Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
Over 30,000 students in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district took part in a sickout on Monday to protest the police-state raids being carried out by the Trump administration. Representing 20 percent of the district’s total enrollment, the walkouts were a powerful rebuke to the ongoing Gestapo-style raids in Charlotte, North Carolina’s largest city.
The protests continued throughout the week, with hundreds joining walkouts on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday at schools including East Mecklenburg High School, Philip O. Berry Academy, Ballantyne Ridge High School and Northwest School of the Arts. Many students carried handmade signs defending immigrant rights and denouncing the raids. Of the over 147,000 students in the district, some 44,000 students are Hispanic.
By week’s end, more than 56,000 students had refused to go to class, making the Charlotte protests one of the largest expressions of opposition to Trump’s immigration crackdown in the country.
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As in Chicago and Los Angeles, many residents who are not themselves targeted by immigration raids are defending their immigrant neighbors. At a Home Depot on Wednesday, more than 100 people gathered to confront federal agents attempting to abduct day laborers. The same day, over 1,000 people attended a volunteer event at a local church to offer support and protection to immigrants. Erika Reynosa, a local resident, said many immigrants are staying home: “They’re locked in for their own safety.”
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That same night, hundreds of workers and young people marched through Charlotte, demanding an end to the raids. Signs at the demonstration read, “Human rights have no borders,” “Immigrants are not criminals, but Donald Trump is,” and “No human being is illegal.”
The protests are a response to a brutal and unprecedented immigration crackdown that has turned entire working-class communities into militarized zones. Last week, as part of Trump’s expanding war on the working class, federal immigration agents launched a sweeping operation across North Carolina under the direction of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) commander Gregory Bovino.
The operation, given the absurd code-name “Charlotte’s Web” by the Department of Homeland Security, marked a sharp escalation in brutality. Unlike previous operations carried out by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), this one was spearheaded by CBP, a move designed to circumvent any local legal restrictions. The result has been a campaign of terror: masked, heavily armed agents in unmarked dark vehicles have been filmed trespassing on private property, pulling over drivers at gunpoint, and abducting workers suspected of being undocumented—all without warrants or legal justification.
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On Thursday, the Department of Homeland Security told Mecklenburg County Sheriff Garry McFadden that “Charlotte’s Web” was officially over. But DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told the Guardian, “The operation is not over and it is not ending anytime soon.” Many federal agents are now expected to redeploy to New Orleans for “Swamp Sweep,” a month-long operation targeting southeast Louisiana, with up to 250 agents arriving beginning Friday.
The protests in North Carolina mark a significant development in the growing popular opposition to Trump’s war on democratic rights. They come just one month after millions participated in the nationwide “No Kings” demonstrations. Recent polls show that more than half of North Carolinians believe the country is headed in the wrong direction, with a majority disapproving of Trump, a state Trump carried in the last three elections.
The immigration raids in Charlotte mark a major escalation of the Trump administration’s conspiracy to establish a presidential dictatorship. With no legal justification, the administration is deploying heavily-armed Border Patrol agents, far from any border, as a paramilitary force to carry out abductions and terrorize the population. The deployment is part of a broader assertion of unlimited executive power, including the use of federal troops in American cities, the preparation for invoking the Insurrection Act, and the declaration of a war on what Trump calls the “enemy within,” that is, the American working class.
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The raids in Charlotte are taking place just a week after the end of the government shutdown, which the Democratic Party ended on Trump’s terms. Throughout the shutdown, the Democrats avoided any mention of Trump’s conspiracy for dictatorship, presenting the conflict as a budgetary disagreement. Then, as popular opposition grew and the crisis of the administration deepened, they handed Trump a political lifeline.
Their aim was not to oppose Trump’s war on democratic rights, but to contain mass anger and preserve the state. Far from an opposition party, the Democrats—including Biden, Harris, and figures like Bernie Sanders—have facilitated Trump’s anti-immigrant program at every step: from Title 42 expulsions to expanding deportation powers under the Laken Riley Act. Sanders, in particular, has repeatedly praised Trump’s attacks, telling right-wing comedian Tim Dillon last month that “Trump did a better job” than Biden in waging war on immigrants.
The Socialist Equality Party calls for the broadest mobilization of the working class in defense of immigrant workers and democratic rights. The brutal ICE and Border Patrol raids in Charlotte and across the country are central to the fascistic program of the Trump administration, which is seeking to build an American police state under the command of the financial oligarchy.
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The defense of immigrants must be fused with the growing resistance in the working class. Students must turn to workers and workers must take up the cause of immigrants as their own. The SEP calls for the formation of rank-and-file committees in every workplace and neighborhood to organize opposition from below, independently of the union bureaucracy and both corporate-controlled parties.
Workers must demand and fight for the immediate end to the mass roundups; the release of all those detained; and the withdrawal of Border Patrol and CBP from all domestic policing operations.
The Trump administration is a government of, by and for the capitalist oligarchy. Its goal is to smash all opposition to the social counterrevolution being carried out on behalf of the billionaires. To stop dictatorship, defend democratic rights and secure jobs, wages and a future for all, workers must unite across all racial, national and citizenship lines, and build a socialist movement to take power and reorganize society on the basis of human need, not private profit.
2. As Ukraine faces military and political crisis, White House proposes negotiated settlement of war
With the Ukrainian government of Volodymyr Zelensky facing a deepening corruption scandal and military crisis, the Trump administration submitted to Kiev on Thursday a 28-point plan for a negotiated settlement of the war with Russia.
The proposal was submitted by a US military delegation led by Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll.
The plan, as published in full by Axios, marks a significant departure from earlier US positions and is a testament to the deepening crisis facing the US-NATO proxy war against Russia.
The document declares that “NATO will not expand further” and that “Ukraine agrees to enshrine in its constitution that it will not join NATO, and NATO agrees to include in its statutes a provision that Ukraine will not be admitted in the future.” It also declares that “NATO agrees not to station troops in Ukraine.”
The 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest declared that Ukraine and Georgia “will become members of NATO.” Russian President Vladimir Putin cited the moves by Ukraine to integrate itself into NATO as the main justification for the Russian invasion in 2022.
The document declares that “Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk will be recognized as de facto Russian, including by the United States.”
Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, and a major aim of the NATO powers in provoking the war with Russia in 2022 was to reconquer the territory. In 2023, Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley declared that NATO would assist Russia to “go on the offensive to liberate Russian-occupied Ukraine.” Russia currently occupies much, but not all, of Luhansk and Donetsk.
The agreement also stipulates that “Ukraine will hold elections in 100 days,” all but guaranteeing the fall of the Zelensky regime, which currently rules by emergency decree.
The Trump administration’s plan also stipulates that “Russia will be reintegrated into the global economy” and that “Russia will be invited to rejoin the G8,” from which it was expelled in 2014.
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hile Zelensky’s advisers bluntly condemned the proposal, the Zelensky government officially accepted it as a starting point for discussions. Zelensky said in a statement on Telegram, “Our teams—Ukraine and the USA—will work on the points of the plan to end the war. We are ready for constructive, honest and prompt work.”
The Financial Times reported that US officials are seeking an extremely rapid timetable for the implementation of the agreement:
The Ukrainian officials said the Trump administration had told Zelensky and other people in his team that the White House was working to an “aggressive” timeline to finalize the proposal in order to bring the war to an end before the close of the year. They added that U.S. officials expect Zelensky to sign the agreement “before Thanksgiving” on Thursday next week, with the aim of presenting a peace deal in Moscow later this month and concluding the process by early December.
The Zelensky government is facing a spiraling corruption scandal over a multimillion-dollar kickback scheme headed by Zelensky’s closest associates. Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau alleged last week that Timur Mindich, Zelensky’s business partner, had organized a scheme to steal over $100 million over 15 months from the state’s nuclear power company.
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Russia is making regular, steady advances on the battlefield, including in the city of Pokrovsk, which is expected to fall imminently.
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Russia is making regular, steady advances on the battlefield, including in the city of Pokrovsk, which is expected to fall imminently.
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The US officially estimates that 1.2 million men have been killed or injured in the war, which is the deadliest conflict in Europe since the Second World War. The real figure, however, is likely to be significantly higher.
3. UN Security Council rubber-stamps Trump’s “peace plan,” as Israel bombards Gaza and Lebanon
The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) voted Monday by 13 votes to 0 to approve would-be US dictator Donald Trump’s “peace plan” for Gaza, including the creation of a colonial-style “board of peace” to oversee the territory. The overwhelming support given to the plan, which tramples on the democratic rights and the very right of the Palestinians to exist, came as Israel continues to bombard targets in Gaza and Lebanon with impunity.
The resolution was introduced by the United States, Israel’s key supplier of weapons and political support during its two-year-long genocide against the Palestinians. The document embraced Trump, hailing his proposal as a “historic” deal that represented a “new course in the Middle East for Israelis and Palestinians and all the people of the region alike.”
Moreover, the UNSC authorized the creation of an “international stability force” to police Gaza on behalf of the imperialist powers and gave UN approval for the creation of Trump’s unelected “board of peace” (BoP) to dictate Gaza’s future. Trump will chair this body, which will also include among its members the unindicted war criminal Tony Blair. The international stability force will be accountable to no internationally recognized institution, but placed under Trump’s direct oversight, with the resolution declaring that military force would “deploy under unified command acceptable to the BoP.”
As if this wasn’t enough of an outrage, the resolution also praised “the constructive role of the United States of America” for “having facilitated the ceasefire.”
The fact of the matter is that American imperialism facilitated the genocide of the Palestinians. The Biden and Trump administrations supplied the Zionist regime with tens of billions of dollars in high-powered weaponry since Israel launched its onslaught on Gaza in October 2023. Authorities in the US and all of its imperialist allies viciously cracked down on anti-genocide protesters and sought to smear them as “antisemites.” Trump held numerous meetings with the war criminal and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to oversee the ongoing genocide, while ensuring that the outstanding arrest warrant for Netanyahu issued by the International Criminal Court has yet to be carried out. And all of this came after decades in which Washington was instrumental to Israel’s relentless persecution and dispossession of the Palestinians.
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The absurdity of describing the Trump administration’s plan as a peace agreement was underscored in the days following Monday’s UN vote. On Wednesday alone, Israel killed at least 25 people across the enclave in a series of air strikes, which the Zionist regime asserted were launched after gunshots were fired at soldiers, causing no injuries. Since the Trump plan went into force last month, Israel has killed some 280 Palestinians in Gaza and continued to back rampant far-right settler violence to annex land in the West Bank.
Israel persists in systematically blocking aid into Gaza, which is still falling well short of the 600 truckloads a day promised when the ceasefire began. It also arbitrarily seizes on alleged “violations” to carry out bloody murders of Palestinian civilians, including when they cross new lines of control unilaterally drawn by the US in consultation with Israel that allow the Israel Defense Force to maintain a substantial presence in Gaza.
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Monday’s UN vote provides yet another devastating exposure of the dead end of the perspective of protest politics that has guided the leaderships of the anti-genocide demonstrations around the world since 2023. The anger of millions of people was misdirected behind making bankrupt appeals to the UN and the consciences of politicians to reconsider their support for Israel’s imperialist-backed extermination of the Palestinians and pursue a different policy.
But the unanimity with which Trump’s “peace plan” has been adopted underscores that what is involved here is not merely a policy choice, but the pursuit of definite geostrategic and economic interests by all of the imperialist powers. They view the consolidation of a US-dominated Middle East as the best way to sideline rivals like China and Russia, while at the same time they seek to ruthlessly advance their interests in a bitter conflict among themselves over how to divide up the spoils.
As for the capitalist regimes in Moscow and Beijing, they chose to let Trump’s resolution pass by abstaining in the vote, which either of them could have blocked with a veto. Part of their motivation for this course was the despicable role played by all of the despotic Arab regimes, who have swung behind Trump’s plan but also serve as important trading partners and sources of investment for Russia and China. However, the more fundamental reason is that both the Putin and Xi regimes represent the interests of oligarchies that want nothing more than an accommodation with imperialism to secure a share of the spoils in a new redivision of the world and the “right” to continue brutally exploiting their own working class.
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The urgent lesson for workers and young people who participated in anti-genocide protests to draw from the UN vote and the entire experience of two years of genocide is that the international working class is the only social force capable of leading a successful struggle against capitalist barbarism. The Gaza genocide is an expression of the barbaric methods the imperialist powers and their attack dogs will deploy in the struggle to redivide the world. Rooted in the crisis-ridden capitalist system, genocide and war cannot be stopped through moral appeals to the politicians guilty of perpetrating these crimes, but only through the overthrow of capitalism and its replacement by workers’ power and socialism.
4. Nationwide strikes called in Italy, Belgium and Portugal as social anger erupts across Europe
Nationwide strikes and other mass workers protests are spreading across Europe against austerity and the bourgeoisie’s remilitarization of the continent. As governments slash basic social services and impose regressive labor reforms to fund a rearmament drive and funnel wealth to the capitalist oligarchy, working class anger is erupting internationally across Europe.
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What is emerging is an objectively revolutionary situation across Europe, as the irreconcilable conflict between the working class and the capitalist oligarchy grows.
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The movement in the European working class sharply poses fundamental questions of political strategy and historical perspective. The Italian and Belgian governments maintaining their policies despite mass nationwide strikes in recent months underscores an essential point: Protest strikes will not shift the basic trajectory of European capitalist governments. To stop imperialist war, genocide and attacks on social and democratic rights, governments must be brought down across Europe and power must go to the workers.
The main obstacle to such a struggle is the national perspective of the union bureaucracies and allied middle-class political parties, who negotiate with the capitalist governments and seek to limit the movement in the working class to the borders of one or other capitalist nation-state.
Indeed, a common thread runs through the general strike calls of the General Federation of Belgian Labor (FGTB), the General Confederation of Italian Labor (CGIL), and the General Confederation of Portuguese Workers (CGTP). They do not mention any events outside their own countries, they do not call to end imperialist wars, they do not call to bring down the government, and they do not call to establish any connection with workers’ struggles outside their country. They leave workers only the invariably disappointed hope that the ruling class will somehow change its mind.
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The European working class must be politically armed and prepared for the inevitable conflict that will emerge, as the class struggle develops, between the workers and these bureaucratic forces. The key political issues are the necessity of an internationalist perspective, a struggle against imperialist war and a struggle for workers’ power and socialism.
Rank-and-file workers need independent organizations of struggle to break through the limits that union bureaucracies and middle-class parties seek to impose on the class struggle. Only such organizations can oppose attempts by the union bureaucracies to stop or delay strike action if they fear the movement will escape their control, and coordinate struggles internationally against austerity, repression and war. The International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) must urgently be built across Europe.
5. Fifty people deported to Ukraine by ICE on Tuesday
On Tuesday, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) forcibly deported 50 people to Ukraine from the US.
The ICE-chartered plane departed from Alexandria, Louisiana. Many of those deported had lived in the US for years, built lives with families and were seeking refuge from war and political instability in Ukraine.
Of the 83 Ukrainian nationals originally scheduled for deportation, 50 were on the flight. The other 33 were either granted stays, had their deportations delayed due to ongoing legal proceedings or were not included in the final flight for logistical or administrative reasons, according to multiple sources tracking the event.
As of November 19, Ukrainian and US officials confirmed that 50 returned to Ukraine via the Shehyni checkpoint, while others remain detained or are under review for future deportation.
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The US Department of Homeland Security issued a statement through a representative defending the deportation and claiming the individuals had received “full due process” and were ordered removed by an immigration judge, in some cases many years ago. As has been proven multiple times since the Trump White House began its assault on immigrants, these assertions cannot be trusted because no evidence or legal record of the alleged proceedings has been presented.
The abrupt expulsion to Ukraine is a violation of basic rights and places them directly in the path of the Zelensky government’s relentless conscription efforts for the ongoing US-NATO war against Russia.
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The designated deportation destination guarantees that some will be forcibly conscripted and sent against their will to the front lines in what has become a death trap for working-class youth on both sides of the conflict.
According to figures published by the Ukrainian government, the number of military dead and wounded in the war with Russia is more than 400,000.
Eric Lee, an immigration attorney who has represented several of the Ukrainian deportees, told NPR: “These individuals are not soldiers—many have fled direct persecution, only to face ICE’s indifference and a tragic return to a country that will press-gang them into war. This is more than deportation. This is state-sanctioned violence, carried out in concert with the Ukrainian regime and Washington’s war agenda.”
Lee further elaborated to CNN, “We are seeing cases where ICE is actively ignoring asylum claims and humanitarian protections. It’s clear that the Department of Homeland Security is prioritizing geopolitical objectives over basic rights and international laws designed to protect refugees and those seeking asylum.”
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On November 15, the Socialist Equality Party issued a powerful statement, “Stop Trump’s deportation flight of Ukrainian immigrants into forced conscription!” Referring to the deportations as “The modern-day Voyage of the Damned,” the SEP statement condemned the flights, linking them to the Trump administration’s broader assault on immigrants and democratic rights.
The statement said, “The forced removal of Ukrainian immigrants marks a new front in the Trump administration’s war against immigrants…These deportations serve two purposes: fueling the military needs of the Ukrainian government and sending a chilling message that no immigrant, regardless of their circumstances, is safe under this regime.”
The SEP also documented the mounting collaboration between US immigration officials and Ukrainian conscription agencies, with US authorities fully aware that deportees are immediately seized for war service upon landing.
Despite international conventions forbidding forced conscription of refugees, arrangements have been made to hand over deportees straight to Ukrainian military officials at the airport, which is a grotesque violation of their rights.
6. Verizon begins cutting 13,000 workers as global jobs massacre accelerates
Verizon’s announcement that it will eliminate more than 13,000 jobs—the largest mass layoff in the company’s history—has triggered shock, anger and anxiety among telecommunications workers and across wide layers of the working class. The cuts, first reported by the Wall Street Journal last week and confirmed in a company-wide memo from new CEO Dan Schulman Thursday, amount to roughly one-fifth of Verizon’s management workforce and come as the company claims it must “reorient” its business and “simplify operations” in the name of “improving customer experience.”
The real motive is not customer satisfaction but Wall Street’s satisfaction. Verizon posted nearly $5 billion in profit in the third quarter alone and is aggressively restructuring to boost its stock price, slash labor costs and prepare for intensified competition in wireless, home internet and enterprise services. Schulman, who took over only last month, declared that Verizon had reached a “critical inflection point” and announced an “aggressive transformation” of the business—corporate language that workers immediately understand as synonymous with firings, outsourcing and speedup.
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On Reddit and thelayoff.com, Verizon employees have flooded forums with reports of entire departments being eliminated and hundreds of retail stores divested or closed. Many describe scenes of stunned silence during mass conference calls where entire teams were informed they no longer had jobs. One worker wrote, “Emotionally draining day … my friends were cut and it just feels like a death. NO ONE deserves to be without a job right before Christmas.” Another technician commented: “They’re ditching field techs in favor of contracting out to companies so they don’t have to pay salaries, benefits, taxes, etc. Going to start seeing cell towers being fixed with duct tape.”
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Some workers noted that the layoffs will not be confined to the US. One Reddit commenter reported: “India is going to be impacted too. Thirteen thousand across US and India.” Workers expressed outrage that a company reporting strong profits would simultaneously slash thousands of jobs on multiple continents.
Across the forums, employees denounced the company’s claim that the cuts are meant to “simplify operations” or “improve customer experience.” One wrote: “Verizon layoffs have nothing to do with AI. It’s only about increasing the stock price.” Another pointed to the insulting severance packages: “The severance pay is honestly so insulting,” the worker noted, adding that it amounted to only two weeks of pay per year of service. Another summed up the broader mood: “Every Fortune 500 company is this greedy. No one cares about the working class.”
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The long-delayed BLS report provides only a glimpse of the economic insecurity that tens of millions are facing as the economy slides towards a potential recession. The US officially added 119,000 jobs in September, a number the media described as “stronger than expected,” but the underlying details make clear that the labor market was already faltering before the shutdown. Gains were concentrated in low-paid, overstretched sectors—healthcare, restaurants and social assistance—while critical productive industries continued to shrink. Manufacturing lost 6,000 jobs in September, extending a months-long decline. Transportation and warehousing lost 25,300 jobs, reflecting a contraction in logistics following massive cuts at UPS, Amazon and warehouses throughout the country.
The official unemployment rate rose from 4.3 to 4.4 percent as 450,000 people entered or re-entered the labor force and could not find work. Wage growth slowed, leaving workers increasingly unable to keep up with housing costs, food prices and basic expenses.
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Technology companies lead the way, driven by restructuring around automation and AI, with more than 141,000 job cuts announced this year. Warehousing recorded nearly 48,000 cuts in October alone, as companies unwind pandemic-era expansion and automate operations. Retailers have slashed more than 88,000 jobs so far in 2025—an increase of 145 percent over last year—as chains shut stores and funnel resources into online operations built on low-wage, precarious labor.
Cost-cutting was the reason cited for more than 50,000 of October’s layoffs. AI-driven restructuring accounted for another 30,000. At the same time, planned hiring has collapsed to its lowest level since 2011.
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Corporations, politicians and the media describe these layoffs as a “market correction,” an adjustment to “consumer trends” or “efficiency gains” from AI. In reality, they reflect the deepening crisis of American capitalism. Corporate profits remain at historic highs, yet employers insist they cannot afford workers while funneling billions into share buybacks, dividends and automation designed to eliminate jobs entirely. The Trump administration’s escalating tariffs, combined with austerity at every level of government, have only intensified these pressures.
This is an international crisis with mass layoffs spreading in Germany and Europe and throughout the world.
Verizon workers, autoworkers, logistics employees, healthcare workers, educators, retail workers and public sector employees in the US and around the world face a common enemy: a corporate-financial oligarchy determined to protect profits by destroying jobs and driving down wages.
The unions—including the Communications Workers of America, Service Employees International Union, the United Steelworkers, the United Auto Workers and others—offer no strategy to oppose this onslaught. Instead, they seek to divide American workers from their international brothers through the promotion of economic nationalism and demand concessions in the name of “saving jobs,” even as plants and departments are wiped out one after another.
The accelerating jobs massacre is a conscious policy of the capitalist class and its political servants. It can be halted only through a unified, international counteroffensive of the working class, built through the formation of independent rank-and-file committees in every workplace. Only through collective struggle for a socialist alternative can workers defend their livelihoods and put an end to a system that sacrifices millions of jobs for the enrichment of a tiny elite.
The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) held a significant public meeting in Indianapolis, Indiana on Monday at the Spades Park Branch of the Indianapolis Public Library.
Workers and students from Indianapolis and surrounding communities attended the meeting which was titled, “After the ‘No Kings’ protest: A socialist strategy to stop Trump’s dictatorship.”
Many of those in attendance originally met SEP members and campaigners who had set up a literature table and distributed leaflets during the No Kings protest at the Indiana State House in Indianapolis on October 18.
Others came in response to campaigns for the meeting over recent weeks, including at the campus of Indiana University in Indianapolis, Allison Transmission and Rolls Royce.
George Kirby, SEP member and writer for the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) opened the meeting and welcomed those in attendance. He said, “We’re almost a month after the ‘No Kings’ protest, where millions said, ‘No Kings and No Fuhrers.’ This was the second wave of protests bringing out millions of youth, workers, professionals and retirees.
“A movement is developing internationally against the threat of fascism, dictatorship and war. What is lacking is a clear political perspective, and this is what this meeting will provide.”
8. California revokes 17,000 immigrant truckers’ licenses as Trump intensifies attacks
California officials announced this month that they will revoke more than 17,000 commercial driver’s licenses issued to immigrants after determining that the state should never have granted them under a state law that barred noncitizens without federal work authorization from holding commercial credentials.
The California Department of Motor Vehicles sent out notices on November 6. Drivers will have 60 days to respond before their licenses are canceled, and many may lose their jobs immediately afterward. The move affects workers throughout transportation, logistics and agriculture, including long haul truckers who have held these licenses for years.
The DMV said it discovered the “technical limitations in its system” after an internal audit and consultation with federal regulators who warned the state that the licenses were “not compliant with federal requirements.”
At the same time, the Trump administration is imposing new federal rules that would sharply reduce the number of immigrant commercial truck drivers, especially in California.
Under the pretext of “public safety,” the Department of Transportation (DOT) is moving to bar refugees, asylum seekers and DACA recipients from holding or renewing commercial licenses, rules that would immediately threaten the livelihoods of tens of thousands of drivers in California alone. Roughly 8 percent of the state’s 720,000 active commercial licenses (about 61,000) are held by workers in these categories. Nationwide, this would potentially affect 194,000 workers.
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The announcement triggered widespread fear among immigrant communities, already terrorized through months of ICE raids, militarized sieges and mass deportations, and immediate political buck-passing by California Democrats. State officials publicly framed the issue as fallout from the Trump administration’s escalating attacks on immigrants, pointing to intensifying federal pressure on state agencies.
Yet the legal basis for the 17,000 initial revocations rests largely on California statutes and regulations such as the California Code of Regulations (CCR). The Legislature, dominated by Democrats for decades, wrote and approved the very statute that restricts commercial licenses to immigrants with federal work documents. The state is enforcing its own reactionary framework and hiding behind Trump to mask its complicity.
Governor Gavin Newsom and Attorney General Rob Bonta quickly issued statements posturing as opponents of Trump’s immigration policies, claiming that federal hostility has created an atmosphere of “uncertainty” and “fear.” But their attempt to shift blame collapses on the most basic facts: in revoking the licenses, the DMV cited state law, not any new federal rule or mandate.
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While there are deepening conflicts within the ruling class, the revocations flow from the bipartisan structure of immigration enforcement built over decades. No less than the Republicans, Democratic administrations have made history for the large numbers of deportations, most notably under Obama. They continue to adamantly uphold laws designed to keep millions of workers in a condition of permanent insecurity.
The consequences for the affected workers will be devastating. For many, the CDL is their only viable source of income. These workers operate heavy trucks, buses and other commercial vehicles. Many have held commercial licenses and stable jobs for years. Some completed state-approved training programs and paid thousands of dollars for certifications the state now says they were never entitled to receive.
Tens of thousands are now at risk of losing their income, housing and ability to support their families. This catastrophe will be felt across logistics, agriculture and construction, industries already plagued by overwork and exploitation.
Employers, especially in the logistics corridors of Southern California, are already preparing contingency plans to replace them. The state has offered no compensation, transition support or legal pathway for workers to regain their licenses.
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The escalating conflict between the Trump administration and Democratic-led states like California is not a struggle between anti-immigrant and pro-immigrant forces but a dispute over how to manage and discipline a workforce that is essential to capitalist exploitation.
The initial revocation of 17,000 commercial licenses is a warning to immigrant workers and the working class as a whole. As economic and political crises sharpen, both parties are prepared to deploy the mechanisms of the state against the most vulnerable layers of the workforce. The necessary response is the independent mobilization of workers themselves, across citizenship status and industry, against both the open attacks of the Republican right and the hypocritical, equally destructive policies of the Democratic establishment.
Lack of maintenance and the push for profits were among the causes for the November 4 crash of a UPS cargo plane that killed 14 people, according to several UPS workers who work at the Louisville, Kentucky, hub and who spoke confidentially with the World Socialist Web Site.
UPS Airlines Flight 2976 crashed on November 4, 2025 at approximately 5:13 p.m. local time, shortly after takeoff from UPS Worldport at Louisville’s Muhammad Ali International Airport.
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), which issued a preliminary report Thursday, said a bracket, known as a pylon that connected the left engine to the wing, was cracked in two places before the crash. The NTSB found “evidence of fatigue cracks” and “areas of overstress failure” in the left pylon and other areas, the report said.
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A total of 14 people were killed in the crash, the deadliest in UPS Airlines history.
The three flight crew members who were killed were:
• Captain Richard Wartenberg, 57
• First Officer Lee Truitt, 45
• International Relief Officer Captain Dana Diamond, 62
The 11 people killed on the ground were:
• Angela Anderson, 45
• Louisnes Fedon, 47
• Kimberly Asa, 3 (granddaughter of Louisnes Fedon)
• Trinadette “Trina” Chavez, 37
• Tony Crain, 65
• Carlos Fernandez, 52
• John Loucks, 52
• John Spray, 45
• Matthew Sweets, 37
• Megan Washburn, 35
• Ella Petty Whorton, 31
Most of the ground victims were reportedly employees or customers at the Grade A Auto Parts & Recycling business, which was hit by the plane.
The MD-11BCF plane was 34 years old. It was first delivered in 1991 to Thai Airways International and in 2006 converted from a passenger jet to a cargo freighter and sold to UPS.
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UPS has a long record of putting profits over safety. In the last two years alone there have been several fatalities, including:
- In September 2025, 43-year-old UPS driver Shelma Reyna Guerrero was crushed to death while loading packages inside a cargo trailer in Richmond, California. Workers reported that the extendable conveyor “has been malfunctioning for some time” and that they were told to continue working even as Guerrero’s body lay in the trailer.
- On August 6, 2024, 37-year-old delivery driver Luis Grimaldo collapsed and died in Bell County, Texas, of what coworkers said was a heat-related illness while delivering packages in temperatures above 100 °F.
- In May 2024, Juan Chavez, a subcontractor, fell into a garbage compactor at a Dallas facility and was killed.
- In February 2024, 46-year-old Dallas Carroll was struck and killed by a vehicle at UPS’s Worldport hub in Louisville, Kentucky.
- On April 23, 2024 UPS driver Julie Reed was killed in a vehicle crash and fire in Indiana.
Instead of protecting workers’ lives, the Teamsters bureaucracy functions as a tool of UPS. The Teamsters have repeatedly negotiated and enforced arrangements that preserve company profits at the expense of rank‑and‑file interests, including the vast expansion of precarious, low‑paid and part-time work.
Teamsters President Sean O’Brien blocked a strike by 340,000 UPS workers in 2023 and hailed as “historic” the five-year deal that has paved the way for thousands of layoffs and even deadlier conditions.
The only way workers can break the stranglehold of the labor bureaucracy is through forming independent, democratic rank‑and‑file organizations that place control in the hands of workers themselves. Rank‑and‑file committees can unify full‑ and part‑time workers to fight for equal wages, guaranteed hours, enforceable safety stop‑work rights and transparent bargaining under workers’ control rather than bureaucratic deals made behind closed doors.
10. Divisions in US Fed opening up
The minutes of the US Federal Reserve’s October meeting released on Wednesday show that members of its governing body are deeply divided on the direction of interest rate policy and the widely expected further rate cut at its December meeting, previously regarded as a near certainty, is very far from a done deal.
The divisions reflect the highly uncertain direction of the US economy. On the one hand it appears to be powering ahead boosted by the massive capital investments, running into trillions of dollars, in the building of artificial intelligence (AI) data centers.
On the other, however, broad sections of the economy are either stagnant or experiencing a downturn while major corporations are carrying out mass layoffs often involving tens of thousands of workers in a single hit.
And even as the AI deals have produced a surge on Wall Street, there is increasing nervousness that the boom could be heading for a bust because revenues generated by AI will be insufficient to finance the massive capital investment.
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Besides having to set its monetary policy in increasingly uncertain conditions, the Fed is also having to deal with indications of possible financial turbulence centering on the ultra-short repo market. This is a market where in order to obtain cash overnight, financial firms use Treasury bonds as collateral repurchasing (hence the term repo) the next day.
In the recent period the interest rate in this market has risen above the federal funds rate indicating a tightening of liquidity.
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Besides having to set its monetary policy in increasingly uncertain conditions, the Fed is also having to deal with indications of possible financial turbulence centering on the ultra-short repo market. This is a market where in order to obtain cash overnight, financial firms use Treasury bonds as collateral repurchasing (hence the term repo) the next day.
In the recent period the interest rate in this market has risen above the federal funds rate indicating a tightening of liquidity.
The World Socialist Web Site is continuing to receive new comments from postal workers in response to the deaths of Nick Acker on November 8 at a United States Postal Service facility near Detroit and of Russell Scruggs Jr. near Atlanta, Georgia on November 15.
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The International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees has announced an independent workers inquiry into the deaths of Acker and Scruggs. In a statement, the IWA-RFC explained: “This is not a journalistic exercise but an effort to arm workers with the knowledge they need to defend themselves and go on the offensive against the regime of corporate dictatorship in the workplaces, which makes these deaths inevitable.”
It concluded:
The time has come to take a stand. An independent investigation into the deaths of Nick Acker, Russell Scruggs, Jr. and other postal workers will become a spearhead for the fight to empower rank-and-file committees to take control of safety conditions, guarantee the right to life, health and safety on the job, and end the dictatorship of production for profit.
12. Ultra-right gains in Chilean election dominated by anti-immigrant, law-and-order campaigns
In the most right-wing campaign since Chile’s return to civilian rule 35 years ago, the general elections held last Sunday strengthened the radical-right, populist, and fascistic conglomerations in the Congress, which will now control 90 of the Chamber of deputies 155 seats.
Unity for Chile, the incumbent alliance including the pro-1973 coup Christian Democrats, President Gabriel Boric’s Broad Front, the Stalinist Communist Party and the Socialist-PPD, Radical, Liberal and Humanist parties lost 11 seats. In the Senate the ruling coalition gained one seat reaching 20, three less than the 23 now held by the right.
In the presidential race, Jeannette Jara, a member of the Communist Party and candidate of Unity for Chile, was the front-runner in the first round with 26.9 percent of the vote, not enough to win outright. Her main contender, José Antonio Kast of the fascistic Republican Party came a close second with 23.9 percent.
The country now heads to a second round vote scheduled for Sunday 14 December. Johannes Kaiser, a fascist Libertarian with 13.9 percent of the vote, and Evelyn Matthei of the Pinochetista Independent Democratic Union (UDI) with 12.5 percent, have already pledged their support for Kast, the son of a Nazi German officer who escaped to Chile via the so-called “rat line” after World War II and collaborated in the Pinochet dictatorship’s repression.
Another presidential contender, Franco Parisi, a free-market economist who heads the right-populist Party of the People, came a close third with 19.7 percent of the vote.
All the candidates, from Kast and Kaiser to the Maoist Eduardo Artés and the Stalinist Jara, focused their campaigns on xenophobic anti-immigrant appeals in combination with vows to get “tough on crime,” promising to shower the murderous Carabineros police, intelligence and state apparatus with infinite resources.
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The Chilean ruling class had been thrown into a profound crisis of rule in late 2019, when long-standing and deep-seated opposition to capitalism, the state and the civilian political caste brought millions into the streets of Santiago, Valparaíso, Concepción, Antofagasta and every other regional city. The mass uprising’s three general strikes and the largest demonstrations in the country’s history defiantly opposed President Sebastián Piñera’s imposition of a state of emergency that left 36 dead, hundreds mutilated and thousands detained and tortured in the ensuing mass sweeps.
The ruling class relied heavily upon the corporatist trade unions, the Stalinist Communist Party and the pseudo-left Broad Front to disorient and divert anti-capitalist sentiment behind appeals to replace the authoritarian constitution that Gen. Augusto Pinochet imposed after taking power in a US-backed military coup in 1973.
Beginning in 2019, the predominantly rightist corporate media saturated the airwaves with nightmarish scenarios of cities besieged by crime and a country facing an extreme security crisis. It explicitly associated this crisis with the struggle for democratic and social rights, vilifying the mass mobilizations as an explosion of criminality.
Student strikes and school occupations against dilapidated infrastructure and lack of resources now were labeled as delinquency, while shantytowns built by desperate immigrants and the homeless on occupied land were alleged to be infested with narco-trafficking and criminal gangs. The deliberate aim of this rightist-backed media offensive was to cultivate among more backward sections of the population xenophobic demands to expel migrants and for an iron fist against crime.
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During the 2025 campaign, every candidate pledged to deal with “illegal” migration. The fascists and populists, being more adept at dog-whistling and emboldened by the US president’s evisceration of the American Constitution as the whole oligarchy turns towards dictatorship, pulled out all the stops.
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At the last televised debate on 11 November, the presidential candidates were asked whether they would support Trump’s invasion of Venezuela. All the right candidates said yes and with gusto. Jara said: “I couldn’t disagree more with Maduro’s regime, but international law must be respected, and I am not in favor of endorsing an armed invasion of another sister country.”
Jara, in true Stalinist form, lied. Her partner in crime, Boric, became President Joe Biden’s attack dog within South America, speaking at all the international forums on behalf of American foreign policy attacking Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua as authoritarian to ingratiate himself with US imperialism. His services rendered assisted in their own way the Trump administration’s attempt to reassert Washington’s hegemonic control over the hemisphere.
Police state dictatorships are being scaffolded internationally in line with the drive to war abroad and against the working class at home. No one more so than “Washington, which is driven to seek by means of criminal violence solutions to intractable problems rooted in the contradictions of US and global capitalism. There is an appearance of lunacy in the war aims of US imperialism in Latin America. It cannot reverse the rise of China as South America’s premier trading partner with bombs and missiles, outside of an all-out world war. But that, along with drive toward fascist dictatorship, is the road upon which it is marching,” the World Socialist Web Site wrote 13 November.
Latin America’s Pink Tide governments, which in an earlier period postured as an alternative to what they called “neo-liberalism,” are today aiding and abetting the Trump Administration’s preparations to invade Venezuela. At the same time, the Maduro government, representing the interests of sections of the Venezuelan bourgeoisie and foreign capital, is incapable of making any genuine anti-imperialist appeal to the working class and the oppressed masses of Venezuela and the Americas.
The working class must intervene with an internationalist perspective, one that eschews the poisonous fumes of xenophobic and anti-immigration nationalism promoted by both the right and the so-called “left.”
Radical journalist and anti-war activist Yves Engler is seeking the leadership of Canada’s New Democratic Party (NDP) based on the claim that this moribund, right-wing social-democratic party can be transformed into an instrument to fight the billionaires, oppose imperialism and its wars, and build “eco-socialism.”
Earlier this month, Engler submitted his nomination papers, along with the first installment in a $100,000 candidate’s fee, to a three-member party vetting committee. It will determine whether his name can go forward in the race to succeed Jagmeet Singh as federal NDP leader, which is to be decided in a membership vote next March.
Prior to his July announcement that he intended to stand for the leadership as the “NDP Socialist Caucus” candidate, Engler was not active in NDP politics. He readily admits that it was the Socialist Caucus that first proposed and then persuaded him to run for the NDP leadership.
Socialist Caucus’s self-avowed mission is to return the NDP to its supposed “socialist roots.” Its activity revolves around federal and Ontario NDP conferences, where it presents alternate, more radically worded resolutions that seldom make it to a vote. Socialist Caucus’ goal is to push the NDP to the “left.” In reality, it works to trap leftward-moving youth and workers in the dead-end of opportunist maneuvers within the orbit of Canada’s social democrats and their trade union sponsors.
Since its founding in 1998, the Socialist Caucus has been politically led by Socialist Action, an anti-Trotskyist Pabloite organization. Repudiating the basic tenets of orthodox Trotskyism, Pabloism emerged as a liquidationist tendency within the Fourth International in the early 1950s under the leadership of Michel Pablo and Ernest Mandel. The Pabloites rejected the revolutionary role of the working class in the fight for socialism, claiming that elements within the Stalinist bureaucracy, bourgeois nationalists, and social democratic and trade union functionaries would be compelled by mass pressure in a “revolutionary” direction. Acting on this perspective, the Pabloites demanded the liquidation of the Fourth International’s national sections into the “mass movement” irrespective of its leadership and program.
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In a statement that sums up its perspective, Socialist Action, speaking through its Socialist Caucus front group, declared, “Engler embodies a robust, left-wing commitment to democratic socialism… The Socialist Caucus endorses Engler because he embodies its enduring project: pushing the NDP away from corporate rule and towards its socialist roots.”
This brief statement perpetrates multiple frauds. Firstly, Canada’s NDP never had “socialist roots.” Its founding in 1961 was a bureaucratic maneuver, undertaken by the Canadian Labour Congress and the CCF—which Liberal Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent had aptly dismissed as “Liberals in a hurry”—with the aim of providing the union bureaucracy and “left” sections of the petty bourgeoisie with a better means of politically controlling the working class and advancing their own interests.
Second, the perspective of pushing the NDP “away from corporate rule” or to the “left” is a hopeless endeavour. Like parties founded in the tradition of Second International social-democracy around the world, Canada’s NDP long ago ditched even the most tenuous association with national-reformist politics and has emerged over the past four decades as an unalloyed defender of capital against the working class.
Finally, claiming that “democratic socialism” is a “left-wing“ project is belied by its proponents in North America and Europe. The US “democratic socialist” Bernie Sanders now champions Trump’s vicious crackdown on immigrants, while Jeremy Corbyn in Britain has kept the working class tied to the bankrupt national-reformist perspective of Labourism in the face of the biggest onslaught on its living standards since World War II. Germany’s Left Party, one of whose predecessor organizations bore the name “Party of Democratic Socialism” and oversaw the restoration of capitalism in East Germany, has enforced austerity whenever it has entered government and backs German imperialism’s mad rearmament drive.
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In keeping with his Canadian nationalist perspective and orientation toward the trade union bureaucracy, Engler has embraced the Canadian ruling class’ bogus “Team Canada” propaganda, which asserts that all Canadians are united in the trade war launched by Trump. While he cloaks it in demagogic calls for Canada to “pause joint military deployments,” Engler joins the CLC’s Bea Bruske and Unifor’s Lana Payne in criticizing Prime Minister Carney from the nationalist right for taking his “elbows down” and not pursuing more aggressively the Canadian ruling class’ trade war with the US, which is waged at the expense of workers on both sides of the border. Promoting the ruling class’ depiction of imperialist Canada as an innocent victim, rather than a predator in the imperialist struggle to redivide the world of which the Trump- initiated trade war is part, Engler bombastically declares: “The NDP needs a former hockey playing leader that’s actually willing to skate into the corners and take the puck away from the goons of the US empire.”
It goes without saying that Engler’s promotion of such a filthy “Canada First” nationalist agenda makes him a bitter opponent of the struggle to unite Canadian, American, and Mexican workers against all the attacks on their social and democratic rights and the root cause of trade war and militarism: capitalism.
14. New Zealand Labour Party leader postures as a “democratic socialist”
In an interview with Radio NZ (RNZ) on November 12, New Zealand’s opposition Labour Party leader Chris Hipkins sought to identify himself with New York’s mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, a Democratic Party politician and self-described “democratic socialist.”
Hipkins declared that Mamdani’s victory showed there was “a big backlash against the system at the moment. People feel like the economic system isn’t working for them and they’re looking for alternatives.”
He continued: “We’ve had four or five decades around the world, now, of an economic system that says: don’t worry about concentration of wealth, eventually that will flow down, everyone will be better off. And a lot of people are looking at that going: that’s not us, that’s not what we’re experiencing, the cost of living’s getting more, we’re feeling more marginalized economically, our jobs are less secure, and they want something different.”
Asked if he considered himself a “democratic socialist,” Hipkins replied: “I don’t really have a problem with the label. Social democrat, democratic socialist, variants of the same thing: people who believe there is a more active role for the state.”
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Unlike Mamdani, a relative unknown prior to New York’s mayoral election, Hipkins has a substantial record as a government minister and in 2023 he served as prime minister. He led the Labour government to one of the most crushing electoral defeats in its history, amid a profound social crisis and an out-of-control COVID pandemic.
For Hipkins to now call himself a “democratic socialist” is an insult to the intelligence of workers, who have had many years of bitter experience with Labour’s phony promises to alleviate social inequality and poverty.
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Workers and young people cannot allow themselves to be duped by Hipkins’ pseudo-populist phrase-mongering, or by the similar statements being made by the Green Party, which propped up the Ardern-Hipkins Labour government and is complicit in its right-wing attacks. All the capitalist parties, as well as the trade union bureaucracy, bear responsibility for imposing the burden of the economic crisis on the working class, while allowing the richest layers of society to accumulate unprecedented wealth.
Those who want to fight against austerity and imperialist war must draw the necessary political lessons from these experiences and act accordingly. The capitalist system cannot be reformed; it is plunging the world towards war, climate catastrophes, mass poverty and fascist barbarism. The current order based on the private ownership of the means of production must be ended and replaced with a socialist system, in which society’s resources are owned and democratically controlled by the working class.
We call on those who agree with this perspective to join the Socialist Equality Group, the only organization fighting to build a genuine socialist and internationalist party: the New Zealand section of the International Committee of the Fourth International.
The union’s talk of “full alignment” in some indefinite future is political theater. A bitter struggle for equal treatment has been reduced to a handful of concessions designed to keep the outsourcing racket intact.
Sophie warned that the NHS faces “creeping privatisation and a government that’s determined to wage war on it.”
17. United Kingdom: Resident doctors strike must rally all NHS workers against Starmer government
The following report was given by a senior nurse to an NHS FightBack meeting on Tuesday: “Defeat Starmer-Streeting budget cuts and privatization! For a united fightback by NHS workers!”
18. Mass struggles against rising unemployment in Turkey
Textile companies have profited for decades from government subsidies and intense worker exploitation. Now, these companies are eliminating jobs and trying to seize accumulated wages and compensation, pushing workers to resist.
19. Workers Struggles: Africa, Europe, & Middle East
Africa
Nigeria:
South Africa:E-hailing taxi drivers in the Nelson Mandela Bay Metro Municipality walk out over super-exploitation
Europe
Belgium:
Tens of thousands of teachers stop work to protest education cuts
France:
Refuse collection workers in Paris and Caen la Mer strike for better pay and working conditions
Greece:
Thousands of train workers strike over poor working conditions and safety at national operator, Hellenic Train
Spain:
Public doctors strike nationwide for improved salaries, hours and working conditions
United Kingdom:
Continuing strikes at several universities by academic staff opposing job cuts
Strike continues by phlebotomists in Gloucester over pay banding
Further strike by fuel tanker drivers at Scottish firm over pay
Iran:
Nurses continue action over pay and conditions
Nurses continue action over pay and conditions
20. 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.
