By JIM FARRELL At midnight on Sept. 15, the United Autoworkers Union (UAW) contract with General Motors (GM) expired and almost 50,000 workers downed tools and walked off the job. During the recession, the UAW and its members had agreed to deep concessions to keep GM afloat. Now, GM is prospering and CEO Mary Barra…
By ERNIE GOTTA Dozens of SEIU members and supporters rallied in support of fast-food workers at a service plaza in Darien, Conn., on Aug. 28. These workers are fighting to reclaim potentially millions of dollars in stolen wages through unpaid benefits or the additional payment required by the Connecticut Standard Wage Law. 32BJ SEIU, the…
By DAVID KIELY The postal workers of SUD-Poste 92, in Haut-de-Seine, in the western suburbs of Paris, have won their 14-month strike, marking an end to one of the longest strikes in French history. During these long months the workers faced intense repression by the police, who worked hand in hand with the managers of…
By ERNIE GOTTA and ERWIN FREED — STAMFORD, Conn. — Like any capitalist enterprise, hotel companies hate losing profit margins to benefit the workers who make them rich. Industry professionals debate about the type of model they need to make the most profit. Currently, hotels in the Stamford area are running on very lean models.…
By ERWIN FREED and ERNIE GOTTA The UFCW’s historic 11-day strike that involved over 31,000 Stop and Shop workers and covered all stores in Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts came to an end on April 21. As covered at socialistaction.org (April 11), the demand of the union was to maintain all wage, benefit, and work…
By IVAN DOLPHY All across New England, workers in over 240 Stop & Shop stores have declared that they will not tolerate the attacks to their wages, benefits, and jobs being made during contract negotiations by their employer. Some 31,000 employees have moved to strike and join the picket lines at their shops. On April 11,…
By A WORKING CARPENTER I’ve been a carpenter my whole adult life. I worked nonunion before I joined the Carpenters’ Union—easily the smartest thing I’ve ever done. For a working-class person, a union is still the best anti-poverty program. Recently, the heads of the Building Trades unions, alongside the leaders of the United Steelworkers and…
BULLETIN — APRIL 11 — At 1 p.m. this afternoon, Stop and Shop workers in three New England states walked away from their cash registers, shopping aisles, and stockrooms in a coordinated strike action affecting thousands of workers. Picket lines immediately went up outside the stores. The strike includes workers at about 163 stores in…
By JEFF MACKLER Facing a pro-charter school board intent on closing or consolidating 24 schools in the next five years, presumably to replace some with private for-profit charters, 3000 teachers represented by the Oakland Education Association (OEA) began a district-wide strike on Feb. 21. On the seventh day of the strike, March 1, a tentative…
By MARTY GOODMAN On Feb. 14, Amazon, owned by the world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos ($166 billion), announced that it was pulling out of a deal made with top New York Democrats for a second Amazon headquarters in Long Island City, Queens, near Manhattan, due to opposition from local politicians. But the resistance was much…
By ANN MONTAGUE The new wave of teachers’ strikes suggests one way that the fight for women’s liberation from the privatized tasks of social reproduction may unfold. The recent one-week strike in Los Angeles, which featured demands to arrest the privatization of public education and improve student health services, reaffirms the potential of political strikes…
By JEFF MACKLER After seven solid days on the picket lines in drenching rains and in the face of a poor-mouthing school district that swore they were dead broke, 34,000 Los Angeles teachers voted overwhelmingly to approve a three-year contract. Most teachers saw the agreement as an important first step toward stemming the decades-long tidal…
By MARTY GOODMAN On Nov. 13, after long secret negotiations, two New York “progressive” Democrats, Governor Andrew Cuomo and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, jointly announced that Amazon will place one of two new corporate “headquarters” in New York City and the other in Arlington, Va. Virtually kissing the feet of Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO, whose…
By ERNIE GOTTA Across the country, teachers in their thousands are fighting back against poor working conditions, low wages, overflowing classrooms, and unusable health care. Following teachers in Arizona, Oklahoma, Kentucky, and West Virginia, Los Angeles teachers erupted in a strike last month. They are 34,000 teachers strong and ready to take a stand against…
Below, we present a statement by the Young Workers Committee of the Milwaukee Area Labor Council, AFL-CIO. Socialist Action believes that this statement is an excellent contribution to a discussion in the labor movement of what to do next in the fight against Trump’s government shutdown. One real strength of this statement is that it does not…
BY JEFF MACKLER For public consumption only, General Motors’ billionaire executives flew on public airlines to Washington, D.C., in 2009, leaving their private jets behind. Bleeding $1 billion in monthly losses, and threatening bankruptcy, this corporation—once the world’s largest—eased its way to the government troughs, with their kept media and the United Automakers Workers (UAW)…
By GARY PORTER On Nov. 29, analysts making 12-month price forecasts for General Motors Co. projected $45.16 per share—an increase of almost 23 per cent over the current $36.76. This is great holiday news, if you are shareholder. That includes the GM directors who receive 60 per cent of their compensation in stock options. It…
By ERNIE GOTTA and ERWIN FREED — STAMFORD, Conn. — The stakes were high for Sheraton hotel workers during their union election her on Dec. 13. Sheraton workers won a stunning but close victory, 69 yes votes to 32 no votes, in the face of a vicious anti-union campaign by the Davidson company, which manages…
By ERNIE GOTTA — STAMFORD, Conn. — On Nov. 19, workers at the Sheraton Hotel here launched a public campaign to form a union. Over 100 workers celebrated their new union with embraces and cheers that filled the courtyard of the St. John’s Episcopal Church as they gathered before making their way to the hotel.…
By ERNIE GOTTA Union hotel workers across the country are fighting and striking against an all-out offensive of hotel owners to crush the standard of living won through decades of struggle. In Chicago nearly all hotels in the city went out on strike. After three weeks, hotel bosses were ready to come to the table…
By JOHN LESLIE Trump’s reactionary immigration policies have created a climate of fear in immigrant communities. Deportations, workplace raids, and hate crimes are on the rise as ICE, police, and far-right vigilantes target immigrant workers and their families. Naturalized citizens are now the object of administration reviews of their citizenship status, based on the expansion…
By JOHN LESLIE Facing poor working conditions and mistreatment that made workers feel “like slaves,” workers at Jasic Technologies are attempting to form a union in Shenzhen, China. On May 10, a delegation of workers delivered a petition to the company and the officially recognized Workers Union. After first expressing support for the workers’ effort…
By MARTY GOODMAN A showdown between capital and labor in France over the privatization of the national railroad will extend into the summer and possibly beyond. France’s nationalized railroad, SNCF, is a source of pride for most French people—and in particular, for rail workers, who recognize the landmark rights they’ve won by striking over many…
By ERNIE GOTTA Hospitality workers from Local 217 Unite Here are hitting the picket lines across Connecticut this summer in solidarity with their coworkers waging contract fights at hotels in Hartford, New Haven, and Stamford. At a time when most unions are making concessions to the bosses, Local 217 has drawn a line in the…
By ANN MONTAGUE On June 27, the U.S. Supreme Court overruled the 1977 decision in Abood v. Detroit Board of Education. That decision said that making non-union members pay for the union’s political activities violated the First Amendment, but that it was constitutional to require non-members to help pay for a union’s collective bargaining and…
