POV: The Great Resignation. It’s Not as Great as Screaming Headlines Suggest

Historical data and a deeper analysis show large numbers of US workers have been quitting for years

January 13, 2022
Jay Zagorsky

The so-called “Great Resignation” was one of the top stories of 2021 as “record” numbers of workers reportedly quit their jobs.

The latest figures, which came out on January 4, showed that 4.5 million people voluntarily left their positions in November—an “all-time high,” according to the agency responsible for collecting the data. That’s 3 percent of the nonfarm workforce—which headlines also proclaimed a record level.

But is it?

The “quit rate” interests me, because I wrote my economics doctoral thesis on how people find work. Since then, I have been fascinated by how people leave jobs and then find new ones.

Data on people quitting comes from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Each month, the bureau runs the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, also known as JOLTS. The bureau interviews about 20,000 businesses and government agencies each month, which it uses to estimate several aspects of the workforce, including the number of people who quit, retired, got hired, or got fired.

Since April 2021, the share of nonfarm workers who quit their jobs has been at some of the highest levels recorded by the bureau. In all, nearly 33 million people left their positions over this period, or over a fifth of the total US workforce.

Certainly, that’s a lot of people. But a closer look at all the historical data we have can help put this in some perspective.

One issue is calling the current levels [of quitting] a “record.” The problem is the data only goes back a little over two decades, which means it’s certainly possible that the [quit] rate could have been higher at several points in the past. We just don’t know.

For example, during the dot-com bubble in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the US economy was strong, which created many new jobs and opportunities for workers. These are typical precursors to more people quitting their current jobs in search of better pay and benefits. Given that the rate was 2.4 percent in January 2001—a month after the quits data begins—it’s not a stretch to imagine it may have been higher than the current level at some point in 2000 or earlier.

Or another time when quits may have been higher was after World War II, when the postwar American economy was booming and the economy was in great flux.

In fact, some data pre-2000 does exist that suggests there are times when the quit rate may have been higher. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics tracked the quit rate in the manufacturing sector from 1930 to 1979, when it ended the survey because the industry—which at one time made up as much as 28 percent of the economy—became less important.

Manufacturing workers, who make things like steel, cars, and textiles, were quitting their jobs at a monthly average rate of 6.1 percent in 1945, compared with the 2.3 percent recorded for the sector in November 2021.

Since about a third of the US workforce had manufacturing jobs in the late 1940s, this suggests the overall quit rate was likely higher back then.

A lot of recent stories have also focused on the absolute number of workers who quit their jobs—such as 4.5 million who quit in November—on a seasonally adjusted basis.

If quits for December 2021 are similar to November, I expect about 47 million people will have voluntarily left their jobs in all of 2021. That would mean about 33 percent of the total nonfarm workforce quit jobs last year.

Again, that seems like a lot, but a huge swath of the labor force does this every year. In 2019, for example, about 28 percent of the US workforce quit.

So, is quitting higher than normal? For sure. But off the charts enough to earn the moniker of “Great”? I don’t think so.

Workers also aren’t quitting in droves across all sectors of the economy. While quits are higher than usual in most industries, a few sectors are responsible for most of the turnover, with some lower than their recent peaks.

The highest quit rate is in accommodation and food services. About 6.9 percent of people working in hotels, motels, restaurants and bars gave notice in November. While that’s the highest since 2000, voluntary turnover in this sector is usually on the high side—given the nature of the work—and has been above 5 percent many times over the past two decades.

November’s second-highest quit rate, at 4.4 percent, was retail trade, which includes workers in stores and shops. Combined, these two relatively low-wage industries accounted for one-third of all people who quit that month.

On the other hand, the quit rates for construction, information, finance and insurance, and real estate are relatively low and have been higher in the past 21 years.

We can also see from the data that young people make up the biggest share of people switching jobs. Data from ADP, one of the largest payroll processors, breaks down turnover by age. But unlike the JOLTS data, ADP doesn’t learn why someone is no longer working at a company—whether they quit, got fired, or something else—so it can track only total turnover. ADP’s most recent data shows high turnover is concentrated among 16-to-24-year-olds, with a turnover rate almost three times the national average.

High turnover for young workers is not surprising, in my view, because COVID-19 restrictions have canceled many nonwage benefits like after-work socializing and company parties. For younger workers new to the labor force, these types of activities are important in developing company belonging and loyalty. Without them, there are fewer ties binding these workers to a company.

Nevertheless, just because the quit rate isn’t at a record doesn’t mean there isn’t a problem of too much turnover in the labor market. But that problem appears to predate the pandemic.

High annual quit rates mean many workers are not satisfied with their job’s pay, benefits, or working conditions. And that can be a huge waste of time and money for both companies and workers. Hiring and training workers is expensive. And searching for new jobs and switching jobs is physically and emotionally difficult for workers.

Research shows employers can minimize turnover by many different methods, such as by giving workers a sense of purpose, letting them work in self-directed teams, and providing better benefits.

Individuals thinking about quitting should ideally find another job before quitting. You have a much higher chance of success transitioning from one job to another than trying to jump from unemployment to work.

The next time you hear about the “Great Resignation,” understand it isn’t quite as great as it seems, since large numbers of US workers have been quitting for years.

Jay Zagorsky, Questrom School of Business senior lecturer in markets, public policy, and law, can be reached at zagorsky@bu.edu.

This column originally appeared January 11 on The Conversation.

“POV” is an opinion page that provides timely commentaries from students, faculty, and staff on a variety of issues: on-campus, local, state, national, or international. Anyone interested in submitting a piece, which should be about 700 words long, should contact John O’Rourke at orourkej@bu.edu. BU Today reserves the right to reject or edit submissions. The views expressed are solely those of the author and are not intended to represent the views of Boston University.

The heat stays on: Earth hits 6th warmest year on record

By SETH BORENSTEIN

Vivek Shandas, a professor of climate adaptation at Portland State University, takes a temperature reading of almost 106 degrees in downtown Portland, Ore., on Aug. 12, 2021. On Thursday, Jan. 13, 2022, NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released measurements showing 2021 was the sixth hottest year on record globally, part of a long-term warming trend. 

(AP Photo/Nathan Howard, File)

Earth simmered to the sixth hottest year on record in 2021, according to several newly released temperature measurements.

And scientists say the exceptionally hot year is part of a long-term warming trend that shows hints of accelerating.

Two U.S. science agencies — NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — and a private measuring group released their calculations for last year’s global temperature on Thursday, and all said it wasn’t far behind ultra-hot 2016 and 2020.

Six different calculations found 2021 was between the fifth and seventh hottest year since the late 1800s. NASA said 2021 tied with 2018 for sixth warmest, while NOAA puts last year in sixth place by itself.

Scientists say a La Nina — natural cooling of parts of the central Pacific that changes weather patterns globally and brings chilly deep ocean water to the surface — dampened global temperatures just as its flip side, El Nino, boosted them in 2016.

Still, they said 2021 was the hottest La Nina year on record and that the year did not represent a cooling off of human-caused climate change but provided more of the same heat.

“So it’s not quite as headline-dominating as being the warmest on record, but give it another few years and we’ll see another one of those” records, said climate scientist Zeke Hausfather of the Berkeley Earth monitoring group that also ranked 2021 the sixth hottest. “It’s the long-term trend, and it’s an indomitable march upward.”

Gavin Schmidt, the climate scientist who heads NASA’s temperature team, said “the long-term trend is very, very clear. And it’s because of us. And it’s not going to go away until we stop increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.”

The last eight years have been the eight hottest on record, NASA and NOAA data agree. Global temperatures, averaged over a 10-year period to take out natural variability, are nearly 2 degrees (1.1 degrees Celsius) warmer than 140 years ago, their data shows.

The other 2021 measurements came from the Japanese Meteorological Agency and satellite measurements by Copernicus Climate Change Service i n Europe and the University of Alabama in Huntsville.

There was such a distinctive jump in temperatures about eight to 10 years ago that scientists have started looking at whether the rise in temperatures is speeding up. Both Schmidt and Hausfather said early signs point to that but it’s hard to know for sure.

“If you just look at the last the last 10 years, how many of them are way above the trend line from the previous 10 years? Almost all of them,” Schmidt said in an interview.

There’s a 99% chance that 2022 will be among the 10 warmest years on record and a 10% chance it will be the hottest on record, said NOAA climate analysis chief Russell Vose in a Thursday press conference.

Vose said chances are 50-50 that at least one year in the 2020s will hit 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) warming since pre-industrial times — the level of warming nations agreed to try to avoid in the 2015 Paris climate accord.

While that threshold is important, extreme weather from climate change is hurting people now in their daily lives with about 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.2 degrees Fahrenheit) warming, Vose and Schmidt said.

The global average temperature last year was 58.5 degrees (14.7 Celsius), according to NOAA. In 1988, NASA’s then-chief climate scientist James Hansen grabbed headlines when he testified to Congress about global warming in a year that was the hottest on record at the time. Now, the 57.7 degrees (14.3 Celsius) of 1988 ranks as the 28th hottest year on record.

Last year, 1.8 billion people in 25 Asian, African and Middle Eastern nations had their hottest years on record, including China, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Iran, Myanmar and South Korea, according to Berkeley Earth.

The deep ocean, where most heat is stored in the seas, also set a record for warmth in 2021, according to a separate new study.

“Ocean warming, aside from causing coral bleaching and threatening sea life and fish populations, ... is destabilizing Antarctic ice shelves and threatens massive ... sea level rise if we don’t act,” said study co-author Michael Mann, a Pennsylvania State University climate scientist.

The last time Earth had a cooler than normal year by NOAA or NASA calculations was 1976. That means 69% of the people on the planet — more than 5 billion people under age 45 — have never experienced such a year, based on United Nations data.

North Carolina state climatologist Kathie Dello, 39, who wasn’t part of the new reports but said they make sense, said, “I’ve only lived in a warming world and I wish that the younger generations did not have to say the same. It didn’t have to be this way.”


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See more AP climate coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/climate.

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Follow Seth Borenstein on Twitter: @borenbears.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Last nine years all among 10 hottest-ever, says US

With the exception of September and December, each month of 2021 had Arctic sea ice levels in the top-10 lowest levels for those respective months, a US agency said in its annual climate report

January 14, 2022 -

With the exception of September and December, each month of 2021 had Arctic sea ice levels in the top-10 lowest levels for those respective months, a US agency said in its annual climate report

The nine years spanning 2013-2021 all rank among the 10 hottest on record, according to an annual report a US agency released Thursday, the latest data underscoring the global climate crisis.

For 2021, the average temperature across global surfaces was 1.51 degrees Fahrenheit (0.84 degrees Celsius) above the 20th-century average, making the year the sixth-hottest in the overall record, which goes back to 1880.

Climate change worsening toll of humid heat on outdoor workers: study


Date1/13/2022 
(MENAFN- AFP)

A punishing mix of heat and humidity that makes outdoor labour difficult and dangerous is causing around 677 billion lost working hours a year around the world, according to a new study Thursday that warns climate change is making it worse.

Researchers in the United States, who estimated the current cost at $2.1 trillion every year, said that the negative effects of stifling temperatures on people doing heavy work in agriculture and construction had been underestimated.

The new figures comes amid a growing focus on the severe health impacts of climate change, not just as projections of future harm from heatwaves and other extreme events, but also as consequences already playing out across a warming world.

The study, published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, looked at data on humid heat -- particularly dangerous because the body is less able to cool down by sweating.

Researchers estimated the number of workers exposed to unsafe levels over the 20 years to 2020, as well as the impact on labour compared to the period 1981 to 2000.

Researchers incorporated the findings from laboratory-based research published last year that suggest productivity drops off at lower temperature and humidity levels than previously thought.

They found that between 2001 and 2020, exposure to high humidity and heat was linked to approximately 677 billion lost working hours a year in heavy outdoor labour.

It suggested almost three quarters of the global working-age population are already living in locations where background climate conditions are associated with about a hundred hours of heat-associated lost work per person per year.

"If outdoor workers are losing productivity at these lower temperature and humidity levels, then labour losses in the tropics could be as high as 500 to 600 hours per person per year, which is over twice as high as previous estimates," said lead researcher Luke Parsons, of Duke University.

The research found that India currently loses around 259 billion hours annually due to the impacts of humid heat on labour, while China loses 72 billion hours and Bangladesh loses 32 billion hours.

- Warming 'magnifies impacts' -

Over the last four decades, as global temperatures have risen, the study found heat-related labour losses have increased by at least nine percent.

The authors estimate that climate change is to blame for an additional 25 billion working hours lost annually in India over the last 20 years compared to the previous 20 years, and an extra four billion hours a year in China over the same period.

Parsons said other hot and humid regions such as the southeastern United States could also be experiencing "significant" labour losses as well.

"These results imply that we don't have to wait for 1.5 degrees Celsius of global warming to experience impacts of climate change on labour and the economy," he said.

"The warming we've already experienced may be associated with large-scale background labour losses. Additional future warming magnifies these impacts."

The Lancet's annual Countdown on Health and Humanity report last year warned that overall some 295 billion hours of potential work were lost due to extreme heat exposure in 2020, with the average potential earnings lost in poorer countries equivalent to between four and eight percent of national gross domestic product (GDP).

Research published last year in the journal Nature Climate Change suggested 100,000 heat-related deaths per year were caused by climate change.

Last year, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that global heating is virtually certain to pass the Paris agreement threshold of a 1.5 degree Celsius cap, probably within a decade.

The last seven years since the Paris deal was signed in 2015 have been the hottest on record.

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“This is exactly what all the factory workers should do”: Autoworkers support struggle by teachers and students to shut down schools

Our reporters

WSWS.ORG

Autoworkers across the United States are supporting the growing movement by teachers and students to shut down in-person schooling to contain the spread of the Omicron variant. Chicago schoolteachers are battling a sellout by the Chicago Teachers union to reopen schools, while students, parents and teachers across the country are organizing walkouts and sickouts to force buildings to shut down. A city-wide walkout by students in New York City on Tuesday affected dozens of schools. This is part of an international struggle, including a nationwide strike by French teachers today.

“I support the student walkouts [in New York City], it’s the safe thing to do,” one Stellantis Sterling Heights Assembly Plant (SHAP) worker said. “The newly elected mayor [Eric Adams] should be ashamed of himself but his arrogant attitude will only make things worse. So, the students have done that, the safest thing possible for their own health and their fellow students’ health and safety. If the mayor has a problem with what they did, then he should enroll his children in that school.”

Stellantis workers at Warren Truck Plant in suburban Detroit

 (WSWS Media)

A worker at General Motors Wentzville Assembly Plant near St. Louis said, “To keep the children and staff safe, I think online school should be enforced till the numbers go down.” Shutdowns, vaccine and mask mandates, widespread testing and contact tracing are needed, she added. “That’s the only way we are going to get past this.”

A worker at Ford’s Chicago Assembly plant said, “I know that teachers are needed, but they also have the right to be safe doing it and the children have the same rights to be safe. It’s very sad that parents have to choose to work or not work. We have a coworker here at Ford Chicago that had to take a leave because she has no one to care for or watch her child when they are not in school.

“They say over a million workers quit their jobs because of their children. I know if I had a child in school, I don’t think that I would send them. I would home school them if I could. “And these union [leaders] are up to no good. Right now, UAW Local 551 at the Chicago plant is trying to change the local bylaws so they can screw us over.

“I think walking out or a wildcat would be a good idea [with teachers and autoworkers united]. I thank the teachers for all their hard work and taking care of the children at their own risk. We, the whole world, need good teachers. Teachers are the future of our community and our lives.”

Another Stellantis worker from Indiana, after watching a video of the walkouts in New York, said simply, “This is exactly what all the factory workers should do.”

After two full years of the pandemic, the situation in the United States is dire. More than 814,000 new cases were recorded yesterday and over 2,200 people died, while hospital systems are spread past the breaking point. Alongside schools and nursing homes, factories and construction sites are the primary centers of transmission for the virus, according to outbreak figures recorded by the state of Michigan. The state abruptly stopped tracking outbreaks in factories in late November, citing the difficulty in obtaining data from worksites—an indication of the cover-up of infections by the auto companies, with the assistance of the pro-corporate United Auto Workers.

The situation in the plants is rapidly deteriorating. At least 500 workers are currently out sick at Stellantis’ Warren Truck plant in the Detroit area, while at SHAP, over 1,000 are currently out. The death toll continues to mount. Yesterday, UAW Local 1700 announced the death of SHAP worker Thomas Whitney. The cause of death was not announced, but COVID-19 is widely suspected.

In response, management is “flooding the plants with temporary part-time (TPT) workers to try to replace them,” in the words of one SHAP worker. At Warren Truck, anger is at the boiling point over the decision to work TPTs, who are the lowest-paid and most exploited section of the workforce, for 12-hour shifts and six days per week to maintain production. A letter from a TPT to the World Socialist Web Site went viral among autoworkers last week, many of whom wrote in to the WSWS with their own experiences.

A skilled worker at Chrysler Technical Center in Auburn Hills, Michigan, explained the dangers white collar workers at the facility face. “The housekeeping may be better and the restrooms cleaner than in the factories, but the new company [Stellantis] that took over doesn’t give a crap about the health and safety of workers at CTC either. As for the UAW, we call the health and safety reps, and they don’t respond. We talk about this every day. There is a joint labor-management health and safety committee, and they work together.

“Most of the workers at the tech center are masked and 100 percent of the non-union workers are vaccinated because of the company mandate. The UAW is opposed to a mandate because they want workers to show up to work.”

Referring to those lost to COVID-19, he added, “The UAW health rep at CTC passed away the day before Christmas from COVID.”

The worker continued, “When the building is fully staffed, there are 11,000 people who work here. Some 8,000–9,000 are working remotely now. There are 2,000 in the building on any given day. All the UAW-represented workers, except the designers, are in the building. That includes those workers involved in electronics and building and making things that cannot be done remotely.

“We got paid sick leave before the pandemic, but we aren’t getting it for COVID. There is a lack of social distancing. They are supposed to do tracing and inform us when someone is infected. But they keep things secret by falsely pointing to the HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) rules designed to protect the privacy of patients. I know the law, and this does not prevent the company and the union from revealing COVID infections to protect public health.

“I’m 62 years old and have preexisting conditions. I show up for work like the workers in the factories. For the corporations, they look at me about to retire, and they say my life doesn’t matter anymore. My wife is a retired schoolteacher, and the schools are just like the factories, few masks, no social distancing and COVID everywhere.

“I voted for Biden, but not for this. Trump gets vaccinated and riles up his supporters about ‘don’t take away my rights’ with vaccines and masks. I say, ‘Don’t take away my right to live.’ But it’s both parties. They don’t care, they want all of us to get sick.”

Other autoworkers voiced support for the teachers.

“Given the gravity of the situation, I don’t think it’s a bad thing to go remote,” a veteran Ford Chicago Assembly worker told the WSWS. “Look, at this point, the teachers have to look out for themselves. Nobody else is going to do it for them. The union isn’t going to do it for them. The government or city obviously isn’t going to do it for them. They’re going to have to hunker down and pull it off on their own. Nobody else is going to care about their health or how it affects them.”

The policies of both big business parties have been virtually identical in relation to the pandemic, he said. “The Democrats are about the same as the Republicans. They say, ‘Let’s take it easy here, keep going to work, we’ll be all right.’”

COVID-19 is spreading widely at the Ford plant, he said. “It’s crazy. We’re having outbreaks of COVID, a lot of outbreaks. There’s a lot of people out with it. It’s like a little chain reaction. They keep moving people from one place to another, back and forth.

“There’s quite a bit of exposure here,” he continued. “If anything, you’re more exposed here than anywhere else.”

Management and the UAW, however, “are not saying anything. They’re just saying there’s an uptick. They don’t have the sense of urgency like when things first started. Before they had the clean-up crew going around, cleaning up all the tables where you eat.

“The whole facemask policy and social distancing, it’s very lax now. If they see someone without a mask, they might say something, they might not. And we’re all going in and out at the same time, so there’s no social distancing. I think they’re just doing the bare minimum to comply with state law and not be liable, but other than that they really don’t care.”

When he tested positive for the COVID-19, he said management asked him if he had stayed six feet apart from the other workers. “I said, ‘What do you mean? I’m working, which means you have to be a foot from someone or six feet from someone, or whatever. Unless you change your job, it’s just not possible to maintain that distance.’

“Let’s cut the BS. We have to work side-by-side all night. And it’s not well-ventilated, they know this. I don’t know what they’re expecting from the workers. The workers are doing what they can. Face masks? Okay, what else? Six feet apart, well, that’s impossible.”

Addressing himself to educators directly, he said, “All those sweet words about ‘How we care about our educators.’ Don’t listen to the words, look at the actions. And the actions show they don’t care. As workers, we have to look out for our best interests. That’s it. That’s the bottom line.”

A Mack Trucks manufacturing worker in Macungie, Pennsylvania, said, “I want teachers to know I support your fight to save the lives of students and your own. The CTU is betraying you, diverting your struggle and misdirecting your momentum, in an effort to demoralize you the same way all the other trade unions do, including the UAW, which ‘represents’ me. We had a worker die from COVID and the UAW has yet to acknowledge his death.

“I cannot imagine the trauma it would be for a classroom of students to lose a teacher to this virus in an entirely preventable death. Hold your ground. Fighting back against what will surely mean mass infections and deaths as a result of keeping schools open is the most important thing for everyone in the working class to fight for right now. You are leading that fight.

“I’m doing everything I can to spread word and build support for you where I am. It used to be common sense to protect children at all costs. Now it’s the governments’ and teacher unions’ policy to infect children at all costs. You have the power to stop this and we as a class can bring an end to this virus if we make the conscious effort to do so.

“For all the students walking out, thank you for supporting your teachers and community by taking the actions necessary to protect yourselves and all of us. To anyone who doesn’t see it, you are saving lives. It means everything to see such a strong future for the world embodied in your actions.”

Thousands of Colorado grocery workers strike at King Soopers as opposition continues to build in the working class

Alex Findijs
WSWS.ORG

Thousands of workers at King Soopers grocery chain stores in Colorado began a three-week strike Wednesday morning at 64 stores from south Denver to Boulder. The workers are members of United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 7.

Support for the strike is high among workers in the area. A striking worker from Centennial, Colorado, said that customer traffic was just 10 percent of normal and that they received considerable support from community members. The company has been attempting to bring in scab workers at $18 an hour, but workers report that few people have taken the jobs. Instead, the company has resorted to flying in salaried workers from out of state in a desperate bid to keep shelves stocked for the few people who cross the picket line.

Grocery store worker pickets outside a King Soopers store after the union rejected the latest contract offer from the chain that is owned by Kroger, Co., Wednesday, Jan. 12, 2022, in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Denver. 

(AP Photo/David Zalubowski)

King Soopers, a subsidiary of Kroger, the largest grocery chain in the country, offered workers a pitiful contract that would have seen starting wages rise to just 13 cents above minimum wage and would have included concessions in health care benefits as well as the ability to lower workers’ wages at any time during the contract.

On Tuesday, the union stated that it would not accept King Soopers “last, best, and final offer,” which included only modest adjustments, notably the inclusion of a “favored nation” clause, which would have automatically lowered negotiated wages and benefits to the level of the lowest deal negotiated by the union with another company.

The union’s counteroffer includes a $6 raise for all workers, raising the starting wage to $18.35, and an additional $1.50 raise in the second and third year of the contract.

For the Denver area, the proposed wage increases are fairly modest. Denver is one of the most expensive metro areas in the country. The average monthly rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Denver is $2,400, up 16.5 percent from last year, while the current maximum wage of a King Soopers worker is just $3,100 a month. According to the MIT living wage calculator, a worker supporting a family of four would need to make $36 an hour to have a living wage in Denver.

Kroger has made impressive profits on the basis of poverty wages for its workforce. A recent study conducted by the Economic Roundtable on the living conditions of Kroger workers in Colorado, Southern California, and the Seattle metro area found that two-thirds of Kroger workers struggle to afford basic necessities.

On average, a Kroger employee makes $16,000 less than needed to survive, with 29 percent of all grocery workers in the US living below the poverty line. Since 1990, wages for the most senior workers have declined between 11 and 22 percent, adjusted for inflation. Up to 78 percent of workers live with low to very-low food security and there are startling rates of homelessness among all age groups and seniority levels.

A Kroger worker from Seattle, referred to as Jim to protect his identity, spoke to the WSWS about the living conditions of Kroger workers after 15 years in the industry.

“The top end of a union job here is $22.15. Which I know seems like a lot, but on a 40-hour-a-week job even that’s around $3,544 a month before taxes, union dues, etc. Rent for a one-bedroom apartment can range from $1,500 to over $2,000 and it keeps going up. With the requirement of making 3x the rent to even qualify for an apartment, the top-scale employees can have a hard time.

“Food, gas, rent—it’s all starting to exceed what we can bring in. Plenty of us have roommates or multiple-income households and we still (generally) can’t afford to not work because the slight decrease in a paycheck will mean we have to pull money from what little savings we have scraped together or just go without.”

Workers in Denver are facing similar circumstances. A striking worker from the Denver metro area who has worked for King Soopers for seven years said, “We’re exhausted, frustrated, and insulted on top of it. Even without the concessions, the wage increases aren’t even enough to cover how much our rent raised in 2021.

“Like a lot of stores, we’re severely understaffed and have had hiring and retention issues for over a year now. Customers are more aggressive, everyone’s getting sick, people threaten our service desk clerks nearly daily and every single department has been working overtime just to have this concession-riddled contract shoved in our faces. The vast majority of us are fired up and genuinely excited to strike.”

Though workers are ready and willing to fight back, the union took steps to weaken and isolate the strike before it even began. Just days before the strike was set to take place, the union told workers in Colorado Springs to report to work, with no explanation provided. Earlier in the week, the union also extended the contract of workers at Safeway, which had expired over the weekend, separating them from the King Soopers workers.

The decision to isolate workers by company only serves to weaken the strike. It is reminiscent of the General Motors (GM) strike in 2019, when the United Auto Workers (UAW) forced workers at Ford and Fiat Chrysler to remain on the job, even though their contracts, which were patterned after the deal at GM due to the pattern bargaining system, expired at the same time. This enforced isolation allowed the UAW, whose top leadership was under indictment for bribery and embezzlement, to eventually shut down and sell out the strike.

The UFCW, and Local 7 in particular, has played a treacherous role during the pandemic, helping to keep meatpacking and food processing plants open in spite of massive levels of infection. In the summer of 2020, after months of stalling by Local 7, workers at the JBS beef plant in Greeley, Colorado, staged a wildcat walkout to force a temporary closure of the facility, where six workers have died. As for King Soopers workers, the two-tier wage system that workers are seeking eliminate was “negotiated” by Local 7 in 2005, and it has limited the current strike in advance to three weeks, allowing the company to make their own preparations to try and weather the strike. The UFCW, which has more than $1 billion in assets nationwide, is a pro-corporate organization ruled over by a privileged bureaucracy. Local 7 President Kim Cordova makes more than $200,000 per year.

“The way UFCW works is they don’t actually tell you anything,” said Jim. “They keep everything vague and generic until the votes. They say they do this so people don’t misunderstand what it means. Then they don’t actually present you with a contract at the vote. It’s more of a bullet point list with the ability to ask questions. Most people go in, throw the vote in the box, and walk out. So you don’t really know what is given and taken. None of it is very clear unless you take the time to read a contract that has already passed.”

King Soopers workers should be on guard against the UFCW’s inevitable attempt to sell out their struggle and force through a concessions agreement. They must do so by organizing their own independent rank-and-file strike committee to formulate a red line for what workers will accept in any deal, and appeal for active support within the working class, including teachers, meatpacking workers, and others.

France: unions say 75% of teachers strike

Issued on: 13/01/2022 -

Video by: James ANDRÉ

French teachers went on strike Thursday (January 13), with the biggest teachers' union saying half of primary schools were closed as staff demand clarity from the government on coronavirus measures. They complain that their members are unable to teach properly, are not adequately protected against coronavirus infection and frequently hear about changes to health precautions via the media rather than from higher-ups. FRANCE 24 's James Andre tells us more.

Half of French schools may close due to teachers strike over COVID-19 concerns
By UPI Staf

French President Emmanuel Macron is seen during a visit at a school in Marseilles, France, on September 2, 2021. Macron has touted keeping France's schools open in the COVID-19 era as a major accomplishment. File Photo by Daniel Cole/EPA-EFE

Jan. 13 (UPI) -- About half of schools in France were expected to close Thursday due to a mass teachers strike over complaints about COVID-19 safety protocols in classrooms and other ways that the government is handling the pandemic.

About a dozen teachers unions across France called for the walkout as a protest and a call for change.

The French government has changed COVID-19 rules three times since children returned to classrooms this month, and many teachers say that lax safety protocols are threatening students and staff. Prime Minister Jean Castex relaxed protocols again on Monday, which spurred calls for the strike.

French President Emmanuel Macron painted a different picture this week when he said that keeping schools open in the COVID-19 era has been one of the country's greatest accomplishments -- a view shared by education minister Jean-Michel Blanquer.

Union officials said about 75% of teachers are expected to participate in the labor walkout on Thursday, and the shortages may close about half of all schools in France.

The walkout comes amid a surge in coronavirus infections across France that are being driven, as in most other parts of the world, by the more contagious Omicron variant. This week, the country has averaged about 350,000 new cases per day.

Eleven unions are taking part in Thursday's walkout, including close to 40% of primary school teachers and a quarter of secondary school teachers.

   

French teachers go on strike over handling of pandemic
By SYLVIE CORBET

1 of 10

Teachers and students hold a banner reading " National Education- working condition - wages " as they demonstrate in Bayonne, southwestern France, Thursday, Jan. 13, 2022. French teachers have walked out in a nationwide strike Thursday to express anger at the way the government is handling the virus situation in schools, denouncing confusing rules and calling for more protection. (AP Photo/Bob Edme)

PARIS (AP) — French teachers voiced anger at the way the French government is handling the pandemic in schools, denounced confusing rules and called for more protection during a nationwide strike on Thursday.

Exhausted by the pressures of surging COVID-19 cases, many teachers answered the call by 11 unions to protest virus-linked class disruptions and ever-changing isolation rules.

France is at the epicenter of Europe’s current fight against COVID-19, with new infections topping 360,000 a day this week, driven by the highly contagious omicron variant.

Health Minister Olivier Veran announced on Twitter Thursday that he tested positive for the virus and was self-isolating in order to continue working.

The teachers’ strike puts the government of President Emmanuel Macron under additional pressure a week after opposition lawmakers delayed implementation of a key measure that mandates proof of vaccination for entry into restaurants, cultural and sport facilities.

Teachers want clarifications on rules and more protections, such as extra masks and tests to help relieve the strain.

Among those at a demonstration in Paris’ city center was English teacher and SE-UNA union member Lilia Larbi who said that people are “fed up” with the situation at school.

“The strike is not against the virus, it’s against bad communication, changing rules... and the bad handling of the sanitary crisis,” she said, adding that the government “is denying reality.”

Larbi said she taught to only three children in her class on Wednesday because colleagues either tested positive for COVID-19 or were waiting for test results. “We feel like we’re babysitting” rather than teaching, she said.

Paris teacher Frédéric Le Bihan expressed “exasperation” at the confusing “orders and counterorders.”

Within a span of a week, authorities changed the rules on testing schoolchildren twice.

Le Bihan said teachers are under additional pressure from parents who expected them to implement government directives “which is not possible.”

Fatna Seghrouchni, a teacher in the Paris region and member of the Federation Sud Education union, said teachers are being asked “to do things without having the means to do them.”

Like many other protesters, Seghrouchni’s anger was directed at Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer who she said has shown teachers “contempt” by announcing last minute, virus-related rules in a newspaper interview to a newspaper instead of sending instructions directly to educators.

Blanquer has acknowledged that January has been “tough” for schools as 50,000 new COVID-19 cases have been detected among students in “recent days” and more than 10,000 classes cancelled. The figures are expected to worsen in the coming weeks.

Unions estimated that 62% to 75% of teachers were supporting the protest movement, depending on which school they’re posted. The government said 27% of teachers were on strike.

The SNUIPP teacher’s union is calling for a return to a previous rule that shuts classes down for a week if a child tests positive.

Teachers are also demanding higher quality masks, more testing at schools and devices in classes warning when ventilation is required.

The strike comes on the same day French senators voted a bill requiring adults to provide proof of vaccination to enter restaurants and bars, cinemas, theaters, museums, sports arenas and inter-regional trains. Unvaccinated kids between 12 and 17 can show a negative test.

The measure will come into force later than initially expected, after parliament approves the legislation by next week.

Nurses Strike Across the U.S.

to Protest Covid Working Conditions

Madison Muller, Bloomberg News

A nurse checks on a Covid-19 patient at a hospital in Morehead, Kentucky. Photographer: Jon Cherry/Bloomberg , Bloomberg

(Bloomberg) -- Early Thursday morning, nurses in Washington, D.C. gathered outside the Howard University Hospital to protest what they say have been unsafe working conditions throughout the Covid-19 pandemic. 

The event kicked off a jam-packed schedule of strikes across 11 U.S. states and D.C. today organized by National Nurses United, a labor union boasting 175,000 members nationwide. With the highly transmissible omicron variant fueling Covid cases across the country, hospitals are also sounding the alarm about staffing shortages, insufficient resources and overall worsening conditions. 

Some health care workers say the U.S. health care system has been stretched to its limit. 

The day of action’s purpose is “to demand the hospital industry invest in safe staffing, and to demand that President Biden follow through on his campaign promise to protect nurses and prioritize public health,” according to the union.

At 1 p.m. New York time, National Nurses United will hold a virtual press conference to highlight the harrowing workplace conditions nurses have had to face on the frontlines of the pandemic. Members in Washington plan to end the day with a candlelight vigil near the White House to honor the thousands of nurses who have died from Covid-19. 

©2022 Bloomberg L.P.

Meet the new boss 

After helping to create Russia’s ‘sovereign Internet,’ the son of one of the Kremlin’s most powerful officials takes the helm at the country’s most popular social network

Source: Meduza

Vladimir Kiriyenko presenting at a Rostelecom conference in September 2018
Kirill Kallinikov / Sputnik / Scanpix / LETA

On Monday, December 13, Vladimir Kiriyenko was appointed to serve as the new CEO of Vkontakte’s parent company, VK. The son of Sergey Kiriyenko (President Putin’s first deputy chief of staff and the Kremlin’s unofficial domestic policy czar), Vladimir previously worked as a vice president at Rostelecom. His appointment followed a major sale of shares that transferred control over VK to Gazprombank and the insurance giant Sogaz. Meduza explores key details of the new CEO’s life.

The Investor

The transfer of VK’s (previously Mail.ru Group’s) ownership was unexpected. On December 2, Alisher Usmanov’s USM holding company announced its sale of shares in MF Technologies, the holding group that controls VK. As a result, structures affiliated with Gazprom now own 90 percent of the shares in MF Technologies.

Both RBC and The Bell had reported that VK would change its CEO as well. According to both outlets, outgoing CEO Boris Dobrodeev (son of VGTRK head Oleg Dobrodeev) would be replaced with Vladimir Kiriyenko — the son of First Deputy Chief of Staff of the Presidential Executive Office Sergey Kiriyenko. VK confirmed these reports in a press release on December 13.

Vladimir Kiriyenko previously held an executive role at Rostelecom. He became the company’s vice president in 2016 at the age of 33. His appointment coincided with his father Sergei Kiriyenko’s new position in the Presidential Administration — he became its deputy chief of staff in charge of domestic policy. When he assumed the role, Rostelecom’s president at the time, Sergey Kalugin, explained that the young VP was responsible for charting “a more active direction for the company to enter new and growing segments of the market.” Kalugin gave no details about how Kiriyenko would achieve such a goal.

Prior to his role at Rostelecom, Vladimir Kiriyenko had no experience in the telecommunications industry. He had spent his entire career in his home region of Nizhny Novgorod. The younger Kiriyenko studied at the local branch of the Higher School of Economics, and after graduating at 22 years of age, immediately became the chairman of the board of directors of a local television company, Volga. At the time Vedomosti reported that the company belonged to a friend of his father, Lukoil vice president Vadim Vorobyov. Vladimir Kiriyenko also co-owned Sarovbusinessbank with Vladimir Travin, another close friend of his father.

In 2007, Vladimir Kriryenko’s company, Capital, received a 25-percent stake in an agricultural holding along the Volga River, NZhMK, after its owner Nikolai Nesterenko appealed to Kiriyenko Sr. for help thwarting an unwanted acquisition by another company, Rinako. According to Forbes, Nesterenko wrote to Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov and sought assistance from law enforcement, thereby preventing “an attempted hostile takeover.”

Vladimir Kiriyenko always hoped that his son would be viewed as a successful businessman, according to a source interviewed by Forbes. As a result, he started “receiving all these assets,” and he began managing the family’s business. Forbes estimated that Kiriyenko Jr.’s assets in industrial enterprises are worth $50 million.

Vladimir’s biography on Rostelecom’s says that he “has experience with direct investment in Russian companies and the IT-sector.” In 2013, he began leading a venture capital fund called Titanium Investments. This fund did indeed invest in startups. Among them is Factory of Online, a business that Russifies popular foreign video games (though the last game it worked on was released in 2014). The fund was also involved in the peer-to-peer lending service Mirdeneg.ru, which is currently defunct and whose website no longer works. A more successful investment was 365score, an Israeli app for sports fans which is used by 40 million people around the world.

Following his appointment at the state-owned Rostelecom, Kiriyenko pledged to divest from Titanium Holdings, even though he was not formally obliged to do so. However, iStories reported that in that same year, Kiriyenko Jr. registered a similarly-named offshore company — Titanium VC Limited — in the British Virgin Islands and used it to invest in foreign startups. Vladimir Kiriyenko was its beneficiary until at least mid-2017.

The Lobbyist

Rostelecom emerged in its current form about ten years ago. In the past, it had been a part of the state-owned Svyazinvest holding, and managed intercity and international telephone networks. But demand for traditional telephony services was falling. As a result, the company pivoted to Internet and wireless services. For example, network operator Tele2 is a wholly owned subsidiary of Rostelecom.

Rostelecom’s growth was also driven heavily by the state. In 2009, Vladimir Putin awarded the company a state contract to create the “Gosuslug” (Public Services) website. Since then, the government has signed contracts with Rostelecom for maintaining the “electronic government’s” infrastructure. The most recent contract for 2020 and 2021 is valued at 11.9 billion rubles ($162 million).

Since then, the number of government contracts received by Rostelecom only grew further. Rostelecom is uniquely tasked with streaming video from presidential and parliamentary elections, video-monitoring of Russia’s standardized Unified State Exam, and Russia’s electronic voting system.

After Kiriyenko joined the company’s leadership, Rostelecom became the sole provider of wireline services to an array of federal government departments. In 2019, moreover, Rostelecom won an auction to connect “socially significant places” to the Internet across half of the country. Such places include schools, various municipal and governmental functions, and police and fire stations. Besides these activities, Rostelecom is part of an initiative to reduce digital inequality within the country, achieved by extending telecommunications networks to smaller towns and settlements.

In addition to other governmental projects, Rostelecom digitized the All-Russian census. Now, census workers have replaced their traditional paper notebooks with Russian-made tablets procured by Rostelecom. In exchange for the 360,000 tablets, Rostelecom received 9 billion rubles ($123 million). Now, Rosstat’s situation centers can track census workers and remotely provide direction through a network also managed by Rostelecom.

Rostelecom also received exclusive contracts to “establish data protection and traffic filtration systems for schools and electoral commissions” — including functionality to prevent access to blocked websites and “extremist materials.”

Experts point to Vladimir Kiriyenko’s influence as a key factor in Rostelecom’s success. “Kiriyenko is an effective manager; thanks to his lobbying capabilities, he strengthened Rostelecom’s position in securing government procurements,” explained Yuri Bryuvkin, the director of the analytics firm Rustelecom.

Kiriyenko Jr. himself said that Rostelecom is first and foremost focused on working with “government clients” and large businesses. At the same time, he has also spoken negatively about certain government initiatives. For instance, Kiriyenko argued that Rostelecom should not take advantage of its wealth of customer data, which it is obliged to collect and retain in accordance with Russian anti-terrorism laws. Per this legislation, network operators are also required to transmit these data to law enforcement upon request.

The Defender

In recent years, the interests of Sergey and Vladimir Kiriyenko have become ever more interconnected. After an unsuccessful attempt to block Telegram, officials became interested in creating a so-called “sovereign Internet.” A 2019 law provides the legal basis for it: network providers would be obliged to install special devices — “technical tools for threat prevention,” which would enable Roscomnadzor to control users’ traffic.

Sergei Kiriyenko was a key figure in initiating Russia’s sovereign Internet, according to Forbes and the BBC. Originally, the concept was framed as defensive, to protect the Russian internet from external attempts to disconnect it. But when Roscomnadzor obtained the ability to control networks, it began to exercise it. For instance, the agency can now independently decide to “slow down” Twitter inside Russia.

Roscomnadzor’s technical tools, which it installs on provider networks, are equipped with software from RDP.ru — a company owned by Rostelecom.

Alexey Danichev / Sputnik / Scanpix / LETA

Rostelecom’s role does not end there. The largest node in Russia’s Internet traffic was a company called MSK-IX. In the early 2010s, the company was absorbed by the Safedata group, which combined several large data centers. Today, Safedata (now named RTK-TsOD) is wholly owned by Rostelecom.

MSX-IX’s technological resources provided the basis for the Internet Technical Center, which was the technical administrator of Russia’s Web domains (.ru, .РФ, and .su). The firm was owned by KTs – the Coordination Centre of national internet domains – and it was an independent domain regulator.

Over time, the Coordination Center lost its independence: in 2015, the government was listed as one of its founders. Then in 2017, Rostelecom created its own private company — TTsI — which received technical control over the root servers of Russia’s domains. Now, Rostelecom has control over servers that have records of each domain, its owners, and their IP addresses. According to Meduza’s source at Rostelecom, Kiriyenko Jr. oversaw the activities of both RTK-TsOD and TTsI.

Rostelecom enjoyed financial success while Vladimir Kiriyenko worked there. Company profits stood at 297 billion rubles ($4 billion) when Kiriyenko assumed his post in 2016 and had risen to 546 billion rubles ($7.4 billion) by 2020. Contracts with the government and large corporations constituted 33 percent of the company’s total profits. The digital services under Kiriyenko’s management were a particularly strong driver of growth. For instance, he oversaw the successful launch of the multimedia platform Wink. “Rostelecom today has a much clearer and more transparent ecosystem of digital services. Sure, not all of them are in high demand, but they are interconnected,” telecom analyst Sergei Polovnikov told Meduza.

The manager

For its previous owners (Alisher Usmanov’s holding structures), an asset like VK was unattractive, according to The Bell. The company was not highly profitable. While Usmanov’s Metalloinvest delivered $1.34 billion in profits, VK mustered a comparably paltry $138 million. And in 2021, VK’s first three quarters posted consecutive losses, while its stock shed 40 percent of its value. “It was obvious that VK wasn’t what USM wanted to invest in. Whereas VK was a pressing issue for the Presidential Administration,” a source told The Bell.

“Market data painted a clear picture: foreign social networks were gaining users while Vkontakte was falling behind. For the government, it was politically undesirable if VK lost contact with its Russian audience. And for Usmanov, such a state of affairs was uncomfortable, too, since he has a certain responsibility to the state,” added The Bell’s source. Someone working for the federal government’s cabinet told Forbes Russia that Sergey Kiriyenko has been tapped to resolve the solve the problem within two or three years.

But Kiriyenko Sr. reportedly did not embrace the recruitment of his son for this assignment. According to Meduza’s own source with ties to the Putin administration, Sergey Kiriyenko wanted his son to remain at Rostelecom, earning “good money” and doing “substantive work” — all “without any politics.”

The source also noted, however, that Kiriyenko Jr. may have been relieved to get away from Rostelecom in light of a police raid on the company’s offices in the spring of 2021. “Who knows what they’ll dig up in the end?” Meduza’s source reasoned.

Kiriyenko Jr. has always been known as an extremely careful manager and not the easiest colleague, recalls a source who works for one of Rostelecom’s partner companies. “He always seemed to be afraid. He was never decisive when it came to doing mundane things, like signing off on internal strategy documents and giving comments for press releases, fearing the questions he might be asked later.” Meduza’s source summed Kiriyenko up as “neither fish nor fowl.”

“He was annoyingly meticulous,” a source at Rostelecom told Forbes Russia. “He’s not the type to listen to a positive answer and be satisfied. He always remembers the details and is keen to question whatever isn’t going as well.”

Another Rostelecom subcontractor described Vladimir Kiriyenko in the following terms: “People who grew up in powerful families can end up weird. But Kiriyenko Jr. gives off the impression of an intelligent and calm person. He understands finance and business and is a respectful communicator. He doesn’t offend anyone.”

In bad news for US cloud services, Austrian website’s use of Google Analytics found to breach GDPR

Natasha Lomas@riptari •January 12, 2022

Image Credits: Thomas Trutschel / Getty Images

A decision by Austria’s data protection watchdog upholding a complaint against a website related to its use of Google Analytics does not bode well for use of US cloud services in Europe.

The decision raises a big red flag over routine use of tools that require transferring Europeans’ personal data to the US for processing — with the watchdog finding that IP address and identifiers in cookie data are the personal data of site visitors, meaning these transfers fall under the purview of EU data protection law.

In this specific case, an IP address “anonymization” function had not been properly implemented on the website. But, regardless of that technical wrinkle, the regulator found IP address data to be personal data given the potential for it to be combined — like a “puzzle piece” — with other digital data to identify a visitor.

Consequently the Austrian DPA found that the website in question — a health focused site called netdoktor.at, which had been exporting visitors’ data to the US as a result of implementing Google Analytics — had violated Chapter V of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which deals with data transfers out of the bloc.

“US intelligence services use certain online identifiers (such as the IP address or unique identification numbers) as a starting point for the surveillance of individuals,” the regulator notes in the decision [via a machine translation of the German language text], adding: “In particular, it cannot be excluded that these intelligence services have already collected information with the help of which the data transmitted here can be traced back to the person of the complainant.”

In reaching its conclusion, the regulator assessed various measures Google said it had implemented to protect the data in the US — such as encryption at rest in its data centers; or its claim that the data “must be considered as pseudonymous” — but did not find sufficient safeguards had been put in place to effectively block US intelligence services from accessing the data, as required to meet the GDPR’s standard.

“As long as the second respondent himself [i.e. Google] has the possibility to access data in plain text, the technical measures invoked cannot be considered effective in the sense of the above considerations,” it notes at one point, dismissing the type of encryption used as inadequate protection.

Austria’s regulator also quotes earlier guidance from German DPAs to back up its dismissal of Google’s “pseudonymous” claim — noting that this states:

” …the use of IP addresses, cookie IDs, advertising IDs, unique user IDs or other identifiers to (re)identify users do not constitute appropriate safeguards to comply with data protection principles or to safeguard the rights of data subjects. This is because, unlike in cases where data is pseudonymised in order to disguise or delete the identifying data so that the data subjects can no longer be addressed, IDs or identifiers are used to make the individuals distinguishable and addressable. Consequently, there is no protective effect. They are therefore not pseudonymisations within the meaning of Recital 28, which reduce the risks for the data subjects and assist data controllers and processors in complying with their data protection obligations.”

The DPA’s wholesale dismissal of any legally relevant impact of the bundle of aforementioned “Technical and Organizational Measures” (such as standard encryption) — which were cited by Google to try to fend off the complaint — is significant because such claims are the prevailing tactic used by US-based cloud giants to try to massage compliance and ensure EU-to-US data transfers continue so they can continue business as usual.

So if this tactic is getting called out here, as a result of a single website’s use of Google Analytics, it can and will be sanctioned by EU regulators elsewhere. After all, Google Analytics is everywhere online.

(See also the extensive list of extremely standard measures cited by Facebook in an internal assessment of its EU-to-US data transfers’ — in which it too tries to claim ‘compliance’ with EU law, per an earlier document reveal.)

The complaint back story here is that back in August 2020 European privacy campaign group noyb filed a full 101 complaints with DPAs across the bloc targeting websites with regional operators that it had identified as sending data to the US via Google Analytics and/or Facebook Connect integrations.

Use of such analytics tools may seem intensely normal but — legally speaking, in the EU — it’s anything but because EU-to-US transfers of personal data have been clouded in legal uncertainty for years.

The underlying conflict boils down to a clash between European privacy rights and US surveillance law — as the latter affords foreigners zero rights over how their data is scooped up and snooped on, nor any route to legal redress for whatever happens to their information when it’s in the US, making it extremely difficult for exported EU data to get the necessary standard of “essentially equivalent” protection that it gets at home when it’s abroad.

To radically simplify: EU law says European levels of protection must travel with data. While US law says ‘we’re taking your data; we’re not telling you what we’re doing; and you can’t do anything about it anyway, sucker!’.

US cloud providers that are subject to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) are all in the frame — which takes in a broad sweep of tech giants, including Google and Facebook, since this law applies broadly to “electronic communications services”.

While Executive Order 12,333, a Reagan era mandate that’s also relevant as it also expanded intelligence agency powers to acquire data, is thought to target vulnerabilities in telecoms infrastructure.

The EU-US legal clash between privacy and surveillance dates back almost a decade at this point.

It was catalyized by the 2013 Snowden disclosures which revealed the extent of US government mass surveillance programs — and led, back in 2015, to the EU’s Court of Justice to invalidate the Safe Harbor arrangement between the bloc and the US on the grounds that EU data could no longer be considered safe when it went over the pond.

And whereas Safe Harbor had stood for around 15 years, its hastily agreed replacement — the EU-US Privacy Shield — lasted just four. So the lifespan of commercially minded European Commission decisions seeking to grease transatlantic data flows in spite of the massive privacy risks has been shrinking radically.

Some complaints about risky EU-to-US data transfers also date back almost a decade at this point. But there’s fresh enforcement energy in the air since a landmark ruling by the CJEU in July 2020 — which struck down the Commission’s reupped data transfer arrangement (Privacy Shield), which — since 2016 — had been relied upon by thousands of companies to rubberstamp their US transfers.

The court did not outlaw personal data transfers to so-called third countries entirely. Which is why these data flows didn’t cease overnight smack bang in the middle of 2020.

However it clarified that such data flows must be assessed on a case by case basis for risks. And it made it clear that DPAs could not just turn a blind eye to compliance — hi Ireland! — rather they must proactively step in and suspend transfers in cases where they believe data is flowing to a risky location like the US.

In a much watched for follow-on interpretation of the court ruling, the European Data Protection Board’s (EDPB) guidance confirmed that personal data transfers out of the EU may still be possible — if a set of narrow circumstances and/or conditions apply. Such as the data can be genuinely anonymized so that it is truly no longer personal data.

Or if you can apply a suite of supplementary measures (such as technical stuff like applying robust end-to-end encryption — meaning there’s zero access to decrypted data possible by a US entity) — in order to raise the level of legal protection.

The problem for adtech firms like Google and Facebook is that their business models are all about accessing people’s data. So it’s not clear how such data-mining giants could apply supplementary measures that radically limit their own access to this core business data without a radical change of model. Or, well, federating their services — and localizing European data and processing in the EU.

The Austrian DPA decision makes it clear that Google’s current package of measures, related to how it operates Google Analytics, is not adequate because it does not remove the risk of surveillance agencies accessing people’s data.

The decision puts heavy underscoring on the need for any such supplementary measures to actually enhance standard provisions if they’re to do anything at all for your chances of compliance.

Supplementary of course means extra. tl;dr you can’t pass off totally standard security processes, procedures, policies, protocols and measures as some kind of special Schrems II-busting legal magic, no matter how much you might want to.

(A quick comparable scenario that might hammer home the point: One can’t — legally speaking — hold a party during a pandemic if lockdown rules ban social gatherings simply by branding a ‘bring your own bottle’ garden soirée as a work event. Not even if you’re the prime minister of the UK. At least not if you want to remain in post for long, anyway… )

It’s fair to say that the the tech industry response to the Schrems II ruling has been a massive, collective putting of heads into sand. Or, as the eponymous Max Schrems himself, honorary chair of noyb, puts it in a statement: “Instead of adapting services to be GDPR compliant, US companies have tried to simply add some text to their privacy policies and ignore the Court of Justice. Many EU companies have followed the lead instead of switching to legal options.”

This charade has been possible because — to date — there hasn’t been much regulatory renforcement following the July 2020 ruling.

Despite the European Data Protection Board warning immediately that there would be no grace period for coming into compliance.

To the untrained eye that might suggest the industry’s collective strategy — of ignoring the legal nightmare wrapping EU-to-US transfers in the hopes the problem would just go away — has been working.

But, as the Austria decision indicates, regulatory gears are grinding towards a bunch of rude awakenings.

The European Commission — which remains eager for a replacement to the EU-US Privacy Shield — has also warned there will be no quick fix this time around, suggesting major reforms of US surveillance law are required to bridge the legal divide. (Although negotiations between the Commission and the US on a replacement data transfer agreement are continuing.)

In the meanwhile Schrems II enforcements are starting to flow — and orders to cease US data flows may soon follow.

In another sign of enforcement ramping up, the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) — just this week — upheld a complaint against the European Parliament over US data transfers involving use of Google Analytics and Stripe.

The EDPS’ decision reprimands the parliament and also orders it to fix outstanding issues within one month.

The other 101 complaints noyb filed back in 2020 are also still awaiting decisions. And as Schrems notes EU DPAs have been coordinating their response to the data transfer issue. So there’s likely to be a pipeline of enforcements striking at usage of US cloud services in the coming months. And, well, a lot of sand falling out of eyes.

Here’s Schrems on the Austria DPA’s reasoning again: “This is a very detailed and sound decision. The bottom line is: Companies can’t use US cloud services in Europe anymore. It has now been 1.5 years since the Court of Justice confirmed this a second time, so it is more than time that the law is also enforced.”

“We expect similar decisions to now drop gradually in most EU member states,” he adds, further noting that Member State authorities have been coordinating their response to the flotilla of complaints (the EDPB announced a taskforce on the issue last fall).

“In the long run we either need proper protections in the US, or we will end up with separate products for the US and the EU,” Schrems also said, adding: “I would personally prefer better protections in the US, but this is up to the US legislator — not to anyone in Europe.”

While netdoktor has been found to have violated the GDPR, it’s not clear whether it will face a penalty as yet.

It may also seek to appeal the Austrian DPA’s decision.

The company has since moved its HQ to Germany, which complicates the regulatory jurisdiction component of this process — and means it may face additional enforcement, such as an order banning transfers, in a follow on action by a German regulator.

There is another notable element of the decision that has gone Google’s way — for now.

While the regulator upheld the complaint against netdoktor it did not find against Google’s US business for receiving/processing the data — deciding that the rules on data transfers only apply to EU entities and not to the US recipients.

That bit of the decision is a disappointment to noyb which is considering whether to appeal — with Schrems arguing: “It is crucial that the US providers cannot just shift the problem to EU customers.”

noyb further flags that Google may still face some pending sanction, however, as the Austria DPA has said it will investigate further in relation to potential violations of Article 5, 28 and 29 GDPR (related to whether Google is allowed to provide personal data to the US government without an explicit order by the EU data exporter).

The DPA has said it will issue a separate decision on that. So Google may yet be on the hook for a GDPR breach in Austria.

Penalties under the regulation can scale as high as 4% of a company’s annual global turnover. Although orders to ban data transfers may ultimately prove a lot more costly to certain types of data-mining business models.

To wit: Long time EU privacy watchers will be aware that Facebook’s European business is on penalty time in Ireland over this same EU-US transfers issue. A preliminary order that Facebook suspend transfers was issued by Ireland in fall 2020 — triggering legal action from the social media giant to try to block the order.

Facebook’s court challenge failed but a final decision remains pending from the Irish regulator — which promised noyb a swift resolution of the vintage complaint a full year ago. So the clock really is ticking on that data transfer complaint. And someone should phone Meta’s chief spin doctor, Nick Clegg, to ask if he’s ready to pull the plug on Facebook’s European service yet?