The International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) is an international network of democratic, worker-controlled rank-and-file committees. It was formed to provide workers with the organizational means to unite across workplaces, companies, industries and national borders, independent of the pro-corporate trade union bureaucracies.
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There are now rank-and-file committees of autoworkers, educators, Amazon and logistics workers, postal workers, bus drivers, and many other sections of the working class.
Rank-and-file committees are of, by and for the rank-and-file workers, who have a different set of interests than management, the bosses, the politicians, and the trade union apparatus, who oppress workers in order to defend the profits of the ruling elite.
Contact us now to join a committee. If there is not already a committee in your workplace, industry or region, we will help you start one!
In his campaign announcement, Lehman called for workers to support his campaign, including by running as delegates for the UAW Constitutional Convention, which will be held from June 15-18.
Hundreds of thousands of jobs are being cut as the ruling class seizes on the artificial intelligence boom to eliminate vast sections of the workforce.
Tens of thousands of unorganized workers are demanding substantial wage increases to keep up with spiking rent, utilities and food costs.
The last-minute deal demonstrates the ruling class’s extreme sensitivity to and fear of the class struggle and its reliance on the union bureaucracy to suppress it.
An inquiry independent of Stellantis, the United Auto Workers (UAW) apparatus and state authorities is essential to uncover the truth, expose systemic safety violations and prevent future deaths.
Approximately 100 workers and youth attended the hearing, which was addressed by members of the IWA-RFC and Shamenia Stewart-Adams, the widow of Ronald Adams, Sr.
One year ago today, 63-year-old machine repairman Ronald Adams Sr. was crushed to death at the Stellantis Dundee Engine Complex in Southeast Michigan.
Stellantis, the United Auto Workers and Michigan safety officials continue to remain silent on the death of the 63-year-old skilled tradesman, even as full production at the engine plant has resumed.
Workers at the facility last month founded a rank-and-file committee affiliated with the national USPS Workers Rank-and-File Committee, citing the failure of the American Postal Workers Union to enforce contractual rights or respond to safety hazards.
Under conditions of the ongoing war on Iran that is disrupting the world economy and the Canada-US trade war that has hit our facility here in Hamilton, Ontario, for over a year now, Management aims to offload the crisis onto our backs through real wage cuts and continued job insecurity.
The Postal Workers Rank-and-File Committee (PWRFC) calls for a resounding No vote. Opposition must be mobilised demanding the removal of Ward, Walsh and the entire CWU Postal Executive who serve as Royal Mail’s enforcers.
The Postal Workers Rank-and-File Committee urges postal workers to vote “No” to the union-backed tentative agreements and “Yes” to authorizing strike action.
A graduate student worker at UMass in Boston described how Harvard and other major universities rely on exploitation of academic workers.
Volkswagen is preparing the next round of mass cuts. The plants in Emden and Zwickau, the commercial vehicle plant in Hanover and the Audi plant in Neckarsulm face closure. A total of 40,000 people work at these plants.
This speech was delivered by Will Lehman, candidate for president of the United Auto Workers (UAW) and member of the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC), at the 2026 May Day Online Rally, organized by the WSWS and the ICFI.
Last month, Nexteer auto parts workers in Saginaw, Michigan voted down a tentative agreement presented by the UAW bureaucracy by more than 96 percent. The reaction from the shop floor to a new TA brought by the union last week is broadly one of anger and disgust. Workers who spoke to the World Socialist Web Site this weekend left no doubt where they stood.
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority ( MTA), like mass transit agencies all over the country, is determined to make the workers pay for a fiscal crisis that they did not create.
Workers rejected the first tentative agreement last July by 71 percent on a 92 percent turnout.
The collapse of Spirit has priced millions of working class travelers out of air travel overnight—and it is only the first casualty of the fuel crisis triggered by the US-Israeli war on Iran.
The government’s decision not to rescue Spirit, on the absurd grounds that they did not “have half a billion dollars laying around,” is deliberate class policy aimed at making the working class pay for the war.
The meeting of health and disability workers unanimously passed a resolution opposing the cuts to the National Disability Insurance Scheme and discussed a campaign to mobilise health workers against Labor’s brutal austerity agenda.
Nurses and healthcare workers should reject the offer presented by the NZNO, which would slash wages and do nothing to address the staffing crisis in hospitals.
People with disabilities will be subjected to demeaning tests, aimed at kicking them off the NDIS or dramatically reducing the support they receive.
The cabinet has decided to massively increase military spending and correspondingly slash social spending. One “reform” will deliver a death blow to healthcare in its current form.
As in the rest of the United States, New Jersey is experiencing a wave of layoffs of educators and school workers because of budget shortfalls.
Bipartisan austerity, union betrayals and deepening inequality are devastating public education in California and across the United States.
The Philadelphia’s Board of Education’s vote to shutter schools is the latest assault on social programs to benefit the wealthy and the U.S. war machine.
The AEU move to sell out the educators’ struggle is driven by fears of a wider working-class movement against the cost-of-living crisis imposed by the state and federal Labor governments.
The ALU could not simultaneously integrate itself into the orbit of the union bureaucracy and the Democratic Party while developing an independent movement of Amazon workers against the entire corporate and political structure those forces defend.
The death went unreported for a week before the online investigative outlet, the Western Edge, broke the story on April 13.
A core element of Amazon’s operations is the Delivery Service Partner (DSP) program—a sprawling network of nominally independent subcontractors through which Amazon controls the lives of hundreds of thousands of delivery drivers without, it claims, employing a single one of them.
A video uploaded to TikTok shows the warehouse doors being shut and locked as more than a dozen drivers tried to get inside.
Around 50 workers on site when the blaze erupted escaped without injury, but some were forced to literally run for their lives.
BP Whiting refinery workers continue their battle, as Northern Indiana Public Service Company (NIPSCO) locks out 1,700 USW workers.
An ethylene production plant at Mossmorran, Scotland has ceased production and started laying off its 400 strong workforce.
This is the second major incident at a US refinery in the past five months, following an explosion at the El Segundo Chevron refinery which rocked much of the Los Angeles area last October.
Residents of nearby Orange have raised concerns mining activity contributed to the most powerful seismic event ever recorded in the region.
A judge fined the company just $7 million for industrial manslaughter over the preventable death of an underground coal worker in Queensland.
There is still no official explanation of what caused the explosion at Polymetals Resources’ Endeavor mine on October 28, 2025, that killed workers Patrick “Ambrose” McMullen and Holly Clarke.
Miners’ struggle demonstrates the social power that must be mobilized for the social and democratic rights and against imperialist war.
A graduate student worker at UMass in Boston described how Harvard and other major universities rely on exploitation of academic workers.
Will Lehman, a rank-and-file Mack Trucks worker who is running as a socialist candidate for UAW president, is calling on workers to break the union's isolation of the nearly two-week walkout by 4,000 Harvard graduate student workers.
The more than 1,500 graduate workers who have walked out teach courses, run laboratories, and generate the research revenue that makes UIC function.
In a flagrant violation of democratic principles, the HAW-UAW bargaining committee has unilaterally called off plans for a spring strike, overriding a clear mandate from the membership
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.
