Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Wall Street Journal announces the era of the “mega layoff”
That one of the chief motivators of mass layoffs is the instant increase in share values is a sign of the extreme shortsightedness and recklessness which dominates corporate strategy. But Wall Street’s response reflects a more basic decision made by finance capital: whole swathes of less productive capital must be eliminated, along with the workers employed by them.
This is expressed in the growing series of mass layoffs. There were 1.2 million layoffs last year, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, the highest toll since the first year of the COVID pandemic. This month alone, layoffs were announced at Snap (1,000 jobs), Disney (1,000), Morgan Stanley (2,500) and Citigroup (1,000). Thirty thousand layoffs each are under way at Amazon and Oracle.
Nor is this confined to white-collar jobs. UPS is eliminating more jobs than any other employer in the country. Thousands of layoffs are taking place in auto, including GM’s shutdown of what had been presented as its new flagship EV plant. At the United States Postal Service, as the result of a manufactured financial crisis, management has stopped payments into the pension plan and is preparing vast cuts. Almost every major school district and transit authority in America is eyeing layoffs to close major deficits.
This is not only an American phenomenon. Lufthansa is closing its subsidiary CityLine. As a result of the expanding war against Iran, Europe has “maybe six weeks of jet fuel left,” according to the International Energy Agency. The BBC is eliminating 10 percent of its workforce, some 2,000 jobs. Canada Post is planning to slash 30,000 jobs, more than half of its workforce, while ending door-to-door delivery.
There is an objective logic driving this. The United States has hit $39 trillion in federal debt, which costs as much in interest payments as the entire military budget. US nonfinancial corporate debt has reached $14.1 trillion, according to a January report by the Federal Reserve. The major “hyperscalers”—Amazon.com, Alphabet, Meta Platforms, Microsoft Corporation and Oracle Corporation—are expected to issue as much as $175 billion in new debt in 2026 to finance AI buildouts.
Meanwhile, US military expenditures are soaring, with $200 billion requested for the war with Iran and $500 billion more in next year’s budget, bringing the total to $1.5 trillion.
The cost of their attempts to sustain these levels of debt and avoid economic collapse, while also financing the massive cost to society of the corporate oligarchy itself, can under capitalism only be carved out of the working class.
This means, on the one hand, mass unemployment, lower pay, longer hours and a vast increase in surplus value extraction through new technology. On the other hand, it means the seizure of natural resources, markets and supply chains from national rivals. This is seen most sharply in Trump’s war against Iran, which is a struggle for control over oil routes, shipping lanes, strategic minerals and industrial supply chains.
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The corporate elite dreams of creating profit out of profit by removing human labor from the equation entirely, both through financial bubbles and through AI. But it cannot extricate itself from dependence on the working class, which is the source of all value.
Moreover, these conditions are producing a profound political change. Millions are concluding that this is not simply a matter of “greed” or bad executives. The capitalist system itself is responsible.
The promise of American “unlimited opportunity” sounds like a mocking phrase to young people who cannot possibly get ahead. For the first time in history, the unemployment gap has closed completely between those with associate’s degrees and those with bachelor’s degrees.
This is radicalizing a generation and expanding the potential base for socialist politics.
The paradox of the crisis is that it emerges from an extraordinarily high level of economic development. The level of society’s wealth is so great, and the economic and cultural integration of the planet so advanced, as a consequence of high-tech global supply chains, that they are no longer compatible with the narrow limits of private ownership and the nation-state system.
Workers must take control of the same technology now being used as a weapon against them and transform it into the scaffolding of a new form of society based not on exploitation, but on the free association of producers.
The vast improvements in productivity made possible by AI and automation must be used to fund a sharp decrease in the length of the working day with no loss of pay, along with high-quality education, healthcare and other public programs, rather than financing out-of-control inequality.
2. IMF spells it out: Workers must pay for the cost of war
According to the IMF, while economies recovered from the energy and food price shock of 2022, governments were left with higher debts and weaker buffers. Even when growth picked up, fiscal positions did not improve.
“Global growth was robust in 2025, yet there was no meaningful progress in repairing budgets. In many countries, deficits stayed high, debt kept rising, and interest bills grew rapidly.”
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The result is that gross public debt rose to 94 percent of global GDP in 2025 and is expected to reach 100 percent by 2029—one year earlier than forecast a year ago. A significant factor in the worsening debt position is the hike in the interest bill, which has risen from 2 percent of GDP to almost 3 percent in just four years.
Poorer countries have faced mounting pressures on their fiscal position for some time—in many cases having to spend more on debt and interest than they do on health, education and other social services. They are going to be hit even harder in the coming period with further rises in interest rates, as well as energy and food shortages.
Now major economies are increasingly being caught in the vortex of the deepening global crisis....
3. New IMF agreement requires Sri Lankan government to complete austerity program
The Sri Lankan government signed another staff-level agreement with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) mission to the country on April 9. The deal was announced after the IMF team conducted an intensive review of the government’s implementation of the austerity program that began in late 2023.
President Anura Kumara Dissanayake, who is also the finance minister, signed the agreement which will mean implementing all remaining austerity measures outlined in the release of the $US3 billion bailout loan.
Speaking at a press conference in Colombo, the IMF mission chief for Sri Lanka, Evan Papageorgiou, praised the government’s “commendable performance,” citing 5 percent economic growth in 2025, rising tax revenues and building foreign reserves to $US7 billion. He said the team concluded the fifth and sixth reviews during their visit and, accordingly, $700 million will be available for the country.
However, the release of the fund, with the approval of the IMF Executive Board, will be contingent on “the restoration of cost-recovery electricity and fuel pricing” and the completion of the financing assurances review so as to confirm multilateral partners’ financing contributions and adequate debt restructuring progress.
The restoration of the price recovery mechanism for electricity and fuel are code words for strictly implementing price increases in these two sectors so as to eliminate the debts of the Ceylon Electricity Board (CEB) and the Ceylon Petroleum Corporation. From February 2022 to April 1 this year, the country’s electricity tariff has increased by around 125 percent.
Though Papageorgiou did not say so publicly, the IMF is demanding the privatization of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) proceed. Though the government earlier listed more than 400 SOEs, only a few have been restructured. The only major restructure has been the CEB, which has more than 20,000 employees and was broken up into six companies last month.
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The IMF official declared, “We know Sri Lankan people are undergoing difficulties with the high cost of electricity, fuel and other everyday necessities.” But people must understand, he added, that the reforms are needed to prepare for “the future shocks and risks.”
The IMF’s expression of sympathy for working people in Sri Lanka is utterly bogus. Its only concern is to ensure the repayment of defaulted foreign debts and to boost investors’ profits. When announcing the IMF bailout in 2023, former mission head Peter Breuer said the program was in fact a “brutal experiment” for Sri Lanka.
4. Milei opens up Argentina’s glaciers to destruction by mining companies
In the summer of 2025, southern Argentina’s Patagonia region was overwhelmed by fires that burned over 270,000 acres of forests, and thousands of homes. The fires were attributed to a decade-long dry spell combined with very high temperatures. Regional rains have fallen by 20 percent. This process was accompanied by less snow in the Andes Mountains, which feed the glaciers, which in turn feed the rivers and lakes upon which Patagonia’s cities and towns, and its tourist industry, depend. There was not enough water to fight the fires.
Further north from Patagonia, the vineyards of central Argentina’s Mendoza province are drying up from lack of water and being contaminated by gold and copper mining. The poor in many areas go days without potable water, which is diverted to rich neighborhoods.
Indifferent to those links between the Patagonian fires, water shortages and water contamination due to the shrinking glaciers on the Andes Mountains, the fascistic administration of President Javier Milei rammed through a bill modifying legal protections to glaciers to increase mining activity in the Andes.
A key provision in the new legislation leaves it up to the provinces and their corrupt politicians how to manage the glaciers within their borders, effectively pitting one province against another. These provinces will be allowed to decide on a case-by-case basis if they believe glaciers should remain protected or whether to permit open-pit mining projects that could destroy them.
The purpose of the new law is effectively to hand over control of these water resources to mining and oil companies. This is justified by the corrupt and fascistic Milei administration as a road to economic development and greater employment to compensate for the attack on full-time jobs and the deindustrialization of the national economy.
In effect, the right of workers, farmers and the middle class to water is to be sacrificed to further the profit interests of mining and oil monopolies and the financial oligarchy.
5. Six films from Iran that should be seen by workers in the US and around the world
In late March 2012, when Iran was under threat of attack by the Obama administration, the World Socialist Web Site published a perspective on the Iranian film A Separation, directed by Asghar Farhadi. One month earlier, the movie had won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, becoming the first Iranian film to win the honor.
The WSWS perspective asked:And will a war, in the name of “the American people,” based on one transparent falsehood or another, soon be launched against Iran? Will deadly US bombs and missiles shortly be raining down on the streets, buildings and human beings we see in A Separation?
We added that US imperialism and its allies
are planning to destroy Iran as a regional power, a task requiring the punishment of its population with the most lethal weaponry ever developed. Americans and Europeans should be seeing this film [A Separation] … Mass opposition must build to the threat of war with Iran. Everything must be done to stop this crime being prepared before people’s eyes.
That sentiment is more true now than ever. The US and international working class must put a stop to the imperialist war against Iran before millions are killed and a major civilization is destroyed.
The WSWS has written, extensively and over a long period, about many of the remarkable films from Iran that were made in the aftermath of the mass 1979 revolution against the hated CIA-backed regime of the Shah. Notwithstanding the fact that what emerged from the revolution in the end was a clerical-led bourgeois nationalist regime, an Islamic Republic, Iranian filmmakers created some of the most intelligent and humane works in the 1980s and 1990s, and beyond.
And whatever the subsequent political evolution or confusion of their makers, such films as Salaam Cinema, The White Balloon, The Mirror, Offside, A Time for Drunken Horses, The Apple, The Blue-Veiled and Under the City’s Skin remain valuable, humane works.
6. Trump administration continues torment of El Gamal family as detained mother remains in severe pain
Hayam El Gamal, the Egyptian mother of five imprisoned with her children at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Texas for over 300 days, was rushed to the emergency room earlier this month after repeated pleas for medical care were ignored or denied by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the staff of CoreCivic, which runs the prison. More than a week later, despite findings that she has an unknown mass in her chest, fluid near her heart and worsening pain, El Gamal is still being denied access to the outside diagnostic treatment doctors said she urgently needs.
According to court filings submitted by her attorney, Eric Lee, and reporting by NBC News, El Gamal was rushed to the emergency room earlier this month after weeks of complaints about a painful growth in her chest were brushed aside by ICE and CoreCivic officials at Dilley. Three doctors who reviewed her records concluded that ICE and CoreCivic were “systematically denying Ms. El Gamal medical care” and that the neglect posed an urgent threat to her health and potentially her life.
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The El Gamal family has effectively been imprisoned since June 2025, when federal agents detained Hayam El Gamal and her five children after her then-husband, Mohamed Sabry Soliman, was accused of carrying out a firebomb attack on a pro-Israel demonstration in Boulder, Colorado. From the outset, the Trump administration treated the family not as individuals with legal rights, but as targets for retaliation. Following the attack, the official White House account posted Soliman’s mugshot alongside video of the attack and gloated: “Six One-Way Tickets for Mohamed’s Wife and Five Kids. Final Boarding Call Coming Soon. ✈️”
The persecution of the El Gamal family has nothing to do with public safety. An immigration judge ordered the family released on a $15,000 bond last September, citing their lack of any criminal record, their cooperation with law enforcement and strong community support. In court, the FBI confirmed that the family “had no inkling at all” of Soliman’s planned attack. Yet ICE invoked an automatic stay to block their release, and the administration later used additional procedural maneuvers to keep the family jailed while undermining their asylum claims. Hayam El Gamal has since divorced Soliman, but she and her children remain imprisoned.
As Eric Lee, one of the family’s attorneys, told the World Socialist Web Site last year, “The Trump administration’s vindictive attack on this young family echoes the methods of Nazi Germany, where authorities used kin punishment—Sippenhaft—to intimidate the population.” That assessment has been borne out by the government’s conduct ever since. The continued detention of Hayam and her children, despite the absence of any evidence implicating them in Soliman’s actions, is a campaign of deliberate state persecution, aimed at terrorizing an immigrant family through indefinite confinement, medical neglect and psychological torture.
The government’s claim that the family is a “flight risk” is as threadbare as it is vindictive. According to Lee, the family even offered to submit to ankle monitors and daily ICE check-ins, including for the younger children, in order to address any supposed concern about supervision. ICE still refused release.
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Ahead of a protest scheduled for Saturday outside the Dilley detention facility, Hayam El Gamal, speaking through her attorney Lee, appealed for the release of her family and all those still imprisoned there. “I am a mother with five children who has been detained behind the gates of Dilley for over 10 months,” she said. “My kids, two of whom are 5 years old, have been struggling to live in a place that isn’t suitable for such long periods of time. We have been suffering from terrible food, inhuman living conditions and medical neglect for almost a year.”
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She concluded, “This place is a prison. We didn’t do anything to deserve this. Children shouldn’t be punished for their parents’ actions. Please treat us as an innocent family. We will follow the law just as we have been doing our entire lives. We are asking for only one thing: our freedom. Freedom is a human right, and we are begging you to help us gain ours back.”
What is happening to the El Gamals is not an aberration but an extreme expression of a broader policy. The Marshall Project reported this month that ICE has detained more than 6,200 children during Trump’s second term. By the end of the Biden administration, the daily average was 24 children in custody. After Trump revived family detention, that figure jumped tenfold to a daily average of 226. The same report found that the number of children in ICE custody rose to more than 550 on a single day in January before later declining. Nearly half of the children detained during the Trump term have been held at Dilley.*****
At the same time that children and parents are being warehoused in for-profit concentration camps, the state is funneling immense resources into expanding the apparatus responsible. An Associated Press investigation published this week found that some newly hired ICE officers began work before passing full background checks and had troubling histories, including bankruptcies, misconduct allegations and unstable employment records. AP identified one new hire with two bankruptcies and six law-enforcement jobs in three years, another who had been accused of lying in a police report in a case that ended in a $75,000 settlement, and a third who had failed to complete a police academy and then lasted only three weeks in his sole policing job. DHS acknowledged to AP that some applicants received offers and began work on a temporary basis before full background checks were completed.
This hiring spree is being financed by a staggering infusion of money. ICE received a $75 billion windfall from Congress last year, tied to the administration’s mass deportation drive, and that the agency added 12,000 officers and agents in the push to double its force.
The torture of the El Gamal family is a warning. What the American state is doing to Hayam El Gamal and her children today, it will do to others tomorrow, regardless of immigration status. A government that claims the power to imprison children, deny a mother urgent medical care, override court rulings and inflict collective punishment on a family that committed no crime is asserting powers that will be used ever more broadly against the entire working class.
7. Iran reports reopening Strait of Hormuz as Paris summit plans European intervention
Iran announced a shaky reopening of the Strait of Hormuz to commercial shipping yesterday, as 49 countries met in an emergency summit in Paris to plan a naval intervention into the waterway. US President Donald Trump responded, however, by refusing to lift the US naval blockade of Iranian ports. The flurry of announcements, while they produced a fall in oil prices, has neither produced a lasting peace nor resolved any of the fundamental conflicts underlying the war.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said that “passage for all commercial vessels through the Strait of Hormuz is declared completely open for the remaining period of ceasefire.” Thus the reopening depends on Washington continuing to respect the ceasefire it declared last week, as well as Israel respecting a truce with Lebanon. Under Araghchi’s terms, Iranian military forces will still control which vessels can transit the strait, the shipping lanes they can use, and the tolls they will pay to Iran.
Trump immediately announced that the US naval blockade of Iran would “remain in full force” until Iran made a comprehensive deal with Washington. Vessels heading to or from Iranian ports remain subject to interception by the US Navy, and Iran’s oil exports remain blocked. Trump claimed that a peace deal is “very close,” but only days ago, negotiations in Islamabad collapsed after 20 hours of talks.
Even if the US ceasefire somehow holds however, Trump’s war of aggression against Iran, his calls to plunder Iranian oil and his genocidal threats to annihilate Iranian civilization will have lasting and irreversible economic and political consequences. The massive human and economic toll of the war is only beginning to come into view. Even if fighting does not resume, which is far from guaranteed, this toll will continue to grow in the coming months.
8. New York home care workers wage second hunger strike in 2 years
Home care workers in New York City have embarked on a hunger strike to abolish 24-hour shifts. These shifts are associated with chronic pain, injury and insomnia, and workers are paid for only 13 of the 24 hours in each shift. Together with supporters, the home care workers have held at least six protests outside City Hall over the past month. Their resort to a hunger strike, which puts their health at risk, shows how intolerable these shifts are and how determined the workers are to eliminate them.
The home care workers hope to pressure the City Council to vote on the No More 24 Act, which would prevent home health agencies from scheduling shifts of longer than 12 hours, as well as shifts that total more than 12 hours in one 24-hour period. Last month, Council Speaker Julie Menin, a Democrat, promised the home care workers that she would bring the bill to a vote in April, but she missed the deadline to do so. In theory, the bill could be brought to a vote during a City Council meeting on April 30.
New York City is home to about 200,000 home care workers, according to a 2023 report from the comptroller’s office. About 89 percent of these workers are women, 71 percent are immigrants and more than half are black or Hispanic. Home care workers help elderly, ill or disabled patients with activities of daily living such as personal care, meal preparation and transportation. They often must lift patients without assistance, which contributes to injury and chronic pain.
During a 24-hour shift, three unpaid hours are set aside for a worker’s meals, and eight unpaid hours for sleep. Nevertheless, the worker must always respond to the patients’ needs.
The Harvard Corporation is simultaneously waging war on two fronts against workers and students at the university. On one front, it has moved to suppress the wages and job security of its clerical and technical workforce. On the other, it has stonewalled thousands of graduate student workers in the Harvard Graduate Student Union–United Auto Workers (HGSU-UAW Local 5118), who have now set an April 21 strike deadline after nearly 96 percent of participating members voted to walk out.
The Socialist Equality Party calls on the members of the Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers (HUCTW) to reject the tentative agreement announced on April 16, build a rank-and-file committee independent of the union bureaucracy, and join hands with their brothers and sisters in HGSU-UAW in a unified fight for living wages, job security and an end to Harvard’s complicity in war and genocide.
HUCTW leadership announced a tentative agreement with Harvard that is centered on a one-year contract that delivers a flat $2,300 raise to most union members. A ratification vote is scheduled for May 12–13. The contract would take effect July 1 and expire one year later.
Canada Post letter carriers, sorting plant workers, post office staff and drivers are voting between April 20 and May 30 on tentative agreements (TAs) for urban and rural units, and on a strike mandate. The Postal Workers Rank-and-File Committee (PWRFC) urges postal workers to vote “No” to the sellout agreements accepted by the union apparatus and “Yes” to the strike mandate.
However, we will not sugar coat the truth. Important and necessary as such a vote would be, it alone will not suffice. To defeat the Liberal government and corporate Canada—for it is they ultimately who determine the class-war policies of Canada Post management—postal workers must adopt a new strategy based on the mobilization of the social power of the working class.
We must combine rejection of the TAs with a fight to make our struggle with Canada Post the catalyst for a broader working class offensive in defence of good-paying secure jobs, public services and the right to strike. We must call on all logistics workers and the broader working class to join us in waging an industrial and political struggle against the Carney Liberal government and the capitalist ruling elite’s agenda of austerity and war.
11. “Loud and proud”: Strikes against Lufthansa continue
For days, pilots and flight attendants have been striking against Lufthansa's brutal restructuring course. On Wednesday, 15 April, a strike by over 19,000 stewards and stewardesses from Lufthansa and LH-CityLine began again.
12. Amid Hormuz blockade, US Treasury threatens to sanction Chinese banks trading with Iran
The Trump administration’s cease-fire in its war of aggression against Iran is rapidly proving to be the setting for another escalation of a global conflict that is now underway. The US blockade of the Strait of Hormuz is setting into motion in particular an explosive confrontation between the United States and China, with far-reaching economic ramifications, that threatens to escalate into a wider, global war.
This week, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the Treasury could impose “secondary sanctions” on any bank found to hold Iranian money, cutting the bank out of the US financial system and access to the US dollar. Like the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz—which cuts off vital oil, gas and fertilizer exports on which the world economy depends—this amounts to a declaration of financial war on countries trading with Iran. This measure is codenamed Economic Fury, echoing “Epic Fury,” the US military’s code name for the war on Iran launched this February.
At an April 15 press conference introducing Operation Economic Fury, Bessent said: “We have told companies, we have told countries that are buying Iranian oil that if Iranian money is sitting in your banks, we are now willing to apply secondary sanctions, which is a very stern measure. And the Iranians should know that this is going to be the financial equivalent of what we saw in the kinetic activities,” that is, the physical, military conflict.
Bessent made clear the main current target of these threats is China, the world’s second-largest economy and largest manufacturing power, which now buys 91 percent of Iran’s oil. He said, “We believe this blockade in the straits, there will be a pause of Chinese buying. But I will tell you that two Chinese banks received letters from the US Treasury. … We told them that if we can prove that there’s Iranian money flowing through your accounts, then we are willing to put on secondary sanctions.”
These remarks make clear that its war of aggression against Iran is part of a broader struggle for world domination, in particular directed at China and control of Eurasia, which threatens to explode into a global conflagration between the major nuclear-armed powers.
12. Starmer premiership threatened as Mandelson/Epstein crisis re-erupts
Following the revelation Thursday that Mandelson failed a top-level security vetting prior to his appointment as ambassador to Washington, every opposition party has demanded that Starmer step down as prime minister. After stating earlier this year that Mandelson was appointed after a “full due process”, Starmer is accused of misleading parliament, a resigning matter under UK government ministerial code.
It is already widely accepted within ruling circles that Starmer will face a leadership challenge following the May local elections, in which Labour is expected to suffer heavy losses. But an anticipated post-election reckoning is being overtaken by events.
An investigation by the Guardian revealed, “A formal decision to deny him clearance was made by [UK Security Vetting-UKSV] on 28 January 2025,” and “According to sources, UKSV informed the Foreign Office that the risk factors involving Mandelson meant that his clearance should be denied.” Outright denial of “developed vetting” is rare, particularly for such a senior post.
Mandelson, the main architect with Tony Blair of the New Labour project, was appointed by Starmer as US ambassador in December 2024, with the prime minister, as everyone was, fully aware of his intimate connections with the billionaire child sex trafficker.
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Mandelson was appointed Ambassador to Washington after the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) took the extraordinary step of overriding the recommendation of the UK Security Vetting unit. The Guardian revealed that FCDO officials “decided to use a rarely used authority to override the recommendation from security officials.”
Starmer now claims that he only became aware of Mandelson’s failed vetting on Tuesday of this week, with the Telegraph noting that his failure to immediately alert Parliament is another potential breach of the ministerial code.
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Starmer is expected to deliver a statement to the House of Commons on Monday to “correct the record” regarding Mandelson’s vetting.
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The extraordinary moves to ensure that Mandelson secured the role of UK ambassador to Washington, despite his longstanding connections to a convicted criminal, confirm the assessment of the Socialist Equality Party. In a February 11 statement, “The Mandelson-Epstein crisis and the socialist struggle against the Starmer government”, the SEP explained, “His appointment as US ambassador was seen by Starmer and his allies as epitomizing the triumph of Labour’s Blairite orthodoxy, following the crushing defeat of the Corbynites. His political and business record—especially his intimate connections with Epstein—were also intended to reassure the incoming Trump administration that the Labour government was a trustworthy ally, economically and militarily, wholly embedded in the same criminal oligarchy.”
13. Australian state Labor government defends unconstitutional anti-protest law
The New South Wales Labor government is defiantly proceeding with arrests and charges under its invalid anti-protest legislation.
14. Massive fire at one of Australia’s two remaining oil refineries
A massive explosion and fire tore through Viva Energy’s Geelong oil refinery late Wednesday night, resulting in a conflagration that took firefighters some 13 hours to extinguish. Around 50 workers were on site when the blaze erupted. All escaped without injury, but some were forced to literally run for their lives, according to media reports.
Shortly before midnight on Wednesday, operators in the MOGAS (motor gasoline) section of the plant noticed a drop in pressure on their control boards and raised the alarm, but before they could investigate, there was a large explosion.
Tony Hynds, Geelong organizer for the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union (AMWU), noted that the lack of casualties was only an accident of timing: “If this had happened during the day, we’d be talking about a whole different outcome in terms of injuries and fatalities.”
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The refinery, one of only two remaining in the country, produces petrol, diesel, LPG, jet fuel and avgas [. It supplies roughly half of Victoria’s petrol and about 10 percent of national fuel supplies. Representatives of management and the federal Labor government rushed to downplay the impact of the blast on fuel availability, emphasizing the partial character of the shutdown.
However, its significance, amid a global fuel supply crisis resulting from the US-led war of aggression against Iran, is undeniable. This was underscored by Labor Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s immediate return to Australia from South East Asia, where he was seeking to shore up future fuel import deals, to deliver a press conference at the Geelong site on Friday.
Albanese insisted the incident had only caused a “slight slowdown” in production at the refinery and “will not lead to any change” in Australia’s four-stage fuel security policy. This was echoed by Viva Energy CEO Scott Wyatt, who declared, “we’re still producing, making about 80 percent of diesel and 60 percent of petrol. We do hope to be able to lift that over the coming weeks.”
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Experts have raised concerns over the age of the plant, which opened in 1956. Yuan Chen, from the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Sydney, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, “Oil refining is inherently a high-temperature, high-risk industrial process.… These operating conditions, combined with the potential for equipment degradation over time, can increase the likelihood of incidents such as fires if not carefully managed through maintenance and safety systems.”
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In November and December 2017, the refinery suffered two separate leaks of hydrofluoric acid—one of the most hazardous substances used in petroleum processing—exposing workers to toxic vapor. WorkSafe Victoria responded by laying 11 occupational health and safety charges against the company in 2018, including failing to provide safe systems of work, adequate training, and safe plant, and for failing to properly notify the regulator of a serious incident.
In 2020, a pipeline leak allowed oil to escape into the environment near the Geelong foreshore. In 2023, a contractor’s crane dropped a compressor during planned maintenance works—a serious near-miss in a facility defined as a major hazard site.
The refinery has also been the scene of repeated large flares, power-related upsets causing uncontrolled releases, and persistent foul-odor incidents that have alarmed surrounding communities. Union records list multiple worker injuries—burns, chemical exposures, fractures—during routine operations and turnaround maintenance.
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These are not random tragedies but the result of the systematic subordination of safety to profit under capitalism. The union bureaucracies will not lead a fight for workplace safety, because they are themselves an integral component of the capitalist system and serve as an industrial police force of management.
15. Workers Struggles: Asia and Australia
Australia:
India:
South Korea:
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.
