Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. CUPE suppresses Air Canada flight attendants strike in late-night backroom deal
The Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) announced in the early hours of Tuesday morning that it had reached a tentative agreement with Air Canada to shut down the strike by 10,000 flight attendants at Air Canada and its subsidiary Air Canada Rouge. The strike, which erupted last Saturday, was the first national walkout by the cabin crew at the country’s largest carrier in 40 years and had quickly paralyzed its operations worldwide. It was waged in opposition to the Liberal government’s attempt to suppress the strike using the anti-democratic powers contained in the Canada Labour Code.
CUPE’s shutting down of the strike without giving workers any clue as to what is in the tentative agreement and without a vote marks a clear betrayal. It comes after flight attendants, in a courageous stand, had openly defied the Liberal government’s invocation of Section 107 of the Canada Labour Code—a provision recently “reinterpreted” to allow the state to unilaterally declare strikes illegal and impose binding arbitration.
Less than 12 hours after the strike began, Jobs Minister Patty Hajdu invoked Section 107 to criminalize the walkout. For more than two days, the workers continued their action in defiance of the strikebreaking initiative, throwing the government of Prime Minister Mark Carney into a deep political crisis.
The Air Canada strikers’ defiance of Section 107 was unprecedented since the previous Liberal government under Justin Trudeau innovated its use to shut down strikes without having to pass back-to-work legislation through parliament. The Liberal government used Section 107 to target workers in a number of key economic sectors, including on the rails, docks and at Canada Post. Each time, the respective union or unions collaborated in enforcing the back-to-work order.
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CUPE’s cutting a deal in the dark of night to restart operations was not a victory but an act of sabotage aimed at saving the government, Air Canada and the entire corporate establishment from a movement that threatened to spiral out of their control and mobilize broader sections of the working class who face the same exploitative working conditions and declining living standards as flight attendants.
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What the flight attendants’ bold defiance proved is that the working class is no longer willing to quietly accept the abolition of the right to strike, and the imposition of a dictatorship in the workplace where workers’ terms of employment are determined by binding arbitration.
The strike revealed the immense power of the working class. With Air Canada responsible for more than half the nation’s passenger capacity, the walkout disrupted thousands of flights and threatened to ripple across the global airline industry. The government and corporate elite were compelled to intervene not from a position of strength but out of fear that the strike would ignite a broader movement.
CUPE’s betrayal was therefore not just a retreat imposed on the rank and file but a calculated political maneuver to staunch a developing class confrontation, and allow the ruling class to regroup and press forward with the evisceration of workers’ democratic and social rights.
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The betrayal of the flight attendants cannot be understood apart from the broader political orientation of the union bureaucracy. CUPE and the CLC are central partners of the Liberal government in promoting a foul campaign of economic nationalism, urging workers to rally behind “Team Canada” in trade conflicts with Washington and Beijing.
This nationalism serves to tie the working class to Canadian imperialism’s global ambitions. Carney has pledged tens of billions in increased military spending over the coming decade, and is expanding Canadian participation in US-led military operations, including Trump’s proposed Golden Dome missile shield, in hopes of securing Canadian imperialism’s place in a renewed North American economic and military bloc.
The unions’ role is to smother opposition at home while whipping up nationalism to divide workers and justify austerity. Just as the United Auto Workers in the U.S. has embraced Trump’s “America First” tariffs and militarism, Canadian unions have rallied behind Carney in the name of “defending jobs” and “protecting communities.” In reality, they are defending the profits of Canadian corporations and the geopolitical interests of the Canadian ruling class.
In conversations with World Socialist Web Site reporters Monday, Air Canada workers emphasized their determination to fight and explained how the issues they were fighting for are questions of burning relevance to all workers. It was precisely because of the potential for the strike to become the catalyst for a much broader movement against ruthless exploitation, capitalist austerity and state strikebreaking that the CUPE bureaucracy, backed by Unifor and the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC), did all it could to shut it down as quickly as possible.
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Workers were eager to discuss the broader political context within which the strike took place, including the Canadian ruling class’s turn to policies of war and support for Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians. After a WSWS reporter explained that all of the established parties defend the capitalist profit system and the interests of the bosses against the workers, one worker among a group of three listening responded, “All of them are responsible for what’s going on in Gaza.”
The Wall Street Journal recently published a revealing article painting a clear and concerning picture: America’s economic and geographic mobility has significantly stalled. Families are trapped in homes that do not suit their needs and young workers face uphill battles launching their careers—hampering fairness, growth and productivity.
The combination of housing market rigidity, job inflexibility and broader demographic trends is creating a “mobility freeze,” undermining the economic dynamism that has long been a hallmark of the US. In a word, the “American Dream” is a dead letter.
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According to the Journal, the share of Americans moving upward each year has collapsed from roughly 20 percent in the mid-20th century to 7.8 percent today. Job-switching rates have also fallen sharply. This is not merely an indicator of social inertia but a measure of how the capitalist system now functions to physically immobilize the working class, locking workers into low-paying jobs and unaffordable housing and stripping them of the ability to improve their living conditions.
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The end of World War II saw a period of high geographic and job mobility. Millions of workers moved to new industrial centers, supported by rising wages, the expansion of manufacturing and federally subsidized housing construction. This “dynamism” rested on the unchallenged economic dominance of the United States, the destruction of its rivals in the war and the readiness of the ruling class to make limited concessions to stave off social unrest.
That period ended in the mid-1970s. The global crisis of profitability, stagflation and the end of the Bretton Woods system marked the beginning of a sustained assault on the living standards of the working class. Deindustrialization hollowed out entire cities, from Detroit to Pittsburgh, while Reagan’s unionbusting, tax cuts for the wealthy and deregulation set the template for every administration that followed.
Since then, housing and labor mobility have steadily contracted. The 2008 financial crash—triggered by Wall Street’s orgy of speculation in mortgage-backed securities—destroyed millions of jobs and homes, but it also accelerated the transformation of housing into a speculative asset category dominated by banks and private equity firms. Entire swaths of the housing stock have been converted into instruments for rent extraction, with corporate landlords squeezing tenants for maximum profit.
The Journal notes that even with the 30-year fixed mortgage rate falling to 6.58 percent as of mid-August—its lowest point of 2025—home sales remain near their lowest level in nearly three decades. For millions of working people, the idea of home ownership is now completely unattainable. Workers who purchased homes before the rise in interest rates remain trapped by “golden handcuffs” of comparatively low mortgage payments, unable to sell without incurring massive increases in monthly costs.
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Instead of housing being a basic human need, it is an investment vehicle for the wealthy. Workers pay rent and mortgages that funnel money upward to landlords, banks and investors. Rising costs mean more of workers’ income is siphoned off into the pockets of the financial elite.
Housing is not simply a commodity under capitalism—It is a financial asset and a tool for disciplining the labor force. Over decades, the speculative inflation of home values, the monopolization of land by real estate conglomerates and private equity and the starvation of public housing have created a permanent housing crisis. The resulting immobility forces workers to accept whatever wages and working conditions are offered locally.
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An aspect the Journal fails to report is that about one in six adult workers (16 percent) in the United States say they stay in jobs they might otherwise leave because they fear losing employer-sponsored health insurance. Households earning less than $48,000 a year are nearly three times as likely to stay in an unwanted job for the health benefits.
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The Journal treats this paralysis as a technical economic challenge to be “fixed” through policy tweaks. In reality, it is the product of deliberate bipartisan policy. For decades, Democrats and Republicans alike have presided over the deregulation of the housing market, the gutting of labor protections, the destruction of public housing and the transformation of urban centers into playgrounds for the wealthy.
Democrats in cities like Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco have presided over policies that encourage speculation and luxury development while pushing working class residents into homelessness or exile in distant suburbs. Republicans have been equally ruthless, attacking public services, blocking rent controls and promoting corporate tax cuts that starve local budgets.
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Programs touted as solutions—cash incentives to move to rural towns, subsidies for remote work relocation, token investments in “affordable” housing—are designed to create the illusion of action while leaving the underlying profit system untouched. These initiatives invariably collapse under the weight of the same forces that produced the crisis: speculative real estate, corporate domination of labor markets and the absence of genuine public investment.
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The same social order that has presided over declining life expectancy, surging inequality, the rise of fascism and endless war has now stripped workers of the ability to pursue a better life. Without the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of a workers’ government, the paralysis now gripping American society will deepen and with it the suffering of millions.
4. White House summit exposes deep rift within NATO
There is no historical parallel for the summit meeting that took place in Washington on Monday. With only 24 hours’ notice, the heads of government of the four economically strongest European countries, the head of the European Union (EU) Commission and the Secretary General of NATO traveled to the American capital to support Ukrainian President Zelensky in his meeting with US President Trump.
Such a gathering of high-ranking politicians is usually only seen at state funerals, excepting regular summit meetings that are prepared months in advance. The meeting in Washington may indeed be the prelude to a funeral: the funeral of NATO, which has shaped transatlantic relations for 76 years.
The bizarre façade of the meeting—the adulation and gestures of humility towards Trump, the Europeans’ desperate efforts to present a united front, the assurances that they were in agreement and only wanted peace—concealed the deep cracks in the NATO alliance. In fact, the differences have never been so sharp.
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The European imperialist powers are still too weak militarily to continue the war against Russia without US support. Ukraine, itself has recently suffered heavy territorial losses, is battling from a shortage of soldiers, and public sentiment is shifting. According to a recent Gallup poll, 69 percent of Ukrainians are in favor of a quick negotiated peace, while only 24 percent want to continue fighting. Three years ago, the ratio was reversed.
Under these circumstances, the European powers are trying to influence Trump, whose policy is also controversial in the US, in their favor. The trip to Washington served this purpose. If they fail to prevent Trump from withdrawing from the war, then Ukraine should at least be turned into a heavily armed fortress that maintains pressure on Russia.
However, the meeting did not result in an agreement. The European leaders considered it a success that there was no scandal and that they were not thrown out of the White House, as Zelensky was six months ago. “It could have turned out very differently,” German Chancellor Friedrich Merz commented afterwards.
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Trump has already rejected Ukraine’s admission to NATO. A mutual defense clause for Ukraine, similar to the one NATO countries grant each other under Article 5, is under discussion. However, it would be of little value unless backed up by military force.
French President Macron and British Prime Minister Starmer have long been advocating the deployment of a Western “peacekeeping force” in Ukraine to deter Russia. Macron repeated this to the BBC after the meeting in Washington: “We will need to help Ukraine with boots on the ground.”
However, neither France nor the UK can mobilise easily the many thousands of soldiers that would be needed for a robust force. Chancellor Merz has indicated for the first time that the German Armed Forces could also participate. But it also lacks resources, and the opposition to such plans is enormous.
The US rejects the deployment of its own troops in Ukraine. President Trump confirmed this once again on Fox News after the meeting in Washington. Neither the US nor NATO would participate in a force, he said. If there were to be one, it would have to come from the European countries.
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It is hard to imagine that Russia will accept the deployment of Western troops on Ukrainian soil in any form, given that NATO’s advance eastwards was the reason for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The demand for “boots on the ground” therefore serves also to sabotage a negotiated solution and continue the war. Macron confirmed this when he told NBC that reports that Ukraine was losing the war were “total fake news.”
Another proposal for how Ukraine could obtain “security guarantees” from the US came from Kiev. The Ukrainian government has proposed to purchase US weapons worth $100 billion in return and to produce drones worth $50 billion jointly with the US. Europe is to pay for the arms deal. The proposal was made in a document prepared for the Washington summit, quoted by the Financial Times.
For the European powers, this would mean paying for a Pax Americana that excludes them and undermines their efforts to develop their own arms industry.
The working class must not support either side in this conflict. A deal between Trump and Putin would not be a step toward “peace” but rather a further escalation toward a third world war, directed primarily against China and also being pushed forward in the Middle East. For their part, the Europeans are determined to continue the war against Russia in Ukraine, which has already claimed hundreds of thousands of victims and threatens to escalate into a direct confrontation with the nuclear-armed power Russia.
5. The stock market fever chart
One of the questions being asked in financial media circles is how, under conditions of rising geo-political and geo-economic turmoil, the US stock market is able to continue its surge, reaching record highs on a regular basis.
As long-time columnist John Plender of the Financial Times noted recently: “The behavior of equity markets over the course of this extraordinary year has come close to matching the dictionary definition of levitation. The Trump trade war, spiraling fiscal deficits and public debt, pervasive geopolitical risk, the radical dismantling of the postwar international order, declining global growth prospects—all have failed to hold back the magical rebound after investors’ initial panic over Donald Trump’s erratic on-off tariff tantrums.”
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Usually in times of turbulence there is a move into US financial assets, in particular Treasury bonds, in the search for a safe haven. In this case, however, the reverse happened. Treasury bonds, supposedly the safest asset in the world, were sold off, causing a spike in interest rates. Contrary to previous experience, the US dollar was sold off in international currency markets.
Questions were raised about its viability as the basis of the global monetary system as the theme in financial markets became “sell America,” sending Wall Street down.
But since April 8, the nadir of the Wall Street fall, the S&P 500 index has risen 29 percent in just four months and is now 5 percent above the previous market high in February. Market sentiment, according to Morgan Stanley, has reversed “from uncertainty and fear to bullish optimism, and the economic outlook from recession to a disinflationary capital-spending boom.”
However, the surge, which suffered a blow yesterday when tech and AI stocks fell, is lopsided in the extreme. It is dominated by tech stocks with the earnings of the so-called “Magnificent Seven” growing at an annual rate of 26 percent while they have barely increased for the other 493 in the index.
The extremely unbalanced character of the boom is further highlighted by data on the 10 largest stocks by market capitalization in the S&P 500. They are dominated by tech firms led by chip business Nvidia, the first company whose market value went over $4 trillion, and include Microsoft, Alphabet, Apple, Amazon, Tesla, Meta, Broadcom, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase.
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The assets of major companies in the S&P in the past were physical assets, such as factories, equipment and inventories. But today, according to an article by FT columnist Tej Parikh, “around 90 percent of their assets are intangible, ranging from intellectual property, brand value and networks, to code, content talent and knowledge.
In the US, he noted, investment in intangible assets passed tangible investments as a share of GDP in the late 1990s, and the gap has widened ever since. “For all intents and purposes, the US has become an intangibles driven economy.” That may be something of an overstatement, but it points to significant changes.
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FOMO (fear of missing out) is a motive force. A company’s shares rise not because of the intrinsic value of its product but because more money is flowing into the markets to buy its shares, giving the market the appearance of a Ponzi scheme.
There are also significant changes in the financing of corporations which are having an impact on share prices. Major corporations are increasingly relying on debt and leverage, rather than raising money through new share issues.
Here they have benefited from the operations of central banks, led by the US Federal Reserve, pumping trillions of dollars into the financial system in response to its deepening crises, starting with the crash of 2008.
This was followed by the crisis of March 2020 when the US Treasury market, the basis of the global financial system and supposedly the safest in the world, froze.
Its collapse was only prevented by the injection of still more money by the Fed coupled with government bailouts. But no sooner had this crisis passed than another erupted with the run on Silicon Valley Bank and First Republic in March 2023, when interest rates rose and devalued the Treasury bonds they were holding. This required the Fed and other government authorities to step in to organize a bailout not only of the banks involved but also with an implicit guarantee to all the others.
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“Too big to fail is enshrined. But small companies get bailed out too, and their creditors. Industrial companies, not just financial companies, are protected. Too leveraged to fail might be the summary of our new regime. But our authorities subsidize leverage, with tax deductions and preferences for debt. As a result, there is every incentive to take risk, to borrow and to lend, with confidence that the government will backstop debt, prop up prices and keep companies afloat should any serious crisis develop.”
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Another factor in the share market boom—above all in major stocks—demonstrating its essentially parasitic character, is the expansion of share buybacks.
Up until 1982 this practice was illegal as it was deemed to be market manipulation. But since the law was changed under the Reagan administration, at the start of the financialization of the American economy, it has become standard operating procedure.
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More than $1 trillion is being outlaid this year, with more to come in the future, not to finance new investment or productive capacity and expand employment, let alone to tackle the myriad social and economic problems confronting US society.
It is being used entirely to boost the assets of the ultra-wealthy, including the CEOs and financial officers of major corporations and banks who receive bonuses, running into the tens, sometime hundreds of millions of dollars, based on the rise of the stock price of the companies they head.
The stock market boom, hailed by Trump and many others as an expression of the health of the US capitalist economy, is in fact a fever chart of its diseased character and the harbinger of yet another financial crisis.
6. New Zealand government “considering” recognition of Palestine, as it continues to back Gaza genocide
New Zealand’s right-wing coalition government announced last week that it is “considering” formally recognizing the state of Palestine at next month’s United Nations General Assembly meeting.
The Australian, British, Canadian and French governments have already indicated that they are prepared to recognize Palestine as a state, in a cynical attempt to divert attention from their continued backing of the Israeli regime’s genocide in Gaza.
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The destruction of Gaza and the mass murder of the Palestinian people is inseparable from the imperialist drive to dominate the Middle East, Eastern Europe and Asia—in fact, to re-colonize the entire world—at the expense of Russia and China. That is why the genocide will not by ended by creating a Palestinian state, whose population will remain entirely at the mercy of the Zionist regime and its imperialist backers.
The developing Third World War will only be stopped by mobilizing the working class against its source: the capitalist system. A consciously socialist movement against war and austerity must be built—including mass strikes to shut down the production and supply of weapons and the financing of war.
7. Australia: Writers boycott Bendigo Writers Festival over pro-Zionist “code of conduct”
Scores of writers scheduled to appear at the Bendigo Writers Festival boycotted the annual literary event last weekend in a powerful protest against the last-minute imposition of a “code of conduct” on all speakers at the festival.
The unprecedented directive, sent to speakers a day before the popular gathering in the regional city northwest of Melbourne, aimed to stifle all discussion of Israel’s war crimes in Gaza at the festival.
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More than 200 Australian authors signed a statement by Readers and Writers Against the Genocide, expressing solidarity with the boycott and condemning the code as “a blueprint for self-censorship and silencing dissent.”
Twenty-one of the 71 scheduled events, including the opening and closing galas, were formally cancelled and eight of La Trobe’s nine sessions dropped. Even as sessions collapsed, the festival’s website continued to display names and images of writers who had withdrawn, while disabling all comments and automatically processing refunds.
Faced with the festival’s collapse, officials responded with lies and doublespeak, refusing to acknowledge the coordinated pro-Zionist lobbying that led to the censorship of participating writers and the resulting crisis.
8. Australian university and high school students strike against the Gaza genocide
Students from universities and high schools around Australia struck earlier this month in opposition to the Israeli genocide in Gaza and the complicity of the Australian Labor government of Anthony Albanese.
While the strikes, held on August 7, were not as numerous as the first ones held in November 2023, hundreds of students walked out of class in Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra, Perth, Adelaide, Brisbane and Wollongong. The largest demonstration was in Melbourne, where around 500 students rallied outside the State Library and marched through the city.
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The International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) went to the strikes to advance a revolutionary socialist perspective. We warned that appealing to governments responsible for the genocide to change course was a dead-end that would only facilitate the completion of the genocide.
We raised the need to campaign within the working class for industrial actions, including strikes, that would cripple the Israeli war machine, in opposition to the corporatized union leaderships that have blocked such a struggle. And we insisted that this must be part of the fight to build an international and socialist anti-war movement.
9. Australian university union admits to over 3,500 job cuts
For the first time, the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) leadership last week publicly acknowledged something of the scale of the job losses being inflicted on university workers across Australia.
“Cost-cutting universities are sacking 3,578 staff nationally, new data reveals,” the Australian newspaper reported last Friday, based on comments made to it by NTEU national president Alison Barnes. The job cuts since last year were across 18 universities.
The article stated that the union “estimates 1,114 looming cuts at the Australian National University, 400 at both Western Sydney University and the University of Technology Sydney, 272 at the University of Southern Queensland, 276 at the University of Wollongong and 200 at the University of Canberra.”
This is only a partial list. As previously reported by the World Socialist Web Site, the job destruction list also includes Sydney’s Macquarie University, Charles Sturt University and the universities of Newcastle, Tasmania, Charles Darwin, Federation, James Cook, Griffith, La Trobe and Swinburne.
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These retrenchments are first and foremost a direct result of the Albanese government’s reactionary cuts to enrollments by overseas students. Their exorbitant fees have helped prop up the chronically-underfunded universities for the past decade and a half since the Rudd-Gillard Labor government’s funding cuts and market-driven “education revolution.”
The Labor government is deliberately applying financial pressure to the universities, in order to align them with the “national priorities” set out in last year’s Universities Accord report. That report insisted that both teaching and research must focus on serving the needs of the corporate elite, as well as the development of a war economy, including the AUKUS military pact and military-related industries, in preparation for a US-led war against China.
Indiana Kroger workers are being forced to vote this week on a third tentative agreement (TA) pushed by the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 700, after overwhelmingly rejecting two previous contracts. Workers voted down the first TA in May by 74 percent and rejected the second in July, though the union refused to release the vote totals.
The UFCW bureaucracy is moving aggressively to block a strike, despite widespread support for one among the rank and file. “I thought we were going to strike,” one worker told a World Socialist Web Site reporter as she headed into her shift.
The contract is part of a nationwide campaign of sabotage being waged by the UFCW bureaucracy. Around 100,000 grocery workers in the UFCW have had contracts expire over the course of the year, but the bureaucracy is deliberately working to isolate workers from different regions and chains, and block a nationwide movement. It follows sellouts in Colorado and California, and other parts of the US.
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The UFCW’s deal makes only cosmetic changes from the earlier proposals workers rejected. It offers a wage increase of $2.75 for team leaders and store clerks, broken up into three tiers, starting from $16.05 to $20.35, with $0.90 added in the final year of the contract.
New hires face a 12-month waiting period and only advance to the second tier if they average more than 30 hours per week, while advancement to tier three requires averaging 36 hours. Utility clerks are capped at $14.75 by the end of the deal—well below the estimated $32,000 minimum annual cost of living in Indiana. Pharmacy technicians remain trapped under $23 an hour even at the highest levels.
The previous TA included a $250 gift card, which has now been removed. Instead, raises are backdated to June 1. A veteran worker explained: “The only thing they did was take back the $250 gift card and, to try and push it through, make the wage increases retroactive to June 1. So, if you are getting $.50 raise, this means on a 40-hour week, you would get 40 x $.50 x 12 weeks = $240. For those getting a $.25 raise, it’s $120 and those getting a $.75 raise, it’s $360.”
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While grocery workers at Safeway, Stater Bros. and King Soopers have also expressed support for strike action, the UFCW has systematically shut down or betrayed struggles, forcing through similar sellout agreements.
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Workers must form independent rank-and-file strike committees in every store to:
Kick out the bargaining committee and replace it with militant workers elected from the shop floor. Negotiations must be livestreamed and reported daily to the membership.
Hold emergency meetings to prepare strike action, based on the principle of “no contract, no work.”
These committees must be independent of all factions of the UFCW bureaucracy, including appendages like the Essential Workers for Democracy caucus, which are seeking to channel opposition back into the Democratic Party.
The task facing Indiana Kroger workers is to link up their struggle with grocery and retail workers across the country. By taking control of the fight into their own hands, workers can begin the national counteroffensive needed to secure livable wages, secure jobs and dignity at work.
11. Thousands of Sri Lankan postal workers remain on strike, defying government threats
Around 17,000 Sri Lankan postal workers are continuing indefinite strike action they began on Sunday over 19 demands. The nationwide walkout which involves all ranks, apart from sub-postmasters, has virtually paralyzed the country’s postal services.
The striking postal workers are demanding resolution to various issues, including overtime payments, permanency for all employees in acting, substitute and labor positions, the prompt filling of all vacancies, promotions and outstanding issues in the postal transport section. They also want three wage increments for first-class officers and the removal of fingerprint machines for recording the arrival and departure of workers.
Yesterday, more than 600 striking postal workers protested outside the Central Mail Exchange in Colombo and then marched to the Presidential Secretariat where union officials presented a letter to President Dissanayake calling on him to resolve the dispute.
The strike is part of a growing wave of industrial action and the radicalization of workers in Sri Lanka and around the world against attacks on their social and democratic rights.
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The current postal workers’ strike is the fourth this year, following two-day token strikes in March and May and an overtime strike on July 15–16. These strikes were shut down following false promises of a resolution by government and postal department authorities.
The union leaderships have done the same thing with this week’s letter to President Dissanayake, appealing to him to intervene and resolve the dispute. However Dissanayake and his right-wing capitalist government, which is completely committed to the International Monetary Fund’s austerity measures, will not change course.
The postal workers should place no confidence in the trade union leaders, who, just as they have done in the past, will betray their struggle at the first opportunity.
12. Far right regaining power in Bolivia after collapse of Movement Toward Socialism (MAS)
The first round of Bolivia’s presidential elections Sunday resulted in the electoral collapse of the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) party which first came to power 20 years ago under former President Evo Morales.
Rodrigo Paz Pereira of the Christian Democratic Party, son of former President Jaime Paz Zamora, led the vote count with 30.81 percent over former President Jorge Quiroga Ramirez, who received 28.81 percent and whose Libre coalition represents the traditional right.
The favorite in pre-election polls, far-right businessman Samuel Doria Medina, finished third with 19.86 percent, followed by Morales’s former ally and Senate President Andrónico Rodríguez Ledezma with 8.22 percent, running as an independent.
Following a years-long and violent faction fight between Morales and acting President Luis Arce, the ruling MAS barely topped the 3 percent needed to maintain its electoral party status.
This outcome marks not the “rejection of socialism,” as the corporate media predictably claims, but a damning indictment of the Movement Toward Socialism of Morales and Arce and the entire political establishment. The numbers speak for themselves: fully 36.33 percent, the largest share of the ballots, were either not cast at all or were deliberately spoiled.
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The results of the Bolivian election prove once again that bourgeois nationalism offers no way forward for the working class and only serves to disarm workers’ struggles, opening political space for the right.
The spoiled ballots and abstentions reveal deep hostility to the entire capitalist political establishment. But without independent organization and internationalist, socialist leadership—a Bolivian section of the International Committee of the Fourth International—workers will suffer fascistic and imperialist-backed reaction that will eclipse that of 2019, the early 2000s and 1970s.
13. Romanian farmworker Gheorghe Vranciu dies amid record heat wave in Spain
On August 11, Romanian farmworker Gheorghe Vranciu, 61, collapsed and died while harvesting fruit in an orchard in Alcarràs, Catalonia. Vranciu died amid one of Spain’s fiercest heat waves in years, with temperatures climbing above 40°C (104°F) and peaking at 43.8°C (111°F). His death, officially attributed to “acute cardiorespiratory failure”, exposes the brutal working conditions facing agricultural laborers, many of them migrants, as heat waves surge due to climate change.
The circumstances surrounding his death are damning. Several companies in the area had already suspended activity that day, following occupational risk prevention services’ calls on employers to halt work due to the extreme heat. Spanish labor regulations require companies to suspend or adapt outdoor work whenever Meteocat, the Catalan Meteorological Service, or Aemet, Spain’s national weather agency, issue an orange or red alert, unless employers can reorganize operations and eliminate heat risks.
Yet Vranciu was kept in the fields. Around midday, he reported feeling ill and asked his supervisor to be taken home. Instead, he was told to rest under a tree. For nearly three hours, he lay suffering in the blazing heat. Emergency services were not contacted until 16:00. By the time paramedics arrived, he was beyond help. Gheorghe Vranciu died under a tree, alone. His death is not an accident, but a social crime.
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Vranciu’s death is part of a growing toll of preventable, work-related heat fatalities. It is the second confirmed case this summer in Catalonia, after the heat-related death in June of a Barcelona street cleaner. Official labor statistics systematically undercount such deaths, treating them as cardiac events or accidents. In 2024, Spain’s Ministry of Labour registered zero heat-related deaths. Yet the Ministry of Health’s mortality monitoring system estimated 2,012 deaths that summer due to high temperatures; another system estimated over 4,000 in June alone.
This underreporting is a European phenomenon. In 2023, only 21 of the EU’s 27 states even reported statistics on work-related deaths from extreme temperatures. Most claimed there were none. Greece has not reported a single case since 2008, though summer temperatures regularly hit above 40°C. France, which had one of its hottest summers on record in 2022, has acknowledged only one workplace death from heat in 15 years.
This exposes the European bourgeoisie’s long-standing refusal to recognize heat as a workplace hazard. The UN’s World Meteorological Organization estimate that 489,000 people died each year from heat-related causes between 2000 and 2019. Europe accounted for 36 percent of these deaths.
14. German government plans to cut housing costs amid drastically rising rents
The German government is planning a reform of the citizen’s allowance (Bürgergeld) welfare payments, which would cut housing support for the poorest households. In the face of rapidly rising rents, this represents a social catastrophe for a growing number of families.
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Bürgergeld, which is available to people with little or no income, is at the center of the government’s social cuts. It is to be downgraded this year to a kind of “basic social security.” This means that the roughly €40 billion budgeted for 2024 will be drastically reduced. A double-digit billion-euro sum is to be saved through the capping of rental payments for those in need.
Accompanying these plans for a brutal attack on the poorest layers is a foul and deceitful campaign about alleged “luxury rents” for Bürgergeld recipients, spearheaded by CDU circles and right-wing media. For example, North Rhine-Westphalia state Prime Minister Hendrik Wüst (CDU) recently demanded that the state should “no longer pay for very large and very expensive apartments for Bürgergeld recipients.”
In the ARD summer interview, Merz claimed that Bürgergeld recipients in major cities received up to €20 per square meter from the “welfare office” for a 100-square-metre apartment, which a “normal worker’s family” could not afford.
Merz is deliberately stirring up envy against the poorest, who are supposedly living in luxury, in order to justify cuts. The reality, of course, is very different.
15. Trump calls for banning all mail-in ballot voting
Speaking to Fox News host Sean Hannity on Friday, Trump said that Putin told him, “‘Your election was rigged because you have mail-in voting.’ He said, ‘Mail-in voting, every election.’ He said, ‘No country has mail-in voting. It’s impossible to have mail-in voting and have honest elections.’ And he said that to me, it was very interesting because we talked about 2020. He said, ‘You won that election by so much.’”
Praising Putin and Russian elections, which have allowed the former Stalinist KGB agent to remain in power for roughly the last 26 years, Trump added, “But Vladimir Putin, smart guy, said you can’t have an honest election with mail-in voting. And he said there’s not a country in the world that uses it now.”
Voting by post is popular in dozens of countries. Since 2008, all voters in Germany have had the option of voting by mail, with about 47 percent using mail-in voting in 2021. In Switzerland, as many as 90 percent of voters cast ballots by mail. Canada has provided mail-in ballots to all citizens since 1993. Several other countries, including Australia, Austria, Spain, Sweden, Italy, Mexico, Poland, Norway, Finland and France, also have exceptions that allow mail-in or absentee voting. Even in certain parts of Russia voting is allowed online and, in some cases, the ballot box will actually be brought to the homes of disabled or elderly residents.
Ignoring this, and the fact that millions of people voted for Trump and Republicans by mail in the 2024 election, Trump went on to smear hundreds of thousands of postal workers as dishonest and incompetent, saying, “It can’t be honest. It goes through a postman. It goes through somebody else, somebody else, somebody.”
16. Swedish advanced battery maker Northvolt purchased by US competitor
The Swedish advanced EV battery maker Northvolt—once lauded as the best-funded start-up in the European Union (EU)—was purchased by Lyten, an American battery company, in early August. The takeover came after months of bankruptcy proceedings involving Northvolt in both Sweden and the United States.
For many years, Northvolt was seen as a critical part of European and American efforts to create an EV battery supply chain relatively independent of East Asia. Today, East Asian countries control an estimated 80 to 85 percent of global lithium-ion battery production, with China alone accounting for about 75 percent. The European imperialist powers in particular promoted Northvolt with substantial government subsidies to strengthen their independence from the United States in the emerging “clean energy” economy.
Over the past year, however, it became increasingly clear that Northvolt’s production facilities were facing serious industrial problems: high defect rates, extremely low factory output and the relentless burning of cash. This culminated in the company’s bankruptcy filings—first in the US in November 2024, and then in Sweden in March 2025.
At the height of Northvolt’s crisis, the company was rumored to be flying in Chinese battery technicians and engineers on a weekly basis to perform damage control on its factory machinery, critical sections of which had been imported from Wuxi Lead Intelligent, the world’s top supplier of the machinery. The episode underscored how far European companies had fallen behind Chinese producers in the race to dominate the EV market.
Lyten, a Silicon Valley-based start-up backed by investors such as Stellantis, FedEx, Honeywell and McKinsey, is acquiring Northvolt’s main assets at a steeply discounted but undisclosed price. This includes the giant gigafactory in Skellefteå in the north of Sweden, the company’s research facility in Västerås outside Stockholm and a planned plant in Heide, Germany. Lyten’s chief executive Dan Cook has pitched the deal as part of a broader effort to establish secure local supply chains in both Europe and the United States, citing Northvolt’s existing strong relationships with Western car companies.
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Despite years of promises, the US and EU remain far behind in electric vehicles. China now controls “the entire EV supply chain—from mineral mining to battery development, car manufacturing, operating software development, and even car shipping,” according to the Center for European Policy Analysis. Six of the world’s top 10 EV makers are Chinese, and BYD has already surpassed Tesla as the world’s largest seller. Some Chinese EVs now sell for under $10,000—a fraction of the cost in Europe or America—and are only kept out of those markets by steep tariffs.
Meanwhile, the sale of Chinese EVs outside Western markets is undercutting the established car companies. A key issue in Volkswagen’s current troubles is that the Chinese market, long its main driver of profits, is now turning away from European and American brands toward Chinese cars.
Collectively, China’s EV dominance poses a critical problem for American imperialism and its former European allies.
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The broader crisis facing European capitalism was expressed in last year’s Draghi report on European competitiveness, which warned that Europe faces an “existential challenge” as it falls further behind both the US and China. Growth in Europe has slowed to near-stagnation, energy costs remain several times higher than in the US, and the EU’s fragmented financing system has prevented the scale of investment needed in advanced technologies.
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Meanwhile, Chinese carmakers continue to make breakthroughs. In 2025, BYD announced a new charging system that could power a 249-mile battery in just five minutes. With that said, even as Chinese EVs set the global pace of the industry, the intensity of competition in China—combined with overproduction and a flattening of demand growth—points toward a new wave of bankruptcies, as weaker firms are forced out and the industry consolidates.
Ultimately, the industrial conflict over critical minerals and EVs, expressed in Lyten’s purchase of Northvolt, exposes the irrationality of capitalism itself. At the very moment when global cooperation is most needed to build a renewable future, the great powers are instead sharpening their knives, driving the transition deeper into rivalry, confrontation and war. The working class in every country will bear the main burden through job losses and attacks on wages and conditions to improve “competitiveness.”
17. United Kingdom: Glasgow Village Hotel workers in month long strike
A group of hospitality workers at the Village Hotel in Glasgow, Scotland have begun a month-long strike over pay and conditions. The workers, most of whom are students, are also seeking backdated pay, paid breaks and the equalization of pay and conditions across all age groups. Regular pickets have been held since August 2, drawing support from passers-by and a group of workers from the nearby Glasgow Science Centre.
The dispute followed the discovery that workers under 21 years of age in the Village Hotel in Edinburgh were paid the same as their older colleagues, £12.21 an hour, while those in Glasgow were only paid £10.42. The strikers are demanding pay rates in line with the “real living wage” of £12.60 an hour for all age groups in Glasgow, and paid breaks.
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According to the employers’ organization UK Hospitality, there as many as 3.5 million workers, working in some 140,000 coffee shops, hotels, pubs, clubs and entertainment venues in the UK. Hospitality and related industries is the third largest employer in the UK after wholesale and retail, and health and social care. The industry is worth some £93 billion in gross value added and £121 billion indirectly.
The sector is notorious for poor working conditions, including breaches of health and safety, working time and pay legislation. According to a 2021 Glasgow University study, Anything goes? Exploring the limits of employment law in UK hospitality and catering, “minor breaches—microviolations or microbreaches—are so frequent as to have become standard practice in the sector, akin to industry norms.”
Figures produced by the Fair Work Convention in Scotland noted that 45.8 percent of workers in the sector earned less than the real living wage, compared to 10.1 percent across all sectors. Workers reported having no say in the hours allocated to them, lack of breaks, pay inaccuracies, varying finishing times, lack of written contracts and reliance on employment apps such as Stint.
While small establishments abound, the Glasgow University authors write, “the sector is dominated by brands and franchises so that many small... enterprises are really part of big multinational chains with unified management structures from middle level and above.”
18. National strike by public employees in Turkey
Many workers were on strike nationwide on Monday in response to the Turkish government’s low wage offer in contract negotiations affecting around 4 million public employees and 2.5 million retirees.
Facing rising living costs and a significant decline in real wages, public employees were so angry that all public sector union confederations, including pro-government ones, struck together for the first time.
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Strikers staged protests in nearly every province, especially Ankara, Istanbul, and Izmir. Tens of thousands reportedly participated in the Ankara demonstration. Despite the legal ban on strikes for public employees—which goes against international agreements and numerous court rulings—and the fact that Monday’s protest was not labelled a “general strike,” it had a significant impact, particularly on railways, where many services were cancelled, and on Turkish Post (PTT) services.
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In 2024, Turkey, whose defence spending accounts for 2 percent of GDP (800 billion Turkish liras), will need to allocate an additional 1.5 trillion Turkish liras from its budget to increase its spending to 5 percent in line with its NATO commitment. This would mean further cuts in social spending and an increase in taxes, which are mainly collected from working people.
While the government suppresses wages and imposes austerity policies, the unemployment rate is rapidly increasing. According to a DİSK union confederation report based on official data, the broad unemployment rate rose by 3.5 percentage points to 13 million people (32 percent) in the second quarter of 2025. This figure is nearly three times higher than the EU’s broad unemployment rate of 10.9 percent.
To resist these attacks, public employees and other workers must form rank-and-file committees independent of the trade union apparatus in every workplace and adopt an international strategy of counterattack against capitalism. Only such committees can unite and mobilize the collective power of workers against official strike bans or union bureaucracies that attempt to block strikes, divide workers, and push through sellout agreements.
19. On the 85th anniversary of the assassination of Leon Trotsky
This interview was conducted on August 16 with World Socialist Web Site International Editorial Board Chairman David North, as part of an event marking 85 years since the assassination of Leon Trotsky, on the island of Büyükada (Prinkipo), Turkey.
20. Demand the freedom of Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist Bogdan Syrotiuk!
