German share prices soar, while incomes and jobs plummet

Marianne Arens

The social gulf in Germany, as elsewhere, is widening.

Since the beginning of the year, stock prices have been climbing while thousands of jobs are cut and real wages fall. The workload for staff in the public sector is being doubled and tripled because money is going into rearmament.

The more the German political establishment shifts to a war economy, the more pressure is put on the working class.

Frankfurt Stock Exchange [Photo by Pythagomath / Wikimedia / CC BY-SA 4.0]

The willingness to resist is growing, as shown by the recent airport strikes in Berlin and Düsseldorf. Warning strikes, protest actions and even indefinite strikes are becoming more frequent.

In Göppingen, 230 metalworkers have been on strike for a week. They went on strike January 22 at two plants belonging to the Kern-Liebers Group, Saxonia Umformtechnik and Saxonia Textile Parts. Both plants produce metal parts: one for the automotive industry, the other for knitting machines and textile operations.

“Participation in the industrial action is overwhelming,” writes the local press. The strike had been approved by 96 percent in a strike ballot. The employees have been working overtime for years, but the Saxonia board refuses to pay the agreed-to wages. The same situation could arise at other plants in the Kern-Liebers company, where management is also complaining about “supply chain problems, the Ukraine war and the energy crisis.”

The top management of German companies warns of “the advantage of German locations being lost,” according to a letter from the country’s Chamber of Industry and Commerce (DIHK). In an interview with Welt am Sonntag, employers’ president Rainer Dulger said he expected the number of people in work to shrink by 5 million by 2030. Since the government would receive less tax and contributions revenue, he said, it would have to “adjust the social welfare systems” (and raise the retirement age, for example). “We will not be able to maintain the prosperity to which we have become accustomed in Germany,” Dulger asserted.

When Dulger says “we” will have to do with less, the multimillionaire and president of the Confederation of German Employers’ Associations (BDA), is clearly not talking about himself and his peers. Nor is he considering higher tax rates for board members and shareholders of corporations like Porsche, Daimler, Siemens and Rheinmetall, for whom things are going really well right now. Share prices on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange have been rising since the beginning of the year.

The DAX index, which tracks the share prices of Germany’s 40 strongest companies, gained almost 9 percent in the first two weeks of 2023. According to an analysis by savings bank subsidiary Deka, DAX companies are expecting record-breaking dividends in spring 2023. A total amount of almost €55 billion ($US60 billion) in dividends is predicted. More than a third of this will go to the auto companies Mercedes, Porsche, BMW, Audi and VW, which achieved record profits last year.

However, the same corporations are demanding concessions from the working class because of the “difficult situation.” To push this through, they are relying on the collaboration of the German Union Confederation (DGB) unions. The latter, including IG Metall, Verdi and the rest, have already proven to be important pillars of German corporate interests, prior to and during the coronavirus pandemic.

Shortly after the start of the Ukraine war, the unions joined forces with the government and business leaders in the “Concerted Action.“ Their goal is to pass on the enormous costs of military rearmament and the consequences of sanctions against Russia to working people while blocking resistance to the war. Since then, “restructuring” has involved more and more layoffs and the biggest wage losses since the 1930s.

A few days ago, Ford announced mass layoffs in Cologne and Aachen. The closure of the Ford Saarlouis plant by 2025 is a done deal. Previously, the Ford works council had secretly agreed to an 18 percent wages cut at all plants. Other European auto plants, such as Volvo in Ghent, Belgium and Stellantis at the Atessa plant in Italy, are putting further pressure on their workforces this week, bringing in short-time working.

The supplier companies are particularly affected by the transformation underway in the auto industry. “The supplier industry is dying a slow death,” writes Der Spiegel, in regard to small and medium-sized businesses. The authors point out the situation of many small foundries and steel producers that depend on coke, coal or gas, which have been hit hard by the energy crisis.

One example is the Vulcast iron foundry in the Eifel region, which has been in existence for over 330 years. Despite well-filled order books, it filed for bankruptcy and laid off 119 employees in January, citing the enormous rise in electricity and raw material prices.

The larger automotive supplier groups—Conti, Hella, ZF, Bosch and Mahle—have been cutting jobs for years in close collaboration with the IG Metall. At Bosch, thousands of jobs are again at risk. Since car production is being increasingly converted to e-mobility, Bosch has announced further drastic job cuts at plants that manufacture parts and components for combustion engines. At Mahle, the automotive parts manufacturer based in Stuttgart, entire factories are being shut down. Mahle in Gailsdorf (300 employees) is to close by the end of 2023. The Mahle filter plant in Öhringen (170 employees) was already shut down at the end of last year.

Almost every day, a new automotive supplier is affected. Here is a short list of announcements in the last few days:

• Auto supplier GKN Driveline is closing its plant in Zwickau, which previously employed 800. The production of drive shafts and other parts for VW, Audi, BMW and Mercedes will be relocated to Eastern Europe.
• Canadian-Austrian automotive supplier Magna plans to close a total of three plants, two of them in Baden-Württemberg (Bopfingen with 170 and Dürbheim/Tuttlingen with 110 employees). A third Magna plant in Bad Windsheim, Bavaria, is also to be closed.
• In Radolfzell on Lake Constance, auto parts manufacturer BCS, which employs more than 600, will close by the end of 2024.
• Ditter Plastic in Haslach in the Black Forest (Baden-Württemberg) has filed for insolvency. The company, which specialises in the precision development of technical plastic parts for the automotive industry, still has 400 employees.
• Mechatronics manufacturer Marquardt is cutting 87 jobs in Baden-Württemberg. Here, too, part of the production will be continued in Eastern Europe.

Other sectors are also affected by mass layoffs. These include Galeria Karstadt Kaufhof department stores, owned by multimillionaire speculator René Benko. Of the 131 stores still in operation, two-thirds will be closed or massively downsized, threatening several thousand jobs. In Switzerland, health food chain Müller closed all 37 stores in 17 cities on January 3; almost 300 sales assistants lost their jobs.

The list of mass layoffs and closures is lengthy. For example, printing company Prinovis in Ahrensburg (Schleswig-Holstein), which belongs to Bertelsmann, is also to cease operations at the end of January, affecting the jobs of 545. In the technology sector, Google with 12,000 layoffs is now being followed by SAP with 3,000 job cuts, 200 of them in Germany.

The number of bankruptcies had already risen by the end of last year, according to the Federal Statistical Office. Insolvencies rose in November by 1.2 percent and in December by 3.1 percent compared to the respective previous months. Year-on-year, almost 18 percent more insolvencies were reported in 2022 than in the previous year. Siemens Supervisory Board Chairman Joe Kaeser warned, “If the broad industrial base crumbles, it endangers prosperity and social peace in Germany.”

Top managers fear that resistance is stirring in the factories. It has been simmering for a long time because wages are also lagging far behind inflation. According to figures from the Hans Böckler Foundation, although collectively agreed wages have recently risen by an average of 2.7 percent, there has been an average loss in real wages of 4.7 percent in the face of persistent inflation.

More and more workers are no longer prepared to accept this. In strike ballots, overwhelming majorities are voting in favour of industrial action. It is only with increasing difficulty that the unions are able to isolate struggles and keep them under control.

In the aviation sector, Wednesday’s all-day strike at Berlin’s BER airport was followed Friday by another strike of 700 baggage handlers at Düsseldorf airport. The airport workers are defending themselves against mass layoffs associated with the takeover by new service providers, including the notorious WISAG Aviation. At the same time, air traffic controllers in Fuerteventura, pilots in Portugal and Ryanair flight attendants in Charleroi, Belgium are on strike.

At wind turbine manufacturer Vestas, technicians throughout Germany are on strike. Since November, they have been fighting for better pay, including regular pay increases, special payments and part-time work for older workers.

In the energy sector, French refinery workers also continued their strikes last week against the Macron government’s pension “reforms.” On Thursday, French port workers joined the strike. For the past week, dockworkers in Mulhouse, Alsace, a major crossroads in the Franco-German-Swiss triangle, have been on strike.

Industrial action is threatened on many fronts—at airports, among nursing staff, on the rail, at the post office, at Berlin’s city cleansing service and now throughout the public sector. This is not just about better wages and working conditions, but also about the increasing threat of war.

“We are fighting not only against the war, but also against the fact that workers have to foot the bill for it,” Endrik Bastian, a nurse and candidate of the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (Socialist Equality Party, SGP) for the Berlin state election, said recently in a video. Commenting on the health care catastrophe, Bastian said, “Germany alone is short 200,000 nurses—200,000! And of those who are there, another 10 percent are missing because of illness and overwork ... To finance war and rearmament, there are mass cuts—in health care, and also in education.”

Labour disputes are also on the rise again in the nursing sector. At the Göttingen University Hospital, about 200 cleaning staff went on strike for three days on Wednesday, because the service and cleaning staff of the UMG (Unimedizin Göttingen) are paid significantly below the agreed rates. In Austrian private hospitals, about 10,000 employees are threatening a wage strike.

All these struggles need a perspective! They must no longer be left to the control of the trade unions, which are subordinated to the “social partnership”—in other words: to big business and the government’s war policies. The unions work closely with the coalition government and the top management of the DAX corporations.

They make a very good living from this, as the example of the VW works council Bernd Osterloh leaders shows. A criminal trial in Braunschweig brought to light the lavish salaries and bonuses collected by Osterloh, a former works council head, which in some years came to more than €700,000. The current head of the corporate works council, Daniela Cavallo, says she collects around €100,000 a year as a fixed salary, to which bonuses in the five-digit range are added.

No wonder high-ranking union officials and works council members also defend the bonuses and dividends paid to managers and shareholders. As DGB leader Yasmin Fahimi said at the end of December, “These are the normal mechanisms of the market economy. You may not like them. But now is not the time for fundamental debates critical of capitalism.”

Chinese health authorities declare COVID infection peak has passed

Benjamin Mateus

With holiday travels during the Lunar New Year celebration in China having reached 90 percent of their pre-pandemic levels and tourist locations packed with vacationing revelers, the corporate press is claiming that COVID is finally over.

Such distortions only promote a completely anti-public-health sentiment that places supposed personal liberties above the well-being of community, threatening the physical survival of those now “free” to move about and mix socially. This will have significant repercussions for populations of every country and entrench the oft-stated policy that the “cure can’t be worse than the disease.” The international default policy openly values the economy, i.e. profits, over the lives of people, in this and any future pandemic.

China’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism has reported there have been more than 300 million trips thus far during the holidays. The chief China economist at Nomura Holdings inc., Ting Lu, told Bloomberg News, “Pent-up demand is being released as many people rush to scenic spots, watch firework shows and crowd into restaurants and hotels. He added that government-released data “suggest the ‘exit wave’ is quickly coming to an end.”

Patients receive intravenous drips in an emergency ward in Beijing, Thursday, Jan. 19, 2023. China on Thursday accused "some Western media" of bias, smears and political manipulation in their coverage of China's abrupt ending of its strict "zero-COVID" policy, as it issued a vigorous defense of actions taken to prepare for the change of strategy. [AP Photo/Andy Wong]

The former editor-in-chief of the Global Times, Hu Xijin, wrote on social media, “The epidemic seemed to disappear from the vast majority of people suddenly. The Chinese Lunar New Year is very lively. The consumption has resumed rapidly.”

According to the World Health Organization (WHO) official figures for the week ending December 19, 2022, the world saw a single-week pandemic high of 45 million COVID cases, nearly twice that of the BA.1 Omicron wave that ran roughshod across the globe a year ago. This is the result of the demise of the Zero-COVID policy that had kept deaths to an enviably low figure in China of just over 5,000 in a country of 1.4 billion people. 

Since the surge in December throughout China, global COVID deaths jumped fourfold to over 40,000 for the week ending January 2, 2023, with “more than half of them from China,” as noted by WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. Official figures from Chinese health authorities have reported the following numbers of COVID-related deaths: 

·       December 8 to January 12:  59,938 deaths

·       January 13 to January 19: 12,658 deaths

·       January 20 to January 26: 6,364 deaths

·       Total: 78,960

China’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has claimed that COVID-related deaths and severe cases at hospitals have declined by more than 70 percent since the peaks in early January. However, the WHO has indicated these figures grossly underrepresent the actual toll and has persistently called for China to be more transparent with their reporting.

As part of their policy to openly conceal the real estimates of the “exit surge,” the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has chosen to adhere to an extremely narrow definition of COVID deaths. People dying at home or from other than respiratory consequences of their COVID infection are not counted. Additionally, rules and procedures are in place at hospitals that prevent or delay annotating COVID-related mortalities on death certificates. 

Such a maneuver greatly lowers the real extent of fatalities and severe disease caused by the “Let it rip” policy that has characterized the ruling class response to the pandemic. The fabricated figures provide a cover for the fraudulent “Omicron is mild” farce. Every country that has lifted their mitigation strategies has experienced a far deadlier surge than what is being reported by Chinese authorities.

Epidemiologic models analyzed by the Economist utilize information such as estimates of the rate at “which people become infected, get sick, recover or die (known Aa a SEIR model [susceptible-exposed-infectious-recovered]).” The magazine found that allowing the virus free rein across China would result in 1.5 million deaths. 

As for their assumptions in modeling their estimates, the Economist wrote, “Our model builds upon work by Jun Cai of Fudan University and others. We account for how people of different age groups are affected by COVID and how protected they are by Chinese vaccines. We looked at when the jabs were administered and assumed that they wane at the same rate as Western ones, though there is little evidence on this. We take China at its word when it comes to vaccination rates and intensive-care-unit (ICU) capacity because there are no alternative statistics.”

Another frequently cited British-based analytic company, Airfinity, has placed cumulative deaths since December 1, 2022, at 955,000. They forecast that deaths passed their peak as of January 26, during the Lunar New Year festivities. 

A recent report published by the National School of Development of Peking University estimates that as of January 11, around 900 million people in China had been infected. Chinese CDC’s chief epidemiologist, Wu Zunyou, who used his social media post to calm fears during the New Year festivities, estimated that the peak of infections had passed. And with 80 percent of the country having already been infected, the resurgence of another wave was unlikely, he argued.

Although the source of his sentiments is clearly located in and emanates from the Chinese Stalinist bureaucratic apparatus, they provide context to the modeling estimates being provided by various analytic groups working on concretizing the impact of abandoning Zero-COVID on the country’s population.

Attempts by Western media to vilify and discredit the handling of COVID by Xi Jinping and the CCP are motivated ideologically by the hostility of imperialism to the Peoples Republic. First they malign Beijing for adhering to Zero-COVID, now they attack the regime for adopting the very same policies as all the other countries, expressed most crudely in then British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s declaration that he would “let the bodies pile high.” 

To place the statistics into stark relief, though the official COVID deaths after three unrelenting years have reached 6.8 million, excess deaths, which are far closer to reality in capturing the social devastation caused by the pandemic, now exceed 21 million. And in the context of scientific breakthroughs and treatments at the world’s disposal, such a magnitude of death, seen only in periods of world wars, is deliberate.

As the World Socialist Web Site recently wrote, “While the CCP bears responsibility for this disaster, the mass infection policy was implemented under the demands of the US and the other imperialist powers … However, having adopted the mass infection policies demanded by global finance capital, the Chinese government is being further attacked and denounced by the US media. If President Xi Jinping and the CCP leadership thought their acquiescence would win them breathing space, they were wrong.”

The reopening of China will not halt the drive by US imperialism towards war with China. Indeed, the war with nuclear-armed Russia being waged in the Ukraine is only a prelude for the confrontation further east. A memo obtained by NBC News from General Mike Minihan, head of Air Mobility Command, predicted a shooting war with China in 2025 in remarks to his subordinate command team.  

Considering these recent developments in China’s response to COVID, Morgan Stanley has raised their GDP forecast for 2023 to 5.7 percent. As they wrote, “The near-term pain of a fast reopening will likely be compensated by an earlier and stronger recovery. The market is under-appreciating the far-reaching ramifications of reopening.” However, these assurances are not unanimous and the current projections by financial institutions are for the most part guarded and pessimistic. 

Indeed, regardless of the state of the pandemic, there is a unanimous effort by the financial institutes to end any and all pandemic mitigation measures. Last month’s comments by German virologist Christian Drosten that the COVID pandemic is entering an endemic phase were revealing. “We are experiencing the first endemic wave with SARS-CoV-2 this winter; in my estimation the pandemic is over,” he told Tagesspiegel. Meanwhile, the country is experiencing a surge in excess deaths that remain unaccounted. 

Additionally, there are pressures placed on the international United Nation’s health agency to end the declaration of “public health emergency of international concern” regarding the COVID pandemic. However, WHO director Ghebreyesus has not indicated this proposal will be on the table when the WHO’s emergency committee meets on Monday, the 14th such meeting since the start of the pandemic.

Israeli drones, warplanes strike Iran and Syria

Patrick Martin

Israeli military and intelligence units carried out multiple acts of aggression over the weekend against Iran and Iranian forces in Syria. The attacks were the first offensive military operations under the ultra-right government newly installed in Israel, under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Explosion from an Israeli drone attack at the Iranian Defense Ministry's ammunition facility in Isfahan. [Photo: Moshe Schwartz/@YWNReporter]

A drone attack, likely staged from within Iran by Israeli operatives, hit a weapons facility in the central Iranian city of Isfahan on Saturday night. This was followed Sunday night by airstrikes against a truck convoy operated by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps as it crossed the Iraq-Syria border headed into Syria.

Definitive information about the scope, damage and casualties from these attacks was difficult to obtain, but the Wall Street Journal cited an unnamed US military source confirming Israeli responsibility for the drone attack in Isfahan.

There were conflicting claims from Iran and from Israeli sources about the damage in Isfahan. The Iranian Defense Ministry said they caused minor damage and no casualties, and that several of what it called “Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs)” had been shot down.

Given the small size of the drones, said to be quadricopters, and the location of Isfahan in the center of the country, hundreds of miles from the nearest border, military officials said the attack had likely been launched from within Iran by Israeli operatives. Israeli agents have carried out dozens of attacks within Iran, including assassinations, bombings and other acts of sabotage.

Map of Iran, Isfahan is circled in red. [Photo by JRC, DG, ECHO, EC / CC BY 4.0]

Iran’s principal nuclear fuel enrichment facility at Natanz is located in Isfahan province, but well away from the city, and it did not appear to be a target of the latest attacks. There is also a large air force base, an Iran Space Research Center site, and numerous smaller military-related facilities, including at least one ammunition warehouse or factory which was reportedly hit by the drone strike.

The attacks came in the wake of a visit by CIA Director William Burns to Jerusalem for talks with Israeli officials, and coinciding with the arrival of US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who begins a two-day round of official meetings on Monday.

And it follows the largest-ever US-Israeli joint military exercises, held in the eastern Mediterranean and across Israeli territory, and involving more than 7,500 troops. Among the reported actions was to test systems that would be vital in the initial stages of a major war against Iran, including advance strikes to take out air defense systems and aerial refueling of warplanes.

The Jerusalem Post wrote, in a gloating tone:

“Experts noted that the US and Israel just spent an entire week conducting military exercises around attacking targets, such as Iran, so carrying out such an attack immediately after these exercises could be meant to send a message as to their seriousness. They estimated that the visit of CIA Director William Burns to Israel just before the attack was evidence of a need for a special face-to-face meeting between the CIA and Mossad chiefs preparing the attack.”

The coordination of the military strikes with Washington went beyond simply operational planning. It seems likely that the target within Iran was chosen in response to Iran’s military assistance to Russia in its proxy war with NATO in Ukraine.

Russia has been making heavy use of Iranian-built drones in the war, although Tehran maintains that the weapons were sent before the war began as part of longstanding military cooperation.

Both the US and NATO have made highly public claims of Iranian participation in the war. With the drone strike in Isfahan, the US and Israel appear to be expanding the Ukraine fighting far into the Middle East.

A top aide to Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky made this connection explicitly on Twitter. “Explosive night in Iran,” Mykhailo Podolyak taunted. “Did warn you.”

Already, at his first Middle East stop in Cairo, where he met with Egyptian military dictator Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, Blinken reiterated the bullying US position that “all options are available on the table to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.”

In the airstrike in Syria, which has not been confirmed by Israeli or US military sources—as is usual in such acts of illegal warfare—fighter-bombers attacked a group of 25 Iranian trucks at the al-Qa’im crossing on the Syria-Iraq border. 

The Saudi-backed Al-Arabiya network said the trucks had crossed the border and then were hit. According to Syrian media, six refrigerated trucks were among those attacked. Syrian sources also said a meeting of Iranians was targeted in the airstrikes as well.

The details and implications of this expanding warfare will become more apparent. But behind the Israeli aggression is not only the strategic interests of US imperialism, but the deepening internal crisis within the Zionist state. 

Thursday’s bloodbath in Jenin, when Israeli troops on a raiding party shot dead 10 Palestinians, produced a retaliatory act of terrorism on Friday night when a Palestinian attacked a synagogue outside Jerusalem, killing seven Israelis. This was followed by further acts of violence around Jerusalem in which both Israelis and Palestinians were killed and wounded.

The new Netanyahu government has taken office with the most sweeping assertion of the reactionary expansionist goals in the history of Israel. Its statement of principles asserts the “exclusive right” of the Jewish people to Israel and the occupied West Bank, and the coalition was formed on the basis of an agreement to formally annex the West Bank when Netanyahu chooses to do so, and to legalize the dozens of unauthorized settlements there, which are illegal even under current Israeli law.

The government has already seen the largest opposition demonstrations in recent history, in which both Jews and Arabs took part, against its threat to neuter the Supreme Court and assume effectively absolute power. This has been followed by the Jenin massacre, which has provoked near-civil war conditions in the occupied West Bank.

UK anti-strike legislation goes to third reading in parliament

Robert Stevens

Britain’s new anti-strike laws are expected to be on the statute books by the summer. They are some of the most draconian in the world.

The next vote on the Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill takes place on January 30, before it proceeds to the House of Lords. The Bill will allow the government to impose Minimum Service Levels (MSLs) on six sectors of the workforce, public and private, covering key industries. The first to be brought under the legislation are the ambulance, fire/rescue and rail services. The legislation will then be imposed on the health and education services, border security and nuclear decommissioning.

Striking ambulance service workers in Sheffield, January 23, 2023 [Photo: WSWS]

This would mean a significant proportion of workers (around 20 percent) across vital sections of the economy would have to keep working during industrial action.

The law is aimed at preventing millions of workers from taking effective strike action. It will cover all the countries of the United Kingdom except Northern Ireland.

The legislation will initially cover over 130,000 workers. But it will then be vastly extended to cover well over 5 million workers. These are the 2.5 million employees in the education sector and around 2.5 million in health, and 650,000 plus workers in transport, including 310,000 in sectors linked to the mass transit of passengers.

The 2016 Trade Union Act was the first UK legislation to define these sectors as “important public services”, adding “rescue” to “fire services” and expanding the definition of “education services” to include “education of those aged under 17”. It imposed ballot thresholds for strikes and more onerous ones for those in key industries.

At the time, the Labour Party only quibbled over wording, tabling a defeated amendment calling for the 40 percent ballot turnout threshold to apply only to those who work in “essential services” as defined by the International Labor Organisation, that states “the interruption of which would endanger the life, personal safety or health of the whole or part of the population”.

Under the new legislation, a set percentage of services determined by the government must be allowed to function during strikes. Workers would be named and instructed to work by companies, effectively conscripted, even after having voted to strike in a legal ballot. Currently only police officers, members of the armed forces and some prison officers are prohibited from striking.

Failure by workers and trade unions to comply with the laws will have drastic implications.

The Bill ends unfair dismissal protections enshrined in the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992, which the House of Commons library notes, “gives protection to employees against dismissal because of taking part in industrial action, by making any such dismissal automatically unfair, providing the industrial action they take part in is protected (meaning the union has complied with all legal requirements).”

An amendment in the new bill “would remove this protection from any employee who takes part in a strike contrary to a valid work notice from an employer that has identified and requested that employee to work.”

The new law not only allows a worker defying an instruction to work to be fired. It allows the mass firing of all workers involved in strike action if a union is deemed not to have taken reasonable steps to ensure the specified workers comply with work notices.

The House of Commons briefing explains, “As acts to induce workers to take part in strikes would no longer be protected against tort action under section 219 if the union ‘fails to take reasonable steps’ under new section 234E(b), any workers taking part in such strikes would lose their protection from dismissal under section 238A, even if they personally complied with the work notices.”

Striking teachers at Knightswood school, Glasgow, January 2023 [Photo: WSWS]

Bringing millions of workers under the legislation is central to the government’s plans to clampdown on the strike wave now involving millions of workers in education and the National Health Service. On January 30, a ballot for industrial action by more than 33,000 members of the Fire Brigades Union will close, with a vote to strike expected. The government has ensured minimum service regulations can be used against any strike taking place from the day after the legislation is enacted even if the relevant strike ballot took place before the Bill was passed.

The Labour Party pledged to vote against the Act, knowing that its passage is a formality given the Tories’ substantial parliamentary majority. However, its main reason for opposing the Bill is because it is happy with the existing raft of anti-strike legislation passed by Margaret Thatcher, which the 1997-2010 Blair-Brown government maintained in its entirety despite Labour’s enormous majority.

More fundamentally, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer argues that the trade unions must be relied on to repress strikes by building a corporatist arrangement in which the union bureaucracy works closely together with big business and the government.

Opposing the bill, Labour deputy leader Angela Rayner claimed that a major problem with the legislation is that, in France and Spain, where such laws are in force, they “lose vastly more strike days than Britain. Has the transport minister taken any time at all to speak to their governments or trade unions to learn any real lessons from them?”

The trade unions have declared they will take only legal action in opposition to the Bill, with neither the Trades Union Congress (TUC) nor any of its 48 affiliated unions organising industrial action to fight it. TUC General Secretary Paul Nowak pledged the trade unions’ compliance with its provisions once passed, while waiting on a future Labour government to repeal it.

Trades Union Congress leader designate Paul Nowak speaking at the CWU rally [Photo: WSWS]

The unions are appealing not only to Labour MPs to oppose the Bill, but to Tory MPs as well, from the very ruling party pushing it through.

In seeking to legitimise its plans, the government argued, “Even the International Labour Organization—the guardian of workers’ rights around the world to which the TUC itself subscribes—says that minimum service levels are a proportionate way of balancing the right to strike with the need to protect the wider public.”

Many restrictions on strikes, including minimum services requirements, are indeed authorised by the ILO—testament to the rotten character of the trade union bureaucracy the world over and the way it disarms workers in the face of a brutal class war offensive being waged by the ruling class internationally.

In a perspective article last December, the World Socialist Web Site warned of the implications of the Bill then being drafted by the government, and its stated intention to use the armed forces to against the growing strike movement. We noted, “Minimum services legislation is already widely used across Europe and has spearheaded a turn to direct state repression to enforce brutal austerity ever since the 2008 global financial meltdown.”

The House of Commons briefing gives numerous examples of how such authoritarian measures are relied on by the ruling elite and complied with by the union bureaucracy.

It notes that in Spain, “On 23 September 2010, for the first time a collective agreement was concluded between the [Socialist Party] Government and the two main trade unions to organise minimum service provision during general strike action that was due to take place six days later. The agreement mainly covered the transport sector, as negotiations in all other sectors had failed.”

Whatever lie Starmer, Rayner and company tells now, the likelihood is that a Labour government would discover the merits of maintaining MSLs once in office, just as its Blairite predecessors kept the last round of Tory anti-strike laws in place.

Outbreak of avian flu has killed more than 100 million birds and poses a serious threat of becoming a human pandemic

Benjamin Mateus

The COVID-19 pandemic, which has killed more than 21 million people, has elevated an existential question into concrete immediacy. Following COVID-19, when will the next pandemic of a highly lethal nature strike again?

A chicken farm [Photo by Fot. Konrad Łoziński / CC BY 2.0]

The first ever extensive global monkeypox outbreak affected multiple countries across nearly every continent. It felt like the world had dodged a bullet when cases began to subside. As well, the outbreak of the extremely deadly Ebola Sudan virus in Uganda threatened the region and beyond as it spread into the densely populated capital of Kampala. Such potential crises are appearing far more frequently in recent years, making new pandemics a risk to the world’s population which cannot be ignored.

The first new pandemic after COVID-19, which is still continuing to infect billions of people, may well be already in plain sight, but overlooked or dismissed for the most part by most news outlets and given no political attention.

The largest recorded outbreak of a highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) has been killing millions of birds since October 2021. From disease and related culling, in all more than 140 million poultry, including 60 million in North America and 48 million in Europe, have been killed, according to the World Organization for Animal Health (WOAH).

A genetic analysis of the H5N1 influenza virus in the current avian pandemic has located it in a clade (virus family) circulating among poultry and wild birds across multiple continents, but most closely related to strains among European seabirds.

The first cases in North America were detected in December 2021 in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, on a bird farm. In February 2022, Florida’s Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission reported that the death of black vultures at the state’s Hontoon Island State Park was caused by the same virus.

Over the next several months, the virus had spread into numerous wild bird species, commercial poultry, as well as mammals, including grizzly bears, red foxes, coyotes, seals and dolphins, as well as a human case confirmed on April 27 by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in an incarcerated individual in Colorado who had been involved in culling infected poultry.

In February 2022, the Wall Street Journal noted that the avian flu had affected a chicken farm in Fulton, Kentucky, and a Tyson Foods chicken processing farmhouse, raising concerns about a repeat of the last major bird flu calamity in 2015.

Egg prices have risen almost 60 percent by December, compared to the previous year, with egg inventories down 29 percent. At present, Nebraska has seen 6.7 million poultry deaths, up from 4.8 million in the 2015 outbreak. According to the Journal, Colorado has lost 90 percent of its egg-laying hens.

As disastrous as the outbreak has been to the bird population, the fear remains that the virus will learn to efficiently use a human host to transmit itself. Until now, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), between 2003 and March 2022, there have been only 864 cases of H5N1 in humans across 18 countries worldwide. The infection in the US was the first time for this country.

The fatality rate, however, is dangerously high with 456 deaths among the 864 cases, giving a 53 percent chance of dying if infected. Thus far, cases have remained sporadic, in small clusters, involving exposure to infected poultry or contaminated environments.

But there is growing concern among scientists that a more virulently infective form of the virus could suddenly evolve and spread rapidly into the human population as a lethal airborne pathogen. Wend Blay Puryear, a molecular virologist at Tufts University, told the Guardian, “There is concern about it having pandemic potential. Before COVID was on anybody’s radar, this was the one that we were all watching closely.”

As a recent report in Think Global Health noted, “Each time one species transmits the virus to another, it constitutes a spillover event. These myriad spillovers—among wild bird species, from wild birds to domestic birds, across birds to mammals, and from animals to humans—raise serious concerns about the potential for further adaptation and evolution of this influenza lineage and the continued risk associated with avian migration. Understanding which species among these many hosts may be helping the virus adapt is crucial for targeted surveillance and mitigation efforts.”

The last pandemic to cause such a significant devastation among birds began in December 2014, when more than 50 million birds died, costing farmers over $1.6 billion. However, by the summer of 2015, the virus suddenly vanished as quickly as it had appeared. Migratory birds returning to Canada were found to be virus-free.

However, in the present instance, the outbreak was sustained throughout the summer and has surged again this winter. Active surveillance has identified more than 3,300 infected birds across 100 species, an immense scale of transmission compared to the outbreak in 2014–2015 when fewer than 100 wild birds tested positive for H5N1.

A veterinarian with Colorado’s agricultural department, Maggie Baldwin, told the Journal, “One of the challenges is that we don’t know why it [the virus] has been able to thrive so long. We’re almost a full year into this outbreak and it is ongoing.”

Mike Tincher, rehabilitation coordinator for Colorado’s Rocky Mountain Raptor Program, said, “There is no historical context for this. It’s like when COVID hit for humans … We’ve never seen this before. And it’s just not slowing down.”

As the US Department of Agriculture recently noted, “Wild birds can be infected with HPAI and show no signs of illness. They can carry the disease to new areas when migrating, potentially exposing domesticated poultry to the virus.” Such asymptomatic spread of the virus poses an exceptional challenge for the international community unless surveillance systems are bolstered across animal and human sectors.

A recent report by Eurosurveillance has garnered much attention on social media. It describes the outbreak of HPAI H5N1 among intensively farmed minks in the Galicia region in northwest Spain in October 2022. Oxford University professor of evolution and genomics Aris Katzourakis tweeted, “[I] don’t understand how mink farming can be defended. Viruses move easily between mink and humans, and this could play a big role in the emergence of future pandemics.”

When the initial outbreak occurred, veterinarians had assumed that the disease was caused by SARS-CoV-2, as it had previously struck mink farms in Denmark in November 2020. However, laboratory testing revealed the culprit was the HPAI H5N1. More than 52,000 minks at the farm had to be culled.

As the Eurosurveillance report noted, the minks were kept in open barns and fed raw fish and poultry byproducts sourced from the same region. Their detailed analysis found the virus was similar to the virus circulating among birds across multiple continents.

A Science article published this week on the bird flu outbreak at the Spanish mink farm states, “The virus is not known to spread well between mammals; people almost always catch it from infected birds, not one another. But now, H5N1 appears to have spread through a densely packed mammalian population and gained at least one mutation that favors mammal-to-mammal spread. Virologists warn that H5N1, now rampaging through birds around the world, could invade other mink farms and become still more transmissible.”

Tom Peacock, a virologist at Imperial College of London, warned, “This is incredibly concerning. This is a clear mechanism for an H5 pandemic to start.”

The mutation in question is uncommon and only seen once before, in a European polecat, according to CIDRAP. The mutation could have spontaneously evolved among mink in a convergent evolutionary pathway. The new variant, labeled 2.3.4.4b, emerged in Europe in late 2020 and became predominant in wild birds. It is believed to have originated in Korea through a process of re-assortment between the H5N1 and the clade 2.3.4.4b H5N8.

Although it appears the mutation may be less pathogenic for humans, about six people have thus far caught the virus and one has died. It also appears to be more adapted to all birds as Richard Webby, an influenza researcher, noted. It is worrisome that in this reappearance of H5N1, numerous mammalian species have become infected.

Thomas Mettenleiter, head of the Friedrich Loeffler Institute, speaking to Science on the lower pathogenicity (lethality) of the new strain in humans, explained, “Of course that can be bad news, too, because it might make it easier for the virus to start spreading under the radar, giving it more opportunity to evolve.”

Surging inflation intensifies cost-of-living crisis in Australia

Mike Head

Official Consumer Price Index (CPI) statistics released in Australia this week show that inflation is accelerating, rather than “peaking,” on top of staggering price rises over the past year for food, petrol and other essentials, hitting working-class households by far the hardest.

According to the headline CPI figure, inflation jumped to a 33-year annual high of 7.8 percent in the December quarter of 2022, up from 7.3 percent in the September quarter. The index for “non-discretionary” spending rose even more sharply, by 8.4 percent.

Striking nurse at Sydney rally on March 31, 2022. [Photo: WSWS]

Working-class households are experiencing enormous hardship, and the greatest cut to living standards since World War II, as the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) and the Labor government, assisted by the trade union bureaucrats, insist that real wages must continue to fall.

As is happening worldwide, the price surge is led by the most basic items that people need to live. Dairy and related products were up 4 percent during the last quarter of 2022 and 14.9 percent over the year. Bread and cereal product prices climbed by 3.4 percent in the three months to be up more than 12.2 percent in the year. Fruit and vegetables fell by 7.3 percent in the December quarter, but were still up by 8.5 percent over the year.

Non-durable items—household consumables like toiletries and detergents—climbed at 2.3 percent during the quarter, and at an annual pace of 12 percent. Automotive fuel prices increased by a little over 2 percent in the three months to December, but were 13.2 percent higher than at the end of 2021.

Housing costs rose by 10.7 percent over the year. That included rents, which lifted by 4 percent, the highest rise since 2012. Economists predicted rental inflation would continue to climb.

The acceleration in the cost-of-living crisis was further revealed in the monthly (rather than quarterly) CPI indicator for December. It rose 8.4 percent in the 12 months to December, following annual rises of 7.3 percent in November and 6.9 percent in October.

While the media focused on a 13 percent jump in holiday travel and accommodation in the December quarter—to distract attention from the impact on food and energy—electricity prices also rose sharply, up 8.6 percent in those three months alone.

Much bigger energy price hikes will occur in 2023, despite token price caps on wholesale electricity and gas introduced by the Labor government in December. But Treasurer Jim Chalmers, while yet again pretending sympathy for “Australians doing it tough,” quickly insisted that even the small promised bill rebates for small businesses and low-income households would not start until later in the year. He peddled the illusion that inflation may have peaked.

However, the RBA’s preferred measure of “underlying” inflation, which removes “volatile” items such as food and petrol, jumped from 6.1 percent to 6.9 percent in the December quarter, much higher than the central bank’s prediction of 6.5 percent.

Chalmers’ contemptuous response epitomises the demand of the ruling class—the financial and corporate elite and its governments—that the working class must continue to be made to pay for the economic crisis gripping global capitalism. Labor’s fraudulent “a better future” slogan for last May’s federal election is a distant bitter memory.

Inflation has been outstripping workers’ wages at a record rate for more than a year—with the union officials policing the biggest cuts to real wages. In the September quarter of 2022, union-negotiated enterprise agreements delivered average nominal annual wage rises of just 2.6 percent, compared with 3.1 percent in non-union deals, according to the most recent data available from the Department of Workplace Relations.

That is, union agreements are imposing supposed pay “rises” that average less than a third of the soaring cost of living. This is in line with the call by RBA governor Philip Lowe, backed by the Albanese government, for wage rises to be kept lower than 3.5 percent.

That is on top of more than a decade of wage cutting. Real wages have fallen to below the level of June 2009, which was during the global financial crisis of 2008‒09.

That underscores the reality that wages are not the cause of the inflation that is devastating working-class households in Australia and internationally. Instead, the roots lie in the capitalist profit system and the US-led drive to war.

Profit-gouging by food and energy conglomerates, exploiting the US-NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, is compounding the inflationary spiral caused by years of governments and central banks pumping trillions of dollars into the financial markets—ever since the global financial crisis—and the ongoing global supply chain problems created by governments letting the COVID-19 pandemic rip for the sake of profit.

Oxfam’s recent global inequality report shows that “95 food and energy corporations more than doubled their profits in 2022, driving major inflation in Australia and around the globe and leaving millions struggling to feed themselves and their families.”

Nevertheless, the big banks and financial commentators have declared that the RBA must further hike interest rates, like its counterparts in the US, the UK and the EU, in order to prevent a supposed “wages-price spiral.”

Commonwealth Bank head of Australian economics Gareth Aird said the outlook for wages was a “key risk” to his bank’s official cash rate forecast peak of 3.35 percent. Similar warnings were issued by UBS Australian chief economist George Therenou and KPMG chief economist Brendan Rynne.

An Australian Financial Review editorial noted that real wages had already fallen “a steep 4 per cent or so through 2022,” but any pegging of wages to inflation would “simply force the central bank to keep interest rates higher for longer in order to squeeze prices growth out of the economy.”

Money market representatives are either predicting or canvassing three more RBA rate rises in 2023, on top of the eight in 2022. That would lift the official cash rate to close to 4 percent. ANZ senior economist Catherine Birch said the CPI result “cements” another rise in the official interest rate at the RBA’s first meeting of 2023 on February 7, taking it to 3.25 percent. Both the ANZ and Westpac, two of the country’s four biggest banks, are forecasting an RBA rate of 3.85 percent by May.

This interest rate “shock”—intended to “squeeze” the economy into a downturn and higher unemployment—will intensify the financial stress confronting millions of working-class homebuyers.

Until last May, the RBA kept rates at a record low of 0.10 percent, in order to pump cheap cash into the hands of business during the pandemic. It promised homebuyers that it would not lift the rate until 2024.

Now a “fixed rate cliff” has begun. About $400 billion worth of fixed rate loans are expiring in 2023 after being taken out on the basis of the previous near-zero rates. RateCity, a company that monitors home loans, estimates that typical fixed-rate borrowers will have to pay about $2,700 more a month. Its calculation is based on a borrower coming off a two-year, 1.92 percent fixed mortgage rate onto a revert rate of 7.16 percent.

Of the $2.1 trillion in home loans, the RBA itself says about 35 percent, or $735 billion, is fixed rate and 65 percent of these are due to expire by the end of 2023. For all the central bank’s claims that “most” borrowers will be safe because of savings “buffers,” the ruling class is intent on inflicting financial misery on millions of low-income homebuyers for the sake of the capitalist economy and for the benefit of the wealthy.

Social inequality is already accelerating. Oxfam reported this month that Australia’s 42 billionaires have a combined wealth of close to $236 billion—61 percent higher than before the COVID-19 pandemic began. This is intensifying a longer-term trend. Oxfam said the richest 1 percent of Australians had accumulated 10 times more wealth than the bottom 50 percent in the past decade.

An immense social crisis is developing in Australia, as it is globally. Major working-class struggles have broken out over the past year against the increasingly unbearable conditions, not least among nurses, health workers and educators.