Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. El Gamal lawyers detail ICE kidnapping operation, as Congress prepares $53 billion for ICE and CBP
On Tuesday the legal team for Hayam El Gamal and her five children released a statement detailing the Trump administration’s illegal attempt last Saturday to deport the family in defiance of federal court orders. It is not an exaggeration to state that the El Gamal family has been tortured for nearly 11 months by the US government, and last Saturday’s illegal rendition attempt was just the latest example.
The statement, issued by attorney Eric Lee, recounts that El Gamal and her children had been released from the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley on Thursday, April 23, after nearly 11 months in detention. They returned to Colorado and reported Saturday morning for what ICE officers allegedly told them would be a check-in lasting no longer than “five minutes.”
Instead, the family was separated from their attorney, taken behind locked doors, surrounded by armed agents and told, “you are being deported today.”
The lawyers stated that the family protested, explaining that their deportation was barred by court order, but ICE officers replied that “they didn’t care.” The family, which includes an 18-year-old, a 16-year-old, a nine-year-old and two five-year-old twins, were then rushed into a van and driven at roughly 90 miles an hour to Denver International Airport. “The children were not put in car seats or seatbelts,” the statement said. “One child said they were going to be sick and the officer said ‘throw up on the floor.’”
At the airport, the family was taken onto the tarmac, where a private jet contracted by Air Wisconsin was waiting. The legal team noted that the timing indicates that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) began planning to re-detain and deport the family from the moment a federal court ordered their release. The family was able to call their lawyers from the tarmac and provide the plane’s tail number before the call was abruptly cut off.
*****
The plane was ultimately turned around in midair after federal judges in Texas and Colorado issued emergency orders barring the deportation. The family was held for a prolonged period at Willow Run Airport in Michigan before being flown back to Denver and released to community supporters.
Chris Godshall-Bennett, one of the family’s attorneys, denounced the operation in an interview with NPR. “I’m afraid to let them out of my sight,” he said from Colorado, while El Gamal’s children played nearby. “They were treated like animals. ICE took children into their custody in violation of a court order and flew them around the country for eight hours. There’s a word for that. It’s kidnapping. The government’s behavior yesterday was entirely beyond the pale.” NPR reported that DHS did not confirm the re-detention and did not address the allegation that it had violated Judge Fred Biery’s order.
*****
The attempt to kidnap and deport the El Gamal family took place as congressional Republicans, with the Democrats’ assistance through the broader DHS funding maneuver, are preparing a massive new infusion of money for the immigration Gestapo. According to the Senate Judiciary Committee reconciliation text released Monday night, the bill would provide $30.7 billion for ICE through Fiscal Year 2029 and another $22.57 billion to hire, train, pay and equip Customs and Border Protection personnel through Fiscal Year 2029.
Together, those two items alone amount to more than $53 billion for the expansion of the immigration Gestapo, the largest portion of the reported $70 billion enforcement package. The money would run through 2029, more than a year after Trump is supposed to have left office, underscoring that what is being built is not a temporary “border security” operation but a permanent mass paramilitary organization loyal to the “America First” fascist agenda.
*****
The meaning of this money was spelled out Tuesday by Tom Homan, Trump’s “border czar,” speaking before an audience of DHS officials and private contractors at the Border Security Expo in Phoenix. “If you think last year’s historic number was good, wait until next year, when we have 10,000 agents. … You ain’t seen s*** yet,” Homan declared. “Mass deportations are coming.”
*****
The Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign is a public-private kidnapping apparatus: Federal agents carry out the raids, but the surveillance, data mining and target selection are increasingly outsourced to corporations and contractors paid out of the federal treasury.
The threats by Homan and the billions being funneled into ICE, CBP and private security and prison contractors are directed against the entire working class, regardless of immigration status. The El Gamal case shows that the Trump administration is prepared to violate court orders, seize children and attempt illegal removals against people who have committed no crime.
The capitalist nation-state arose historically to create and defend national markets, common laws, currencies and political structures through which the bourgeoisie could protect its property and accumulate capital. But capitalist production long ago outgrew the national framework. Globalized production has bound workers on every continent into a single world economy, while the nation-state system now survives as a machinery of borders, prisons, deportations, war and dictatorship.
Under socialism, the immense productive powers created by the international working class would be freed from the irrational division of the world into rival capitalist states and reorganized on the basis of human need, democratic planning and international cooperation. The struggle against deportations and dictatorship is therefore inseparable from the fight for the socialist unity of the working class across all borders.
2. Stalin, Trotsky and the 1926 British General Strike
May 4 marked 100 years since the beginning of the 1926 British General Strike. The strike, defeated after nine days, was a pivotal experience for the working class in Britain and internationally. The World Socialist Web Site is re-publishing a lecture, “Stalin, Trotsky and the 1926 British general strike” by Chris Marsden, the National Secretary of the Socialist Equality Party (UK). It was first delivered at a summer school of the Socialist Equality Party (US) held August 2007 in Ann Arbor in the United States.
3. Mass protests in Japan against war and remilitarisation
Large protests took place on Sunday throughout Japan against plans by the right-wing coalition government of Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi to water down Article 9—the so-called pacifist clause—of the country’s constitution. An estimated 50,000 people gathered in the Tokyo Rinkai Disaster Prevention Park to mark Constitution Memorial Day, carrying banners reading “STOP Constitutional Revision and Military Expansion.” Smaller protests took place in many cities.
Opposition to Takaichi’s drive to remilitarize Japan, including her insistence on constitutional revision, have grown rapidly this year. Anti-war protests at the National Diet (parliament) in Tokyo swelled in size from 3,600 in late February to rallies of more than 30,000 last month. The protest movement is the most significant since 2015 when mass rallies opposed Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s legislation to allow Japan to participate in US-led wars on the pretext of “Collective Self-Defense.”
The latest protests are being further fueled by overwhelming public opposition to the US-led war on Iran. An Asahi Shimbun survey in March reported that 82 percent of Japanese voters opposed the US attacks on Iran, with only about 9 percent in favor. A Jiji poll in the same month, which reported 75 percent against, found that opposition ranged across the political spectrum, including the ruling coalition. About 70 percent of Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) supporters opposed the war, along with 71 percent of supporters of its ally, the Japan Innovation Party.
*****
Under Takaichi, military spending is being doubled, Japan’s southern islands are being militarized in preparation for war against China and restrictions on the export of lethal weaponry were further eased last month.
The LDP’s longstanding campaign to change the constitution aims to legitimize the existence of the Japanese armed forces, which stands in glaring contradiction to Article 9, and further undercut any legal or constitutional constraints on military deployments in the pursuit of the interests of Japanese imperialism.
Article 9 consists of two paragraphs. The first forever renounces “war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes.” The second declares that “land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.”
*****
While successive governments have justified remilitarisation by claiming that China, in particular, poses a threat, Japan has closely aligned itself with Washington’s advanced preparations for military conflict with China, of which the US war against Iran is a component. Just as the US is using its military might in a desperate attempt to reverse its historic decline, so Japanese imperialism is seeking to rebuild militarily as its global position has slipped from the world’s second largest economy in 2010 to the fourth largest.
Significantly, while public discussion has been focussed on Article 9, the government is also considering the insertion of a profoundly anti-democratic state-of-emergency clause into the constitution, which could be used in the event of foreign invasion or supposed “domestic rebellion.” Cabinet orders during such a so-called emergency declaration would be considered law while the terms of lawmakers would be extended without elections. A proposal contained within the LDP’s 2012 revised constitution draft would allow the military to be deployed on the streets to “maintain public order.”
A process of radicalization—which is already evident in the growing mass anti-war protests—will only deepen as the implications of the criminal US war on Iran, its economic impact on the working class and the unfolding of a wider global conflict become apparent.
The turn by Japanese imperialism to war will not be halted by constitutional restraints. Workers and youth in Japan, like their counterparts internationally, need to fight for the only viable solution—the building of a unified anti-war movement of the international working class based on a socialist program to abolish the source of war, the capitalist system.
4. The collapse of Spirit Airlines: The latest in a decades-long war on the working class
The most immediate trigger for the bankruptcy is the doubling of jet fuel prices during the war on Iran, as a direct consequence of the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20 percent of global oil traffic previously flowed. Spirit, already under bankruptcy, could not absorb the shock. Other airlines are expected to fall if the war continues, including JetBlue and Frontier.
But in reality, the fuel shock is being used as an opportunity to further consolidate the industry and wipe out jobs. Spirit has been allowed to collapse by the US government because the removal of the ultra-low cost carrier will significantly increase prices and profits for the rest of the industry.
*****
The World Socialist Web Site demands that Spirit’s workforce, and all those dislocated by the economic impact of the war, must be made whole, with full pay and benefits until they find new employment. This must be paid for through the expropriation of the windfall profits extracted by the oil companies and major banks from the war they support. This, however, is only a first step towards the nationalization of the airline industry and operating them as public utilities under workers’ control, guaranteeing decent conditions for airline workers and affordable fares for the traveling public.
These demands cannot be won through appeals to the Trump government, but through the building of independent rank-and-file committees uniting Spirit workers with workers across the airline industry and the working class as a whole, which are capable of preparing and coordinating the actions necessary to enforce them.
The economic shocks produced by the war are being used to accelerate a bipartisan attack on the working class which has lasted for half a century.
Deregulation of the US airline industry began in 1978, under the Democratic administration of Jimmy Carter and a Democratic-controlled Congress. Carter signed legislation dismantling the Civil Aeronautics Board ending strict regulations on routes and prices, touching off a brutal competition among the airlines to see who could cut pay, jobs and services the deepest.
This touched off a series of bitter strikes in the 1980s, including at Continental (1983-85), Pan-Am (1985), pilots at United Airlines (1985), flight attendants at TWA (1986) and machinists at Eastern Airlines from 1989 to 1991, which ended in that airlines’ liquidation. The airlines used bankruptcy courts to void union contracts and carry out huge layoffs and pay cuts, including at Continental in 1983 and Eastern Airlines in 1989. By 1991, Eastern and Pan Am air lines had collapsed, wiping out the pensions of workers who had spent their entire careers at those carriers.
This could not have been done without the crucial assistance of the trade union bureaucracy, which transformed itself into an arm of management, protecting its own interests rather than organizing a struggle which would inevitably challenge capitalism. The Air Line Pilots Association and the International Association of Machinists delivered $200 million in annual wage cuts at TWA in 1985 in exchange for an equity stake; United workers accepted up to a 15.7 percent wage cut in 1994 for 55 percent ownership and a six-year no-strike pledge.
Of the 10 major “trunk” carriers in 1978, only three now survive: American, Delta and United. In 1978, the top four carriers accounted for 40 percent of ticketed passengers; now they account for 80 percent.
Deregulation was part of a wider attempt by the ruling class to extricate itself from a structural economic crisis through massive attacks on the working class, summed up in the declaration of Carter’s Fed Chairman Paul Volcker that the “standard of living of the average American has to decline.” The same policies were enacted in every advanced country, including Britain under Margaret Thatcher and France under François Mitterrand.
A major turning point was in 1981 when, acting upon plans first drawn up under Carter, Republican president Ronald Reagan fired 11,000 striking air traffic controllers from the PATCO union. In spite of mass support, including a rally of 400,000 workers in Washington, the AFL-CIO refused to support a general strike. This sealed the fate of PATCO and was followed by a series of unending betrayals and sellouts which continues to the present day.
*****
Iran is part of a global war on the working class. The World Bank estimates that an extended conflict keeping oil above $100 a barrel could push 45 million more people into acute food insecurity. Prices for urea, a key ingredient in fertilizer, have surged 60 to 70 percent, threatening famine across sub-Saharan Africa at planting season. The Iranian government has acknowledged that 2 million workers have already lost their jobs as a direct consequence of the conflict. In Britain, as many as 250,000 jobs could be lost by next year, and in Germany 200,000 jobs are at risk because of the war.
The scope of these attacks will inevitably trigger huge social struggles. As David North told the International May Day Rally last Friday, “the first months of 2026 mark the point at which the resistance of the working class has emerged as a global force, contending against the offensive of the oligarchy on a scale that places the fundamental questions of the epoch—war or peace, dictatorship or democracy, socialism or barbarism—directly on the historical agenda.”
The outcome, North stressed, “will be settled by the struggles now underway and by the political consciousness, organization and leadership that the working class develops in the course of these struggles.”
5. Facing mounting crisis, Trump reverses course on escorting ships through the Strait of Hormuz
The reversal came amid a deepening crisis for the Trump administration. Iran has effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz, the chokepoint through which roughly a fifth of the world’s seaborne oil and gas passed before the war the United States and Israel launched on February 28. Some 1,600 commercial vessels carrying 20,000 seafarers remain trapped in the Persian Gulf; before the war, around 130 ships transited the strait each day.
Trump announced the escort operation Sunday, with the US Navy guiding commercial ships along a pathway declared free of Iranian mines. The cease-fire that had held for nearly four weeks broke down within hours. Iranian forces shot at two commercial vessels Monday; the missiles were intercepted by US forces.
In two days of the escort operation, only three commercial ships made it through: two Monday and one Tuesday. The first US-flagged vessel to exit, the Maersk-operated Alliance Fairfax, transited Monday under what the Pentagon called a defensive “umbrella” of guided-missile destroyers, fighters, helicopters, drones and 15,000 service members. US forces shot down Iranian cruise missiles and drones and destroyed six Iranian speedboats, according to US Central Command. A senior Iranian military official denied on state media that any boats had been sunk.
The same day, Iran fired drones and missiles at the United Arab Emirates and Oman. The attacks left three Indian sailors injured at an oil industrial zone in Fujairah; an oil tanker was struck; and air defense missiles detonated overhead in Dubai. Two people were injured in the Omani coastal town of Bukha. The UAE imposed airspace restrictions through May 11 and reported GPS jamming. They were the first such strikes on the UAE since a fragile cease-fire took effect on April 8. Iran neither claimed nor denied them.
Iran on Tuesday announced a new “Persian Gulf Strait Authority” to oversee traffic in the waterway, requiring vessels to obtain transit permits by email. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy warned that the only safe route was an Iranian-designated corridor and that “action” would be taken against ships deviating from it.
*****
The Democratic Party and the establishment press have criticized Trump from the right—condemning his failure to secure the Strait of Hormuz rather than the criminal character of the war itself. The New York Times editorial board wrote last month that “Iran continues to defy a central part of the deal and block most traffic from crossing the Strait of Hormuz. Mr. Trump’s irresponsibility has left the United States on the cusp of a humiliating strategic defeat.”
The Pentagon hit roughly 13,000 targets in 38 days of combat operations. Of the five major war goals Trump stated on February 28—preventing Iran from ever getting a nuclear weapon, destroying its ballistic missiles and launchers, sinking its navy, ending its support for Hezbollah and Hamas, and creating conditions for the Iranian people to topple their government—only the destruction of the Iranian navy has been accomplished.
Trump’s own language has shifted. He called the war a “miniwar” at a White House small-business event Monday; in earlier speeches he has called it an “excursion” and a “detour.” On the eve of the cease-fire he had warned that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”
Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Tuesday that Iran has attacked US forces more than ten times since the cease-fire took effect, but that the attacks have all been “below the threshold of restarting major combat operations.” Caine acknowledged that defining the threshold “is a political decision.” Pressed by reporters hours later to specify it, Trump said, “You’ll find out, because I’ll let you know.”
The Pentagon said the war so far has cost $25 billion, with lawmakers expecting the administration to ask Congress for another $100 billion later this year. Hegseth will testify next week on a roughly $1.5 trillion fiscal year 2027 Pentagon budget request.
6. Louisiana governor suspends primary election to enforce new congressional gerrymandering
The suspension of congressional primaries in Louisiana, ordered by Governor Jeff Landry April 30, marks a major new step in the political crisis in the United States. For the first time in US history, a governor has postponed a statewide election in order to seize an advantage for his party, rather than because of a genuine emergency.
The action directly violates the US Constitution, which assigns the determination of the “Times, Places and Manner” of congressional elections to state legislatures, not to governors. Landry’s executive order is thus facially unconstitutional, and was immediately challenged on that ground by Democratic Party-aligned legal groups.
According to the complaint filed by the Elias Law Group, headed by Democratic election lawyer Marc Elias, “If the governor is permitted to declare any ‘emergency’ he wishes to justify canceling an election that is already underway, it would set a precedent that would fundamentally and forever subvert the people’s ability to trust and rely on an orderly democratic system.”
“What is happening in Louisiana right now is both a redistricting power grab and a dry run for authoritarian election subversion this fall,” Elias added. In other words, it tests the waters for a far more sweeping intervention against the midterm general election, already foreshadowed by Trump in his notorious claim that his administration was so successful, “When you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.”
Landry’s action is radically different from previous suspensions of primary elections. (No US general election has ever been postponed, even during the Civil War, or in 1814, only a few months after British troops had occupied Washington D.C. and set fire to the US Capitol).
The state of Louisiana postponed primary voting in New Orleans and a few other locations in 2005 after Hurricane Katrina devastated much of the state. New York state suspended the primary in which voters were going to the polls on September 11, 2001, after hijacked airliners struck the Twin Towers in lower Manhattan, killing nearly 3,000 people. The state of Florida delayed primary voting in Miami-Dade County after Hurricane Andrew tore through that area in 1992. And a dozen states moved back their primaries in 2020 after the eruption of the COVID pandemic, most by legislative action rather than executive decree.
No state has done what Landry has announced. The governor postponed the upcoming May 16 primary—in which voters had already begun to cast ballots by mail—until July 15, or “such time as determined by the Legislature.”
His purpose was to give the legislature time to redraw congressional district maps, following the Supreme Court decision in Louisiana v Callais, issued April 29, that the congressional district boundaries in the state constituted a “racial gerrymander.” In its 6-3 decision, the ultra-right high court majority gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, one of the last remaining enforcement provisions in the landmark legislation passed in 1965.
*****
Several other southern states are preparing to follow Louisiana’s lead and redraw their maps to eliminate some or all Democratic-held seats, all of them in black-majority districts. The governors of Tennessee and Alabama have called emergency sessions of their state legislatures for this purpose.
*****
Republicans hide their brazen gerrymandering behind bogus claims of race neutrality. The Democrats offer the perspective of identity politics, which elevates race above class and asserts that capitalist politicians can represent workers if they share the same skin color, regardless of the social chasm between the super-rich and the rest of the population.
*****
In the vicious infighting between two reactionary capitalist parties, neither side defends democratic principles of any kind. The staggeringly anti-democratic character of the gerrymandering is proof of this. In Florida, where a 20-8 Republican delegation could be shifted to 24-4, Republicans could hold 86 percent of the seats in the House, although Trump won the state in the presidential election with 56 percent of the vote. Similarly, in Virginia, Democrats could hold 91 percent of the state’s congressional seats (10 out of 11), but Kamala Harris only carried the state with 52 percent of the vote.
Up until the Supreme Court decision on Louisiana, the rival gerrymandering efforts had effectively canceled each other out, with the Republicans set to gain five seats in Texas, four in Florida, and one each in North Carolina and Missouri. The Democrats countered with measures intended to shift five seats in California, four in Virginia, and one in Utah.
None of these supposed gains are guaranteed, particularly if there is a large swing against Trump and the Republicans, which has been indicated in current polling. Democrats are presumed the favorite to retake control of the House, where the Republicans hold only a three-vote majority.
*****
A report in the Washington Post Tuesday said that White House staff was being prepared for the likelihood that the Democrats would win at least the House, and thus be in a position to conduct hearings and issue legally binding subpoenas. According to the Post account, “The White House Counsel’s Office is giving private briefings to the administration’s political appointees on how to best prepare for congressional oversight as staff begin to brace for the likelihood of significant Democratic victories in the November midterm elections, according to two people briefed on the topic.”
While such measures are politically routine, there is little doubt that far more sinister preparations are under way ahead of the midterm election set for November 5. This includes efforts to rig the vote through gerrymandering and legislative atrocities like the Save America Act, which could disenfranchise millions of US citizens, and to intervene outright through the mobilization of troops and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents at the polls. Trump could even declare the elections “stolen” and overturn the results entirely by issuing executive orders from the White House or invoking the Insurrection Act.
7. Mehring Yayıncılık holds first cinema screening of Tsar to Lenin in Türkiye
Mehring Yayıncılık successfully held the first cinema screening in Türkiye of the unique documentary Tsar to Lenin.
8. Balikatan 2026: US turns Philippines into forward base for war against China
The United States fired a Tomahawk cruise missile from a civilian airport in Leyte on May 5, striking a target in the farming province of Nueva Ecija as part of Balikatan 2026—the largest US-Philippines war games in history, involving 17,000 troops from seven countries, roughly 10,000 American, and, for the first time since the Second World War, Japanese combat forces firing anti-ship missiles on Philippine soil.
*****
The United States has constructed an elaborate legal fiction to obscure what is in fact taking place. The Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) of 2014 grants US forces access to nine designated Philippine military facilities on a rotational basis, and Philippine officials ritually insist, particularly since Iran threatened retaliatory strikes on US bases following Washington’s attacks in February, that “there are no American military bases in the Philippines.”
But US forces are not confined to EDCA-designated facilities. The former colonial ruler moves with impunity across the entire archipelago. They launch a Tomahawk from Tacloban’s civilian airport and position anti-ship missiles on Itbayat, which appears in no EDCA document. Lal-lo Airport in Cagayan—an EDCA site in the north of Luzon, a short flight from Taiwan—is being developed as a refuelling depot for US and Philippine aircraft. The US Defense Logistics Agency has simultaneously issued a solicitation for a fuel depot on the Davao Gulf—outside any EDCA designation—capable of holding approximately 977,000 barrels of US government fuel for warships and aircraft over a four-year period.
This is the operational logic of the Pentagon’s own “deterrence by denial” strategy and its Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations (EABO) concept, which explicitly calls for dispersing missile systems, fuel stocks, and logistics nodes across allied territory to complicate an adversary’s targeting calculus—but it does so by embedding US weaponry in civilian airports, fishing communities, and farming provinces, making the Filipino civilian economy the physical medium through which US forces operate. The counter-drone drills at Balikatan—preparing Philippine and US forces for saturation drone strikes—confirm that Washington anticipates exactly this. It is preparing defenses against the very attacks its own provocations are designed to invite.
The integration of Japan into this war preparation carries a specific historical charge that the Philippine ruling class is studiously avoiding. Japan is conducting combat exercises on Philippine soil for the first time since its wartime occupation, during which it carried out some of the worst crimes in Philippine history—the Manila Massacre of February 1945 alone killed an estimated 100,000 civilians. The legal vehicle for this return is the doctrine of “collective self-defense,” a reinterpretation of Article 9 of Japan’s postwar constitution—the clause that formally renounces war and prohibits Japan from maintaining “war potential”—introduced by the Abe cabinet in 2014, which permits Japan to use force when an ally is attacked and Japan’s “survival” is deemed at stake.
The phrase “collective self-defense” is doing today precisely the work that “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity” did in the 1940s: it is the threadbare legal and moral pretext for regional military projection. Yesterday’s “co-prosperity sphere”—under which Japan conquered, enslaved, and massacred its neighbors under the banner of Asian liberation from Western imperialism—is today rebranded as a “Free and Open Indo-Pacific,” defended by Japanese “Self-Defense Forces” firing anti-ship missiles from the Philippines at the behest of Washington.
*****
The Filipino working class has no interest in this war. Washington is not defending the Philippines; it is using the archipelago—its airports, its fishing communities, its farming provinces, its young soldiers—as the forward launching platform and expendable buffer zone for a war against China over Taiwan and US regional hegemony. The interests being defended are those of US imperialism, of the Philippine oligarchy aligned with it, and of a remilitarizing Japan now sending combat troops and missiles back to the country its forces once occupied and massacred.
In a statement on the upcoming strike vote, Will Lehman, a Mack Trucks worker from Macungie, Pennsylvania who is running for UAW president, said:
Workers at SHAP are right to be angry and ready to fight outsourcing and job cuts. But that fight will go nowhere if it is left in the hands of the UAW bureaucracy. Workers have been down that road before—and it has led to concession after concession.
The Ram 1500 is creating enormous profits for Stellantis, sweated off the labor of SHAP workers. Shawn Fain and the rest of the UAW bureaucracy will do nothing that will interrupt the flow of profits to management because a portion of that gets funneled back to them.
Outsourcing didn’t just appear—It was made possible by what the union already conceded. Now skilled trades workers are being targeted, and tomorrow it will be everyone else. The strategy is obvious: Divide workers, isolate one group at a time and drive down conditions for all.
The current contract language sanctions outsourcing and only requires that the UAW be consulted. This allows the union to bid against outside contractors for work, forcing workers into a race to the bottom, where the “winner” is whoever accepts the lowest wages and worst conditions. This has never saved jobs. It has destroyed them—tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands over the past decades.
The UAW bureaucracy kept this language in the 2023 sellout contract signed by Fain and supported by Rick Boyer, Margaret Mock, LaShawn English and every other UAW official. After this rotten deal led to the firing of TPTs and mass layoffs, Fain launched his phony “Keep the Promise” campaign, which included a series of strike votes that did not result in a single strike. Belvidere Assembly is still closed and may never reopen. Thousands remain on layoff, and brutal speedup and cutting corners on safety have led to the deaths of Stellantis brothers Ronald Adams Sr. at Dundee Engine and Antonio Gaston at Toledo Assembly, along with Gregory Knopf at Ford Sharonville Transmission.
At the same time, Fain has backed Trump’s tariffs and sought to divide American workers from our brothers and sisters in Canada, Mexico and other countries. But economic nationalism only leads to trade war and shooting war, as we see with Trump’s criminal war against Iran, which has not only driven up gas prices but threatens to drag our children off to war.
If workers want to defend their jobs, they need to take matters into their own hands. That means organizing independently, uniting across all divisions in the US and internationally, and preparing to fight on their own terms—not waiting for approval from a bureaucracy that is already preparing the next sellout.
This means building rank-and-file committees controlled democratically by workers ourselves. We should be the ones who decide when to strike and what demands to raise. Any other strategy can only lead to workers being betrayed once again. It requires a collective struggle led by the rank and file, not just at SHAP but across Stellantis and the auto industry, with our working class brothers and sisters internationally.
10. Nexteer workers: Prepare now to defeat another UAW sellout contract!
After extending the last contract behind the backs of workers UAW Local 699 officials have announced that they have reached a new deal.
10. Australian Education Union cancels strikes in Victoria to impose Labor’s austerity agenda
The AEU move to sell out the educators’ struggle is driven by fears of a wider working-class movement against the cost-of-living crisis imposed by the state and federal Labor governments.
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.
