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.
In bringing this contract to a vote, the IAM bureaucrats have declared they are not on the side of workers but of management, and behind them a government which does not want a strike at a major defense contractor.
There is absolutely nothing legitimate about UAW Local 3212’s claims that their deal was “ratified” by 92 percent Saturday.
As their strike reached a critical juncture, rank-and-file Dakkota auto parts workers in Chicago issued a statement Tuesday appealing for a ban on scab parts from their factory.
The Teamsters Canada Rail Conference has cravenly surrendered to the Trudeau Liberal government’s strikebreaking, scuttling a militant struggle of 9,300 Canadian National and Canadian Pacific Kansas City (CPKC) railway workers that threatened to paralyze much of the North American economy.
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.
The announcement by the VW Group that it is terminating the agreement on job security, cutting tens of thousands of jobs and closing entire plants and production sites is a declaration of war on all workers and marks the beginning of a new stage in the class struggle.
Argentine pilots walked off the job for nine hours on September 6 to protest stalled wage talks while 10,000 United Airlines maintenance workers in the US held pickets to demand better pay, safety standards.
The attacks on the Belgian Audi workers are part of a broad international strategy by the Volkswagen Group.
Prime Minister Trudeau announced the imposition of punitive tariffs on electric vehicles at a cabinet retreat which was attended by President Joe Biden’s National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, making clear Canada’s ever-deeper involvement in the US war drive against China.
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.
A judge has granted UC’s request for a temporary restraining order to halt the strike by tens of thousands of academic workers against the police crackdown on protest over the US-backed genocide in Gaza.
Over 180 people registered for the meeting and attended, including postal workers from both the US and Canada, autoworkers, healthcare and academic workers.
One worker wrote to the WSWS, “Union sold us out, promised to stand by us and took us to the bank instead,” and commented, “I don't have faith in Boeing, IAM and president Jon Holden to bargain in good faith for members.”
Sanitation workers are picketing in Anne Arundel County over working in hot weather, ill-equipped garbage trucks and with a lack of protective equipment.
Argentine pilots walked off the job for nine hours on September 6 to protest stalled wage talks while 10,000 United Airlines maintenance workers in the US held pickets to demand better pay, safety standards.
In bringing this contract to a vote, the IAM bureaucrats have declared they are not on the side of workers but of management, and behind them a government which does not want a strike at a major defense contractor.
Under the direction of the NSWNMA bureaucracy, the rallies will be about nothing more than allowing nurses and midwives to let off steam, clearing the way for a union-government sellout.
Health NZ has issued a letter to its administrative workforce calling for “voluntary redundancies” as the government seeks to slash $1.4 billion from healthcare.
“Soon we may be forced to deny these life-sustaining treatments to patients who need them to stay alive, or to choose patients who can stay on haemodialysis while others die.”
The depletion of IV fluid stocks reveals that there is no effective system in Australia which identifies stocks of items essential for proper management of public health.
Major public universities have had their enrolment numbers slashed for 2025, particularly targeting those with the highest numbers of Chinese students.
School shootings are a manifestation of the devastating social crisis of American capitalism.
According to one report, the school is “now reevaluating its course offerings, contemplating layoffs, and even considering a potential merger with another school to ensure its survival.”
Faculty at Oakland University and Western Michigan University are poised to begin strikes, with educators demanding pay increases large enough to offset soaring inflation.
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.
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.
Major energy companies are merging as 2023 saw the greatest consolidation of the oil and gas industry in over a decade, with $243 billion spent on mergers and acquisitions.
The devastating blasts, occurring 13 hours apart, left three workers injured and necessitated an emergency evacuation of more than 50,000 residents from the surrounding area.
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.
