Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
More than 850 people were arrested in Parliament Square in London on Saturday, the latest mass arrests against opponents of the genocide in Gaza. These arrests, which follow the proscription of protest group Palestine Action, have plunged British imperialism deeper into police state forms of rule.
On July 2, the “Mother of Parliaments” voted almost unanimously for a ban overturning democratic freedoms established over centuries. These stretch from the Magna Carta in 1215 through the Bill of Rights in 1689 and the entry of the working class into political struggle with Chartism in the 1830s, which have collectively acted to safeguard citizens from the arbitrary actions of the state and guarantee free speech and freedom of thought and assembly.
This fundamental assault on democratic rights was carried out to criminalise opposition to the greatest crime of the 21st century, the genocide in Gaza, and equate peaceful protest against this atrocity with terrorism.
Under the Terrorism Act (2000), membership in or encouragement of support for a proscribed group carries a sentence of up to 14 years, and even wearing clothing or publicly carrying items indicating support carries a 6-month sentence, or a fine of up to £5,000.
Since parliament’s vote, close to 1,500 arrests have been made under this charge, including the 850 on Saturday and over 500 at a protest in the same location in August. Leading figures within Palestine Action and the legal rights campaign group Defend Our Juries have been targeted in police raids and face the maximum penalty under the law.
Over 300 other individuals have been arrested under other laws at pro-Palestine protests, including Stop the War Coalition Vice-Chair Chris Nineham and Palestine Solidarity Campaign Director Ben Jamal. Prominent journalists have had their homes raided and devices seized.
2. PHOTO GALLERY: Police in London arrest almost 900 at protest against banning of Palestine Action
A World Socialist Web Site photo-gallery documents the mass arrests of anti-genocide protesters which took place on Saturday, September 6th in London, England.
Nearly 900 people were arrested in an unprecedented operation that lasted until late in the evening.
Immigrant workers, who fully contribute to society and the economy, are being targeted, criminalized and removed at a breathtaking pace. In Los Angeles, Adam, 21, who is undocumented, and his sister Abriel, 18, a US citizen, spoke to the World Socialist Web Site about their lives under siege, their family’s sacrifices and their fears for the future.
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The cruelty of Trump’s deportation machine became personal when Adam’s uncle was detained during an ICE raid at a car wash. “They took him and moved him from place to place—downtown, then Altadena, then somewhere else,” Adam explains.
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Abriel, Adam’s younger sister, was born in the US, but citizenship offers little comfort. “I’m scared too,” she says. “Walking to the corner store, you never know what’s going to happen. My parents are terrified. Sometimes we just stay home.”
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For Adam and Abriel, the attacks on immigrants cannot be separated from broader attacks on democratic rights. Abriel puts it bluntly: “The government’s failing. The country’s falling apart. Anything could happen now.”
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“Something has to change,” she says. “We can’t keep living like this, scared every day, hiding from the government, worrying about being torn away from each other. No one deserves to live like that.”
4. London Underground workers launch powerful strikes: “Our safety is not up for grabs any further”
London Underground services were brought to a standstill Monday as thousands of tube workers—including fleet engineering, drivers and station staff—walked off the job. It is part of a week of rolling strike action by members of the Rail, Maritime and Transport union (RMT) demanding redress over stagnating pay, chronic staff shortages and being rostered to exhaustion.
Workers on the Docklands Light Rail are striking from Tuesday.
World Socialist Web Site reporters visited picket lines on Monday morning. Tube workers explained they are facing a growing burden of ill health and that government cuts and austerity are threatening public safety.
Pickets also took up the defense of hundreds of their colleagues who face deportation because of punitive income thresholds introduced by the Labour government aimed at driving up deportations and promoting anti-immigrant poison.
5. Taking lead from Trump’s dictatorship bid, Boeing hires replacement workers to break defense strike
Boeing announced Thursday that it will begin hiring permanent replacement workers for the 3,200 workers on strike at its defense plants in the St. Louis area, now in their sixth week on the picket lines. The decision is a deliberate provocation, carried out with the full backing of Wall Street and the Trump administration. It must be answered by a mass mobilization of workers in St. Louis and throughout the country in support of the strike.
The isolation of the strike by the officials of the International Association of Machinists, who never wanted the strike in the first place, must be ended. This can only be done through the building of new leadership, drawn from the rank and file, to take control out of the hands of the saboteurs in the IAM bureaucracy and fight for the broadest possible appeal to workers across the region and the country.
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Boeing workers are not alone. They are striking alongside hundreds of GE Aerospace workers in Cincinnati producing engines for US Navy warships, part of the same supply chain of militarism. The strikebreaking measures at Boeing are at the same time a warning for GE workers, who confront not only management but a United Auto Workers bureaucracy braying for war. It poses the need for unity between workers at both companies.
The corporate dictatorship Boeing workers are fighting finds its most complete expression in the Trump administration. Boeing’s actions cannot be separated from the deployment of the military into American cities. On Monday, Trump announced the start of “Operation Midway,” deploying the National Guard into Chicago, with dozens of other cities to follow. This is part of his unfolding plan to establish a fascist dictatorship in the United States.
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Workers in the United States have bitter experience with the deployment of the state militia, supplemented by Pinkerton agents and other company thugs, to gun down striking workers generations ago. Ludlow, Blair Mountain, Homestead and the locations of other strikes have become bywords in American history for the savage violence American capitalists have meted out against workers fighting for their most minimal rights. But what is now being prepared goes far beyond even a return to such methods. It is the abolition of even the semblance of democracy.
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This trajectory was presaged by the Democratic Party. During the mass protests against the police murder of Michael Brown in St. Louis in 2014, it was Democratic officials who oversaw the deployment of MRAPs and other weapons of the so-called “war on terror” onto American streets. And today, Democrats are joining hands with Republicans in crushing anti-war protests on university campuses.
Boeing’s move to hire scabs has Trump’s fingerprints all over it. It is inconceivable that such a step would have been taken without close consultation with the White House. In fact, it is certain that the administration has been involved from the beginning.
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The IAM bureaucracy, for its part, is doing nothing to resist Boeing’s strikebreaking. Tom Boelling, IAM District 837 president, issued only a perfunctory statement to the press, dismissing the danger and offering “free advice” to Boeing not to anger workers.
Nothing about this is featured on the front page of the IAM website. But there is an article about a local fundraiser for dogs. This says everything about how the bureaucracy views workers: they treat them worse than animals.
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A rank-and-file strike committee must be built, composed of trusted workers from the shop floor and excluding the union officials. Workers must take control of the strike as part of a rebellion against the bureaucracy, which functions as management’s agents while monopolizing hundreds of millions in dues money to fund their own salaries.
The demands of such a committee must include:
$800 a week in strike pay.
Workers’ control over picketing, including the organization of flying pickets to appeal for support across the region.
The shutdown of Boeing’s entire operations, particularly measures to prevent the training of strikebreakers, and an appeal for solidarity strikes by civilian aircraft Boeing workers, who themselves struck last year only to be betrayed and sent back to work under a IAM sellout contract.
Rank-and-file control over bargaining, including the livestreaming of all talks and the publication of all correspondence between the bureaucracy and the government. A rank-and-file bargaining team must ensure the fight is conducted for what workers actually need, not against them behind closed doors.
Above all, workers must unite with their class brothers and sisters around the world through the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) to build a common struggle against inequality and exploitation.
As the World Socialist Web Site Labor Day statement explained: “it is high time that workers organize and prepare their own counteroffensive. 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.”
6. US Secretary of State Rubio and Mexican President Sheinbaum unveil security pact
On September 3, a day after the US military sank an alleged Venezuelan drug-carrying boat in the Caribbean, killing 11, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is also serving as President Trump’s national security advisor, met with Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum at the National Palace in Mexico City. The agenda centered on “bilateral security issues” and on drug cartels, which Trump has designated as terrorist organizations.
At a press conference after the meeting Rubio pledged to foster “security cooperation and respect Mexico’s sovereignty and territory.” “We have reached a historical level of cooperation,” he said, praising the transfer of dozens of high-level cartel members wanted by the Trump administration for trial in the US.
“It is the closest security cooperation we have ever had, maybe with any country but certainly in the history of US-Mexico relations,” Rubio gushed. He gave “[m]uch credit … to President Sheinbaum and her administration in really taking on things that had not been taken on for a very long time.”
This marks a de-escalation from the recent belligerent calls by Vice President Vance, Attorney General Pam Bondi and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for direct intervention against the cartels in Mexico, if not outright invasion.
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At the same time, Rubio said the Trump administration intends to expand its lethal strikes on drug cartels throughout Latin America, both in the Caribbean and the Pacific Ocean. While in Mexico, he defended last Tuesday’s strike on the boat off the Venezuelan coast.
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Earlier this year, Trump claimed that Mexico is “run by cartels.” Historically, there is a measure of truth to that claim. Drug cartels have bribed high-level government officials and their families at least as far back as the 1988-1994 presidency of Carlos Salinas de Gortari.
Genaro García Luna, the secretary of public security under President Felipe Calderon (2006 to 2012) was convicted in 2023 in U.S. federal court of cartel-related charges, including drug trafficking; and Gen. Tomás Ángeles Dauahare, Calderón’s sub-secretary of National Defense, has declared that Calderón knew about García Luna’s cartel involvement.
Others have claimed that AMLO himself was a recipient of campaign funding from the Sinaloa Cartel, and it is the case that he made a special effort to reach out to the mother of the co-leader of the Sinaloa Cartel, Joaquín “Chapo” Guzmán Loera, who was convicted in U.S. federal court in 2019 of trafficking, and sentenced to life imprisonment.
In any event, at whatever level, national or state, undoubtedly there has been significant corruption of MORENA political honchos, something Sheinbaum and her administration want to keep under wraps.
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The Sheinbaum administration hopes that the agreement on enhanced cooperation reached on Wednesday will prevent the Trump administration from taking unilateral military action on Mexican soil, at least for the time being.
The Mexican navy is already active in stopping the flow of drugs, especially cocaine trafficking through the Pacific, the main corridor for transnational cartels.
A senior Mexican naval officer stressed Wednesday that if the US asked Mexico’s navy to open fire on a vessel and kill its crew, it would be against Mexican law, and greatly damage the relationship the two militaries have built up.
Of course, the White House’s enthusiasm for Mexico and Sheinbaum is in large part due to her accommodating, if not fawning, approach to Trump, which many in Mexico see as appeasement.
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Despite the apparent lighter touch with Mexico put forward by Rubio last week and the pledge that the US will foster security cooperation and respect Mexico’s sovereignty and territory, that policy could turn on a dime. US imperialism could quickly put into high gear its impetus toward full on war and invasion of Mexico, even though that would result in a highly bloody and drawn out conflict, potentially triggering a confrontation as well with the close to 40 million US residents and citizens of Mexican extraction.
In fact, the US is attempting to reassert its power and strategic influence over the entire Latin American region, which includes its Mexican neighbor. In its existential conflict with China, which is heavily invested in the region, US imperialism seeks control over the region’s critical resources, such as rare earth elements, lithium, gold, oil and natural gas.
7. Trump launches ICE raids in Chicago, as Supreme Court tramples Fourth Amendment protections
On Monday, September 8, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) formally announced the start of “Operation Midway Blitz,” targeting the city of Chicago.
DHS declared that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents would fan out across the city and suburbs, targeting workplaces, neighborhoods, and transit hubs in what it called a campaign against “criminal illegal aliens.” In reality, as seen in California, Washington D.C., Georgia and Iowa, the kidnappings are overwhelmingly targeting workers and longtime residents.
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As of this writing it does not appear that any National Guard elements have been deployed in the city yet. On Monday, Trump again threatened to send troops, “We’d love to go into Chicago and straighten it out.”
In a statement Monday, the city of Evanston, located just north of Chicago and home to Northwestern University, revealed that it was “informed of the likelihood that federal immigration agents will be present in our community in the coming days.”
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The same day that DHS announced its Chicago operation, the US Supreme Court handed down a 6–3 ruling on its “shadow docket,” granting the Trump administration’s emergency petition in Noem v. Perdomo, staying a July 11 temporary restraining order that barred ICE from using ethnicity, language, workplace or job type as justification for seizing people to investigate their immigration status.
The cowards in command of the Supreme Court did not even bother to explain their reasoning. Brett Kavanaugh issued a concurring opinion, not joined by any other justice, that reads more like a Trump press release than a legal analysis.
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In practice, the Court is allowing the Trump administration to violate the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches and seizures, without even rendering a written opinion, until such time as the underlying case makes its way through layers of appeals to reach the Supreme Court. Throughout this period, which could take years, ICE and CBP agents are authorized to stop, interrogate and detain individuals based on the mere “appearance” of being Latino, speaking Spanish (or some other language) or being present at certain workplaces.
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As Trump threatens military occupation and floods cities with ICE thugs, the Democrats respond with a pledge to maintain “order” through expanded policing.
The events of September 8 make plain that democratic rights cannot be defended through any capitalist institution, including the courts and the Democratic Party. As the fascist felon in the White House consolidates dictatorial methods, with the backing of his hand-picked and corrupt Supreme Court, the Democrats collaborate by preserving and legitimizing the same repressive apparatus under the banner of “credible” policing.
The Tamil Nadu DMK (Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam) state government, with which the Stalinist Communist Party of India (Marxist), is closely allied, has repeatedly unleashed violent police assaults against sanitation workers protesting the Greater Chennai Corporation’s decision to privatize manual garbage collection and street sweeping services.
The workers started their protests soon after the Chennai municipal government, the Greater Chennai Corporation (GCC), announced in July 2024 its decision to outsource sanitation services to private companies in two of the 15 municipal zones—Zone 5 (Royapuram) and Zone 6 (Thiru Vi Ka Nagar.) The GCC has already pushed through the privatization of sanitation services in much of Chennai.
The 2,000 sanitation workers—who are overwhelmingly women from the most impoverished “lowest caste,” Dalits (formerly “untouchables”)—are protesting because they are well aware that under a private contractor, their already miserable working conditions will vastly deteriorate. Despite repeated government attempts to suppress their struggle, the workers have tenaciously kept up their opposition to privatization for over a year. For two weeks last month, from August 1 to 13, they staged a militant strike.
The latest police attack occurred around noon on Thursday, September 4 at Chennai’s “May Day Park,” a park so-named to purportedly honor the working class. Hundreds of workers had gathered at the park for a meeting called by the two unions leading the agitation, the Left Trade Union Centre (LTUC) and the Uzhaippor Urimai Iyakkam (Toilers’ Rights Movement). They had gathered to discuss what further actions to take after the Madras High Court recently gave a ringing endorsement of the DMK government’s privatization drive.
Claiming that the gathering was “unauthorized,” scores of police swooped in and closed the park’s gates to prevent the entry of more workers. When the mostly female workers sat down in front of the gates in a sit-down protest, female police constables violently manhandled them and subsequently arrested at least 300. More than five police vehicles and a bus were used by the police to transport the workers to different locations. The detainees shouted slogans as they were sped away in police vehicles and buses. Several workers were injured, with at least one of them requiring hospital treatment.
However, the most egregious police attack occurred on August 13, after the Madras High Court, the state’s highest judicial body, issued orders to the DMK government to remove the workers’ protest encampment in front of the landmark Ripon Building, where the GCC is seated. This court order came in response to a so-called public interest litigation petition, filed by one D. Thenmozhi, demanding the enforcement of police notices served on the protesting workers to vacate their protest encampment. It has been reported that far from being an ordinary citizen, Thenmozhi has close ties to the ruling DMK.
With this judicial backing, the DMK state and city governments, who are viscerally hostile to these workers, went about implementing the court order with gusto.
The 2,000 workers had been protesting peacefully in front of the Ripon Building since August 1. The government, not wanting to create a scene during the daytime, deliberately waited until midnight to unleash hundreds of police to violently clear the encampment. Most of the workers were resting or sleeping at the encampment when the police assault occurred.
The police brutally manhandled the protesters, beating many. Numerous workers were injured and hospitalized due to this wanton police assault. The police hauled away hundreds of striking workers in buses so as to further intimidate and harass them. After spending a harrowing night in detention, they were released the next day.
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The Stalinist Communist Party of India (Marxist), which has promoted the DMK as a progressive party standing for “social justice,” has issued a mealy-mouthed appeal to the fiercely pro-business DMK. In an editorial in their official Tamil organ, Theekathir (Spark of fire), Tamil Nadu CPM State Secretary P. Shanmugam gently reminded the DMK that the “concept of outsourcing went against social justice and urged the state government to abandon it.”
Although Shanmugam claimed to have met with the sanitation workers, the CPM has refused to mobilize the tens of thousands of industrial and other workers in the Greater Chennai area who are members of the party’s trade union unit, the CITU, or Center of Indian Trade Unions, in defence of the sanitation workers. The CITU has long been betraying strikes by workers they have organized in Tamil Nadu, such as at Samsung, BYD and Foxconn, and the Tamil Nadu State Transport Corporation.
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The DMK-led Tamil Nadu government’s response to the protest, its privatization drive and its promotion of precarious contract employment, reveals its total commitment to the ruling class agenda of increased worker-exploitation, austerity and the massive diversion of public funds into swelling corporate profits and expanding India’s military might.
During the last state election, DMK Chief Minister M.K. Stalin made a promise of “permanent jobs” for the state’s sanitation workers. Predictably, this has proven to be a ruse, with his government relentlessly proceeding with outsourcing solid waste management.
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The agitation led by the Left Trade Union Center (LTUC), a Maoist-controlled trade union, has confined and isolated the sanitation workers’ struggle, with no attempts made to mobilize other sanitation and sewerage workers across Chennai, let alone the working class as a whole. The LTUC has instead confined itself to making futile appeals to the DMK government.
The events in Chennai reflect a broader trend of systematic privatization of public services and the contractualization of jobs across India. Sectors such as education, healthcare, coal mining, rail transport and India’s globally connected auto industry face similar threats. While workers have time and again waged tenacious struggles to defend their jobs and secure better wages and working conditions, they have invariably come up against the sabotage of the existing trade unions, including the CPM-affiliated CITU and the Communist Party of India (CPI)-led All India Trades Union Congress (AITUC) that systematically isolate their struggles, while tying them to various right-wing capitalist parties like the DMK and the Congress Party.
9. Five months after death of Stellantis worker Ronald Adams Sr., silence and cover-up continue
Five months have passed since the April 7 death of 63-year-old skilled tradesman Ronald Adams Sr. at Stellantis’ Dundee Engine Complex in Michigan. His family and co-workers still have no answers. Stellantis, the United Auto Workers (UAW) and the Michigan Occupational Safety and Health Administration (MIOSHA) have all maintained a wall of silence.
Adams was crushed to death when a gantry hoist suddenly activated while he was performing maintenance in an enclosed factory cell containing an industrial washer. Production at the plant has since resumed, but neither his co-workers nor his family have been given any explanation as to what caused the fatality.
Speaking to the World Socialist Web Site last week, his widow Shamenia Stewart-Adams said:
We still have not heard anything. They have called workers back to work, and we don’t have answers. They have to be somewhere in the investigation, because surely they’re done walking through the plant and questioning folks. Have there been more safety issues? I don’t know, but all I do know is that my husband is dead, and the workers are back working.”
Autoworkers at Dundee and other plants report that, since Adams’ death, management and the UAW have quietly implemented changes to safety procedures without acknowledging their responsibility for Adams’ death or for the deaths of other workers.
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The silence surrounding Adams’ death echoes other tragedies at Stellantis plants. Just last month, the family of 53-year-old Antonio Gaston, who was killed at the Toledo Assembly Plant on August 21, 2024, filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the company.
“I want to know the truth of what happened to my husband at work, because I haven’t gotten anything—I haven’t gotten any answers,” Gaston’s widow Renita Shores-Gaston said at an August 11 press conference. “All the questions just go unanswered, and it’s coming up on a year.” She added, “I just don’t want this to happen to another family.”
Gaston, a father of four, had been transferred from the shuttered plant in Belvidere, Illinois. Though a material handler, he was pressed into assembly line work and was tightening undercarriage bolts, when he was caught under a moving vehicle and crushed to death.
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The brutal death of Ronald Adams Sr. is far from an isolated event. Every day in America, at least 15 workers are killed on the job—or more than 5,200 each year.
Another 135,000 workers die each year from illnesses caused by exposure to chemicals and other hazardous materials. On Tuesday, the New York Times reported on the large number of wildfire fighters now suffering from deadly cancers, including leukemia, after being sent into toxic smoke without masks or warnings of long-term health risks.
Recent workplace fatalities include:
August 29—Strawn, Texas: Guillermo Luna, 40, was killed when his semi-truck veered off I-20, struck a guardrail and rolled into a dry creek bed.
August 27—Wabasha County, Minnesota: Craig Alan Goring, 52, of Michigan, was killed when his semi-truck left the roadway and rolled over just before noon.
August 27—Kern County, California: Hongyi Ji, 62, of Orlando, Florida, died when his semi-truck overturned at the Laval Road offramp on I-5.
August 23—Marion County, Kentucky: Firefighter Brian Hatt, 51, died from injuries sustained in a fire truck rollover crash while responding to an emergency.
August 22—Mackinac County, Michigan: A 55-year-old man was killed when the cement roller he was operating lost control on a steep grade and crushed him.
August 22—Lowell, Massachusetts: A construction worker fell to his death from the roof of a three-story multifamily house under construction on Aiken Ave.
August 21—Austin, Texas: A contractor was killed when a mobile crane tipped over at a residential construction site, trapping him inside.
August 19—Ilion, New York: Phil Whynot, an electric department foreman and 19-year municipal veteran, was killed instantly after contacting an energized transformer.
August 19—Whitesville, West Virginia: Coal miner Eric Bartram, 41, was killed in an accident at the Alpha Metallurgical Resources’ Marfork Processing Plant.
August 15—Immokalee, Florida: Farmworker Marco Antonio Hernandez Guevara, a seasonal H-2A visa worker from Mexico, collapsed from heat stress in the fields. Declared brain dead on August 21, he died eight days after collapsing.
August 15—Sterling Heights, Michigan: A 41-year-old school bus driver pressed into landscaping work was electrocuted when his lift struck a live power line.
August 15—El Mirage, Arizona: A contract worker was crushed beneath a steel plate weighing more than 1,000 pounds at a BNSF rail yard.
August 15—Bal Harbour, Florida: A worker died from a “traumatic injury” at a Bal Harbour Shops construction site after being pulled from a confined space.
August 14—Albany, New York: LifeNet paramedic Kevin Robert collapsed and died aboard a medical helicopter while treating a patient.
August 14—Broward County, Florida: A construction worker was killed when a truck slammed into protective crash trucks guarding a line-painting crew on I-75.
August 13—Trinity County, Texas: Three contract sewer workers—John Nelson Sr., 52; Bradley Wrightsman, 46; and Brad Hutton, 47—were killed after being overcome by hydrogen sulfide gas while attempting to repair a cracked line.
The tragedies are not confined to the United States. Globally, an estimated 7,500 workers are killed every day—2.78 million each year, according to the UN Global Compact. On September 6 in Gujarat, India, six people died when a cable snapped on a cargo ropeway at the Pavagadh Hill temple site, plunging operators, laborers and a flower vendor to their deaths.
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The five-month anniversary of Adams’ death comes as the Trump administration moves to gut what remains of OSHA and dismantle protections for workers. Trump’s budget would cut OSHA funding by more than 8 percent, eliminate over 200 positions and slash enforcement and standards programs. Fines have been reduced, while “compliance assistance” is prioritized over inspections. At the same time, critical institutions, such as the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), face layoffs and lab closures as part of the fascist president’s war on public health and science.
At the same time, Trump’s ICE raids—including the mass roundup at the Georgia EV battery plant—are being used to terrorize immigrant workers and intimidate the entire working class. These raids are a warning: The state is preparing to use repression not only against immigrants but also against strikes, mass protests and any resistance to the destruction of the social and democratic rights won through more than a century of struggle.
At the Labor Day parade in Detroit, UAW President Shawn Fain did not utter a word about the deaths of Ronald Adams Sr. or Antonio Gaston. He was equally silent on Trump’s dictatorial measures. Instead, Fain echoed the fascist president’s nationalist trade war rhetoric, blaming the assault on workers’ jobs and conditions on “bad trade deals” rather than on capitalism itself.
The refusal of Stellantis, the UAW and MIOSHA to release even the most basic information about Adams’ death underscores the urgent need for workers to take matters into their own hands. As the IWA-RFC hearing showed, only rank-and-file committees—independent of the union bureaucracy—can expose the truth, defend workers’ lives and fight to prevent further tragedies.
The response of the union bureaucracy has been pathetic and complicit. Three days after the raid, the UAW issued a perfunctory statement, which downplayed the attack as “unfortunate” and presented it only as a safety issue. It said nothing about Trump, dictatorship, or the urgent need to defend the seized workers.
The AFL-CIO’s Georgia president even reduced the attack to the “workload burden” left behind for other workers. This is disgusting. Hundreds of men and women have been abducted into detention camps, families torn apart, and entire communities terrorized. To speak of “workload” under these conditions exposes the union apparatuses for what they are: not defenders of workers, but arms of the corporations and the state.
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The attack on immigrants is the spearhead of a much broader assault on the entire working class. Trump has already stripped union protections from nearly a million federal employees. Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are on the chopping block. The government is preparing massive cuts, repression, and war, and it is building the machinery of dictatorship in advance to suppress inevitable opposition.
The raid at Hyundai is one front in this war. Other raids have already swept up meatpacking workers in Iowa, construction workers in Florida, and day laborers outside Home Depot in California. The same police-military apparatus that now occupies Washington and is being deployed against Chicago will be used to criminalize strikes, demonstrations, and resistance.
Workers cannot rely on the union bureaucracy, the Democratic Party, or any section of the ruling class to defend our rights. The defense of immigrant workers must be taken into our own hands.
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The International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) provides the framework to organize this struggle. Its purpose is to unite workers internationally on the basis of our common class interests.
The American working class is made up of workers from around the world. The capitalist class has always sought to divide and weaken the working class by promoting national, ethnic and racial divisions. History has proven that every gain ever won has been accomplished by rejecting this divide-and-conquer strategy and uniting all workers in a common fight.
Workers must reject the poisonous lie that immigrants are to blame for declining living standards. The real enemy is the corporate-financial oligarchy that exploits immigrant and native-born workers alike while looting society for its own enrichment. Dividing workers along national lines is a deliberate strategy of the ruling class to weaken us.
11. Deutsche Bahn report finds fatal train crash in Garmisch-Partenkirchen “was avoidable”
The train disaster in June 2022 in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, which left five dead and 78 injured, “was avoidable,” according to an expert report published by national rail operator Deutsche Bahn on September 1. It confirms the assessment made at the time by the World Socialist Web Site in the article “A fatal accident that could have been predicted.”
On June 3, 2022, the last Friday before the Whitsun holidays, all five double-deck coaches and the locomotive of a regional train derailed at Burgrain, just beyond Garmisch-Partenkirchen. Four women and a 13-year-old boy were killed, 16 passengers seriously injured and 62 lightly wounded. As the train jumped the track, three carriages plunged down an embankment and became wedged into each other, throwing people out, crushing them between the wreckage or burying them underneath.
Law firm Gleiss Lutz, which was commissioned to carry out the confidential final report, “came to the conclusion that the accident was avoidable.” The horrific accident, the company now states, was the result of the then-responsible DB Netz subsidiary failing to act on findings of defective concrete sleepers (railroad ties). Also implicated were “the board members responsible for the division at the time.”
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The immediate cause of the derailment were the prestressed concrete sleepers, which had been damaged at their core by chemical processes. At the accident site, these defective sleepers had been laid on a left-hand curve. Under the high forces exerted by the train in the curve, the damaged sleepers shifted, widening the track. All the carriages derailed, and one collided with an overhead line mast, tearing open its side wall.
The track was totally destroyed over 700 meters, and three overhead line masts were torn down. The locomotive and carriages were so badly damaged that they had to be scrapped, showing the enormous forces at work. The line was closed for several months.
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Fatal workplace accidents in the railway sector also continue, though they rarely make the news. In May 2025 alone, there were four fatal accidents in just four weeks. No German authority, not even the BEU, systematically records all railway accidents.
12. Florida’s “Charlatan General” Ladapo reveals no scientific evidence supported anti-vaccine policy
Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo appeared Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union to explain and defend the state government’s decision to eliminate all vaccine mandates. What he said left the program host Jake Tapper slack-jawed in amazement and enraged medical professionals who watched or learned of his comments.
Last Wednesday, September 3, Ladapo and Governor Ron DeSantis announced at a press conference held at a private religious high school that several vaccine mandates established by health department rules—rather than by statute—would be scrapped immediately. These include requirements for chickenpox (varicella), hepatitis B, Hib, and pneumococcal vaccines, which Ladapo described flatly as “gone.” Other vaccine mandates would be repealed by the Republican-controlled state legislature when it reconvenes early in 2026.
When Tapper asked whether Ladapo’s office had conducted any data analysis on the likely impact of removing mandates, given rising numbers of hepatitis A, whooping cough and chickenpox in Florida. Ladapo replied bluntly: “Absolutely not.” No analysis was necessary, he argued, because it was the absolute right of parents to decide what goes into their children’s bodies. He dismissed Tapper’s citing public health concerns by saying Florida manages outbreaks “all the time” and pointing to Sweden and the United Kingdom—countries without school vaccine mandates—as examples where “the sky isn’t falling.”
If the new policies are enacted, Florida would become the first state to dismantle requirements that have long been a cornerstone of public health in preventing infectious diseases. The proposal has drawn widespread condemnation from medical and public health experts. Ladapo has been accused of promoting “pseudo-scientific chicanery” and “scientific nonsense” while endangering the lives of Florida’s children.
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Taken together with the push to abolish mandates, Florida is veering toward a de facto “right to choose infection” regime—a direct break from more than a century of US public health law and practice. If mandates are repealed entirely, the state will almost certainly face a resurgence of measles, pertussis and chickenpox outbreaks, bringing avoidable hospitalizations and child deaths, and turning Florida into a national cautionary tale.
It should be recognized that the legal and medical communities in the United States have long defended vaccination not as unwarranted coercion but as a necessary exercise of public health authority. Compulsory (and not coercive) vaccination laws have consistently been upheld as legitimate expressions of state police power in defense of the common good.
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By elevating individual choice above the social aspects of our common humanity and preservation of community safety (which have historical precedence in human civilization), anti-vaccine leaders have portrayed public health itself as oppressive. These dynamics persist today. The same arguments about inviolable freedom and “medical liberty” continue to animate opposition to vaccines, even in the face of scientific advances like mRNA technology. It matters not one iota to them how many millions of lives vaccines have saved in the last five decades.
Public health is a social right, fought for by the working class and principled scientists over two centuries. It is grounded in the recognition that society functions as a collective organism, not a loose assemblage of individuals or the property of financial elites. Effective vaccination, which requires mandates, has flourished as one of medicine’s greatest achievements. Ladapo’s comments on CNN show the reactionary and retrogressive character of the fascistic movement headed by Trump, which seeks to roll back all the progressive achievements associated with both the development of science and technology and the struggles of the working class.
13. In an attempt to appease the White House, Maryland Democrats announce police surge to Baltimore
At a joint news conference Friday evening, Maryland Governor Wes Moore and Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott announced a surge of police to Baltimore, the state’s largest city. The decision by the two Democrats comes as President Donald Trump has stepped up threats to send troops to Democratic-run states and cities over the past few weeks, including Baltimore.
Since last month, Trump has singled out Moore, the first African American governor of the state, for vilification. Trump reiterated various slurs against the city, calling it a “hellhole” and a “death bed” on social media while denouncing Moore’s reported presidential aspirations. Trump has also threatened to withhold federal funding for rebuilding the Francis Scott Key Bridge, which collapsed last year when a container ship collided with it.
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The state plans to deploy Maryland State Police troopers to state-owned routes within Baltimore to free up city police to patrol other areas in greater numbers. The Baltimore Police Department is replacing 55 vacant sworn officer roles with 66 new civilian jobs in administrative and support functions, like Evidence Control, Inspections, and Investigations. It will hire other officers through various state funds and grants. These steps aim to free uniformed officers for street duties while reducing overtime costs.
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Both the Democratic and Republican parties, as representatives of Wall Street and the military-intelligence apparatus, accept the basic premise of a police crackdown in major cities.
The main difference between the two big-business parties is not over “democracy” or the constitutional rights of the population. The Democratic Party, which has controlled Baltimore for decades, has no problem running a police-state apparatus.
In 2016, the Justice Department uncovered vast evidence of racial profiling, use of excessive force, arrests without just cause and many other abuses. In 2005, under Democratic Mayor Martin O’Malley, as many as 1 in 6 Baltimore residents spent time in jail, as city arrests rose to over 100,000 in a single year.
For Democrats, the main opposition to Trump has always been focused on how to best suppress the class struggle in the face of intense social opposition to the fascistic president and within the working class more broadly.
“We can do this ourselves,” Mayor Scott said at the press conference on Friday. During the event, Scott led the crowd in an emphatic chant, yelling: “We’re all we got!” with the crowd responding, “We’re all we need!” This demonstrated the city’s intent to repress its own population without National Guard involvement.
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For the past four weeks, Trump has controlled Washington D.C. police and mobilized a total of 9,000 police officers and troops to occupy the city. Over 300 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents are en route to Chicago to target immigrants. The National Guard may follow, to suppress public opposition to the raids.
The political establishment is aware that its policies are deeply unpopular; the real purpose of deployments is to intimidate the population, not address a non-existent crime wave.
14. My Dead Friend Zoe: “Imperial Storm Troopers tricked into modern colonialism” and their fate
There are relatively plausible and recognizable situations and characters in My Dead Friend Zoe and generally talented performers. However, the issues raised are dealt with in such a superficial fashion, meant to flesh out certain of the writer-director’s notions and “prescriptions,” that Hausmann-Stokes’ film fails to move strongly or illuminate the conditions in a meaningful manner. It never sheds an air of conventionality and predictability. The images are listless, not sharp or purposeful. The film remains largely on the surface.
These flaws flow from the greatest and most glaring weakness, concentrated in the creators’ conviction that they can tellingly present the lives and fate of military personnel without giving any serious thought to the nature of the conflicts in which those individuals saw action. This is not a neutral stance here (“We support the troops, not the wars”), as it never is. This type of “support” for the rank-and-file soldiers can’t be walled off from confronting the concrete social role and vast, world-historic crimes of the American military.
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The absence of any concern with “modern colonialism” and the catastrophic consequences of US involvement in Afghanistan—in fact, over the course of more than four decades—is not simply a false political and human choice. It renders impossible, in fact, a penetrating understanding of the American characters’ own tribulations, including the phenomenon of widespread mental distress and suicide among veterans, who are also imperialism’s victims.
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The general refusal to confront the terrible legacy of serving in an imperialist war, where soldiers, whatever their level of social awareness, certainly recognize themselves to be hated and reviled as foreign invaders and oppressors, pervades and undermines My Dead Friend Zoe from beginning to end.
15. French government collapses with strikes against austerity set to begin
French Prime Minister François Bayrou’s government fell in a confidence vote yesterday, by a 364-194 margin, with 15 abstentions. It was the first time since France’s Fifth Republic began in 1958 that the National Assembly brought down a government.
President Emmanuel Macron issued a communiqué, pledging to “receive tomorrow the prime minister, François Bayrou, to accept his resignation” and “name a new prime minister in the coming days.” He is apparently trying to form a new government without new elections, based on France’s current hung parliament. Figures cited as possible prime ministerial picks range from Macron’s fascistic former interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, to former Socialist Party (PS) prime minister Bernard Cazeneuve.
A confrontation is fast emerging between the working class and the capitalist oligarchy. Macron’s poll ratings have plunged to 15 percent, the lowest ever for a French president; his possible new prime ministers are all unpopular figures who share Bayrou’s agenda of military spending increases and austerity. Moreover, the neo-fascist National Rally (RN) is declaring itself ready to take power, pledging to more than double Bayrou’s social cuts, from €44 to €100 billion.
With strikes and protests set to begin across France tomorrow, the working class is entering into a struggle that can only be waged with revolutionary methods. The only way to resolve the debt crisis in France and across Europe without impoverishing the workers is to expropriate the capitalist oligarchy, breaking its grip over state power. This, in turn, requires freeing the class struggle from the grip of bureaucracies trying to strangle it—primarily the parties and trade union leaderships in the New Popular Front (NFP), led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
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The capitalist oligarchy has not enriched society, but rather plundered it. The oligarchy condemns France and much of Europe to industrial stagnation, monopolizing the wealth created by the workers. In his 2010 work For a Fiscal Revolution, economist Thomas Piketty found that in France, the top 10 percent of the population held 62 percent of total wealth; the top 1 percent alone held 24 percent. Since then, however, wealth has become far more concentrated at the top: the wealth of just the 500 wealthiest Frenchmen rose from €194 to €1,228 billion.
Strengthening the military and stabilizing state finances without expropriating these massive fortunes means destroying social spending. The French state currently has €330 billion in yearly tax revenues. On this basis, raising military spending by €100 billion per year, finding €100 billion per year for interest on the debt, and finding tens of billions of euros more to pay down France’s debt would require virtually eliminating pension, health and education spending.
16. UTLA bureaucrats holding Los Angeles educators back from struggle
Negotiations officially broke down last month between the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), the second largest district in the country, and the United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA).
After 10 bargaining sessions, the UTLA announced on August 20 the complete failure of talks, revealing that LAUSD rejected virtually all of the union’s already toothless demands. The district’s 21 counterproposals represented, according to the UTLA, a “minor movement, missed opportunities, or unacceptable proposals like cutting programs.”
LAUSD has flatly rejected meaningful wage increases, smaller class sizes, or guarantees of adequate resources. At the same time, the district is pushing sweeping cuts to healthcare by freezing contributions and shifting employees onto high-deductible plans—effectively cutting hundreds of dollars from already meager monthly incomes.
Both teachers and school workers (members of Service Employees International Union Local 99) remain on expired contracts, facing some of the most severe attacks in decades: layoffs, budget cuts, loss of healthcare and unprecedented assaults on democratic rights for staff, students and their families. Officials are openly discussing school closures, benefit cuts and the elimination of essential student programs.
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More than 80,000 teachers from virtually every major school district in the state of California are currently working under expired contracts. The California Teachers Association, of which the UTLA is a part, has spent the summer and the start of the semester attempting to fool educators by pretending to organize some sort of job action in the future.
The name of this campaign, ironically, is “We Can’t Wait,” even while the CTA makes teachers wait for permission to strike that it refuses to give.
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LAUSD is preparing deep cuts, layoffs and privatization schemes—yet UTLA calls on workers to hand out flyers and wear matching T-shirts rather than mobilizing for a real fight. These stunts are meant to let off steam and prepare the ground for the next sellout agreement.
Philadelphia is a warning for California teachers. There, the teachers union organized a similar bogus “strike ready” campaign over the summer, only to announce a contract meeting none of teachers’ demands which they rammed through days before an August 31 strike deadline.
In Chicago, teachers recently experienced their own major betrayal by the union bureaucracy—a warning with urgent lessons for educators everywhere. Under the Democratic Socialists of America-controlled CTU leadership and Democratic Mayor Brandon Johnson, Chicago teachers were sold a contract touted as “Trump-proof,” with “common good” language presented as a bold defense.
Shortly afterward, the city announced that the school district was in deep financial crisis and is now threatening to rip up the CTU contract. Today, under conditions where the CTU and the Democrats conspired to impose “labor peace,” Trump has now sent the National Guard and ICE into the city, declaring that the Chicago was “about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR.”
17. Japanese prime minister resigns
After just 11 months in office, Shigeru Ishiba resigned last Sunday as Japan’s prime minister—a move that will deepen the crisis of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and the political establishment in Tokyo as a whole.
Ishiba’s resignation followed mounting opposition within the LDP after it lost control of the parliamentary upper house in elections in July, having already done so in the lower house last October. A post-election review last week called for a “complete overhaul” of the party, fueling calls for an early leadership contest that was due to be decided at a meeting on Monday.
Ishiba said he was resigning to head off a “decisive split” in the LDP, which has ruled Japan for most of the past 70 years. Ishiba has presided over a slowing economy that is now being hit by the Trump administration’s large tariffs on Japanese imports, amid rising social tensions.
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Ishiba came to office last October after the resignation of Fumio Kishida, who was mired in a series of scandals, including revelations that different LDP factions had established slush funds by under-reporting millions of dollars in political donations. The party also continued to face criticism of its longstanding ties to the right-wing religious cult known as the Unification Church, exposed following the assassination of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in 2022.
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The LDP did not resolve any of the issues that fuelled resentment and opposition in the lower house election—rising prices, particularly of the staple rice, falling real wages and the lack of well-paid permanent jobs, especially for young people. Ishiba dramatically boosted military spending, in line with the LDP’s support for the US war drive against China, at the expense of social spending.
As a result, in the upper house election in July, the fascistic Sanseito party, which ran a Trump-style campaign scapegoating immigrants for every social ill from low wages and crime rates to rising property prices to dangerous driving, made significant gains. It was able to capitalise on the continuing decline in living standards under both the LDP and the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), which held office from 2009 to 2012.
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Ishiba will remain as caretaker prime minister while the LDP undertakes the complex process of selecting a new party president. To nominate requires the backing of 20 lawmakers. A ballot is taken of all LDP lawmakers and an equal number of votes from the party’s members. If no candidate receives a majority, a second round run-off takes place with the share of the vote for the rank-and-file dropping to 47—one for each of the country’s prefectures.
On most previous occasions, the LDP president has automatically become the prime minister. However, the LDP does not command a parliamentary majority so there is no guarantee that whoever is chosen will be endorsed. In 2024, Ishiba managed to gain parliamentary endorsement by relying on a divided opposition and an upper house majority. Now the LDP is in a minority in both houses.
Ukrainian authorities are continuing their investigation into the assassination of prominent fascist politician and parliamentary member Andriy Parubiy following the arrest of a suspect, as the government of Volodymyr Zelensky desperately attempts to link the killing to Russian intelligence despite a lack of evidence.
Parubiy, the former chairman of Ukraine’s parliament and along with Oleh Tyahnybok founder of the neo-Nazi, Social Nationalist Party—later known as Svoboda—was shot to death on August 30 in broad daylight in the western city of Lviv. His assassin was dressed as a delivery driver who then fled on an electric bike.
Not long after, Ukrainian authorities announced the arrest of a 52-year old Lviv resident later identified as Mikhail Stselnikov, and immediately attempted to tie the killing to Russian intelligence without providing any evidence.
“We have information indicating the possible involvement of the Russian Federation’s security services in organizing the murder,” Vadym Onyshchenko, regional leader of Ukraine’s security service (SBU) said in a statement following Stselnikov’s arrest.
Stselnikov reportedly admitted to the killing calling it “personal revenge against the Ukrainian authorities,” following the death of his son who served in the Ukrainian Armed Forces and was killed in the battle for Bakhmut in May 2023. Like countless thousands of both Russian and Ukrainian soldiers who died before Russian forces ultimately captured the city, the body of Stselnikov’s son was never recovered.
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Rather than a Russian operation, Parubiy’s assassination very much resembles the killing of Iryna Farion, another far-right Ukrainian nationalist and Svoboda party member who likewise was killed in Lviv last year in broad daylight despite being under SBU surveillance.
Her killer was later revealed to be 18-year-old neo-Nazi Viacheslav Zinchenko, a member of the rival far-right organization NS/WP (National-Socialism/White Power).
As the World Socialist Web Site pointed out at the time “this type of political assassination in the war has been so far pioneered above all by NATO-backed Ukrainian intelligence. Under the leadership of Kyrylo Budanov, Ukraine’s military intelligence has carried out a number of political murders of far-right pro-Moscow political figures on Russian soil, such as Illia Kiva, Vladlen Tatarsky and Daryna Dugina, daughter of the Russian nationalist political figure Aleksandr Dugin.”
That such assassinations are a regular part of Ukrainian politics testifies to the intensity of the conflicts within the ruling class and the broader violence unleashed upon Ukrainian society by the dictatorial Zelensky regime, which has imprisoned tens of thousands of Ukrainians, such as socialist Bogdan Syrotiuk, for opposition to the NATO proxy war that has killed hundreds of thousands.
19. Australian government’s Zionist envoy leads mayors summit to push censorship
From Wednesday to Friday last week, local government leaders from across the country gathered in a luxury hotel on the Gold Coast for an event billed as the “Australian Mayors Summit Against Antisemitism.”
Its name notwithstanding, the event had nothing to do with countering anti-Jewish or any other form of bigotry. It had the character of a gaudy and bizarre junket, aimed at intensifying a witch hunt against mass popular opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the Australian government’s complicity.
The gathering was headlined by Jillian Segal, the Labor government’s special envoy to combat antisemitism. Segal is a businesswoman and a long term Zionist lobbyist.
The summit was her first initiative since she released a report in July, demanding an unprecedented police-state crackdown on pro-Palestinian sentiment. The report, which contained no evidence for its assertions of rampant antisemitism, called for a campaign of censorship targeting the press, universities, publicly funded institutions and virtually all areas of civil society.
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The mayors’ summit was attended by many Labor Party local government leaders. Labor’s federal Defence Minister Richard Marles sent a video message, hailing its efforts, as did former Labor Prime Minister Julia Gillard.
Several mayors and councils refused to participate, pointing to the politically-motivated character of the gathering. That decision was undoubtedly a reflection of the widespread and growing popular hostility to the genocide and to the censorship activities of the Zionists.
19. “Block Everything” September 10 day of action reveals explosive social anger in France
As the September 10 day of action approaches, France finds itself in a historic political crisis. Prime Minister François Bayrou’s minority government—desperately weak from the moment he took office—has fallen. This opens a period of unprecedented uncertainty and instability in official politics. Pro-Macron parties are in shreds, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s New Popular Front (NFP) is divided, and traditional right-wing parties discredited. None have managed to stabilize the situation.
In this political vacuum, the threat of a coming to power of the neo-fascist National Rally (RN), and more broadly of fascistic dictatorship, hangs over the entire institutional setup. There is constant discussion in the capitalist media of new elections. However, with a hung parliament and a deeply fragmented electorate, no clear perspective emerges for how a new government would be formed.
It is amid this deep crisis of capitalist rule in France that calls for a day of action to “Block Everything” on September 10 have emerged. A symbol of a growing social radicalization, it reflects the instinctive sense in the working class—well beyond the ranks of those now participating in the movement—that there must be a general strike to fight the power of the capitalist oligarchy.
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The “Block Everything” initiative for a September 10 day of action was born on the Telegram app and on other social media, where they spread very rapidly. Without publicly identified leaders or central structures, it reprises the methods of mobilization of the 2018-2019 “yellow vest” movement: local discussions, actions dispersed in many locations and informal coordination.
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The positions of the union bureaucracies are profoundly contradictory. On the one hand, they promote themselves to workers, with the assistance of parties like Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France Unbowed or the Pabloite New Anticapitalist Party, as the best placed organizations to obtain media coverage and logistical support for strike action. However, by tying workers to a perspective of negotiating with capitalist governments, they inevitably become a brake on the movement, then sell it out.
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Workers must organize themselves independently, in rank-and-file committees to escape the “mechanisms of control,” that is, political sabotage by the union bureaucracies. The organization of movements like the “yellow vest” protests and “Block Everything” show how mass action can be organized independently of the unions, via social media. This same principle must be applied to organizing not only one-day social protests but the launching of mass strike actions leading toward a general strike.
Above all, workers in France need to find allies internationally—reaching out to workers in the United States fighting Trump’s coup, in Germany preparing strikes against austerity measures designed to fund the government’s €1 trillion military spending bill, and beyond. Only such an international struggle can ultimately smash the power of the financial markets and the capitalist oligarchy and pave the way for a socialist revolution.
20. Australia: Queensland Teachers Union “pauses” strike threat
Less than a month after 50,000 public school teachers took strike action in the northern Australian state of Queensland—the first such stoppage called by the Queensland Teachers Union (QTU) in 16 years—the union leadership has halted any further strikes.
The QTU informed its members, who had voted almost unanimously for a “series of 24-hour strikes,” that further strike action will not be considered until early October. The union bureaucrats are defying that vote, in order to finalize a sellout deal with the state’s Liberal National Party (LNP) government.
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Many teachers are outraged. On a Queensland teachers Facebook page, a poll was taken asking: “Do you agree with the decision of the QTU State Council to delay consideration of any further industrial action for at least a four week period.” The result was that 91 percent (1,255 teachers) disagreed, compared with just 8 percent (124) who agreed.
The World Socialist Web Site warned from the outset that the QTU officials only called the August 6 strike out of fear that the hostility among public school teachers to a real wage cut and further attacks on their conditions would erupt out of their control.
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Together with their fellow bureaucrats throughout the Australian Education Union (AEU), the QTU officials are also keeping teachers isolated, state-by-state, to avoid any unified action that could threaten the federal Labor government. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s government is also cutting public education and social programs while boosting military spending to prepare for war, as is the Trump administration in the US and governments around the world.
The AEU has hailed the Albanese government’s promised funding increases to schools under the misnamed Better and Fairer Schools Agreement. Compared to what public schools need, the amount is a pittance—$16.5 billion over the next 10 years. The vast majority of the spending is backloaded into the 2030s, with only 2.4 percent scheduled in the next four years.
In order to defeat yet another sellout out deal, teachers have to take matters into their own hands. The Committee for Public Education (CFPE), the rank-and-file educators’ network, calls for new organizations of struggle to be built in schools—rank-and-file committees democratically run by workers themselves, independent of the union bureaucracy.
21. Workers Struggles: The Americas
Argentina:
Ceramic Workers protest mass layoff
Bolivia:
Students and workers protest Gaza genocide
Canada:
Dalhousie University strike/lockout continues
Dalhousie University strike/lockout continues
Alberta teachers contract talks deadlock
Ecuador:
Pensioners protest Social Security privatization
Pensioners protest Social Security privatization
United States:
Novato, California city workers walk out again over contract
Toledo Libbey Glass workers enter third week on strike
Houston, Texas, hotel workers launch union’s first-ever strike
Houston, Texas, hotel workers launch union’s first-ever strike
Management threatens to permanently replace striking workers at New York City pharmaceutical plant
22.
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.
