Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. After Republican election debacle, Democrats pledge “bipartisan common ground” with Trump
Following the massive repudiation of US President Donald Trump in the 2026 midterm elections, the Democratic Party has launched a campaign to rescue the Trump administration.
As is universally acknowledged in the media, the 2026 midterm election was the greatest electoral repudiation of a sitting president in over half a century, and one of the largest in American history. The shift against Trump ran through every region of the country and every section of the population, and it was sharpest among rural voters, young men and workers whom Trump had claimed as his base.
The vote was a rejection not only of Trump but of the entire agenda of his administration. It expressed mass opposition to the growth of social inequality, war, the assault on immigrants and attacks on democratic rights.
Yet the Democrats came out immediately offering bipartisanship.
Hakeem Jeffries, who is expected to become speaker of the House in January, declared that Democrats are “ready, willing and able to find bipartisan common ground” and that “the American people don’t want us to get even.” He added that not a single member of his caucus had raised impeachment with him.
Barack Obama declared that Americans “want a politics that brings people together rather than divides them.” The same line was repeated in various forms by newly elected Democrats: a call to “restore a sense of decency and bipartisanship in Washington,” (Kansas Senator-elect Adam Hamilton); the assurance that “come January, we will be forced to work together,” (Iowa Governor-elect Rob Sand); a disavowal of any interest “in moving Minnesota to the left or the right,” (Minnesota Governor-elect Amy Klobuchar).
James Talarico, elected to the Senate from Texas, said he had not been elected “for retribution.” On immigration, the policy of mass roundups, detention camps and deportations, he said one should “give the president credit where credit is due.”
This response demonstrates the fraudulent character of the elections and the imperviousness of the ruling elite to the will of the population. The Democrats are not acting as an opposition party that has defeated the government. They do not need Republican support. They will hold substantial majorities in both the House and the Senate. Why, then, are they talking about bipartisanship at all?
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What do the Democrats really want? They are looking for a quid pro quo, above all on the war against Russia. The Democrats are a party of the military-intelligence apparatus, with a substantial component drawn directly from the CIA and other intelligence agencies, and their sharpest attacks on Trump over the past year have been over what they see as his insufficient aggression toward Moscow. With control of both houses of Congress, the Democrats will use their position to press for a more aggressive war.
Beyond this, the ruling class needs the two parties to work together on a whole series of issues, beginning with the economic crisis. The election took place amid extreme financial turbulence, with Wall Street dependent on an enormous speculative bubble in artificial intelligence stocks. On Thursday, the Nasdaq fell 5.5 percent and entered a correction, and the Dow fell 1,833 points, as investors, in the words of Reuters, “reassessed implications for the AI data center buildout from the Democrats’ sweeping wins.”
With the national debt above $40 trillion, fueled by war and the endless bailout of the rich, the ruling class is demanding an assault on social programs. Such cuts require the cover of bipartisan agreement, and the Democrats are preparing to provide it.
Then there is the war against Iran, which remains live. Amid far-reaching plans by Trump to carry out an attack, the Democrats have not called for an end to the war. They want to ensure that the election does not derail the drive of American imperialism to dominate the globe, and the Middle East in particular.
Above all, the Democrats are hostile to anything that would encourage a movement from below and further destabilize a state apparatus whose authority is already badly eroded. The Democrats’ task is to contain opposition to the Trump administration before it becomes a movement against the oligarchy that controls both parties.
In all of this, the Democrats are drawing inspiration from none other than Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) member and Democratic mayor of New York, who has played the leading role in forging a political alliance with Trump, having met with him three times in the past year.
Asked on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Thursday for his “advice for Democrats on working with the president,” Mamdani replied, “I think you can,” calling on Democrats to adopt a policy of “looking for a place of shared purpose” with Trump. Mamdani continued: “I think there’s always an opportunity. And you always have to make the ask ... I will still call the president if there’s something else that can help New Yorkers.”
The statement was explicitly offered, and received, as a model for the Democratic Party. Claire McCaskill, the former Democratic senator from Missouri, said of Mamdani’s approach, “And that’s what we’ve got to do as Democrats now.”
All of this explodes the claim promoted by the DSA that the elections, including the victories of its own candidates, would push the Democratic Party to the left. Far from pulling the Democrats to the left, the DSA is playing a leading role in the accommodation with Trump.
The “shared purpose” Mamdani invokes is the defense of the capitalist system and the interests of the financial oligarchy. He is reprising the language of Obama, who, the day after Trump’s first election in 2016, called the contest “an intramural scrimmage” and declared, “We’re actually all on one team.” That team is the financial oligarchy, and its opponent is the working class.
Tuesday’s vote recorded the opposition of millions of working people to war, oligarchy and dictatorship. This opposition will not stop with the election. It will come increasingly into conflict with the Democrats and their “progressive” and DSA auxiliaries, whose role is to channel it back behind the party of Wall Street.
2. After the Republican defeat in the US, Berlin insists: Rearmament continues
The official German reaction to the outcome of the US midterm elections is characterized by a striking contradiction.
On the one hand, the Republicans’ defeat is presented as proof of the vitality of American democracy. The rise of a vulgar gangster to the helm of the American state is thus not seen as an expression of the historical crisis of American capitalism, but merely as a temporary hiccup. In this view, Trump does not embody a ruling class whose power and wealth are based on extreme exploitation, financial speculation and military force—and are therefore incompatible with democracy—but is merely a regrettable misunderstanding that is now being overcome by democracy’s self-healing powers.
On the other hand, all commentaries insist that Germany and Europe must stick to their course of rearmament and military autonomy even after the Republicans’ electoral defeat—a course they had justified not least by citing the growing conflicts with the Trump administration. They argue that Trump will remain president of the US for another two years, and that even a Democratic administration would pursue goals similar to Trump’s.
When it comes to its own economic and geostrategic interests, official Berlin thus acknowledges that Trump is merely the symptom, and not the cause, of the political shift to the right with which the US and all other imperialist powers are responding to the deep crisis of global capitalism. The German ruling class is sticking to the policies of militarism, social cuts and oppression against which voters in the US have rebelled and against which millions of young people and workers are taking to the streets in Germany and Europe.
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The daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) warned that people in Berlin or Brussels should not “dream that there are now only two years left to get through. The old transatlantic partnership will not return, certainly not in a form where America bears the brunt of the cost of Europe’s security.” The world has changed fundamentally. Trump’s posturing has laid bare America’s weaknesses. “Europe must stand up for itself (much more), under this president as well as under his successor.”
Several commentaries assume that Trump, having nothing left to lose, will act even more ruthlessly than before.
“Amid all the relief at the victory of the Democrats (and of democracy) in the US, it is easy to overlook the fact that Donald Trump will remain in office until 20 January 2029. That is a good 800 days. In the current global political climate, which is more dangerous than at any time since the end of the Second World War, that is an eternity,” wrote Der Spiegel. “The 80-year-old president still has every opportunity to drag the world down with him into the abyss.”
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The landslide in the US midterm elections was the result of massive opposition to the rising cost of living, anti-migrant rhetoric, war and self-enrichment—the hallmarks of Trump’s policies. But the election has not solved a single problem. No sooner had the victory celebrations died down than the Democrats offered to cooperate with the Republicans. They represent the same capitalist interests as Trump’s party, even if they have tactical differences on some issues.
The World Socialist Web Site has long argued that the trade union bureaucracies have become appendages of management and the state, promoting rabid nationalism and imposing concessions and job cuts on the workers they claim to represent. With workers more internationally united by the process of production than ever before and increasingly rebelling against decades of givebacks, conditions are ripe for workers to assert their class interests. But to do so, they must build rank-and-file committees to free themselves from the shackles of the union apparatuses, put power back on the shop floor where it belongs, and develop an industrial and political working-class counteroffensive across North America.
The urgency of fighting for this program received renewed confirmation Tuesday when Frank Crowder, the president of United Steelworkers (USW) Local 7135—the official bargaining unit for the 1,200 striking National Steel Car (NSC) workers in Hamilton, Ontario—spoke at a Canadian parliamentary committee hearing on the federal Liberal government’s Buy Canadian policy.
The workers at NSC’s rail car manufacturing plant in Hamilton are approaching the three-month mark of their strike against a barbaric piecework system that claimed the lives of three workers on the job between 2020 and 2022.
Yet, in his testimony before the House of Commons’ Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates, Crowder had nothing but praise for National Steel Car-owner Greg Aziz and for economic nationalist policies that pit workers against each other. This included directing blame for the strike away from Aziz and touting an NSC-union scheme, Operation Backbone, to boost Aziz’s profits by having the Canadian government subsidize purchases of NSC-made rail cars.
Summing up the content of his remarks before the parliamentary committee, Crowder himself declared, he was doing “the company’s job.”
The rank-and-file committee formed by National Steel Car workers with the support of the World Socialist Web Site has repeatedly warned that the Steelworkers’ apparatus is strangling the strike, opposing any and all efforts to rally broader working-class support.
Opposed to class struggle, to mobilizing tens of millions of workers across North America who, like the NSC workers, confront a state-employer assault on their living standards, jobs and rights, the USW bureaucrats pursue an anti-worker corporatist alliance with big business and their political representatives in the federal Liberal and Ontario Progressive Conservative governments and the rest of the political establishment.
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From the standpoint of the bureaucracy, accepting brutal exploitation is the “sacrifice” workers must make to maintain the USW’s alliance with Canadian capital in the escalating trade wars and imperialist wars supported by the entire political establishment to defend “Canadian sovereignty” against “foreign nations.” Just how far to the right this alliance extends was underscored by the visit of far-right Tory leader Pierre Poilievre last month to the NSC picket line, an event that could only have taken place with the coordination of the USW national and local leadership.
Striking NSC workers must repudiate Crowder and the USW’s pro-company, Canadian nationalist propaganda, which goes hand in hand with their repeated efforts to physically bar strikers from speaking to WSWS reporters. While Crowder praises Aziz and hob-knobs with the enemies of the working class in Ottawa he reserves his hatred and redbaiting for the only publication that has fought to mobilize workers throughout North America to defend the National Steel Car workers.
This shows that the USW apparatus is determined to keep the strike isolated from workers’ strongest allies in the working class across Hamilton, Canada, the US and internationally because they are errand boys for Aziz and corporate Canada as a whole.
Strikers cannot win their fight in alliance with their class enemies in Canada’s boardrooms and government ministries, but only by unifying their strike with the insurgent struggles spreading throughout the working class in Canada, the United States and Mexico. NSC strikers should combine their fight for improved conditions with the Stelco workers in Hamilton and nearby Nanticoke workers facing mass layoffs, and the more than 20,000 steelworkers in the US who have been working for over two months on contract extensions approved by the USW bureaucracy at Cleveland-Cliffs and US Steel.
As the National Steel Car Rank-and-File Committee emphasized in its latest statement,
It’s time to build the National Steel Car Rank-and-File Committee to break our strike out of the isolation imposed by the USW apparatus. It should be constructed as part of the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) in a decisive repudiation of the nationalism and pro-corporate toadying of the USW bureaucracy, which boasts of heading an “international” union while doing everything to divide workers in Canada and the US.
We need committee members from every shift and department to form delegations to go to visit workers at Stelco, Stellantis and other worksites to fight for a broad-based worker-led industrial and political mobilization in Canada and throughout North America against the ruling elite’s onslaught on our jobs and living conditions. Contact us at nscrfc@gmail.com or fill out the form below to join the fight.
4. The latest COVID surge, the bird flu death and the fabrication of vaccine injury
In its November 2 report, drawing on data through October 24, the Pandemic Mitigation Collaborative (PMC), an independent group led by Michael Hoerger of Tulane University, estimates that national COVID-19 transmission has entered another pre-winter surge: about 1,136,000 new infections a day, 7.78 million in the past week and some 172 million this year, an average of 5.67 for every American since 2020.
Roughly one in 43 people, 2.3 percent of the population, is actively infectious in this 13th wave, higher than at this date in any prior year and spread across 47 states and territories, roughly double that reported in September. By PMC’s risk table, the chance that someone is infectious reaches 69 percent in a group of 50. Nearly every classroom, workplace and holiday gathering is now at risk, with the greatest danger in Oregon, with an estimated infection rate of one in 15.
That a surge of this scale is barely visible to the public due to the policy of the Trump administration and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The CDC revised its wastewater figures upward by 25 to 40 percent for seven straight weeks, turning a wave that had looked small into a large one, but only in hindsight, since some 200 of its 1,200 monitoring sites went dark after a September dispute with the firm Verily. The agency quietly relabeled its wastewater categories downward on August 14, so that identical readings now read milder.
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In every prior year the winter peak arrived only after the holidays, so a large wave is likely as family and workplace gatherings begin, in a population with the weakest protection in years. On August 27 the FDA restricted the updated vaccines to adults 65 and older and younger people with qualifying conditions; last season only 17.5 percent of adults received COVID vaccines, against 43.9 percent for influenza; and the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) has issued no recommendation since a court blocked Kennedy’s appointees in March, leaving the new vaccines without the government approval that compels insurers to cover them.
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The pattern is a single policy wearing many faces. COVID transmission is hidden and its dead uncounted; influenza is called routine as vaccination collapses; measles deaths are struck from the federal tally; a bird flu that has killed a Yakima man spreads through a mink farm the state will not cull or test; and the same government pays physicians to report vaccine injuries and builds a research center around a harm it has yet to demonstrate.
The equivalence it asserts between the damage of infection and the risk of vaccination is no scientific finding but a political decision over whose deaths will be counted and whose will not. Public health was never a gift of the capitalist market but a conquest wrested from it, and its defense now falls to the working class itself, through rank-and-file committees of health workers, educators, scientists and parents independent of both capitalist parties, and the placing of medical research and provision under democratic social control.
5. One-day public sector strike hits France amid mass student, “yellow vest” protests
Yesterday’s one-day nationwide strike was the first held by French trade unions amid the growing wave of social protests across Europe this autumn. Called against rising living costs and the €54 billion in cuts in Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu’s austerity budget, it came after six weeks of mass protests by high school and university students in France, joined by “yellow vest” protesters in October.
Protesters marched in 193 cities, and the state and the General Confederation of Labor (CGT) gave wildly divergent estimates of participation. The Interior Ministry said 575,000, with 65,000 in Paris; the CGT 1.6 million, with 350,000 in Paris. Large marches hit Marseille (14,000 for police, 150,000 for the CGT), Bordeaux (21,000-20,000), Toulouse (21,800-80,000), Lyon (30,500-55,000), Rennes (20,600-35,000), Nantes (24,000-35,000), Grenoble (10,000-28,600), Tours (16,200-22,000), and Rouen (9,700-20,000).
While the unions billed November 5 as a general strike, it remained largely confined to the public sector, notably education and the railways. The unions did not call out key industries that have seen militant strikes in recent years—such as refineries, trucking and airlines. This shows that, while social anger is mounting towards a general strike in France and across Europe, such a strike must be prepared by a conscious, independent movement in the working class, organized in committees of action. It cannot be left to the union bureaucracies.
The SNES-FSU teachers’ union reported 52 percent of staff at middle and high schools walked out. The Education Ministry put the figure at 13.5 percent in secondary schools and 19.1 percent in primary schools, while the state claimed that 10 percent of central government employees and 5 percent of local government and public hospital staff struck.
Nine of 10 TGV high-speed trains ran, as did the metro, buses and trams in Paris, where strikes were felt mainly on regional and suburban rail. On some regional lines, every second train was canceled. The strike halted the metro in Lyon, and in Bordeaux the public transport network was largely paralyzed. Nuclear power output fell by 2.4 gigawatts, and France had to import electricity for several hours.
The government prepared for the day of action as if for an uprising, mobilizing 70,000 police and gendarmes nationwide. The Paris police prefecture banned the march initially proposed by the unions but authorized a march from Republic to Nation squares, while protesters in Toulouse gathered on Saint-Cyprien Square in defiance of a police ban.
As on previous days of action, police violently attacked demonstrators, repeatedly mounting baton charges and firing tear gas at protesters in Paris and cities across France. In Rennes, police used water cannon, armored vehicles and tear gas. Yesterday morning in Aubervilliers, outside Paris, a teacher suffered a head injury when police moved against a school blockade. Yesterday evening, the Interior Ministry reported 448 arrests nationwide, bringing the total since high school protests began in September to over 12,400.
Workers and youth in Paris spoke to WSWS reporters about their growing anger and concern at economic hardship, war, police repression and the threat of far-right dictatorship, as well as disillusionment with union sellouts, such as the 2023 mass strikes against pension cuts.
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Marc, a CGT official working at Roissy-Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris, said he placed his hopes in the youth: “In April 1968 nobody would ever have thought May 1968 [the French general strike] possible. It started with the youth, then it spread like wildfire.” He acknowledged widespread disillusionment among workers with unions’ partial strikes and sellouts: “If you take stock from 2006 until now, over 20 years we’ve done nothing but lose. We mobilized … we’ve done nothing but lose.”
Camille, a CGT rail worker at the Gare du Nord in Paris, spoke on opposition to war: “Who is it that fights the war? It’s the workers who will kill each other for other people, who themselves don’t kill each other.” He drew a connection between militarism and social attacks through the repression itself: “Just with the 22,000 tear gas grenades they fired since the start of the movement, those cost several million. That could have bought a number of things for the high schools.”
Phil, a doctoral researcher, pointed to the class interests underlying the government’s hostility to the protests: “95 percent of the media in France are owned by a handful of billionaires.” He described “a system that is not only political but also economic and media-based, which works in favor of a small group of owners against the people in general.” On the war, he said, “Nobody has anything against the Russian people. The Russian people are an oppressed people.”
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The November 5 French nationwide strike—like similar actions called on November 11 in Spain, November 20 in Italy, and November 25 in Greece—is only one step in a growing radicalization and entry into struggle of the working class internationally. By itself, it cannot resolve the problems of capitalist austerity, police repression, far-right dictatorship and imperialist war that are provoking this movement. Rather, it must be taken as a starting point for a broader mobilization of the working class in Europe and internationally.
This mobilization must be organized independently of the union bureaucracies. While “yellow vests” are calling further protests for today and Saturday, the union leaderships are deepening their collaboration with the Lecornu government. Yesterday, Lecornu announced that he would chair a “social conference” with representatives of employers’ federations and the trade unions at his official residence on Monday.
Mass anger is building against the entire capitalist system: billionaires who dictate political life, governments that pour billions into war while public services crumble, and union bureaucracies that sell out struggles. Workers and youth who are in struggle must build their own committees of action in workplaces and schools, fight to deepen the mobilization, and prepare a European general strike that can bring down governments like those of Macron-Lecornu and open a path to workers power and socialism.
6. Amid economic disaster for performers, SAG-AFTRA kicks out hundreds of members over unpaid dues
The ongoing economic disaster for the overwhelming majority of film and television actors, members of SAG-AFTRA, once again made the headlines this week.
As of November 1, the union reinstated its regular dues enforcement and membership rules. The various regulations were suspended during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2023 Hollywood strike to provide some financial relief (or because the union had no ability to collect the dues, frankly, given the devastation).
According to standard SAG-AFTRA practice, membership is automatically terminated if a union member remains out of good standing for a period of 18 months due to the non-payment of dues or related administrative fees.
The union claims that since 2020,
SAG-AFTRA has worked hard to support members through extraordinary challenges, however, we must return to our traditional and constitutionally-mandated membership dues billing practices. This will allow us to continue funding critical union services like residuals processing, contract negotiations, legal advocacy and member support services.
While SAG-AFTRA has not released an exact figure, affected performers and industry reports suggest that hundreds of members had their union standing scheduled for termination November 1.
One of those who made his painful situation public was 37-year-old Colton Little, a performer on the long-running soap opera Days of Our Lives. Little appeared in 32 episodes from 2023 to 2026. He indicated in a social media post that he was set to lose his union membership amid financial struggles.
Little’s post explained:
Get ready with me to get kicked out of SAG-AFTRA, the actor’s union… If you’re new here, I’m an actor, and I’ve been acting professionally for about 15 years. I’ve been a recurring character on a major TV show for the last four. I’ve done a handful of movies and co-star spots and guest star spots on other shows, and SAG is kicking out hundreds of members today because the union charges actors dues that are based on how much you earn acting. Right now I owe about two thousand dollars. And as a working class actor in LA after COVID and two strikes and now the imminent threat of AI replacing everybody’s job. There are no auditions. There are no parts. There is nothing filming in LA. It’s really bleak.
Little went on to reveal he had decided not to pay his dues and “to pull back” from acting and “this dream that I’ve poured so much into.”
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Despite the fantasies generated about Hollywood, the reality for the vast majority of performers or would-be performers is very difficult.
According to various news reports, roughly 80 to 85 percent of SAG-AFTRA members make less than $26,500, the minimum threshold required to qualify for SAG-AFTRA health insurance.
Another report estimated that approximately 85 percent of union members earn under $16,000 a year or struggle to make a full-time living from performance work alone.
Statistics and reports indicate that for actors fortunate enough to work regularly the median salary is around $46,960.
Less than 1 percent of the SAG-AFTRA membership consistently earns over $100,000 a year entirely from acting roles.
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Part of the propaganda generated by the various entertainment unions, at least until recently, was the assertion that the SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes in 2023 were great victories. The present state of things has helped to reveal this, as the WSWS insisted at the time, as a giant lie. The contracts attained did nothing to protect jobs or incomes, instead they gave the studios and networks a free hand to impose the current brutal conditions.
7. Ten die in a week of devastating house fires in New York
A deadly blaze tore through a residential building in Brooklyn, New York, Thursday morning, killing six people and injuring nine. The fatal fire is the second in a week, following the deaths of four people in a Bronx apartment on Wednesday, October 28.
According to a press briefing by Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Fire Department officials, Thursday’s three-alarm fire broke out at 653 58th Street in the Sunset Park neighborhood. The FDNY received the initial call at 1:39 a.m. and arrived just over 3 minutes later to find a fast-growing, intense fire blowing out every window.
Six died in the blaze, all adults. Four victims were found dead upon the FDNY’s arrival, while two others died later after being transported to local hospitals. Two survived after being pulled from the burning building by firefighters. Alongside the civilian injuries, three firefighters and two police officers suffered minor injuries while responding to the emergency.
Crews controlled the fire by 4:28 a.m., preventing the flames from spreading and engulfing the entire block of attached wooden row houses. The fire displaced eight residents from neighboring buildings, who have been temporarily relocated to hotels. Fire officials are investigating the cause, which remains unknown. Firefighters removed a charred e-bike from the home, and investigators will examine its lithium-ion battery as a possible cause.
The Sunset Park tragedy closely resembles the horrific blaze that occurred just a week prior in the Mott Haven neighborhood of the Bronx. Shortly before 1:00 a.m. on Wednesday, October 28, an e-bike battery burst into flames inside an 11th-floor apartment at the Patterson Houses, a public housing complex operated by the New York City Housing Authority. The rapidly expanding fire immediately blocked the apartment’s front door, trapping the family inside.
The fire claimed the lives of four family members: 33-year-old mother Syida Adam and three boys, ages 11, 15, and 16. The family’s 37-year-old father, Courtney Maine, who worked at a local car wash, was gravely injured and remains hospitalized.
Both locations where the fires broke out are working-class neighborhoods. Sunset Park is home to Chinese and Latin American immigrant enclaves, while Mott Haven remains one of the poorest neighborhoods in the city.
Over the past decade, New York City has seen a severe divergence between the cost of living and the resources available to the working class. While the citywide median asking rent has risen over that period by roughly 30 percent to a record high of over $3,700 a month, wages for workers have flatlined.
Under such conditions, many New Yorkers are effectively priced out of safe living arrangements. Those relying on public housing face the consequences of decades of systemic underfunding and deferred maintenance. In the private sector, residents are frequently forced to subdivide apartments, move into illegal cellar units, or pack multiple families into single residences to afford skyrocketing housing costs.
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Today, the dangers of overcrowded and substandard housing are compounded by the risk of fire from lithium-ion batteries used in e-bikes and e-scooters. Mayor Zohran Mamdani, appearing on Morning Joe Thursday morning, pointed to the proliferation of e-bike-related fires—400 so far this year in New York City—and issued a vague call for tougher enforcement and action.
Despite a citywide ban on sales, the non-certified, damaged or heavily modified batteries that pose the largest fire risk remain in common use. There are no prohibitions nationally on the sale of such products. For many, including the tens of thousands of gig delivery workers on the city’s streets, high housing and transportation costs combined with low wages leave little room for the high upfront cost of safer e-bikes and batteries. Workers turn to dangerous batteries overwhelmingly out of economic necessity.
Meanwhile, the multibillion-dollar app companies that control the delivery industry shift all capital costs entirely onto the workers. With it, they shift the fire risks to residential homes.
8. Russian government axes social spending
In an effort to fund massive increases in war expenditures and service a rapidly growing public debt, the Russian government is preparing to slash outlays over the course of the coming three years on a range of social programs and freeze others in nominal terms, such that inflation will erode their actual value.
The austerity measures target subsidies for large families, childbirth benefits, education, healthcare, housing and utilities, sports and physical culture, and the entire basket of services that fall under the label “social policy” in the federal budget, according to an analysis just released by the National Institute of Economic Forecasting at the Russian Academy of Sciences (INP-RAN). Based on the Ministry of Finance’s figures, social spending will fall by 15.2 percent next year.
The Kremlin is preparing to simultaneously spend 4.4 trillion rubles ($55 billion) more in 2027 on defense, security, law enforcement and paying off the national debt than it originally planned, an increase of about 1.39 trillion rubles ($17 billion) compared to 2026. This is on top of years of massive increases in war spending. In 2026, defense and security accounted for 42 percent of Russia’s federal budget.
According to the revised plan for 2027-2029, funding for virtually all social programs will stagnate, fall, or experience only a modest recovery over the course of the coming years. Whatever small increases are planned for 2028 and 2029 amount to very little, and will turn into nothing, should inflation rise above the 4 percent estimate upon which the budget is currently built.
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The increased financial burden being placed on the Social Fund will ultimately be paid for by workers. The Social Fund is sustained by federal monies and insurance contributions made by employers on behalf of their employees. The Russian government intends to make employers give more. Employers, however, see these contributions as part of workers’ compensation. When their insurance obligations increase, they find ways to take it out of employees’ pay.
The idea, furthermore, that Russia’s regions can cover what the federal government is taking away from social services is absurd. Regional budgets are under extreme financial pressure. Multiple areas across the country are reporting major shortfalls and axing services.
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The Russian bourgeoisie is not doing this in order to defend the country’s working class from the US and the European powers. It is doing so in a desperate attempt to preserve its ability to exploit Russia’s workers for itself. The Putin regime will try to extract as much blood and sweat as it can in this effort. Thus, the fight of the Russian working class is against capitalism in all its forms and all its governments, whether in Moscow, Washington, Berlin, or elsewhere.
9. MUA keeps Australian dockworkers out of international anti-war strikes
Dockworkers across Europe and internationally took part in coordinated strikes and protests against war and militarization on Friday, October 30. But the Maritime Union of Australia (MUA) made sure Australian wharfies were not involved in the international stoppages.
The day of action involved strikes, stoppages and demonstrations at 113 ports in 22 countries and regions. Around 14,000 workers struck at 24 French ports, approximately 3,000 dockworkers and seafarers walked out at Piraeus in Greece, and action was also held at ports in Italy, Spain and elsewhere.
In Australia, dockworkers were kept on the job, as they have been throughout Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians. To cover over their complicity, the MUA leadership engaged in pseudo-militant posturing on social media and at token protest rallies held well away from the ports.
The contrast could not have been more stark—while tens of thousands of dockers shut down ports across Europe, workers at Port Botany were allowed to do nothing more than serve as background players in a 30-second video of MUA Sydney Branch secretary Paul Keating ranting and raving about “solidarity.”
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The MUA-engineered absence of Australian dockworkers from the international strikes was conspicuous. But it does not mean that the union bureaucracies in Europe and elsewhere play a fundamentally different role from the MUA.
The international dockworkers strikes demonstrated the immense strength of the working class and that there is a mass sentiment for such action among workers. But it also revealed the limitations of what is possible within the existing leadership of the working class. A single-day strike cannot prevent the descent into a third world war!
To the extent that the union bureaucracies called strikes on October 30, they did so in an attempt to contain the anger and determination of workers and prevent the working class from truly exercising that immense strength.
Workers entering into struggle against war, job cuts and falling living standards internationally confront this common obstacle. The answer is not to pressure the existing union leaderships into adopting more militant slogans, but to build new organizations through which workers can take control of their own struggles.
A grass fire at Canadian Forces Base (CFB) Wainwright in Alberta killed four Canadian Armed Forces members and severely injured 39 others October 17. CFB Wainwright, located approximately 200 kilometers southeast of Edmonton, is one of Canada’s most important military training installations.
Despite the scale of the disaster, the military and government’s narrative of an unforeseeable disaster, triggered by freak high winds, has been widely accepted by the media and political establishment. Initially, some media did raise questions about the chain of decisions that resulted in soldiers conducting exercises in close proximity to a wildfire. But in the almost three weeks since, reporting has largely focused on expressions of sympathy from the community, family interviews and funeral announcements.
This conforms with a pattern, where events that could undermine the Canadian state’s narrative of the armed forces as a pillar of Canadian “democracy” led by a self-sacrificing top brass are quickly sanitized and covered up.
Instead, the political establishment and corporate media are seeking to exploit the understandable popular sympathy for the Wainwright fire victims to promote militarism. No doubt attempts will soon be made to attribute the manifest failure of senior CAF personnel to take heed of explicit warnings of an “extreme” fire risk at CFB Wainwright to a lack of “resources”—and thus justify accelerating the drive to raise military spending to 5 percent of GDP.
*****
According to military officials, the fire was known to base range control and the base fire hall several hours before the overrun occurred. Due to this sector being classified a “Permanent Danger Area 2” due to high concentrations of unexploded explosive ordnance, firefighters were prohibited from entering and fighting the blaze. The fire was instead “monitored” and training exercises in adjacent areas of the base were allowed to continue. According to the military, the fire was driven out of the permanent danger area “just before” or “approximately around” 4 p.m. by high winds and headed toward the soldiers holding the exercise, overrunning their position with no advance warning.
Four young men lost their lives as a result of injuries sustained in the fire. They are Sgt. Morgan Wong (26), Pte. Shaun Farrell (23), Pte. Aidan Goulding (23) and Pte. Hayden Lykkemark (19). Thirty-nine more were injured, 19 of them initially in critical condition. According to a November 4 Canadian Armed Forces’ statement, of those injured, 14 have been released after receiving treatment, while 25 remain hospitalized. Almost three weeks after the incident, 13 CAF personnel remain in critical condition, suffering from severe thermal burns covering up to 50 percent of their bodies.
The grief of the families and friends is understandable, as well as their need for social support. But efforts have been made to dissolve any questions or criticism in a wave of “national mourning” and “solidarity,” serving as a distraction and a distortion of reality.
*****
Military leadership has repeatedly evaded questions by journalists and given contradictory statements. They refused to confirm whether CFB Wainwright had a meteorologist or wildfire behavior expert on hand, or the precise time when the fire began on the grenade launcher range.
A recent report by GlobalNews, interviewing experts and reviewing satellite information, showed an active fire at 12:17 p.m. According to military accounts, the timing of the cold front and a “major escalation in fire activity” occurred 30 minutes before the fire reached and quickly engulfed the soldiers.
Military leadership and politicians have presented the disaster as a highly unpredictable, natural anomaly. Major-General Wade Rutland stated, “The fire was a kilometer away when the wind shifted. It is not normal for a fire to move a kilometer in 30 to 60 seconds. ... Within 30 seconds to a minute they saw no fire, and then there was a fire right on top of them.”
The Chief of the Defense Staff General Jennie Carignan has flatly stated that the primary reason that soldiers died was simply “how fast the fire traveled.” For his part, Prime Minister Mark Carney has termed the Wainwright fire an “impossible-to-understand event.”
*****
The official mourning has served to obscure the contempt with which the military treats the lives of its own soldiers. In remarks to the press, the top brass made clear that the dead and injured were, in their eyes, an expendable resource in the service of imperialist interests. General Carignan declared it was “normal” for the Armed Forces to conduct training in the vicinity of brush fires to simulate realistic combat conditions. Brig.-Gen. Vanessa Hanrahan stressed that the training was entirely “routine” and that risk is inherent to military service.
In an address to the nation, Carney tried to present the reckless training exercise next to an active wildfire as a necessary sacrifice: “CFB Wainwright is where the women and men of our Armed Forces learn to do the hardest things this country can ask of anyone. Those we lost were training to defend Canada. To serve Canada. Now Canada serves them.”
What is being left out of the patriotic discourse is that the soldiers who died and were injured were going to be sent to fight an imperialist war for resources and markets. Their deployment could well have ended in their deaths under conditions where Canada and the other NATO powers are ratcheting up pressure on Russia, not for the defence of Canada’s population but for the defence of the profits and strategic interests of the Canadian ruling class.
The soldiers were preparing for deployment to Latvia, where Canada leads NATO’s “forward” forces on Russia’s border, a deployment Carney has extended to 2,600 troops through 2031.
*****
The rearmament of Canada, Germany, France, Britain and the US is not preparation for some hypothetical future conflict. It is the escalation of a war already underway, driven by the crisis of world capitalism and the violent redivision of the world among the imperialist powers, exactly as in 1914 and 1939. The difference today is that the contending powers are nuclear-armed.
*****
The media coverage around the medical crisis caused by the fire has carefully avoided mentioning the connection between the waging of war and social spending cuts. The same government pouring tens of billions into rearmament has left the healthcare system so gutted that a country of 40 million has only 46 dedicated burn beds, and specialized staff and equipment had to be flown in to treat the victims. The soldiers’ families have been reduced to crowdfunding for their medical care.
Nearly three weeks after the fire, the following questions remain:
- What criteria were used to assess the threat level if range control officers were aware of the fire on the grenade range “for several hours”?
- Why did the wind warnings at 2:14 p.m. and 3:05 p.m. not trigger a halt to the training exercise?
- Who assessed the threat level that day? Who gave orders for the training to take place? Who allowed it to continue despite the wind warnings?
- Were the soldiers aware of the danger beforehand? Were they alerted when conditions changed?
- What was the condition of the firebreaks at CFB Wainwright that were unable to stop the fire?
- Did the impending deadline for deployment to Latvia cause military leadership to dismiss routine security measures?
On October 29, the Canadian Press reported that a fire was burning in Canada’s second largest military base, CFB Gagetown. It was also caused by artillery shooting in a training area.
11. Wall Street plunge wipes off $3.2 trillion in market value
In one of its largest declines this century, the market value of stocks on Wall Street plunged $3.2 trillion yesterday led by a precipitous drop in AI and high-tech stocks which left the tech-heavy NASDAQ index down by 6.4 percent for the day.
The plunge in the market came after an initial uptick following the sweeping repudiation of Trump in the midterm elections for Congress. The violent selloff just 24 hours later appears to have been triggered by concerns that Democrat victories in state governorships will bring about restrictions on the AI buildout.
The Democrats won gubernatorial elections in Texas, Ohio, Nevada, Michigan, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Arizona with warnings that restrictions could be introduced on the construction of AI data centers. There is significant opposition from communities on a variety of grounds, among them fears that AI power demands are going to bring sharp rises in electricity prices along with concerns over water costs.
The issue was significant in Texas where ousted Republican governor Greg Abbott had backed away from his previous fulsome support for data center construction in the lead-up to the election.
Texas has some 248 data centers planned for construction, around a quarter of all planned US data center development, and the incoming Democrat governor, Gina Hinojosa, has said she will issue a ban on all new approvals until new laws are passed.
It has been estimated that 41 percent of all US planned data centers are in states where the new governor is in favor of a pause.
*****
Comments from a senior manager of a Wall Street broker-dealer cited by the Journal summed up the prevailing market sentiment.
“It seems like the rug is getting pulled out from under it,” he said. “The market continues to be extremely fragile with all this uncertainty in front of us.”
While some executives have been “spooked” by the proposed restrictions of some of the Democrats others are taking a longer-term view.
One unnamed executive at a “large tech company” cited by the FT said while the election result had disrupted construction plans in the short term, it was hoped that a “workable middle” could be reached with Democrats by sometime next year “paving the way for the continued data center buildout” because “eventually, the fundamentals win out.”
In any case, concern over possible restrictions on the buildout was not the fundamental cause of the selloff but rather the catalyst which set it off.
The fundamental reason resides in the very nature of the boom and its highly speculative character. Hundreds of billions of dollars, trillions, resting on a mountain of debt, are being outlaid on the basis that at some, unspecified, time in the future there will be a massive profit for those firms which can win the buildout battle.
*****
Alphabet (the owner of Google) which lost nearly $500 billion in the market last week “could be the canary in the coal mine.”
“With Alphabet’s net debt issuance in excess of $75 billion in the first nine months of 2026 versus a little more than $11 billion over the comparable period of 2025, there can be no mistaking the ominous turn in the AI leveraging cycle.”
Yesterday’s market events are a confirmation of that warning.
12. Inside French unions’ “general assembly” at the Paris North train station
The November 5 nationwide strike in France called by the trade unions refuted all those tendencies who claim that the escalating protests in France and across Europe can remain under the leadership of the union bureaucracies. The movement of youth and “yellow vest” protesters that led to several mass protests in October developed almost entirely outside them. From September to November 5, they organized no strikes to defend youth from bloody police repression and mass arrests.
Social anger is mounting among workers against inflation and austerity, police repression, the threat of far-right rule and imperialist war. In response, the trade unions have called one-day “general strikes” in France on November 5, Spain on November 11, Italy on November 20 and Greece on November 25. But the mounting ferment and anger in the working class does not find expression in growing worker participation in activities organized by the union bureaucracies.
Sophie Binet, the head of the Stalinist-led General Confederation of Labor (CGT), announced after meeting with Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu last month that “general assemblies” (AG) would be held by the trade unions in workplaces on November 5 to decide on further strike action. The meaning of this term, historically rooted in the assemblies of sans-culottes during the French Revolution, is clear. It would mean all workers assembling in their workplaces to decide via an equal, open and democratic vote on how to pursue the strike.
WSWS reporters attended the “general assembly” held by the unions at the Gare du Nord in Paris. It was evident from the outset that Binet’s call, like the promotion of it by parties like the Morenoite Révolution permanente (RP) party and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France insoumise (LFI), was fraudulent. What took place was not a general gathering of Gare du Nord workers, but an internal meeting of a handful of union delegates who had no serious intention of taking further strike action.
*****
Ultimately, only approximately 100 people attended the Gare du Nord AG, largely union officials and a delegation of student members of RP. Discussion was opened by a CGT official, who called for “a general increase of wages” and endorsed the mass youth protest movement: “It shows energy, determination and anger that makes one feel good to see.” Citing strikes in Spain, Italy and Albania, he added that “the workers’ movement has historically promoted this internationalist perspective.”
The official also noted growing concern among workers over war and police state repression. “The climate can become increasingly authoritarian,” he warned, adding, “What can stop the far right and the fascist groupings … is a powerfully organized workers movement, that is capable of defending itself collectively and to not leave the street to the reactionaries.”
For the WSWS reporting team and the Parti de l’égalité socialiste, Alex Lantier spoke to argue that workers have to build committees of action and organize, independently of the bureaucracies, a powerful European and international movement against austerity, fascism and war. He explained that working class opposition has been suppressed by the bureaucracies, but that the situation is evolving toward a general strike like May 1968 in not just France but across Europe. He said that such a strike would open a path to fight fascism and war via socialist revolution.
This appeal did not generate support, however, insofar as the AG was almost entirely composed of union delegates who, whatever their complaints about the national union leaderships, do not support continuing strike action independent from the bureaucracies.
*****
The meeting was a confirmation, though in the negative, of the perspective advanced by the Parti de l’égalité socialiste and the WSWS. An explosive confrontation is developing between the working class and capitalist governments and ruling elites across Europe. However, to wage this fight and discuss the necessary socialist perspectives on which it can proceed, rank-and-file workers must build independent committees of action to break the grip of the bureaucracies and pro-capitalist politicians over the class struggle.
13. Deere announces plans to close two Iowa plants in warning shot ahead of 2027 UAW contract fight
Agricultural and heavy equipment maker Deere & Company announced Wednesday that it will close its Ottumwa Works factory in southeastern Iowa, which has built hay equipment there since 1900, and end production at its Hagie sprayer plant in Clarion, a town of 2,800 in north-central Iowa.
Deere plans to move windrower production from Ottumwa to its Des Moines Works factory by the end of its current fiscal year on October 31, 2027, and round balers by the end of fiscal 2028, after which the plant will be shut. Production of Hagie sprayers would move to Deere’s plant in Thibodaux, Louisiana, beginning in fiscal 2028, and the Clarion factory would close by fiscal 2029.
Deere took a majority stake in Hagie Manufacturing, a fixture in Clarion since the 1940s, in 2016, and stated at the time that the sprayers would still be built in Clarion. It bought the rest of the company in 2020. Now, a decade after taking control, it is keeping the product line and its technology and throwing the workers who built them out of work.
Deere told the agricultural news service DTN that Ottumwa Works employs more than 300 workers and the Clarion plant more than 200. Ottumwa city officials estimate that the closure will cost about 400 jobs and more than $30 million in payroll.
Deere also announced that it is moving sugar cane harvester production from Louisiana to Catalão, Brazil. Its construction and forestry division, which includes the Dubuque Works in northeastern Iowa, is additionally evaluating “strategic sourcing opportunities,” corporate jargon for outsourcing. Workers at Ottumwa Works, Dubuque Works, and Des Moines Works are covered by the United Auto Workers (UAW) contract with Deere, while the Clarion and Thibodaux plants are non-union.
The announcement came less than a week after Deere said it would recall more than 275 laid-off workers in Waterloo, Iowa, and hire more than 400 at other factories, including Ottumwa Works. The company said this would allow it to keep supplying customers through “a range of operating environments, including future labor negotiations”—in other words, building up inventory with the aim of defeating a potential strike. The UAW contract covering some 10,000 Deere workers in Iowa, Illinois and Kansas expires on October 31, 2027.
A retired worker from Ottumwa Works told the World Socialist Web Site that the closure would devastate the city, as the shutdown of the John Morrell meatpacking plant did in 1973. “Many smaller businesses that supported John Deere are already gone,” he said.
The closures are a warning shot aimed at the entire Deere workforce. In August workers overwhelmingly rejected Deere’s offer to extend their contract by two years, which would have locked in the tier system and raises barely above inflation. By stockpiling machines while threatening entire communities, Deere is preparing for a confrontation and seeking to intimidate workers.
The UAW bureaucracy, for its part, will work on behalf of the companies to use the closures in an effort to extract concessions and lower wage demands, and any promises of securing new product would be worthless. Three years after the UAW declared victory in its 2023 strike against the Detroit automakers, touting Stellantis’s promise to reopen its idled Belvidere, Illinois, assembly plant, the factory remains shut.
Workers cannot wait until next year, and they cannot leave their fate to the UAW apparatus. They should begin organizing now to build the Deere Workers Rank-and-File Committee in every plant, to prepare a counteroffensive that starts from what workers need, not what Deere claims it can afford.*****
Ottumwa, a small city of about 25,000 on the Des Moines River, has depended on the Deere factory for generations. Joseph Dain moved his hay tool company there from Carrollton, Missouri, in 1900 and sold it to Deere in 1910.
The city never recovered from the closure of Morrell, whose packinghouse had anchored Ottumwa since 1877. The Hormel pork plant in the city was one of the centers of the 1985-86 strike betrayed by the United Food and Commercial Workers bureaucracy, with nearly 500 Ottumwa workers fired for refusing to cross picket lines set up by members of UFCW Local P-9 from the Austin, Minnesota, Hormel plant. Hormel sold the factory to Cargill subsidiary Excel in 1987.
The city’s population fell from 29,610 in 1970 to 24,488 in 1990 and has barely grown since. Today, its largest employer is meatpacking giant JBS, which acquired Cargill’s US pork business for $1.45 billion in 2015, including the Ottumwa plant. More than 17 percent of residents live below the official poverty line, compared with 12.5 percent nationally.
*****
The retiree who spoke with the WSWS described how management stripped products out of the plant, dropping pull-type forage harvesters, small square balers and mower-conditioners to rely on large balers and windrowers. “There was plenty of market out there if they would take care of small and medium farmers,” he said. “They only wanted to support large corporate farmers, with the big machines.”
He said that once Deere leaves, JBS and the health care sector will be the city’s only major employers, and that health care “will be badly damaged by those families leaving.” “Ottumwa will again fall,” he said.
*****
Deere’s profits have fallen from a peak of $10.2 billion in fiscal 2023, but the company remains enormously profitable. It made nearly $4.9 billion over the past four quarters, and in August it raised its forecast for the 2026 fiscal year to between $4.75 billion and $5 billion. Third-quarter profits rose to $1.38 billion, from $1.29 billion a year earlier.
The slump in farm machinery sales has been offset by a boom in construction equipment. In the third quarter, sales of Deere’s large farm machinery fell 6 percent, while sales in its construction and forestry division jumped 18 percent to $3.6 billion and the division’s profits rose 84 percent.
While threatening to close plants, Deere is enriching its executives and big shareholders. Last year it paid out $1.7 billion in dividends and spent $1.1 billion buying back its own stock to prop up the share price, and its board has authorized another $7.4 billion in buybacks. CEO John May took home $27.9 million in fiscal 2025.
*****
The UAW International responded Wednesday with a blustering four-sentence statement, writing that it was “disgusted” by “John Deere’s latest attack on the working class of Iowa.”
It said the UAW would “use every tool at our disposal, from our contract negotiations in 2027, to legislative and executive action, to keep good jobs in Iowa and stop the one-sided class war waged by John Deere.”
“It’s time for America to come together to save John Deere from its own corporate greed, and fight back in the war on America’s factory workers,” it concluded.
The statement proposes no strike or other action by workers. Beyond next year’s contract talks, the supposed “tools” it cited are appeals to Congress and the Trump administration, that is, to the politicians of the two big business parties. Its call for national unity to rescue a company that is shutting down plants peddles a reactionary economic nationalism, which promotes Trump’s trade war measures and ties workers to their exploiters, setting them against workers in Mexico and Brazil, where Deere is shifting production.
The UAW’s record at CNH in Burlington, Iowa, shows what its pledges are worth. After the UAW isolated and betrayed the nine-month strike by over 1,000 workers in Burlington and Racine, Wisconsin, in 2022-23, CNH announced plans in November 2024 to close its Case backhoe plant in Burlington, with the last of the workers scheduled to be laid off last May.
Workers have drawn their own conclusions about the bureaucracy. In the UAW’s national elections last month, more than 90 percent of members boycotted the vote, and UAW President Shawn Fain was reelected with the votes of only about 6 percent of the membership. Fain took office in 2023 posing as a reformer, after a corruption scandal sent two former UAW presidents to prison, but his administration has consistently sold out strikes and pushed through concessions contracts, overseeing thousands of layoffs in the auto industry.
The real alternative in the UAW elections was represented by Will Lehman, the Mack Trucks worker who ran for president on a program to abolish the bureaucracy and transfer power to rank-and-file committees. In July, Lehman called on Deere workers to reject the two-year extension outright and to rebuild the Deere Workers Rank-and-File Committee to prepare for the fight in 2027.
*****
The fight to stop the closures and win what workers need in 2027 must be organized by the rank and file. The Deere Workers Rank-and-File Committee, founded on the eve of the 2021 strike to give workers a means of fighting independently of the bureaucracy, should be revived, with committees of trusted workers organized in every plant.
Its program should include no closures or layoffs, the real abolition of tiers, retiree health care for all and raises that make up for and exceed rising prices. A threat to Ottumwa and Clarion must be answered by workers at every Deere plant.
This struggle must be organized internationally. Through the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees, Deere workers can link up with their counterparts abroad and with workers at CNH, Caterpillar and the auto plants facing the same assault.
This fight requires not just organization, but a political perspective. Defending workers’ jobs and livelihoods means taking industry out of the hands of corporations that treat whole towns as disposable and placing it under the democratic control of the working class, to meet social need rather than private profit.
After more than 120,000 young people demonstrated in over 30 cities in Germany last Saturday against the destruction of education, exploding living costs, social inequality, rearmament and the reintroduction of conscription, tens of thousands of workers walked out on Monday at more than 2,000 sites across the country.
At the start of the week, the union IG Metall called a first wave of limited “warning strikes” in the ongoing wage dispute in the metal and electrical industries. The sector, which includes arms manufacturing, mechanical engineering and the auto and supplier industries, among others, employs around 3.7 million people. This does not include the 130,000 Volkswagen employees in Germany, for whom IG Metall is negotiating a separate new company agreement in parallel.
In the second round of negotiations, the metal and electrical employers demanded wage cuts and threatened job losses. IG Metall then felt compelled to call warning strikes. Many workers took part in these time-limited strikes and protests, including at Audi, Liebherr, Mercedes, Miele, Philips, Rolls-Royce, Schaeffler, ZF and Siemens. In North Rhine-Westphalia alone, more than 16,000 workers at 235 sites took part.
The workforces are highly mobilised. In many workplaces, workers are discussing whether the wage round must become the start of an indefinite strike against the massive destruction of jobs and constant deterioration of working conditions. Workers are also affected by the same problems that are driving millions of young people across Europe onto the streets: unaffordable fuel prices, rent increases and large-scale military rearmament financed by sweeping social cuts. According to a Forsa poll, 83 percent of the population support the youth protests.
But the IG Metall leadership is desperately trying to stop the spark of the youth rebellion from leaping to the working class. It wants to confine the warning strikes to the immediate wage issues and is working closely with corporate boards to prevent a wildfire. Together, the companies and union leadership aim to cut the corporations’ costs at the expense of the workers.
*****
Workers in the metal and electrical industries face a fundamental decision. The IG Metall leadership does not represent their interests. This apparatus is hostile to the workforces. It cannot be pressured “from within,” “pushed to the left” or “reformed.” Its officials are closely tied politically, financially and not infrequently personally to top management and shareholder representatives, and share the same profit-driven standpoint.
That is why independent rank-and-file action committees must be built, elected by the workers themselves, accountable to the workforce and free of full-time union officials and works council barons. These committees must turn the warning strikes into a real struggle—for full compensation for inflation, against every form of “differentiation,” against job cuts and against longer working hours.
15. Salvadoran troops launch offensive in Haiti as warnings of civilian bloodbath mount
In a long post on X on Tuesday, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele told Haitians that his troops would “help you retake the country from the hands of the traitors who betray the legacy of [Jean-Jacques] Dessalines, and finally, Haiti will be free.” The traitors who “plunged Haiti into several generations of suffering and misery,” he wrote, still exist.
If Bukele resembles any figure from the Haitian Revolution, it is not Dessalines, who led the only successful slave revolution in history, but Gen. Charles Leclerc. In 1802 Leclerc, Napoleon’s brother-in-law landed with some 30,000 troops, carrying a proclamation that told the population “you are all free and all equal before God and the Republic.” His real mission was to reimpose French rule, with slavery restored in Guadeloupe that same year.
Bukele has deployed more than 2,000 soldiers to Haiti with the backing of US imperialism, the same power that occupied the country from 1915 to 1934. He is helping Washington retake control of the country so that American corporations can step up the exploitation of Haitian workers, who sew clothing for the US market for a few dollars a day.
The Salvadoran deployment is the spearhead of Operation Condor 2.0: the use of the region’s most repressive regimes as proxies to turn the hemisphere into a policed platform for US imperialism. The first Operation Condor was a secret, transnational network of political repression and state terrorism created in the 1970s by US-backed military dictatorships of South America. Today it operates publicly.
On November 2, as Salvadoran troops launched their first major offensive in the Cul-de-Sac plain, hundreds marched in Canaan behind a banner reading “Kanarandebou” (“Canaan Standing”). Canaan is a sprawling settlement north of Port-au-Prince, built by survivors of the 2010 earthquake and now home to as many as 350,000 people. Signs read “The people of Plain demand justice for their children who die from gunshots and drones.” Speakers called the operation a planned “genocide” and insisted there are “no gunshots, rapes or kidnappings in Canaan.”
The march must be treated with caution. Canaan is the stronghold of Jeff “Kanaran” Larose, the leader of the Canaan gang and a member of the Viv Ansanm coalition. Such gangs are armed instruments of rival factions of the Haitian bourgeoisie. In July 2025 the UN placed him on its sanctions list, citing kidnapping, rape and murder.
Local outlets reported that Viv Ansanm threatened residents of the plain with death to force them into the streets against the Salvadoran deployment. Viv Ansanm’s leader, Jimmy Chérizier, has long dressed up the gangs’ operations in denunciations of the “Haitian and American oligarchs.”
The fears the march voiced are well founded nonetheless, and Haitian workers and youth do not need to be coerced to oppose foreign troops. Based on their experience, they know foreign troops “fighting gangs” mean dead civilians, and a force operating outside even the formal restraints of a UN mandate means a greater risk. The UN “stabilization” mission of 2004 to 2017 carried out raids in Cité Soleil that killed civilians and introduced cholera that killed roughly 10,000 people.
The Monday offensive, carried out by Salvadoran troops in about a dozen armored vehicles in the plain northeast of the capital, targeted the Chen Mechan and 400 Mawozo gangs, which are blamed for the October 18 disappearance of four Salvadoran aviation technicians. Haitian press reports cited by EFE, in the absence of an official toll, said at least a dozen gang members were killed.
*****
The UN has distanced itself from the operation. Spokesman Stéphane Dujarric said only about 200 of the Salvadorans fall under the UN-authorized Gang Suppression Force (GSF), and he called the rest “a bilateral matter.” According to the Miami Herald, they report to a Salvadoran commander rather than to the GSF’s Mongolian force commander. They arrived without the human rights training required under UN rules and before any signed agreement with Haiti.
Washington has hired for the job a regime that holds the highest incarceration rate in the world and has seen hundreds of deaths in custody and the torture of deportees sent to its prisons by the Trump administration. In 2020 Bukele marched soldiers into the Legislative Assembly to force through a loan for his security forces.
Trump reportedly told Bukele to “do what you have to do.” The first Salvadoran reinforcements landed in Port-au-Prince aboard a US military C-130 that, according to the Miami Herald, was “provided by the Pentagon at the request of the U.S. State Department.” A Colombian Air Force Hercules followed, and the Salvadoran combat helicopters entered Haiti from a Dominican army base on the border. All three governments belong to the US-led Coalition of the Americas Against Cartels, which met in Santo Domingo days before the surge. Canada, the co-sponsor with Washington of every recent Haitian regime, has said nothing publicly.
*****
Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils-Aimé insisted on Tuesday that “The international forces did not come to replace the State. They came to support it.” The Haitian state in question is a regime installed and kept in place by Washington.
Fils-Aimé is a businessman and former director of the Banque de l’Union Haïtienne. He presided over the Chamber of Commerce from 2011 to 2016 under Michel Martelly, the US-installed president whom Washington later sanctioned for drug trafficking, and he ran for the Senate in 2015. In November 2024 he was named prime minister, with the backing of the private sector, by the Transitional Presidential Council that the US and Canada had assembled. He replaced Garry Conille, whose family had close ties to the Duvalier dictatorship.
When five of the council’s seven voting members moved to fire him on January 22 of this year, the State Department declared his retention “integral” to the fight against the gangs, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio phoned to reaffirm US support. Three days later Washington announced it was revoking the visas of two council members for “supporting gangs.”
On February 7 the council’s mandate ended and power passed to Fils-Aimé alone. Ottawa declared that “Canada looks to Prime Minister Fils-Aimé.”
His office also oversees the drone task force run by Erik Prince’s mercenary company Vectus Global, whose strikes killed 1,243 people between March 2025 and January 2026, according to Human Rights Watch.
*****
A bloodbath in preparation
Doctors Without Borders (MSF) reported that 30 people, including women and children, were wounded by gunfire and drone explosions in the eight days after October 18. “We fear that this armed conflict will claim even more victims, and displace even more people in the coming days, particularly with the arrival of additional international security forces,” said Davina Hayles, the head of MSF’s mission in Haiti.
The danger extends to the Salvadoran soldiers themselves. Romain Le Cour Grandmaison of the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime notes that Haiti’s armed groups “have taken on a profile closer to that of militias,” with territories spanning hundreds of kilometers and “military-grade weapons and munitions.”
16. Independent truck drivers’ strike paralyzes largest port in Chile
The growing strike is far more than a local dispute over freight rates. It is the sharpest expression to date of a social explosion that is building across Chile, as the ultra-right government of José Antonio Kast presses forward with an austerity program that is immiserating broad layers of the working class and petty bourgeoisie. And it is unfolding as part of a developing international wave of class struggle, from the copper mines of northern Chile to the auto plants, healthcare systems and logistics networks of North America, Europe and elsewhere.
The immediate trigger of the strike is the relentless rise in the price of diesel, which has accumulated an increase of more than 400 Chilean pesos (CLP) per liter since late July and now stands at a historic peak of roughly CLP 1,589 per liter. The truckers’ costs have been driven up not only by fuel but by tolls, the installation of new TAG gantries and the maintenance of their vehicles, while the rates they receive for hauling containers have remained frozen since 2022.
The origins of this crisis lie in the war of aggression launched by the United States and Israel against Iran, which has disrupted the flow of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, sending the price of oil soaring from around US$70 to over US$100 per barrel. The escalation of the conflict has driven up energy costs worldwide, and Chile—an importer of nearly all its fuel, with the United States supplying two-thirds of its diesel—has been hard hit.
*****
The most significant development of the strike is the pressure that is building among the port workers that the union apparatus is desperately trying to contain. The Chilean Port Workers Union Confederation (CUPCh) has issued a statement declaring that it “fully support the truck drivers’ demands” and that it is “deeply” concerned for the families affected by each day of inactivity. The union has called on the government to “stop being spectators” and warned that, absent a concrete response, the port workers “haven’t ruled out joining the protests.” Patricio Fredes, a leader of the Port Union, has made similar statements.
None of this should be taken at face value. These are corporatist union apparatuses integrated into the state through tripartite mechanisms, functioning as the industrial police of the corporations. Their declarations of “solidarity” with the truckers are a substitute for action. The bureaucracy issues statements of support precisely because it senses the danger that the strike at San Antonio will inspire the port workers to move independently of it.
The truckers of San Antonio acted outside and against the leaderships that have spent the year containing their anger. Sergio Pérez, president of the National Confederation of Cargo Transport (CNTC), is a figure whose political history is inseparable from the right. He served on the Citizens’ Council of Sebastián Piñera’s 2017 presidential campaign, has declared his admiration for León Vilarín, the truckers’ leader who helped paralyze the country in 1972 in preparation for the Pinochet coup, and has stated that “the military intervention of ’73 brought order to the country.”
Pérez is also very close to Kast, having had his righthand man appointed as regional transport secretary after defending the government’s management of the MEPCO and praising the fiscal “subsidy” of a miserly CLP 300 per liter, while the small truckers he claims to represent are being driven out of business.
The strike at San Antonio follows, by barely a month, the sellout of the copper miners at BHP’s Escondida—the world’s largest copper mine—where the corporatist union apparatus once again moved to shut down a struggle that had erupted against the companies’ drive to intensify exploitation.
The truckers of San Antonio are independent owner-operators, a layer of the petty bourgeoisie that is being proletarianized by the crisis, squeezed between the monopolies and the state, their capital of work devoured by fuel costs, their incomes arriving 30 to 60 days late. Their strike is a movement of a layer that has been driven to the wall, and its eruption, outside and against the established associations, is a harbinger of what is coming.
17. The defense of public healthcare in New Zealand is inseparable from the fight for socialism
According to the Ministry of Health, in the second quarter of 2026 about one-third of patients referred to see a specialist—66,639 people—were waiting longer than four months for their first appointment. The number waiting longer than 12 months was 6,943.
This week the New Zealand Herald reported that 85 nurses at Starship Children’s Hospital sent a letter to Health NZ warning that due to staffing shortages “the chances of us making a mistake are extremely high.… It could cost someone’s life.” Children have faced delays in receiving cancer treatment, which can have severe and even life-threatening consequences.
The country has a two-tier healthcare system that is becoming more and more entrenched. The rich have the ability to bypass the public waiting list and receive the best treatment money can buy. The National Party-led government has diverted billions of dollars to private hospitals by outsourcing procedures from the public system, strengthening the role of the private, for-profit sector.
The Socialist Equality Group (SEG), whose candidate Tom Petterson is standing in the Hutt South electorate, warns that the election will not resolve the crisis. The next government, whichever party leads it, will continue to starve the healthcare system, at the expense of workers’ lives and well being.
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A recent study by University of Auckland surgeons Cameron Wells and Ian Bissett examined the relationship between nursing levels and surgical patient outcomes during 2022–2024, i.e. mostly during the Labour government. It linked 182 deaths per year to inadequate nurse numbers on surgical wards.
While healthcare is starved of funding, the National-led government is dramatically expanding military spending. In 2025 it committed $13 billion over four years to the armed forces.
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Hospitals and clinics must be rebuilt, upgraded and expanded to eliminate all barriers to timely, high-quality diagnosis and treatment. Healthcare must be guaranteed as a fundamental social right, not treated as a commodity determined by personal wealth.
These changes will not be achieved through parliament. They require the political mobilization of healthcare workers and the entire working class against austerity and war. This in turn requires a break from the union bureaucracy, which is seeking to channel opposition to the healthcare crisis into the Labour Party’s election campaign.
The unions have repeatedly betrayed healthcare workers’ struggles, including the “mega strike” of October 2025 involving 100,000 nurses, doctors, teachers, and broader layers of the working class. The bureaucracy proceeded to divide and isolate these workers, in order to push through below-inflation pay deals.
The SEG calls on healthcare workers to build new organizations: rank-and-file committees, independent of the union bureaucracy and democratically controlled by workers themselves. Such committees must link up with other workers who are entering into struggles over wages and conditions, in New Zealand and internationally.
The struggle to defend and expand public healthcare is inseparable from the fight for socialism because genuinely universal healthcare is incompatible with the requirements of the profit system. The SEG calls for the banks and major corporations to be placed under public ownership and democratic workers’ control, so that the wealth created by the working class can be directed towards meeting human needs, rather than being hoarded by a wealthy few.
The SEG urges healthcare workers and all working people to support our election campaign and, if you are in Hutt South, to vote for Tom Petterson. Most importantly, we urge workers to join the fight to build a revolutionary socialist party in New Zealand, as a section of the International Committee of the Fourth International.
It is nearly 16 years since a series of explosions ripped through the Pike River underground coal mine in New Zealand in November 2010, resulting in the deaths of 29 workers—one of the deadliest workplace disasters in the country’s history.
The WSWS recently spoke with Bernie Monk, whose son Michael died in the disaster, aged just 23, about why he was supporting the campaign of Socialist Equality Group leader Tom Petterson, who is standing in the Hutt South electorate in tomorrow’s election.
Monk and other family members of the Pike 29 are still fighting for justice for their loved ones, and to uncover the full truth about the causes of the disaster.
A 2012 royal commission of inquiry found abundant evidence that the mine’s board and management had placed production and profit ahead of workers’ safety. The mine had no proper emergency exit, as required by law, its methane detection and ventilation systems were faulty, and its main fan was installed underground—a highly unorthodox practice because of the risk of sparks causing an explosion. To this day, however, no one has faced any accountability for actions that led to 29 avoidable deaths.
The state’s Department of Labour (now Worksafe) and the Engineering, Printing and Manufacturing Union knew about the dangerous conditions in the mine, but did not publicize it and took no actions to stop Pike River’s operations and force safety improvements.
Monk said that for many years Petterson and the WSWS had drawn attention to the injustice of Pike River and similar industrial disasters, “not only in New Zealand but worldwide, and you are listening to what we are actually saying. The other people [political parties] don’t listen. You’re the only ones that can honestly say you’ve [supported us] the whole way through this.”
He explained that successive Labour Party and National Party governments had refused to carry out a thorough underground investigation of Pike River, to recover bodies and forensic evidence and prosecute those responsible.
“It’s unbelievable. Both parties have told the country: it’s not in the best interests of the country” and that it would cost too much to re-enter the mine workings and do a proper investigation. “Time and time again, I’ve gone to government departments, under Labour and National, and got nothing,” Monk said.*****
The 2017–2023 Labour Party-led government of Jacinda Ardern was elected with promises to re-enter the mine and gather evidence for prosecutions, but the operation was aborted and the mine was sealed before critical evidence and human remains could be recovered.
Throughout the current election season, Monk said, all the established parties had remained completely silent about the glaring lack of justice for the Pike River families. “They say to us: ‘We can’t say or do anything until the police make a decision.’ I don’t see why things can’t be out in the open,” he said.
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Monk said he felt as though governments and officials were “wearing us out and hoping we’ll die.” He compared the cover-up at Pike River to other preventable tragedies for which no one has been prosecuted. He said “we’re going through the same struggles” as the families impacted by the 1989 Hillsborough disaster in Britain, in which 94 people were killed; the 2017 Grenfell Tower inferno that killed 72 people; and the CTV building collapse in Christchurch in 2011, which killed 115 people. In each case, there is evidence of official negligence and cost-cutting, yet no one has faced accountability.
The Socialist Equality Group’s election campaign is aimed against all the capitalist parties, which defend a judicial system rigged in favor of the rich. Pike River and the countless other avoidable industrial disasters in New Zealand and internationally underscore the need for the working class to take power out of the hands of the corporate and financial elite, and for society to be reorganized on the basis of social need, not private profit.
19. New Zealand election foreshadows deep attacks on the working class
The lead-up to the New Zealand election on November 7 has been marked by widespread alienation, anger and disillusionment with the entire political establishment. Successive Labour- and National Party-led governments have overseen savage austerity measures and the diversion of billions in public funds into the military to prepare for war.
Both main parties entered the election campaign promising, as a priority, to return government books to surplus—National by 2028/29 and Labour by 2029/30. This can only be achieved by a vast escalation of the ongoing assault on the social position of the working class.
Strikes have re-emerged after a period of quiescence imposed by the trade union bureaucracy. About 10,000 public servants took part in a half-day strike on September 9 against moves to drive down wages and impose thousands of job cuts. On October 21, 8,000 tertiary education staff held a half-day national strike against low wages, understaffing and insecure contracts. Long-running strikes by firefighters continue.
The past two weeks have seen walkouts by KiwiBank staff and retail workers at Farmers and Ikea. TVNZ staff struck nationally for first time in 20 years. Localised strikes were held by Watties frozen food workers in Hawkes Bay and hospital staff in both Hamilton and Tauranga.
For months National and Labour have both polled below 30 percent support—the first time the two central props of the ruling establishment have been so unpopular since the 1930s. Whichever leads the next government will have to form a coalition with two or more minor parties, which will likely be highly unstable.
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Public services are being sacrificed to fund preparations for war. Both parties are committed to double defense spending to 2 percent of GDP by 2032/33. In its 2026 budget the government committed a combined $1.58 billion uplift to the military as part of a total $3.5 billion defense and intelligence package.
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The rightward shift by the entire ruling establishment is a sharp warning to the working class. The next government, whichever party leads it, will ramp up austerity and accelerate the militarization of the country.
To oppose this agenda, the Socialist Equality Group (SEG) is standing its candidate Tom Petterson in the working class Hutt South electorate on November 7. The SEG rejects the premise shared by every other party contesting the election: that working people must pay for the crisis of the profit system.
SEG members and supporters have distributed thousands of copies of its election statement, which calls on workers to build a new revolutionary socialist party. The SEG urges workers, young people and readers of the World Socialist Web Site to vote for Tom Petterson and join the struggle to build the party.
This is the fourth part of a 10-part series responding to British-based historian Hakim Adi’s recently republished book, Pan-Africanism and Communism: The Communist International, Africa, and the Diaspora, 1919–1939.
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For [Vladimir] Lenin, temporary tactical collaboration against imperialism did not mean political subordination to the national bourgeoisie. The working class had to champion every genuine struggle against colonial oppression while simultaneously fighting to establish its own leadership over the oppressed masses. This linked the early Communist International’s colonial policy directly to the strategic lessons of October and Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution. In Russia, the Bolsheviks had rejected the Menshevik demand that the working class subordinate itself to a supposedly progressive bourgeoisie in the democratic revolution. The same fundamental class problem reappeared throughout the colonial and semi-colonial world.
The historical significance of Lenin’s formulation lies precisely in this distinction. The issue was never whether Communists could enter temporary practical agreements with bourgeois nationalist movements against imperialism, but whether the working class would surrender its political independence and leadership to them.
Adi reduces Lenin’s position to a willingness to cooperate with bourgeois nationalists, suppressing the very warnings that distinguished the early Comintern’s revolutionary policy from the class-collaborationist perspective later advanced by the Stalinized Comintern.
21. United Kingdom: North Sea Apache workers stage second walk-out, further strikes divided by Unite
A November 4 one day strike by 170 offshore workers employed by US based oil and gas giant Apache shut down seven of its operations on platforms in the North Sea. The workers have rejected a 'final pay offer' of just 4 percent—a real-terms cut.
The action follows a one-day stoppage on October 21, which brought Apache’s operations to a standstill and was subject to a news blackout by the media and Unite the Union. The strikes involve workers across different grades: electrical experts, production technicians and radio operators.
General Secretary Sharon Graham has declared that members 'have no option but to escalate their strike action in the face of a belligerent offshore operator which is making billions of pounds in profit.' But the actual schedule of action is not an escalation but a carefully staggered series of token stoppages designed to limit the impact on Apache's operations and keep the initiative in the hands of the company and the union bureaucracy.
The plan to fragment the collective struggle is laid out in Unite's press release on November 3. The one-day stoppage on November 4 is followed by a further 24-hour action between November 13-14 involving only the Forties Alpha, Forties Bravo, Forties Delta and Beryl Bravo platforms. The remaining three installations—Forties Charlie, Forties Echo and Beryl Alpha—are to strike separately between November 15-16.
This is a retreat from the all-out action which demonstrated the collective power of Apache workers. A genuine escalation would mean all seven platforms out together, indefinitely to assert worker’s demands against Apache. Instead, Unite is rationing the strike, handing Apache advance notice of which assets will be affected on which days, and allowing the company to plan ways around each stoppage. The union's October 19 statement had already acknowledged that a strike could halt Charlie, a major platform, and disrupt the Forties Pipeline System carrying around a third of UK oil and gas production.
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The rank-and-file committees must be built on the platforms, elected by and accountable to the workers, with the power to call and coordinate action without reference to the union apparatus. They must establish direct communication between the Apache and Wood Group disputes, and with workers on other installations and other companies, to prepare for unified, industry-wide action. They must take control of the strike schedule, replacing the union's staggered token stoppages with all-out action and connect their fight to the broader struggle of the working class against austerity and war.
22. Mass strikes erupt across Spain ahead of November 11 nationwide stoppage
Mass strikes and protests are erupting across Spain amid a growing wave of working-class struggles sweeping Europe. Railway workers, metalworkers, teachers, university staff, doctors and workers in other industries have struck or are preparing strikes. These struggles are unfolding just days before a nationwide stoppage on November 11 and three weeks before Spain’s November 29 general election.
On October 29, a 24-hour protest railway strike caused widespread disruption across Spain, just one day after the Urda disaster. The collision between a Renfe high-speed train and a stationary Iryo train killed 69 people. Called by the Spanish Train Drivers’ Union (SEMAF) on October 16—almost two weeks before the Urda disaster—demanding improvements in railway safety affected commuter, it disrupted regional and long-distance services across the country. According to the Spanish National Railway Network, Renfe, nearly a third of scheduled public-service trains did not depart. In Madrid and Catalonia, it was nearly half of the commuter services.
SEMAF has announced a further 24-hour strike at Renfe on November 10, followed by partial stoppages on November 12. Train drivers employed by private high-speed operator Ouigo are preparing partial strikes on November 6 and 9. Workers at Adif, the state-owned railway infrastructure manager, are preparing industrial action on November 17, to demand railway safety and better working conditions.
The Urda catastrophe is a social crime for which Spain’s capitalist ruling class and successive Socialist Party (PSOE)-led governments, first in coalition with the pseudo-left Podemos and later with Sumar, bear political responsibility. It exposes the consequences of years of systematic underfunding of railway infrastructure, maintenance and safety. For more than eight years, PSOE-led governments have presided over this deterioration while advancing the liberalization of high-speed rail and diverting billions to the military.
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The November 11 national stoppage must not become another isolated protest subordinated to the electoral calculations of the trade union bureaucracies and the PSOE-Sumar government. What is required is the unification of these struggles through independent, democratically elected rank-and-file committees, controlled by workers themselves and linked across workplaces, industries and national borders.
Above all, these struggles raise the necessity for an independent political movement of the working class, opposed to all the capitalist parties and based on a socialist programme. The deterioration of public services, suppression of wages and subordination of workers’ safety to corporate profits are inseparable from the broader agenda of austerity, militarism and social inequality pursued by the Spanish ruling class and the European Union. The fight to defend wages, working conditions and public services must be developed into a common struggle of workers across Spain and Europe against the capitalist system.
23. Workers Struggles: Africa, Europe, & Middle East
Africa
Ghana:
Kenya:
Nigeria:
South Africa:
Czech Republic:
Public broadcasting workers strike for public media independence as thousands protest in Prague and other cities
Germany:
Thousands of metalworkers in warning strikes for pay increases
Spain:
University staff, secondary school teachers and students in Madrid organize combined strikes and protests over working conditions in education
Türkiye:
Miners march to Ankara over unpaid wages
United Kingdom:
Further stoppages by North Sea oil workers
Strike by care workers in Oldham over pay
Catering and cleaning staff at London school strike over pay cut
Children’s services staff in Suffolk to protest planned cuts
Middle East
Iran:
Ongoing protests over deteriorating living conditions
Iraq:
Protests over jobs and living conditions
Syria:
Kurdish language protesters in city of Hasakah
24. 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.
