The International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) is an international network of democratic, worker-controlled rank-and-file committees. It was formed to provide workers with the organizational means to unite across workplaces, companies, industries and national borders, independent of the pro-corporate trade union bureaucracies.
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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!
In his campaign announcement, Lehman called for workers to support his campaign, including by running as delegates for the UAW Constitutional Convention, which will be held from June 15-18.
The last-minute deal demonstrates the ruling class’s extreme sensitivity to and fear of the class struggle and its reliance on the union bureaucracy to suppress it.
The outcome of the war will be determined by the development of the class struggle in the United States itself—in Detroit, New York, Los Angeles and other major working class centers.
The fascist president heads a government of, by and for the financial oligarchy.
An inquiry independent of Stellantis, the United Auto Workers (UAW) apparatus and state authorities is essential to uncover the truth, expose systemic safety violations and prevent future deaths.
Stellantis, the United Auto Workers and Michigan safety officials continue to remain silent on the death of the 63-year-old skilled tradesman, even as full production at the engine plant has resumed.
It is the capitalist system that produces tragedies like the death of Ronald Adams Sr., a system that operates in the interests of the ruling class, which derives value and profit from the labor of workers.
Shamenia Stewart-Adams delivered powerful remarks to the public hearing on the death of her husband at the Dundee Engine Complex.
The Postal Workers Rank-and-File Committee (PWRFC) calls for a resounding No vote. Opposition must be mobilised demanding the removal of Ward, Walsh and the entire CWU Postal Executive who serve as Royal Mail’s enforcers.
The Postal Workers Rank-and-File Committee urges postal workers to vote “No” to the union-backed tentative agreements and “Yes” to authorizing strike action.
“Our mission is to unite postal workers worldwide to build collective power, protect our rights, and improve wages, benefits and working conditions through solidarity, transparency and democratic action to actively counter the efforts of the 1 percent.”
By calling off its work bans the AEU is signalling its willingness to force the state government’s offer through, further cutting real wages and doing nothing to address staff shortages and intolerable workloads.
This is the text of a resolution introduced by UAW presidential candidate Will Lehman at a meeting of UAW Local 677 in Macungie, Pennsylvania.
The recent meetings between Pentagon officials and top US auto executives are aimed at securing the more direct integration of the auto industry into the war drive of US imperialism.
As the Trump administration launches a scorched-earth campaign to bring higher education under the direct ideological control of the far right, Harvard’s leadership has responded not by defending democratic principles but offloading the costs of this political warfare onto its workforce.
Three weeks ago workers at the Nexteer Automotive plant in Saginaw, Michigan, overwhelmingly rejected a pro-company contract backed by the United Auto Workers International Union and UAW Local 699 officials.
Mid-May marks the contract expiration for 40,000 subway and bus workers and the end of the cooling off period for 3,500 rail workers, posing confrontations with the Hochul and Mamdani administrations.
WSWS reporters visited picket lines and spoke with striking London Underground drivers.
On the picket last Friday, workers raised the need for unity across London if the strike breaking operation by Stagecoach is to be defeated and working conditions defended.
Talks have broken down not due to RMT intransigence but because of TfL’s hardline stance. It has used Dempsey’s demobilisation of members to press ahead with restructuring.
“These supports are not optional—they are essential to my daily survival, including help with eating, hygiene, dressing and maintaining basic safety and wellbeing.”
Hundreds of thousands of retired workers, mostly depending on poverty-line aged pensions, are still facing prohibitive costs under the Support at Home program, which the Labor government launched last November.
Home care workers in New York City ended a weeklong hunger strike after being told the “No More 24” Act would be brought to a vote—a commitment officials later denied.
The decision marks the culmination of more than a year in which the Nurses and Midwives’ Association has enforced a strike ban under the phony pretext that the Industrial Relations Commission would reverse years of real wage cuts.
Educators in Ann Arbor angrily reject demands for austerity, in a near-unanimous rejection of the union’s tentative settlement.
Even as striking educators rallied at the state parliament on March 24, the AEU apparatus was already moving to contain, dissipate and ultimately shut down this movement.
The schools in New Jersey’s third largest city are being deprived of the resources that the state itself acknowledges they need to provide a “thorough and efficient” education.
Only two days before Little Lake City teachers walked out, union officials canceled a far larger strike in Los Angeles Unified School District.
The ALU could not simultaneously integrate itself into the orbit of the union bureaucracy and the Democratic Party while developing an independent movement of Amazon workers against the entire corporate and political structure those forces defend.
The death went unreported for a week before the online investigative outlet, the Western Edge, broke the story on April 13.
A core element of Amazon’s operations is the Delivery Service Partner (DSP) program—a sprawling network of nominally independent subcontractors through which Amazon controls the lives of hundreds of thousands of delivery drivers without, it claims, employing a single one of them.
A video uploaded to TikTok shows the warehouse doors being shut and locked as more than a dozen drivers tried to get inside.
Around 50 workers on site when the blaze erupted escaped without injury, but some were forced to literally run for their lives.
BP Whiting refinery workers continue their battle, as Northern Indiana Public Service Company (NIPSCO) locks out 1,700 USW workers.
An ethylene production plant at Mossmorran, Scotland has ceased production and started laying off its 400 strong workforce.
This is the second major incident at a US refinery in the past five months, following an explosion at the El Segundo Chevron refinery which rocked much of the Los Angeles area last October.
The financial press has noted that this could set a precedent for the slashing of labour-hire wages throughout the coal mining industry and more broadly.
The 47-year-old contractor died after falling while doing maintenance work at the South32-owned facility near Collie, south of Perth.
Workers were given less than 48 hours to decide whether to immediately accept redundancy or take six weeks’ unpaid leave in the hope that the mine is quickly sold.
The Turkish miners’ wildcat strike and occupation in İzmir, defying state oppression, is part of a growing radicalization within the working class on an international scale.
In a flagrant violation of democratic principles, the HAW-UAW bargaining committee has unilaterally called off plans for a spring strike, overriding a clear mandate from the membership
Picket lines went up April 21 at Harvard’s main campus in Cambridge and at Harvard Medical School, as graduate students indefinitely halted teaching, grading and research.
The UAW bureaucracy has twice now rejected their democratic vote; students must organize to impose their decision, with or without the approval of corrupt and unaccountable bureaucrats.
Kennedy Orwa, a PhD student at the University of Washington, was detained at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport on April 7 and deported with his 13-year-old son the following day.
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.
