r/Trotskyism

>Meatpacking workers: Speak out against the Tyson closure in Joslin by filling out the form below. All submissions will be kept confidential.

>About 2,500 workers at Tyson Foods’ beef plant in Joslin, Illinois, face the end of their regular pay on October 12, two months after the company abruptly shut down production. Families who spent decades working at the slaughterhouse are seeking food and clothing assistance, while laid-off workers struggle to find employment in the Quad Cities region along the Illinois-Iowa border.

>Tyson announced the closure on August 13 and stopped slaughter and processing operations that day and the next. Its state filing covered 2,495 employees; it was submitted no more than an hour before the plant’s closure was announced to workers. To avoid running afoul of laws requiring advance notice before layoffs, Tyson agreed to continue paying them for the next two months. Sanitation contractor Fortrex subsequently announced another 103 layoffs at the site.

>Laid-off workers rallied outside the plant after the announcement, demanding a plan either to keep it open or six months of severance. The United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), which represented the Joslin workforce, subsequently signed an agreement committing it to cooperate with the shutdown and oppose actions that interfere with it.

>Tyson cited the historic shortage of cattle in announcing a restructuring of its beef business. It is also closing its facility in Eagle Mountain, Utah, and pursuing the sale of its plant in Pasco, Washington. The company said it would shift capacity to plants in Nebraska, Kansas and Texas, concentrating production at locations it considers more competitive.

>Despite losses in its beef division, Tyson as a whole remains profitable. In its third-quarter results, released 10 days before the Joslin announcement, it reported $13.87 billion in sales and $362 million in operating income, up 39 percent from a year earlier. It had $4 billion in liquidity as of June 27. Workers are being made to bear the cost of a restructuring aimed at protecting returns to shareholders.

>In its response to the closure, Local 1546 President Robert O’Toole praised the union’s “long-standing and proud union partnership with Tyson Foods.” The plant-closing agreement dated August 18 translated that partnership into binding commitments: The union agreed to cooperate with the closure, refrain from interference and withhold support from others taking such action. If workers interfered, officials were required to publicly disavow the action and order members to stop.

>In return, the agreement provided just one to four weeks of severance, depending on length of service, calculated at 36 hours per week. Even workers with more than 10 years at Tyson received only four weeks. The agreement also contained a broad release of claims against the company, including claims under the federal plant-closure notification law.

>Joslin workers need full wage and benefit continuation, financed by Tyson, and a fight against further closures and layoffs. Rank-and-file committees can unite workers across Tyson and other meatpacking companies, defend immigrant coworkers against raids and deportations, and coordinate actions through the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC). Workers who built their lives around these plants must have a decisive voice over their jobs and the conditions of production.

>WSWS reporters spoke with former workers and immigrant support organization Akwaaba QC about the closure’s consequences. Many workers have made the region their home, raising families while supporting relatives abroad. The shutdown now threatens to uproot them, while immigration arrests make even the search for another job a source of fear.

>Nana Ouro-Agoro, president of Akwaaba QC, emigrated from Togo in 2008. Akwaaba QC provides language assistance, housing support and help accessing services for immigrants and refugees.

>At a relief center established for displaced Tyson workers, she said the organization was expanding food assistance. She described a couple who came to the organization for food and clothing after working at Tyson for 25 and 23 years respectively.

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>She said the number of available jobs, compounded by language barriers, could not meet workers’ needs. Moving elsewhere would mean leaving communities built over many years.

>“When we try to approach them to go maybe out of state, maybe Michigan, JBS in Nebraska ... they don’t want to leave the Quad Cities. They say, ‘We love the Quad Cities. We have our family here.’ This has become home for a lot of people.”

>The Trump administration’s assault on immigrants adds the threat of detention to the loss of employment. Ouro-Agoro reported arrests among Akwaaba’s clients, including asylum seekers with current work permits.

>“The fear is there, especially for asylum seekers. Those who have work permits—They are arresting them! They are detaining them. So we have clients, people who have work permits, who are fearful now: ‘Where am I going to go and find a job with my work permit? I don’t want to go far and be arrested.’

>“We have two clients who have been detained in Iowa ... and then we have one who was detained, and we worked with a lawyer and he was released one month ago. And now I got a call from someone who has been detained in Missouri who needs a lawyer to get released.”

>Workers seeking help after injuries and dismissals at Tyson had repeatedly encountered indifference from UFCW officials, Ouro-Agoro said.

>Five miners were killed and two others were rescued injured on 1 October when a roof collapsed in an underground coal mine operated by İmbat Madencilik in the Soma district of Manisa province, western Türkiye.

>All of the dead—Ramazan İnce (26), Halit Ersay (37), Kerim Ören (37), Ömer Karakaya (34) and İsa Olcay (49)—were members of the Independent Miners Union (Bağımsız Maden-İş). İsa Olcay, who had returned to the mine because he could not make ends meet on his pension, worked in the same mine as his son. Mass marches and funerals were held for the workers. The miners’ deaths were protested in many cities, including Istanbul and Ankara. In Istanbul, police detained protesters with brutal violence.

>This new catastrophe, in the mining basin where the 2014 massacre claimed the lives of 301 miners, is neither an “accident” nor “fate.” These deaths are the product of the profit system, in which production is pushed forward under dangerous conditions, inspections are a formality and profit is placed above human life.

>Miners and their families cannot rely on the company, the state or the bureaucracy of the Turkish Mine Workers Union (Türkiye Maden-İş), which collaborates with them, to hold all those responsible to account. It is an urgent necessity for the miners to launch an independent workers’ inquiry through rank-and-file committees elected by themselves, with the support of experts they trust, and to seek to mobilise the support of the broadest sections of the working class. The findings must be made public. The miners must exercise, through their own committees, the right to stop work wherever they see danger.

>The Evaluation Board set up by the rank-and-file union Bağımsız Maden-İş, together with miners who survived the collapse, technicians and engineers, represents a step in this direction. According to the board, the collapse took place in the development roadway of the East-5 panel, which had not yet entered production. The company wanted to bring East-5 into production as quickly as possible to replace East-3, which had been closed due to a fire. To move equipment by monorail, it had the floor of the tunnel dug out. The ground beneath the roof-support props was excavated, the props were not set deep enough into the floor, and proper clamps were not used on the central props. According to the statement, it was known three days before the collapse that the faces were dangerous.

>A worker who was in the mine at the time of the collapse told soL Haber that the support sets gave way while 18-tonne conveyor pans were being moved through by monorail. “This is negligence, this is murder,” he said. A former İmbat worker reported that the company was notified of official inspections weeks in advance. As a result, risky areas were covered with tarpaulins, and work resumed as soon as the inspectors left.

>...

>The carnage in the mines is an international phenomenon. As the World Socialist Web Site noted in May, although mining employs only about 1 percent of the global workforce, it accounts for more than 8 percent of all fatal workplace accidents. This year, 82 workers were killed in a coal mine in China’s Shanxi province, and more than 600 in the Rubaya mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

>At the same time, a rank-and-file movement is developing against these dangerous conditions in the mines and against unpaid wages. In March, the Polyak miners broke through a barricade and seized the mine. In April, the march by Doruk Madencilik workers from Eskişehir to Ankara to demand what they were owed placed the miners’ struggle on the national agenda. In August, the Eti Gümüş and Doruk miners held out in defiance of a protest ban and waves of detentions.

>The fact that workers are forced to work, and die, under dangerous conditions testifies to the bankruptcy of the capitalist system. Today’s immense level of scientific and technological development makes it possible to organise production and supply chains on a world scale, under the democratic control of the working class, without endangering the safety of any worker. For workplace killings to end, the decaying capitalist profit and nation-state system must give way to a world socialist society.

>Are you an aviation industry worker ready to support the building of a rank-and-file committee to launch a fight back against the systematic deregulation of the industry carried out by governments and corporations, and supported by the trade union bureaucracies over the past four decades? Fill out the form at the end of this article to contact us and speak out about your own experiences.

>The death of ramp worker Oscar Robayo at Montréal-Trudeau Airport in late August was the product of systematic deregulation and profiteering across the air travel sector. The 39-year-old was crushed to death by an Airbus passenger jet while performing a routine pushback operation for which his employer, the subcontractor Samsic, failed to follow appropriate safety procedures, according to numerous worker testimonies given to the World Socialist Web Site.

>The semi-privatization of Canada’s airports in the 1990s facilitated the growth of a highly competitive race to the bottom between subcontractors providing ground handling services and other operations at airports. Government deregulation allowed competitors to underbid existing providers by cutting labour costs in a process referred to as “contract flipping,” resulting in ever greater pressure to cut corners and ignore safety rules.

>Montreal Airport provides a clear example of this. It was there in 2023 that Samsic, a multinational provider of “business services” employing over 100,000 people in 27 countries, secured the contract for ground handling services following a “contract flip” that abrogated existing workers’ seniority rights and benefits.

>Interviews by current and former employees at Montreal Airport with the WSWS show that workers complained for years prior to Robayo’s death about the cavalier attitude towards safety shown by Samsic, and the subcontractor’s expectation that workers use broken equipment and violate long-established safety procedures.

>Robayo was crushed because he was forced to stand next to the landing gear of the passenger jet, a violation of standard operating procedure, due to the absence of an extension cable that would have allowed him to communicate with the pilot from a safe distance.

>A retired pilot, John, recently spoke to the WSWS about the transformation of the aviation industry he witnessed over three decades during his career.

>...

>The consolidation of the regionals into a single Air Canada subsidiary in the 2000s was, in John’s account, a cost-cutting exercise dressed up as restructuring. Seniority lists were scrambled, pushing out the highest-paid pilots near retirement, and crew complements were pared to the legal minimum.

>“They changed the rules: on a 37-seat aircraft, one flight attendant; at 38 seats, you had to have two. So they kept it at 37 passengers and one attendant.” The result, he said, was fewer workers, longer hours and lower wages, “which is basically what deregulation does.”

>Despite extensive training and experience, pilots faced dire conditions: “It took a long time for a pilot starting at regional level to actually make a decent salary. I can remember driving cab on my days off just to pay the rent. That was kind of the price to get into the industry at that level.”

>The defining feature of the job, John explained, was the relentless pressures of a schedule determined by constantly shifting market competition—a pressure that flowed directly from the airlines’ need to keep aircraft in the air and generating revenue. “The delays are cumulative,” he explained. A half-hour delay in Victoria meant a late arrival in Winnipeg, which cascaded down the line. “You always had to be on time, or even slightly early, to make that critical departure time.”

>Without constant coordination with ground staff and air traffic control, a crew could lose its departure slot and fall behind. “We’d be constantly talking with ground staff and air traffic control for a departure time, and it just got really, really tough.”

>It was precisely this pressure—the compression of schedules to maximize aircraft utilization and profit—that contributed to the death of Oscar Robayo. The jet on which he was performing the pushback had been delayed in Montreal over the previous weekend due to a technical problem and was already one-and-a-half hours late for its departure to Paris on the day of the fatal accident.

>The industry’s culture, John said, discourages pilots from admitting when they are unfit to fly. “There’s a ‘we can do anything’ mentality—we don’t need sleep, we don’t need food—that World War II mentality. It’s ridiculous.” But when a pilot does develop a medical problem, “There’s no support, no way to proactively deal with it.”

>The individual worker is invariably made to pay the toll with their physical and mental health, and they are made to carry all the responsibility and guilt for safety.

>John pointed to the case of Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, who landed his crippled plane in the Hudson River. “Immediately they said it was his fault and tried to crucify him, and of course it was proven afterwards that was really the only thing he could have done,” he added.

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>At Montreal, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM), of which Robayo was a member, lauded its partnership with Samsic management as recently as August 2025 and released a token news release following Oscar’s death that failed even to mention him by name.

>Aviation workers need to build rank-and-file committees, controlled democratically by the workers themselves, to take up the demands of the rank and file and mobilize the industrial and political power of the working class against deregulation and corporate profiteering, and for workers’ control over workplace safety and the aviation industry.

>“Rank-and-file committees are probably the best way to outflank the unions, to be completely independent of all the vested interests,” John said in agreement. He described the camaraderie and pride in craft he saw in the crew rooms—qualities that management exploits but that also point the way forward.

>“The fight against the current—we’re not going to speed up, that’s it. It’s bad enough as it is. Pushing back—the shop floor is the place to do it,” he said.

>Crucially, John insisted, this fight must be political, “Getting workers involved in seeing the political aspect of it, developing that political understanding most of us don’t have when we’re working, I think that’s an excellent way to go.”

>This sentiment could hardly be more timely under conditions in which the Carney Liberal government announced plans to privatize Canada’s four main airports to increase the opportunities for the financial oligarchy to extract profits from the aviation sector.

>The privatization initiative is part of the ruling elite’s class war agenda to subordinate all of society’s resources to enriching the financial oligarchy and mobilizing Canadian imperialism to wage war around the world.

>A key mechanism for the enforcement of Carney’s program is the effective banning of the right to strike, a threat that will be familiar to thousands of airline workers at Air Canada and Westjet who have been on the receiving end of government-imposed strike bans over recent years.

>We strongly urge all workers who agree with the urgency of a rank-and-file mobilization to fight for good-paying, secure jobs, safe workplaces and an end to capitalist deregulation and austerity to fill out the form below to get involved.

>Help build an aviation workers rank-and-file committee to coordinate an industrial and political mobilization of the working class and conduct a workers’ inquiry into Oscar Robayo’s death that will get to the bottom of the conditions behind it and explain what must be done to prevent a repeat of this tragedy.

>Sunday’s results are, above all, a devastating verdict on the perspective advanced by the PT and the pseudo-left organizations that support it: that fascism could be defeated through an alliance with the rotten bourgeois political establishment. Far from defeating the threat of fascism, the “Broad Front” promoted by the PT has only strengthened it.