February 28, 2025 will certainly go down in history as an unprecedented masterclass on how not to conduct diplomacy. In fact, you were much more likely to see a civilized discussion at any flea market than in the Oval …
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The civilian death toll is now thought to be somewhere above 750, with over 1,000 people killed in total.
By Jonathan Spyer, Middle East Forum
Shock and outrage are appropriate, but no one really has an excuse for being surprised at the dreadful scenes that have emerged from Syria’s western coastal region in recent days. The civilian death toll is now thought to be somewhere above 750, with over 1,000 people killed in total (Alawi sources place the number much higher). Around 125 members of the Damascus regime’s security forces have also died. Video clips, many of them filmed by the perpetrators, show people in civilian clothes being summarily executed by Islamist gunmen; the humiliation of Syrian Alawi men and women; and the inevitable Sunni jihadi battle cries of ‘Allahu Akbar.’
The specifics of the situation are important (more on that in a moment), but the non-specifics are no less crucial. What has just happened in western Syria is what happens when Sunni jihadi fighters encounter a non-Muslim civilian population which they have defined as an enemy. It is what Islamic State did to the Yazidi people of the Nineveh plains in the summer of 2014. It is what happened to Israeli Jews near Gaza in October 2023.
The fact that western governments have chosen to believe in recent months that the current Islamist rulers in Damascus exist somehow outside of the known patterns and practices of Sunni jihadi organisations should not obscure the simple, and terrible, truth: the massacre of civilians is an inherent element of the Sunni Islamist way of war.
A number of Syrian sources have told me in recent days that the present Islamist regime in Damascus harbours a particular hatred for Syria’s Alawis, who they habitually refer to by the insulting name of ‘Nusayris.’
The present de facto President of Syria, Ahmed Sheraa, said in an interview in 2015 that in order to receive protection from the future Islamic regime that he and his comrades wished to establish, it would not be sufficient for Syria’s Alawis to renounce their support for the Assads. Rather, he said, they would need to ‘correct their doctrinal mistakes and embrace Islam.’ After which they would ‘become our brothers and we shall protect them as we protect ourselves.’ It is worth bearing this ominous warning in mind when considering the events of recent days.
The Alawis are a sect that emerged from Twelver Shia Islam in the ninth century, but which adopted beliefs which led to them being considered non-Muslims by both Sunni and Shia mainstream theology. Hafez Assad, Bashar’s father, and his closest colleagues emerged from this sect, and as a result, Syria was dominated by a core Alawi group for the half century of the Assad’s rule.
The majority of Alawis saw limited benefit from the rule of the Assads. But the fall of the dictator has placed them in a uniquely vulnerable situation. Unlike Syria’s Druze and Kurds, they do not possess defence organisations. And unlike the Christians of the country, they do not enjoy the concern and attention of elements in the West. Fifty years of Assad rule was sufficient time for a long litany of individual acts of humiliation and disregard to take place and to remain in the minds of many Syrian Sunnis as good justification for revenge. All this, coupled with the undoubted efforts of former regime elements to mobilise resistance to the new government, led to the events of recent days.
Regarding the specifics, the situation in Syria’s west had been building up to this point for some time. T, a Syrian Alawi woman now in Europe and hailing from a village in the Al-Ghab area of Syria’s Hama province, described to me a gradual increase of tensions beginning immediately after the fall of the Assads.
‘The attitude of this government towards Alawis is beyond any political orientation,’ she told me. ‘It’s ideological. Rooted in their thinking.’
T says there were widespread arrests of individual Alawis in the weeks preceding the latest events, and firings from workplaces. ‘But until now it wasn’t systematic,’ she said.
The trigger for the massacre was an attack on security forces loyal to the new regime, in the Jableh area of Latakia province, on 6 March. Thirteen members of the Damascus security forces were killed. Following this, troops and gunmen loyal to Damascus descended on the coastal area, and the killing commenced. The government’s response appears to have consisted of a number of discrete elements, namely a heavy-handed assault using heavy weapons on areas considered loyal to counter regime forces, attacks by jihadi gunmen on individuals they deem to be connected to forces loyal to the former regime, and straightforward sectarian attacks on Alawi civilians, including women and children.
While it is not yet clear who was responsible for the incident in the Jableh area, it is likely to indeed have been the work of elements loyal to the former regime. There is considerable evidence that a nascent structure intent on insurgency has been assembled in Syria’s west. Voices favourable to the current authorities in Damascus maintain that this structure is controlled from outside Syria, specifically by Iran-linked elements in Iraq, and is headed by one General Ghaith Dalla, formerly of the Assad regime’s notorious Fourth Division.
Such claims are plausible. Iran lost heavily from the fall of Assad. Tehran remains the most skilled user of proxy military forces as a tool of policy in the Middle East. A group calling itself the ‘Syrian Islamic Resistance Front’ and professing loyalty to Iran announced itself earlier this month. It is not yet clear if this group had any connection to the attacks in Jableh. The existence of such a structure of course in no way contextualises, explains or justifies the massacres of civilians of recent days. But it should be borne in mind.
What should be learned from all this? Firstly, and most importantly, that it is mistaken to regard HTS as the undisputed, legitimate rulers of Syria. They are better seen as a Sunni jihadi group currently dominant in Damascus, but facing determined opposition from a variety of quarters and locations.
Secondly, that the practices of the ruling group and their evident attitudes towards non-Sunnis have not been transformed, and remain those of the Islamist and jihadi milieu from which they come. And lastly, and most tragically for the people of Syria of all sects, the situation in the country has not been resolved, and further strife almost certainly lies ahead.
The post No one should be surprised about Syrian massacres appeared first on World Israel News.
The causes and consequences of this war have been the object of a vast media disinformation campaign, which has sought to camouflage NATO and US war crimes.
The post Twenty-six Years Ago: NATO’s War of Aggression against Yugoslavia: Who are the War Criminals? appeared first on Global Research.
Jonathan S. Tuttle was caught on video by Harvard Chabad tearing down hostage posters during a pro-Hamas rally on March 3.
By Jewish Breaking News
A Harvard librarian who tore down posters of Israeli hostages has been fired, ending a week of outrage that has put the already-embattled university under renewed scrutiny from federal officials and donors alike for failing to address campus antisemitism.
Jonathan S. Tuttle was caught on video by Harvard Chabad during a pro-Hamas rally on March 3 who in turn posted the footage to Instagram. An investigation followed and Radcliffe Institute Dean Tomiko Brown-Nagin attempted damage control with a letter to donor affiliates.
“I strongly support the right of all Americans and all members of our community to protest in support of positions that we hold dear,” Brown-Nagin wrote in the email obtained by the Crimson. “But disruptive behaviors including property destruction or defacement and acts of vandalism that seek to suppress or censor the speech of others are not protected speech.”
Eventually Tuttle had his employment terminated on Sunday by the university, whose reputation remains under intense scrutiny in the wake of the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel. University officials have repeatedly failed to protect Jewish students from harassment and have allowed antisemitic rhetoric to go unchecked at campus protests against Israel.
According to a recent federal lawsuit against Harvard, Jewish students have been physically assaulted, spat upon, and threatened with violence simply for expressing their support for Israel. Perhaps most disturbing is the complicity of some professors who have used their classrooms to spread anti-Israel propaganda and have even gone so far as to encourage Hamas sympathizers to engage in physical intimidation and violence against their Jewish peers.
Their belated action against Tuttle may be too little. Last week, the Trump administration slashed $400 million in federal funding to Columbia University over its handling of antisemitism. A federal task force is now investigating nine other universities, with many expecting Harvard to be next on the chopping block.
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Left-wing anti-Israel groups accused the Democratic Party of ‘villainizing’ and ‘ignoring’ voters who questioned America’s support for Israel’s defensive operations in Gaza.
By Jewish Breaking News
Four months after getting trounced by Donald Trump in the presidential elections, Kamala Harris and Democratic leadership find themselves besieged by Hamas apologists demanding a radical overhaul of the party’s Israel policy.
In a blistering four-page joint letter to the DNC obtained by POLITICO, IMEU Policy Project, IfNotNow, Gen-Z for Change, and Justice Democrats accuse the Harris campaign of systematically “villainizing” and “ignoring” voters who questioned America’s support for Israel’s defensive operations in Gaza. Campaign staffers were also instructed to ignore any mention of the conflict in voter outreach efforts.
“The chasm between the Democratic base and the Harris campaign could have been narrowed and course-corrected months prior to the election,” they wrote. “The pattern of disregarding and ignoring the issues Democratic voters care about, be it rising costs of living or ending U.S. complicity in war crimes abroad, will not lead to winning elections.”
The letter also demands newly installed DNC Chair Ken Martin investigate whether Harris and Biden’s refusal to abandon Israel cost Democrats the White House. As evidence, they tout self-serving polling from IMEU and YouGov claiming “ending Israel’s violence in Gaza” outranked the economy by 30% as the top concern for Harris-to-Trump defectors.
Of course they conveniently omit any polling that consistently showed Americans broadly supporting Israel’s right to defend itself after Hamas slaughtered over 1,200 Israelis, including women and children, on October 7, 2023.
With President Trump pursuing decidedly pro-Israel policies and midterms looming on the horizon, Democratic leaders now face the unenviable choice between appeasing their radical anti-Israel wing and reconnecting with mainstream voters who recognize Hamas as the bloodthirsty terrorists that they truly are.
The post BPro-Hamas lobbyists pressure US Democrats to abandon Israel appeared first on World Israel News.
Review of The Working Sovereign: Labour and Democratic Citizenship by Axel Honneth, translated by Daniel Steuer (Polity Press, 2024).
As the United States faces a serious rising economic competitor in China, some Americans are concerned the country isn’t working hard enough, while plenty of others think everyone is already working too much. These anxieties about work appear as ever to be driving both popular and more theoretical debates. In her recent book, Hijacked: How Neoliberalism Turned the Work Ethic Against Workers Against Workers and How Workers Can Take It Back, philosopher Elizabeth Anderson, for example, contends that a conservative version of the work ethic has been used as a cudgel to chastise the lazy poor while valorizing the hard-working rich — while arguing for the value of a progressive, nonideological variant of the work ethic. Erik Baker has criticized America’s entrepreneurial work ethic for the exhausting demands it imposes on workers without any accompanying rewards. By contrast, right-wing commentators like Ben Shapiro and Thomas Sowell unsurprisingly tout the economic, psychological, and moral virtues of hard work — with Shapiro going so far as to argue unironically that people ought to give up retirement and work until they die.
Axel Honneth makes a welcome, thoughtful contribution to discussions of work with his latest book, The Working Sovereign: Labour and Democratic Citizenship. Honneth is a third-generation Frankfurt School philosopher and critical theorist; though little-known outside the academy, he is widely respected for his pioneering left-Hegelian scholarship that culminated in his magnum opus, Freedom’s Right: The Social Foundations of Democratic Life in 2014.
Honneth follows G. W. F. Hegel in arguing that modern societies must offer various kinds of social recognition to its members to constitute an ethical community that fully realizes human freedom. Against conservative readings of Hegel, Honneth insists that this recognition cannot be based merely on traditional or abstract legal norms, which are often experienced as inadequate, especially by the poor and other socially marginalized groups. The ethical life of a community needs to be based on recognizing the aspects of freedom that are realized in various different social spheres, including personal relationships, the realm of politics, and the economic sphere. With The Working Sovereign, Honneth elaborates what a freedom-respecting organization of our working lives in particular might look like.
Honneth is critical of the reductive view, which he associates with Isaiah Berlin, that there are only two kinds of freedom: negative and positive. Negative freedom is usually cast as a right to be “left alone” by the state and by other individuals: as the saying goes, I have a right to swing my fist until it encounters your nose. Positive freedom is more complex and related to the idea of self-determination. On a positive conception of freedom, I am free if I act according to reasons that I have “personally held to be appropriate” rather than for reasons that I feel have been imposed upon me. If I want to express a controversial opinion, but due to fear of social ostracism and marginalization I remain quiet, it’d be odd to say I’d been coerced into silence (i.e., deprived of negative freedom). But I may have internalized reasons for acting that are not the ones I would act on under conditions more conducive to self-realization, i.e, conditions of greater positive freedom.
Honneth thinks fostering both negative and positive freedom for all is important for a just society. In his lucid The Idea of Socialism (2016), Honneth defends the socialist ideal while chastising some earlier socialists for failing to recognize the value of negative freedoms, both in themselves and as a necessary basis for democratic socialism. Nevertheless, he contends, negative and positive freedom by themselves are inadequate. In Freedom’s Right, Honneth argues we need to recognize a third concept of liberty: social freedom. Social freedom is realized through our participation in a community that respects our autonomy. Drawing on Hegel’s description of “objective freedom,” Honneth defines social freedom as
a third model of freedom . . . subjecting the objective sphere of reality to the criterion of freedom. Not only must individual intentions be developed without any external influence, but the external, social reality, must be able to be conceived as being free of all heteronomy and compulsion.
The idea of social freedom has more than a little in common with the better-known republican ideal of nondomination, though Honneth is critical of aspects of republicanism. Republicans argue a person cannot be truly free, even if one is left alone, if they remain subject to the arbitrary will of another. Similarly, the ideal of social freedom implies that, even if I enjoy extensive liberties to do as I wish, they are fickle if I don’t also possess political agency to protect them. Without such agency, someone else might simply decide to restrict or eliminate my liberties with little difficulty.
A classic expression of the link between negative freedom and social freedom can be seen in the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson and the other authors of course begin by stressing individual’s “unalienable rights” to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Typically these are associated with the negative concept of liberty. But the founders also believed that to “secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed — that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government.” Abolishing a government and instituting a new one that respects individual rights would be a paradigmatic exercise of social freedom in a twofold sense. First, it entails abolishing the old tyrannical mode of government through revolutionary agitation. Second, it also involves creating, ideally, a new kind of society where social freedom will be secured on a permanent basis.
Honneth thinks there are three sets of theoretical “resources” for critiquing this state of affairs. The first is the classic Hegelian-Marxist notion of “estrangement” — the idea that the labor of workers is estranged by being bought and sold in the marketplace, turning them into something “thinglike.” Honneth acknowledges there are many difficulties in elaborating this idea, but endorses the Marxist view that work should elevate and help develop individuals’ capacities rather than objectify them.
Second, Honneth appeals to a liberal and republican notion of “autonomy.” In the workplace, individuals are often subjected to domineering forms of coercion and control. Indeed, Marx himself argued as much in Capital Volume I, noting how cherished liberal values of freedom and equality ended at the factory door. Honneth commends the resurgence of interest in this idea by liberal philosophers like Elizabeth Anderson and contemporary republicans, affirming the “demand for the absence of paternalism and arbitrary rule in the sphere of social labour.”
The third resource is what Honneth calls “democracy” and is aligned with the defense of social freedom more generally. Honneth stresses that this is different from the republican notion of nondomination. For Honneth, the republican idea of freedom is in some ways just a more sophisticated iteration of the negative concept of freedom, recognizing how political agency is a prerequisite for individuals to be free from the domination of another. This is obviously important, since workers deserve a degree of “autonomy” in the workplace. But Honneth holds that his notion of democracy is richer. In the workplace, it aligns with the positive idea that workers should be collectively self-determining, and that this is an “intrinsic good, namely the greatest possible and most effective participation of all members of a society in the process of democratic self-determination.” This kind of democracy is required to ensure that the “social reality” of the workplace itself is “free of heteronomy and compulsion.”
This ideal is rather abstract, and Honneth doesn’t do as much as he could to concretize it. Partially for this reason, how exactly Honneth’s idea of democracy differs from republican freedom is at times unclear. He does mention worker cooperatives as approximating the ideal of social freedom in the workplace. In well-functioning cooperatives, workers are less estranged from their labor and from each other, since they are able to exercise more of their diverse capacities. They enjoy more autonomy, since they are not subjected to the dictates of unelected and unaccountable bosses, and often enjoy more rights to voice opinions and robust protections against poor treatment. And cooperatives are more democratic since their workers actively participate in decisions that impact them and have a say in who manages them. Honneth thinks cooperative principles should be extended more broadly, including into the family, where women perform a disproportionate share of unpaid household labor.
Honneth is unlikely to ever be considered one of the “sexy” critical theorists, like his Frankfurt School predecessor Theodor Adorno. In The Idea of Socialism, he acknowledges that many have criticized him for being insufficiently radical and seeks to answer that by offering a careful reconstruction and defense of twenty-first-century socialism. That project continues in The Working Sovereign. But it is unlikely it will help Honneth shed accusations of being overly removed from the realm of political practice. Part of this is a matter of style rather than substance. Like that of his mentor Jürgen Habermas, Honneth’s writing is hyper-scholarly and lumbering. His arguments are well reasoned, in no small part because they are filled with qualifications. It’s the kind of writing and thinking that encourages careful intellectual reflection, but hardly serves as a passionate call to arms for political activism.
But the more substantial issue is the Honneth’s failure to theorize about economic power in a sufficiently concrete way. Honneth is undoubtedly aware of the ways in which the ethical life of the community can be distorted by the reification and domination imposed by capitalism. He rightly criticizes older leftists in The Idea of Socialism for failing to take into account how important features of liberal democracy offset that — for instance, by securing rights to freedom to speak and criticize. But the nature of capitalism as a global system of “dull compulsion” is largely occluded in his work, which like Hegel’s remains too focused on the state. For one thing, it is unclear how we could bring about and sustain more democratic workplaces on a large scale without a broader, democratic coordination of the economy at a national and international level — workplace democracy by itself does not address the systemic threats to workers’ freedom and well-being associated with the private, profit-driven allocation of investment. This is something Honneth has not theorized comprehensively.
Nonetheless, The Working Sovereign once again demonstrates Honneth’s masterful command of his subject matter. He convincingly argues that our societies will never be truly free so long as people lack a say in determining the conditions under which they labor, at home or in the workplace. Connected to his broader project, Honneth is also persuasive in his contention that, as long as this freedom is denied in these and other social spheres, the ethical life of our society becomes diminished and unstable. We cease to be a “we” for all intents and purposes — producing a dangerous situation of atomization that helps antisocial tendencies and reactionary ideologies of racism, sexism, and the like to flourish.
Kosovo Prime Minister Hashim Thaci is part of a criminal syndicate
The post Kosovo, America’s “Mafia State”: The US-NATO-EU Support a Political Process linked to Organized Crime appeared first on Global Research.
Russia is certainly in no jeopardy in the Arctic. However, it’s clear that the political West wants to overstretch Russia, as well as to disrupt the multipolar world’s plans for the region. The Kremlin will continue to monitor NATO’s activities in the Arctic, particularly in the vicinity of its borders and territorial waters. The political West’s ISR (intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance) assets are as active as ever, which prompted the Russian military to deploy its own (in part also to observe “Joint Viking 2025”).
In this monthly roundup on “large-unit labor elections,” Benjamin Y. Fong from the Center for Work and Democracy at Arizona State University will recap all National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) elections of 250 or more voters tallied in the previous month, in this case for February 2025. See the January 2025 roundup here.
It’s the center’s belief that if the labor movement in the United States is to be rebuilt, it is going to be through experimentation with new strategies and tactics that push against the constraints of labor law and through large-unit organizing in the hundreds and thousands. The latter concern will be at issue in this series.
Given the outsize importance of large-unit labor elections in the overall composition of the labor movement, there’s a good argument to be made that the overall trajectory of organized labor can be gleaned from an analysis of such elections.
There were 122 National Labor Relations Board representation elections run in February 2025, and ten involved units of 250 or more eligible voters. Those ten elections, however, involved 74 percent of all eligible voters that month.
The highest-profile election was the loss at the Amazon Fulfillment Center in Garner, North Carolina, which my colleague Jonathan Rosenblum covers well here. Jonathan and I offer some more in-depth thoughts on what recent news in the world of Amazon organizing means in a recent article in these pages, but in brief: it’s going to be very difficult to make much headway with this company with traditional site-by-site organizing methods. Amazon is too big and too flexible for such organizing, and the company is only going to come to the table if the flow of goods through their dynamic distributional system is disrupted, which requires multisite coordination and a laser focus on the pain points in their facility network.
As with last month, health care elections dominated the large-unit news, claiming five of the eight large-unit victories. The other victories included an undergraduate workers’ union at Macalester College (1,098 workers), transportation workers at Zum in Jessup, Maryland, joining Teamsters Local 570 (300 workers), and transportation workers at Unifi Aviation in Georgia doing the same with the National Association of Government Employees (356 workers).
The largest unit won in February was for 1,120 nonprofessional workers at an Optum Care subsidiary, Crystal Run Healthcare, a network of eleven primary care facilities in the state of New York. Optum is in turn owned by UnitedHealthcare, which gained massive international attention after the murder of its CEO, Brian Thompson, in December 2024 and is now the largest employer of doctors in the United States.
It’s worth repeating: the largest health insurance company in the country is also the largest employer of doctors. Amy Gladstein, assistant for strategic organizing at the union that organized Optum, 1199SEIU United Healthcare Workers East, cited this “vertical integration of health care” as the driving force behind the organizing effort.
From the perspective of UnitedHealthcare, it makes sense to own the very primary care practices that they’re also reimbursing: cutting costs in the former means less expenditure in the latter. From both patients’ and workers’ perspectives, however, this vertical integration is extremely frustrating, depressing wages and benefits and depersonalizing care. And what’s happening at Optum is occurring in primary care across the country, from Amazon’s One Medical to Walgreens’s VillageMD.
One particular frustration felt by both workers and patients was the establishment of a call center: instead of getting direct lines to offices or departments, patients were directed to a general call center number where they would sometimes wait so long that they’d just give up on booking an appointment or doing follow-up. Some workers got in trouble when they’d give out direct lines or their personal numbers to patients.
As important as wages and benefits are to these workers, this basic breakdown in the provision of care was a key frustration for Optum workers. Gladstein noted that while the lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic were a primary source of organizing among hospital workers, it was frustrations like these, stemming from the corporatization of primary care, that fueled organizing efforts like that of Optum workers:
In hospital organizing, it was COVID and feeling unrecognized in staffing. In this organizing, it is the corporatization of health care. I think it comes from a different place. [Traditionally] if you’re working in a primary care practice, you know how to find the doctor, and the doctor isn’t being squeezed into twenty-minute blocks. And then, all of a sudden, you’re under this other set of rules, and [they’re written by] a big corporation that makes billions. So it’s a different set of issues that draw people toward us.
Optum has run an intense anti-union campaign and even has an in-house, anti-union management team euphemistically dubbed “the People Team.” After the successful representation election, where the union won by a two-to-one margin, Optum announced its intention to challenge the results, on the grounds that 1) since the NLRB did not have quorum, it could not certify elections and 2) that the company was not able to exercise its free speech rights by holding captive audience meetings, which were banned in the waning days of Joe Biden’s NLRB.
The first objection, now made irrelevant by the fact that Gwynne Wilcox has been reinstated as an NLRB board member, never held up, as the board has the ability to process elections at the regional level even while lacking the ability to decide cases, according to a 2010 Supreme Court case. The second objection, that depriving a company of the ability to hold mandatory meetings is an infringement upon its free speech rights, is about as twisted an understanding of the First Amendment as you’re going to find.
The Oregon Nurses Association (ONA) won three large units at the Legacy hospital system in Portland, Oregon, totaling 2,298 nurses. ONA actually filed for these units together, and the board stipulated that the elections be run separately, so arguably this was the de facto largest unit won in February.
Elizabeth Gemeroy, deputy director of organizing at ONA, cited the alleged normalization of practices during the COVID-19 pandemic as a key spur to organizing:
COVID really just exacerbated all issues in health care. During COVID, staffing [i.e., the staffing ratios of number of nurses to number of patients] was horrible, because we were trying to stop the spread. All of the protections went away because we were in a crisis situation. And management was like, “Oh, we made a lot more money when we were in crisis, because there were a lot more people who came into the hospital and a lot fewer staff.” And it seems like that’s now the model.
As with Optum workers, Legacy nurses also felt the impingements of the corporatization of health care:
There was a huge lack of transparency from their employer. This is a trend with the corporatization of health care: there’s so many managers, and your direct manager working on the floor [is answering to someone else] who’s making decisions about patient care, [and they’re] not even in the hospital. They’re probably states away. They probably have a degree in business, and they’re generally making decisions based on spreadsheets, not based on patient care, patient outcomes, or best practices.
This alleged lack of transparency was also felt in pay disparities and what many nurses felt to be a lack of recognition of seniority. More generally, knowing what their equivalents made at other hospitals, nurses at the Legacy hospitals simply felt they were underpaid as a whole.
The organizing drive started with the formation of Legacy Frontline Workers, a grassroots group that started a petition against Legacy’s COVID practices in 2021. ONA started working with three different groups of workers at the three different facilities at that time, but eventually they ended up combining organizing committees, as nurses from different hospitals were happy to work together as part of a broader effort. This proved a fortuitous decision when it was announced in October 2024 that the Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) bought Legacy’s facilities. ONA already had a strong foothold at OHSU hospitals, whereas Legacy had been much more hostile to unionization.
This announcement energized the organizing efforts, and all three facilities filed for an election at the same time. According to Gemeroy, the units made a conscious decision to wait until all three were ready to file, understanding the importance of the solidarity that had been built through the system-wide organizing committee.
ONA has a set program for building organizing committees and ensuring wins in NLRB elections, executed in collaboration with nurse leaders. But Gemeroy said that they slightly changed their practices to accommodate such a large unit of workers. Typically, they would hope to form an organizing committee comprising roughly 10 percent of the total unit, achieving a leader-to-worker ratio of one to ten. In this case, that would have meant an organizing committee of about 230 workers. To maintain a tenable decision-making body, they kept the organizing committee around seventy nurses and trained an additional layer of about 140 nurse organizers to be election captains, thus allowing for an extension of organizing structure without impeding decision-making.
Both Gladstein and Gemeroy were concerned about larger political dynamics around looming disruptions to the NLRB process but didn’t feel like they were going to impede new organizing efforts. If anything, Gemeroy believes that a more hostile political environment will “invigorate more folks to move to organizing.” The February total election count was not out of line with that of previous years, so any cooling of labor organizing interest with the new Trump administration has yet to be registered.
On March 8, International Working Women’s Day, the town square in Chiatura, Georgia, was filled with residents. Young girls handed out violets to the women, a traditional gesture of celebration. The crowd gathered, waiting for the loudspeakers to power up on a makeshift stage made from wooden boxes. A protest had been growing for days already, initially smaller and confined to the other side of the square. It began when workers realized they had not received 60 percent of February’s pay as a result of a temporary shutdown of mining operations. The company said it was because prices had been falling globally since November. People thought this was a temporary pause. But on March 7, the situation took a devastating turn.
That day, Georgia Manganese, the multinational that owns the rights to Chiatura’s manganese-rich mountains, sent a text message to workers’ phones. It told them that due to the current crisis and two years of severe financial problems, the company could no longer sustain its operations. Underground mining, the backbone of Chiatura’s economy, would be closed. The message promised that more details were forthcoming about terminated contracts and compensation. But such information never came.
Despite the gravity of the announcement, affecting 3,500 workers in this country of 3.7 million people, not a single Georgian media outlet or news channel showed up to report on the protest. No government officials appeared to address the crowd. The local mayor, though involved, offered little reassurance, saying he didn’t know much and he didn’t have much power to react.
Nestled in the mountains, Chiatura is known for its picturesque ropeways and brightly colored cable cars that transport people up and down the steep slopes, often advertised as a tourist attraction. Founded in the late nineteenth century around manganese mining, Chiatura thrived during the Soviet era as a mining hub, with other industries also flourishing. The town’s stunning theater building opened in 1949, adorned with murals of workers, and stands as a testament to its rich history. But now that past is overshadowed by an uncertain future, as the town faces the collapse of its main industry.
With the demise of the USSR, Chiatura — along with the rest of Georgia — came to a screeching halt. The town lost 50 percent of its population in post-Soviet years when national production capacity fell by 80 percent. Factories were looted, dismantled, and sold for scrap. Through privatization schemes, workers, desperate for basic necessities, traded the “shares” they were given in their workplaces for as little as a bag of sugar. As a result, industries quickly fell into the hands of a few individuals, who often sold off the assets. For many Georgians, the 1990s remain a deeply traumatic period, remembered as the worst time in living memory. The scars of that era are so profound that people go to great lengths to ensure it is never repeated.
Since 2005, the reopening of Chiatura’s mines has brought jobs and a degree of economic stability to the town. However, the mines have also been a locus of exploitation. Over the years, there have been relentless protests and strikes against poor labor practices, ecological devastation, and temporary closures that have plagued the industry.
Today Chiatura faces the greatest crisis yet, with the closure of underground mining. Not only does mining directly employ thousands of people, but their jobs make all kind of other businesses possible, from cafés to grocery stores, salons, car washes, and so on. While we were resting, a Chiaturian woman told me: “How am I going to tell my daughter that the town is shutting down? I finally understand what my parents went through in the 1990s — how scared they were.” Another person on the mic asked, “Are we going back to the ’90s?” The fear of returning to that dark period looms large over the community.
According to miners, the company employs approximately 3,500–3,700 people. Mining operations are divided into two main types: open-pit and underground. In recent years, the company has issued licenses to subcontractors — often cynically referred to as “cooperatives” — allowing them to dig anywhere in Chiatura and its surrounding areas. This has led to widespread excavation, stirring up dust and further exacerbating the town’s ecological crisis. In 2017, the government charged them 416 million Georgian lari (around $150 million) for damage to air and water.
Now the company has announced the shutdown of underground mining, which employs most workers — an estimated 2,500 people. Meanwhile, open-pit mining will continue, as it requires fewer workers and is less costly for the company. However, open-pit mining is far more damaging ecologically and devastating for the town.
The shift from underground to open-pit mining will leave thousands of workers in the most precarious of conditions, reliant on being called up for shifts from one day to the next. The limited number of positions in open-pit mining cannot offset the massive job losses caused by the closure of underground operations. Local elected officials have suggested that other jobs could replace those lost in the mine, but most people recognize this as unfeasible. The scale of the crisis is too vast, and the town’s economy has been too dependent on mining for such a transition to happen overnight.
The local church has also expressed solidarity with the people of Chiatura, particularly during what is known as “heavy fasting” — a period of strict fasting observed by Orthodox Christians before Easter. In its message, the church echoed the suggestion that new businesses need to be created and encouraged local entrepreneurs to step up. However, if the mine’s closure is inevitable, the effort to bring in new investment should have begun years ago. The sudden call for economic diversification, without any prior planning, offers little comfort to a community on the brink of collapse.
The company says underground mining is not profitable. There is no quality manganese left in these mines, and it wants to keep only the profitable part of its operations. In 2023, when miners were making every attempt to work with the mining company to improve labor conditions and limit environmental damage, the company mockingly told them, “The working class can have the underground mine. You all can run it.” Apparently, workers can now own the mine the company depleted, while it will keep the profitable part of the mining.
In 2016, the company started using even more exploitative labor practices, known as the “Wachtian” system — a term derived from the German “night watch.” Under this system, miners were forced to work twelve-hour shifts and the mine could stay open 24/7. Trucks were used to transport the mined minerals continuously, maximizing output.
This was a stark departure from practices during the Soviet era, when miners were not allowed to work underground for more than seven hours at a time, as it was deemed harmful to their health. These seven-hour shifts, combined with the use of railways for transportation, limited the speed at which manganese could be extracted. The Wachtian system, however, allowed the company to rapidly increase production.
The consequences of this system were severe and far-reaching. The health of the workers deteriorated, the environment suffered significant damage, and wages remained disproportionately low compared to productivity. The rapid depletion of manganese reserves became another hidden cost. These burdens were all externalized by the company and borne entirely by the miners and their families.
About a decade ago, a doctor diagnosed two sick miners with Parkinson’s disease, attributing their condition to mining practices. After speaking out, she was threatened by the company and has since refrained from making further diagnoses related to occupational diseases.
The mining company is also highly litigious. In Shuqruti, a nearby village where houses have collapsed due to mining activities, locals have faced immense financial and emotional burdens. To make matters worse, the company has sued many of these residents, freezing their assets and leaving them in legal limbo as they await trials that drag on for years.
Workers who dared to protest against the company’s practices were swiftly fired. Desperate for justice, residents of Shuqruti traveled to the capital, Tbilisi, and staged a hunger strike in front of the parliament, lasting for weeks in 2024. Yet their cries for help were met with indifference. Even protesters demonstrating against the government walked past them, as these working people’s plight did not align with the political narratives of the liberal opposition.
For years, hunger strikes and protests have continued in an attempt to draw government attention to their suffering. The company, meanwhile, has offered token compensation — amounts that barely cover a fraction of the damages inflicted. It also employs aggressive tactics such as lawsuits, freezing assets, and firing workers to intimidate and silence those who speak out.
During the Soviet era, the Chiatura-Zestaponi-Poti industrial circuit was established. Manganese was mined in Chiatura, sent to Zestaponi for refining, and then transported to Poti for export. Today parts of this circuit remain operational under private management. The Zestaponi factory is currently running, as the company has stockpiled enough manganese to last for months. There are even rumors that they may be importing manganese from Uganda to supplement their supply.
For years, miners and locals have tried to uncover the true production costs and revenues of Georgia Manganese, the company overseeing these operations. However, the company uses a complex network of subsidiaries to evade liability and obscure its financial details. While employers claim that the Chiatura operation is unprofitable, no one has a clear picture of the profitability of the company’s other operations. The lack of transparency makes it impossible to assess the full scope of its activities.
What is clear, however, is that the company treats Chiatura and its surrounding areas as personal property. The firm digs wherever it pleases, pollutes the environment, and extracts as much manganese as possible, disregarding both the long-term and more immediate consequences for the community. Now, after years of plundering the area, the company sends a perfunctory text message to tell people that their jobs are lost. This reckless decision threatens to devastate an entire town and destroy the livelihoods of thousands of families. At a recent rally, one woman voiced the frustration and despair felt by many: “This is my town. Why do I have to leave? The company needs to leave.”
Conscious of the way this company has been operating, on March 3 Chiatura miners issued a list of demands that stretched beyond the workplace itself. This was still before the company announced it was firing thousands of workers. Their demands are as follows:
Meeting with government; the investor (GM) must go, government must take responsibility for the mining operations; part of the profit from manganese mining be diverted to a fund for future generations of Chiaturians, the wealth from Manganese must be shared by everyone; free transport in the Chiatura municipality; the residents who have incurred damages from mining should be fully compensated, taking into the considerations of the interests of residents; the open-pit mining needs to be regulated to stop polluting and creating ecological damage, considering the interests of the residents.
Then, on March 7, the company announced a shutdown. Now the entire focus has shifted to the government to step in and address the crisis. Just a few days ago, a news article revealed that the Georgian Revenue Service had placed a lien on part of Georgia Manganese’s property because the company owes millions of dollars in unpaid taxes. It appears that, in addition to exploiting the town and its people, the company has also been neglecting its financial obligations to the Georgian government.
Yet despite the town’s dire circumstances, no one in power has reached out. This is particularly striking given Chiatura’s political leanings. During the recent elections — amid widespread allegations of fraud and calls for new elections by the opposition — Chiatura remained a stronghold for the ruling Georgian Dream party, with the government enjoying 65 percent support here. Even when the mine was temporarily shut down just five days after the elections, the residents did not join calls to oust the government. They have been loyal voters, standing by Georgian Dream even as the neoliberal opposition has tried to overturn the election.
Now, facing total collapse, the people of Chiatura continue to approach the government with constructive appeals, despite the sadness and offense they feel at being ignored during the town’s biggest crisis in thirty years. Their loyalty and patience are being tested as they wait for a response that has yet to come.
Georgian Dream is often cast as an “anti-Western” and radical force. In reality, it is strongly ideologically constrained by its commitment to neoliberal policies. For years, it has boasted about Georgia’s high rankings in indexes of “economic freedom” and ease of doing business, tied to principles like deregulation and privatization. These policies, enforced by institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, discourage actions like nationalization — when they are in the interest of workers — as they could harm the country’s rankings and “investor confidence,” jeopardizing the sovereignty of the market.
However, this ideological rigidity is selective. In Ukraine, the IMF itself pushed for the nationalization of PrivatBank, which was owned by Ihor Kolomoisky, the same oligarch linked to Georgia Manganese, which is under Georgian American Alloys, a company headquartered in the United States. This move was motivated by a desire not to serve the people but to tilt the balance in favor of pro-Western capital. Kolomoisky, a Ukrainian-Israeli-Cypriot businessman, had initially backed Volodymyr Zelensky but later fell out of favor, leading to his arrest on charges of fraud and corruption. This demonstrates that nationalization is not off the table when it aligns with geopolitical goals or benefits Western interests.
Yet in Georgia, citizens are told that demanding the nationalization of Chiatura’s mines — a move that would benefit the people and possibly save their town — is against the “orthodox norms” of investment and could endanger foreign direct investment (FDI). This double standard exposes the hypocrisy of neoliberal policies: nationalization is embraced when it serves powerful interests but dismissed as radical when it could empower ordinary citizens. While foreign investors and their profits are protected, the people of Chiatura are left to fend for themselves.
Faced with economic catastrophe, the community has rallied together impressively in shows of solidarity. Townspeople are donating big bags of potatoes and other foodstuffs, local restaurants are providing meals, and others are contributing money to help those in need. Meanwhile, miners are chasing down cars suspected of secretly transporting materials out of Chiatura for the company, desperate to hold on to whatever resources remain.
Even before this crisis, 12,000 people in Chiatura were already relying on welfare. Now the situation has grown even more dire. The company has failed to pay February’s salaries to workers and has not provided any compensation for the mass layoffs. Families are drowning in debt, with bank loans accumulating interest and fees daily. To make matters worse, Georgia has no unemployment insurance system, leaving those who have lost their jobs with no safety net.
The lack of concern for the miners from the political opposition, which has been staging protests in the capital for over a hundred days, speaks volumes about its own ideological constraints. While opposition leaders position themselves as pro-Western liberals, their commitment to neoliberal principles often overshadows any genuine solidarity with workers or collective struggles. Neoliberalism, by its very logic, casts workers’ issues and collective solutions such as unions or government intervention as either politically irrelevant or something to vehemently oppose. This ideological framework prioritizes the sovereignty of the market above all else.
This contradiction was starkly evident when the opposition co-opted the concept of a “strike” for their own purposes. During their protests, pro-opposition businesses staged a symbolic shutdown called a “general strike,” in a move designed to appeal to Western politicians and garner international attention. Yet from their perspective, industrial workers and unions appear as “relics from the Soviet era,” indeed in a town that voted overwhelmingly for the ruling party.
If the opposition see neoliberalism and closer ties to the European Union as a path to advancing Western civilization, the government camp wants to welcome all capital. If anything, it sees more potential of FDI coming from the “East.” In this regard, the government is deeply invested in maintaining their reputation as business-friendly, despite being rhetorically limited by their emphasis on national sovereignty and Georgian traditional culture. Chiatura has become a testing ground: how can the government maintain its popular base — drawn to ideas of sovereignty and caring for Georgia — while remaining loyal to foreign capital and expecting an entire town’s population to accept, like divine providence, the cruel vicissitudes of the market?
The response by people in Chiatura shows that this is still, in part, a resilient society in which the culture of solidarity can still make itself felt. Evidently not all post-Soviet citizens are won to the anti-communist gospel of blind faith in the market, and not all Georgian politics is a showdown between pro-Russian or pro-European oligarchs. Their reaction expresses a solidarity built on decades of labor in often harsh conditions, hacking at the hard ground to produce wealth for others but also to make life possible for the future generations. With that future torn away, that spirit will be harder to keep alive. The people of Chiatura need the government to intervene, and soon.
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