On March 27, David North, chairman of the International Editorial Board of the World Socialist Web Site,
delivered a lecture of exceptional political and historical
significance at Friedrich-Alexander University (FAU) in Nuremberg,
Germany.
*****
The Nuremberg lecture capped a highly successful series of public meetings across Germany, following well-attended events in Leipzig and Berlin.
Trump's speech begins about nine minutes into this official White House video
There has never been an address like this given by an American
president. Whatever the crimes carried out by former administrations,
they were framed as the defense of democracy, self-determination and
liberation. Now the American president’s message to the population of an
entire country is: accept our demands, or die.
*****
A criminal underworld is in power. The war against Iran is the
product of decades of escalating violence—from the invasions of
Afghanistan and Iraq, through the destruction of Libya and Syria,
through the genocide in Gaza—each crime more brazen, each carried out
with greater impunity.
Under Trump, however, a qualitatively new
stage has been reached, with the abandonment of any even pretense of
legal restraint, the proclamation that there are, as they say, no “red
lines”—including the use of nuclear weapons—in the pursuit of
imperialist domination.
In oral arguments before the Supreme Court Wednesday and in an executive
order issued at the White House Tuesday afternoon, the Trump
administration pressed ahead with a frontal assault on the democratic
rights of the American people.
The Supreme Court heard arguments Wednesday morning on Trump v. Barbara,
the case triggered by Trump’s issuance in January 2025, upon taking
office, of an executive order purporting to do away with birthright
citizenship.
The order has been challenged repeatedly in court,
based on Trump’s open defiance of the plain language of the
14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which begins: “All persons born
or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction
thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they
reside.”
For 160 years, this clause has been understood to mean
all children born in US territory, except those of foreign diplomats,
are citizens. The application of this language to the children of
immigrants was upheld by the Supreme Court in its 1898 decision in United States v. Wong Kim Ark,
which upheld Wong’s citizenship rights based on his birth in San
Francisco, even though his immigrant parents had been barred from
naturalization by the racist Chinese Exclusion Act.
Seeking to
overturn birthright citizenship is a major focus of Trump’s persecution
of immigrants. It would deprive a quarter-million newborns of
citizenship each year, and if applied retroactively would nullify the
citizenship of millions of people born in the US to immigrant parents.
Trump signaled the importance of the case by attending the first part of
oral arguments, when Solicitor General D. John Sauer presented the
administration’s case and answered questions from the Supreme Court
justices. It was the first time any president had attended oral
arguments, in what was clearly a heavy-handed effort to bully the court,
including the three members appointed by Trump during his first term.
*****
The brief filed by the ACLU on behalf of a group of immigrant parents
and their children makes a powerful case for the unconstitutionality of
Trump’s executive order.
It points to the historical roots of
the 14th Amendment in English common law, and the discussions in
Congress during its adoption, in which the language was drafted to put
birthright citizenship “beyond the reach of officials in any branch of
government who might seek to overturn or narrow it.” The brief declares:
“The government is asking for nothing less than a remaking of our
nation’s constitutional foundations.”
Only ultra-right Justice
Samuel Alito seemed to favor the arguments made by Sauer, while his
co-thinker Clarence Thomas asked one question to begin the hearing and
then remained silent for the remaining two hours. Echoing the fascistic
“Great Replacement Theory,” Alito remarked that there were billions of
people who were “one plane ride” away from producing a child who would
be an American citizen. This deliberately echoed the administration
brief’s fantasy of “birth tourism,” and Trump’s own social media ravings
about “Chinese billionaires” giving rise to tens of thousands of new
American citizens.
While Sauer praised Alito’s remark, saying that
the ease of global travel meant that it was a “new world” compared to
the era of the 14th Amendment, Chief Justice John Roberts rebuked the
notion, saying, “It’s a new world, it is the same Constitution.”
*****
Whatever the eventual court ruling, there is no reason to think that
the Trump administration will abide by it. Trump has demonstrated his
contempt for constitutional and legal restraints on executive power ever
since entering the White House. And the persecution of immigrants,
through mass detentions and deportations and outright state killings of
immigrant defenders—as in the murders of Renée Nicole Good and Alex
Pretti in Minneapolis, has been the main focus of his domestic policy.
This
was demonstrated by the executive order which Trump signed on Tuesday
afternoon, purporting to take control of mail-in voting for federal
elections. Titled “Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in
Federal Elections,” the order directs the Department of Homeland
Security (DHS) and the Social Security Administration to create jointly a
master list of all US citizens aged 18 and older and eligible to
register to vote. The creation of such a list is unprecedented, and the
databases to be used are riddled with errors.
The DHS would then
transmit to each state its portion of the master list, and state
officials who issued mail ballots to anyone not on the list—or allowed
such individuals to register to vote—would be subject to felony
prosecution.
The order goes on to direct the U.S. Postal Service
to establish uniform regulations for the form of mail ballots to be used
by the states, effectively making the USPS the overseer of mail-in
voting, rather than merely the conduit by which such ballots are sent
from individual voters to the state and local officials who tabulate
them.
Trump issued the executive order despite the complete lack of any
legal or constitutional authority to regulate the conduct of elections.
The Constitution reserves primary authority over elections to the
individual states, while allowing Congress to set national rules. The
executive branch is given no role to play.
Multiple states
immediately announced they would file suit against Trump’s executive
order. State opposition had already torpedoed an administration plan to
compel the states to hand over their voter rolls to the Department of
Justice, which would “vet” them against databases of felons and
undocumented immigrants—again, riddled with errors. So many states
refused to cooperate, including several under Republican control, that
the plan had to be abandoned.
Instead of relying on the states to
turn over voter data to the federal government, the new executive order
would have the federal government “push” voter data to the states and
require the states to use the federal lists. There is little prospect of
this procedure being put into effect in time for the 2026 elections,
even if it survives legal challenges.
But that is not really the
goal. Trump and his fascist aides are seeking to conjure up the specter
of fraudulent voting by masses of “illegal aliens” as a way to discredit
the 2026 elections, under conditions where opinion polls suggest a
debacle for the Republican Party, including loss of control of Congress
and governorships of key states.
The ultimate aim is to rig the elections, through a combination of
physical intimidation of voters using troops and armed federal agents,
like the ICE Gestapo, and to create systematic disruption of voting in
major urban areas, on college campuses and at other locations where
opposition to Trump and his policies is concentrated. Or, on the pretext
of war, terrorism or some combination of the two, cancel the elections
entirely, and entrench Trump as dictator-president without any legal
check on executive power.
Such an outcome cannot be prevented
through lawsuits or appeals to the congressional Democrats. The defense
of democratic rights, including the rights of immigrants and the right
to vote, depends on the independent political mobilization of the
working class against capitalism and the parties that are the political
instruments of the financial oligarchy, the Democrats as well as the
Republicans.
As the criminal US-Israeli war of aggression on Iran enters its fifth
week and the Trump administration is poised to dramatically escalate the
conflict, its global dimensions are coming into sharper relief. While
the immediate aim is the subordination of Iran and the Middle East to US
imperialist interests, the war is viewed in Washington as essential
preparation for conflict with China, regarded as the chief threat to US
global domination.
The war has already had a major impact on the Chinese economy, not only
through the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, but also by undermining its
efforts to strengthen diplomatic and strategic ties with Iran and the
broader region over the past decade. As well as being a significant
source of oil and gas for China, Iran is strategically placed on the
crossroads between Europe and Asia and thus for Beijing’s key Belt and
Road Initiative, which aims to forge infrastructure links across the
Eurasian landmass.
Like many countries in Asia and internationally, China has been hit
by soaring global energy costs. By the end of 2025, China was importing
around 1.4 million barrels a day of oil from Iran, which represented
roughly 13 percent of its total imports. The hardest hit have been
China’s so-called “teapot” refineries—small private operations that
specialised in processing sanctioned oil at a discount—from Iran and
also Venezuela.
The Trump administration’s decision to attack
both Venezuela and Iran in rapid succession was not accidental. Both
countries were heavily dependent on China as a means of circumventing
the sanctions regime imposed, for the most part, unilaterally by US
imperialism. China accounted for between 80-90 percent of Iran’s oil
exports in recent years. Having secured control of Venezuelan oil in the
wake of the illegal kidnapping of the country’s president, the US aims
to do the same with Iranian oil.
*****
While Iran has been central to its moves in the Middle East, China
has sought to strengthen its ties more broadly throughout the region. In
March 2023, in a deal brokered by China, Iran and Saudi Arabia—bitter
rivals throughout the Middle East—agreed to re-establish diplomatic
relations ruptured in 2016 and ease mutual tensions. The agreement,
which effectively sidelined the US, set off alarm bells in Washington as
it signalled China’s growing influence in the region.
The easing
of tensions between Iran and Saudi Arabia helped consolidate China’s
expansion of ties with Arab countries in the Middle East. Two-way trade
expanded rapidly from $36 billion in 2010 to $400 billion in 2024 and
diversified from a focus on oil and gas into technology related to AI
and 5G systems, as well as renewable energy. Chinese foreign direct
investment has also expanded, particularly related to BRI
infrastructure. In 2024, the Middle East was the largest recipient of
BRI investments, with projects and construction contracts totalling
around $39 billion, including $18.9 billion in Saudi Arabia, $9 billion
in Iraq and $3.1 billion in the UAE.
Beijing has forged
“comprehensive strategic partnerships” with Saudi Arabia and the UAE,
while deepening ties with Egypt and the Gulf States. China has also
begun selling arms to other Middle Eastern countries in addition to
Iran, including military drones to Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Iraq and
Jordan.
The all-out US-Israeli war on Iran has now ruptured relations between
Iran and its Arab neighbours, especially Saudi Arabia, and dealt a
significant blow to Chinese diplomacy in the Middle East. In the face of
the massive bombardment of its civilian and military infrastructure,
Iran has been driven to retaliate against the Gulf States where the US
military is based and from where it has launched strikes.
*****
Beijing’s response to the brazen, illegal US war on Iran has also
called into question the value to governments of its comprehensive
strategic partnerships, not only in the Middle East but more broadly.
These partnerships have never been formal military alliances committing
China to come to the aid of its partners in time of war. It has no
mutual defence treaty with Iran, no permanent bases inside the country,
and has not provided Iran with advanced weaponry.
The Chinese
government has criticized the attacks on Iran as a fundamental breach of
international law, but has taken few if any steps to provide Tehran
with political or material support. The Chinese foreign ministry
described the killing of Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei as “a grave
violation of Iran’s sovereignty and security,” and Foreign Minister Wang
Yi declared the attacks to be “unacceptable.” China and Russia convened
an emergency UN Security Council session in New York on February 28
citing the US and Israel’s “unprovoked and reckless act of military
aggression.”
At the same time, however, Russia and China abstained
on a blatantly biased UN Security Council resolution condemning “in the
strongest terms” Iran’s retaliatory strikes on the Gulf states, while
saying nothing about the ongoing American and Israeli aggression that
had provoked the Iranian retaliation. By abstaining rather than using
their veto powers, the two countries allowed the resolution to be
carried.
*****
The sole social force capable of halting this plunge into world war is
the international working class. What is necessary is the political
fight for a unified anti-war movement of workers in the Middle East and
around the world, including in China and the US, based on socialist
principles, aimed at abolishing capitalism and its outmoded nation-state
system that is the source of war.
General Motors has again idled its flagship electric vehicle plant in
Detroit, temporarily laying off the 1,300 workers on the last shift
left running at the factory. Factory Zero stopped production on March
16 and is not expected to restart until April 13, leaving the workers
without pay for a month.
The latest shutdown comes less than three
months after a mass permanent layoff and the elimination of an entire
shift. It is a devastating new blow to workers who have now endured a
relentless cycle of overwork, temporary shutdowns and permanent job cuts
stretching back years.
Last October, GM had announced it would
permanently eliminate more than 1,200 positions at Factory Zero and
slash operations to a single shift. The cuts cascaded immediately
through the supply chain: supplier Avancez laid off 143 workers in Hazel
Park, Michigan; Dana Thermal Products closed its Auburn Hills plant,
cutting 200 jobs; Autokinition eliminated 133 positions; and Yanfeng cut
another 192.
Hundreds of additional layoffs hit EV and battery
plants across the Midwest and South—550 indefinite layoffs and 850
temporary ones at the Ultium Cells plant in Lordstown, Ohio, and 710
temporary layoffs at the Spring Hill, Tennessee Ultium Cells facility.
Now, with the April shutdown, those who survived the first wave of cuts
find themselves once again pushed into economic limbo.
GM
spokesman Kevin Kelly offered corporate speak in response to press
inquiries, saying that “Factory Zero will temporarily adjust production
to align EV production with market demand” and that “impacted employees
will be placed on a temporary layoff and may be eligible for subpay and
benefits in accordance with the GM-UAW national contract.”
United
Auto Workers Local 22 President James Cotton told reporters he was
“disappointed that the EV market has failed to take off as expected” and
blamed the Trump administration’s elimination of the $7,500 EV tax
credit and rollback of tailpipe pollution rules. “I never feel great
about any layoffs,” Cotton said, “but sometimes market demand may impede
production.” That anodyne response stands in sharp contrast to the fury
and anxiety among workers on the shopfloor.
“Workers
at Factory Zero are not responsible for the economic crisis being
exacerbated by Trump’s criminal war against Iran, nor for the
shortsighted decisions of management, which are primarily concerned with
enriching stockholders and corporate executives,” Lehman said.
He
said workers at Factory Zero and other plants should build
rank-and-file committees that would enforce a zero-layoff policy and the
return of all laid-off workers to their jobs. “When production is
slowed, workers’ hours should be cut with no loss of pay. Automation,
artificial intelligence, and other technologies should be used to lessen
the burden of work and sharply increase workers’ living standards—not
throw them into the streets.”
Lehman placed the crisis squarely in
the context of capitalist production for profit. “GM is spending
billions on executive salaries, stock buybacks and its new headquarters
in downtown Detroit while workers are thrown out of their jobs,” he
said. “The company had adjusted profits of $12.7 billion for 2025,
following record profits of $14.9 billion in 2024. GM stock has risen
approximately 55 percent over the past year, and the company spent $6
billion on stock buybacks for their wealthy investors. Workers produced
that wealth. They should not be sacrificed to further enrich
shareholders.”
Lehman was scathing in his denunciation of UAW
President Shawn Fain and the broader union bureaucracy for their silence
in the face of layoffs at Factory Zero and at GM and Ford electric
battery plants across Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee. “The UAW
apparatus has not called a single membership meeting, organized a single
protest, or issued a single concrete demand to stop these layoffs,”
Lehman said. “The bureaucracy’s silence is not passivity—it is
complicity.”
He reserved particular condemnation for Fain’s embrace of Trump’s
nationalist economic agenda. “The chauvinist nationalism of Fain and the
UAW apparatus aligns them directly with Trump,” Lehman said. “By
blaming ‘unfair trade’ and pitting American workers against their
brothers and sisters in Canada, Mexico and around the world, the UAW
bureaucracy functions as a tool of the very corporations that are
destroying workers’ livelihoods.”
“The fight of Mexican workers
against the transnational auto corporations is our fight. The
International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees is building
the unity of American, Canadian and Mexican workers against these
corporations, and that is the only program that can actually defend
jobs.”
Lehman stressed that his campaign for UAW president is
aimed not at a changing of the guard within the current bureaucratic
apparatus but at transferring genuine power to workers on the shop
floor. “This campaign is about waging a relentless fight against
capitalism, which subordinates every decision—what to produce, how to
produce it, who works and who doesn’t—to the needs of corporate owners.
That has to end. The transformation of the auto industry, including the
shift to electric vehicles and the use of automation and AI, must be
placed under democratic workers’ control and reorganized to meet social
needs, not the further enrichment of wealthy shareholders. The
squandering of trillions on war and destruction must end and society’s
resources used to raise the material and cultural conditions of all
working people.”
*****
The crisis at Factory Zero is unfolding within the broader context of an
accelerating collapse of manufacturing employment across the United
States in 2026. More than 100,000 American manufacturing workers have
lost their jobs since Trump entered office, driven by a combination of
AI-driven restructuring, tariff-related economic uncertainty and
corporate decisions to offshore production.
*****
Automation is being weaponized to lay off workers across entire
sectors, as workers are being made to pay for a looming economic crisis.
Companies like Ford—converting an EV battery plant into a data center
facility—exemplify the instability of the supply chain that the UAW once
celebrated as the foundation of a “just transition to EVs.”
Factory
Zero was inaugurated with fanfare in 2021 after GM invested $2.2
billion retooling the former Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly plant. President
Biden visited for a test drive of the electric Hummer. UAW leaders
proclaimed a bright future. Less than four years later, the plant has
been cut to a single shift, laid off repeatedly, and now sits idle
again. The UAW, which pledged to defend jobs in the transition to
electric vehicles, has offered workers nothing but platitudes and
silence.
The Teamsters and global logistics giant DHL announced a tentative
agreement Monday, blocking a strike of 6,000 workers across 16 states.
Workers had voted earlier in March to authorize strike action by 96
percent if they did not get a new deal before the old one expired on
March 31.
In a statement announcing the deal the union claimed the
agreement “includes a 20 percent wage increase, higher health and
welfare contributions, and critical job protections” as well as
“safeguards against AI-driven routing systems” and “autonomous
vehicles.”
The 20 percent over four years will barely keep pace
with inflation, worsened by economic shocks from the US war on Iran. A
recent report from the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and
Development (OECD) anticipates an inflation rate of 4.2 percent for
2026.
Full details of the Teamsters’ deal with DHL have not been
made available and the union has not stated when a contract vote will
occur, only that it will take place “in the coming weeks,” meaning that
workers will continue to work without a contract for weeks before a vote
occurs.
Moreover, wages for DHL workers are largely set by their
local supplemental contracts, so it is not clear what this 20 percent
figure represents. For locals across much of California and Nevada the
advertised wage increases would raise top pay for drivers from nearly
$40 an hour to $48 an hour in 2030 in some of the country’s most
expensive areas, barely behind the top rate of $49 an hour which UPS
drivers will have reached by 2027.
*****
There is every reason to believe that the claims about job security
are a lie. For weeks, the Teamsters bureaucrats loudly claimed they were
preparing to strike DHL, not to prepare workers for a struggle but to
market the contract as the product of a “credible strike threat.” This
bait-and-switch maneuver was used notoriously in 2023 to push through a
contract at UPS.
As soon as the contract was ratified, UPS began
laying off tens of thousands as part of its automation-led “Network of
the Future” restructuring. There were no protections against job losses
due to automation, only requiring that management give the union advance
notice.
For nearly three years, Teamsters officials have barely
even acknowledged one of the largest layoffs in the company’s history.
The Teamsters are even allowing UPS to deploy AI driver-facing cameras
despite claiming they had prohibited such devices in the contract.
*****
DHL is part of the same corporate entity as Deutsche Post, the German
post office, which was privatized in the 1990s. In 2025, Deutsche Post
announced 8,000 new layoffs.
At the US Postal Service, years into
its own restructuring project, the independent agency could run out of
money as soon as next February, setting the stage for the deepest cuts
in its history.
For years, DHL has been building partnerships with robotics companies
like Boston Dynamics and Robust.AI to design warehouses around
automated processes. DHL global head of digital transformation, Tim
Tetzlaff, told CNBC that the company had increased automation projects
from 240 in 2020 to 10,000 in 2026. These systems include fully
automated forklifts and product picking robots guided by artificial
intelligence technologies.
In 2023, DHL announced plans to build
four new automated warehouses in addition to the nine it already built,
four of which are in the US. It also announced interest in building five
more in the future.
Automation is also targeting truck and delivery drivers. In 2024, Supply Chain Dive
reported that DHL was partnering with Volvo VNL Autonomous to launch
two autonomous trucking routes in Texas, between Dallas and Houston, and
Fort Worth and El Paso. On DHL’s website the company also highlights
“outdoor autonomous vehicles” as a subject of interest for the
deployment of AI driven delivery vehicles. While they note that the
technology is several years away from widespread deployment, the company
is clearly keen to adopt new technologies that will displace thousands
of its highest-paid workers.
*****
The automation technology being deployed in the logistics industry
has the potential to greatly reduce the physical burden on workers,
increase efficiency, reduce working hours and improve safety. But it can
only be used for this purpose under the control of the working class
itself.
The fight against layoffs and workers’ control over new
technology requires the building of rank-and-file committees, in
opposition to the union bureaucracy. The Teamsters apparatus, headed by
the right-wing Sean O’Brien, cannot be reformed, because its interests
are intertwined with management and the corporate political
establishment. Instead, workers must organize to take back power in the
union by abolishing the bureaucracy and replacing it with genuinely
democratic organs made up of workers themselves.
With 90 percent of the oil which passes through the Strait of Hormuz
and 83 percent of the liquefied natural gas destined for Asia, the
region is at the center of the growing economic and financial crisis
precipitated by the US war on Iran. So much so that the closure of the
Strait is increasingly being described as an “Asian crisis.”
As
the war enters its second month, the price of Brent crude, the global
benchmark, has risen by 63 percent from its pre-war level, eclipsing the
previous record monthly rise of 46 percent following Iraq’s invasion of
Kuwait in 1990, amid warnings that there are more rises to come.
The economies of Southeast Asia, as well as those of India, Japan and Korea, are taking a double hit.
First,
there is the rise in the dollar-price of oil, and then there is the
additional hike resulting from the fall in their currencies in relation
to the dollar.
There is an interaction between the oil price hikes
and the hit to stock markets which is manifested in currency values.
The Indian stock market has experienced a major downturn with the two
major indexes, the Sensex and the Nifty 50, falling by 10.8 percent and
9.5 percent respectively so far this year.
This had led to an
outflow of foreign investor money, which in turn has pushed down the
value of the rupee. It has fallen 4.4 percent in the March quarter and
has hit a record low of 95 rupees to the dollar.
The Reserve Bank
of India has been intervening to try to maintain the value of the rupee
by demanding that Indian banks limit their dollar holdings. It has
insisted that they hold no more than $100 million at the end of each
business day. So far, the effect appears to have been minimal. On
Monday, after the restrictions were ordered, the rupee rose by 1.4
percent but then lost most of its gains by the end of the day.
One of the worst affected stock markets is that of South Korea. Earlier
this week, the Kospi index experienced another significant fall, taking
its total loss since it reached a record high in late February to 20
percent, passing the threshold which is considered the entry to bear
market territory.
Korean stocks have not only been hit by the oil price rises, the threat
of significant inflation and higher interest rates, but also by
developments in AI that can sharply reduce the amount of memory which is
needed to train AI large language models. Consequently, the shares of
the major chipmakers, Samsung and SK Hynix, have seen major falls.
*****
In the Philippines, higher oil prices and a fall in the peso have
delivered what has been called a “double whammy,” which is expected to
double the rate of inflation in coming months, if not weeks, hitting the
working class and the poorest sections of the population.
The
Marcos government, fearful of an upsurge in the working class—there has
already been a national transport workers’ strike—has declared a
national state of emergency. And it has, despite its vociferous
rhetoric, reached out to China to explore the possibility of joint
operations in the hotly-contested South China Sea to extract oil and
gas.
The currency turmoil has extended to Japan, with financial
officials raising the prospect of a major intervention in the market to
halt the slide of the yen.
*****
The Japanese finance minister, Satsuki Katayama, said she was watching developments with a high degree of urgency.
“It’s now reaching a point where it’s affecting the real economy and people’s daily lives,” she told a press conference.
These
remarks express the fear held by all governments in the region that
developments in the real economy—higher inflation combined with job
cuts—will provoke struggles by the working class.
The combined
effects of the oil price hikes and the deprecation of Asian currencies
has international ramifications, not least for the $30 trillion US
Treasury market.
Yesterday, the Financial Times reported
that “foreign central banks have slashed their holdings of Treasuries at
the New York Federal Reserve to their lowest level since 2012, as
countries sell US government bonds to prop up their economies and
currencies in the wake of the Iran war.”
*****
According to Brad Setser, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign
Relations, oil importers, including Turkey, India and Thailand, were
among those selling Treasuries to obtain dollars to buy oil and mitigate
the slide in their currencies.
The selloff comes amid the fall in
bond prices in the US, sparked by inflation fears in the short term.
The longer-term concern is that at some point the bond market is simply
not going to be able to absorb ever increasing US debt, now at $39
trillion and set to rise even further, as the Trump regime demands more
money for the military.
The numbers involved in the recent selloff
by central banks are not large at this stage. But the process does
illustrate the complex interconnectedness of the global economy and its
finances. It means that a crisis in one region, in this case centering
on the Asian economies and their currencies, can be rapidly transmitted
to the very heart of the international system.
Numbers of participants likened the rampage to the actions of US
President Donald Trump’s administration in Minneapolis, where
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have carried out a
reign of terror, including the murders of Renée Good and Alex Pretti in
January.
As the World Socialist Web Site stated, the
coordinated rampage on February 9, and the entire Herzog visit, was a
turning point in Australian politics. By backing the police repression
of dissent, the Labor governments signalled their full support for
imperialist war and barbarism, not just in Palestine but globally, and
their readiness to tear up basic democratic rights.
Eleven
parties, including Kurdish nationalists and nominally “left-wing”
groups in Türkiye, issued a statement appealing to the Erdoğan
government for "peace" without addressing US imperialist aggression
against Iran and across the Middle East.
Eleven Kurdish nationalist, Stalinist and pseudo-left parties —
including the Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party (DEM), the Workers’
Party of Turkey (TİP) and the Labour Party (EMEP) — issued a joint
statement Monday, “Call for Urgent Concrete Steps for Peace and
Democracy.” [1]
Despite the word “peace” appearing in the title of
the statement issued by parties that describe themselves as
“democratic,” “left” or “socialist,” it says nothing concrete about the
US-Israeli war of aggression against Iran, Israel’s invasion of Lebanon
or the genocide in Gaza.
What the 11 parties mean by “peace”
amounts to nothing more than advancing the ongoing negotiations between
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government and the Kurdistan Workers’
Party (PKK), led by imprisoned Abdullah Öcalan. By severing workers’
aspirations for peace and democracy from the international revolutionary
struggle against imperialism and confining them to negotiations with
the Erdoğan government, the statement prevents Turkish and Kurdish
workers and youth from confronting the real danger—the capitalist system
and the imperialist wars it generates—and politically disarms them.
The
statement promotes the illusion that “peace and democracy” can be
achieved by changing the policies of a bourgeois government. However,
since the beginning of the 20th century, Marxists have explained that
wars are inevitable in the epoch of imperialism and that the foundations
for lasting peace can only be laid through a world socialist
revolution. In 1915, amid World War I, Vladimir Lenin wrote:
Pacifism,
the preaching of peace in the abstract, is one of the means of duping
the working class. Under capitalism, particularly in its imperialist
stage, wars are inevitable. …
At the present time, the propaganda
of peace unaccompanied by a call for revolutionary mass action can only
sow illusions and demoralize the proletariat, for it makes the
proletariat believe that the bourgeoisie is humane, and turns it into a
plaything in the hands of the secret diplomacy of the belligerent
countries. In particular, the idea of a so-called democratic peace being
possible without a series of revolutions is profoundly erroneous.
In contrast to this approach, the statement puts forward a series of
concrete demands directed at the Erdoğan government: the withdrawal of
trustees appointed in place of elected mayors; the release of political
prisoners in accordance with rulings by the Turkish Constitutional Court
and the European Court of Human Rights; and an end to politically
motivated judicial operations targeting opposition parties.
These
are legitimate democratic demands that every worker and young person
should defend. However, a class and political gulf separates the
signatories of this statement from the perspective of the Sosyalist Eşitlik Partisi – Dördüncü Enternasyonal (Socialist Equality Party –
Fourth International). Rather than calling for these demands to be won
through the independent political mobilization of the working class, the
signatories advance the bankrupt perspective that they can be achieved
by pressuring and appealing to pro-imperialist bourgeois parties in
government.
Ahmad Othman, an activist against the genocide of the Palestinians, has
successfully sued against the second dismissal issued against him. On 26
March, the presiding judge at the Dortmund Labour Court, Dr. Kirchner,
ruled that “the employment relationship of the parties is not dissolved
by the dismissal by the defending state of 11 July, 2025.” Ahmad Othman
remains an employee of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW).
Ahmad had been active in Palestine Solidarity Duisburg (PSDU), which
the North Rhine-Westphalian state Interior Ministry under Herbert Reul
(Christian Democratic Union, CDU) banned on 16 May 2024. The young IT
specialist was immediately suspended—in June 2024—by his employer, the
State Agency for Quality Assurance and Information Technology in Teacher
Training (Laquila).
In mid-November, he received his notice of
dismissal, effective 31 December 2024. He successfully sued against
this. In April 2025, the Dortmund court ruled in the first instance that
the dismissal was invalid. The state of NRW then issued a second
dismissal in July 2025. The state withdrew an appeal against the first
dismissal in October 2025.
While the first trial was primarily
concerned with the alleged danger posed by Ahmad due to his membership
in PSDU and his work as an IT employee, the real reason for the
repression against him became clearer last week: “You just carry on,” as
lawyer Christian Althaus of the Kümmerlein law firm put it.
What
he meant was: Ahmad continues to draw attention to the genocide in
Palestine by the Israeli government and continues to protest publicly
against it. “You don’t play by the rules,” the lawyer told the state
employee.
The lawyer went on to say that Ahmad “does not distance
himself from his political standpoints” and distributes “symbols of
terrorist organizations” (referring to the inverted red triangle as an
identifying mark of Hamas). He added that the slogan “From the river to
the sea” and Ahmad’s appearance at a Palestine conference in Vienna were
“subversive.”
In Vienna, Ahmad had reported that he and his family “originally came
from Haifa.” The state of NRW accused him in both dismissals of being a
liar because he was born in Syria. In fact, his grandparents had been
driven out of Haifa by the Israelis, and Ahmad has a right of return to
their home, the village of Balad al-Sheikh near Haifa, registered with
the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the
Near East (UNRWA).
*****
It is clear that the attempt to force Ahmad Othman out of his job is
an act of deliberate political repression. The court again saw no
grounds for a dismissal under employment law. The judge emphasized several times that she was not evaluating the ban on the PSDU or the
alleged criminal liability of individual slogans. She was solely
evaluating whether the plaintiff’s behavior justified a dismissal. Her
verdict was “no.”
In both hearings before the Dortmund Labour
Court, it became apparent that Ahmad had never given cause for complaint
in the performance of his duties at Laquila. On the contrary, the state
agency was highly satisfied with his work.
In court, his lawyer drew a parallel to the “Radicals Decree” (Radikalenerlass)
passed by the federal and state governments in 1972 under Chancellor
Willy Brandt (Social Democrat, SPD). At that time, teachers, railway
workers, postmen and many others were removed from employment in the
public sector or not hired because they had been politically active on
the left.
*****
The claim in the first proceeding that Ahmad posed a danger as an IT
specialist was also briefly discussed in the second trial. However, when
asked by the judge whether there was any evidence of this, the state’s
Human Relations representative was forced to answer with a monosyllabic
“no.” Ahmad emphasized once again that he had neither the technical
access nor the will or motive to hack Laquila, other state authorities
or even the Interior Ministry, as the state had insinuated.
*****
After his first court victory, Ahmad was deregistered with the agency
but not reinstated by the state. Thus, all payments to him were stopped
again and he lost his health insurance cover. It was not until the end
of June in 2025 that the employment agency admitted that Ahmad had been
wrongly sanctioned and deregistered. Nevertheless, it took another month
for his unemployment benefit to be paid out.
When the judgement
from the first trial became legally binding and Ahmad stopped receiving
money from the employment agency, the state delayed his salary payments
for over four months. When these finally arrived, Ahmad discovered that
he had been incorrectly placed in tax class VI. As a result, his back
payments shrank. He was even expected to pay back taxes.
Because
the small courtroom held only 18 spectators, Ahmad reported on the
verdict to about twice as many supporters waiting outside the court
building after the trial and thanked them. At the conclusion, when he
shouted the slogan “From Dortmund to Gaza–Yalla Intifada,” he was seized
by the police and dragged away, allegedly to establish his identity.
The authorities have tried, unsuccessfully, to wear Ahmad down and
break him. He is one of many who are targeted to be intimidated into
silence. Anyone who opposes Germany’s imperialist interests is criminalized and gagged.
The actions against Ahmad and other
opponents of the genocide in Palestine and the Israeli government are
aimed at suppressing all opposition to the redivision of the world among
the imperialist powers. Israel serves the US and Germany as a military
bridgehead in the resource-rich and geopolitically central Middle East.
The genocide against the Palestinians, the current war against Iran and
the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, which has been going on for
years, are part of the same global war strategy.
Germany’s
economic and geopolitical interests, as well as the growing rejection of
the policies of the US, Israel and the German government by the
population, form the background to the harsh persecution of opponents of
the genocide in Gaza. This repression serves as a test run to crush
popular opposition to war and social devastation.
Stopping the genocide in Gaza and the wars in the Middle East and in
Ukraine requires the mobilization of the international working class in a
united struggle against capitalism—the root cause of war and
oppression. Against this background, Ahmad’s legal success against the
state of NRW is to be welcomed.
The agreement reached in Bad Breisig (Eifel region of the German
state of North Rhine-Westphalia) initially imposes a nine-month wage
freeze. Wages will not increase until January 2027, when they will rise
by 2.1%, followed by a 2.4% increase in January 2028. The old collective
bargaining agreement expired at the end of February; the new one has a
term of 27 months, running through May 2028.
Given the explosion
in energy prices and the rising inflation rate resulting from the war of
aggression against Iran, these modest nominal wage and salary increases
represent a significant decline in real wages. Currently, the official
inflation rate in Germany is still at 2.1%, but even the most optimistic
forecasts predict an increase of 2.5% to 2.6% in the coming year. If
rising energy prices also affect goods and services, the inflation rate
will be much higher.
The IGBCE, which has always been among the
most business-friendly unions, did not even put forward a concrete wage
demand in the negotiations due to the crisis threatening the profits of
industrial conglomerates. Led by Chairman Michael Vassiliadis, the union
leadership claimed it wanted to secure wages through an increase just
above inflation, but the final agreement exposes this as a fraud.
Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel Wuthering Heights is an astonishing
work of art. Its wild intensity has attracted many filmmakers, with
adaptations by directors as varied as William Wyler, Jacques Rivette and
Luis Buñuel.
It deals with two landowning families on the Yorkshire moors, the
Earnshaws at Wuthering Heights and the Lintons at Thrushcross Grange.
The destructive passions between them center on Heathcliff, the
Earnshaws’ fostered son. There is a fiery love between Heathcliff and
Catherine Earnshaw, but he is brutalized and alienated by her brother
Hindley.
Catherine loves Heathcliff but knows how low Hindley has
brought him, making him a servant. Catherine marries Edgar Linton, by
whom she has a daughter, Cathy Linton, dying soon after her child’s
birth. Having misunderstood Catherine’s feelings for him, an angry
Heathcliff exacts revenge on both families. He marries Edgar’s sister
Isabella and exploits Hindley’s gambling debts to take over Wuthering
Heights as mortgagee. After Hindley’s death, Heathcliff subjects
Hindley’s son Hareton to the treatment he had endured. Heathcliff also
tries to manipulate marriage between Cathy Linton and his own sickly and
vicious son Linton Heathcliff in an attempt to dominate the
landholding.
Wuthering Heights has what Charlotte Brontë
called a “storm-heated and electrical atmosphere.” Its force, its
genius, is an almost organic expression of this devastating personal
impact which has definite social roots in property relations. This is
not a novel of happy endings, although it is a novel of hope in the
possibility that they could exist.
*****
Heathcliff seems a force of nature, his love and passion twisted into
something vicious. Dark-complexioned and of mysterious origin, he is
presented as being alien to the world of the Earnshaws and Lintons.
Charlotte Brontë summarised the portrayal of this “unredeemed” figure,
saying that only occasional glimpses of human feeling prevented us from
saying “he was child neither of Lascar [a sailor or soldier from India]
nor gipsy, but a man’s shape animated by a demon life.”
The
passion between Heathcliff and Catherine is almost elemental. While much
of the book’s plot follows Catherine’s death, that passion dominates.
To
represent this on screen, many adaptations have omitted the stories of
Cathy, Linton and Hareton. New generations respond enthusiastically to
the emotional maelstrom, finding in it an expression of something that
resonates with all human experience. The consuming fires of Heathcliff
and Catherine’s passion are always contemporary, so new generations
continue to seek themselves in Wuthering Heights.
The
stories of the younger family members, however, allowed Brontë to show
Heathcliff’s self-destructive vengeance in full flow. Adaptations
without those narratives, therefore, have to find other ways of
maintaining the depths of the central passion and its effects, most
often through dominating central performances.
Wyler’s Heathcliff,
for example, was Laurence Olivier at his best. Few actors have reached
Olivier’s ability to combine love, self-hatred, passion and cruelty. But
too often critics have complained that adaptations have been
overwrought rather than intense.
This is perhaps the nicest comment that could be made about Emerald Fennell’s dreadful film.
School support workers at Leicester SEND school, Ash Field Academy
have voted to strike in support of Unison rep Tom Barker who was
summarily suspended from his role as a teaching assistant in October
2025.
The suspension took place days after members had voted to take industrial action against job losses.
Ash Field is a specialist school for children aged four to 19 with
complex medical conditions, serious physical disabilities, leading to
Profound and Multiple Learning Difficulties (PMLD) and/or Moderate
Learning Difficulties (MLD). Children come from Leicester,
Leicestershire and Rutland as well as out of the area.
*****
Its recent White Paper, “Every Child Achieving and Thriving”,
proposes an overhaul of the rights of children with SEND to access
education over the next decade. The measures will remove the statutory
right of hundreds of thousands of children to receive necessary support,
slash funding, and offload SEND provision onto cash-strapped schools
and exhausted teachers.
Educators must mobilize their collective
and independent strength against this offensive and in opposition to the
trade union bureaucracy who drive every dispute down a blind alley of
appeals to employers and the government.
The outrage expressed by
several unions to Barker’s suspension is hot air to cover their
complicity in imposing austerity and privatization of public services.
A
public meeting and rally was held on February 18 organized by the
Leicester and District Trades Union Council to call for Barker’s
reinstatement. Among the speakers in support was Zarah Sultana, MP for
Coventry South and a leading light within Your Party along with Jeremy
Corbyn. Sultana said that the decision to suspend Barker was an attack
on the right to protest, adding, “An attack on one is an attack on all.
Let’s fight back, let’s stand up together and let’s show that working
class people won’t be silenced, intimidated, or pushed aside.”
But
so far, the sentiment to “fight” has led only to 400 trade unionists,
plus new UNISON General Secretary Andrea Egan and 20 members of UNISON’s
National Executive Council, signing an open letter to demand Barker’s
reinstatement. Not a single union is mobilizing against cuts or the
anti-strike laws that block workers from mounting a struggle and the victimizations of their own members.
The suspension of Barker must be lifted and a unified campaign launched
to oppose the decimation of state education. The drive to privation,
cuts in education spending and the defense of the basic democratic
right to organize in the workplace can only be fought by the building of
independent rank and file committees.
On March 31, Italy’s far-right government, headed by fascist Prime
Minister Giorgia Meloni, denied the United States access to the
Sigonella airbase in Sicily during the March 2026 escalation against
Iran, in a move aimed at cultivating an image of “national autonomy.”
Defense
Minister Guido Crosetto confirmed that the refusal took place 'a few
nights ago' after it became clear that the required authorization had
not been granted in time for a parliamentary vote.
This decision,
widely reported as a sign of friction between Rome and Washington, has
been cynically presented as evidence of an independent Italian foreign
policy that rejects war. It is nothing of the sort. It is an expression
of the growing disintegration of NATO and the breakdown of the postwar
equilibrium long anchored in the uncontested hegemony of the United
States.
The refusal was not based on any principled opposition to
the imperialist war drive against Iran. It rested on two interrelated
factors: a narrow procedural dispute over authorization protocols, and,
far more significantly, the explosive growth of anti-war sentiment
within the Italian working class, which has begun to destabilize the
Meloni government itself.
While all parties hypocritically invoke
Article 11 of the Italian Constitution which rejects war as an
instrument of national policy, Italy remains deeply integrated into the
US-led war machine. Its territory hosts a dense network of bases,
logistical hubs and intelligence facilities central to operations across
the Mediterranean and Middle East.
Sigonella has long functioned
as a key node for surveillance drones, refueling and weapons transfers,
alongside installations such as Aviano Air Base, Camp Darby and naval
facilities in Naples and Taranto.
The Meloni government has not
curtailed this cooperation. On the contrary, it has expanded Italy’s
role in imperialist operations, providing logistical support, including
overflight permissions and intelligence-sharing. Italian bases and
airspace continue to be used routinely for military staging.
On
the same day that Meloni made the “reassuring” statements over Iran,
Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani joined his European counterparts in Kyiv
to reaffirm Italy’s support for Ukraine’s accession to the European
Union.
The denial of access to the US is selective and tactical,
not strategic. It reflects a widening divergence within NATO between the
global imperatives of US imperialism and the domestic and geopolitical
constraints confronting its European allies.
According to news reports, Oracle has begun a sweeping layoff
campaign that is impacting as many as 30,000 workers globally. The
reports say the tech corporation sent termination notices by email
starting at 6:00 a.m. on Tuesday.
Segments of the email have been
published by Business Insider and other websites, though the full
message has not been officially released by Oracle. The quoted text
says: “After careful consideration of Oracle’s current business needs,
we have made the decision to eliminate your role as part of a broader
organizational change. As a result, today is your last working day.”
The
portions published also say affected employees must provide a personal
email address for severance follow-up and that access to company systems
will be deactivated soon. Oracle has not issued a press statement or
provided official reasons for the job cuts.
Neither has the global
corporation—which has approximately 162,000 employees
worldwide—publicly disclosed an exact number of layoffs. Reporting
indicates the company is cutting thousands of jobs, with some accounts
placing the figure as high as 18 percent of the workforce, or even
20,000 to 30,000 positions.
Reuters has reported that Oracle is
laying off thousands of employees, while earlier reporting said the cuts
could begin in March and affect multiple departments as part of
restructuring tied to artificial intelligence (AI) data-center spending.
Reporting
from Business Insider and Reuters also says Oracle is trimming staff as
it pours money into the data centers, with some positions reportedly
targeted because the company believes they will be made redundant.
The
layoffs were communicated with no warning to the affected workers.
Employees in the United States, India, Canada, Mexico and Uruguay
reportedly received messages from “Oracle Leadership” in the morning,
with no prior notice from human resources or managers.
This method
of mass layoffs has followed the now-common corporate practice of using
abrupt digital communications to implement job cuts and avoiding any
meaningful confrontation with the workforce. The language in the email
reportedly reduced the destruction of livelihoods to a bland “broader
organizational change.”
Some workers have openly expressed their anger, especially on Reddit and
other social media accounts, as they described the layoff method as
“evil,” “disgusting” and “cowardly.” One widely circulated account
quoted a family member saying, “My dad has worked for Oracle for 20
years. … Not even a phone call. These companies are evil.”
*****
Wall Street responded enthusiastically to the announcement as
Oracle’s shares rose 4 percent to 6 percent on the layoff news. The
reports in the financial press framed the cuts as a sign of “AI
efficiencies” and a cost-saving move to help the company’s market
position in the context of the expensive data-center expansion.
Oracle’s announcement comes amid the continuing wave of tech layoffs in 2025 and 2026. Previously, the World Socialist Web Sitereported that tech giants led all industries in layoffs in 2025,
with more than 153,000 job cuts through November, and that AI and
automation were central to major reductions at Microsoft, Intel, Amazon,
Verizon and HP.
The World Socialist Web Site report also noted that the announcement
of layoffs at Block is especially revealing because it shows an
ideological shift in the tech industry. Block CEO Jack Dorsey bragged
that “the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with
smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working,” while
insisting the company was “ahead of the curve” and that “within the next
year” most companies would make similar structural changes.
In
other words, the corporate and financial elite are boasting that AI
implementation is being used as a mechanism for intensifying
exploitation, cutting labor costs and transferring the gains of
productivity to shareholders and executives.
Oracle is one of the central firms in enterprise computing, database
software, cloud services and business applications used by governments,
banks, hospitals, retailers and large corporations around the world. Its
software and cloud infrastructure sit deep inside the operations of
global capitalism, making the company strategically important far beyond
the tech sector itself.
*****
Oracle is a giant on Wall Street with market capitalization reported
at roughly $422.5 billion in late March 2026. Reuters and other
financial reporting noted that Oracle shares had suffered steep declines
in recent months even while the company attempted to reassure investors
through earnings and other AI-related announcements.
Larry
Ellison, Oracle’s cofounder and longtime chairman, has become one of the
defining tech billionaires of the Trump era. Ellison has a long history
of support for Trump, while he has been an advocate of Trump’s
interventions into business matters as president, such as the takeover
of TikTok by US corporations from China’s ByteDance conglomerate and
Stargate, the AI infrastructure venture unveiled at the White House.
Ellison’s
personal wealth is estimated in 2026 at between $225.8 billion and $393
billion, depending on the index and date. Both Forbes’ real-time wealth
list and Bloomberg place Ellison at sixth richest person in the world.
*****
AI is not being used to eliminate jobs only in the tech industry,
although the industry is leading all others in job cuts. Across business
generally, AI is being used in three interlocking ways: to justify
layoffs, to speed up restructuring and to extract more output from fewer
workers.
In customer service and support, AI is being deployed to
replace human agents with chatbots, automated ticketing systems and
AI-assisted “self-service” tools that eliminate the jobs of live
workers. While material from Salesforce claims AI is creating “new”
roles, firms are widely using AI to compress staffing, flatten teams and
make fewer workers do more work under constant monitoring.
In finance, the jobs elimination drive is similar: banks and
financial firms are using AI for data entry, reconciliation, fraud
detection, forecasting and trading analysis, which allows them to reduce
back-office labor and narrow the number of staff needed for clerical
and analytical work. CNBC reported that JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs
are already using AI to reduce their workforce, while executives across
business have warned that white-collar tasks could be fully automated,
making the threat to jobs systemic rather than temporary.
For
workers, the message from Oracle and its peers is unmistakable. AI is
being turned into a corporate bludgeon on livelihoods, while the
billionaires who control these firms and their Wall Street backers
celebrate “efficiency” and “transformation” with the expectation that
earnings, dividends and stock values will increase.
In a massive repudiation of the United Auto Workers bureaucracy,
Nexteer Automotive workers in Saginaw, Michigan rejected a
concessions-laden contract backed by the UAW in a near unanimous vote.
According to UAW Local 699, workers rejected the deal by 96.2 percent,
with 98 percent of production workers and 82.8 percent of skilled trades
workers voting down the UAW-backed deal.
The voting started Wednesday and concluded Thursday morning. Workers who spoke to the World Socialist Web Site
on Wednesday as the vote was underway delivered a devastating verdict
on the contract—denouncing its expansion of a two-tier wage system,
unaffordable healthcare costs, poverty-level pay for new hires, and the
role of the United Auto Workers bureaucracy in imposing it.
As the
WSWS reported last week, the tentative agreement creates a new layer of
“third-class employees” among new hires, who would start at $19.05 an
hour—compared to $22.50 for current workers and $24.75 for legacy
workers hired before May 2021. After four years, wages for new hires
would rise only to $20.89. The deal also sharply increases out-of-pocket
healthcare costs for workers hired after May 2021, with weekly
contributions for a married couple with children more than doubling from
$26.50 to $53.34. A workers’ leaflet was being circulated at the plant
entitled “Concessions our Leadership fails to tell you.”
Workers were blunt in their anger. A veteran Nexteer employee with
three decades on the job tied the contract’s failures to the broader
decay of living standards and the widening gulf between workers and the
corporate elite.
“Health care costs are already excessive for new
workers because they’re already paying $25 a week,” he said. “I have
been here for 29 years and we aren’t paying anything. They all have
families and cost of living is up for everybody. So, I think we all
ought to be equal and that’s what the UAW is for. This contract just
creates the separation and the gap between the new and older workers.”
His
frustration extended to the decades of stagnation in his own wages. “If
this contract passes, in four years I’ll be making the exact same
amount as I made 20 years ago. Our cost of living hasn’t gone down in 20
years. So how is it I’m making the same amount of money as pay rates 20
years ago when the CEO’s pay doesn’t go down that drastically? We
deserve an increase that equals the cost of living.”
The squeeze
of rising costs, exacerbated by Trump’s criminal war against Iran, was
immediate and personal. “I live 78 miles from here. So I’ve doubled my
gas cost every week to go back and forth to work. It happened overnight.
But my pay doesn’t change. Now I just have to budget what I can afford
to spend on food, groceries and bills.”
*****
A strike at Nexteer’s Saginaw facility would not be a local affair.
The plant is a critical supplier of steering systems to some of the most
profitable vehicles in North America. Production stoppages would
rapidly cascade across the industry.
Vehicles dependent on
Saginaw-produced steering systems include the Ford F-150 and F-150
Lightning EV, the Ford Mustang, Bronco and Escape; General Motors
Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra—the best-selling trucks in the
country—as well as the GMC Hummer EV, Cadillac Escalade, Cadillac XT6,
Chevrolet Traverse and Buick Enclave; and Stellantis’s Ram 1500, Dodge
Charger, Dodge Challenger, Jeep Grand Cherokee and Jeep Avenger.
International models including the BMW 1-Series, Fiat 500 and Linea,
BYD Song Pro/Plus, Chery Tiggo 8 PHEV and Zeekr 001 EV also depend on
components produced here.
This is precisely why the UAW
bureaucracy is working so hard to prevent a strike. The leverage that
Nexteer workers possess is immense—which makes the bureaucracy’s
determination to suppress it all the more deliberate and calculated.
At the same time, workers pointed out that Nexteer has moved many
operations to lower-wage countries, including Mexico and Poland. “If we
strike, they can just ship everything out. They’ve already pretty much
turned plants four and seven into ghost towns,” one worker said.
This
points to the need for building international solidarity. The veteran
worker recounted a formative conversation with a woman who had trained
workers in Mexico for Ford parts production. “She said they were happy
with what they got when they first got it. But then after they realized
what they had to do every day, and then what the company was making,
then they realized that they wanted to be unionized and start to get a
good daily wage.
*****
Last week, Will Lehman—a Mack Trucks worker running for UAW president—called on Nexteer workers to reject the contract and establish
rank-and-file committees to ensure vote integrity, prepare for strike
action under the direct control of workers, and extend solidarity to
auto parts workers striking in Findlay, Ohio, and throughout Mexico.
The
mass opposition among Nexteer workers to this contract reflects a
broader awakening. Workers are drawing connections—between their poverty
wages and the fortunes being accumulated at the top, between their
local struggle and the wars being fought on the other side of the world
in the name of “billionaires needing more money,” and between their own
fight and that of workers in Mexico and beyond. The task now is to
transform that opposition into organized, independent action under the
democratic control of the workers themselves.
