Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:

1. ICE agents, National Guard could arrive in Chicago by weekend

[Illinois Governor JB] Pritzker said that the state had been informed by “patriotic officials inside the government and from well-sourced reporters about Donald Trump’s plan, which is to deploy armed military personnel to the streets of Chicago. He added that Trump was looking for “any excuse to put active-duty on our streets supposedly to protect ICE.”

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Trump’s campaign organization—which is raising vast sums of money although he is barred by the Constitution from running again for president—sent out a fundraising email Wednesday urging contributors to “join the MAGA Blitz and say: LIBERATE CHICAGO – SAVE AMERICA – STAND WITH TRUMP!”

Pritzker debunked the claims that the raids in the Chicago area were aimed at fighting crime. “Let’s be clear, the terror and cruelty is the point, not the safety of anyone living here,” he told a downtown Chicago press briefing. But he added that the state “cannot stand in the way” of federal law enforcement. “It’s not like we’re going to have armed men standing in between,” he said, but rather the state would go to court against illegal federal actions. 

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This counsel of impotence and passivity was positively militant compared to the posture taken by congressional Democrats in Washington. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, in his opening remarks at his weekly press conference Thursday, did not mention either the troop deployment in Washington DC or Trump’s threats to send troops into Chicago, Baltimore, New Orleans, Boston and other cities.

He confined himself to a litany of shopworn Democratic criticisms of the Republican Party for failing to lower the high cost of living, “fix our broken healthcare system” and “clean up corruption in this town.” He attacked Trump’s tax cut for the wealthy, passed two months ago, but said nothing about the presence of National Guard troops only a few hundred yards from where he was speaking in the Capitol.

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While the Republicans are enthusiastic about military-police rule, and the Democrats deliver their consent largely through silence, the majority of the American people oppose sending soldiers into the cities, by a 53-37 percent margin, according to a Yahoo/YouGov poll of 1,700 adults.

A majority, 51 percent, said Trump has “gone too far in sending federal troops into US cities,” while only one-third, 33 percent, would approve of Trump sending troops into their own communities. A majority of 53 percent agreed that Trump was “more of a dictator than most previous presidents have tried to be.”

These poll numbers give only a pale reflection of the mounting opposition to Trump’s unprecedented attacks on democratic rights. But they suggest what is inevitably coming: a direct clash between this fascistic government and the vast majority of American working people.

2. The plot to kill Americans: Kennedy escalates attacks on vaccines

In his appearance Thursday before the Senate Finance Committee, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made a series of extreme statements that exposed the fascist character of his assault on vaccines, science and public health. Throughout the three-hour hearing, Kennedy repeatedly told senators they were “making stuff up,” dismissed basic scientific evidence as “confusion” and doubled down on his campaign to eliminate vaccine protections for American children.

When questioned by Senator Maggie Hassan about whether COVID-19 vaccines have saved millions of American lives, Kennedy responded with a total dismissal of scientific consensus: “The only confusion I’ve expressed is how many they saved. I don’t think anybody knows.” This statement flies in the face of overwhelming evidence, including research published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases estimating that nearly 20 million lives were preserved globally during the first year of vaccination alone.

Kennedy’s most revealing statement came when defending his firing of CDC officials involved in the pandemic response: “The people at CDC who oversaw that process, who put masks on our children, who closed our schools, are the people who will be leaving. And that’s why we need bold, competent and creative new leadership at CDC, people able and willing to chart a new course.”

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The Democratic senators’ theatrical outrage represents nothing but hot air from a party that has refused to organize workers in defense of public health, let alone Trump’s ongoing coup and efforts to establish a military dictatorship in the United States. These are the same Democrats who sat silently as the Biden administration dismantled COVID-19 protections, ended the Public Health Emergency and denigrated masking, policies that laid the political foundations for Kennedy’s far more extreme assault today. 

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The 11th wave of the pandemic is currently underway in the United States with virtually no reporting or acknowledgment from health authorities. Emergency department visits for COVID-19 have increased 15.2 percent in the most recent week, with test positivity rates at 9.9 percent nationally. This wave is being covered up more completely than any prior wave, even as the spread of COVID-19 is growing in 40 states. Under these conditions, Kennedy has systematically dismantled the very infrastructure needed to monitor and respond to this ongoing crisis, while drastically restricting access to COVID-19 vaccines. 

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The scientific community has responded to Kennedy’s assault with growing resistance. More than 1,000 current and former HHS employees have now signed letters demanding Kennedy’s resignation. A September 3 letter accused Kennedy of “endangering the nation’s health” through his appointment of “political ideologues masquerading as scientific experts,” and the rescission of COVID-19 vaccine emergency authorizations without scientific justification, while an August 20 letter accused Kennedy of being “complicit in dismantling America’s public health infrastructure.” 

3. As French government and debt crises mount, Mélenchon denies there is a capitalist crisis

The French government is set to fall Monday, amid bitter divisions in the National Assembly. Across Europe, the ruling class wants savage social cuts in order to finance surging military spending and sovereign debts. But in France’s hung parliament, no opposition party dares back the austerity policy of President Emmanuel Macron’s unpopular minority government, meanwhile the bourgeois media openly fear France is ungovernable.

This crisis of rule, rooted in the failure of capitalism, is exposing Jean-Luc Mélenchon, whose France Unbowed (LFI) party leads the New Popular Front (NFP). Irreconcilable class conflict is emerging. Amid the NATO-Russia war in Ukraine and the Gaza genocide, the capitalist oligarchy plans to slash social spending and impoverish the workers in order to divert hundreds of billions of euros to the war machine and the banks. Workers across Europe reject this policy.

Mélenchon, however, blames the entire crisis on just two men, Macron and Prime Minister François Bayrou. They are traitorously inventing a crisis out of spite, he asserts, and everything will be resolved in France if only the National Assembly can organize their removal. In his speech this week to LFI’s summer school, Mélenchon said:

Why are they traitors? Because there is no financial crisis on the horizon. It is not true, but if you as president or prime minister keep repeating that there is a crisis, you finally create a mood of catastrophe. And that is what they are doing. Why? To obtain the intervention of the financial markets in French politics just as before in Greece, as in Italy, like everywhere. That is, the ratings agencies change your rating, interest rates rise, and you are asphyxiated. But we are 1,000 kilometers from such a situation. …
Our goal is for [Macron] to go away and to have snap presidential elections. Anything else would simply prolong the system’s agony. The French people has a right to decide, as a great question is posed on its identity, its organization, the course it chooses to take.

Mélenchon’s claim there is no financial crisis is false. France’s debt is 114 percent of its Gross Domestic Product, the euro zone’s collective sovereign debt is 91 percent of its GDP. France is hemorrhaging hundreds of billions of euros each year as the ruling class ruins the country—amassing trillions of euros in wealth and demanding tens of billions more be spent to prepare “high-intensity war.”

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Mélenchon’s history, especially his role in the 1981-1995 Socialist Party (PS) presidency of François Mitterrand, must be taken as a warning. He began political life in Pierre Lambert’s Organisation communiste internationaliste (OCI), which in 1971 had broken with the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), the leadership of the world Trotskyist movement, to ally with the PS on a national perspective. It backed the PS-PCF alliance, which promised “popular government” and left-wing reforms like those of the 1936 Popular Front.

Elected in 1981 amid a wave of popular enthusiasm, Mitterrand launched in 1982 an “austerity turn” as French trade and budget deficits rose. This set the stage for four decades of social attacks on the working class. With his calls for “citizens revolution” and a New Popular Front with what remains of the PS and PCF, he is only defending this same anti-Trotskyist orientation, 45 years later, to tie the working class to capitalism amid its mortal crisis.

The Parti de l’égalité socialiste (PES), the French section of the ICFI, explains that an objectively revolutionary crisis is emerging, requiring a working class struggle for socialist revolution. The PES calls to form rank-and-file committees in France and across Europe, to liberate workers struggles from the diktat of union bureaucracies and coordinate the necessarily international struggle against imperialist war, genocide and the capitalist oligarchy. Against the failure of capitalist Europe, it advances the perspective of the United Socialist States of Europe.

4. Canada’s Liberal government to join Trump’s “Golden Dome” missile defence shield

The decision by the Carney government to join Golden Dome marks a reversal of a now 20-year-old Canadian policy of choosing not to integrate directly with US missile defense. This development will lead to an unprecedented fusing of the US and Canadian militaries within the context of a rapidly developing third world war for the redivision of the world among the major powers. There is nothing “defensive” about Golden Dome—the purpose of this missile defense shield is to prevent retaliatory action in the event of a first-strike nuclear attack on Russia or China. Above all, it is aimed at creating the infrastructure through which US and Canadian imperialism can wage a “winnable” nuclear conflict. 

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Trump declared in May that the Canadian government had asked to join his Golden Dome missile defence program. On his Truth Social platform, he gloated: “I told Canada, which very much wants to be part of our fabulous Golden Dome System, that it will cost $61 Billion Dollars if they remain a separate, but unequal, Nation, but it will cost ZERO DOLLARS if they become our cherished 51st State. They are considering the offer!” Since Trump’s post, his quoted price has gone up to $71 billion US ($97.6 billion CDN).

In total, Trump said the Golden Dome project would cost $175 billion US ($242 billion CDN) and would be completed within three years. The US Congressional Budget Office, however, stated that the cost of the system could be as high as $831 billion US, and budgetary outcomes would depend greatly on the extent to which the cost of launching sensor satellites could be reduced.

It will inevitably fall upon the Canadian and American working class to bear the brunt of the enormous cost of such a program. The shield comes on top of the astronomical sums spent by both countries on the military each year at the expense of social programs and public services.

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The Liberal government’s sudden push to join Trump’s Golden Dome project was made without any public discussion, entirely behind the backs of the population. Considering that Trump is rightly a widely reviled figure amongst large sections of the Canadian population, this should be taken as a warning that the ruling class in Canada, no less than in the US, is increasingly dispensing with democratic forms of rule.  

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The only force within society capable of halting a global conflagration—which now poses an existential threat to the survival of humanity itself—is the international working class united around a genuine socialist program. The struggle against the imperialists’ latest war plans must be combined with opposition to imperialist war around the world, from the US-led war to subjugate Russia to the ongoing horrific imperialist-backed genocide in Gaza. This requires the building of an international anti-war movement that links the struggle against imperialism with opposition to the slashing of tens billions of dollars from public services and workers’ wages to pay for the mad war plans of the financial oligarchy. The basis for developing this fight is a socialist and internationalist program aimed at overturning the capitalist profit system, the root cause of war. 

5.  GE Aerospace strikers: “There’s got to be a line in the sand—that’s what we’re doing”

On Thursday, Boeing announced plans to hire “permanent replacement workers” to break the nearly five-week strike by workers who have rejected two pro-company deals, which were brought back by the International Association of Machinists (IAM) bureaucracy. 

The defense companies have been emboldened by the Trump administration, which has fired nearly 300,000 federal workers, stripped another 445,000 of their collective bargaining rights in August alone and is deploying military troops to major American cities to crush popular opposition to its fascist policies. 

GE Aerospace, which has secured billions of dollars in military and civilian contracts from the Trump administration, is demanding a nearly 40 percent hike in out-of-pocket health care costs while offering a paltry 12 percent raise over the next three years. The company has brought in managers from throughout the country to keep operations going and is demanding that United Auto Workers leaders bring back its “record offer” to the membership for a vote. 

Far from opposing this, UAW President Shawn Fain and the rest of the union apparatus are conducting business as usual: isolating the strike, starving workers with $500 a week in strike pay, and urging workers to rely on negotiations and appeals to the Democratic Party to end “corporate greed.” UAW Local 647 officials have promoted Democratic politicians, including bringing former US Senator Sherrod Brown to the picket line for a photo-op for his election campaign. Brown voted for the bipartisan bill to outlaw the 2022 railroad strike and impose a pro-corporate contract that workers had previously rejected. 

In discussions with a World Socialist Web Site reporting team, striking workers expressed their determination to fight and grappled with broader political questions confronting the working class, including the emergence of a corporate-financial oligarchy, which controls both political parties. There was wide and sympathetic support for the call by International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) for workers to take the conduct of the struggle into their own hands, unite with Boeing workers and develop an industrial and political counter-offensive against capitalist exploitation, dictatorship and war. 

6. Germany’s trade unions use “Anti-War Day” to spread war propaganda

It is nothing new that the German Trade Union Confederation (DGB) and its member unions support the government’s pro-war policies. Their leading functionaries have already repeatedly taken part in meetings of the corporatist “Concerted Action” at the Chancellery.

But the fact that on the 86th anniversary of Germany’s invasion of Poland, that is, the beginning of the Second World War, the DGB called rallies in the name of its member unions supporting military rearmament and spreading war propaganda marks a new stage in the shift to the right by the trade unions.

It shows how deeply the apparatus of the trade unions is integrated into government policy and how urgent it is to build independent rank-and-file action committees to break the bureaucratic control of the unions and link the fight against sackings and social cuts with the fight against militarization and war preparations. 

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The German government has exploited Trump’s election victory in the US to launch a reckless military build-up costing over one trillion euros. It justifies this by claiming that with Trump as President, European security interests can no longer be guaranteed, and that Germany must therefore make a strong military contribution to Europe’s rearmament. In this way, Europe, as an alleged “power for peace,” could intervene in the growing conflicts between the US, China and Russia.

In reality, the German government is not pursuing a peace policy but a war policy. It is using Trump’s election to return to great-power politics, which it has long been preparing, and to enforce its own economic interests by force, just as German imperialism did in the First and Second World Wars.

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The government is passing the costs of rearmament onto the population with massive social attacks. Chancellor Friedrich Merz has declared that the welfare state is “no longer affordable.” Pension cuts, savings in education and healthcare, and restrictions on continued wage payments during illness are supposedly “unavoidable.” The DGB does nothing against this. It only demands that the social devastation be carried out in closest cooperation with the union officials within the framework of Germany’s system of “codetermination,” the constitutionally enshrined corporatism that places union officials on company boards and committees.

At the same time, the DGB supports the conversion of industry to the production of armaments.

When the head of Germany’s largest arms manufacturer Rheinmetall, Armin Papperger, expressed interest last spring in taking over and converting Volkswagen plants for the production of military vehicles and equipment, IG Metall applauded. Papperger described the VW plant in Osnabrück in particular as “very suitable” for conversion to military production.

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Union support for war policy, arms production and social cuts is not limited to Germany. In France, resistance to the austerity budget of the hated Macron government is developing into a general strike movement. The union leaders are trying to split this movement and are doing everything to sabotage resistance.

The role of the union leaderships is particularly blatant in the US. There, at the beginning of this week, at the same time as “Anti-War Day” here, the traditional Labor Day took place. On this “day of labour,” the unions did everything to prevent a powerful mobilisation against Trump’s dictatorship and police-state measures.

The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) in the US published an appeal that day, “No to dictatorship! Mobilise the working class against Trump’s coup!,” which is also of significance for workers here. It concludes with the words:

The working class possesses immense social power to shut down production, bring the entire economy to a halt and overthrow the ruling class. But this power can only be realized through independent organization and political clarity.

This Labor Day, every worker must confront the gravity of this crisis: The organizations that claim to represent your interests have betrayed you; the politicians who seek your votes have deceived you; and the capitalist system is ruthlessly destroying your life and your children’s lives.

The task now is to build independent organizations run by workers themselves—the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC)—to initiate an independent movement in the working class and prepare for the struggles that lie ahead.

6. Tony Blair adds ethnic cleansing in Gaza to his list of crimes

Twenty-two years after lying about Iraqi President Saddam Hussein possessing weapons of mass destruction to justify US President George W. Bush’s war on Iraq in 2003, former UK Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair has given his imprimatur to plans to ethnically cleanse Gaza advanced by US President Donald Trump.

The US/UK’s unprovoked war of aggression and the subsequent occupation of Iraq cost the lives of more than 600,000 Iraqi civilians, according to the UK medical journal The Lancet, and many estimates are higher. By April 2007, 1.9 million Iraqis were displaced within the country and over 2.2 million were refugees abroad. Once one of the most advanced Arab economies due to its oil, after the invasion Iraq’s GDP contracted by 50 percent, its currency dived, unemployment and poverty soared.

The 2016 Chilcot report, summarizing the findings of a public inquiry into Britain’s role in the war, concluded that Blair had deliberately blurred lines between what he believed and what he knew to justify the invasion. In 2017, Britain’s High Court was forced to block a bid by a former chief of the Iraqi Army’s staff to bring a private prosecution against Blair for committing a “crime of aggression” by invading Iraq in 2003.

Last week, this unindicted war criminal went to the White House to brief Trump on proposals, initiated by Israeli businessmen and drawn up with the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), the Gaza Humanitarian Fund (GHF) and his own Tony Blair Institute (TBI), for a “post-war” Gaza.

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Blair’s post-premiership career prepared him well for this new crime. He used his years since leaving Downing Street to hobnob with the Middle East’s autocrats in his role as Middle East Envoy for the United Nations, European Union, United States and Russia from 2007-2015, a position gifted to him by Bush in return for services rendered. Under his watch, the two-state solution became a dead letter and he became persona non-grata in Ramallah, the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) headquarters in the West Bank, because of his naked bias towards Israel.

Afterwards, taking advantage of these contacts, he set up his own consultancy business, the Tony Blair Institute (TBI), becoming the go-to man for the world’s kleptocrats and dictators.

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While Blair’s record shows that no criminal enterprise is too much for Britain’s former prime minister, the present Labour prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, is his ardent admirer, disciple and fellow war criminal. Starmer fully supports Netanyahu’s genocide of the Palestinians as part of US imperialism’s broader plans to assert its control over the resource-rich Middle East—targeting China above all—from which Britain hopes to profit. The British government supplies Israel with weaponry, conducts near daily reconnaissance flights from its base in Cyprus to provide intelligence for the Israel Defense Forces and provides political and diplomatic support for Israel at the United Nations. 

7. Workers indict Bridgestone after tire factory death in Brazil

The death of Daniel Silva Saraiva, 37, at the Bridgestone tire factory in Santo André, in São Paulo’s ABC industrial region, brought to light a series of denunciations of unsafe working conditions inside the plant.

A video of a former employee talking about the lack of safety at the company, recorded during a procession in honor of Daniel, received almost 8,000 likes and more than 500 comments on social media....

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There is a striking contrast between the massive outrage expressed on social media and the silence of Sintrabor (the Greater São Paulo and Region Tire Repairers Union), led by the Força Sindical union federation. Despite holding a meeting on the day of the accident and formally expressing its solidarity with Daniel’s family, Sintrabor is treating the death at the factory as an isolated case – a complete distortion of reality, which is even more evident in the face of so many complaints. 

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Job cuts and unsafe working conditions are directly related. When a company reduces its workforce, it requires the remaining workers to compensate for production, which means less time for machine maintenance, putting on protective equipment, or even taking adequate breaks. The workday becomes longer, faster, and more dangerous – a perfect recipe for new accidents.

Job cuts also exert pressure externally: from the corporations’ point of view, the workforce is easily replaceable as they have a reserve army of unemployed people at their disposal.

The strategy of Bridgestone, a transnational giant, is rooted in its need to maximize profits. Always in search of cheaper labor and cost reductions, it uses its global structure to transfer production from one region to another, temporarily suspending certain products, postponing the replacement of precarious machinery as long as possible, and exhausting its workers to death, if necessary.

Daniel’s death at Bridgestone in Santo André cannot be viewed as merely an accident or an isolated case. In recent weeks and months, the World Socialist Web Site has reported on worker deaths in Italy, South Korea, and numerous US states. These examples are part of the global industrial slaughterhouse that kills millions of workers around the world every year.

The working conditions that killed these workers cannot be tolerated, at the risk of new victims and the normalization of death in the name of capitalist profit. The slogan “Workers’ lives matter” must be a starting point for the unification of workers in this and other factories, in other cities and across national borders.

8. Gaza: Doctors on the Frontline–British surgeons working in the midst of the “utter inhumanity” of Israel’s genocide

With foreign journalists barred from entering Gaza, Doctors on the Frontline presents the testimony and video evidence recorded by the doctors, who see their role extending beyond medicine to bearing witness for humanity. 

9. Australia: Inquiry continues whitewash of Melbourne public housing demolition

Last month, the Legal and Social Issues Committee of the Victorian Legislative Council held the final hearings in its inquiry into the state Labor government’s plan to demolish 44 public housing towers in inner Melbourne. 

The existing towers house 10,000 working class residents, who will be turfed out of their homes and relocated, in many cases to the outer suburbs, far from their jobs, schools and communities. Once completed, the new builds will accommodate 19,000 residents in private apartments, with just 11,000 places for social housing tenants.

These privately owned and operated “community housing” units will be more costly and provide less security of tenure than the public housing they replace. Residents were previously given verbal assurances that they will have a “right to return” after the rebuild, but written references to this indicate that it will be subject to “the suitability of new homes”—over which residents have no control or input.

Moreover, the Labor government is undertaking the destruction of vast swathes of public housing amid a deepening housing crisis. The national shortage of affordable housing is estimated at more than 600,000, while in Victoria alone, some 60,000 people are on the waiting list for public housing. 

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The SEP’s perspective is in stark contrast to that put forward by various housing activist groups involved in the tower dispute, who present the demolition plan as a single issue, connected to nothing broader than the overall crisis of housing affordability. Their friendly participation in the inquiry underscores that they are seeking to promote illusions that the Labor government can be persuaded to change course.

Among these groups is the Renters and Housing Union (RAHU), which was represented at the inquiry by Secretary Harry Millward and member Jordan van den Lamb, known on social media as “purplepingers,” who was the lead Senate candidate for the pseudo-left Victorian Socialists in the May federal election.

Van den Lamb took the promotion of illusions in capitalist political parties to an extraordinary level, stating that “if state governments could do it [build the towers] under [Liberal Prime Minister from 1949–1966] Robert Menzies, then we could do it again.”

This statement is totally ahistorical, ignoring the broader context surrounding the housebuilding boom, including the construction of many of the Melbourne towers, while the arch-conservative Menzies was in office. Under conditions of relative prosperity in the post-war period, capitalist governments in Australia, as elsewhere, undertook mass public housing projects to provide homes for workers to supply the vast scaling up of industry and profits.

The political and economic situation today is completely and irreversibly transformed. Public housing is being eviscerated around the world as part of a broader assault on the living and working conditions of the working class, amid a deepening capitalist crisis.

10. Survey reveals deterioration of physical and mental health among schoolchildren in Sri Lanka

Dr. Alaka Singh, WHO representative in Sri Lanka, stated: “Key findings indicate an increasing trend in substance use, consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages, physical inactivity, sedentary behavior, and psychosocial issues compared to the 2016  [Global Student Health Survey, Sri Lanka] . The findings reveal a double burden of malnutrition alongside high rates of smoking, serious injuries, physical fights, and cyberbullying.”

11. Australian governments cover up roots of childcare crisis

Australian federal, state and territory governments, Labor and Liberal-National alike, have responded to disturbing allegations of sexual abuse in childcare centers by refusing to address the underlying issue of profit-driven understaffing. 

This response was laid out by Jason Clare, the Albanese Labor government’s federal education minister, after what was dubbed as an emergency national meeting of federal, state and territory ministers in late August.

Clare said his government would provide $189 million over four years to pay for closed-circuit television cameras, bans on the personal use of mobile phones in centers, a national register of all childcare staff and improved training for staff, supposedly to enable them to identify child abusers.

None of this will ensure the safety of children in the understaffed, under-funded and casualized daycare centers.

In July, about 2,000 parents in Melbourne, Victoria’s capital city, were advised to get their babies and toddlers tested for sexually transmitted diseases after a childcare worker, Joshua Dale Brown, was charged on July 1 with over 70 offenses.

The allegations produced deep concern not only among families with children in childcare facilities but throughout the working class. But the Albanese government is trying to divert this alarm and anxiety away from the root causes in the profit-making domination of day care.

As the WSWS commented on July 13: “Brown’s alleged offending would constitute criminal and anti-social behavior of a pathological character. But the conditions where it could occur, without detection for an extended period of time, are clear.

“The privatization of childcare, an industry that has experienced burgeoning growth over the past decade, means profit, not childcare, is primary.”

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Much evidence exists connecting the rise of for-profit childcare providers with increasing neglect and injury to children, understaffing, breaches of quality care such as inadequate nutrition, inadequate supervision and widespread hiring of unqualified or unvetted staff.

The Keating Labor government’s acceleration of the privatisation of childcare in the 1990s has resulted in Australia having one of the highest rates of privately run childcare in the world. Today, 75 percent of long day care centres are run for profit.

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Huge turnovers in staff, extreme levels of casualization, chronic understaffing and the hiring of underqualified or unvetted staff have resulted in as many as one quarter of for-profit childcare centers employing trainees without qualifications. Universities and private education providers are exploiting the staffing crisis by offering short childcare courses with hefty fees. 

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Under the capitalist profit system, childcare has been transformed into a marketplace of exploitation. The right to fully-staffed, highly-trained, properly-resourced childcare, freely accessible to all, can be established only through the development of a political fight against the Labor and Liberal governments and their partners in the union bureaucracies.

Childcare workers and parents should contact the Committee for Public Education (CFPE), the rank-and-file educators’ network, to develop a discussion on forming rank-and-file committees, independent of the trade unions, throughout childcare centers.

12. Defeating Australia’s far-right requires a political fight against the Labor government

Masses of people have responded with shock and horror to far-right rallies that were held across Australia on Sunday. Footage of participants chanting anti-immigrant and racist slogans, many of them draped in Australian flags, has been shared widely, as have videos of violent assaults perpetrated by the neo-Nazi National Socialist Network, which effectively led the demonstrations. 

In taking forward a fight against the far-right and its attacks on immigrants, crucial questions are posed. What political climate created the conditions for thousands to participate in such protests? What is their relationship to the policies of the government and the political establishment?

In the first instance, the protests are another exposure of fraudulent claims that Australia is exceptional or exempt from the political shocks and upheavals taking place globally. The mobilization of politically backward layers of the population by right-wing groups, on the basis of anti-immigrant demagogy, parallels developments throughout Europe and in the United States.

As in those countries, extreme right-wing tendencies are actively cultivated by segments of the political establishment, have entrenched support in the police and military, and feed off the social discontent fueled by the pro-business policies of governments.

13. Nurses and case workers strike Henry Ford Genesys Hospital in Grand Blanc, Michigan

More than 700 nurses and case workers at Grand Blanc’s Henry Ford Genesys Hospital launched a strike Monday. The strikers have shown that they are determined to win their demands for safer staffing, decent working conditions and improved wages.

Negotiations between the Teamsters Local 332 and hospital management are set to resume on Friday. The strike began on Labor Day after the nurses voted by 93 percent against the hospital’s contract offer on August 21.

Henry Ford Health claims that the hospital is fully operational, using contract nurses and some staff who crossed the picket line as the forty-sixth contract negotiations resume. 

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The present strike is a continuation of the same struggle that erupted in June of 2024, but which was betrayed by the officials of the Teamsters union.

Henry Ford Health management claims its contract proposal is “robust and competitive,” pointing to their system-wide staffing model and financial woes, with Genesys having run $50 million in annual losses in previous years. While management claims that patient safety remains paramount it argues that mandated ratios, a core demand of the workers, is “inconsistent with system-best practices” and hinder adaptability.

In other words, Henry Ford is attempting to make the Grand Blanc facility profitable through intensifying the exploitation of the staff by taking away previous benefits and insisting that establishing mandated rations would make the hospital “uncompetitive,” i.e., unprofitable, in a market where every other hospital management is maintaining the exact same policy: no mandatory staffing requirements.

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The result is that patients get sicker as their needs cannot be met in a timely and adequate manner by nurses. One nurse described that there would be only one nurse staffing an entire hallway for hours on end without assistance. More than one nurse stated that Henry Ford has challenged the notion that patient ratios impact patient care, which is a position they find ridiculous and do not accept. 

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Reporters from the World Socialist Web Site spoke with several nurses manning the picket lines on Wednesday. The conditions have significantly worsened since Henry Ford acquired the hospital. One nurse joked that the sign she was holding was the one she had used in 2024.

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Many nurses supported the call of the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees to organize a struggle against any attempt by the Teamsters bureaucracy to sell out the strike, as took place in the 2024 contract struggle.

Strikers said Henry Ford is busing scab workers into the facility to keep the hospital system functioning. Some strikers mentioned unconfirmed rumors of patient deaths resulting from negligent conditions in the scab-operated hospital system. In any case, the strike-breaking operation is of greater importance to management than the safety and well-being of patients who are being placed at severe risk.

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Nurses’ strikes in Michigan, California and New York have repeatedly been shut down via deals behind closed doors, enforcement of court injunctions, or no-strike clauses. The Teamsters’ record is no exception. Despite heated rhetoric, the union bureaucracy recently pushed through a contract at UPS that dropped key demands after promoting a “strike threat” only to call off any action and deliver a sellout deal.

The Teamsters leadership’s support for Donald Trump exposes the willingness of the union apparatus to subordinate workers’ interests to a reactionary political alliance. Trump, whose administration slashed federal funding for public health, targeted the NIH and CDC for devastating cuts, and denies the existence of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, has declared war on public health services and democratic rights more broadly.

The Teamsters’ embrace of Trump shows that the organization is run by a corrupt bureaucracy that does not represent the interests of nurses or any section of the working class.

20. Workers Struggles: Africa, Europe, Middle East

Africa

Liberia:

Volunteer teachers protest at home of president to demand permanent jobs

Academics on go-slow at University of Liberia

Morocco: 

Delivery workers in 48-hour strike

Nigeria: 

Academic staff at university in Ondo State on indefinite strike over pay and funding

South Africa:

Cheap labor scheme refuse workers at Msunduzi Municipality strike to demand permanent jobs

NUMSA rams through sellout deal at Macsteel to end stoppage against job losses

Non-clinical staff at Dora Nginza hospital, Eastern Cape walk out over unpaid overtime

Europe

France:

Utility workers at government-owned multinational EDF strike for pay increase and reduced tax on energy

Ireland:

Thousands of school secretaries and caretakers on indefinite national strike for pensions and other benefits

Turkey:

Shipyard workers in Yalova Altinova strike for pay and decent working conditions

United Kingdom:

London underground rail workers to hold week-long series of stoppages over working conditions

Bus workers at London company strike over unpaid backdated pay settlement

Pathology staff at London hospitals walk out over pay

Security staff at UK parliament strike over pay and conditions

Canteen staff at refinery in Fawley continue strike over pay

National Coal Mining Museum workers in Wakefield, England extend strike over pay

Refuse workers in Birmingham vote to extend ongoing strike beyond Christmas

Middle East

Iran:

Protests by contract and permanent oil workers over pay

Israel:

High school students hold strike over Gaza hostages

18.

Free 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.