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.
“We say from bitter experience that to avoid yet another sell-out, you need to take matters out of the hands of the UWU bureaucrats.”
The result of the recent Berlin Transport Company (BVG) staff council election in Berlin has revealed the extent of opposition to the public service union Verdi.
The Canadian Union of Postal Workers has left strikers isolated on picket lines, while the Canadian Labour Congress has remained entirely silent on the strike and the attacks on postal workers’ democratic and social rights being prepared by the Liberal government and Canada Post management.
The call by the CWU for “engagement” is a blueprint for a surrender document Mark II, not a call to arms for postal workers.
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.
OSHA fined the company $7,000, around the same amount Tesla CEO Elon Musk makes in less than a minute.
As the largest producer of vehicles in South East Asia, tens if not hundreds of thousands of jobs in Thailand are potentially on the chopping block.
Tavares was forced out a year before the end of his contract due to falling profits and what appears to be his failure to cut costs quickly enough for Wall Street and European investors.
The brutal restructuring at Vauxhall in Britain is part of a global jobs massacre by Stellantis and other transnational car producers. Unite officials will be working with the company every step of the way.
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 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.
The National Government Workers Group called a one-day strike over new seniority rules, while CN rail workers could be in a position to strike by January 1.
The result of the recent Berlin Transport Company (BVG) staff council election in Berlin has revealed the extent of opposition to the public service union Verdi.
A resounding vote in favor of a strike must be followed by the organization of a rank-and-file committee through which workers at the JFK8 fulfillment center can wage a successful struggle.
Workers reported being homeless, often sleeping at the airport or staying with coworkers.
The proposed deal will not increase the number of frontline paramedics or end the worsening working conditions they confront.
Private equity firms are spearheading an avalanche of mergers and consolidations as hospitals and healthcare systems align to cut costs, increase market share and maximize revenue streams at the expense of healthcare workers and patients.
“How can you work with one registered nurse looking after nine patients in the emergency ward? We are not superhuman.”
The NSWNMA is blocking Ramsay private hospital nurses and midwives from uniting with their public hospital counterparts against the cost-cutting demands of their employers and the state Labor government.
The school board took just two weeks from the announcement of the plan to vote to approve it, displacing more than 1,000 students and nearly 200 teachers.
Wrestling magnate Linda McMahon, Trump’s pick for Education Secretary, plans to build a direct school-to-work pipeline, while the new government dismantles and defunds regulatory and oversight agencies that would keep students safe.
California, once celebrated as a hub of education excellence, innovation and progressivism, is now at the epicenter of a deepening crisis. School districts, community colleges, and public universities across the state are grappling with budget cuts, layoffs, and campus closures.
The incoming administration intends to use the crisis of "chronic absenteeism," a product of the intense social crisis in the US, to justify vast new attacks on public education.
Amazon workers took part in protests in more than 20 countries on Friday and last weekend, during the Black Friday shopping event.
A resounding vote in favor of a strike must be followed by the organization of a rank-and-file committee through which workers at the JFK8 fulfillment center can wage a successful struggle.
Instead of participating in a race to the bottom against low-paid, precariously employed delivery workers, we must turn to these workers and fight to rally them alongside us, for a joint struggle, based on our common class interests for well-paid and secure jobs for all.
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.
After more than 10 weeks on strike, workers at Marathon Detroit Refinery are determined to win improved wages and stop subcontracting, healthcare cuts and dangerous work schedules.
Chemical leaks this week at petrochemical plants in Baton Rouge and a Houston suburb killed two workers and caused dozens of serious injuries. The facilities had been cited repeatedly for safety and environmental violations.
The Scottish pseudo-left aim to tie workers at Grangemouth to the “just transition” or “workers’ transition” fraud proposed by the Unite trade union at the closure-threatened oil refinery.
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.
For 14 years, successive governments, state agencies, the judicial system and the union bureaucracy have worked to prevent anyone being brought to justice for the avoidable deaths of 29 workers in Pike River Coal’s underground mine.
As a result of privatisation, workers face the same risks of dismissal, wage cuts, loss of social rights and even increased risk of death and injury in precarious conditions as in other companies.
The police’s murderous tactics, dubbed “surrender or starve”, have caused outrage in South Africa where unemployment has soared to 42 percent and economic desperation is widespread in the world’s most unequal society.
The company is also seeking to impose further real wage cuts for remaining workers at the facility.
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.
