The World Socialist Web Site and the Socialist Equality Parties are assisting workers everywhere in the building of an interconnected network of rank-and-file committees, to organize a united counter-offensive against inequality, exploitation, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, and the rapidly escalating imperialist world war.
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!
With the strike by 33,000 aerospace workers entering its first full week, the Boeing Workers Rank-and-File Committee issued the following statement spelling out the issues workers now confront.
The meeting called for a unified campaign by educators and students, and workers and youth more broadly, against the Albanese government’s cuts to international student enrolments and the thousands of job cuts they are triggering across the tertiary education sector.
The mass protests over the past few days have shown our collective power. But this power must be organized so that Boeing workers can take control and countermand decisions that violate our will.
In bringing this contract to a vote, the IAM bureaucrats have declared they are not on the side of workers but of management, and behind them a government which does not want a strike at a major defense contractor.
Doctors asked to forego pay rise walk out across Germany in warning strike; protests in Iran to mark second anniversary of murder of Mahsa Amini by morality police for improperly wearing the veil, as cost-of-living protests by workers and retirees continue; striking workers at BMW in Pretoria, South Africa fighting redundancy plans face police rubber bullets as Cape Town teachers protest education cuts
The train drivers’ two-year strike and the junior doctors’ action in England were the two remaining national disputes from the 2022-3 strike wave of rail, postal and telecom workers, NHS staff, teachers and lecturers that was demobilised by the union bureaucracy based on sellout agreements.
The demands of Boeing workers—at least a 40 percent raise to combat inflation, maintaining their yearly bonus, improved healthcare and the restoration of pensions—echo among all workers who have faced decades of slashed wages and declining living standards.
The strike was called after the extension expired on September 5 and after workers voted down two tentative agreements brought by the United Auto Workers.
On October 24, the World Socialist Web Site and the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees brought together a panel of leading scientists to explain how the virus that causes COVID-19 could be eliminated.
Dear Brothers and Sisters,
Workers in the United States and throughout the world must decide to act collectively and finally put an end to the COVID-19 pandemic. 2022 must not be another nightmarish year of mass infections, illness and death!
The implementation of a scientifically guided and progressive response to the pandemic is possible only to the extent that these policies find the necessary social foundation in a mass movement of the working class on a global scale.
“The aim of this global initiative is to develop a genuine broad-based movement of the international working class, and to encourage workers in all countries to break out of the prison-like shackles in which they are confined by the existing state-controlled and antidemocratic unions, staffed by right-wing pro-capitalist executives.” – DAVID NORTH
The International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees, with the political assistance of the Fourth International and the Socialist Equality Parties, will strive to unify workers in a common worldwide struggle, opposing every effort by capitalist governments and the reactionary proponents of the innumerable forms of national, ethnic and racial chauvinism and identity politics to split up the working class into warring factions.
All over the world the trade unions, including those which were founded through bitter struggles led by socialist-minded workers, now play the leading role in enforcing the dictates of management.
In this lecture, delivered in Sydney, Australia in January, 1998, David North explains this profound transformation through an historical examination of the trade unions themselves.
On August 3, 1981, 15,000 members of the union of air traffic controllers in the US—the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO)—went out on strike against their employer, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).
