Social workers and day care educators carry out warning strikes throughout Germany

Marianne Arens

Warning strikes and rallies involving workers in social and educational services have been taking place across Germany for two and a half months.

On Wednesday, the third and final round of negotiations began in Potsdam. The workers are fighting for better conditions, higher pay scales and reduced workloads. But the negotiations being conducted with the municipal employers by the Verdi and GEW unions, together with the German Civil Servants' Federation, will not resolve any of their problems.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, nursery and social workers have been deemed “essential workers.” At great risk, they have worked the entire time, many contracting COVID-19.

In working class neighbourhoods and social hotspots, they bear the brunt of providing child care, child and youth welfare services, refugee assistance and disability services. But their working conditions have not improved for seven years, since the big day care strike of 2015. Due to the great stress and poor pay in the sector, there is now a shortage of over 173,000 workers at nurseries and day care centres.

Striking day care workers in Frankfurt am Main [Photo: WSWS] [Photo: WSWS]

In recent weeks, thousands have taken to the streets across Germany. Several hundred social workers came to Hanover for a day of action on May 2, and over a thousand kindergarten teachers rallied in Frankfurt am Main on May 4. In Gelsenkirchen, 10,000 educators gathered on May 11, in Hamburg there were over 2,000 on May 12, and another 2,000 demonstrated in Munich.

Large rallies were also held in Kiel, Stuttgart, Leipzig and elsewhere. In Marburg, hundreds of underpaid employees of charitable welfare associations and church organisations protested, although they are not directly affected by the current negotiations. They also function as social workers in schools and centres for the disabled.

Despite a boycott by the major media outlets, the social workers and day care centre workers succeeded in making it clear to the public that things cannot go on like they are. “Day care centres are bursting at the seams, we have no staff,” one kindergarten teacher in Frankfurt said. Another added, “I can’t go on, I’m already exhausted by 11 o’clock in the morning.”

A day care centre director in Bremen said, “I wish politicians would come and work with us for at least one day. Then maybe they will see that this is not just talk from us. The situation is damn serious.”

Many express fears about the future on Twitter. One worker tweeted, “I love my job, but I don’t think I can do it until retirement age.” Practically all agree on waging a longer and more aggressive strike if necessary.

The outbreak of protests by social and education workers is part of a larger movement that is also increasingly affecting health workers. For example, a strike at university hospitals in North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) has just been extended until May 26. At NRW university hospitals, over 98 percent voted for an indefinite strike. In Frankfurt am Main and Stuttgart there have already been joint rallies of social service workers and nurses.

Nursing staff in Düsseldorf on 12 May, during the indefinite strike at the university hospitals in North Rhine-Westphalia. The large placard reads “Asystole. I can’t carry on!” [Photo: WSWS] [Photo: WSWS]

This movement is by no means limited to Germany. Nurses are currently on strike in Madrid and in California. They are demonstrating throughout Vienna and are at the forefront of the social uprising in Sri Lanka. In Finland, nurses went on strike for a fortnight in April. In Nashville, Tennessee, nurses protested on behalf of a colleague accused of being solely responsible for a tragic medication error. There is also a growing willingness to strike in industry and logistics.

The protests by educators at day care centres and workers in social services are part of this growing movement. Their demands for relief from intolerable work pressures and for better pay resonate strongly with working people. A Forsa survey showed that 87 percent of respondents thought the demand for better pay was justified, and 81 percent would support shorter work hours in social and care services.

However, the negotiations in Potsdam will not bring any solution. This is the third and, for the time being, last round of negotiations. The negotiators from Verdi (public sector union), the GEW (education union) and the dbb (civil service union) represent the same political programme and belong to the same parties—the Social Democratic Party (SPD), Greens, Christian Democrats (CDU)—as their counterparts, the representatives of the Federation of Municipal Employers’ Associations (VKA), with whom they are supposedly negotiating.

The establishment politicians have once again increased the pressure on day care workers and social workers. The federal government has decided to prepare for open war against Russia, and the working class, above all public sector workers, are to bear the cost.

While the federal coalition of the SPD, Greens and Liberal Democrats (FDP) has pulled a special fund of €100 billion for the Bundeswehr (German military) out of the hat, the demands of public service workers are allegedly “not realisable for cost reasons.” This was stated by VKA President Karin Welge (SPD) in an interview with the German press agency dpa.

Welge went on to say that especially in view of the consequences of the Ukraine war and higher energy prices, municipal employers must be able to offer “reliable structures.” “We cannot provide general salary enhancements in the sense that every pay group gets more,” the VKA President said.

Politicians from all the establishment parties are already preparing measures to suppress resistance from the working class. In Saxony, one mayor responded to a warning strike with a lockout. The mayor of Öbisfelde-Weferlingen responded to the all-day warning strike on May 13 by shutting down all of the town’s day care centres and after-school care centres for the day, locking out all workers without pay. In doing so, he prevented the establishment of emergency child care arrangements and punished those who did not receive Verdi strike pay.

In Hesse, the state government told day care centres that it would raise the number of children per specialist from 25 to 30 with immediate effect, due to the influx of refugees from Ukraine. This is their answer to the demand for “relief.”

The trade unions have no answer to these attacks. Verdi leaders Frank Werneke and Christine Behle (both SPD), who have headed the negotiations in Potsdam, share the views of the government politicians on the war against Russia. They are not prepared to call on the working class to take real industrial action, even if the negotiations fail.

On the contrary, the demands being advanced by Verdi are designed to stall industrial action and reach a rotten compromise. They are aimed at achieving slightly better pay through the manipulation of pay scales. They are demanding an extension of the time allowed for preparation and follow-up work, as well as better conditions for the qualification of those joining the profession from other fields, who make up an increasingly large part of the staff. On all of these questions, mini-compromises can be reached that are then counteracted twice and three times over by concessions on other issues.

The demands also distract from the fact that the unions are not defending public sector workers against skyrocketing inflation. As a result of the billions given to the banks and corporations in the financial crisis and the pandemic, as well as the sanctions against Russia, inflation officially rose to 7.4 percent in April. For energy and food it is already much higher.

The introduction of a sliding scale of wages is therefore urgently needed throughout the public sector, although it alone would not improve the educators’ profession.

There is no question that the working class is ready to fight. But it must no longer allow itself to be ordered about by Verdi, GEW, dbb & Co. Significantly, Verdi leader Frank Werneke stressed on the first day of negotiations in Potsdam, “From our side, we have no interest in a week-long strike.”

Pussy Riot, the war in Ukraine and Russia’s upper middle class

Andrea Peters

Over the course of the past week and a half, the Western press has picked up the story, first reported in the New York Times, of the allegedly daring escape of Maria Alyokhina, a member of the anti-Putin punk rock group Pussy Riot, from Russia.

The band first came to prominence in February 2012 when they conducted an unauthorized performance in which they yelled slogans hostile to the Kremlin leader and the Russian Orthodox Church in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. It landed three of them in jail, part of a broader crackdown on anti-government opposition. In August of that year, Alyokhina, the mother of a four-year-old child, received a two-year sentence for “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred.” She and others were granted amnesty by the parliament in December 2013 and released.  

Maria Alyokhina 2015 in Berlin (Wikimedia Commons) [Photo by re:publica from Germany, CC BY 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 4.0]

Pussy Riot’s attacks on the Putin government do not go beyond an extremely limited critique of the Kremlin’s anti-democratic character and connections to the nationalist, backward and obscurantist Russian priesthood. The self-described anarchist feminist group has close ties to Russia’s right-wing liberal opposition. They have never evinced the slightest sympathy for the socio-economic oppression of the country’s working class. They have been feted in the West as “freedom fighters,” and with the support of the European Commission, set up the news outlet Mediazona, whose reporting focuses on the repression and brutalities of Russia’s justice system.  

Alyokhina has been arrested and detained several times over the years for oppositional activities. She was on a form of probation, soon to be transformed into a 21-day sentence in a penal colony, when in April 2022 she disguised herself as a courier, left her Moscow apartment, and somehow managed to evade detection when crossing the Russian and Belarusian borders, ultimately making her way to Iceland via Lithuania.

The circumstances of Alyokhina’s departure are such that one can only assume that Russia’s security services, or some segment within it, allowed her to leave, as it is impossible that one of the country’s most well-known anti-Putin activists who is under constant surveillance, evaded detection with a food-delivery costume and a Lithuanian visa. It must have been abundantly clear from the outset that she will play a role in the West’s anti-Russian campaign.

This is already proving to be the case. In the recent New York Times article recounting her departure from Russia, Alyokhina went beyond criticisms of the Putin government or even the demand for its downfall and insisted that the very presence of Russia on the planet is illegitimate and indefensible.

“I don’t think Russia has a right to exist anymore,” she told the newspaper, arguing that its “values” are so degraded that the country is beyond redemption. “Even before, there were questions about how it is united, by what values it is united, and where it is going. But now I don’t think that is a question anymore,” she declared.

Hers are not misplaced words. In identifying Russian “values”—which are part of a society’s culture—as the source of the problem, Alyokhina, now comfortably ensconced in the “artist community” in Iceland, is endorsing nothing short of the destruction of that society as the solution to its ills. In her vision of Russia, there are no class distinctions, there is no exploitation of the working masses by the ruling class, and there are no differences in the “values” of those on the bottom and those on the top. There is also no such thing as American imperialism, much less its “values” of death and destruction. We are meant to think, by implication, that the “values” of Washington and Brussels are the pinnacle of human freedom.

All of this fits entirely with the war propaganda pouring out of the news channels, halls of power and influential institutions in the US and Europe. Russian culture, Russian people and Russian artists are attacked as the source of the problem as much as the Kremlin, transformed into legitimate targets of retribution. There are, however, some exceptions.

The promotion of Pussy Riot comes alongside growing media attention to the apparent plight of Russia’s anti-Putin, middle and upper middle class. Tens of thousands have recently fled their comfortable apartments in Moscow, Saint Petersburg and elsewhere, taking up residence in places such as Georgia, Armenia, Istanbul and Kazakhstan. IT workers, university professors, mid- and high-level managers at private and state-owned enterprises, journalists, attorneys, employees at major cultural institutions and others are jumping ship.

The speed with which many have left Russia is remarkable. By March 13, for instance, the New York Times was reporting the case of one 25-year-old man, now in Armenia, who within weeks of the invasion “quit his job as a lawyer with Russia’s state-owned Sberbank, organized his financial affairs, made out a will and said goodbye to his mother.”

Whatever their opposition to the Russian invasion of Ukraine—which often comes from a pro-US and pro-NATO standpoint—their primary motivation for leaving Russia is the impact of Western sanctions on their living standards and life styles. These layers have benefited from the explosive growth of social inequality during the post-Soviet era, particularly that of the last 20 years under the Putin government. Some may have been longstanding critics of the Kremlin and active constituents of the “liberal” opposition, while others no doubt accommodated themselves to the politics of the government in Moscow so long as it secured for them an acceptable social position. What unites them is their absolute determination not to share the fate of Russia’s working class, which is being hammered by job losses and inflation.

Both the New York Times and Foreign Affairs have featured articles recently about the trials and tribulation of these layers as they open up overseas bank accounts, set up their remote employment from a different location, secure long-term visas and find shops and restaurants that meet their requirements. They sip wine at outdoor cafés in Istanbul, work studiously at their laptops in new apartments in Yerevan and hold signs aloft at pro-Ukraine demonstrations, images show.

The central concern with these social forces from the standpoint of the West is that they can be galvanized into an active, anti-Putin opposition outside of Russia’s borders but with a capacity to also influence the country’s internal politics. In the Foreign Affair’s “Escape from Moscow” article of May 13, the mouthpiece of the leading US think tank, the Council on Foreign Relations, noted with enthusiasm the historically important and right-wing role that Russia’s exiles have played. It appeals for the creation of new institutions of higher education and media outlets that can employ today’s refugees from the Kremlin and turn them into ideological weapons.

“With hundreds of thousands of Russians on the European continent, it is time for European governments to start thinking of these exile populations far more strategically. Rather than remaining on the defensive, trying to deflect the disinformation and cyberwarfare campaigns that Moscow aims at the West, they should draw on this crucial resource to wage a new kind of information war on the Kremlin. And although much of the emphasis in the Western media has been rightly focused on Ukrainian refugees, European governments should be wary of falling into the trap of regarding Russian exiles themselves as the enemy, rather than crucial allies, in the effort to counter the Putin regime,” counsels the magazine.

Cannes Film Festival promotes US-NATO war against Russia

Stefan Steinberg

The Cannes Film Festival is the latest cultural institution or event to disgracefully provide a public stage for Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to promote the US-NATO war against Russia.

Zelensky addressed the gala opening of the 75th film festival in Cannes on a huge screen via a video link from Kyiv. Drawing heavily on The Great Dictator (1940), Zelensky exploited the profoundly humanist message of Charlie Chaplin’s film classic to claim that the Ukrainian army was striking a blow for cinema and the arts.

“If there is a dictator, if there is a war for freedom, once again, everything depends on our unity. Can cinema stay outside of this unity?” Zelensky intoned. Quoting directly from Chaplin’s speech at the end of The Great Dictator, Zelensky continued: “In the end, hatred will disappear and dictators will die.” The Ukrainian president’s duplicitous speech was then given a standing ovation by the well-heeled audience of film celebrities, super-models, media figures and critics gathered at the festival’s Grand Théâtre Lumière.

2022 Cannes Film Festival poster

Zelensky’s references to Chaplin’s film are repugnant. In The Great Dictator, Chaplin bitterly satirized the fascist rulers of Germany and Italy at a time when Hollywood studios didn’t dare make any such criticism. Chaplin played two roles in the film, the Nazi dictator (named Adenoid Hynkel in the film, but unmistakably Hitler) and an identical looking Jewish barber.

When the barber is mistaken for Hitler, the former gives an impassioned speech to a crowd in which he deplores “a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people” and calls upon his audience “to free the world—to do away with national barriers—to do away with greed, with hate and intolerance.”

Zelensky, whose government’s promotion of unfettered free market capitalism and extreme nationalism includes full support for the notorious fascist Azov battalion, and his US-NATO backers stand for everything that Chaplin abhorred. In fact, what would a Chaplin make out of the self-satisfied rubbish about “poor, defenseless little Ukraine,” armed to the hilt and financed by the biggest imperialist robbers on the planet?

The shameless promotion of the NATO war against Russia and its puppet Zelensky by the media and bourgeois governments across the globe is being accompanied by the cancelling and demonisation of Russian artists. Cannes festival officials banned any official delegations or reporters from Russia. The only Russian director allowed to feature at the festival was Kirill Serebrennikov, whose new film Tchaikovsky’s Wife, was financed in part by Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich.

This action alone makes a mockery of the festival’s pretence to be the guardian of democratic rights, or art. How many of the greatest masterworks of world cinema have come from Russia? The festival adopted a course of action far closer to an authoritarian than a genuinely democratic approach to filmmaking. How many American movies have been banned by Cannes officials during the decades of criminal invasions or bombings of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and more, resulting in millions of deaths?

The extent to which Zelensky and his media team, with the overwhelming support of the global press and television, have been able to promote the NATO war against Russia is unprecedented.

Just a week ago, a massive media campaign swept the Ukrainian band, Kalush Orchestra, to victory in the European Song Contest held in Italy. Zelensky was quick to respond, thanking the band and declaring, “I am sure that the sound of victory in the battle with the enemy is not far off.”

In defiance of the rules of the competition, which forbids political commentary, a member of the band was able to appeal on stage for international support for Ukraine’s war effort and its soldiers in the steelworks of Azovstal. The European Broadcasting Union, which organises the contest, declared it would take no action against the band for making such a statement.

On April 3, as part of a media and propaganda offensive, which has included appearances before the parliaments of various Western nations, Zelensky addressed the audience at the annual Grammy music awards in Las Vegas to express his hope that the Ukrainian people could soon “be free like the people on the Grammy stage.”

In his comment on the occasion, David Walsh wrote on the WSWS that the reaction of the American media and its “effusion over Ukraine is one of the most mendacious in history. It lives up to what was once said about the ‘patriotic press’ on both sides during World War I, that ‘hacks of all political shades’ were putting out ‘as many lies as has been seen since the creation of the world.’”

Later the same month, Zelensky, who entered the public domain as a little-known actor in a satirical Ukrainian television series, addressed the audience at the Venice Art Biennale, posing as a defender of “the power of art,” which “can tell the world things that cannot be shared otherwise.”

In addition to lining up with the US-NATO war drive, the Cannes festival has underlined its attitude by massively promoting the new Tom Cruise film Top Gun Maverick, a piece of pro-war, patriotic propaganda. The original Top Gun movie (1986) led to a massive increase in recruitment for the US Navy and the top brass in the Pentagon are clearly hoping that its follow-up will have the same effect.

According to the website Brands & Films, Paramount Pictures, the production company for Top Gun Maverick, was provided “a vast amount of access to Naval facilities and staff in the state of California, Nevada and Washington—including permission to fly aircraft, position cameras on and in F / A-18 Super Hornets and Navy helicopters, and protected access to a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier of the class Nimitz.”

The website also notes: “Yet Pentagon funding hasn’t come without any strings attached (it rarely does). In return for the DoD funding, creators of the film and Paramount Pictures had to promise to offer an exclusive screening of the top brass before the film was made public.”

Note from 1939 with the French Government's decision not to participate at the Venice Film Festival anymore, but instead to host its own festival in Biarritz, Cannes or Nice

In the wake of the tidal wave of national chauvinism and war-lust surrounding the Cannes festival, it is worth recalling the circumstances under which the event was founded.

In its statement announcing the exclusion of Russian participants, the festival hypocritically asserted that, “Faithful to its history, which began in 1939 in resistance to the Fascist and Nazi dictatorships, the Cannes Film Festival will always be at the service of artists and film professionals, whose voice is raised to denounce violence, repression and injustices, and to defend peace and freedom.”

Indeed, the film festival in southern France was originally conceived in 1939 (one year before the premiere of The Great Dictator) as a counterweight to the Venice Film Festival, founded seven years earlier by the National Fascist Party to promote the political and cultural aims of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. In 1938, the Venice event handed out its top award to films from Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, including Leni Riefenstahl’s notorious Olympia, celebrating the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. The fascist propaganda films won out over Jean Renoir’s anti-war and anti-chauvinist La Grande Illusion (subsequently banned in Germany and Italy).

French film figures were outraged and pressured the government of Prime Minister Édouard Daladier to launch a festival in their country. The latter was nervous about offending Mussolini and reluctant to take such action.

In fact, sympathy for Mussolini and Hitler, unstated or otherwise, was rife in French ruling circles. The government that finally did approve the establishment of the Cannes festival had previously reinstituted the six-day week to finance the war effort, banned the Communist Party over the Stalin-Hitler pact and would vote Marshal Pétain into power less than a year later.

The 1939 festival was scheduled to open September 1, the day that Germany invaded Poland, initiating World War II, and had to be cancelled. The tragic events associated with the Cannes festival’s origins ought to serve as a warning about the implications of the filthy, anti-democratic Ukrainian-nationalist drivel the festival is currently serving up.

10,000 healthcare workers strike in New Zealand

Tom Peters

About 10,000 health workers in New Zealand held a nationwide 24-hour strike on May 16. The strike went ahead after the Public Service Association (PSA) union, the District Health Boards (DHBs) and the state’s Employment Relations Authority failed to reach an agreement to call it off. The PSA members are continuing work-to-rule industrial action until May 20, which includes a ban on overtime and on working during breaks.

Health workers protest in Wellington. [Source: Public Service Association Facebook page]

Thousands of workers and supporters took part in protests and pickets in Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and many regional centres including Nelson, Blenheim, Rotorua, Tauranga, Whanganui and Palmerston North.

The allied health workers are employed in more than 70 occupations, including anaesthetic technicians, audiologists, occupational therapists, dental technicians, social workers and physiotherapists, and workers who process COVID-19 tests. Many of these workers are making little more than the legal minimum wage of $21.20 an hour. Their pay has effectively been frozen since their previous employment contract expired 18 months ago.

The strike points to growing anger among working people at the soaring cost of living under the Labour Party-led government, as well as the crisis of under-resourcing in public hospitals. Annual inflation in New Zealand stands at nearly 7 percent, more than double what most workers are receiving in wage rises.

Lakes DHB occupational therapist Bridget Davey told the Rotorua Daily Post that her team was “notoriously understaffed” and staff were “leaving to go overseas” to try and make more money. Physiotherapist Grant Tuhaka added that staff were pushed to work too many extra hours and “everyone’s either leaving or we’re burning out and we’re just really tired.”

A striking mental health worker, Scott Rusbridge, told TVNZ: “I probably put in an extra 10 hours a week in unpaid overtime. I’ve got a masters degree in social work and I still start off on a $53,000 salary,” about $25.50 an hour.

Conditions for healthcare workers have dramatically worsened as a result of the government’s decision last October to end its COVID-19 elimination policy and to allow the virus to spread throughout the country. According to the Ministry of Health, 986 people had died with COVID as of May 17—up from 59 at the end of 2021. The toll is likely to pass 1,000 deaths by the end of the week.

Hospitals currently have more than 400 patients with the virus, and thousands of hospital workers have been infected, leading to major staffing shortages and delays for essential medical procedures. On May 16, Stuff reported that 37-year-old mother Aroha Raynel​, who had recently had COVID, was told she would have to wait 17 hours for attention after she went to Waikato Hospital’s emergency department suffering severe chest pains. Many other patients reported similar wait times.

Sue Stebbeings,​ chairperson of the College of Emergency Nurses, said: “Chronic understaffing, space constraints, increasing [patient] presentations and more complex presentations are all factors” in long waiting times. Last Friday, Director General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield warned that hospitalisations for COVID-19 could more than double during the winter, which starts next month, making the situation even worse.

Southland Hospital in Invercargill was forced to close to visitors this week after several vulnerable patients tested positive for COVID, prompting fears that the virus was spreading in the hospital. Dr Hywel Lloyd, a spokesperson for the Southern DHB, told Radio NZ that both patients and staff had to be protected, adding that “we have significant staffing shortages.”

Allied health workers had initially voted to strike in March, but the Employment Court banned the strike at the last minute, in an extraordinary anti-democratic ruling. The PSA had already sought to appease the authorities by calling off the strike in Auckland, but the court decided this was not enough.

Following the ruling, the union re-entered negotiations with the DHBs, facilitated by the Employment Relations Authority (ERA). The ERA recommended a deal which was agreed to by the PSA leadership, which said if it was accepted by the DHBs, then the strike could be averted. Last week, the DHBs presented an offer, which the union said fell short of the ERA’s proposal. No details of either proposal have been made public, leaving healthcare workers in the dark as to what the PSA has agreed to.

The union now says it wants to negotiate directly with the government’s new agency Health NZ, which is to replace the DHBs in July as part of a restructure that will centralise the public health system. Workers should have no confidence that this will produce a better deal; the government has made clear that it supports the offer made by the DHBs.

Health workers protest in Auckland. (Source: Public Service Association Facebook page)

Health Minister Andrew Little revealed to Newstalk ZB on May 16 that under the DHBs’ offer, “those on the lowest rates [of pay] would go up to about $52,000 a year,” i.e., hardly more than the minimum wage. He nonetheless backed the offer, implying that workers who were unhappy with it should wait for a separate “pay equity” deal, which the government claims will significantly boost wages.

The details of the “pay equity” deal—supposedly meant to address long-standing underpayment in the sector—have not been determined, and Little admitted that “we don’t even know when agreement is going to be reached.”

Nurses have strongly objected to a similar “pay equity” deal hatched between the government and the New Zealand Nurses’ Organisation, which falls short of the increased cost of living and will not address the staffing crisis.

The situation facing healthcare workers, and the working class as a whole, exposes the unions’ lies that the Labour-led government would enact progressive reforms. In 2020, the PSA campaigned vigorously for Labour’s re-election, declaring in one statement that the party had a “commitment to workers’ rights and wellbeing” (September 19) and in another that its policies “signal a shift toward secure work with decent pay and conditions for all” (September 14).

In reality, the Labour-Greens government has used the pandemic to carry out the biggest transfer of wealth to the rich and big business in New Zealand’s history, through multi-billion dollar subsidies and quantitative easing. The accumulated debt is to be repaid through brutal austerity measures, at the expense of healthcare and other essential services.

Throughout the world, from Sri Lanka to the United States, Europe and Australia, workers are seeking to fight back against the out-of-control cost of living, and to stop more needless deaths from COVID-19. They are hamstrung and divided by the trade unions, which are enforcing government and corporate austerity and have suppressed opposition to the dismantling of public health measures.

School districts slash spending across the US

Renae Cassimeda

School districts across the United States are implementing deep budget cuts. Citing the drop in student enrollment—the result of the criminal response of both political parties to the pandemic—federal, state and local officials are accelerating the attack on public education.

A major decline in enrollment in US public schools has taken place over the past two years. According to Return 2 Learn Tracker, a recent national survey on student enrollment, an estimated 1.2 million students have left public schools since the pandemic began.

There are still no definitive studies on the causes of the sharp decline. However, large numbers of working class parents likely pulled their children out of school because they lost jobs, suffered homelessness, got sick or lost family members who cared for children. Some parents with the economic means also transferred their children to parochial and other private schools, which have largely remained open throughout the pandemic.

As most public school funds are tied directly to student enrollment and attendance, districts face major budget deficits for the upcoming school years. Insufficient pandemic relief funding from the federal government has not stemmed the budget crisis. Projecting major budget deficits, districts across the US are already imposing austerity measures in the form of hiring freezes, school closures, cuts to vital services and programs including Special Education programs and English as a Second Language programs, teacher and staff layoffs, classroom consolidations and more.

A snapshot of school budget cuts in several areas gives a sense of the scale of this assault.

Minneapolis educators march earlier this year (WSWS Media)

In New York City Public Schools, the largest district in the US, over 50,000 students have left the district over the past two years. Proposals for cuts to the budget include cutting $215 million for next school year and a total of nearly $1 billion to schools over the next three years.

In Minnesota, Minneapolis Public Schools faces an estimated $27.1 million budget deficit for the upcoming school year. Citing decline in enrollment and added expenses from meager employee raises under new labor agreements, the district plans to enforce a hiring freeze, cut 5 percent from each department, and decrease allocations to school sites. The district also plans to use 78 percent of its remaining pandemic relief funds to pay salaries for the next two years. The drastic cuts come two months after the 20-day strike of teachers and support staff in the district was shut down and betrayed by the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers.

In California, student enrollment has declined by more than 250,000 students since 2019, representing the state’s lowest public school student enrollment numbers in 20 years. In the Sacramento City Unified School District, one month after the Sacramento City Teachers Union and Service Employees International Union Local 1021 sold out the strike of over 5,000 school employees, the district voted unanimously to lay off 106 classified positions, effective since last Friday, and unilaterally extend the school year. The district has cited the cost of the below inflation rate wage increases for educators and fines from lost instruction due to the strike as basis for its estimated $38.5 million budget deficit.

San Francisco Unified School District last week rescinded hundreds of layoff notices and issued 35 layoff notices to teachers and classified staff, instead of an initial proposal of 311 layoffs back in March. The rescinding of layoffs was due in large part to a major exodus of teachers and staff from the district for the 2022–2023 school year. Since January, 68 teachers have resigned and 15 teachers retired. The district is cynically presenting these figures as a means for solving the budget crisis, but most of the vacancies will remain unfilled due to ongoing budget cuts.

Facing a $50 million budget deficit, Oakland Unified School District will carry out the closure, consolidation and merging of 11 schools in the district over the next two years, a plan which has been confronted with mass opposition from teachers, staff and families. The school board recently announced there have been 96 employee “separations” from the district since January, which include special ed teachers, counselors, psychologists, English as a second language teachers and food service staff, among others.

According to state data, Kansas public schools enrollment dropped by more than 15,000 since the start of the pandemic. The Olathe School District in Kansas City faces a $28 million deficit for next school year and has issued major cuts to the district including 140 teaching and staff positions and a hiring freeze on vacant positions.

Maysville School District in Everett, Washington, recently finalized 35 teacher layoffs to offset $13.5 million in lost revenue. Also on the chopping block are millions in cuts to sports programs, instructional materials, student support staff and school maintenance staff. Evergreen Public Schools in Vancouver, Washington, plans to lay off nearly 200 positions for the 2022–2023 school year, including teachers, paraeducators and student intervention specialists. The district also proposed to eliminate all COVID-19 quarantine monitor positions.

In New Jersey, Montclair Schools will cut 26 teaching positions due to a more than $3 million budget deficit. An undisclosed number of support staff are also getting laid off in addition to hiring freezes on special ed and bus driver vacancies.

Pentucket Regional School District in West Newbury, Massachusetts, plans for $1.34 million in cuts for next year, which will have a devastating impact on the quality of public education in the district. Cuts are to include the elimination of seven teachers, two paraeducators, two Special Ed teachers, one nurse and one librarian position in the district. There will also be cuts to school supplies, field trips for grades 6–7, reductions in athletics and cuts to summer special ed programs.

In Pennsylvania, Pleasant Valley School District has issued layoffs to 52 staff, including 18 teachers and 34 support staff for next school year. The layoffs come after the district incentivized early retirements in February resulting in 28 teacher and 22 support staff early retirements in the district.

Additional relief funding from the federal government during the pandemic has proven to be entirely insufficient. The $30 billion one-time COVID-19 relief funding for schools from the CARES Act did not adequately address safety concerns across US schools. Instead it served largely as a buffer for districts to keep afloat during the pandemic. Another $122 billion in American Rescue Plan stimulus funds must be spent by July 2024. Even if this was actually spent, it would hardly be a dent in the resources needed to address crumbling infrastructure in schools, lack of resources and COVID-19 safety mitigations.

Significantly, federal Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) fund money is being used to “bolster” meager pay raises through one-time funds. At the same time, state and district officials, along with the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA), are telling teachers and support staff to lower their expectations because this money will soon run out too.

US Secretary of Education Cardona issued a nationwide call in March, during the Minneapolis teacher strike, for districts to use ESSER funds as a means to attract new educators and address the teacher shortage. But most of those funds were already allocated for important school services and in many cases have since been redirected for one-time bonuses. During the strike and contract negotiations in Sacramento, district and union officials agreed to take ESSER funds earmarked for health services for 504 plans, behavioral supports, and nutrition services and other services amounting to $11 million.

Far from fighting for a genuine redistribution of wealth in order to expand funding for public education programs and teacher salaries, the unions have pursued this “rob Peter to pay Paul” policy, which allows districts to drive a wedge between teachers, parents and students.

Significantly, the latest budget passed by Congress has offered no significant increase in public education funds, instead funneling unlimited billions for war. Just last week the US House of Representatives voted to send an unprecedented $40 billion in military and financial aid to Ukraine. All claims that there is no money to adequately fund public education is a lie.

The present crisis in public education is the result of a decades-long defunding of public education and diversion of public resources to for-profit charters and other school privatization schemes. Declines in student enrollment before the pandemic were always a self-fulfilling prophecy. The gutting of public schools led to lower enrollment, which in turn was used to carry out further cuts and promote charters, school vouchers and other “school choice.”

Since the outbreak of the pandemic, first Trump and then Biden refused to carry out the necessary public health measures—school and workplace closures and the replacement of lost wages, universal testing, contact tracing, quarantining and a global campaign of mass vaccinations—to shorten the pandemic and eliminate SARS-CoV-2.

Politicians from both parties cite the dangers of supposed “learning loss” to keep the schools open as cases and hospitalizations rise due to the highly infectious and immune-resistant Omicron BA.2 and BA.2.12.1 subvariants. But the “let it rip” policy has and continues to have a catastrophic impact on schoolchildren, including on their learning capacity, with many thousands facing long-term illness and debilities from Long COVID.

Now all of the feigned concern over the educational needs of students is further exposed by the massive budget cuts hitting the schools.

Sri Lankan attorney general orders arrest of leaders of mob violence against anti-government protesters

Saman Gunadasa & K. Ratnayake

On the orders of the Attorney General Sanjay Rajaratnam, the Sri Lankan police have begun arresting some 22 leaders of the mob that violently attacked anti-government protesters on May 9.

The 22 persons include former ministers, MPs and local leaders of the President Gotabhaya Rajapakse’s Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP). The attorney general also ordered the arrest of Deputy Inspector General of Police in charge of Colombo area, Dehabandu Tennakoon, in connection with the attack.

The anti-government campaigners had been occupying the Galle Face Green in Central Colombo for more than a month demanding the resignation of the president and his government and an end to the intolerable hardships caused by soaring prices and chronic shortages of essentials. Some campaigners had also started a protest outside the official residence of Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapakse.

More than 1,000 SLPP thugs were bussed from many parts of the country to the prime minister’s official residence where they were whipped up into a frenzy. They first attacked unarmed demonstrators outside the residence then turned on protesters at Galle Face Green down the road. There they smashed up temporary shelters and physically beat up the demonstrators. More than 100 were injured.

Right-wing thug attack on a protest hut at Galle Face Green [Photo: Facebook]

The police stood by allowing the mob to rampage freely across Galle Face Green, only later dispersing the attackers with tear gas and water cannon. None of the attackers were arrested.

In response, thousands of workers and others flooded onto Galle Face Green to oppose the attack and demand the immediate arrest of those responsible. Health, postal and port workers immediately went on strike and many other sections of the working class joined a general strike the following day.

Widespread public outrage has continued to mount over the past week over the failure to arrest and prosecute anyone over the flagrant attack on the anti-government protests.

After dragging his feet, the attorney general finally instructed the Inspector General of Police and the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) to arrest the 22 persons and produce before the courts.

Apart from Deputy Inspector General Tennakoon, former minister Johnston Fernando, State Minister Sanath Nishantha, MPs Sanjeewa Edirimanne and Milan Jayatilake, and Moratuwa Mayor Samanlal Fernando were among the others to be detained.  

Lankadeepa reported that it had asked whether any action would be taken against Prime Minster Mahinda Rajapakse, who resigned in response to the public outcry over the attack. He has been widely criticised for inciting the attackers.

Reuters journalists in Colombo reported that they had seen people enter the meeting at the prime minister’s residence chanting: “Whose power? Mahinda’s power!”

According to Reuters, a video showed Mahinda Rajapakse rhetorically asking whether he should resign. “No” came the reply. “That means,” he said, “I don’t need to resign… I have always been on the side of the country… I am willing to make any sacrifice for the people’s benefit.”

Mahinda Rajapaksa, former prime minister of Sri Lanka [Credit: Wikimedia Commons]

In the video, former minister Johnston Fernando told the meeting: “Get ready… Let’s start the fight. If the president can’t ... he should hand over to us. We will clear Galle Face.”

All that the attorney general’s department told Lankadeepa, however, was that the investigation was ongoing.

So far, police have arrested Sanath Nishantha and Malith Jayatilake, who faced court yesterday and remanded until May 25. Four others on the list have also been arrested.

Johnston Fernando, a high profile SLPP figure, is being allowed to roam free and even attended the sittings of parliament this week. The CID questioned Deputy Inspector General Tennakoon for eight hours but did not arrest him despite the attorney general’s order.

Sri Lankan police and authorities are notorious for suppressing cases against high-profile politicians and other figures. If unable to cover up their crimes, scapegoats are found to let the real culprits off the hook.

The attack on the anti-government protesters was a deliberate provocation aimed at creating the conditions for widespread state repression on the mass protest movement.

It came in the immediate aftermath of a second general strike and hartal on May 6 involving millions of workers and small businesses across the island that effectively shut down the economy. The previous one-day general strike on April 28 was also widely supported.

The emergence of the working class in struggle not only against the government but the entire political establishment, including the opposition parties and the trade unions that had called it. On the night of May 6, the president proclaimed a state of emergency enhancing his already sweeping powers, including to mobilise the military.

In the wake of the May 9 attack on Galle Face Green, the president seized on retaliatory violence at the homes of government ministers and MPs as the pretext for mobilising the military and police across the island and imposing a nation-wide 24-hour curfew. Soldiers were ordered to strictly enforce the law and shoot rioters and looters on sight. Military check points were set up throughout the country.

As the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) warned, the violent attacks on government figures and the burning of their homes would only play into the hands of reaction and the state apparatus.

While legal action against the SLPP thugs and their leaders has been dragged out, the police rapidly arrested many of those involved in the retaliatory protests. So far 900 people have been arrested based on CCTV footage and formal complaints.

The resignation of Mahinda Rajapakse as prime minister plunged the country even further into political crisis. The ruling class is desperate for emergency finance from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and other sources to be able to pay for essential imports of food, fuel and medicines. Any bailout will inevitably come with harsh austerity measures that will only deepen the social crisis facing working people.

In a desperate move last week, President Rajapakse appointed right-wing United National Party (UNP) leader Ranil Wickremesinghe as prime minister. He is notorious for ruthlessly implementing the dictates of international finance capital and serving Washington’s geopolitical interests. For months, he has criticised the government for not holding talks with the IMF sooner. 

In a speech to the nation on May 16, Wickremesinghe warned that the next few months would be the hardest that anyone had faced. He set out the extent of the country’s financial crisis in an effort to bludgeon the population into accepting the hardships as inevitable.

The UNP is widely discredited and Wickremesinghe, a former prime minister, is its sole parliamentarian. But the opposition parties, including Samagi Jana Balawegaya, the Tamil National Alliance and an “independent” grouping that recently broke from Rajapakse’s ruling coalition have all declared they will back Wickremesinghe’s “development work.”

The trade unions have also fallen into line. Having previously promised to call an indefinite general strike if the president and the government did not resign, they have now abandoned their bogus posturing in favour of token protests. Their aim from the start was to deflect and suppress the rising anger and opposition of the working class.

The SEP has explained repeatedly that there is no solution to the social crisis facing working people within the profit system or the national borders of Sri Lanka. The turmoil in Sri Lanka is a particularly sharp expression of the global crisis of capitalism.

The government led by President Rajapakse and Prime Minister Wickremesinghe will ruthlessly impose the IMF’s dictates on working people and will not hesitate to use police state measures against any opposition.

The state of emergency is still in place. A night curfew is still in force. Armed troops have been deployed throughout the country, including near the country’s free trade zones. A crackdown on social media has been intensified.

The Northern Ireland Protocol is in Tatters

Kenneth Surin

Photograph Source: Sinn Féin – Protest at Boris Johnson visit – CC BY 2.0

The recent UK midterm elections delivered a historic verdict in the north of Ireland when Sinn Féin, standing for a reunited Ireland, emerged as the largest party.

Sinn Féin topped the first-preference vote with 29%, and won 27 seats, enabling its deputy leader, Michelle O’Neill, to become the north of Ireland’s first minister-designate.

O’Neill is the first nationalist to hold this position in a momentous blow to Protestant-oriented Unionism.

The Democratic Unionist party (DUP), the largest of the Unionist parties won 25 seats.

The cross-community Alliance Party won 13 seats, becoming the third-largest party in an election for the first time.

The DUP, much chagrined at its loss of hegemony in Northern Ireland politics, retreated in a huff by saying it will not re-enter the Northern Ireland power-sharing executive while issues with the Northern Ireland protocol remain.

The 1998 Good Friday Agreement, which resulted in the prevailing Northern Irish political settlement, called for a “frictionless” border between the 2 parts of Ireland.

Brexit put the “frictionless” border in jeopardy, since a border now existed between the EU-member Republic of Ireland and the UK-belonging (and thus non-EU) Northern Ireland.

The anomalous status of Northern Ireland with regard to EU trade was resolved by the Northern Ireland protocol, which retained the “frictionless” border, but upheld the need for checks on goods between Great Britain and Northern Ireland (the latter basically being a part of the EU’s single market).

In the 2019 general election, Boris “BoJo” Johnson had a single mantra—he had an “oven-ready deal” that would “Get Brexit Done!”. It won him an 80-seat parliamentary majority.

The routinely dishonest BoJo claimed categorically that his Brexit deal would not put a border in the Irish Sea. He insisted that businesses in Northern Ireland would have unencumbered access to markets in England, Scotland and Wales, saying with typical bombast that the Irish Sea trade border would exist “over my dead body”.

However, BoJo, in his haste to show he could “get Brexit done”, signed an agreement with the EU, binding in international law, which required the Irish Sea border to be there.

In so doing BoJo conned the DUP, which is renowned historically for its inflexibility when it came to safeguarding what it perceives to be Unionist interests.

BoJo also duped the EU into thinking he could be trusted when he signed a treaty enshrining Northern Ireland’s special status with regard to the EU— a status he clearly had no intention of adhering to.

The DUP, having lost its majority in the assembly, decided to take a gamble by calling BoJo’s bluff— telling BoJo that unless he scrapped unilaterally the part of the Northern Ireland protocol which requires trade barriers to exist between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK, the DUP would not enter into any power-sharing arrangement with Sinn Féin, thereby scuppering the Good Friday Agreement.

The foreign secretary Liz Truss, who has ambitions to succeed BoJo and is branding herself as a “Margaret Thatcher MK 2”, has taken the position that the UK has no choice but to act unilaterally if the EU did not accede to the UK’s demands to abolish the checks on goods crossing from Great Britain to Northern Ireland.

BoJo supported Truss at first, but shifted his position later in typical fashion. Renowned for having no settled principles on anything (except his own self-interest)— BoJo was after all anti-Brexit when he was mayor of London, BoJo flew to Belfast on Monday to meet with the north of Ireland’s political leaders.

BoJo took a less strident tone than his foreign secretary, but ended-up pleasing no one.

Sinn Féin’s president Mary Lou McDonald accused BoJo of intolerable and timewasting tactics where the protocol is concerned.

McDonald said BoJo was placating the DUP and that he gave “no straight answers” during their meeting, saying: “The British government is in a game of brinkmanship with the European institutions, indulging a section of political unionism which believes it can frustrate and hold society to ransom”.

The DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson said after meeting BoJo: “We cannot have power-sharing unless there is a consensus. That consensus doesn’t exist”.

“Consensus” for the DUP involves ditching the part of the protocol which requires a trade border to exist between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK, and since Sinn Féin is opposed to this, no return to power-sharing is on the horizon, and BoJo left the meetings empty-handed, with the ball back in his court. The only thing that would be acceptable to the DUP is precisely what Sinn Féin opposes.

BoJo said more details regarding the protocol would be released “in the coming days”, and is widely expected to scrap unilaterally key parts of the protocol, daring the EU to give him what he wants or else.

After his meetings with the Northern Irish leaders, BoJo typically wanted to have his cake and eat it. He dismissed the idea that his proposed legislation, giving his government the right to ignore key parts of the protocol, could start a trade war with the EU, saying: “What we’re doing is sticking up for the Belfast/Good Friday agreement, and what we are doing it trying to protect and preserve the government of Northern Ireland”.

It is hard to see the EU sitting back and allowing the UK to get away with breaking an international treaty it had signed in order to maintain a “frictionless” border between the 2 parts of Ireland, and by so doing, ensuring that a single market exists between the north and the south of Ireland.

The EU fears a “slippery slope”. Its members have trading relations with non-EU countries, of course, and allowing the UK to break agreed-upon rules for the institution of a single market could set a precedent for other countries demanding a similar leeway in their trading relations with EU members.

Meanwhile, a delegation of powerful US Congressional representatives, including the head of the ways and means committee, Richard Neal, is expected to arrive in London in the coming days, reflecting the White House’s concern about escalating tensions over the protocol.