International unions

United Auto Workers union members at three production plants in the USA walked out on Friday 15 September following the expiration of a national contract with General Motors (GM), Stellantis (formerly Chrysler), and Ford (collectively, the Big Three). This is the first time the union has ever struck at all three companies simultaneously. Strikes in Missouri, Michigan and Ohio saw just 13,000 of the unions near-150,000 members at the Big Three walk out at midnight. The union leadership strategy is one of escalating action, that threatens to bring more shops out one-by-one for as long as it...

Workers’ Liberty members met with members of Sotsialny Rukh (SR — Social Movement) in Lviv and Kyiv during our visit to Ukraine in August 2023. SR emerged from the regrouping of (and splits from) the left which took place around the Maidan Revolution of Dignity in late 2013 and early 2014. It was formally launched in 2015 and now has functioning branches in three Ukrainian cities, plus members in others. SR defines itself as “a Ukrainian political organisation and initiative towards the legal registration of a left political party based on the principles of democratic anti-capitalism, feminism...

Mark Osborn, a teacher from south London, recently met activists from Ukraine’s Free Trade Union of Education and Science Workers (VPONU), an affiliate of the Confederation of Free Trade Unions (KVPU), in Lviv and Kyiv. On 22 August, in western Ukraine, I met the Lviv Committee of VPONU. Nataliia Babych told me that Ukrainian education workers needed solidarity from British unions: “We want to survive. We want to be free and live in an independent Ukraine. We want to live in a democratic state.” Nataliia told me that educators face increased workload and low wages. Despite the fact that...

In places where existing trade unions fail to organise workers, new unions will often emerge to fill the gap. And those new unions will sometimes be the subject of state repression as a result. This is what appears to be happening today in Azerbaijan. The existing trade unions in the oil-rich former Soviet republic are strongly tied to the regime. The news on their website consists primarily of support for whatever the regime wants and says, and opposition to Azerbaijan’s traditional enemy, Armenia. Meanwhile a new union has come into existence to organise workers the traditional unions won’t...

On the last day of June, the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) released its annual “Global Rights Index”. It presented a bleak picture of a world where workers’ rights are routinely trampled upon. And according to the ITUC’s acting general secretary Luc Triangle, the report “provides shocking evidence that the foundations of democracy are under attack.” Protest by workers “has been met with increasingly brutal responses from state forces”, he said. “Violations of workers’ rights have reached record highs,” the ITUC concluded. The report named the ten worst offenders in the world —...

In 1924, a rebellion against Bolshevik rule broke out in western Georgia. The opening shots were fired in the manganese mining town of Chiatura, which had for years stood at the centre of working class struggles in the country. The miners were loyal to the Social Democratic Party, which had been ousted from power by a Red Army invasion three years earlier. The rebellion spread across the country, leading both Stalin and Zinoviev to declare that it constituted a threat even greater than the 1921 Kronstadt rebellion. The fact that miners stood at the forefront of a fight against a “workers’...

Hosheng Myanmar is a garment factory in Yangon, Myanmar. Hosheng Myanmar Garment Co. Ltd. is owned by Chinese nationals and is affiliated with international brands such as Zara and Inditex. The Hosheng workers’ union was born a few months ago in the hope of fighting for their rights and organising strikes. The daily pay rate for each worker was reportedly $2. The union recently had a strike campaign to ask for a pay increase of $3 US daily from the original $2 US, leading 600 workers from the garment factory not to work since 14 June. Military officers and police officers came to the Hosheng...

The official death toll from the rail crash in the eastern Indian state of Odisha on 2 June is 288, with 803 injured. We send condolences and solidarity to the victims and their loved ones. We send our solidarity to India’s rail workers and their unions, engaged in a long struggle against the understaffing, cuts and privatisation that form the background to this disaster. India has a long history of devastating rail collisions; this is far from the first one that has seen hundreds killed. Its infrastructure is crumbling. Two days after the Odisha crash a four-lane suspension bridge in the...

Six months ago, a woman trade union leader from Cambodia was on her way home from Melbourne, where she attended the world congress of the International Trade Union Confederation. Chhim Sithar, the leader of Labor Rights Supported Union (LRSU) of Khmer Employees of NagaWorld, was was arrested at Phnom Penh airport. She stood accused of violating her bail conditions by travelling overseas. (She and her lawyers deny this.) On 25 May, she was sentenced to two years in jail while eight of her colleagues received lesser sentences. Sithar and her fellow union leaders were found guilty of “incitement...

The Workers' Autonomous Federation emerged in May 1989 as a prototype for a future independent trade union movement in China. It arose alongside the student demonstrations which began in April 1989 calling for greater democracy, an end to corruption, a more open and accountable government and autonomous student unions. Under the red banner of the Workers' Autonomous Federation and fluttering slogans calling for democracy and freedom of association, between fifty and one hundred workers erected a tented headquarters on the outskirts of the students' tents at the Tiananmen Square in Beijing in...