Trump tariffs bring job destruction

Nick Beams

Thomas, a mechanic, works at University Bicycles in Boulder, Colorado. [AP Photo/Thomas Peipert]

The bogus claims by US President Trump that his economic agenda, based on a tariff war against the rest of the world, would bring a new “golden age” for American capitalism are being ripped apart by jobs data for the economy as a whole and the emergence of mounting sackings across US industry.

Figures released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) on Friday showed that job creation in the US economy has stalled, with only 22,000 new positions created in August. The number of jobs created in the previous two months was revised down by 21,000. This confirms the trend revealed in the data for July, after which Trump sacked the BLS chief, claiming the figures were “rigged.”

Over the past four months, only 107,000 jobs were created in the US, which is an average of 27,000 per month. Last year, the average was 167,000 per month. Almost all of the new jobs last month, some 48,600, were in social services and healthcare, which rely on government spending. Of the 511,000 net new private sector jobs since January, 453,000 have been in this area.

In its report on the jobs data, the Financial Times noted that “evidence of a languishing jobs market is accumulating,” with many of the hardest-hit industries being “the blue-collar sectors that the president vowed to reinvigorate with the dawn of a new ‘golden age’ in America, but which have been hit disproportionately hard by his tariffs as many companies freeze hiring.”

In comments to the newspaper, Erica Groshen, a former BLS commissioner under Obama, said the numbers were “pretty sobering,” and the economy was now “flashing yellow.”

“What we see is that the US economy is essentially not creating jobs,” and that the three-month average change was “basically zero for an economy of the size that we have.”

Omair Sharif, an analyst at Inflation Insights, pointed to tariffs as a central factor in the jobs decline in his comments to the FT.

“Trade policy uncertainty—and policy uncertainty in general—is causing a pullback in hiring, and it is not clear that will be resolved anytime soon,” he said.

In an editorial comment, the Wall Street Journal, which speaks for sections of the corporate world opposed to tariffs, pointed to the hit they have delivered.

“Industries with high tariff exposure shed workers, including manufacturing (-12,000) and wholesale trade (-11,700). Transportation equipment manufacturing lost 14,500, and manufacturing jobs overall this year have declined by 38,000.”

Major machinery and farm equipment manufacturers are reporting large hits due to the tariff hikes.

Caterpillar has estimated that tariffs will cost it $1.8 billion this year. John Deere has said that its costs will rise by $600 million this year because of the higher prices for steel and aluminum as a result of the Trump tariff hikes on these commodities. It is also being impacted by the blow suffered by US soybean farmers because their market share in China has declined due to retaliation ordered by Beijing in response to the Trump tariffs.

The Journal reported that “nearly all industries” in an Institute for Supply Management survey last month reported a slowdown arising from tariff uncertainty. It cited one retail company spokesperson, who said that “all decision making is currently dominated by tariff considerations.”

It also cited a spokesperson for a transport equipment maker who noted, “This current environment is much worse than the Great Recession of 2008-09.”

After lashing out at the BLS following its August report, Trump responded to the latest data in comments from the Oval Office on Friday, saying interest rates were “too high” and that “corrections” were often made to data and “so many elements” had not yet been included.

But all the corrections to the data, made as more accurate figures become available, have all been down. Kevin Hasset, the director of the National Economic Council, desperately tried to claim that the latest data were an “anomaly,” and he expected—with no evidence—that they would be revised upwards.

Data from the employment and management firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas point to the job destruction taking place across the US economy.

Overall, it said, US employers announced 85,979 job cuts in August, up by 39 percent from the 62,075 announced in July and a 13 percent increase from the number in the same month last year.

One of the areas hardest hit is pharmaceuticals, where companies announced a total of 22,433 job cuts, an increase of 142 percent from the same period last year.

There is an even bigger hit in the retail sector, where firms in the year to August have announced 83,656 job cuts, which is up 242 percent from the same period last year.

“Retailers are being hard hit by tariffs, inflation, and the ongoing economic uncertainty, causing bankruptcies and closures. If tariffs and consumer constraints play out, the approaching holiday season may see fewer seasonal hires and, in fact, high layoffs,” Challenger said.

Every week, new job cuts are being announced. Just in the past few days, the Texas-based oil company ConocoPhillips has announced it will cut 20-25 percent of its total global workforce, affecting 2,600 to 3,250 jobs. It said it was using artificial intelligence to increase efficiencies.

The supermarket chain Kroger, one of the largest in the US, has said it will cut 1000 jobs. The electric vehicle (EV) maker Rivian is cutting 200 jobs at its Illinois plant, and there are 350 temporary layoffs at the GM Factory Zero in Detroit after the cancellation of an EV tax credit.

The effect of the tariff hikes is showing up in price hikes, with the index of wholesale prices jumping by 3.3 percent in July from its level a year earlier.

But it is being reflected in what might have been unexpected areas as well. Amid reports that health insurers in the US are raising their premiums by the most in 15 years, at least one company, UnitedHealth, has said the Trump tariffs are one of the reasons.

The company said it was increasing its insurance rates “to account for uncertainty regarding tariffs” and the cost of returning pharmaceutical production to the US. This is one of the key aims of the Trump administration, which has threatened to impose a tariff as high as 200 percent on pharmaceutical imports.

Speaking to the FT, Matt McGough, a policy analyst at the health research firm KFF, said tariff uncertainty had led companies to raise rates, and “consumers had to pay that extra cost.” He said that while people may not have expected tariffs to show up in their healthcare costs, “all the signs from insurers are that they are.”

Japanese prime minister resigns

Peter Symonds

After just 11 months in office, Shigeru Ishiba resigned last Sunday as Japan’s prime minister—a move that will deepen the crisis of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and the political establishment in Tokyo as a whole.

Shigeru Ishiba, Japan's Prime Minister and president of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), addresses the media at the LDP headquarters in Tokyo, July 20, 2025. [AP Photo/Franck Robichon]

Ishiba’s resignation followed mounting opposition within the LDP after it lost control of the parliamentary upper house in elections in July, having already done so in the lower house last October. A post-election review last week called for a “complete overhaul” of the party, fueling calls for an early leadership contest that was due to be decided at a meeting on Monday.

Ishiba said he was resigning to head off a “decisive split” in the LDP, which has ruled Japan for most of the past 70 years. Ishiba has presided over a slowing economy that is now being hit by the Trump administration’s large tariffs on Japanese imports, amid rising social tensions.

Ishiba attempted to put the best face on his resignation by declaring that he had stayed on as prime minister until a trade agreement with the US was reached last week. Under the deal, the Trump administration agreed to drop the planned auto tariff from 25 percent to 15 percent, in return for Japan agreeing to invest $550 billion in the US in areas nominated by Trump.

Ishiba came to office last October after the resignation of Fumio Kishida, who was mired in a series of scandals, including revelations that different LDP factions had established slush funds by under-reporting millions of dollars in political donations. The party also continued to face criticism of its longstanding ties to the right-wing religious cult known as the Unification Church, exposed following the assassination of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in 2022.

In an attempt to consolidate his grip on power, Ishiba called a snap election last October 27 that backfired badly on the LDP. For only the third time since its formation in 1955, the LDP, together with its longstanding ally Komeito, failed to win a majority in the lower parliamentary house. While Ishiba had promised to crack down on corruption in the LDP and provide cost-of-living relief, voters turned away from the party.

Ishiba and LDP had managed to limp on as a minority government as a result of deep divisions in the parliamentary opposition between the far right, such as the Japan Innovation Party (Ishin), and the supposed “progressives” such as Democratic Party for the People (DPP) and the Constitutional Democratic Party (CDP).

The LDP did not resolve any of the issues that fueled resentment and opposition in the lower house election—rising prices, particularly of the staple rice, falling real wages and the lack of well-paid permanent jobs, especially for young people. Ishiba dramatically boosted military spending, in line with the LDP’s support for the US war drive against China, at the expense of social spending.

As a result, in the upper house election in July, the fascistic Sanseito party, which ran a Trump-style campaign scapegoating immigrants for every social ill from low wages and crime rates to rising property prices to dangerous driving, made significant gains. It was able to capitalise on the continuing decline in living standards under both the LDP and the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), which held office from 2009 to 2012.

The DPJ split in 2016 into the DPP and CDP. While not a far-right party, the conservative DPP also made upper house gains, based on a populist appeal to younger voters and a vague promise to “increase take-home pay.”

Within the right-wing LDP, Ishiba, regarded as something of a moderate conservative, has come under attack from the party’s more hardline right factions, for ceding political ground to Sanseito and Ishin. One of the likely contenders for the party leadership is Sanae Takaichi, who narrowly lost the party leadership contest last year to Ishiba.

Takaichi was promoted by Shinzo Abe, who was instrumental in loosening the constitutional and legal restrictions on the Japanese military, known as the Self Defence Forces, and aligning Japan more closely with Washington in its aggressive confrontation with China. She supports revising Article 9 of the constitution that formally bars Japan from going to war overseas or maintaining a military and she is notorious for her relations with far-right activists, and visits to the Yasukuni Shrine that memorialises class A war criminals.

Shinjiro Koizumi, the son of former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, also contested the LDP leadership last year. He has served in Ishiba’s cabinet as agriculture minister and has had to deal with the surge in rice prices that has fueled the LDP’s unpopularity. He has reportedly fostered ties with the far-right party, Ishin.

Koizumi and former Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga met with Ishiba on Saturday and undoubtedly discussed the possibility of his resignation.

Ishiba will remain as caretaker prime minister while the LDP undertakes the complex process of selecting a new party president. To nominate requires the backing of 20 lawmakers. A ballot is taken of all LDP lawmakers and an equal number of votes from the party’s members. If no candidate receives a majority, a second round run-off takes place with the share of the vote for the rank-and-file dropping to 47—one for each of the country’s prefectures.

On most previous occasions, the LDP president has automatically become the prime minister. However, the LDP does not command a parliamentary majority so there is no guarantee that whoever is chosen will be endorsed. In 2024, Ishiba managed to gain parliamentary endorsement by relying on a divided opposition and an upper house majority. Now the LDP is in a minority in both houses.

Whatever the outcome of this process, the next government will be one of crisis from the outset, as Japan aligns with the accelerating US preparations for war with China, and at the same time confronts Trump’s economic war on friend and foe alike. The social tensions revealed in this year’s election will only be compounded as the government imposes new burdens on workers and youth.

Erdoğan government in Turkey dismisses CHP’s provincial leadership in Istanbul, deploying massive police forces

Barış Demir & Ulaş Ateşçi

The government of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has entered a new phase of its judicial operation targeting fundamental democratic rights and the Kemalist (CHP), which emerged as the leading party in the March 2024 local elections. This operation, targeting the CHP’s elected mayors, reached its peak in March with the arrest of Istanbul Metropolitan Mayor and the party’s presidential candidate Ekrem İmamoğlu on “corruption” charges, sparking mass protests.

On September 2, the Istanbul 45th Civil Court of First Instance issued an interim ruling that the CHP Istanbul provincial administration, elected two years ago, should be “provisionally” removed from office. A five-member trustee board was appointed to the Istanbul Provincial Administration, with former MP and one of the former CHP administrators, Gürsel Tekin, as chair. This decision came ahead of another hearing on September 15 regarding the cancellation of the congress that elected the CHP central administration, on the grounds that “the election was tainted”. At the congress held in November 2023, Özgür Özel defeated the former party leader, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu.

CHP leader Özgür Özel (left) and CHP's dismissed İstanbul chair, Özgür Çelik (right) on the Taksim Square, Istanbul, September 9, 2025 [Photo: @herkesicinCHP/X]

The Socialist Equality Group and the World Socialist Web Site, despite their irreconcilable political differences, oppose the appointment of a trustee to the Istanbul administration of the CHP and the threat to remove its elected leadership as an attack on fundamental democratic rights. The right to vote and be elected, and the current, extremely limited multi-party democratic politics, are under threat. However, this attack, which essentially stems from the crisis of the global capitalist system and bourgeois rule, can only be stopped by building a working-class movement that is completely independent of the CHP, which is part of and defends this system.

Following Tekin’s announcement that he would come to the Istanbul provincial office on Monday to take up his post, CHP members gathered in front of the provincial building on Sunday evening to protest the appointment of a trustee. Party members were met with a police blockade and prevented from entering the building of their own party. While many people were detained, the Istanbul Governor’s Office imposed a four-day ban on rallies, marches, and events in six districts. Arbitrary restrictions were also imposed on messaging and social media applications, and dozens of social media users were detained.

On Monday, Tekin arrived at the CHP Istanbul provincial office, where police had surrounded the area and attacked protesters with pepper spray, and entered the building accompanied by hundreds of police officers.

CHP Chairman Özgür Özel said in a statement Monday, “A process has been initiated to coup the future ruling party and the next president. March 19 [Ekrem İmamoğlu’s arrest] is the day this became concrete. For 173 days, a coup against Turkey’s future has been ongoing, and we are resisting it. That is why they are attacking our party. They are sending police to our provincial office. I am addressing Erdoğan: You are throwing the nation into the fire for your own interests. Is it worth it? You will go down in schoolbooks as a coup leader.”

The imprisoned İmamoğlu stated, “There is no internal conflict within the CHP; there is a clear intervention by the ruling power against the CHP through judicial and police force.”

Meanwhile, faced with the threat of the CHP leadership under Özel being removed from office at the September 15 hearing, over 900 delegates, the majority of those who attended the 2023 congress, applied for an extraordinary congress to be held on September 21. The CHP also applied to hold the Istanbul Provincial Congress on September 24.

Efforts to use the government’s influence over the judiciary to portray the CHP as criminals began last October with the appointment of Akın Gürlek as Istanbul Chief Public Prosecutor. Gürlek had previously served as Deputy Minister of Justice in the Erdoğan government.

The intensifying political crisis and the building up of a dictatorship in Turkey are integral to the global rise of authoritarian and far-right tendencies. The inauguration of the fascist President Donald Trump in the US, and his attempts to establish a presidential dictatorship that serves the interests of the financial oligarchy, have inspired and emboldened similar tendencies in Turkey and around the world.

On the same days that the CHP’s Istanbul provincial administration was unlawfully removed from office and police were deployed to the region, nearly 900 anti-genocide protesters were detained in Britain, and Trump sent military troops to Chicago after Washington DC.

The increasing political pressure exerted by the Erdoğan government stems from the objective requirements of the ruling class. The building up of a police state, which has been reinforced for years with the support of the CHP, primarily targeting the Kurdish movement and the “left” opposition, is escalating in 2025 with Trump’s arrival in office. This occurred amid intensifying war in the Middle East (in which Turkey is deeply involved), an ongoing NATO war with Russia, and severe austerity measures against the working class at home.

At the same time, both the Kurdish nationalist DEM Party and the CHP and their pseudo-left supporters are helping to present this as an effort toward “peace and democratization” by participating in the commission established by the Erdoğan government in parliament as part of its attempt to negotiate with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). In reality, the Ankara-PKK agreement represents a reactionary effort by the Turkish and Kurdish bourgeoisie to reconcile their interests in alliance with the US in the Middle East’s war of redivision.

It is impossible for the CHP, which is under pressure from the Erdoğan government, to consistently defend democratic rights and respond to this attack in a progressive manner. The reason for this is that the CHP, like Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP), is a pro-imperialist, right-wing bourgeois party.

During the protests in March, Özel addressed Keir Starmer’s Labour Party, which heads Britain’s most right-wing government and has abolished fundamental democratic rights by declaring the anti-genocide movement in Gaza criminal, saying, “We feel abandoned... How is this friendship, how is this a sister party? How is this on defending democracy together?”

Özel, in an interview with CNN around the same time, defended NATO imperialism, the force behind Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the war against Russia in Ukraine, stating, “We support a strong alliance with NATO.”  

The CHP leader said in an interview with the Financial Times Tuesday that if the government’s pressure politics intensify, “we can carry out peaceful but effective acts of civil disobedience that will bring life in Turkey to a standstill. We have the power to bring together not millions, but tens of millions of people.”

Millions, even tens of millions, of workers and youth in Turkey are ready to take action against the Erdoğan government’s police state repression and social attacks, as demonstrated by the protests in March. However, just as much as Erdoğan, the CHP and its allies in the union bureaucracy, who ended this movement, fear a mass working-class movement targeting the capitalist system—the source of dictatorship— and are fundamentally opposed to it.

Tougher asylum law in Greece criminalises refugees

Katerina Selin

An aerial view of a refugee and migrant cemetery with graves of the people who lost their lives in the Aegean Sea while crossing from Turkey to Greece, on Thursday, May 15, 2025. [AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris]

Refugees will in future be treated like criminals in Greece. That is the essence of the tougher asylum law that the Greek government, under the right-wing New Democracy (ND), pushed through parliament a week ago.

Those seeking protection who are denied asylum and remain “illegally” in the country now face heavy prison sentences and fines. These people have usually endured a life-threatening escape route and often given up their family’s entire savings to flee war, persecution and poverty in their homeland. Now, in Europe, they are not only treated like cattle, but also imprisoned if they do not “voluntarily” return to the misery from which they have just fled.

The new law was passed overnight September 2-3 with the votes of the ruling party, which has a majority in parliament. In July, the government had already decided to suspend all asylum applications from refugees from North Africa for three months, completely nullifying the right to asylum.

The pseudo-left opposition party Syriza criticised the toughening of the law, while carefully concealing the fact that during its own four years in government it had implemented the EU’s inhumane policy against refugees, thereby paving the way for today’s government.

The asylum reform includes a whole package of measures designed to deprive refugees of their rights, terrorise and persecute them:

• The deadline for voluntary departure is reduced from 25 to 14 days, meaning a rejected asylum seeker has only two weeks to leave the country.
• If they remain “illegally” in Greece, they face imprisonment of two to five years without parole as well as fines of at least €5,000 and up to €10,000 for illegal re-entry.
• Migrants without papers will no longer receive legal status after seven years of residence in Greece, as was previously the case. In practice, this means they can be arrested at any time as “illegal” migrants and remain excluded from the health system, labour market and housing market.
• New arrivals without valid documents will be locked up in closed facilities. This administrative detention is extended from 18 to up to 24 months.
• Rejected asylum seekers will be monitored by electronic ankle tags during the departure period so that they can be immediately arrested if they do not leave.
• The list of so-called “safe” countries of origin will be expanded so that people can now also be deported to third countries in which they first applied for asylum.
• For the first time, the law establishes an entry ban for people classified as a “threat to public order and security”—a regulation that can be broadly interpreted and arbitrarily applied.

These attacks directly affect the great majority of refugees, since ever fewer of those seeking protection in Greece receive a proper asylum procedure, let alone asylum itself. According to figures from the EU asylum agency, the recognition rate in the EU has fallen to 25 percent—the lowest level ever recorded. There are no exact figures for Greece, but the rate is likely to be even lower.

It is no coincidence that Thanos Plevris, the new migration minister since June, is pushing through this brutal law. Plevris is a notorious far-right figure with close links to neo-Nazis. Until he joined ND in 2012, he was a member of parliament for the far-right party Laos (Popular Orthodox Rally). His father, Konstantinos Plevris, whom he once defended in court as a lawyer, is an antisemite and considered an ideological forerunner of the neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn.

What Plevris is now implementing as migration minister has long been on his political agenda. In 2011 he openly called for the killing of refugees. At an event, to the applause of his fascist supporters, he declared: “There is no border protection without deaths.” Migrants had to be deterred from entering Greece: “Hell should look like paradise to them, after what they have experienced here!”

The country’s refugee policy of recent years—from pushbacks at sea to concentration camps—has long since turned Greece into a hell for most refugees. But that is not enough for Plevris. He also wants to jettison the last remnants of human rights, which, at least on paper, still existed for refugees.

In his parliamentary speech last week, Plevris boasted, “I say this with great pride: I am glad to be a minister of this government that criminalises illegal residence in the country.” He addressed the refugees with a direct threat:

If your asylum application is rejected, you have two options. Either you end up in prison or you return to your homeland. The Greek state does not accept you. You are not tolerated because you entered illegally. You have only one choice: to return. You are not welcome.

With his rabid rhetoric, Plevris emulates the anti-immigrant tirades of Donald Trump, whom he openly admires. After Trump’s election in November 2024, Plevris congratulated the new American president on X for his “great victory,” citing among other things his stance against illegal immigration. He described his election as an “important message for the EU” and invoked Greece’s “good cooperation” with Trump.

Like Trump, Plevris has no interest in cloaking his criminal migration policy in humanitarian concerns. Rather, he brags about setting the tone in the EU. He dismissed criticism from many human rights organisations of his plans as “irrelevant” in a television programme in August: “Migration policy is determined by the government. Returns, both forced and voluntary, are the great concern at both national and European level. And Greece plays a leading role in this debate.”

Indeed, the latest toughening of the law is not a unilateral national measure by the ND government, but an integral part of European anti-refugee policy. At a meeting of EU interior ministers in Copenhagen at the end of July, where further attacks on refugees were discussed, Plevris promoted his plans.

According to a report by Politico, he held several bilateral backroom talks with EU representatives. The newspaper quotes a Greek government official, who wished to remain anonymous, as saying: “The new Greek legislation has attracted particular interest among ministers, as it is considered the strictest ever presented at EU level.”

Plevris met with his counterparts from Austria, France and Germany, as well as with representatives of the EU border protection agency Frontex, to discuss sealing off the external borders and further deterrent measures against refugees.

The European bourgeoisie fully supports the toughening of asylum law in Greece and has already begun implementing similar far-right attacks on migrants in their own countries.

Last Wednesday, shortly after the vote on the Greek asylum law, the German government cleared the next hurdle in toughening its refugee policy: Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt (Christian Social Union, CSU) pushed two laws through the cabinet to implement the reform of the Common European Asylum System (CEAS) in Germany. This allows for even stronger EU border fortification, faster deportations and the detention of refugees in camps at the external borders.

Germany has also resumed deportations of refugees to Greece this year. In previous years, there had been a de facto halt to deportations due to the devastating situation faced by refugees in Greece. Although the situation has further deteriorated, the Federal Administrative Court ruled in a landmark decision this April that there were no inhuman or degrading living conditions for refugees there.

In Britain, a far-right campaign is currently being waged by the government and establishment media against so-called “asylum hotels” in which refugees are accommodated. Tory politician Robert Jenrick, who could become the next leader of the Conservative Party, recently welcomed the proposals of far-right figure Nigel Farage to herd asylum seekers into concentration camps, but then tried to outflank him from the right: these camps should be “rudimentary prisons,” Jenrick said.

The attacks on refugees serve the ruling class in all countries to undermine democratic rights and prepare a broad offensive against all the social gains of the working class. Parallel to the latest asylum law, the Greek government is pushing ahead with military rearmament and toughening capitalist exploitation with the new labour law.

In order to divide and set workers against each other, the weakest and most defenceless—the refugees—are being targeted first and made scapegoats for social problems that are in fact the result of the capitalist crisis.