Over 240,000 people back Chinese tech worker protest

Mike Ingram

A protest by tech workers in China over inhumane working conditions has gained widespread support from software engineers and others internationally.

In March of this year a GitHub user with the name 996icu created a project named 996.icu. The project was named to protest the “996” work culture in Chinese tech companies. The name comes from the schedule of 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week. The ICU was added to illustrate that workers who follow this schedule run the risk of ending up in an Intensive Care Unit.

GitHub is the largest open source code repository and development platform, which was bought by Microsoft last October for $7.5 billion. It has over 36 million users and hosts more than 96 million repositories from 2.1 million organizations worldwide. Unlike social media sites, GitHub is not blocked by China’s firewall as it is the dominant platform for developers to collaborate and is a crucial part of Chinese tech companies’ daily operations. The 996.icu project has been “starred” (liked) over 244,000 times and is watched by 4,790 users, making it one of the most popular repositories in GitHub history.

More than 500 users have contributed to a list of companies practicing 996 working hours. The list includes well-known companies such as Huawei, Alibaba, Baidu and Youzan.

A project started by Microsoft and GitHub workers, MSWorkers/support.996.ICU has been starred over 9,000 times. The site hosts a petition in Chinese and English that is signed by 486 tech workers. The petition notes, “Since going viral, Chinese domestic browsers, such as those by Tencent and Alibaba, have restricted access to the 996.ICU repository on their web browsers, warning users that the repository contains illegal or malicious content. We must entertain the possibility that Microsoft and GitHub will be pressured to remove the repository as well.”

The workers state that they “stand in solidarity with tech workers in China” and know “this is a problem that crosses national borders.”

The petition states: “These same issues permeate across full time and contingent jobs at Microsoft and the industry as a whole. Another reason we must take a stand in solidarity with Chinese workers is that history tells us that multinational companies will pit workers against each other in a race to the bottom as they outsource jobs and take advantage of weak labor standards in the pursuit of profit. We have to come together across national boundaries to ensure just working conditions for everyone around the globe,” concluding, “We encourage Microsoft and GitHub to keep the 996.ICU GitHub repository uncensored and available to everyone.”

Chinese labor law declares: “The State shall practice a working hour system wherein laborers shall work no more than eight hours a day no more than 44 hour a week on average.”

Employers can “prolong work hours due to needs of production or business” but “in general, shall be no longer than one hour a day” or “no more than three hours a day” if due to “special reasons.” Technology companies have openly flouted labor laws in China for years. In September 2016 the classified advertising website 58.com officially declared its adoption of the 996 working hour system. Jack Ma, the billionaire co-founder of Alibaba and China’s richest man called 996 a “huge blessing” and said, “Those who can stick to a 996 schedule are those who have found their passion beyond monetary gains.”

The 996 protest is part of a growing movement of the working class internationally which is fueled by the global crisis of capitalism. The Nikkei Asian Review reported in March on a wave of layoffs across the Chinese tech industry. Tencent Holdings, which runs the social media platform WeChat, announced March 19 that it would demote 10 percent of middle managers for “falling short of expectations.” More than 200 individuals are affected, according to reports.

Since February there have been reports that online game provider NetEase and JD.com, the second largest e-commerce platform, have also been cutting staff. US tech giant Oracle announced plans to lay off 500 senior staff at its China Development Center in Beijing prompting protests this month.

As stated by the Microsoft and GitHub workers, these practices are by no means limited to China. Tesla co-founder Elon Musk recently tweeted that “nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week.” A Guardian article from May 2017 gives a glimpse of what this means for workers at Musk’s Freemont, California factory:

“Ambulances have been called more than 100 times since 2014 for workers experiencing fainting spells, dizziness, seizures, abnormal breathing and chest pains, according to incident reports obtained by the Guardian. Hundreds more were called for injuries and other medical issues,” the article says.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos wrote in a 1997 letter, “You can work long, hard, or smart, but at Amazon.com you can’t choose two out of three.” What this means for Amazon workers has been well documented by the World Socialist Web Site and the International Amazon Workers Voice.

Last year saw significant protests among US tech workers. At Google and Amazon workers challenged contracts to sell artificial intelligence and facial-recognition technology to the Pentagon and police. At Microsoft and Salesforce protests were issued against selling cloud computing services to immigration agencies who were separating families at the southern border. Now workers at Microsoft and GitHub are taking a stand in solidarity with workers in China fighting against the super exploitation of transnational corporations.

Banks and multinationals announce mass layoffs in Spain

Alejandro López 

Major Spanish banks Santander and Caixabank, automakers Nissan and Ford and other multinationals have announced layoffs of thousands of workers. They are part of a global assault on jobs and working conditions.

The state-sponsored redundancy schemes (Expediente de Regulación de Empleo, ERE) enables companies to collaborate with the trade unions to regulate working hours, close for short periods and carry out collective dismissals. They were created in 1994 to maintain “social peace” by incorporating the unions still closer into the state apparatus while providing well-paid jobs to the bureaucracy—during the Socialist Party (PSOE) government of Felipe González.

Last week, Banco Santander announced it was preparing to lay off 3,700 workers, around 12 percent of its workforce and to close 1,150 branches (26 percent of its network).

Santander is the largest bank in Spain and the fifth largest in Europe, with assets valued at €1.4 trillion (US$1.6 trillion). Earlier this year, Santander reported an 18 percent increase in net income for 2018 on the back of strong growth in the United States, Brazil and Spain. The bank reported a net income of €7.81 billion last year, compared to €6.62 billion in 2017.

Santander’s announcement came on the eve of the mass layoff negotiated between Spain’s third-largest lender, Caixabank, and the trade unions. In early May, Caixabank announced it had closed a deal with the CCOO, SECB, UGT, FEC, SIB and CIC unions to lay off 2,023 workers. Further job losses are expected after Caixabank merges with Unicaja y Liberbank.

In a statement, the bank said that the cost of laying off workers would be €890 million, but in exchange it would save up to €190 million per year. On the same day, Caixabank’s stock value rose by 1.25 percent.

Both Santander and Caixbank cite “organisational and productive” reasons for the layoffs in their EREs, even as Santander had posted a €1.8 billion profit in the first quarter of this year and Caixabank €533 million. While thousands of jobs are being cut, Santander has distributed €4.7 billion in dividends and Caixabank €1 billion.

Since the global economic crisis in 2008, 45 savings banks have either been taken over by other banks or forced to merge. Over 85,000 workers have lost their jobs and nearly 17,000 offices closed.

Other multinationals have also announced layoffs.

Japanese carmaker Nissan announced earlier this month it had reached an ERE agreement with the unions to cut 600 jobs at its plant in Barcelona, almost 20 percent of the plant’s workforce—a condition the company demanded in exchange for a €70 million investment.

Vodafone announced earlier this year it was laying off 1,200 workers, 25 percent of its workforce and supermarket chain Dia will cut 2,100 jobs after it announced it had lost €352 million in 2018. The Finnish company Nokia has announced it is planning 162 redundancies, representing 17 percent of its 915 staff. German chemical giant Bayer AG is planning to eliminate 67 jobs in Spain, one in 10, as part of its announced 12,000 job cuts worldwide. In Germany, it is eliminating 4,500 jobs.

On Sunday, Ford announced it would activate its ERE at its Valencian plant of Almussafes where around 7,000 workers are employed. It is still unknown how many workers will lose their jobs, as the unions and the company are involved in backroom negotiations. The auto company has already said it will cut 5,000 jobs in Germany, close three plants in Russia, another in France and will also cut jobs in the UK. The automaker’s suppliers are also announcing EREs. According to Las Provincias, “sources from the supplier industry point out that summer is going to be a key period for the application of adjustments in its workforce, which may exceed 20,000 jobs.”

These are only the latest examples of a process of restructuring that has swept major companies and the manufacturing industry in recent years, as firms have sought to offload the cost of the economic crisis onto workers by substituting older relatively better paid workers on more secure contracts with younger employees on “precarious” working conditions.

The number of workers losing their jobs as a result of EREs has started to increase again after a fall from a record 483,313 in 2012. In 2017, the number of workers made redundant had fallen to 57,497 but rose in 2018 to 72,896.

If companies can implement EREs it is due above all to collaboration with the unions. The unions even profit from each ERE, receiving direct financing for “legal advice,” which can be as much as 10 percent of the redundancy pay. This is on top of the large subsidies the unions receive from the state, regional and local government.

The increase of EREs points to a looming economic crisis. As economic professor Gay de Liébana told La Vanguardia, companies “see a storm is coming, and that is why they are adjusting now.”

The raft of recent job losses is further proof that increased exploitation of the working class is at the heart of the capitalist system, whether in “bad” or “good” times. The Spanish economic “miracle”—growth is expected to be over 2 percent in 2019, outperforming most other European countries—was due, in large part, to three labour reforms in the past decade that have had a devastating impact on the working class. The latest statistics show that unit labour costs in Spain remain 4 percent lower than they were at the beginning of 2008.

Poverty and inequality are rampant. Spain’s Gini coefficient—a measure of a country’s income inequality—is among the highest in Europe. More than a quarter of the population remains at risk of poverty or social exclusion and unemployment remains high, with total unemployment around 14.5 percent and youth unemployment close to 40 percent.

The acting PSOE government, which recently won the elections but without a majority, is expected to form a coalition with the right-wing Citizens or pseudo-left Podemos parties or try to form a minority administration.

Whatever the outcome, austerity, militarism and attacks on democratic rights will intensify. This is clear from the statement made by Manuel de la Rocha, senior economic adviser to acting PSOE Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, who declared, “I want to send a firm and reassuring message to investors and markets: The economic policies will continue. … Fiscal consolidation, macro-economic stability and reduction of inequalities and very pro-European policies will be the priorities for the next government.”

The reference to “reduction of inequalities” is a fraud. The PSOE has already sent letters to the European Commission promising a new labour reform, cuts in pensions and more austerity. However, de la Rocha’s throwaway line about reducing inequalities performs a political function—to cover for a filthy deal with Podemos.

Party leader Pablo Iglesias has been making constant appeals for a PSOE-Podemos government, saying that Podemos will not impose “red lines or ultimatums” in negotiations. Earlier this week, he insisted that he will not ask Sánchez “for the moon,” but a “coalition government that guarantees social rights as spelled out in the Spanish Constitution.”

Looming collapse of British Steel threatens 25,000 jobs

Robert Stevens 

The UK’s second largest steelmaker, British Steel, could go into administration today, with the loss of nearly 5,000 jobs, mainly at its Scunthorpe plant but also at its site in Teesside. A further 20,000 jobs could go in its supply chain.

With talks with the government still underway yesterday over securing financial support, reports were circling that the EY administration firm could be appointed if British Steel is refused a further loan.

Although the company is named British Steel, a historic reference to the former nationalised entity, it is owned by the “vulture fund” Greybull capital. Greybull purchased the crisis-ridden Scunthorpe plant for £1 in 2016 from Tata Steel Europe. It branded its operations, centred on what was Tata’s Long Products division in the UK, as British Steel.

A shuttered foundry in Chatanooga, Tennessee points to the possible fate of British Steel facilities.

Just weeks ago, Greybull was granted a £120 million loan from the government to be paid back on favourable commercial terms to help it meet a European Union (EU) environmental bill over carbon emissions. The payments were necessitated due to the UK’s delayed departure from the EU, originally set for March 29. The £120 million meant British Steel would not face EU non-compliance fines, on top of existing liabilities, which would have equated to an additional £600 million in bills.

Greybull initially demanded a further £75 million loan from the government as a prerequisite to staying in business due to the adverse impact of “Brexit-related issues”, a fall in orders and an ultra-competitive global steel market, but has lowered this to £30 million.

The parasitism involved is staggering. Greybull is demanding a bailout despite putting together a £400 million package, mostly from bank loans—supposedly to invest in British Steel—when it took over the company. A further loan of £90 million was obtained last year.

The Financial Times reported this week, “Greybull’s initial contribution into British Steel from its own funds was less than £20m, according to several people who spoke on condition of anonymity.” Yet in the two years since, “Greybull took £6m in management fees from British Steel. It also charged £17m a year in interest on loans it provided via a Jersey-based parent company, Olympus Steel, at a rate of 9 per cent…”

Accounting records show that Greybull Capital partners, Marc Meyohas, Nathaniel Meyohas, and Richard Perlhagen, charged British Steel £3 million a year during 2017 and 2018.

The Labour Party and trade unions can be counted on to do nothing to defend the interest of workers at British Steel facing layoffs.

Community union general secretary, Roy Rickhuss, dubbed the formation of British Steel as a “new chapter in the course of the UK steel industry.”

The company was able to report a profit a year after Greybull’s took over. But this was only due to a restructuring agreed between the unions and management in which staff were forced to take a cut in pay and pensions. In return, workers were given a paltry five percent stake in the firm—a stake that is now all but worthless.

Greybull also formed part of the financial backing for electrical retailers Comet in 2012, only for the chain to collapse months later with the loss of 7,000 jobs. In 2014, it bought Monarch Airlines and imposed 700 job losses and other restructuring. The unions agreed to salary cuts of up to 30 percent and changes to terms and conditions for pilots, cabin crew and engineers. In 2017, Monarch went bust. The government stepped in to organise the return to the UK of 110,000 stranded tourists at a cost of £60 million in what was described as “the largest repatriation since the Second World War.”

In response to the news that British Steel is nearing administration, the unions demanded the government and company act together in the “national interest.”

The Unite union called for “ministers to take British Steel into public control if a deal cannot be struck between owners Greybull, its lenders and the government to avoid the steelmaker collapsing into insolvency.”

The Labour Party took up the demand, writing that it had “told the government that if a deal can’t be agreed, it must prepare to take British Steel into public ownership to protect thousands of jobs.”

In real terms, this amounts to nothing more than a call for the government to hand over more money to Greybull, which is cynically using the threat to jobs as a bargaining chip.

There is, of course, little chance that the Tories would take any advice regarding nationalisation. However, any such capitalist state “nationalisation” would not be aimed at defending workers jobs and livelihoods, but to safeguard the interests of British imperialism against its rivals while imposing massive cuts on workers.

Labour’s shadow steel minister, Gill Furniss, complained that the government had “simply failed to take the steps necessary to ensure UK steel remains competitive.”

The Unite union’s Assistant General Secretary Steve Turner declared, “British Steel’s success is key to any future UK industrial strategy… It is a national asset supporting UK Plc that cannot simply be left to the market.”

Continuing his nationalist diatribe, Turner complained “many steelworkers will be questioning how Greybull could find the finance to fund the acquisition of a French steel works last week [Ascoval] while pushing British Steel to the brink of collapse.”

The Financial Times noted that what is driving the union’s opposition to the £42 million Ascoval buyout was that it “could be fitted with equipment to enable it to supply basic material to British Steel’s existing rail factory in France, in the process displacing metal currently supplied by the giant Scunthorpe plant in Lincolnshire that forms the core of the business.”

On Monday, Unite led the charge for a new charter being promoted by UK Steel, the employers’ body. This is to be based on the insistence that government and companies in the UK operate a “buy British” policy. Unite stated, “We would urge the UK government to back this charter and use its buying power to put UK steel at the heart of major infrastructure projects and ensure projects like the Royal Navy’s new Fleet Solid Ships are built in the UK using UK steel.”

Such nationalist demagogy is aimed primarily at preventing a unified struggle by steel workers against job losses, pay cuts and speed-ups uniting British steel workers with steel workers in France, throughout Europe and internationally.

Instead, the unions are seeking to convince workers to align themselves with British capitalism in its drive to impose ever-deeper attacks on workers in the name of global competitiveness. It means a fratricidal struggle between workers of different countries that can only benefit the corporations. The reactionary logic of this nationalist program was underscored by Unite’s insistence that the £2.5 billion worth of steel needed in the UK “over the next five years” included the building of “warships.”

British Steel workers should reject this perspective. A genuine struggle to defend jobs requires the mobilization of workers through the formation of rank and file committees independent of Labour and the trade unions that would link the struggle of steelworkers with workers across Britain and internationally. This fight requires a socialist perspective aimed at reorganizing economic life on the basis of production for human need, not the private profits of the hedge funds and billionaires.

Ford slashing 7,000 white collar jobs

Jerry White 

In a scene played out just a few months ago at General Motors, hundreds of engineers, managers, technicians and other white-collar workers at Ford will lose their jobs this week as part of Ford’s plan to cut 7,000 salaried workers, ten percent of its global white-collar workforce, by August.

The job cuts are part of a restructuring of the global auto industry. Over the last six months, job cuts have been announced by GM (14,000), Volkswagen (7,000), Jaguar Land Rover (4,500), and Tesla (3,000). This is driven by Wall Street and other global investors who are pushing carmakers to cut costs and increase profit margins as sales fall in the major North American, Chinese and European markets, trade tensions sharpen, and signs continue to mount of a new global recession.

The job cuts further expose the lies about a “booming economy” peddled by the Trump administration and echoed by the Democrats. While the stock market, corporate profits and CEO pay continue to rise, millions of workers live in a state of perpetual economic insecurity.

Ford's World Headquarters in Dearborn, Michigan

Workers leaving Ford’s World Headquarters in Dearborn, Michigan, Monday afternoon told World Socialist Web Site reporters that there would be meetings this week where human resource managers would inform employees whether they had a job or not. The cuts have been hanging over the heads of workers for seven months, ever since Ford CEO Jim Hackett announced the company’s $11 billion global cost-cutting campaign, euphemistically dubbed “Smart Redesign.”

According to the Detroit Free Press, “Ford employees packed boxes with their belongings on Friday and headed home for the weekend, not knowing what would happen Monday as word spread to prepare for what employees predict will be ‘Armageddon’ in Dearborn.”

“A lot of people are going to be leaving Ford,” one manager told the newspaper. “It may well be in the hundreds, if not thousands. I don’t know if I’ll have a job past Tuesday.” Another said, “The cuts appear to heavily be a cost cutting measure against future pension level costs.”

In an internal email, obtained by the WSWS, Hackett said, “notifications to employees in North America affected by wave four of Smart Redesign will begin [Tuesday],” and the “majority will be completed by May 24.” He added that “restructuring work continues in Europe, China, South America,” and “we expect to complete the process in those markets by the end of August.”

In April, Ford said it would cut 5,000 jobs in Germany. It is also ending production at a transmission plant in Blanquefort, France, near Bordeaux, closing three factories in Russia, and shuttering its oldest factory in Brazil as part of the company’s exit from the commercial truck business in South America. Ford also laid off 2,000 workers at its joint venture in Chongqing, China, after sales in the country fell by 40 percent.

According to Ford spokesmen, 500 salaried workers in the US will be involuntarily laid off this week and a total of 800 by June. With the 1,500 US employees the company claims have already accepted so-called voluntary buyouts, the total number of white-collar Ford workers forced out of their jobs in the US has reached 2,300.

The exact number of global job cuts could likely be much higher than the 7,000 announced in Hackett’s letter. Estimates by industry analysts have suggested that layoffs, buyouts and retirements of Ford employees and contractors could reach 25,000 globally, far more than the job cuts announced by GM late last year.

In a gesture of corporate magnanimity, Hackett—who made $17.7 million last year, 276 times the median compensation of a Ford worker—assured “team members” that Ford had moved away from past practices of forcing fired workers to leave company property “immediately.” Instead, the company would give them “the choice to stay for a few days to wrap up and say good-bye.”

Wall Street investors, who have long been punishing Ford’s stock prices, have bid it up by 34 percent since the company began its jobs bloodletting. Ford intends to double its profit margin in order to boost stock buybacks and dividend payouts, the latter of which rose to $2.3 billion last year.

In March, Ford announced it was hiring as its new chief financial officer Tim Stone, the former vice president of finance for Amazon who led the $14 billion acquisition of Whole Foods. Stone, who takes over as Ford CFO on June 15, brings his expertise from a company that has perfected the exploitation of its workers, electronically monitoring their every move and measuring their restroom time, in a manner that would put Henry Ford’s time-motion study experts to shame.

Announcing the company’s first-quarter profits last month, Hackett told investors that the results were proof that his push to cut costs and improve profitability around the globe is working. “We have a solid plan to create value in the near term and the long term,” Hackett said. “The results clearly demonstrate the benefit of our fitness actions. There’s more to come.”

Despite one-time downsizing charges, Ford made $1.1 billion in first quarter profits. In North America, it made $2.2 billion in profits, up 14 percent from 2018, and its profit margin rose to 8.7 percent from 7.8 percent. Hackett has called 2019 the “year of action.” Like GM, Ford management plans to use the threat of mass layoffs in this summer’s contract negotiations to demand sweeping concessions, particularly in healthcare benefits, from Ford’s nearly 60,000 hourly workers in the US.

The carmakers have relied on decades of collusion with the United Auto Workers to slash hundreds of thousands of jobs, halve the wages of new hires and vastly expand the number of disposable part-time temporary workers. Predictably, the UAW has nothing to say in response to Ford’s job-cutting plan because the union supports it.

There is a growing sense, however, that blue-collar and white-collar autoworkers have to unite to fight layoffs and a realization that such a fight must be organized by workers themselves, independently of the UAW.

A comment posted by a salaried Ford worker on the web site thelayoff.com expressed this determination and more broadly the growing anti-capitalist sentiments gripping ever-wider sections of workers.

“Ford is no longer an automotive or a mobility company. It’s a profit company. Its sole focus is to deliver good quarterly results and returns to shareholders. And this problem is not at all restricted to Ford. We are at a point in our economy where the only focus is on profit margins and returns. Any loyalty large companies may have had to their employees in the past is nonexistent.”

The worker said he was “absolutely NOT advocating for something like the UAW, which has evolved to have its own hierarchy and has been repeatedly found to be conspiring with the auto companies themselves at the expense of the hourly workers. The UAW is corrupt and is a bad example of what collective representation should be.

“Separately and individually we have no leverage against the company. But if we were able to collectively say stop it with the layoffs or we will all walk off the job, we would have power over the company. We’ve seen this pattern repeat itself enough times in the past that even after this round of cuts is over, it’s likely that we’ll just be facing them again a few years from now. The only way we can do anything to stop this cycle is to band together.”

Pointing to the broader issues, he concluded, “Inequality has been skyrocketing in this country for decades, and I only ask everyone to recognize that the threats we face as the working class are only going to grow from here on. But as the workers that actually make this company run day to day, we need to find a way to band together to ensure our future job security.”

Indeed, the relentless assault on jobs poses the need to build new organizations of struggle, including factory and workplace committees that are democratically controlled and will not bow to Wall Street’s dictates. But the task of unifying autoworkers and other sections of workers coming into struggle, like teachers, hospital, Amazon and other workers, must be combined with the fight for a new political perspective and strategy.

The fight for the social right to a good-paying and secure job for all workers requires an irreconcilable opposition to the nationalism promoted by Trump, the Democrats and the unions and the fight to unite the working class in the US and around the world on the basis of a socialist program. This includes the transformation of the other auto giants into publicly owned utilities run on the basis of human need, not private profit.

White House and Google launch technology war against China

Andre Damon

On Monday, Google, the internet search and smartphone software monopoly, announced that it would block Huawei phones from accessing critical parts of the Android operating system, effectively ending Huawei’s business outside China.

Compounding the blow, US hardware manufacturers Qualcomm, Broadcom and Intel announced that they would no longer sell the company components, without which it cannot produce any of its current line of smartphones or IT infrastructure systems.

The moves came after the US Department of Commerce added Huawei to its Restricted Entity List on the grounds that it was “engaged in activities that are contrary to US national security or foreign policy interests.”

The companies complied with Trump’s nakedly protectionist measure, which has serious consequences for their own business interests, without a hint of protest. Whatever damage Trump’s trade war does to their bottom line will be more than offset by winning the favor of the American state and securing preferential regulatory treatment and lucrative military contracts worth billions of dollars.

Huawei announces the Mate X folding smartphone in February

In a nervous editorial, reflecting the hesitations of the British ruling class over the US war on Huawei, the Financial Times did not mince words. The US was afraid that China’s “technology is on course to outstrip America’s,” it wrote. The newspaper concluded bluntly, “Indeed, the US steps appear part of an attempt to constrain China’s rise.”

With sales of Apple and Samsung phones plunging, Huawei was on the verge of becoming the largest seller of smartphones by the end of the year, in addition to being the world’s leading provider of 5G telecommunications equipment.

In the course of just a few years, Huawei has become the most dynamic player in the highly competitive and rich global smartphone market. Its phone sales have risen 50 percent over the past 12 months.

Huawei has not only produced the top-ranked phone camera, according to DxOMark, for two generations in a row. With the botched launch of Samsung’s Galaxy Fold, Huawei is also on the verge of rolling out the first viable mass market phone that converts into a tablet, dominating a market segment that Apple, the previous industry leader, has not even attempted to enter.

However, the blacklisting of Huawei by the Trump administration, and the cooperation of Google and other major technology companies, will mean the effective destruction of Huawei as a player in the global smartphone market. Even if it is able to produce phones without relying on components sold by American companies, their sales will be confined to the Chinese market. The moves, one analyst told the Financial Times, were “very likely to cost Huawei all of its smartphone shipments outside China.”

No one knows what the consequences of this new salvo in the global trade war will be. The development of the internet and the launch of the app economy by Apple in 2007 took place during a period of globalization and international integration. However, the internet and the global technology industry are becoming fragmented along national boundaries, amid the rise of protectionism and trade war.

In a clear-eyed warning about the potential implications of the breakdown in US-China relations, Morgan Stanley predicted that despite a loosening of monetary policy by the Fed, the move against Huawei would likely portend a “full-blown recession” in the United States.

The announcement by the White House last week of new restrictions on Huawei and Google’s compliance with them come after the near total failure of US efforts to prevent its allies from purchasing Huawei communications equipment. Britain, Germany, India and numerous other countries rejected Washington’s efforts to strong-arm them into banning Huawei’s 5G telecommunications equipment, which is universally regarded as substantially superior to its Western competitors.

In response, the US simply doubled down, leading to what one analyst told the Financial Times was “effectively the starting signal of a technology cold war.” The New York Times called the move the beginning of a “digital iron curtain.”

The massive and sudden intensification of the US-China trade war came as a shock for many. “The move by the Trump administration is much more comprehensive than many Chinese expected,” one analyst told the Times … “It also came much earlier. Many people only realize now that it’s for real.”

The growing conflict between the United States and China is centered on US efforts to prevent the entry of Chinese corporations into high-value manufacturing segments previously dominated by the US and EU members such as Germany. Last year, the Trump administration shortened visa durations for Chinese graduate students studying in fields such as robotics, aviation and hi-tech manufacturing. Meanwhile a group of congressional lawmakers is pushing for even further restrictions on student visas.

US Vice President Mike Pence

In November, Vice President Mike Pence announced what many called a new Cold War between the United States and China, demanding that China abandon its efforts to enter into “the world’s most advanced industries, including robotics, biotechnology, and artificial intelligence,” which he called the “commanding heights of the 21st century economy.”

Since then, US and Chinese negotiators had intensively discussed a possible deal to halt the raging trade war. But the discussions fell apart, once it became clear to Chinese negotiators that the United States was demanding what China could not offer: the effective dismantling of its high-tech manufacturing sector.

Commenting on last week’s announcement, the China Daily declared: “With its treatment of Huawei, the US government has revealed all its ugliness in its dealings with other countries: its despotism as the world’s sole superpower without any respect for rules, its haughtiness and lack of respect for the dignity of its trade partners, its condescending attitude toward the rest of the world and its outright selfishness and unwillingness to accept that it is a member of a wider community.”

But could China’s ruling elite have expected otherwise? American imperialism was happy to make China the sweatshop of the world, extracting billions of dollars from the toil of its proletariat. The US, however, will not abide China becoming an economic peer and will use all its power—from its preeminent role in the global financial system, to its network of alliances, to the threat of full-blown nuclear war—to assert its dominance.

The US attempt to destroy Huawei is only a preview of how far it will go to secure its hegemony. The country that brought the world Hiroshima, Vietnam and the Iraq war is willing to destroy more than just companies. It is now setting its sights on a country of 1.4 billion people, with potentially devastating consequences for all of humanity. China, for all its vaunted economic growth, remains an oppressed country in the crosshairs of imperialism.

These developments should put to rest the fashionable academic arguments that the categories of Marxism—imperialism, monopoly, exploitation, and the conflict between the global economy and nation-state system—have been superseded. In fact, it is only these analytical tools that explain the fragmentation of the global economy in the 21st century and the reemergence of “great-power conflict.”

The central argument of contemporary Marxism, made abundantly clear by the 20th century, is that socialist revolution is the only way to avoid a new global conflagration, driven by the desperate struggle between capitalist nation-states for markets, profits and influence.

German government prepares troops for domestic missions

Tino Jacobson & Peter Schwarz 

With the pilot project of a Bavarian “state regiment,” the German federal government is secretly and unconstitutionally creating an armed homeland security force. This links up with the tradition of volunteer military organizations that terrorized the working class during the Weimar Republic in the 1920s and 1930s.

The Bavarian State Regiment is a joint project of the Federal Ministry of Defence, the Bundeswehr (armed forces), the Reservists Association and the Bavarian state government. The project officially began on April 1 and will be extended to the whole of Germany after a trial period until the end of 2021. The first state regiment will enter service on May 18 in Roth near Nuremberg. It includes 500 reservists, as well as five active Bundeswehr soldiers. Fifty other active Bundeswehr soldiers will take part in exercises and join up in case of emergency.

The proposal to build state regiments comes from Oswin Veith, Christian Democratic Union (CDU) member of parliament. Veith is president of the Reservists Association, funded by the Defence Ministry, and in addition to enjoying the free provision of offices, exercise areas and materials, is funded with around €14 million annually.

At the annual meeting of the Bundeswehr reserve in autumn 2016, Veith announced: “I dream that in 2026 there will be a provincial regiment in each state with a charismatic commander, a troop flag and an organization of between 800 and 2,000 reservists to support the police and the Bundeswehr in emergency situations.”

In draft guidelines, which he sent internally to association leaders the following year, Veith called for universal compulsory service, obliging all 16- to 35-year-old men and women to undertake social duties. Those who decided to serve in the Bundeswehr should be able to serve in one of 16 state regiments near their home town.

According to Veith, the state regiments would form a “national reserve” with around 30,000 posts and have a clear ideological orientation. The “reservist, who has not yet committed or wanted to get involved” should be “addressed and motivated with the positive term ‘national.’”

An internal analysis of the Bundeswehr at that time rejected this proposal on the grounds that the guidelines of the Reservists Association were “incompatible” with the German constitution. The structures of the state regiments “contradict the state’s monopoly of force” and some of the chosen formulations placed “the principles of our liberal and democratic constitution on its head,” said the Bundeswehr. But less than two years later, Veith’s proposal is being put into action, at least in part.

The Bavarian State Regiment relies on three existing reserve units: the Upper, Middle and Lower Franconia companies of the so-called Regional Security and Support Services (RSU). There are 27 such companies nationwide. Reservists include former soldiers who have retired from active duty but remain at the disposal of the Bundeswehr and, recently, specially recruited men and women between the ages of 25 and 55, who are being trained in a crash course as “soldiers lite.”

The RSU units are trained for domestic tasks that are forbidden for the Bundeswehr according to the constitution. These include “monitoring and ensuring the safety of the German air and sea areas,” “securing domestic military installations,” as well as deployment in a “domestic emergency.” In addition to natural disasters and particularly serious incidents, these emergencies include uprisings, strikes and protests that endanger the state order.

The reserve units are therefore also intended to be used as a kind of National Guard for counterinsurgency purposes. In forming the state regiments, they will receive a stronger, centralized command structure and be linked more closely with the Bundeswehr.

Colonel Stefan Helmut Berger, the first commander of the state regiment, was “extremely happy” to take on a new mission “for the homeland” and welcomed this “further opportunity for a serious reserve force. For example, the reservists have done very good preparatory work in the past 10 years in establishing the KVKs and BVKs.”

The abbreviations KVK and BVK refer to District and Regional Commands, which already exist in all federal states, and are deployed in disasters or major incidents. They would form a link between civil protection and the Bundeswehr.

The head of the Bavarian State Chancellery, Florian Herrmann, bragged about the special role of Bavaria in the pilot project, “For Bavaria, as the top reservist state, one thing is clear: we want to make better use of the reserve’s potential.”

The Bavarian state government has been campaigning for domestic Bundeswehr operations for years. It has been involved in several civil war exercises in recent years, such as: GETEX (Joint Counter Terrorism Exercise), BAYTEX and the 2017 nationwide anti-terror exercise, in which heavily armed soldiers trained to collaborate with the police in the inner cities.

The construction of a Homeland Security force is not limited to Germany. Similar developments already exist in France, Poland, Sweden, Denmark and the Baltic states. All these countries are building up national reservist troops for domestic deployment to prepare for future uprisings.

Since the 2015 terrorist attacks in France, an 85,000-strong National Guard has been created to take over the army’s domestic operations. Since the end of March, President Emmanuel Macron has been using soldiers against the “yellow vests” who take to the streets against social inequality and the “president of the rich.” The Paris military governor, General Bruno Leray, threatened that his soldiers would also use live ammunition if necessary.

In Germany, the “Bavarian State Regiment” pilot project is part of a comprehensive upgrade of all state organs—the military, the police and the secret services—and the deliberate strengthening of extreme right-wing forces. These include the new police laws in the individual federal states, the financial, personnel and material upgrades of the police and intelligence services and the construction of camps and detention centres for refugees.

After defeating the Munich Soviet Republic, the Guards Cavalry Rifle Division moves into Munich. (Photo: Federal Archives)

The use of the Bundeswehr and the reservist associations domestically violates the constitution. The German constitution expressly excludes domestic army operations, with the exception of “natural disasters” or “particularly serious incidents,” such as the devastating 2013 Elbe flood. However, they have been practised for years and are constantly being expanded.

For example, the “new Bundeswehr Concept,” which the grand coalition presented last summer, states: “With regard to the threats in the ‘global commons,’ as well as hybrid threats in cyberspace, national and spatial boundaries, the strict separation of internal and external security is losing its significance.”

The paper, which advocates the permanent deployment of the Bundeswehr domestically and the collaboration of the military and the police, is also supported by the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Greens. The first joint exercises by the Bundeswehr and police in Germany not only had the backing of Defence Minister Ursula von der Leyen (CDU), but also the then North Rhine-Westphalia state Interior Minister Ralf Jäger (SPD) and Baden-Württemberg state premier Winfried Kretschmann (Greens).

The ban on Bundeswehr domestic missions was one of the lessons drawn from the Weimar Republic and the Nazi regime. The Reichswehr (Imperial Army) together with paramilitary combat units, the secret service and police had formed a state-within-the-state. Among other things, the assassination of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht and the bloody suppression of the Munich Soviet Republic took place exactly 100 years ago as a result of this “deep state.”

Between April to May 1919 in Munich, the Freikorps (Free Corps) brutally rampaged and murdered thousands of revolutionaries and also ordinary workers. Bavaria became an El Dorado for all types of Freikorps and military associations. They operated under the protection of the reactionary Bavarian state premier Gustav Ritter von Kahr, and the Social Democratic federal government of Ebert/Scheidemann in Berlin with their Wehrbeauftragte(Parliamentary Armed Forces Commissioner) Gustav Noske (SPD). This paved the way for other far-right formations, such as the Stahlhelm (Steel Helmets) and Nazi Sturmabteilung (SA), and finally Hitler’s seizure of power.

With the establishment of the state regiment in Bavaria, the federal grand coalition government of the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats is completely abandoning these lessons. In the death agony of capitalism, it is increasingly resorting to authoritarian methods to arm itself against the resistance of working people.

Russia: 98 arrested in opposition-led protests in Yekaterinburg

Clara Weiss

Since May 13, when protests began against the construction of an Orthodox church on a city square in Yekaterinburg in the Urals in Russia, 98 people have been arrested by Russian riot police.

Reflecting the incestuous relationship between the oligarchy, the state and the Orthodox Church that has emerged with the restoration of capitalism in Russia, the construction of the church is supported by the local authorities and funded in large measure by the two oligarchs Igor Altushkin (net worth $3.8 billion) and Andrei Kozitsyn (net worth $1.2 billion). Both of them made their fortunes in the Ural mining industry and maintain close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The protests began on Monday, drawing a crowd up of up to 2,000 people who occupied the park where the church is set to be built. The protests escalated into a violent clash overnight between demonstrators and the Russian riot police OMON, which is subordinated to the interior ministry. The OMON launched a brutal crackdown, arresting dozens that night. Several protesters were injured, including a 17-year-old boy. Since the protests began, 98 people have been arrested, among them several figures from the staff of the right-wing opposition politician Alexei Navalny.

On Thursday, President Putin intervened, calling for a city referendum on the construction of the church. The referendum is scheduled to be held on Saturday, May 18. Online polls have showed a majority of the city population opposing the construction of the church.

Since the beginning of the protests in Yekaterinburg, similar, smaller protests against the construction of buildings in parks and squares have been held throughout the country. Leaders of the protests in Yekaterinburg are now in the process of negotiating for a compromise with the local authorities.

The protests were immediately endorsed by the Western bourgeois media, which were quick to hypocritically denounce the violent police crackdown.

However, as reactionary as the planned construction of the church by the oligarchs and the state is, workers must be warned about the political forces that are leading the protests. They are closely aligned with the right-wing, imperialist-backed opposition of Alexei Navalny, whose local campaign staff were involved in organizing the protests.

One of the main figures behind the protests, Fedor Krasheninnikov, has a long record of right-wing political alliances in the region and is a member of the US-supported liberal opposition.

While still a student in 1994–1998, he was a member of the far-right nationalist Liberal National Democratic Party (LDPR) in Yekaterinburg, and the party's local city representative. The head of the LDPR, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, is notorious for his violent outbursts denouncing Jews, Sinti and Roma and immigrants in fascistic language and has, for the past two decades, functioned as a loyal opposition to Putin.

In the 2000s, Krasheninnikov founded a business consulting agency in Yekaterinburg and was part of various nationalist outfits, including the Party for the Resurrection of Russia (Partiia Vozrozhdeniia Rossii) which had close ties to the Stalinist and far-right nationalist Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF). He participated, in various capacities, in several gubernatorial and city duma elections.

In 2011, he co-founded the People’s Freedom Party (Partiia Narodnoi Svobody), or PARNAS. The party was led by Boris Nemtsov until his murder under dubious circumstances in 2015. Nemtsov, as well as PARNAS as a whole, have long-held and well-known ties to the US State Department and the CIA. Also in 2011, Krasheninnikov co-wrote a book on “transparent democracy” with Leonid Volkov, one of Alexei Navalny’s closest advisers. Krasheninnikov became a leading figure in the 2011–2012 anti-Putin protest movement by layers of the upper-middle class and has publicly attacked Putin’s foreign policy in Ukraine since 2014, denouncing the annexation of Crimea and the “Russian invasion” in the east of the country.

Krasheninnikov is one of the most influential political figures in the Urals, arguing for greater independence from Moscow, through a decentralization of the entire Russian Federation and regional autonomy for the Urals. At the protests this week, slogans like “The Urals are ours,” associated with this perspective, were reportedly shouted as well.

The business daily Kommersant in 2012 noted that Krasheninnikov was among the “local businessmen who feel squeezed by Moscow [businessmen],” fueling local separatist tendencies in the elites. In 2003, Krasheninnikov was on the campaign staff of Anton Bakov, the leader of the Monarchist Party of Russia, and considered the “grey cardinal” of the separatist tendency fighting for a “Ural Republic.” In 1993, a “Ural Republic” was very briefly proclaimed in parts of the Sverdlovsk region, of which Yekaterinburg forms part, but lacking any major base of support it was quickly disbanded by then-president Boris Yeltsin.

Under Putin, in particular, the Kremlin has pushed for strong centralized control by Moscow over the regions, following numerous major conflicts with regional elites in the 1990s. However, recent years have seen growing tensions between the oligarchs in Moscow and regional businessmen.

The protests in Yekaterinburg are part of the overall strategy of the imperialist-backed liberal opposition in Russia, which has a history of fomenting and supporting protests supposedly aimed at protecting the environment or “green spaces,” as well as secessionist and regionalist movements.

Historically, protests to defend parks, squares and environmental sites have formed the basis for alliances of the liberal opposition and the pseudo-left with extreme nationalist and monarchist forces. Such protests have also been supported by US imperialism. Among the most recent example were the protests over the Khimki forest near Moscow, which started in 2010. The leader of these protests, Yevgeniya Chirikova, a local businesswoman, was awarded a “Women of Courage” award by US Vice President Joe Biden in 2012.

The support of regionalist and separatist tendencies within sections of the local bourgeoisie in regions like the Urals, which is rich in energy resources and has a strong industrial base, has also been a major focus of the program of the liberal opposition, especially under Navalny. In his election programs and other statements, Navalny has repeatedly emphasized the need for greater regional autonomy, i.e., greater power for regional elites. Navalny also participated in several of the fascist Russian marches, where he shouted slogans like “Stop feeding the Caucasus,” a slogan that is not only racist, but also a code word for various separatist tendencies advocating the break-up of the Russian Federation in its current form.

US imperialism grants support to such forces and programs as part of its efforts to prepare regime change in Moscow and carve up the Russian Federation, to bring the resources of the former Soviet Union under its direct control.

Under conditions of a massive economic and social crisis, the promotion of these types of right-wing middle-class protests is also aimed at diverting attention from the major issues confronting the working class, above all the danger of a US-led war against Russia and the devastating social crisis. Russia has been hit extremely hard by the economic sanctions by the US and European Union following the beginning of the Ukraine crisis in 2014. Due to the Russian economy’s high dependence on oil prices, Russia is also set to suffer significant economic setbacks from the escalating US-China trade war.

In the Russian auto industry, hundreds of thousands of jobs are threatened, with the American company Ford laying off thousands of workers this summer. In the first quarter of this year, real wages, which have been declining for years, fell by another 2.9 percent, and consumer confidence measures fell to a historic low. In a poll, 79 percent said that they considered Russia to already be in a recession. Another poll earlier this year indicated that 80 percent of Russian households are struggling to buy even basic necessities.

One million take to the streets against education cuts, austerity in Brazil

Miguel Andrade

On Wednesday, mounting social anger over the austerity measures of the fascistic government of President Jair Bolsonaro exploded in Brazil’s streets with more than one million students and teachers walking out of classes and attending demonstrations initially called by teachers unions to let off steam over the reactionary “pensions reform” being proposed by the government.

In both of Brazil’s two largest cities, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, more than a hundred thousand demonstrators flocked to rallies, while tens of thousands attended demonstrations in other large state capitals such as Recife and Salvador, in the northeast, Belo Horizonte in the southeast and Porto Alegre in the far south, as well as in the capital, Brasília. Overall, every state capital and more than 170 regional centers and smaller cities saw demonstrations, even in the countryside of the most remote regions of the scantily populated west and the Amazon.

While the Workers Party (PT) and the unions have so far attempted to strangle mounting workers struggles, most notably shutting down in mid-March a 33-day strike by São Paulo public workers against the will of the rank-and-file, workers and youth found in Wednesday’s demonstrations an outlet to express widespread opposition not only to Bolsonaro, but to the whole political establishment, with demonstrators comparing PT state governors to the fascistic president and his allies for themselves implementing brutal austerity measures and aping his apologies for the murderous military police forces.

Mass demonstration on São Paulo's Avenida Paulista

The demonstration had been called on April 5 by the PT-controlled National Education Workers Confederation (CNTE) “if the pensions reform cleared the House Constitutional Panel”, in the words of its president, Heleno Araújo Filho, which happened in late April.

The almost one-and-a-half month truce was designed to allow time for Congressional horse trading and for the mobilization to be sabotaged, as the same unions had done with a “national day of struggle” on April 24. However, the announcement of a 30 percent budget cut for all federal teaching institutions—from high schools to faculties and universities—on April 30 generated a growing wave of spontaneous protests, forcing both the CNTE and the National Students Union (UNE) to call the walkouts and demonstrations.

The immediate trigger for the demonstrations was the announcement by the Education Minister, the far-right economics professor Abraham Weintraub, that his ministry would cut the budget of universities that permitted “mayhem” on the campuses, later telling O Estado de S. Paulo that by “mayhem” he meant political events, citing as an example “allowing landless workers on campus”. Weintraub said among the first to have its budget cut would be the Fluminense Federal University, located in the state of Rio de Janeiro, which had been forced during the elections, under threat of criminal proceedings against its dean, to remove an anti-fascist banner put up by students. The electoral court ruled that it constituted “electoral propaganda” against Bolsonaro.

The announcement was immediately perceived as an attempt to impose political censorship, by the fascistic education minister, who is famous for paraphrasing the Nazis by saying that “communists are the top of the country, the top of financial institutions, the owners of the papers, the big companies and the monopolies.” The funding cuts came on top of the announcement days earlier that the government would defund sociology and philosophy departments across the country, with the government affirming that it was not interested in allowing “children of farmers” to “come back home with anthropology degrees.”

In the face of widespread revulsion over the cuts, the government doubled down on the announcement declaring that the 30 percent cuts would hit all federal institutions—60 universities attended by 1.2 million students and 40 secondary technical schools, the so called “Federal Institutes”, IFs, while insisting that the motivation for the cuts were economic reasons and not political. Soon, thousands of parents began demonstrating with their children in front of the IFs, waiting for Bolsonaro at places he was scheduled to visit, such as the celebration of the 130th anniversary of Rio’s Military High School.

In every one of these demonstration and later in the mass nationwide protests on Wednesday, there was a large range of issues raised by demonstrators carrying banners opposing Bolsonaro’s campaigns for the militarization of schools, his war on climate science and his cutting in half the country’s science budget, the striking down of environmental and workplace regulations, and the continued Brazilian economic slump—with the central bank estimating a possible return to recession after a 0.1 percent GDP contraction for the first quarter.

Most significantly, while the unions, the PT and the pseudo-left organizations attended demonstrations with “Free Lula” banners—promoting the lie that former president PT President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva imprisoned for corruption, would somehow oppose austerity—demonstrators in PT-ruled states targeted the state governors as well, with demonstrators in Salvador, Brazil’s first capital and today the capital of the state of Bahia, calling Rui Costa, the PT governor the “PT’s Bolsonaro”. Bahia’s PT-run state government has closed schools with hundreds of students and cut 28 percent of the state universities’ 2018 budget. Protesters also remembered that Costa, hailed in Lula’s interviews from prison as an “important leader” on the left, regularly whitewashes police murders, famously claiming that police officers are like “strikers in front of the goal”, hailed “if they strike” and decried when they miss.

For his part, Bolsonaro reacted with unrestrained hostility and aggression to the demonstrations. Speaking from Dallas, Texas, where he travelled to receive the corporate “Person of the Year” originally meant to be delivered at New York’s American Museum of Natural History before protests forced the event to be moved, he called the demonstrators “useful idiots” being manipulated by the PT.

Significantly, he tweeted a 2010 video from Lula using the same words as Weintraub to justify budget cuts by his PT government, saying “they were necessary because tax collections were less than predicted by the budget.” Bolsonaro wrote below the video “Lula clarifies for the left how is it when we have to withhold funds (which every government does). Thank you for explaining!”

Bolsonaro is rapidly being engulfed in the same crisis hitting every section of Brazilian political establishment, of which his election was a distorted expression.

In their immense size and nationwide scope, the Wednesday demonstrations show, like the demonstrations developing in Northern Africa, the Yellow Vest protests in France, teachers strikes in the US and the youth demonstrations against capitalist inaction over global warming, that the world’s masses are moving sharply to the left. Millions are coming into struggle against a bankrupt capitalist system which lets Notre Dame and the Brazilian National Museum burn down, is incompatible with the most basic rights of workers, to education and decent living standards, and threatens the very life of the planet.

Rising US health insurance costs take toll on workers

Alex Johnson

A new poll conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) and the Los Angeles Times found that an extraordinary rise in the cost of health care plans and deductibles over the last decade has imperiled the financial security of American workers.

According to the Times article published earlier this month, health insurance deductibles have soared in recent years, increasingly leaving Americans with unaffordable bills.

Since 2007, annual deductibles in job-based health plans—the most common form of coverage—have increased fourfold, with the average deductibles for health plans rising to an estimated $1,300. The results have spurred on what the Times calls “an affordability crisis” that has sent many households of the middle and working class to, or on the brink of, financial ruin.

The ever-rising cost of health insurance has placed an increasing number of workers in increasingly more precarious conditions.

More than 4 in 10 workers enrolled in plans with high deductibles don’t possess enough savings to pay for them. In a country where more than 70 percent of the population live paycheck to paycheck and where more than half have witnessed stagnant or declining wages, one health emergency requiring an out-of-pocket payment could send an individual or family into destitution.

According to government data analyzed by the KFF for the Times, only half of single households and 60 percent of family households had more than $2,000 in savings in 2016.

Among the conclusions drawn are that one in six Americans who received insurance through their jobs reported that they had to make “difficult sacrifices to pay for their healthcare plans” in 2018. These sacrifices included cutting back on food and other desperate actions such as moving in with friends and family or taking on extra jobs.

The study notes that the rise in cost sharing is “endangering patients’ health” and has caused millions, including people with serious illnesses, to skip care entirely to avoid the expenses. Additionally, a larger number of workers are turning to GoFundMe pages or other charities to seek financial relief.

The article admits that the health care system is fueling “resentments” and “deepening inequalities, as healthier and wealthier Americans are able to save for unexpected medical bills while the less fortunate struggle to balance costly care with other necessities.”

A 45-year-old Information Technology worker told the Los Angeles Times that his family has been severely handicapped by $5,000 in outstanding medical bills. Despite having a household income of more than $80,000, he said his family has very little left over to cover a $4,000 annual deductible.

“We shop at discount grocery stores. My wife is couponing. We are putting every single bill we can on the credit card.” After noting that even a family meal at McDonald’s has become a luxury, he said, “we’re drowning.”

Another worker, a 55-year-old nurse’s assistant working in a nursing home in Ohio, said she’s had to cut back on taking trips to the grocery store as she struggled to pay off $1,000 in medical bills after breaking her wrist. Other workers spoke of having to move back in with their parents or take on extra jobs.

A separate poll found that more than a quarter of workers had to put off vacation time or buying major purchases to pay their medical bills. An additional quarter said they reduced spending on clothing or other more-basic purchases.

A study published by the American Cancer Society found that more than 56 percent of American workers in the last year either struggled to pay their medical bills, delayed appointments and doctors’ visits, or experienced turmoil over how they could afford care. Individuals and families with medical conditions such as heart disease, cancer and diabetes have suffered the most.

The staggering explosion in the cost of deductibles followed the passage of Obama’s Affordable Care Act (ACA) in 2010. Prior to the ACA, in 2006, nearly half of Americans had no deductible, while the average cost of a deductible plan when adjusted for inflation was only $376. By 2018, the average cost of a deductible had ballooned to an estimated $1,350 while insurance premiums increased beyond the rate of inflation.

These price increases provide a dramatic exposure of the ACA, which was essentially authored by the insurance companies and hospital giants to lower health care expenses for corporations and the government, shifting the cost of rising premiums and deductibles onto the backs of workers while at the same time enriching insurance companies.

UnitedHealth, for example, accumulated $12 billion in profits over two years under the ACA, largely to the benefit of its wealthy executives and investors.

While the stock market soars, US life expectancy has declined over the past three years, largely due to the opioid epidemic and the lack of affordable health care and other services.

In March, the White House proposed a 12 percent reduction in funds for the Department of Health and Human Services for the 2020 fiscal year, while slashing Medicaid over the next 10 years and allowing states to lower benefits for poor and lower-income workers.

The proposed cuts to Medicaid and Medicare, which amount to around $1.4 trillion in total over the next decade, will only exacerbate the cost of health care and worsen workers’ conditions.

Moreover, slashing social programs aimed at treating medical and preventive care—including wellness visits, immunizations, and screenings—will increase the number of people forced to undergo emergency operations or serious hospital treatments, where costs are much more expensive.