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!
Workers must organize actions from below to enforce the necessary safety measures to make sure such deaths never happen again.
It must be said plainly: the strike is in danger as long as the AFSCME bureaucrats retain control. Victory can be achieved, but only if workers take control over the strike themselves.
Adams’ death is part of a continuing pattern of preventable workplace tragedies in which workers’ lives are sacrificed for the sake of profit.
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!”
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.
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.
The following resolution was unanimously supported by workers and young people at the public hearing in Detroit on Sunday, July 27.
The Philadelphia Workers Rank-and-File Strike Committee calls for teachers and all city workers to build independent rank-and-file power to defeat austerity, union betrayal, and attacks on living standards.
The contract rejection must become the launching pad for a renewed fight based on an entirely new strategy—one that breaks the stranglehold of the CUPW bureaucracy and mobilizes the immense social power of the entire working class.
The Philadelphia municipal strike was not the end but the opening act in a rapid series of confrontations in Philadelphia and beyond.
The agreement is aimed at blocking a growing rank-and-file rebellion and preventing the resurgence of a powerful citywide strike movement.
If the UAW bureaucracy had to call the strike it was only because Fain & Co. knew they would not be able to impose another sellout on workers fed up with decades of union-backed givebacks.
Coming on top of the current month-long strike by 3,200 workers at Boeing jet fighter plants in Missouri and Illinois, a strike by GE Aerospace workers would substantially impact the US war machine.
Despite efforts in using water containment booms to halt the spillage of oil, residents some 30 miles south of the Tangipahoa River, which runs alongside the explosion site, have reported seeing oil on the surface of the river.
Opposition among Volkswagen employees against the sweeping cuts to jobs and wages worked out with the help of the IG Metall union is growing. Union officials are warning: “The mood is turning.”
SEPTA’s $213 million budget shortfall triggers major service cuts and fare hikes, disrupting Philadelphia commuters and students amid political funding deadlock.
At least $50 million will be paid directly to the Transport Workers Union, which unsurprisingly hailed the decision as a massive victory.
Italian dockworkers’ struggle against Saudi shipping giant Bahri shows how the working class can fight genocide and war and raises important political issues facing workers internationally.
Tuesday’s accident at state-operated Korail shows that the Lee Jae-myung administration’s pledge to reduce workplace deaths is just for show.
Healthcare workers confront not only Kaiser Permanente, but a treacherous union bureaucracy enmeshed with management through corporatist schemes like the “Labor Management Partnership.”
Streeting’s “Fit for the Future: 10 Year Health Plan”—a blueprint for accelerating NHS privatisation—is proceeding apace with no opposition from the health unions.
While doctors want to reject the deal and resume industrial action, the Australian Salaried Medical Officers Federation is adopting a “neutral” position, continuing to enforce a strike ban and seeking to subordinate the physicians’ struggle to arbitration.
Talks with Health Secretary Wes Streeting have been described as a “window of opportunity” to rule out any further strike action for the summer period, while the RDC attempt to cobble together a sellout they can put a face-saving spin on.
The workers—paraeducators, bus drivers, custodians, mechanics and food service staff—among the lowest-paid in the school workforce—voted by 92 percent to strike after five months of negotiations produced no agreement.
Even by the standards of the American trade union bureaucracy, the maneuvers to ram through this contract are noteworthy for their brazenness and crudeness
Trump’s Department of Education has targeted Northern Virginia schools over pro-LGBTQ policies, threatening funding cuts.
1,400 University of Minnesota custodians, cooks, maintenance, and dorm workers prepared for the school’s first system-wide strike in nearly fifty years, only to be blocked by Teamsters Local 320 leadership.
Smalls was released by the Israeli government on Thursday after a five day hunger strike against his mistreatment.
Despite filing numerous complaints with HR and government agencies including the EEOC, Susan faced continued harassment and was denied medical accommodations.
The WSWS is urging workers to take matters into their own hands and organize a rank-and-file committee to investigate this and other needless incidents at JFK8 and fight for workers’ control over safety.
Leony Salcedo-Chevalier, 34, was fatally struck on April 9 by a box truck backing up in a loading dock at the JFK8 Amazon fulfillment center in New York.
The scientists warn: “Plastics are a grave, growing, and under-recognised danger to human and planetary health.”
“Closing the CSB will mean more accidents at chemical plants, more explosions and more deaths.”
The 250 striking workers were given just 48-hours notice to vote on a lengthy seven-year contract that failed to meet their key demands.
On strike for more than three months, Marathon workers called for joint action to stop the cutoff of their insurance on December 13.
The Mining and Energy Union has endorsed the reopening drive by owner Anglo American, which is anxious to restart operations to facilitate its pending sale of the mine.
“We prefer to speak out rather than continue walking in the footsteps of our fallen comrades. Our lives are worth more than copper,” reads an open letter from subcontract miners.
The operation is an extension of Operation Vala Umgodi that began with the Stilfontein massacre in January, where 90 miners died after police surrounded an abandoned mine, cutting off food supplies and forcing them to the surface.
The union leadership is seeking to use the legitimate concerns of workers over the future of Mudgee to limit the dispute to one town and to cut miners off from their colleagues elsewhere, who face the same assault on pay and conditions.
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.
