Statement Of The ILPS On The Occasion Of International Workers Day 2026
The International League of Peoples’ Struggle joins with all the workers of the world in holding high the banner of working class power and solidarity on this International Workers’ Day. In the midst of excruciating economic and political crises, it is only the power of all working people fighting together against their oppressors that will end the horrors of imperialist war and crushing exploitation of the monopoly capitalist system in every country where it has its stranglehold.
Global Economic Crisis
We are living through a deepening global economic crisis marked by inflation, low wages, rising debt, and shrinking social services, worsening living conditions for working people. Around 186 million people are unemployed worldwide, 1.5 billion are underemployed, and 2.1 billion (at least 60% of the global workforce) work in the informal sector with very low pay, minimal protection, and harsh working conditions. Women in particular are hardest hit, being 25% more likely to be unemployed than men across the world. Global markets increasingly rely on migrant labor to cut costs, leaving migrants among the most vulnerable in times of crisis, war, and displacement. As of 2026, there are an estimated 281 million migrant workers and 32 million displaced refugees worldwide, numbers that continue to rise with intensified war and multiple forms of crisis.
In the Global North, de-industrialization, financialization, and cuts to public spending have made jobs more insecure and weakened unions. Corporations were allowed by these imperialist countries to price gouge from 2021 to 2023, raising inflation to 8%, unprecedented since the stagflation crisis in the 1970s. Unionization rates is at 15% in the Global North despite more formal work than in the Global South. Military spending has continued to rise with NATO countries pledging to commit 5% of their GDP towards it, coming at a great cost of cutting social services as is explicitly stated in imperialist countries such as the United States now.
In the Global South, debt crises, structural adjustment, and environmental disruptions have deepened poverty and instability, forcing millions to migrate in search of survival. Nearly all informal workers in the world are located in the Global South, with continents such as Africa having around 90% of their workforce in this sector. The UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD) wrote in 2025 that ‘developing’ countries — or rather underdeveloped — had $11.4 trillion of external debt, amounting to 99% of their export earnings. This debt crises brought on by plundering entities such as the IMF-WB has forced countries in Global South to commit an average of 45% of their government revenue to debt servicing, some cases up to 70%, a figure astronomically higher than spending for health care, housing, or any other social service. Due to this, across all regions, workers face declining wages, precarious employment, rising living costs, and a lack of social protections. This ever-worsening crisis has forced millions of migrants to try to make it to the Global North and rich imperialist dependencies such as the Gulf States, indicated by an uptick of remittances from 2023 to 2024 by 4.6%. They face the brunt of the fascist offensive in the Global North as a scapegoat for their socioeconomic woes, with migrants denied even asylum; in the United States, there are at least 300,000 asylum seekers that are currently stranded.
Since the deadly creation of the neo-liberal economic offensive under the US-led imperialist system, ruling governments in countries across both the Global North and Global South have used so-called Structural Adjustment Policies (SAPs) to privatize national assets such as infrastructure, public housing, energy, education, and health industries through International Financial Institutions (IFIs) as the monopoly capitalist class’s weapons of choice against all workers. The US ensured, through its relationship with neo-colonial puppet regimes or through brute military force in countries that did not bend to its will, that these neo-liberal polices would be imposed across the entire imperialist world system. This has greatly deepened the global economic crisis, drowning the workers in further misery.
The peasants, the indigenous people, the fisher folk, all those who produce food for society are today by and large landless, mainly due to imperialism especially US imperialism, as it plunders the lands and resources of the Global South. The US hegemony has aggressively maintained landlessness in our countries, many of which live under semi-feudal, semi-colonial rule. The parasitic relationship of semi-colonial states with imperialist states such as the US, has allowed it access and control over land and natural resource, while deepening the exploitation of the working class and the peasantry. In recent years, China and Russia have also started using different imperialist policies for building their control on our land and resources.
Imperialist Wars of Aggression
Economic crises perpetuate political crises, and vice versa. Economic decline fuels instability, while war, political repression and rampant government corruption deepen the crisis for migrants and workers. As trust in governments erode, the ruling elites intensify exploitation, plunder, and inevitably resort to militarization and fascism as strategies to manage economic decline, secure markets, and maintain global dominance, all of which are inherent to imperialism.
The current US-Zionist war with Iran has already had major economic impacts on the people, such as rising oil prices, inflation to augment military spending, and has cost billions of dollars.
The US-imposed closing of the Strait of Hormuz, where 20% of global oil and liquified gas are transported through, has thrown the global economy into a tailspin. Increase in fuel prices has had immediate impact across the board, as petrol is an integral part of production and transportation. These price hikes have a tremendously harsh impact on the working class that lives on daily wages, or terribly low wages, but are being forced to pay for higher prices for food, medicines, transport and energy. Migrant workers in war zones have suffered loss of life, livelihood as well further economic hardship.
In countries outside the direct war zones, gig workers are the first to face the impact of shortage of fuel its price hike and rise in fuel prices. In India, based on shortage and/or high prices of LNG gas, major platforms have temporarily closed restaurants; about 1 million workers have lost their jobs just from two platforms. Workers have been instructed to bring food from home. Similarly, in Pakistan, over 100 spinning mills, and 100s of ginning mills have been reportedly closed, which means thousands of workers have already lost jobs, and many more millions will be in the same situation if the Strait of Hormuz remains basically closed.
Fisher folk are hit hard by fuel price hikes as well. Many fishers rely on liquified petroleum gas (LPG) cylinders to power their boats. In the Philippines, LPG prices are projected to rise by up to P30/kg, a ~P330 hike per 11kg tank. In India, the government has reduced the size of cylinders from 14kg to 10kg, while prices have increased by Rs 60, equaling Rs 115 in Mumbai and almost Rs 200 in the countryside.
Widespread Food and Energy Crisis
The agriculture sector is also highly vulnerable across the Global South. Agro-chemical agriculture production that was deliberately promoted by monopoly capital, is highly dependent on fertilizers such as urea. One-third of globally traded urea passes through the Strait of Hormuz. The Gulf countries are not only producing urea but are also source of cheap LNG needed for urea production. Crops such as wheat, maize and rice are highly dependent on urea for high productivity, and sowing seasons are time bound. So, peasants will be facing not only high cost of production, but also potentially much lower yields if there is a shortage of urea in the market. This will result in a vicious circle of much lower crop yields, and elevated food prices. For the masses it will result in wide spread hunger and malnutrition. In addition, there are thousands of fertilizer production plants across Asia and Africa, and workers in these factors also face job losses.
There has been an up to 30% rise in fuel prices in South and Southeast Asia. However, in many countries, petrol prices have gone up by 50% and 68%, such as in Vietnam and Cambodia, respectively. In Nigeria, it is also 50%, while for Puerto Rico, it is close to 40%. In countries like Australia, the imperialist war against Iran has impacted people across all regions; oil and diesel prices have jumped by 32 – 39%. Hoarding is also happening which further exacerbates the situation; in the US and Canada, petrol price rise is about 40%. Asia has been the most severely impacted, and governments across Asia have taken different steps to decrease fuel use which range from school closure, to online classes for students, as well as mandatory work-from-home directives.
War Profiteers Fuel the Fires
While the bourgeois media pundits claim that the shortage in supply of oil and other commodities is the chief reason for the global rise in prices, an easy tactic to put the blame on Iran for its defensive control over the Strait of Hormuz in the face of US-Zionist aggression, the real economic manipulators in government policy-making and investment firms are kept hidden.
Governments, especially the bureaucrat capitalists in neo-colonial countries, have been making a scene giving away meager aid to workers waiting all day in lines in scorching-hot heat (with at least one worker reported dying of heat stroke in the Philippines because of this). But this amounts to hardly enough for working families to get through the week. In reality, the same governments maintain incredibly high value-added tax (VAT) on petroleum and basic goods for services, pocketing the tax revenue without providing government services that the taxes should be paying for. This overt government corruption, mixed with increased deregulation of domestic energy and other industries, is the real source of deadly inflation today.
At the same time, Wall Street traders bet high on global oil markets and then pull out their investments based on the rapidly changing conditions of the war and Trump’s erratic public comments (often just before stock markets open) about the direction of the war, and therefore the state of the global oil market. Financial firms have made massive profits from investment and futures trading on oil markets in this fashion, with Morgan Stanley reported to have made $5.57 billion, Goldman Sachs $5.63 billion, and JP Morgan Chase a bloated $16.49 billion. Meanwhile, weapons companies saw an over 25% increase in their profits.
These facts lay bare the inherent interests of monopoly capitalists, financial elites, and neo-colonial bureaucrat capitalists in keeping imperialist wars raging. Their profits surge as the masses and workers of the world are bled dry from immensely high prices and loss of basic goods supply.
Fascist Attacks on Migrants, the Underclass of the Working Class
Imperialist wars, such as the US-Zionist war on Iran, cause more instability in working class and migrant worker communities, forcing them and their loved ones to migrate abroad or become refugees. This, coupled with the intensifying economic crisis, is taken advantage of by monopoly capitalists to fuel the rise of fascism, the last-ditch emergency switch to protect the capitalist system.
Rising fascist attacks on working class communities, especially against migrants, have only intensified. This has been the case with Trump in the US, encouraging openly racist and xenophobic violence against migrants and tearing apart families through detention and deportation. Trump’s protectionist measures to serve US imperialist interests have intensified war and the political crisis in several regions.
In many host countries, migrants occupy the lowest rung of the working class, placed in the most precarious sectors of labor, and are often scapegoated to cause division among workers, which masks the roots of the crisis. They face the most egregious forms of fascist repression, outright terror, including detention, violence, and racist targeting by the state, rendering them a disposable workforce.
Migrant workers are relied upon for the most important jobs in society, yet face the most inhumane treatment of any working people. Concentrated in low-wage, precarious sectors, they provide cheap and flexible labor while facing unsafe conditions, legal vulnerability, and exclusion from the basic rights and social protections as workers in the host countries. Driven by poverty and instability in their home countries, many migrants are forced into debt just to work abroad, while governments of these sending countries rely on their remittances, effectively sustaining a system of forced migration and super-exploitation. For all of these reasons, migrant workers are truly the underclass of the working class in the world today.
Free the Migrants! All Workers, Unite!
Migrants and workers are the main force capable of transforming society. Migrant workers are part of the international working class, linked to both host and home countries, and must hold all governments accountable for exploitation and forced migration.
Migrant liberation is inseparable from the liberation of the entire working class. This can only be achieved through migrant workers and workers in the host countries waging shared struggles, addressing exploitation, labor rights, housing, and access to social services, to foster working-class unity. Through united struggles, strikes, organizing, and militant action, working-class unity can be built to confront the monopoly capitalist system at the root of all workers’ oppression and exploitation.
The path to our liberation is the solidity of an all-workers united front to confront and take down the imperialist system that is the cause of our suffering and hardship! The historic mission of the proletariat to be the grave-diggers of the capitalist system must be both the helm and the engine of the anti-imperialist movement in all countries of the world.
ILPS is joining with other anti-imperialist and workers’ organizations and networks on this day to launch a new campaign, “Free the Migrants! All Workers Unite!” This will be a grassroots campaign led by migrants and workers, where migrant workers play a leading role. It creates space for migrant and non-migrant workers to educate themselves about the economic crisis, understand its root causes, and take action against those who exploit them, from employers and corporations to immigration systems and governments. Most importantly, it is a campaign through which all workers can build their own power to fight those who live off their misery, and fight towards a world of unity, justice, and peace where all have the freedom to live, work, migrate, and return home on their own terms.
The League stands with all workers, organized and unorganized, formal and informal, migrant and non-migrant, on this International Workers’ Day, a day that has symbolized the proletariat’s struggle against capitalism ever since the years proceeding the Great October Revolution of 1917. Only through an all workers front at the heart of the anti-imperialist movement will the fight for national liberation and socialism be achieved!
All Workers, Unite!
Free the Migrants!
Fight for Workers’ Liberation!
Down with US imperialism!
Fight for national liberation and socialism!
4/30/2026
Learn more about the “Free the Migrants! All Workers Unite!” campaign by visiting https://internationalsolidarity.org/allworkersunited/
Source : https://peoplesstruggle.org/en/all-workers-unite-fight-for-national-and-social-liberation/
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