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.
The Stalinist- led CITU is assisting Samsung management by diverting workers toward futile appeals to the pro-investor DMK-led Tamil Nadu government.
On Tuesday, the Pennsylvania-Ohio Educators Rank-and-File Safety Committee met, discussed and passed the following resolution condemning the fascist violence being directed against Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio.
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 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.
Against the illusions promoted by the union, GM workers showed their determination to fight by voting down two contract proposals at Monday’s mass assembly.
In an effort to contain the growing opposition of auto workers to layoffs at Stellantis before the 2024 elections, Shawn Fain, president of the UAW, gave a speech on Tuesday that combined vague talk of strike action with economic nationalism.
While Unifor Local 88 Plant Chair Mike Van Boekel boasted in a statement that it was a deal the bargaining team could be “proud of,” the union is withholding details of the agreement from workers until a ratification meeting which is scheduled for 10 a.m. Sunday, September 22.
Tens of thousands of workers marched in the Belgian capital against Audi’s plans to shutter plants in Belgium as carmaker Volkswagen launches a global assault on jobs.
Suspensions, banishments, withholding of diplomas, and demands for letters of apology are among the weapons used to attack freedom of speech.
The significance of the strike, and the police-state measures used to end it, are that they anticipate an even broader and more explosive confrontation between the working class, which is being forced to pay the cost of war, and American and world imperialism.
The UAW apparatus is a critical instrument of the Biden administration, which is relying on the discredited labor bureaucracy to hold back opposition to US imperialism’s wars for global domination.
A judge has granted UC’s request for a temporary restraining order to halt the strike by tens of thousands of academic workers against the police crackdown on protest over the US-backed genocide in Gaza.
This means that three of the four postal unions are now working under expired contracts, even as USPS management is carrying out an historic attack on jobs and on postal services under the “Delivering for America” restructuring program.
Protests against the police shooting of an alleged fare evader and two bystanders on Wednesday were confronted with brutality by the New York Police Department.
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.
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.
Under the proposed agreement, base pay rates in most classifications will remain lower in real terms than they were in 2019, until at least October 2027. Moreover, the deal will do nothing to address the deepening crisis in the state’s public health system.
7,000 low-wage CVS retail pharmacy workers across California are carrying out a strike vote that coincides with a powerful strike by 33,000 Boeing workers along the West Coast
Darzi's report is handmade for a Labour government ready to wield the knife, under the cover of “reform”.
On Tuesday, the Pennsylvania-Ohio Educators Rank-and-File Safety Committee met, discussed and passed the following resolution condemning the fascist violence being directed against Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio.
Not only does the UK fare badly in terms of early years spending, but class sizes across the age range are larger than those in Mexico, Turkey and Columbia.
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.
Boston University resident assistants struck August 31 over an impasse in negotiations with BU for better pay and working conditions. Three thousand BU graduate students, organized in the same SEIU local, went on strike in March for improved pay and benefits and still have not reached an agreement with the university, having been largely abandoned by the union apparatus.
With the ALU and the Teamsters offering no strategy against Amazon, workers at the JFK8 fulfillment center in Staten Island, New York, must seize the initiative in their struggle against the retail giant.
The KSBD air hub, which opened in March of 2021, is one of Amazon’s largest facilities on the West Coast.
Last week about 100 package delivery drivers at Amazon’s DIL7 Delivery Station in Skokie, IL went on strike demanding wage increases, a standard 40-hour work week, and to protest union busting efforts by the company.
Everything is done to paint Stallings as a terrible mother, but absent from the official narrative is any questioning of the social conditions that would deprive a working parent of childcare, forcing them to bring their children to their workplaces.
More than 270 workers went on strike Wednesday morning to demand substantial wage increases and an end to exhausting work schedules that threaten the health and safety of workers and the surrounding working-class community in southwest Detroit.
GB Energy will form “an enduring partnership with business” to provide corporations, including the Crown Estate, with a profit bonanza, at the same time facilitating Starmer’s war economy agenda.
Major energy companies are merging as 2023 saw the greatest consolidation of the oil and gas industry in over a decade, with $243 billion spent on mergers and acquisitions.
The devastating blasts, occurring 13 hours apart, left three workers injured and necessitated an emergency evacuation of more than 50,000 residents from the surrounding area.
Two deaths during August at the Byerwen Coal Mine brought the official number of miners who have lost their lives in the state of Queensland’s mining sector during the past decade to 26.
The draconian sentences signal “the criminalization of social protest and the use of criminal law to prevent people from defending their rights,” said the miners’ attorney.
The tradition must be recovered of the struggle of miners serving as a powerful spearhead in the fight for social equality and the ending of centuries of colonialist looting.
Unemployment is rising across the country, with the highest levels recorded in working-class areas.
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.
