Romanian Government Scholarships for International Students 2017/2018

Application Deadline: 20th March 2017.

This is the date whereby Foreign diplomatic missions accredited to Bucharest must send the application files with a Verbal Note to Ministry of Foreign Affairs – Public, Cultural and Scientific Diplomacy Directorate.

However, the candidate should enquire at the diplomatic mission where he intends to submit the application file about the enrolment calendar. The deadline for submitting the application files is established by each diplomatic mission.

Offered annually? Yes

Eligible Countries: Any non-EU country

To be taken at (country): Romanian Universities

Eligible Field of Study: priority will be given to the candidates applying for: political and administrative sciences, education studies, Romanian culture and civilization, journalism, technical studies, oil and gas, agricultural studies, veterinary medicine, architecture, music, arts.

About Scholarship: The scholarships are granted for three levels of study:

1.  for the first cycle (licenta): This scheme is dedicated to graduates of high schools or of equivalent pre-university systems, as well as to candidates who require the equivalent of partial studies and the continuation of their studies in Romania. The complete cycle of university studies lasts for 3 to 6 years, according to the specific requirements of the chosen faculty, and ends with a final examination (licenta);
2.  for the 2nd cycle (master): This scheme is dedicated to graduates of university/post graduate studies; it lasts for 1,5 to 2 years and ends with a dissertation;
3.  for the 3rd cycle (doctorate) this scheme is dedicated to the graduates of university/postgraduate studies (i.e. master); it lasts for 3-4 years, in keeping with the specific requirements of the chosen faculty, and ends with a doctor’s thesis.

Type: Undergraduate, Masters and Doctoral degrees

Eligibility: Citizens of non EU countries (irrespective of their country of residence) are eligible to apply. Priority is given to citizens from non EU states with which Romania does not have cultural and education cooperation agreements.

Number of Scholarships: 85 scholarships for undergraduate and postgraduate studies in Romania

Value of Scholarship:

• Free-of-charge tuition
• Free-of-charge accommodation (depending on availability, accommodation will be offered free-of-charge in students hostels, in keeping with the higher education regulations and within the limits of the sums available for this purpose),
• Financial support – a monthly amount representing :
  •  the equivalent in Romanian currency of 65 EURO per month, for the under-graduate students (1st cycle),
  • the equivalent in Romanian currency of 75 EURO per month, for post-graduate students (master degrees and specialization) 2nd cycle,
  • RI737126839CN the equivalent in Romanian currency of 85 EURO per month, for post graduate students (doctor’s degree) 3rd cycle.

These scholarships do not cover food, international and local transport. The candidates must be prepared to support personally any other additional expenses.

Duration of Scholarship: For the period of study, subject to academic performance

How to Apply: To get all the necessary information about the scholarships (conditions, necessary documents, enrolment calendar) and to submit their application files, the candidates should apply directly to:

• the Romanian diplomatic missions accredited to the candidate’s country of origin or of residence or to
• the diplomatic mission of candidate’s state of origin accredited to Bucharest

Visit scholarship webpage for Details

Sponsors: Romanian Government

Important Notes

Language of Study: In order to promote Romanian language and culture, the Ministry of National Education has decided that the beneficiaries of the scholarships should study only in the Romanian language. The candidates who do not know Romanian are offered one supplementary preparatory year to study the language. Students who declare that they know Romanian language will have to pass a language test organized by the competent higher education institutions.

Selling Death: US Weapons Kill a Yemeni Child Every 10 Minutes

Medea Benjamin

While the world has been transfixed on the epic tragedy in Syria, another tragedy — a hidden one — has been consuming the children of Yemen.

Battered by the twin evils of war and hunger, every 10 minutes a child in Yemen dies from malnutrition, diarrhea, or respiratory-tract infections, UNICEF reports. And without immediate medical attention, over 400,000 kids suffering from severe acute malnutrition could die, too.

Why are so many of Yemen’s children going hungry and dying?

Since 2014, Yemen has been wracked by a civil war — a war that’s been exacerbated by intervention from Saudi Arabia, a U.S. ally. Since 2015, the Saudis have been pounding this nation, the poorest in the Middle East, with cluster bombs and explosives.

And the U.S. has been helping, selling the Saudis advanced weapons and providing intelligence and logistical support.

This nearly two-year-old bombing campaign has killed thousands of innocent Yemenis and sparked a severe humanitarian crisis. A desert country, Yemen imports 90 percent of its food. But thanks to a Saudi naval blockade and the bombing of the country’s main port, imports have dried up.

Subsequent shortages have led food prices to soar. Meanwhile, the war has left millions of people unemployed and displaced. Unable to buy the high-priced food, they’re forced to depend on humanitarian aid for their survival.

UN and private relief organizations have been mobilizing to respond to the crisis, but a staggering 18.8 million people — out of a population of 25 million — need assistance. The situation is only getting worse as the war drags on and the winter cold sets in.

At the same time, the UN Refugee Agency has received less than half the funds it needs.

The nation’s health system is also on the verge of collapse. Less than a third of the country’s population has access to medical care, and only half of its health facilities are functional. Diseases such as cholera and measles are spreading, taking a heavy toll on children.

The only way to end the humanitarian crisis is to end the conflict. That means pushing harder for a political solution and calling for an immediate ceasefire. Until that happens, the United States should stop its military support for the Saudi regime.

Despite the repressive nature of the Saudi regime, for decades U.S. administrations have supported the Saudi government both diplomatically and militarily. Under Obama alone, weapons sales to the Saudis reached a whopping $115 billion.

Concerned over the high rate of civilian casualties, on December 12 the White House took the rare step of stopping the sale of 16,000 guided munition kits. This is a great step forward, but it represents only a small fraction of total U.S. weapons sales to the Saudi regime.

In fact, at the same time the White House announced it was blocking this $350 million deal, the State Department announced plans to sell 48 Chinook cargo helicopters and other equipment worth 10 times as much.

Moreover, the coming Trump administration might well restore all sales. That’s why it’s important for Congress, which has the authority to block weapons sales but seldom actually does, to step forward and take a stand.

Selling weapons to a repressive regime should never be allowed. And today, when these weapons are leading to the death of a Yemeni child every 10 minutes, the sales are simply unconscionable. The time to stop them is now.

Any Way You Calculate it, Income Inequality is Getting Worse

Pete Dolack

A flurry of new reports have provided yet more data demonstrating that inequality is getting worse. All right, this does not qualify as a shock. But it really isn’t your imagination.

The economic crisis, nearly a decade on now, has been global in scope — working people most everywhere continue to suffer while the one percent are doing just fine. One measure of this is wages. A newly released report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development finds that median wages in the OECD’s 35 member countries are still below where they were in 2007. For the bottom 10 percent of wage earners, the news is worse; wages for this bottom decile have declined 3.6 percent since 2007. But wages have risen for the top 10 percent.

The report on wage inequality by the OECD, the club of the world’s advanced capitalist countries and a few of the biggest developing countries, also found that inequality has increased in most of those countries. No part of the world has been immune. The report, “Income inequality remains high in the face of weak recovery,” states:

“The crisis has not only heavily affected the number of jobs but also their quality. … Even in countries where labour market slack has been re-absorbed, low-quality jobs and high disparities among workers in terms of work contracts or job security weigh heavily on low-earning households and contribute to maintaining high levels of income inequality. Wages have stalled in most countries, including those that were largely spared by the recession (e.g. Japan) and fallen in those hard hit (e.g. Greece, Portugal, Spain, and the United Kingdom).”

Chile and Mexico are the most unequal countries among the OECD members, followed by the United States, as measured by the gini coefficient. Iceland, Norway and Denmark are the least unequal. (The gini coefficient, the standard statistical measure of income distribution, is equal to zero if everybody has the same income and to one if a single person takes all income.) To put that scale into some tangible form, Iceland’s gini coefficient is 0.24 and Chile’s is 0.46.

Global inequality worse than any country’s

The world’s most unequal country is South Africa at 0.65. Calculating this scale on a global basis gives a better idea of the scale of inequality but is a difficult statistic to find. One measure, as calculated for a United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization paper, estimates the world gini coefficient in 2005 was 0.68, significantly higher than in the 19th century but a bit lower than it had been in 1981. That’s higher than South Africa. The Economist, crunching data from several sources, estimates a global gini coefficient of 0.65 in 2008, a very slight dip from the 1980s peak.

Global inequality has very likely worsened since but no more recent statistics appear to be available.

Rising inequality has been particularly acute in the global center of world capitalism, the United States, and a quick examination of trends there are useful as capitalists elsewhere seek to emulate the new U.S. gilded age. Those at the top of the pyramid are grabbing ever more. The Economist reports:

“Including capital gains, the share of national income going to the richest 1% of Americans has doubled since 1980, from 10% to 20%, roughly where it was a century ago. Even more striking, the share going to the top 0.01%—some 16,000 families with an average income of $24m—has quadrupled, from just over 1% to almost 5%. That is a bigger slice of the national pie than the top 0.01% received 100 years ago.”

Another new study, by economists Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, found that the average pre-tax income of the bottom 50 percent of U.S. adults is flat since 1980 in inflation-adjusted dollars — and this includes government transfers, other public spending and the value of job-derived fringe benefits — and thus the share of national income going to the bottom half of United Statesians declined to 12 percent in 2014 from 20 percent in 1980. The top one percent, meanwhile, hauled in 20 percent of income in 2014. Another way of looking at this inequality, the authors write, is that the top one percent of U.S. adults earned on average 81 times more than an adult in the bottom 50 percent. This ratio was 27 times in 1980.

The top of the pyramid does well around the world

To zero in on the tip of the pyramid, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service released a report this month on the 400 tax returns showing the highest incomes reported to it. Those 400 taxpayers reported an aggregate income of $127 billion in 2014 — a fourfold increase in inflation-adjusted dollars since 1980. Those 400 taxpayers by themselves accounted for 6 percent of all interest income and 11 percent of all capital gains (profits from financial assets such as stocks and bonds). To put that in perspective, 149 million tax returns were filed in the U.S. in 2014. Stock-market bubbles and other forms of financial speculation truly are the province of the super-wealthy.

In Canada, Statistics Canada reports that, in 2013, the top one percent grabbed 10.3 percent of income; the average Canadian in this grouping received $450,000 that year. In Britain, the top one percent have doubled their income since 2005, collectively adding another £250 billion to their wealth. Meanwhile, a fifth of Britons live below the poverty line and life expectancy in some areas is lower than in many developing countries, The Independent reports. Australian inequality has not yet reached the above levels, but is getting wider — the percentage of total Australian income grabbed by the top 0.1 percent there has more than doubled since 1980.

Again, nothing here is going to make you fall off your chair in shock. The question becomes: What will we do about all this? This is the internally logical result of the development of capitalism — the upward distribution of income as exploitation accelerates through work speedups, layoffs, movement of production to low-wage havens and the panoply of deregulatory measures resulting from corporate capture of governments.

So-called “free trade” agreements, with their use of clauses enabling multi-national corporations to use secret private tribunals controlled by their lawyers to overturn laws they don’t like, are an exemplary example of the processes used to ratchet up inequality, even if but one of many manifestations. Capital is international and our resistance to it must be international as well. The rise of far right and even fascist movements across Europe and in the United States, decked in the cloaks of nationalism and fake populism, is all the more dangerous because the scapegoating that is always front and center in such movements deflects attention from the real problems.

If the beginning of the end of capitalism is upon us — admittedly something that none of us can yet be certain of — then the need to build movements that can move societies toward a better world is all the more a necessity. Even if the final decay of capitalism has arrived, that decay is likely to unfold over decades unless a global Left movement, uniting the variety of social and environmental movements and struggles across borders, can speed up the process. The only alternative is for inequality to get worse and the repression necessary to impose that inequality to get still more severe.

What Israel Fears

Vijay Prashad

On December 23, the United States Ambassador to the UN abstained on UN Security Council resolution 2334, which condemned Israel’s settlement activity in the occupied territory of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The language is tentative. It does not call the settlements illegal, but only having no “legal validity”. In the world of international law, the difference might not be significant.

Israel pressured Egypt to withdraw the resolution, which it did, and it pressured the U.S. to veto it, which it did not. Malaysia, New Zealand, Venezuela and Senegal sponsored the resolution, which passed with 14 votes in favour and one abstention (the U.S.). Ambassadors around the table hoped that the vote would push towards the two-state solution, the “common aspiration of the international community”, said Chinese Ambassador Wu Haitao.

The resolution and the occupation

Five years previously, during the high point of the Arab Spring, the U.S. had vetoed a similar resolution. Then U.S. Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice said that her country rejects “in the strongest terms the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlement activity”. So then why veto the resolution, which the U.S. would abstain on five years later? In 2011, Ms. Rice said that the resolution would not further the negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. Israel, the subtext read, would lash out against the Palestinians. This is precisely what the Israelis now promise to do: build more settlements, fully annex the West Bank and East Jerusalem and thereby annul any prospect of a two-state solution.

The UN resolution — important as it is in itself — is not what Israel fears. What troubles Tel Aviv are the steps that would come after this resolution, particularly from the International Criminal Court (ICC). In January 2015, the ICC’s Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda opened a preliminary investigation into Israel’s actions during the 2014 bombing of Gaza and into the illegal settlements. Ms. Bensouda has since made it clear that she would not move forward to a full criminal investigation without substantial political clarity from the UN Security Council.

Resolution 2334 produces the political will for such a move by the ICC. With Palestine as a recognised state in the UN as of 2012, and as a member of the ICC since 2014, and with this resolution now in force, the ICC could move in the next few months to a rigorous investigation of Israeli criminality. This would threaten the settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, but it would also pressure Israeli soldiers to refuse to serve in any future criminal bombardment of Gaza. Whether the Palestinian leadership has the courage to insist on this remains to be seen.

In 1967, Israel seized the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip — parts of Palestine that had been outside its control. The UN Security Council passed a series of resolutions (242, 252, 298) within the next decade, asking Israel to withdraw from this land and — in resolution 446 (1979) — to desist from building settlements on the occupied territory. The U.S., which had already become the shield for Israel, abstained from the major resolutions.

It was on this occupied territory that it was then assumed — against Israeli opinion — that a Palestinian state would be built. The two-state solution, the international consensus for the Israel-Palestine conflict, is premised on Israeli withdrawal from this land occupied in 1967. No wonder that the UN has periodically returned to censure Israel for its ongoing occupation and — in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention — the construction of settlements on occupied land.

The first major UN resolution to define the terms of the Israeli occupation was 242, sponsored by the United Kingdom and passed in November 1967 with unanimous approval. There was no abstention and no veto used by the permanent members. U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk said at that time that despite the U.S. and Israel being “sharply divided” on the issue of territory, the U.S. made no commitment “to assist Israel in retaining territories seized in the 1967 war”. Even when the administrations in Washington defended Israel’s annexationist policies — such as during the term of Ronald Reagan — the U.S. did not veto to defend the settlements.

The element of criminality

The Oslo Accords (1994) put in place the possibility of a Palestinian state, although it did not have an explicit statement to end settlement activity. Israel continues to eat into the potential Palestinian state. Neither does Israel want a two-state solution nor a one-state solution. This negative approach to the ‘peace process’ means that Israel is committed to a permanent occupation of the Palestinians. It continues to harbour dreams of a Greater Israel (Eretz Israel).

Four years after Oslo, the international community passed the Rome Statute for the establishment of the ICC. It was this new development — the ICC — rather than the Oslo Accords that increased the vetoes exercised by the U.S. in the UN Security Council to protect Israel. The Israeli establishment worried that the ICC would legitimately turn its gaze on issues such as population transfer and war crimes. The ICC — under pressure to investigate crimes outside the African continent — could find that Israeli actions provide a legitimate site of inquiry. The vetoes from Washington prevented any legal foundation for ICC action against Israel.

Prosecutor Bensouda’s investigators visited the West Bank and East Jerusalem in October this year. The ICC said that this was not part of its preliminary investigation, but it is hard to imagine that this is true. The new UN Security Council resolution harkens back to more radical postures from it in 1979 and 1980 as well as to the International Court of Justice’s 2014 finding that the ‘apartheid’ wall that entraps the West Bank is illegal. Pressure will mount on her to take her investigation forward.

Tel Aviv’s triumphalism

The tone of Israel’s rejection came when Ambassador Danny Danon said that Tel Aviv has the right to build “homes in the Jewish people’s historic homeland”. The settlements, for the Israeli government, are essential for their own project. They see nothing short of — as Ambassador Danon put it — “a Jewish State proudly reclaiming the land of our forefathers”. Ambassador Danon is fully in agreement with Washington’s incoming Ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, who believes in a Greater Israel and denies the existence of Palestine. U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to undo the resolution and threatened to end U.S. funding to the UN.

António Guterres, the UN’s new Secretary-General has indicated that he will send a UN Support Mission to push for a two-state solution. Mr. Guterres and Ms. Bensouda will have to thread the needle between the consensus of the international community (a two-state solution) and Israel’s own illegal territorial ambitions. Optimism for progress would be unwarranted.

The Coming Assault on Social Security

Dave Lindorff

The first assault of the new Trump administration and Republican Congress upon Social Security has been launched. It comes in the form of release of a new report by the Congressional Budget Office, which of course these days is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Republican Congressional Caucus.

Using some financial sleight-of-hand, this CBO report pushes forward by two years the date at which its ideologically driven experts claim Social Security benefits will exhaust the Trust Fund, and since the Social Security program is required to be self-financing, the date at which, barring adjustments by Congress in the program’s funding and/or benefit payment levels, promised benefits would have to be cut by what the CBO claims will have to be 31%.

Such a cut would clearly be a staggering blow to the finances and livelihoods of nation’s retirees, dependents and the disabled.

This end-of-the-year CBO report is at odds with a report issued earlier this year by the Trustees of the Social Security Administration, which projected that the Trust Fund, barring any changes in taxes or benefit payments, would be tapped out in 2033, and that at that point benefits, barring some fixes in Social Security financing, would have to be cut by an also horrific but far lower 21% (with the remaining 79% of benefit payments being covered by current employee FICA taxes being paid into the system).

How did the projection on Social Security move from a cut in benefit payments of by just over a fifth being required in 17 years to a cut by almost a third being required in just 15 years?

Well, the CBO decided, in its wisdom, that the estimates of economic trends being used by the SSA’s Trustees — a group about evenly divided between Republican and Democratic appointees, with Democrats having a slight edge — were too optimistic.

Specifically, for example, the CBO gnomes are projecting that the interest rate on 10-year Treasury notes will only be at 1.7% in 2026, rising to just 2.3% in 2046. Since the Trust Fund — composed of FICA taxes paid by workers — is invested by law entirely in these 10-year notes, that’s a pretty low rate of return to be projecting. In contrast, the Trustees, in their 2016 report earlier this year, projected 10-year rates in 2016 of 2.4%, rising to 2.7% in 2031. For the record, the 10-year rate today is 2.51%, well above even the Trustee’s projection, and almost a percentage point higher than the latest CBO figure for the year.

The CBO is also projecting a slower rate of wage growth than did SSA Trustees, and thus is predicting a lower amount of FICA tax payments into the fund, as well as a further decline in labor participation rates and productivity growth, and other factors that all point to reduced contributions to the Trust Fund going forward.

Remember, though, that the Trump campaign and the Republican Senate and House candidates running for election, have been all about boosting jobs, raising incomes and lowering taxes, all of which should logically, if it were to come to pass, improve Social Security finances, not worsen them.

This leaves us with only two ways to look at the new CBO report, which will now be cited ad nauseam by Republicans in Congress as a reason to cut back on Social Security benefits and on annual inflation adjustments to those benefits, to raise the retirement age for receiving full benefits (a disaster especially for poor workers who cannot continue the hard physical labor many of their jobs require), and to raise the FICA tax rate, already a regressive flat 6.2% for employees and employers. Either Trump and Congress are not really going to try to boost jobs and income, or are going to try using measures like deregulation and trade sanctions on imports that will not work, or the CBO is just providing a fraudulent projection to give a boost to Republican plans to gut Social Security.

So what’s really going on here?

It’s classic scare tactics.

The Republican game, one in which they are, as always, being shamelessly supported by many conservative Democrats, as well as by nearly every financial advisor in the financial industry, and by financial industry lobbyists, is and has been to frighten younger workers into thinking that they are never going to receive Social Security benefits by the time they reach retirement age. The goal is to drive a wedge between older workers and retirees on the one hand, who are looking at Social Security benefits as the mainstay of their lives in retirement (half of all Americans have no retirement savings — no IRA or 401(k) and no pension — and of those with savings, the average amount is $60,000 per family, according to the Economic Policy Institute, enough to pay out just $2400 per year in interest for life), and younger workers, who are being told Social Security will be going bust before they retire.

In 2016, according to the Social Security Administration, 61 million Americans, or about one-fifth of the country’s population and nine out of 10 of the nation’s elderly and disabled, are receiving Social Security benefits. Of these, 48% of couples and 71% of single retirees depend on those benefits for 50% or more of their income. Furthermore, 21% of retired married couples and 43% of single retirees depend on those benefits for 90% or more of their income. Cutting Social Security benefits, or reducing them by stealth through continued under adjustment for inflation each year, will wreak havoc with their lives.

Meanwhile the 75-year-old system, which has never missed a payment, has long been supported by all workers, young and old, first because of confidence that it will pay promised benefits, and equally importantly, because children and grandchildren paying into the system know that it is supporting their parents and grandparents, and helping to keep them out of poverty and also off the backs of their offspring. There is, in other words, an inherent solid logic in seeing Social Security as a national good for people of all ages.

The Republican strategy is to destroy this universal support by convincing the young that their FICA taxes are going into a black hole and that those funds won’t be available for them when it’s their turn to retire.

The idea is to pretend that Social Security is like an investment in stocks and bonds, and that the return is not very good in comparison to investing money in privately managed accounts (that’s what the Wall Street financial community wants: to get their hands on all those FICA funds totalling nearly a trillion dollars a year!).

But Social Security is not like a 401(k) fund. It is a government program funded by taxes and with benefits set by Congress. It is a wholly political construct, and it will be whatever the public demands it to be. Sadly, because most of the corporate media have bought into the Republican-led scam that Social Security is just an investment program with a poor return, many Americans are losing confidence in its future. And so for years, during which, as even now, small tweaks in the funding of the program could have made the program fully solvent right through the period when a large population of Baby Boomers will be increasing benefit outlays, and into the foreseeable future, and that in fact would allow it to be expanded (European public retirement programs pay benefits that are about twice as large as those paid by the US Social Security system!), nothing has been done.

Make no mistake: this CBO report is the opening salvo of an all-out assault on Social Security, as Republicans, now thanks to Trump’s presidential win, seek to take advantage of their full control of the levers of power in Washington for at least the next two or more likely four years, try to do as much damage to the program as possible.

The only answer is for progressives to organize massively in support of this last and most critical piece of the old New Deal legacy of President Franklin Roosevelt. It will require massive protests in Washington and major cities of the country, incessant pressure on all elected officials, and a concerted educational program so that all Americans understand that this program is critical to their and their parents’ and grandparents’ survival.

The truth is that despite a decade of dithering by Republicans and limp Democrats also anxious to cut the program’s cost on behalf of their Wall Street contributors, Social Security could be fully funded for another 75 years or more by simply eliminating the cap on income subject to the FICA tax (currently only the first $118,500 of income is taxes, rising to 127,200 next year), so that all income is taxed, and benefits could even be expanded by adding a small transaction tax of a fraction of a percent on all short-term stock trading (a measure that would not impact long term investors or retirement funds).

It is a critical time for this organizing to begin because the attack on Social Security promises to be rapid and brutal. On the upside, rallying and organizing around a defense of this program can be the core of a new progressive movement that can address all the key issues facing us in the year and presidential term ahead. Just as an example, it would be difficult to rescue, and impossible to expand Social Security benefits if Trump and Congress go ahead with announced plans to expand spending on the military instead of cutting military spending.

New Zealand: Report reveals rampant exploitation of migrant workers

Sam Price

A report published on December 14 examines the rampant exploitation of migrant workers and international students in New Zealand. Worker Exploitation in New Zealand: A Troubling Landscape by Dr Christina Stringer, a lecturer at the University of Auckland Business School, is based on 105 interviews with workers from many industries, including construction, dairy, fishing, horticulture, viticulture, hospitality, education and sex work.

The report was commissioned by a coalition of NGOs, including ECPAT Child Alert, Hagar New Zealand, Stand Against Slavery, and The Préscha Initiative, in response to numerous media reports of exploitation and abuse of immigrant workers.

The interviews shed light on appalling conditions faced by these highly vulnerable people, who are bearing the brunt of the assault by the government and the ruling elite on conditions and wages.

One interviewee recalled working 12 hours daily, seven days a week for six months, for only $5 an hour. The hourly minimum wage is $15.25. Others said they were denied payment for months, or had excessive wages deducted for food, accommodation and transport. Requests for holiday pay, which workers are entitled to under the law, were met with responses such as: “I will give you holiday pay but you will lose your job.”

Workers also spoke of being charged excessive recruitment fees, being denied an employment contract, having their documents confiscated, as well as verbal, physical and sexual abuse.

One interviewee feared pressing charges with New Zealand police because he was continuously told by his employer, “You don’t know my powers.” Another was threatened by a contractor that if he spoke out “nobody’s gonna find your dead body in New Zealand.”

The report cites a 2012 story about a liquor store owner who withheld payment to 12 new immigrant workers, paid as little $4 an hour, and an alleged death threat. It also refers to a US report from the same year which named New Zealand as a major “source country” for sex-trafficking of underage boys and girls.

Because many migrants have no official employment contract, New Zealand authorities often refuse to help them. One interviewee explained: “I went to IRD [the Inland Revenue Department], I went to Labour Department, I went to Immigration, everywhere, to complain against these guys… but no one is doing anything.”

Speaking in parliament, Workplace Relations Minister Michael Woodhouse attempted to dismiss the testimony in Dr Stringer’s report as isolated incidents. He declared that “the vast majority of employers in New Zealand are law-abiding and treat their employees fairly.”

Yet cases of migrant exploitation continue to surface regularly. In August a number of men working at the Taste of Egypt eatery in Richmond were paid just $400 for up to 77 hours a week. In another recent case, a Lewis Pass motor inn was ordered to pay $19,000 to a worker who was paid below minimum wage and denied holiday pay for 5 months.

In October the managers of the Masala Indian restaurant chain in Auckland were convicted for paying their employees $3 an hour for working up to 66 hours a week. On December 14, labour contractor Binde Enterprises was ordered to pay $430,000 to 75 staff who were underpaid and denied holiday pay.

The publication of the University of Auckland report coincided with the sentencing of Faroz Ali, the first person convicted in New Zealand for human trafficking. Ali promised 15 Fijians $900 a week for picking fruit; instead they received little or no pay and were subjected to inhumane conditions.

One woman received only $25 after working three weeks on an orchard. Another was forced to sleep on the basement floor of her employer’s house with three others and no bedding provided. A 21-year-old man worked 12-hour shifts from 5 a.m., every day for three weeks and also slept on the floor. Ali’s victims were all made to pay $4,000 in administrative fees, leaving most of them financially worse off than when they left Fiji.

The opposition Labour Party has feigned concern for migrant workers and hypocritically attacked the National Party government. In fact both parties have repeatedly attacked migrants’ wages and conditions.

On December 2, Newshub reported that four Indonesian welders employed at the Napier Pine sawmill were being paid only $3 an hour and sometimes worked from 8 a.m. to 3 a.m. the next morning. An Immigration New Zealand official stated that these extremely low wages were legal because the men worked for “an offshore employer... so we can’t dictate the employment conditions or the wages that they’re earning.” Tens of thousands of people have been employed under these “specific purpose work visas” under successive Labour and National governments.

In 2007 Labour launched the Recognised Seasonal Employer Scheme to bring in low-paid workers from Pacific Island states to fill labour gaps in New Zealand’s $7 billion horticulture and viticulture industries. These workers are frequently forced to live in overcrowded accommodation and are contractually restricted to work for one company or face deportation.

In 2008 journalist Michael Field began investigations into horrific conditions suffered by foreign fishing crews in New Zealand waters. He and other researchers found routine underpayment of wages, shifts up to 20 hours, beatings and sexual abuse, and cases of workers being fed rotten meat. All of this occurred under National and Labour governments.

Labour’s main response to Dr Stringer’s report was to echo the anti-Asian, right-wing populist New Zealand First Party’s call to slash immigrant numbers. Labour MP Jacinda Arden wrote in a Fairfax Media column on December 18 that bringing in migrant workers was “creating a vulnerable work force where wages will continue to be compressed.”

The editor of the trade union-funded Daily Blog, Martyn Bradbury, responded to the report with an anti-immigrant rant. On December 18, he demanded “that we urgently shut down immigration and student visa scams until our infrastructure can be built up to cope with the landslide of desperate people trying to get into our country.”

Such attacks on immigrants are designed to divert attention from the fact that the Labour Party and the trade union bureaucracy have no real differences with the government’s austerity measures, which have led to soaring social inequality and poverty. For more than a century these nationalist organisations have scapegoated foreigners, especially Chinese people, for the social crisis in order to divide the working class and prevent a unified struggle against the capitalist system, which is the real source of poverty and inequality.

Slavery and trafficking in Thai fishing industry

John Braddock

Slavery remains endemic throughout Thailand’s seafood industry, according to a Greenpeace report published on December 15. Turn the Tide, the 86-page report into illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing, describes vessels travelling thousands of miles into remote waters to avoid legal regulations and surveillance. Thailand’s fishing industry is the fourth largest in the world, with a 42,000-strong fleet, and is a central part of the country’s GDP.

The 12-month investigation followed a 2015 Associated Press (AP) exposure of appalling abuses in the Thai industry. AP reported trawlers operating off the coasts of South East Asia with thousands of slaves, smuggled from Burma (Myanmar) or Thailand, brutalised and forced to work against their will. When not at sea, crews were kept in cages at ports on remote islands in Indonesia. Workers in onshore factories, including small children, were found doing 16-hour days peeling shrimp in ice buckets. According to the UN, 60 percent of Burmese migrants in Thailand’s seafood industry were victims of forced labour.

The new Greenpeace report provides detailed evidence that widespread structural abuses persist despite the Thai government’s insistence that new legal measures to police the sector are working. The EU warned Thailand last year to clean up its $US6.5 billion industry or face a ban on its exports. In response, the military regime implemented limited measures against trafficking and arrested more than 100 people, mostly low-level operators.

Trafficking, murder and corruption still pervade the industry. Investigations by the Environmental Justice Foundation have found that the policing of fishing boats was highly erratic, overfishing rampant, the use of cheap and forced labour undiminished, and that crew transfers occurred at sea to hide trafficking from authorities.

Greenpeace observed several official inspections and alleged that the Royal Thai Navy failed to adequately identify and protect victims. Crew members reported that they had not been paid for some years, did not possess correct work permits, and had paid extortionate recruitment fees. Yet authorities cleared the vessels to return to port. The tiny number of convictions linked to trafficking decreased from 206 in 2014 to 169 in 2015.

Greenpeace claims that much of the seafood caught by Thai vessels is unreported, unregulated and essentially illegal. Depleted seafood stocks in the Gulf of Thailand forced ships to move to waters off Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, frequently using fake permits and ghost fleets to avoid inspections. An Indonesian government policy to sink vessels caught fishing illegally in the country’s waters forced boats into less policed waters off Papua New Guinea, Greenpeace claims.

Greenpeace tracked Thailand’s overseas fishing vessels and found that, after restrictions were imposed by the governments of Indonesia and Papua New Guinea in August 2015, as many as 76 Thai-flagged vessels shifted operations to the Saya de Malha bank off the eastern coast of mainland Africa, more than 7,000 kilometres from their home ports. There, vessels are out of reach of authorities, operating outside the law.

Large refrigerated vessels known as “reefers” remain at sea for years at a time, trans-shipping their catches. Captains routinely abuse, beat and traffic fishermen. Survivors told Greenpeace that daily beatings were part of everyday life, and that many had given up hope of ever getting off the boats alive. Of 15 trafficked survivors interviewed, almost half experienced physical violence. One of the main reasons for beatings was illness, especially when there was insufficient food and exhausted crew members would try to rest.

According to a 2016 Thai government report, nearly half of the 1,000 fishermen on 50 vessels in the Saya de Malha bank were working in violation of immigration and labour laws. Greenpeace interviewed men who had been trafficked to the boats after being told they would be employed at an on-shore fish processing factory. Instead, they worked 20-hour days, seven days a week, and could only leave the vessels once they had paid back the 30,000 baht ($US834) for which the captains had bought them.

Some fishermen are at sea for as long as five years. Beriberi, a preventable disease caused by vitamin B1 deficiency and common in the nineteenth century, was responsible for the hospitalisation and death earlier this year of a number of Cambodian and Thai fishermen who had continuously manned a reefer for nine months.

The report concludes by calling for greater controls and enforcement. Its recommendations include “prioritising efforts to eliminate risky practices,” “improved” inspections and better “transparency” to “hold sub-standard operators to account.” It absurdly declares that ultimate responsibility “rests with the industry.” In reality, the conditions described in the report are the inevitable outcome of the existing political set-up and the capitalist profit system.

Turn the Tide reveals that the powerful companies which are implicated in the use of slavery and other illegal practices are intimately connected through ownership and family ties to “significant interests” throughout the seafood supply chain as well as to influential positions in Thai “industry and politics.”

The Thai military junta is a repressive, anti-working class regime tacitly supported by Washington. The ruling National Council for Peace and Order, which came to power in a military coup in May 2014 by removing the elected Pheu Thai Party government, has maintained conditions of martial law. Torture is regularly used by the police and military, public gatherings and protests are banned, the media has been censored and elections have repeatedly been postponed.

More fundamentally, the fishing industry is an example of the global nature of capitalist production. It operates across national borders in defiance of nationally-based regulations to deliver ever-greater profits by producing at the cheapest price.

Thai seafood exporters include global operators such as Kingfisher Holdings, owned by the world’s largest seafood conglomerate, Japan-based Mahura Nichiro Corporation. Kingfisher, one of the companies implicated in AP’s 2015 slavery investigation, produces squid, shrimp and mackerel products for export to restaurant chains, food service companies, wholesalers and retailers throughout the US, Europe and Australia.

Under conditions of the worsening global economic crisis, the brutal practices uncovered by Greenpeace are not the exception, but increasingly the norm.

Anger mounting among US autoworkers in wake of GM layoff announcement

Shannon Jones

Frustration and stress is mounting in General Motors plants in the wake of the mass layoff announcement last week by the largest US-based automaker.

On December 19, GM said it would eliminate one full shift, almost 1,300 jobs, at its Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly Plant in March. In addition it said it would idle five plants for one to three weeks in January, impacting some 10,000 workers.

In November, GM reported plans to eliminate shifts at its Lordstown, Ohio plant and Lansing Grand River plant in Michigan, impacting some 2,000 workers. In reporting the cuts GM cited excess inventories and slower sales. The layoffs, however, are coming at a time when many plants are imposing forced overtime.

The United Auto Workers has given its support to the job cuts, taking the position that the mass layoffs are a business necessity. In a statement issued in the wake of the job cut announcement UAW Local 22 at the Detroit-Hamtramck plant justified the cuts on the grounds of “cost efficiency.”

Hardest hit by the layoffs will be young workers, many of who are on long-term temporary assignment and do not qualify to be placed at other GM facilities. Many are also being deprived of supplemental unemployment benefits, which pay a portion of the difference between their state jobless benefits and their regular wages. Most of the workers facing layoff were hired in April of 2016. That means the layoffs were timed so that these workers will have less than the one-year seniority required to receive supplemental unemployment pay and other benefits.

A young GM worker at the GM Detroit-Hamtramck plant, who wished to remain anonymous, told the World Socialist Web Site she had previously worked for a GM subcontractor, but could not carry that seniority with her. “It sucks. They said they would see if they will transfer us to either Lake Orion or Romulus, but it is not a promise.”

Andrew, another young GM Detroit-Hamtramck second shift worker who faces layoff, said, “A guy who works near me quit a job at FedEx in Cleveland because he thought working at GM would be a more secure job.

“Out of the 1,300 that are being laid off, only about 300 are permanent employees. The rest are temporary and that means they can’t move to another plant. You are out of a job, and we don’t get sub pay.

“What is also upsetting is the uncertainty. I could be out of a job for a year. Do I start looking for a new job or hope to go back to work at GM?”

He continued, “The health insurance part is major. I am only getting one extra month of health insurance. My wife went off her health insurance plan at the job she was working so she could be covered under my plan at GM, which was better. But now she can’t get back on her old plan until November. Meanwhile, she has major medical expenses.”

Under terms of the UAW-GM sellout national agreement signed in 2015, the number of temporary workers that can be hired by management was doubled. This has created a super-exploited, “third tier’ of workers who can essentially be hired and fired at will by the company.

A veteran worker at the GM Delta Township plant near Lansing told the WSWS, “The majority of those being laid off are temporary workers. The shift they are eliminating at the Grand River plant are new hires. They will be coming over here to Delta and they will displace the temporary workers.

“We have temporary workers who work very hard. A lot of them quit other jobs to come work for GM where they thought they could get a foot in the door. They have made purchases and they have bills. In fact we just brought in another 100 temps the week before Thanksgiving.

“We call them ‘perma-temps.’ You can have them in there for years. It is not right. The decision should be made to hire them full time after 90 days.”

Workers pointed to the contradiction of GM insisting that it must slash jobs and production even as it has forced workers to labor extra hours and on weekends in order to build up inventory.

The Delta Township worker commented, “People are working two to three Saturdays in a row and they are laying people off. People are overworked. It is not right. It has got to stop.”

A worker from Ford's assembly plant in Wayne, Michigan said her factory had been impacted by layoffs. “I think it’s horrible what they’re doing. We have no rights. We were laid off for a week before Christmas from December 12 through the 19, and we will be off in February for another one or two weeks. They say it’s due to a slump in sales, yet they’ll work us 10 to 12 hours a day to boost production just so they can lay us off."

Workers also focused on the role of the UAW in facilitating the attack on jobs. Andrew, the Detroit-Hamtramck GM worker, said, “The UAW comes around once in a while. They claim they did not know in advance about the layoffs, but I find that hard to believe.”

The former GM subcontract worker said, “When they made the announcement there was not one UAW person on the stage to answer questions. Their position is basically you are out the door, ‘goodbye.’”

The Delta Township worker noted the fact that the UAW was one of the largest holders of GM stock. “They signed off on the decision to move small car production to Mexico, even though it would hurt jobs.

“The UAW has allowed GM to amend a lot of the old contracts in order to help the company make money. What the union isn’t saying is that it is in the interest of the union itself so that it doesn’t drive their stock down.

“A couple of years ago the union decided to raise union dues, saying there would be a big strike and they needed money for the strike fund. The strike never happened, but they did not lower the dues. Instead they gave themselves raises.”

Berlin’s “red-red-green” state government sets up refugee ghettos made from shipping containers

Franci Vier

On December 13, the red-red-green (SPD-Left Party-Green Party) state administration in Berlin decided to swiftly move refugees from mass lodgings into so-called “temp-homes.” The refugees are to be housed in container settlements that were ordered by the previous Social Democrat-Christian Democrat administration, and which are partly completed.

More than 20,000 refugees are still living in inhuman conditions in airport hangars, gymnasiums and trade fair halls in Berlin. Residents at one such camp recently went on a hunger strike to draw attention to the intolerable conditions.

Refugee shelter in a hangar at Tempelhof airport

The Left Party, whose state ministers are responsible for Housing and Construction and for Labour, Integration and Social Affairs in the new government, now praise the temporary container settlements as the solution to the housing crisis facing refugees. Last Tuesday’s decision by the Berlin state administration was a “signal for a real change in policy,” said Katina Schubert, the refugee policy spokeswoman for the Left Party.

The special building programme adopted in autumn 2015 planned originally for thirty container villages, but the figure was since reduced to eighteen. Designed to be habitable for a maximum of three years, they have mostly been built on the outskirts of Berlin, far away from the inner city districts with their infrastructure, subway system and educational institutions.

They are usually situated next to or in industrial areas, as well as close to major roads and not infrequently by train tracks. At the end of 2014, a special derogation in planning law was introduced allowing accommodation for refugees to be built in places that are not suitable for residential purposes.

As with the current mass accommodation, external operators will be contracted to organize and manage the container villages. They will receive a guaranteed daily rate per refugee for three years, providing them with lucrative business. As a result, it is not surprising that there was a veritable scramble when the European-wide tender was opened for each location. The approximately 30 to 50 companies who applied to operate a container village noticed they offered “quite some economic potential,” the spokesman for the Berlin State Office for Refugees (LAF) Sascha Langenberg was quoted recently in the online edition of Die Welt.

According to the state administration, around 280 to 500 people will be housed in each facility, with up to 1,000 at a double-sized location. The units consist of three containers, each of approximately 13 square metres, making a total of just 39 square metres. This is meant to house four to eight people—depending on whether the state administration defines them as “emergency shelter” with high permitted occupancy rates or “community accommodation” with a lower occupancy level.

The interior of the accommodation is Spartan, to say the least. The windows are located on the narrow sides. With a container length of about six metres, the rear portion of the space is difficult to ventilate and receives little daylight.

Temp-homes in Berlin Altglienicke (Photo: Ronald Seiffert, www.altglienicke24.de)

The shelters are situated in remote wastelands—without any landscaping or trees. Each site will be fenced off, with an entrance gate with entry control and security personnel. Supply buildings, children’s playrooms, computer rooms and the like are also situated within this perimeter fence.

In this way, the temp-home settlements take on the character of a ghetto. Cut off from the neighbourhood, the containers—seen all over the world on building sites or cargo depots—repurposed for “residential” use, clearly send out the message: Whoever lives here is a refugee, only temporarily tolerated in Germany; these are people of second or third class.

The plans to house refugees in subhuman conditions are not seen as merely a short-term, temporary solution. This reality is reflected in the so-called “modular accommodation for refugees (MUF),” facilities to be built in the coming year and which the new red-red-green state administration wants to construct.

Unlike the containers, the MUF facilities are designed to be habitable for up to one hundred years. Using a precast concrete construction, similar to previous prefabricated buildings, large, five-story homes are to be constructed to house refugees.

But these shelters will face even greater problems with lighting and ventilation. Apart from the communal sanitary facilities, many kitchens and living areas remain without daylight. People would continue to live in narrow confinement and have little privacy. Two people are to occupy a 16-square-metre room, while 15 people share two showers.

The architecture magazine Bauwelt describes these buildings as being part of a fundamental shift from “housing to shelter.” The “modular shelters” are only “convertible into individual apartments at extraordinary expense,” it says.

This demonstrates the long-term strategy of the Berlin state administration, which is only planning for a minority of refugees to be provided with homes and integration. The percentage of asylum seekers who manage to get a private apartment stood at 58 percent in 2013.

At the same time, the minimum social standards that shaped housing in the post-war period, and which emulated the programme of social housing in the 1920s under the slogan “light, air, sun,” are being undermined. The first to suffer are refugee families, but ultimately this will also apply to other working-class residents who can no longer afford Berlin’s soaring rents, and who will be forced into ever more miserable living quarters.

By opting for temp-homes and the continued construction of the MUFs, the red-red-green state administration has made clear that it will continue the right-wing refugee policy of its Social Democrat-Christian Democrat predecessor. Just one week after taking office, it has abandoned its promise to provide refugees with decentralized accommodation in individual apartments. While the coalition agreement said that a red-red-green administration would “accommodate refugees quickly in homes,” there is no longer any talk of this.

Under the new government, the Left Party’s Katrin Lompscher will serve as state minister for construction. She served as state health minister in the earlier SPD-Left Party administration of Klaus Wowereit, which was responsible for the mass privatization of social housing that contributed to the present housing shortage.

Now the self-created housing shortage is being used as justification to force refugee families into container villages and push them into ghetto-like settlements in the long term.