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The war against Iran, launched in defiance of US constitutional and international law, is deeply unpopular among workers in the United States. Fifty-nine percent of Americans oppose the decision to strike Iran, with only 16 percent strongly approving, according to a CNN poll taken shortly after the US-Israeli onslaught started. Although Trump has threatened to put “boots on the ground,” only 12 percent favor sending US troops into Iran.

The United Auto Workers (UAW), like the national AFL-CIO and majority of unions, has not issued any statements on the illegal war, which has already killed more than 1,000 people in Iran. This signals the support and complicity of the labor bureaucracy with an imperialist war, which Trump intends to make the working class pay for with their lives and livelihoods. 

Supporters of the Socialist Equality Party distributed copies of the SEP National Committee statement, “Stop the criminal US-Israeli war against Iran!” to workers at the Ford Dearborn Truck Plant and Stellantis Warren Truck Assembly Plant in metropolitan Detroit earlier this week.

Most workers were appreciative to hear opposition to the war and hundreds readily took copies of the SEP statement as they rushed in and out of work during their shift changes. 

Workers rejected Trump’s lies that the unprovoked attack was aimed at protecting the American people. “I hate war,” one Ford worker said. “This doesn’t benefit us, we got problems here,” another commented. 

Several workers reacted with disgust to the news that the first day of bombing had already claimed the lives of more than 100 children who were killed in a deliberate attack on an all-girls school in southern Iran. “That was horrible. I don’t like people being killed, and for what—oil?” one worker said.

“We shouldn’t be bombing people, period,” one young Ford worker said. Instead of spending money on war, he said, “Money should go to the schools, or the people here. We all need help. Everybody should band together to stop this war. No one should be supporting this.” 

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A veteran worker expressed concern that the US-Israeli attack was triggering a far broader war, which could draw in nuclear-armed Russia and China. 

One worker, expressing her opposition to yet another war, wanted to know what workers could do to stop it. When SEP members said the working class had to use its economic and social strength, including preparing for a general strike to halt Trump’s war abroad and war against the working class at home, one Ford worker said, “That is long overdue.” 

Others commented that Trump launched the war to cover up his own crimes, including his connections with sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. During the president’s January 13 tour of the Dearborn Truck Plant a Ford worker, TJ Sabula, denounced Trump for being a “pedophile protector.” Trump responded with obscenities and demanded that the worker be fired on the spot. Sabula returned to work last month after a massive outpouring of public support. 

The historic Ford Rouge complex is in Dearborn, home to one of the largest Middle Eastern populations in the United States. Large numbers of city residents took part in the mass protests of the US-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza, which is now being used as the model to destroy Iran and eradicate its 3,000-year-old culture. 

At the Warren Truck plant one worker said the bombardment “just seems like unwarranted, unhinged violence against a country that’s minding its own business.”

Another worker at the plant said, “I don’t think we should be bombing or invading other countries just to take their oil and resources. And that’s exactly what Trump is doing. Regardless of how many more people end up losing their lives before this blows over, the United States is already a pariah state.”

One autoworker, whose father served in the military during Vietnam, noted that the president had to get an authorization from Congress to wage war. Trump just does whatever he wants, the worker said. “I think the attack on Iran was a diversion from the Epstein scandal,” he continued. “Also, I think he might use it to try to cancel the 2026 elections.”

When the question of oil in Iran and Venezuela was posed, and how both countries principally sold to China, the principal target of American imperialism, the worker agreed that the war was also about dominating Iran’s oil supplies.

Addressing Trump’s war against the social and democratic rights of the working class at home, he said, “ICE agents shot Alex Pretti in the back after they took his gun. He wasn’t even trying to use it. Not even police are allowed to just shoot you in the back like that. These are the guys from January 6, and they’ve been given guns and authority by Trump.”

Workers speak out worldwide

The World Socialist Web Site has also received comments from working and young people who oppose the war from throughout the world.   

A commenter from Dortmund, Germany said: 

I consider this war a criminal adventure designed to externalize internal social tensions and distract from the Epstein scandal. US imperialism is running amok under Trump. 

In my opinion, there is only one way to stop the killing. All workers in logistics must organize globally (!) and plan and carry out coordinated strikes with the explicit goal of cutting off supplies to the military. This would bring the killing machine to a standstill over the heads of all governments, parties and unions, because without supplies, the generals would quickly run out of their limited resources.

Airplanes don’t fly and vehicles don’t run without fuel. Aircraft carriers need vast quantities of various goods to maintain operations.

They must no longer receive any of this. If you deprive the war of its material basis, it will end. The workers can force this if they recognize their social power and rise up worldwide as an international class.

A commenter from Canada said: 

I am absolutely horrified by this unprovoked attack on Iran just like the NATO proxy war on Russia. We have been lied to. We are being lied to. We will be lied to. This is the modus operandi of Western governments. Here in Canada, Prime Minister Mark “Carnage” Carney applauds the illegal attack on Iran and defends Israel’s so-called right to defend itself. 

Once again, do not be fooled by his speech at DAVOS as he manufactures consent for war here in Canada with a massive military budget of 5% in accordance with the Trump regime’s demand of NATO nations. Canadian soldiers are serving side by side with American forces wreaking death and destruction on innocent people and they will be traumatized and suffer the grave moral injury of war. This war will likely come home to all of us here in North America and Europe before it ends and hopefully not in mushroom clouds. However, one cannot be sure with these people who belong in an insane asylum for the criminally insane!

A commenter from South Korea said: 

Trump and Netanyahu have initiated an unprovoked and illegal war on Iran by firing massive bombs behind the back of their people respectively. Already innocent civilians and children are being killed. This war must be stopped immediately! 

The pretext of nuclear weapon worries or ‘democracy’ for the Iranian people is just so absurd and rotten while IDF is still killing Palestinians in Israel and ICE attacking and killing immigrants and citizens in US. Their real aim is to establish a puppet regime for their imperialist interests, curtail Chinese and Russian influence in the region and prepare a wider confrontation.

I also condemn those US allies from UK, Germany, Spain and other powers in Europe and Asia to regional powers like Saudi Arabia and Türkiye for their open or implicit lining up behind the US war drive with their own claims of national interests. What does “national interests” mean? Do those governments care about ordinary working people? No, I don’t think they do. They mean big businessmen, they mean financial and industrial oligarchs, they mean a handful of privileged layers while the lives of working people suffer all the consequences under military buildup and economic chaos.

I think working people around the world must be united and organized with a genuine revolutionary strategy to counter this imperialist war drive.