Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Philadelphia Sheraton hotel workers’ union calls off strike days ahead of busy July 4 holiday
On June 28, union officials from UNITE HERE Local 274 announced an end to a nine-day strike at the Sheraton Philadelphia Downtown hotel following a tentative agreement (TA). The agreement came just in time for the massive July 4 tourism rush to the city.
Workers had only days to vote on the TA. According to local sources, the contract was ratified on Monday, June 29, and workers were returning to their jobs on Wednesday, July 1.
The workers had been without a contract since May 2024, laboring under extensions while inflation and housing costs surged. The TA would bring Sheraton workers “up to the standard” already won at five other unionized Center City hotels: a path to $30 per hour for non-tipped workers by January 2028, a 15-room daily quota for housekeepers, 18 percent banquet gratuity and improved pensions and family health coverage.
The hotel workers first walked out in October 2025, alongside roughly 190 workers at the Sheraton and Hampton Inn Center City, part of a broader struggle involving nearly 4,000 Local 274 members across eight hotels. That four-day strike led to Hampton Inn and other properties to adopt a new citywide standard, but Sheraton held out. Sheraton’s owners, Cambridge Landmark, calculated that they could absorb a brief stoppage and continue profiting from a packed 2026 events calendar—FIFA World Cup matches, America 250 celebrations, the MLB All-Star Game—without conceding immediately.
In June, Sheraton workers struck again, with 98 percent of members authorizing the walkout. This time it coincided with the hotel’s busiest season and a major World Cup match in the city. The deal, reached as Philadelphia prepares to mark the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, allows the largest unionized hotel in the city to resume operations for the holiday weekend and the flood of visitors to “America’s birthplace.”
Union leaders quickly wound down the strike and treated the membership’s acceptance of the TA as a foregone conclusion even while the so-called “industry standard” embodied in the agreement masks the underlying reality.
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The decision to end the strike well in advance of the holiday weekend reflects the union’s institutional ties to the Democratic Party and its role in defending capitalism. At the international level, UNITE HERE President Gwen Mills received about $204,308 in compensation, with other top officers such as senior HR Director John McCaffrey and an international vice president in the $179,000–$183,000 range.
As reflected in the hotel workers’ minor wage increases and other concessions, UNITE HERE and the rest of the trade union apparatus have been critical to maintaining the status quo in the city and throughout the region. July 1 marks one year since the start of the powerful Philadelphia municipal workers strike in 2025. Nearly 9,000 AFSCME District Council 33 members—trash collectors, 911 dispatchers, street pavers and other city workers—launched the largest municipal strike in almost four decades, demanding 8 percent annual raises over three years, full healthcare coverage and real cost-of-living protections.
After eight days, AFSCME shut down the strike and rammed through a tentative agreement for a miserly 9 percent wage increase over three years—just one percentage point more than the city’s initial offer.
The municipal workers had immense leverage and mass support, but the union apparatus conspired to prevent a broader movement. UNITE HERE Local 274, for its part, kept its members working through July 2025, even though their own hotel contracts had expired in May 2024. The union chose not to link tens of thousands of hotel and restaurant workers to the municipal strike, ensuring that the potential for a genuine citywide offensive against austerity was never realized.
The only organization that advanced such a perspective was the Philadelphia Workers Rank-and-File Strike Committee, formed during the municipal strike out of opposition to AFSCME’s betrayal. The committee urged fellow municipal workers to “renew the strike immediately and expand it to include transit workers, white-collar employees and all other sections of the working class in Philadelphia.”
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The Sheraton strike confirms the central lesson of last year’s municipal struggle: So long as workers remain confined within the framework of the official unions and the Democratic Party, every fight will end with “industry standards” and “fair, fiscally responsible” agreements that leave poverty wages and intolerable living conditions fundamentally untouched.
2. California Democrats strip elected education superintendent of authority
Governor Newsom’s AB 181 strips the elected education superintendent of executive authority, advancing the Democratic Party's assault on democratic rights and public education.
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The bill is being sold in the language of technocratic efficiency. Newsom acted on recommendations from Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE), a Stanford-based research institute, which argued that splitting authority between an elected superintendent and the governor creates “inefficiency and ineffectiveness.” Dozens of education advocacy organizations endorsed the concept. Ted Lempert of Children Now praised Newsom for providing “strong leadership.” Former State Board President Michael Kirst called it “an important milestone.”
PACE and its endorsers are instruments of the ruling class, staffed by personnel who circulate between universities, foundations and state agencies, serving as conduits for the corporate restructuring of public education. The “efficiency” they invoke is code for removing institutional obstacles to the imposition of austerity.
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The significance of weakening the elected Superintendent is not that it violates democratic principles in the abstract. The Superintendent election was always a mechanism of bourgeois democracy, a form through which the bourgeoisie rules. What AB 181 reveals is that the ruling class can no longer tolerate even the limited institutional buffers that bourgeois democracy once provided. The Democrats are jettisoning their own legal forms when they become inconvenient, a sign of the advanced decay of American democracy.
Newsom represents a ruling class terrified by the rise of workers’ opposition. His proposal forms part of a broader, bipartisan offensive against public education unfolding across the United States. At the federal level, the Trump administration has moved aggressively to dismantle the Department of Education and convert schools into centers of nationalist and religious indoctrination, most recently demanding that universities submit to a “Compact for Academic Excellence” that imposes ideological conformity in exchange for funding, an American version of the Nazi policy of Gleichschaltung.
Newsom, who has carefully cultivated an image as the leader of the Democratic “resistance” to Trump, is replicating the same authoritarian logic at the state level. He has already led the charge in expanding state repression, deploying the California Highway Patrol as “domestic shock troops” for crime suppression sweeps and homeless encampment clearances across the state’s major cities. His “SAFE Task Force“ mobilized six state agencies to forcibly destroy the belongings of homeless residents.
The education power grab extends this logic to public schools. The weakening of the independently elected Superintendent and the concentration of authority in a single appointed administrator reporting directly to the governor streamlines the implementation of budget cuts, layoffs, school closures and, fundamentally, the suppression of labor unrest.
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In April 2026, a unified strike of near 70,000 Los Angeles educators—teachers, administrators and classified workers walking out together for the first time in the district’s history—was cancelled in the middle of the night through a joint operation involving the union apparatus, LAUSD management and Democratic Mayor Karen Bass. At 2:30 a.m., just hours before the walkout, SEIU Local 99 announced a last-minute deal. United Teachers Los Angeles and the Associated Administrators of Los Angeles had already capitulated days earlier. Mayor Bass personally intervened in the overnight talks and later appeared at a press conference flanked by union presidents, who thanked her for “stepping in.”
Yvonne Wheeler, president of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, declared she would “rather be here today than on the picket line,” a remark met with loud applause from assembled officials and union executives.
The cancellation paved the way for a wave of layoffs already outlined in the district’s “fiscal stabilization” plan, under which 3,200 workers had received pink slips. Ratification took place in late April and early May. By the time final budget decisions were made, the workforce was already bound by a new contract while management retained full freedom to implement cuts—the same bait-and-switch used earlier this year in San Francisco and last year in Chicago.
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These developments evince the essential unity of the Democratic Party, the union bureaucracy and the pseudo-left in managing the social crisis produced by capitalism. The Democrats refuse to fight Trump because they are a capitalist party committed to the same basic policies of war and austerity. Their function is to provide a liberal cover for the dismantling of democratic rights and the immiseration of the working class. Newsom’s 2025-26 budget already imposed $5 billion in cuts targeting undocumented adults, the disabled and foster youth.
Newsom’s education power grab is the administrative expression of the same class logic that the union bureaucracy enforces on the industrial front. The Democratic Party dismantles democratic forms from above; the union bureaucracy suppresses resistance from below. Both serve the same master: the financial oligarchy that is waging war abroad, slashing social spending at home and preparing for the explosion of class conflict that the deepening crisis of American capitalism will inevitably produce.
3. Japanese yen hits 40-year low
The Japanese government and its financial arms, the Ministry of Finance and the central bank, are becoming increasingly embroiled in a series of economic problems that are leading to a continuous fall in the value of the yen.
Earlier this week, the yen weakened to 162 to the US dollar, hitting its lowest level in almost four decades despite efforts by financial authorities to prop up the currency. In an expression of concern over the weakening, Japan’s chief cabinet secretary, Minoru Kihara, told a press conference that the government “stands ready to take action whenever necessary.”
The immediate effect of the falling yen is to increase the price of oil and energy as Japan is dependent on the Middle East for more than 90 percent of its supplies. But the hikes will go across the board as Japan imports much of its food and raw materials.
Last year the price of rice, a staple, soared from ¥2000 to ¥5000 for a five-kilogram bag. While it came down somewhat this year because of government intervention, it still remains at historically high levels.
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A key issue is the divergence between Japanese interest rates and the rest of the world. After years of ultra-low rates, close to zero and at times even negative, the Bank of Japan has lifted its base interest rate to 1 percent, in an attempt to “normalize” monetary policy. However, this remains well below the rate in the US, between 3.50 and 3.75 percent, with the Fed having ruled out cuts for the foreseeable future because of rising inflation.
The senior currency analyst at the financial firm MUFG Lee Hardman, told the Financial Times (FT) that crossing ¥162 was “another reminder of how weak the yen has become. The energy price shock has weighed on the [currency], and the Fed’s hawkish policy update is now encouraging higher US rates and a stronger dollar.”
Lower rates in Japan have led to international investors borrowing in Japan and then using the money to invest in the US and other markets, leading to an outflow of yen, putting downward pressure on the currency.
While the lower value of the yen aids exporters, making their products more competitive in global markets, the authorities cannot allow the yen to slide. This is because such a decision would certainly bring retaliation from the US where the Trump administration, along with others before it, has periodically accused Japan of being currency manipulator.
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The Bank of Japan is being constrained by political pressure from the Sanae Takaichi government which wants it to go slow on interest rate hikes. Following her election victory in February, she said she was going to set out a new direction for the Japanese economy.
That plan, though short on detail, was unveiled last week. It involves a ¥370 trillion ($2.3 trillion) investment program based on government private sector collaboration. It will extend over 14 years and direct investment into 17 key sectors of the economy with more than $600 billion for AI and semiconductors.
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But questions are already being raised about how corporations will be induced to take part—they are supposed to finance more than half of the outlays—and how much the government contribution would add to the national debt, already at around 200 percent of GDP, the highest for any advanced economy.
Investors have already signaled their concerns over financing with the interest rates on longer-term government bonds reaching their highest levels since the 1990s in recent months.
The fall in the value of the yen poses an acute dilemma for the government. An increase in the Bank of Japan interest rate would provide a boost to the yen. But such an increase would add to the costs of servicing government debt and have an adverse impact on economic growth.
4. The oligarchy in power: Trump pocketed $2.2 billion in 2025
On Tuesday, President Donald Trump released his mandatory financial disclosure for 2025. It showed that he more than tripled his personal income during the first year of his second term, from $622 million in 2024 to at least $2.2 billion last year.
The scale of Trump's self-enrichment renders the great corruption scandals of American history almost quaint by comparison. The Teapot Dome affair of the 1920s, which stood for a century as the byword for political criminality, centered on roughly $400,000 in bribes—about $8 million in today's dollars—accepted by Interior Secretary Albert Fall in exchange for leasing naval oil reserves. Fall went to prison. Vice President Spiro Agnew was forced to resign in 1973 over kickbacks totaling perhaps $250,000, collected in envelopes of cash from Maryland contractors. By Trumpian standards, small potatoes.
The report provided some indications of the flagrant self-dealing and corruption that enabled the real estate swindler and media huckster-turned-US president to massively expand his fortune and that of his family. By last September, the collective wealth of the Trump family stood at an estimated $10 billion, having nearly doubled since the November 2024 election. Donald Trump Jr.’s wealth went from $50 million to $300 million, and that of Eric Trump rose tenfold to $400 million.
In the same year, labor’s share of the national income fell to its lowest level since records began. In the third quarter of 2025, labor’s share fell to 53.8 percent, down from 70 percent in 1947. These statistics translate in real life into poverty wages, impossibly high rents and living costs, and longer working hours for tens of millions of workers.
An annual income of $2.2 billion is equivalent to the incomes of 37,931 US autoworkers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ estimate of the average autoworker’s wage, based on a 40-hour workweek. An annual income of $2.2 billion computes to $251,000 per hour. At that rate, someone takes in $70 per second, more than twice what a UAW autoworker earns in an hour.
No wonder that at an Oval Office event this week Trump defended his refusal to sign a bill to increase low-income housing, demanding that Congress first pass his plan to disenfranchise millions of working class voters and calling the housing bill a “big yawn.”
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Last October, Trump pardoned Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, the richest man in crypto, who had pleaded guilty in 2023 to violating anti-money laundering laws and served four months in prison. Binance has since become a critical business partner to the Trump family’s own crypto venture.
Crypto, however, is by no means the only area where Trump has used the White House to promote his business ventures and increase his personal wealth. He has licensed the Trump name to properties in countries such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Those two deals alone generated more than $14 million for Trump in 2025.
Last Sunday, the New York Times published an exposé about a multi-billion-dollar deal between the US and Kazakhstan for the development of tungsten mines in the former Soviet republic. The project directly involves the sons of Trump and his Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. Billions in loans from the U.S. Commerce Department and the Export-Import Bank are being allocated to finance a venture that stands to generate untold millions in profits for the two families, as well as other billionaire cronies of the president.
Then there are the millions being made by members of the financial elite from bets in predictive markets on oil prices based on advance notice of White House announcements of bombings and/or peace talks with Iran. In a world dominated by oligarchs and their gangster representatives such as Trump, the lives of countless thousands become the stuff of profiteering from manipulated markets. Investigative reports have documented how Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner has used his role in negotiations and Middle East policy to secure massive sums from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf monarchies for his private investment vehicles.
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Trump is not merely breaking the rules; he is rewriting them so that his enrichment ceases to be legally classifiable as crime. Corruption raised to the level of state policy—the legalization of the loot as it is looted.
These are not the crimes of a single individual. The staggeringly wealthy and parasitic financial oligarchy has installed Trump, a fascistic product of the New York real estate and gambling mafia, as the head of state. Nothing reveals the mores of this new aristocracy more than the Epstein scandal, which implicates the heights of official society and whose cover-up unites Trump, the corporate media and virtually the entire political establishment.
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This entire class must be expropriated, and the wealth produced by the working class must be used to meet social needs.
5. Colorado primary results show continuing radicalization of US workers and youth
A member of the Democratic Socialists of America defeated an incumbent Democratic congresswoman for renomination in Denver, while Senator Michael Bennet was denied the party’s nomination for governor.
6. Turkish cinema great Kadir Inanir (1949-2026)
The actor’s death plunged millions into mourning. He was buried in Istanbul on June 28 in a ceremony attended by large crowds.
7. Ebola deaths pass 400 in the DRC as US guts surveillance systems to stop it
The Bundibugyo Ebola outbreak is spreading faster than any before it, precisely as Washington dismantles the global public health infrastructure built to contain such threats.
8. Albania’s “Flamingo Revolution” shakes the government
Since late May, Albania has seen its biggest wave of protests since the collapse of the Stalinist regime in the early 1990s. The direct cause of the demonstrations is a tourism development project backed by Donald Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
9. United Kingdom: Lloyds de-banks Canary in fundamental attack on independent media
Workers, youth and all defenders of democratic rights must demand that Britain’s Lloyds Bank immediately reverse its de-banking of left-wing media publication Canary.
Canary announced Lloyds’ freezing of their account in a statement Tuesday, explaining, “Despite banking with them for almost a decade they are currently withholding a substantial amount of our money. We are left with barely any funds.
“Lloyds has not explained why it has taken this action. Despite multiple communications from us, the bank has not been forthcoming with its reasoning.
“The Canary is now in a financially precarious situation. We do not know when our money that Lloyds is holding will be returned. Moreover, we do not know how it will affect our ability to get another bank account in the future.”
Launched by former Occupy activist Kerry-Anne Mendoza in October 2015, Canary played a prominent role in supporting Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party. It has since become the most widely read left-wing publication in Britain, with more than 231,700 monthly visits in May, according to Semrush, a web analytics and marketing company.
On May 26, with a major cash injection by businessman Cecil Hetherington—founder of Northern Ireland classifieds website Used Cars NI—Canary launched a daily “yellow top” print edition, with 20,000 copies distributed across 6,500 newsagents in England and Wales.
Despite Canary’s high profile in Britain, its de-banking by Lloyd’s met a wall of silence from the mainstream media over the past 48 hours. Only the pro-Scottish independence National, business publication City AM, and right-wing GB News carried news of Lloyds’ actions.
Independent outlets, including Double Down News, Middle East Eye, Declassified UK and Novara Media, have condemned Lloyds’ actions as a major attack on press freedom and speech.
Robert Stevens, UK editor of the World Socialist Web Site, wrote, “Lloyds’ de-banking of Canary is a major attack on democratic rights—if this stands, all left-wing and independent media are threatened.”
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Canary is the latest victim in a wave of de-banking measures, targeting especially opponents of the Gaza genocide. Prominent Jewish anti-Zionist campaigner Tony Greenstein has suffered repeated de-bankings by HSBC subsidiary First Direct, while signatories for Greater Manchester Friends of Palestine (GMFP) had their personal accounts frozen last year by Yorkshire Building Society (YBS). GMFP’s own account was frozen by Virgin Money.
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On Wednesday, Canary’s Steve Topple told WSWS, “So far, we have not received any further communication from Lloyds relating to why the decision was made. This is since we have gone public with it.
“The immediate effect has been that we have been unable to pay any staff or contractors. We have a large team, and all of them are now extremely distressed and in limbo. Many of them are marginalized people, and it has hit them very hard. We are trying our best to mitigate the situation and have so far received much-appreciated support from members of the public.
“Whilst we do not yet know the reasons for our de-banking, we cannot afford to be naive about it. It is an outrage that the Canary has been unceremoniously dropped into financial instability with no notice or explanation from Lloyds. Our situation is a damning indictment of the treatment of independent media in this country—whereby you can be potentially ruined without recourse by banking giants like Lloyds. It also shows just how at risk independent media is at all times.”Lloyds’ de-banking of Canary was announced the same day as Labour’s National Security States Threats Bill passed through the House of Lords with minor amendment. It criminalizes anyone associated with state organizations deemed a threat “to the UK or its interests”, treating them as terrorists, punishable by up to 14 years’ imprisonment.
Labour MP Andy Burnham delivered his first major policy speech at Manchester’s People’s History Museum Monday, three weeks ahead of his expected coronation as successor to Sir Keir Starmer as Labour leader and prime minister.
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Burnham, cast as the “King of the North”, was conveniently distanced for almost a decade from the Westminster bubble. He now proposes to repeat his supposed successes in Manchester on the national arena and tackle the cost of living crisis after four decades of failed Thatcherite orthodoxy.
After “twenty years of falling living standards since the 2008 financial crash,” he declared, Westminster “hasn’t been working for people”; in fact, “it is broken.” His agenda, he insisted, embodied “a rejection of the old trickle-down model” and “a new determination to raise living standards of every single person in this land.”
There is almost nothing of substance in any of this, and nor can there be. Starmer is massively unpopular. But his downfall was engineered by the ruling class because, in an effort to placate backbench MPs fearful of losing their seats, Starmer refused to impose the level of social spending cuts needed to meet demands for vastly higher military spending.
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The Guardian, which has swung from fulsome backing of Starmer the Blairite to Burnham the Blairite, hailed it as the boldest assault on the post-1979 order in a generation. Should Burnham reach Downing Street, it wrote, the speech represented “the most serious challenge to the Thatcherite settlement attempted by any prime minister since 1979”—but only if he converted “the language of devolution and public control into institutional power.”
As for the Corbynite left in the Socialist Campaign Group, they have largely embraced Burnham while urging him to adopt a long list of 23 reformist policy demands such as equalizing capital gains tax, a two percent levy on assets worth more than £10 million, windfall taxes on sectors making unearned “super-profits”, a freeze on energy bills, universal free school meals, rent controls, council house building and an “ethical foreign policy”. All of which will be ignored by Burnham.
The trade union leaders and apparatus will likewise fall in line, especially as Burnham proposes to rely on the union bureaucracy far more actively than Starmer ever did—pledging to govern in “strong partnership” with “our trade unions”—along with suggestions of making peace with some remnants of the Corbynite left that Starmer tried to expel.
The pseudo-left groups, having campaigned in 2024 for a Starmer government as the “lesser evil” to the Tories and Reform UK, backed Burnham during the by-election on the same basis.
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Whatever heavily caveated illusions are fostered in Burnham, he cannot simultaneously intensify the offensive against the working class on behalf of the oligarchy and revive popular support for Labour. Indeed, he has repeatedly made clear that his policies and his government are rooted politically in Tony Blair’s “Third Way”, which codified Labour’s repudiation of its old national reformist policies and its embracing government-corporate partnership as the basis for all aspects of economic and social policy.
During the Makerfield by-election, the Times headlined his pledge: “Andy Burnham: I’ll cut welfare bill to fund defense.” “I am not squeamish about saying that the plan would be to reduce the welfare bill,” he said. “Not at all.”
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Burnham’s actual economic policy was laid down in his speech, including his promise to back Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s spending limits and to govern based on “the discipline of our current fiscal rules.”
The document on which his speech was based is “The Productive State: A Framework for Manchesterism”, written by Mathew Lawrence and Alex Williams. Its special gift to the world is the creation of a series of devolved mechanisms, the Productive State, as a “third pillar” of political economy alongside the market and the welfare state.
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Last week Burnham named James Purnell as his chief of staff. A former special adviser to Blair himself in 1997 when he first entered Downing Street, Purnell became a welfare minister responsible for savage cuts under Gordon Brown. He was described by Peter Mandelson, New Labour co-architect and intimate friend of the billionaire child trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, as “one of my boys”.
He will be joined by Starmer’s former Health Minister Wes Streeting, another Mandelson protégé, while Starmer’s Blairite national security adviser, Jonathan Powell is set to be retained by Burnham.
What guarantees that Burnham will deepen the offensive against the working class is the deepening crisis of British and world imperialism that led to Starmer’s downfall.
An air of unreality hung over his parochial “Manchesterism” speech, as though the world beyond the museum gallery—that will ultimately determine the policies he pursues—did not exist.
The world situation is characterized above all by an escalating global war unfolding over multiple fronts, driven by the efforts of the imperialist powers to carve up the planet, its markets and essential resources such as oil, gas and rare earths between them.
Existing NATO-led wars such as Ukraine and preparations for future direct military conflict with Russia and China are sucking up vast social resources, which demand an escalation of austerity by governments of whatever formal political designation. The eruption of militarism and its devastating impact, as evidenced by the war against Iran, demands an escalation of austerity, not a reversal.
Starmer was forced out of office because, faced with inner-party rebellions by his more nervous MPs, he retreated from making some of the savage cuts to welfare needed to increase the military budget to the astronomical levels being demanded to “end the peace dividend” and prepare a “whole of society” war effort.
11. Ahead of NATO summit, Ankara proclaims its “indispensability” to the imperialist war machine
Appearing willing to take on a greater role in Europe’s “security” and to assume new NATO obligations, the Turkish political establishment is using this card to strengthen its hand—above all against its regional rivals Israel and Greece—and to secure the interests of the Turkish bourgeoisie.
12. Australia: Senate committee whitewashes Labor’s assault on NDIS disability support
The interim report is a warning that Labor intends to ram through the NDIS legislation despite the widespread opposition revealed in hearings and the thousands of submissions to the Senate inquiry.
13. 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.
