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.
At Deutsche Bahn (DB) Cargo, the logistics branch of the German railway company, the threat of massive job cuts has led to a systematic increase in work pressure. This has considerable consequences for the health of railroad workers and results in life-threatening situations.
Students have taken a courageous stand. But we, the working class, have to be the base of the fight against war.
The Day of Mourning and the stated purposes behind it has been in effect for 34 years. Yet at our workplace alone, four people, brothers Andrew Kenmuir, Fraser Cowan, Colin Grayley, Quoc Le, have been gruesomely killed in 20 years—three of them in less than two.
We workers have every right to take all action deemed necessary to protect our jobs, regardless of whether you choose to sanction them or not. If you will not fight the layoffs, then get out of the way so that UPS workers can do it ourselves.
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.
Despite backing from the Biden administration and favorable media publicity, the UAW unionization campaign was turned back by the first serious management resistance it encountered.
The UAW unionization drive has received the blessings of the Biden administration, which is seeking to use the unions to control and stifle social opposition to war and austerity.
Autoworkers in the Detroit area are expressing support for University of California academic workers who are demanding strike action to protect anti-genocide protesters on campus.
The vote by the graduate student workers is a sign of a new stage in which the working class will emerge as the basic social force against war and dictatorship.
The powerful movement for a political strike is already confronting both the intransigence of the university authorities and the UAW bureaucracy.
That the UAW is calling out only a single campus confirms the warnings made by the WSWS that the bureaucracy is doing everything it can to limit this struggle.
The vote is a major step forward because it poses the entry of the working class into the struggle as the basic political force against war and police dictatorship.
In statements and conversations with the WSWS, students, grad student workers and others expressed support for a mass strike to protect democratic rights and end the genocide in Gaza.
Labour’s rail plan is not a programme of “renationalisation” but an effort to save a collapsed privatisation strategy and to safeguard the interests of British capitalism.
At Deutsche Bahn (DB) Cargo, the logistics branch of the German railway company, the threat of massive job cuts has led to a systematic increase in work pressure. This has considerable consequences for the health of railroad workers and results in life-threatening situations.
The strike ban underscores that as Canadian imperialism backs Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians, and takes on an ever greater role in NATO’s war on Russia and the US strategic offensive against China the Trudeau government will tolerate no opposition from workers at home.
TWU rank-and-file members must reject his slanders and countermand the threats of legal action. Instead, workers must organize actions in defense of the students.
The conference brought together health experts in several fields who detailed the impact of the destruction of healthcare facilities and basic infrastructure on the besieged population of Gaza amid the continuing US-Israeli onslaught.
While there is rising anger among doctors, nurses and other healthcare workers over stagnant pay and dangerous staffing shortages, the unions are keeping workers’ struggles isolated and divided.
The work being conducted by numerous scientists concludes that the H5N1 HAPI (Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza) virus poses a very real threat to human populations.
Two medical missions at the European Hospital in Khan Younis have been trapped in place with limited supplies since the closing of the Rafah border crossing into Egypt.
Protesters involved in an indefinite strike were violently assaulted by riot police, including with a water cannon spraying polluted water at them at high pressure.
That the UAW is calling out only a single campus confirms the warnings made by the WSWS that the bureaucracy is doing everything it can to limit this struggle.
The "Palestine Campus" group explained that the impulse for the protest was the start of the Israeli army's murderous ground offensive against Rafah.
The motion called for a black ban and cessation of work on all university research, education or other projects linked to the Israeli military or otherwise assisting the genocide in Gaza.
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.
According to his obituary, Paulo DeSouza Bezerra succumbed to a heart attack shortly after standing outside in the bitter cold. Bezerra, 50, who emigrated from Brazil, leaves behind his wife of 25 years and a young son.
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.
Gusmão’s return as prime minister will see stepped up efforts to pressure the Australian government to back his campaign to construct pipelines from Greater Sunrise to Suai, in Timor’s south.
The family charges that the company stonewalled them and is seeking documents in connection to the accident.
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.
Kurt Hourigan, a 37-year-old father of two, was killed in the collapse, and a 21-year-old worker sustained life-threatening injuries to his lower body.
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.
