In San Francisco, 6,400 teachers are on strike against unlivable wages, overcrowded classrooms and chronic understaffing in a city dominated by tech billionaires. In Los Angeles, tens of thousands of teachers have voted to authorize strike action, while 40,000 graduate students across the University of California system are voting on whether to strike. At the same time, high school students across the country are walking out in opposition to attacks on immigrants, defying threats from administrators, politicians and union officials.
In healthcare, the strike of 31,000 Kaiser Permanente nurses and healthcare workers has entered its third week, now joined by 4,000 pharmacy and laboratory workers. The response of the union apparatus has been swift and revealing. In New York City, officials rushed this week to shut down a month-long strike by 15,000 nurses through a sellout agreement, isolating those still on strike and provoking outrage among rank-and-file workers.
These struggles are driven by inflation, falling living standards, mass layoffs and the relentless offensive of the corporate and financial elite. The response of the union bureaucracy is to suppress resistance, isolate strikes and block a unified movement. Highly paid officials—earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a year while presiding over organizations with billions in assets—act as enforcers of this containment strategy and as political agents of the Democratic and Republican parties.
The World Socialist Web Site has intervened in these struggles with a clear perspective: workers must develop their own independent organizations of struggle. Through our reporting and analysis, the WSWS has exposed betrayals, given voice to rank-and-file opposition and advanced the program of the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees.
The ability of the WSWS to carry out this work depends entirely on the support of our readers. We accept no corporate funding, no government money and no resources from the union apparatus we subject to criticism.
I therefore urge you to make a donation to the WSWS New Year Fund today, and—if possible—to become a regular monthly supporter. The scale and intensity of the struggles now emerging demand sustained, daily intervention and analysis. The resources required for that work must be built consciously and deliberately.
A mass movement is developing. Whether it advances as an independent force of the working class, or is once again diverted and suppressed, is a question of leadership and political clarity. The WSWS is committed to providing both.
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