Ford to slash 1,400 jobs as auto industry cuts widen

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/09/03/ford-s03.html

By Tim Rivers
3 September 2020

Ford Motor Company will eliminate 1,400 salaried jobs before the end of the year, the company announced Wednesday, advancing its years-long, multi-billion dollar restructuring plans. The cuts will begin via early retirement buyouts, targeting older, better paid employees, but intensified attacks on jobs and working conditions throughout Ford’s workforce will inevitably follow.

Ford’s president for North America, Kumar Galhotra, announced the buyouts in an email to employees Wednesday, stating, “We’re in a multiyear process of making Ford more fit and effective around the world. We have reprioritized certain products and services and are adjusting our staffing to better align with our new work statement.”

As has become standard practice, layoffs are threatened if Ford doesn’t reach its target of voluntary buyouts. “Our hope is to reach fitness targets with the voluntary incentive program. If that doesn't happen, involuntary separations may be required,” Galhotra concluded.

The stock markets responded positively to Ford’s announcement of job cuts, boosting the company’s share price 1.76 percent Wednesday.

Even as Ford and other major corporations are forcing workers back into deadly working conditions in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, they are using the economic crisis to engineer further restructuring measures and carry out a jobs bloodbath. Also on Wednesday, United Airlines announced that it would indefinitely furlough over 16,000 employees at the beginning of October.

Ford’s own cost-cutting efforts are set to accelerate with the ascension of Jim Farley, currently COO, to the role of CEO in October, replacing current CEO James Hackett, who has been under fire by major investors for years. Despite overseeing tens of thousands of layoffs and billions in cost cuts, Hackett has been viewed by Wall Street financiers as insufficiently aggressive in carrying out the attacks.

In 2019, Ford had announced 7,000 salaried job cuts, along with the layoff of 12,000 workers and the closure of five plants throughout Europe. Expressing the ruthless drive for profit of the financial elite, Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas said last year that Ford would not reach the profits the company was promising and instead stated that an additional 23,000 white-collar jobs were needed.

The depth of the crisis at the company, which was long seen as a mainstay of global auto production, can be seen from key figures on its balance sheet just over the last two years. Ford’s net income has fallen almost continually since the end of 2017. In its first quarterly earnings net loss since 2009 during the Great Recession, the firm recorded a loss $2 billion for the first three months of 2020, and has projected a net loss for the full year. Analysts have also been quick to point out that Ford has been losing money in every market except North America and the company’s debt was cut to junk status by ratings agency S&P in March.

At the same time, Ford is sitting on a pile of cash on hand, $39.3 billion, up $2 billion from last year’s amount, and was in the top 10 US companies with the most cash available near the end of 2019, behind only the tech behemoths Microsoft, Alphabet (Google), Apple, Facebook and Amazon, and Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway.

Nevertheless, in the frenzied competition to dominate new and emerging technologies, global automakers are racing to slash costs and ensure massive sums of money continue to flow to the largest investors. Incoming CEO Farley has said that the company is targeting a profit margin of 10 percent in North America, up substantially from last year’s 6.7 percent margin. Such an outcome could only take place through an immense intensification of exploitation of Ford’s workforce.





In response to Ford’s job cuts announcement, numerous workers posted comments on the web site thelayoff.com, pointing to the further job cuts waiting in the wings.

“If this September 8th offer is true,” one wrote, “it only means there will definitely be a heave hoe coming after the voluntaries.”

Another added, “The voluntary packages will be followed by involuntary packages, the involuntary packages will again target those employees nearing pension milestones and the highly compensated employees. Those of you a few years shy of 30 years and not yet 55 will be primary targets.”

After years and decades at the corporation, workers who had once held the expectation of a well-paid lifetime career are now facing the stark reality of suddenly being cast into poverty.

“Ford claimed that you could keep your benefits until eligible for Medicare, but they have since raised the monthly cost and co-pays so much that it’s unaffordable,” reported another worker. “I know a few people who thought they could afford to take the buyout but are now stretched because of the increased cost of Ford benefits. I don’t believe you could qualify for unemployment after nine months because you technically quit your job.”

Along with the record stock prices endlessly touted by the Trump administration, a wave of job cuts is slicing through major corporations worldwide. More than 200,000 job cuts and buyouts have been announced in recent weeks, and corporations globally anticipate more blood-letting as furloughs implemented early in the pandemic are transformed into permanent layoffs.

Germany-based automaker BMW is also cutting salaried positions in the US, and last week announced plans to cut some 400 jobs at its Mini car plant in Cowley in the United Kingdom. The company earlier this year announced plans to cut 16,000 positions globally. Both Volkswagen and Daimler AG have also signaled plans to carry out mass job cuts, and a wave of layoffs has been spreading throughout Brazil’s auto industry.

In the airline industry, more than 400,000 workers had been fired, furloughed or told they could lose their jobs in the immediate future by the end of July. More reductions have been announced since, including American Airlines, at 19,000 workers, and United’s 16,000. Lufthansa is working on more cost-tightening measures that could see another 20,000 jobs destroyed. Airbus chief executive Guillaume Faury said last month that a plan to cut 15,000 jobs was not the worst-case scenario.

Earlier this year, agricultural equipment giant John Deere announced its own round of early retirement buyouts of salaried employees as part of its “Smart Industrial” restructuring, along with the layoff of production employees in Iowa. The job cuts via voluntary retirements were followed last month by the termination of an undisclosed number of white collar workers.






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Markey wins Massachusetts Democratic primary with “progressive” masquerade

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/09/03/mark-s03.html

By Kate Randall
3 September 2020


US Senator Ed Markey beat out challenger Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy III in Tuesday’s Democratic primary contest in Massachusetts. Markey, 74, in Congress for 44 years, scored a decisive 55–45 margin victory over Kennedy, 39, the grandson of Robert F. Kennedy, the late US senator and attorney general. The Kennedy dynasty had never before lost an election in Massachusetts.

To read media reports of the outcome, one would believe that Markey’s victory heralded a win for the “progressive” wing of the Democratic Party. This was due in large part to the support given by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to the longtime middle-of-the-road Democrat.

Celebrating his victory, Markey described his campaign as “a movement fueled by young people who are not afraid to raise their voices or make enemies.” He added, “Tonight’s victory is a tribute to those young people and to their vision.” Nothing could be further from the truth.

An examination of the senator’s record, which has included 37 years in the US House and 7 years in the Senate, shows that he was a reliable vote for the party establishment on key domestic and foreign-policy issues, and sometimes stood on the right wing of the party, voting in 2002 to authorize the war in Iraq. Why, then, did Ocasio-Cortez lend her support to his campaign?

Ads flooding the Massachusetts television market featured Ocasio-Cortez championing Markey as coauthor of her “Green New Deal.” Markey cited his support for Medicare for All and other progressive initiatives. Taking a swipe at the much younger Kennedy, Ocasio-Cortez argued in ads, “It's not a question of your age; it’s the age of your ideas.”

Markey appeared in ads, wearing his trademark Nike sneakers, relating how his father worked as a milkman, and how as a young man he drove an ice cream truck to finance his undergraduate and law degrees at Boston College, in an effort to contrast his background to Kennedy’s as the scion of the most prominent and wealthiest political family in Massachusetts.

Kennedy had hoped to capture the vote of young adults as well as African Americans, banking on his family’s association—however limited and contradictory—with the civil rights era of the 1960s. However, this vote did not materialize in significant numbers. He carried the older industrial cities such as Springfield, Worcester, Lowell, Fall River and New Bedford. Markey dominated in the upscale suburbs west of Boston, including Brookline and Kennedy’s hometown of Newton, former strongholds of the Kennedy clan, as well as in the university towns.

Before turning to Markey’s voting record on key policy issues, it is worth examining the so-called progressive content of the Green New Deal and Medicare for All. Sen. Markey and Rep. Ocasio-Cortez introduced the Green New Deal in both houses of Congress in February of last year. The nonbinding resolution called for American energy production to transition to non-carbon-based sources within 10 years.

The resolution’s nonbinding character meant its supporters would be committed to nothing. Furthermore, even if it were adopted, the deal is placed entirely within the framework of the US capitalist profit system. Insisting that the US become “the international leader on climate action,” it would advance US corporate interests and proposes no international collaboration to advance climate concerns.

Given the attitude of the Trump administration toward the World Health Organization in the course of the coronavirus pandemic, it is laughable to expect that the US ruling elite could be counted upon to advance the environmental interests of the planet and its population.

Similarly, Medicare for All, championed by Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont in his Democratic presidential bids in 2016 and 2020, has no chance of being adopted. A genuine socialist reorganization of the US health care system would require the expropriation of the giant hospital chains, private insurers and pharmaceuticals. Even a very limited reform like that proposed by Sanders would never take place under either a Republican or Democratic administration. So, it was easy for Markey to toss around the Green New Deal and Medicare for All as cheap campaign slogans in a cynical effort to boost the senator’s progressive credentials.

On policy issues of real substance, in the House in 1994 Markey voted for the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which opened the door to mass incarceration, created 50 new death penalty offenses, and eliminated Pell Grants for inmates to receive higher education while incarcerated.

Rep. Markey was only one of three members of the Massachusetts Democratic congressional delegation to vote for Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq in 2002. Eighty-one Democrats in the House voted in favor of the resolution, while 126 voted against, placing Markey on the right wing of the Democratic caucus. Markey now claims he was duped by the lies of George W. Bush about Saddam Hussein’s possession of weapons of mass destruction.

Those in the Democratic Party who now hail Markey as a beacon of the progressives are well aware of these pro-imperialist and law-and-order votes, but chose to back him against Kennedy, whose policies were equally right-wing, although with a shorter record.

When Kennedy first announced his bid for the Senate, he was ahead of Markey in the polls by double digits, and there was some speculation that Markey might resign his seat. But Markey ramped up his campaign and enlisted the support not only of Ocasio-Cortez but from many corners of the Democratic “left,” including MoveOn, Our Revolution, Progressive Democrats of America and the Sunrise Movement. Elizabeth Warren, the senior senator from Massachusetts, endorsed him.

Markey’s campaign site lists the support of 17 unions, union locals and officials, demonstrating his long-term relationship with the corrupt union bureaucracy in the state.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi backed Kennedy, saying she always supported members of her caucus, whatever seat they sought. Longstanding ties between the wealthy Pelosi and Kennedy families may have played a role in her decision.

Markey’s primary victory is revealing for what it says about the corrupt politics of forces like Ocasio-Cortez, who aim to ingratiate themselves with the Democratic establishment. Her campaign to remake the persona of a hack politician like Markey is part of an effort to do the same for the Democratic Party as a whole, in order to channel the discontent and anger of workers and young people over the pandemic, unemployment, hunger, evictions and other social catastrophes back into this political dead end.

In other primary results in the state, 17-term Rep. Richard Neal, 71, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, the powerful body that handles all tax legislation, beat out a challenge from Holyoke Mayor Alex Morse, 31. His win followed a #MeToo-type smear against the openly gay Morse from the student paper at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, which received widespread media attention thanks to Neal’s campaign, but ultimately proved bogus.

Both Markey and Neal will win the general election easily. Markey faces only token opposition, while Neal is one of four members of the all-Democratic delegation from Massachusetts who face no Republican opponent on the ballot.

In another significant result, Jake Auchincloss won the Democratic primary to succeed Joseph Kennedy in Congress. Auchincloss will add another member to the military-intelligence caucus in Congress, which the WSWS has identified as the CIA Democrats. The most right-wing candidate in a nine-person contest, he won with just 23 percent of the vote.

According to his campaign website, Auchincloss, as a captain in the Marine Corps, “commanded infantry in Helmand Province, Afghanistan in 2012 and a reconnaissance unit in Panama in 2014.

“In Helmand, he led combat patrols through villages contested by the Taliban. In Panama, his team of elite reconnaissance Marines partnered with Colombian special operations to train the Panamanian Public Forces in drug interdiction tactics.”

Auchincloss will join a dozen other CIA and military operatives who now play an outsized role in the Democratic caucus in the House of Representatives.






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New York deploys COVID-19 “SWAT Team” to SUNY Oneonta after six percent of students test positive for virus

wsws.org/en/articles/2020/09/03/suny-s03.html



By Alex Findijs
3 September 2020

A recent outbreak of COVID-19 cases at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Oneonta has resulted in 245 infections among students, six percent of the currently enrolled student body. This comes just one week after classes began and just one week before public grade schools are scheduled to open across the state, except in New York City where reopening has been delayed until September 21.

In response to the outbreak, New York Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo has deployed a “SWAT team” of 71 contact tracers and eight case investigators to Oneonta, a city of 13,000 three hours northwest of New York City. Three rapid testing centers will be opened, offering 15-minute tests for free to all residents of the city.

SUNY Oneonta is the first college in the state to suffer from an outbreak of COVID-19 this Fall. While the state government and SUNY system have acted quickly in response to the outbreak, it was their policies in the first place that not only made it possible, but inevitable.

State universities have been allowed to fully reopen with in-person classes despite the diagnosis of tens of thousands of new coronavirus cases around the country every day. State guidelines for infections on campus are woefully inadequate. Schools are required to return to remote instruction for just two weeks in the event that more than 100 students or 5 percent of students, whichever is smaller, become infected over a two-week period. Colleges may return to normal activity if cases fall below the threshold.

If the local health department determines that the school is incapable of controlling infections then it may require the institution to continue with remote learning. Local and state Departments of Health have the authority to enforce a 100 percent transition to remote learning if it determines that smaller outbreaks are straining the ability of the school to contact trace and isolate students.

What is being posited here is the idea that there is a reasonable level of infection, and by extension death, that is tolerable to the state government and SUNY system. It is irrational and unscientific to assume that infections will not translate to deaths among students and community members, and that even small clusters of cases will not spread off campus and possibly to other parts of the state.

This is not simply lax control of the virus, but a deadly experiment with student’s lives to determine the effects of a full reopening of economic activity. Cuomo described colleges as the “canary in the coal mine.” The significance of this statement cannot be understated. Students are being sent into danger as a test to determine whether it is safe to reopen economic activity.

But it is already known that it is not safe. As universities and public schools have reopened across the country thousands of students and educators have already become infected and dozens have died. Additionally, colleges are, as Cuomo also noted during his press conference, “similar to a dense urban environment.” One does not need to be a medical professional to draw the conclusion that placing students in a dense population would result in a rapid spread of the virus. This exact scenario has already played out in every city in the United States since March.

Fully aware of what they are doing, and unwilling to accept blame for any deaths, Cuomo and the SUNY system have resorted to blaming students for the outbreak. Five students and three organizations at Oneonta have been suspended with further suspensions possible after several large parties were held on campus.

SUNY Oneonta did not require students to be tested before returning to campus. Nor were students required to be tested upon their return to campus. Instead, students were simply told to self-quarantine for seven days prior to arriving on campus, even while it is known that the incubation period for COVID-19 averages around 14 days.

Now the situation is being capitalized on by the Democratic Party-controlled state government to build the ground for the implementation of repressive measures. The use of the term “SWAT Team” to describe the contact tracers is not without intention. While the contact tracers are not on campus for policing purposes, the implication is that students are responsible for the outbreak at SUNY Oneonta. This raises the possibility for a more aggressive crackdown by police on student gatherings, and protests in particular, in the future.

Student led protests in New York state against police violence have drawn thousands of participants since May. Protests have occurred in cities and towns with SUNY schools including Geneseo, Oswego, Buffalo, Fredonia, Binghamton, and Albany. With police killings continuing unabated, it is highly likely that protest activity on and off campus will increase.

The events at SUNY Oneonta are just the beginning of what is to come, and a warning sign of how the capitalist class intends to sacrifice students and educators for the profits they intend to squeeze out of the population in the murderous drive to reopen workplaces and schools during the pandemic.

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Biden launches massive “law and order” ad campaign

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/09/03/bide-s03.html

By Barry Grey
3 September 2020

The presidential campaign of Joe Biden released a new TV ad on Wednesday that denounces anti-police-violence protesters who engage in vandalism or looting and places the blame for violent clashes between police and demonstrators in cities such as Kenosha, Wisconsin and Portland, Oregon on President Trump.

The sixty-second ad sums up the law-and-order message of the speech given Monday in Pittsburgh by the Democratic candidate. That hastily arranged appearance was in response to the fascistic denunciations of protesters and portrayal of Biden and the Democrats as beholden to socialist rioters and arsonists that dominated last month's Republican convention.

The ad begins with video of Biden speaking in Pittsburgh interspersed with photos of burnt-out cars and stores and video of confrontations between protesters and riot police. Biden states: “I want to make it absolutely clear. Rioting is not protesting. Looting is not protesting. It’s lawlessness, plain and simple. And those who do it should be prosecuted.”

Biden goes on to say, “Fires are burning and we have a president who fans the flames. He can’t stop the violence because for years he’s fomented it… Donald Trump adds fuel to every fire.”

The ad is part of a massive $45 million one-week television and digital purchase that is by far the campaign’s largest to date. The ad will air nationally on cable television and in local markets in nine battleground states: Arizona, Florida, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

The Trump campaign has launched two new law and order ads of its own around the theme “Communities not criminals. Jobs not mobs.” They will air in Minnesota and Wisconsin.

The Biden ad comes on the eve of a quickly organized visit by Biden and his wife Jill to Kenosha, Wisconsin set for Thursday. On Tuesday, Trump visited the city, met with police and National Guard officials and reiterated his defense of killer cops and far-right vigilantes who attack crowds protesting against police violence and racism.

Kenosha is a city of 100,000 that has been devastated by decades of plant closures. It has become a focal point of demonstrations against police violence that have been ongoing across the country since May, following the brutal police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Protests erupted in Kenosha last month after the August 23 police shooting of 29-year-old Jacob Blake, an African American worker and father of six. Officer Rusten Sheskey, a seven-year veteran of the police force, shot the unarmed Blake point-blank seven times in the back as the victim was trying to get into his car, where three of his children were seated. Blake remains hospitalized, paralyzed from the waist down.

The Democratic governor of Wisconsin has called in some 1,500 National Guard troops and the Democratic mayor of Kenosha has overseen a brutal police crackdown against overwhelmingly peaceful protesters, involving mass arrests and the use of tear gas, rubber bullets and military-grade armored vehicles.

On August 25, during the Republican convention, 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse, a Trump enthusiast and would-be cop, heeded a call by the Kenosha Guard militia group to come to the city and carry out an armed confrontation with protesters. Rittenhouse shot and killed two peaceful protesters and injured a third.

Biden’s ad makes no mention of the murder of two protesters by a pro-Trump vigilante in Kenosha or the open coordination between the militia members and the Kenosha police, captured on cell phone video viewed by millions around the world.

In responding to the fascistic ravings of Trump and the Republicans by seeking to establish their own law-and-order credentials, Biden and the Democratic Party are following the demands of their backers on Wall Street and within the intelligence and national security apparatus, as articulated by the New York Times.

On Tuesday, the Times’ print edition carried an op-ed piece by columnist Brett Stephens headlined “Unwitting Progressives for Trump: Does Joe Biden have the nerve to stand up to the far left?”

The article denounced protesters in Washington DC who jostled Republican Senator Rand Paul and his wife as they were leaving the White House following Trump’s acceptance speech at the Republican convention. It complained that Biden's Pittsburgh speech did not go far enough and urged him to “call out far-left ugliness,” visit burned-out businesses in Kenosha, and telephone the family of a right-wing activist killed last Saturday in Portland.

This was followed Wednesday by a prominently placed commentary by the Times’ leading columnist Thomas Friedman calling Biden's “looting is not protesting” speech a “good start,” but demanding that he more forcefully denounce calls to “defund the police.” Friedman, among the Times’ most direct conduits to Wall Street and US intelligence, went on to say that “Biden, if he frames it right, can be the real ‘law and order’ candidate in this election. Because he’s not for disbanding the police, but for improving them.”

The Washington Post cited Ed Rendell, the former Pennsylvania governor and senior figure in the Democratic Party, described by the Post as a “Biden friend,” as praising the Pittsburgh speech but warning, “He has to give that message over and over.”

Biden’s Pittsburgh speech and the new campaign ad are part of a further shift of his campaign to the right. The ad is intended to reassure the American ruling elite that he can be relied on to suppress growing social opposition intensified by the criminally incompetent and callous response of the entire political establishment to the coronavirus pandemic, and the social catastrophe that is unfolding as a result of the subordination of workers’ health and lives to corporate profits and Wall Street stock prices.

It makes a mockery of the attempts by Biden and the Democrats to posture as allies of youth and workers confronted by police violence and racism. It points to the fact that the Democrats’ promotion of racial politics is aimed at dividing the working class and defending the capitalist ruling class and the state institutions, such as the police, that safeguard its wealth and power.






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