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!
Postal workers at Royal Mail in Britain have added their voices to the growing international condemnation of the public death threat made against Will Lehman, a Mack Trucks worker and candidate in the United Auto Workers presidential election, by a senior UAW official.
“When I saw the picture posted it made me feel sick to my stomach. It shows that the UAW leadership are scared of Will. Why else would you threaten him and try to intimidate him?”
The conditions we’re fighting against are not unique to our plant. Manufacturing and industrial workers across North America confront the same onslaught on their conditions, pay and jobs.
The continued attempts by the AEU bureaucracy to force through a sellout, and the mass opposition of educators, underscores the crucial importance of the new rank-and-file committee aimed at organising teachers and staff independently.
Healthcare workers in Romania begin indefinite stoppage over pay and conditions; national 24-hour strike by rail workers in Italy for more pay and improved safety; protests across Tunisia and Libya due to collapsing infrastructure during heatwave
More than 500 public defender workers are now on strike in New York City and Detroit, in an expanding rebellion against poverty wages, healthcare cuts and crushing caseloads.
This outcome, after three limited strikes and 15 months of closed-door negotiations, is a warning of the retrograde enterprise agreements that the trade unions are trying to impose at public universities across the country.
More than a week after declaring an "industry-leading" agreement, the Teamsters have still not released a term sheet, wage schedule or contract language to United mechanics.
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).
