Chadian President Marshal Idriss Déby Itno died yesterday from wounds sustained Monday while fighting the rebel Force for Change and Concord in Chad (FACT) militia in northern Chad. His son Mahamat Idriss Déby, aged 37, seized power at the head of a military commission staffed with 15 hand-picked generals.
Military spokesman General Azem Bermandoa Agouna issued a communiqué yesterday, declaring: “The president of the republic, the head of state and supreme commander of the armies, Idriss Déby Itno, just breathed his last breath while defending our territorial integrity on the battlefield. It is with deep sadness that we are announcing to the Chadian people the passing on this Tuesday, April 20, 2021 of the marshal of Chad.”
Chadian President Idriss Deby Itno, center, attends his final campaign rally for the recent elections in N'Djamena, Chad. Friday, April 9, 2021 (AP Photo)
It added that Déby, “like each time our republican institutions are gravely threatened, led operations in heroic struggles against the terrorist hordes come from Libya. Wounded in the struggle, he passed away once returned to N’Djamena,” the country’s capital.
Déby, who ruled Chad with an iron fist for 30 years after seizing power in a French-backed coup in 1990, was a longstanding tool of French imperialism. Hosting French and US troops at strategic bases at N’Djamena in the heart of the Sahel, Chad’s geopolitical importance surged after the bloody 2011 NATO war in Libya, which toppled Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, in alliance with Islamist militias. Chad’s army has provided troops for French military operations in Nigeria and across the Sahel, including in Niger and Burkina Faso, amid the French war in Mali.
Déby’s death comes amid a deepening crisis of French imperialist strategy in the Sahel, shortly after French President Emmanuel Macron rejected mounting calls in February for a withdrawal of French troops from Mali and the region.
The Elysée presidential palace in Paris issued a statement endorsing the illegal seizure of power by Déby’s son and praising Déby as a “courageous friend” of France, who “worked ceaselessly for the security of his country and the stability of the region for three decades.” It stressed “the importance that the transition take place in peaceful conditions, in a spirit of dialog with all political actors and civil society, allowing for a rapid return to inclusive governance based on civilian institutions.”
This effectively endorsed the moves of Mahamat Déby and the army chiefs, who extra-legally dissolved the National Assembly and announced an 18-month military dictatorship.
With the FACT militia reportedly still moving south from the Libyan border on N’Djamena, panic is mounting in the capital, and the new junta decreed a 6:00 p.m. to 5:00 a.m. curfew. There are some reports that civilians may have begun fleeing from N’Djamena across the border into neighbouring Cameroon.
There is mounting speculation that French forces, already stretched thin by operations in Mali and across the Sahel, may intervene against the FACT. France has 5,100 troops in Chad, including 1,000 troops, hunter-killer drones, and a squadron of Mirage jets at its main military base in N’Djamena, the headquarters for Operation Barkhane, France’s war in Mali and the Sahel. In 2008 and again in 2019, French warplanes bombed and repulsed rebel militias marching south on N’Djamena from the border region with Libya.
Citing French official sources, Reuters reported: “France and its allies will be looking to see how the political handover happens in the coming days. … If the [FACT] advance were to gather steam now, that could force Paris’ hands although it would seek to avoid intervening directly given the general uncertainty and impact it could have on wider Sahel operations.”
Washington and London have already ordered their non-essential diplomatic personnel to evacuate Chad, fearing violence if and when FACT troops reach the capital. “Due to their growing proximity to N’Djamena and the possibility of violence in the city, non-essential US government employees have been ordered to leave Chad by commercial airline,” the US State Department declared in a statement.
While it is strategically critical and has significant petroleum resources, Chad remains one of the world’s poorest countries. A former French colony that was granted formal independence in 1960, it ranks 187th out of 189 countries in the 2019 Human Development Index. Fully 66.2 percent of its population lived in severe poverty in 2019—before the economic and social dislocation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Though Chad only obtained 12.5 percent of the revenue from the Chad-Cameroon oil pipeline, revenues from the pipeline provided a basis for limited attempts by Déby to raise public sector workers’ salaries. However, this ended with the collapse of oil prices in 2017.
Since then, protests and social discontent have mounted against Déby, in line with growing strikes and anti-imperialist protests across the region. These include prominently the hirak against the Algerian military regime in 2019, as well as strikes by public sector workers and protests demanding the withdrawal of French troops in Mali.
Just before Déby died, Chad had held a presidential election on April 11 that ended officially in Déby’s re-election with 79.3 percent of the vote after security forces repeatedly attacked opposition candidates’ rallies. The FACT launched its operations against Déby in the context of these elections.
The FACT is itself a former tool of French imperialism, though one that has somewhat fallen out with its patron amid reports of rising tensions between Paris and Moscow.
It is a Chadian rebel militia based in southern Libya that until recently worked closely with General Khalifa Haftar, a French- and Russian-backed warlord and former CIA asset that has played a leading role in the civil war triggered in Libya by the 2011 NATO war. Until recently, Haftar and Déby were reported to have maintained cordial relations. Recruiting primarily among the Gorane (or Tubu) ethnicity, it was reportedly based at Sebha, in Libya’s Fezzan region, and tied to Russia’s Wagner private security firm.
In 2017, however, Paris turned on FACT leader Mahamat Mahdi Ali and froze his funds in French banks, on unspecified charges of “committing, or attempting to commit, acts of terrorism.”
In the run-up to the recent Chadian elections, the FACT moved south towards the Chadian border, however, attacking a border post while the elections were underway. Wolfram Lacher, from the German Institute for International Affairs and Security think tank, said: “By moving towards the border region with Chad, the FACT left the zone controlled by Haftar. It is not entirely certain whether it needed a green light from Haftar in order to attack Chad.”
The Macron government expressed its anger in the press, unabashedly expressing its neo-colonial view that Chad is a French military base. “The FACT potentially was able to avail itself of money and weapons because it had worked for Haftar together with Wagner,” an official French source told Le Monde, adding, “The fact that these people have now ended up in Chad in our zone of strategic influence is extremely problematic.”
The FACT clearly retains ties to the French political and media establishment, however, and yesterday Mahamat Mahdi Ali gave a brief interview to Radio France Internationale (RFI). He said that “Idriss Déby thought he was invincible” and appealed to “civil society” in N’Djamena to protest against the new regime.
Working hand in hand with the trade unions, transnational corporations operating in Spain are cutting tens of thousands of jobs. The list of companies involved covers almost all sectors of the economy.
Companies are using redundancy schemes, known by their acronym ERE in Spanish. This enables companies to carry out collective dismissals based on so-called “objective” reasons, such as economic downturns, technical innovations, organizational changes and productivity increases. The main advantage is that it allows companies to slash severance pay, which they must give to workers.
The trade unions play a despicable role in EREs. Many of the firms that obtained redundancy grants would not have gotten them without the intervention of the unions involved in negotiating the sackings. Part of the redundancy money goes straight into union coffers as commissions per worker made redundant, in most cases without the worker’s knowledge.
Rocio Sanchez works in the kitchen at La Francachela restaurant in Madrid, Spain, Friday, March 26, 2021. (AP Photo/Manu Fernandez)
Trade unions can gain up to 10 percent for each worker dismissed. In addition, workers under EREs pay a fixed amount for the trade union’s legal advisory services, ranging from €100 to €400. This helps to explain the popularity of EREs.
In the past six years, over 250,000 workers have lost their jobs under these schemes. Now, summing the ERE announcements in the past several weeks, over 21,000 workers are expected to be laid off in the coming months while all kinds of work centers will be closed, including factories, offices, shops and large shopping centers.
Banking is one of the main sectors. Since the 2008 global crisis, successive PSOE, Popular Party (PP) and PSOE-Podemos governments have promoted the concentration of this sector. In a little over a decade, five large banks increased their market share from 42.4 percent in 2008 to 67.4 percent last year. This was accompanied by a huge assault on workers: 100,000 jobs were destroyed, and 22,060 branches were closed. This assault continues.
With the green light from PSOE and Podemos, Bankia and CaixaBank are to merge, creating Spain’s largest bank. The new merger aims to make between 7,000 and 10,000 redundancies. Unicaja and Liberbank plan redundancies affecting 2,500 workers. BBVA has also leaked plans for 3,000 layoffs.
The banks can count on the inestimable support of the trade unions. Banco Santander recently laid off 3,572 workers and closed 1,033 offices. The redundancy agreement was described as a victory by the five signatory trade unions, while the compensation packages were described as “sufficient and worthy.” Sabadell bank also recently dismissed 1,800 workers, which the Stalinist Workers Commissions (CCOO) union called a “satisfactory agreement.”
In retail, job destruction is also accelerating. The trade unions agreed to the dismissal of 3,292 workers at El Corte Inglés, one of Europe’s largest retailers. FETICO union General Secretary Antonio Pérez argued that the redundancy scheme was valid because it was “supported by a technical report prepared by the consulting firm Deloitte” and “El Corte Inglés clearly has surplus staff.” FETICO is now calling on its members to sign up for the scheme voluntarily.
German perfume chain Douglas has agreed to 492 layoffs and the closure of 82 stores. A CCOO union bureaucrat described it as “bad news” but was quick to point out that the scheme “has managed to reduce the number of people affected and substantially improves the conditions of those who end up dissociating themselves from the company.” “Dissociating” means being sacked.
For its part, Swedish fashion multinational H&M plans to lay off 1,100 workers and close 30 stores, as part of a global restructuring plan. CCOO, the main union at the company, described the measure as “unjustified and disproportionate,” its usual comment before entering into negotiations and then claiming job losses as victories. The unions have made it clear that they have no intention of mobilising workers against the redundancy scheme.
In the food and beverage sector, Coca Cola aims to cut 360 jobs. Food products corporation Danone will soon negotiate the dismissal of 160 workers between Spain and Portugal, in a global layoff campaign targeting another 1,850 workers. Dairy company Leche Pascual agreed to 137 redundancies earlier this year. The company thanked the unions, welcoming “the rigor and responsibility that characterised the negotiating process from the beginning, always seeking the least possible social impact.”
In the manufacturing industry, which has already been ravaged since the 1980s due to the impact of globalization and requirements to enter the European Union, which included mass privatisations implemented by the PSOE, more jobs are expected to be lost.
In the Galicia region, on top of Alcoa’s aluminium plant closure, the Endesa-owned As Pontes thermal power plant and a Siemens-owned manufacturer of wind blades are to close. Multinational electrical equipment manufacturer Eaton has announced that it is closing its plant in the Basque country. Petronor will lay off 129 workers at its Muskiz refinery in another ERE, and Tubacex, a group specializing in the manufacture of steel tubes, is targeting another 129 workers.
In Valencia, automaker Ford is negotiating an ERE with the trade unions for 630 employees, within the 10,000 job cuts it plans across Europe, after having already laid off 350 workers in its Valencia plant less than a year ago. Electricity company Naturgy has just proposed another 1,000 layoffs to the trade unions, within an international restructuring plan that led it to lay off already 6,500 workers worldwide. The list of layoffs continues with automotive company U-Shin (76), Nissans ubcontractor ISS (110) and Italco textile (245).
These job cuts are not inevitable. They are the product of the capitalist crisis triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic and the reaction of big business to put the costs on the backs of the working class. In order to improve its competitive position in the world market, they seek to work with the unions to impose wage cuts, redundancies and worsen labour conditions.
In this process, the union bureaucracies rely on the pseudo-left, who like themselves articulate the interests of privileged layers of the upper middle class. An example is that of the Morenoite Workers’ Revolutionary Current (CRT) and its mouthpiece, La Izquierda Diario .
In one article on the mass attacks on jobs, they fraudulently call on workers to put their faith in the same unions that are profiting from the redundancies. They say: “The only way to avoid rising unemployment and increasing job insecurity is through a plan of struggle imposed on the unions by self-organized workers. It is necessary to demand that the unions break all their pacts with the government and the employers and that they call for unitary measures of struggle.”
Characteristically, they add: “We urgently need to organize and get the unions back from the hands of the union bureaucracies. An alternative fight plan must be promoted to defend all jobs.”
Such statements aim to conceal a fact experienced by millions of workers worldwide. Trade unions are no longer linked to the defence of the working class, as they were in the middle of the last century. Closely tied to the capitalist state and the corporations, they impose job cuts and social retrogression on the workers in the interests of privileged bureaucracies. They cannot be reformed nor pressured to benefit the interests of workers, any more than the capitalist class itself can be.
Nearly 900 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccines have been administered worldwide since vaccination campaigns began in earnest at the end of 2020. Despite a massive upsurge in production, a comparison of vaccination rates by continent starkly demonstrates that vaccines have not been distributed based upon need nor in the pursuit of equity, but rather according to economic hierarchy. North America has provided a vaccine to 39 percent of its population, Europe 23 percent, South America 14 percent, Asia 8.6 percent, Oceania 3.7 percent and Africa just over 1 percent.
World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus noted recently that one in four persons in high-income countries has received a vaccine. In low-income countries, only 1 in 500 has gotten the jab.
As the burden of the COVID-19 pandemic across the globe is shifting to more impoverished regions of the world, vaccine inequity raises significant concerns.
First CoronaVac vaccine doses arrive in Sao Paulo, November 2020 (Credit: GOVESP)
A surge in cases in mid-March in the Pacific island nation of Papua New Guinea, its first since the start of the pandemic, saw its inadequate health care system collapse in a matter of days, with hospital beds fully occupied and medicinal oxygen running out. India is facing a massive wave complicated by a variant with a double mutation that has driven daily case counts over a quarter million, and the death count has begun to soar.
The current pace of new infections had caught up with the previous highs during the winter months in the Northern Hemisphere, when Europe and the United States remained the epicenters of the pandemic. Though they still have the highest disease burden, Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands are seeing current infections surging fastest.
Additionally, the health care systems of countries like Poland, Ukraine and Turkey are facing a deluge of patients. While still suffering under a “maximum pressure” US sanctions regime, Iran is coping with a fourth and more extensive surge.
The world’s rich income countries have used their vaccination campaigns to ensure their populations are vaccinated first and foremost. The aim is to get the working class back into the factories to generate profits and to diffuse social tensions, a byproduct of utter neglect of the welfare of the population during the worst of the pandemic.
The paradox remains that the pandemic has been an enormous boon to financial capital, as evidenced by the rise in the indexes of stock exchanges, even as the death toll and mass misery have continued to grow.
Meanwhile, international tensions have only escalated as a result of the pandemic. Global relations increasingly resemble the pre-World War I years, with rival nation-states hell bent on securing control over world resources and markets. China’s more than 18 percent expansion in the first quarter of 2021 is seen as an existential threat by US and European imperialism.
Given these developments, the current and emerging COVID-19 vaccines are being promoted for prosecuting the ongoing geopolitical brinkmanship that is pitting the US and Europe against China and Russia in a struggle for the division of the globe’s resources. This struggle has the potential to rapidly escalate into open military conflict, posing an existential threat to life on this planet.
It is essential to take account of the state of the current global vaccine campaign.
Beijing has announced that it is committed to vaccinating 40 percent of China’s population by June. Last week, China had administered nearly 190 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines to its population, translating to approximately 13 doses for every 100 people. The seven-day average has remained steady between 3 to 5 million daily jabs but far short of the 11.5 million doses a day to meet the stated goal.
Though vaccine acceptance remains exceptionally high, the urgency to seek vaccination remains low. Since January 31, the country has reported less than 1,000 cases of COVID-19, of which the majority are imported. Since April 17, 2020, only six people have died from COVID-19. By all accounts, the coronavirus has been eradicated within the country. Still, national health officials and epidemiologists are concerned that they will not be able to maintain strict border controls forever. As a whole, the population remains biologically naïve to the coronavirus, and any outbreaks would create a severe public health crisis.
China exports vaccines to more than 30 countries
Thus far, China has exported close to 115 million doses of its COVID-19 vaccines (accounting for 42 percent of all the COVID-19 vaccines it has produced) to more than 30 countries. It has gone primarily to low- and middle-income nations, especially in Latin America, where China has increasingly supplanted the US as the region’s leading source of trade and investment.
Additionally, it is providing vaccine aid to dozens of countries. However, as Beijing is refocusing on its domestic vaccination campaign, it will need to produce 1.1 billion doses to meet current commitments to other nations.
The United States has administered 207 million doses of the 210 million COVID-19 vaccines it has manufactured to its own population. This accounts for 38 doses for every 100 people. India has produced 173 million doses and exported 37 percent, while the EU has made close to 157 million doses and exported 41 percent. The UK has provided over 22 million doses domestically.
Russia’s Sputnik V COVID vaccine has yet to be approved by the Emergency Medicines Agency. However, many European countries are turning to Moscow out of frustration over the EU’s slow rollout. As of March of 2021, the Russian Direct Investment Fund has licensed production in India, China, South Korea and Brazil. By the end of March, Russia had manufactured at least 30 million vaccine doses, and 5 percent were exported.
By comparison, the WHO-led COVAX facility, created to provide equitable vaccine access to low-income countries, has supplied only 40 million doses to the world’s poorest nations and is far from its goal of delivering two billion doses. According to the Wall Street Journal, “The COVAX division meant to help countries prepare for vaccine rollouts has received only around $600 million in contributions, leaving a gap of $7.3 billion for this year, and the World Bank has committed just $2 billion of a $12 billion financing package meant to help countries buy and distribute vaccines and strengthen health systems.”
Due to “incredibly tight” global supplies, Seth Berkley, CEO of the Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, told Reuters it would be unlikely if the COVAX dose-sharing facility would be able to procure more supplies this year. The ambitious goal of delivering 2 billion doses by the end of 2021 to participating countries, including 92 low-income countries, is severely hampered by lack of funding, vaccine nationalism and export restrictions on supplies.
These developments are most certainly the consequence of strategies to employ the COVID-19 vaccines as weapons in great power struggles.
The White House has predicted that the US will reach herd immunity sometime during the mid-summer. It intends to position itself to challenge China’s present lead in global vaccine distribution. Politico noted back in February that Chinese-made vaccines had “rolled out quicker than COVAX and even European vaccines earmarked for EU countries. China is providing vaccines for 19 African countries, for Serbia, Colombia, and many places in between.”
According to the purportedly independent multimedia organization, the China-Africa Project (CAP), “If the US really wants to make an impact and present a legitimate alternative to Chinese vaccines in places like Africa, it only has about six to nine months left. … China alone, not to mention India, may be able to satisfy much of the demand. Last week, Zheng Zhongwei of the National Health Commission said that Chinese vaccine output in 2021 would reach three billion doses. By the end of next year, that number will rise to five billion. Those are probably conservative estimates. And with local production deals already in place in Africa, the Middle East, and the Americas, Chinese vaccine output will increase even more.”
The high-income nations that are leaving poorer nations in the lurch have primarily taken up the supply of high-priced Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. According to Duke University, rich countries had collared 5.4 billion of the 7.8 billion doses purchased globally. China has positioned itself to fill this gaping void. Its vaccines have used traditional technologies making storage and shipping easy. If the World Health Organization (WHO), which is currently reviewing supporting documentation for COVID-19 vaccines from Sinopharm and Sinovac, provides these products emergency use listing, it will bolster China’s global role.
WHO-Europe vaccination expert, Siddhartha Datta, told journalists, “We are in touch with them to review the dossiers that both vaccine manufacturers have submitted. We will be hearing about a decision on the emergency use listing in April or early May, so please keep an eye on that.”
Currently, the WHO has issued emergency listings only for Pfizer, AstraZeneca, and Johnson & Johnson vaccines. The WHO’s emergency listing is a prerequisite for any vaccine manufacturer for purchase by the COVAX facility, which would extend their portfolio of vaccines to deliver shots to poorer countries.
As Washington has opted to hoard the COVID-19 vaccines for its own needs, the US corporate bourgeois media is working diligently to tarnish China’s vaccine initiatives. The language used in its reporting is characterized by unabashed nationalism and anti-Chinese provocations.
The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and New York Times have been direct conduits for Washington’s anti-Beijing rhetoric. Allies have utilized their press against China as well. Canada’s CTV News recently stated, “China and Russia have been using their locally produced COVID-19 vaccines to grow their international soft power by giving doses to desperate countries in order to have more political influence over them.” Benjamin Gedan, deputy director of the Latin American program at the Wilson Center in Washington, told CTV News, “It’s never encouraging to see the world’s largest dictatorships taking most advantage of this diplomatic opportunity.”
On April 5, Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced the appointment of former Obama administration official Gayle Smith as the coordinator of Washington’s global COVID-19 response and health security. Smith, who led the US response during the Ebola crisis, was asked to join the Biden administration to coordinate vaccine diplomacy efforts against those pursued by Chinese and Russian authorities.
In announcing Smith’s appointment, Blinken said, “We have a duty to other countries to get the virus under control here in the United States. But soon, the United States will need to step up our work and rise to the occasion worldwide because, again, only by stopping COVID globally will Americans be safe for the long term.”
Aside from its unvarnished appeal to nationalism, Blinken’s statement betrays concerns within the US ruling elite over both social tensions within its own borders created by the homicidal response to the pandemic, as well as Washington losing its grip over hearts and minds globally because of its failure to provide significant aid in the fight against the pandemic.
While vaccine diplomacy serves as an auxiliary of Chinese foreign policy in pursuit of bilateral agreements with poorer nations, China’s long-term efforts to produce and distribute its vaccines remain on unsteady footing. It faces similar issues with vaccine supplies as many other manufacturers. Constraints placed by the Biden administration through the Defense Production Act on the export of critical raw materials impede the world’s ability to produce COVID-19 vaccines.
Dave Lawler of Axios put it succinctly, “Few countries other than the US have the capacity to manufacture vaccines at scale, and most lack the resources to buy their way to the front of the line for imports. That’s led to a scramble for whatever supply is available.” Many Latin American nations rely on the limited supplies from China and Russia to begin their vaccination campaigns.
CoronaVac efficacy controversy
Numerous concerns have been raised regarding the performance of Sinovac’s COVID-19 vaccine, CoronaVac. Specifically, data from Brazil in January placed the vaccine’s efficacy barely above 50 percent, the threshold needed for regulatory approval. However, recent real world data from Chile, covering 10.5 million people, demonstrated that it was 67 percent effective at preventing symptomatic infections. The data also showed the vaccine to be 85 percent effective in preventing hospitalizations and 89 percent effective in preventing ICU admission. Prevention of death was at 80 percent.
The Western media, however, has cynically latched onto the low efficacy after a single jab of the two-dose vaccine regimen to besmirch its effectiveness. It should be noted that many in Chile had not heeded public health warnings or comprehended that the completion of the vaccine series was critical to providing maximal benefit and that continued public health measures needed to be implemented, leading many to become infected.
Still, the real world data is far more compelling as to the function of the vaccine, which has proved effective in protecting the elderly, making the surge less deadly for them. Dr.Rodrigo Cornejo, head of the ICU at the University of Chile’s hospital, told the Wall Street Journal that several of his close colleagues had died of COVID-19 infections early in the course of the pandemic. But since the medical staff has been completely vaccinated, he had not heard of any physicians dying from the contagion.
On April 9, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence published its annual threat assessment, stating: “In the coming year, the United States and its allies will face a diverse array of threats that are playing out amidst the global disruption resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic and against the backdrop of great power competition. … Beijing, Moscow, Tehran, and Pyongyang have demonstrated the capability and intent to advance their interests at the expense of the United States and its allies, despite the pandemic.”
It continued: “The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic will continue to strain governments and societies, fueling humanitarian and economic crises, political unrest, and geopolitical competition as countries, such as China and Russia, seek advantage through such avenues as ‘vaccine diplomacy.’”
The pandemic has already claimed the lives of more than 3 million people without any significant international measure to bring it to a stop. Without a doubt, millions more will perish. The economic fallout and instability portend long-term financial instability and humanitarian crises that will plague developing nations for decades. High food insecurity doubled from 135 million in 2019 to 270 million in 2020. By year’s end, the US threat assessment projects the figure will rise to 330 million.
For the working class, vaccines are necessary to save lives. For the ruling elites, they are seen as weapons as deadly as bullets in the drive toward global war.
On the night of April 13, the IG Metall union and Volkswagen group negotiators reached an accord on a new collective wage agreement for the 120,000 employees at VW plants in Wolfsburg, Braunschweig, Hannover, Salzgitter, Emden and Kassel, as well as for Financial Services AG, Volkswagen Immobilien GmbH (property services) and Volkswagen Vertriebsbetreuungsgesellschaft mbH (wholesale and distribution). Excluded from the agreement are thousands of workers in Saxony (Zwickau, Chemnitz und Dresden) who are still paid and treated as second-class employees.
VW chief negotiator Arne Meiswinkel stated that the result was achieved “with a sense of proportion and reason” and that it was “fair in the particularly challenging environment since the beginning of the pandemic.”
VW plant in Kassel (Image: BiCYCLE / CC-BY-SA 3.0)
IG Metall also praised the agreement. Their chief negotiator, Thorsten Gröger, who is also the district manager for IG Metall, magnanimously declared: “The colleagues deserve to be involved in the good result.” He described the deal as a “strong result in difficult times.” Bernd Osterloh, chairman of the VW works council, also praised the “strong result that our workforce, including during the coronavirus pandemic, has earned.”
The trade union has agreed to a cut in real wages barely any better than agreements in the steel and metal industry. There has been no monthly wage increase in the VW wage agreement since 2018. The union now praises the agreed wage increase of 2.3 percent all the more.
This increase will only take effect from January 1, 2022, and the collective agreement will run until November 30, 2022. With an inflation rate of 1.8 percent (2018), 1.4 percent (2019), 0.5 percent (2020) and an estimated 1.4 percent (2021) and 1.6 percent (2022), the 2.3 percent “increase” means a massive loss of real wages. These inflation figures come from a study carried out by leading economic institutes on behalf of the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology.
IG Metall also presented the following results as a “success”:
● A one-off payment of a “coronavirus premium” of €1,000 for 2020 (€600 for trainees).
● A previous performance-related remuneration will become a fixed component of the salary.
● A collectively agreed “additional remuneration” of 27.5 percent of a monthly wage will now be convertible into half the amount and three days off. So far, this solution only applies to those who care for relatives or have to look after their children more intensively. The latter can use the entire additional remuneration for this purpose—i.e., up to a maximum of six days.
● A training guarantee of 1,400 apprenticeships will be extended until 2025.
● Also, small amounts were negotiated as “pension components” for company pension schemes.
Regardless how the IG Metall officials want to present the result of the negotiations, in view of a profit of around €8.8 billion after tax in 2020, the collective bargaining agreement is an insult to the workers.
“We want to continue this in the coming years,” announced works council chairman Bernd Osterloh—a warning for all employees. This was not the reason 140,000 VW workers took strike action. IG Metall had originally demanded 4 percent, which itself was completely inadequate.
Sugarcoating the deal, IG Metall negotiator Gröger said: “The result that we negotiated last night means that the VW workforce will find a noticeable plus in their wallets”—a “plus” that inflation will have long since turned into a minus when it reaches the workers. In addition, all the signs are already pointing to job cuts, another reason why the VW Group is content to exchange wages for “time off.”
Despite lower net profits in 2020, shareholders can pocket a slight increase in dividends compared to the previous year. The share price rose in the period between March 2020 and the beginning of April 2021 from €87.50 to €246.15, almost reaching the record high of March 2015. According to the remuneration report, VW boss Herbert Diess earned around €6.1 million in 2020, plus bonuses of €1.8 million.
The remuneration for the group works council representatives is a measure of how much the “employee representatives” act as co-managers of the VW group and represent the interests of the owners and shareholders. Works council chairman Osterloh earned up to €750,000 a year including bonuses.
Last Friday, in a press conference with Health Minister Roberto Speranza, Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi announced a significant loosening of lockdown restrictions starting Monday, April 26. The announcement, which comes as hundreds of people continue to die every day of the virus, will ensure a further rise in coronavirus cases and deaths and has been widely denounced by medical professionals and scientists.
All schools are to resume in-person classes beginning next Monday. Restaurants and bars in so-called “yellow zones,” where there is a less rapid spread of the virus, will be permitted to reopen for outdoor dining. Swimming pools and outdoor sports can reopen.
Students outside the Ripetta art high school in Rome, Wednesday, March 24, 2021. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)
There are currently more than 14,000 daily cases in Italy. The B.1.1.7 strain, referred to as the UK variant, is the dominant variant in the country. An average of 381 people are dying every day. Just a week ago the daily death rate stood at 470. More than 3,000 people remain in intensive care.
Under these conditions, Draghi’s reopening announcement has a clearly homicidal character. In the course of the Friday press conference, he made no serious effort to justify the decision from a medical standpoint. Instead, he declared that it involved a “calculated risk” that there would be another resurgence of the virus.
This calculation has nothing to do with the protection of the population and everything to do with the interests of the Italian capitalist class. Schools are being opened so that parents can be freed to go to work and Italian capitalism can continue to make profits for its super-rich.
Medical professionals immediately denounced the announcement and warned that it will lead to unnecessary deaths.
“I would like to understand what has been calculated and considered, and how many deaths we are willing to accept,” said Sergio Abrignani, an immunologist in Milan on the “Che Giorno” program of Rai Radio1. Without sufficient vaccinations “and a high level of transmission, it is a biological threat,” he said.
Andrea Crisanti, the director of the Department of Molecular Medicine at the University of Padua, told Radio Capital that the reopening would be “irreversible, and there will clearly be a price to pay to be taken into account. … The figures do not justify the government’s decisions. How many deaths from COVID-19 are we willing to tolerate?”
He said, “For weeks we have been moving between 15,000 and 20,000 cases per day, a very high plateau, which does not permit us to plan reopening.”
Massimo Galli, the head of infectious diseases in Milan, told the Daily that “with Friday’s announcement, an all-clear message has been given that we cannot afford.”
Filippo Anelli, the president of the Federation of the Order of Doctors, said that “as doctors we cannot say that we are not worried that the situation will get out of hand.”
Even by the standards of other European countries, Italy’s current vaccination campaign has been a debacle. Only 17 percent of residents aged 70–79 have had at least one dose of the vaccine, the lowest level in the EU, apart from Bulgaria. With the health care system undermined by decades of funding cuts, the government had no coordinated national program for vaccine distribution, and left this to regional governments.
The widespread opposition among students and teachers to the reopening of in-person classrooms was expressed in a letter to Draghi written by a 16-year-old high school student, Flavia di Nocera, published in the Corrierino on Monday.
“The prospect of returning to school in the month of May is a measure in which I do not see any benefits, but only innumerable disadvantages,” she wrote. “My first reaction was anger: How is it possible to completely negate the sacrifices of the past year just to prove our efficiency, when the current conditions do not allow such a measure?”
Returning to classrooms “will not guarantee us immunity from the coronavirus, which can never be completely isolated from our classrooms, nor from public transport which many students use every day to get to school. This is not my hypothesis, but a fact attested to by the main newspapers that report many schools closed due to infections,” she wrote.
“Why reopen schools now? What drives us to throw away all our efforts, to make the infections spike again, to speculate on the lives of students, like guinea pigs in a monstrous experiment that pays for every mistake with human lives? … I have decided … that I, like many other children, will not take part in face-to-face lessons until my words and those of all the students of Italy will have been listened to and properly weighed. We do not want to be the puppets of macabre propaganda.”
The WSWS noted when Draghi became prime minister in February that he “personifies European finance capital like no other” individual in Italy. The former investment banker for Goldman Sachs and then head of the European Central Bank, Draghi’s name is identified with the policies of providing unlimited funds to the financial markets and imposing austerity on the working population.
“Will these openings be definitive?” Draghi asked on Friday. “When I said this was a calculated risk, that is exactly the answer. We have taken this risk; we are reopening … I have no doubt that the vaccination campaign will get better and better, if the correct social distancing measures are maintained, including masks, the chance that we must go into another lockdown is very low.”
Draghi is stating in a particularly open manner what is the policy of all the European governments. In France, Emmanuel Macron is moving to reopen primary schools the same day: April 26. His government has set a target date of mid-May for further relaxations of the limited lockdown measures in place. In a speech at the end of last month, Macron refused the closure of nonessential workplaces or an extended closure of schools, insisting that it was necessary to consider the broader impact of a lockdown, including on “the economy.”
Draghi’s announcement is in line with the campaign by the neo-fascist Fratelli d’Italia, which is continuing to campaign for an end to all lockdown restrictions, including the full reopening of all restaurants, and the pushing back of the curfew until 11 p.m.
The Fratelli d’Italia is attempting to capitalise on social immiseration of small businesspeople—including restaurant owners and other shopkeepers, who have been ruined by the pandemic and the lack of government support—to direct it behind the homicidal demands of big business for an end to all coronavirus restrictions. Many small businesspeople have reported not having received any government assistance at all.
The announcement by China earlier this month that it is currently testing the use of a digital yuan in various pilot programs has brought a reaction from the Bank of England. The Treasury and the BoE announced on Monday that they had established a joint task force to evaluate the creation of a central bank digital currency (CBDC).
Reporting on the decision, the Financial Times said it was a move to “future proof sterling against crypto currencies and improve the payments system.”
A statement issued by the BoE said a CBDC would be a new form of digital currency issued by the bank for use by household and businesses and would exist alongside cash and bank deposits rather than replace them. The taskforce would monitor international CBDC developments “to ensure the UK remains at the forefront of global innovation.”
Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak speaks during a press conference n 10 Downing Street, London on March 3, 2021(Tolga Akmen/Pool Photo via AP)
It said the government and the BoE had not yet decided on whether to introduce a CBDC in the UK and would “engage widely with stakeholders on the benefits, risks and practicalities of doing so” and would “support a rigorous, coherent and comprehensive assessment of the overall case for a UK CBDC.”
As yet authorities have no clear idea as to the form any digital currency would take. But they are clearly concerned that if Britain falls behind in the development of new methods of international monetary transactions, then the position of the City of London as a major global financial centre could be weakened.
When crypto currencies first emerged, central banks were somewhat dismissive of them. But with the rise of bitcoin and a host of other cryptocurrencies and their growing use in financial circles the use of central-bank-backed digital currencies, and whether or not they use the blockchain ledger system that forms the basis of bitcoin, is under active discussion.
Last month the chairman of the US Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, told an “innovation” conference conducted by the Bank for International Settlements that Fed officials were working with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to explore the feasibility of a dollar-based digital currency.
As with virtually every other economic issue – from COVID-19 vaccines, to trade, investment, technology and even green energy and climate change – the introduction of CBDCs is being analysed and discussed within the framework of a conflict with China.
The FT reported that the British CBDC move was “likely to magnify perceptions that the West can only meet the challenge from China’s currency advances, and the greater efficiencies it is likely to offer users, by following a similar path.”
Announcing the digital currency move last week, Chinese financial authorities said its goal for internationalising the yuan (also known as the renminbi) was not to replace the dollar and that the digital yuan was aimed at domestic use.
The deputy governor of the People’s Bank of China, Li Bo, said internationalisation of the renminbi was a “natural process, and our goal is not to replace the US dollar or other international currencies. I think our goal in to allow the market to choose, to facilitate international trade and investment.”
But as Bloomberg reported, the Biden administration “is increasing its scrutiny of China’s progress toward the digital yuan amid concerns it could kick off a long-term bid to displace the dollar.”
Immediately the Chinese move was announced, the former first managing director at the International Monetary Fund, John Lipsky, told the Wall Street Journal anything that threatened the dollar was a “national security” issue and “and this threatens the dollar over the longer term.”
There are also more immediate considerations in the US centering on its ability to use the pre-eminent position of the dollar in global financial markets to impose sanctions in pursuit of its geo-strategic agendas.
In a comment on the China move, the FT cited remarks by Martin Chorzempa, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics who recently testified to the US-China Economic Security Review Commission on the China “threat.”
He said hype had outpaced reality in digital currencies and while cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin were “booming” they were mostly used for speculation. China’s efforts to create a digital yuan had yet to prove that they would be more efficient or convenient than the existing international and domestic payments system. They were unlikely to “represent any more a threat to the dollar’s international dominance than the current forms of RMB (renminbi) at least over the short and medium term.”
While discounting any short-term threat to the dollar’s global position, Chorzempa said a benefit for China of a well-funded financial network would be the creation of “an alternative sanctions-proof set of financial infrastructure and currency arrangements.”
This is an issue of immediate concern. Starting under the Trump administration and intensifying under Biden, the US has weaponised the dollar by threatening to cut off banks which have dealings with individuals or countries it has sanctioned from the international financial system. Even Chinese banks will not deal with Chinese citizens who have been sanctioned, such as Hong Kong chief executive Carrie Lam, because of fears they will be unable to operate internationally.
Last month China began discussions with the Belgium-based SWIFT messaging service for international financial transactions to explore the means by which it could operate a digital yuan and has begun collaboration with Thailand and the United Arab Emirates on digital currency usage.
If the US views the development of a digitalised yuan as a significant means of evading the effect of its sanctions, then a significant response will follow.
The way in which the “China question” has become front and centre in all economic and financial decision-making in Washington was underscored on Monday when US Secretary of State Antony Blinken framed the question of climate change in terms of the conflict with Beijing.
He said the US was “falling behind” in the development of green technology and China held nearly a third of the world’s energy patents and was the world’s largest producer and exporter of solar panels, wind turbines, batteries and electric vehicles.
“It’s difficult to imagine the United States winning the long-term strategic competition with China if we cannot lead the renewable energy revolution,” he said.
The COVID-19 pandemic is now spreading across India like wildfire, threatening a human catastrophe of biblical or, to be more precise, 21st century capitalist proportions.
Yesterday, Indian health authorities reported 259,170 new infections, only marginally lower than Saturday’s record tally of 273,802. India’s daily count of new COVID-19 cases has exceeded 200,000 every day since April 15. That is for six straight days.
Daily COVID-19 fatalities have been increasing by more than 1,000 a day since April 14—although numerous reports suggest that this is a gross undercount. Yesterday’s daily COVID-19 death toll set a new record: 1,761 deaths were officially attributed to the virus, bringing the total to more than 182,000.
People line up to get tested for COVID-19 at a government hospital in Jammu, India on April 19, 2021 (AP Photo/Channi Anand)
Despite the wave of infections and death, India’s Narendra Modi–led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government is adamant that it will not impose a nationwide lockdown to halt the spread of COVID-19, which is being fueled, as around the world, by new, more contagious and lethal variants.
On Monday, Indian Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman spoke with the heads of major business lobby groups and the CEOs of some of the country’s biggest corporations, including Maruti Suzuki and Tata Steel, to reassure them that the Union government will continue to prioritise corporate profits over human lives.
Sitharaman said that “there is no plan [for a] national lockdown.” Animesh Saxena, the president of the Federation of Indian Micro and Small & Medium Enterprises (FISME), told the Economic Times of India that the “Focus would be on creating small containment zones to stop the [virus’s] spread. She wanted our inputs for addressing any of our concerns.”
R.C. Bhargava, the head of Maruti Suzuki, India’s largest automaker, voiced his satisfaction with the government’s decision to let the virus run rampant. He told the Kolkata-based Telegraph, “Do not think lockdown is the appropriate response this time. [It] will do more harm than good.”
In a national televised address last night, Prime Minister Modi delivered much the same message as his finance minister. Only far from wanting to “address” the concerns of the Indian people, he effectively told them to live with the threat of mass death and continue to fend for themselves in the face of an unprecedented socio-economic crisis.
Rewording the capitalist mantra that “the cure must not be worse than the disease,” Modi declared that India must be “saved” not from the pandemic, but from a lockdown aimed at halting the virus’s advance and saving lives! “In today’s situation, we have to save the country from lockdown,” Modi declared.
“I would also request the states,” he continued, “to use lockdown as the last option. We have to try hard to avoid lockdown and the focus should be on the micro containment zones only.”
Harrowing as the current situation is in India, everything suggests that the exponential growth in COVID-19 infections and deaths has only begun:
* There are currently more than 2 million active COVID-19 cases, almost a four-fold increase from the 580,327 on April 1.
* The virus is surging in multiple regions, from Maharashtra in the west, Delhi and Uttar Pradesh in the north, to Chhattisgarh in the centre-east, and Karnataka and Tamil Nadu in the south.
* India’s ramshackle public health system is collapsing under the weight of the surge in cases.
Hospitals are already overwhelmed by shortages of staff, intensive care beds, and anti–COVID-19 drugs, such as Remdesivir and Tocilizumab. Several states and the Delhi National Capital Territory, which has the country’s highest per capita number of COVID-19 cases, are facing acute oxygen shortages.
“We have collapsed, Maharashtra is sinking and other states will follow,” Dr. Jalil Parkar, a top pulmonologist at Mumbai’s Lilavati Hospital, told NDTV journalist Barkha Dutt. “This is worse than World War II.”
So serious are the drug and oxygen shortages some hospitals are now telling patients and their families to procure them directly from dealers.
The surge in COVID-19 cases is far outpacing the government’s vaccination campaign. As infections began to spike in February and early March, Modi and his government cavalierly dismissed calls for action to stop the virus’s spread, claiming that the answer to the contagion would be found in India’s world-beating vaccination campaign. Health Minister Harsh Vardhan even fatuously boasted India was in “the endgame” of the pandemic.
The much-vaunted vaccination drive is now in a shambles. As of Monday, April 19, just 8 percent of India’s 1.4 billion people had received a vaccination shot, and little more than 17 million people or 1.3 percent of India’s population were fully vaccinated.
Moreover, whilst India is the world’s largest vaccine producer, the supply of vaccines is running dry. This despite the Modi government imposing a reactionary export ban, which will have a devastating impact on the many low- and middle-income countries that were counting on Indian production for all or much of their vaccines.
Because they have lost or fear that they will lose their jobs and be left penniless by local lockdown measures, migrant workers are starting to flee major cities like Delhi and Mumbai. This raises the prospect of a further spread of the virus to rural India, where public health facilities are largely non-existent.
Last March and April, more than 10 million migrant workers returned to their villages in a chaotic mass migration prompted by the BJP government’s calamitous lockdown, which without any warning or provision of social support had suddenly deprived hundreds of millions or their livelihoods.
By Monday afternoon, 50,000 people had reportedly descended on Delhi’s bus depots in search of a means to get home. “We know very well after last year that no one will take care of us and hence I am going back,” one worker told NDTV. “When we are at home,” said a woman waiting for a bus to Bundelkhand, “we at least know we can ask someone for help and our children will not starve. Last year, we had to stand in queues and beg for food.”
While Indian authorities are criminally trying to downplay the significance of the emergence of new COVID-19 variants, they have rendered the pandemic more virulent and changed the profile of those becoming seriously ill and dying.
As elsewhere, the current wave of infections is striking down many more people in the prime of life. According to data from the Union government’s Integrated Disease Surveillance Programme, 31.5 percent of COVID-19 hospitalisations, or almost a third, are of people 39 years old and younger, with children and adolescents accounting for 5.8 percent of the hospitalised.
In addition to the three major global variants—the so-called British, South African and Brazilian strains of COVID-19—all of which are now circulating in the world’s second most populous country, India has seen the emergence of a so-called “double mutant” virus that combines two mutations identified elsewhere.
In Maharashtra, which has been averaging almost 55,000 infections per day for the past week, testing indicates that the double mutant was responsible for 20 percent of all new infections last week, and in some districts more than 60 percent.
Although the Indian double-mutant variant was first identified late last year, and was quickly linked by some epidemiologists to the February spike in infections, the government, in keeping with its callous indifference to the health of the population, had less than 1 percent of positive COVID-19 samples genetically sequenced last month, thereby making it impossible to properly track the variants’ impact.
Determined to defend the profits and wealth of India’s elite, the Hindu-supremacist BJP government won’t take even the most minimal measures to safeguard the population in the face of this unfolding catastrophe. Yesterday, the Delhi High Court pointed to the government’s failure to immediately order the suspension of oxygen deliveries to all but essential industries, so hospitals could be resupplied. Noting that the government order banning the industrial use of oxygen will only take effect on Thursday, the court felt compelled to chastise the government, declaring, “Industry can wait. Patients cannot. … Lives are at stake. Are you going to tell patient to wait till April 22 for oxygen?”
However, it is not only the Modi government that is responsible for the catastrophe now engulfing India. The entire ruling class and political establishment have blood on their hands. Maharashtra and Delhi, the two most severely impacted states, are led by the BJP’s ostensible political opponents, but they have pursued the same homicidal policy of prioritising corporate profit over workers’ lives. The corporate media, like the rest of big business, has railed against lockdowns. It cynically invokes the plight of the hundreds of millions of Indians whose meagre incomes were further reduced as a result of the pandemic, only in the next breath to celebrate the swelling fortunes of India’s billionaires as proof of Indian capitalism’s rise.
Indeed, while India’s workers and toilers were ravaged by the pandemic and its economic fallout, the ruling class gorged itself. According to Forbes’s 2021 billionaires list, the number of India’s dollar billionaires swelled from 102 to 144 last year and their wealth “nearly doubled to $596 billion.”
