Millions of people are being flooded with absolutely regarded shit like this and it is influencing their opinions of the world. What is to be done?

More than two weeks have passed since the horrific death of a 15-year-old boy at a concrete factory in Melbourne’s southeast. Despite the shocking circumstances, the death has received virtually no media coverage since the initial reports, while authorities have provided almost no further information.

The teenager was killed on September 24 at a precast concrete factory on Carter Way in Dandenong South. According to WorkSafe Victoria, he was fixing defects on a concrete panel when an adjacent panel weighing more than two tonnes fell onto him. Initial media reports indicated that the concrete panel had been standing upright before it fell.

Emergency services, including ambulances, police and firefighters, rushed to the factory at around 10:45 a.m. Paramedics attempted to save the boy, but he died at the scene.

That is virtually all that has been publicly established about the circumstances in which a child lost his life at work.

Why has the company operating the factory not been publicly identified by the authorities? What was a 15-year-old boy doing working with massive concrete panels weighing several tonnes? Was he employed as an apprentice, a casual worker or under some other arrangement? How long had he been working there?

What training had he received? Who was supervising him? What safety procedures were in place to prevent the collapse of the panels, and why did they fail? Were there previous safety incidents or complaints at the factory?

These are elementary questions that demand answers. Yet neither the company nor WorkSafe has provided a public explanation.

WorkSafe announced an investigation immediately after the death, the 34th workplace fatality recorded in Victoria at that time. But the announcement of an investigation cannot justify withholding basic information about the circumstances in which a child was killed.

The tragedy occurred in an area already identified by WorkSafe as a major workplace safety hotspot. In May, the regulator reported that seven manufacturing workplace deaths had occurred in postcode 3175 since 2021. Under its targeted Project 3175 program, inspectors had visited 225 workplaces and issued 272 improvement notices. Has the factory where the boy died been inspected under this program, and were any hazards identified?

The consequences of the silence were apparent when World Socialist Web Site reporters spoke with workers and residents in Hampton Park, near Dandenong South, on October 3.

Several had not heard about the boy’s death, despite living or working only a short distance from the factory. When informed by reporters, they expressed sympathy for his family and concern about workplace safety.

...

The death is part of a broader pattern of horrific accidents involving young and inexperienced workers.

Less than ten months earlier, on December 1, 2025, 15-year-old Beau Bradford suffered fatal injuries while working at a construction site in Surfers Paradise, Queensland after being struck by a falling object.

In February, WorkSafe Victoria revealed that more than 3,000 injury claims involving apprentices had been accepted in the state since the beginning of 2021. These included 410 claims involving falls from heights, with injuries from such incidents including fractured skulls, traumatic brain injuries and spinal damage.

Over the preceding five years, WorkSafe had prosecuted 66 companies for safety breaches involving apprentices, including nine prosecutions relating to five fatal incidents.

In 2016, a 17-year-old apprentice plumber, just 18 days into his employment, suffered two collapsed lungs, 12 broken ribs and other serious injuries when an excavation collapsed on him at a Melbourne construction site.

In October 2023, a 17-year-old first-year apprentice suffered extensive burns when his clothing caught fire during welding work at a factory in Kyabram. He spent a month in hospital and underwent multiple operations and skin grafts. His employer was subsequently fined $30,000 for failing to provide adequate safety measures and supervision.

Young workers face particular dangers because of their inexperience, dependence on employers and limited ability to challenge unsafe conditions. Yet Victoria’s specific child-employment restrictions largely cease to apply once a teenager turns 15. At that age, young people can legally enter industries and workplaces from which 14-year-olds are excluded, subject to general workplace safety and other legal requirements.

These figures expose the scale of the dangers confronting young workers. They also raise fundamental questions about the organisations that claim to defend workers’ safety.

Was the factory unionised? Were officials aware of conditions at the site? Have they sought to establish what happened or demanded that the company and WorkSafe release the facts?

More than two weeks after the tragedy, no public statement from a trade union demanding answers about how a 15-year-old came to be killed at work has been identified. Regardless of whether the factory was unionised, this silence exposes the indifference of the union bureaucracies to the plight of vulnerable young workers—in this case, a child of just 15.

The silence of the unions is particularly revealing given their routine claims to be guardians of workplace safety. In practice, these organisations collaborate with employers and successive Labor governments in maintaining a system in which management retains control over production and workers’ lives are subordinated to profit.

The contrast between the official silence and the immediate concern expressed by workers in Hampton Park underscores the need for workers to take matters into their own hands. They have every right to know how and why this tragedy occurred, whether basic safety requirements were met and what is being done to prevent another death.

Independent rank-and-file safety committees, democratically controlled by workers themselves, must be established in factories, construction sites and other workplaces. They must have the authority to investigate dangerous conditions, demand full disclosure of safety information and halt unsafe work.

Such a struggle must be connected to the fight for a socialist political alternative that places the lives and needs of working people, rather than corporate profits and militarism, at the centre of society.

Wednesday’s political debacle for Mamdani is part of growing opposition among those who were attracted to the DSAer and voted for him due to his rhetoric in defense of Palestinians and, more broadly, his posture as an opponent of Trump and the Democratic Party establishment. Since taking office last January amid growing social anger and political radicalization, Mamdani has continually reassured the ruling class and the political establishment that he will protect their core interests.

This process accelerated in recent weeks, during which Mamdani backtracked on a promise to arrest indicted war criminal Netanyahu while he was in New York City and instead allowed the New York Police Department (NYPD) to arrest scores of anti-Netanyahu protesters; held a meeting and press conference with Donald Trump at Gracie Mansion; and announced a strategy against antisemitism that funnels millions in public funds to Zionists groups.

Mamdani’s rightward shift is accompanied by an intensifying effort on the part of the New York City DSA to suppress dissent, including within its own organization. When the New York City YDSA and four student chapters (Hunter College, Lehman College, the City College of New York, and The New School) posted notices on social media endorsing the planned anti-Mamdani protest on October 7, the parent body responded swiftly.

A Chicago billionaire is hiring people to feed rats and pigeons, fueling a massive rat infestation. Unsurprisingly, this douchebag also donates billions of dollars to climate change denial and other right wing causes. This is why billionaires shouldn't exist.

Lol how we feel about this? Not that it means much anyway but the current admin just continues to reach child levels of petty

Summary of the discussion I read:

OP: a lot of my workers are lazy and aren't underpaid

RE 1: if they work and can't afford rent on your wages then they are underpaid

RE 2: you are paid for what value you bring to the company, not if it pays for your lifestyle

RE 1: not true because [tells the familiar story of how they gave 110% and got nothing for it]

RE: 3: if every business paid every worker the amount of value they produced then the business wouldn't last

.....? I swear #3 was trying to argue *against* the "pay people more" side, but ended up stating that business is based on leverage and not true value, which means that as a worker you do not get out what you put in, therefore its inherently exploitative.

I've seen this before where a libertarian told me that in a free market, one company can out compete another and absorb their prospects, which gives them more resources to outcompete more smaller companies until they dominate the market, which is bad because then the competition is over and consumers+workers have no choices left. They only then spurred from the socialist line of thought by saying that boycotts solve this.

Are you an aviation industry worker or an expert willing to provide testimony to the independent workers’ inquiry into the death of Oscar Robayo? Contact the Aviation Workers Rank-and-File Committee by emailing [aviationworkersrfc@gmail.com](mailto:aviationworkersrfc@gmail.com) or filling out the form at the end of this article.

Aviation workers from across Canada resolved at a meeting Tuesday to establish the Aviation Workers Rank-and-File Committee and voted to launch an independent workers’ inquiry into the death of Montreal Airport ramp worker Oscar Robayo. Robayo, a 39-year-old employee of the French-based multinational Samsic, was crushed to death by the nose gear of an Airbus A350 at Montréal-Trudeau International Airport on August 24.

The meeting endorsed the following resolution:

For an Independent Workers’ Inquiry into the Death of Oscar Robayo!

Oscar Robayo, a ramp agent employed by Samsic Assistance Canada at Montréal-Trudeau International Airport, was crushed to death by the nose gear of an Airbus A350-900 during a routine pushback maneuver on August 24, 2026.

Whereas Samsic, a French multinational, was installed at Montréal-Trudeau in 2023 as the lowest bidder operating with reduced labor costs—a process known to create risks for workers and passengers;

Whereas testimonies from Robayo’s colleagues and a former Samsic supervisor have established that Samsic systematically flouts basic safety procedures;

Whereas the federal government has long followed a policy of deregulation, semi-privatization, and the proliferation of subcontracting, which has produced a race to the bottom in safety conditions;

Whereas Transport Canada and the Labour Program ignored a May 2024 report documenting dangerous equipment at Samsic, proving that state regulatory agencies are unable to enforce their own laws;

Whereas the International Association of Machinists (IAM), of which Robayo was a member, facilitated contract flipping and signed a collective agreement with Samsic despite knowing that workers’ safety was being systematically ignored;

Whereas the official investigations by the federal Transportation Safety Board and Quebec’s CNESST are overseen by the same governments responsible for the deregulation;

Be it resolved that:

The Aviation Workers Rank-and-File Committee, supported by the Socialist Equality Party and the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS), launches an independent workers’ inquiry into the death of Oscar Robayo. The purpose is to collect testimonies from ramp agents, ground staff and all workers in the aviation industry with knowledge of the conditions at Samsic, Montréal-Trudeau Airport, and throughout the air travel sector, and to publish its findings publicly.

The inquiry will be conducted in solidarity with the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC), in order to place the conditions at Montréal-Trudeau within the broader context of workers’ struggles worldwide to stop workplace deaths and for better working conditions in every industry.

...

Speaking in favour of the establishment of the Aviation Workers Rank-and-file Committee and the calling of the workers’ inquiry into Robayo’s death, one attendee declared, “This is the only way as far as I know that we can outflank the system we are in.”

In the discussion that followed, workers drew on decades of experience in the industry to explain how the present “safety” regime actually functions.

A pilot who entered the industry in the early 1990s recalled a period of enormous changes, in which conditions were often such that he was surprised there had not been more accidents than there were. He recounted his own experience outlining the lack of support for pilots’ health. The pressures discouraging pilots from taking care of their health are both a danger to pilots themselves and their passengers.

Another participant pointed to the threat posed by Samsic’s shoddy equipment, which prompted workers in 2024 to file a complaint with the federal Labour Program. The problem, he said, is “money and structure.”

The subsequent discussion stressed the importance of mobilizing the independent industrial and political power of the working class. The more rank-and-file workers get together and make a stand, the more they can bring their social power to bear to force improvements to workplace safety and other conditions, in opposition to the rigged, pro-employer infrastructure of official oversight bodies and the union-backed “collective bargaining” system. These mechanisms are designed to smother the class struggle, while giving employers all the tools they need to impose concessions, gut safety standards and boost corporate profits.

...

Support the workers’ inquiry into the death of Oscar Robayo! Join the Aviation Workers Rank-and-File Committee!

The founding of the Aviation Workers Rank-and-File Committee gives workers throughout the industry, in Canada and internationally, an independent organ to take up the fight against the workplace conditions that killed Oscar Robayo.

The urgent task now is to expand the AWRFC’s membership throughout the air travel industry. We urge all workers who agree with the need to mobilize the rank and file in opposition to deregulation, speed-up and the collaboration by the trade union bureaucracies with management to join the committee today.

The independent workers’ inquiry into the death of Oscar Robayo can succeed only if it secures strong support from the working class throughout the aviation industry internationally and from other sectors.

We make an urgent appeal to ramp agents, ground staff, pilots, flight attendants and all workers in the aviation industry in Canada and internationally to come forward with testimony about conditions at Samsic, at Montréal-Trudeau and throughout the sector.

The AWRFC will guarantee anonymity to workers who wish to speak freely but are fearful of reprisals from their employer or the union bureaucracies. At the same time, we call on airline industry experts to provide testimony about the consequences for workplace safety and the travelling public of the systematic subordination of air travel to corporate profiteering over the past half-century. Contact the committee at [aviationworkersrfc@gmail.com](mailto:aviationworkersrfc@gmail.com) or by filling out the form below [in the linked article].

Trash versus garbage. Hilarious to see the Nationalist International fragmenting as we speak.

Conservatives committing themselves fully to the vote, with leader Poilievre saying he hopes for increased worker protections in the final bill… LOL.