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Part One

Labor Injustice in the European Union

1.

Work as a human right!

If you desire peace, cultivate justice!

Motto of the International Labor Organization (ILO), part of the League of Nations, founded after the First World War. Since the founding of the United Nations UN after World War II, the ILO has been one of its subsidiary organizations.

Labor and labor injustice - the great taboo

In the European Union, labor injustice, exploitation, disenfranchisement, insecurity, impoverishment, multiple sickness prevail, especially among dependent employees. And this is the main reason for the political drift to the right: The EU promotes labor injustice and thus also the drift to the right in Europe. It is not the AfD, Le Pen and similar right-wing groupings that are responsible for this, but the leading parties and governments in the EU. In Germany, these are the Christian-painted parties CDU and CSU and the social-democrat-painted SPD, supported by the unabashedly neoliberal FDP, private and state-run mainstream media, consultants and other accomplices.

Labor injustice is not just about impoverished low-wage workers and cross-border wage dumping. Even the low statutory standards are violated millions of times and with impunity by capitalists and their highly paid aides/support staff, for example in the minimum wage, through chain-like subcontracting, in the exploitation of migrant workers and refugees. No area of law in the EU knows such a statutory injustice and such an enforcement deficit and such a gray and dark zone of systemic illegality – except perhaps in the case of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, which is systemically relevant to such a system of injustice.⁶²

The majority of dependent employees - even in the most “modern” sectors of the gig economy - have been and continue to be not only financially degraded, but also disenfranchised, humiliated, worn down, made ill, silenced, and these days also increasingly monitored. This is true in the new EU states of Eastern Europe and the Balkans as well as in the rich founding nations of Western Europe - and in the EU’s supply and production chains reaching as far as North Macedonia, Bangladesh, Mexico and Liberia.

Big capitalists -

today more invisible than ever before in the history of capitalism

This taboo also includes the media-political disappearance of big business and its coordinators such as BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, Capital Group, Blackstone, KKR, PwC, Freshfields & Co. They hide the “beneficial owners”, i.e. the owners of the companies and banks, in the occult parallel society of four dozen financial havens: The most important financial havens also include central founding states of the EU such as Luxembourg and the Netherlands. And the European Commission in Brussels takes advice from the organizers of the parallel society.

Today, the hidden, irresponsible capitalists are at the same time as invisible and as unproductively rich as never before in the history of capitalism.⁶³

The extorted silence of the working class

And freedom of expression, this so highly esteemed value of the “free western community of values”, it is occupied by the big private media, in Germany also by the state compulsory media ARD, ZDF and DLF. And in the working class there is extorted silence.

The arrest in Turkey of a journalist from the newspaper “Die Welt” from the private Springer group is denounced, but the arrest of striking Turkish trade unionists - also in German companies there such as Deutsche Post DHL - is ignored not only by the Springer media with complicit silence. Workers and their representatives should shut up everywhere, in Germany and in Turkey. If they protest, they are imprisoned in Turkey, in Germany they are “merely” dismissed, psychologically demoralized and vanish in the media-political darkness.

Talking tools

In the Western mainstream media, dependent employees sometimes do indeed pop up. They speak briefly about the labor injustice done to them. But, typically, it says “name changed”. They are given different names, their faces are rendered unrecognizable, they speak behind a curtain, their voice is “dubbed”: Fear reigns, there is no freedom of expression – at the heart of the cradle of “free expression”. “Talking tools” – as the Greek tutor of slave owners, the philosopher Aristotle, referred to slaves. They must understand work instructions but are not allowed to speak publicly.

The lower they are in the hierarchy, the more dependent employees are left with only their mere body, the muted commodity of labor power, the hectic securing of existence, religious and cultural abandonment, the more or less joyless search for distraction in the jungle of target-group-specific entertainment production.

War refugees, who have somehow overcome the walls of death around the fortress of wealth after all, along with millions of labor migrants from impoverished EU states form in the middle of the rich EU founding states a “ghost army of labor without a face, without a name and without a history”, as the migrant care worker Rev. Peter Kossen bemoans again and again, without being heard by Christian-painted politicians or the bishops of ecclesiastical Christianity.⁶⁴

Women in the EU:

Capitalist leadership and cheap prostitution

The tabooing is also organized with the help of the “new values” such as “diversity”, promotion of up-and-comers from ethnic and other minorities, through corporate programs for the free choice of sexual gender (LGBT, extended on Facebook to 40 sexual orientations), as well as through the perverted part of the women's movement: It promotes the rise of women to the upper echelons of business, the military and EU institutions - for example, the presidents of the European Commission and the ECB and the growing ranks of national 'defense' ministers.

The capitalist media promote the sexual empowerment of female celebrities and semi-celebrities and actresses, such as with quotas on corporate and party boards and with the display of prominent figures in the MeToo movement – while the same milieu humiliates, abuses and also sexually exploits precariously employed women in private households and companies by the millions, this moreover also in mafialike organized prostitution with minors from the EU periphery.

Individual as consumer: courted - Individual as worker: invisible People are courted as consumers, celebrated, publicly portrayed in a highly professional manner in the happy enjoyment of the CO₂ guzzlers they buy. The right to consume is the highest value for the people.

Yet, as dependent employees these same people are not celebrated. Especially in the leading Western nation USA, where the richest capitalists are even richer and more brutal than elsewhere - there the dependent employees are more invisible than anywhere else.⁶⁵

Yet “the customer is king” has always been a fake – the money is plucked from his pocket for feigned happiness, even if he piles up debt and plunges himself into despair and poverty. And, besides, today’s mass consumer is surreptitiously even more tracked, manipulated, resold.

Selfie with laughing female colleagues at the boss 's desk?

Ethnic, religious, and sexual affiliations are cultivated in the US-led West as the most important criteria of individual and collective identity. How do I live as a Muslim and as a Jew in Germany? Recently, the search for identity among gays and lesbians has been cultivated in the media, literature, and politics: How many years was I afraid to come out as gay and lesbian after all?

But the question is not asked how dependent employees are afraid throughout their whole lives and deny their identity as self-confident people and upright citizens. Instead of self-confidently beating their entrepreneurs and bosses around the ears about the humiliations, the mobbing, the low pay? Or: Where did the question appear so far in this warped discourse on identity: How did I overcome my fear as a dependent employee to come out as a candidate for the next works council election? With a nice little selfie - surrounded by laughing colleagues - at the desk of the stupidly grinning boss? And that totally regardless of denominational or sexual orientation.

The exploited as his own employer

Likewise, the taboo is organized by the perverse escalation of private entrepreneurship: Dependent employees are supposed to disavow their identity as dependent employees. Rather, they are supposed to become entrepreneurs themselves, entrepreneurs of their labor power who, in competition with the other desperate entrepreneurs of their own labor power, expose and offer themselves on the market even more streamlined and at the same time cheaper. The unemployed person who, full of hope, transformed himself into a “Me plc” and would succeed as a me-entrepreneur was part of the original Hartz laws in Germany.⁶⁶

Labor rights, conditions and incomes vary widely across EU countries. But everywhere, since the end of socialism in Europe, the average level has been lowered and additionally decoupled from growing productivity,⁶⁷ while incomes and rights of capitalist private owners and their managerial and advisory staff have been excessively - and at the same time hierarchically - increased.

Labor rights as human rights: Suppressed

The Treaty of Versailles after World War I regulated not only the much-discussed reparations in 1919. The International Labor Organization (ILO) was also founded. Their immediate program included: an 8-hour day, a weekly rest period of 24 hours, equal pay for equal work for men and women. Since 1919 the ILO’s motto is “If you desire peace, cultivate justice”. This insight and these rights were not simply granted by the capitalists to the workers of that time – it required class struggle. And even these rights are not yet or no longer reality, despite the fact that today's labor productivity makes quite other rights possible.⁶⁸

ILO: If you desire peace, cultivate justice

To date, the ILO has adopted 189 labor rights. The best known of these are the eight core standards, especially the right to free trade unions, collective bargaining and strikes, equal pay for men and women, and the abolition of forced labor. Less well known, including among trade unions, are other labor rights: adequate wages that can support a family with dignity; paid leave and paid training; protection against dismissal (including for pregnant women and the disabled); protection against hazards at work; social insurance for unemployment, sickness and retirement; rights for migrants and domestic workers.⁶⁹

At the same time, these rights have a completely different quality than the labor rights promoted in the EU from the very beginning: What is more, these relate to the labor market. In the EU, human labor is a capitalized commodity. Note: Those who speak of a labor 'market' negate human rights, no matter how much they may invoke them.

UNO: The right to work

In the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, labor rights are enshrined in Articles 23 and 24 as human rights: The right to work in general and the most important rights codified by the ILO; the right to education and further training; the right of working mothers to special care; the right to privacy in the workplace and the prohibition of discrimination of any kind.

The right to work can be realized under socialism, but also through full employment under capitalism.⁷⁰ The right to work as defined by the UN also does not mean that “any work” must be accepted; on the contrary, it must be in accordance with human rights. Today we can add new substantive criteria: The work must not serve the destruction of the environment nor the preparation of wars.

UN Social Covenant: Ratified - and forgotten

The most important ILO standards were incorporated into the UN Social Covenant of 1966 as an international treaty. The Western European states ratified the treaty - but with the help of the EU they have forgotten and suppressed it. The four Hartz laws in Germany in the 2000s, then the minimum wage delayed for decades, in truth a poverty wage, women still being paid less and treated worse - all this violates the Social Covenant.

The German Basic Law and the EU documents essentially only know civil “fundamental rights”.⁷¹ The UN’s Universal Human Rights of 1948 and the labor and social rights⁷² contained therein are not even mentioned. In the Basic Law, the terms trade unions and labor rights are scrupulously avoided. The most recent EU declaration “European Pillar of Social Rights” (2017) looks even worse.⁷³ (see page 125ff.)

Capitalism – the (dis)order of the capitalist minorities

The leading Western nation USA is the lonely leader when it comes to non-recognition of ILO standards, universal human rights and international law. In terms of the country's wealth and purchasing power it has the lowest statutory minimum wage in the world: USD 7.25, with exceptions down to USD 2.13 for occupations where tips are expected, such as restroom attendants and waiters.

Thus, at the current nadir of labor injustice, it is part of the necessary countermovement to emphatically demand the rights of dependent employees - including the many new forms of digitally organized (pseudo) self-employment - as universal human rights.

The perverted ILO

Today, however, it is no longer possible to simply appeal to the ILO. Like the UN itself during the time of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, it was attuned by the global corporate lobby to the Western-defined “globalization”.

For example, in 1998 the ILO adopted the “Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work and its Follow-up”. The “realities of the globalization of the economy (are to be) countered by a genuine minimum social base”.⁷⁴ To this end, the 181 individual standards on social insurance, protection against dismissal and paid leave, protection against workplace hazards, etc. are omitted altogether. Reference is made only to the eight core standards: However, they are worded more generally and without the ILO's implementing provisions involving sanctions; and the two standards on equal pay for men and women and on the minimum age for dependent employment are omitted altogether.

The established trade unions, participants in the ILO tripartite system (the bodies are made up of representatives of governments, employers and trade unions), tag along, blackmailed and complicit.

Free trade agreements all refer to this diluted 1998 Declaration in a mandatory chapter. But the few standards are also exempt from all sanctions. In the context of a worldwide democracy movement, a new start is required.⁷⁵

All people are born with equal rights

In many ways people are not equal. In many ways, they cannot and need not be equal at all. But they are born with equal rights. Equality before the law applies. In a democracy, there are no unmerited privileges.

In the EU, there are 240 million dependent employees, at least according to the official count, which is probably missing many millions who live in the EU gray areas and manage to work somehow or languish unemployed. But this also includes many millions more who depend on the work, rights and incomes of these 240 million, children and other family members. And dependent employees also include those who once had this status and now, dependent thereon, draw their more or less adequate pension. It is about the tabooed interests of these majorities of the population, the working class, i.e. about the fundamental question of democracy.

Human rights internationalism confronts minority-led globalization, also promoted by the EU. Ultimately, only a form of socialism can bring about the democratic, peace-securing equality of people before the law and in social reality. But, for the foreseeable future, we now have to prove ourselves in the difficult transitional phase.⁷⁶

For work in accordance with human rights in a free, democratic and peaceful Europe!

The systemic crisis in the EU

The EU, contrary to its initial promises, is neither social nor peaceful nor democratic. The post-World War II promises of general prosperity, the rule of law and peace were accepted by majorities of the population. But these promises were merely populist maneuvers by those who then organized the EU with its precursors - with the Marshall Plan and NATO, the Coal and Steel Community, the Single Market, the euro, and eastward enlargement.

The German Chancellor: “At the crossroads ” in the old direction In post-war Europe, unlike anywhere else in the world, the extreme US-style contempt for and exploitation of dependent employees clashed with labor and trade union rights, which had been at least partially renewed in the wake of fascism - in the Western European states with the potency of the left and trade unions and in the socialist states with their fundamental orientation toward workers’ interests. This conflict is not over. It is a key part of the systemic crisis that was inherent in the EU from the very beginning.

“Europe is at a crossroads,” the German chancellor declared, repeating similar EU statements since 2017. “If we stand still, we will be crushed in the great global structures.”⁷⁷ The populist was onto something there. But EU leaders continue to want to speak for the whole of Europe in a peace-threatening manner. Simulating independence, they want to remain vassals of the USA and NATO.¹ Correct: They are being crushed globally, and not only by the “global structures”: The EU grinds down, disenfranchises even its own population majorities with the core of dependent employees and those farmers not yet expropriated by agribusiness. These crisis and crossroads proclaimers, including the new European Commission president von der Leyen, want to continue on the old crisis-spawning path, also in continuation of the Corona pandemic management. Selfblinded, they stick to the old path.

Thus, the “furies of hyperglobalization” have pushed the injustices in both the EU and in the US-led “Western community of values” as a whole even beyond the conditions that have hitherto been denounced as “neoliberal”. The new capital organizers like BlackRock are preparing, along with companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook, in which they are the main shareholders, the even more direct control of society, in the shape of stakeholder capitalism (departure from shareholder capitalism, the superficial inclusion of workers, clients, municipalities…) that is to be combined with a Green New Deal and digitalized, global disease management and the Great Reset of a “sustainable” capitalism, such as that propagated by BlackRock CEO Lawrence Fink with the World Economic Forum.

Multi-class system between EU states and within EU states In better times, there was talk of a “two-speed Europe”: The wealthy founding states with Germany and France - and somewhere also Great Britain - at the top, and next to and below them and somewhat “slower” the rest.

Today, the EU states are entangled in a multifaceted over-, under- and against each other. The EU is led by Germany and France, with Germany competing with economic dominance and France with greater militarycolonial pretensions.

The social democratic model of the welfare state - especially lauded in the Scandinavian countries - dissolved into a rich-poor divide and nationalist right-wing radicalism. And one level lower are Eastern European states like Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia, with reactionary oligarchs and a wealthy upper class exploiting and nationalistically agitating their working class and relegated middle classes - mostly in the service of Amazon, VW & Co as well as a corrupt domestic bourgeoisie.

And yet lower still, again hierarchically tiered among themselves, the very poorest EU states such as the three Baltic states, Greece, Croatia, the EU protectorate Bosnia-Herzegovina and then those still standing as poor beggars in front of the door and offering themselves as future EU members with servile preparatory inputs, such as Serbia and, as an important US military base, the corrupt, impoverished US protectorate of Kosovo. The latter is ruled by the mafia and is supposed to serve no other purpose anyway and was separated from Serbia to this end in violation of international law.

This multiple split is being exacerbated by the management of the corona crisis. The Western states, and additionally through them the EU, are taking out by far the largest loans to date to bail out environmentally damaging, innovation-resistant corporations in the auto and coal industries resting fat on their profits. And the German government is not only taking out most of these loans, but also has to pay the lowest interest rates for them, or none at all. And for new outsourcing of operations to impoverished EU countries, German, French, Taiwanese and US companies are once again receiving the highest EU subsidies.

And across these divides, millions of migrant workers and refugees are herded back and forth in a gray and shadowy realm systemically linked to illegality, crime, and human rights violations: A multi-class system between and multi-class system within individual EU states.

Technological and economic decline

In the EU, all states are already so over-indebted that, according to current logic, no debt reduction can take place in their EU lifetime, accompanied by cuts in public-sector budgets (“debt brake”). For the majority of the population, vital infrastructure is falling into disrepair - or being privatized and made more expensive. With the pandemic management, this process is intensifying.

Moreover, not only states and public-sector budgets down to the municipalities are over-indebted, but also private companies and millions of individual private households – incidentally, unlike the enemy states Russia and China. In 2019, purchasing power-adjusted per capita government debt alone was USD 46,000 for the US, USD 41,000 for France, USD 33,000 for Germany, but only USD 7,000 for China and USD 4,000 for Russia.⁷⁸

As a result of the inherent visible and invisible long-term, multifaceted government cutbacks, the purchasing power of the majority in the Western and EU states is sinking, including that of the middle classes that politically were previously deemed systemically relevant. And precisely the leading companies in the EU have fallen behind in environmental technology, especially in comparison with the innovative People's Republic of China, which has risen to become the world's largest economy. And against the dominance of the leading US digital corporations - and their tax evasion and breaches of the law - the EU is making no headway, despite constant new attempts.⁷⁹

“Rebuilding Europe ”: The unjust crisis system is being perpetuated If we subtract the environmentally destructive part of production and services - such as coal and lignite power, big cars with gasoline and diesel engines, plastic packaging, cheap mass textiles, cheap mass aviation and transcontinental free trade goods traffic, arms production and military operations and maneuvers - the meaningful economic performance in the EU shrinks far below the puny turnover success figures even further, also looking ahead. This also means that human skills are devalued, disqualified, perverted, abused. The potential for uplifting, meaningful, joyful, interlinked work and the products and services that result is demoralized, destroyed.

Precisely because the pandemic has exposed the vulnerability and obsolescence of the political and economic system, we need to do more than just “rebuild” the old system. But political innovation - i.e. democratization -, economic innovation - i.e. innovation in the environment and European sovereignty in technology, investment - and labor innovation - e.g. an end to organized working-poor migration - are being neglected, obstructed.

US military and geostrategic dominance

Contrary to the insipid declarations of intent by the German and French governments, for example, that they finally wanted to develop “more independence” vis-à-vis the US, the EU continues to submit to the military and geostrategic dictates of the US, even if the vassals did at times take potshots at Trumpkins up to 2020:

• Rapid, obedient increase in military budgets of European NATO members

• participation in military actions and wars in violation of international law, such as in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya

• compliance with US economic boycotts of Russia, Iran, Cuba, and Syria, resulting in economic harm, including the loss of many jobs

• agitation and armament against Russia and now also against the People's Republic of China

• immediate support for US-sponsored coups in South America, such as Venezuela and Bolivia

• silent helplessness of the EU in the US-led construction of the “Eastern NATO” within NATO by the US with the help especially of the nationalist governments of Poland and the Baltic states (Visegrad states, Intermarium).

The geopolitical wealth fortress

The EU's involvement in the new US-led wars, beginning in Yugoslavia, then Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, is driving millions of refugees from these impoverished war zones. The EU does not want to face these consequences - the EU is being turned into a fortress. The fundamental human right that drowning people be rescued is permanently being violated. Directly and indirectly, the EU organizes and provokes the death of refugees in the Mediterranean with police resources. The leading Western capitalist democracies in particular cause more war and economic refugees than any other states. None of the demonized states like Russia or China are driving refugees to their deaths on their shores and erecting walls and fences on their borders.

In the EU wealth fortress, only the wealth of a few is being defended. Walls are being built not only against refugees from the outside, but also walls of the gated communities of the super-rich against the poor at home.

At the same time, the EU is outsourcing its defense against refugees to states outside the EU. Thus, it promotes permanent conditions in breach of human rights in the immediate neighboring states, such as Turkey, Libya - which, moreover, was previously destroyed under US leadership - and other North African states. Where the slave trade flourishes.⁸⁰

EU: Against international law and universal human rights

The EU stands in conflict with the democratically organized world community: In international law and universal human rights, especially individual and collective labor rights. Western EU countries in particular ratified the UN Social Covenant with its social and labor rights in the 1960s and 1970s, but undermine it through EU directives and national laws.

The International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of their Families (ICRMW): This international treaty has been in force since 2003. But the EU and its Member States reject it to this day.⁸¹

The EU also rejects the global supply chain law: this stipulates that the disregard of human rights by companies in the international production and service chains is an offence. The UN Human Rights Council had already adopted this binding treaty in 2011. The German government is also delaying such a mandatory and sanctioned supply chain law due to resistance from the business lobbyists of BDA, CDU, CSU.⁸²

The UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and other People Working in Rural Areas was rejected by the small minority of the US and its closest friends Britain, Israel, New Zealand, Australia, Sweden and Hungary. By abstaining, the majority of EU states, including Germany and France, made it clear that they will not implement these rights either.⁸³

The EU has also failed to ratify the ILO Convention on the Protection of Workers at Work adopted in June 2019: This convention - the importance of which also stems from the fact that it was adopted on the 100th anniversary of the ILO - is concerned, among other things, with equal treatment of the sexes in the workplace, with upper limits on working hours, with health and safety, and with the protection of privacy.⁸⁴

The EU promotes hate, racism, nationalism

Since the war against Yugoslavia in the 1990s at the latest, the EU, in cooperation with NATO, has been promoting nationalist hatred, and in many cases Christian-based racism.

Anti-democratic and even fascist traditions were revived from the dustbin of history. Politicians of this ilk were maneuvered into government in the small new states split along ethnic lines, as in Croatia and Kosovo. Similarly, in Eastern European countries such as the Baltic States, Poland and Hungary, then Ukraine.

After the primary populists come the secondary populists

The political parties that helped build the EU have not been able to fulfill, have not wanted to fulfill, have not been allowed to fulfill their, from the very beginning, populist promises of prosperity and work for all, peace and democracy.

In particular, the systemic labor injustice for the working class and the actual, feared, claimed and ongoing restrictions on the middle classes have fueled the decline of these 'people’s' parties. But because these primary populists, and with them the mainstream media, interpret this descent, they do not promote the rise of democratic and left-wing forces, but the emergence of secondary populists. The public utterances of the capitalist lobby and the private mainstream media gripe a bit about the style and choice of words of the new up-and-comers - that is typically “bourgeois”: This attitude already promoted the rise of fascists and similar forces in Europe after World War I, starting in Italy, then Poland, Scandinavia, and finally Germany.

Thus, transatlantic capitalists turn up their noses at populist and nationalist liars and bullies like Donald Trump and Boris Johnson – but these are infinitely preferable to the democratic alternatives such as Corbyn's Labour Party in the UK, Bernie Sanders in the USA, La France Insoumise in France and Podemos in Spain.

The real crisis

The real crisis of the EU, as of the entire US-led West, is this: the democratic forces are not (yet) strong enough for change. They are stronger than they generally believe themselves to be. They have by no means brought their defeats to date on themselves - contrary to the prevailing legend, for which the guilt-ridden sociologist Didier Eribon, for example, is happy to let himself be used by the mainstream media.⁸⁵

Rather, the democratic forces are preparing themselves, still tentatively, mostly unheard and uncoordinated. And the representatives of the old order attempt to stifle and/or instrumentalize or even integrate even small stirrings. But it is precisely such stirrings that point the way ahead.

¹ •Since the Roman Empire and the European Middle Ages, vassal by no means signifies total subservience. The relationship of the vassal to the master is often regulated by contract. For the master’s recognition and his promised protection, the vassal must perform some services, such as providing soldiers and cheap labor, collecting taxes from his subjects, and preventing uprisings. In return, the vassal gets advantages: He or the vassal community may pursue their own interests, enrich themselves, expand regional power, oppress their own population. There are always minor conflicts between the vassals and the master. The master can change his preferences between the vassals, such as for some time Poland has been rated higher than Germany in certain respects.