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 strike in Australia's most populous state shows that nurses want to fight cuts to their wages and conditions. But they are in a struggle against the Labor government and the union bureaucracy.
It has become absolutely clear that if we are to win this strike, we have to overthrow the dead weight of the IAM union bureaucracy.
The fact that Labour Minister Steven MacKinnon participated in the talks Thursday underscores that Trudeau’s Liberals have already begun their preparations to enact strikebreaking legislation, just like they did in 2018. But the CUPW leadership says nothing about this threat, and has struck a deal with management to postpone our strike.
Workers and students at Western Sydney University in Australia have sent solidarity greetings to the striking Boeing workers in the United States.
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.
Social anger is growing among workers as mass job cuts and factory closures across the US and the world.
Hardly a day goes by without a German company announcing massive job cuts at an international or national level.
The auto workers’ union in South Korea is attempting to prevent a broader struggle against job cuts as the car industry around the world prepares a jobs bloodbath as part of the so-called “just transition” to electric vehicles.
After nearly two months on the picket line, the walkout by 525 Eaton Aerospace workers in Jackson, Michigan is in danger of defeat unless rank-and-file autoworkers break the isolation of the struggle by the UAW bureaucracy.
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.
Social anger is growing among workers as mass job cuts and factory closures across the US and the world.
For the first time at BVG, the rank-and-file “Action Committee” is running a slate of candidates and calling for workers to break the dictatorial control exercised by the Verdi trade union and for independent rank-and-file committees to be set up in all depots and departments.
The Berlin Transport Workers Action Committee is contesting staff council elections being held this week for the Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe (BVG).
The employers on both coasts have crippled Canada’s largest port operations with the aim of compelling the Trudeau Liberal government to intervene to enforce pro-company contracts through binding arbitration or other anti-democratic means.
More than 1,700 nurses set to strike indefinitely at University of Illinois Health in Chicago demanding better pay and safer working conditions for themselves and their patients.
The leaders of United Michigan Medicine Allied Professionals (UMMAP) called of the one-day strike less than 24 hours before it was scheduled to begin in exchange for a meaningless “memorandum of understanding” from the University of Michigan hospital administration regarding contract negotiations.
The strike in Australia's most populous state shows that nurses want to fight cuts to their wages and conditions. But they are in a struggle against the Labor government and the union bureaucracy.
The strike by 2,400 Kaiser Permanente workers in Southern California has entered its fourth week.
Teachers' strikes have begun in three districts on the North Shore of Massachusetts. Strikes began Friday, November 8, by about 800 educators in Beverly and 1,000 in Gloucester. Five hundred Marblehead teachers are set to strike beginning Tuesday, November 12.
The policy is an attack on students and graduates, who will be made to pay for the economic crisis through fee hikes.
The move is wholly inadequate in dealing with the mounting cost-of-living crisis and is a cynical attempt to garner support as a federal election looms.
A recent report from the Education Data Intiative exposes the fact that the world’s richest imperialist country has underfunded schools for decades. It indicts the US for failing to meet global benchmarks for education and, despite economic growth, allocating proportionally less for schools.
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.
The company is also seeking to impose further real wage cuts for remaining workers at the facility.
Siberian miners began a hunger strike over unpaid wages on Monday, four days after three were killed in a gold mine collapse in the Russian Far East.
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.
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.
