During the weekend of 4–6 June, SAV, the German section of ISA, discussed and approved a document on political perspectives, encompassing the impact of Covid-19 on the German working class, class struggle, the youth, and feminist and anti-racist activism. Moreover, the developments surrounding political parties prior to the upcoming general elections were evaluated, in particular the prospects of die LINKE (The Left) and the Green Party. In the following edited extract from this document, the text puts an emphasis on economic developments in Germany, the attacks of the ruling class and perspectives for class struggle. Part 2 coming soon on liamm526.sg-host.com/
As in other countries, the virus intensified and enormously accelerated the already existing processes of capitalism. The “bottom-up” redistribution — concentrating wealth in the hands off the richest — was amplified by the pandemic. The economic crisis that had already begun to emerge — exacerbated by technological upheavals — has become the deepest slump of the post-war period as a result of the pandemic. Globally, the economy slumped by 4.4 percent in 2020, the German economy by 4.9 percent. Covid has not only deepened this crisis, but has changed its pace and sequence, determining which regions, countries and sectors are the “winners and losers” of the crisis.
If Covid had not intensified the crisis and changed its course, this economic crisis would have developed first in the production of consumer commodities and capital goods and only later, through the destruction of mass purchasing power, would have affected areas such as hospitality, culture, and tourism. As a result of the pandemic, these areas entered into crisis more quickly and sharply.
But before the pandemic, the crisis had already begun in various sectors, including the car industry. In Germany, sales in 2019 had already fallen by 5% compared to the previous year. Angela Merkel’s government had no problem paralysing small hospitality businesses, during the lockdown, because it is more committed to maintaining exports and world market-oriented companies. At first, it seemed that the strategy would be successful, and that Germany would certainly be one of the “winning” countries.
The atypical course of events meant that there was no great wave of layoffs in Germany and the official unemployment rate only increased moderately. Many smaller companies in the hospitality and retail sectors etc. have gone bankrupt, but are being kept alive artificially by an extension of the firms’ existence with special insolvency rules.
Production and transport chains became Covid infection chains as the bourgeoisie did not want to interrupt them. Whether the cynical calculation from the point of view of the bourgeoisie “works”, to let production run at the price of thousands of deaths, will only become clear over time.
The ruling class attempted to overcome the health crisis without qualitatively increasing investment in health and care. This has also led to the premature deaths of tens of thousands of retired people. One study estimates that in Germany, elderly people lost an average of 9 to 10 years of their lives due to the pandemic.
German Myth Toppled
The way the government has dealt with the crisis has destroyed the myth that everything works fine in Germany. For example: There are testing centres that virtually any private company can open and receive taxpayers’ money without any verification that they are actually testing. Members of the Christian Democrats — the party of Angela Merkel, who is currently leading the government — had been negotiating illegal deals with private mask manufacturers, who charged extremely high prices per mask and took taxpayers’ money in return. On top of this, many of these masks turned out to be inefficient in protecting against the virus. To cover up this scandal, health minister Jens Spahn distributed those masks to unemployed people and disabled people in care, in fact deepening the scandal and revealing his misanthropic and social chauvinist views.
The chaos and government corruption regarding masks, tests, and vaccines has shown the unwillingness and inability of politicians to intervene in production and distribution and push back against the interests of individual capitalists. From the beginning, the German government relied on distractions: while offices, logistic centres and factories remained open, mainly migrants and young people who were organizing parties were blamed for the spread of infections. Individual guilt was intended to hide the ruling class’s systematic failure in health policy.
In the working class, the Covid pandemic had very different effects: in precarious sectors such as the meat and agriculture industry or home care, Central and Eastern European workers were exploited even more, through longer working hours. They had to work longer hours and with lower pay. This led, not least, to a wildcat strike in the asparagus fields in Bornheim which eventually led to a repayment of wages. However, despite this the seasonal workers’ shelters and transport services became pandemic hot spots and quarantine camps with inhumane conditions.
Because of the closing of local retail facilities, online retail exploded. Even before the Covid crisis, there was a shortage of 10,000 employees in the parcel delivery service, and now working hours and stress have increased enormously. At the same time, many who lost their jobs due to the crisis, for example in the events industry, temporarily switched to the delivery service. This development is accompanied by the economic crisis in some export sectors like textiles and automobiles due to existing overcapacity, which is encouraging companies like Daimler in particular to make mass redundancies. Not all export manufacturers are, however, in crisis. Especially German automation systems and IT are currently seeing an upswing.
The Ruling Class Fights for Longer Working Weeks
At the same time, the government temporarily experimented with the Working Hours Act between March and August 2020 using the covid-19 state of emergency as excuse. In “essential jobs”, i.e. those that already stand on the front line of the pandemic, rest periods were reduced from eleven to nine hours, and weekly hours were increased to 48 hours, and daily working hours were extended to 12 instead of the maximum of 10. In the federal state of Lower Saxony, the government went even further and installed a maximum 60-hour working week for nurses and care workers in hospitals for the period between November 2020 and March 2021. This is accelerating the already existing health crisis even further. Staff are exhausted and burnt out. In some areas, there was a shortage of capacity in hospitals, not because there were not enough hospital beds or oxygen, but because there were too many nurses on sick leave.
Plans to extend working hours not just temporarily, but for good are already on the table. This is the case, for example, in the meat industry, but also in logistics sectors such as airport shuttle services. Elon Musk, who is currently opening an electric car factory in the East German federal state of Brandenburg, will profit from the fact that working weeks in the East are still longer than in West Germany. At the same time, he negotiated with the local government of the state to be allowed to have his factory open 24 hours, 7 days a week. This may lead to other production companies also seizing Sundays, which are currently free for manufacturing workers.
Such experiences could be extended on a permanent basis after the federal elections this September. On top of this, there are discussions among the politicians and agents of the ruling class about increasing the retirement age from 67 to 68 years, instead of reducing it.
Behind these figures are also gender relations: The disadvantage faced by working-class women has not only become more visible as a result of the pandemic, but has also become more acute. Women are affected by the crisis in different ways: they make up three quarters of employees working in essential professions. The already precarious working conditions of employees in care, education or retail have become even worse: stress at work and overtime continue to increase due to chronic staff shortages.
The pandemic has also exacerbated the situation in the domestic sphere. On the one hand, it has become clear how much capitalism depends (especially when it is in crisis) on reproductive work which is done privately and unpaid — homeschooling would not have been possible at all without the care of many parents, especially mothers.
Domestic violence also increased enormously, women’s shelters were completely overcrowded in a short period of time and many women therefore had and still have almost no possibility to escape violent situations. At the same time, hotels were empty, but the government and businesses refused to open them for such emergencies or for homeless people. To stay home — was not an (safe) option for all.
Capitalist Covid policy also utilized racism: Anti-Asian racism and warnings about the “Yellow Danger” served parts of the bourgeoisie to find a scapegoat for the spread of the virus. Refugee shelters were turning into hotspots of the virus, but this was portrayed as a problem of migration by the racist German mass media, while protection against infection was not guaranteed to migrants, especially in this type of accommodation.
In particular, people with a migrant background and people of colour mostly work in customer service, in delivery and parcel services, at Amazon and other large logistics and wholesale companies, in construction and in the agricultural and meat industries. That is, in sectors that cannot be closed or converted to home-based work. The pandemic affects them in several ways: low wages mean precarious and cramped living conditions in which the virus can spread rapidly, temporary contracts mean that many will work despite symptoms of the virus so as not to risk losing wages.
Moreover, in the shadow of the pandemic, deportations continue. In recent weeks and months, numerous students and their families have become victims of the racist German state. But also employees, whose residence status had been unclear for more than a decade, now face the authorities’ decision that they cannot stay.
In solidarity, activists protested against the deportations and pilots refused to carry out deportation flights, which, at least in some cases, resulted in the deportations being suspended.
In particular, migrants and people in precarious jobs, as well as older people, are among the groups most likely to contract the virus and pay with long-term consequences or with their lives.
Covid-19 and the Youth
Young people are particularly affected by the crisis: school students suffer from the back and forth between school openings and closings, trainees worry about being sacked by the company, students who have to finance their studies themselves have mostly lost their jobs. In addition, many young people have the unfortunately not unjustified feeling that they are missing out on a valuable part of their youth because of the few opportunities for leisure activities.
The results of the study “Cohesion in the Pandemic” by the Bertelsmann Foundation show that people under 30 feel lonely due to the pandemic and are particularly worried about their future, but at the same time continue to take the virus, and the measures to contain it, seriously. Nevertheless, young people are increasingly criminalised when they take advantage of opportunities for social contact in the free time they have left.
Parties or trade unions are still not the first point of contact for young people — also because they do not feel that their needs are represented by them, but rather abandoned. At the same time, the discontent of many young people is growing.
Movements and Labour Struggles
Apart from minor wildcat strikes in the agriculture sector, in delivery services such as Gorilla in Berlin, regular strikes at Amazon, and the warning strikes in local transport and care, there have been few struggles so far. Previous predictions of a rapidly developing collective bargaining conflict in local public transport linked up with the Fridays For Future climate activists, or of a new outbreak of social and education workers’ protests or longer public care workers’ strikes in the summer did not turn out to be as large and militant as expected, due to the pandemic.
Unfortunately, the leadership of the German Federation of Trade Unions (DGB) in many cities refrained even from celebrating May Day 2020 and organized very few activities in 2021. Also in the electrical and metal sector bargaining talks, only a few small activities have been organised by the Metalworkers’ Union leadership (IG-Metall), apart from a few extended lunch breaks and plenary meetings, despite the planned mass layoffs at Daimler and other car factories.
Despite the lack of collective organisation and the frightening and uncertain scenario of the pandemic, the creativity and determination to defend itself of the working class was visible during the crisis. Out of solidarity with the overburdened care sector and families in distress, workers greatly restricted their daily lives, bought disinfectants and sewed masks before any employer provided any sort of safety in workplaces. Childcare and education were organised independently, food was collected for the poorest people, food bags were hung on fences in public parks, and food was bought for neighbours and colleagues at high risk of infection.
In some schools, pupils started to build air filters, but this was stopped by the federal state governments. This was linked to the hope that the pandemic could be controlled within a year. But it could not.
We can assume that the potential for frustration is particularly acute in the care and education sectors. These sectors have been directly affected by the failed pandemic policy and have had to experience the incompetence of the policy first hand on a daily basis.
In both sectors, the majority of staff are women and they were and are affected by the multiple domestic, family and personal crises which abounded during the pandemic, in addition to labour conflicts. In the field of education, both in schools and universities, decades of neglecting investment in digitalization as well as huge social differences between students had to be compensated for. This meets resentment about delayed and absent investments in buildings, such as sanitary improvements and heating structure reforms. Here, despite many good initiatives, the education and science union (GEW) currently still lacks a broad, united approach to confidently translate this discontent into public activity and organise concrete (strike) actions.
In the health sector, the crisis has also affected the already existing catastrophic conditions, with understaffing, lack of investment and lack of facilities in hospitals. Even during the pandemic, hospitals continued to cut 3,000 beds across the country. Before the pandemic, there were already militant examples like in Jena or Hamburg, where workforces organized successful campaigns for more staff. In addition, in many cities there are initiatives like “Healthy Hospitals”, which not only involve workers, but also society as a whole. In the coming years, larger struggles may emerge that are not limited to strikes in hospitals.
Also, other conflicts which were brewing prior to to covid-19 remain acute and are being reignited intermittently and regionally: the campaign to expropriate real estate corporations in Berlin, women’s protests on November 25 or March 8, health worker protests and the Black Lives Matter movement, which impressively broke through the political agenda during lockdown.
The pandemic is a class issue. In every country, the poorest and most precarious sectors are most affected by disease and death. They receive poorer health services and live in more restricted/difficult conditions. Sections of the working class have risked their health for a year on the frontline of healthcare, logistics and education.
In order to push back against the inaction of the bourgeoisie in containing the pandemic in the sphere of production, an active trade union policy would have been necessary, imposing with militant means the protection of health in the workplace. Since capital did not close the companies on its own, strikes would have been necessary to paralyze production, as happened in Italy and other countries.
