This report was given by Eric London to the Seventh Congress of the Socialist Equality Party (US) in support of the resolution titled “Build the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees! For a global counteroffensive of the working class!”
The report issued in advance of the conference in Davos details a series of deepening crises: the ever-worsening economic outlook, the intensification of geopolitical conflicts and tensions, the deterioration of health care, and the effects of climate change.
The announcement by Google that it is laying off 12,000 workers is the latest in the intensifying jobs bloodbath in the technology sector internationally and the spearhead of a drive by the financial elite to impose the inflation crisis on the backs of the working class.
Lehman’s written protest is an encyclopedic historical record of the election, comprehensively detailing every facet of the antidemocratic conspiracy by the entrenched bureaucracy to cling to power by suppressing the vote.
We are building a network of rank-and-file committees of workers in key industries and workplaces to stop the spread of COVID-19 and save lives, and prepare for a political general strike.
If Canada Post’s sweeping concession demands are to be successfully resisted, power must be placed back in workers' hands through the establishment of a network of rank-and-file committees.
“The jailing of Bogdan is an attempt to handcuff and silence working class opposition around the world.”
The Educators Rank-and-File Committee (US) demands the immediate release of socialist Bogdan Syrotiuk from a Ukrainian prison and urges educators and students to fight for his freedom.
“With our brothers and sisters of the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC), we are for abolishing, not reforming, the UAW bureaucracy, to put power into the hands of the workers.”
The union is facilitating the destruction of a portion of its membership. This is the logical follow-up to the sellout contract agreed to by SAG-AFTRA after a lengthy strike last year.
We recently spoke to stuntwoman-actress Michelle Shock about the SAG-AFTRA contract and the general situation in the film and television industry.
When only a little more than a third of the membership bothers to vote in such circumstances, this has to be considered a vote of non-confidence in the union leadership.
The Drescher-Crabtree-Ireland leadership and the national board as a whole have proven themselves to be conscious agents of the corporate predators.
The ending of the second shift, scheduled for July 1, comes as Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares has launched a “cost-cutting" race in the EV transition.
This victory vindicates the protracted and principled struggle waged by Lehman and thousands of his supporters to uphold the democratic rights of more than 1 million rank-and-file autoworkers, academic workers and retirees.
Autoworkers across the US are hailing the victory in court this week against the Department of Labor and the United Auto Workers bureaucracy over massive irregularities in the 2022 union elections.
In comments to an investors meeting in Milan, Italy, Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares pledged to shift the company’s supplier base “from the Western world to the best-cost countries.”
The significance of the strike, and the police-state measures used to end it, are that they anticipate an even broader and more explosive confrontation between the working class, which is being forced to pay the cost of war, and American and world imperialism.
The UAW apparatus is a critical instrument of the Biden administration, which is relying on the discredited labor bureaucracy to hold back opposition to US imperialism’s wars for global domination.
A judge has granted UC’s request for a temporary restraining order to halt the strike by tens of thousands of academic workers against the police crackdown on protest over the US-backed genocide in Gaza.
Over 180 people registered for the meeting and attended, including postal workers from both the US and Canada, autoworkers, healthcare and academic workers.
O’Brien will be speaking at a meeting that will be, for all intents and purposes, a fascist rally put on by one of the two main political parties.
Flight attendants’ right to strike is highly restricted under the Railway Labor Act, which was used by Biden and Congress to ban a strike on the railroads in 2022.
More than 200 people registered for the meeting from different industries to link the campus protests with workers’ struggles against mass layoffs and other cuts.
While the TTC and the city of Toronto claim there is no money to make desperately needed repairs to infrastructure, the ruling class is showering unlimited cash on the military and providing unlimited funds to wage war abroad.
The latest offer contains a 28.4 percent (compounded) wage increase over four years, under which base pay rates in most classifications will still be lower in real terms than in 2019, until at least October 2027.
The principled stand taken by workers at the May 20 meeting, in opposition to the ANMF bureaucracy, was important, but it is only a first step.
“I’m so over this business of spending my weekends volunteering. What a sad state of affairs it is when our taxes can’t cover essential medical equipment for a rural town.”
“People end up sitting in emergency departments for hours on end until they get frustrated and leave.”
The move is the latest in a series of coordinated attacks by university managements, the corporate media and the political establishment in Australia against the rights to protest and freedom of expression of students on campus.
The union and Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson hope to avoid the possibility of over 25,000 Chicago teachers on strike during the convention.
Wednesday’s police assault makes clear that Sri Lankan workers need to prepare for a political general strike, based on a revolutionary socialist program, against the government’s International Monetary Fund austerity measures.
Teachers in the UK must prepare to take on Labour as it prepares to take office. This requires a break from the trade union bureaucracy whose function, in order to secure their privileged existence, is to block the development of a struggle in defence of educators’ independent interests.
With the merger, Amazon workers will now be directly confronting a Teamsters apparatus that is helping enforce mass automation and layoffs, including at one of Amazon's main competitors, UPS.
The union’s fraternizing with Stalinist parties, like its relations with the anticommunist trade unions, is aimed at building a new labor bureaucracy while ignoring the needs of Amazon workers.
Fourteen months into the struggle, a balance sheet of the GMB’s leadership is required. The union has not provided a route to victory and cannot do so; the trade union bureaucracy is a hostile social force to the working class, aimed at securing a comfortable partnership with the employers.
The retailer has joined a growing corporate campaign to abolish government regulation and restore the open dictatorship of management.
Major energy companies are merging as 2023 saw the greatest consolidation of the oil and gas industry in over a decade, with $243 billion spent on mergers and acquisitions.
The devastating blasts, occurring 13 hours apart, left three workers injured and necessitated an emergency evacuation of more than 50,000 residents from the surrounding area.
Business analysts have warned that the demise of Qenos is a sign of things to come as other energy intensive industries cease operations in Australia, destroying thousands more jobs.
At least 27 chemical incidents have occurred in Texas so far this year, the most of any state.
Recent reports reveal that workers in construction and mining are committing suicide at rates that are more than double the average for all occupations.
An internal company memo issued last year declared that the “globally accepted standard, that ‘we don’t work under unsupported ground,” was “dated.”
Efforts to rescue the miners trapped 410 feet underground came to a halt on Monday.
The WSWS spoke with Liz French from Betteshanger, a former pit village in the Kent coalfield in south-east England. Liz was a founding member of the National Women Against Pit Closures during the 1984-85 Miner’s Strike. Among the 200 miners imprisoned during the 1984-85 strike, Liz’s late husband Terry received one of the longest prison sentences of five years.
Striking London United bus strikers spoke to WSWS reports during their strike this weekend.
Last May, the union pushed through a 2.25 percent increase for a two-year agreement up to December 2021. Shepherds Bush was one of three garages that voted the deal down.
A driver from Norwood told WSWS, “It’s a really difficult time. Mortgages are going up and we have to work overtime to make ends meet. Without overtime you can’t survive.”
By Unite’s own admission, it has presided over four years of below-inflation pay deals. It now wants to impose another one.
The ICFI and its affiliated Socialist Equality Parties are advancing this initiative to begin and develop a global counteroffensive of the working class against the homicidal policies of the governments controlled by the capitalist ruling class, which are responsible for the worldwide catastrophe.
This resolution was adopted unanimously by the membership of the Socialist Equality Party in the United States at its Sixth National Congress, which was held online from July 19 to July 24, 2020.
The characteristic of every great crisis is that it lays bare the contradictions that have accumulated and been suppressed for decades. All that is backward, anachronistic, corrupt, and, in the most profoundly objective sense, absurd and even irrational in the economic organization, social structure, political leadership and dominant ideology of the existing society is brutally and comprehensively exposed. The pandemic is such a crisis.
This lecture by David North examines the causes for the betrayals of the trade unions in their hostility to the class struggle and socialism, and reviews the historical conflict between the trade unions and revolutionary Marxism. It was re-published in the 2014 book, The Russian Revolution and the Unfinished 20th Century.
