Subjects Archives: Strikes

“Time is running out. This decade is our last chance to stop the destruction of our people and our planet… This is why we strike.”

The recent seven-day strike by the Oakland Education Association (OEA) was eerily similar in key ways to its 26-day strike in 1996. What happened in both cases was that union members and community allies won on the picket lines and in the streets but got a draw, at best, at the bargaining table.

Greta Thunberg has called for a world-wide strike on Friday September 27-for children and adults. Here’s how to make this a reality.

To help this movement win, we should ask why others lost. We should ask, for example, why Occupy, despite the energy and sacrifices of so many, came to an end, while the institutions it confronted remain intact.

What if they succeed? We know what the ‘success’ of structured parties like Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain led to. Maybe a horizontal federation of autonomous base-groups attempting to re-invent democracy could do better.

Today marks the latest international day of action for the student climate strike movement. The task ahead is to channel the energy and radicalism of the strikes into the labour movement and fight for a social alternative.

The authors are the lead organizers of U.S. Youth Climate Strike, part of a global student movement inspired by 16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg’s weekly school strikes in Sweden and other European countries.

Corporate media absolutely won’t tell you this, but this year’s Los Angeles teachers strike is the latest chapter in the long running struggle against the privatization of public education in the U.S

I don’t remember where I was on September 12, 2012. I was in Chicago, but I wasn’t in the streets when the approximately 26,000 members of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) walked out of school and onto the picket lines.

Last spring a teacher uprising swept the red states. Today it reached the West Coast, as the 34,000 members of United Teachers Los Angeles began a long-anticipated strike in the nation’s second-largest school district.

In a massive display of social opposition, more than 50,000 teachers, school personnel, parents and students marched in downtown Los Angeles Monday on the first day of the strike by educators in the nation’s second largest school district.

When it comes to the work of social reproduction of another human being, the care of another human cannot be limited by capital’s ticking clock, so these workers put in their own time, or in the case of teachers, also their own money, to provide the best care they can.

On 8 and 9 January, over 160 million workers went on strike in India from a broad range of sectors, from industrial workers to health care workers. This has been one of the largest general strikes in the world.

The strike by 10 central trade unions is against a proposal to limit the formation and powers of trade unions, as well as for a minimum wage of Rs. 18,000 and the protection of the public sector.

Fifteen districts started the school year on strike in Washington state—the latest to ride the West Virginia wave.

September 10, 2018 Prison Radio broadcast from Mumia Abu-Jamal on the significance of a “lock down” that has been instituted for the entire state of Pennsylvania.

In a September 8 post to the Jacobin  website, Eric Dirnbach announced that “U.S. workers are striking again.”

Massive Mazdoor Kisan Sangharsh Rally on September 5 to hit out at neoliberal economic policies, communal agenda, authoritarian attacks by the BJP government.

Organized in the face of a crackdown by authorities, the action seeks to strike at the root of the prison-industrial complex.

A labor historian traces the origins of the 2018 prison strike through a legacy of involuntary servitude.