Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. The “Global Progressive Mobilization”: A bankrupt spectacle in Barcelona
It was not a gathering of opponents of austerity, repression and war, but of their administrators. It was not a mobilization against the far right, but a convention of the very parties and state functionaries whose policies have created the conditions for its advance. It was not a defense of democracy, but an exercise in political branding by representatives of governments that defend oligarchic wealth, fortify the repressive powers of the state and support imperialist violence all over the world.A very low bar has been set for what now passes as “progressivism.” The term has been emptied of all serious content. It now embraces virtually every politician to the left of Attila the Trump. To qualify as a “progressive” today, one need do little more than impose socially regressive policies with a humane tone of voice, shed a symbolic tear for the poor while attacking wages and social programs, offer ritual sympathy for migrants while fortifying borders against them, and emit a sigh of regret over imperialist slaughter while funding, arming and defending it.
In an earlier period, however limited and bourgeois in character, “progressivism” implied social reform, democratic rights, hostility to entrenched privilege and, in some measure, opposition to the more predatory forms of capitalist exploitation. Today, it signifies the effort to place a morally presentable face on austerity, repression and war.
The roster of speakers made clear what this gathering actually was.
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Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez:
...president of the moribund Socialist International, heads a government that is increasing military spending to record levels, attacking migrants and imposing austerity.
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Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva:
...once presented as the voice of workers and the poor, now a veteran manager of Brazilian capitalism.
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South African President Cyril Ramaphosa:
As president, he oversaw the starving to death of more than 100 zama zama miners at the beginning of this year.
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Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum:
...representing a government that speaks in mildly reformist phrases while deploying the Mexican National Guard against workers and migrants at Washington’s behest.
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German Vice Chancellor and Social Democratic Party co-leader Lars Klingbeil:
...whose government is overseeing a massive €1 trillion military and infrastructure spending plan aimed at making Germany “fit for war.”
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United Kingdom Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy:
[who] last year... was responsible for stonewalling lawyers and doctors attempting to meet with young people on hunger strike after being arrested for protesting the genocide in Gaza.
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To describe such a gathering as “progressive” is not merely to deprive the word of meaning. It is to legitimize political fraud.
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Of course, we cannot neglect the representatives from the United States. The two American Democrats in attendance—Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz—performed the function assigned to the Democratic Party. Walz actually spoke the word “Trump,” calling him a “feeble-minded, trigger-happy president” who had launched the Iran war “where no threat was present, with no clear objectives and no exit plan.” Murphy declared that “Donald Trump is out to end our democracy” and that “we are not on the verge of a totalitarian takeover, we are in the middle of it.”
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In their mouths, such phrases are empty. If the United States is in the midst of a totalitarian transformation—and here what Murphy said was true—the Democratic Party is not fighting it but adapting itself to it. It votes for war budgets for the military-intelligence apparatus, backs the machinery of repression and blocks any independent political movement of the working class.
Hillary Clinton, one of the principal architects of the regime-change operations that devastated Libya and Syria, was granted the honor of a video address. The organizers evidently concluded that no conclave of political frauds would be complete without a benediction from one of the high priestesses of imperialist regime change.
Nor, for that matter, would such a gathering be complete without the presence of Zohran Mamdani.
The newly elected mayor of New York City and member of the Democratic Socialists of America delivered a video message that was revealing precisely for its emptiness. Mamdani, elevated through the familiar pseudo-left process of making social promises while remaining safely within the framework of the Democratic Party, thanked Sánchez for convening the summit, observed that there were many crises and conflicts in the world, noted that rent is high and called for collective action against inequality.
What he did not say was more important. He did not mention Trump. He did not mention Iran. He did not mention Gaza. He did not mention Lebanon. He did not mention the deportation operations being carried out against immigrants in New York. He did not even use the word “war.”
Mamdani and the DSA exist to absorb radical sentiment, strip it of political clarity and redirect it into the dead end of Democratic Party politics. In a speech on his 100 days in office a week ago, Mamdani focused his record of achievements on the filling in of potholes, in what he called “pothole politics.” “The phrase deserves to survive, if only as an accidental monument to the political bankruptcy it was meant to disguise.
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The ruling classes of every major country are arming to the teeth. They are cultivating fascist movements as battering rams against the working class. The war against Russia, the genocide in Gaza, and the bombardment of Iran and Lebanon are the opening stages of a new imperialist conflagration. And in the face of all this, the assembled “progressives” in Barcelona produced 15 agreements, a critical-minerals deal, a proposed UN panel on inequality and a reforestation target.
The shamelessness of it all was almost breathtaking. Faced with war, dictatorship and social collapse, they answered with bureaucratic vapor.
The pretense of opposition to Trump, stripped of all verbiage, comes down to this: a request that he moderate his rhetoric, consult his allies and observe proper diplomatic etiquette before ordering the next bombing—and prosecute the war against Russia.
The task facing the working class is not to pressure these people, or to wait upon them. It is to break politically from the parties they represent—from the Democratic Party in the United States, from the PSOE, PT, SPD, Labour and their pseudo-left satellites—and to build in every country an independent movement of the working class, armed with an international socialist program.
That is the only basis on which fascism, dictatorship and imperialist war can be fought. Nothing in Barcelona pointed in that direction. Everything was designed to prevent it.
2. US seizes Iran-bound ship from China in Arabian Sea
US Marines boarded and seized an Iranian-flagged container ship in the Gulf of Oman on Sunday after the destroyer USS Spruance put five-inch shells through its engine room. It was the first time a US warship had fired on a merchant ship since the blockade of Iran began on February 28.
The seizure—an act of international piracy, wholly illegal under international law—marks a new escalation of the 52-day-old US-Israeli war on Iran. It comes two days before the scheduled expiration of a nominal ceasefire between the United States and Iran.
The ship, the M/V Touska, was bound for Bandar Abbas. Over the six weeks before the seizure, it had twice docked at Zhuhai, in southern China.
In a report Monday, the Wall Street Journal identified the Touska as part of a fleet operated by a subsidiary of the Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines that “often sails to China, one of Tehran’s most important backers.”
The Touska has been under US Treasury sanctions since 2018. The US military has not disclosed its cargo. A search of the 965-foot ship will follow once tugs bring it in.
The seizure extends a pattern of US attacks on Russian and Chinese shipping that began with the military campaign against Venezuela. US President Donald Trump ordered a blockade of Venezuelan oil exports beginning last December 17. This has accompanied a series of missile strikes on small boats in the Caribbean and Pacific that have killed at least 181 people and that Human Rights Watch has called extrajudicial killings. Since December, the US Navy has boarded and seized at least 10 tankers carrying Venezuelan crude.
The Russian-flagged Marinera, formerly the Bella 1, was seized on January 7 in the North Atlantic south of Iceland while under Russian navy escort, including a submarine. Navy SEALs carried out the boarding, ferried by Army special operations helicopters and watched over by AC-130J gunships and P-8 surveillance planes. A Chinese-operated tanker, the M Sophia, was taken in the Caribbean the same month. On February 9, the US Navy captured the tanker Aquila II in the Indian Ocean with 700,000 barrels of Venezuelan crude that were bound for China.
Since February 28, the US military has stopped 25 ships off Iran and turned them back. Roughly 230 loaded oil tankers now sit trapped inside the Persian Gulf.
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The two-week ceasefire is set to lapse at midnight Wednesday, April 22. In an interview Monday with Bloomberg News, Trump said it was “highly unlikely” he would extend it.
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On Friday, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi posted on X that the Strait of Hormuz was open to commercial shipping on a route hugging the Iranian coast. Nineteen ships transited the strait on Friday and Saturday morning—the first cargo to move through since the war began 51 days earlier.
On Saturday afternoon, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps gunboats fired on two Indian-flagged ships without the standard radio warnings. That evening, the Revolutionary Guard overruled Araghchi and announced the strait was re-closed.
“No vessel should make any movement from its anchorage in the Persian Gulf and the Sea of Oman,” the Guard’s statement read. “Approaching the Strait of Hormuz will be considered as cooperation with the enemy.”
India’s Foreign Ministry summoned the Iranian ambassador. On Sunday morning, the USS Spruance stopped the Touska.
Within hours, US President Donald Trump had posted a burst of messages on Truth Social threatening to destroy the civilian infrastructure on which 90 million Iranians depend. “The United States is going to knock out every single Power Plant, and every single Bridge, in Iran. NO MORE MR. NICE GUY!”
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On the ABC News Sunday interview program, “This Week,” US Ambassador to the United Nations Michael Waltz defended Trump’s threat. Destroying civilian power stations and bridges, he said, “is not a war crime.” He cited the Allied strategic bombing campaigns in the Second World War as precedent.
By Monday’s close, US oil futures rose about 7 percent to $89.61 a barrel; Brent crude settled near $97. The American Automobile Association posted a nationwide average gasoline price of $4.05 a gallon.
International Air Transport Association Director General Willie Walsh warned of jet fuel shortages forcing flight cancellations across Europe by the end of May. Goldman Sachs has modeled a Brent price of $135 in an extended closure of the Strait of Hormuz; Oxford Economics has modeled a peak of $190 a barrel and a world downturn exceeded in the last four decades only by the 2008 crash and the COVID shock.
Al Jazeera puts the Iranian dead at 2,076, among them 240 women and 212 children. The independent Iranian human rights monitor HRANA puts the toll at 3,636.
The Iranian Red Crescent Society counts 339 damaged hospitals and clinics, 857 schools and 32 universities. The UN refugee agency estimates that between 600,000 and a million Iranian households—up to 3.2 million people—have been driven from their homes. Iran’s government puts the monetary damage at $270 billion.
The Lebanon ceasefire signed at midnight April 17 was broken within 48 hours. UN experts, quoted by Al Jazeera, describe the Israeli pattern in southern Lebanon as “domicide.”
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz has ordered the demolition of Lebanese houses along a 10-kilometer “Yellow Line” that runs across 55 villages; residents of those villages have been barred from returning to them. “We have not yet finished the job,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said.
3. White House sends delegation to deliver war ultimatum to Cuba
Following mounting reports the Pentagon is acting on Trump administration orders to accelerate preparations for military action against Cuba, the White House has dispatched the first high-level US delegation to the island since 2016.
While that earlier visit, led by Barack Obama, took place under conditions of a temporary diplomatic reopening, the actions of the latest delegation bear all the hallmarks of an ultimatum preceding aggression.
The delegation arrived in Havana on April 10 aboard a US government aircraft and presented a sweeping set of demands to the Cuban government. These included a two-week deadline to release high-profile political prisoners, implement sweeping market reforms, expand the private sector and attract foreign investment.
The demands, delivered during what US officials described as a “secret meeting,” were accompanied by calls for compensation to American corporations and individuals whose assets were nationalized following the 1959 revolution.
Washington further insisted on “greater political freedoms” culminating in so-called “free and fair elections,” a familiar pretext for regime-change operations across the globe.
Far from representing genuine diplomacy, these talks recall the pattern employed by US imperialism in the lead-up to military interventions in countries such as Iran and Venezuela: declare the target government noncompliant, and then claim that all peaceful avenues have been exhausted.
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Active military preparations are already underway. According to reports by CiberCuba, the US Navy has flown at least two surveillance missions using the high-altitude MQ-4C Triton drone in less than a week. The aircraft was detected circling the island on April 17 and again on Monday, based on publicly available tracking data.
These reconnaissance flights are widely understood as precursors to potential military action.
Trump himself has repeatedly declared that Cuba is “next” following US operations targeting Iran, as his administration announces a “Greater North America” doctrine to reassert dominance across the hemisphere.
The internal situation in Cuba, meanwhile, is marked by both concessions to imperialist pressure and growing fears of imminent attack. Cuban Deputy Prime Minister Oscar Pérez-Oliva Fraga recently declared that “there are no limitations” on investment from the Cuban diaspora, explicitly appealing to Cuban exile capitalists in Miami, many of whom have historically backed terrorist attacks and coup attempts against the island.
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Workers must carefully study the fate of Venezuela following military aggression. A January 3 military operation led to the kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores, who now face terrorism charges in a US court. In the aftermath, a puppet regime aligned with US interests was installed, handing over control of oil, minerals and the broader economy to American corporations and the US Treasury.
However bad the economic situation was in Venezuela, it has only grown worse for workers, who have protested against the government and US embassy demanding living wages. Cuba would meet a similar fate under a pro-US regime, which would seek to attract investments on the basis of maintaining desperate conditions to coerce workers to accept extremely low wages and sweatshop conditions.
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Having already imposed devastating sanctions and blockades, Washington now insists that Cuba open itself fully to foreign capital—effectively demanding surrender in exchange for the possibility of relief.
The alternative posed by US imperialism is not democracy or prosperity, but the restoration of a neocolonial order reminiscent of the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, under which Cuba functioned as a playground for foreign capital and organized crime.
The escalating threat of war against Cuba must be opposed by workers throughout the Americas and internationally. Workers in the United States, in particular, bear a decisive responsibility. Through their collective power over production and distribution, they have the capacity to break the embargo and halt the machinery of war. This requires an independent political mobilization, as part of a broader struggle against capitalism and for socialist internationalism.
4. Thousands march in London against housing crisis, but capitalist politicians offer no way forward
Several thousand people marched through central London on Saturday in a national housing demonstration organized by the London Renters Union (LRU) and allied campaign groups. Demonstrators assembled in Soho Square Gardens and marched along Oxford Street to Berkeley Square, demanding rent controls and council housing.
Workers attending the rally gave voice to widespread anger over the housing affordability crisis. Between 40 and 50 percent of all working age adults across the UK are struggling to meet housing costs or falling behind on payments.
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Workers are facing an economic order in which housing has been subordinated to speculation, finance and private profit. A statement issued by the Socialist Equality Party, “The socialist answer to the housing crisis in Britain”, was distributed by SEP members, with some attendees asking for multiple copies to distribute in their area.
The statement explained: “Housing has been transformed over the past 45 years into a speculative arena for the enrichment of the banks and major institutional and private investors”. It linked this to the domination of the oligarchy over every aspect of life, explaining: “The housing affordability crisis testifies to the parasitism and non-productive nature of modern capitalism. The UK has 156 billionaires, with the 50 richest families owning more wealth than 34 million people. Society can no longer afford the rich! The wealth of the billionaires must be confiscated and directed to meet urgent social needs.”
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Under reactionary new Ground 7B regulations, entire households can be evicted with only two weeks’ notice if even one tenant is deemed to have “no right to rent” under immigration law. The result is not the curbing of landlord power, but its legal reorganization into a more codified, efficient and in some cases broader eviction machinery.
The Shelter charity reports that since Labour was elected more than 30,700 Section 21 claims were issued and more than 15,000 households were removed by bailiffs under the no-fault procedure, while tenant groups have reported a last-minute surge of landlords trying to push through evictions before the May 1, 2026 deadline.
5. Federal court orders release of El Gamal family after 10 months in ICE detention
A federal court in Texas has ordered the release of Hayam El Gamal and her five children after more than 10 months of vindictive imprisonment by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Trump administration at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center, a for-profit detention camp operated by CoreCivic in south Texas.
The Texas Tribune reported Monday that the El Gamal family, including 5-year-old twins, is “believed to be among the longest detained” at the Dilley facility, which first opened in 2014 under the Obama administration.
On Monday, US Magistrate Judge Elizabeth S. Chestney issued a 33-page Report and Recommendation finding that the El Gamal family’s amended habeas corpus petition should be granted and that the family should be released from ICE custody.
A habeas corpus petition is one of the oldest legal mechanisms for challenging unlawful detention. Its purpose is to require the government to justify why it is holding a person in custody. In the El Gamal case, the family challenged not a final removal order, but the procedures that kept them locked up after an immigration judge had previously found that they could be released on bond.
Attorney Eric Lee announced the development Monday on X, writing: “I am thrilled to report the El Gamal family's habeas petition was GRANTED. The family has been ordered released.” Lee credited attorneys Chris Godshall-Bennett, Niels Frenzen and Rebecca Webber as the federal court legal team.
Importantly, Lee noted that “despite the court’s ruling, the family has not yet been released.” A hearing is scheduled for Thursday but Lee called on the federal government to release the family now, noting that ICE “continues to detain them even though a court has held that their prolonged detention violates the Constitution.”
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The federal court ruling itself underscores the significance of the family’s prolonged detention. The magistrate judge noted that the family includes “a mother with five children, ages 18, 16, 9, and twin five-year-olds,” and that their detention, then over 10 months long, had become especially grave because “each additional day a child is detained increases the risk of severe and lasting adverse effects on their psychological and physical development.”
The court decision is a significant victory, but only a first step. The family remains detained and in removal proceedings. The Dilley camp remains open. ICE and Customs and Border Protection goons continue to imprison, abuse and kill immigrants and citizens across the country. And the Trump administration, backed by congressional Republicans, is seeking to secure years of funding for the immigration Gestapo even as the Department of Homeland Security shutdown approaches 70 days.
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Under current immigration procedures, many detainees must prove that they are neither a danger nor a flight risk in order to win release. Chestney concluded that, under the specific facts of this case, forcing the El Gamal family to prove a negative while the government used aggressive procedural maneuvers to keep them imprisoned violated due process. “In this case,” she wrote, “the Government’s aggressive tactics taken to prevent Petitioners’ release on bond combined with the allocation of the burden of proof on Petitioners to prove they are not a flight risk together violated Petitioners’ right to procedural due process.”
The release order is a blow to the Trump administration’s campaign of collective punishment against the family. But it does not end the danger facing them, or thwart the drive of the ruling class to impose a presidential dictatorship.
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The actual release of the El Gamal family would be a welcome development. But the very fact that it required emergency litigation, public pressure and a federal habeas petition to free a mother and five children who had committed no crime is an indictment of the entire system.
What the US government did to the El Gamal family, it will do to others. The assault on immigrants is the spearhead of a broader attack on the democratic rights of the entire working class. A state that claims the power to imprison children, deny urgent medical care, override court rulings, intimidate supporters and impose collective punishment on innocent people is asserting powers that will be used ever more broadly against workers, students, protesters and all opponents of dictatorship and war.
6. Disney carries out “massive layoffs,” while Sony, SnapChat, Artnet do their own job slashing
Relentless downsizing in the arts, entertainment and creative industries continues with layoffs at Disney, Sony Pictures, SnapChat, Bad Robot and Artnet. The application of artificial intelligence (AI) tools and the desire of investors for quick returns are often driving forces.
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Last week, Walt Disney Company’s new CEO Josh D’Amaro announced in a memo what Forbes magazine described as “massive layoffs.” The giant conglomerate, D’Amaro reported, would lay off over 1,000 workers, to “streamline operations.” These include jobs in studios, television networks and sports. Particularly hard hit will be workers in the Marvel Studios Visual Development department. These include a wide variety of specialists responsible for the look of Marvel’s various film and television productions.
Unlike artists hired for a single film, these long-term illustrators, character designers and environment specialists were a part of a single, unified endeavor of “world-building” years before film production commenced. They translated, for example, comic book costumes into cinematic form. By shifting this in-house team to a project-based freelance model, the studio loses over a decade of knowledge from the creative workers who ensured that hundreds of disparate characters and places felt like part of a single cohesive unit.
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Big investors were enthusiastic about the job destruction. Business Insider reported that “Disney shares rose 1.6% on Tuesday as the S&P 500 climbed 1.1%, and the stock gained steam after news of the layoffs broke.”
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The level of inequality that the stock market helps to produce was not lost on hundreds of thousands of readers on social media. One comment that went viral on Reddit after the layoffs were announced said, “They pay the CEO $45M to play golf and fire the people who actually draw the movies. If the CEO took even a 10% pay cut, half these jobs could be saved tomorrow.”
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On April 7, Sony Pictures Entertainment made public plans to eliminate “a few hundred” of its workers in film, television and corporate divisions globally. CEO Ravi Ahuja has characterized these cuts as a “strategic pivot” to align the company with specific high-growth sectors.
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The layoffs include junior and middle management roles in Sony’s Motion Picture Group, and positions will be lost from the streamlining of production and marketing units, the reorganizing of its TV Game Show Group. The company will lay off administrative and operational workers at its Culver City headquarters and global offices. Sony will also shut down Pixomondo, its visual effects and virtual production studio, which it acquired in 2022.
In his memo to staff, Ahuja shed a few crocodile tears about the “difficult decisions” affecting “talented people who have contributed meaningfully to our work and culture. … I know this kind of change can feel uncertain and raise questions.”
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On April 15, Evan Spiegel, the co-founder and CEO of Snap Inc., the parent company of the social media app Snapchat, announced in an internal memo to all employees that the firm is cutting 1,000 jobs, some 16 percent of the company’s global workforce.
In the memo, Spiegel framed the layoffs as a necessary response to a “crucible moment” for the company, driven by two primary factors: the need for financial profitability and the rapid advancement of Artificial Intelligence. Like Ahuja, he too found the job-cutting “an incredibly difficult decision.” Spiegel’s personal net worth, according to Forbes, is $2.2 billion.
The move follows intense pressure from Irenic Capital Management, holding a 2.5 percent stake that urged Spiegel to “optimize” the company’s portfolio and slash annualized expenses by over $500 million. Irenic specifically targeted Snap’s expensive projects, notably its Specs augmented reality glasses division, which has consumed $3.5 billion in capital and reportedly loses $500 million annually.
By eliminating these roles and closing 300 additional open positions, Snap has aimed to reassure investors of its commitment to profitability, a strategy that saw the company’s stock rise nearly 8 percent immediately following the announcement.
In the art world proper, dozens of editorial employees have been laid off by the visual arts web platform Artnet, following a merger with Artsy on April 16. Beowolff Capital, the investment firm founded by former Goldman Sachs partner Andrew Wolff, acquired both web platforms, the two most significant in the visual art world, in 2025. Artnet is a multi-faceted platform that serves as both a marketplace for buying and selling art and the industry’s primary art market tracker.
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In another downsizing move, publishing giant Condé Nast is ceasing publication of Self magazine after 47 years. It is also closing the international editions of Glamour in Germany, Spain and Mexico. This will result in the loss of approximately 300 jobs in total. In a memo on April 16, CEO Roger Lynch explicitly noted that Condé Nast is reorganizing its technology division to reflect the “rapid advancement of AI,” with the goal of building products faster.
Workers at the company have protested management conduct, particularly after four union leaders and journalists were dismissed by Condé Nast without pay following a November 2025 protest at the company’s Manhattan offices against the “downsizing” of another Condé Nast publication, Teen Vogue. The incident began when about 20 staffers gathered outside the 34th-floor office of Stan Duncan, the Chief People Officer in Manhattan, to demand clarity on why senior creative roles were being eliminated while executive pay remained untouched.
Most of the staff were laid off at Teen Vogue, and the magazine, which had a notably left-wing posture, was absorbed by other publications.
7. A connecting link between Trump and Epstein: Who is Paolo Zampolli?
Attention to Zampolli risks personalizing what is in fact systemic. His growing prominence reflects a decay in political life. As ruling classes rely increasingly on intermediaries operating outside formal accountability, democratic institutions are hollowed out and replaced by direct forms of oligarchic control. As inequality rises and social conditions deteriorate, workers face declining living standards and little to no influence over political decisions, while private actors move freely between business and government, shaping policy without public oversight.
8. Lufthansa closes regional carrier CityLine with immediate effect: An act of top-down class war
On Thursday, April 16, the Lufthansa executive board announced the immediate closure of regional carrier CityLine. In an unprecedented act of top-down class war, it has suspended around 1,300 pilots, stewards and stewardesses, and technical and other personnel with immediate effect.
Last week, the entire personnel of CityLine, around 25,000 employees, had participated in strike actions at Lufthansa Classic, Lufthansa Cargo and Eurowings to defend jobs, working conditions and pensions. In a loud demonstration on Wednesday, well over a thousand strikers marched right up to the corporation’s centenary celebration in Frankfurt am Main.
Only one day later, the Lufthansa executive board gave its answer: In an internal communication, it informed CityLine employees that the operation of their airline had been discontinued with immediate effect: “All affected employees in the cockpit and in the cabin will be suspended subject to recall—with a few exceptions.”
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Behind the Lufthansa executive board stand billionaire shareholders such as Kühne Holding, which owns 15.01 percent of Lufthansa. Multimillionaire Karl-Michael Gernandt, a major shareholder of Kühne+Nagel, Hapag-Lloyd and Lufthansa, as well as a member of the Lufthansa supervisory board, personally spoke up in an open letter to demand that the sectoral trade unions UFO (cabin crew) and Cockpit (pilots) immediately break off the strikes, hurling foul abuse at them. Gernandt accused them of “unreliability, egoism and blind industrial action.”
The chairman of the supervisory board, Karl-Ludwig Kley, the multimillionaire CEO of pharmaceutical giant Merck, also insulted the striking unions as “destructive” at the ceremony marking Lufthansa’s 100th anniversary, demanding Chancellor Merz bring in a new regulation of the right to strike before this “grows into an even greater competitive disadvantage.”
Under conditions of trade war, the wars against Iran and Russia and exploding energy costs, German business leaders are determined to pass the entire burden of the crisis, the tariff war and massive rearmament costs onto the working class. Anyone who resists this is insulted as “egoistic” and “irresponsible” and threatened with dismissal or punished.
It is clear that this must not be accepted, as otherwise the floodgates will be opened for even sharper attacks on more and more workers—at the suppliers, subsidiaries and the core brand Lufthansa alike. But workers’ jobs, wages and retirement provisions are not negotiable. They take precedence over the profits of the oligarchs, not only in the interests of the workforce and their families, but in passenger safety as well. To defend them today requires the principle of solidarity: “One for all and all for one.”
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A coherent industrial struggle is possible. It is now five years since service provider WISAG at Frankfurt Airport dismissed around 230 ground workers and bus drivers and partially withheld their wages, with at least 30 more dismissals being added subsequently. Those sacked were experienced and professional airport workers who had worked at the airport for decades. Verdi did not lift a finger for them and even contributed to their dismissal.
But contrary to what the corporation, Verdi and the works council had expected, the WISAG workers refused to accept the dismissals. Under the motto: “Today it’s us—tomorrow you!” they began to organize their resistance together, demonstrating countless times at Frankfurt Airport, in front of company headquarters and the private villa of WISAG boss Wisser, as well as in Wiesbaden in front of the Hesse state parliament. At Terminal 1, they even organized a hunger strike for eight days, and they appeared as a collective at all court hearings.
The WISAG workers were able to reverse some, though not all, dismissals at the time, as they remained essentially isolated back then. But the most important thing their struggle achieved was the understanding that workers must mobilize independently, and that this is possible.
All the institutions of society—the media, the trade unions, the bourgeois parties and also the courts—act as instruments of a narrow layer of super-rich capitalists who were able to further enrich themselves in the COVID pandemic. Today, they enhance their wealth boundlessly in the various wars. Lufthansa is also involved in the insane military rearmament program; its subsidiary, Lufthansa Technik, works as a supplier to the air force and profits from it.
9. Federal prosecutors seize on California warehouse fire to criminalize anti-capitalist opposition
On April 7, shortly after 12:30 a.m., a major fire broke out at a 1.2 million-square-foot Kimberly-Clark distribution warehouse in Ontario, California. The facility, which stored large quantities of paper products, was rapidly consumed by the blaze.
All 20 workers on the night shift were evacuated, with no deaths or injuries reported. Some 175 firefighters from more than a dozen agencies battled the inferno, which took nearly 12 hours to extinguish. The warehouse was destroyed, with losses estimated at $500 million to $600 million.
The facility was owned by Kimberly-Clark Corporation, a multinational personal care and hygiene products giant whose brands include Kleenex, Huggies, Scott and Kotex. The company sells its products in more than 170 countries and reported operating profit of $2.4 billion in 2025, compared to $2.7 billion the year before.
Later that day, Chamel Abdulkarim, 29, a warehouse worker employed at the facility through a third-party contractor, was arrested. Authorities claim Abdulkarim ignited the fire and filmed himself doing so. A video posted to his personal Instagram account, which appears to show him lighting paper products on fire, quickly went viral on social media.
Authorities have not officially confirmed a motive, but video Abdulkarim filmed and uploaded to social media points strongly to anger over low wages and poor working conditions.
Throughout the video, Abdulkarim can be heard repeatedly tying the act to low wages, declaring, “If you’re not going to pay us enough to f*cking live or afford to live, at least pay us enough not to do this sh*t”; “You know, we may not get paid enough to f*cking live, but these bitches [lighters] dirt cheap”; and “All you had to do was pay us enough to live.”
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Abdulkarim allegedly compared his actions to those of Luigi Mangione, who is accused of killing Brian Thompson, the former CEO of UnitedHealthcare. In other texts and phone calls cited by authorities, Abdulkarim stated: “1% is a f*cking joke”; “Billionaires profiting off of war …”; and “All you had to do was pay us enough to live. Pay us more of the value WE bring. Not corporate. Didn’t see the shareholders picking up a shift.”
Abdulkarim has pleaded not guilty to the state charges. If convicted in state court, he could face up to 10 years in prison, according to prosecutors. He also faces a federal arson charge carrying a mandatory minimum sentence of five years and a maximum of 20 years, underscoring the effort to impose an exemplary punishment.
The incident has struck a nerve among workers internationally because Abdulkarim’s statements gave expression, in a politically confused manner, to the intense anger over poverty wages, corporate greed and worsening working conditions.
What has alarmed the ruling class is not the isolated actions of individuals who lash out at their employers and destroy property. Such actions are politically bankrupt, endanger other workers and provide the authorities a pretext to expand state repression. What the capitalist class fears is that the widespread hostility to exploitation and social inequality will find conscious, organized and socialist expression in the working class.
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The fact that social anger is often expressed in desperate and individualistic acts is the product of decades of betrayals by the trade union bureaucracy, which long ago abandoned any serious resistance of capitalist exploitation and has left workers alone to face unprecedented attacks on their jobs, living standards, working conditions and democratic rights.
Workers are not lacking anger or a will to fight. What they confront is a union apparatus that systematically isolates struggles, wears workers down and enforces sellout agreements on behalf of the corporations.
This has been demonstrated in recent months in the betrayal of the strike by meatpackers at JBS in Greeley, Colorado, where UFCW Local 7 ordered workers back on the job despite the company making no new offer; in New York City, where 32BJ SEIU officials abruptly called off a strike by 34,000 doormen, porters and maintenance workers without any vote by the membership; and in Los Angeles, where the union apparatus, working with Mayor Karen Bass and the Democratic Party, canceled a strike by 77,000 educators and school workers only hours before it was set to begin.
These betrayals create the conditions in which social anger, blocked from finding collective and organized expression, can take confused and individual forms. The task is not to romanticize or justify such actions, but to build a conscious leadership in the working class capable of transforming anger over exploitation into a collective struggle against the capitalist system.
That a warehouse worker could resort to such extreme and politically misguided measures will come as no surprise to workers familiar with the brutal conditions in warehouses and logistics facilities. Warehouses are better described as industrial slaughterhouses, where speedup, injuries, safety violations and labor grievances are endemic.
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Southern California, where this incident took place, is a crucial chokepoint for world commerce. A strike by warehouse workers, in alliance with port workers, truck drivers and rail workers, would shut down vast sections of the US economy. This enormous social power must be consciously organized through rank-and-file committees, independent of the pro-corporate union bureaucracies and both big-business parties.
Isolated acts against capitalist property, moreover, do not solve the underlying problem, which is the capitalist system itself. The means of production must not be destroyed by individual workers driven to the breaking point but taken out of the hands of the capitalist class and placed under the democratic control of the working class, to be run for human need, not private profit.
The fight for decent wages, generous benefits, healthcare, paid time off, safe working conditions and secure employment must be waged as a political struggle of the working class against capitalism and for socialism.
10. Borneo fire devastates thousands of Malaysia’s poorest people
A catastrophic blaze destroyed about 1,000 makeshift homes and displaced almost 10,000 residents in a coastal village in Malaysia’s Sabah state in the early hours of Sunday. The tragedy underscores the plight of hundreds of thousands of people living in shanty settlements in both the Malaysian and Indonesian parts of the island of Borneo.
Kampung Bahagia, near the port city of Sandakan on the northern tip of Borneo, is one of Sabah’s densely-populated so-called water villages—which consist of highly inflammable houses made of wood and board built on stilts—housing some of Malaysia’s poorest people, including many stateless and indigenous groups.
Authorities were notified of the fire about 1:30 a.m. and about 35 firefighters arrived 20 minutes later, according to media reports. Sandakan district’s fire and rescue chief Jimmy Lagung said strong winds and the close proximity of the houses caused the fire to spread rapidly and made access difficult. The inferno was not extinguished until noon—over 10 hours later.
Drone footage of the scene shows almost total destruction covering more than four hectares, or about 10 acres, of densely packed homes. Houses are no longer recognizable structures, just charred debris, as if the fire had quickly flattened the entire area.
No deaths have been reported yet, but some people were injured, Sandakan police said, according to the Malaysian state news agency Bernama. Police dismissed social media reports claiming lives were lost.
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The extreme fire dangers in coastal settlements are well known. Most homes are built entirely of wood, boards and other flammable materials. Houses are tightly packed with minimal space between them, allowing flames to jump from roof to roof in seconds. Narrow wooden walkways and a lack of direct road access prevent standard fire engines from reaching the sources. At low tide, firefighters lose their most immediate water source—the sea—as seen in Sunday’s Kampung Bahagia disaster.
Moreover, the Sabah and Malaysian governments, like governments around the world, are conducting an intensifying crackdown on immigrant residents, including those who live in makeshift villages. In 2025, Malaysian authorities significantly escalated immigration raids. Between January and May, authorities arrested an estimated 34,000 people, according to civil rights organisations.
Previous studies have estimated that some 215,000 people live in about 84 major “Kampung Air” (water villages) across Borneo, with at least 50,000 people in 10,000 settlements in Sabah alone. A significant proportion of the residents are stateless immigrants or refugees, denied citizenship, healthcare, education and land ownership rights. Building on stilts above the water—often considered “no man’s land”—is their only option.
Many residents work in nearby cities—like Sandakan or Kota Kinabalu—as labourers or in the fishing industry, but they cannot afford the high cost of formal land-based housing. Children born in these villages often cannot attend government schools. When their homes are destroyed, their informal community schools can disappear as well.
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In some areas, governments plan to replace water villages with new townships, hotels and offices to boost tourism. After some previous fires, governments have demolished or failed to rebuild homes, forcing people into even more precarious living conditions, provoking considerable popular opposition.
For stateless residents, fires can mean losing their only proof of identity—such as IMM13 permits or birth certificates—in the flames. Without these, they face a higher risk of arbitrary detention or deportation, as they cannot prove their right to be in Malaysia.
While saying that humanitarian assistance is a priority, Prime Minister Anwar and state ministers have insisted that the country’s laws regarding illegal structures must be upheld to ensure long-term security.
Anwar’s government has quickly proposed a redevelopment plan for Kampung Bahagia. Deputy Human Resources Minister Datuk Khairul Firdaus Akbar visited the fire-ravaged site yesterday. He said gazetting the 60-acre village would lay the groundwork for “comprehensive development, including the construction of a planned settlement for residents.”
During the Sabah chief minister’s visit to the site on Monday, he said the area was previously recognised as a settlement for Filipino refugees under the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) but that status had been removed. He said a full report on the victims was expected within one to two weeks, noting about 70 percent of them were non-citizens, and those placed in six evacuation centres would remain there for a week pending further assessment.
More broadly, Anwar’s supposed “progressive” Pakatan Harapan coalition government increasingly has been trying to blame migrant and stateless workers—among the most vulnerable members of the working class—for deteriorating economic and social conditions, which Malaysia’s ruling capitalist class is now intensifying amid the global impact of the US-Israeli war on Iran.
11. Porto Alegre Conference: How not to fight fascism
From March 26 and 29, representatives of dozens of pseudo-left organizations from around the world gathered in Porto Alegre, capital of Brazil’s southern state of Rio Grande do Sul, for the so-called “1st International Antifascist Conference for the Sovereignty of Peoples.” With 4,000 participants and a “forum of authorities and parliamentarians” from some 40 countries, the event was celebrated by its organizers as a “qualitative leap in the international coordination” of the left.
The document adopted by the conference, dubbed the Porto Alegre Charter, acknowledges explosive signs of the world imperialist crisis and a growing social radicalization. It declares:
That same week, the Nuestra América convoy to Cuba took place; more than a million people took to the streets in Argentina, fighting for memory and against Milei; there were hundreds of thousands at the antifascist mobilization in the United Kingdom, and especially the great and historic “No Kings” demonstration in the United States, where millions of Americans gathered in hundreds of cities, once again declaring Trump an enemy of humanity.
The capitalist-imperialist system is living through a profound crisis and a sharp economic, social and moral decline. The response of the imperialist powers to their decline has been the fostering of fascism everywhere, the imposition of neoliberal policies, military aggression against weaker nations and their recolonization.
But far from representing a step forward in the construction of an international movement against fascism and war, the Porto Alegre Conference was a platform for political forces determined to block the development of a revolutionary and independent response by the working class to the deepening world capitalist crisis.
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The 1st International Antifascist Conference for the Sovereignty of Peoples does not represent a step forward in the struggle against fascism and imperialism. It represents, on the contrary, a new chapter in the history of the political containment of working class struggle by pseudo-left apparatuses. This is a history whose previous chapters include the WSF, the Pink Tide, Syriza and Podemos. In each case, the radicalization of the masses was channeled into the framework of bourgeois politics, and the result was the weakening, not the strengthening, of the working class’s resistance to fascism and imperialism.
The Latin American working class paid a devastating price in the second half of the last century for the subordination of the working class by social democracy, Stalinism and Pabloism to various forms of bourgeois nationalism, which politically disarmed the masses in the face of brutal dictatorships. The perspective offered by the Porto Alegre Conference—the “broad front” with bourgeois parties, the subordination of the class struggle to the electoral calendar, an “internationalism” that is, in practice, a collection of diverse national campaigns—is the repetition of that same catastrophic policy under new circumstances.
To prevent even more devastating betrayals and defeats at a moment of deepening world capitalist crisis and of the real rise of fascism, the only way forward for Brazilian and Latin American workers is to build an independent political leadership of the working class, in a break with the PT, the PSOL and all parties that subordinate the struggle of the exploited to the interests of the ruling classes. This requires the construction of sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International in every country of Latin America. It represents the only political tradition that analyzed and predicted the trajectory of capitulation of these tendencies, and that defends the international unity of the working class not as electoral rhetoric, but as a program for world socialist revolution.
12. Mass arrests in Brisbane add to repression of anti-genocide protests in Australia
Large squads of riot police arrested 22 anti-genocide demonstrators in Brisbane last weekend, taking to more than 50 the number of pro-Palestinian protesters violently arrested in three Australian states in recent weeks.
The Brisbane arrests, conducted over Saturday and Sunday at two rallies, marked a show of force by the Queensland state Premier David Crisafulli’s right-wing Liberal National Party (LNP) government to enforce its recently enacted “hate speech” legislation, which bans the anti-genocide phrases “from the river to the sea” and “globalize the intifada.”
At the first demonstration on Saturday by about 300 people against the laws, Queensland’s heavily-armed Public Safety Response Team (PSRT)—which specializes in “incidents of critical level violence or public disorder and civil disobedience”—arrested 20 people on 14 charges of displaying prohibited expressions and 7 charges of reciting prohibited expressions.
Dozens of PSRT commandos, backed by horses, arrested speakers at the rally and charged into the crowd to grab people who were chanting or displaying the banned “river to the sea” slogan.
After 15 people were arrested at the event, another five were arrested following a march to the police lockup. Two more arrests were made by large PSRT contingents at a Justice for Palestine (JFP) anti-genocide rally of about 700 people the following day.
Over the past two weeks, police have also arrested three other people for reciting or displaying a prohibited slogan.
These moves followed police operations in recent weeks conducted by the state Labor governments in New South Wales (NSW) and Victoria, involving dawn raids on homes across Sydney and Melbourne.
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Like those in Sydney and Melbourne, the Brisbane arrests are designed to try to intimidate protests against the continuing US-Israeli genocide in Gaza under conditions in which the mass killings have been extended to Iran and Lebanon, all with the material, political and diplomatic support of the Albanese government.
All these arrests must be condemned and defeated. They are based on the utterly false allegation, spearheaded by the Labor governments, that opponents of the genocide in Palestine, which include many Jews, are antisemitic.
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The Brisbane arrests had a stage-managed character to them. Opening Saturday’s protest, JFP organizer Phil Monsour foreshadowed the arrests, stating: “A message to the Crisafulli government… we will use violence against us to grow our movement.” He said the JFP had a “strategy” to double its social media following.
Over the next two hours, this “strategy” became evident. Speakers concluded their comments with a chant of the prohibited phrase “from the river to the sea” and were escorted by PSRT squads into waiting police vehicles.
At the event’s conclusion—after the 15 arrests—Monsour declared that the “JFP determines when and where people get arrested,” and that “the police did exactly what we wanted.”
That is, the aim of the organizers was to use arrests to place pressure on the Queensland LNP government. This served to channel the protest against the LNP government, while barely mentioning the federal and state Labor governments.
Nor was there any reference to the Albanese government’s support for the US-Israeli war on Iran, or its wider commitment to the underlying drive by US imperialism for control over the resource-rich and strategic Middle East as part of preparations for war against China.
There was no mention of US President Donald Trump’s threats to exterminate an entire vilification in Iran, or the Albanese government’s dispatch of SAS troops, a war command aircraft, missiles and other military assistance to the Gulf region to bolster the assault on Iran.
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As the limited character of last Thursday’s NSW Court of Appeal ruling demonstrates, democratic rights cannot be defended exclusively through the courts, whose function, alongside the police, is to defend, enforce and seek to legitimize the capitalist economic and legal order overall.
The demand must be raised throughout the working class for the dropping of all the charges and the overturning of all the anti-protest and “hate speech” laws, including those of the Labor governments that have led the charge against anti-genocide protests since the US-backed Israeli assault began in October 2023.
The Albanese government’s 2026 National Defence Strategy, released last week, is another statement of the Albanese government’s total commitment to US-led wars globally, and above all to Washington’s preparations for a catastrophic war against China, of which the drive for US control over the entire Middle East is a critical part.
Defence Minister Richard Marles pledged to increase military spending by $53 billion over the coming decade, on top of record expenditure of $60 billion this financial year. That means further cutting social spending—from health and education to disability services—to pay the colossal bill, at the expense of working-class households.
As the World Socialist Web Site has stated: “The only way to defeat the attacks on fundamental democratic rights and stop the plunge into wider wars is through the mobilization of the power of the working class against all those responsible, including the Labor governments. This fight requires the development of an independent working-class movement—in workplaces, throughout industries and across national borders—against the capitalist system that is the root cause of war and repression.”
13. University of California workers prepare to strike
Around 42,000 University of California system employees with the AFSCME union (American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees) are preparing for an open-ended strike beginning May 14. These include the lowest-paid layers of the UC workforce, including custodians, food service workers, security personnel, medical assistants, MRI technicians and respiratory therapists.
Their contracts expired in two phases, with patient care technical workers losing their agreement on July 31, 2024, followed by service workers on October 31 of the same year. Since then, the union has kept them on the job without a new deal and called five short-term strikes, carefully limited in scope and duration.
Now, an indefinite strike has been authorized. While this is a sign the UC workers have had enough, the outcome of the struggle depends upon the assertion of control by the rank and file over the struggle, independent and in opposition to the apparatus.
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The University of California’s latest contract offer has been cynically promoted as “historic.” In reality, it is a carefully constructed fraud. The headline claim of 32.3 percent “total pay growth” is padded with previously agreed increases and stretched over years, amounting to a real pay cut after inflation. It does nothing to address the fundamental reality that UC employees cannot afford to live anywhere near the campuses they serve.
The touted $25 minimum wage is equally deceptive. It formalizes a wage floor that remains far below what is required in California’s major metropolitan areas. For many workers, rent alone consumes the bulk of their income. The addition of a one-time $1,000 bonus is an insult. It vanishes instantly under the weight of basic expenses like housing, food and transportation.
On healthcare, the proposal is even worse. By tying premiums to a percentage, it guarantees workers will pay more every year as costs rise. Small stipends and cherry-picked “low premium” examples do not change the basic structure, which steadily shifts costs onto workers. In practice, it amounts to a wage cut.
At the same time, the university continues to push for 401(k) retirement schemes that shift risks onto workers while reducing its long-term obligations. Chronic understaffing has become institutionalized, with hiring freezes and high vacancy rates used to cut costs.
Employees are sleeping in their cars, cycling through shelters or enduring punishing commutes of two to three hours each way. Entire sections of the workforce are effectively excluded from the communities in which they work. In cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco and San Diego, living near one’s workplace is not merely difficult, it is impossible.
The conditions facing UC workers are mirrored in the student population. Housing insecurity is widespread, with one in 13 UC students experiencing homelessness or unstable living conditions. The same economic pressures that drive workers into poverty are shaping the lives of the next generation.
Behind this stands the political establishment in California, the richest state in the country. The Democratic Party, which dominates the state and oversees the UC system, bears direct responsibility for this social disaster, carrying out austerity at the state and local levels.
However, AFSCME’s response is also vague. Its calls for a “living wage,” equity adjustments and limited subsidies do not challenge the underlying framework. The union bureaucracy’s role is not to mobilize workers against austerity but to contain and manage their opposition.
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The union bureaucracy is working more openly to disrupt the class struggle as conditions for it are becoming more and more favorable. Last Tuesday in Los Angeles, teachers and school workers were blocked from carrying out a joint strike, instead confronting them with a last-minute deal that achieved none of their demands. Friday that same week, the Service Employees International Union canceled a strike of 34,000 doormen and other building workers in New York City.
These strikes would have involved a combined 114,000 workers in the two largest cities in America. It goes without saying that they would have had a galvanizing impact on workers around the country and even the world.
Also at the University of California, the United Auto Workers pushed through a contract for tens of thousands of graduate student workers without allowing sufficient time to review its terms, effectively splitting the AFSCME workers from one of their most powerful allies. And last November, UPTE (University Professional and Technical Employees) preemptively undermined the largest coordinated UC strike in decades.
This reflects the social position of the union bureaucracy itself. Integrated into corporate and political structures, it functions to contain workers, not to advance the interests of the rank and file.
The authorization of an open-ended strike reflects a growing recognition that the status quo is untenable. But the decisive question is leadership, who directs the struggle and in whose interests.
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The issues extend beyond wages to the allocation of social resources. While billions fund war and repression, workers’ needs are ignored. The UC strike must become part of a wider struggle against austerity and inequality, recognizing that the problem is not individual administrators but a system prioritizing profit over human need.
More than 200 teachers and school employees in the Little Lake City School District in Los Angeles County continued their strike into its third day Monday, following a walkout that began April 16.
Little Lake City consists of seven elementary schools, from kindergarten through sixth grade, and two middle schools, serving seventh and eighth grades, in Santa Fe Springs, Norwalk and Downey in the Los Angeles metropolitan area. The district employs roughly 200 teachers, not all of whom are full-time, and serves 3,656 students. The overwhelming majority of students, about 80 percent, qualify for free school lunches in this impoverished section of southeast Los Angeles County.
The issues in the strike are wages, healthcare benefits, class sizes and special education support services. The immediate trigger was a midyear healthcare benefits cut that could increase some employees’ monthly costs by as much as $1,400. It is the first strike in the district’s 154-year history, and more than 90 percent of district teachers voted to authorize the walkout.
The educators are members of the Little Lake Education Association (LLEA), which is affiliated with the California Teachers Association (CTA) and, through it, the National Education Association (NEA).
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The Little Lake City teachers’ strike is part of a growing wave of struggles by teachers and education workers in California and throughout the country. In February, more than 6,000 teachers and paraprofessionals in San Francisco struck for the first time in nearly 50 years, closing schools serving roughly 50,000 students.
Last week, some 70,000 teachers, principals and school support staff in Los Angeles Unified, the second-largest school district in the country, were prepared to strike before the walkout was called off at the last minute after tentative agreements were reached by the unions.
These struggles are driven by the same conditions: unaffordable healthcare costs, wages that do not keep pace with the cost of living, overcrowded classrooms, understaffed schools and attacks on special education services. They are unfolding under conditions in which both big business parties insist there is “no money” for public education, even as trillions are squandered on war, tax cuts for the rich and the bailout of the financial oligarchy.
On the first day of the strike, reporters from the World Socialist Web Site spoke with teachers and supporters and discussed how the struggle could be broadened beyond Little Lake City and placed under the democratic control of educators themselves.
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Andrea, a fifth grade teacher, said she has “been with the district for over 10 years. And throughout this time, I’ve encountered amazing educators. Educators that support, value and guide our students. And today, we fight for them. Our district wants to increase class sizes. We know that more students in the classroom is a disservice to them. And that’s not the education that this community deserves.
“Our district has removed our healthcare coverage and is using increasing classroom sizes as a bargaining chip. For many of us paying over $1,000 a month means being forced to make an impossible choice between the profession we love and the financial stability for our own families. We stand together as educators wanting the best for our students.
“Currently, I already have 31 students. So an increase in class sizes, we can only imagine. It’s not fair to any of us: the students, the parents or teachers.
“Some of these teachers are paying over $1,000 a month for their health care,” she added.
Andrea noted that LAUSD is “one of the biggest districts ... they are powerful. We are a tiny district trying to be just as strong.“We are not even asking for a raise. All we are asking for is for our healthcare to be covered and for our class sizes not to increase.”
The Communication Workers Union (CWU) has reached a “negotiators agreement” with Royal Mail on national deployment of USO reform and equalization of new entrants pay, terms and conditions, announced in a Letter to Branches (LTB) on April 15.
The nine-page “final agreement” makes clear what CWU general secretary Dave Ward and deputy Martin Walsh have been up to in their talks with management over the past two months, shielded from rank-and-file oversight by the official Dispute Resolution Procedure.
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The Postal Workers Rank-and-File Committee (PWRFC) calls for a resounding No vote. But rejection alone is not enough. Opposition must be mobilized demanding the removal of Ward, Walsh and the entire CWU Postal Executive who serve as Royal Mail’s enforcers.
This rotten agreement has been endorsed by the entire CWU Postal Executive. Briefings have been held with full-time officials and local reps, but a ballot date has not been announced for members to decide. This is deliberate, as the CWU prepares to launch a PR blitz based on lies, disinformation and threats to crowd out rank-and-file opposition with pro-company messaging.
Postal workers must seize the initiative. Rank-and-file committees should be established at all delivery offices and mail centers. Decision making must be transferred to the rank-and-file, based on a fighting strategy to protect the mail service, not EP Group profits!
16. Workers Struggles: The Americas
Argentina:
Canada:
Montreal municipal workers stage 3-day strike
Chile:
Colombia:
Honduras:
Public health doctors carry out work to rule protests
United States:
Colorado educators strike over unity with staff workers
17. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
"Peace for the world! Down with war!"
