On February 29th we (comrades from the CWO and Battaglia Comunista) were at the solidarity demonstration with the warehouse workers of the Italian-Japanese company Peroni in Tor Sapienza, Rome. The workers there are carrying on a bitter struggle for better working conditions which started with a week-long strike.

American Factory is a 2019 documentary, distributed by Netflix and produced by Higher Ground (production company owned by Barack and Michelle Obama). The directors, Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar, have previously told the story of the closing down of the General Motors plant (GM Moraine) in Dayton, Ohio(1) in the 2009 documentary The Last Truck.

For years now the whole Brexit issue has diverted attention from the declining quality of life experienced by the working class in the aftermath of the financial crash. Now we have an election campaign where Labour and the Conservatives are vying to outdo each other as to how much they will increase state spending in order to end austerity.

In spring 2019, a crisis on an unprecedented scale was sparked in French hospitals. The emergency services went on strike in massive numbers. Barely three months from its beginnings on 18 March, in the Saint-Antoine Hospital in Paris, it had spread to around a hundred establishments all across France by July. The movement will not stop spreading as long as the situation remains untenable.