French Workers Continue the Fight Against Raising the Retirement Age
Many thousands of workers and students have taken to the streets of France once again in response to the government’s announcement on March 16 that it is raising the retirement age from 62 to 64. President Emmanuel Macron and Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne have done this without a vote of the National Assembly. Macron’s government […]
NYC Uber and Lyft Drivers Strike and Win Higher Pay
Last month, New York City Uber and Lyft drivers staged a 12-hour strike at LaGuardia Airport, calling once again for a pay raise, as they picketed at the airport and refused pickups from the busy transit hub. It is their third strike in recent months, as drivers demand higher pay due to skyrocketing inflation and […]
Determined Alabama Coal Miner’s Strike Ends After 23 Months
In mid-February, striking coal miners at the Warrior Met Coal mine in Brookwood, Alabama decided to return to work, ending their 23-month strike. The miners, organized in the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), finally decided to go back to work after one of the he longest strikes in the U.S. in many years. The […]
Rail Companies Sacrifice Lives for Profit
These train crashes expose the backwards priorities that are rampant throughout this whole system, not just in the railroads. Workers know all too well the many ways companies risk our lives and the safety of our communities for profit
Education Workers in Portugal Fight Back
After a month-long, rotating strike that began in mid-January, 150,000 teachers and supporters staged a major demonstration in Lisbon, Portugal on Saturday, Feb. 11. The demonstration by teachers was probably the largest single action by educators in Portugal’s history, and showed the anger that has been building for years among education workers. In all, eight […]
The Violence of This Society Cannot Continue!
Yet again, an outburst of senseless and seemingly random violence rocks a community. This time it was in Half Moon Bay, California, where seven people had their lives taken from them, and another was seriously injured in a mass shooting. It was the deadliest shooting that took place in the history of San Mateo County. […]
Fast-Food Corporations Call for Referendum Against Workers
Last year the California Legislature approved the Fast-Food Recovery Act, which would have created a council to improve wages and workplace standards statewide for fast-food workers. But, fast-food corporations lobbied to get the bill suspended by applying for a referendum to overturn the law. California’s minimum wage for all workers is only $15.50. The Fast-Food […]
NYC Nurses Occupy Their Hospital to Oppose Management’s Cuts
Nurses occupied NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital to force the hospital to honor their contract.
UK Nurses Strike Across the Pond
Nurses in the UK went on strike on January 18 and 19, and more strikes are expected in the coming months.
BART – Ignoring Reality
This article is reprinted from the Speak Out Now newsletter at Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system in California. The Covid pandemic has exposed a key problem in BART’s funding model – relying on fares for a large part of operating expenses. San Francisco is now one of the leading urban centers of office vacancies […]
France: After the January 19 Strike: We Will Persist to the End!
January 23, 2023 editorial of the workplace newsletters of the Etincelle fraction of the New Anticapitalist Party (NPA). Translated from French. The January 19 strike was a success: the trade unions counted more than two million demonstrators, and even the police acknowledged that more than one million people marched. This is more than the strike […]
Child Labor, Dangerous Work
Last summer, the federal Department of Labor opened an investigation into Packer Sanitation Services, Inc. (PSSI) to determine if the Wisconsin-based company was using child labor to clean slaughterhouses. The company provides cleaning services for over 700 locations nationwide, including JBS, the world’s largest meatpacking company. The Labor Department looked into company records from 50 […]
Fare Evasion
The following article has been edited and reprinted from our workplace newsletter at Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) in the San Francisco Bay Area. For context, station agents are agents that work in the booth at each station to help passengers. For some station agents, fare evasion presents real challenges. People who pay their way to ride […]
Amazon Workers Around The World Stand Up On Black Friday
Another annual ritual of capitalism has came and gone — Black Friday, the day following Thanksgiving which marks the beginning of the holiday shopping season. For working people in retail, transportation, and logistics, this day and the following month can be extremely chaotic and stressful on top of all of the normal pressures that people […]
800 Longshore Workers Walk Out In Mobile, Alabama
On November 22nd, 800 longshore workers in Mobile, Alabama in the union International Longshoremen’s Association Local 1410 began a strike against the CSA Equipment Company at what is said to be the 11th largest seaport in the United States. The workers have been working without a contract for over four years since October 2018. Since […]
The Railway Workers’ Fight Is Our Fight
Last Friday, President Biden signed a Congressional resolution to impose a contract on railway workers. He and Congress took this action in spite of the fact that the majority of railway workers had voted to reject that very same contract. Despite the exceptional profits that the railway companies are making, Congress didn’t direct the companies […]
Anti-Government Protests Rock China
Online and on social media, Chinese families blamed authorities for the death of a four-month-old girl after access to medical care was delayed because of the government’s harsh, so-called zero-Covid policies. In southern China, protesters broke out of buildings locked down because of those same zero-Covid policies, confronting health care workers and ransacking stores to […]
A Railroad Strike is Back on the Table as Workers Reject the Tentative Agreement
Conductors and yard workers represented by the Transportation Division of International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers (SMART-TD) have voted down their tentative agreement. Together these workers make up about 30% of all unionized rail workers. Now, just over half of all railroad workers have voted against their tentative agreements, while the […]
Railroad Bosses Threaten Workers on the Job and in Our Communities
The possibility that workers might strike against national freight rail companies has gotten some headlines recently. But the attacks of such companies against working class people threatens life in our communities as well as on the job. People in a working-class neighborhood of Baltimore have fought back against one such attack by the giant CSX […]
Argentina: Workers’ Party’s Rally Gathers over 35,000 to Fight for Socialism!
The Workers’ Party of Argentina held a rally with over 35,000 people, fighting for socialism.
France: Let’s Go on the Offensive!
October 24, 2022 Editorial of the Workplace Newsletters of the Etincelle fraction of the NPA, Translated from French. President Macron did not see this one coming: the oil workers’ strike sparked a protest that had been brewing for months. And even if the movement is on hold in several refineries, their struggle was not for […]
The 1969-70 General Electric Strike: “If You Want A War, We’ll Give You A War”
On October 27, 1969, over 150,000 workers across the United States walked out of General Electric, taking on the fourth largest corporation in the world at that time, in the largest national strike in over two decades. The strike lasted for 102 days, through the cold winter months until February 4, 1970. It involved workers […]
“Don’t Be Afraid! We’re All Together!” – The Struggle in Iran Deepens
Last month, the Iranian morality police murdered 22-year old Mahsa Amini for the crime of not wearing her hijab properly. Since then, mass protests have taken place throughout the country against this outrage without signs of slowing down. While young people and women have been incredibly vocal throughout, we’re now seeing the struggle move through […]
British Workers Resist Skyrocketing Living Costs as Corporations Make Record Profits
In the United Kingdom (U.K.), more than 50,000 rail workers represented by three unions recently went on strike, bringing rail services throughout the country nearly to a standstill. In many areas, no trains are running, and direct services between Britain’s biggest cities have been shut down. About 89 percent of normal train schedules have been […]
What’s Been Going on in the Railroad Sector?
For those not familiar with the railroads, trying to follow the situation over the last few months can be confusing. We offer some clarification to help paint a clearer picture. Freight and passenger rail operators in the U.S. have been negotiating with railroad workers’ unions for months now. Railroad workers, or “rails” as they sometimes […]
A National Railroad Strike has been Called off … for now
On Thursday, Sep. 14, two unions representing about 60,000 railroad workers announced that they have reached a tentative contract agreement, and have called off what would have been the first national railroad strike in 30 years. For months the Biden administration has been supporting the rail companies in trying to stop a strike from happening. […]
Kaiser Mental Health Workers Continue the Fight
Note: This article comes from the most recent edition of Speak Out Now’s Healthcare Newsletter. Kaiser mental health workers in Northern California have reached week 4 of their strike. They are fighting alongside Hawaiian mental health workers, who have also been on strike since August 29th. Their fight is linked to absurd levels of understaffing, which […]
UK Port Workers Stand Up to the Global Supply Chain
On August 28, nearly 2,000 port workers in Felixstowe, the United Kingdom’s busiest port, concluded an 8-day strike that followed their rejection of a final offer from C.K. Hutchinson Holding, Ltd, the port operator. Because the port handles nearly one-third of all the U.K.’s trade, and an even larger percent of its trade with Asia, […]
Starbucks – Hands Off Your Worker-Organizers!
In recent months, workers at over 220 Starbucks locations in 33 states across the United States have organized to join a union, with a store in Buffalo, New York being the first store to unionize back in December 2021. The struggle has not come without some serious consequences. Many of the core organizers across the […]
Coal Miners’ Strike: Over 500 Days and Betrayed by Democrats and Republicans
Coal miners in Alabama have been on strike now for more than 500 days — nearly a year and a half. The strike originally started when the mine’s owner, the company Warrior Met Coal, refused to negotiate a contract with better terms. This refusal came even though years earlier the company told miners they would […]
Worker Productivity Scores: Exploitation Gets an Innovation
The bosses are always trying to find new ways to squeeze more work out of us throughout the day. If there’s any way bosses can find to make us work more like machines, they’ll take it. And in response to the increasing numbers of workers working from home due to Covid, companies decided to monitor […]
Kaiser Mental Health Clinicians Fight for the Care Their Patients Deserve
Thousands of Northern California Kaiser mental health clinicians have been on strike since Monday, advocating for better mental healthcare for their patients. This comes after a year of failed negotiations between the union and Kaiser to increase staffing and provide more timely care to patients. These clinicians understand first-hand the importance of adequate access to […]
Workers of Panama: “Solo el pueblo salva al pueblo” (Only the people can save the people!)
On August 2nd the teachers of Panama ended their nationwide strike that sparked strikes for construction workers, Indigenous groups, and regular people nationwide. The strikes began because of high prices on fuel, food, and medicine caused by the pandemic and U.S. and EU sanctions from the war in Ukraine, high unemployment, and political corruption. But […]
Workers at UPS and Amazon Die Due to Extreme Heat and Brutal Working Conditions
Workers at UPS and Amazon have been dying of extreme heat, while the companies make profit.
(video) U.S. Rail Workers Could Strike and Shut Down the Economy
The following short video {5 min} was produced and edited by Paula Pecorella and Meg Herschlein for the website More Perfect Union. In this excellent video railroad workers discuss many of the reasons that could lead to a major railroad strike in the U.S. as soon as next month, in September 2022. Over the past […]
BART: Do the Math
The following article has been edited and reprinted from our workplace newsletter at BAY AREA RAPID TRANSIT. The BART Board approved the tentative agreement and it is now a contract. That means a 10.5% wage increase over three years. But where does that leave BART workers after a 2.75% wage increase in 2020? We are […]
Biden Administration Attacks Rail Workers
As working conditions in the rail industry have worsened, Biden has used an executive order to create a board to mediate a labor dispute and prevent rail workers from striking for 60 days.
Labor Notes 2022 — A Reason to be Hopeful
This year’s Labor Notes Conference in Chicago brought a record number of activists and rank and file workers from across the country. According to the organizers, they had to cap registration at 4,000 people in order not to overload the hotel staff. Labor Notes started in 1979 as a magazine initiated by some members of […]
Workers in Baltimore Suburb Organize First Union at Apple
Apple workers in Towson, Maryland have voted to form a union, the first at Apple.
Richmond, California: Lessons from the Chevron Workers Strike
On May 28, 2022, striking workers at Chevron in Richmond, California voted by a narrow margin to ratify a contract and to call off their strike. The strike lasted over two months, a long strike reflecting the determination of the workers in a very difficult situation. The strike involved about 500 workers, who struck for […]
South Korean Truckers Win Strike
On June 14, South Korean truck drivers won an eight-day strike for higher wages. In the city of Ulsan, production at the Hyundai Motor Company factory was cut in half due to a lack of raw materials, while at Busan, the largest port in South Korea, container traffic decreased by two thirds. The strike started […]
The Fight for Mental Health Care at Kaiser Continues
The California Department of Managed Health Care recently announced it would be examining the medical giant Kaiser Permanente to see if it is providing adequate mental health care. This comes after mental health workers at Kaiser hospitals have complained that patients often have to wait weeks between appointments. This is far too long, especially considering […]
The Minneapolis General Strike of 1934 Demonstrated the Power of Workers’ Organizing
The Minneapolis general strike of 1934 grew out of a strike by the local union of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) against most of the trucking companies operating in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a major distribution center for the Upper Midwest. It became one of the most important and influential struggles of the working-class response to the Great Depression. Background to the […]
An Extension and a Raise at AC Transit?
AC Transit workers have gotten an extension of the current contract and a raise, but it’s not much considering inflation and pandemic conditions.
BART Workers Keep a Dysfunctional System Running
Live Within Our Means? Some of us have been told that the key to being able to make it in the Bay Area is to live within our means. Some of us have really taken that to heart in terms of the financial decisions we make on a regular basis. But with these crazy levels […]
California Nurses Locked Out in Class War over Health Care
On April 18, over 8,000 nurses in Northern California went on a one-day strike in the 18 facilities of the Sutter health care system. They have been working without a contract since June 2021. The strikers are asking for a safer working environment and an increase in nursing staff. Last week was the final straw […]
Chevron Richmond: A Month-Long Strike
Workers at the Richmond Chevron refinery have been on strike for a month. Chevron has brought in less skilled replacement workers, causing instances of polluting flaring.
India Strike Called “Low Turnout” Despite Nearly 50 Million Participants!
In the last week of March, India saw workers across the private and public sectors conduct a two-day strike in opposition to the policies of the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Bank, manufacturing and public transport workers struck in large numbers in at least six states, causing disruption of production and service in much […]
Staten Island Warehouse Workers Win First Amazon Union in the U.S.
Workers at the JFK8 Amazon warehouse in Staten Island, New York, have voted to form a union.
Richmond Chevron Workers Go on Strike
Over 500 workers at the Richmond, California Chevron refinery have gone on strike.