A Critique of Robert Reich

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNRyDa79ygA&ab_channel=DemocracyAtWork

Sen. Bernie Sander's Address at The Worker Co-op Conference

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utpSESPBy3c&ab_channel=U.S.FederationofWorkerCooperatives

Jobs bloodbath in Australia continues as companies restructure to slash costs

Terry Cook

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/10/12/jobs-o12.html?pk_campaign=newsletter&pk_kwd=wsws

Thousands of jobs continue to be shed across Australia as companies continue to restructure their operations to slash costs in a bid to offset the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and maintain profits.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), the unemployment rate is currently 6.8 percent, down from a 22-year high of 7.5 percent in July. The ABS monthly jobs survey, however, understates the real levels of joblessness by counting as employed anyone who has worked for just one hour a week.

A more reliable indicator of current levels of joblessness is provided by Roy Morgan Research. According to its September survey, 1.83 million people were unemployed or 12.9 percent of the workforce. An additional 1.33 million or 9.4 percent were under-employed—i.e., working but seeking more hours. In total, a massive 3.16 million, 22.3 percent, were unemployed or under-employed.
The real rate of unemployment is also obscured by the federal Liberal government’s JobKeeper scheme under which employers originally received $1,500 per fortnight to keep employees on their books, even when they have been stood down. The government scheme was introduced in April, when COVID-19 restrictions were being imposed and out of fear that the looming depression levels on unemployment would provoke social explosions.

Unemployment levels are set to leap dramatically as the JobKeeper payment is wound up at the end of March next year, having already been reduced to $1,200. According to Natasha Hawker, director of Employees Matter, the end of JobKeeper will leave workers exposed to a “redundancy bloodbath.” She told the media that for smaller businesses—“for whom cash flow is vital”—JobKeeper “has been like a ventilator but the oxygen is about to be turned off, and some businesses won’t survive without life support.”

Those employees now being thrown out of work will also face increasing financial hardship as the federal government moves to end the JobSeeker unemployment benefit that it introduced in the first months of the pandemic, doubling the previous social security payment. The JobSeeker benefit has now been slashed by $300 to $815.70 a fortnight, and will revert to the old poverty-level $282.85 a week payment from January.

The JobSeeker payment is being slashed to coerce the jobless into low-wage employment and the drastically worsened conditions that have been created during the pandemic. One of these areas is in farm produce harvesting, where the government has reduced its COVID-19 travel restrictions so that the agricultural industry can access cheap backpacker labour.

The “redundancy bloodbath” underway since April has seen thousands of jobs destroyed across the university sector.

According to the latest figures compiled by the National Tertiary Education Union on September 25, nearly 12,500 permanent jobs have been cut at Australian universities or 10 percent of the entire pre-COVID-19 university workforce of approximately 130,000 people. The union estimates that 90,000 permanent, fixed-term and casualised tertiary jobs have been eliminated in the past six months.

Many employers are utilising COVID-19 to restructure and implement sweeping workplace changes that were planned prior to the pandemic, including moving face-to-face customer services to online servicing and opening the way for further outsourcing of jobs.

For example, in September, Suncorp, the Brisbane-headquartered banking and insurance group, announced that it will permanently close 19 stores in Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria and one business centre at the cost of 550 jobs. Most of the stores had been shut since April. A Suncorp spokesman said the company was “continuing to realign teams around our new operating model.”

Thousands of jobs have been axed in the airline sector, led by Australia’s largest carrier, Qantas, despite pocketing millions of dollars in government handouts. At the end of August, the company announced the destruction of 2,400 in-house ground staff positions through outsourcing. This came on top of the elimination of 6,000 jobs earlier in the year. Virgin Australia, newly-acquired by corporate raider Bains Capital, has announced another 150 job cuts on top of the 3,000 slashed in August.

Other layoffs include:

Travel agency Flight Centre announced this month it will shut down 91 stores across Australia, destroying hundreds of jobs. The cuts come on top of the 300 store closures and the axing of 4,000 sales and support workers jobs by the company in the past six months.

As part of a global restructure, Chevron will cut 230 jobs, or 10 percent of the workforce, at its Australian operations. This follows the company’s elimination of 1,500 jobs in July.

Australia’s largest meat processing company, JBS, announced last month it will cut 600 jobs at its Dinmore plant in Queensland, or a third of the 1,700-strong workforce. Consultancy company Accenture will cut up to 250 jobs at its Australian operations, as part of an international restructure to cut 25,000 positions worldwide.

Opera Australia has plans to axe over 25 percent of its permanent workforce and terminate the contracts of many others. The company employs over 300 permanent artists and staff, and provides employment opportunities for up to 1,000 people in any one year.

The NRL (National Rugby League) will cut 25 percent of staff, including head office positions, in a restructure to save $50 million per year.

The Australian Defence Department in August said it will cut 111 jobs across multiple divisions, including those of scientific and engineering specialists.

Russian elders describe their life in the USSR

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjI8jwn0Upo&ab_channel=1420

Accelerated job cuts in German auto industry

Dietmar Gaienkersting

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/10/12/auto-o12.html?pk_campaign=newsletter&pk_kwd=wsws

Barely a day goes by without a new announcement of cutbacks and job cuts in the auto industry in Germany. The coronavirus pandemic is being deliberately used to slash costs and increase profits.

Last Tuesday, Daimler CEO Ola Källenius announced at a conference with investors that the Mercedes auto division would reduce its fixed costs by more than a fifth by 2025 (compared to 2019) by cutting capacity and personnel costs.

Källenius made no effort to hide the reason behind the decision. The plan was to restore profits to double-digits by 2025. Even under unfavourable conditions, the company was aiming for a profit margin “in the mid to high single-digit percentage range.”
The cuts program, which was already announced in recent months, is expected to result in the loss of around 30,000 jobs worldwide, i.e., almost one in ten. While the company did not confirm this figure, it left no doubt about its intent. At the same time, management declared as it always does, the aim was to find solutions that were “as socially acceptable as possible."

Some information about about the concrete consequences of the planned cutbacks has already been revealed.

According to union sources, about 1,000 of 2,500 jobs are to be cut during the next few years at the company’s engine plant in Berlin, which first opened in 1902. In return, the company declares it will invest more in battery cell research. The works council at Daimler’s main plant in Untertürkheim, Stuttgart, however, is demanding it receive the new investment funds. According to the works council, the company plans to cut around 4,000 from the 19,000-strong workforce at Untertürkheim by 2025.

At a time when workers are being forced into the factories despite the increasing risk of COVID-19 infection—in the auto industry, only about a third of all employees are on the Kurzarbeit social insurance program, which partially compensates workers for lost wages due to reduced working hours—Daimler board member Markus Schäfer justified the cuts with the words: “The ultimate criterion is the health of this company.”

Schäfer said that Mercedes had deliberately set up production facilities in Eastern Europe and China in order to secure its competitiveness via a “mixed calculation” of “German high-wage locations” with lower-cost personnel abroad. No plant can therefore guarantee that it can maintain its workforce forever. This applies in particular to engine and component plants specialising in combustion engines, which are being directly affected by the transition to electric cars.

Instead of uniting the company's workers against these attacks, the auto union IG Metall and the union-controlled Daimler general works council (a type of corporatist body common in Germany) are dividing the workforce by denouncing workers in Eastern Europe. If any investment in conventional drive systems is made at all, “it will be in Poland or Romania,” declared works council chairman Michael Brecht and his deputy Ergun Lümali in a leaflet addressed to the more than 170,000 Daimler employees in Germany.

Daimler is just one of several corporations that have announced accelerated cuts to jobs and conditions in recent weeks and months.

In mid-September, Volkswagen announced the elimination of 9,500 jobs at its truck subsidiary MAN in Germany and Austria. Last Tuesday, the new MAN chief executive, Andreas Tostmann, prematurely terminated the existing site and job security agreement. This means that not only are compulsory redundancies possible, but also that benefits exceeding the general pay scale will be eliminated. A letter to employees cited “the planned reorganisation of MAN” as well as “economic reasons” as the basis for the cuts.

Only some details of the reorganisation have been released. For example, the production of heavy trucks and driver cabins is to be relocated from the main plant in Munich, possibly to Kraków in Poland. In addition, axle production in Munich could be outsourced to suppliers. This would threaten 3,000 jobs alone in Munich.

Another 1,300 jobs may be lost at the MAN engine plant in Nuremberg. Tostmann is also seeking to cut 1,500 jobs in the German service and sales network. To this end, component production is to be relocated from Salzgitter and also moved to Krakow. This would affect another 1,400 employees.

The works council at MAN is working hand in glove with management. The company's jobs protection scheme, which was extended in 2018, was due to last until 2030. The truck manufacturer has linked its termination of the scheme to an ultimatum: if a deal is reached with IG Metall and the works council by the end of the year, the contracts could come into force again “in whole or in part.” Should talks not succeed, “the agreements will expire at the end of the year or in 2021.”

It is already clear how this farce will proceed. The works council and IG Metall will approve the savings program and job cuts and then present them as a success on the basis that layoffs have been averted.

MAN works council chairman Saki Stimoniaris, who raked in 482,040 euros last year for his activities on the company supervisory board, declared: “We have no interest in any escalation.” The chairman of the VW Group works council, Bernd Osterloh, stated in the course of negotiations that the works council would “ensure that extensive job security measures come into force again.”

The job cuts at MAN are a prelude to attacks on all the 670,000 employees of the Volkswagen Group. The cancellation of guarantees against site and job cuts was backed up by VW boss Herbert Diess, who defended MAN's policy at the company’s online annual general meeting last week.

Even before the pandemic, Diess said that MAN's economic situation left it unable to fund important investments. MAN needed “restructuring with plant closures and staff reductions of around 9,500 in order to restore competitiveness,” Diess said.

The Munich-based auto manufacturer BMW announced in June plans to cut 16,000 jobs. The company is also increasing pressure on its suppliers to cut costs. Some suppliers are being asked to reduce their prices for current orders by an average of five percent by year’s end, reports the German business newspaper Wirtschaftswoche. A BMW spokeswoman argued cynically that the company could not cope with the consequences of the pandemic on its own.

Other major suppliers are also cutting tens of thousands of jobs. Last week the supervisory board of Continental decided to close its tire plant in Aachen by the end of 2021 and its auto electronics plant in Karben near Frankfurt by the end of 2024. The Continental factory in Regensburg will also be closed for re-tooling. This will affect around 4,800 jobs at the three sites. Worldwide, 30,000 jobs will be affected by the announced cutbacks at Continental, with 13,000 of them in Germany.

Two weeks ago, the auto supplier Mahle announced the closure of two of its factories in Germany. The closure of the production facility in Gaildorf in Baden-Württemberg is due to be completed in the course of 2023. At the plant, 290 workers manufacture camshafts and steel components. A second site in Freiberg, Saxony, with 85 employees, is scheduled for closure in 2022.

Mahle manufactures components for internal combustion engines, mainly pistons, but also filters and pumps. The company has cut 6,700 jobs since 2018. In mid-September, the company announced that it intended to cut a further 7,600 jobs worldwide, including 2,000 in Germany. Mahle currently still has 72,000 employees worldwide, including almost 12,000 in Germany.

Mahle's top management announced that it will start talks with the works council, once again to plan a “socially acceptable implementation” of the layoffs.

The situation is similar in company after company: workforce reduction, cuts and savings, developed and implemented by the various unions and the works councils. If they organise protests at all, they are toothless events that serve merely as an outlet to let off steam, while the unions help the big corporations to carry out the anti-worker offensive.

One example was an outdoor meeting held by the works council at the Daimler plant in Berlin on September 24. At the meeting, a leading representative of IG Metall Berlin, Jan Otto, appealed to management “to continue acting fairly and in the spirit of social partnership.”

Otto also agitated against Eastern European workers: “We will not allow management to secretly move combustion engine production lines to Romania or Poland.” Otto called on management to develop “future perspectives” for the Mercedes-Benz plant in Berlin in collaboration with the works council and the IG Metall: “We are prepared to do this and have plenty of ideas.”

Daimler workers in Berlin should take this as a warning. The union and works council will carry out the attacks the company demands. The main aim is to secure benefits for the union functionaries.

The Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (the Socialist Equality Party in Germany) and the World Socialist Web S ite call for the setting up of rank-and-file action committees that are independent of the unions and the works councils. Workers must take the struggle to defend jobs and wages into their own hands.

To do so, they must make contact with their colleagues in other factories at home and abroad. The nationalist agitation against Polish, Romanian or Chinese workers must be countered by unifying across borders. Priority must be given to lives, health and jobs of the workers, rather than profit maximisation and inflated dividends. There is enough money there in the hands of the company investors and owners.

5,000+ Lawyers Urge Senate to Not Put Religious Zealot on Supreme Court

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7atLi5Wc934&ab_channel=act.tv

State and federal governments conceal COVID-19 outbreaks in US schools

Chase Lawrence

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/10/12/scho-o12.html?pk_campaign=newsletter&pk_kwd=wsws


Across the United States, the locations of COVID-19 outbreaks in schools are being deliberately hidden from the public, in order to prevent teachers and parents from drawing the conclusion that face-to-face instruction should stop. At the federal level, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Department of Education have no programs in place whatsoever to track coronavirus cases in schools or colleges.

The list of states not reporting outbreaks in schools includes California, Nevada, Idaho, Alaska, Wisconsin, North Dakota, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Alabama, West Virginia, Florida, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Jersey, and Delaware. The rest of the states are split between having either limited data or district-level data, which often does not disclose the specific schools where an outbreak occurs.

Significantly, the locations of reported cases are known by state governments, and it is well within the capabilities of the state and federal government to report case locations. They are deliberately concealing this information as part of the broader back-to-work campaign to force parents to work in unsafe conditions, all to produce profits for the financial oligarchy.
The COVID Monitor website, which independently tracks coronavirus cases in school, has reported 42,778 cases in K-12 schools as of this writing, with most cases occurring after schools reopened en masse in late July. This figure is certainly an under-count, but nevertheless illustrates the criminality of school reopenings.

It is worth examining some of the specific efforts by the state governments to cover up the locations of outbreaks in schools.

In Illinois, the state government knows of at least 44 outbreaks at school buildings around the state and has deliberately withheld the location of these outbreaks from the public. The state’s Democratic Governor J.B. Pritzker has endorsed school reopenings, stating, “I’m very much in favor of trying to get our kids back into in-person learning.” Classes started in-person during mid-August for most schools in the state, with an uptick in cases corresponding with this development.

As of October 2, at least 8,668 children ages 5-17 have tested positive for the virus across Illinois, with five children dying in the same age range. More than 1,800 public schools are open for in-person instruction, with roughly a quarter of students and staff attending only in-person and almost three-quarters attending at least partially in-person.

In Highland Community Unit School District 5 in Madison County, near St. Louis, which only announces cases by email to parents, there has been an outbreak with 25 cases confirmed after the district reopened with in-person classes. After having trended downwards, the county has seen a spike in cases since October 7, roughly corresponding to the start of in-person classes.

In New Trier Township School District 203 in Cook County, Illinois, which started on October 5 and announces cases every two weeks on its dashboard, at least 60 students and 13 school workers are now in quarantine. Cook county has also seen an increase in the seven-day average following school re-openings, although the full impact will probably be delayed due to the slow turnaround in testing. The county has recorded one of the highest confirmed cases and deaths in the US, with 63,990 cases and 1,967 deaths.

In New Jersey, teachers have collected data showing that 130 schools in the state have reported coronavirus cases. There is no significant effort by the government to track case counts in schools, with the recently launched state government website only showing 11 outbreaks in schools.

In Passaic Valley High School, there was an outbreak on September 18 reported by teachers that forced over 100 students into quarantine and ultimately caused the district to be shut down. The county has seen 19,702 cases and 1,255 deaths, with cases increasing following school reopenings that began on October 5. Democratic governor and multi-millionaire Phil Murphy has cited privacy laws as the reason for covering up outbreak locations.

In Texas, a report issued by the Texas Education Agency (TEA) and Department of State Health omitted the locations of around 2,700 cases from schools with less than 50 students in the first week of school reopenings. The reason given by the TEA for the omissions was that by releasing case locations they would violate the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA).

Texas had the highest number of new cases in the US yesterday, with another 3,324 people becoming infected. The state government is going to wait a full four weeks after publishing the first report to reevaluate districts’ enrollment for in-person learning. The state and school districts lack any testing or contact tracing requirements, leaving it up to parents and teachers to self report cases.

In Iowa, which is currently a “red zone” as documented in a White House Coronavirus Task Force report, an effort by a concerned couple has revealed over 400 cases in schools across the state. Iowa officials have cited HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act ) to hide data in the pandemic.

Health officials in Georgia have recently dropped plans to report the number of coronavirus cases in schools from weekly reports gathered from schools, while only 70 percent were reporting case numbers in the state. As with other states, officials have speciously justified their refusal to report cases in schools with the claim that the public has no legal right to information on outbreaks.

In Michigan, the Department of Health and Human Services recently issued an emergency order to disclose COVID-19 cases at schools after the Michigan Supreme Court struck down an executive order by Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer to shut down schools and some businesses. This is following earlier efforts by Whitmer to hide the location of coronavirus cases in schools and workplaces.

On top of the deliberate efforts to obscure the location of outbreaks, all states lack a meaningful testing regimen for students and teachers, crippling any response to the virus.

The invocation of privacy laws as a pretext to withhold the location of cases in schools is based on a falsification of these laws. The US Department of Education states on their website, “FERPA’s health or safety emergency provision permits such disclosures when the disclosure is necessary to protect the health or safety of the student or other individuals.”

In addition to most of the aforementioned states, Indiana and Tennessee have cited the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act as a reason to obscure case locations, which is also false. HIPAA, just like FERPA, has an exemption which allows the release of information in the interest of public health and safety.

The Health and Human Services administration released a statement in light of the pandemic stating that “HIPAA Privacy Rule permits a covered entity to disclose the protected health information (PHI) of an individual who has been infected with, or exposed to, COVID-19” in certain circumstances, including in order to “notify a public health authority in order to prevent or control spread of disease.”

Suffice to say, none of the health or school privacy laws prohibit the release of information that could be used to save the lives of students, teachers, and parents, and every citation of these laws by various state agencies and governors is fraudulent.

The deliberate cover-up of school outbreaks goes hand in hand with their reopening of schools. Obscuring the link between coronavirus cases and their cause is a key part of the reopening campaign being pursued by the two parties of the financial oligarchy. This raises the objective necessity of building independent, rank-and-file safety committees in order to accurately report COVID-19 outbreaks in school to ensure the safety of the vast majority of the population.