France: “Generation 6-7 doing May ‘68 all over again”6 October – the third act of the school students’ protests that have rocked France since the beginning of the school year – represented yet another escalation of the movement. The demonstrations were huge everywhere. According to the organisers, school and university student organisations, 100,000 marched in Paris alone, and a total of 450,000 marched across the country. The demonstrations were lively, extremely youthful, and mainly composed of high school students, who turned up in quick-moving columns from each school and neighbourhood, armed with hundreds of home-made cardboard placards. On 5 October, 2,000 high schools – over half the total – across the country were already blockaded. On 6 October, about 90 percent of the country’s universities also joined the movement, following mass general assemblies attended by hundreds, and even thousands, of students.
https://communist.red/france-generation-6-7-doing-may-68-all-over-again/AutoZone Workers Won a Union. Then the Company Fired Them.Speaking with members of the newly formed AutoZone Workers Union, you would never guess that one of them had just been fired — and that another would be the next morning. That’s what happened to Nathan DuCongé and then David Valencia after they won their union election. On a Zoom call with Jacobin, though, their joy was contagious. DuCongé and his coworkers were all smiles and banter as they talked about their union campaign, how it feels to win, and the unexpected boost they received from filmmaker Boots Riley. On Friday, September 25, an AutoZone store in White Plains, New York, became the first of the company’s nearly seven thousand American retail locations to unionize. DuCongé and his coworkers, now members of United Auto Workers (UAW) Local 259, said they hadn’t been sure which way the vote would go. “The deck was really stacked against these workers trying to organize here,” said Brian Murray, an experienced organizer brought on in August by UAW Local 259 Vice President Mike DiGuiseppe. “It was because of their sticking together, the amount of fun they have, and their camaraderie, their solidarity for each other, [that] they were able to overcome a lot of union busting.” He added, “I would have expected [them] to no
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