The Trump Cabal’s “Apocalypse Again”

by Philip A. Faruggio / December 17th, 2025

In Francis Ford’s Coppola’s brilliant 1979 film Apocalypse Now, we have the CIA ordering the assassination of a renegade colonel. Colonel Kurtz, played by Marlon Brando, rambled “Off the reservation” and simply went too far, even for the genocide loving US government in Vietnam. When the assassin, played by Martin Sheen, gets too close to Kurtz at his deep jungle compound, Kurtz, dying, shouts out “Kill ’em. Kill ’em all” referring to his Cambodian army of followers.

Fast forward to our horrific current era of outright (and I will say it) Fascist Amerika. The Trump Cabal obviously took the mantle in spades from the war mongering Bush 1 and Bush 2 administrations. Bush 1 used the lies about Saddam Hussein’s attack on Kuwait (read the transcript of the meeting between US Ambassador April Glaspie and Iraq President Saddam Hussein about Kuwait and it’s illegal drilling of Iraqi oil); Bush 2 ( with Cheney pulling the strings) using WMD lies to illegally invade and occupy Iraq. The Trump Cabal, let’s give them credit here, are great students of their predecessors. They just take it on steroids with the disgraceful missile attacks blowing up Venezuelan speedboats. Trump’s handlers obviously viewed the massacre of the fleeing Iraqi Revolutionary Guards in Iraq War 1, blowing them into dust. They also obviously watched documentary footage of the Nazis grabbing up Jews, packing them into trucks and speeding off to the concentration camps. Not a bad preface to what occurs in places like Alligator Alley and a myriad of our current ICE detention centers.

The hope all good and decent Americans are pining for is official resistance. We need our military personnel to say NO when ordered to do any such illegal or immoral action. We need our Congress to finally stand together and say NO to the sociopaths running this fascist enterprise. Yes, call it what it is folks.

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Philip A Farruggio is regular columnist on itstheempirestupid website. He is the son and grandson of Brooklyn NYC longshoremen and a graduate of Brooklyn College, class of 1974. Since the 2000 election debacle Philip has written over 500 columns on the Military Industrial Empire and other facets of life in an upside down America. He is also host of the It’s the Empire… Stupid radio show, co produced by Chuck Gregory. Philip can be reached at paf1222@bellsouth.net. Read other articles by Philip.

It’s Time For America to Indict Itself: Cruelty and Dehumanization Never End Well

By Jared O. Bell

December 16, 2025

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

Image by SwissAmish/Wikimediacommons, public domain dedication

This week marks the 30th anniversary of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. On December 14,1995 leaders from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and the former Yugoslavia signed the Dayton Peace Agreement, ending a ferocious three-and-a-half-year war that claimed around 100,000 lives, left thousands missing, and reduced entire communities to rubble.

But the war in Bosnia did not begin with bombs or snipers. It began with cruelty and dehumanization, with the deliberate turning of neighbors against neighbors.

Over the last few weeks to mark the impending anniversary of Dayton, social media is filled with images and videos recalling the horrors of that war. More disturbingly, recent reporting has revealed that some tourists came to Sarajevo and other cities not as witnesses, but as participants, joining sniper attacks against Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) for sport. These are not grotesque curiosities from the past. They are warnings. Violence does not erupt spontaneously. It is cultivated, normalized, and enabled when dehumanization hardens into practice.

Having lived and worked in Bosnia and Herzegovina for six years, I have seen this reality up close. I lived in an apartment building where chunks of the facade were still missing from sniper fire, silent reminders embedded into everyday life. I walked streets scarred by shelling, listened to survivors carry grief that never fully leaves, and witnessed the enduring physical and psychological toll the war continues to exact.

Maybe it is cheeky to use this moment, and I will take the criticism. Dehumanization and cruelty never end well. Ever. History makes that clear, yet its warnings are lost in the noise of daily chaos. What once shocked us or was unacceptable now barely registers and is casually shrugged off. Cruelty becomes banal. Dehumanization becomes routine. And people grow dangerously accustomed to both.

Recent survey data underscore this normalization. A 2025 Pew Research Center study found that large majorities of Americans say racial, ethnic, and religious minorities, including Black Americans, Muslims, Jews, Hispanics, and Asian Americans, face discrimination in the United States. Yet the same data reveal sharp partisan divides over how serious that discrimination actually is, with many respondents acknowledging bias in the abstract while minimizing its real-world impact. This gap, recognition without urgency, helps explain how dehumanization becomes tolerable. When harm is acknowledged but downplayed, it becomes easier to excuse, ignore, or rationalize. Over time, cruelty does not disappear. It becomes administratively acceptable.

We see this in the way entire communities are spoken about and treated as problems to be managed rather than people to be protected. Somali and Afghan communities are routinely cast under a cloud of suspicion, framed as perpetual outsiders or security threats rather than neighbors who have fled war and displacement, often shaped by U.S. policy itself. We see it in the rise of Islamophobia, where Muslim identity is conflated with extremism, surveillance is normalized, and ordinary expressions of faith are treated as something dangerous or foreign.

This dehumanization is no longer abstract. Muslim women are harassed for wearing hijab. Mosques are vandalized or threatened. Muslim students face intimidation, and communities confront demonstrations that frame Islam as an existential threat. Political rhetoric and online disinformation recast Muslims not as citizens or neighbors, but as enemies within.

At the same time, antisemitism is rising openly and violently, met too often with selective outrage or cynical political instrumentalization rather than moral clarity. What we are witnessing goes far beyond criticism of Israeli or U.S. policy in Gaza. It is the resurgence of conspiratorial antisemitism, assigning collective guilt to Jews, casting them as shadowy manipulators, and blaming them for imagined schemes designed to inflame fear and hostility.

Alongside it all is the quiet whitewashing of overt racism, where racial resentment is softened, excused, or even rewarded. Avowed white supremacist rhetoric, once confined to the margins, now circulates openly with alarming legitimacy, shielded by appeals to free speech. When whole communities are labeled as garbage, it is not a metaphor. It is permission to ostracize, harm, or worse.

This logic becomes most dangerous when it is absorbed into state power. The weaponization of ICE is one of the clearest examples of dehumanization made operational. Raids, workplace sweeps, and neighborhood operations punish entire communities rather than address individual wrongdoing. Families are torn apart without warning. Parents disappear on the way to work or school. Asylum seekers are treated as criminals for exercising a legal right. When enforcement is untethered from proportionality, due process, and dignity, it ceases to be about law and order and becomes collective terror.

Bosnia is not our only warning. We do not need to look abroad or far back to understand the consequences of dehumanization. The United States has its own record. Jim Crow. The internment of Japanese Americans. The dispossession of Indigenous peoples. Redlining and housing segregation. Mass incarceration. And moments when fear of communists, Muslims, or immigrants transformed into surveillance, blacklists, and collective punishment.

It is time America indicts itself. It is time to look honestly in the mirror and decide what it wants to be. The growing cruelty we are witnessing is not the work of one party or one individual. Complicity can’t be ignored. These impulses are older, deeper, and far more bipartisan than we care to admit. We did not arrive here by accident. Some seek an America built on exclusion, nostalgia for eras when inequality was enforced by law and belonging narrowly defined. America has postponed this reckoning far too long.

The reckoning that follows an honest indictment will be difficult, uncomfortable, and unavoidable. It will require drilling into a national psyche shaped from its inception by racial hierarchy and sanctioned violence, a society that too often defends guns over lives, punishment over prevention, and power over accountability. Without that reckoning, the cycle simply continues.

Indictment is not about self-destruction. It is about deciding whether the country is finally willing to tell the truth about itself. Without that truth, America cannot get better. Cruelty has never delivered justice, stability, or peace, and history makes that plain. From the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, to the atrocities of Nazi Germany, to the sanctioned injustices of Jim Crow, cruelty has only deepened suffering and delayed reckoning. These are not the foundations of national greatness. They are the very forces that eroded America’s moral standing to begin with. Campaigns of intimidation, collective punishment, and dehumanization directed at immigrant communities will not make America great again. They do the opposite, accelerating moral decline and weakening the democratic values they claim to defend.

Racism, xenophobia, cruelty, and dehumanization function like a cancer within the body politic, and truth is the only treatment capable of stopping their spread. A society can deny the diagnosis for only so long before the consequences become irreversibly devastating.

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Jared O. Bell, syndicated with PeaceVoice, is a former U.S. diplomat and scholar of human rights and transitional justice, dedicated to advancing global equity and systemic reform.

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Trumpist Geopolitics in Western Balkans – How a Heritage Ideologue Sells “Third Entity” in Bosni

By Vuk Bačanović

December 16, 2025

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

Image by Chris Woodrich/Wikimediacommons, licensed via CC BY 4.0

Bosnia and Herzegovina is usually introduced to foreign readers as a “post-war success story” held together by the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement — a fragile compromise that ended the bloodshed by freezing the country into a constitutional maze. Two entities, three “constituent peoples,” a rotating tripartite Presidency, layers of vetoes and international supervision: Dayton didn’t build a shared political community so much as it administered a ceasefire in legal form, turning everyday life (jobs, schools, hospitals, housing) into collateral damage of permanent ethnic bargaining.

But in recent years, a different vocabulary has been gaining ground — one that reframes BiH not as a society in need of reconstruction, equality, and economic renewal, but as a border problem. In this language, the country is no longer a place where people live; it is a sanitary cordon. Its institutions become a guardhouse for the EU and NATO, and its internal arrangement is treated as something to be “adjusted” to the needs of frontier management. That is how calls for constitutional and territorial “reform” are increasingly sold: not as democratic repair, but as security engineering.

This is where Trumpist ideology enters the picture.

A policy analyst at the conservative U.S. think tank The Heritage Foundation, Max Primorac — the son of Croatian right wing immigrants from Herzegovina and a man well placed within Trumpist circles — has articulated a view that has largely slipped under the radar in Serbia, Montenegro, and Bosnia and Herzegovina, even though it neatly distills the dynamics now unfolding on the ground.

Starting from the familiar narrative of the “sad fate” of Croats in BiH and the demographic decline afflicting both Bosnia and Croatia — a downturn driven, to a significant extent, by prolonged post-Yugoslav social unraveling and economic out-migration — Primorac immediately translates the issue into the language of geopolitics and security borders. In that context, he said the following:

“The last thing Croatia needs right now — or NATO, or the EU, because it’s the same border — is for (the Croatian people in BiH, author’s note) to be left with yet another pro-Kremlin-oriented Serb entity and a radicalized Muslim entity. At this moment, I think the only way to prevent that, and to secure the Croatian and European border, is for there to be a third entity. Otherwise, the Croatian community will disappear.”

What matters most in this statement is neither any real concern for the “Croatian people,” nor the performative anxiety over their alleged endangerment, but the way Bosnia and Herzegovina is coolly reduced to a sanitary cordon and a “border”: as if people, institutions, and an entire political space were nothing more than the EU’s and NATO’s guardhouse. From there, it becomes “logical” to tune the country’s internal architecture to the needs of border patrols, rather than to any idea of coexistence among three indigenous peoples, their equality, or economic renewal.

In that framing, a “third entity” does not appear as a remedy for any concrete, lived problem (wages, schools, hospitals, housing, safety for Croats), but as a geopolitical prosthesis within a new redistribution of power.

The pairing of “a pro-Kremlin entity” with “radicalized Islam” is no accident. It is a textbook example of political racism in the contemporary idiom of the “civilized world”: you don’t need to declare anyone an inferior race to turn them, in public discourse, into a permanent threat — a “security problem” to be handled not through politics and law, but through quarantine and partition. The Serb political space is essentialized as Moscow’s fifth column (even when the reality is that both Belgrade and Banja Luka kneel, as submissively as possible, before Washington and the European Union, offering up territory and resources for next to nothing in exchange for keeping ruling clans in power), while the Muslim political space is cast as naturally prone to extremism — as if the mere existence of a community were itself grounds for suspicion.

The paradox is that both the Serb and Bosniak political establishments actively court precisely that security-racist image of themselves, because in the short term it generates political rent.

The former president of Republika Srpska (the Serb entity in Bosnia) and the self-styled leader of Bosnia’s Serbs Milorad Dodik, has built his power on the nonstop manufacture of an existential threat (“the Islamic danger,” “the Muslim menace”), while simultaneously presenting himself as a geopolitical exception with a “patron” in Moscow — even though this is, in realpolitik terms, largely marketing without backing. Draško Stanivuković, the current mayor of Banja Luka, also stays inside that same frame because he survives on the same electoral market in RS: he criticizes Dodik, yet takes care never to undermine the basic template of “defending the entity” and the supposedly anti-NATO reflex, even though — like Dodik — he ultimately benefits from it.

On the other side, Dino Konaković, as BiH’s pro-Western foreign minister, tries to sell international partners the simplest possible storyline: Republika Srpska as a Russian outpost (“a Russian submarine”). In doing so, he effectively reinforces Primorac’s racist shorthand of a “pro-Kremlin entity,” in which European politics collapses into border security. Konaković’s opposition — the Young Muslim SDA and the ostensibly civic DF — performs essentially the same function: by backing the obscure figure Slaven Kovačević as a candidate for the Croat member of the BiH Presidency in the 2026 elections — a candidate who, if the already familiar pattern of electoral engineering repeats itself, would be elected by Bosniak votes — they produce a new, media-fresh version of the “Željko Komšić case” as proof that the Croatian position can once again be “outvoted.” That, in turn, makes the whole story about imposed changes to the election law by the High Representative — and, ultimately, about a third entity — easier to market as a necessity of self-defense.

The reference is to the recurring controversy around Željko Komšić, who has repeatedly won the seat reserved for the “Croat member” of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s tripartite Presidency thanks largely to votes from Bosniak-majority areas, prompting many Croat parties to argue that the position can be effectively decided by the larger Bosniak electorate rather than by Croat voters themselves; supporters of this arrangement counter that the Presidency is elected on a civic, territory-based ballot and that any candidate who wins under the law has full democratic legitimacy — a dispute that has since become a symbolic shorthand for the broader fight over electoral rules, “legitimate representation,” and demands for a separate Croat political unit (a “third entity”).

It turned out to be the perfect game for mapping out the Trumpist agenda.

When Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenković — following right-wing attacks on Serbs in Croatia — came to Banja Luka, the administrative center of Republika Srpska, he was welcomed by virtually the entire political “front row” of Serb politicians. Both Milorad Dodik and Draško Stanivuković were present, and that is symbolically crucial: it shows how internal feuds are instantly suspended the moment it is time for “inter-state” photo ops and for legitimacy brokered through Zagreb. In TV studios they call each other traitors, foreign mercenaries, and grave-diggers of the nation; but when the Croatian prime minister arrives — the financial inspector, not to say the gauleiter of the Balkan tavern — everyone leaps to their feet: “Welcome, please, just tell us where to stand so it shows up on the evening news.”

We witnessed the identical pattern in Zagreb, at the conference marking 30 years since Dayton (“30 Years After Dayton: Seeking Local Solutions”), where the host axis of Plenković and Grlić Radman convened the regional elite, and Konaković appeared as the “constructive partner,” advancing the thesis of the biggest crisis since Dayton and “Russian influence” as the principal obstruction.

In other words: at home, inside the humiliating Dayton protectorate, Bosniaks and Serbs accuse and smear one another, turning the other side into an apocalypse in human form — but when it is time to demonstrate seriousness and “stability” before the external arbiter, they all collectively switch into a mode of theatrical, almost pathetic submission.

What is really unfolding is a slightly revised version of the 1990s script, with the same underlying logic of “using one side to break the whole.” Just as Croatian policy in the early phase of Yugoslavia’s disintegration primarily capitalized on Bosniak interests and energy directed against Yugoslavia — thereby strengthening its own position in the wider process of dismantling and redefining the political space — today, under new circumstances, it is capitalizing on the Serb factor as a lever for reengineering the Dayton protectorate.

The Serb “disruptive” role — whether real or amplified through media framing — becomes a convenient argument for presenting demands for a deeper internal redesign of Bosnia and Herzegovina as a matter of “stability” and “border protection.” And once that redesign is set in motion, it can easily slide into a process that, in practice, undermines the existing order and leads either to its breakdown or to a radical transformation.

How Serbs might fare in such an outcome is hardly a mystery: it is enough to look closely at the fate of Bosniaks who, in 1992–1993, largely counted on Croatian and broader European partnership as protection from the “barbarians from the East,” only to discover later that an alliance lasts precisely as long as its usefulness within the broader strategy of breaking and redrawing the map.

When it comes to Montenegro, the fit into Zagreb’s racist templates works in exactly the same way.

Over the past few years, Croatia has dealt with Podgorica from the position of an EU member state armed with a veto — and willing to wield it as a disciplinary baton. Already during the debate over the Jasenovac resolution, signals from Zagreb warned that this would “certainly slow down” Montenegro’s European integration; and Croatia then did, in fact, block the closing of Chapter 31 (foreign, security and defence policy). Throughout, the handy pretext is the current Serbian president Aleksandar Vučić’s warped Radical-style caricature of aggressive “Serbdom” — which, in reality, is little more than a reality-show paper tiger, perfectly prepared to carry out whatever tasks are demanded: from opening lithium mines to erasing the last traces of Serbian statehood in Kosovo, while Republika Srpska and Serbs in Montenegro are treated as small change.

In that atmosphere, a segment of anti-Serb Montenegrin nationalists and self-declared “anti-fascists” instinctively go looking for an external patron and a stamp of symbolic verification in Zagreb (as the “European address”). They accept a language and a frame in which Montenegro is useful as the antithesis of the “Serb World” and as a bridge to Croatian interests in the region. At times this spills into caricature: Croatian far-right figures (such as Velimir Bujanec) openly call for an alliance of “true Montenegrins” and Croats against the “Serb World” — a reminder of how easily ideological labels (“anti-fascism”) can be converted into geopolitical cheerleading for someone else’s interests.

Paradoxically, this lands them on the same objective side as Dodik. He manufactures and feeds the narrative of a “Russian/Serb disruptive zone” inside Bosnia; they amplify it as a regional “threat”; and Zagreb, in both cases, constructs the same conclusion — that new mechanisms of control and redesign (electoral, constitutional, territorial) are needed in order to “secure the border.” However much they despise one another inside the region, their moves fit perfectly into the same external template of pressure and reengineering.

The way out of this nightmare labyrinth is not another “salvational” Croat entity in Bosnia, nor a fresh round of mutual accusations, but a conscious break with the racist imposition — both external and internal — that reduces Serbs to a “pro-Kremlin zone” they are not, Bosniaks to a “radicalized Islam” that scarcely exists in BiH, and Montenegro to a protectorate disciplined through vetoes and brutal humiliation. In terms of imperial strategies, it is a classic method of managing the periphery: the center produces caricatures, local elites accept them as a currency of legitimacy, and politics is reduced to who can play their assigned role more skillfully in someone else’s script.

As long as Serbian, Bosniak, and Montenegrin politics (whether led by Serbs or by national Montenegrins) accept that language and that borrowed frame — and then quarrel inside it — they work together toward the same outcome: the abdication of real politics and the preparation of terrain for “solutions” that, when needed, will be delivered from outside — in the form of a ‘joint investigation,’ a formulation that functions here as a euphemism for extermination.

Workers in Germany Strike at Avnet (USA)

By Thomas Klikauer

December 16, 2025

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

Image by Adam King, German metal workers union, https://freiburg.igmetall.de/aktuelles/2025/triaavnet-verwehrt-zutritt

It is October 2025, and one room in southern Germany was in a rage. The discontent of workers over the loss of industry-wide collective bargaining had escalated at a local technology company.

Workers at Avnet and Tria had been excluded from Germany’s traditional collective bargaining regime covering the entirety of the metal industry. Avnet’s management sought to justify its attack on workers with “restructuring” – a rather common lame-duck excuse when inflicting harm on workers for the benefit – read: profits – of a company.

Unsurprisingly, Germany’s metalworkers’ union – IG Metall – is resisting management’s assault on workers. The 140-strong workforce at the US-owned Avnet Embedded Freiburg GmbH manufactures electronic components. The company’s Eschbach site offers technology consulting, electronic system design, development and integration, logistics, and repair services.

In a “tense economic situation” – read: the normal crisis of capitalism – collective bargaining, collective agreements, and a strong trade union offer workers at least some degree of security, even in the world’s third-largest economy: Germany.

At Avnet, however, workers at its southern German site have been denied their collective bargaining structure. It began in spring 2025 when management unilaterally cancelled an agreement that is standard in Germany’s metal industry.

Management’s “reason” for acting against workers was framed as “restructuring,” in which the sister companies – Tria Technologies and Avnet Integrated Solutions – were removed from the traditional collective bargaining structure.

This move affected around 140 workers in the 1,100-inhabitant town of Eschbach, situated on the French border near Freiburg (Baden-Württemberg) and Basel (Switzerland).

Immediately, workers were set to lose a “certain” degree of security – already fragile in capitalism and under the whip of often irrational management. Once the current collective agreement expires, workers are likely to be denied entitlements such as leave loading, holiday payments, and even the traditional Christmas “bonuses” – a little extra pay for the festive season – with other benefits are also likely to be cut.

Facing severe wage cuts in the foreseeable future, workers at Avnet in Eschbach did not accept this quietly. This is why the works meeting on 14 October 2025 was extremely well attended.

Workers and the trade union – IG Metall (IGM) – are taking on management. As a first step, IGM called on Avnet/Tria stubborn management to negotiate.

Following the simplistic re-naming of the former Freiburg company MSC Technologies under the Avnet umbrella, the company was divided into four entities. While Tria “Systems” and Avnet Integrated Solutions “IC” continued to maintain industry-wide collective bargaining, management decided that this should no longer apply to Tria “Technologies” and Avnet Integrated Solutions [no “IC”], both located in the Business Park in Eschbach.

In addition, IGM has rightly criticised Avnet’s management for nearly a year for banning the union from accessing the companies for crucial discussions with the works council and workers – a gross violation of German labor law.

In line with Germany’s cherished “social partnership ” ideology, IGM stated: “We urge employers to finally sit down at the negotiating table with us and talk seriously about solutions – under one condition: the interests of workers must remain at the centre of all negotiations.”

While collective bargaining is viewed as a “burden” by management, for workers it promises security, justice, a living wage, and a perspective for the future.

In other words, management that deliberately endangers what German unions call “social peace” should not be surprised if worker protest grows. Discontent among Avnet and Tria workers in the Gewerbepark Breisgau is intensifying. Workers are demanding a return to Germany’s standard collective bargaining practices.

Workers made their position unmistakably clear at the work-stop meeting. There was no doubt about the depth of dissatisfaction with Avnet’s current management. The room was buzzing. There were powerful speeches and a shared goal: fair conditions for all workers.

In a typical yet illogical move, Avnet’s corporate management has failed – to this day – to explain why only half of the four sister companies retained the collective bargaining agreement.

This is an anti-union strategy known as “divide and conquer,” designed to fragment the workforce and weaken the trade union.

For this purpose – and leaving one to wonder where the “H” for “human” (or humane or even humanity) is in HRM – the HR manager prohibited IGM representatives from entering the company. Yet IGM Freiburg remains adamant that Avnet’s management has no legal authority to do so.

Despite this inhuman “HRM” – at times, also camouflaged as business ethics – workers possess fundamental and human rights. These include, under Germany’s Works Constitution Act, the right to speak with their works council and trade union representatives.

As so often in real-existing capitalism, corporate management grossly disregards these rights.

Instead, and in further contradiction to German labour law, management demands that the works council negotiate issues such as remuneration and working hours – matters regulated by collective bargaining law, not works council law. Perhaps the HR manager should revisit “German Labour Law 101.” By law, the works council neither can nor may do this.

Worse still, the not-so “human” HR manager threatened to use force to compel the works council to comply – an act that is itself unlawful. German labour relations strictly separate collective bargaining from works council responsibilities.

At the same time, Avnet’s management has attempted to block workers’ access to information and advice.

Despite enormous pressure put on by Avnet’s management against workers, the works council sought IGM’s support for all talks with management. When the union announced a visit three days in advance and arrived – as permitted by German law – management blocked union officials at the door.

Avent’s HR later claimed that the works council was not allowed to conduct a company tour to speak with workers. This too violates labour law. HR further argued that the works council should not address workers “on such a large scale” – another legal violation.

Even worse, HR wrote to all workers stating that work-stop meetings were not permitted and that participants would not be paid. This too directly contradicts the Works Constitution Act.

All this demonstrates not only repeated violations of German labour law, but also a profound lack of respect for workers and their legitimate representation. In the hallucinations of management studies, this is known as corporate social responsibility – another ideology.

Unsurprisingly, IGM argues that Avnet’s management must urgently reconsider its position. The union is taking legal action. This is not the first time a US company has violated German labour law, only to discover that it must comply.

Meanwhile, the underlying corporate strategy is clear: Avnet wants to pay workers less. This is to be achieved through fragmentation into four companies.

Two – Avnet Integrated Solutions IC and Tria Systems – have returned to collective bargaining. The other two – Avnet Integrated Solutions and Tria Technologies – are excluded, without explanation.

This contradiction violates German labour law and labour relations. Management falsely claims the works council could resolve these matters.

IGM argues that the workforce cannot be divided. Workers want fair participation and secure jobs. They are prepared to strike to regain their collective agreement.

The company’s history stretches back to the late 19th century, when it operated as “Hellige” in Freiburg. It long formed part of Germany’s collective bargaining system.

Renamed MSC in 2001 and acquired by Avnet in 2013, the company changed significantly. Production expanded, the workforce grew, and in 2023 operations moved to Eschbach.

Soon after, management initiated “restructuring,” isolating the works council and presenting faits accomplis.

Four companies emerged: two production entities and two employee entities. Management believes this allows the collective agreement to lapse. After a one-year transition, management moved to cancel it.

Workers responded with industrial action. After a strike ballot on 14 July 2025, 91.5% voted for indefinite strike action.

On 16 July, management attempted to undermine the strike with €200-per-day [$235] strikebreaker bonuses – scab money – and threatening emails. Workers remained resolute, striking for two weeks.

After the summer break, strikes resumed on 22 September. Participation increased. Pressure mounted. As one union official put it: “Sometimes, you need a long breath.”

Management remains opposed to collective bargaining in principle, proposing instead illegal wage negotiations with the works council.

Workers reject this. They will continue to fight – for their families, their dignity, and their right to co-determination.

Despite management’s attempts to divide them, workers stand together and defend their right to strike at Avnet.Email

Thomas Klikauer

Thomas Klikauer has over 800 publications (including 12 books) and writes regularly for BraveNewEurope (Western Europe), the Barricades (Eastern Europe), Buzzflash (USA), Counterpunch (USA), Countercurrents (India), Tikkun (USA), and ZNet (USA). One of his books is on Managerialism (2013).