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!
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.
“Our mission is to unite postal workers worldwide to build collective power, protect our rights, and improve wages, benefits and working conditions through solidarity, transparency and democratic action to actively counter the efforts of the 1 percent.”
By calling off its work bans the AEU is signalling its willingness to force the state government’s offer through, further cutting real wages and doing nothing to address staff shortages and intolerable workloads.
“The same economic pressures that lead to dangerous line speeds, inadequate safety protections, and a lack of proper PPE and equipment in the past are mirrored in our own workplaces through chronic understaffing and cuts to essential services.”
Around 50 workers on site when the blaze erupted escaped without injury, but some were forced to literally run for their lives.
The cost of their attempts to sustain massive debt, while also financing the massive cost to society of the corporate oligarchy itself, can only be carved out of the backs of the working class under capitalism.
South Korea: Hyundai workers demand negotiations; India: Uttar Pradesh police attack workers protesting for minimum wage; Australia: Aurizon Coal train drivers strike for pay rise and better conditions; Northern Territory iron ore mine workers stood down without pay.
These highly exploited workers are risking their health to end torturous 24-hour shifts, but previous experience shows that protests and moral appeals must give way to class struggle.
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).
