Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Anger spreads after strike by 42,000 UC California workers canceled in the middle of the night
42,000 University of California healthcare and service workers were set to begin a historic open-ended strike on Thursday, May 14. Custodians, patient care technicians, respiratory therapists, food service workers and others had voted overwhelmingly to strike against poverty wages, skyrocketing housing costs and the inadequate healthcare. Workers in AFSCME Local 3299 have been kept on the job without a contract since 2024.
Then in the dead of night, the strike was abruptly called off at approximately 1:26 am Thursday morning, and workers were ordered to report to work only hours later. The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Local 3299 announced it reached a tentative agreement behind closed doors with the University of California administration.
This is the latest in a series of sellouts by union bureaucrats across the country. In particular, it is almost identical to the way that the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) blocked a district-wide strike of 77,000 Los Angeles public school workers in April with only hours to go before their strike deadline, following all-night talks involving LA Mayor Karen Bass. The same week, the SEIU canceled a strike of 34,000 building workers in New York City shortly before it was set to begin.
Also at the UC system, the United Auto Workers (UAW) suppressed a 93.3 percent strike mandate by 40,000 academic workers after their contract expired in March, ultimately pushing through a ratified agreement without ever allowing a strike.
The union bureaucracy is deliberately sabotaging workers in order to prevent a struggle which would inevitably develop into a broader fight that would threaten their ties to management and the Democratic Party. A general rule is emerging: The more favorable the objective conditions for a struggle, the more shamelessly the bureaucracy acts to disrupt and dissipate workers’ momentum.
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AFSCME officials never intended to wage a genuine struggle against the financial interests of the UC Regents, the Democratic Party establishment or the capitalist system, which subordinates healthcare and education to profit. Their function is not to mobilize workers independently but to contain and suppress opposition within safe channels acceptable to management and the state.
On AFSCME Local 3299’s Instagram page, workers were furious. “What happened to all that talk about retro pay? The housing? We won’t stop until we win?” asked one worker, throwing the union’s rhetoric back in its face.
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World Socialist Web Site reporters were on the ground speaking to workers at UC Irvine Thursday morning following the announcement.
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The struggle must be resumed under workers' control. AFSCME members should organize meetings to decide on their own non-negotiable demands and prepare the ground for mass action to win them, with or without the permission of the union apparatus.
This struggle must be based on a strategy of class struggle. Workers are being told there is “no money” for housing, staffing or wages while hundreds of billions are funneled into criminal wars. Trump recently declared with utter contempt that he does not think “even a little bit” about the economic impact of the war on tens of millions of Americans.
But the attack on the working class is bipartisan. The Democrats who run California, and who also make up the UC Regents, have overseen brutal austerity, while refusing to do anything to hold Trump accountable in the slightest for his fascist policies.
The struggle is not simply against the UC administration but against an entire political and economic system that subordinates human need to private profit.
2. Mélenchon 2027: A presidential campaign that holds back workers’ mobilization
On May 3, Jean-Luc Mélenchon announced his candidacy for the 2027 presidential election on TF1’s evening news broadcast. His interview with Anne-Claire Coudray laid out not a revolutionary perspective but the absence of one. Together with his party, La France Insoumise (LFI), he is acting not to mobilize workers against austerity and war but to smother them within a nationalist orientation toward French capitalist institutions.
Pressed to explain his decision to run after having proclaimed his retirement at the last presidential election in 2022, Mélenchon brushed the question aside: “I haven’t changed my mind. … the discussion wasn’t about who is the best candidate from the standpoint of I don’t know what, what kind of aesthetics. It was: who is best prepared to face the situation that is coming?” He cited the danger of a “generalized war.”
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Mélenchon analyzed the international situation as follows: “We are entering a very turbulent season in world history. We are threatened with a generalized war. We are threatened by a spectacular change in the climate. And then we have an economic and social crisis that is bearing down on us.” He went on to address the rise in fuel prices in France:
“None of this falls from the sky. It is not a mistake made by poor people who didn’t go to work enough. All of this is a war started by two countries: Israel and the USA. And whoever started this situation therefore has a political cause.”
Having criticized the obvious and undeniable responsibility of Trump and the Israeli regime for their military aggression against Iran, Mélenchon then responded to the journalist’s question about what he would have done in Macron’s place. Mélenchon replied that he would have built an alliance with the PSOE-Sumar government in Spain to defend international law and stop the war. He said:
“I would have made international law my banner… I would have created a front of refusal with the Spanish… We would start with one thing: cutting the European Union’s commercial cooperation relationship with Israel. Israel cannot survive without the European Union. And with that, an arms embargo.”
This reasoning has an appearance of coherence and proposes defensible measures, such as an embargo targeting Israel following the genocide in Gaza. But it is silent on several decisive questions. First, and we will return to this, it does not address the consequences for workers of an alliance with the capitalist PSOE-Sumar government.
But above all, Mélenchon does not say that Macron is a political criminal. He does not say that France, since the beginning of the war on February 28, has made its military bases at Istres and in the Persian Gulf available for the American-Israeli aggression against Iran. He does not say that France, under Macron, continued to deliver arms to Israel even as the genocide in Gaza was underway. He does not say that Macron, by publicly declaring his friendship with the Netanyahu regime, made himself complicit in crimes against humanity.
Mélenchon, who wants to confine workers within the framework of French institutions, says nothing about the politically criminal evolution of French imperialism or about the fact that Macron’s ministers marched alongside the neo-fascist National Rally (RN) to defend the Israeli regime.
Where does this silence come from? It comes from his own record. During the 2024 legislative elections, even as the genocide in Gaza had been underway for months, Mélenchon was calling for votes for candidates from the Socialist Party (PS) and the Macronist bloc—formations that supported Israel’s policies. Pointing today at Macron as a genocide accomplice would oblige Mélenchon to account for his own Nouveau Front Populaire (New Popular Front). This silence is not modesty; it is complicity.
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The crisis triggered by the Hormuz blockade is striking now—in transportation, in food, in housing. It will not wait for the end of the 2027 presidential second round. By then, a global recession could be entrenched, and millions of workers could have lost their jobs. An international social mobilization is needed to impose a price freeze, expropriate the war profits of oil companies and, above all, to stop the war and the energetic strangling of the global economy.
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Mélenchon announced that his campaign would put forward what he called the “New France,” to which he attempted to give a popular content by invoking racial and gender identity. To flesh out the slogan, he continued:
“One in three French people has a foreign ancestor. One family in two has left its region of origin. Don’t you see that women have a completely different status from what they had in 1958? Young people, elderly people who are more numerous than ever. All of that is the New France. The New France is not one part of France against another; it is all of France.”
By foregrounding women and racial or national minorities, Mélenchon sets aside the class divide within this France, which is the same as in the “old” one. Lumping together the bourgeois, the small property owners and the workers under these identity categories, he leaves aside precisely what is essential from a Marxist standpoint: The overwhelming majority of both the “new” and the “old” France consists of workers exploited by the capitalist oligarchy.
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The substitution of “the people” and racial or gender categories for a class perspective is not a mere rhetorical adjustment: It is a political decision. By diverting workers from the necessary struggle for working-class unity, it favors the normalization of a populist political climate in which the capitalist oligarchy can normalize neo-fascist populism.
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Mélenchon’s interview on TF1 demonstrates that none of the burning questions facing workers will be resolved through the presidential elections. The interview sends a clear signal to the ruling class: Mélenchon is trying to create a political framework for the electoral campaign that will exclude the questions of world war, genocide and the necessary mobilization of workers against austerity and fascism.
This illustrates what the Parti de l’égalité socialiste (PES), the French section of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), has always maintained: LFI is a petty-bourgeois pseudo-left formation that channels working-class opposition toward the ballot box and the framework of the capitalist state.
3. The crisis of the Starmer government, the Labour Party and British capitalism
Britain has entered a new stage of political crisis. Labour leader Keir Starmer’s premiership is on the verge of collapse—shaken by resignations and no-confidence letters, including from the arch-Blairite Health Secretary Wes Streeting—and now awaits the final trigger for an open leadership challenge.
To mount a socialist response, workers and young people must look past the media psychodrama that reduces politics to soap opera and personality clashes, and focus instead on the underlying realities driving the crisis.
The Starmer government’s crisis is the outcome of two intertwined, long-term processes: the global decline of British imperialism amid the convulsions of world capitalism, and the complete collapse of the Labour Party’s working class constituency.
In the nearly 30 years from 1979 to 2007, Britain had only three prime ministers. Two of them—Margaret Thatcher for the Conservatives and Tony Blair for Labour—served continuous 10-year terms. Since then, in less than twenty years, Britain has churned through seven prime ministers, with four—and now potentially five—coming in just the last four years.
In every case, the fall of a British prime minister has been precipitated by an international shock that exposed the brittleness of British imperialism’s global position and, in doing so, sharpened domestic class antagonisms at home.
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Starmer ultimately came to power in what the media aptly characterized as “a loveless landslide”, delivered a huge majority on an unprecedentedly low share of the vote thanks to disgust with the Tories and Britain’s undemocratic electoral system. Now he has been capsized by the shock waves of the war in Iran and President Donald Trump’s detonation of the “special relationship” between the US and the UK.
Britain’s ruling class is caught in a tightening vice. On one side is a brutal price shock—with food costs projected to end the year 50–64 percent higher than in mid-2021, and soaring fuel costs squeezing working class families and battering industry. On the other is the demand for a massive rearmament drive—what one senior government adviser, quoted in the Financial Times, called a “‘rude wake-up call’ for the country’s under-investment in its military.”
Once again, amid deepening popular hatred of Starmer’s government and its rapid electoral collapse, the Labour “left” is playing the decisive role in clearing the ground for the crisis to be settled entirely among a gang of right-wing Blairites in disarray.
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In every crisis of rule suffered by the British capitalist class, as its global position has weakened, the dictates of international finance and the requirements of militarism have asserted themselves ever more directly and nakedly. Vastly more column inches—and far more anonymous briefings from Labour insiders—are devoted to addressing the wishes of the bond markets than of the population, when it comes to a potential new prime minister.
Kathleen Brooks, research director for investment company XTB, put the matter bluntly: “The UK still has the highest borrowing costs of any G7 member, and our yields have risen at the fastest rate since the Middle East war started. Until a challenge from the left of the Labour Party is eradicated, or the government embarks on growth-positive economic policy, we do not see UK bond yields substantially falling from here.”
On the military front, whoever is the Labour prime minister for the rest of this parliament is expected to reverse the prolonged decline of the British armed forces by shifting billions from welfare spending to war.
These demands are incompatible with even the most minimal social programs. The absurdly mislabeled “soft left” leadership hopefuls—Andy Burnham and Angela Rayner—have already begun the required pilgrimages to corporate headquarters, offering up whatever scraps of socially minded rhetoric may have escaped their lips in the past. Global finance, they reassure, will have the final say.
The Labour Party is not merely pressured by these forces. Having severed any remaining connection to its former working class constituency, it is a political instrument of the corporate and financial oligarchy—body and soul.
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In less than two years, the Starmer-led Labour government has fully confirmed the Socialist Equality Party’s assessment on the day of his election: that a “new reactionary monster” had been installed “at the head of a Labour government on a collision course with the British working class.”
4. Australia: Longtime carer Julienne Verhagen denounces Labor government’s attack on the disabled
Julienne Verhagen spoke last week with the World Socialist Web Site about the Albanese government’s $36 billion cut to the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS). Labor’s measures will drive at least 300,000 people off the scheme by 2030 through the replacement of diagnosis-based eligibility with “functional assessments,” the imposition of a 16 percent reduction in social and community participation programs, the removal of thousands of autistic children from the NDIS and other brutal cost-cutting measures.
Verhagen is a highly skilled disability support worker and a full-time family carer with years of experience in disability service management, including involvement in the hiring and training of support staff. She is also the author of The Power of Interactive Care.
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Julienne Verhagen:
"All the rhetoric about the NDIS being too big, and that we shouldn’t have children or people with milder disabilities on plans, is false and despicable. How dare they blame the disabled and put even more pressure on families who are already doing everything they can!
I’m a full-time carer for my sibling, who has severe and complex disabilities—he’s quadriplegic and blind—and cannot do anything for himself. And yet the NDIA [National Disability Insurance Agency] absolutely gutted his plan, so I’ve seen how the system works and what happens when you challenge its decisions.
The NDIS was designed to ensure that providers made a profit and that services were made available for people with disabilities—support workers, disability housing, speech therapists, occupational therapists, and others willing to develop those resources. This wasn’t meant to be a temporary measure to get the system started, but was built into the system itself, with the promise of reasonable profit margins of maybe 10 or 20 percent. Instead, we now have inflated provider rates, overpriced equipment, and ballooning profit margins.
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"My family spent nearly two years in tribunal hell fighting a brutal reduction in the care plan for my sibling. The reduction would have made safe daily living impossible for him. I was grilled on the witness stand for nearly three hours by a QC. No expense was spared by the NDIA in trying to stop us from winning back physiotherapy, home support, and other essential needs. We had to fund reports, legal representation, endless conferences, and mountains of evidence just to secure the support he needs to survive. We eventually won, but the emotional and financial damage was enormous, and we had to take out a second mortgage to pay the lawyers. It took five months before the NDIS implemented some of the gains we won during the case conference process.
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"There’s a difference between being alive and having a life. Having a life means access to the community—interaction, relationships, and meaningful activity. If you’re denied that, it’s like being taken back to the conditions of the 1950s and 1960s: segregation, invisibility, and greater risk of abuse and neglect. My family member would not be alive today if he had been born 20 years earlier. Even in the 1970s, people with cerebral palsy were still dying because the government would not provide enough money for basic support.
Don’t get me wrong, there are lots of problems with the NDIS, but it has meant freedom for thousands of disabled people and has been instrumental in giving my family member a life. For the government to suddenly declare it is going to fix the NDIS is like trying to fix a plane while it is in the air and full of passengers. If you were really going to fix it, the first thing to do would be to land the plane and then get the passengers off safely.
We should be investing more money into disability, mental health, aged care, and other social needs. You really do get your money back when you invest in the people in our community who need help."
5. Australian Liberal leader launches tirade against immigrants in budget reply
Liberal Party leader Angus Taylor used his speech last night, replying to the Labor government’s budget, to carry out a frothing attack on immigrants. The address was less an outline of economic policy, and more a political signal that the Liberals and their Coalition partners in the Nationals are shifting to a Trumpian “Australia First” appeal.
That is one expression of a massive lurch to the right by the entire political establishment. There was a sense in which Taylor was straining to outflank Labor from the right, given the utterly reactionary character of its own policies.
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Taylor was not only attacking so-called “illegal” immigrants, but also those who have a valid visa and even permanent residency in Australia. Non-citizens would be immediately excluded from receiving all government benefits and assistance, Taylor declared.
“My message is this: If you commit to Australia, then Australia will commit to you,” Taylor said. “After all, the taxes paid by hard working Australians should support Australians.” Those are only two of a series of lines he delivered, in his budget reply and follow-up interviews that were both false and had a clear xenophobic character to them.
Taylor, the scion of a wealthy farming family who studied economics at Oxford under a Rhodes scholarship, is no doubt aware that non-citizens pay taxes.
In an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation after his speech, Taylor defended the policy, saying migrants were rushing to Australia to immediately access welfare. In reality, new migrants are already denied the poverty-level unemployment payment for up to four years after their arrival, in what is already a brutal attack on their social rights.
The threats to subject many immigrants to even greater pauperism were connected to a demand that they “make a choice” as to whether they are “committed” to Australia. People had been “let into the country,” he stated, who do not share “our values.”
That is the hyper-nationalist line that non-citizens are potentially “disloyal” or an “enemy” within. It is a vicious attack on the more than 1 million permanent migrants who are not citizens. It is also a threat to the entire population. The suggestion that citizenship and democratic rights are tied to “values” is a declaration that those who do not subscribe to the Coalition’s pro-business, pro-war and anti-working class “values” should be deprived of basic civil liberties.
Above all, Taylor thundered that a Coalition government would carry out “one of the largest cuts to immigration in Australian history.”
Taylor declared that migration levels would be pegged directly to the completion of new houses built, scapegoating “foreigners” for the massive housing affordability crisis.
That is based on a lie. The unaffordability crisis is a product of the dominance of property developers, investors and the banks over the housing market, which they have inflated with the aid of bipartisan government policies to make vast profits. And it is the outcome of a continual erosion of real wages, overseen by pro-business Coalition and Labor governments, working with the corporations and the trade union bureaucracy.
6. US Postmaster General floats ending six-days-a-week mail delivery, closing most local post offices
Postmaster General David Steiner proposed the most sweeping service cuts in the history of the United States Postal Service in a May 8 meeting of the USPS Board of Governors.
Steiner’s opening report to the meeting called on Congress “to remove the mandates that ensure the Postal Service loses money: For example, days and levels of service, the ability to close unprofitable offices, and the underpricing of First-Class Mail. If we had flexibility on those three main issues, we could go a long way towards becoming profitable, but the American public would see reduced levels of service and higher rates.”
This amounts to the abolition of USPS as a public service, converting it openly into a for-profit model and setting the stage for its privatization. More than 70 percent of local post offices are unprofitable, according to USPS’ own estimates. Combined with cuts to “days and levels” of delivery service, this would lead broad swathes of the country, especially rural areas, without reliable access to mail.
He specifically singled out the post office’s Universal Service Obligation: The legal requirement to provide all Americans with postal delivery at uniform prices. “Revenues and savings cannot offset the costs associated with the universal service obligation, our ‘USO,’ under the current business model. It is unsustainable.”
Steiner technically presented this as one of two options before Congress, with the second being substantial increases in federal subsidies for USPS, which operates as an independent, self-funding agency. But nobody should be under any illusions about which route will be taken. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board already answered for the ruling class on Monday: “No thanks. Start with option one, and let Mr. Steiner run the business like a business.”
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The financial crisis is the result of a bipartisan project stretching back decades. In 1971, the Nixon Administration demoted the post office from a cabinet-level department to an independent agency, following a massive nationwide wildcat strike the previous year. The requirement that the new agency be self-funding created the framework within which every subsequent round of cuts has been justified.
The latest phase began in 2021, under previous Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s “Delivering for America” restructuring program, which aimed at broadly similar goals to what Steiner is now floating. The program closed hundreds of facilities, eliminated or redrew thousands of routes and consolidated the system into a smaller number of large, highly-automated distribution centers. Conditions in these buildings are horrendous, with multiple deaths in the last few months, according to an independent investigation by the Postal Workers Rank-and-file Committee.
Dismantling much of USPS is being floated by the ruling class as a solution to close a funding gap of $2 billion per quarter. But this amount equals roughly two days of the war against Iran, which burned through more than $12 billion in its opening week. The Trump administration has requested a 50 percent increase in the Pentagon budget to $1.5 trillion annually.
The attacks on postal services are worldwide. Royal Mail in Britain was privatized in 2013, and sold to Czech billionaire Daniel Kretinsky in 2024. Now, with the collaboration of the Communication Workers Union, it is imposing mass cuts. Canada Post is preparing to eliminate 30,000 jobs—more than half its workforce—and ending door-to-door delivery.
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The postal union bureaucracy is trying to chloroform postal workers and the public about what is taking place, denying that a crisis exists at all and limiting their “solutions” to within the existing framework. On May 1, the presidents of the American Postal Workers Union, National Association of Letter Carriers, National Postal Mail Handlers Union and the National Rural Letter Carriers Association sent a joint letter to Congress calling for it to raise USPS’ statutory borrowing limit, allow the pension fund to invest in the stock market and change accounting for legacy retirement obligations.
In an April livestream, APWU president Jonathan Smith dismissed the crisis as a “situation,” attacked “negative headlines,” and told workers “victory is only a phone call to Congress away,” berating them for not calling their representatives.
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Postal workers must organize themselves independently of the union bureaucracy in order to defend the post office, rallying behind them workers across the country. In 1970, postal workers launched a wildcat strike that brought mail delivery to a halt across the country, defying President Nixon and anti-strike laws, along with union leaders who ordered them back to work.
Today there is growing opposition across the working class—to mass layoffs, to the war in Iran, to the entire political establishment. The problem is not the absence of opposition but the deliberate sabotage of working class resistance by institutions which claim to represent workers.
The USPS Workers Rank-and-File Committee and the IWA-RFC urges postal workers to insist: the postal service is a public service! It requires full public funding and no cuts to service days or routes.
Postal workers who want to fight back should join or form a rank-and-file committee in their workplace and make contact with the USPS Workers Rank-and-File Committee and the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC), which is coordinating resistance among postal workers in the US, Britain, Canada, Australia and beyond.
7. Germany’s trade union apparatus closes ranks with the government
Yasmin Fahimi’s 96 percent reelection exposes the German Trade Union Confederation’s role in enforcing social cuts to finance German rearmament.
8. Germany: Labour court investigates possible irregularities at works council election at Bosch GmbH
It is entirely justified to have the legality of the works council elections of March 11 reviewed by the Aalen Labour Court.
9. Democrats force House vote on increased military aid to Ukraine
The Democrats in the House of Representatives have succeeded in forcing a floor debate and vote on legislation to provide more military and financial aid to Ukraine, over the opposition of House Speaker Mike Johnson and the Trump White House.
In a procedure known as a discharge petition, a total of 218 representatives, a numerical majority, have given their signatures to force the vote. This includes all 215 Democrats, as well as two Republicans, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania and Don Bacon of Nebraska, and Republican-turned-independent Kevin Kiley of California.
Bacon is retiring from Congress, while Kiley’s seat has been effectively eliminated by the Democratic gerrymander of California’s congressional delegation, although he may seek to retain his seat by running as an independent.
Kiley made the right-wing character of the pro-Ukraine legislation explicit, saying that it was necessary both to show support for Ukraine in its war with Russia, and to warn Russia against providing support to Iran in the current US-Iran war.
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House Speaker Mike Johnson opposed the legislation and has refused to permit it to come to the floor for nearly a year. He has now set a vote on the bill for the first week of June, when it is expected to pass. More than likely, however, it will either be bottled up in the Senate or vetoed by Trump.
A discharge petition is a rarely used procedure to bypass the Speaker, but it has now been successfully employed six times since the beginning of 2025. This is largely because the Republican majority is so narrow that only a handful of defections—at present, the number is three—can force a vote, provided all Democrats sign the petition.
The Ukraine Support Act has three main components:
· Reiterating US support for Ukraine and NATO and creating a special coordinator for rebuilding efforts after the end of the war
· Authorizing $1.3 billion in direct military aid to Ukraine and up to $8 billion in direct loans
· Expanding sanctions and export control targeting Russian government officials and the country’s financial, oil and mining sectors, while limiting President Trump’s ability to lift those sanctions.
The bill also proposes rebuilding US weapons stockpiles depleted through the Ukraine war—and even more by the war in Iran.*****
Among the Democrats endorsing stepped-up US intervention in the war with Russia—which carries with it the danger of a nuclear conflict—are all three members of the Democratic Socialists of America in Congress, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib and Greg Casar, as well as Summer Lee, a former DSA organizer, and others identified as members of the supposedly radical “Squad,” like Ilhan Omar and Ayanna Pressley.
They stood shoulder to shoulder with Republican supporters of the war on Iran, like Kiley, and with Democratic warmongers like Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and former Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
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There has been no discharge petition on the war in Iran, in part because a vote to invoke the War Powers Act is privileged under House rules and cannot be blocked by the Speaker. Democrat Ro Khanna introduced bipartisan legislation requiring a congressional vote to authorize the war. The measure was defeated in March by 219-212, with four Democrats voting “no” and ensuring its defeat. A similar bill was defeated in April by 214-213, with a lone Democrat, Jared Golden of Maine, providing the deciding “no” vote.
These votes are entirely for show, since the Republican-controlled Senate has repeatedly rejected resolutions invoking the War Powers Act in relation to Iran, and Trump would veto or simply refuse to comply with such a measure if it did pass.
10. Bond markets send out a warning
Before the war on Iran financial traders had been expecting that the BoE would lower borrowing costs to try to boost economic growth. Now they expect the BoE to make two or three quarter point interest rate increases by the end of the year.
In the US the rise in bond yields has come amid a further inflation surge with the annual rate of inflation rising to 3.8 percent in April, from 3.3 percent in March as petrol (gas) prices continue to rise along with a range of other products impacted by the war. And judging by the 6 percent increase in the wholesale price index for the month of April prices for the consumer are set for further major increases.
US economists have warned that there will be upward pressure on prices in every sector of the economy. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has said that the price of freight transportation, which feeds into the cost of every commodity—from groceries to industrial products—had increased by 8.1 percent in April.
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The inflationary surge is also increasing concerns about how long the rise in US debt can continue as it goes over $39 trillion and the interest bill, now at $1 trillion, continues to surge, taking up an ever-increasing portion of government spending.
The worsening financial position of the US has set up the conditions for continuing conflict within the political and financial establishment.
After waging a campaign against Federal Reserve Board Chairman Jerome Powell, denouncing him as a “numbskull” and “moron” over his refusal to bring down interest rates—even at one point launching criminal proceedings against him—Trump has secured the appointment of his chosen successor Kevin Warsh.
Warsh received Senate confirmation on Wednesday and takes over the helm of the Fed today.
Trump backed Warsh because he has been an advocate of lower rates and appeared to be toeing the president’s line, issuing his own criticisms of the operations of the Fed. He has been regularly denounced as the “sock puppet” of Trump.
But whether he can carry out the demand for interest rate cuts from his political master—Trump has said they should go to as low as 1 percent—is another question. The rate is not set by the chairman alone but by the 12-member Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC). And here the sentiment is turning to a rate increase, not a cut.
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Whatever the machinations in the Fed and the financial establishment, the objective crisis produced by the Iran war continues to deepen. The decision last week of the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) to lift its rate indicated the future direction of other, more significant, central banks.
The baseline scenario of the RBA and other central banks and forecasting agencies, is that the oil prices rise would start to ease over the next few months. That is looking increasingly unlikely.
On Wednesday, the International Energy Agency (IEA) warned that global oil reserves, which have so far kept the oil price from going up more than it has, were being run down at a record pace.
It said that stockpiles of crude and refined oil fell by almost 4 million barrels a day in April. This is more than the combined daily consumption of the UK and Germany.
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Whatever the immediate twists and turns in the war, the working class is confronting an even bigger hit to its living standards than have been experienced so far. This will drive forward wages struggles under conditions where the central banks, the guardians of the interests of finance capital, are demanding that no compensation should be provided.
11. Mass layoffs to hit New York City’s New School next month
Next month, The New School in New York—one of the most prominent ostensibly progressive academic institutions in the United States—plans to conduct mass layoffs of up to 20 percent of its full-time workforce. The cuts will fall on faculty as well as staff, across finance, IT, HR and support positions, as the administration implements a sweeping restructuring plan to eliminate a $48 million budget deficit.
The school announced potential layoffs in December. It offered a buy-out option to full-time faculty which only about 7 percent accepted. Now the school claims that it has no choice but to impose drastic staffing reductions. By the fall of this year, it aims to eliminate 400 to 460 positions, transition to a “two-college model,” gut student medical services, with full-time faculty facing a projected 15 percent reduction, devastating departments within Eugene Lang College and the New School for Social Research.
The New School was founded in 1919 by scholars—including several expelled from Columbia University for opposing US entry into World War I—who sought a genuinely critical institution outside of conventional academia. For decades it remained, as the World Socialist Web Site has noted, “a center of progressive ideas and opposition to fascism and militarism,” welcoming exiled European intellectuals fleeing Nazism in the 1930s.”
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The central pillar of the university’s austerity program is a massive administrative consolidation that effectively dissolves the operational identities of several historic divisions. Under this plan, the Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts and the New School for Social Research (NSSR) are being merged into a single integrated unit, while Parsons School of Design, the College of Performing Arts, and the School of Public Engagement are being grouped into a secondary professional and creative arts cluster.
This consolidation is not merely an administrative shift; it has triggered the systemic elimination of academic offerings, including the discontinuance or “pausing” of over 23 majors and 16 minors across the university. These cuts have targeted programs deemed “low-enrollment,” with the Eugene Lang curriculum being hit particularly hard in areas such as Journalism + Design, Global Studies, and several foreign language tracks. These course cancellations will lead to job losses among the part-time faculty, who make up almost 90 percent of the total.
The academic contraction is also visible at the graduate level, where the university has implemented a “Ph.D. pause,” suspending new admissions for the 2026–2027 cycle across nearly all doctoral programs, including sociology, philosophy, economics and politics. By freezing these programs, the administration has signaled a pivot away from its historical identity as a “university in exile” for left-wing scholarship.
The present restructuring is not simply a repudiation of the history of The New School but is a part of a widespread attempt by university administrations across the United States to suffocate intellectual dissent on the campuses and align both scholarship and education with the ruling elite’s program of war and dictatorship. This was most dramatically revealed by Columbia University’s capitulation last year to the demands of the Trump administration to impose a regime of censorship on students and faculty.
That a similar process lies behind The New School’s restructuring is best shown by the university’s formation of a right-wing Center for the American Experience (CAE). While the administration has been close-mouthed about exactly what the orientation of the CAE will be and where its funding comes from, there is little doubt that it will be aligned with the right-wing accommodation of universities yo the Trump administration. One of the CAE’s co-directors, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, publicly opposed an American Historical Association resolution in 2025 that condemned the destruction of Gaza’s educational system.
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Faculty and students have taken several actions to fight back. They have held protests and delivered petitions to the administration. Recently, full-time faculty, who do not belong to a union, have sought to join the United Auto Workers to defend their rights.
Expecting the UAW bureaucracy to lift a finger on behalf of New School faculty, however, would be a grievous mistake. The union apparatus subordinates workers to the Democratic Party and the very corporate elite that they are now fighting. The UAW bureaucracy exists not to advance workers’ struggles, but to contain and suppress them, as its record among academic workers and autoworkers has shown repeatedly.
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The inevitable conclusion is that workers at The New School need to build new organizations to defend themselves from layoffs and to call a halt to the reactionary restructuring of the university: independent rank-and-file committees. These would operate outside the no-strike clauses the UAW has embedded in every contract it has signed with the university, appealing directly to workers across New York City—academic workers at Columbia, NYU, and in particular transit workers, whose contact with the MTA expires this week—for the active solidarity the union bureaucracy has systematically blocked.
This perspective finds its expression in the campaign of Will Lehman, a rank-and-file Mack Trucks worker running as a socialist candidate for UAW president. Lehman’s platform does not seek to reform the UAW bureaucracy but to abolish it—transferring power and the union’s financial resources directly to rank-and-file workers under democratic control.
When the UAW blocked Columbia’s strike authorization in April 2026, Lehman declared the apparatus “management’s enforcer” and “complicit in political repression,” urging workers to seize the initiative independently. His campaign explicitly connects the suppression of academic workers struggles to the subordination of the working class to the Democratic Party and the bipartisan program of austerity and war. This program has never been more necessary for New School workers.
The SAG-AFTRA tentative agreement locks performers into four years of managed decline, institutionalizes AI exploitation and must be rejected. Build rank-and-file committees now!
13. From the Ford Rouge plant: build rank-and-file committees
This speech was delivered by Martaz Crutchfield, candidate for UAW delegate at Ford Dearborn Truck Plant, at the 2026 May Day Online Rally, organized by the WSWS and the ICFI.
14. French imperialism, the war on Iran and the EU assault on migrants
This speech was delivered by Alex Lantier, Parti de l’égalité socialiste (PES) national secretary, at the 2026 May Day Online Rally, organized by the WSWS and the ICFI.
15. Worker with 35 years at Canadian Coca-Cola distributor terminated following job injury
Days after making a splash in the local Calgary media by unveiling a new $75 million state-of-the-art warehouse facility, Coke Canada Bottling unceremoniously axed a worker with 35 years at the company who was injured on the job—essentially crying poor.
Shawne Hopkins was terminated on the basis of the doctrine of “frustration of employment”—a legal term of which most workers are probably unaware. It can be invoked when there is no reasonable likelihood of an employee being able to return to work within a reasonable time after an unexpected situation occurs, such as an illness or injury.
Yet even if an employer makes the claim that an employment agreement has been “frustrated,” it does not release the employer from the obligation to comply with the Alberta Human Rights Act. According to the Alberta Human Rights Commission, “An employer cannot terminate, refuse to hire, or otherwise negatively impact an employee because of their disability, injury, or illness.” The employer is obligated to work with the employee and, “During the accommodation process, everyone must act reasonably and cooperatively in searching for and implementing accommodation.”
Hopkins’ fate is a glaring example of how Canada’s ruling class treats workers as disposable inputs for their profit-making operations who can be tossed aside at a moment’s notice, legal and other regulatory protections be damned.
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The company offered a one-time lump sum payment of $2,511.20 “in recognition” of Hopkins’ 35 years of service and to help him transition away from Coke Canada Bottling, on the condition that he sign a non-disclosure agreement and release the company from liability.
Hopkins declined the insulting offer.
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Hopkins’ union, the Teamsters, performed its duties in characteristic perfunctory fashion, filing a grievance and hiring outside counsel for advice in a legal dispute whose adjudication could take many months, even years. The outcome will be very much dependent on the quality of legal representation he receives. Frequently, such cases result in a “compromise” that strongly favors the company. This is even true when workers die on the job, as shown at Hamilton, Ontario’s National Steel Car plant, where owner Greg Aziz was fined a meager $650,000 after three workers died on the job within 18 months.
The priority of the union bureaucrats is to not upset their ongoing relationship with the company. In 2021, Teamsters Local Union 987 proudly hailed a collective agreement that provided a miserly 9 percent wage increase over a six-year term, just as inflation in Canada was skyrocketing following the initial stage of the COVID-19 pandemic. The bureaucracy’s role as an imposer of real wage cuts is par for the course in light of the entire union apparatus’ integration with corporate management and the state over the past 40 years.
The claim by Coca-Cola Canada Bottling Limited that the company is unable to find an equivalent position within the organization for an employee of 35 years without assuming undue hardship is absurd.
With 6,000 employees in 5 production facilities and more than 50 distribution centers, Coke Canada is a major player in manufacturing across the country. The “proudly independent and family-owned” distributor of Coca-Cola products makes bold and visionary claims on its website: “At Coke Canada Bottling, we foster a supportive, collaborative, family-like culture where our people have opportunities to grow and develop through meaningful work in a fast-paced, dynamic work environment.” It continues, “The ‘behaviors we owe each other’ guide us each day in how we act towards one another, our customers, consumers, communities, and stakeholders.”
Formed in 2018 when a joint venture purchased Coke’s Canadian bottling and distribution franchise, Coke Canada is an independent, privately held company owned by billionaires with extensive corporate connections—the Tanenbaum family and the descendants of Junior Bridgeman—and not part of the publicly traded Coca-Cola Company. Its annual revenues are estimated at $3.3 billion.
*****
The wealth at the disposal of Tanenbaum and Bridgeman’s heirs is far from exceptional among Canada’s unaccountable and ever wealthier oligarchy. Oxfam Canada reported recently that the country’s 89 billionaires grew their combined wealth by 20 percent during 2025 alone, translating into an increase of $95 billion for the richest 40 billionaires. On the other side of the divide, poverty has risen steadily since 2020, and some 25 percent of Canadians live in food-insecure households.
*****
Coca-Cola Canada Bottling Limited and its owners could easily afford to accommodate the needs of a 35-year employee who was injured on the job—they just don’t want to. The company’s callous outlook typifies the standpoint of a billionaire oligarchy that views the working class as so much raw material for exploitation and disposal as needed. Workers can only secure safe working conditions and decent compensation for injuries by organizing independently of the pro-corporate union bureaucracies and waging a collective struggle for their class interests by building rank-and-file committees in every workplace to fight for social needs, not private profit, to take precedence.
16. United Kingdom: Postal workers challenge CWU spin over its restructuring plans with Royal Mail
What terrifies the CWU bureaucracy is that workers increasingly recognize the union apparatus as an arm of management. “He's reading off a script,” one worker said of Tony Bouch’s video. Another answered: “from a Royal Mail director.”
Britain’s ruling elite is preparing an unprecedented crackdown in central London on Saturday, directed above all against opposition to the Gaza genocide.
The Metropolitan Police’s £4 million operation has the character of a military deployment. Alongside 4,000 officers, the force is placing armored police vehicles on standby.
On Saturday, a far-right “Unite the Kingdom” march organized by the fascist Tommy Robinson is being held. It was prioritized by the police over a planned demonstration by the Palestine Coalition marking the 78th anniversary of Israel’s expulsion of the Palestinians. A counter-demonstration to Robinson’s, organized by Stand Up To Racism, will also be held.
London is also hosting football’s showpiece FA Cup Final, usually attended by 90,000.
The Met is using the pretext of possible clashes to mount an operation “unprecedented in recent years”, requiring “the most assertive possible use of our powers including strict conditions.”
While routinely restricting national anti-genocide protests in London, Met updates on such stipulations generally amount to a few paragraphs, with maps showing march routes and times. This time its update, “4,000 officers prepare for day of protest in central London”, ran to almost 3,000 words.
It reports the comments of Met Deputy Assistant Commissioner James Harman given at a May 13 media briefing that the 4,000 officers “will include 660 officers from other police forces across England and Wales. In addition to the officers you see out on foot, there will be specialist traffic units, mounted officers, police dogs, police helicopters, drone teams and detectives to investigate offenses that take place at protests.”
Harman said all police officers will be equipped with riot gear, described as “their protective public order equipment”.
He announced, “This Saturday is also the first time we will be using live facial recognition as part of a protest policing operation.” While it is being “deployed in the London borough of Camden in an area likely to be used by those attending the Unite the Kingdom event”, this sets a precedent for a digital dragnet against all future demonstrations.
The Met announced they “will have specialist armed vehicles available for use as a very high level contingency option”: an 18-strong fleet of SandCat armored vehicles manufactured by Israeli company Plasan. The same vehicle has been extensively used by Israel’s military during the genocide in Gaza. Upon purchasing them, the Met said they were intended only for the “most serious public disorder” situations and “high-risk armed policing operations”.
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That such vehicles are now readied for use against political demonstrations makes clear the extraordinarily sharp intensification of class tensions in Britain.
Alongside parading the hardware of repression, the Met is threatening direct curtailment of freedom of speech and assembly. Police conditions under the Public Order Act state that organisers and speakers at both rallies “must ensure that all content displayed and broadcast as part of the assembly” does not include material “likely to stir up racial or religious hatred.”
Harman warned, “For the first time we’ve also imposed conditions relating to the speakers at these protests. These conditions make the organizers responsible for ensuring speakers they invite don’t break the law by using these events as a platform for unlawful extremism or hate speech.” Therefore, “If hate speech is used at the rally, we, the police, will intervene, then and there with the speaker. Our condition places the responsibility on the organizer as well as the speaker to stay within the law.” The BBC reported “Specialist officers, working with prosecutors, will be on standby to take swift decisions to arrest and charge hate speech crimes.
The police statement makes clear that these sweeping powers are aimed principally at pro-Palestinian demonstrators. Harman boasted that police had “arrested and charged people for calling for intifada at protests”. How all-embracing these powers are is confirmed in his statement: “If something is hateful and intimidating we will take action whatever the academic or historical interpretation of those words.”
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The pro-Palestinian protest is the primary target of this crackdown, despite Robinson’s far-right demonstrations repeatedly descending into violence. Harman admitted that at last September’s “Unite the Kingdom” rally, “there was violence in multiple locations when protesters attacked police officers and tried to reach opposing groups.” He added that police still have “more than 50 outstanding and unidentified suspects for offenses on that day.”
Saturday’s operation is a directive virtually handwritten in Downing Street. The Met’s statement came within two weeks of Starmer’s April 30 “criminal justice roundtable”. This forum followed the stabbing last month of two Jewish men in Golders Green, London, which Starmer declared was the result of a mass wave of “antisemitism” with those who have protested the Gaza genocide responsible.
Starmer—with the Met Police Commissioner by his side, along with Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood—threatened, “If you stand alongside people who say ‘globalize the intifada’ [the word means rebellion, or uprising], you are calling for terrorism against Jews and people who use that phrase should be prosecuted.”
*****
Even with his premiership threatened by a leadership challenge, Starmer ensured he spent Friday morning at a London police station to review Saturday’s operation, alongside Rowley and Labour’s London Mayor Sadiq Khan.
18. Private security firm staffed by former military officers contracted to spy on UK students
Horus is paid roughly £900 a month by universities specifically to compile “encampment updates”, which use the information to identify students.
19. Trade union leaders call for orderly transition from Starmer to police working class opposition
The trade union bureaucracy bears direct responsibility for delivering the working class into the hands of the Starmer government.
The rejection of a second sellout contract by Nexteer workers must be the signal for rank-and-file action to take the fight into their own hands by building the Nexteer Rank-and-File Committee.
21. Workers Struggles: Africa, Europe & Middle East
Africa
Kenya and Uganda:
Nigeria:
South Africa:
Europe
Belgium:
Tens of thousands strike and march against government’s austerity reforms
Greece:
Public sector employees hold 24-hour nationwide strike and protest rally over austerity pay and working conditions
Ireland:
Ambulance workers in Ireland strike for more pay and improved working conditions
Portugal:
Thousands of nurses in one-day strike over pay and conditions
United Kingdom:
UK Royal Fleet Auxiliary workers strike over pay and conditions
Workers at Cambridge University escalating strike over pay parity
Teachers at two secondary schools walk out to oppose job cuts and attacks on conditions
Middle East
Iran:
22. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
"Peace for the world! Down with war!"
