Trade union

World in View: Rousseff wins Brazil’s runoff election

 November 30, 2014

Brazil’s President, Dilma Rousseff, barely won a runoff election against the conservative free-marketeer Aécio Neves. With her election to a second term, the Workers’ Party, first under Lula Da Silva and now under Rousseff, has won its fourth consecutive presidential election. While Lula’s first election was greeted with great hope for a sweeping change in Brazil’s developmentalist trajectory, Rousseff’s cliffhanger illustrated the grave disappointment that much of Brazil’s masses felt recently….

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Ukraine: New Unions and Democratic Left meet

 February 25, 2014

Kiev was host to an historic international gathering of workers’ organizations from four formerly Soviet nations that demonstrated the development of a new independent labor movement in Ukraine, now very active in the huge democratic-revolutionary movement.

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Portsmouth, England: unite against austerity

 May 10, 2013

“We are going through the biggest squeeze in living standards since my granddad was born in this city in the 1920s,” said Jones, who cites his grandfather’s conversion to trade unionism precisely through his experience working in Portsmouth.

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Attacks on organizing

 April 6, 2013

The number of unionized workers in the U.S. last year dropped by 400,000 members, to 14.3 million workers. Assaults on unions like right-to-work legislation in Indiana and Michigan and laws narrowing the right to union representation in Wisconsin had a huge impact on unions. The most important development is the transformation of union leadership from being militant fighters to contract concessionary specialists and corporation supporters.

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Massive London march against austerity

 December 9, 2012

London, England—The leader of the opposition, Ed Miliband, was heckled on Oct. 20 at a mass demonstration here against austerity cuts.

The Labour Party leader had addressed the crowd to garner support for his stand against the ruling coalition of the Liberal Democratic and Conservative parties. Mr. Miliband claimed the government’s cutbacks were “too far and [=>]

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Using robots to attack labor upsurge in China

 July 29, 2012

Workers who created a wave of strikes in China from auto and electronics to steel over the past two years have confronted the power of private capital, the state and the Communist Party. In 2011 alone, China’s State Council acknowledged 500 large-scale “mass incidents” per day, including peasant resistance to land grabs as well as [=>]

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Trade unionism and revolutionary syndicalism

 July 13, 2012

by Michael Gilbert

The theory and practice of how to organize workers to take power into their own hands and fight for a new social order has always been uppermost in the minds of all true revolutionaries, even in the darkest moments of capitalist and state-capitalist repression. Following Marx, the founder of Marxist-Humanism, Raya Dunayevskaya, has [=>]

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Immigrant workers ‘March for Dignity’

 April 11, 2012

Berkeley, Calif.—On Feb. 17 over 500 people joined a “March for Dignity,” endorsed by Occupy Oakland, in support of the over 200 mostly Latino workers fired the previous month, despite Berkeley being a “sanctuary” city (meaning the city pledged to not cooperate with discrimination based on legal status). An I-9 (Employment Eligibility Verification Form, for [=>]

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Car wash workers unionizing

 October 2, 2011

Editor’s note: On Aug. 6, 15 young Mexican workers and student activists picketed the Robertson Car Wash for seven hours in support of low-wage immigrant car wash workers. They again picketed on Aug. 14, along with additional students from the AFL-CIO Union Summer program.

Of the very few drivers who came to have their cars washed, [=>]

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Workshop Talks: Rank-and-file workers will have their say

 March 27, 2011

by Htun Lin

All eyes are on the massive worker protests in Madison, Wisconsin, against Governor Scott Walker’s attempt to totally bust public sector unions by stripping them of collective bargaining rights. Many pundits say this is a power grab to hurt Democrats, but the demonstrations have brought out something much deeper that speaks to all [=>]

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Corporate assaults on workers and women

 March 20, 2011

Editorial:

As the national assault against the working class in the U.S. increases, most openly evidenced by the orchestrated attacks aimed at destroying public employees’ unions, workers and their unions are challenging these vicious attacks. The most blatant attack, by Republican Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin–who introduced legislation to eliminate the right of public worker unions [=>]

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Strikers in China demand own unions, defy capitalism

 September 16, 2010

The new September-October 2010 issue of News & Letters is online.  Here’s the lead article:

Strikers in China demand own unions, defy capitalism
by Bob McGuire

A wave of strikes in China that began in mid-May in auto and continued through the summer is challenging the foundations of China’s world-leading production system. Workers striking key [=>]

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