Multimillionaires around the world benefited from the inflation year 2023, while the German super-rich alone increased their wealth by 10 percent to more than €2.1 trillion.
The so-called “concerted strikes” being organised by service sector union Verdi are in reality fragmenting the industrial action. What is necessary is the building of independent rank-and-file action committees that take the struggle into their own hands.
Calling the first nationwide public transit strike since 1992, Verdi is reacting to the growing anger of transport workers over intolerable working conditions and low wages. But the union is doing all it can to sabotage the strike.
Local public transport buses are operating “at a somewhat reduced frequency,” as the BVG put it, precisely as the new school year begins, when hundreds of thousands of children, young people and adults return to school and work from their summer holidays.
The strike of the Volvo Trucks workers in Virginia is winning increasing international support.
London bus driver David O’Sullivan was sacked by his employer Metroline after warning his colleagues about the spread of coronavirus at the depot where he worked.
Pressure from workers has led to the Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe postponing the re-introduction of front boarding for the fourth time.
Every day, the 15,000 employees of the Berlin transport association BVG and tens of thousands of passengers risk infection with the coronavirus.
The Berlin Transport Company’s pandemic policy, which endangers the lives and health of workers, is supported by the Berlin Senate consisting of the SPD, the Greens and the Left Party.
Last week, Verdi dropped its demand for a uniform nationwide contract and signed separate agreements in two German states.
While the trade unions are limiting the public transit strikes to a set of minimum demands, anger amongst the workforce at the miserable level of wages and unsafe working conditions is growing.
As part of the collective bargaining round for 2.3 million public sector workers, protest strikes are currently taking place in day-care centres and hospitals, town halls, government offices, savings banks, refuse companies and elsewhere.
Social distancing has been abandoned in schools and no safety measures such as face masks are being provided.
Resistance is growing among German teachers and pupils against this irresponsible policy, which threatens to turn schools into new hotspots of COVID-19.
“We must learn to live with the pandemic,” Chancellor Angela Merkel stressed.
A serious fight against the coronavirus pandemic must focus on the interests of the broad masses of the population, not the profits of the wealthy few.
Research indicates some 13 million people in Germany are living in poverty or confront hunger, malnutrition and social misery due to the effects of the coronavirus pandemic.
Andy Niklaus has worked for the Berlin Transport Company for 25 years and is running as a candidate of the Partei für Soziale Gleichheit in the Berlin Senate elections on September 18.
Wherever the Left Party is in power it implements the inhumane refugee policies of the German government.
A hundred-strong force of the Berlin police conducted a brutal raid on Roma families protesting against their threatened deportation.
