Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Kaiser healthcare workers connect upcoming national strike with fight against Trump
On October 14, a five-day strike by 46,000 Kaiser Permanente workers is set to begin. One of the largest healthcare strikes in U.S. history, it comes under conditions of an unprecedented attack on democratic rights by the fascist Trump administration.
The walkout, called by the Alliance of Health Care Unions (AHCU), is concentrated on major facilities across California and the West Coast, with thousands more workers joining the strike in Hawaii.
This strike is not simply a contract dispute over wages or staffing levels. It is a political confrontation with the corporate oligarchy which is destroying public health. The 97 percent strike authorization vote last month was an unmistakable signal that healthcare workers have reached the limits of their endurance.
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Kaiser Permanente, with its vast, vertically integrated network of hospitals, insurance plans and physician groups, represents the financialization of healthcare in the United States. It functions as both insurer and provider, extracting profits at every link in the chain while invoking the “nonprofit” language of community and compassion. Meanwhile, it forces nurses to work through meals and exhaustion while its executives collect millions in compensation.
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The conditions at Kaiser are due to collusion between management and the union bureaucracy. In 2021, during the peak of the pandemic, the AHCU called off a strike at the last minute to impose a deal with toothless staffing provisions of the type which hospitals across America routinely ignore.
There is no doubt that they are working feverishly to do the same today. Workers must organize rank-and-file committees to give themselves the means to enforce their decisions through independent action.
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The AHCU repeatedly boasts of its “historic partnership” with the company and how “we work in partnership with management every day.” The Alliance, along with the rival Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions (CPKU), participates in joint schemes such as the Labor Management Partnership, whose explicit aim is to block strikes.
In internal Kaiser meetings held last month, HR and labor relations executives reaffirmed their “long, positive history” of labor-management cooperation and expressed “confidence that an agreement will be reached without a strike.”
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The strike is due to take place as Trump’s immigration gestapo rampages throughout the country. Iris, a labor and delivery nurse who also works at Los Angeles County Hospital, described the terror now gripping immigrant patients. “Things have become really bad with ICE detentions,” she said. “People are scared to come to the hospital. One mom left her kid with a note saying what was wrong with him, and then left because she was afraid of ICE being there. We’re seeing more incomplete abortions because women are trying to perform them on their own and end up in the hospital with complications.”
Another nurse recounted an experience that will haunt her for years. “ICE brought in a detainee. The person asked us to contact their spouse to let them know they were alive. They were in tears, terrified that their family wouldn’t know where they were. ICE agents told us we’d be breaking the law if we made the call. Administration told us to cave to ICE demands. I’m a zealous patient advocate, but in the face of federal law enforcement and management pressure, I backed down—and I’m not sure I’m okay with that.”
In Los Angeles, immigrants make up more than 56 percent of healthcare workers; about one in four nurses is Filipino. Across California, nearly 37 percent of registered nurses are immigrants. The repression of immigrants is a direct attack on the core of the healthcare workforce.
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Many healthcare workers have voiced outrage over the Trump administration’s open contempt for science and its embrace of anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now heading the Department of Health and Human Services.
A licensed vocational nurse warned: “It’s only a matter of time until the bird flu pandemic starts. Now we have an administration that wants to stop all measures for tracking and countering diseases. Medicare and Medicaid are about to be gutted. Hospitals won’t have funds to care for patients or pay their staff. An insane number of people will die—and it’ll all be covered up. It’s going to be apocalyptic.”
An ICU nurse with 25 years of experience said bitterly: “I’ve found out how useless and unworthy I am in my own country. RFK Jr. and Trump just confirmed it. We’re not billionaires—so we don’t matter. Here’s your Nazi death panel the Republicans have been projecting about since 2009 [when they made false historical allusions to this to whip up hysteria against Obamacare]. Welcome to the new Gilded Age.”
These are not exaggerations. The Trump administration’s Health and Human Services Department has presided over the dismantling of the public health system. Confidence in HHS has fallen below 50 percent—a 20-point collapse over the past decade. The result is a nation where pandemic preparedness, disease tracking, life-saving research, and vaccine distribution are subordinated to private profit and the falsification of science.
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While workers prepare for battle, the machinery of betrayal is already in motion. At the September internal meeting, Kaiser’s Legal and National Labor Relations team briefed managers on its strike strategy. The presentation revealed a high degree of coordination between the company and the unions.
Managers were told to “stay calm” and “not overreact” to worker protests, to treat leafleting and rallies as mere “leverage tactics.” They were assured that “an agreement will be reached without a strike.” In case “Alliance-represented employees have concerns they would like [to be] addressed during bargaining,” managers were instructed to “direct them to their local union.” Behind this calm tone lies months of preparation, including contracting with staffing vendors to recruit replacements; rescheduling elective procedures; expanding outside pharmacy networks; and establishing “National Command Centers” to coordinate operations during the strike.
Despite the overwhelming strike mandate, the unions are at the bargaining table this week, signaling their intent to shut down the movement before October 14.
The union bureaucracy exploits the so-called “strike authorization” only to provide a façade of militancy while it works to prevent a strike. Democracy has been reduced to a hollow formality, as the will of 46,000 workers is brushed aside by a handful of officials whose six-figure salaries depend on their collaboration with management.
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The struggle at Kaiser is part of a growing wave of class resistance, from autoworkers and teachers to healthcare and logistics workers, against unbearable living and working conditions and an escalating crisis leading to dictatorship.
This struggle poses fundamental political questions. The fight for decent working conditions and health care is inseparable from the fight against fascism, war, genocide and capitalism itself.
To succeed, Kaiser workers must take the conduct of their struggle into their own hands. This means forming rank-and-file committees, independent of the union bureaucracy, to link up with other sections of workers across industries and across borders. These committees must fight to expand the struggle to a general strike and transform it into a movement against dictatorship.
The working class cannot defend healthcare within the framework of capitalism. The entire for-profit system must be replaced by a socialist reorganization of healthcare, which is publicly owned, democratically controlled, and oriented toward human need, not private enrichment.
2. Huge fire destroys the house of South Carolina Circuit Court judge after clash with Trump, Miller
An investigation is underway into the fire that destroyed South Carolina Circuit Court Judge Diane Goodstein’s Edisto Island residence on Saturday.
The investigation is being led by the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division (SLED). In a statement to TIME and Newsweek, SLED Chief Mark Keel said: “At this time, there is no evidence to indicate the fire was intentionally set … The investigation remains active and ongoing.”
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On Saturday, October 4, at approximately 11:30 am ET, Judge Goodstein’s home on Edisto Island erupted in flames. Edisto Island is a barrier island located on the coast of South Carolina, approximately 45 miles south of Charleston.
Judge Goodstein was not present at the time, but her husband, Arnold Goodstein, a former Democratic state senator, and two other family members were injured and hospitalized. The fire was so intense that rescue crews had to evacuate some occupants by kayak through the swampy terrain around the house.
St. Paul’s Fire District and Colleton County Fire-Rescue responded to the incident, with one person airlifted to the Medical University of South Carolina due to serious injuries. Dramatic footage showed the home engulfed and subsequently reduced to twisted beams and charred debris.
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Judge Goodstein had received death threats in recent weeks that were linked to her rulings, especially after she blocked the release of voter registration data sought by the Trump administration.
Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller both publicly targeted Goodstein, inciting abuse and threats from right-wing activists. The threats escalated after the ruling, placing her and her family under heightened security.
In September, Judge Goodstein issued a temporary restraining order prohibiting the South Carolina Election Commission (SCEC) from turning over the voter registration data for over 3 million residents to the US Department of Justice. The DOJ demanded personal details—including Social Security numbers—as part of an effort to cull voter rolls and investigate claims of fraudulent voting.
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A surge in violent threats and intimidation against judges who opposed Trump administration policies includes both federal and state judges. Chief US District Judge John McConnell of Rhode Island recounted receiving multiple death threats and harassing phone calls after issuing rulings blocking administration actions.
At a “Speak For Justice” conference, judges warned publicly that “hostile rhetoric” from the administration has emboldened dangerous actors and undermined judicial independence. US District Court Judge Esther Salas from New Jersey shared her personal experience after her son was murdered by an assailant who tracked their home, highlighting the real-world consequences of online and media incitement directed at judges.
Legal experts have characterized the current environment as especially perilous for judges. Expert commentary from judicial advocacy groups emphasize that Trump administration figures repeatedly demonize judges as “crooked” and call for their impeachment or criminal prosecution in the wake of unfavorable rulings.
Experts have also noted the degree of direct public incitement from top political officials is unprecedented in modern American history and warn that when “national leaders demonize the judiciary, they are inviting people to do us harm.” The fact is that the campaign against the legitimacy of court decisions is part of the dismantling of democratic government and the implementation of a presidential dictatorship run by Donald Trump out of the White House.
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The fire at Judge Diane Goodstein’s home remains under investigation and so far, there is no official word as to the cause of the blaze. Meanwhile, the fire took place amid a wave of threats and political attacks on the judiciary by Donald Trump and leading members of his administration and Judge Goodstein had recently been the subject of death threats.
The aim of the fascists in the White House and their congressional allies and equally far-right representatives of the Republican Party is to intimidate and eliminate any judicial obstacles to the establishment of an authoritarian regime and presidential dictatorship in the US.
Tuesday, October 7, marked six months since the death of Stellantis worker Ronald Adams Sr. at the company’s Dundee Engine Complex in southern Michigan. Stellantis, the United Auto Workers (UAW) and the Michigan workplace safety agency have all remained silent on the cause of death of the 63-year-old skilled tradesman, even as full production at the plant has long since resumed.
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The UAW’s silence is particularly damning. President Shawn Fain has given interviews to the New York Times, Jacobin and other outlets praising the 2023 “Stand Up” strike, but he has made no mention of Adams or of Antonio Gaston, another Stellantis worker who was crushed to death eight months earlier in Toledo, Ohio. The union has provided no information to members about either death.
Adams’ widow, Shamenia Stewart Adams, told the WSWS:
Initially, MIOSHA reached out to me by calling me and sending a letter with who the person in charge of the investigation was. But after calling them so many times, I haven’t heard anything from them since May or June. When this happened, the plant manager called everybody into the auditorium to say, “I failed Ronald Adams and his family.” That’s what he said out of his own mouth. I want to know: What were the grounds for his suspension? And if he’s back to work, what were the grounds for bringing him back?
Why don’t I have answers? We found them liable. We didn’t find them liable. Something. I should be notified, because the people who were suspended pending an investigation are back. Stellantis is investigating themselves. As far as they’re concerned, it’s always going to be an “ongoing investigation,” because as long as it’s still open, you don’t have to answer to anybody.
In May 2025, the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) initiated its own investigation. On July 27, the IWA-RFC convened a public hearing in Detroit to present its findings and hear testimony from Dundee workers, members of Adams’ family and safety experts.
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Meanwhile, the American industrial slaughter continues. Recent workplace deaths include:
September 27 – Eureka County, Nevada: Jeremy Smokey, 37, father of three, killed at the Goldrush Underground Mine, the 25th mining death of 2025.
September 30 – Spirit Lake, Iowa: Balduino Florencio Velasquez, 23, crushed by a tipped forklift.
September 30 – Richmond, Kentucky: Edwin Burton II, 61, killed when an air conditioner unit fell on him at Eastern Kentucky University.
October 1 – Canton, Wisconsin: A 71-year-old logger killed by a falling tree.
October 2 – Rockford, Illinois: Horacio Prada Dominguez, 38, fatally pinned between stone slabs.
October 2 – Harris County, Texas: Jose Bonilla, 25, struck and killed by a flying truck tire.
October 3 – Negaunee Township, Michigan: A contractor suffocated from toxic gases while escaping down an 85-foot pipe.
October 4 – Pryor, Oklahoma: Lonnie Dean Swift, 57, killed at the LSB Industries chemical plant.
As part of its conspiracy to establish a dictatorship, the Trump administration is using the government shutdown to halt reporting on workplace deaths, fire hundreds of thousands of federal employees and eliminate what little protection OSHA provides. Trump’s budget director, Russell Vought, a key author of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, is spearheading this attack.
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Asked about the dismantling of safety standards and Trump’s drive to return workers to conditions of industrial slavery, Shamenia Stewart Adams said:
“I can’t believe the government is trying to go back to that. But I think people are not going back, not without a fight. People would rather lay their lives down and die fighting, than go back to that.”
4. Silence of the Democrats aids Trump dictatorship
While Trump and his top fascist aides, like Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem and Pam Bondi, speak the language of civil war and openly incite violence against the American people, the Democratic Party, the supposed opposition party in Congress and the states, is doing everything it can to disarm the public and block any systematic response to Trump’s drive to establish a presidential dictatorship.
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The extraordinary events of the past five days, with Trump calling up National Guard troops for deployment to Portland and Chicago, and Stephen Miller denouncing unfavorable court orders—issued by judges appointed by Trump himself—as a “judicial insurrection,” have not prompted the Democratic Party leadership to declare that this is a government that seeks to overthrow the Constitution and establish Trump as king in all but name.
The Democrats treat the deadlock over the federal budget that led to the partial shutdown of the national government Tuesday night as though it was a mere repetition of previous budget clashes and shutdowns over the past two decades. They went to the White House last week for talks with Trump and continue to beg for a deal in which they would approve funding for Trump to continue his authoritarian rampage in return for minor concessions on healthcare spending.
Not a single Democrat declares that there can be no negotiation with a president seeking to overthrow the Constitution and establish his dictatorship or that the central task is to build support for removing Trump and his fascist sidekick JD Vance from office. Not a single Democrat even makes a connection between the budget shutdown and the deployment of troops to American cities, although both are component parts of Trump’s long-planned coup d’état.
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The Democrats’ silence is not simply a matter of cowardice or miscalculation. It flows from their class character. The Democratic Party is a party of Wall Street and the military-intelligence apparatus. Its verbal opposition to Trump is limited by its defense of the capitalist system. What the Democrats fear most is not Trump’s dictatorship but the emergence of a mass movement of workers and youth from below that would threaten the wealth and power of the ruling elite. Moreover, on the fundamental issues of social policy, the Democrats agree with Trump.
To defeat Trump’s ongoing coup requires the independent intervention of the working class, using its immense social power at the point of production and rallying behind it millions of young people and all those devoted to the defense of democratic rights. Opposition to dictatorship is inextricably connected to the fight against the capitalist oligarchy and the capitalist system itself.
5. Gold price surge continues, passing the $4,000 mark
After hitting record highs throughout this year, the price of gold continues to surge and has now passed $4,000 an ounce, taking its rise this year to more than 50 percent after a 12 percent increase for September alone.
The gold price surge is a sign of growing uncertainty and doubts over the stability of the international monetary system based on the US dollar as the global currency. As a Wall Street Journal article noted, the gold price “has surged this year more than it did during some of America’s biggest crises” including the 2007–2009 recession and the onset of the pandemic.
Back in June, as the gold surge was accelerating and it had become the second-largest reserve asset held by central banks after the dollar, surpassing the euro, an article in the Financial Times (FT) described it as the “world’s refuge from uncertainty” and pointed to the broader implications of its rise.
Bullion, it said, had “made a roaring comeback, not just among speculators and so-called gold bugs who mistrust paper currencies, but even among the most conservative investors in the world” and that “in a febrile political era, when many of the core assumptions about the global economy are being questioned, gold has once more become an anchor.”
In the four months since these lines were written all the processes it identified have intensified.
The key “core assumption,” not only being questioned but increasingly eroded, is the capacity of the US state and its financial institutions to provide a stable foundation for the international monetary order based on the US dollar as a fiat currency after US president Nixon removed its gold backing in August 1971.
While this process has accelerated under the second Trump presidency it was already well underway before he arrived on the scene.
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A central factor in the latest gold surge has been the escalation of US government debt. It now stands at more than $37 trillion. For more than a decade the rise in debt—used to finance wars, tax cuts to the wealthy and corporations as well as government bailouts—was able to proceed almost unnoticed because of the ultra-low interest rates maintained by the Fed.
But after the rate rises started in 2022, the interest bill has become an increasing drain on government finances, such that it has risen to almost $1 trillion annually and is set to become the biggest item in the US budget, surpassing even military outlays.
This has meant that the global monetary system is based on the currency of the most indebted country in the world, whose credit rating has been downgraded by all the three major rating agencies and which needs to borrow money just to pay the interest bill on past debts.
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Significantly, such is the uncertainty around the financial position and indebtedness of all the major economies—the debt-induced turmoil in France is a case in point—that the move out of the dollar is being accompanied by growing uncertainty about other currencies. As one analyst at a metals trading firm told the FT: “People are looking to short the dollar, but they are not quite sure what currency to purchase—that uncertainty leads you straight to gold.”
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The entire fiat monetary system that has prevailed for the past 50 years and more—the foundation for the functioning of the global capitalist order—is starting to unravel, and that will have major economic, financial and political consequences.
6. Survey reveals decline in Australian living standards
A recently published national survey reveals a long-term decline in living and working conditions across broad sections of the Australian population. This trend was already underway before 2020, but has sharply accelerated since the start of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
The Household Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) report, produced annually by the University of Melbourne since 2001, released its 2025 edition in September, based on data collected in 2023. HILDA tracks a cohort of some 17,000 respondents through their lives with annual surveys, collecting information on income, financial stress, childcare, retirement and health.
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Since 2021, all indicators of financial stress have increased. These indicators include having to ask for financial help from family, friends or welfare organizations; being unable to heat one’s home; skipping meals; pawning property, and falling behind on rent, mortgage, or utility payments.
Nearly 15 percent of respondents reported experiencing two or more indicators of financial stress in 2023—the highest level in over a decade. Single-parent families were hit hardest, with more than 30 percent reporting financial stress.
The Australian fertility rate—1.5 children per woman in 2023—continues to steadily decline, a decades-long trend. Notably, there has been a marked increase in the number of respondents citing financial pressures as the main driver of their decision to have fewer children or none at all. Compared to 2008, concern about the cost of raising children increased by 7.9 percent among women and 10.1 percent among men in 2023.
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Rising anxiety about childcare expenses reflects their escalation as a key household cost, driven by longer working hours and the growing prevalence of dual-income families.
Between 2002 and 2023, the proportion of families using paid childcare increased from 42 percent to 56 percent, and the number of paid hours rose by 7.7 hours per week. Over the same period, median childcare expenditure jumped from $72 to $171 per week—a 137.5 percent rise.
The burden was greatest for working-class families: Between 2002 and 2022, childcare spending rose by 51.3 percent for the lowest-income earners, compared with 41.9 percent for middle earners and 22.2 percent for the top third. Including unpaid care, the total use of childcare grew by 11 percent in the decade to 2023, with 29 percent of families relying on grandparental care, the highest level since the survey began tracking it in 2004.
Older Australians are playing an increasing role in the informal care network for children, despite several factors contributing to the deterioration of their own living conditions and capacity to provide this support.
For one thing, the long-term trend of Australians having children later in life means that grandparents are, on average, more elderly....
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Between 2003 and 2023, the mean retirement age rose from 58.8 to 63.6 years for women and from 59.9 to 64.8 for men. The report attributes this to “financial necessity, improved health, changing social expectations, and policy reforms such as the increase in the Age Pension eligibility age.”
But the HILDA survey’s own findings challenge the claim that improved health is a major factor: Across the entire research period, average bodily pain increased, particularly among older age groups.
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Alongside physical pain, psychological distress also worsened—particularly among those aged 15–44. Between 2013 and 2023, distress increased by 55.1 percent for males and 46.3 percent for females.
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Taken together, the data paint a bleak picture of family and social life. High living costs are discouraging childbearing; parents who do have children must work longer hours and spend less time with them, while childcare costs climb beyond reach. Many turn to grandparents for help—yet grandparents are increasingly older, less healthy, and often still working out of financial necessity.
Successive governments—Labor and Liberal-National alike—have overseen this decades-long decline, deepening it through relentless austerity. The current Labor government has overseen the largest decline in working-class living standards since the end of the Second World War.
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The trade union bureaucracies, fully integrated into the state and corporate apparatus, help enforce this agenda—suppressing strikes, imposing sub-inflationary agreements, and stifling opposition within the working class.
Under capitalism, the vast majority of the population face a future of growing financial strain, declining living standards, and worsening health. To prevent this, what is required is a fight by the working class against the entire political establishment, including the Labor governments and complicit unions. Only through such a political struggle can the working class defeat the capitalist system and lay the foundation for a socialist society based on social need rather than private profit.
The battle lines in the now nearly two-week-old national strike by 55,000 Canada Post workers continue to harden.
The Crown corporation presented provocative new offers last Friday, after weeks of delays, that translate the Liberal government’s plans to restructure the post office at the expense of postal workers and the public into contract language.
The offers mark a dramatic escalation in the war that the Liberal government and Canada Post, with the full-throated support of corporate Canada, are waging on postal workers. They go far beyond the concessions-filled offers that urban and rural postal workers have decisively rejected over the past year, establishing the contractual framework to eliminate tens of thousands of full-time jobs.
Canada Post’s proposals include a voluntary severance or early-departure buyout scheme aimed at those nearing retirement or eligible for pension—a mechanism to cull higher-paying full-time positions. They would give management the right to close as many as 493 rural and suburban postal stations and retail counters currently staffed by Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) members.
Most dangerously, the offer calls for the suspension, for the contract’s duration, of Article 53 of the urban postal workers’ contract, which provides “lifetime” job security for permanent workers.
Canada Post would be free to unilaterally reorganize positions, convert full-time jobs to part-time or casual status, and eliminate roles altogether. This effectively amounts to an end to permanent jobs, since management will insist any “reintroduction” of job guarantees be at its discretion and in conformity with its ongoing drive to make the post office a profitable rival of cheap-labor private couriers and package delivery companies.
Canada Post is also seeking sweeping changes to delivery operations, in line with the government’s demand that it slash mail delivery from 5 to 3 days per week and replace all home letter delivery with “community” mail boxes.
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A baseline wage increase of 13.59 percent over 4 years is effectively mooted by the removal of job protections and the weakening of full-time status. The corporation asserts that its financial “realities” demand tougher concessions, claiming workers’ demands would add “significant new costs” at a moment of crisis. Yet this crisis has been manufactured under a government policy that rejects operating the government-owned Crown corporation as a public service and insists Canada Post must live or die on its own revenue.
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As the Postal Workers Rank-and-File Committee explained in its founding statement issued in June 2024, it is evident that postal workers face a political struggle that requires mobilizing the full power of the working class in defence of public services and the right to strike and against the ruling class’ agenda of austerity, rearmament and war.
But the CUPW apparatus has worked tirelessly to keep workers confined within the straitjacket of the pro-employer, state-regulated collective bargaining system, even as the Liberal government has repeatedly intervened on the side of management.
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Prime Minister Mark Carney, the millionaire former governor of the Banks of Canada and England, has insisted on “significant changes” and declared the reported loss of $10 million a day at Canada Post as “intolerable.” Behind such statements lies the government’s goal of using the sweeping attacks on postal workers as a benchmark for a wider class war. The ruling class plans to direct tens of billions to the military, hand massive subsidies to corporations, and slash services—all in the name of 'austerity and investment.”
CUPW’s response to management’s latest proposal has been entirely perfunctory and capitulatory. “We waited 45 days for offers that are worse than what we rejected in August,” CUPW officials declared. “Canada Post must have known that there is no way we can accept these and is clearly wasting even more time.”
Such remarks state the obvious but offer no way forward. The union seeks to draw a distinction between management and the government, as if the two were not operating in lockstep. Its refusal to acknowledge that the latest offer is a deliberate provocation, intended to escalate the war on postal workers, is yet another capitulation by the union apparatus.
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The Liberals now hold two swords over the heads of postal workers. One is to illegalize the strike, either under Section 107 of the Canada Labour Code or through a parliamentary back-to-work law, running roughshod over the democratic right to strike and imposing a management-dictated contract. The second is to let the strike drag on, deliberately increasing pressure on workers, small businesses, and communities that rely on postal services in the weeks leading up to the fast approaching Christmas season.
Either approach depends on the isolation of postal workers by the CUPW bureaucracy, the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) and other corporatist labour organizations. Already, Unifor and the Teamsters are enabling strikebreaking by ensuring that Canada Post’s subsidiary operations, such as parcel delivery service Purolator, continue running.
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Rank-and-file postal workers have made clear in comments to the World Socialist Web Site that they see through the maneuvers of management and the union. One worker in Ontario explained, “They don’t want decent jobs and decent hours. They want us all to be gig workers. Carney just wants to eliminate all good jobs for everybody. … I was telling my co-worker recently, we need a revolution against this government. Enough is enough! They’re taking our god damn jobs away.” Another emphasized, “They say Canada Post should make money and that it should be a profitable business. But it's a public service!”
Such sentiments reveal the depth of anger developing among postal workers and the working class more broadly. In Alberta, 50,000 teachers began the largest education workers strike in the province’s history Monday; in Ontario, 10,000 college support workers have been on strike for three weeks; and in British Columbia, over 17,000 of 34,000 BCGEU members are now walking picket lines in rotating strikes. The Canada Post walkout follows shortly on the heels of the defiance of a government back-to-work order by Air Canada flight attendants, which was ultimately sold out by the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE).
Protests marking two years since the October 7 pretext for Israel’s ongoing genocide of the Palestinians were held Tuesday in cities around the globe. In Europe, demonstrations were held in London, Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam, Geneva, Athens, Milan, Thessaloniki, Istanbul, and Stockholm. Protests also took place in Jakarta, Indonesia and Sydney, Australia.
The Jerusalem Post reported, “In the Netherlands, pro-Palestinian activists splashed red paint on Amsterdam’s Royal Palace in protest against a decision by the city mayor to ban a pro-Palestinian rally while permitting a pro-Israeli event.
“In Turkey, a protest was expected outside an energy company over its exports to Israel. In Sweden, demonstrators were expected to welcome back participants of a Gaza aid flotilla detained by Israel, including climate activist Greta Thunberg.”
In Britain, around a dozen protests were held on campuses—including in Sheffield, Leeds, Bristol, Nottingham, Leicester, Birmingham, Sussex, Glasgow, Edinburgh and London—as well as an “inter-university march” in central London, organized by students across four higher education institutions.
The march, announced with the statement “Two years of genocide and our institutions remain complicit”, gathered at King’s College London on the Strand at 2 p.m. Around 400 students marched from there to the London School of Economics, and University College London, before finishing with a rally at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS).
The campus protests were held in defiance of calls by a pro-Zionist British political establishment. They followed already scheduled pro-Palestinian protests which took place between Thursday-Saturday—in the aftermath of the killing of two Jewish worshipers in Manchester at the hands of a terrorist and accidental police gunfire.
The Labour government, up to its neck in the crimes of the Israeli government, denounced those demonstrations as an affront to the entire Jewish community.
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World Socialist Web Site reporters attended the protests and spoke with students.
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Responding to attacks on the right to protest, [SOAS student] Muna said, “Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood said something about how, just because we have freedoms, it doesn’t mean we should be able to exercise them all the time. I mean that sounds like fascism to me. Our government is becoming more and more far-right every day and making me scared about the state of our country and the future state of our country, for sure.”
Muna added, “They keep attacking protests as ‘disruption’. That’s the whole point: you’re meant to disrupt, that’s what protesting is. And if you see a genocide taking place and you’re seeing that your government is aiding and abetting it, what else should you do but disrupt that?
9. Child dies amid far-right anti-immigrant campaign cultivated by South Africa’s ANC
The xenophobic atmosphere fostered by South Africa’s ruling African National Congress (ANC) is being utilized by far-right parties. They have begun preventing foreign workers from accessing public hospitals, forced the closure of shops run by foreigners, attacked employers for hiring immigrants, and are threatening to prevent the children of foreigners from attending public schools next year.
A one-year-old baby died in late July as a direct result of actions by far-right thugs. Grace Manda, a 21-year-old mother from Malawi who was living in South Africa without legal documents, rushed her son to Masakhane Clinic in Alexandra, a working-class township in Johannesburg. Her baby was suffering from diarrhea and vomiting, but members of Operation Dudula—a far-right vigilante group—blocked their access to the clinic, demanding proof of citizenship and intimidating staff and patients.
Turned away, Manda carried her son to another clinic, where staff, fearing reprisals from Dudula members, also refused to treat him. Desperate, she took a taxi to yet another clinic, only to encounter the same hostility. Finally, she found a private doctor who examined the child and sent them home. By the following morning, he was unresponsive and was later declared dead. Terrified of exposure and deportation, she kept silent until the story was reported in the media months later.
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Operation Dudula, from the Zulu word for “push back,” emerged in 2021 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, initially in Johannesburg’s Soweto townships. From the start, Dudula targeted African and Asian migrants, organizing marches, raids on informal traders, and door-to-door intimidation campaigns to drive immigrants out of communities and workplaces. It has spread to other urban centers across South Africa, drawing support from sections of unemployed youth.
For the 2024 elections, Dudula transformed itself into a political party. Despite wall-to-wall media coverage it won only 3,855 votes, underscoring its lack of mass support. That it has nonetheless been able to launch violent campaigns against immigrants, handed a national platform by the capitalist media, is above all due to the ANC, whose scapegoating of foreigners has created the political basis for such reactionary forces to thrive.
Over the past 11 months, the ANC has imposed a blockade in Stilfontein where 90 miners, mostly undocumented immigrants, died after being prevented from accessing food and water. In Barberton, 1,000 migrant gold miners were arrested for working without permits. These two operations were part of the ANC’s violent anti-immigrant Operation Vala Umgodi (Plug the Hole), whose stated aim is to stop unlicensed miners from operating in the country.
The operation is led by former National Chairperson of the South African Communist Party (SACP) and current Minister of Petroleum and Mineral Resources, Gwede Mantashe, who described arrested miners in Stilfontein as “foreign nationals raping our economy”.
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Dudula’s campaign has been escalated by the ANC’s ally in government, the far-right Patriotic Alliance (PA), which won 677,719 votes in 2024. It is a member of the ANC-led Government of National Unity with the Democratic Alliance (DA), and the Inkatha Freedom Party.
Founded in 2013 by businessman, former bank robber and convicted criminal Gayton McKenzie, the PA presents itself as a defender of “South Africans first,” mimicking Donald Trump’s rhetoric with a program built on virulent anti-immigrant chauvinism, law-and-order demagogy, and appeals to South African nationalism. McKenzie now serves as Minister of Sports, Arts and Culture in the ANC-led Government of National Unity.
The party’s central slogan, abahambe (“they must leave”), is chanted by vigilante mobs against immigrants. McKenzie popularized the phrase during the COVID-19 pandemic, when he declared, “If there is a South African, Zimbabwean or Mozambican patient on oxygen, and I see a South African patient, born and bred in South Africa, I will turn the oxygen off, so that the South African can live.”
In June, just weeks before the toddler’s death, the PA openly joined Dudula’s campaign. In videos documenting their actions, PA members march into hospitals demanding that patients produce IDs to prove they are South African citizens. They have stormed informal shops owned by foreign nationals and forced their closure, taking Dudula’s vigilante tactics into the political mainstream.
Two months ago, anti-black remarks by McKenzie resurfaced on X, in which he, a “Coloured” man, hurled the slur “kaffir”. Originally meaning “infidel” in Arabic but under colonialism and the apartheid white supremacist regime (1948–1994) the word turned into one of the most degrading terms used to dehumanise black South Africans. In South Africa, “Coloured” was another racist term under apartheid to classify people of mixed ancestry, including descendants of enslaved Africans and Asians, indigenous Khoisan peoples, and Europeans. Although Coloured South Africans were oppressed under apartheid, they were placed in the racial hierarchy above black Africans but below whites.
That McKenzie, who openly recycles the language of white supremacist rule, was personally invited by President Cyril Ramaphosa to serve in his cabinet is a damning indictment of the ANC and the entire post-apartheid order. Confronted with South Africa’s deepening capitalist crisis, the ANC has systematically worked to deflect mounting anger away from its own corrupt elite and onto the most vulnerable. By scapegoating immigrants, it has cultivated the poisonous climate that is now claiming lives.
The attack on migrants takes place amid a jobs slaughter under the ANC-led government. In the year to June, South Africa has shed 229,000 jobs. Since then, the jobs cull has continued to spread, with ArcelorMittal South Africa cutting 4,000 jobs. The Africa Growth and Opportunity Act—a US trade scheme granting duty-free access to key exports like cars and agricultural products—is approaching expiration, with Trump’s tariffs on steel and aluminum already battering the local industry. Together, these measures threaten to collapse entire sectors, including automotive manufacturing, leading to tens of thousands of job cuts.
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Unemployment stands at 33 percent, 8.2 million people. Including discouraged job seekers, unemployment sits at 43 percent. Youth unemployment stands at 46 percent among those aged 15 - 34. Fully 55 percent of the population lives below the upper poverty line of R1,634 ($95), while 25 percent live below the food poverty line of R796 ($47) per month.
Workers continue to suffer from inadequate access to essential necessities such as water and electricity. This has resulted in tremendous anger within the working class, which has erupted in protests like those recently seen in Westbury, Johannesburg.
The ANC fears a similar eruption of class struggle to that which has swept the continent in countries such as Madagascar, Morocco, Angola, Mozambique, and Kenya, against inequality, corruption, and austerity. It is inciting racism and nationalism to redirect social anger produced by capitalism and imperialism, against immigrants, to protect the domination of South Africa’s ruling class.
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The ANC once promised equality for all, proclaiming in the Freedom Charter that “South Africa belongs to all who live in it.” Once it came to power, the ANC claimed, the end of the white supremacist Apartheid regime would open the doors to black majority rule under capitalism and resolve the fundamental democratic aspirations of the black masses: freedom, equality, and social advancement.
Three decades in power have shown the opposite: its historic role was to safeguard the interests of global finance capital and enrich a thin stratum of black elites, while most workers, above all black workers, have been driven into ever-deeper poverty.
Its campaign of scapegoating immigrants, often targeting citizens of countries that once gave their blood and resources to support the ANC’s armed struggle—providing bases, headquarters, and shelter while bearing the brunt of apartheid’s military raids and economic blockades—demonstrates the complete degeneration of this pro-capitalist, nationalist project.
Leon Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution is confirmed in South Africa. As Trotsky explained, in countries of belated capitalist development the genuine resolution of democratic and national tasks can only be carried out by the working-class taking power and leading the rural masses, as part of the struggle for world socialism. Under capitalism, whether under white supremacist minority rule or black majority rule, oppression, inequality, and exploitation persist. Today, the racist filth that was the bread and butter of apartheid is being revived by the ANC.
The only way forward for completing the unfinished democratic and social tasks is through a socialist revolution. All major banks, mines, industrial conglomerates, and the sectors essential to social life, such as land, agriculture, education, healthcare, telecommunications, energy, and transport, must be placed under public ownership and democratic control.
This requires the unconditional political independence of the working class from all capitalist parties, including the ANC, DA, PA, EFF, and MK. The urgent task is to forge a new revolutionary leadership based on an internationalist and socialist perspective. This means the construction of a South African section of the International Committee of the Fourth International to unite workers across national borders in the fight for the United Socialist States of Africa as part of the struggle for world socialism.
In Paramount’s statement responding to the Film Workers’ anti-genocide call, the studio leadership piously declared that “we believe in the power of storytelling to connect and inspire people, promote mutual understanding, and preserve the moments, ideas, and events that shape the world we share.” Continuing along the same lines, the Paramount statement asserted that the studio did not “agree with recent efforts to boycott Israeli filmmakers. Silencing individual creative artists based on their nationality does not promote better understanding or advance the cause of peace. The global entertainment industry should be encouraging artists to tell their stories and share their ideas with audiences throughout the world. We need more engagement and communication—not less.”
This was all rubbish, of course, intended to throw dust in the public’s eyes. The Ellisons and company are zealously dedicated to suppressing the truth about the mass murder in Gaza, the role of American imperialism in that world-historical crime and their own support for the homicidal Israeli regime.
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The Employees of Conscience demolish the claims by Ellison-Paramount that “we believe in the power of storytelling to connect and inspire people, promote mutual understanding, and preserve the moments, ideas, and events that shape the world we share.” The open letter asks how can a company with this supposed mission
actively ignore, suppress, and silence internal calls for years to champion stories that shed a light on the reality that marginalized and excluded communities, particularly Palestinians, face every day?
They point out that efforts to interest the company in films such as No Other Land and It’s Bisan From Gaza And I’m Still Alive fell on deaf ears. Meanwhile, Paramount invested budgets and resources in pro-Zionist propaganda films, such as We Will Dance Again, The Children of October 7 and as1one.
The Paramount employees refute the claim that the Film Workers for Palestine boycott is aimed at “silencing individual creative artists.” They commend Javier Bardem for explaining on the Emmy awards red carpet, as we cited in the WSWS:
Film Workers for Palestine do not target any individuals based on identity. The targets are those film companies and institutions that are complicit and are white-washing or justifying the genocide and its apartheid regime. We do stand with those who are helping and being supportive of the oppressed people.
The letter from the Paramount Employees of Conscience concludes convincingly by asking:
When a powerful media conglomerate attempts to intimidate film workers for exercising their freedom of expression to condemn war crimes in this manner—who is really doing the silencing?
11. New Zealand government to push teenagers off welfare
New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has confirmed that his government will kick thousands of 18- and 19-year-olds off unemployment benefits.
From November next year, they will no longer receive the payments if their parents earn a combined income over $65,529—a threshold that is just 1.3 times the minimum wage. The government estimates that 4,300 unemployed young people will become ineligible for Jobseeker Support, about 28 percent of teenagers who currently receive the benefit. This would cut around $39 million a year from welfare spending.
The policy is a major attack on some of the most exploited and insecure workers in the country, as well as their families who will be forced to support them. It is part of the National Party-led coalition government’s austerity agenda, aimed at making the working class pay for the deepening economic crisis and for the diversion of billions of dollars to the military to prepare for war.
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Tens of thousands of young people, unable to find work, are leaving the country, mostly to live in Australia. A record 73,400 New Zealand citizens—almost 1.4 percent of the population—moved overseas in the year to July 2025, more than a third of them aged 18-30.
Opposition Labour leader Chris Hipkins told the New Zealand Herald on October 7 that the government should focus on creating jobs. “There’s 36,000 fewer jobs now than there were when Christopher Luxon became prime minister. Young people do want jobs, they’re just struggling to find them,” he said.
Hipkins refused, however, to commit to reversing the attack on Jobseeker entitlements, saying Labour would “set out our policy on it before the next election” next year.
The Labour Party has no substantial differences with the government’s agenda of austerity. The last Labour government lost the 2023 election in a landslide amid soaring living costs, increasing child poverty and proposals to cut public sector jobs.
Labour also agrees with the government’s decision to double the military budget, with $12 billion to be spent over the next four years, in preparation to join US-led wars in the Middle East, against Russia and particularly against China. New Zealand’s ruling elite is strengthening its alliance with the fascist Trump administration in Washington, which is seeking to reverse its economic crisis by using military force to dominate the entire world.
In this context, Luxon’s nationalist call for young people to fulfill “the duties and the responsibilities of being a Kiwi” has an ominous meaning. It is not accidental that the decision to push teenagers off welfare coincides with intensified efforts to recruit them into the armed forces to serve as cannon fodder for imperialism. Sections of the media, including the Labour-aligned Daily Blog, have proposed the reintroduction of compulsory military training as a solution to youth unemployment.
12. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
The fight for the Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist's freedom is an essential component of the struggle against imperialist war, genocide, dictatorship and fascism.
