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!
Whatever chain of events in the aircraft’s systems led to catastrophe, the ultimate cause is ruthless pursuit of profit by the corporate oligarchy which controls every aspect of American and world society.
The domination of the United States by a parasitic oligarchy, whose seat of power is in the White House, is on display for everyone to see.
The threat to shut off food stamps is part of a broader social counter-revolution, which will not stop until the oligarchs behind Trump are finally expropriated, and society put under workers’ control.
Sixteen workers were incinerated in a US weapons plant—the largest mass death in an industrial disaster since the 2010 Upper Big Branch mine explosion—and the news networks and other corporate media simply moved on.
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.
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.
It is the capitalist system that produces tragedies like the death of Ronald Adams Sr., a system that operates in the interests of the ruling class, which derives value and profit from the labor of workers.
Shamenia Stewart-Adams delivered powerful remarks to the public hearing on the death of her husband at the Dundee Engine Complex.
An inquiry, organized by workers and not corrupt union bureaucrats, is needed to arm workers with the knowledge they need to defend themselves and go on the offensive against the regime of corporate dictatorship in the workplaces which makes these deaths inevitable.
Workers must fight for workers’ power and workers’ control over production, harnessing the surplus created by new technologies to improve, not lower, the standard of living for the masses.
“The path forward lies in organizing independently—through the creation of rank-and-file committees democratically controlled by nurses themselves—to wage a genuine fight for your demands.”
For those reading this in Canada thinking this explosion happened in the US and thankfully it cannot happen here, they should look soberly at what our current prime minister is doing without any real pushback, and our experience at the National Steel Car plant in Hamilton, Ontario.
The disruption caused by the recent plant fires at Novelis in Oswego County, New York demonstrate the increasingly fragile character of supply chains, vulnerabilities exacerbated by Trump’s tariffs.
In a scathing report earlier this month the monitor pointed to a “toxic culture of division and retaliation at the highest levels of the UAW bureaucracy.”
Workers must fight for workers’ power and workers’ control over production, harnessing the surplus created by new technologies to improve, not lower, the standard of living for the masses.
The Stellantis group, which includes Peugeot, Fiat and Chrysler, as well as Opel, is systematically cutting jobs and preparing further plant closures. In October, production lines in six factories came to a standstill for days.
For weeks, employers, the corporate media and the entire political establishment—both federalist and Quebec sovereignist—joined forces to demonize the Montreal transit workers, accusing STM bus and subway drivers and maintenance workers of “holding the population hostage.”
This is the human cost of “modernization” at the United States Postal Service, where jobs are being slashed through automation and the postal infrastructure handed over to private corporations.
California’s action exposes Democratic complicity with Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda and deepening attacks on the working class.
The Transport Workers Union seeks to stall and handicap workers as they voted unanimously to authorize a strike amid stalled contract talks.
The Alberta Union of Provincial Employees announced a last-minute deal, shutting down a strike by 16,000 hospital staff, while more than 1,130 grocery workers at 11 New Seasons Markets have voted to strike over contract demands.
This is part of a wider jobs massacre, with US employers announcing 1.1 million jobs this year alone.
The union’s talk of “full alignment” in some indefinite future is political theatre. A bitter struggle for equal treatment has been reduced to a handful of concessions designed to keep the outsourcing racket intact.
Sophie warned that the NHS faces “creeping privatisation and a government that’s determined to wage war on it.”
Trump’s redefinition of “professional” degrees aims to push working-class students out of healthcare and education specialities and further undermine science and culture.
The QTU has been forced to call another 24-hour stoppage, while still pleading for talks with the state’s right-wing Liberal National Party premier.
Thomas Alter's dismissal sets a precedent for the systematic dismantling of democratic rights on the campuses and the initiation of a purge at universities of all those who do not subscribe to the fascist ideology running rampant through the Republican Party.
The only state or territory to temporarily shut all affected schools has been the Australian Capital Territory, centred on Canberra.
The trillions hoarded by the billionaires must be expropriated and used to meet social needs: secure, well-paid jobs for all, healthcare, housing, education, and the eradication of hunger and poverty.
Mass layoffs at Amazon, UPS, Paramount Global, and in the auto industry reveal the corporate offensive to cut jobs and weaponize AI against the working class.
The move marks an accelerating jobs bloodbath, with rapid advances in automation and artificial intelligence being weaponized to eliminate entire sections of the workforce.
Amazon announced last week that it would be cutting thousands of employees as part of an ongoing series of layoffs at the tech giant. The move follows a previous series of massive job cuts at the company and in the technology sector as a whole.
The Alberta Union of Provincial Employees announced a last-minute deal, shutting down a strike by 16,000 hospital staff, while more than 1,130 grocery workers at 11 New Seasons Markets have voted to strike over contract demands.
The Chevron refinery disaster reveals decades of bipartisan deregulation, corporate impunity, and the collapse of environmental oversight amid the Trump administration’s shutdown and California Democrats’ fraudulent “green” agenda.
The massive explosion at Chevron’s El Segundo refinery, narrowly avoiding mass casualties, exposes the deadly consequences of corporate cost-cutting and bipartisan deregulation amid America’s crumbling industrial base.
The scientists warn: “Plastics are a grave, growing, and under-recognised danger to human and planetary health.”
The 2010 mine disaster, which killed 29 workers, and the cover-up by successive governments, demonstrate the urgent need for workers to build rank-and-file committees, independent of and opposed to the union bureaucracy and all capitalist parties.
“I don’t think what the company has done in sending workers back on the job is right at all,” a Cobar worker said, referring to the October 28 mine explosion that killed two workers.
Endeavor workers have not only been instructed not to speak to the media, but even to their own families about the tragic death of their colleagues and the conditions in the mine.
One miner said, “The people all the way up, that own the companies, don’t care that much. They’re just money-hungry and not willing to take the correct procedures, fix the equipment.”
The Trump administration’s move to strip Harvard University of its ability to enroll international students is a fascistic assault on democratic rights and an attempt to place the entire university system under direct political control by a gangster regime in Washington.
Graduate workers are exploited by a system that pays them in stipends and earn as little as $15,000 a year, in a city that regularly ranks as one of the poorest in the country.
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 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.
