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.
Postal workers must defy this anti-democratic edict, but this requires the mobilization of the broadest sections of the working class—public and private sector alike—across Canada and internationally.
The CUPW leadership has issued no call for postal workers to defy the impending, patently anti-democratic government-order illegalizing their strike. As for the Canadian Labour Congress, it hasn’t so much as bothered to issue a press release denouncing the Liberal government's strikebreaking.
Now more than ever, the central issue is to mobilize the social power of the entire working class. Every worker has a stake in our struggle and we must make them aware of that.
Canada Post strikers are determined to wage a struggle. But they are being hamstrung by the disastrous policies of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers and Canadian Labour Congress, which are forcing the workers to stand alone against the combined strength of corporate Canada and its bought-and-paid-for political representatives.
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.
Every day, 99 workers die in America’s industrial slaughterhouse.
The Rivian deal explicitly ties the interests of the UAW apparatus to the profit interests of the company’s wealthy shareholders.
According to media reports, the collective bargaining parties “wrestled” for more than 70 hours over five days to reach an agreement. In fact, the whole thing was a set-up.
To diffuse anger, the UAW bureaucracy claims it has cut job cuts by half but workers fear even larger layoffs.
The lawsuit, launched by the ACLU in California, alleges that the summary banishment by the University of California Regents was illegal.
Suspensions, banishments, withholding of diplomas, and demands for letters of apology are among the weapons used to attack freedom of speech.
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.
The rally offered valuable information on the role played by the Danish shipping conglomerate Maersk in the genocide in Gaza, but proposed no policies to mobilize dockworkers against capitalism and war.
The Rail, Tram and Bus Union promised to give the New South Wales Labor government exactly what it wanted while workers received nothing in exchange.
Workers are up against a Labor government that is utterly hostile to their demand for a real pay rise and intends to use every mechanism at its disposal to eliminate their democratic rights and shut down their struggle.
Amazon workers must insist that their strike not be limited in advance by the Teamsters to only three days, which severely limits its impact during the height of the holiday shopping season. Instead, the strike must be guided by a strategy worked out and democratically enforced from below by workers, through rank-and-file committees made up of representatives from every Amazon facility.
Resident physicians who recently voted to unionized are battling Tenet Healthcare to win better wages and working conditions
As the government imposes brutal austerity measures, including more than 2,000 job cuts in the healthcare sector, tens of thousands of nurses and healthcare workers have stopped work across the country.
The health secretary declared that regulators have the power, “to set conditions that a healthcare professional must work under, suspend them, or strike them entirely from the medical register."
While the gunning down of the UnitedHealthcare CEO has exposed widespread public opposition to the criminal practices of the health insurance corporations and capitalism generally, Jacobin has published an interview with Bernie Sanders aimed at reviving illusions in the Democratic Party and reform of the healthcare system.
Graduates are shunning teaching degrees, while registered teachers are leaving the profession in unprecedented numbers.
The online meeting was part of a campaign to alert workers to the government-initiated police attacks on SDOs and to rally support for their defence.
The passage of the bill reflects immense fear within the US ruling class that large sections of the population will be looking for a revolutionary alternative to the unending war, inequality, austerity and fascism offered by the capitalist system.
The Michigan Educators Rank-and-File Committee insists that there are plenty of resources to pay educators what they need and deserve.
The holiday season has begun in the United States, along with the season of class struggle. Thousands of Amazon and Starbucks workers are on strike, with many more seeking to join.
The Teamsters bureaucrats will not organize a wider struggle because they are not interested in taking the fight to Amazon on behalf of workers everywhere, but in establishing the same corrupt relations with Amazon management it enjoys elsewhere.
More than 5,500 workers at Amazon’s JFK8 facility, alongside thousands of other workers, are fighting for their economic needs and fundamental rights.
The strike is the largest ever of Amazon workers in the United States. It is part of a growing movement by workers across Amazon’s global operations, following protests in 20 countries during Black Friday last month.
The 250 striking workers were given just 48-hours notice to vote on a lengthy seven-year contract that failed to meet their key demands.
On strike for more than three months, Marathon workers called for joint action to stop the cutoff of their insurance on December 13.
The working class in the metro Detroit area must come to the defense of the more than 250 Marathon refinery workers who have been on strike for three months.
After more than 10 weeks on strike, workers at Marathon Detroit Refinery are determined to win improved wages and stop subcontracting, healthcare cuts and dangerous work schedules.
For 14 years, successive governments, state agencies, the judicial system and the union bureaucracy have worked to prevent anyone being brought to justice for the avoidable deaths of 29 workers in Pike River Coal’s underground mine.
As a result of privatisation, workers face the same risks of dismissal, wage cuts, loss of social rights and even increased risk of death and injury in precarious conditions as in other companies.
The police’s murderous tactics, dubbed “surrender or starve”, have caused outrage in South Africa where unemployment has soared to 42 percent and economic desperation is widespread in the world’s most unequal society.
The company is also seeking to impose further real wage cuts for remaining workers at the facility.
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.
