This is the report delivered by Eric London to the 2022 International May Day Online Rally held on May 1. London is a writer for the WSWS and a leading member of the Socialist Equality Party (US).
President Rajapakse has clearly been shaken by the entry of the working class into the mass protest movement against his government, fuelled by intolerable social and economic conditions.
Amid unprecedented inflation and falls in living standards due to the pandemic and the Ukraine war, Turkish doctors have organized a two-day nationwide strike.
“It’s not my job to die. You send firemen with oxygen and their gear. You send us with nothing. It’s like you gave me a rock and a stick and sent me into war and expected me to be quiet.”
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 Apparel Workers’ Action Committee warns that this repressive move could be extended to other centres of the working class in both the private and public sectors.
The CNH Workers Rank-and-File Committee is being launched in order to organize a real fight for the needs of all workers at CNH.
The following statement by the Rank-and-File Committee of Ford Workers in Saarlouis was published in German ahead of the works meeting at the Saarlouis plant on Wednesday.
Quebec school workers are being forced back to work on their fifth day of infection with COVID-19. That is, while still contagious with the debilitating and potentially fatal disease.
Chile’s president, ex-student radical Gabriel Boric, ordered Carabineros Special Forces to break up the picket line at a major oil refinery.
A Texas oil worker spoke with the World Socialist Web Site about the significance of Valero workers turning down the contract amid a nationwide struggle of oil workers against the corporatist unions and the oil companies.
The oil companies’ soaring profits are a slap in the face to the tens of thousands of oil workers across the country demanding better pay and staffing.
A picketer told the WSWS, “it is time to start fighting for our rights because we run this place really. It’s thanks to us, and yet they don’t want to give us anything and treat us like we’re nothing.”
These endless delays, which help only management not workers, must be brought to an end. Detroit Diesel workers should demand that UAW Local 163 immediately set a strike deadline for no later than May 24.
The UAW is reportedly floating the possibility of suspending the strike and ordering a return to work without a contract, which would signify an abject surrender to the company’s intransigent demands for concessions.
The information blackout is being carried out in de facto coordination with the company and the national media, which has remained entirely silent on one of the largest strikes of industrial workers currently taking place in the US.
Detroit Diesel workers are in an immensely powerful position, but it would be a serious mistake to hope that their rejection of the contract will force the UAW to either come back with a better contract or call a strike.
Michelle Heughins is facing an involuntary manslaughter charge in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, for the brutal killing of John Neville by prison guards at the Forsyth County Jail, when she was the only one who tried to save his life.
Around the world, health care strikes are erupting against conditions created by over two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, and decades of privatisations and subordination of health to profit.
Cedars-Sinai hospital workers in Los Angeles struck to win improved staffing and wages but their struggle was shut down by the SEIU-UHW.
The nurse is part of a growing movement of health care workers across the US fighting for better working conditions, pay and benefits, staffing, and resources.
The BEU has kept workers on the job for nearly three years without a contract. Like many teachers, including those in the Boston Public Schools system who have been working without a contract for eight months, Brookline educators are demanding “reasonable compensation as well as working conditions that meet the realities of a modern, comprehensive education.”
“Earlier some of us thought the union was on our side. After the agreement was announced I heard from school staff. Everyone thought the agreement was a joke.”
Over 34,000 teachers and support staff in the nation's second largest school district are facing a battle over wages and school conditions.
The AEU-Labor government deal will, if ratified, significantly worsen teachers’ and school workers’ living standards, while also exacerbating the crisis within the public education system.
D.C. Circulator drivers will see their wages eaten up by inflation as an even greater crisis in the region’s transit system looms.
At Arriva Yorkshire, the starting hourly rate for bus drivers in the first year is £9.79 (just 29 pence more than the minimum wage). Drivers then graduate to £10.91 for two years, before reaching the top rate of £12.15.
A driver told the WSWS that support for a ‘no’ vote inside the garage was high, and that his colleagues “don’t want to accept it, and I won’t accept it.”
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.”
The firing of several senior managers at JFK8 after the victory of the Amazon Labor Union is meant to be an intimidating message to all workers.
Amazon’s dropping of safety measures to pre-COVID-19 levels has nothing to do with the current state of the pandemic and will only intensify it and accelerate the spread of the disease.
The attempt to use the ALU as cover for the bureaucracy and the Democrats appears to have backfired spectacularly. Instead, the exact opposite happened: the ALU managed to discredit itself within a few short weeks by its association with these layers.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration declined to fine the warehouse giant, but cited numerous “risk factors” present in its warehouse.
COSATU is warning its ANC partners that they have massively underestimated the anger building in the working class.
In the days surrounding official acknowledgment that miners labor under brutal conditions, news broke of more deaths in the country’s extraction, metallurgy and construction industries.
Pike River: The Crime and Cover-up, published by Mehring Books, examines the causes of the 2010 New Zealand mine disaster, which killed 29 people, and the decade-long cover-up by successive governments and the judicial system, which have shielded the company leadership from prosecution.
Mine workers in Utah, who have risked their lives during the pandemic, are prepared to fight for higher wages, better benefits and safe working conditions.
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.
News of the strike vote at Brixton was eagerly awaited across Arriva London South. Drivers are determined to win an above-inflation pay award, with this year’s pay talks already delayed and inflation running at 9 percent.
Bus drivers explain their reasons for following and sharing articles from the WSWS and the importance of the fight taken up by the London Bus Rank-and-File Committee.
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.
