Solidarity with Workers Across Canada and Around the World–Building a Transnational Future
Magkaisa Centre
Official Statement
May 1, 2025

Toronto ON., – On this International Workers’ Day, we gather to honour the tireless contributions of workers around the world and to commemorate the victories led by working-class peoples throughout history against exploitation, oppression, and injustice. As we celebrate our progressive history today, this is also a time to recognize the challenges we face in a rapidly shifting global political economy and the need to continue to confront the pressing forces that continue to oppress and divide us.

In recent years, and especially with Trump 2.0, tariffs have been weaponized as a tool of economic warfare. They are not just trade disputes; they represent a direct attack on working people. The narrative around tariffs by mainstream media, framed as a mere “bargaining tool,” fails to acknowledge that it is the working class across borders who bear the brunt of these policies. 

We did not ask for this war. 

Workers here in Canada, the United States, and Mexico, did not ask for the tariffs that threaten jobs, increase our cost of living, and exacerbate income inequality. These tariffs are used to divide and pit workers against each other under the guise of nationalism, while the wealthy and corporate sector continue to benefit.

A Dying Old Economic Order , Same Class War

The imposition of tariffs by Trump 2.0 signals a dying US hegemony – and the west imposed “rule based order.” But make no mistake – tariffs are an act of intensifyingclass war, where the oligarchs push economic policies that hyper-exploit the labour of everyday workers. The Canadian government deceives workers with empty promises of retaliation but all of these trade policies are nothing but veiled deceptions to promote further corporate interests over the well-being of the people. These tariffs do not protect us; they harm us. They are excuses to increase prices (by grocery monopolists), reduce job security, and make it harder for the working class and racialized communities to make ends meet.

Here in Canada, workers face growing job insecurity. The continued erosion of unions and the ever increasing reliance on gig work have left many people vulnerable and heavily exploited, especially racialized communities including migrant workers and international students. These problems are not isolated to one country, but are part of a broader, transnational struggle that requires worker solidarity and cooperation, not competition.

Solidarity beyond borders

We must reject the false narrative of Canadian patriotic chauvinism that seeks to divide workers by creating nationalistic borders. The struggle for better wages, better working conditions, and basic dignity is universal. We must recognize that workers in all three North American countries share a common enemy: the corporations and governments that prioritize profit over people. Our solidarity must extend beyond national borders and build genuine transnational working-class solidarity.

Being part of a larger community of transnational workers, we the Filipino Canadian community have seen decades of profit-driven immigration and labour policies that push many in our communities into a cycle of temporariness, precarity and insecurity. As part of the larger working class in Canada, we, at the Magkaisa Centre, stand in solidarity with Indigenous peoples and all racialized and marginalized communities. We continue to uphold the working class struggle by helping build socialism in Canada and build genuine international solidarity. 

As working-class communities on either side of the border suffer the brunt of the inter-capitalist trade war, let us not forget that the real war of attrition on our communities is inflicted by governments’ and corporations’ ever-intensifying greed for profit, land acquisition, and resource extraction. Our interests as working-class and racialized communities are at odds and are incompatible with capitalism and imperialism. We continue our fight for secure and meaningful employment, affordable housing, food security, free education, truly universal health care and childcare, among other pro-people programs. Meanwhile the ruling classes continue to bailout corporations, claw out funding for these essential programs, and pour our taxes into policing and military spending, as we are currently witnessing with the ongoing genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

We continue to stand in solidarity with all oppressed, displaced and disenfranchised peoples around the world in their struggle for self-determination and national liberation. The Palestinian struggle is shared by anti-imperialist revolutionaries worldwide as it symbolises our unity and our interconnected struggles as workers and exploited people. In our current day and age, the status quo grasp at straws to justify a genocide to the populations of the world that understand very well the process of land theft, displacement and imperialist violence and super exploitation used in our own communities.  

We denounce all wars perpetuated by capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism and call for a just and lasting peace. As neofascism continues to rise globally, we remain vigilant and steadfast in exposing widespread misinformation, historical revisionism, and all right wing propaganda, while endeavouring to help strengthen a transnational worker’s movement that can envision and plan a better society for all.

Down with Imperialism!
Free Palestine!
Advance and Uphold the Struggle for Socialism!
Long Live International Workers’ Solidarity!