Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
Immigration attorney Eric Lee appeared on MS Now on February 15 to expose the horrific conditions faced by immigrants held in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facilities. He also warned that these attacks on immigrants are part of a broader project by the US ruling class to establish a presidential dictatorship, using mass detention infrastructure as the backbone of that repression.
Documents made public in recent days outline plans by ICE to dramatically expand its network of concentration camps, including eight “mega-centers” capable of holding thousands of people and hundreds of additional processing sites to boost capacity to approximately 92,600 beds nationwide by late 2026. This $38.3 billion plan is being financed through the “One Big Beautiful Bill” and includes converting warehouses and other large facilities into long-term detention campuses to “effectuate mass deportations.”
Data analyzed by The Marshall Project shows the number of children held in ICE detention on any given day has increased more than six-fold under the current administration, with some days seeing more than 400 children locked up at family detention centers such as Dilley in Texas, where disease outbreaks and abusive guards have fueled mounting outrage.
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Speaking on The Weekend: Primetime, Lee bluntly declared, “We live in a country where the federal government kidnaps children, spirits them away to what are really concentration camps, hundreds of miles from home,” describing months-long detention in “disease infested conditions,” without adequate food, clean water, or medical care.
Lee stressed that the abuse is intentional. “This is not negligence or a few ‘bad apples.’ This is a deliberate policy directed from the White House by Donald Trump and his fascistic aides like Stephen Miller to harm children,” he said, adding, “the fact that this administration and Trump himself are so deeply implicated in the Epstein scandal, it really comes as no surprise that this is how children of vulnerable working class families are treated in this country.”
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Lee warned that Trump is expanding this network “as the spearhead in his attempt to set up a dictatorship in this country.”
2. Sick 2-month-old baby deported after falling ill in south Texas ICE concentration camp
The US government has deported a critically ill, two-month-old baby after releasing him from the hospital and returning him to a south Texas Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) concentration camp.
As of Tuesday evening, federal authorities had still refused to confirm whether Juan Nicolás was alive, deported, transferred or dead. However, Univision reporter Lida Terrazas posted on social media that Nicolás was deported, “along with his mother and the rest of the family.”
Terrazas reported that she spoke over the phone with Juan’s mother, who said that they were “practically abandoned at the border” and that the baby “is still sick.”
Nicolás, who has spent nearly half of his life imprisoned at the Dilley family detention center in Texas, was recently hospitalized after becoming unresponsive while suffering from bronchitis, according to his mother. Texas Congressman Joaquin Castro reported Tuesday morning that Juan’s mother was brought before an immigration judge and told she would be deported, without being informed when or where. Castro said she and her infant son were then returned to Dilley, after which their whereabouts became unknown.
In an interview Tuesday afternoon with Pablo Manríquez of Migrant Insider, Castro said that neither he nor his staff has been able to obtain basic information from ICE. “Right now and for the last several hours I cannot tell you where he is,” Castro said. He explained that Juan’s mother missed scheduled appointments to speak with family members and legal contacts. “We have not gotten a straight answer from ICE about where exactly he and his mom are,” Castro said.
Terrazas reported that the baby “is still sick. They were left there with the money they had left in their commissary and someone actually gave them a phone—in the street—and that’s how she was able to call me.”
Terrazas said Juan’s mother was in “distress” and “panicking, they were sent to the same place they fled from.”
There is no doubt that the US government purposely preemptively discharged and deported Juan in order to avoid providing him proper medical care after forcing him and his family to languish in a disease-ridden concentration camp. In his interview with Migrant Insider, Castro warned that seriously ill detainees often become “a hot potato for the system,” and that ICE is attempting to evade responsibility for the infant’s medical care. The lack of transparency has fueled grave concerns, including the possibility that Juan’s condition worsened while in federal custody.
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Last month, two cases of measles were identified at the same Dilley detention center where Juan Nicolás became sick. Separately, El Paso city officials and U.S. Representative Veronica Escobar confirmed that two cases of tuberculosis and 19 cases of COVID-19 were identified at Camp East Montana, a 5,000-bed tent facility built last year on the Fort Bliss Army base. Approximately 3,100 people are currently imprisoned on the army base.
The deportation of sick Juan Nicolás and his family comes the day after the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) formally notified the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) that it will not share evidence or allow access to case files related to the murder investigation of Alex Pretti.
Three weeks ago Pretti, a Minneapolis ICU nurse, was executed by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) thugs Jesus Ochoa and Raymundo Gutierrez. As of this writing neither Ochoa, Gutierrez nor Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent that murdered Renée Good, has been charged with a crime. BCA Superintendent Drew Evans called the FBI’s refusal to share information “concerning and unprecedented.”
While state investigators are being stonewalled in efforts to secure basic evidence in the killings of Pretti and Good, federal authorities are simultaneously moving forward with plans to dramatically expand the concentration camp network under ICE.
Internal government documents released in recent days detail plans to construct a network of long-term “mega centers” capable of holding tens of thousands of people at any given time. These facilities are explicitly designed for sustained mass detention, which will sharply increase the risk of disease, medical neglect and death.
The United States already operates a sprawling, for-profit detention system that imprisons more than 55,000 people on any given day, with tens of thousands more cycling through its camps annually. The expansion now underway is aimed at normalizing mass incarceration without due process or a trial.
These camps are not being built to detain the “worst of the worst,” as claimed by the Trump administration. They are being constructed to imprison workers, immigrants and political opponents of the financial oligarchy. The real “worst of the worst” are not detained in Dilley or El Paso but are in Washington, where officials are advancing illegal plans to bomb Iran, continuing the genocide in Gaza and backing the annexation of the West Bank. The same ruling elite that wages imperialist war abroad is building concentration camps at home.
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Under conditions in which a majority of self-identified Democrats and a plurality of independents support abolishing ICE and prosecuting those responsible for the thousands of crimes and abuses carried out by the immigration police since Trump’s return to the White House, the Democratic Party has dropped any demands that would halt ICE raids, dismantle the detention camp network, or impede Trump’s drive to concentrate unchecked executive power.
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The refusal of the Democratic Party to oppose ICE terror is not a failure of courage or political will but a conscious decision rooted in class interests. The Democrats and Republicans defend the same capitalist system, the same corporate and financial oligarchy that is driven towards dictatorship in order to preserve its unearned wealth through attacks on the working class. The disappearance of Juan Nicolás underscores that the defense of immigrants, democratic rights and human life itself cannot be entrusted to Congress, the courts or any faction of the political establishment.
3. Left Voice: An accomplice of labor bureaucracy in Minneapolis
The lesson of the protests in Minneapolis, according to Left Voice, is that as a result of mass opposition, the Democrats, and indeed the Trump administration, can be pressured to “de-escalate tensions.” Whatever the rhetorical criticisms of the Democrats, the position of Left Voice is that the ruling class will back down if there are just more protests: “Winning our demands means pushing the fight forward with all our might.”
This is complacent and politically dangerous. The reduction in visible federal presence was not a “concession” but a maneuver to reorganize repression more effectively. Local Democrats helped clear the streets so federal operations could proceed with less resistance.
The Trump administration is redeploying to expand ICE operations in other cities and states. The agency is spending more than $38 billion in the construction of a vast apparatus of detention and deportation in California, Florida, Texas, Pennsylvania, Michigan and other states.
Left Voice’s formulation that “both the Trump administration and the Democratic Party are starting to understand” the risk of mass outrage implies that pressure alone compels concessions and that the system can be forced to retreat through protest. The real lessons are the opposite.
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In its February 1 statement, Left Voice declares: “What is at stake in Minneapolis is nothing other than the glue that keeps [Trump’s] coalition together: immigration.” This is false and politically disarming. Immigration is a critical arena in which the state is testing methods of repression, but it is not the “glue” of Trump’s coalition or the state apparatus.
The real cohesive force is the class interests of the capitalist oligarchy. The turn to authoritarianism flows from the deepening crisis of American capitalism and the ruling class’s determination to impose austerity, social devastation and imperialist war. These policies cannot be carried out through democratic means.
In opposition to the independent mobilization of the working class against capitalism, Left Voice advances an orientation to the trade union bureaucracy and the institutions of the capitalist nation-state.
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The fight against dictatorship is inseparable from a fight against capitalism and for socialism. This cannot be fought through appeals to the institutions that defend capitalist rule. It requires the conscious development of a genuine revolutionary leadership in the working class—based on the independent organization of workers, the unification of struggles across industries and borders, and a clear program to defend democratic rights by mobilizing the social power of the working class against the corporate and financial oligarchy.
4. US corporate media slanders anger over Epstein cover-up as “conspiracy theories”
The Times situates Epstein’s impunity within the broader social crisis produced by American capitalism, noting that his “Caligula-like antics” unfolded amid “rising populist anger and ever-growing inequality,” the collapse of manufacturing, and the subprime mortgage crisis that cost millions of workers their homes. It catalogs Epstein’s documented relationships with former President Bill Clinton, billionaires such as Elon Musk, senior financiers, royalty and political operatives across the globe.
Having established this factual record, however, the article abruptly reverses course. The same revelations, the Times claims, “have done nothing to quiet the conspiracy theories that his behavior spawned,” instead fueling “feverish new speculation with little or no factual basis.”
Among the supposed “conspiracies” is Epstein’s death in federal custody, which has been accepted uncritically by the media as a suicide. Newly released video logs from the Metropolitan Correctional Center show an unaccounted-for figure moving toward Epstein’s cell on the night of his death. Rather than grappling with the implications of this evidence, the Times dismisses doubts as the work of “internet sleuths,” reiterating the official ruling, which no one believes, of suicide.
This framing collapses under minimal scrutiny. As reported by CBS News, both the FBI and the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General had already logged the unidentified orange-clad figure in their internal timelines years ago, while refusing to disclose this publicly. Senior officials repeatedly suggested that no one approached Epstein’s cell. Dan Bongino, then in FBI leadership, explicitly stated that the footage confirmed no one else entered the cell block. That claim is now demonstrably false.
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Over the weekend, the Washington Post escalated the “conspiracy theory” smear by conflating exposure of the criminal ruling class with “antisemtism.” In an article titled, “How the Epstein files are fueling antisemitic conspiracy theories,” the Washington Post writes:
Denunciations of out-of-touch elites and the ‘money power’ are a recurring feature of American politics. But in response to the Epstein files, antiestablishment voices have advanced the claim that Jewish networks and interests are corrupting American society.
Antisemitic slanders such as the medieval blood libel and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion are reactionary lies. But the existence of such lies has nothing to do with the extensive documentary evidence that Epstein maintained close relationships with senior figures in the Israeli state and intelligence apparatus.
The Post’s method is to shift the axis of discussion from what is true to what is offensive, thereby immunizing state actors and intelligence agencies from accountability.
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Reporting by Drop Site News shows that Epstein facilitated back-channel diplomacy involving former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, Russian President Vladimir Putin and US officials during the Syrian civil war. Leaked emails show Epstein advising Barak, arranging meetings, sharing intelligence-adjacent information and pressing for US military intervention against Iran and Syria. These are matters of state policy and intelligence operations, not religious identity.
[For the Washington Post t]o describe such reporting as antisemitic is itself a blatant slander. States are not religions. Intelligence agencies are not peoples. Exposing covert diplomacy, blackmail networks and imperialist maneuvering is not an attack on Jewish people. It is an exposure of the criminal ruling class.
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Taken together, the interventions by the New York Times and the Washington Post reveal a coordinated strategy to contain the Epstein revelations and protect the ruling class. Where the Times deploys the language of “conspiracy theory” to pathologize demands for accountability, the Post escalates to the antisemitism smear to shut down investigation into state and intelligence connections altogether. In both cases, the aim is the same: to sever documented facts from their political implications, delegitimize opposition and shield the institutions of wealth, intelligence and imperialist power that enabled Epstein’s crimes and continue to block justice.
The recent World Socialist Web Site exposure of the National Education Association’s (NEA) injunction to teachers, “Obey now, Grieve Later,” directed at preventing educators from walking out against ICE with their students has angered educators nationally and triggered a defense of the bureaucracy by a “teacher union rep” on social media.
The WSWS article, which received over 3,000 upvotes on Reddit, revealed the thoroughly reactionary policy of the NEA. It stated:
As students walked out in opposition to fascistic attacks that threatened their communities, friends and families, teachers were ordered to do the opposite: remain in their classrooms, obey administrative directives and suppress any collective response, under the guise of “student safety.”
Union locals issued directives to teachers warning against participation in protests, reminding them of school districts’ policies on staff conduct, and instructing educators to enforce attendance and disciplinary rules against student protesters. These interventions were intended to block the participation of educators in actions framed as part of a national general strike, which threatened to draw teachers into a mass movement independent from the union apparatus.
It concluded:
The power of the working class must be brought to bear against oligarchy and inequality. But this requires new organizations which are accountable to workers, not the political establishment, and a strategy based on the mobilization of the working class, not its suppression. Democratic rank-and-file committees are required to organize real protections for student and educator safety, based on collective action and solidarity with broader sections of the working class.
Many comments objected angrily to the revelations of the NEA’s openly reactionary position. But the article clearly touched a nerve in the apparatus, prompting an angry response on Reddit from someone who identified themselves as a union rep. They wrote:
The NEA General Assembly has already voted for a provision to lay the groundwork for a general strike in 2028 in conjunction with UAW. These things take time, and you have to develop things for members in states that have anti-strike legislation.
In other words, “Don’t take a stand now. Wait for two years, when it might be ‘legal’.”
This, in response to Trump’s open flouting of the law, including the use of paramilitary ICE forces occupying cities, the murder of protesters, the seizure of men, women and children to incarcerate or deport them and the imposition of massive austerity on workers by slashing jobs and destroying public education.
This is not a plan for resistance but a political cover for support of the Democrats. The proposal for a May 1, 2028, “general strike” was first promoted by UAW President Shawn Fain in October 2023. The idea was invoked to provide a “militant” smokescreen for the betrayal of the national “stand-up strike” (dubbed by workers the “bend over” strike), which has led to the layoffs of thousands of autoworkers with the UAW’s acquiescence.
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The timing of this call for a strike makes clear that it is a campaign stunt designed to drum up support for Democrats in the 2028 general elections. Indeed, the NEA or UAW have no intention of calling a real strike even in the future, or, if they do, it would be a token action that does not challenge the status quo. Instead, they are using the promise of a strike in 2028 to oppose action now, giving Trump the critical time and space he needs to consolidate dictatorial power.
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The union bureaucracy enforces no-strike clauses and demands that workers accept existing legal restrictions on strikes to preserve their role as a labor police force and ensure the continued flow of dues money and investment returns into the unions’ coffers. The labor bureaucrats are creatures of the state and corporate America, not workers’ leaders.
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After these words were written, San Francisco teachers mounted a powerful four-day strike coinciding with 31,000 nurses at Kaiser Permanente. But the teachers’ strike was promptly ended by the United Educators of San Francisco (affiliated with the NEA and American Federation of Teachers, or AFT), which settled for paltry 2 percent annual raises. The sellout followed an extraordinary intervention by the city’s Democratic mayor and former House speaker Nancy Pelosi. The California Teachers Association (also affiliated with the NEA and AFT) has kept tens of thousands of teachers across California on the job without contracts since last summer, blocking strike action despite multiple strike votes.
This is only the most recent example of the collusion of the bureaucracy with the Democratic and Republican parties in stifling the independent mobilization of teachers. Last year, Trump eviscerated the Department of Education, vowed to close it down and turn Title I into block grants, withheld over $12 billion in funding to schools and passed measures, including national vouchers, to destroy public education. The unions wrung their hands and filed lawsuits which changed nothing.
The bureaucracy is not a tool to be “weaponized.” It is the weapon used against teachers.
The betrayals of the bureaucracy arise directly from their class interests. The NEA bureaucracy, holding roughly $375 million in assets, inhabits a world entirely apart from teachers. It is an upper-middle-class social stratum which provides labor peace in exchange for their legal right to collect dues. For these services, NEA President Becky Pringle receives over $514,000 a year, while top executives bring home between $270,000 and $380,000. At least 482 staffers collect six figures, with hundreds of additional officials—“organizational specialists,” policy staff, managers, lobbyists and other full‑time functionaries—collecting between roughly $140,000 and $190,000 a year.
The AFT has $138 million in assets and disburses $52.9 million in salaries and other perks to its top officials, including AFT President Randi Weingarten who pocketed $514,000 in 2024.
Integrated into management structures, regulatory bodies and the Democratic Party apparatus, the material interests of this bureaucracy lie in maintaining capitalist stability, not mobilizing workers.
Will Lehman, a leader of the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC), is running for UAW president to spearhead this rebellion and demand the abolition of the apparatus and the return of power to the rank and file.
In his campaign announcement, he explains:
The truth is, this bureaucracy can’t be reformed. It must be abolished. The union parasites who collaborate with management and the state must be removed, and the resources of the union must be taken out of their hands and placed under the democratic control of the rank and file.
Social progress has never come through maneuvering within capitalist institutions but through independent mass action by the working class. A general strike is the product of the objective growth of class struggle. Every such struggle has involved the organic and direct participation of the masses in the build up for a mass strike.
Writing in 1906, Rosa Luxemburg ridiculed those trade union functionaries who believed that a “prohibition of ‘propaganda’ eliminate the problem of the mass strike from the face of the earth,” or those who saw it as “means of struggle which can be ‘decided’ at their pleasure and strictly according to conscience, or ‘forbidden’—a kind of pocket-knife which can be kept in the pocket clasped ‘ready for any emergency,’ and according to the decision, can be unclasped and used.” The Russian experience in 1905 proved the mass strike to be “a historical phenomenon which, at a given moment, results from social conditions with historical inevitability,” she concluded.
This “inevitability” is what the bureaucracy is fighting against. It is trying to disrupt this growing objective movement by sowing confusion, pessimism and complacency. The working class must respond by developing new channels where this opposition can be fully organized, maintaining independence and initiative free from the interference of union bureaucrats or corporate parties.
This means the formation of rank-and-file committees in every workplace, school and neighborhood, which are capable of resisting and defeating bureaucratic sabotage, build momentum by connecting the fight against fascism and dictatorship with the fight against job cuts and austerity and draw in ever wider sections of the working class for collective, mass action.
As Will Lehman says, “We as workers have enormous power. Without us, nothing moves, machines don’t run. The trucks don’t ship. The profits don’t flow. But we have to use that power consciously. And that means getting organized.”
If you are ready to fight for a general strike, form or join a rank-and-file committee, the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) urges you to contact us immediately and participate in building a democratic, independent workers’ movement. Read the program of Will Lehman and sign up today.
ICE activity is escalating sharply across the Detroit metropolitan area, marking a new stage in the Trump administration’s nationwide rampage against democratic rights.
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The choice of Detroit as one of the next targets shows that the attack on immigrants is escalating into a terror campaign against the working class as a whole. Metro Detroit is a major industrial center of 4.4 million people and the historic heart of the US auto industry. Nearly 250,000 manufacturing workers live in the region.
The city has a rich history of class struggle spanning more than a century, which lives in the memory of workers whose families have labored in the plants for generations. This includes historic battles against Henry Ford, a notorious antisemite and Nazi sympathizer. His legacy finds its parallel today in the support for Trump among today’s oligarchs.
The auto plants have diverse workforces spanning racial, ethnic and national backgrounds. Detroit is home to one of the largest Middle Eastern immigrant communities in the country. Hamtramck itself is a deeply diverse working-class city, with residents whose ancestry spans from Bangladesh to Poland. Dearborn—home to Ford’s headquarters and the Rouge complex—has the highest concentration of Arab residents in the United States.
This is what Trump is going to war against. An admirer of Hitler, he is aiming at nothing less than establishing a dictatorship in the United States. Trump acts and speaks not as an individual, but as a representative of the corporate and financial oligarchy, whose interests are incompatible with legal and democratic forms of rule. The massive expansion of ICE operations is closely connected to the 2026 elections, which the Trump administration intends to hold under the barrel of a gun, if they are held at all.
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The fundamental target of dictatorship is the working class. The operations began at Factory Zero and the Hazel Park Amazon facility, but agents will soon appear at factories and workplaces across the region unless they are stopped.
And it is the working class that must be organized in response, as in Minneapolis. There is deep hostility to Trump in the Detroit auto plants. During a visit to the Ford Rouge Complex in Dearborn, autoworker Thomas “TJ” Sabula made headlines when he angrily denounced Trump. He received widespread support after the company suspended him, leading to his reinstatement.
Neighborhood groups have spontaneously begun to monitor and oppose ICE. Anger has already erupted at Town Hall meetings against the expansion of ICE operations in Michigan. High school students have staged walkouts at cities across Southeast Michigan in recent weeks.
The Socialist Equality Party and the World Socialist Web Site propose the following as the basis for the fight against ICE, to be advanced at Town Hall meetings and other forums:
First, the social force that must be mobilized is the working class, including autoworkers, educators, healthcare workers, Amazon workers, postal workers, technology workers and other sections of the working class. It is the working class that has the power to halt production and stop the operations of ICE and Trump’s Gestapo agents.
Second, workers in the United Auto Workers and other unions should demand mass meetings in every local to pass resolutions rejecting any collaboration with ICE agents, as Amazon did when it opened its doors for two Amazon Flex workers to be seized in the plant. Workers should prepare strike action in response to any effort to seize their coworkers, and the unions must be committed to the defense of workers and youth.
The initiative, however, cannot be left in the hands of the union bureaucracy. In Minneapolis, the union apparatus worked consciously to prevent strike action, insisting that workers had to remain on the job due to contractual technicalities.
The UAW has said nothing about the Factory Zero raid, even though it took place only a few miles from its headquarters. It also said nothing about the mass layoffs at the plant, now down to one shift. UAW President Shawn Fain warns that the right to strike is at stake and that there will be attacks on picket lines. Yet he proposes no action to fight this, issuing only statements that commit the union to nothing.
Therefore, third, to coordinate and organize opposition, rank-and-file committees should be organized in every factory and workplace, union and non-union, along with committees in every neighborhood and school. A network of rank-and-file and neighborhood committees will create the framework for workers to monitor and respond rapidly when ICE attempts to abduct coworkers and family members.
There is precedent for this. In 2020, at the start of the coronavirus pandemic, wildcat strikes broke out in Detroit that forced the shutdown of the auto industry across North America within hours. Action by autoworkers against ICE would provide a lead and inspire confidence among workers across the United States.
Fourth, the development of opposition must be connected to definite demands, including the removal of ICE from the city and state, and freedom for all those who have been detained.
The logic of the struggle of workers and young people is toward a general strike, a logic which arose organically in the development of the struggle in Minneapolis.
The development of a struggle in Detroit will become the impetus for a coordinated nationwide movement of the working class, raising the demand for the abolition of ICE, the immediate end to the persecution of immigrants, the release of all immigrants held in concentration camps, and the resignation and prosecution of all members of the Trump administration responsible for the violation of rights guaranteed by the US Constitution.
In this fight, no confidence can be placed in the Democratic Party, a party of Wall Street. It recently voted to temporarily extend funding to the Department of Homeland Security, and is presently abandoning even its toothless proposals to permanently defund DHS. In Minnesota, local Democrats are now collaborating with ICE and the Trump administration.
The Democrats’ main concern is not fascism, but the growth of opposition from below.
The fight against ICE and Trump’s dictatorship depends on the independent action and initiative of workers themselves. Workers and young people should be on guard for any provocations staged by ICE. Opposition should be developed through collective action and social struggle.
Workers reading this must begin laying the groundwork now. Organize groups in your workplaces and neighborhoods. Hold meetings to discuss and decide what must be done. The working class is the most powerful force on earth, once it knows how to use that power.
The Socialist Equality Party (US) and the World Socialist Web Site stand ready to assist all workers in building this movement.
7. Royal Mail workers in Sheffield expose reasons for mail delays amid CWU-backed restructuring
“You've got people on 18-hour contracts, 24-hour contracts and they just can't do the work in that time. It means there is a point in time when you surrender, because everybody's got a backlog.
The situation is worse elsewhere, with pay erosion at 16 percent in Wales, 20.8 percent Northern Ireland and 21 percent in England. But the NHS is a UK-wide service employing 1.4 million whose survival depends on a unified struggle against pay erosion, understaffing and privatization.
9. Show trial in Hungary: German anti-fascist Maja T. sentenced to 8 years in prison
The case of Maja T. exemplifies how neo-Nazis, the right-wing extremist Hungarian government of Viktor Orbán, the compliant Hungarian judiciary, the Trump administration and German authorities, courts, media and politicians are working closely together to persecute anti-fascists and leftists and eliminate democratic rights.
10. New report documents France’s human rights abuses during New Caledonia unrest
Despite its damning exposures, the Human Rights Commission’s report will not lessen French colonial domination, sustained for over 170 years by brute military force.
11. Australian universities on trial: The Albanese government’s “report card” against dissent
Labor’s immediate aim is to silence opposition to the ongoing genocide in Gaza, but the broader intent is to establish a framework to stifle basic democratic rights, protests and free speech.
12. Expanding nurses strikes in California and New York raise need for unified struggle
More than 2,000 registered nurses in Los Angeles have announced strike actions beginning February 19, the latest expression of deep and growing opposition to a healthcare system that subordinates life itself to profit.
At the center of the new actions are two separate walkouts by nurses represented by the California Nurses Association/National Nurses United (CNA/NNU). Roughly 1,800 nurses at Keck Hospital of USC and USC Norris Cancer Center will launch a seven-day strike starting February 19. Another 800 nurses at Centinela Hospital Medical Center will carry out a one-day strike the same day.
The USC nurses have been in contract negotiations since May 2025 with no meaningful progress. Central issues include comprehensive and affordable health coverage, safe staffing levels and retention measures to address high turnover. Instead of addressing these demands, USC has proposed restructuring employee health plans in ways that would sharply restrict where nurses and their families can seek care.
Since January, nurses have faced higher out-of-pocket costs and the loss of a no-premium plan that allowed access to a broad regional network. Forcing hundreds of healthcare workers into USC’s own provider system will further clog an already strained hospital network, producing longer wait times and delayed treatment for employees and patients alike.
At Centinela, nurses cite chronic understaffing and unsafe conditions that endanger patients and exhaust staff. Their strike follows a near-unanimous authorization vote in January, reflecting widespread anger over deteriorating working conditions.
The Centinela strike is part of a broader wave of actions at Prime Healthcare facilities. Nurses are striking or preparing walkouts at Shasta Regional Medical Center in Redding, CA; Saint Mary’s Regional Medical Center in Reno, NV; and West Anaheim Medical Center in Anaheim, CA. Hundreds more nurses are involved, represented by various affiliates of National Nurses United.
In addition, nurses and licensed professionals at Providence Cedars-Sinai Tarzana Medical Center began a five-day strike on February 16. Represented by SEIU Local 121RN, these workers have been laboring under an expired agreement since July 2025.
These actions are unfolding alongside a prolonged dispute involving 2,200 additional healthcare workers at USC (respiratory therapists, nursing assistants and technicians) represented by the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW). They have been kept on the job without a contract since April 2024.
The geographic spread of these struggles underscores that this is not a series of isolated disputes. It is a national confrontation between healthcare workers and a corporate system that has transformed hospitals into profit centers.
Yet in every case, the unions have kept their members divided. Kaiser workers remain separated from New York nurses. USC nurses are isolated from Prime Healthcare nurses. Different unions control different bargaining units, each confining the struggle within narrow institutional channels and, in most cases, limited strike actions. The enormous potential power of tens of thousands of healthcare workers acting together is deliberately suppressed.
On the Kaiser picket lines, workers articulated an understanding of the broader social crisis driving these battles.
Kathy, an inpatient pharmacy technician with 19 years at Kaiser in Anaheim, recalled the experience of the pandemic. “During COVID we were essential workers. We were heroes. The whole world was relying on nurses and pharmacies and doctors … we fought through it … and now … to be treated like this, just wanting to be silenced and shut down. It isn’t how it should be.”
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Jennifer, a nurse in Riverside, linked the strike to broader attacks on democratic rights. She described her teenagers seeing immigration agents near their school and living in fear. “It feels like anyone can get grabbed,” she said.
Corporate media portray nurses as greedy, she explained. “That’s not true. We’re fighting for patient safety … safe staffing ratios. Yes, wages and pensions are part of it, but that’s not the heart of it.” The real issue, she said, is the defense of safe care and basic social rights.
Vanessa, another Riverside nurse, situated the struggle in a global context. Healthcare costs in the United States continue to rise while shareholder profits expand. “Those profits should be reinvested in patient care and staffing,” she says. Instead, resources are siphoned upward.
Across these voices runs a common thread: a growing awareness that the crisis in healthcare reflects the crisis of the entire social order. Workers confront not merely stingy employers but a system organized around private accumulation.
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Healthcare workers are not simply demanding higher pay. They are raising fundamental questions about who controls society and for what purpose. Their experiences during the pandemic shattered illusions that corporations and governments place public health above profit. The present strike wave expresses a determination that the sacrifices of recent years will not be answered with further austerity.
To realize the full potential of this movement requires the building of independent rank-and-file committees in every hospital and workplace. Such committees can provide the framework for linking up workers across unions, regions and industries, breaking down artificial divisions and formulating demands based on human need, not corporate balance sheets.
13. Auto parts workers occupy plants across northern Mexico after 4,000 jobs cut
The shutdown of six First Brands maquiladora plants in northern Mexico and the firing of over 4,000 workers has thrown auto parts workers across the border region into limbo and triggered a wave of militant plant occupations organized initially independently of the trade union apparatus.
On January 28, workers received a notice from Interim CEO and Chief Restructuring Officer Chuck Moore, announcing an “orderly, accelerated shutdown” of major North American operations, including the wind-down of the Brake Parts Inc., Cardone and AutoLite business units.
First Brands, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in September 2025, warned that if it cannot secure additional funding from US bankruptcy courts, job losses could eventually engulf its approximately 13,000 employees worldwide. The collapse, driven by years of opaque off-balance sheet financing and an alleged multibillion-dollar fraud overseen by founder Patrick James, now under federal indictment, is a stark example of how speculative parasitism in the financial system is being paid for through a jobs massacre.
The same evening following the shutdown announcement, workers at several plants began on their own initiative occupying the factories and blocking the removal of machinery in freezing temperatures. At the Tridonex-Cardone plant in the border city of Matamoros, where around 1,400 workers are threatened with losing their jobs, rank-and-file workers organized a permanent guard at the entrance, declaring that “no machines will leave the building.”
In Ciudad Juárez, across from El Paso, some 3,000 workers at plants belonging to BPI Brake Manufacturing, Hopkins Manufacturing, and Centric Parts were laid off and immediately launched protests, plant occupations and demonstrations at state offices. In Mexicali, Baja California, more than 450 Autolite workers occupied their factory to prevent equipment being spirited away.
Only after these occupations were underway did labor lawyer Susana Prieto Terrazas—founder of the so‑called “independent” union SNITIS in Matamoros and a former legislator—move to insert herself into the conflict. SNITIS filed a lawsuit seeking “to preemptively freeze the assets” of the company, framing the issue exclusively as one of securing severance pay and instructing workers to extend their guards in order to protect corporate property until it could be valued and sold.
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It is vital that workers draw the necessary warning from Prieto’s long record. During the 2019 “20/32” wildcat strikes in Matamoros, when 70,000 maquiladora workers across dozens of plants walked out for a 100 percent wage increase and to expel the corrupt CTM unions, the World Socialist Web Site intervened to fight for the building of rank-and-file committees and expansion of the struggle across the US-Mexico border. Workers marched to the border bridges, calling on US workers to “wake up” and join their fight against the transnationals.
It was precisely when this movement began to link up with an international socialist perspective that Prieto stepped in to corral it back behind appeals to President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, to preserve CTM structures in many plants and to negotiate a far more limited settlement of a 20 percent raise and a 32,000‑peso bonus. The companies responded with a wave of victimizations and layoffs, and the current mass terminations are part of the long-term blowback whose consequences continue to reverberate in today’s mass layoffs.
Prieto has a documented history of collaboration with the US AFL‑CIO bureaucracy and with the CTM “charros” she claims to oppose, using a veneer of “independence” to secure contracts, dues and a political career in Morena’s orbit. Rather than building genuine workers’ power, she founded SNITIS as an “independent union” to replace CTM contracts while keeping intact the corporatist model and subordinating workers to the government and the courts.
Today, Prieto is repeating the same tactics: praising workers’ initiative while insisting the only realistic goal is severance. SNITIS legally called a strike at Tridonex for February 19—legally defined as a plant occupation in Mexico—explicitly to make sure severance is paid in a court‑controlled liquidation process, not to save jobs.
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There is no question that workers have both the right and the urgent need to occupy plants and prevent asset-stripping. But subordinating the occupations to the bankruptcy courts and limiting their horizon to the sale of machinery for severance—while SNITIS explicitly refuses to call out workers at other plants in coordinated strike action—means channeling their energy into a dead end.
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The First Brands collapse is an international question. The company is a global auto parts conglomerate whose portfolio includes Anco and Trico wiper blades, Fram filters, Carter pumps, Hopkins towing brands and Philips-licensed lighting. In addition to the Mexican layoffs, First Brands has filed WARN notices to close two Texas plants in Arlington and Harlingen, eliminating 129 jobs, and it shut manufacturing at a Hopkins Canada facility in Blenheim, Ontario in 2025.
This is part of a far broader wave of sackings. More than 1.1 million jobs were eliminated in the US last year, while new AI-driven technologies are being used as a pretext to destroy entire categories of white- and blue-collar work.
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The World Socialist Web Site calls on First Brands workers to form rank-and-file committees independent of the union bureaucracies, linked across borders through the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC). These committees must demand that all layoffs be rescinded and that shuttered plants be placed under workers’ democratic control, integrated into a rationally planned, workers-run auto industry organized to meet human needs, not the private profit of speculators and corporate executives.
Leading IWA-RFC member Will Lehman is running for United Auto Workers president on a socialist and internationalist platform to abolish the union bureaucracy in the United States, building a genuinely independent movement of workers to defend jobs and defeat the threat of fascism, dictatorship and world war. “What we need is an international strategy based on the unified struggle of American, Canadian and Mexican workers against transnational corporations,” Lehman stated in his campaign launch.
14. US murders 11 people with airstrikes on boats in both Caribbean and Pacific
The strikes are murders under international law. The men on these boats posed no imminent threat to anyone. They were not armed combatants. They were not engaged in hostilities. Under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the UN Charter, and the Pentagon’s own Law of War Manual, killing them is a crime. UNCLOS (United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea) Article 98 establishes a duty to rescue persons in distress at sea.
The US media treated the strikes as entirely routine. ABC News ran a write-up of approximately 130 words. The Washington Post filed its report under “national security,” not the front page. The killings did not receive even token condemnation from the Democratic Party. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said nothing in response to the strikes.
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The Ford carrier strike group has now been redeployed from the Caribbean to the Middle East, where it will join the USS Abraham Lincoln strike group. Approximately 50,000 US troops are deployed to the region. Reuters reported Friday that the Pentagon is planning “sustained, weeks-long operations” against Iran. Trump told troops at Fort Bragg that regime change in Iran would be “the best thing that could happen.”
The same carrier used to kidnap the president of Venezuela is being redeployed to wage war against a country of 88 million people.
Some Democrats made verbal criticisms of earlier strikes. In November, Tim Kaine said the double-tap “rises to the level of a war crime,” and in December, Himes called it “a violation of the laws of war.” But these criticisms have been completely dropped. War powers resolutions introduced by Kaine were defeated on party-line votes.
Ocasio-Cortez spoke at the Munich Security Conference last weekend and said nothing about the killing campaign or about the preparations for war against Iran. Instead, she accused Trump of insufficient aggression against Russia, called for reviving Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership to confront China and refused to rule out sending American troops to fight China over Taiwan.
Despite the total criminality of the Trump administration’s killing spree in the Caribbean, the Democrats have consistently voted to fund Trump’s war machine. The $901 billion National Defense Authorization Act passed the House 312-112 in December, with 115 Democrats voting yes. In the Senate, it passed 77-20, with the vast majority of Senate Democrats voting in favor.
Trump has called for a $1.5 trillion military budget for fiscal year 2027—the largest in American history. The Democrats have said nothing to oppose it. They supplied the votes to pass the spending bill that funds the ongoing killing spree in the Caribbean and every warship now sailing toward Iran.
The ban on WhatsApp is the temporary culmination of a years-long effort by the Kremlin to shut down all means for encrypted and international communication. The promotion of virtual private networks (VPNs), which allow users to hide their personal IP online, and circumvent such bans, was prohibited last summer. Their use, while not entirely outlawed, has become extremely difficult. For well over a year, YouTube has only been available with severe slowdowns that often render it virtually dysfunctional.
Due to the great popularity of WhatsApp, the Kremlin took longer to shut it down. Voice calls on WhatsApp have been disabled for many months and since December, many had to use VPNs to access the app. Also in December, the Kremlin disabled calls via FaceTime, Apple’s video communication app, and Snapchat.
The only app now remaining that allows, at least theoretically, for encrypted communication is Telegram. But it, too, has come under attack, above all through systematic slowdowns of the service.
At the same time, the Kremlin has forced people to install the app MAX. Like the Chinese WeChat, it has multiple functions, including payments, but does not allow for encrypted communication and works with the authorities. Since August 2025, all phones sold in Russia have MAX preinstalled. According to the Guardian, it has now some 55 million users.
For almost a year, the Kremlin has also engaged in sometimes week-long shutdowns of online communications in entire regions. Although one reason for these slowdowns appears to be the drone war between Russia and Ukraine, which results in dozens, sometimes hundreds of drone attacks on Russian territory every day, the shutdowns have also been used to further the Kremlin’s efforts to create an isolated Russian internet in which users are virtually barred from accessing information about, and communication with, the outside world.
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Reports indicate that the attacks on WhatsApp and Telegram have triggered widespread anger, among both the civilian population and soldiers at the front. With the war now soon entering its fifth year, both the human and the economic cost of the war are becoming ever more severe. In addition to the tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dead at the front, last year has seen a series of factory explosions, especially in the armaments industry, that killed dozens of workers.
The escalation of the censorship campaigns comes amid significant signs of unrest in the working class in the US and internationally. The censorship of WhatsApp, in particular, is aimed not only at preempting encrypted communication but at isolating workers in Russia from developments abroad.
As the Putin regime is trying to negotiate a settlement of the war with the fascistic Trump administration, Russian press coverage of events in the United States—from the mobilization of ICE to the mass protests against Trump—has been minimal. This is not only a tactical move. The World Socialist Web Site has emphasized for years that in launching the invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin was, fundamentally, seeking to improve its negotiating position with the imperialist powers. It now hopes it can achieve this goal.
But the Russian oligarchy also has definite political sympathies with Donald Trump and his far-right agenda. Although their historical origins differ vastly, the Putin regime, which has emerged out of the transformation of the Stalinist bureaucracy into a ruling oligarchy and the destruction of the Soviet Union, likewise defends the interests of a tiny elite which fears nothing more than a revolutionary challenge from the working class.
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The attempts to completely isolate workers and young people in Russia from the rest of the world and make it impossible for them to communicate safely must be seen in this broader context. Amidst the descent of the world into a new global conflagration, and a resurgence of social and political struggles by the working class, the Kremlin seeks to preempt what it rightly understands as it greatest threat: the linking up of workers in Russia with their class brothers and sisters around the world in a common fight against capitalism.
16. Sentimental Value: We will have to take their word for it
As we suggested in regard to Trier’s earlier film, The Worst Person in the World, “the filmmakers … unreservedly accept the life-conditions and ideological assumptions of the Oslo petty bourgeoisie as the entire contents of their artistic and psychological universe.” No need to change a word of that here.
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Neither work, unhappily, and this is perhaps the worst aspect, genuinely takes film artistry and effort seriously. The neglect of the content of Kelly-Borg’s films collectively is not accidental. It doesn’t matter terribly to either filmmaker. Film and art in both cases are primarily means to various ends, making a prosperous or semi-prosperous living, becoming famous and maintaining a certain socio-cultural status, attracting sexual partners, avoiding family and personal obligations, etc. Both films are about fatherly neglect and daughterly resentment, considered rather superficially and glibly. We went through a phase a few years ago in which sexual abuse was the key to every present-day psychological and even social question, now it seems to be parental absence.
In both Jay Kelly and Sentimental Value the modern film industry is merely a frame within which to pursue a superficial psychological study. By and large, the stories could be taking place in the worlds of psychiatry, book-selling or hardware.
17. South Australian nurses to strike at Adelaide hospital over Labor government wage cuts
Nurses and midwives at one of Adelaide’s largest hospitals, the Lyell McEwin, will walk off the job for 24 hours on Thursday, February 19, in a dispute over wages and conditions that has exposed the deepening crisis of the public health system under the South Australian (SA) Labor government of Premier Peter Malinauskas.
The Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation (ANMF) has described the walkout as the first in “a string of planned stoppages” across Adelaide’s metropolitan hospitals. The 20,000 nurses and midwives across the state want to fight further wage cuts and dire conditions, including chronic staff shortages, overwork and worsening delays in emergency departments, but the union is working to isolate their struggles to individual hospitals.
Tomorrow’s strike was unanimously endorsed at a meeting of Lyell McEwin nurses and midwives on Monday. Industrial Relations Minister Kyam Maher made Labor’s hostility to the workers clear, threatening that wage rises above the government’s meagre offer would have to be paid for through “hiring freezes,” while Malinauskas declared that meeting nurses’ demands would “completely destroy the fiscal position of the state.”
Earlier this month, nurses and midwives across the state rejected an offer from the government for a cumulative pay rise over three years of 11.14 percent—4 percent backdated to January 1, 3.5 percent next year and 3.25 percent in 2028.
With the inflation rate already at 3.8 percent and the Reserve Bank of Australia expecting it to reach 4.2 percent by June, Labor’s offer would likely be a pay cut in real terms.
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The ANMF bureaucracy’s isolation of nurses is compounded by the fact that other major public sector unions have already rammed through sell-out agreements over the past year:
- Public-sector doctors had been demanding a 30 percent pay rise over three years, before the Australian Salaried Medical Officers Association cancelled a planned strike and pushed through a four-year 13 percent deal in July last year
- The Health Services Union, which covers allied health workers, imposed a four-year 13.5 percent pay “rise” deal in mid 2025
- In November, the United Workers Union shut down a campaign that had included numerous strikes by hospital workers including orderlies, cleaners and catering staff, accepting the Labor government’s offer of 11 percent over three years
- The Public Service Association, after a protracted dispute involving prison lockdowns and court closures, signed a deal late last month containing “increases” of 3.75, 3.5 and 3.25 percent
The continued slashing of real wages by the Labor government, aided by the unions, exposes the fraudulent character of the 2022 state election campaign. The crisis of the public health system, exacerbated by the reckless dismantling of COVID-19 mitigation measures, was a central factor behind Labor taking office.
Ambulance ramping—patients stuck on stretchers outside emergency departments—became a potent symbol of the system’s collapse under the previous Liberal government. The Ambulance Employees Association ran a high-profile campaign, with “Ash the Ambo” urging voters to “vote Labor like your life depends on it.”
In fact, since the Malinauskas government took office, the situation has only worsened. Australian Medical Association figures show that South Australian patients spent more than 45,000 hours ramped in 2023–24, compared with just over 30,000 in 2021–22.
Throughout Labor’s term, the health unions, which are integral components of the Labor Party and its governments, have maintained a complicit silence as conditions deteriorated, culminating in their ramming through of sell-out enterprise agreements across most of the sector. The same process has been carried out around the country, as state and federal Labor governments, aided and abetted by the union apparatus, have slashed health workers’ wages and gutted social spending as part of a broader austerity agenda.
The fight of South Australian nurses is part of a global struggle by healthcare workers against the gutting of public health systems. In the United States, more than 31,000 Kaiser Permanente healthcare workers in California and Hawaii have been on an open-ended strike since late January, alongside 15,000 nurses at New York-Presbyterian and other New York hospitals who have been on the picket line for more than six weeks.
In both countries, the same essential dynamics are at play. Healthcare systems are starved of funding. Staffing levels are chronically unsafe. Wages have stagnated while the cost of living soars. And in every case, the trade unions have worked to isolate and contain the struggle—refusing to unite different sections of workers, negotiating behind closed doors, and imposing sell-out deals.
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The fight for decent wages and safe staffing cannot be waged within the union framework of plaintive appeals to a Labor government that is hostile to the interests of the working class. Nurses and midwives must form rank-and-file committees at every hospital, democratically controlled by workers themselves, politically and organizationally independent of the ANMF.
Such committees must fight for a unified struggle involving doctors, paramedics, hospital orderlies, cleaners, other health workers—all of whom face the same crisis—to join a common fight against Labor and the capitalist system itself. The struggle for wages and conditions is inseparable from the fight for a fully funded public health system of the highest quality, freely accessible to all.
18. New York nurses in “uprising” against union boss’s attempts to sabotage strike
Last week, NewYork-Presbyterian nurses overwhelmingly rejected a management-backed settlement offer that the executive committee had already turned down at the bargaining table. NYSNA’s leadership ignored the union’s bylaws and forced a snap vote anyway, hoping to browbeat strikers into accepting the sellout. The vote at NewYork-Presbyterian coincided with grossly inadequate tentative agreements at the Mount Sinai and Montefiore hospital systems, where more than 10,000 nurses were sent back to work last weekend.
“There’s a large uprising of rank-and-file nurses ready and determined to make big changes in our union,” one striking nurse told the World Socialist Web Site. Last week, nurses marched on the offices of NYSNA, denouncing President Nancy Hagans and her collaborators for union busting and raising demands for an investigation and resignations.
When Hagans appeared on WNYC radio’s Brian Lehrer Show last Friday, nurses flooded the lines. “The majority of us feel that this displayed union busting tactics coming from inside the house,” one nurse said. “We feel that NYSNA leadership owes an explanation and an apology and that they need to be held accountable for this behavior, as opposed to acting like it never happened.”
Another nurse called the attempt to shut down the strike “a stab in the back.”
Hagans has absurdly attempted to justify her treachery by claiming she merely wanted to give workers a democratic vote. She brushed off a question about the isolation of NewYork-Presbyterian nurses, responding only that NYSNA members are “resilient.” Meanwhile, Hagans and the union leadership are doing all they can to wear down that resilience, including a refusal to provide strike pay and other resources to help nurses withstand the financial strain of the strike.
But Hagans’ efforts to betray the nurses’ strike aren’t simply due to rotten leadership. They reflect the imperatives of the Democratic Party, with which she is deeply embedded. Hagans is well-connected to the Democratic leadership in New York, including Governor Kathy Hochul and Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
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After appearing alongside Hagans on the picket line four weeks ago, Mamdani has been largely silent in public on the strike, apart from expressing “congratulations” to nurses after the shutdown of two-thirds of the strike last week. Mamdani’s pretense as a supporter of nurses is increasingly difficult to maintain, however, following his endorsement of the strike-breaking governor for reelection.
The overriding concern of the Democratic Party, from Mamdani to Hochul and beyond, has been to prevent the strike from becoming a catalyst for a broader movement against the subordination of healthcare and all basic needs to private profit, raising a challenge to the irrational and bankrupt social order. Hagans’ attempt to sabotage the strike reflects a union bureaucracy that works not on behalf of its membership, but in alliance with the Democratic Party as an instrument of the ruling class.
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“It’s a tough, tough, tough fight,” one nurse explained. “Now that the other hospitals have gotten their contracts ratified, it’s really only us left out here. But there still has been support from the other nurses at the other hospitals. They’ve come to our own strike line. And they’re still showing up with signs. There’s action going on still.”
Asked about the role of the Democrats, the nurse replied, “We weren’t really happy about Mamdani endorsing Governor Hochul for re-election. I don’t think I would vote for her.”
“The Democrats do not have a future,” a medical-surge nurse said. “They do not have a good plan. Mamdani is unproven, but New York City is one of the best places to fight for change.
“We want our jobs and to be able to help patients, but the hospital executives are about cutting costs. They are a business and about making money.”
A nurse with nine years at the Children’s Hospital neonatal intensive care unit explained, “There is a dichotomy in our strike situation. People are more engaged, but have also just gotten so numb to the many atrocities going on. The ruling class has a playbook. There are so many things going on. It feels unclear to know what to do.”
The New York Healthcare Workers Rank-and-File Committee has outlined a fighting strategy to take the strike forward based on three fundamental principles: rank-and-file control over the strike, the mobilization of the broader working class and a rejection of the supposed “right” to profit.
On Friday, the committee published a statement stressing that “by asserting their own democratic control, expanding the strike and advancing a clear political perspective, NewYork-Presbyterian nurses can impose a genuine defeat on management and set a powerful example for healthcare workers and the entire working class.”
The demands of nurses for safe staffing, improved pay and other basic needs can be won, but it requires rank-and-file organization to take the initiative.
19. BP Whiting workers denounce USW betrayal, call for national strike to defend jobs
While the USW leadership attempts to shut down the struggle nationally, they have intentionally left the 800 workers at BP’s Whiting refinery in Northwest Indiana to face management alone. BP is aggressively attempting to pull the Whiting facility off the national pattern, demanding a six-year contract that includes deeper pay cuts, the elimination of dozens of jobs and the right to implement automation without oversight. Despite a 98 percent strike authorization vote at the facility—a powerful expression of the rank and file’s determination to fight—the USW International has kept workers on the job under a series of day-to-day extensions, effectively paralyzing their leverage while the company prepares for a potential lockout.ast Saturday, approximately 200 workers and their families held a defiant rally outside the Whiting refinery, the largest in the Midwest, to protest the isolation of their facility and the betrayal of the national bargaining program. In interviews with the World Socialist Web Site, workers provided a damning indictment of both the oil giant’s greed and the union bureaucracy’s complicity. Their testimonies reveal extreme operational hazards, a stage-managed negotiation process and a growing rebellion against a union leadership that many now view as an adjunct of corporate management.
A central theme among Whiting workers is that BP is using the current negotiations to fundamentally restructure the workforce, replacing experienced USW members with cheaper, non-union contract labor. A 20-year veteran operator at the plant explained that the company’s refusal to follow the national pattern is a calculated move to facilitate this transition.
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The anger at BP management is matched by a profound sense of betrayal regarding the USW International’s handling of the national contract. Workers characterized the negotiation process as a “smoke and mirrors show” designed to keep the rank and file in the dark until a deal is finalized behind closed doors. One veteran observed that the union provides the “least amount of information” possible, keeping workers guessing until an agreement is rushed out.
“We got a bunch of text messages and it seemed like the negotiations weren’t going anywhere, and then boom—they have a contract proposal,” the worker said. “I don’t get it. They folded so quick it was embarrassing. They couldn’t even get them to 16 percent [wage increase]. Why did you tell us 25? Why even start at 25 if you’re just going to fold like a lawn chair on a Sunday after a baseball game?”
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The isolation of the Whiting workers is finding growing resistance from other USW locals nationwide. A refinery worker from California reached out to the WSWS to express solidarity and condemn the proposed national deal, making it clear that the anger is not confined to Whiting.
“Many members feel betrayed by the national and feel slighted by them taking what seems like a very weak deal from Marathon at the bargaining table,” the California worker stated. “We feel like what BP said about not even considering the proposal for their Whiting plant should have been immediate grounds to call a strike at that plant and others around the country in a show of solidarity.”
The worker continued: “Anybody who would agree to that proposal with no AI protection is a clown. To think we are the only industry exempt from AI being used is naive. We also feel they bent over and took it real easy—no fight at all, no concessions from the company. The 15 percent deal is garbage.”
The way forward for refinery workers lies in breaking the isolation imposed by the USW bureaucracy and linking Whiting workers with their brothers and sisters across the country to reject the sellout. The call for building rank-and-file committees is gaining traction as workers realize that the current union leadership serves as a barrier to, rather than a vehicle for, a real struggle.
20. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
The fight for the Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist's freedom is an essential component of the struggle against imperialist war, genocide, dictatorship and fascism.
