https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPnc1RNMHmE
Wednesday, September 9, 2020
HLM Podcast Ep. 29 - Times Square, Portland, and the Sydney Blue Whale
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfJ9M0d-hDU&ab_channel=HLM
Heathrow airport ground staff given ultimatum: Accept pay cuts or face redundancy
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/09/09/heat-s09.html
By Margot Miller
9 September 2020
Frontline staff at Britain’s Heathrow Airport have been told they face the stark choice of either accepting pay cuts of between 15 and 20 percent or suffering job losses. Since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, these savage ultimatums have become the new normal in industrial relations.
On September 2, Heathrow issued formal section 188 notices, which means that after a 45-day consultation period the company can fire and rehire its workforce on company terms. This will affect half the airport’s ground staff of 4,700, including engineers and security workers. Demands also include the end of the workers’ final salary pension scheme.
Heathrow Airport Holdings Ltd is owned by shareholders including Spanish multinational Ferrovial, Qatar Holdings, the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation, the UK Universities Superannuation Scheme and Alinda Capital. The company says it will “guarantee a job” for whomever wishes to remain. Staff, however, could lose up to £10,000 a year. How far Heathrow is prepared to go in cutting pay is indicated by a comment in the Independent, which report of management’s plans, “No one’s salary will fall below the London Living Wage, it said.” The London Living Wage is set at just £10.75.
Heathrow is London’s busiest airport, but with the advent of the coronavirus pandemic travel and tourism ground almost to a standstill.
A spokesperson for Heathrow stated, “COVID-19 has decimated the aviation industry, which has led to an unprecedented drop in passenger numbers at Heathrow, costing the airport over £1bn since the start of March. Provisional traffic figures for August show passenger numbers remain 82 percent down on last year and we must urgently adapt to this new reality.”
In March, one runway and two terminals were closed, and most flights were grounded. Most workers were retained at that point under the government’s job furlough scheme, which ends in November. In June, the company launched a voluntary redundancy scheme, after slashing managerial roles by a third.
Tens of thousands of jobs have been lost across the travel and tourism industries in the recent period. This trend began before the pandemic, which has acted to accelerate efforts to cut costs in an increasingly competitive global market.
The threat to jobs and pay cuts at Heathrow follows the recent announcement at Gatwick, London’s other main airport, of its intention to make a quarter of its workforce redundant. This amounts to 600 ground staff posts after a reduction in passenger numbers for August of 80 percent.
Gatwick, which is owned by VINCI Airports and Global Infrastructure Partners, announced 200 job losses in March and took out a £300 million bank loan, but later said it needed to reduce costs further. Chief Executive Stewart Wingate blamed the cuts on the “devastating impact” of the coronavirus on the airline and travel industries. At the moment, with 80 percent of the Gatwick staff on the government furlough scheme, only the north terminal is in operation.
In every case, the role of the trade unions is to push through redundancies and facilitate concessions, so long as they receive a place at the negotiating table.
Heathrow had been in negotiations with the Unite union for four months before the latest announcement. Unite official Wayne King said the airport’s plans would “further undermine confidence in the industry… Our members have worked tirelessly throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.” Appealing to Heathrow management to continue “already difficult negotiations” he added, “To conduct industrial relations via the media in such a brutish manner is designed to create fear and panic in a group of key workers.”
The central pre-occupation of the union bureaucracy is not the interests of workers but to defend the interests of the aviation industry, the auto industry, the aerospace industry, etc. King added: “At a time when Unite is working hard to persuade the government to follow the lead of other European nations and provide specific financial support to the aviation sector to ensure that the industry and workers can survive the pandemic and thrive in the future …”
Unite regional manager, Jamie Major, said of the Gatwick job losses, “This is a bitter blow for the workers and once again highlights the chronic failure of the government to support the aviation sector, despite promises way back in March that it would do so.”
Offering to help facilitate the attacks, he continued, “Unite will be entering into formal negotiations with Gatwick Airport to ensure that redundancies are minimised and that all redundancy procedures are fair and fully transparent.”
Last month, the British Airline Pilots Association (BALPA) foisted a sell-out on pilots at British Airways (BA). The union recommended its members accept a deal in which 270 of BA’s 4,300 pilots would lose their jobs. The pay of the remaining workforce will be slashed immediately by 20 percent and fall to an 8 percent cut in two years and only return to where it is now at some undefined future point.
BA has also issued an ultimatum to cabin crew and ground staff to either accept redundancy, or a wage cut and inferior terms and conditions. According to Unite, some workers could face cuts in pay of up to 43 percent.
Unite General Secretary Len McCluskey pleaded with BA chief executive Alex Cruz to work with Unite to ensure the continued profitability for the company. In mid-August, Cruz hailed the announced “significant progress” in talks with the unions. This is as more than 6,500 staff have already lost their jobs, including 4,500 cabin crew based at Heathrow and Gatwick, as the company seeks 12,000 redundancies.
Like other airlines internationally, BA, with the backing of the unions, is using the pandemic to justify long-planned cuts in jobs, pay and conditions, to gain the edge against international competitors.
Just weeks before, BALPA reached an agreement with Ryanair involving a 20 percent pay cut beginning in July. The sell-out deal means pilots have to work to more flexible rota and leave arrangements, to the detriment of their well-being. Again, pay cuts are supposed to be gradually restored over four years. BALPA sold the pay cuts on the basis of saving 260 pilot jobs. However, 70 of these posts are still under threat if Ryanair closes its bases at Leeds/Bradford, Prestwick, Bournemouth and Southend as proposed.
In addition to slashing their workers’ jobs and pay, the airlines are agitating for a reckless opening-up of international travel to facilitate their return to profit-making.
The air transport industry has not seen the recovery in passenger traffic it hoped for since lockdown ended, aggravated by the government’s imposition of 14-day quarantine measures for travellers returning from virus “hotspots.” This has deterred potential holidaymakers from making bookings, leading to flights being cancelled during the peak summer holiday season.
Writing in the Daily Mail, Heathrow Airport Chief Executive John Holland-Kaye urged the government to introduce swab testing for coronavirus of incoming passengers as an alternative to quarantining. An enthusiastic backer of the criminally irresponsible back to work drive, Holland-Kaye warns that UK business is in danger of falling behind its rivals.
“This [swab testing at airports] is starting to get their [Germany and France’s] economies moving again and, in fact, both Frankfurt and Charles de Gaulle airports carried more passengers over the last few months than Heathrow,” he said.
The interests of airline workers are diametrically opposed to those of the airline owners and chief executives, whose only interest in running these companies is the extraction of profit—whatever the costs to their employees. Unite, Balpa and the rest of the trade unions have proved again and again that they stand on the side of the employers.
Workers must break from these rotten organisations and form independent rank-and-file committees, in alliance with airline workers internationally, to fight back against the onslaught on their livelihoods and safety.
Why “Progressive” Media & Think Tanks' Push For Biden Is Extremely Dangerous
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAJRq911MNY&ab_channel=TheConvoCouch
COVID-19 outbreaks spread within a week of England and Wales schools reopening
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/09/09/scuk-s09.html
By Tony Robson
9 September 2020
It has taken less than a week for the Johnson government’s criminal reopening of schools in England and Wales to place the lives of educators, children, and the wider community in danger.
There is virtually no part of the UK that has been left unscathed, with teachers and pupils testing positive in both primary and secondary school settings. On Monday, the Department of Education confirmed at least 60 outbreaks. By Tuesday evening, at least 347 schools had been hit be infections--an increase of 97 over the previous day.
Schools in Scotland returned three weeks earlier, leading to outbreaks that were a warning of what was to come that went unheeded. According to the campaign group Boycott Return To Unsafe Schools (BRTUS) reported outbreaks at schools across the UK (England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland) stood at 173 for the period from August 12, 2020 to September 7, 2020. BRTUS started to compile a database during the national lockdown when schools were open only to the children of key workers and then covering the period from June 1 when schools were partially reopened. The cases of school-related COVID-19 outbreaks even with limited numbers present and where social distancing applied went largely unreported officially and by the media.
The growing list of affected schools includes Castle Rock secondary school in Coalville, Leicestershire, visited by Prime Minister Boris Johnson on August 26. Johnson was filmed sitting relaxed on the floor of the school gym next to children to instil the idea that schools were “COVID secure.” After one staff member tested positive, six tutor groups and two PE classes were instructed on Monday to stay at home and await further guidance.
Last week, with re-openings commencing in England and Wales, the propaganda offensive went into overdrive to overcome widely expressed scepticism that measures were in place to protect children and staff. Their mistrust was also founded on the Johnson government’s long record of criminality, which has resulted in the UK having a higher per capita death rate than the US and the worst excess death rate in Europe. Among the preventable deaths have been tens of thousands of the most vulnerable in care homes across the UK.
The defence of the indefensible school re-openings also involved a sordid campaign of emotional blackmail choreographed by the TV media to inundate the public with the images of children naturally relieved and happy to be ending a long period of isolation. This was cynically used to delegitimise opposition to unsafe school re-openings on the grounds that such sentiments were antithetical to the well-being and educational needs of children.
Even as new outbreaks emerge, the guidance of Public Health England and its counterpart in Wales regarding schools with cases of COVID-19 has been to oppose any systematic containment measures—in line with broader government policy.
The number of schools that have been closed due to outbreaks are in the minority. The 60 reported outbreaks in England and Wales include the Samuel Ward Academy in Haverhill, in Suffolk, where five teachers had tested positive for the virus, and two secondary schools. This included Trinity Church of England in Lewisham, South London, which had delayed its re-opening until September 7 after a teacher tested positive.
However, in Sheffield, South Yorkshire—the fourth largest city in England—none of the five schools where outbreaks have been identified have closed. Rather, children and staff of the respective year “bubbles” to which the individual who has tested positive belongs have been sent home to isolate for 14 days. This is the case at Hillsborough Primary School and Chaucer Secondary School in the Parsons Cross area of the city, which are run by Tapton Academy Trust. Abbeyfield Primary in Pitsmoor has reported a child testing positive with only pupils and staff in that year group sent home to self-isolate.
The two other schools affected in the city are King Edward VII, with a child in Year 8 and one in Year 11 testing positive, and a fee-paying private school, Birkdale, in which a sixth form student tested positive. Only the year groups concerned have gone into self-isolation. This leaves thousands of school children and education staff in settings which are anything but “COVID secure.”
According to the Guardian, an estimated 200 students and 21 staff in Liverpool are self-isolating after five schools in the city reported positive cases. The same holds true for other areas in the north and the Midlands, including Middlesbrough, Bradford, Leeds, Lancashire, Manchester, and Nottingham, as well as Leicester.
The concept of “year bubbles”—officially of up to 240 pupils—cannot prevent transmission. It is a policy premised on the acceptance that schools do not have adequate facilities to ensure social distancing and designed to prevent the closure of schools when the inevitable occurs and a staff member or pupil is infected. It is a policy not of containment but controlled spread—of herd immunity.
The term “government safety guidelines” should by now be viewed as an oxymoron. A prime minister who has likened the government’s local lockdowns in response to the upsurge of a deadly virus to the arcade game “Whack-a-Mole” does not deserve to be taken seriously, other than as a threat to public health. He oozes contempt for the working class, which has been disproportionately affected by the pandemic both in terms of illness and death.
The profit and death calculus of capitalism means that no extra funding is to be provided that would enable containment measures or disrupt the production of profits. Parents are to be forced back to work in unsafe environments and schools are to function as glorified child-minding services in which the spread of the virus is not prevented, but only “managed.” It is noteworthy that the return to school coincided with a second government propaganda offensive calling workers back to their offices.
The response of the education unions to the crisis that teachers, school staff, parents and their children have been plunged into has underlined their refusal to wage any kind of opposition.
Kevin Courtney, the supposedly “left” joint secretary of the National Education Union, has couched his comments since the reopening purely within the framework of managing the “disruption” caused—not stopping the spread of the virus and the threat to life. It was on this basis that he made a lame appeal for additional funds.
“This should include employing more teachers and looking for additional space to seek to minimise disruption as well as ensuring IT access for children and young people who need it when they have to be at home,” he said.
At no point are the government or the interests of the wealthy elite it serves to be challenged by the unions, even when they produce a homicidal policy. The unions have no independent standpoint based upon the interests of the working class.
This underscores the importance of the Education Rank and File Safety Committee launched by the Socialist Equality Party last Saturday in an online forum to open up a new path of struggle.
The Committee’s appeal states: “The catastrophic impact of the pandemic is fundamentally a social and political issue, not simply a medical one. The technology and medical expertise exist to contain the virus, but under capitalism everything is subordinated to the profit interests of the corporate and financial elite. The demands advanced by the SEP are not based on what the corporations and the politicians claim is affordable, but what is necessary to protect the lives and well-being of children, teachers and educators, and the entire working class.”
All educators, students and parents who agree should sign up to the Educators Newsletter and attend the next online meeting on Saturday, September 19.
Saudi regime declares Khashoggi assassination case “closed forever” after sham verdict
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/09/09/saud-s09.html
By Bill Van Auken
9 September 2020
In the consummation of a judicial travesty, a Saudi court Monday announced the commutation of five death sentences previously handed down in connection with grisly October 2, 2018 assassination of dissident journalist and former regime insider Jamal Khashoggi at Saudi Arabia’s consulate in Istanbul. Instead, the five who were sentence to die were given 20-year prison sentences, while three others were sentenced to between seven and ten years.
The Saudi prosecutor’s office issued a statement saying that the announcement of the sentences “closes the case forever.”
This is despite the fact that no one who ordered and directed the assassination—including Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the oil kingdom’s de facto ruler—has been held accountable. The entire trial was held in secret, with both the press and the public barred, and now not even the names of those sentenced have been made public.
Presumably the eight who are being sent to prison were members of the 15-member death squad sent to Istanbul to murder Khashoggi, though there is no way to know if even this is true. This squad included Saudi intelligence operatives and military officers, bin Salman’s chief bodyguard and a forensics specialist who came equipped with a bone saw.
The commutation of the death sentences came after Khashoggi’s sons said in May that they had “pardoned” his killers, a statement apparently secured through a combination of the monarchy’s threats and bribes.
Turkish bugs planted in the consulate recorded Khashoggi’s horrific last moments after he entered the consulate for the purpose of obtaining divorce papers so he could marry his Turkish fiancée. This included his being physically subdued, injected with a drug and then suffocated. The tapes, provided to the CIA as well as UN human rights investigators, included the Saudi forensic expert telling his cohorts, “I often play music when I’m cutting cadavers. Sometimes I have a coffee and a cigar at hand.” He added, “It is the first time in my life that I’ve had to cut pieces on the ground—even if you are a butcher and want to cut, he hangs the animal up to do it.”
None of this stopped the sham court in Riyadh from ruling that Khashoggi’s killing was not premeditated.
Exonerated at the outset of the trial were two Saudi officials who are known to have played leading roles in the murder operation. Saud al-Qahtani, formerly bin Salman’s most influential adviser, was identified as the ringleader in Khashoggi’s killing by the CIA, which established that he had exchanged 11 text messages with the Crown Prince immediately before and after the murder. Turkish intelligence, meanwhile, reported that al-Qahtani made a Skype call to the Istanbul consulate in which he insulted Khashoggi and ordered the death squad to “bring me the head of the dog.” The Saudi prosecutor said al-Qahtani “was not charged because of lack of evidence against him.”
Also cleared was Ahmed al-Assiri, a former deputy head of intelligence, who was initially charged with giving the order to dispatch the squad to Istanbul. The prosecutor found that this “was not proved.”
The principal culprit who was never brought into the dock was Prince bin Salman himself. The CIA issued a finding that concluded with “medium to high confidence” that the prince, who rules Saudi Arabia with an iron fist, had ordered the killing.
Agnes Callamard, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings who investigated the Khashoggi case, also issued an investigative report in June 2019 that found “credible evidence” that the prince and other senior Saudi officials were responsible for the killing. She tweeted on Monday that the verdicts “carry no legal or moral legitimacy,” and that the trial was “neither fair, nor just, or transparent.” She added that “the responsibility of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has not even been addressed.”
Khashoggi’s fiancee, Hatice Cengiz, denounced the Saudi court’s ruling Monday as a “complete mockery of justice.” The prosecutor’s closing of the case “forever,” she added, left the essential facts of Khashoggi’s murder hidden. “Who planned it, where is the body?” she asked. “These are the most important questions that remain totally unanswered.”
Turkey also condemned the verdict, with a spokesman for President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan saying that the final verdict “fell short of meeting the expectations of Turkey and the international community.”
Ankara is holding a separate trial and has indicted 20 Saudi citizens on murder charges, though none of them are in Turkish custody.
While the US government issued no immediate reaction to the new verdicts, when the initial verdicts, including the five death sentences, were handed down in December, a State Department official called them “an important step in holding those responsible for the terrible crime accountable.”
The muted or non-existent response of Washington and other Western capitals, as well as of the major media, to the travesty in Saudi Arabia stands in stark contrast to their frenzied reaction to the non-fatal poisoning last month of the right-wing Russian politician Alexei Navalny. While in the first case there is ample evidence that the Saudi regime and its chief, Prince Mohammed bin Salman, were directly responsible for the brazen murder and dismemberment of Khashoggi, who was at the time working as a columnist for the Washington Post, no sanctions whatsoever have been imposed on the monarchical regime. In the case of Navalny, who was not killed, Western politicians and media immediately declared, without presenting a shred of evidence, that President Vladimir Putin ordered the poisoning and are demanding sanctions against and confrontation with Russia.
The source of this discrepancy is clear. Saudi Arabia has served as a lynchpin of reaction and US imperialist domination in the Arab world, under both Democratic and Republican administrations alike, for three-quarters of a century. It is now an ally of both the US and Israel in an anti-Iranian axis that is pushing the region toward a catastrophic new war. It is also the number one market for US arms exports, with Trump using his first trip abroad as president to fly to the kingdom and sign a weapons deal touted as worth $110 billion.
Washington turns a blind eye not only to the Saudi regime’s responsibility for the Khashoggi assassination, but to even more grotesque crimes, including the mass beheading of the regime’s opponents, including children. Meanwhile, both the Obama and Trump administrations have provided indispensable support for Riyadh’s near-genocidal war against Yemen, which has directly claimed over 100,000 lives, while bringing fully half of the country’s 28 million people to the brink of starvation.
Nonetheless, the assassination of Khashoggi, who only fled Saudi Arabia after Prince Mohammed bin Salman began a purge in 2017 of prominent businessmen and even members of the royal family, had an undeniable political significance. The World Socialist Web Site stated in the immediate aftermath of his killing and dismemberment that it was: “emblematic of a sinister shift in world politics, in which such heinous crimes are becoming more and more common and accepted. It recalls the conditions that existed in the darkest days of the 1930s, when fascist and Stalinist death squads hunted down and murdered socialists and other opponents of Hitler and Stalin throughout Europe.”
The acceptance of this crime has only deepened with the passage of two years. Riyadh has been chosen to host the G20 summit in November, when every major capitalist leader in the world will clasp the bloody hand and accept the hospitality of the royal assassin Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. All of them are prepared to carry out such crimes, and worse, against the working class and socialist opponents of the capitalist system.
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