Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
It is unclear exactly why some of the airports were chosen. While several, such as Atlanta’s airport, are among the busiest in the country and have experienced significant delays during the more than six-week partial government shutdown, others are comparatively small and have not faced the same level of disruption.
Atlanta News First reported Monday from Hartsfield-Jackson that even after the arrival of ICE agents, “lines still remain long.” Traveler Michael Montisano summed up ICE’s presence: “They’re here, they’re not helping,” adding that he did not expect them to because they are not “trained” to provide airport security. Video from throughout the day shows the agents milling around and menacing passengers at the various airports.
Speaking in Nashville, Trump made clear that the operation had nothing to do with alleviating long security lines. Instead, he used the airport crisis to demand that Democrats back his attempts to disenfranchise voters. “Don’t make any deal on anything unless you include voter ID,” he said, adding, “The most important part of Homeland Security is voter ID and proof of citizenship.”
Combining anti-immigrant racism and attacks on transgender people, Trump grunted, “[The Democrats] are holding it up because they want to take care of illegal immigrants coming into our country, they want to take care of criminals that are in sanctuary cities, they want to take care of transgender for everybody, literally the mutilization of our children. Men in women sports. But what they don’t want to do is give us anything to do with citizenship for voting or voter ID.”
He further demanded that Republicans “weld” the SAVE America Act directly into DHS funding legislation. In other words, Trump is using the airport crisis to force through a voter suppression law designed to disenfranchise millions ahead of the 2026 midterms.
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Speaking from Newark Liberty International Airport, Senator Cory Booker made clear that “Democrats want to fund TSA” and were demanding immediate funding for the agency, while also calling for the removal of ICE agents from airports. Booker was obliged to acknowledge the deep hostility felt by broad layers of the population toward ICE, an agency identified with raids, detentions and killings. But he stopped far short of calling for its abolition. Instead, the Democratic response remained within the framework of cosmetic reform: demands that ICE “abide by civil rights,” “use warrants” and “don’t kill people with no accountability.” He said nothing about Trump’s threats to deploy ICE agents to polling stations, nothing about the National Guard threat, and nothing about the broader drive toward dictatorship.
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Lessons must be drawn. The failure of Trump’s January 6, 2021 coup was not due to any principled or determined resistance from the Democratic Party or the trade union apparatus. Its failure lay above all in the inexperience, confusion and ineptitude of Trump’s paramilitary allies, including the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and Three Percenters, who were unable to secure hostages, seize the ballots and consolidate control of the Capitol. In the aftermath, the Democrats worked to contain and suppress mass opposition, channeling everything back behind the institutions of the capitalist state.
Their central line after the failed coup was the construction of a “strong Republican Party” in the name of “national unity,” including waging war against Russia in Ukraine and supporting Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Trump and his principal co-conspirators were never held politically or legally to account in any serious way for the attempt to overturn the election. He was allowed to return to the White House and resume the same conspiracy under conditions far more advanced than in 2021.
Since returning to office, Trump has continued to insist that he did not lose the 2020 election, threatened to stay in office past 2028, and has already overseen confirmed seizures of election materials in Georgia, where the FBI took ballots, voter rolls and tabulator tapes from Fulton County, and in Puerto Rico, where federal officials seized voting machines and related data. In Arizona, the FBI has subpoenaed election audit records. Trump’s threat to send National Guard troops into airports comes amid the ongoing military occupation of Washington D.C., where the Guard deployment was already extended through the end of 2026 and is now reportedly under consideration for continuation through early 2029, to the end of Trump’s term.
Under conditions of historic unpopularity, intensified by war, rising prices and mass deportation operations that have provoked outrage among workers, students and immigrant communities, Trump and the financial oligarchy he represents know that they cannot rely on a genuinely democratic process. Hence, the SAVE America Act is aimed at stripping millions of their voting rights through forced re-registration, citizenship checks and the integration of election procedures with the DHS apparatus, giving the administration another weapon to target those it regards as politically hostile.
The task facing workers and youth is not to place their faith in the Democrats, who have again demonstrated that they will not mount a serious struggle against dictatorship and war. It is to turn to the working class, the only revolutionary social force in capitalist society, and build a mass movement independent of both big business parties to drive the fascists and their agents out of the airports, the neighborhoods and Washington itself.
2. Despite “postponing” attacks on power plants, Trump expands preparation for Iran invasion
Iran’s foreign minister has directly rejected Trump’s claims. “There are no talks with the United States,” he stated. “President Trump’s statements are an attempt to lower energy prices and buy time for military plans.” This assessment corresponds to the objective reality. The five-day pause announced by Trump aligns not with any credible negotiating timetable but with the arrival of Marine and naval assets in the theater and the further “softening up” of Iranian defense, with US and Israeli strikes on Iran continuing during the five-day period.
Nor can Kharg Island be treated as the only, or even the main, option under consideration. The very discussion of “taking the island” is bound up with other, more expansive operational concepts: a coastal seizure aimed at physically controlling approaches to the Strait of Hormuz, including major port areas; or deep inland raids on nuclear sites, such as Isfahan or Natanz, requiring thousands of troops and extended occupation of Iranian territory.
The Washington Post reported last week that the administration is seeking $200 billion from Congress to fund the war, a supplement that would bring this year’s direct military spending above $1 trillion. For comparison, at the peak of the Iraq occupation, when 170,000 American soldiers were on the ground, annual war spending reached $144 billion. The Iran war has not yet involved ground troops, and the administration is already demanding more.
This war is part of a plan to re-establish American global hegemony through global war. The $200 billion supplemental is not the cost of a limited war. It is the down payment on an escalating global war directed ultimately at China, which purchases 37.7 percent of all crude oil passing through the Strait of Hormuz.
All of this is unfolding within the framework of complete illegality. The United States has launched a war of aggression—the crime for which Nazi leaders were prosecuted at Nuremberg. The systematic assassination of Iran’s political and military leaders constitutes a campaign of extrajudicial killing prohibited by the laws of armed conflict.
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What is being revealed is a complete breakdown of the mechanisms of democracy. A president launches an illegal war, murders the leaders of a country, threatens a war of annihilation against a nation of 90 million people—and there exist no mechanisms within the political establishment capable of opposing, let alone stopping, this ever-expanding war.
3. UNAC/UHCP rams through sellout for tens of thousands of Kaiser Permanente nurses
The United Nurses Associations of California/Union of Health Care Professionals (UNAC/UHCP) has announced the ratification of its agreement with Kaiser Permanente on March 20. This follows the expiration of the previous contract on September 30, 2025 and an open-ended strike launched on January 26, 2026.
That strike, embracing tens of thousands of healthcare workers in California and Hawaii, was abruptly shut down by the union bureaucracy on February 24, on the basis of claims that “significant movement” had been achieved, even as no concrete agreement was presented. It was not until March 11, more than two weeks later, that the details of the tentative agreement were finally released.
This sequence of events constitutes a calculated betrayal. Workers were ordered back on the job without the most basic democratic right to review, discuss or vote on a contract, because one did not exist. The blackout of information was a deliberate tactic to isolate the rank and file and create the conditions for the imposition of a fait accompli.
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The actions of the UNAC/UHCP bureaucracy were a political intervention aimed at derailing a broader process of working class radicalization. The convergence of struggles across industries raised the objective possibility of a far wider confrontation, developing toward a general strike. It is precisely this danger that the union apparatus moved to preempt.
The content of the ratified agreement confirms this assessment. Far from representing a victory, the contract entrenches the very conditions that provoked the strike, while strengthening the corporatist framework that binds the union to management.
At its center is the preservation of the Labor Management Partnership, which remains fully intact. This structure institutionalizes the subordination of workers’ interests to the financial and operational imperatives of Kaiser Permanente. It is a mechanism through which the union bureaucracy has been transformed into a co-administrator of cost-cutting and “efficiency” measures.
4. Impact of Iran war on global economy intensifies daily
As the US war on Iran nears the completion of its first month and deepens by the day, its effects on the global economy are intensifying.
In the recent period central banks and governments have sought to overcome major economic storms by throwing money at the problems, amounting to trillions of dollars. This has led to an unprecedented growth of debt while at the same time lifting the wealth of the financial oligarchs to unprecedented heights.
But in the growing crisis set off by the war, that “solution” is not possible. As is being increasingly pointed out, central banks may be able to print money, but they cannot print molecules.
5. Plane-truck crash at LaGuardia Airport kills two pilots
An Air Canada Express passenger jet with 76 people on board crashed into a firefighting truck that was crossing the runway as the plane landed late Sunday night at LaGuardia Airport in New York City. The pilot and co-pilot were killed when the cockpit of the plane, a Bombardier CRJ-900, sheared off under the impact of the collision. One pilot has been identified by relatives as Antoine Forest. The name of the other pilot has not yet been released, but both were based in Montreal, Quebec.Remarkably, the two firemen in the truck survived, as did all 72 passengers and two flight attendants. The forward flight attendant, Solange Tremblay, was strapped into a seat that was ejected from the plane on impact and traveled some 300 feet. She suffered a broken leg and other injuries, but survived.
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It appears from preliminary reports of communications between the control tower, two planes and the firetruck, that a single controller was handling both takeoff and landing and ground traffic along and across the runways. Normal practice is to separate the duties of directing planes in the air and overseeing the movement of ground vehicles, but late at night, with the acute shortage of air traffic controllers, one controller may be doing both jobs.
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Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy sought to downplay the shortage of air traffic controllers. “As our airports go, LaGuardia is a very well-staffed airport,” he said. “We are a couple controllers short in total but it is a very well-staffed airport.”
Actually, press reports said that LaGuardia has four vacancies out of 37 ATC positions, a shortfall of more than 10 percent. Seven graduates of the Federal Aviation Administration’s air traffic control academy in Oklahoma City are receiving training at LaGuardia, but are not yet prepared to handle the job on their own.
The flight from Montreal to LaGuardia was operated by Jazz Aviation LP, which is an Air Canada subcontractor and the second-largest regional air carrier in Canada. There is no indication of malfunction in the plane, although one passenger told the New York Times that flight attendants had warned of a possible emergency landing as the plane was descending. The passengers escaped by climbing onto the wings of the plane and then jumping down to the tarmac.
Several passengers interviewed by local media called the two pilots heroes and credited their efforts with limiting the crash. “They did everything they can to save us and they didn’t save themselves and they couldn’t save themselves,” Rebecca Liquori, a nurse said. Another passenger, Clément Lelièvre, credited the pilots’ “incredible reflexes” for saving the lives of the passengers, saying that the pilots braked forcefully just as the plane’s wheels touched down.
6. ICE agents appear in The Pitt episode “5:00 P.M.”—“What can we do?”
Since our last comment on The Pitt January 28, the HBO Max medical drama has continued to attract large audiences, averaging roughly 12 million US viewers per episode across various platforms by mid-February, a 50 percent jump over Season 1. It has collected added honors, including a Directors Guild of America award for best direction of a drama (Amanda Marsalis) and an award for outstanding performance by an ensemble at the 2026 Actor Awards (formerly the Screen Actors Guild Awards).
An episode involving ICE agents (“5:00 P.M.”) that aired March 19 has drawn wide attention. It is another indication of the broad-based opposition to the Trump administration and its drive toward dictatorship, including its vicious anti-immigrant witch-hunt.
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In general, critics welcomed the Pitt episode. One at AV Club wrote, “‘5:00 P.M.’ rightly depicts ICE as thugs who are tearing apart families and communities, terrorizing American cities, and making hospitals less safe with their presence. In a season full of social issues, it’s a welcome, full-throated condemnation of one of the existential threats of our time. No one is safer when ICE is around.”
Various commentators on social media argued that the horror and the ripple effect of ICE agents appearing in a healthcare facility were well depicted. A vocal subset, however, felt that the show sanitized ICE by having too few agents, too much restraint and even presenting the agency’s willingness to bring an injured detainee to the hospital.
One of the critics complained, “This was literally a nice portrayal of ICE. They never would take someone to the ER, they would let them be in pain/bleed out. Also they would have arrested everyone in the room, not just Jesse.”
The creator and executive producer R. Scott Gemmill has commented that the episode was most likely written around mid-2025, before things had “escalated” beyond what the writers could have imagined. “In retrospect, I think we could have pushed a little harder.”
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Gemmill has said in interviews that the episode was written with the possibility in mind that the ICE situation might “go away” and the episode might not resonate by the time it aired. That this seemed a plausible scenario reflects a certain amount of wishful thinking and the view that the current political situation is an aberration that will correct itself.
In any event, the writers and creators deserve credit for what they produced, imagery and drama that will remain in the minds of the millions who watched the episode. It contributes to the intensifying atmosphere of opposition and resistance.
7. Australia: ABC workers to strike for the first time in 20 years
Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) journalists and staff will strike for 24 hours, starting at 11 a.m. on Wednesday, after voting by 60 percent overall to reject a three-year, below-inflation pay rise offer. It is the first combined strike by ABC journalists and technical and production staff since 2006.The government-funded network, which reaches up to 13 million people weekly through its television, radio and digital services, employs about 4,400 people, including about 2,000 in news, its largest division, but has suffered repeated funding and job cuts for decades.
With Australia’s inflation rate at 3.8 percent in January, and forecast to reach 5 percent this year due to the impact of the US-Israeli war on Iran, ABC management has offered only annual wage increases of just 3.5 percent, 3.25 percent and 3.25 percent, and a one‑off $1,000 payment that excluded casual staff.
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The fact that Wednesday’s walkout is the first combined national strike of MEAA and CPSU members in two decades speaks volumes. It shows a determination to fight the low pay and poor working and employment conditions facing ABC workers as the direct outcome of these past betrayals.
8. BP Whiting lockout continues towards second week
Almost 900 workers at the BP Whiting refinery in northwest Indiana remain on the picket lines after being locked out by the oil giant on March 19. BP’s “last, best and final offer” was nothing less than a declaration of war against the oil workers, with the company demanding job cuts, reductions in pay and free rein to introduce AI-based automation and further job cuts down the line.
With an output of around 440,000 barrels per day, the refinery is the largest inland facility in the country and the largest in the Midwest, refining crude from Canada and Texas delivered via pipeline.
Workers at the refinery are overwhelmingly united in their opposition to BP’s demands. They voted by 98.3 percent to reject it, with a 94 percent turnout. Locked-out workers are receiving widespread support from the local community who are supporting the pickets and expressing solidarity with their struggle by dropping off food and other supplies.
Workers expressed concern not only for the attacks on their own jobs and living standards but for the environmental impact of the contract proposals and the lockout. The Whiting refinery is adjacent to residential neighborhoods and has a history of violating federal air quality standards. According to workers, BP intends to eliminate the entire Environmental Department at the refinery.
Workers noted that the refinery is over 100 years old and that their long experience gives them a much deeper understanding of how to avoid serious problems that might be missed by engineers and other salaried workers, who are not as close to the actual conditions at the plant. They say this is all the more true given BP’s preference for quick fixes that maintain the refinery’s output. Management’s attempts to keep up output during the lockout creates a real danger of equipment damage or catastrophic failure.
As if to drive the point home, on Monday a massive explosion rocked the Valero refinery in Port Arthur, Texas. No injuries were reported as of this writing, but this is the second major incident at a US refinery in the last six months, following an explosion at a refinery in the Los Angeles area last October..
9. Australian health workers denounce Labor’s backing for US-Israeli war against Iran
“In my workplace we’re using outdated, sometimes broken equipment. Meanwhile billions go to the military. I’ve heard nothing from the unions—no statements, no leaflets, nothing opposing the war.”
10. Workers and youth in South Australia speak out against war and major parties in the state election
“If all of these parties support the war, then the election has no meaning. What are we voting for? No one is even raising the question of war, so people don’t get a chance to have their voice heard.”
16. The Riyadh statement: Türkiye, Azerbaijan and Arab regimes legitimize US-Israel war on Iran
The foreign ministers of Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Türkiye and the United Arab Emirates held a summit in Riyadh on Wednesday, March 18, titled the “Consultative Ministerial Meeting of the Foreign Ministers of a Group of Arab and Islamic Countries on Iranian Aggression,” and condemned Iran, which is under illegal assault by the United States and Israel.
In the meeting’s final statement, the ministers “affirmed their condemnation and denunciation” of Iran’s attacks on US targets in Arab countries under the right to self-defense and declared that “such attacks could not be justified under any pretext or in any manner whatsoever.”
The statement, which distorts the truth, called on Iran to respect “international law, international humanitarian law and the principles of good neighborliness,” and to put an end to “the escalation.” The ministers signaled their intention to join the war against Iran by declaring that they would adopt the “necessary legitimate measures ... to halt the Iranian heinous attacks on their territories.”
This shameful statement, which bears witness to the reactionary nature of the pro-imperialist regimes across the region, not only fails to condemn the unlawful, unprovoked imperialist war waged by the United States and Israel against Iran but also fails to even mention the aggressor by name and instead blames Iran. This statement provides political justification and active support to the Trump administration, which is making criminal threats against Iran’s energy infrastructure and preparing for a ground operation, using the closure of the Strait of Hormuz as a pretext.
By allowing the United States to use their military bases and airspace, these regimes have aided and abetted the killing of dozens of high-ranking Iranian officials, the bombing of civilian infrastructure—including hospitals and schools—and the killing of more than 1,000 civilians, at least 210 of whom were children.
The gap between Ankara’s support for the war—as evidenced by its signing of this statement, which is an expression of its subservient allegiance to US imperialism—and the sentiments of the people is so vast that the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs has still not been able to publish the statement on its Turkish-language website or social media accounts.
According to a survey conducted by Asal Research in 26 provinces following the US-Israel attack on Iran, 96 percent of participants did not support the war. According to more recent research by Areda Survey, when asked, “Is there a legitimate reason for the war launched by Israel and the U.S. against Iran?”, 94.7 percent of respondents answered “no.”
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The Turkish bourgeoisie’s deep financial and military-strategic ties to imperialism are dragging Türkiye—along with Israel’s open ally Azerbaijan and collusive Arab regimes—into a reactionary, disastrous war against Iran alongside the United States.
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The war against Iran is escalating at a time when discontent and spontaneous strikes are on the rise among the working class due to rising living costs and eroding wages in Türkiye. As the Erdoğan government prepares for war in cahoots with the Trump administration, this is accompanied by the suppression of opposition at home. The recent arrests of Mehmet Türkmen, chairman of the independent rank-and-file union BİRTEK-SEN, on baseless charges of “inciting the public to hatred and hostility,” and of BirGün newspaper columnist İsmail Arı on charges of “publicly disseminating misleading information,” are part of this campaign of repression.
The escalating US-Israeli war against Iran and the collaborationist nature of the Riyadh statement reveal that the anti-war sentiments prevailing among workers and youth in Türkiye, the Middle East, and around the world can only find political expression on the basis of a revolutionary socialist program against imperialism.
11. The Philippines: National transport strike as Iran war creates economic crisis
On March 19, tens of thousands of jeepney and bus drivers, joined by workers and transport workers across the Philippines, launched a two-day nationwide strike. The sharp increase in the price of oil and basic commodities is creating the conditions of a social catastrophe and are triggering immense levels of anger. Elite politics, with its rival factions and geopolitical orientations, has been profoundly destabilized.
Another two-day strike starting this Thursday was announced yesterday by the No To Oil Price Hike Coalition.
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Since Washington launched its criminal war of aggression against Iran on February 27, pump prices in the Philippines have surged—diesel up 17.28 pesos per liter, kerosene up 32.35, gasoline nearly 7.48. Behind these numbers lies immense human misery. Fuel prices govern the cost of everything. When diesel rises, so does the price of every kilogram of vegetables, fish, and rice that is trucked or shipped to market. Electricity rates in Manila—already raised 64 centavos per kilowatt-hour by Meralco electricity corporation in early March—are forecast to jump a further 16 percent in April. The Department of Economy, Planning and Development has projected that headline inflation will surge to between 6.3 and 7.5 percent in March and accelerate again in April, a level that would wipe out the gains of the past two years.
For the mass of Filipino workers and poor, there is no cushion. Food and non-alcoholic beverages already consume 37 percent of average household expenditure. The official poverty threshold for a family of five is P13,873 ($US230) a month—and the official statistics agency itself conceded last year that the food component of that threshold, P63.87 per person per day, is “insufficient.” The poorest Filipinos, those already living on the margin between bare subsistence and destitution, are now being pushed over the edge.
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The Philippines is among the most petroleum-dependent and energy-insecure economies in Asia. It has a single functioning oil refinery—the Petron facility at Bataan—capable of meeting only 40 percent of the country’s fuel requirements. The rest is imported as finished petroleum products from the regional hubs of South Korea, China, Malaysia, and Singapore. Yet this regional supply chain is overwhelmingly dependent upon oil that transits the Strait of Hormuz. South Korean and Singaporean refiners source approximately 70 to 80 percent of their crude from the Gulf states. Malaysia's refineries draw heavily on the same supply routes.
China alone constitutes a partial exception: Beijing has diversified its crude imports toward Russia—which became China’s single largest crude supplier in 2024 at 2.17 million barrels per day—and maintains strategic reserves estimated at 120 days of imports. Russian crude reaches China via pipelines and Arctic tanker routes. The Chinese refined products that account for roughly a quarter of Philippine imports are therefore only partially exposed to the disruption ravaging the rest of Asia’s energy supply.
The strategic significance of this fact has not been lost on sections of the Philippine ruling class. China is the sole major source of refined petroleum that does not depend entirely on the strait that Washington’s war has now closed to orderly commerce. The oil shock has made the calculus explicit in a way that years of diplomatic maneuvering had obscured: the Philippines cannot afford a confrontation with Beijing. The peso, driven down by oil import costs and investor anxiety, broke through the P60-per-US dollar barrier on March 19, a historic low, and the Bangko Sentral intervened to prevent a complete freefall. Finance Secretary Frederick Go warned that if oil prices remain elevated, the Monetary Board will likely raise interest rates as early as April. Economists calculate that growth—which had already slowed to 4.4 percent in 2025—will take further hits from each month the war continues.
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The Iran war has compressed into weeks a set of contradictions that were years in the making. The Philippines is locked into a US war alliance that is economically devastating it. Its only source of refined petroleum that does not transit the Strait of Hormuz is from China. But Washington is preparing to go to war against China, dragging Manila behind it, and sections of the Philippine military, acting at Washington’s behest, are working to sabotage the diplomatic efforts of Manila’s own foreign ministry to preserve a relationship with Beijing.
The peso is at a historic low. Electricity prices are about to jump 16 percent. The transport strike brought workers into the streets. But the organizations that claim to lead them—BAYAN, PISTON, the Makabayan bloc—offer as a way forward a set of appeals addressed to the very government and the very system responsible for the catastrophe. The decisive political question posed by all of this is not whether the Marcos government will cap fuel prices or review EDCA. It is whether the Philippine working class—alongside workers in the United States, in Iran, in China, in every country being dragged toward war—will build the independent political organization capable of putting an end to the capitalist system that produces imperialist war, oil shocks, and poverty wages.
12. IG Metall union suffers losses in works council elections
The IG Metall union has suffered losses in many car plants in works council elections that began at the start of March. Even though it still commands a majority in the large plants, the dominance of the trade union apparatus has been shaken.
Results at Volkswagen, the largest German car corporation, show the incipient rebellion of the workforce particularly clearly. In all German plants in 2022, IG Metall still held 93 percent of all works council seats, according to its own evaluation. In 2026, the figure is only 85 percent, 304 out of a total of 359 works council posts.
It is remarkable that IG Metall lost even more votes at VW headquarters in Wolfsburg. Here, the chair of the general works council, Daniela Cavallo, led the IG Metall list. Only 58 percent of the roughly 60,000 employees took part in the election—a historically low figure. IG Metall received 26,000 votes, 74 percent of the valid votes and less than half of those eligible to vote. Compared to the last election in 2022, this is a loss of more than 10 percentage points.
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Shortly before the polling stations closed, VW boss Oliver Blume announced the destruction of 50,000 jobs across the entire group in collaboration with IG Metall and its works council reps. At the beginning of the week, a study drawn up by McKinsey on behalf of VW was then leaked to the press recommending that of the group’s 10 plants in Germany, only two should remain: VW in Wolfsburg and Audi in Ingolstadt.
The leaked McKinsey proposal serves “as a beacon for the workforce,” writes stock market magazine Der Aktionär.
In this situation, workers’ rejection of IG Metall works councils and officials is growing. Their cronyism with managers and shareholders is hated. But this opposition was only partially expressed in the works council elections.
Why? Because most workers do not feel represented by the opposition lists that stood and mistrust the entire system of legally regulated “co-determination” supposed to provide “worker representation” on various company committees. And in most cases, this is absolutely justified. Opposition lists frequently emerge from internal struggles within the apparatus. This is currently all the more often the case, as the number of full-time works council posts is falling along with the reduction in the workforce.
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Where workers actually turned against the IG Metall apparatus, the latter struck back with utmost severity. At Bosch in Schwäbisch Gmünd, for example, the slate put forward by the “Free Metalworkers” (Freie Metaller), which, supported by production workers, led a rebellion against the local IG Metall apparatus, was not even allowed to participate in the election.
The IG Metall apparatus, however, would not have been able to defend its dominance in the plants once again, despite all reprisals, if it were not slavishly supported by various pseudo-left groups.
These criticise individual aspects of IG Metall policy but sharply reject all attempts to seriously oppose the apparatus. For them, the apparatus is the trade union and the trade union the supposed representative of workers—even if in reality it has long been the opposite.
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This year’s works council elections demonstrate the urgency of a new political perspective in order to fight against the IG Metall apparatus and the co-managers sitting in the works councils, a perspective that points beyond the framework of the company and capitalism.
The decimation being carried out in the car industry is part of a comprehensive attack on workers all over the world. Mass job reductions, wage decreases and cuts to social benefits are taking place everywhere in order to drive up profits and pass the consequences of the capitalist crisis onto the workers.
Under President Donald Trump, the USA has declared war on the world in order to defend its dwindling economic hegemony by military means. It has attacked Iran and threatens to destroy the country of 90 million inhabitants. The German government under Friedrich Merz is placing the Ramstein air base at its disposal for this and is preparing to participate in the war itself in order to guarantee the “freedom of navigation.”
The escalation of the war drives up prices and will result in further social cuts to collect the costs for rearmament and war. At the same time, the trade war is expanding. The burden is borne by workers on both sides of the Atlantic through mass dismissals, and wage and social cuts.
The IG Metall bureaucracy and its works council reps are responsible for implementing these attacks. And for this they are paid handsomely, which is why they take such vehement action against any opposition.
The apparatus not only knows every legal and dirty trick, it also has huge resources at its disposal. The “largest single trade union in the world” has an annual income of €600–650 million and assets (including reserves and real estate) in the multiple billions. The apparatus financed by this is the main obstacle to defending jobs and wages. It must be disempowered.
Workers in the German car and metal industries should take the American autoworker Will Lehman—who is running for the presidency of the US autoworkers’ union UAW (United Auto Workers)—as a role model. Like IG Metall in Germany, the UAW works most closely with the corporations and the government and supports Trump’s trade war and war policy.
“This bureaucracy cannot be reformed,” Lehman states clearly. “It must be abolished.” His programme focuses on transferring power from the apparatus to the workers on the shop floor through a network of rank-and-file committees. This is the only way to end the policy of “social partnership” with the corporations and replace it with a strategy of class struggle. This is the only way to reject the poison of nationalism, which divides workers across borders, and mobilise the industrial power of workers in defence of democratic rights and against war.
Will Lehman is a socialist and member of the Socialist Equality Party (SEP), the sister party of the SGP in Germany. The International Committee of the Fourth International initiated the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) on May 1, 2021.
The attacks on the rights and conditions of workers are global. The strategy of the corporations can only be broken through cross-border coordination. The allies of autoworkers in Germany are the autoworkers in the US and the whole world. The worldwide building of rank-and-file committees and their networking is the task of the hour.
13. Starmer government refuses parliamentary vote on UK involvement in Iran war
On Monday evening, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer convened an emergency COBRA meeting to discuss the expanding war on Iran and its devastating impact on the economy. The meeting was attended by the chancellor, foreign secretary, energy secretary and the governor of the Bank of England.
COBRA meetings are convened to respond to national emergencies. The latest was the third since the US-Israeli onslaught on Iran began almost a month ago. It took place as the claims of the crisis-ridden Labour government that Britain is not participating in the war on Iran have unraveled.
Last Friday, the government designated military action against Iran “collective self-defense.” This allows strikes against Iranian missile systems threatening shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, not just missiles directly threatening British personnel or allies. It replaced a policy, supposedly operative since March 1, allowing the US to use British bases only for a “specific and limited defensive purpose.”
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi warned that London’s actions “will definitely be considered as participation in aggression… we reserve our inherent right to defend the country’s sovereignty and independence.”
President Donald Trump later issued an ultimatum on his social media platform threatening to wipe out the infrastructure upon which 90 million Iranians depend.
A government statement on Sunday confirmed that Britain would do nothing to prevent such an attack. Sky News broadcaster Trevor Phillips asked government minister Steve Reed, “What is the government’s position on this 48-hour deadline? Are we saying to the Americans, ‘No, don’t do this because this is escalating the situation,’ or are we simply standing on the sidelines waiting to see what happens?”
Reed replied, “I think you need to ask President Trump about the things that President Trump is talking about.”
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The Starmer government can only proceed in backing the US against Iran because it relies on the support of a Parliament that acts even more firmly than in 2003 as a single party of imperialist war.
On Monday afternoon, Starmer appeared before Parliament’s Liaison Committee of MPs. The main criticism of Starmer was from MPs demanding an even more aggressive military posture and that he commit to a rapid escalation of military spending.
For the last month, a substantial section of the US’s heavy bomber fleet has been operating from the Royal Air Force Fairford base in Gloucestershire, launching strikes against Iranian targets. Yet Starmer maintained a straight face as he told the committee that “This is not our war, and we are not getting dragged into this war.” He had maintained “a divide” between Britain and Washington over this, and UK military bases were only being used “for the purposes of collective self-defense.”
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Declared opposition to the war has come from a tiny minority of MPs and is led by Jeremy Corbyn—the figurehead of the Stop the War Coalition and leader of Your Party, who centers his bankrupt program on futile appeals to complicit governments to oppose war.
On March 4, Corbyn put forward the Military Action (Parliamentary Approval) Bill, a private member’s bill, co-sponsored by just 11 MPs, which has no chance of being passed in a 650-seat chamber stuffed with warmongers. Parliament’s own website notes that the Second Reading of the Bill is not scheduled to take place until April 17, “although the House of Commons is not expected to be sitting on that date”!
Nowhere in a Bill of just 81 words does it even refer to the war on Iran, let alone describe it as illegal. It merely requests that there be “parliamentary approval for the deployment of UK armed forces and military equipment for armed conflict; to require parliamentary approval for the granting of permission by Ministers for use of UK military bases and equipment by other nations for armed conflict; to require the withdrawal of that permission in circumstances where parliamentary approval is not granted.”
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.
