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 agreement meets none of our demands, which we have made abundantly clear from the start, including an immediate 40 percent pay increase and the restoration of our pensions. No amount of bureaucratic spin can hide the fact that it is a pro-company sellout.
We call on you to vote for the rank-and-file “Action Committee for Transport Workers” slate in the upcoming staff council elections in mid-November at Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe (BVG). We are running in these elections to build new fighting structures that will enable us transport workers to intervene directly in workplace disputes.
The whole of corporate America is lining up behind Boeing; the working class must line up behind us.
We demand a national contract with real gains which will set an example for workers everywhere.
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.
Events at the company over the last years fully attest to the fact that Eaton strikers in the US and Britain are involved not in a national but a global struggle.
Deere is once again placing the burden of declining sales on workers by slashing jobs.
Workers took to the streets in Rome, Italy, for industrial action in opposition to Stellantis’ plans to cut more jobs and move production to other countries.
The intervention of a federal mediator points to pressure from the White House to shut down the strike against Eaton, a supplier of critical aircraft components.
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 agreement meets none of our demands, which we have made abundantly clear from the start, including an immediate 40 percent pay increase and the restoration of our pensions. No amount of bureaucratic spin can hide the fact that it is a pro-company sellout.
The deal contains pathetic 1.3 percent annual wage increases, in addition to substandard cost of living adjustments, continued hyper-exploitation and surveillance, and the continuation of a vast restructuring program aimed at privatizing USPS.
IAM officials have yet to release ballot totals at Textron, while simultaneously preparing to ram through a deal at Boeing in a snap vote this week.
The proposed contract confirms every warning made by the World Socialist Web Site since the beginning of the strike, that Boeing and the IAM are colluding to get a pro-company contract passed so that Boeing can resume production on its terms and force workers to pay for the company’s mountain of self-inflicted debt.
The “new” offer contains the same sub-inflationary 3.5 percent pay “rise” that workers decisively rejected in July, but the Health Services Union bureaucracy is promoting the deal as a win and pushing workers to accept it.
The experienced paramedic provided testimony about the toll that the ongoing pandemic is taking on the public and about the eugenicist character of the ruling-class' abandonment of public health.
The SEIU-UHW is attempting to limit the ULP strike to non-wage demands, while keeping workers on the job without a contract despite unionizing since 2022.
Privatisation in the public health system is underway as funding cuts see one third of the population missing out on healthcare of some kind.
The report demonstrates the consequences of decades of attacks by the ruling class on the social conditions of the working class.
Educators in East Orange, New Jersey, called in sick to work on Thursday and Friday, after the city’s school board announced that nearly 10 percent of education workers in the district would be laid off in December.
The growing attacks on public education in Brazil and internationally are part of a shift by the world’s ruling elite towards dictatorship at home and war abroad.
The DeVos family, thanks to their Amway billions, have become leading financial backers of right-wing and fascist groups.
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.
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.
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.
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.
