Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain issued a video statement Monday voicing his “solidarity” with the protests organized by Germany’s IG Metall union against job cuts at VW, BMW, Porsche and other automakers. Auto companies on both sides of the Atlantic made billions in profits, he said, and “now they want layoffs, plant closures and concessions.” International solidarity means “workers standing across borders, across companies, and across languages,” he said, concluding: “IG Metall, the UAW stands with you in full solidarity.”
This rhetoric comes from the mouth of one of the most prominent supporters of Trump’s trade war measures. Fain has repeatedly boasted that the UAW meets regularly with administration officials on auto and heavy truck tariffs, while he has not lifted a finger to defend the thousands of workers in Canada and Mexico being thrown out of their jobs by the UAW-backed tariffs.
The fraud at the center of Fain’s remarks is exposed by the very organization he embraces. IG Metall is implementing, not fighting the jobs massacre in Germany. On September 3, IG Metall representatives voted for a further 50,000 job cuts at Volkswagen at a secret overnight meeting of the supervisory board, which the union holds seats on. This is on top of the 35,000 jobs and the up to 20 percent cut in wages IG Metall agreed to in December 2024, claiming this would prevent plant closures.
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The UAW and IG Metall bureaucracies formed an alliance in 2015 with the explicit aim of expanding “the principle of ‘co-determination’ between management and employees by establishing German-style works councils or similar bodies to promote employee representation.” That is the meaning of Fain’s statement in the video that “IG Metall had our backs” during union organizing drives at German automakers in the US southern states.
Most fundamentally, the UAW promotes the same anti-Chinese and militarist program from the standpoint of the interests of American, rather than German imperialism. Fain’s video was apparently pre-recorded at the UAW Community Action Program meeting in Lansing, Michigan, on September 14-16, where he and Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed denounced Trump’s suggestion that Chinese companies might build factories in the US as a “betrayal,” railing against the “violation of national security interests” and Chinese “slave labor.”
This is the same chauvinist filth behind “Buy American” campaigns and smashing of Japanese cars in the 1980s that led to the murder of Chinese American engineer Vincent Chin in Detroit. It is also a signal that the UAW bureaucracy can be depended on to suppress working class resistance to American imperialism’s wars for global domination.
Fain has repeatedly invoked the World War II “Arsenal of Democracy” to sanctify the conversion of the plants to war production, even as GM delivers components to Lockheed Martin for Patriot missiles. In World War II, the UAW enforced the no-strike pledge to keep war production running. Today it is preparing to play the same role, imposing labor discipline to churn out the tanks, planes, missiles and ammunition needed for a new world war.
Fain’s “solidarity” with IG Metall is not the solidarity of workers, but of bureaucrats—a mutual defense pact among the privileged strata whose positions depend on suppressing the class struggle and subordinating workers to their respective national ruling classes. Fain stands with the IG Metall apparatus because he recognizes in it a brother bureaucracy facing the same threat: the emergence of an independent, international movement of the rank and file.
That threat found expression just hours before Fain’s statement was posted on social media, when workers from the United States, Europe, Canada and Mexico took part in an online meeting with Will Lehman, the rank-and-file Mack Trucks worker and socialist candidate for UAW president. The September 20 meeting, titled, “For rank-and-file power and the international unity of the working class,” co-sponsored by the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC), outlined a genuine international strategy against the global assault on jobs, trade war, militarism and dictatorship.
Lehman told the meeting: “Any autoworker who walks around their own plant can see that parts are made from all over the world. So, the reality is we can’t be separated from each other and succeed in any kind of struggle. The union likes to promote this fallacy. They’ve done so for decades. And they’ve lost. The reason they lost is because they’re nationalist.”
The international unification of the working class—the most powerful force on the planet—requires a rebellion against the nationalist union apparatus and the building of rank-and-file organizations in every workplace. It requires the transfer of power from the bureaucrats to the shop floor, and the perspective of socialist internationalism for which the Socialist Equality Party and the IWA-RFC fight.
2. Trump’s threat to “annihilate” Iran: The criminalization of imperialist foreign policy
US President Donald Trump told the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday that he is deciding whether to “annihilate the Islamic Republic” of Iran and “drive them into hell with no chance of survival.”
The American president asked: “Do I annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly, never giving them a chance to kill and destroy people and countries again?”
Trump’s murderous language marks a new stage in the criminalization of imperialist foreign policy amid the eruption of global war. It is without precedent in modern politics outside the discourse of Adolf Hitler’s regime, which waged a Vernichtungskrieg, a war of annihilation, against the Soviet Union.
Unlike Trump, however, Hitler did not announce his war of extermination in public. He gave the order in private, to his generals. On March 30, 1941, in a closed meeting with some 200 senior officers, he told them the coming invasion would be a Vernichtungskampf, “a war of extermination,” according to the diary of his army chief of staff, Franz Halder.
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Trump’s criminal war of aggression against Iran had killed at least 3,468 people and wounded more than 26,500 by June 10, according to Iran’s Health Ministry. Last week, a UN fact-finding mission found “reasonable grounds to believe that the United States committed war crimes,” citing the US missile attack on February 28 on an elementary school in Minab that killed more than 150 people, 120 of them children.
The war against Iran is one component of the US-Israeli onslaught throughout the Middle East, whose highest expression is the genocide in Gaza, which has killed 73,919 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.
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During Trump’s speech, only the delegations of Iran and Cuba, whose government Trump threatened to overthrow, left the hall in protest. The representatives of the European imperialist powers, for all their constant talk of democracy and human rights, sat there and did nothing. Khalilur Rahman, the Bangladeshi foreign minister who presides over the Assembly, thanked the American president.
The UN Charter was signed in San Francisco on June 26, 1945, seven weeks after the surrender of Nazi Germany, “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind.”
Its Article 2 binds every member to “refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.” Trump’s speech was such a threat, made in the building constructed to outlaw it by the leader of a state almost seven months into an illegal war of aggression. Trump’s speech itself is indictable as a violation of international law.
The European counterpoint to Trump was given Tuesday by French President Emmanuel Macron, who spoke of “the return of imperialism, of arrogance, the return of unrestrained force which knows no rules ... A world in which some believe that they can undermine the international order so as to push their borders outwards.”
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But while some commentators took his remarks as a veiled critique of Trump, he never named the American president. Rather, his speech was a vocal and explicit denunciation of Russia and a declaration of intent to continue, alongside Trump, to fund and arm Ukraine.
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The day before his speech, Trump met New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), at Gracie Mansion. Mamdani said nothing about the war and told reporters: “We appreciate the president’s commitment to the city.”
Trump began his speech by boasting of “the golden age of America,” declaring, “The entire world is being lifted by the wealth, strength, spirit, and momentum of a newly energized and a very powerful United States of America.”
In fact, Trump presides over a social order and political system that is rotting on its feet—what Trotsky described on the eve of World War II as “the death agony of capitalism.” The same crisis is producing its opposite: the growth of social opposition, mass protests and global class struggle.
The opposition to Trump’s criminal warmongering will come neither from the European imperialist powers nor from the Democrats and their accomplices in the DSA. It will come from the international working class, armed with the program of international socialism.
3. Berlin funds rearmament over education: Pupils record lowest PISA scores since 2000
The scale of Germany’s education catastrophe becomes especially clear in international comparison. In China, 93 percent of pupils reach the minimum competency level in reading. Just 8 percent of pupils in Germany reach the highest competency levels, 5 and 6, compared with 54 percent in China.
But the study does not merely reveal the failure of the education system to progressively impart knowledge and skills. It also exposes that system as part of a class society.
In hardly any other country is educational success so heavily dependent on parents’ socioeconomic status as it is in Germany. From 2015 to 2025, the performance of pupils from the poorest families deteriorated enormously, while that of pupils from the top 25 percent stagnated.
In Germany, success in science is 19 percent dependent on pupils’ socioeconomic status, well above the OECD average of 11.6 percent. In only five of the 90 countries surveyed is educational inequality greater than in Germany.
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The fact that not a single country has succeeded in significantly improving its PISA results over the long term makes clear that the solution does not lie in this or that isolated fix within the education system. The problem is the social system common to all OECD states. The capitalist profit system, which enriches the wealthy by exploiting the mass of the population for that purpose, means social regression across the board, including in education.
Capitalism finds itself in an existential crisis in which no answer is possible to the catastrophic developments in the education system, which strip young people of precisely the prospects indispensable to successful learning. Halting and reversing the destruction of the education system therefore requires a socialist movement that overcomes capitalism.
Proof of this was furnished more than 100 years ago by the October Revolution. It not only ended the mass slaughter of the First World War. It also provided the decisive impetus for enormous educational progress in a society where, as late as 1920, more than 62 percent could not read or write—progress that, despite the enormous brake that Stalinism represented, reached its high point after little more than 40 years with Yuri Gagarin’s first flight into space.
4. Australia: ACT Labor government slashes secondary college budgets
Public secondary colleges in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) are facing a combined $4 million in budget cuts for 2027, as the territory’s Labor government moves to redistribute an already inadequate pool of public school funding under the banner of “equity”.
The cuts, announced suddenly at the end of August, supposedly resulted from a review of the territory’s school resourcing formula. The ACT Education Directorate reduced the per-student funding weighting for colleges—which serve years 11 and 12—and shifted the money toward primary schools. Eighteen schools will see their funding fall by more than 5 percent, while 31 may receive increases of more than 5 percent.
The nine secondary colleges in Canberra are the worst affected—Dickson College, Erindale College, Gungahlin College, Hawker College, Lake Ginninderra College, Lake Tuggeranong College, Narrabundah College, The University of Canberra Senior Secondary College Lake Ginninderra and Melba Copland Secondary School.
Principals, who already had to have their budgets and staffing arrangement in place by the end of June, were caught by surprise. Many said they did know how the cuts would apply. The Education Directorate has not specified which colleges would lose funding and by how much.
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The government’s claim that the cuts to the secondary colleges is a progressive measure to address “equity and student need” is consciously misleading. This is not an increase in funding for disadvantaged schools, but a reallocation of scarce resources within a system that has been systematically starved for decades, including by successive federal governments and Greens-backed Labor governments in the ACT since 2001.
Less than 24 hours after Wilber Rafael Garces Perez, a father, husband and DoorDash delivery driver, spoke publicly about being shot by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent and denied medical care, guards at the South Texas ICE Processing Center confiscated his tablet, revoked his communication privileges and transferred him from the infirmary to an isolation cell, according to his attorney Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch.
The apparent retaliation occurred while Garces Perez still had a bullet lodged near his spine and was suffering severe pain from a fractured collarbone. Monday evening he lost movement in his left arm. Guards at the GEO Group-run concentration camp shackled the wounded 28-year-old at his wrists and ankles, wrapped a chain around his waist and handled him roughly while transporting him to a hospital.
He was briefly treated with intravenous morphine before being returned to the Pearsall, Texas, concentration camp around midnight. Despite his neurological symptoms, he remains isolated on a flat, non-medical bed with only Tylenol and ibuprofen for pain.
Garces Perez, a 28-year-old asylum seeker from Venezuela, was shot shortly before 1:00 p.m. on Sunday, September 20, while making DoorDash deliveries in North Austin. According to his account, an unmarked vehicle that had not activated its emergency lights sideswiped his car on Anderson Lane. He made a U-turn and was struck again. Agents then got out and shot him through the passenger window, hitting him in the back just below the neck, and pulled him from the car.
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Like the majority of the over 63,000 people languishing in mostly for-profit ICE concentration camps, Garces Perez has no criminal record. Representative Greg Casar said he had “zero criminal record,” and the Department of Homeland Security has not accused him of assaulting an agent, possessing a weapon or committing any other crime. The only basis DHS has offered for pursuing him is a final order of removal, an administrative order arising from civil immigration proceedings.
DHS has declared that Garces Perez “illegally entered our country under the Biden administration.” In fact, he entered the US in 2024 through the government’s CBP One appointment system, received a work permit and applied for asylum. According to the New York Times, the removal order was issued after he had missed an immigration hearing whose notice had been sent to an old address.
More than 48 hours after the shooting, the ICE agent who shot Garces Perez has still not been identified, much less charged with a crime. He has been placed on administrative leave. DHS officials told NBC News and The Atlantic that the agent had been issued a body camera but was not wearing it, despite an ICE policy requiring agents to activate cameras during enforcement operations. A second officer’s camera recorded part of the encounter, but, according to DHS officials, that footage does not show the shooting itself. None of it has been made public.
ICE is, moreover, investigating itself. DHS has said that Homeland Security Investigations, a division of ICE, is leading the inquiry into the shooting with assistance from the FBI.
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The treatment of Garces Perez follows a now-familiar pattern. Federal agents shoot an immigrant worker, DHS brands the victim an “illegal alien,” the camera footage is missing or withheld, the agency investigates itself, and the victim and witnesses are pushed toward deportation before they can testify. In Houston a man, who was in the van with Lorenzo Salgado Araujo when he was killed, was held in immigration detention until a judge ordered his release.
The shooting has provoked protests in Austin, including a walkout by high school students in Pflugerville. The Democratic Party’s response has been a toothless letter from more than 100 congressional Democrats to the acting ICE director, while the apparatus of mass deportation continues to operate at full capacity. Defending Garces Perez and all immigrant workers requires the independent mobilization of the working class against this machinery, not appeals to the agency that shot him.
6. Inside Pearsall, the ICE prison holding wounded delivery worker Wilber Garces Perez
After an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent shot Wilber Rafael Garces Perez in Austin on Sunday, September 20, ICE transported the wounded Venezuelan delivery worker from the hospital to its South Texas ICE Processing Center in Pearsall, roughly 130 miles away. The 28-year-old arrived with a bullet lodged near his spine. He told reporters Monday that he had slept on the floor and received no pain medication until a nurse gave him a pill that day.
On Monday evening, Wilber was hospitalized again after becoming unable to lift his left arm. By midnight, he had been returned to Pearsall. His attorney, Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch, said Tuesday that he was being held in isolation in a non-medical bed and given ibuprofen and Tylenol. A man shot by an ICE agent was thus placed back under the agency’s control, with his urgent medical needs subordinated to his imprisonment.
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Pearsall is owned and operated by the private prison corporation GEO Group and has a capacity of 1,904. During a February visit, House Representative Joaquin Castro reported approximately 1,700 people held there. Detainees told him of denied medical care, including a diabetic woman who had gone without medication for months. Some wanted to be deported simply to escape their imprisonment.
An interview with a former Pearsall detainee, whose identity the World Socialist Web Site is withholding, gives a picture of what awaited Wilber upon his arrival. “I had worms in my food,” he said. “I was basically surviving on commissary because the food was so bad.”
He described dormitories in which men had no bed: “And at times there were four to five guys sleeping on the floor because they don’t have any rooms. There’s a hundred guys in one room.” Even their names were dispensed with. “They will never call you by your name. They call you by a number. They don’t say your name. They say things like, ‘71, you have visitation.’ You’re just a number in there.”
“To me, it looked like a modern-day concentration camp in there,” he said. “Everything in there is very depressing.”
“The food is super bad. It doesn’t have any flavors. They don’t have any salt. They give you beans every day, every day beans. I counted five different styles of beans, but no flavor. So beans for lunch, beans for dinner.” During the federal government shutdown, he said, “you would get a piece of chicken once a month. After the shutdown was over, they started giving it once a week. But still, the food was terrible. Not edible.”
Detainees also supplied the labor to prepare these meals. “The kitchen, they make people work inside the kitchen for basically free for food.” A 2022 Department of Homeland Security inspector general’s report recorded detainee wages of just $1 to $3 a day. While prisoners worked for these sums, GEO’s contract guaranteed payment for 1,350 beds, whether occupied or not. Between November 2020 and October 2021, ICE paid approximately $18 million for unused beds.
That same inspection exposed how detainees could be packed together even when space was available elsewhere in the facility. During the pandemic, officials filled dormitories while leaving others empty, instead of spreading people out to reduce COVID-19 transmission. The former detainee described the consequences of sharing crowded living quarters with sick men: “And the first two months I was sick every single day, every single day, because everybody touches everything and everybody is sick.”
“And their ducts are very dirty. They never change the filters. And sometimes they had a bat come out of the, I guess that would be the duct, the ductwork. And they were chasing it around trying to get rid of the bat.”
When the ventilation system failed, the crowding made it impossible to escape the heat. “And then on top of that, for the whole time I was there, the AC broke three times. Three times they had to move us to different dorms.” On one occasion, however, a transfer was impossible: “And there was one time it was close to 90 degrees inside there. It was like 86 degrees inside, locked up, but they brought some fans and that’s the best they could do. They couldn’t get any AC people to come and service it.
“And they were so overcrowded that they couldn’t move us anywhere, so we were stuck in a hot room, everybody sweating and stinking.”
His confinement also included four days in solitary, where even access to water was denied. “They threw me into the hole once. When I got into the hole, they put me in a cell and there was no water.
“So if you have to use the restroom, you’re gonna have to smell your own stuff. It was nasty and disgusting. So they had me in that room for two days with no water.
“Finally, my wife and my sister got hold of somebody in Congress and then the jail headquarters. So they came and moved me to a room where there was water.”
From his cell, he could hear another man “screaming and banging his head on the door.” Another detainee told him the man had been held there for a year without medical attention. “I assume the guy was sane and went crazy after being put in that room. I had to hold on to my faith so I didn’t go crazy either in that ‘poço,’” he said, using the Portuguese word for a well or pit.
The scale of solitary confinement at Pearsall is documented in a report by Physicians for Human Rights and Harvard researchers: 488 people were placed in isolation there between April 2024 and May 2025, the fourth-highest total in ICE’s system. Former professional rugby player Vincent Jobo reported being isolated for 12 days without drinking water, medication or a mattress after a suicide attempt. GEO denied his account.
For the former detainee interviewed by the WSWS, obtaining care was a struggle in the regular dormitories as well. Notices promised dental treatment within six months, he said: “But they don’t even have a dentist on staff. So they lie, and people are just not being treated there for their medical sickness.” He recounted his own attempt to get help:
“I had severe pain in my eye, and I asked for medical attention. And the sergeant came and said, ‘Well, what do you want me to do? You want me to open your head and see what’s wrong with it?’
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Emergency calls from Pearsall show families trying to obtain the help their imprisoned relatives could not secure inside. A Wired investigation documented nearly 80 calls between January and May 2025. In one, a woman called because her husband was too weak to leave his bed and had received no help. The records also included three suicide attempts: one man swallowed pills, another ingested cleaning chemicals and a third cut himself.
GEO claims “around-the-clock access to medical care” and “dietician-approved meals,” alongside a 100 percent accreditation score in 2023. But the former detainee’s warning to anyone entering Pearsall was stark: “So if you’re sick or you have an emergency, good luck, because you’re pretty much gonna die there.”
The powers of arbitrary arrest and confinement exercised against immigrants threaten the entire working class. Workers must demand Wilber’s immediate release and the medical care he needs, with full accountability for his shooting and subsequent mistreatment. Pearsall and the entire network of these medieval torture chambers must be shut down.
7. Transit workers call for independent investigation into the death of subway conductor Moet McCullum
Last weekend, WSWS reporters spoke with New York City Transit (NYCT) workers in Brooklyn about the death of their coworker, 41-year-old subway conductor Moet McCullum. A mother of three with only 11 months on the job, McCullum was fatally struck by a moving D train late on September 3 near the 161st Street station in the Bronx while working as a construction flagger on the tracks.
Workers described construction flagging as one of the most dangerous assignments in the subway system. Several condemned the participation of Transport Workers Union Local 100 in the investigation alongside the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), arguing that the agency cannot be relied upon to hold itself accountable, and supported the WSWS’ proposal for an independent investigation conducted by rank-and-file workers.
McCullum’s death comes as more than 40,000 subway and bus workers remain without a contract. Their previous agreement expired May 16, the same day 3,500 Long Island Rail Road (LIRR) workers began a three-day strike against the MTA. Local 100 kept its subway and bus members on the job rather than mobilizing them in a common struggle with the railroad workers. In interviews with the WSWS, transit workers themselves connected the unresolved contract struggle with unsafe conditions, staffing cuts and the need for workers to act independently.
A conductor with two years of service told WSWS reporters, “What has happened [to Moet McCullum] is horrible. There is a need for real change.” He spoke about the dangers of the flagging position and called for an independent rank-and-file investigation by workers themselves.
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On the overall political situation, Sam commented, “I feel like what they say about the working class being abandoned is true. No one cares about the working class. We are the ones struggling to pay our bills. All the politicians, including Mamdani, are out for themselves. What about us, the blue collar workers? What can we do? Some people work overtime and still can’t make ends meet. Prices go up, up, up; while wages are stagnant. There needs to be a complete change.”
He continued, “I think it is crazy we haven’t heard anything about our [contract] for four months. They are trying to demoralize us into accepting a bad contract.”
Nicole, a 20-year transit worker who had worked both as a conductor and as a flagger, spoke along similar lines, denouncing the partnership between the union and the state, as well as the political system which oversees the erosion of safety conditions in the workplace.
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Workers themselves must conduct their own investigation into McCullum’s death through independent rank-and-file committees, as the spearhead of a broader inquest into safety across the entire system. Such a struggle also necessitates uniting workers across the entire industry and beyond in the fight for better wages, working hours, conditions and benefits. This requires independence from the Democratic Party, including its “left” variant in the Democratic Socialists of America, as well as the TWU bureaucracy. Workers who want to take up this fight can contact the WSWS to build rank-and-file committees today.
8. New testing finds toxins above screening levels after 2023 East Palestine, Ohio derailment
More than three-and-a-half years after residents of East Palestine, Ohio, were told it was safe to return home following the Norfolk Southern derailment and toxic chemical fire, newly released environmental testing is giving them their first detailed look at evidence of widespread contamination that was not made available to them at the time.
The testing indicates that roughly half of the locations sampled contained dioxins above the health screening level used by investigators, while approximately 70 percent exceeded the corresponding level for carcinogenic polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs.
On February 3, 2023, a Norfolk Southern freight train carrying hazardous materials derailed in East Palestine. Three days later, five tank cars carrying roughly 1.1 million pounds of vinyl chloride were deliberately breached and burned, sending a massive black plume over the area. Residents were soon permitted to return, as Norfolk Southern and government officials cited environmental testing as evidence that the community was safe.
Chemical engineer and industrial hygienist Stephen Petty presented the findings September 11 at a “Right to Know” town hall in Columbiana, Ohio, alongside independent environmental tester Scott Smith. Video of the full town hall meeting here.
The National Transportation Safety Board later concluded that the vent-and-burn was unnecessary. Important evidence bearing on the extent of contamination, however, remained unavailable to residents for years.
The reports became public only days earlier after being filed September 8 in separate federal litigation brought by East Palestine-area businesses against Norfolk Southern. Petty said legal agreements had previously prevented him from releasing the testing. The World Socialist Web Site reported earlier this month on the delayed release.
Petty added: “My frustration always was that when people said ‘there’s nothing to see here’ … Well, I’m not saying everything’s bad, but there is something to see here.”
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Petty’s reports, Rosenfeld’s report and Petty’s June 23 deposition were filed in federal court September 8. Ohio Advocates for Medical Freedom has collected the documents and related materials here.
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The new material provides evidence that areas outside the evacuation zone were exposed to the plume and that some soil used to establish official “background” levels may itself have been contaminated. Residents were told it was safe to return without access to this information about what had been released into their community.
The data do not answer every question. Petty stressed that determining where contamination was deposited is only the first step; a comprehensive assessment of cumulative exposure remains necessary. This should be accompanied by long-term medical monitoring and healthcare for residents, continued independent testing and remediation, and the release of all government, railroad and contractor records concerning the derailment, vent-and-burn, sampling and cleanup.
9. Electioneering fraud in New Zealand over escalating retail prices
Whichever combination of capitalist parties makes up the next government after November 7, the cost-of-living crisis will continue and worsen.
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Foodstuffs and Woolworths control most of the wholesale supply which small grocers depend on. Labour promises to remove “anti-competitive” rules that stop small stores from lowering their prices, switching to another chain or going independent.
The far-right populist NZ First Party, which is part of the ruling coalition, has also declared it would legislate to break up Foodstuffs into two cooperatives.
Labour’s ally the Green Party also proposes to break up the duopoly but says it would do so by purchasing 120 Woolworths and Foodstuffs supermarkets and two distribution centres to create a state-owned chain, called KiwiMart. This policy will not be implemented by a Labour-led government, but even if it was, the Greens are unable to say how much money working people would eventually save.
A few media commentators have sought to raise expectations of real change. A Post editorial on September 9 praised the Greens’ idea for “a powerful third player” to address “a lack of supermarket competition.” Gareth Hughes, a former Green MP, told Radio NZ on September 21 that the “very strong policies” announced by Labour and National “signals the end of this very hands-off neoliberal approach which has been dominant for the last 40-plus years.”
In fact, there is no reason to believe that any of the parties’ proposals would actually lead to lower prices. Their record demonstrates that they will take no action that seriously undermines supermarket profits.
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Retail prices and profits are determined fundamentally by the operations of the global market. New Zealand is a major international exporter of meat, fish and dairy products, but working-class consumers frequently find them unaffordable because they are forced to pay global market prices.
The escalating cost of food and other necessities is due to policies pursued by the capitalist ruling class, which is transferring the cost of its own crises onto the working class.
Real wages have been pushed down by 6.4 percent between 2021 and 2026, with the collaboration of the trade union bureaucracy. Following an historic “mega strike” by 100,000 public sector workers in October 2025, the unions refused to organize any further joint strikes and pressured teachers, nurses and healthcare workers to accept real wage cuts.
Meanwhile, according to Stats NZ, from June 2024 to June 2026, the prices of everyday household staples skyrocketed. A two-liter bottle of milk has risen from $4.00 to $6.90 in some stores, while other increases included 28.2 percent for beef mince, 42 percent for butter and 67.6 percent for bread. There was also a 21.4 percent rise for electricity and 17.2 percent for petrol.
The surge in prices is an international phenomenon. Following the 2008 financial crash and the 2020 crisis triggered by the pandemic, governments printed hundreds of billions of dollars to prop up the financial markets and the fortunes of the super-rich, producing a surge in inflation. The US-NATO proxy war against Russia, including economic sanctions, followed by the war against Iran, have further driven up prices, sparking mass protests throughout the world.
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The struggle for the socialist reorganization of society includes the demand for public ownership of the supermarket chains and food producing industries, under the democratic control of the working class.
10. Survey exposes dire conditions facing young and child workers in Türkiye
A survey published last week in the newspaper Evrensel is testimony to the brutal exploitation of children and young workers in Türkiye.
Labour Youth conducted the survey in July and August among 530 young and child workers in industrial estates, textile workshops and working-class districts. It found that long working days, poverty wages, workplace accidents and exhaustion define the daily lives of these young people.
The participants range in age from 11 to 25. Their average age is 17, and 55 percent are not yet 18. Their main workplaces include automotive and metalworking repair and maintenance shops, as well as cafés, restaurants, and warehouses.
Two students from Vocational Training Centers (MESEM) who took part in the survey summed up the situation: “We are not treated like students but made to work like regular workers. The pay we get is absolutely not worth it. We are seen as low-wage ‘disposable apprentices.’”
These words expose the real content of the system that President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government has expanded under the banner of “vocational education.”
Under MESEM, high school students spend four days a week at the workplace and only one day at school. It provides employers with cheap labor under a legal cover. “Student” or “apprentice” status provides the justification for low wages. Of those surveyed, 172 are MESEM students. The rest include vocational high school students, graduates and high school-age youth who have been pushed out of education. The problem is not limited to MESEM, but MESEM is an institutionalized form of youth labor exploitation.
Working conditions underscore the extent to which the rights won by the working class through great struggles, including for the eight-hour day, have come under attack. Of the participants, 275 work six days a week and 38 work seven days. For 44 percent, the working day lasts nine to 10 hours, and for roughly a quarter it lasts 11 to 12 hours. Some report even longer working days. One 16-year-old MESEM student in the engine mechanics department said the demand was to work from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. That a 10-hour workday would be an improvement for this student shows how drastically expectations have been driven down.
Working longer does not mean earning more, either. While the official net monthly minimum wage is 28,075 lira, the average monthly wage of those working 41–50 hours a week is 25,747 lira, and that of those working 61–70 hours is just 26,848 lira. Sixty-nine percent of participants earn the minimum wage or less. As Karl Marx explained, the production of absolute surplus value through the prolongation of the working day forms the general groundwork of the capitalist system.
Fifty-five percent of participants have suffered at least one workplace accident. Reports by the Worker Health and Work Safety Council (İSİG) document that dozens of children are killed in workplace homicides every year, MESEM students among them. According to İSİG data, 33 child workers lost their lives on the job this summer alone.
Complaints of fatigue, sleeplessness and unhappiness stand out prominently in the survey. The words of one 15-year-old student—“I wish I could have stayed in school”—show that the constitutional right to education is an empty promise for a considerable number of working-class children. According to figures from the Turkish Statistical Institute reported by the newspaper Nefes, more than a third of Türkiye’s 21.3 million children, or 7.8 million, live “at risk of poverty or social exclusion.” Among children aged 15 to 17, the labor force participation rate stands at 25.5 percent, or 980,000 children.
These conditions are the product of the capitalist oligarchy’s escalating assault on the social conditions and living standards of the working class. High inflation and a minimum wage held at poverty levels make children’s earnings a necessity for working-class families. Cheap youth labor, in turn, exerts downward pressure on the wages of all workers.
This is an international phenomenon. According to the International Labour Organization and UNICEF, there were some 138 million child laborers worldwide in 2024, 54 million of them in hazardous work. At the same time, according to SIPRI, global military spending reached $2.887 trillion in 2025. Türkiye’s military expenditure rose 7.2 percent to $30 billion, amounting to a real increase of 94 percent since 2016. The social resources that could free children from work and guarantee them a high-quality public education, including proper nutrition, are being squandered on war preparations aimed at defending the reactionary interests of the ruling class.
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The survey is important in shedding light on the situation of child and young workers. But the program and policies of the Labour Party (EMEP), with which Labour Youth is affiliated, offer no way to put an end to these conditions, which stem from the capitalist profit system. On the contrary, EMEP, a Stalinist party, advances a perspective that channels the anger within the working class behind different factions of the ruling class. It does so on the basis of its pro-capitalist program of so-called “democratic people’s power,” which rejects socialist revolution.
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None of the parties that EMEP has allied with or supported opposes the capitalist system, which subjects the working class, children included, to ruthless exploitation and sends it to die in war. Directing workers to support Turkish or Kurdish nationalist bourgeois politicians means lending “left” support to the very order of capitalist exploitation they claim to criticize. It also means blocking the development of an independent revolutionary movement within the working class.
The International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE), affiliated with the Sosyalist Eşitlik Partisi – Dördüncü Enternasyonal (Socialist Equality Party–Fourth International) in Türkiye, rejects this pro-capitalist nationalist perspective. It calls on students and young workers to unite with their class brothers and sisters in other countries and to fight for international socialism.
As inseparable demands of this struggle, the economic compulsion that drives children into work must be ended and child labor must be banned. The rights to education, nutrition, transportation and housing must be publicly guaranteed. MESEM must be abolished. Vocational training must cease to be a means of supplying companies with cheap labor and must instead be provided within a fully public-school system. The fight for these demands requires the unification of young workers, students, teachers and other working people, nationally and internationally, through rank-and-file committees independent of the trade union bureaucracies and the establishment parties.
11. UN Agency warns of deepening global youth jobs crisis
The International Labour Organization’s (ILO) latest report on the prospects for the world’s youth points to a deepening worldwide crisis of youth unemployment and the growing difficulty of young people finding a secure income in their working life. In the cautious language of such reports, it describes “A rocky road for young people and labor market entry…”.
The unemployment figure dramatically understates the scale of youth exclusion from work. The global NEET (not in employment, education or training) rate rose from an already massive 19.7 percent in 2023 to 20 percent, meaning 257 million young people are neither working nor in education or training. As the ILO notes, “With many more young people implicated and with youth disengagement harder to redress, the increasing NEET rate is especially worrisome”.
It points to a crisis that is genuinely global: both youth unemployment rates rose between 2023 and 2025 in eight of the ILO’s eleven global sub-regions. in almost all sub-regions of the world. In two of the three remaining subregions, falling unemployment was accompanied by rising NEET rates; only Latin America and the Caribbean recorded declines in both measures, due in part to declining youth population sizes.
The crisis is particularly acute in poorer countries. The Arab states and Northern Africa continue to have the world’s high youth unemployment rates at 26.2 and 22.6 respectively in 2025. Meanwhile, nearly nine out of ten young workers aged 15–29 in low- and lower-middle-income countries work in the informal sector, on a casual basis without even the minimal security and social protection associated with formal employment.
More than two-thirds of NEET young people are women. While girls have equal access to education, young women are far more likely to be out of school or education due to unpaid care responsibilities, discrimination and limited access to quality employment, particularly in the Arab states, Northern Africa and Southern Asia.
Perhaps the ILO’s most significant finding is that the deterioration is no longer confined to the world’s less developed countries. Some of the sharpest increases occurred in higher-income economies previously able to provide young adult workers with secure forms of work. In Northern America, youth unemployment was particularly high, rising from 8.3 percent in 2023 to 9.8 percent in 2025, with Europe showing a similar if lower trend. Both school leavers and university graduates in these two subregions are finding it increasingly difficult to find work. The ILO says this is frustrating the aspirations of millions of young people at the beginning of their working lives.
12. 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.
