Ford

On September 1, workers at the Volkswagen-Audi factory in the city of Curitiba began a one-week strike. Workers at the Volvo and Renault/Nissan plants in the same town also went on strike on the same day.

During that week, 24-hour strikes occurred at Ford, General Motors, Toyota, Mercedes Benz and Scania in cities in the interior of Sao Paulo state.

Many Americans are probably not aware of the great extent to which U.S. corporations collaborated with the Nazi war machine during WWII. Ultimately, the international corporations, the lawyers, bankers and financiers who collaborated with the Nazis prevailed. They exerted tremendous influence to thwart investigators delving into their seditious activities after the war.

120 of the 200 striking workers at SLM, a Ford subcontractor in Gent, refused to participate in the vote.

Fellow strikers at another subcontractor, Lear Corporations, also found the agreement totally unsatisfactory and also refused to vote on the plan.

The Guelph Mercury reported that auto workers at Guelph Products Collins & Aikman went on a wildcat strike Saturday to support workers at a Toronto plant pushing for severance pay for 200 laid-off workers.

Nearly 75 of the Guelph plant's staff walked off the job around 3:30 p.m. and management barricaded the turnstile entrances with chains and steel bars so the workers couldn't re-enter.

Workers barricaded doors at the Collins & Aikman plant in Scarborough, a suburb of Toronto, yesterday. The factory produces floor, acoustic systems and cockpit modules for cars.

200 workers have been laid off at the plant since it filed for bankruptcy in 2005, but they have not been paid severance pay. The company claims that its US arm won't release the funds.

"The strike took place overnight, the night shift did not assemble any cars," said Yekaterina Kulinenko, Ford Russia spokeswoman. "Most of the day shift is also on strike. We are not making cars at the moment."

The factors that provoked the widespread stoppage of work by thousands of British workers in the winter of 1978-79 began with the Labour government of James Callaghan's attempt to enforce limits on pay rises to curb inflation. Inflation had reached a height of nearly 26.9% in August 1975.

The following excerpts thoroughly document how capitalists really acted during the Second World War. Behind the patriotic propaganda that encouraged the working class to slaughter each other in the interests of competing national interests, international capital quietly kept the commodity circuits flowing and profits growing across all borders.

The dispute was only one of the hundreds that tore across Australia that year, but was remarkable for the strikers ability to circumvent official control, gain widespread community support and push the needs of migrant workers onto the national agenda.