The World Socialist Web Site and the Socialist Equality Parties are assisting workers everywhere in the building of an interconnected network of rank-and-file committees, to organize a united counter-offensive against inequality, exploitation, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, and the rapidly escalating imperialist world war.
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!
Antwiane Sanders, a Nexteer worker with more than 10 years on the job, was fired after speaking out against the fourth tentative agreement at a UAW Local 699 roll-out meeting held on company premises.
These were not simply tragic accidents but the lethal results of austerity. Preventing them requires an organized movement from below, not beholden to management, toothless regulatory agencies or corrupt union officials.
The BMA and other health unions—Unite, Unison, the GMB and the Royal College of Nursing—are suffocating a unified fightback by National Health Service workers.
Four workers have died at the Palmetto Regional Processing and Distribution Center in Georgia in the past two years. The most recent, Demarcus Little, told a supervisor he felt unwell last week, collapsed, and died.
In typical anti-democratic fashion, the NTEU is trying to push an endorsement vote through a hastily called members’ meeting on Thursday.
The winding down of the monitorship does not mark the end of corruption inside the union or even a separation between the union bureaucracy and the capitalist state. It amounts to official sanction for the corruption and bureaucratic suppression through which the apparatus polices the rank and file.
The existing accounts of the lockout all put the defeat down to the miners themselves—courageous, but worn down after 16 months of struggle. This article examines the critical role of the Labor Party, the trade unions and the Communist Party in isolating the locked-out miners and finally forcing them back to work on the terms of the coal barons.
The union apparatus, in line with its role as an industrial police force, has embraced Labor’s brutal agenda and offered its assistance.
On October 24, the World Socialist Web Site and the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees brought together a panel of leading scientists to explain how the virus that causes COVID-19 could be eliminated.
Dear Brothers and Sisters,
Workers in the United States and throughout the world must decide to act collectively and finally put an end to the COVID-19 pandemic. 2022 must not be another nightmarish year of mass infections, illness and death!
The implementation of a scientifically guided and progressive response to the pandemic is possible only to the extent that these policies find the necessary social foundation in a mass movement of the working class on a global scale.
“The aim of this global initiative is to develop a genuine broad-based movement of the international working class, and to encourage workers in all countries to break out of the prison-like shackles in which they are confined by the existing state-controlled and antidemocratic unions, staffed by right-wing pro-capitalist executives.” – DAVID NORTH
The International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees, with the political assistance of the Fourth International and the Socialist Equality Parties, will strive to unify workers in a common worldwide struggle, opposing every effort by capitalist governments and the reactionary proponents of the innumerable forms of national, ethnic and racial chauvinism and identity politics to split up the working class into warring factions.
All over the world the trade unions, including those which were founded through bitter struggles led by socialist-minded workers, now play the leading role in enforcing the dictates of management.
In this lecture, delivered in Sydney, Australia in January, 1998, David North explains this profound transformation through an historical examination of the trade unions themselves.
On August 3, 1981, 15,000 members of the union of air traffic controllers in the US—the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO)—went out on strike against their employer, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).
