Both trade union activists and the business press have been closely following the negotiations between UPS and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) for some time. Then, on July 25, the big news came. The IBT had signed a tentative agreement with UPS. The purpose of this article is to explain what is in the new agreement and the attitude that socialists should take.
Economic headlines present a confusing jumble of news. Commentators speak of avoiding a recession, while interest rates and food prices remain high. There are plenty of Help Wanted signs yet many people are not feeling particularly flush. What’s really going on? The purpose of this article is to examine the current US economic situation.
It is no exaggeration to say that the Supreme Court’s legitimacy is teetering toward the edge of a cliff. But the right-wing fanatics currently enjoying a 6-3 supermajority in the Court do not allow such minor considerations (like accountability) to deter them from achieving their main goal: turning back the clock in U.S. society to the 1950s era, when LGBTQ people were forced to stay in the closet; college students were wealthy, Christian, and white; racial segregation still flourished; and, of course, abortion was illegal.
In the year to Q1 2023, in Europe, unit profits increased more than unit labour costs in manufacturing, construction and finance, and grew at the same rate as unit labour cost in “accommodation food and transportation”.
The Republican Party is no longer the most important political vehicle for the ruling class. The Republicans have become so involved in Trump’s intrigues, vendettas, and conspiracy theories that a considerable layer have forgotten their responsibilities to bourgeois democracy and to a stable system of capital accumulation.
The Peruvian revolutionary peasant and indigenous rights leader Hugo Blanco, a long-time member of the Fourth International, died late last month. We translate and reprint a reflection on Blanco’s life from Pepe Mejía, a member of the editorial board of Lucha Indígena, a newspaper that Blanco founded.
The June 25 elections in Greece confirmed, but also reinforced, the harsh negative features of the results of the “first round” of the May 21 election. In the new parliament, the sum of the right and the far-right parties reached 200 seats (out of a total of 300), thus creating a correlation of parliamentary forces that is unprecedented in the years following the overthrow of the military dictatorship in 1974.
Our work has been devoted to essentially arguing a negative point—that it’s fundamentally wrong to see any part of the Democratic Party as the road to social change. This viewpoint obviously poses a major question: if socialists shouldn’t be supporting Democrats, then what should we be doing instead? What is our alternative course of action?
