Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Trump signs $70 billion blank check for ICE and Border Patrol after Democrats enable passage
Speaking at the White House before signing the bill, Trump praised the “heroes of ICE and Border Patrol” and boasted that the legislation fully funds the Department of Homeland Security “through the end of my term, so we won’t have that to be talking about any longer.”
After months of mass protests, appeals to Congress and denunciations of ICE violence, the administration has secured a massive increase in funding for the same agencies responsible for the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. The bill contains no restrictions on their operations. There is no requirement that ICE or CBP agents use judicial warrants; no prohibition on masked agents; no end to roving patrols; and no restriction on the deployment of immigration police in airports, workplaces, schools, neighborhoods and public spaces.
The passage of the bill exposes, once again, the fraud of the Democratic Party’s posture as an opponent of Trump’s mass deportation regime. While Democrats voted “no” on the final bill, they had ensured its passage beforehand, making possible the last act in a phony charade.
As the World Socialist Web Site explained last week, the Democrats’ opposition was a carefully staged maneuver. Earlier this year, they agreed to separate funding for ICE and Border Patrol from the broader Department of Homeland Security funding bill. This allowed them to vote for the rest of DHS funding, posture as opponents of the most openly fascistic elements of Trump’s immigration program, and then leave Republicans free to pass the ICE and CBP money through the budget reconciliation process without formal Democratic support.
In other words, the Democrats preserved their ability to posture before the public while guaranteeing that the immigration Gestapo would receive the funding demanded by Trump and the ruling class.
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Since Trump’s return to the White House, millions have taken part in “No Kings” demonstrations and the mass protests in Minnesota in response to the killing of Good and Pretti. There have been protests outside for-profit immigrant detention centers in New Jersey, Texas, Illinois and California, and walkouts by students across the country against the mass deportation operation. Yet this mass opposition finds no expression in Washington. The reason is that the Democrats are not an opposition party. They are collaborators in Trump’s and the ruling class’s drive to establish a presidential dictatorship.
The passage of the Secure America Act underscores that the fight to free immigrants, stop the construction of a nationwide network of concentration camps, and abolish the immigration Gestapo cannot be left in the hands of the Democratic Party. Workers need their own party and organizations, grounded in an internationalist and socialist program, which recognizes the right of all human beings to live, labor and love wherever they choose, regardless of immigration status.
2. US consumer prices jump as workers pay for American imperialism’s war on Iran
The inflation report was issued only hours before Trump announced a new round of airstrikes on Iran, which will undoubtedly have a further catastrophic impact on world energy supplies and prices. Workers in the United States, and around the world, are paying the price for the US military slaughtering the people of Iran.
Trump himself underscored that connection at a press briefing at the White House, as he signed into law a bill providing $70 billion for the police-state operations of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) for the next three years. Asked about the increase in the Consumer Price Index, he responded with his characteristic mixture of indifference, lies and sheer incoherence.
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Trump’s remarks are the latest in a series of declarations in which he has expressed the indifference of the billionaire oligarchy toward the impact of the war on the broad mass of the population.
In April, he declared that the government should stop worrying about “Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things” and focus on “one thing, military protection.” By this he means, not protection for working people, but protection for the giant oil companies and the vast fortunes of the super-rich. Asked last month about the impact of the Iran war on the cost of living, he replied, “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. Not even a little bit.”
The same crisis of American and world capitalism that drives the ruling class to war abroad drives it to impoverish workers at home. The hundreds of billions spent bombing Iran, financing the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine and funding the ICE police-state machine must be extracted from the working class. Trump has said so openly, though the entire political establishment, Democrat and Republican, agrees.
The same contradictions driving the ruling class to war are driving workers into struggle, and the past three months have seen a powerful growth of the class struggle. As in similar periods in the past, price inflation and the slashing of living standards are having a radicalizing effect on millions of working people and fueling an increasingly oppositional mood in factories, warehouses and workplaces of all kinds.
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The trade union apparatus is engaged in a systematic operation to suppress opposition among workers. The UAW Constitutional Convention opens Monday amid a series of betrayals of auto parts workers. On Wednesday, the UAW announced that it had reached a tentative agreement at American Axle in an attempt to shut down the strike before the convention begins and block the development of a united movement with Nexteer, Dana and other parts and auto workers.
The union apparatus as a whole is doing nothing to oppose the attack on wages and living standards. Workers are trapped in multi-year contracts that lock in real wage cuts while the bureaucracies function as arms of corporate management and labor police forces, controlled by privileged officials drawing six-figure salaries.
The Socialist Equality Party encourages the formation of rank-and-file committees in every workplace, independent of the union apparatus and both corporate parties, to organize a struggle to defend living standards, oppose war and defend democratic rights.
These committees, organized through the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees should raise and fight for immediate demands, including: a large increase in wages to recover income stolen through decades of stagnation and inflation; the automatic indexing of all wages, pensions and benefits to the cost of living through a monthly escalator; a sharp increase in Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security, against all cuts; and an end to price-gouging by the energy and food monopolies.
But these demands raise the necessity for a direct assault on the wealth and power of the capitalist oligarchy. The giant energy corporations, food monopolies, banks and financial institutions must be transformed into publicly owned utilities, democratically controlled by the working class. The fortunes of the billionaires and corporate executives—amassed through war, speculation, exploitation and price-gouging—must be expropriated and used to meet urgent social needs.
The fight against inflation is inseparable from the struggle to end the war, and both require breaking the grip of the financial oligarchy over economic life. This is a political struggle: for the independent mobilization of the working class against both capitalist parties, for workers’ power and for the socialist reorganization of the world economy to serve human need, not private profit.
This review makes clear that Trotsky’s writings are the working class’s indispensable guide to this critical historical experience.
4. Far-right pogrom burns out immigrant families in Belfast
An organized pogrom by far-right forces against immigrants and asylum seekers began in Belfast, Northern Ireland, on Tuesday evening.
Seizing on a horrific stabbing attack by a Sudanese refugee, mob violence left families burned out of their homes and communities terrorized across the city.
Mobilizations were also organized in Glasgow and Liverpool, cities with an historic presence of the Ulster Unionist forces at the center of events in Belfast. Hundreds of masked men attacked migrants and a hotel housing asylum seekers was attacked in Liverpool.
Many schools and shops were closed and public transport shut down across Northern Ireland Wednesday, stranding some and leaving Belfast mostly deserted during the day. On Wednesday evening, a group of around 200 people—again clothed in black—gathered at roundabout about eight miles north of Belfast city center and confronted police, including by throwing projectiles. Riot police, who barricaded the road, responded by firing water cannon.
The pretext for the latest far-right provocation was the attack on Stephen Ogilvie, who was stabbed on Monday evening in a street in the north of the city with a kitchen knife by Hadi Alodid, aged 30. Ogilvie was stabbed repeatedly in the face, head, neck and back and Alodid also tried to cut his throat. Oglivie, aged 44, lost his left eye. Members of the public intervened to fend off the attacker until police arrived. The incident was partially filmed, and the footage widely circulated by far-right figures, including Tommy Robinson.
On Wednesday, Alodid appeared at Belfast magistrates court charged with attempting to murder Ogilvie, threatening to kill a National Health Service radiographer on the same day, and possessing a knife.
Ogilvie’s family issued a principled statement condemning the far-right attacks, which concluded, “We have many migrants who make a deeply valuable contribution to our country, including in our healthcare system and hospitality sector, and we depend on them to make our country work. We do not want this terrible tragedy to be used to divide people or fuel hostility.”
In a posting on X Tuesday afternoon Robinson described the stabbing as “another invader attack on our people” and listed specific times for protests being held that night in various cities. The posting was eventually viewed over 9 million times. Rupert Lowe, leader of the far-right Restore UK added his voice to calls for mobilizations with a video (viewed over 2 million times) and another posting stating, “We must stop harboring those who wish to decapitate children. A vast number of people need to be removed from our country-when I say vast, I mean it. Millions and millions need to leave or be made to leave.”
Elon Musk, the billionaire oligarch who uses his control of X as a megaphone for the international far-right, reposted another of Lowe’s diatribes reading “Enough”, resulting in it being viewed over 62 million times.
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In Belfast, gangs went door to door demanding the removal of anyone identifiably foreign. At least three homes were torched. Some families had to be evacuated by Northern Ireland Fire and Rescue Service (NIFRS) officers as their homes caught fire or flames approached. Among those rescued was a two-month-old baby.
The protest involved hundreds not thousands, with the fascist hardcore reported to have attacked one local youth—who involved himself in the attacks—for filming them with his phone.
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Tuesday’s attacks took place a year to the day of another anti-migrant pogrom in Northern Ireland. The far-right have also been heavily organising in the Republic of Ireland over the last few years.
The attacks Tuesday were the second major occurrence of violence organized by the far-right within a week. It followed sustained protests in Southampton and beyond after Vickrum Digwa, a British Sikh, was jailed for the fatal stabbing of 18-year-old student Henry Nowak in December.
In that city Robinson told the crowd “As white people we are treated like second-rate citizens by our own government.” Former British National Party member and current Britain First leader Paul Golding urged the crowd to “take your anger and turn it into political action” against “the real criminals who are turning Britain into a foreign country”.
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None of this emerges in a vacuum. The far-right has been cultivated and animated by an unrelenting campaign of immigrant demonization that has characterized every government at Westminster for years. The Conservatives and now Labour have made the scapegoating of asylum seekers and migrants a central instrument of their political programs, competing to demonstrate toughness on borders in order to deflect working-class anger from the social catastrophe they are themselves imposing.
Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham, positioning himself as a future Labour leader, moved to line up substantially behind Farage’s agenda, having already backed harsh anti-immigrant proposals of Labour Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood.
5. Platner wins Democratic Senate primary in Maine
The contest was over months before primary day. Mills—the candidate Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer had personally recruited and endorsed in October as the establishment favorite—dropped out in April citing fundraising troubles, after polls showed her trailing Platner by as much as 38 points.
By late May, Platner led the entire field, Collins included, in fundraising, having raised $16.3 million for the cycle. Polls now show him leading Collins in the general election by between 5 and 9 points.
The vote for Platner expresses popular opposition to inequality, to which Platner’s rhetoric speaks. Platner’s promoters—large sections of the Democratic Party and the trade union apparatus, most avidly its so-called “progressive” wing—present him as a genuine representative of the working class. He is nothing of the sort.
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His politics are entirely compatible with the Democratic Party. He invokes the New Deal, praises Roosevelt and talks about billionaires, while accepting the framework of capitalism, private property, imperialism and the nation-state. On immigration, he criticizes Trump’s methods while accepting the need for border enforcement and a more “effective” system. On war, his military record and later mercenary work speak louder than any carefully scripted antiwar phrase.
This was underscored last Tuesday when Platner traveled to Washington D.C. to meet with Senate Democrats, including Senate Minority Leader Schumer. Following the meeting, Schumer repeatedly ducked questions about Platner, saying only that Democrats were going to beat Susan Collins and take back the Senate. In the end, however, he said he endorsed Platner’s campaign.
Platner has tried to have it both ways, saying he “spoke with Senator Schumer” and is happy to find “common ground” to defeat Collins, while insisting he will not vote for Schumer to remain Senate minority leader and will not soften his “criticisms of the party.” But one cannot be a champion of the working class and simultaneously receive the blessing of the “senator from Wall Street,” one of the most fervent defenders of the Israeli genocide in Gaza.
The #MeToo-style campaign against Platner must be understood within this broader political framework. It is necessary to identify the political function of this scandal and the fraud of both camps.
The controversy began in earnest on May 30, when the Wall Street Journal reported that Platner’s wife, Amy Gertner, had told his campaign that she had found sexually explicit text messages to other women on his phone. Gertner and Platner have stated that they went through counseling and that the matter is private.
This was followed on June 4 by a New York Times article based on interviews with several women who had dated Platner. The article described what it called “unsettling” behavior, though nothing described in the piece amounts to a crime. The most significant allegations come from Lyndsey Fifield, a pro-Zionist Republican operative who worked on Nikki Haley’s presidential campaign and has been paid by the Independent Women’s Forum, a right-wing organization that backed the elevation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court when he himself was the target of sexual assault allegations.
Platner has issued varying responses. He has categorically denied allegations of physical abuse and claimed that when he put the Totenkopf tattoo on his chest he did not know it was a Nazi symbol. At the same time, he has acknowledged that after several military deployments on behalf of US imperialism he went through a “dark period” in which he abused alcohol and acted in ways he now says he regrets.
The hypocrisy of the Republican attacks is staggering. Republicans have seized on Platner’s alleged infidelity and womanizing, presenting themselves as guardians of moral decency. These are the same forces that worship at the altar of Donald Trump, who has faced numerous allegations of sexual misconduct and was found civilly liable for sexually abusing and defaming E. Jean Carroll.
At the same time, the response of Platner’s pseudo-left supporters is no less revealing. Many of the same forces who previously insisted that “believe all women” was a sacrosanct political principle have discarded it overnight, recasting his alcoholism, womanizing and evasions as marks of his working class bona fides.
This is a contemptible caricature of the working class, which is not composed of drunken liars and men who “accidentally” tattoo Nazi insignia on their chests. The #MeToo campaign was always, as the World Socialist Web Site explained from its 2017 origins, a reactionary movement of privileged upper-middle class layers, hostile to due process and the presumption of innocence and indifferent to class. It was deployed in 2020 to drown class anger in the politics of gender and race. The pseudo-left embraced it then and discards it now. Platner is their candidate, their project, their chosen instrument for corralling opposition to capitalism back into the Democratic Party.
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Platner is not a threat to the financial oligarchy. His campaign is an operation of the Democratic Party, prepared by operatives, consultants and the trade union bureaucracy. As Politico reported in December, Platner was not some spontaneous expression of working class anger. He was recruited by operatives Daniel Moraff and Leanne Fan, veterans of the Sanders milieu, who had previously sought a “blue collar” candidate in Maine before turning to Platner. They were directed to him by union officials, community organizers and “progressive” networks.
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Workers and youth must draw the necessary conclusion. The fight against capitalism will not be waged through the Democratic Party or its pseudo-left apologists. The fight to expropriate the billionaires, end imperialist war and hold the fascists accountable requires the independent political mobilization of the working class, in the United States and internationally, on the basis of a socialist program.
6. In attack on WSWS, Counterpunch extols “socialism with Mexican characteristics”
In a recent piece published by CounterPunch, American novelist Eve Ottenberg mounts a defense of Mexico’s former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) and his hand-picked successor, President Claudia Sheinbaum, as the government faces growing opposition from below amid spending cuts and a deepening social crisis.
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The poverty statistics Ottenberg cites do not survive contact with Mexico’s own official data. According to the National Institute of Statistics (INEGI), the share of the population living in poverty did fall from 41.9 percent in 2018 to 36.3 percent in 2022, the period Ottenberg celebrates. But extreme poverty remained virtually unchanged, and in absolute terms nearly 400,000 more people joined the ranks of the extremely poor. More damning still: the number of Mexicans unable to access health services more than doubled, from 16 percent to 39 percent—approximately 30 million people stripped of healthcare during the years of what Ottenberg describes as a “social welfare revolution.”
A study by the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) found that cash transfers played a minimal role even in the modest poverty reductions recorded; the improvements were largely attributable to the post-COVID income recovery.
Yet Ottenberg does not merely praise these programs. She borrows a term coined by Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping to justify the restoration of capitalism in China to describe AMLO’s project as the construction of “socialism with Mexican characteristics.”
The phrase “socialism with Chinese characteristics” sought to provide an ideological cover for the de-collectivization of agriculture, the opening of China to foreign capital, the privatization of state enterprises, and the transformation of the Chinese Communist Party bureaucracy into a property-owning bourgeois ruling class engaged in corruption, theft of state assets, and joint ventures with overseas capital.
It attempted to conceal the fact that China was being integrated into the world market on imperialist terms, reviving the pre-revolutionary “concessions” through special economic zones and enabling the exploitation of Chinese workers at globally competitive wages. The consequences included runaway inflation, mass unemployment, official gangsterism, and the reemergence of prostitution on a scale not seen since the worst days of Chiang Kai-shek—while the regime maintained its dictatorial suppression of the working class, demonstrated most brutally at Tiananmen Square in 1989.
The 1949 Chinese Revolution, nonetheless, represented a monumental world historic event, ending a century of imperialist subjugation and unifying the most populous country in the world. It dealt a major blow to imperialism, smashed the domination of the landlord class and, ultimately, nationalized much of Chinese industry. At the same time it created a Stalinist-style bureaucratic police state that ruthlessly repressed opposition, particularly from the left.
To compare such a history to the meager reforms offered by the bourgeois governments headed by Morena (Movimiento Regeneración Nacional/National Regeneration Movement) is preposterous, while adopting Beijing’s rhetorical fig leaf for capitalist restoration—“socialism with Chinese characteristics”—as the template for a positive depiction of the rule of AMLO and Sheinbaum recalls nothing so much as Lenin’s famous metaphor of “wishing mourners at a funeral many happy returns of the day.”
Neither AMLO nor Sheinbaum, of course, has even claimed to be building socialism. Morena’s ideological content consists of vague promises to put “the poor first” and expand “the people’s access to rights.” The slogan of the “Fourth Transformation” grandiosely compares these limited policies to Mexico’s three prior historic transformations: the Wars of Independence (1810–1821), the liberal Reform War and expulsion of the French Empire’s invasion under Benito Juárez (1858–1867), and the Revolution of 1910-20.*****
Oxfam Mexico’s 2026 report, “Oligarchy or Democracy,” demonstrates how preposterous it is to speak of “socialism with Mexican characteristics” under Morena. The wealthiest 1 percent of Mexicans receive 35 percent of the country’s total income and hold 40 percent of its private wealth. Carlos Slim—whom Ottenberg quotes praising AMLO’s social peace—increased his fortune by 66 percent since 2020, accumulating $107.1 billion. As Oxfam notes, the Mexican state devotes less than 4 out of every 100 pesos of national wealth to public investment, while the private sector invests less than 8. “When wealth is concentrated,” the report states, “power remains in the same hands, causing the erosion of democracy and the establishment of an oligarchy.”
AMLO himself, in 2018, created a Business Advisory Council composed of Mexico’s richest men and headed by millionaire Alfonso Romo, who served as chief of the Presidential Office. This is the institutional architecture of Ottenberg’s socialist paradise.
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Ottenberg states her framework openly: “AMLO’s accomplishment comes within the context of regulated capitalism,” and she finds it “difficult to get upset about leaders who obviate this awful system, modify it or use it to advance social welfare.” What this really means is that capitalism is acceptable so long as it maintains a polite face that helps suppress the class struggle.
But the Mexican working class does not experience capitalism as a spectrum from “regulated” to “unregulated.” It experiences it as super-exploitation. A minimum wage of $15 per day, modestly raised, remains a poverty wage—and in a country where three out of five workers labor in the informal sector, minimum wage laws are largely symbolic.
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Ottenberg’s article has a concrete political purpose: to dissuade workers in the United States and Mexico from drawing the conclusion that social reformism has exhausted its historical possibilities and that their joint revolutionary struggle to overthrow capitalism is necessary. Her celebration of Sheinbaum and AMLO as “socialism with Mexican characteristics” replaces class analysis in favor of feel-good storytelling about benevolent rulers—and in doing so, provides a service to Trump and US imperialism in blocking the joint struggle of workers across North America against capitalist exploitation, imperialist war and fascism.
The degree of Mexico’s economic subordination to US imperialism means the Mexican bourgeoisie possesses no independent basis from which to resist being reduced to the status of a protectorate. What gives it any room to maneuver at all is the fear, in Washington, of provoking the Mexican working class—and the service Morena provides in containing that class from igniting a continental explosion. Mexican workers need to throw the Mexican bourgeoisie and its representatives in Morena into the trash bin of history and unite with their class brothers and sisters in the United States and the rest of the Americas to destroy imperialism.
7. Washington meddles in Peruvian election with runoff too close to call
A paper-thin margin separates the two candidates as the Trump administration openly maneuvers to shape the outcome in Washington's favor.
8. Mr. Nobody Against Putin: A portrait of Russian working class life, but in the service of NATO
Under the cover of a generally humane portrayal of the impact of the Ukraine war on a beat-up working class Russian town, the film, at its core, promotes typical US-NATO anti-Putin politics.
9. Students across Chile protest criminalization of youth and education cuts
The protests were directed against Kast’s newly installed fascistic government and its across-the-board spending cuts in the public sector in service of Chilean and international capital.
10. ICE abducts mother at Ann Arbor middle school
The Trump administration’s targeting of the Detroit metro area, the historic heart of the American auto industry and home to nearly a quarter million manufacturing workers, makes it clear that ICE is not engaging in narrow immigration enforcement but a terror campaign aimed at the working class as a whole.
11. Collapse of Franco-German fighter jet project exposes sharp tensions
The Future Combat Air System (FCAS), considered a lighthouse project of Franco-German plans to arm Europe into an independent imperialist great power capable of standing up to both the US and China, has failed spectacularly.
12. “I would be willing to strike”: New York transit workers prepared to fight for their needs
Almost a month since their last contract expired, New York City transit workers are determined to fight for their needs against the administration of the Metropolitan Transit Authority. The MTA is demanding huge concessions in a new contract for 40,000 subway and bus workers, including 2 percent annual pay increases, restrictions on overtime and sick leave and a doubling of out-of-pocket costs for healthcare.
The MTA claims there is “no money,” in the richest city in the world, for pay that keeps pace with inflation. Meanwhile, around 15 percent of the MTA’s overall budget is spent servicing debt to Wall Street firms like BlackRock and Vanguard.
The fight is against the city’s financial elite, as well as the Democratic Party, including Governor Kathy Hochul and city mayor Zohran Mamdani. Brought to power because of widespread opposition to inequality, Zohran Mamdani quickly aligned himself with the pro-business governor, held two fawning meetings with Trump, and is now establishing a municipal agency, COGE, patterned after DOGE, which slashed 300,000 federal jobs.
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The World Socialist Web Site also received the following letter from a working CSX railroad worker, addressed to Long Island Rail Road workers. Workers on LIRR and the Class I freight carriers share many of the same unions.
To My Brothers and Sisters at the Long Island Rail Road and the MTA:
I’m writing as a fellow rail worker — a conductor, a SMART member, working CSX in the northeast. First: what you did on May 16th took guts. The first LIRR strike in 32 years. The MTA couldn’t break you — their scab operation was a humiliation, and the strike was working at the very moment it was shut down.
But solidarity means being honest. Your officials ordered you back without showing you a single term of the contract — and when asked why, the answer was plain: they were afraid you’d vote it down if you saw it. That’s not representation. Now they’ll tell you this is the best deal you could have gotten. They always do.
They did the same thing to us on the freight railroads this contract cycle, also weakening our bargaining power by isolating each craft during contract talks. This tactic of negotiating each craft separately, is not an accident — it is a pattern, and its purpose is to weaken your hand before you even sit down at the table. When you hear “this is the best we can get,” what it really means is: this is the best they were willing to fight for.
This moment demands more than waiting for the next contract cycle or the next hot shot union rep. The power that shut down New York’s commuter rail for three days belongs to the workers who walked that picket line — not to the bureaucrats who ended it without your consent.
Take that power back! The time is now to form your own workplace committees — democratic, rank-and-file bodies that answer only to you, that you run, that represent what you actually need. We should do this nationally, and right now.
In solidarity — A CSX Conductor, Northeast Region, SMART-TD Member
13. Hersheypark workers in Pennsylvania reject 4th tentative agreement, vote to strike
On Wednesday, June 3, over 200 skilled trades workers at the Hersheypark theme park and luxury resort in Hershey, Pennsylvania, voted down a fourth tentative agreement offered by management and the Chocolate Workers Local 464 bargaining committee. Following the rejection, over 500 Local 464 members across Hersheypark, the Giant Center and Hotel Hershey voted to authorize a strike. A walkout could shut down operations amid the busy opening weeks of summer.
Originally, the skilled trades workers had been scheduled to authorize a strike in mid-May, following rejection of one of the $1 billion corporation’s “final offers.” No sooner was that offer defeated than management and the union—affiliated with the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers (BCTGM)—returned with another proposal, keeping workers on the job while attempting to ram through yet another sellout agreement. It was only after the fourth rejection that Local 464 officials felt compelled to call a strike authorization vote at all and only then to save face.
The consecutive rejections and strike authorization reflect a deepening mood of resistance and militancy among workers in the United States and internationally. They come as 1,700 Nexteer auto parts workers in Saginaw, Michigan, have launched a rebellion against both management and the United Auto Workers union, rejecting three tentative agreements and authorizing strike action by 86 percent. That militancy, however, is being strangled by the UAW leaders, who have instructed workers to remain on the job indefinitely.
Nearby, American Axle workers in Three Rivers, Michigan, have launched strike action against low pay, the absence of sick days and years of concessions extracted by the UAW, even as the company has posted massive profits. In addition, Dana workers in Michigan, Ohio and Indiana have rejected union-backed contracts by more than 90 percent over the last week.
In a June 3 statement, the same day Hersheypark workers voted to strike, the Nexteer Workers Rank-and-File Committee—composed of workers from the shop floor determined to advance their struggle—declared: “We have rejected three contracts. We have voted to strike. We have made our position clear. From this point forward, the workers will become the authority.”
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Workers should build a rank-and-file committee of militant members to prepare for strike action, elect a new bargaining committee directly accountable to the membership, and organize solidarity with non-union workers at the park, as well as rank-and-file members across other unions.
What has unfolded since the contract’s expiration in mid-March makes this clear.
On March 15, the contract expired. Rather than strike, a 60-day extension was agreed to—a move that enabled management and the union leadership to divide the workforce, pushing a separate revised agreement through at the Hershey Lodge and Hershey Country Club.
On May 7, they voted down what management called its “last, best and final” offer. With Hershey preparing to operate seven days a week through the Memorial Day holiday weekend, a strike at that moment would have significantly disrupted operations and increased pressure on the company by directly hitting its bottom line. The union ensured that did not happen.
The most recent vote was conducted over three days, June 1 through 3, with different sections of the workforce voting in separate time blocks. This staggered process was plainly designed to dilute unified opposition and improve management’s chances of securing ratification. Despite it, workers rejected the offer a fourth time and authorized a strike.
Hersheypark workers are not alone in confronting the brickwall of the apparatus. The BCTGM brings to this struggle a long train of betrayals. In mid-2021, 600 Frito-Lay workers in Topeka, Kansas, struck and rejected four sellout agreements, but the BCTGM pushed through a contract while paying just $105 a week in strike benefits. “The union,” a striking worker told the World Socialist Web Site at the time, “literally starved us into accepting the latest offer.”
In August–September 2021, Nabisco workers struck across five states. The BCTGM colluded with management to isolate the walkouts, rushing through a sellout vote that gave workers less than an hour to read the contract before balloting.
The relationship between the BCTGM bureaucracy—with President Anthony Shelton drawing $364,966 per year to deliver sellout agreements to his members—and the two major political parties is what separates these institutions from the rank and file. Their material interests make them instruments of management and capitalism, not of workers’ power or solidarity.
A strike would win mass support. A former coworker posted on social media following the latest rejection: “The Hershey Trust is sitting on how many billions? I worked with those guys for two seasons. They deserve every penny.”
These were not simply tragic accidents but the lethal results of austerity. Preventing them requires an organized movement from below, not beholden to management, toothless regulatory agencies or corrupt union officials.
15. FBI raids pro-Palestinian activists at University of Michigan, indicting eighy and arresting seven
The Trump administration escalated its political persecution of anti-war protesters on Wednesday, as the FBI and federal law enforcement agencies raided homes across southeast Michigan and unsealed a 63-page indictment charging eight individuals associated with pro-Palestinian activism at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
16. Sri Lankan President pledges separate courts for Buddhist monks, placing them above the normal law
The Dissanayake government’s move is a further step in strengthening the Sinhala-Buddhist chauvinist state and towards autocratic rule.
17. Earthquake off southern Philippines leaves at least 46 dead
The flouting of safety standards in order to cut costs in the Philippines and in countries around the world regularly turns so-called "natural disasters" into man-made ones.
18. One-day nationwide strike in Portugal opposes right-wing labour reform
The June 3 strike was the second nationwide strike against Trabalho XXI in six months, after the December 11, 2025 strike--the first in 12 years--which paralysed the country.
19. Trump orders second day of new strikes on Iran, vowing to attack “very hard”
The United States bombed Iran for a second consecutive day Wednesday, with the US military announcing that it had begun striking “multiple targets” in Iran at 5:15 p.m. Eastern time. CBS News reported Wednesday that two US officials said the targets included ammunition depots, command-and-control nodes and warehouses.
20. Preface to the book: “The Ukraine War and the Fight for Socialism: The Case of Bogdan Syrotiuk”
This book appears at a decisive moment. More than two years after Bogdan’s arrest, the legal frame-up constructed by the SBU has largely collapsed. Bogdan’s lawyers have systematically refuted the claim that he is a supporter of the Kremlin on the basis of his own writings. Late last year, they submitted an independent linguistic expert report by Yuri Borisovich Irkhin, one of Ukraine’s most renowned criminologists. His analysis shows that the accusations against Bogdan are entirely baseless.
21. 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.
