Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. “We’re going to have to draw a line in the sand”: Locked-out Martinez refinery workers speak out
Around 120 members of United Steelworkers Local 5 at Marathon Petroleum’s Martinez, California refinery have been locked out after the company refused their offer to return to work while contract negotiations continued.
The workers went on strike April 27 over chronic understaffing, forced overtime and unsafe conditions, as well as Marathon’s refusal to extend to Martinez the four-year national agreement covering most US refinery workers. In June, the USW offered to return unconditionally and continue bargaining without a contract. Marathon refused to bring the entire workforce back, turning the strike into a lockout.
Workers say Marathon is seeking to eliminate 46 jobs despite staffing studies showing the need for additional operators, while also pushing for more overtime and shorter training periods for new operators.
The attack at Martinez is aimed at further breaking up the national bargaining framework covering roughly 30,000 refinery and petrochemical workers. More than 800 workers at BP’s Whiting, Indiana refinery have also been locked out since March 19 after rejecting a concessions contract by 98.3 percent.
Last August, workers voted for a mandatory National Oil Bargaining Program calling for a 25 percent wage increase over four years, protections against job losses from artificial intelligence and improved healthcare.
Instead, the USW and lead company Marathon reached a pattern agreement in February providing only 15 percent over four years, with no guarantees against job losses from AI. Refinery workers across the country reacted with anger, and many told the WSWS they wanted strike action to enforce the program they had voted for. But outside of the two lockouts, the United Steelworkers has kept refinery workers on the job.
Conditions exist for a far broader struggle. Around 23,000 USW members at US Steel and Cleveland-Cliffs are working under 30-day contract extensions following the September 1 expiration of their agreements. In Hamilton, Ontario, more than 1,200 National Steel Car workers have been on strike since August 12 against the piecework system and other attacks.
At Martinez, workers said chronic understaffing is at the center of the safety crisis at the plant. Several staffing studies had already established the need for more operators, they said, but the company refused to discuss staffing during bargaining. It later proposed eliminating 46 jobs while demanding still more overtime.
The normal schedule is supposed to be four 12-hour shifts followed by four days off. But two of the four “off” days can be made mandatory workdays.
“Some guys were working 13-in-ones,” one veteran operator said, meaning 13 days straight followed by a single day off. “At the 14th day, the company’s like, ‘Okay, you have to take a day off.’”
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Workers increasingly see the company’s objective as breaking their organization and establishing a precedent for future attacks. One said he feared Marathon was “trying to write the playbook on how to break [us] here.”
The offensive is taking place amid enormous corporate profits. Marathon reported $5.1 billion in net income in the second quarter, more than four times the $1.2 billion it made in the same quarter of 2025, and returned $2.8 billion to shareholders. Its refining and marketing earnings soared as refining margins rose sharply.
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The discussion broadened to the cost-of-living crisis and growing social inequality. One veteran operator said he was poorer in real terms than when he first hired in, despite years of work and enormous amounts of overtime.
“Everything’s gone up. Medical, everything, and wages are not keeping up. And my story is not unique. It’s going across the entire country.”
“We’re working 60-plus hours a week just to try to float, stay ahead,” he added. “At some point, we’re going to have to make a stand as all workers in this country. We need to make a stand that enough is enough.”
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The National Steel Car strike provides a concrete example of how workers can begin overcoming the isolation of separate struggles. The National Steel Car Rank-and-File Committee (NSC-RFC), founded by shop-floor workers during the 2023 strike, has called for workers to take control of the present struggle and expand it throughout North America.
It has appealed directly to steelworkers in the United States to form their own rank-and-file committees and prepare common action. It has also called on railroad workers in Canada and the United States not to handle NSCX cars that continue generating revenue for National Steel Car during the strike.
Martinez workers responded strongly when WSWS reporters described the NSC struggle.
“I support him. I support him,” one operator said when asked what he would say to a Canadian USW striker. “You have to strike for your rights.”
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The discussion turned to the trade war between Washington and Ottawa and the attempt to present workers in different countries as competitors.
Asked whether US and Canadian workers had the same interests, one operator replied, “Yeah. Absolutely. I don’t think we’re enemies or competitors.”
He extended the same point to Mexico. “Everybody just wants to provide for their family and live a good life,” he said. “I don’t think the borders change that in any country.”
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These sentiments point to the way forward. The Martinez and Whiting lockouts, the National Steel Car strike and the developing contract battles at US Steel and Cleveland-Cliffs must be united into a common movement, rather than kept separate by company, industry or national border.
The example of the NSC-RFC shows that the initiative must come from workers themselves. Rank-and-file committees should be built at Martinez, Whiting and throughout the refinery industry to establish direct communication with one another, send delegations to steel plants and other workplaces and prepare coordinated action.
These committees should link up with the NSC-RFC and the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees to organize the broadest possible fight against job cuts, unsafe conditions, falling living standards, trade war and war.
“Eventually at some point we’re going to have to draw a line in the sand and say no more,” a Martinez worker said. “Maybe that’s what it’s going to take. Everybody coming out together and striking.”
2. Hemingway in decline: Film version of Across the River and Into the Trees
Isolated and feeling “abandoned,” a figure like Hemingway, still a self-styled maverick, was appalled by the emergence of McCarthyism, the Cold War and the “Iron Curtain,” the national security state, but unable to grasp or seriously oppose those developments, or make his revulsion and disapproving view of postwar life a meaningful part of his art. This was an objective, generalized problem, but the writer was not in a position to grasp that.
As a result, Hemingway was largely thrown back on himself, his intuitions and his feelings about himself, his life, his artistic career, his memories, his “honor” and reputation as a writer, much of all that distorted, magnified, malformed, by disappointment and crushed or semi-crushed hopes.
The limits of his intense, “objectiveness,” facticity, separated from a broader view of society and history, made themselves sharply felt. A powerful subjectivism and often incoherent self-absorption filled up a good deal of the space.
3. Sri Lanka: More than 1,000 workers strike at Sevanagala Sugar Factory
Workers have been on strike for more than a week demanding a wage increase, in defiance of the union bureaucracy.
4. Thousands of children face catastrophic conditions following Nepal floods
Flash floods in Nepal have left over 22,000 children vulnerable, with families struggling to access clean water.
5. Blood on their hands: Trump’s immigration Gestapo drives Haitian student Pierre Damas Bel to suicide
Bel’s death came weeks after Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) forced him to wear a GPS ankle monitor following the termination of Temporary Protected Status for approximately 350,000 Haitians. Although he had committed no crime and had a pending asylum case, the aspiring doctor was shackled with an electronic device used by ICE to track immigrants it is preparing to imprison and deport.
Bel was one of more than 100 Haitian immigrants in Springfield fitted with what amounts to a modern-day yellow star: a GPS ankle monitor that brands its wearer as a criminal while allowing ICE to track every movement in preparation for kidnapping and deportation. Hundreds more have been summoned to ICE offices, where agents confiscate their passports and order them to report back every few weeks.
At 8:03 a.m. Monday, Bel called his father by video. “I’m not feeling OK mentally because of the bullying,” he said. His father urged him to come home so they could talk. Roughly three hours later, police arrived at the family’s door and told them their eldest son was dead.
The real offense, it turns out, was criticizing a genocide the Left Party itself has supported—in parliament, in coalition budgets, and now on the campaign trail.
7. Australia: Teachers denounce union pay “victory” in Queensland
Educators are furious at the Queensland Teachers Union’s claim that they had a “significant win” last week when the state’s industrial relations judges granted a supposed 3 percent wage rise.
8. Gary, Indiana residents speak out after 14 days without power
We spoke to residents of Gary, Indiana who spent 14 days without power after a storm damaged electrical infrastructure owned by NIPSCO, the local power monopoly.
9. Whistleblower warns Postal Service will deny mail ballots to millions under Trump scheme
A whistleblower report by an anonymous United States Postal Service official made public on Tuesday warns that under an executive order issued by President Donald Trump, USPS will withhold mail ballots from millions of voters.
The report, together with a letter to Postmaster General David Steiner, was published Tuesday by Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut), the top Democrat on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Blumenthal received the report Monday through Whistleblower Aid, a nonprofit legal group.
The whistleblower wrote to Blumenthal: “Potentially millions of American voters may not receive their mail-in ballot this election cycle in a timely manner, or at all.”
Trump has stacked the USPS Board of Governors with Republicans who parrot the lie that Biden’s 2020 election victory was the result of fraud. The whistleblower’s report asserts that USPS has rushed to set up a portal for vetting mail ballots in defiance of court orders blocking implementation of Trump’s March 31 executive order curtailing mail-in voting.
The executive order is based on the pretext that mail-in voting has allowed hundreds of thousands of non-citizens to vote, a total fabrication. In 2024, 47 million Americans, or 30 percent of the electorate, voted by mail. Of these, the Brookings Institution found four documented cases of fraud out of 10 million ballots.
The attack on mail-in voting is part of a broader effort to disenfranchise working class and poor voters. The authoritarian drive includes the “Save America Act,” which would require proof of citizenship to register to vote and a photo ID to cast a ballot. Trump is also threatening to deploy federal troops and/or Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers at polling stations, seize voting machines, and otherwise manipulate, overturn or suspend the November 3 midterm elections, which the Republicans are expected to lose.
The executive order directs the secretary of Homeland Security to compile lists in each state of US citizens 18 and older and eligible to vote, and to send the lists to the states prior to any federal election. The states are then required to send lists of all registered voters to whom they are sending mail-in and absentee ballots to the federal government and USPS. The Postal Service is tasked with verifying these lists and withholding mail ballots from voters not on the lists of citizens compiled by federal agencies.
Finally, the Department of Justice is directed to investigate and prosecute state and local election officials who issue ballots to individuals deemed by the federal government to be ineligible to vote in federal elections. The order also directs the Postal Service to refuse to deliver mail ballots in states that do not comply with the new rules.
The very attempt of the Trump administration to overhaul the election system is unconstitutional. Article I, Section 4 of the Constitution explicitly delegates the manner of holding federal elections to the states, while giving Congress the power to “make or alter regulations” concerning federal elections. The Constitution grants the executive branch no power to administer or regulate federal elections.
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The whistleblower report describes a chaotic and largely untested drive by USPS to put in place a portal for receiving mail voter lists from the states in time to be used in the midterm elections. The report cites, in the run-up to the planned September 1 launch date, “multiple USPS officials describing the election ballot mail IT system development process as ‘a shit show.’” It adds that “A number of workers familiar with the IT process believed that the entire process seemed to be a ‘mess.’”
The whistleblower focuses on the adoption by USPS of a zero percent failure rule in verifying lists of voters sent by the states to receive mail ballots. He reports:
Given states often deliver ballots to the USPS in large ballot batches, a zero percent failure rate during verification can derail vast numbers of ballots. The new scanning verification process is designed so that after a single failed bar code verification, USPS will stop the sample scanning and refuse to accept the entire batch of ballots.
He adds, “It could delay ballots by the thousands in repeated verification cycles, and thus prevent states from mailing enormous numbers of ballots.”
States constantly update their voter rolls, and the lists they send to the Postal Service could be out of date within minutes as new voters register and existing ones update their registrations because they’ve moved.
Under these conditions, the whistleblower report speaks of “raising questions about whether catastrophic failure would be a feature rather than a bug”—whether, in other words, the entire system is intended to exclude millions of eligible voters and sow chaos.
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The Trump administration’s attack on the right to vote will not be halted by the courts or by appeals to the Democratic Party. Only the mass, independent mobilization of the working class against the entire political and economic system will halt the assault on democratic rights and the drive to dictatorship.
10. American Postal Workers Union convention offers no fight against historic USPS cuts
The American Postal Workers Union held its 28th Biennial National Convention in Los Angeles last month as the US Postal Service prepares the deepest cuts in its history. Despite repeated declarations that postal workers face an existential threat, the convention proposed no meaningful action to stop the attack.
Postmaster General David Steiner has set the period after the New Year as the starting point for major measures if Congress does not act. He has threatened changes to service standards, higher prices and the closure of “thousands of unprofitable post offices.” A July Inspector General white paper compiling possible measures to close USPS’s financial gap included an option for a 10 percent workforce reduction, fewer delivery days and reductions in universal service.
The attack also extends directly to the November elections. Trump has sought to use the Postal Service to restrict mail-in voting, part of a broader drive to overturn longstanding democratic norms and place the conduct of elections under greater federal control. In August, USPS issued rules requiring states to provide lists of mail-ballot recipients and use unique barcodes on ballot envelopes, with the Postal Service empowered to reject ballots that do not comply. A federal judge temporarily blocked the rules on August 28, but the Trump administration is appealing the decision as states prepare to begin mailing ballots.
On the opening day of the APWU convention, the USPS Workers Rank-and-File Committee published a statement calling for committees in every workplace, uniting clerks, city and rural carriers, mail handlers and other crafts, and preparation for collective action, including a national strike, to stop layoffs and service cuts. A rebellion of this kind—postal workers taking control of the struggle themselves and breaking through the divisions imposed by the union apparatus—is precisely what Smith and the other union officials are working to prevent.
The postal union bureaucracies have suppressed opposition to the restructuring of USPS for years. The National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC) supported major elements of the earlier Delivering for America restructuring plan, while the National Rural Letter Carriers Association defended key elements of it and warned against reversing its initiatives wholesale. NALC and the National Postal Mail Handlers Union are both moving to send contracts into binding arbitration, preparing the ground for the cuts to begin.
The National Rural Letter Carriers Association (NRLCA) also held its convention this month. The union has helped impose the Rural Route Evaluated Compensation System (RRECS), which grew out of a 2012 interest arbitration award and has cut the annual pay of some rural carriers by thousands and even tens of thousands of dollars.
APWU has taken a somewhat different tack from openly declared collaboration, instead posturing as an opponent of closures and service cuts while refusing to organize action capable of stopping them. The APWU held rallies at more than 90 locations on July 28, generally drawing crowds numbering only in the dozens. One of the principal demonstrations in New York attracted about 50 people.
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AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler addressed delegates on the third day. Her speech focused heavily on union growth, electoral politics and the introduction of artificial intelligence and automation. COPA (Committee on Political Action) captains also worked the convention floor soliciting contributions to APWU’s political action fund so that, as the union put it, APWU could make its voice heard “on Capitol Hill.”
Shuler devoted substantial attention to the attack on mail-in voting. “Vote by mail is going to be absolutely essential to making sure our voices are heard,” she told postal workers.
The defense of mail voting and democratic rights is an urgent issue, as Trump is seeking to place the distribution of mail ballots under federal control, require states to submit voter lists and standardized ballot materials, and empower USPS to withhold ballots from voters or states deemed noncompliant with his administration’s rules.
But American democracy is rotting on its feet precisely because of the domination of the country by a capitalist oligarchy. This is why democratic rights can only be defended through an independent movement of the working class against the oligarchy and the state apparatus it dominates.
The AFL-CIO bureaucracy works deliberately to prevent the emergence of such a movement, subordinating workers instead to the Democratic Party, Congress and the electoral process.
The appearance of American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) President Everett Kelley was even more revealing. The federal workforce has already undergone an assault of the dimensions now being prepared at USPS. It has shrunk by more than 270,000 since Trump returned to office through layoffs, reductions in force, deferred resignations, retirements and hiring restrictions, while executive orders stripped more than a million federal employees of collective bargaining rights.
But AFGE has organized no industrial action to halt this offensive, relying instead on lawsuits, rallies and appeals to Congress.
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Under conditions of the deepest attacks on USPS in history, and ongoing conspiracies from the White House, the postal unions are attempting to divide workers and prevent a counter-offensive in defense of jobs and democratic rights.
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That initiative must now be consciously organized on a national scale through rank-and-file committees independent of the bureaucracy. Postal workers must unite all crafts, prepare collective action to stop closures and layoffs, reject binding arbitration and the strike ban, and demand full public funding of USPS as a public service. The privately owned logistics giants—UPS, FedEx and Amazon—must be transformed into public utilities under workers’ democratic control.
11. Pacific leaders pull out of contentious Pacific Islands summit
Five prime ministers have withdrawn from the Pacific summit amid escalating tensions caused by far-advanced war preparations by the US against China.
12. Russian-Israeli historian Artem Kirpichenok detained by Israeli secret service
Kirpichenok’s arrest is an attack on the democratic rights of the entire working class and speaks to the utter lawlessness and criminality with which the Israeli state suppresses its critics, regardless of their faith and nationality.
13. Former New Zealand defense minister says World War III is underway
Ron Mark, who wants to be the defence minister again, said New Zealand must be “mentally prepared to start arming ourselves” for war against China, Russia, Iran and North Korea.
14. Bond yields surge as governments borrow for war and rearmament
The rise in US bond yields was particularly significant because it came in the face of attempts by Treasury secretary Scott Bessent to suppress them.
15. Maintenance worker crushed to death at Kaiser Aluminum plant in Kalamazoo, Michigan
Andrew “Andy” Block was killed at the Kaiser Aluminum plant in Kalamazoo, Michigan two weeks ago when he was crushed by a powered scrap shoot clam shell that closed on him while he was performing a welding repair.
The death of Robayo has exposed the deadly consequences of airport subcontracting and deregulation.
17. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
The fight for the Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist's freedom is an essential component of the struggle against imperialist war, genocide, dictatorship and fascism.
