently deputy Prime Minister of Kosovo. Thaci, as head of the Kosovo Liberation Army militia, was wanted by Serbian authorities for terrorist attacks against security forces, and had also been accused of liquidating rivals within his own ranks. He also had ties to the drug mafia.

After the war, Kosovo was under United Nations administration, practically under the military and political control of the countries who led the war. The country’s declaration of independence in 2008, which was only recognised by the western powers, further intensified ethnic tensions in the region.

The governments of the countries that pressed for Kosovo’s separation and independence are now responding with an inhumane policy of deporting refugees fleeing the catastrophe they have produced. Almost none of the asylum seekers from Kosovo are permitted to stay in Germany or other European countries. The human rights organisation ProAsyl estimates that only 40 Kosovars were given the right to reside in Germany in 2014. Almost 9,000 applications were lodged.

“There is no asylum for Kosovars,” Manfred Schmidt, President of the federal office for refugees and immigration, bluntly stated. Almost all asylum applications from Kosovar nationals are rejected because they cannot prove any political persecution. Many of the refugees have used all of their savings for the journey and face an even more hopeless situation after their return.

In Germany, the interior ministers at the federal and state levels enacted several measures two weeks ago to restrict the flood of refugees from Kosovo. The German police will provide support to the Serbian border police. This could mean that Kosovars who possess a Serbian passport will be prevented from crossing the Hungarian border.

In contrast to past practices, asylum seekers from Kosovo are not to be distributed among the municipalities after they have been registered. Instead, their asylum proceedings are to be completed at arrival centres within two weeks. European spokesman for ProAsyl, Karl Kopp, criticised the plan, commenting, “There will certainly not be impartial proceedings.” It was merely about “declaring the people to be ready for deportation as quickly as possible.”

Discussions are also ongoing about classifying Kosovo as a secure third country. The most recent states to be classified were Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia and Serbia. Since November of last year, applications for asylum from nationals of these countries have been rejected in sped-up proceedings as “obviously unjustified.” Subsequently, deportations must take place within a week. The interior minister in Saxony, Markus Ulbig (Christian Democratic Party), has already demanded such a classification for Kosovo.

The state president in Baden-Württemberg, Winfried Kretchmann (Green Party), spoke out cynically in the Süddeutsche Zeitung in favour of denying asylum to Kosovars. “We have a right to asylum which is meant for people who are politically persecuted. Currently, the mass migration of people from Kosovo is beyond that—but this can’t go on, they are not politically persecuted. It is overwhelming and endangering the right to asylum.”

In Austria, interior minister Johanna Mikl-Leitner (Austrian People’s Party) has provoked a campaign against the refugees on behalf of the Social Democratic-Conservative government. She described it as her mission to restrict the storm of refugees from Kosovo. In the name of this goal, she arranged for statements to be distributed in Kosovo making it absolutely clear that refugees are not desired in Austria and could be punished with prosecution.

The text states, “Smugglers lie. There is no asylum in Austria on economic grounds.” For breaching the EU’s travel ban, a fine of up to €7,500 is threatened.

German trade union approves 1,400 layoffs at Karstadt department store

Dietmar Henning

The job and wage cuts at German department store Karstadt are proceeding without interruption with the full support of the United Services Union (Verdi) and the joint works council.

At the end of last week, Verdi and the works council agreed to lay off 1,400 employees. Dismissal notices are supposed to be sent out as early as March. “The employers want to push this through as fast as possible,” explained Verdi chief negotiator Arno Peukes.

Hellmut Patzelt, the chair of the joint works council, called the agreement a compromise with which he was “very satisfied.” “We have reached our goal—the establishment of a transfer company and the prevention of downgrading. Obviously we have also arranged for severance pay,” he explained.

The corporate leadership was more direct. It spoke of a “breakthrough” for the company which leaves restructuring efforts entirely on schedule.

In fact, the company has now nearly reached its target. In October of last year, Karstadt CEO Stephan Fanderl announced that he would slash 2,750 of the then 17,000 jobs within the company. The works council and Verdi dutifully expressed their indignation over these “massive cuts.” Since then, approximately 1,000 employees have been forced out of jobs into early retirement or part-time work. With the now-stipulated 1,400 layoffs, Fanderl is just 350 jobs short of his initial target.

For the 1,400 employees who will now be terminated, the well-paid Verdi and works council functionaries have arranged a meager settlement amounting to one half of monthly wages for each year of employment. A salesperson who worked full time for 20 years at Karstadt, will receive approximately €20,000, from which they must pay taxes.

Additionally, laid off workers will have the possibility between June 2015 and February 2016 to enter a transfer company, where they will receive roughly 80 percent of their last net wage. For most, this only means that their trip to the unemployment office will be delayed for a few months, where they will then receive even less support.

The company has also split up personnel into cashiers, sales associates and stock clerks. This means the latter category will now earn €300 less than sales clerks.

For theses workers, Karstadt is relying on voluntary redundancies and turnover within the workforce rather than on dismissals with the option for reemployment under new terms and downgrading. That is the only concession that the company has made. In practice, it means that older workers will be pressured until they “voluntarily” agree to downgrading and wages for new hires will be considerably lower.

This week, Verdi and the company put forward further drastic cuts during negotiations. As early as 2013, they quit the contract bargaining protections for retail workers, which meant that employees were forced to relinquish contractually agreed pay raises worth €50 million.

Fanderl wants to extend this “contract pause.” He further demands that employees now give up part of their vacation and Christmas pay and that the workweek be lengthened from the current 37.5 hours to 40 hours.

“We will not accept that,” said a Verdi spokesperson. But the trade union and works council functionaries have said that before every other cut. The signatures of Verdi and the joint works council can be found at the bottom of every contract agreement, which have deprived the Karstadt workforce of millions of euros over the last ten years.

The latest job cuts will not be the end to the wave of layoffs. Last year, Verdi and the works council already accepted the closure of six locations with a combined 350 employees. In a letter from October, Fanderl announced “painful decisions” and threatened the closure of 20 of his 83 stores, or their sale in the event that they still generated losses. In November, the joint works council wrote in a leaflet that the corporate leadership will place all of the Karstadt stores on trial, and placed an exclamation mark next to the word “all.”

In January, financial director Miguel Müllenbach confirmed in a memo: “There is no doubt about it, drastic personnel changes in our stores and especially in the Service Center in Essen are unavoidable.” There are currently about 1,700 workers employed in the Karstadt headquarters in Essen, referred to internally as the “Service Center.” Ninety percent of staff at the online portal Karstadt.de are also expected to lose their jobs.

At the beginning of this month, the Supervisory Board—including heads of the works council and Verdi functionaries—discussed a 32-page Future Concept marked “strictly confidential.” It described in detail the now impending cutbacks and restructuring measures. It was there that the process was evidently set into motion.

In order to quiet the growing resentment among workers, Verdi and the works council collected signatures for a petition from customers and conducted a postcard campaign on behalf of employees. For the beginning of March, a one-day strike is planned in order to placate staff without harming the company. With the restructuring agreements already in place, the union is now largely irrelevant.

Fanderl, appointed by Karstadt owner René Benko, can now carry out the planned job cuts. In the end, only fragments of the long-established company will remain, leaving behind the only thing that interests real estate speculator Benko: Karstadt real estate. In 2012 Benko, who was convicted that year of what a Vienna judge described as a “model of corruption,” had already grabbed the choice cuts, including the 28 Karstadt sporting goods stores and the three luxury shopping centers in Berlin, Hamburg and Munich. All this was made possible by the joint works council and Verdi representatives.

Top British politicians caught in cash for access sting

Robert Stevens

Two former UK government ministers—Labour MP Jack Straw and Conservative MP Sir Malcolm Rifkind—have been exposed in a Channel 4Dispatches documentary as ready to accept thousands of pounds from a private company in return for access to their political and business contacts.

Straw, an MP since 1979, was foreign secretary from 2001-06 in the Labour government of Tony Blair. He played a key role in Britain’s illegal 2003 invasion of Iraq. He also served as home secretary and justice secretary in the Labour government.

Rifkind has been an MP for more than 40 years and served as a minister in the cabinets of Conservative prime ministers Margaret Thatcher and John Major. So trusted was Rifkind in ruling circles that in 2010 he was nominated by parliament to be chairman of its critical Intelligence and Security Committee. In that position he has had access to classified intelligence from the UK security agencies MI5, MI6 and Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). GCHQ, in concert with the US National Security Agency, conductsmass surveillance of the world’s population.

The Dispatches documentary, “Politicians for Hire”, was a joint investigation with Daily Telegraph reporters and was broadcast Monday evening. In the programme, undercover reporters posed as staff of a fake Chinese communications agency, PMR, and held discussions with the MPs about joining the company’s “advisory board”. The choice of a Chinese company was to make what happened doubly embarrassing.

On camera, Straw states that his services would require payment. “So normally, if I’m doing a speech or something, it’s £5,000 a day, that’s what I charge,” he stated.

He revealed that he used his position to operate “under the radar” in order to assist ED&F Man, a commodities trading company that paid him £60,000 a year, to demand a change in European Union legislation regarding sugar production in Ukraine. Straw began work for ED&F Man in 2011, just months after Labour was kicked out of office. The legislation was subsequently changed, in favour of what the company had requested. He told the reporters that on another occasion he used “charm and menace” to convince the then Ukrainian prime minister, Mykola Azarov, to change laws on behalf of ED&F Man.

While Straw was being recorded, he said that he would not take up a paid position with PMR while still an MP but, he said, he expected to be soon elevated to the House of Lords and “The rules there are different and plenty of people have commercial interests there. I will be able to help you more.”

Rifkind told the undercover reporters that he has extensive political contacts and although not a minister, could arrange “useful access” to every British ambassador in the world. Among the contacts cited by Rifkind was Madeleine Albright, the former US Secretary of State. “I still have the contacts with all these people who have served at a very senior level. Some of them still do serve—are still active,” he said.

As a former defence minister, Rifkind said that he had contacts in that area, and for good measure boasted, “I am involved with the World Economic Forum, Davos, and they have a number of specialist committees—one of which looks at nuclear security, nuclear weapons security.”

Describing how he could establish what government “thinking” was on a particular issue, he said, “[I]n my own case I could write to a minister… I wouldn’t name who was asking.”

Explaining how much he expected to earn in return for political influence, Rifkind said his usual fee for half a day’s work was “somewhere in the region of £5,000 to £8,000.”

Asked if he could commit the necessary time to PMR, he explained, “I am self-employed—so nobody pays me a salary. I have to earn my income.”

This will no doubt come as a surprise to many. Rifkind, as with all MPs, receives a taxpayer-funded £67,000 salary. On top of this, MPs can claim many thousands of pounds in expenses. As chair of the ISC, Rifkind was paid thousands in addition, taking his basic parliamentary pay to more than £80,000 a year. In these circles, income of well over £100,000 with expenses is considered chump change.

Due to the fallout resulting from the scandal, Rifkind and Straw both suspended themselves from their parties, pending parliamentary inquiries which are to investigate if they have breached the parliamentary code of conduct. After initially saying he would not stand down from the ISC, Rifkind was forced to resign his position Tuesday. Straw was due to stand down as an MP at this year’s election and Rifkind said he would also stand down.

Sir Alistair Graham, a former chairman of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, said if Rifkind wrote to a minister in the way he described, it “would be a clear breach of the code of conduct.”

From the comments of both MPs since the exposé, their main concern is apparently that they have fallen for a ruse previously used by Dispatches to expose the financial skulduggery of MPs. Monday’s broadcast was a replica of a 2010 Dispatches investigation in which senior Labour figures Geoff Hoon and Stephen Byers were also recorded offering their services for money.

Today, any divisions between the political elite and big business have been effaced, with MPs viewing their political careers as just a stepping stone to eventual personal enrichment. Many MPs get on the gravy train while still in parliament, and establish the future contacts with big business necessary for more lucrative future earnings.

According to the Telegraph, 180 MPs have second jobs, bringing in a total of £7.4 million a year. Rifkind declares five other jobs outside Parliament, through which he has raked in £800,000 in the last five years. 30 MPs were paid at least the equivalent of their MP’s wage for other employment. One Conservative MP, lawyer Geoffrey Cox, declared annual extra earnings of £820,000—12 times his MP’s salary. Working a total of 1,953 hours of outside work, he pocketed an hourly rate of £420, or £20 every three minutes. All told, MPs spent more than 26,600 hours on non-parliamentary duties last year.

The scandal is just the latest confirmation of the revolving door tht exists between parliament/government and the banks and major corporations. The fees being discussed by Rifkind and Straw are chickenfeed compared to the fortunes they know can be amassed once their parliamentary careers are over.

Although not shown in the aired Dispatches, Straw also told their reporters he assisted a furniture company, Senator International, to win two government contracts, one of which was worth up to £75 million over four years, after he lobbied a minister on its behalf. He said for the firm it was “about getting on the ladder for government contracts,” which are a “big” target for any office furniture business. According to the Telegraph, Straw had not previously disclosed his relationship with Senator International.

Straw told the reporters that he was now “considering an offer” from Senator International to go on their board as an executive, which he would “almost certainly take.”

This path is well-trod for bourgeois politicians of all stripes in the UK and internationally. Former German Chancellor and Social Democratic Party leader Gerhard Schröder took over as the head of the supervisory board of the North European Gas Pipeline (NEGP) after his election defeat in 2005.

In 2009 Joschka Fischer, the ex-German Green Party leader and foreign minister in the former Social Democratic Party-Green government, took up a post as adviser for the Nabucco pipeline project.

For this grasping, avaricious layer, however, Tony Blair is the man to emulate. By 2014, according to estimates, through his Tony Blair Associates consultancy and extensive property holdings, his personal wealth stood at around £100 million.

Federal prison regulations violate constitutional rights

Ed Hightower

A commentary in Crain’s Chicago Business last week by law professor David M. Shapiro shed light on a new regulation by the federal Bureau of Prisons that severely limits inmates’ contact with family members, clergy, consular officials and other visitors. The rule sets guidelines for the bureau’s Communications Management Units (CMUs) and allows them to isolate inmates, limit their access to educational materials, religious activities, and media contact.

“Communications Management Unit” is the Orwellian title given to two federal prisons, one in Terre Haute and the other in Marion, Illinois, which operate much like the infamous CIA black sites, holding inmates virtually incommunicado in degrading and illegal conditions.

Shapiro, a clinical assistant professor of law at the Roderick and Solange MacArthur Justice Center at Northwestern University School of Law, sketches the history of CMUs, beginning with the September 11, 2001 terror attacks and the subsequent bipartisan attacks on democratic rights.

In 2005, the Justice Department established the Correctional Intelligence Initiative , a program designed to counter the alleged threat of Islamic radicalization in federal prisons. In 2006, the Bureau of Prisons purged the shelves of religious libraries available to prisoners of certain texts, including books by the medieval Jewish philosopher, physician and scholar, Maimonides.

The Bureau conducted its book purge under the banner of the Standardized Chapel Library Project, which employed a secret panel of supposed religious experts to create an approved list of 150 book titles and 150 multimedia resources covering 20 religions, while providing no funding to prisons to obtain any of them. At the same time, the Bureau of Prisons directed chaplains to remove all unapproved texts and other media. This meant the dismantling of large collections of books and media in some cases, donated by religious institutions and private parties.

At the same time, Shapiro writes, the bureau has enacted other rules attacking the bedrock democratic right to legal counsel, by allowing federal agents to snoop on communications between prisoners and their attorneys. This unconstitutional practice makes the right to counsel meaningless, as prisoners can expect to be punished for reporting abusive conditions, not to mention having their legal strategies passed on to prosecutors, giving the latter an unfair and illegal advantage in judicial proceedings. Shapiro writes that federal prisons in New York state and Florence, Colorado, have allowed this type of snooping.

Physical treatment of prisoners in federal facilities has also mimicked that of Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and the CIA black sites, with prolonged shackling, stress positions, and solitary confinement used as punishment.

The Bureau of Prisons created the CMU facilities between 2006 and 2008 to house inmates purportedly posing a threat to national security. Any inmate at a federal prison can be transferred to a CMU for any reason, without judicial review. Once inside, prisoners have virtually no contact with the outside world, making it almost impossible to expose the conditions they face.

Officially, the bureau detains only prisoners posing a national security threat, without regard to past behavior, political or religious belief. In reality, more than two-thirds of CMU inmates are Muslims, even though Muslims comprise just six percent of the total federal prison population. According the to Center for Constitutional Rights, CMUs house inmates with little or no disciplinary history. Instead, CMU inmates tend to be either Muslims or political activists of some sort, including prisoners’ rights advocates.

CMU inmates cannot physically interact with any visitors, including their children or spouses.

Likewise, inmates can only have three 15-minute phone calls per month (the bureau originally proposed a single 15-minute call per month) Other federal inmates get 300 minutes per month.

Contact of any kind is limited to: “immediate family members, US Courts, federal judges, US Attorney’s Offices, Members of US Congress, the Bureau, other federal law enforcement entities, and the inmate’s attorney,” according to the regulation.

Written contact can be limited to six double-sided pieces of paper per week to and from a single recipient. In person visits can be limited to four one-hour visits per month (the bureau proposed just one initially). Total visitation time allowed is one quarter of the amount allowed for inmates in federal “supermax” facilities.

CMU inmates have little or no access to job training and other rehabilitative programs available to other federal inmates. In addition, some CMU inmates are completely isolated even from other inmates.

The new Bureau of Prison regulations on the CMUs went into effect on February 23.

The publication notes for the regulations paint the new measures in rosy colors: “These regulations represent a ‘floor’ beneath which communications cannot be further restricted.”

As in other aspects of the war on democratic rights, the US government is at great pains to provide an example of how such inroads on basic legal principles further any interest in securing the country against terrorism.

Far from protecting the population from terrorism, the new CMU regulations serve two related functions: first, to intimidate, incarcerate and torture opponents of US imperialist policies and second, to limit the chance of exposing torture at these domestic GITMOs by sealing inmates off from the outside world.

Three New York men charged in alleged terror plot

Bill Van Auken

US prosecutors and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have charged three men from Brooklyn, New York with the crime of attempting and conspiring to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization for allegedly seeking to travel to Syria to join the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

The charges made public after Wednesday’s arrest of the three—all immigrants from former Soviet republics of Central Asia—makes clear that the case, like virtually all so-called “homegrown terrorism” prosecutions carried out since the September 11, 2001 attacks, was put together largely through the activities of a paid FBI confidential informant who pretended to be a terrorist sympathizer.

Arrested were Abdurasul Hasanovich Juraboev, 24, and Abror Habibov, 30, both citizens of Uzbekistan, and Akhror Saidakhmetov, 19, who is a citizen of Kazakhstan. All three are legal permanent residents of the US. Juraboev worked at a gyro shop, while Saidakhmetov worked repairing cellphones and selling kitchenware at mall kiosks run by the third man, Habibov.

According to its version of events, the FBI initiated its investigation based on postings that it found from Saidakhmetov and Juraboev on an Uzbek language website. These included an August 2014 posting alleged to have been made by Juraboev, using a pseudonym, in which he inquired whether shooting US President Barack Obama and being in turn shot and killed would qualify someone as a martyr. He allegedly went on to state that, while he would like to travel to Syria to join ISIS, he had no means to do so. He is said to have acknowledged that he likewise had no means of attacking Obama.

The federal complaint goes on to claim that FBI agents visited Juraboev’s Brooklyn apartment, where he is said to have freely handed over his cellphone and openly espoused agreement with ISIS. It is likewise claimed that Juraboev named Saidakhmetov as someone who shared his views.

Saidakhmetov, according to the FBI’s claims, posted a comment on the Uzbek website expressing enthusiasm over an ISIS video.

The FBI also presented a transcript of an alleged phone conversation between the two discussing how they could reach Syria via Turkey based on what they had learned on web sites. Both, according to the federal complaint, expressed a lack of knowledge of the area and concern over the border being “heavily guarded.”

By late September, the FBI sent in its paid confidential informant. The complaint states that the FBI makes no claims as to the “credibility of the CI [confidential informant],” but was using him solely for the purpose of introducing the conversations that he secretly recorded.

On this basis, the extent of the role played by the informant is left largely in the shadows. From what the FBI reveals of the secretly taped conversations, however, it appears that he took the lead in turning Internet fantasies of the two younger men into a plan to reach Syria.

On its report on their appearance Wednesday in Brooklyn federal court, theNew York Times stated: “As they were led into court, the youthfulness of Mr. Juraboev and Mr. Saidakhmetov was striking. Both had shaggy brown hair and broad faces. Mr. Saidakhmetov wore a green hooded sweatshirt, jeans and red hightop sneakers, and Mr. Juraboev a knit cap, a gray hooded shirt and jeans.”

The confidential informant, clearly an older individual, set out to solve the problems that the two younger men said were keeping them from going to Syria. For example, Saidakhmetov said that his mother had his passport and wouldn’t give it to him. The informant then said he would fill out a new passport application for the youth and forge his signature. As part of the FBI “sting” operation, he helped stage an appointment earlier this month at the immigration offices in New York City to have Saidakhmetov’s photograph and fingerprints taken, purportedly for the passport.

Similarly, the informant dissuaded the two younger men when they spoke about possibly flying back to their home countries and then making their way to Turkey, telling them that they should purchase tickets direct to Istanbul.

Saidakhmetov then purchased a plane ticket to Turkey, scheduling his flight for February 25 to supposedly fly there together with the FBI’s paid informant. He was arrested at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York before boarding the plane. Juraboev, who had purchased a ticket to Istanbul for the end of March, was arrested at his Brooklyn apartment.

Habibov, who is charged with having paid for Saidakhmetov’s ticket, was arraigned in a Jacksonville, Florida federal court. All three men face up to 15 years in prison and were held without bail.

On the same day as the arrests, just before they were announced, FBI Director James Comey delivered a speech in Washington announcing that the agency had “homegrown violent extremist investigations in every single state.” No doubt the vast majority are unfolding under similar circumstances, with the FBI’s paid undercover agents guiding hapless suspects into crimes that would never have existed otherwise.

In New York, the city’s police commissioner, William Bratton, declared: “This is real. This is the concern about the lone wolf inspired to act without ever going to the Mideast. Or the concern of once they get to the Mideast [acquiring] fighting skills, capabilities and then attempting to return to the country.” The assertion that the case is “real” is no doubt driven by the knowledge of all those involved that it is in fact a carefully constructed “sting” operation designed to entrap the accused.

Adam Perlmutter, the lawyer representing Saidakhmetov, blasted the prosecution, declaring that the charges against his client and the two other men “highlight everything that is wrong in how the Justice Department approaches these cases.” He added that Saidakhmetov was “worked over extensively by a confidential informant, according to the complaint.”

The defense attorney told reporters that the “US government needs to find another way to approach Muslim men who could be radicalized.” Describing the government’s tactics as “ham-fisted,” he continued, “There is no attempt to intervene, to speak, to explore, to understand. There’s just the rush to prosecution, to arrest and to conviction.”

Perlmutter added that both of the two younger men were “detained by the FBI” and interrogated without the presence of a lawyer.

There is a clearly discernible motive behind the government’s tactics of entrapping such individuals in carefully constructed terror “sting” operations. These operations, which account for all but a handful of terror prosecutions over more than a decade, serve the dual purpose of justifying war abroad and police state measures at home, all in the name of a never-ending “war on terrorism.”

The New York Times cited “intelligence sources” as estimating that 150 Americans have traveled or tried to reach Syria or Iraq to join ISIS. What of course neither the so-called newspaper of record nor the prosecution admit, however, is that for the most part the government turned a blind eye to these trips even as its closest allies in the region—Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia—funneled arms and money to ISIS and similar Islamist militias as part of the US-backed war for regime change in Syria. All of this has unfolded under the supervision of the CIA.

If criminal prosecutions are to be organized for providing material support and resources to terrorist organizations in Syria, they would most appropriately begin with top US officials in the White House, the CIA and the Pentagon, rather than trolling for youth on the Internet.

Obama Justice Department: No federal charges to be filed in Trayvon Martin slaying

Thomas Gaist

The Obama Justice Department announced Tuesday that it will not press federal civil rights charges against George Zimmerman for the February 2012 slaying of unarmed African-American teenager Trayvon Martin.

Attorney General Eric Holder released a statement declaring that “a comprehensive investigation found that the high standard for a federal hate crime prosecution cannot be met under the circumstances here.”

Martin's mother, Sybrina Fulton, criticized the decision in comments to reporters following the announcement, which came on the eve of the third anniversary of the killing of the 17-year old in the Retreat at Twin Lakes gated community in Sanford, Florida.

“[Zimmerman] took a life, carelessly and recklessly, and he shouldn’t deserve to have his entire life walking around on the street free. I just believe that he should be held accountable for what he’s done,” Fulton said.

Pointing to the recent exoneration of police officers who killed unarmed youth and workers in Ferguson, Missouri and New York City, Fulton said, “We have grand juries and special grand juries; they’re making a decision to not even arrest a person.”

Zimmerman, a self-appointed vigilante with aspirations to join the police or the military, stalked Martin as he returned from purchasing snacks at a nearby convenience store before shooting the youth less than 100 yards from the home where Martin’s father was staying.

“This guy looks like he is up to no good or he is on drugs or something… these assholes, they always get away,” Zimmerman can be heard to say on a recording of a phone call to police taken just prior to the killing.

Police arrived on the scene just minutes after the call ended, where they found Martin lying unresponsive on the ground near Zimmerman, who was still holding the weapon used to kill the youth.

Police and local prosecutors initially refused to arrest or charge Zimmerman. After widespread protests, Zimmerman was eventually charged with manslaughter and second-degree murder.

Among the issues raised in the case was Florida’s reactionary “stand your ground” law, one of a raft of measures across the US aimed at promoting law-and-order vigilantism. The law was initially cited by prosecutors in justifying their decision not to bring charges against Zimmerman, and was later referred to by the judge in his trial.

Despite the overwhelming evidence against him, Zimmerman was acquitted of both charges after a month-long trial. Prosecutors conducted the trial in an ineffectual manner, with police officers called by the prosecution barely concealing their sympathy for the killer.

Race was likely a factor in the killing of Martin. However, in an effort to obscure the social and class dynamics underlying the events in Ferguson, the Democratic Party and Obama administration have worked aggressively to frame the incident entirely in racial terms.

The federal civil rights investigation terminated this week was announced as part of these political maneuvers by the White House, which aimed to dissipate popular anger and channel the protest movement behind the Democratic Party.

This political operation was aided by the professional practitioners of identity politics, including Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, along with the various “left” groups that orbit around the Democratic Party. Obama’s race was cited as part of efforts to present the federal government as an instrument for achieving justice in the Zimmerman case.

While the decision not to charge Zimmerman for violating Martin’s civil rights does not come as a surprise, it is clearly a calculated political move on the part of the Obama administration. The announcement means an end to any possibility of holding Zimmerman criminally accountable, thus encouraging the type of vigilantism that led to Martin’s death.

The announcement also comes in the wake of media reports that the administration will not bring civil rights charges against Darren Wilson, the officer who shot Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. An official announcement on that investigation is expected soon.

USW blocks way forward for striking oil workers

Jerry White

With the strike by US oil workers nearing the end of its fourth week, the leadership of the United Steelworkers union has tied the hands of strikers in the face of the intransigence of the energy conglomerates, which have dug in for a drawn out fight. Workers are engaged in a critical battle over safety provisions, impossibly long work schedules, and the continued erosion of their living standards, yet their struggle has been sabotaged by the USW, which has limited the strike to only 6,500 of the 30,000 workers it organizes in the oil industry.

Workers on the picket line at BP-Husky refinery just outside Toledo, Ohio

In a “Letter to USW Oil Workers,” texted to strikers on Thursday, USW President Leo Gerard made no attempt to explain this crippling policy, let alone how the union plans to respond to companies, which according to Gerard, have “adamantly refused to bargain in good faith.” Last week the USW rejected the seventh insulting proposal from lead industry bargainer Shell and the companies have basically walked away from negotiations determined to concede nothing particularly since the current strike has had minimum impact.

Gerard paints a picture of intransigent employers who have stonewalled any proposals to improve safety, agreeing to “meet and discuss” these issues only to give “the impression that they are actually bargaining.” The companies have “shut down discussion” about contracting out work and overtime and fatigue standards, he says while grueling schedules keep workers from their families and imperil their lives. Fires are an almost weekly occurrence and 27 oil workers have recently lost their lives, Gerard says, yet “equipment is old and in need of maintenance, but the company considers [it] too costly to take off line and fix properly because it might slow production.”

The union’s proposals for a minor reduction in huge out-of-pocket health care costs “is not even pennies on a dollar, but they insist they will not budge on this matter.” The multi-billion dollar industry has also resisted any improvement in wages.

Finally, Gerard says, the oil companies are trying to run their struck facilities with people “who are unfamiliar with the processes and equipment,” which “is arrogant and dangerous, and a threat to our communities.”

Pickets at BP-Husky refinery

Having said all of this—which is no doubt true—Gerard does not say he will call out all 30,000 oil workers on strike, let alone appeal to support for solidarity action by auto workers, teachers, dockworkers and others who make up the five million workers with expiring contracts this year. Not a chance. On the contrary, Gerard makes it clear the union will not alter its policy an iota, even though this has led oil workers to a dead end.

Instead, in the most slavish manner, Gerard begs the oil bosses to “recognize” that “we are an efficient and productive workforce.” Leaving aside the fact that Gerard is not part of this workforce—instead he makes $217,000 plus perks from sitting on various corporate and government boards—the oil companies are well aware of how much profit they squeeze from workers—and they want even more!

Even as oil workers are facing the fight of their lives, the USW opposes any struggle that would upset relations with its corporate “partners” and the Obama administration. Instead it is looking to establish more “labor-management safety committees” and an agreement on a minimal number of USW workers the oil companies will employ. The latter is so the USW bureaucracy can tell its accountants how much dues money it can rely on to fund the bloated staff of 900 officials at its Pittsburgh headquarters.

The one matter Gerard seems to have accomplished this week at the AFL-CIO Executive Council meeting in Atlanta was an apparent truce in the turf battle with North America’s Building Trades Unions (NABTU) over dues money in the refinery business.

While Gerard admits that the oil corporations have ignored the recommendations of these various safety committees he nonetheless asks for more. That is because such committees—rather than protecting the lives and limbs of oil workers—offer a path to a lucrative career for corrupt union officials.

In one example, the World Socialist Web Site has learned that Matt Plas, a former USW Process Safety Representative at the BP Husky refinery was hired by management as an Environmental Specialist in the months leading up to the strike. He is now making a great deal of money as part of the strikebreaking operation at the BP Husky refinery. Holed up inside the refinery for 19 straight days, in housing set up by the company to accommodate scabs, Plas reportedly stated that the oil companies are preparing for a five-month strike.

The USW has continuously operated behind the backs of workers, ignoring their demands for a national strike of all 30,000 refinery workers and seeking a sellout deal to end the strike and preserve the interests of the union apparatus. Top USW and AFL-CIO officials have maintained close communication with the Obama administration which, fresh from threatening to break a strike by West Coast dockworkers, wants the oil strike shut down before it becomes a catalyst for a much wider struggle by the working class.

In contrast to the USW, on the picket lines and at oil refineries around the country, workers remain determined to beat back the corporations. One worker at the BP Husky refinery in Toledo, where 350 workers are striking, said representatives from the International USW were coming to a union meeting Thursday night to discuss the strike. “The first thing I am going to ask them,” he said, “is why isn’t this a full national strike?”

Another picketer drew attention to the issue of wages, which have stagnated over the last decade. “There has been a lot of talk about the economy rebounding, we aren’t seeing any of it though. It’s the rich that are making good. Our wages haven’t even kept up with inflation.”

Another striking worker drew the connection between conditions faced by oil workers and auto workers and denounced the imposition of two tier wages in the auto industry as a condition of the Obama administration bailout in 2009. “That never should have been done the way it was. Young workers should be able to work their way up to parity with older workers.”

Henry

Henry, a restaurant worker at Tony Packo’s Café—a well-known establishment near the BP-Husky plant—commented on the dangers in the industry. “I know they’ve got long hours of work and dangerous conditions. This is not just dangerous for them but also the surrounding communities. I used to live near a Sunoco refinery and there was some sort of explosion a while back. Everything got covered in oily ash. We lived a mile away and our house and car got covered. Living here we can always smell the exhaust from the refineries. I imagine the cancer rate is much higher here than in other areas.”

Reporters from the WSWS also spoke to workers at the Sunoco Oil Refinery at Gerard Point in Philadelphia. The USW worked with the Obama administration to help the private equity firm Carlyle Group acquire the refinery in Philadelphia and agreed to major concessions in 2012, including reductions in overtime pay.

A member of Operating Engineers union told the WSWS, “We are treated like second-class citizens. You get docked 15 minutes for clocking out a second early. I worked eleven hours today. It is supposed to be an eight and a half hour day but they want a lot of overtime. I worked 2,400 or 2,500 hours overtime last year. But they are cheap. I do a lot of digging and they tell me I don’t need a respirator. I put it on anyway. They don’t want to pay for it even though it doesn’t cost much.”

An electrical contractor protested working conditions inside the refinery, “They work us to death. Contract workers have union representation but not the USW. We work an eight and a half hour day but in reality it’s twelve hours, seven days a week. We have the 14th day off.” Asked if he would support a national oil strike, he said, “I have a family to feed but I would not cross a picket line.”