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.
A rank-and-file rebellion against not just management, but also against the union bureaucracy, is the only thing that can stop this. As long as the Teamsters sellout artists remain in charge, UPS will succeed in its drive to cut jobs. But if we break out of their control, and develop new, alternative structures, that will change the balance of power in our favor.
The unprecedented plan laid out last month to close 200 facilities is the next stage in an offensive against jobs at UPS and requires an urgent response.
The Health Trade Union Alliance (HTUA) last Wednesday announced that it would call an indefinite strike from today. However, after discussion with health and finance ministry officials, HTUA leaders called off the strike.
Whatever we got, and it was nowhere near enough, we got by ourselves. No thanks at all to the bureaucratic industrial police force known as the United Steelworkers.
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 of 14,000 job cuts at Tesla marks an escalation of the assault by the corporate oligarchy on workers’ jobs. This a global campaign, which requires a globally coordinated response by the working class.
The layoffs are not just the product of the ample greed and stupidity of Elon Musk, but part of a broader attack on jobs in the auto industry and in industries across the world.
The role of the trade union bureaucracy in the escalating global war is to discipline the working class on the “home front” so as to ensure continued production and deployment of military equipment, and to suppress opposition from workers both to the war itself and to austerity and heightened exploitation to pay for it.
The laid-off workers sequenced parts for Stellantis assembly plants in Detroit.
There is nothing “historic” or “groundbreaking” about this proposed contract, which includes a no-strike clause and amounts to crumbs offered up by the university.
Some 200 University of Michigan employees and supporters attended a rally on Saturday, March 16 at the main campus in Ann Arbor in support of non-tenure track lecturers who are in the midst of contract negotiations with the university.
On Friday, the SENS-UAW claimed it had won a “groundbreaking” tentative agreement and shut down the strike, without a vote by workers and without releasing the full details of the proposed contract.
The TA is a sellout that would increase pay from only $35,700 a year to $40,000 a year, still below a living wage in the city of Los Angeles.
The OIG’s reports are exercises in damage control, beginning by hailing DFA as “creating a best-in-class mail and package processing network” and then describing staggering levels of negligence and incompetence at facilities in Richmond and Houston.
Following the collapse of a major bridge in Baltimore after being hit by a container ship, officials aim to fully reopen the port by the end of May, as bodies of three workers remain missing.
The $600 million settlement, equal to just a quarter’s worth of profits for the railroad, comes after revelations that the federal government never issued a public health emergency following the poisoning of the entire town.
TfL’s “withdrawal” of the train modernisation plan is purely tactical. It wants to prevent a wave of strikes during London’s mayoral elections on May 2, and this year’s general election, with the vital assistance of the rail unions.
A new report from the Kaiser Family Foundation said on Friday that nearly one-quarter of the 20 million people removed from Medicaid rolls during Biden’s “post-pandemic unwinding” of the program this year are now uninsured.
The 43 members of the newly formed Greater Detroit Association of Emergency Physicians union are contracted by Ascension St. John Hospital but employed by a private equity-funded staffing company called TeamHealth.
“We remain undeterred and will continue to speak out against the systematic silencing of Australian doctors and the complicity of the Australian government with the Gaza genocide.”—New South Wales doctor
While experts have pointed to the dangerous implications of the recent spread of the Juno variant, their statements have been ignored by the Labor governments and the official press.
The claim that “there is no money” is a lie. In Michigan, where the Democrats fully control the state government, corporate handouts—particularly to the automakers—amount to billions.
The deal which the union leadership is hoping to rush through in a three-hour online only vote on Friday is an abject capitulation to management which workers must reject with the contempt it deserves.
The Albanese government’s Universities Accord cannot be separated from Labor’s whole pro-business agenda, its commitment to US war plans and its complicity in the US-backed genocide in Gaza.
The Ann Arbor School Board voted 4-3 to impose cuts in the face of heated opposition from an overflow crowd at the meeting.
Fourteen months into the struggle, a balance sheet of the GMB’s leadership is required. The union has not provided a route to victory and cannot do so; the trade union bureaucracy is a hostile social force to the working class, aimed at securing a comfortable partnership with the employers.
The retailer has joined a growing corporate campaign to abolish government regulation and restore the open dictatorship of management.
According to his obituary, Paulo DeSouza Bezerra succumbed to a heart attack shortly after standing outside in the bitter cold. Bezerra, 50, who emigrated from Brazil, leaves behind his wife of 25 years and a young son.
Amazon has begun testing a humanoid robot called Digit, designed to handle tote processing that is currently the responsibility of human workers, and it is experimenting with a robotic arm called Sparrow with a similar goal of reducing the amount of repetitive tasks employees must do.
At least 27 chemical incidents have occurred in Texas so far this year, the most of any state.
Gusmão’s return as prime minister will see stepped up efforts to pressure the Australian government to back his campaign to construct pipelines from Greater Sunrise to Suai, in Timor’s south.
The family charges that the company stonewalled them and is seeking documents in connection to the accident.
Chemical workers at AdvanSix in Hopewell, Virginia were browbeaten into accepting a sellout agreement which they had already rejected three times.
An internal company memo issued last year declared that the “globally accepted standard, that ‘we don’t work under unsupported ground,” was “dated.”
Efforts to rescue the miners trapped 410 feet underground came to a halt on Monday.
The WSWS spoke with Liz French from Betteshanger, a former pit village in the Kent coalfield in south-east England. Liz was a founding member of the National Women Against Pit Closures during the 1984-85 Miner’s Strike. Among the 200 miners imprisoned during the 1984-85 strike, Liz’s late husband Terry received one of the longest prison sentences of five years.
Kurt Hourigan, a 37-year-old father of two, was killed in the collapse, and a 21-year-old worker sustained life-threatening injuries to his lower body.
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.
