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ILC INTERNATIONAL NEWSLETTER NO. 127-128
A dossier of weekly information published by the International Liaison Committee of Workers and Peoples April 19 - 26, 2005 International Liaison Committee of Workers and Peoples 87, rue du Faubourg Saint Denis 75010 Paris, France The
World Conference of the ILC was held in Three bulletins have been devoted to publishing a full report on the World Conference of the ILC. Below we publish the third and last of these report-back bulletins. On the following pages you will find contributions by delegates to the World Conference in the order of their appearance, as well as the Closing Statement by ILC Coordinator Daniel Gluckstein. ********** DARIA SOFRANOVA ( Student Yesterday,
I took an active part in the European session, bringing up the situation
in The Russian Government has decided to replace various devices of no charge or reduced tariffs, which applied to a large number of citizens, by giving them some money, instead. You might think that there is nothing very wrong with that. But, in reality, for those people, it is the destruction of a system of social security. And very many people are concerned by that. In Meanwhile, the pensions, allowances and grants either have not been increased, or not nearly enough, and do not enable these people to pay the full tariff. Here are a few figures: pensions are around 50 to 100 euros, student grants are 10 euros, the childbirth allowance 200 euros, the allowance for a child under 18 is 2 euros. What is more, the different allowances cannot be accumulated. In other words, if a student has a child, she will receive an allowance for her child, but will no longer receive her student grant. If a child is brought up in a single parent family, or if it is an orphan, it will receive a specific allowance, but no ordinary one; if a retired person or a veteran lives alone, he is entitled to a rent reduction, but if some other member of his family lives with him, the rent will no longer be reduced. In public hospitals, they can only spend 0.25 euros for food and 0.20 euros for medicine per patient per day. That is clearly an insufficient amount, which means that the patient's family has to bring in food and medicine. That
is why, in very many Russian towns, those who were entitled to these
benefits and most particularly the retired people have been
demonstrating. They have organised one meeting after another, protest
actions, demonstrations. They have blocked main streets, demonstrated
outside government and council buildings. For example, grandmothers
assembled on the main square in A
wave of similar protest meetings has been sweeping through the whole
country and fortunately, in some regions, has produced results. For
example, in We
have to hope that these examples will be followed in the other towns and
cities of ********** GREGORIO TAVARES VALERIO ( First of all, I would like to welcome all you comrade workers taking part in this world conference, which I consider as the way open for the peoples of the world, enabling them to have their say. The Dominican Republic is a small, poor country, hemmed in, in the midst of the Caribbean, but that does not stop it from having exactly the same problems as those which the workers of the whole world are exposed to: globalisation, free trade treaties, the foreign debt which it is impossible to finance, for it has doubled over the past four years and now amounts to over 8,000,000,000 dollars. For all these reasons, we suffer from the same imperialist attacks, "they" want to transform us into a consumer market, while our own national production has dropped. Day by day, the threats of privatisation become greater. In
my opinion, the workers of the whole world need to organise themselves
in a global way, so as to combat all these problems from which we
suffer. For example, in my country, and the same is true almost
everywhere in My
country used to produce sugar which was exported to the Take myself, for example: I am a construction engineer, I have seen over the last few years the building costs soar to a percentage which puts them totally out of reach of a worker earning 60 euros a month, when the average cost of a home is 150,000 euros. This is why we must tackle all these problems together. Today's workers must encourage young people to take part in union activities, too. I submitted this problem to our Latin-American comrades, since day after day, in our countries, governments get elected which made one promise after another beforehand, but once they lead their country, they immediately become corrupt, obeying the orders of Capital, the IMF, the World Bank and North-American imperialism, whose onslaught we feel more and more each day. I hope that this international workers' conference will bring guidance to the poor peoples of the world, to the oppressed peoples, to oppressed workers, enabling us to open up another path for humanity, since otherwise it is the destruction of the destiny of mankind which is at stake, if all these calamities continue. I thought before that Europe held the solution, that's what they tell us where I come from, that Europe is wonderful, and we discover today that precisely in Europe, too, the same problems exist as we have in our poor countries, we see that in Europe, too, they are destroying the trade unions, privatising and that the people are also going back to ever-increasing poverty. But we do hope that the World Conference will henceforth create the necessary impetus to enable the workers to combat, with their workers' unions, to achieve socialism and the demands of the workers, for each people, in each region. Not a single backward step! ********** A CHINESE ACTIVIST ( Ladies and Gentleman, It is a valuable opportunity to discuss how to grasp the characteristics of international workers movement under globalization and how to effectively guarantee and safeguard the rights of labors together with so many friends from different countries. It is my honor to attend this meeting because its topic for discussion is the working class of the whole world, an issue that all people with a sense of social justice pay much attention to. As a professor doing research on industrial relations and labor laws, I hope to give my ideas about this issue from a perspective of a scholar. Economic globalization, at present, not only is a trend, but has become reality. The problem here is not that whether globalization should exist, but that how it exists. The essence of current globalization is capital globalization or global capitalization. The capital flows unrestrictedly in the world and the model of capitalism market economy has been copied to the whole world. This not only promotes the development of global economy, but also brings the inherent contradiction of capitalism, that is, the industrial conflict, to the whole world. The capital, especially multinational capital, occupies the benefits of economic development while working class, the immediate producers of social wealth, goes down the drain before the strong international capital. The working class of developed and developing countries both faces the problems such as the increase of unemployment, decrease of salary, deterioration of working conditions and decrease of social welfare and social insurance. Therefore, I agree with the slogan of World Social Forum --- "Another World is Possible". We need to strive for a more equal and just globalization. Under this background, international working class faces an austere challenge. International capital has formed a global coalition under WTO. They compete with each other for the benefits of their own, but the capital of different countries takes action as a whole to manage workers. This is because their common goal is to safeguard the interests of capital. On the other hand, globalization does not bring coalition and solidarity to international working class. On the contrary, to get a job opportunity, workers compete with each other, not only within individual workers, but within different enterprises, regions and countries. They also intensely compete for their existence. This is a kind of "race to the bottom". Therefore, decentralization and isolation put workers of different countries in an unfavorable position in the struggle against international capital. Under such international background, we must recur to Marx and must again advocate the principle of Marxism -- Proletarians of all countries unite. Through this union, the competition within workers can be reduced so as to realize the competition with international capital. The coalition is not only a union of workers from developed countries, but to unite workers from developed and developing countries. We need make research on many new theories and practical issues about how to form the new coalition of workers of all countries under globalization. I
am very glad to see that this meeting has put much emphasis on the
Chinese industrial relations and the Chinese workers. As a very
important part of capital globalization, Fortunately,
the Chinese government has paid attention to this problem and has
advocated to cultivate harmonious society since last year. This is an
active rectification for neglecting workers rights before. However, in Now the problem is how to achieve the guarantee of workers rights and further realize the balance and harmony of industrial relations. The point I want to emphasize is that in current world, only within the structure of law, workers rights can be protected through the solidity and strive of working class. International Labor Treaty, with the main purpose of workers protection, is the most powerful law weapon to strive for workers rights. The Treaty is formulated by three parties, employees, employers and government. Workers can protect their rights through this powerful weapon according to law and can gain the attention, sympathy and support from all society. Therefore, I greatly appreciate that international labor standards can be the main issue of this meeting. I think that it will be a feature of international workers movement under globalization that workers of all countries use International Labor Treaty as a weapon to strive for their own rights. I believe, the struggle of international workers will change the status quo of economic globalization and another more equal and harmonious world will eventually come. Finally, I reiterate that in order to achieve this goal, the basic condition is that Proletarians of all countries unite. Thank you. ********** ALAN BENJAMIN ( Co-Coordinator, Open World Conference Continuations
Committee Comrades and friends, The
delegates from the The
elections last November 2nd did not offer a choice for working people in
the United States that could end, or even put a halt to, those attacks.
The central reason Bush was elected was that there was no opposition to
his policies from his Democratic Party challenger. There was no credible
candidate, no credible party running against him that was willing to
challenge Bush's lies and fear-mongering and that refused to promote the
dictates of corporate Both
parties ran essentially on the same platform. The Democrats simply
echoed Bush's policies. Many people referred to Kerry as "Bush-Lite."
Some of us warned that a large number of working people in the But
that is only one part of the story. Despite the lack of a genuine
opposition, 60 million people voted against Bush. Moreover, 40 million
voters abstained, and many did not even register to vote. After all the
votes were tallied, Bush was elected with only 26.2% of the eligible
voters in the This
statistic reflects a major crisis in the political establishment and
allows us to say there is no mandate for Bush and that the question of a
mass working class alternative to the twin parties of the bosses is a
central, fundamental question for the survival of the This is not a minor question for those of us who are firmly anchored in the belief that we must defend tooth and nail our trade union movement, just as we seek to transform it into a vehicle to defend without wavering the specific interests of working people -- the very reason for which the trade unions were founded in the first place. A
split in the One wing of the trade union officialdom says correctly that we need more money for organizing. No one will dispute that. But this wing of the labor movement accompanies this proposal with a plan to restructure the trade union movement that includes forced mergers of national unions, the removal of the right of these merged unions to elect their own leaders, and the removal of autonomy from union locals and central labor councils -- thereby further concentrating all decision-making powers in the very top echelons of the officialdom. All this is to be done in the name of making the unions more effective instruments, with higher density to combat the policies of big business. This restructuring plan poses a major problem. The union movement is rooted in the principle that the trade union leaders can only take action on the basis on the mandate from the workers -- from the rank and file. Trade unionism is about accountability. It is about the election to office -- and removal from office should the mandate not be heeded -- of the trade union leaders at every level. It is about entrusting the workers themselves to organize to defend and advance their own specific interests as a class. This question is linked to the discussion raised in Daniel Gluckstein's opening report about the ILO conventions and about why we defend the ILO system of binding rights and cannot therefore accept seeing these rights transformed into non-constraining guidelines. This question is related as well to the proposed merger between the ICFTU and the WCL, which is aimed at integrating the trade union movement into the structures of "world governance" led by the IMF, the WTO and the World Bank. Removing the autonomy of union locals and councils, thus undermining trade union democracy, in the name of making the unions more efficient instruments of struggle may sound good, but for many of us it sounds like a corporate-style response to a very real crisis that afflicts the trade union movement. What will bring about higher union density and more effective unionism is a fightback vision and strategy that reaffirms the independence of the trade unions in relation to all attempts to co-opt the unions into safe channels for the corporations and those beholden to their interests. This
requires a break with the misguided policies of "labor-management
cooperation" and "partnerships" that have caused such
great damage to the Indeed,
these "jointism" schemes have been tested in the A true fightback strategy also requires that the trade unions break with the Democratic Party to build their own political party: a Labor Party. As long as the unions are joined at the hip to the Democrats, they will not be able to defend the interests of their members. The advocates of "union restructuring," however, are not calling for a break with the Democrats or a break with the "partnership" schemes. For its part, the majority wing of the trade union officialdom clearly lacks a vision and strategy to turn things around in favor of labor. Their motto is, essentially, let's do more of the same -- but with a few twists. "Yes,
the labor movement is in crisis," these officials say. "We
represent only 12% of the labor force in the There
has been a beginning of a discussion of all these questions in the While
there is a lot of talk about the possibility of a split within the There is broad support within the trade union movement, at all levels, for affirming the unity and independence of the labor movement in relation to the corporations and the politicians in their service. Many voices in fact have come forward after the November 2nd election to call on labor to build its own political instrument: a Labor Party based on the unions and open to all the oppressed. As
many of you may know, a Labor Party was formed in the This stagnation is the result of Bush's "selection" in 2000, which gave new life to the proponents of "lesser-evilism." It is also the result of a union merger that tied the hands of the main union that gave rise to the Labor Party; that is, the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers union (OCAW). When OCAW merged with the extremely conservative Paperworkers' union to form PACE, a sharp blow was dealt to the Labor Party. But just as important, the stagnation of the Labor Party, at least in my view, is the result of the Labor Party leadership's refusal from day one to begin the process of running its own candidates for political office. This has allowed multi-class parties, such as the Green Party, to occupy the political space that should have been occupied by the Labor Party. Having said this, following the 2004 presidential election, there has been a revival and resurgence of the discussion around the need for a Labor Party. The existing Labor Party -- which has continued to hang on by a very thin thread, with a number of the endorsing unions still on board -- is arguing forcefully that the crisis in the labor movement today is the result of labor's subordination to the Democratic Party. The existing Labor Party is urging the labor movement to break with the Democrats to build a genuine, mass-based Labor Party. The LP's national organizer, Mark Dudzic, has raised for the first time the need for labor to run its own candidates for political office against the candidates of the bosses' parties. This is new. In my view, our role today as partisans of working class and trade union independence, is to be the best organizers of slates of independent labor-community candidates for public office in the upcoming 2005 local and regional elections. These slates should be rooted in the fightback struggles of the oppressed -- such as the struggle waged today by education workers, teacher unions and the Black community in Oakland, Calif., to save public education, about which Brother Clarence Thomas spoke earlier. There is a wide base of potential support for this next step for independent labor political action among the unions that support U.S. Labor Against the War or that are on the front lines to defend Social Security, medicare, pensions, nurses' rights and public education, to name but a few of the sectors in struggle. I have been on a speaking tour in many cities across the United States to promote this call for independent labor-community candidates in the November 2005 elections and beyond to the 2008 presidential election. Everywhere, working people are open to this discussion. Anger
at the Democrats for kow-towing to Bush is enormous. Many workers point
out that the Democrats are even trying to out-do Bush and the
Republicans. In January, 27 leading Democratic officials called on Bush
to increase the military appropriations for the war in Anger
at the Democrats is perhaps most acute within the fighting sectors of
the Black struggle. As Clarence Thomas pointed out, the Million Worker
March arose primarily as an initiative of Black workers who were sick
and tired of being taken for granted by all the politicians and who felt
it was time for working people to organize in our name. This was the
meaning of the October 17th March in Black Workers For Justice (BWFJ) and other Black organizations in recent texts have posed the need to build an independent political organization of Black workers to take on the Republocrats. Such an independent Black political organization, they say, could join forces, as equals -- not as second-class citizens -- with other sectors of the trade union movement to form a genuine Labor Party. The Black political organization would be an organized component of such a Labor Party. Indeed, the openings to advance the struggle for independent political action are far more numerous and encouraging today than they have been in many years. So
to conclude my remarks: Many in the I totally disagree. What is necessary, more than ever, is to defend the trade unions against all its enemies and detractors. We must preserve these instruments and work within them to direct them to fight for the interests of their members and of working people at large. And most important, we must advocate and put forward a strategy for independent labor political action. Our task is to work in the labor movement and within all the fightback struggles that are emerging to help move them forward politically, so that in 2008, if we are successful, out of the labor movement, out of this process, there can be a candidate representing labor that can challenge the Democrats and Republicans for political office. Thank you. ******************** YANNICK SIBELIN ( Trade Unionist Daniel’s report, and various other contributions, have spelled out exactly what is at stake for the working class around the world. We are in a phase where the attacks by capital arrive from every direction and with an unprecedented violence. The
working class therefore has no other solution but to unite in order to
resist, organized within independent class organizations. This is why my
organization, the CGT, in The reforms of the structures of the CGT, of it’s financing, which occupied its preceding congresses, have the sole objective to deprive the trade unions of the power to decide the political direction of their organizations. The new element today, is the violence of these attacks. It is the level at which they arrive. That a general secretary denounces a decision taken by his own body, the National Confederation Committee, a decision which represents the opinion of the vast majority of the trade unionists and the members, and that he denounces this decision with such force, shows the importance of the deadlines which are proposed to us. That
these attacks come with such force and at such a high level, is a clear
indication that things are urgent, and that this is because the
resistance of the workers’ movement is able to block the intentions of
capital. This should give us encouragement for an eventual victory of
the No vote on the European Constitution in This also demonstrates that if the No vote wins, this, will be a major victory for the working class against the implementing of the destruction of all of their rights. The CGT is therefore at the heart of the class struggle. This is why an ever increasing number of activists, aware of what is at stake, intervene to maintain the independence of the CGT. With regard to this, we have published an information bulletin produced by activists of the CGT which many of you have seen and which is available here for those who would like to obtain it. Today, we resist the blows of capital, and we must oppose all measures which represent a backward step, every social regression, and every restriction of liberty. Together we must insist upon the liberation of all imprisoned trade unionists, including Miron Cozma of course and all of the others. The
working class will benefit much more from meetings such as this
conference, than from losing it’s soul by participating today in Our comrade Hébert reminded us that the CGT-FO had voted against the European Constitution at the CES, but he forgot to say that FO, also, had not called upon members to participate in today’s march, which is also a point of support for the class struggle. The salvation of the working class will therefore require the reinforcement of it’s organizations following the route of independent trade unionism, and to achieve this, as has been the subject of many of the contributions, activists workers must take hold of their organizations, or win back the control of them, which is the only essential solution for all of us. ******************** LORENZO VARALDO ( Teacher, member of the leadership UIL-Turin
Teachers’ I have received my mandate from the "National Committee for the NO to the European Constitution, against Reform of the Italian Constitution, against Regionalization". I
would like to begin my contribution by reminding you of what happened in
On
Tuesday evening, Berlusconi appeared on television and in view of his
government's crisis, in view of the regional elections which are to take
place at the beginning of April and which could be the beginning of a
new political crisis, he said: "In September, we will withdraw our
troops from It
is perfectly clear that But
on the other hand, Prodi, the head of the opposition, which is preparing
to govern along with Bertinotti, the head of Communist "Refoundation",
had declared 2 weeks ago: "Bush and the Prodi,
former president of the European Commission, dictated from There have been strikes and demonstrations in all sectors. 90% of doctors have been on strike, there have been several strikes in the transport sector, and there has been a general strike in the textile sector, a strike at Alitalia, which is throwing out 5,000 workers. This widespread action was each time taken against the E.U.'s directives, against the European Constitution. I am a teacher and on several occasions teachers have demonstrated and have been on strike to protest again the reform of schooling, which is dictated by the E.U. Tomorrow, there will be a general strike of civil servants (i.e. all the public sector), for the defence of the national work contract, for the pay rises the government doesn't want to grant, arguing: "there is the stability pact" (200,000 people demonstrated in Rome on March 18th). But more particularly, I would like to concentrate on the combat of the Fiat workers. I
come from So
the Fiat workers have spontaneously demonstrated, several times, they
have marched through the streets of They
were demonstrating to get the layoffs cancelled, to say No to
relocation, to defend their jobs. And they have demonstrated and been on
strike to say No to the European Union, No to the European Constitution.
Berlusconi did indeed declare: "I can grant a few more exemptions
to Fiat, but I cannot intervene to save the workers if Fiat's plans are
to do otherwise, because the E.U. forbids that sort of
intervention". And Prodi went to see the Fiat workers in Given
this situation, we, the National Committee, launched an appeal to get
all the layoffs cancelled, to say No to relocation in The heart of the discussion is the independence of the unions and we wish to bring our contribution to the combat against the unions getting integrated. Prodi has announced that, along with Bertinotti, he wants a new Social Pact for the application of the European Union's policies. Berlusconi has announced that he would give money to Fiat again in the name of "competitiveness". There are a lot of union leaders who agree, who say "We need a social pact, we need to develop our competitiveness". But competitiveness means exemptions, which are not without consequence on the workers, because they mean that the State then makes cuts in the budgets of schooling, of contracts, of the health system. Thus it is impossible to fight at one and the same time in the interest of the workers and in that of the capitalists. We need to fight for the independence of the trade unions, so that they stay in their place: defending the working class and fight against the Social Pact, which goes along with the European Union's policies. The workers have shown that they do have strength and willpower: this conference will provide us with valuable support in combating the integration of the unions, the E.U.'s Constitution and the E.U.'s directives. ********** SANYAL CHANDAN KANTI ( General Secretary, National Federation of Sales
Representatives Good
morning and our greetings to all the participants who have come from all
over the world. Our special thanks to the organisers of Now
I am here from a National federation in The pharmaceutical industry, also like other grand commercial industries, has been undergoing a process of consolidation of capital on one hand and rapid unformalisation of workers, under the goad of flexibilisation of workers and others. A rat race to acquire the monopoly position, by centralising capital in order to maximise profit and minimise competition, is fastening on, which is evident from majors mega majors and acquisitions during the last decade. Just for information, a global scenario was, you will observe, that the giant multinational companies in pharmaceuticals during this era have merged under mega mergers and acquisitions, like Glaxo, Welcome, Smith-Kline and Region, these are the three firms which have united together. Ext, Perusal, Sandoz, Siba and Myriam designed another group. Then Pfizer, B are another group. Astra and Geneca are in another group. So world wide there are a lot of other instances where the monopolistic system is on the increase. And following all these global developments, there are job losses, which have been enormously discussed here. The same situation prevails also in pharmaceutical industry. As
far as the situation in I
would like to stay on one point: that in the WTO agreement, the TRIP is
one of the most important clause. The trade related intellectual
properties. We have discussed a lot on the flexibilisation,
deregulation, etc, but incidentally TRIPs is a subject where too much
restrictions are being imposed. So the patent right which is being
extended as far as the WTO order and it is being dictated that every
country, those which are having their own patent law, shall have to be
amended. Accordingly, in So
I here request ILC to consider that TRIP matter in a separate way by
your organising workshops and in details, Now this is on the one side. I
also reflected on the national healthcare system against which we have
opposed and we have taken up with the central ministry against the
privatisation of the public sector units, then against new patent
regime, against irrational drugs and formulations, against hermetical
marketing, for proper price control, against outlabel the prescriptions,
and against drug abuses. Our design in the pharmaceutical arena, as far
as the political situation we have in The former government was outvoted, and after having that new government, the expectations were much that there would be certain changes, but as it is observed, all the details have been followed here, and the deregulation and other things are going on, as I have already told, by ordinance they have amended the patent act, then next they have opened all the markets, even for the retail market here in India. Construction, coal mining, other markets are being opened by the same government. And last of all, I have heard of use which the speakers have told already, that the change of rulers did not make any change whatsoever in following up the dictates of the multinationals and the world capital. There
in I also share the view that the change of rulers, even where it is being ruled by Marxists, and Left socialist front, there are also the situation did not see any change whatsoever. It is being propagated that this economic policy is inevitable, and unavoidable. So the struggle reached is contriving. Finally I just expect that we are confident that renewed meaningful directions in this context will surely emerge from this World conference of an international committee of workers and peoples, on these days. Thank you. ********** JOSE LIMAICO ( Movement for a Workers' Party Dear
comrades, I bring you a most fraternal greeting from the people of First of all, may I introduce myself: my name is Pepe Limaico, I have not been mandated by a union, I am rather a political activist, working on the construction of the Movement for a Workers' Party in my country. Unfortunately, I must repeat that I am not a union member and the reason for that is precisely because of the political projects applied in my country by the successive neo-liberal governments. I
would also like to tell you how pleased I am to speak at this
conference, in particular here in the third city of You
are probably also wondering what happened in And
that is not all: the living standard is getting worse every day, in These
policies are set out in a "letter of intention" signed on
February 9th, 2003. We have analysed the contents of this letter, which
is practically identical - as my comrade Erwin Salazar, delegate from What do these letters of intention contain? The commitment to carry through to completion the privatisation of oil, water, electricity, telephone, in other words the privatisation of those companies which are the most profitable on the American continent, as in the rest of the world. We wondered whether we ought to simply watch this all happening. No, dear compatriots, no, dear comrades. Today, there is a great deal for us to do in America and in the world. And it is precisely this conference, which will bring us the motivation and the political and ideological consistency necessary for the pursuit of our combat. In Ecuador, we have started up a movement for the construction of a workers' party. For our part, we are convinced that we need such a tool, a political instrument that will help us to unite, to give a direction to our combat and give it the necessary avant-garde characteristic. If that were not the case, all would be lost. Of course, it is not easy. In Ecuador too, as I already mentioned, the empire's "butler" has prepared the ground, so as to repress, to punish any revolt from the people, any uprising, as they say, of the oppressed and exploited people. Lucho Gutierrez has become a master of courts of justice, of electoral tribunals and of the instruments of control of the Ecuadorian State. And he has done that along with the parties which are supposedly left-wing, the Ecuadorian Socialist Party is playing his game, another supposedly left-wing party, the Popular Democratic Movement (a Maoist-Stalinist-type party), is also playing his game, in a purely opportunist way, it is also taking part in the sharing of the cake. That is why we think, why we are certain, that we need new political representatives, for the Ecuadorian workers. To conclude, I would like to invite you to check for yourselves the work we have already undertaken and are pursuing in Ecuador. We have published a newspaper to distribute our information. We are committed to proclaiming the class struggle. We have no choice but to find the way of retrieving the trade unions and making them act in line with the reason for their existence: as a tool for the class struggle. We believe in solidarity throughout the world, because only the combat of the Proletarians of the whole world will make us strong enough to progress and to change the present system. Thank you. *********** VITALY KOULIK (Ukraine) Borotba Organisation Dear comrades, there are delegates from Russia, Ukraine and Byelorussia taking part in this conference. The comrades from Moldavia were unable to come, because the European Union refused them visas. All our countries border on the European Union and are also at the centre-point of the United States' interests in our region. We are made to feel the pressure of Brussels and Washington. After the so-called "Orange Revolution" in Ukraine, the government of Yushchenko and Tymoshenko accelerated the process of destruction of labour laws and the attacks against trade union rights. Today, they talk of re-privatising companies and of the withdrawal of troops from Iraq. But it isn't true. In actual fact, the intention is simply to take the factories away from their present owners and hand them over to other owners, friends and relatives of Yushchenko. Whatever is done, it is the workers who are the losers. That is why what we need is not re-privatisation, but nationalisation. About withdrawing troops from Iraq they are also just pulling wool over our eyes. They are only going to withdraw 100 of the 1,800 there. The others will have to stay and fill the ranks of the Iraqi puppet army. As from May this year, Ukraine will join the so-called Bologna process for education. What that actually means for us is that in Ukraine education will no longer be free of charge and that its quality will deteriorate. Already for the past two years, we have been fighting to keep the Soviet labour legislation in Ukraine. Under the former government, it was still possible for us to oppose the government reforms, but now the new Minister of Labour wants to eliminate the labour laws and make us go over to the European Social Charter. Yushchenko and Tymoshenko talk of democracy and of defending social rights, but an example will show you what that means coming from them. This year, we celebrate the 60th anniversary of the victory against fascism. The government has decided that there should not be a victory procession and that the money that would have been spent on the ceremonies should go to the veterans. But they are pulling wool over our eyes, because the cost of the procession is 2,000 times higher than the amount to be given to the veterans. In Moldavia, the situation is farcical. The communists got the majority at the legislative elections, thanks to the support received from the United States and the European Union, but the Communist Party of Moldavia has nothing communist about it, apart from the name. Voronin, its president, is for joining the European Union, for destroying the labour legislation. Moldavia is the poorest of all the countries of the Ex-Soviet Union. Salaries are around 30 dollars per month, but Moldavia, too, has sent soldiers to Iraq and the communist government doesn't want to withdraw them. That is undoubtedly more important than having jobs inside the country. In Central Asia, the situation is even more tragic. I was recently in Uzbekistan, in one of the largest companies of Central Asia. It is the Metal Works of the town of Novoi. Social benefits have been conserved there, there are kindergartens, etc., the wages are 100 dollars per month, but as the factory produces gold and uranium, the United States are demanding that it be privatised. Elsewhere in Uzbekistan, the average wage is 40 dollars per month and some children already work from the age of seven. If the factory is privatised, 20,000 people are going to loose their jobs and the town of Novoi, with its 60,000 inhabitants, entirely dependent on that factory, will become, like so many others, a ghost town. All this explains why I support the initiative of our comrade from Pakistan, that we should co-ordinate our initiatives for May 1st. We support the campaign for the liberation of Miron Cozma, because I could find myself in the same situation as him, as could any one of our comrades in Ukraine, Moldavia or Byelorussia. We must unite in our struggle; our force is in our unity. ********** BENOIT ESSIGA (Cameroon) Confederal President CGT-Liberté (General Workers'
Confederation - Liberty) I am President of CGT-Liberté (General Workers' Confederation - Liberty) of Cameroon and am representing that confederation at this conference. My country is not very well known on the global political scene, its leaders are very discreet, thereby hiding their repressive nature and resolutely vicious character. These leaders are frequently gentler than lambs when faced by their masters, yesterday's colonisers, or by the multilateral institutions of international high finance, but reveal themselves to be wolves, or rather untameable and pitiless lions, when faced by their ravaged and despairing population. We are invited to debate here about the defence of the independence of the working class movement, the defence of the International Labour Organisation and its conventions, the stand taken on globalisation, subsequent to the Washington consensus, the defence of our collective benefits. But before answering those questions, I would like to rapidly describe to you the dramatic situation in Cameroon into which the labour movement is plunged, and with it the desolation of the working class as a whole. Today exist six national groups of affiliated trade unions in Cameroon. It is important to point out to you that before 1991, when a multi-party political system was reintroduced in Cameroon, there was one only, stemming from the single party since 1972. But government interference within that group of affiliated trade unions, after it had declared its independence, and also internal ideological contradictions brought about its splitting up into the six different groups I just mentioned. Those divisions, fuelled by the government by means of corruption, intimidation and persecution, have resulted in the development of two completely different union movements in my country. Firstly, there are those who belong to the movement which openly supports government action and its suicidal reforms, then secondly those who are attached to the independence needed by their organisations and make demands when necessary, protesting against the austere measures which are forced upon us by the bilateral and multilateral financial institutions. The confederation I am at the head of naturally belongs to the second movement. Of course, you can well imagine, confronted with our activity and our firm stand, that the authorities, far from negotiating with us, rather tend to organise repression against our union leaders. That repression can be loss of job, imprisonment, etc., etc. As an example to illustrate this, I would like to tell you of my own particular experience. I would like to remind you that I was myself a victim of that repression from 2003 to 2004. It was while my railway union was efficiently defending the interests of the rail workers, confronted by the CAMRAIL Company, which was buying us up, that I was suddenly fired for no motive, other than my union activity, in January 2003. We were demanding an increase in wages and pensions, maintenance work on the railway tracks, for their poor state had already caused several derailments, paralysing rail transport and worst of all making it terribly dangerous. I was fired with the collusion of the Minister of Employment and Labour and the Social Security. A few days later, I was arrested, along with all my officers of the Railway Union, 14 members in all, and locked up in the political prison of my country's capital. Forbidden to communicate with anybody, we were accused of having caused all the derailments that had occurred in January 2003 and of having bought arms with the intention of assassinating the general director, who came from Belgium, and his fellow-workers. Thanks to the reaction of the International Liaison Committee and other international organisations, we were freed one week later. But that was not the end of the affair. One month after being freed, it started again. We were arrested and imprisoned 7 times, in a small town located over 110 kilometres from the capital, in April 2003. A new international campaign was started up and we were freed again mid-May 2003. The affair was brought before the Criminal Court and we were acquitted purely and simply because there was no substantial proof of anything. But in the meantime, comrades, they continued their harassment and it was the turn of my wife, Thérèse Béatrice Mengue, militant in the same union, to be fired and jailed at the main prison. Her imprisonment lasted nine months and seven days. The International Liaison Committee, the Women's Committee, the International Committee against Repression, all tirelessly attempted one action and campaign after another to get her freed. She at last came out in April 2004 and recently, she too was acquitted by the court, on January 18th, 2005. For showing such solidarity and in the name of the workers grouped together within CGT-Liberté, I would like to thank from the bottom of our hearts the International Liaison Committee, the Women's Committee and the International Committee against Repression. It's not just a question of these examples I have given you, what we have to combat is the whole policy of dismantling all the different forms of workers' resistance. This tyranny carried out by political regimes has been set up on an international scale by applying the directives which come from global imperialism, as is shown by what has been described by many of the speakers who have preceded me. This capitalist policy, inspired by the supposedly "developed" nations, the G8, the G7 and of which the Bretton Woods institutions are the executives, is applied invariably in all the countries of Africa and produces just as invariably the same social consequences, as everyone has said, privatisation, layoffs, etc. We must thus take action. One comrade said that the independent trade union movement must also include China. I would say: the international trade union movement needs to include all the different organisations that resist within each nation. Structuring ourselves for permanent mobilisation within each State is a first answer to that question. How should we go about it? For it is indeed from the starting-point of efficient organisation within each nation that the international movement will find a fitting basis for the launching of any action on a global scale, going beyond forums and other ways of bringing us together. The struggle for trade union independence and the defence of the collective benefits (conquered by the workers in the past), must first of all be envisaged on a national scale, but supported by permanent international solidarity. For trade union independence is the link in the chain, without which democracy is not possible, and without democracy there is no hope that workers and the working populations in general will flourish. Yes, let's defend trade union independence and those collective benefits, Yes, let's defend the International Labour Organisation, the preamble of its Constitution and its international conventions. No, to "global governance", No, to the destruction of nation-states. ********** MARKUS SOKOL (Brazil) Member of the National Executive Committee of the PT
(Workers' Party) Hello comrades, I am speaking on behalf of the town councillor present here with us today, Adilson Mariano, member of the PT (Workers' Party) in Joinville and also on my own behalf, as member of the National Leadership Body of the PT (Workers' Party) of Brazil, for the movement therein called "O Trabalho". To begin with, I bring you greetings from a meeting held on March 4th and 5th, 2005, at which 200 delegates were present, from 10 states of the country, thus representing 5,000 members. That meeting began with the contribution of the delegation of the International Liaison Committee, which was in Venezuela. Indeed, for us - as, I believe, for the workers throughout the world - we who know that all the governments, throughout the world, are ruling us with the same policies and that it is up to the workers to cut their own path, it is extremely important to see that the workers of Venezuela can also support some measures actually taken by their government, which back them up and reinforce the sovereignty of their nation. That is all the more true for us, in Brazil, who elected Lula, the head of our party, the PT, two and a half years ago, and after two years of a coalition government, Lula is still applying the same policies as the previous government. We see that on the question of employment. We heard witness of what occurred when factories were occupied, how can we create new jobs, if we cannot even defend the jobs in the factories going bankrupt? I could speak to you about the problem of the young people, who are confronted with the reform of the universities, which is in actual fact a problem of them being submitted to the demands of private education. But I am going to concentrate on Agrarian Reform, which is without any doubt the most important question at the moment in our country. First of all, because the only possible way to combat hunger, is Agrarian Reform. The policy of "allowances", of grants, decided by the so-called participative budget, that results in disaster. In our country, there is a song, which says that charity either kills by shame or humiliates citizens. And that is true. The electoral defeat of our party, the PT, at the recent elections in São Paulo and most particularly in the all-too-well-known town of Porto Alegre - the capital of the World Social Forum and of the so-called "participative budget" - and I say it is only so-called or badly named, because there is no REAL participation, almost everything has already been decided, the payment of the debt has already been decided and all that remains, it is up to the different movements to fight over it in a process which, in reality, we must call integration. The dictatorship of the debt, which never ceases to exert itself on the country, can be seen precisely, too, in Agrarian Reform. Lula had said during his electoral campaign, that if he could do only one single thing, while in government, it would be Agrarian Reform. However, two years have gone by and there are even less landless families managing to set themselves up than in the two years preceding his election! The official figures, which are contested by the church and by the Movement of the Landless, mention only 117,000 families finally set up, of the 2 million families still waiting, throughout the country. But at the same time, during those 2 years, there were 70,000 families that got expulsed among the rare ones to have any land, so they have now rejoined the ranks of the landless. That is how, in actual fact, the question of the Landless Families remains unchanged. The situation has even got worse, if we take into consideration that, under this new government, the massacre of these landless workers continues. It must be pointed out that these massacres are carried out by organised militia. We call those militia "Jagunços". Five landless peasants were assassinated in November, three in December and a further four in February. And all that is happening because we are continuing to pay a debt which makes it impossible to carry out Agrarian Reform, despite the fact that there is even a Minister of Agrarian Reform, Mr Rossetto, who claims to be left wing, whereas, in reality, he continues applying the same policy as went on before. At the meeting of March 4th and 5th, a survivor of one of these massacres, in Felizburgo (State of Minas Gerais), said that the Landless are still waiting for Lula to change policy and to carry out Agrarian Reform. But now, with the announcement that the budget for Agrarian Reform will be cut by yet another 2,000,000,000 (which will only leave 1,500,000,000), that comrade concluded that it's not possible, that "they must take up the struggle for their class rights". And that struggle, as has already been said here over and over again, is both national and international. I want to tell you about something else: you just cannot imagine the repercussions there have been in our country, be it in the large cities or out in the remotest rural areas, to the letter sent by a group of American trade-unionists, with as first signatories: Baldemar Velasquez, Alan Benjamin, Ed Rosario and others. This letter, which asks that the assassins of the Landless be punished and that a minimum of 200,000 families out of the plan of one million families be installed immediately, by a special government commission, the Plinio Sampaio Commission, has had extremely important repercussions throughout our country. Among the different repercussions of that letter, I bring you one here. It is a letter addressed to this Madrid Conference by the leaders of the rural workers' union of Governador Valadares, in the north of the State of Minas Gerais, the region where one of those last massacres took place. They write: "it is with great satisfaction that we discover and countersign the letter addressed to President Lula and to the Minister of Agrarian Reform, Rossetto, because we are very worried by the policy of the government, which is not carrying out Agrarian Reform. We want to exchange our experience and become aware of the struggle of rural workers in other countries." The letter ends with a "proposition addressed to this conference, that of holding an international meeting on agrarian problems and the situation of the workers". They end by writing: "it is with great enthusiasm that we would help to organise such a meeting to take place in Brazil" and they sign: "looking forward to your answer, the leaders of the rural workers' unions of Governador Valadares." We are engaged in a campaign for Agrarian Reform, those of us who are here, the Brazilian delegation, we do not intend to adapt ourselves to fit in with the policies of the government, even less do we intend to desert the organisations that the workers have constructed so as to obtain what they demand. We are going to defend the historic origins of these organisations through to the bitter end, whatever the consequences, that is the meaning of our current campaign, which we request you to reinforce and support. The Landless Movement is convening, for the month of April, a huge march in Brasilia, the capital of our country, to demand that Agrarian Reform be implemented. What we have to say to the Landless workers, to the rural workers, is: "take the land, occupy the farms", that is the only way to obtain Agrarian Reform, the only way to force the government to recognise Agrarian Reform as a reality. We invite all those of you here to sign and have signed the letter written by Baldemar Velasquez, Alan Benjamin and Ed Rosario (the last two of whom are here with us). You can be sure, comrades, that Agrarian Reform is the beginning of the breaking away from the IMF. Agrarian Reform means reviving the profound movement that constituted the PT, the CUT, the Landless Movement. It is that profound movement which enabled Lula to become President of Brazil. Agrarian Reform is part of the wave that is shaking the whole continent right now, which brought in new governments, in which the people laid their hope. That is the case in Uruguay, it is what is destabilising the regime in Bolivia, it is what makes necessary giving support to the measures, which the people of Venezuela have obtained. Throughout the continent, the masses have their role to play and I can assure you that, even in Brazil, and particularly in Brazil, the people and the Brazilian workers have not yet had their last word. Thank you very much. ********** BLAS ORTEGA (Spain) Doctor of Medicine, member of the trade union federation for public services (FSP-UGT) First of all, may I introduce myself? I am a doctor and a trade unionist of the Federation of Public Services of the UGT. In Spain, we have what we call a State comprising autonomies, a monarchy with regions, and I would like to speak mainly of the effects of this regionalization on our health system. Today, we have 17 regional health services. One for each region. Some of them, such as La Rioja, have a population smaller than just a single district of Madrid or Valencia. I shall speak about my region. In 1987, a law created the Valence Health Service, intended to protect and promote health and preventive measures in the community of Valence, responsible for the management and the providing of those services. Today, the Regional Parliament is examining a decree, which is intended to convert the Valence Health Service into the Valence Health Agency. And what is advocated, for example, in Article 1 of this decree?: "the day to day running and the administration of the health centres, services and establishments can be achieved directly or indirectly, with their own or external means, which can be public or private, agreements or conventions being permitted with people or with public or private entities, likewise can be developed systems of management either integrated or in partnership". As a resolution of my union section pointed out, "it is question here of a leap in quality". The administration may well declare that it is creating an autonomous body so as to improve the health of the population, but that is no guarantee of anything whatsoever. Even less so, when it applies the drastic budget restrictions which are demanded so as to keep the deficit at zero. Seeing it set up such objectives and state clearly the intention of privatising, we can only fear the worst. After Alcira, Torrevieja and Denia - three hospitals already privatised - how many more hospitals do they wish to privatise? If we don't manage to put a stop to this, will they leave us with even one public hospital still working? In Article 3 of the same decree, we read that the Valence Health Agency "will be governed within the framework of a management plan", which according to the law "should bring about stimulation and commitment to efficiency in the health service, in the sense that it will enable the objectives to be clarified and bring about competition, permanently controlled by the health authorities, between the different 'agents' (people or entities providing services)". The intention is apparently to open up a health market in which multinational health service companies will be able to make profits thanks to the population falling ill. Beyond that, this management plan is based on the search for efficiency, in opposition to the effectiveness that the law that had set up the Valence Health Service had proclaimed as its objective. Effectiveness involves having to find the appropriate means to reach a given objective, efficiency involves, on the contrary, using the means available in such a way that they produce the best results possible. They are completely different. It is now question of abandoning the declared objective of protecting and improving the health of the population, and preferring instead to make use of and compress the resources, depending on their economic viability, because in a market economy the only type of viability is profitability. And as the resources are limited, more and more limited because of the obligation to run the services in such a way that there can be no deficit and also because of the "autonomy" debt, produced by the Valence government itself because of its preference for speculative markets, we fear that it will be necessary to reduce the services provided and that they will also no longer be free of charge. Fundamentally, what it comes down to is the destruction of a public service and the consequences of that, for the workers and the entire population, will inevitably be terrible. And at the very same time, they are destroying the statute of the Health Workers, because until they have done that, privatisation is not possible. In application of the European directive on the number of hours worked, those extra days that staff have worked because of the lack of sufficient means, which had to be compensated in one way or another at the end of each year, will no longer be compensated at all. Of course, hospital staffs have risen in protest against this. What's more, salaries now become dependent on productivity. That's the way things work now: objectives are set up for each hospital, each service, each doctor, and the doctor, taking into account these objectives, thus on criteria of economic viability and not on scientific criteria, must choose which patient will or will not be treated in the hospital, and how. So, of course, that brings about individual salaries. It is thus easy for anyone to understand the connexion there is between the "European Constitution", the Treaty of Maastricht and the attacks against the system of public health. The situation existing in my region is the same as that of other regional health services. For example, in Madrid today, eight hospitals are in the process of being privatised and in Sevilla a religious order has taken over a newly built hospital and has forbidden abortion and even family planning services inside that hospital. And the same things are happening everywhere. This policy aims at opposing the workers of one region to those of the other regions, opposing the doctors to the nurses, opposing the health professionals to the population. This policy is heading us for chaos. I would like to conclude with the following remarks: "in order to prevent privatisation of the public health system, we must bring together all the different groups already trying to resist and we must achieve a single system of public health, national and not regional, to which sufficient money will be provided, and THAT is not compatible with the Maastricht criteria. And just as all the Spanish workers must unite in their struggle, it is also essential that throughout Europe all the workers bring together their efforts and prevent the social conquests and labour rights from being sacrificed in the name of the European Union. Thank you. ********** MARGARITA PAGARETE (Portugal) Student I am a student in Portugal. I have come here because I believe that the only way to deal with capitalism in the world is by organising ourselves all together, with internationalism. Capitalism, via its institutions, is attacking all the young people. At the same time as it is deregulating the very foundations of our country, public services and schooling in particular, it is also providing all possible means of derangement for young people: drugs, false information via social communication which is completely corrupt and gives as the one and only message to young people: that's the way the world is, there is no solution, there is nothing you can do. Our job is to say: there is something to be done, it is possible, as we see in France, where the young people are demonstrating because they want to keep their "bac", the national exam [at the end of high school, giving the right to enter university, which is marked anonymously and of equal value throughout the country = translator's explanatory note], despite the policies of regionalization of the European Union. Here, we can see that there are people who want to get organised all together, in all countries throughout the world, and that young people everywhere are faced with the same conditions, the same terrible situations. In the universities in Portugal there is a reform called "LMD" (or Bachelor, Master, Doctor), as in France, in Spain, in Ukraine. This reform is being forced upon all the countries in Europe, but behind it is the will to cut off State financing of universities, to reduce degree courses, all that with a single aim: turn universities into factories for providing cheap labour. That is what capitalism wants to do with young people. In Portugal, we are fighting against that. What we need is a big European movement against it. It is now 2 years since the war began in Iraq. In Portugal, in a few hours time, the workers are going to demonstrate against the war, against this barbarity. Our government was elected recently and one of its first measures was: we are going to reinforce our relationship with NATO and with the United Nations. What can we answer to that? We must unite in all countries. In Portugal, we are organising a campaign of signatures against the war. We will continue to fight against all the capitalist measures and we are going to build up an organisation that will defend our rights. NO to war! YES, to internationalism! YES, to revolution! ********** JUNG SIKHWA (Korea) Vice President, Korean Metal Workers Federation (KMF-KCTU) Greetings to all the comrades My name is Jung Sikhwa from KCTU South Korea. I already met you in San Francisco 4 years ago. At that time, I spoke of the struggle of Korean workers against the economic neo-liberalism globalisation and permanent contract work in South Korea. Today, I wish to speak of the struggle of Korean workers and the crisis that is upsetting the Korean labour movement in the neo-liberalism globalisation. I'll start with the negative aspects. First of all, we had planned a KCTU conference for last March 15th. The object was to take a stand on a tripartite committee comprising government, employers and workers; it was cancelled for reasons of agenda. Actually the groups opposed to the committee had it forcefully cancelled. Up to now we have stood up to police and gangsters' brutality used by capitalists. But now, we have to face a violent drive within the ranks of the KCTU. Ideological dfferences have emerged. That is just the visible tip of the crisis tearing at the fabric of the KCTU. In the same way, differences are upsetting political parties and causing a crisis. In South Korea, the KLDP (Democratic Labour Party of Korea) had 10 MP's elected on April 15th of last year, a first in fifty years. Now rifts are beginning to show within the KLDP. A second problem is that permanent contract workers are not interested in the struggle of casual workers. Trade unionism and pro governmentalism in larger firms are heading down. Permanent contract workers are content with their situation. That is the trend today. Last year, the KMWF, the metal works federation I am a member of, had the Ship Building Union and the Thunder Heavy Industry Union, the largest ship building unions in the world, regrouping 25,000 members, excluded. We excluded them because they refused to fight casual jobs alongside us. In February, in the Kia automobile group that also regroups 25,000 unionised workers, the steering committee had to resign because it was found guilty of corruption" I shall also speak of the Hyundai automobile group. A union of casual workers is being set up inside that group. When our comrades are struggling, the company guards turn off water and power and they also resort to violence. But the permanent-contract workers who witness those actions turn away from the struggle. They do not wish casual workers to get some strength by getting unionised because if a second crisis of the IMF bursts, they will no longer be protected from a second round of redundancies. Workers refrain from taking part in the struggle for that kind of reason. I am going to mention another negative point: the union of Korean Telecommunications (KT) that used to regroup 50,000 members has now fallen to 30,000. That union accepted to be co-opted in the restructuring of the company and the redundancy plans that occured when relocation and branch outsourcing took place. Repressive measures are sometimes quite tragic as many union activists are evicted by employers who have them committed to psychiatric hospital for mental diseases or other such methods. Larger firms are simply delighted by this weakness of the present Korean trade union movement. Besides, there are ideological tiffs within leading groups and we have failed to adapt when rank-and-file "casual labour" are taking industrial actions. However, I'd like to keep up hope. First, the KCTU has been on general strike for a whole year. The government tried to pass a law favouring casual labour but it had to postpone it several times because of the general strike. Last November, the government was foiled once, then again in February of this year; it intends to pass it coming April. We will then launch another general strike. The KCTU and our union, the KMWF are constantly involved in the fight. That is how a new Korean working class is developing in a context of economic neo-liberal globalisation of capitals. The KLDP, the labour democratic party, has 10 representatives in Parliament but it is bolstering its political activities. We are trying to devise new solutions for a new labour movement. We are trying to find new guidelines for the labour movement; a movement that would comprise all the workers, permanent-contract as well as casual-contract workers, that would also comprise the whole population that is increasingly getting impoverished in the framework of globalisation. In this situation, I think that the links with the ILC are very important. Unionists from South Korea also think that the world-wide struggle of labour movements and of peoples in an international framework is of the utmost importance in this situation of globalisation of economic neo-liberalism. When I come back to you two years from now, I hope we will have found better solutions to the present problems. To conclude, I should like to add a word on the nuclear issue in North Korea. About the tensions in North-East Asia caused by the North Korean Nuclear agenda, the labour movement is constantly fighting in favour of denuclearization and détente through [daily] struggle and work. Comrades, I hope to see you again soon. Thank you ********** ANDY GRIGGS (USA) Chair, Human Rights Committee United Teachers of Los
Angeles (UTLA) Comrades, Thank you for the chance to speak to you today on behalf of education workers in the United States. I bring you greetings from the United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA), the second largest teachers union local in the United States, representing 46,000 education workers, canteen workers, gardeners, and teachers and health and human services workers. Last month UTLA held an election, in which a progressive slate of activists was swept into power, taking 4 out of 7 city-wide officer positions in 26 out of 32 seats on the board of directors. As one of those elected to the board, I look forward to beginning my 3 year term this July. I guarantee that we will not be as accommodating and reactive as was the leadership before. We will rather be pro-active and put up resistance to attacks on education and educational workers. And these attacks are manifold and come from many directions in the US, as well as throughout the world. We have the "No Child Left Behind Act," which is the authorizing legislation for cutting K-12 education. The goal as stated is laudable and aimed at reforming education, but at its bottom line, it is the destruction of public education in the US. There are three basis thrusts to the law: No. 1: improving student achievements; No. 2: guaranteeing quality teachers; No. 3: ensuring school and district accountability. For No. 1: The law requires that by the year 2014, 100% of all students and all grade levels will be proficient in reading and mathematical standards. Quite frankly, I think it would be hard to show that even 50% of the politicians who voted for this law would be proficient. For No. 2: teacher quality. All students must be taught by highly qualified teachers. Now this seems to be a lofty goal, but the reality is that each state sets what highly qualified means. So, that in many states, if a person can pass a proficiency test in the subject matter, they can become a teacher with absolutely no training in pedagogical methodology. And then we have the concept of accountability, No. 3: Any growth goal on the aforementioned tests is set and the percentage of students who achieve proficiency determines whether a school made adequate learning progress. And so we test and we test again. In Los Angeles, for example, we have some form of testing on 35 days of our instructional calendar of 180 days. Nearly 20 % of instructional time. It is not enough for the entire school to meet this growth goal. Each school is made up of sub groups, and it is those who must meet this goal, as well as testing 95% of the entire school. So, therefore, if you don't meet the entire goal, and this is entirely possible if one group does not meet the number needed, they can be declared failing. And what happens if the school fails? Sanctions and penalties on schools are designated. And instead of receiving more resources to deal with the problem, funds are taken away. In the last two years, these sanctions and punishments grew until school staffs could be reconstituted or replaced, and, finally, a school could be just taken over by the state. In Oakland, California, recently, four schools were taken over by the state administrator, since then there have been layoffs, forced school closures, reconstitution of staff, formation of privately owned charter schools, and the contracting out of cafetaria and other services. So who suffers from all this? The students, education workers, and the society as a whole. Students already at risk are being further marginalized, and in some area, they are being pushed out of the system, so that they won't pull down the task course. There is another interesting aspect of "No child left behind". This is Section 9588, which makes it mandatory for schools to release students private contact information to military recruiters under penalty of losing federal funds for noncompliance. Students have the right to opt out of having that information released, but it is the responsibility of the school to notify students of that right. Since there are no guidelines for that notification, many districts make minimal attempts to do so, thus leaving many parents and students ignorant of their rights. In California, we have a governor, the Terminator, Arnold Schwartzeneger. He has this year launched an all-out attack on teachers, nurses, and all public employees. As he holds $89,000 plate dinners to fund these attacks - by the way, $89,000 would fund the education of 15 children for a year - he calls teachers "a special interest". His specific attacks include: 1. increasing the time for tenure from two to five years with no inadequate performance marks. 2. Cutting funding to schools and 3. Attempting to remove state funding for both teachers and public workers pension funds and turning this back to the districts or employees. That's taking even more money from the classrooms. We are fighting these attacks. Although many of our rank-and-file members locally, statewide, and nationally still need to be educated, we are making the connections for them. Connecting the fact that in 20 years California has gone from near the top to 43 on the list in terms of appropriate funding, connecting to the fact that prison spending has grown to the first in the nation, in California it costs $30-60,000 a year to keep a prisoner. The military spends $18,000 to recruit one student, and yet we spend only $7,000 to educate that same child. What are the priorities here? With rising tuition and fees in the community colleges, state colleges, and universities, we are providing our students - particularly those of color and with limited income - with limited options: they can get jobs at minimum wage or go to prison or the military. We also recognize the attacks on education and the education profession worldwide, through the U.S. imperialist neo-liberal policies of privatization and globalization as practiced by the IMF and World Bank, and we recognize the concerns brought about by the policies being developed by the Education International and the World Education Forum. These are education and civil society NGOs, to the exclusion of the education institutions. Last night, several education workers present at this conference supported a proposal to contribute to the publication of a series of reports from various countries and regions that deal with the privatization of education and its various manifestations. We urged this body to accept that proposal and we will proceed with it. Lastly, I call for all delegates present and all comrades worldwide to remember that an attack on education and educational professionals is an attack on all workers, workers who are students, and workers whose family members are students. We hereby call for the reaffirmation of the principle of a free publicly funded and equitable education for all. And we demand that funds currently being used for war and occupation be redirected into social services and education funding. And finally we call for all to defend the rights of all education workers and all workers throughout the world. Thank you. ********************
GERARD BAUVERT International Committee Against Repression I am greeting you on behalf of the International Committee against Repression and particularly on behalf of Maitre Yves Dechezelles, who cannot be here with us on account of his age, but who was a founder member of the International Liaison Committee in Barcelona. This year, our Committee is celebrating its thirty years of existence. A thirty-year-long dogged fight, frequently alongside militants of the ILC in defence of individual and collective rights. As you well know, those rights, individual freedoms and collective rights, partly gains of civilisation, partly human rights, tightly overlap and cannot be separated. Today, the onslaught is led under the banner of fight against terrorism. I think this is reaching unheard of dimensions. Of course, this onslaught takes on various guises. In some cases, the Patriot Act in the USA is mentioned, version No. 1 and version No. 2, with entire sectors where workers are no longer allowed to join trade unions. Elsewhere, for instance in Europe, there is a European arrest warrant that has actually cancelled all the traditional forms of extradition. There are countries where civil liberties are suspended and others where people are simply jailed without trial. All that, a vast coercion apparatus, is being set up in Europe; I think Europe is becoming a case study: behind a pseudo-democratic make-up it is a purely totalitarian instrument in every area, including individual freedom. That aspect is very often underestimated, and we are wrong to do so. Defending individual rights should be given the same priority as defending collective rights because they cannot be separated. I read the Madrid newspapers yesterday and saw that a bill was being drafted that is most specific, this draft bill is intended to further clarify a law that has been in existence in Spain since November 2002. At the time, the law mentioned "threats against the safety of the State and of the institutions". In those newspapers, we read that the word "threat" is not sufficient and is replaced in this draft bill by "risk of a threat". That is obviously a very dangerous notion, for who can objectively decide what constitutes a "risk of a threat"? That would mean that whoever you are, you could be arrested here at any time, because there could be a "risk of a threat". Of course, all that is explicitly done under the banner of the "fight against terrorism". I would like to draw your attention to a problem called the right of asylum. We rarely hear mention of this now, which is very bad, because the right of asylum is no longer anything more than a virtual right. We must take great care not to overlook the fact that rights we imagine are still a reality are becoming no more than empty shells. Whereas the Geneva Convention, drawn up immediately after the "great" world war, enabled asylum to be given to all those who feared persecution, who feared for the lives of themselves and their families, nowadays, and particularly because of the Schengen Agreement, it is necessary not only that the persecution should actually have occurred, but moreover, it is up to the person persecuted to provide the proof himself. In other words, if you are a refugee, you had better bring your persecutor along with you in your suitcase! At the present time, it is sufficient for one country which has signed the Schengen Agreement to refuse somebody asylum and automatically none of the other countries which has also signed has the right to grant that person asylum! In order to carry out this abuse of authority, they have simply invented the notion of a request being "manifestly unfounded". So what is a request which is "manifestly unfounded"? It's perfectly simple, it's in the hands of the person who handles the request to decide! Thus, since the Treaty of Amsterdam and its different appendices, the latter having, by the way, been drawn up by Aznar himself, trade union or political persecution supposedly does not exist in the European Union, purely and simply because any country which is a member of the E.U. is supposedly democratic, otherwise it supposedly could not be a member. And it is with that sort of reasoning that somebody like Cozma can be sent to jail, in Rumania, a country bordering on the E.U., just as Madassamy can be jailed in Guadeloupe, while you know that Guadeloupe is almost France, thus almost in the E.U. Which all goes to say that the sphere of application of such anti-labour measures is immense. Our committee will be organising, after the outcome of our discussion here, a delegation to the Rumanian Embassy in Paris, accompanied by trade union leaders from Force Ouvrière and the CGT, to request that Cozma be freed. In conclusion, we have received a letter from Thérèse Béatrice Mengué, the wife of our comrade who spoke earlier on behalf of CGT Liberté. She thanks our committee, our comrades here and all those who took part in the action to get her freed. She tells us that after 8 months of postponements and debates, she was finally recognised "not guilty" and acquitted on January 18th, 2005. "I am therefore completely free", she writes, "despite my adversaries' appeal to delay matters. I know I can continue counting on you, for our struggle goes on. Your different campaigns, mobilising public opinion, and the pressure you put on Cameroon's diplomatic missions, brought about the results and have convinced me more than ever that solidarity in our action is an absolute necessity for all those who are struggling so that democracy and justice may triumph. I wish this letter to bring home to you the extreme sincerity of my thanks. Although my health is now very poor because of a nervous disease I contracted during my stay in prison, I was determined to write this letter by hand to you, that is my way of stressing my thanks and friendship toward you." The combat in defence of workers' and democratic liberty cannot be dissociated from action in defence of our social rights. ********** SAID MIMI (Morocco) Union Marocaine du Travail (UMT) - Moroccan Labour
Union Comrades, First of all, I would like to speak to you about a highly sensitive subject in Morocco: the new Labour Regulations that will soon be applied. But beforehand, I must clarify a few things. Firstly, concerning the trade union organisation I belong to, that is the UMT, founded on March 20th, 1955, which thus is 50 years old today. Within this union framework you also find the national movement and the Liberation Army, all of which contributed to the liberation of our country. For 5 years, from 1955 to 1960, it managed to be successful in several demands for wage increases, for pensions and for social security. All of the social benefits, which have been obtained by Morocco's working class, were obtained during that period, while t here was a single, united, trade union organisation. However, the State worked on getting it split up, by creating other union frameworks. Today in Morocco, there are 21 trade union organisations, which breaks up the unity of the working class. As for vital sectors which have been recently privatised: firstly, the transport sector, secondly the sector of distribution of water and electricity, handed over to a company called AMENDIS, a subsidiary of VIOLIA, which is in its turn a subsidiary of VIVENDI INTERNATIONAL. This company (AMENDIS) has 1,400 workers who fought a battle for over a month, in summer 2004. I myself work for that company and in the name of its workers, I pay tribute to the unconditional support brought to us in the International Liaison Committee's communiqué and provided by its official delegation which came to give support to the worker comrades of AMENDIS. At the moment, the State is trying to privatise other vital sectors such as Education and Health. The percentage of union members in Morocco is 13% of "labourers" ("blue collar" workers). As concerns the Labour Regulations: government policy, in the past as in the present, has been in favour of healthy budgets to the detriment of healthy social rights. That has led to a great decline in working conditions, in education, in health, in housing and in living standards, all that during a period whose main characteristic is globalisation of economy, based mainly on submitting mankind to the rules of the global market, by letting financial capital dominate and being obsessed with increasing productivity and profits. This domination can be implemented because it gets support from the fact that it is the international finance organisations that dictate the orientation of economic and social policies of several countries to such an extent that they even dictate the labour regulations. The World Bank and the IMF are trying to standardise labour regulations throughout the world, so as to have an ever better guarantee of the conditions in which foreign investments, mainly represented by multinational companies, can run their business (and exploit the workers). This tendency to accept international domination is supported by the bosses in Morocco, to obtain "softer" labour regulations: the amount of time worked and the number of hours (per day, week, month...), the level of wages, freedom to fire workers and to fix the amount of compensation, penalties for legal irregularities, the freedom to work as opposed to the right to strike. The working classes, even if they are aware that there can be a difference between a law and its application, are nevertheless aware of how very important it is to obtain and defend Labour Regulations guaranteeing their interests and able to keep a balance in the relationship between workers and bosses, so that a social balance can also be achieved. Even without debating the problem of "softening" of the regulations, we believe that our economy does not need to be "softened" but in fact needs to cease being an economy of favours, the logic of favours being contradictory to the liberal logic they say we need. Our economy must cease being a feudal one in the public sector, one in which money is extradited, where there is tax fraud, debts, bribes and administrative corruption. The Labour Regulations must be in conformity with the international labour conventions. The social benefits, which the international labour movement achieved only after atrocious struggle and great sacrifice, those conquests now have a universal dimension. The Moroccan working class, which was among the first of those who fought for Moroccan independence and achieving democracy and social rights, must not remain deprived of those social rights and benefits. The international conventions in the field of social rights in particular and in the field of Human Rights in general, those conquests are universal, it is therefore the national laws which must be adapted to fit in with those conventions. Morocco has only signed 41 of the 180 conventions. Among the conventions not signed, should be mentioned in particular: convention 87 on trade union freedom, convention 135 on the protection of the workers' representatives, convention 103 on maternity protection and other no less important conventions. To end my contribution, I appeal to all of you present at this conference to work together in order to prohibit the merger that is to tak_e place between the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions and the World Confederation of Labour. I also take this opportunity to appeal for the release from prison of trade unionists throughout the world. Long live activism and thank you. ********** JEAN-PIERRE REDEJEKRA (Central African Republic) First president of the African Party for a Radical Transformation and the Integration of States I am called Jean-Pierre Redjekra. I used to be the leader of the students' and pupils' movement in the Central African Republic, from 1990 to 1993, but I am also vice-president of a young political party of which I am going to explain the motivations to you. I haven't received a mandate, but I would like to speak to you here mainly on behalf of my country and more particularly on behalf of the thousands of towns and villages of my country. For the past 15 years, I have been an active militant in public life in my country, where the unions that exist are mainly in the public sector (for civil servants). My commitment to activism is based on fighting for democracy, popular democracy, on the one hand, and on the other hand fighting against the structural adjustment programs of the capitalist institutions. The Central African Republic, as can be seen in its name, is right in the heart of Africa. It is a country of 3 million inhabitants which has already been badly weakened for many decades now by immense difficulties, slavery, colonial enterprise, the Terror Regime of Mr Bokassa, who is renowned throughout the world for his cruelty and who was supported by the imperialist powers. For around fifteen years now, it is a false democracy that has been developing in this central African country of 622,000 square kilometres, with its 3 million inhabitants. One week ago, there were elections for the president and for the parliament and everybody - workers, young people, peasants - knows that nothing can change, despite elections being held. Not one candidate points out the responsibilities, both internal and external, of the many different forms of imperialism. Economic imperialism, political interference, to which the population as a whole is exposed. An important element is the fact that this country, the most populated of central Africa, has a government that obeys, exactly in the way that has been described by many of you present here, the orders of the World Bank and the IMF. Worst of all, there are sons of this country and sellers of arms, whether inside or outside the government, who provide for non-conventional troops, which rape women and young children. Uncontrolled armed men cross over into our country because of the conflict in the neighbouring Darfour, in Chad, and on the southern borders, troops rebelling the Kinshasa regime who already raped something like 320 women in 2003. I would like to tell you all assembled here that in my country there are millions of peasants living in permanent terror and the government does nothing. This government that does nothing, it does act when it is a question of protecting (ex-) president Giscard - who is also an author of the European Constitution - when he comes to our country to hunt game, then there is a battalion mobilised to keep him safe. This government also acts when it is a question of protecting the Baron de Rothschild, when he comes to our country for the exoticism of its landscapes and its rare species. I'm going to give you some information which will demonstrate that if the workers of the Central African Republic and most particularly the young people, since they represent 65% of the population, do not join forces and fight, do not get organised, the country could simply disappear from the maps, as far as its human identity is concerned. Ours is the number one country, at least in central Africa, concerning AIDS, 10% of the population is affected. The gross national product has been halved in the past fifteen years and we now have 260 dollars per capita. I am not being demagogic, but I must tell you that in our hospitals you will find no gloves, no syringes. I was in the hospitals only a week ago and they didn't even have any medicine for treating tuberculosis. Tritherapy (for treating AIDS) represents six months' salary of an executive worker, when the medicine is even available. Life expectancy is now 43 years. It was also a few weeks ago that an expert from the World Bank was visiting our country, to define the program of structural adjustment. He happened to see just one of Bangui's cemeteries and when he saw how huge it was; he thought the country must be at war. And we answered him that war is indeed being waged on our country, by the Bretton Woods institutions, and with the government's complicity, and that is why this cemetery exists and why there are more people in the cemetery than in the city. This city also has some other cemeteries, which he didn't get the opportunity to see. What answer can we give, faced with these attacks from capitalist and imperialist order? On the one hand, there is the trade union movement. Unfortunately, the delegate who usually takes part in the ILC, Mr Patrice Zakaria, is candidate in the general elections, along with some other trade unionists who are trying to get into Parliament, which is why he cannot be here with us. The trade union movement is one of the social forces for resistance in the Central African Republic. For the past twenty years, the student movement has been important, too - it was thanks to that movement that Bokassa fell in 1979. But the student movement alone cannot, today, suffice to give us a progressive political perspective. The political class takes its orders from the Bretton Woods institutions and the electoral legitimacy acquired over these past years by the parties has each time been betrayed by them, one after another. That is why we founded one and a half years ago a small political formation called "The African Party for a Radical Transformation of States" and this party is trying to make people more aware of realities and to bring about the necessary combat, that of the struggle for obtaining working class rights. The Central African Republic does have some specific features, which mean that the struggle for working-class rights will need to be carried out in particular ways: It is a country which has no industry, it is a virgin country. There is room, there is space for working. And yet, the social structure is dominated by 85% of the population being peasants, labouring with a hoe at the beginning of the 21st century. It is a young country and that is why we have founded our political organisation on these two bases: a peasant environment and a young population. We are counting on your solidarity, so as to be able to continue this mission in our country in Africa and in the world. I would like to say to the Venezuelan comrades that in our country, for some time now, we have adopted the practice of banging on saucepans at particular times of day, to make our claims for various things. That is something that the authorities find very disturbing. We have two things to share with you in coming to this world conference. The first one is that your conference, held in the spirit of the Manifest against war and exploitation, should adopt a text that prohibits, or at least makes life very difficult for all those who wish to buy arms and start up war in our countries. The second one is that we want your conference to renew the demand to bring peace back to the Ivory Coast, for the hope for democracy and social progress in all of Africa and in all other countries depends on a future of peace in the Ivory Coast. My party and my country ask to become members of the International Liaison Committee of Workers and Peoples, on the one hand, and on the other hand we tell your assembly that we are in full agreement with the conditions in principle that have been adopted by the ILC up to now. We must renew the meaning of democracy by taking up the combat for obtaining working-class rights, we are convinced that it is the only way our rights can be asserted: the right to obtain work, the right to have a decent wage and decent living conditions. We thank the ILC for opening up the way towards re-conquering our rights, for the dignity of our people and of all the peoples of the world. *********** RUBINA JAMIL (Pakistan) President, All Pakistan Trade Union Federation (APTUF)
Chair, Working Women’s Organization Comrades, Greetings from Pakistan, to all the comrades come from the different world and attending this meeting. Comrade, I come from a country where the population is 1,44 million in which women are the half of the population. The country which remains under the marshal law since long period and 85% of people are denied their basic rights. The fight between the sectarian groups, between the sectarian parties, is going on and the civil war is also going on. The country where the law and order situation is going to be worse day by day. And the women are the first victims of the war. The women in Pakistan are facing enormous kind of violence, people are making suicide day by day because of the poverty, because of the high inflation rate. The youth are taking drug because of not having a job and women are considered like a second class citizen. They are 50 % of the population, hundreds of thousands of women are working in informal sector, and working in garment factories, on contract or sub-contract basis. They are not getting any right and facing aggression, violence, by their male counterpart as well as by the bosses. They are denying all the basic rights, having no appointment letters, no maternity leave, no day care centres facilities, and getting less wages. Women are working in clothing sector, in carpet wring, and in agriculture sector, they are working as bonded labour and exploited by the feudal lords, by the owners. They are kidnapping and the feudal lords rape the women who raise the word against the discrimination. I would like to mention here that a supreme court judgement was passed in 1998. It says that the bonded labour and forced labour is a crime and it is abolished, but still the government of Pakistan has failed to implement the supreme court order. The Pakistani government ratified 44 ILO conventions, including ILO convention 98, 78, 100 and 103, but these conventions are not implemented. In textile and clothing industry, it’s playing a major role in Pakistan. 40 % of the total work force are employed in this industrial sector with 1,4 billion workers. The growth of GDP export on foreign exchange earning and employment and poverty would depend on its performance. Pakistan has invested 4 billion dollars in the textile sector. Now I would like to briefly describe about the situation of the legal status in Pakistan. Pakistan is a country where parallel judicial legal systems are operating, some of them are exclusively applicable to the private areas and others are applicable throughout the country. The Constitution of Pakistan includes three distinct judicial systems that function inside the ordinary judicial system, the federal shariat court, the applied shariat bench, and the criminal forums. The article 25 of the Constitution of Pakistan guarantees the equality of the rights of all citizens irrespective of sex, race and class, and empower the government to take informative action to protect and promote the women’s rights. A series of discriminatory laws were introduced as a part of the process of islamisation by the dictator Zial Haq during the late 70s. The Hudu ordinance promulgated in 1979 equated rape with adultery; in the case of maximum punishment a women’s testimony was not admitted to prove rape or adultery. Instead, the evidence of four Muslim males of good reputation was required in such cases. This also created a situation where women could be charged for adultery if they reported rape but could not prove her innocence. But testimony of two women is equal to one man’s in financial transactions. The laws of evidence in case of death institutionalised a compensation or blood money for crimes including murder. According to this law, women’s value would be considered equal to half of that of man. So you can imagine the women are working in Pakistan, they are fighting in two dimensions. The women workers are struggling to safeguard their rights, and on the other hand, they are struggling for the abolishment of the discriminatory laws against women. Now I would like to finish my intervention on this forum. We strongly condemn all anti-workers and peoples policies no matter this are existing in Pakistan or any part of the world and it is our duty to strengthen working class movement nationally, regionally and globally and I believe that united we will definitely win our goals. Thank you so much. ******************** STEFAN CHOLEWKA (Great Britain) Editor, The LINK I will begin my contribution by informing the ILC world conference of the proposed all out strike that is scheduled to take place in Britain on 23 March. UNISON, T&GWU, civil service union PCS, together with AMICUS and UCATT have balloted all their members affected by the changes in local government pensions, supported by the teacher unions. In a few days time it is estimated that 1.4 million workers will go on strike against Blair’s implementation of the European Union March 2002 Barcelona Summit decision to increase the retirement age and raise the minimum age at which a pension can be paid. The proposed strike will be bigger than the 1926 general strike in Britain. These changes affect all workers, but Blair is speeding up the attack on public sector local government workers ahead of the referendum on the EU Constitutional Treaty that will take place after the predicted 5 May general election in Britain. We need to be clear, this proposed strike will be a major event for the working class in Britain and will have political echoes all over Europe because it rejects EU demands. The organised working class still exists in Britain despite eighteen years of Tory rule and Blair’s anti-working class policies. It exists as a class through its historic organisations in the form of the TUC and the organic link of the affiliated trade unions to the Labour party. A second lesson to be drawn that requires a clear analysis is that the direct pressure for the ballot itself is a result of the organised working class pushing from below, rejecting the content of the European Union demands, directives and treaties. The overwhelming vote for strike action takes place despite the leadership of the unions wanting to separate out workers demands on domestic issues from that of the EU Constitutional Treaty in order to prevent workers from making the link between the two. The main aim is to get the millions of workers who reject Blair’s policies to abstain from voting in the referendum, rather than turn out and vote NO. Yet every day the facts show that workers demands run up against EU policies. Further examples in Britain are on the issue of rail renationalisation and post office closures. Working class resistance has come to the surface despite the general secretaries of the most powerful trade unions making a deal will Blair, the so called WARWICK AGREEMENT - on trade union and labour rights, itself subordinated to EU policies. The major lesson to be drawn is that the working class still exists despite all the body blows inflected upon it due to its historic organisational form and organic link to the Labour party through the trade unions. In this respect Allan Benjamin’s contribution to the ILC discussion in Madrid regarding the threats to and defence of the AFL-CIO in America is extremely germane. The working class remains a class only if it is organised. In Britain this framework is represented by the TUC as a national federation with member unions affiliated to the Labour party. Let me try to explain this point further in relation to the opening remarks and contribution from Daniel Gluckstien, ILC coordinator and Roger Sandri concerning the ICFTU project to unify the international trade union movement and merge with the WCL. In the British context a similar process and project is being proposed in the form of a merger between the T&GWU / AMICUS and the GMB unions. The net result will be a single giant union of 2.6 million workers on the model of VERDI in Germany. I would like to take this opportunity given to me by the ILC world conference in Madrid to launch an appeal to the trade union movement in Britain. I would like to ask a simple question: What will be the impact of this proposed super union on collective bargaining? In other words, how will this new trade union structure defend the interests of a specific sector or industrial enterprise?. Is is not reasonable to suggest that this super union could well act as an instrument of the ETUC in order to relay the destructive anti-working class policies of the EU institutions, directives and treaties? Will this juggernaut of a new union be a tool used by the ETUC? I do not feel it is mere idle speculation either to raise the very real prospect of this super union being a direct competitor to the prerogative of the TUC itself. Even more alarmingly, could not this new union endanger the Labour party by establishing itself as an alternative structure claiming to represent the working class not only industrially but also politically through the institutions of the European Union in Brussels. This is not the only potential threat that we face. A second and complementary threat also exists. This emanates from all those forces that are currently grouped around the World Social Forum. They advocate the disaffiliation of the trade unions from the Labour party. We have be be crystal clear and state and openly that all these forces grouped around the WSF are objectively helping Blair destroy the Labour party as the political expression of the working class in Britain. Let us attempt to draw out some preliminary conclusions from this analysis by asking some fundamental questions. First of all, can the Labour party be saved by all those forces who participate in the WSF process? Can the Labour party be saved by all those who attended the 19 March demonstration in Brussels, organised by the ETUC on the political axis of calling for a "YES" vote for the EU Constitutional Treaty? Today, the struggle to defend the organisations of the working class in Britain demands the building of a Labour campaign to reject clearly all the institutions of the European Union. This is why as a member of the Labour party and an affiliated trade unionists I call upon the labour movement in Britain to inflict a resounding defeat to both Blair and the European Union by saying: "VOTE NO to the EU Constitution!". ******************** PAUL NKUNZIMANA (Burundi) Member of the Executive Committee of the University of Burundi Workers' Union (STUB) Burundi, one of the countries of the African Great Lakes, along with Rwanda and the "Democratic" Republic of Congo, is plagued by "ethnic" wars since it formally acquired political independence on July 1st, 1962. In these countries, during the past twelve years, these wars of genocide and dismantling have caused the death of over 3.8 million people in Congo Kinshasa, 1 million in Rwanda and over 300,000 in Burundi, according to the official estimations. For the authorities and the International Press, these wars are supposedly the result of ancestral ethnic hatred motivating the populations of this sub-region. But in reality these wars are stirred up by the authorities and the multinational companies linked to them through the spoliation of the resources of these countries, the privatisations, the repayment of the foreign debt, the throwing into question of the statute of the civil servants and of the labour regulations, through the intermediary of armed bands and pro-government men. In Burundi, since 1994, a series of peace agreements have been signed under the aegis of the World Bank, the United States, the European Union and the UNO: Kigobe-Kajaga Agreement (1993), Government Convention (1994), Political Partnership (1998), Arusha Agreement (2000), "Cease-Fire" Agreements (2002, 2003). But today, the populations are living in absolutely disastrous conditions. The last mass massacre of the Congolese Banyamulenge, who had taken refuge in Burundi (in Gatumba, right next to the border with the "Democratic" Republic of Congo), executed by the Palipehutu-Fnl, the Congolese Maï-Maï and the Interahamwe, who carried out the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, brought about over 160 deaths on August 13th, 2004, in the presence of the U.N. troops, supposedly there to maintain peace («Monuc» in Congo and «Onub» in Burundi). Carolyn MacAskie, the special representative of the U.N. Secretary General in Burundi and Head of the «Onub», had declared when she took up that post in July 2004 that the U.N. troops had sufficient means to prevent massacres and genocide. On the subject of the Gatumba massacre, that same MacAskie preferred to say that the «Onub» troops, comprised of contingents from South Africa, Mozambique, Kenya, Pakistan, Nepal and Ethiopia, were simply observers! At the same time, massacres of civil populations continue in the rural province of Bujumbura, forcing several tens of thousands to take flight and live in conditions for which even the epithet "inhuman" would be an understatement (no shelter, no food, no medicine, and all their personal belongings had been pillaged), just a further addition to the ranks of over a million "displaced" people since 1993. Safety conditions worsen day by day. Even if we only take the official reports, President Ndayizeye himself lists on November 3rd, 2004 that "During the past three months, there have been 300 assassinations, 72 road ambushes having nothing to do with those of the FNL (National Liberation Forces), 31 cars stolen, 460 armed robberies (in addition to those of the 31 cars). We are in presence of setting of scores or gangland killing and of the killing of administrative officials." For the military spokesperson of the «Onub», Adama Diop, "There are on average 6 to 10 people who are killed each day during bandit attacks. Today, we are witnessing a peak of criminality in Burundi." Other consequences of the war: famine has already set in and is killing in the northern provinces of the country (Kirundo, Ngozi, Muyinga and Karuzi) and is threatening to spread to other places, while the populations as a whole are already in extreme poverty. According to a recent survey, over 80% of the population has given up having any health care and for the remaining 20%, they can only get some by selling a piece of land or some cattle. Sick people who receive treatment but are unable to pay the bills are then kept as prisoners in the hospital. It is noted, too, that AIDS continues to be devastating and that patients suffering from AIDS occupy 80% of the non-surgical hospital beds. In Burundi, it is estimated that there are over 50,000 children in the streets, orphans of war or AIDS, or abandoned. The workers and the populations are facing unprecedented poverty and are confronted with measures of price increases for ordinary consumer products. For example, in the year 2004, the government kept increasing the price of fuel; the price of petrol (or "gas" for American readers of this) went from 0.7 US dollars, to 0.8, then 0.9, then 1 USD, i.e. a total increase of 35%, which meant that the prices of all basic consumer products absolutely soared. The Constitution which came out of the Arusha Agreement forced upon us by the referendum of February 28th this year consecrates the "ethnic" splitting up of our institutions, labour regulations and the statute of workers in the public sector, political positions and employment in the public sector being distributed, at the end of that electoral process, according to "ethnic" origins (40% for the Tutsis, 60% for the Hutus and equal numbers in the army and the police forces). The aforesaid Agreement aims, at the same time, to spoil the people of its resources. For according to the Arusha program, "Privatisation must stay on the agenda of the economic reforms, so as to reduce the economic burden of companies. The non payment of the debt (towards the World Bank, Bad, Fida... ) would make the situation even more complicated". The government is very pleased about the fact that Burundi is eligible for the regime of the "Poor countries which are badly indebted" (PPTE) in the middle of the year 2005, but on condition, according to the aforesaid institutions, that it pursue the macro-economic reforms. Thus, the government is applying literally these dictates of destroying the social system: it means dismantling the little that remained of public services; the budget for 2005 already plans to spend 45% on repaying the foreign debt, which amounts to 1,250,000,000 US dollars, and 30% on defence and security services. Isn't it the plans for privatising, for repaying the debt and for the "ethnic" elections, which are precisely the reason for dismantling the country and its people? Isn't it the powerful authorities, their financial institutions, the multinationals, the UNO and the government who are responsible for this situation? Thank you. ********** VOLKMAR SCHONE (Germany) Member of the Workers' Commission of the SPD party
and of the Ver.di trade union Dear comrades, I'm called Volkmar Schöne, I come from Germany, from Berlin, I have been elected to take part in a workers' commission of the SPD, I'm a member of the Ver.di union, staff representative in a public company employing 1,000 people. The EU has decided and put into action the liberalisation of public services. Schröder speaks in public, saying that only goods are concerned, not people. He cynically adds that he was the one who persuaded them in Brussels to allow workers to go freely from one country to another, in particular the workers from the new member countries, but that he then had that postponed until 2007. Schröder is lying to us, of course human beings are concerned and not just goods or capital. Human beings are always concerned by what happens. In legally independent subsidiaries of companies, workers are forced to work in Germany for poverty-line wages. Workers come to Germany because they cannot find any work in their own country, and those who work receive starvation wages with which they can scarcely feed their legislation. For example, butchery workers earn 5 euros per hour, whereas the wage they should be earning, according to the collective agreement of the butchery sector, is between 13 and 15 euros. We are fighting the battle for a united Europe, for a workers' Europe, and I emphasise that we mean ALL the workers. We are fighting the battle AGAINST the Europe of the speculators, the big shareholders, the big trust companies. That is not our Europe. We are experiencing in Germany, and particularly in Berlin, the destruction of public services, the destruction of local democracy. The Kindergartens are not only privatised, many are closed down. Schools are closed down, because there isn't enough money to do any maintenance work on them. Hostels or centres for young people and old people's homes have been privatised and now they simply get closed down. As for the hospitals, there are less and less places available in them and many complete closures are programmed. The local public transport sector is threatened with privatisation and destruction. Worst of all, the Chamber of Senators that is applying this neo-liberal policy from the Maastricht Treaty, is supposedly red-red. This red-red Chamber of Senators is in fact comprised of Social Democrats and Neo-Stalinists, unconditionally submitting to the Maastricht Treaty. In my company, for example, according to their plan, the number of workers must be reduced from the present 3,250 to only 1,000 in 2006. In Berlin, we call that Berlin's 2006 Agenda. We are organising the struggle among Social Democrats and in the trade unions against Schröder's Agenda 2010. Schröder declares that his policy will not change and WE say that we have to get rid of Schröder. We have been carrying out a campaign in Germany against the Bolkestein directive. We say load and clear: NO to Bolkestein, that directive cannot be "reformed". We have carried out a campaign in Germany against the European Constitution, because it contains a neo-liberal economic program and also a military program. What's more, if you look closely at Article 2, which is supposed to conserve life and forbid the death penalty, look very closely and you'll see that in the case of riots and uprisings, the death penalty CAN be applied (translators note: the police can shoot at the rioters), and that in the case of war, execution is lawful. We must explain the contents of this Constitution in our campaigns. We are clearly saying no to this Constitution. The trade union leaders of Ver.di and also of the DGB submit to the policies of Schröder's government and to those of the European Union and collude with the privatisation of public services, the destruction of local democracy, the dismantling of collective agreements, despite the fact that they were mandated by their union members to defend the independence of the trade unions. Independent trade unions are the pillars of democracy. Many of the contributions during this conference have demonstrated that we must organise our struggle in all countries for trade union independence. We do not accept their destruction and this world conference must be a sort of springboard from which this fight can get off the ground and in that way we will reinforce the International Liaison Committee of Workers. Thank you. ********** MARUTI GAWALI SURESH (India) General Secretary, Sarva Shrmaik Sangha Party, Maharastra Mr chairman, members of the presidium, and friends, I am from Maharastra, a State of India. I am the general secretary of the R... Party of Maharestra, I am also working amongst urban and rural world of Maharastra. Yesterday, speakers from India, comrade Mahadevan, comrade Vasudevan, and today in the morning comrade Sanyal talked about the Indian situation. So I would not like to repeat the same points, I agree fully with the points they made in their speeches. The strategy of development adopted by the Indian rulers is giving conflicting and contradictory results. China and India are the two top leaders of the development in the world today. China with 9 % and India with 6 %. The growth in the service sector in India is more, followed by the development in the industrial sector. But this development is not giving a push in the livelihood or the economic progress of the workers, or the middle class; it is not increasing the employment potential, but the unemployment is growing. Particularly in agriculture sector, the strategy being adopted by the Indian rulers since 1990, under the new economic policy, has ruined the agriculture sector. 52 % of the Indian population is in the agriculture sector and for these last 13, 14 years, the rate of development of agriculture is around 2 to 3 % and sometimes it has gone down, even below the 0 %. There were some years in which there was negative growth up to 7 % or 8 %. So this is a major area of economic crisis in India. And the other points for a developing country like India, this is the important point, and I really would like to point out the speeches by the Brazilian comrades, who pointed out the crisis in agriculture sector in developing countries. So this is an important area, and on which I think that the working class movement, particularly from developing countries, will have to concentrate. In India, there is a political change. A new government has come up and it has stated in its policy that they will intervene, they will not leave the entire issues to the market forces; but in practice, they are following more or less the same policies. The two bourgeois groups in India are following the same policy. They are pursuing the course of total liberalisation, leaving things open to the market forces, to the capitalists in India and abroad. And this is causing a lot of harassment to the Indian working classes. So why this is happening ? This is happening because there are only 7% of the workers organised in India today. 93% are not organised, those who are organised are divided into various trade union centres, there is no one united trade union centre in even these 7 % organised workers. There is no real work organisation of agriculture workers and poor peasants in India. And politically, the working class at the moment has not been able to intervene in the situation. So this is an important area where we will have to look into. Comrade Daniel has presented a very good report the day before yesterday. It is one of the best reports I have heard so far. I fully agree with the points made by him. But I would like to add that particularly the working class movement in the developed countries should look at the problems of the agriculture as a whole, because in the WTO today, agriculture is one of the areas where the developed countries, the imperialist countries, are resorting to distorting practices. 50 billion dollars are being given as subsidies, there is a policy of support, export subsidies, none ... ; through various measures they are obstructing the development of agriculture particularly in developing countries. The prices of agriculture have gone down by nearly 50 % in the last five years, the subsidies like cotton and sugar are being challenged at the WTO, and as we find that America, who is in the forefront of this subsidies, is not trying to fall in line with the WTO while they preach other countries to follow the principles of WTO, and refrain from distorsions to the market, while actually what they are doing is the same thing. So I would like to make a last point that why we are retreating, why the process of privatisation is gaining? We have to particularly think about the service sector . Schools are being privatised, why is there no revolt from the guardians of the students, why is there no opposition from the society at large, so we ought to think of the qualities which were giving in the public sector particularly in education and health, if we are to fight against the wrong policies of the rulers, we have to gather support from the masses, and for that purpose, we will have to find out a proper strategy of work culture, as organising workers, independently, at the same time we must have a political force, we must have a political party which will intervene at the national level, to change the policies. So basically, we have to think of all these points. With this, I thank the presidium for giving me this opportunity. ******************** Diana POP (Rumania) Representative, Alliance for the Emancipation of Workers I speak on behalf of a group of young Rumanians and what unites us, beyond all our differences of opinion, is the fact that we are close to Rumanian activists affiliated to the ILC through a series of associations, leagues, trade unions. As you know, Rumania is a candidate State to the European Union and in 2007, it will enter the EU. From a legal point of view, the membership of Rumania to the EU and to the European Constitution is possible without a vote according to the current constitution of Rumania. In 2003, by forcing the adoption of this new (Rumanian) Constitution, the political establishment wanted to avoid a referendum mainly because they were not sure of the result of such a vote. This concern is great even if in Rumania there is currently no organized opposition to the membership to Europe. Some voices are heard that are opposed to Europe, such as organizations and activists of the ILC, which seldom reach the rank and file citizen. Except those voices, there are many people in Rumania who think that membership to the EU is not the right thing to do now, however. 15 years ago, the Rumanian youth revolted against the Ceausescu dictatorship. This revolutionary action was caused by the shortage of everyday supplies, by the lack of basic civil rights and by the lack of prospects. Now, there is some well-being, civil rights and prospects but only for a minority. In their great majority, young people are unable to express themselves because they have no means to do so. The young do not vote because they do not have people whom they can vote for. The young leave Rumania for other countries because in their country there is no prospect. We are workers, students, university graduates. Most of us rely on their parents for their living. Very few of us earn more than 100 _ a month. None of us can afford a really decent home. The connection with the EU pushed up the prices of housing to a level similar to that of the West. The rent of a bachelor pad in Bucharest has reached a price similar to that of Vienna or the south of Italy. The price of an apartment equals many years of wages. Clothing, food, and ordinary goods are already more expensive than in many other EU countries, while the average salary in Rumania is between 200 and 300 _. Under those circumstances, young Rumanians have no other way but look for jobs on the black market, mainly in the West. Already in Rumania, they estimate that there are between one and two million people working on the black market, without protection or social assistance, without right for a pension. Likewise, since 1990, more than one million Rumanians have gone abroad where most of them work illegally in almost slavery conditions. Until now, however, to work abroad meant something. After a few years, some of those Rumanians who left the country were able to come back with enough money to buy a house or have one built and start a family. But now, the great many of them come back home in the same conditions as they left. For emigrants, the European Union has become a space where those who survive are only those who are able to resist the toughest exploitation. At home in Rumania, it is already possible that a day's work lasts more than 16 hours in the private sector. In some places, especially in trade, where people work 24 hours followed, at best, by a 48 hours' time off. Sometimes, employees come from the EU, especially from Italy or Greece, Those jobs are generally held by women, who after their working hours, have their own housework. Exploitation has no limit! Those jobs are nevertheless better than unemployment for which in Rumania benefit is paid for six months only, and then it is simply utter poverty. We want this situation to change! and yet we know that EU membership is not going to bring an improvement as the Rumanians know better than us who work in the West from 12 to 16 hours a day with scarcely a half-hour lunch break. Under these circumstances, we have no other solution but oppose this Europe. The European Union, as an institution, with its laws and its practice, is opposed to our aspirations. The destruction of industry and the closing down of Rumanian agriculture, implemented in recent years, following the enforcement of "performance criteria" of the EU clearly proves it. This is the Europe that seeks to be built on the basis of the destruction of labor relationships, of the closing down of unions and labor organizations, this Europe that imposes the imprisonment of union leaders, like Miron Cozma, an Europe that leaves us no chance for a future. We have no other solution but oppose this Europe. We consider, however, that we too, as Rumanians, we are Europeans and that our future can only be common. But we want a Europe in which we can live a decent life, at home and not being forced to go abroad. That is why we are by the side of the ILC, in the actions launched against the European Constitution, actions that demand at the same time the abrogation of the European regulation, and in every country, the laws based on the Maastricht, Amsterdam and Nice Treaties. However, we consider that it is not enough to claim our opposition. We have to organize and fight day after day to change things really, above all for us, the young ! You, political activists, union leaders, local councilors and elected representatives, you must stand by our side, with your experience, fruits of past struggles. We want a world where it is possible to live ! Help us build it ! ******************** IGOR NOLIKOV (Byelorussia) I am representing a delegation from one of the ex-Soviet Union countries and I would like to draw your attention to the way the social and political situations are tending to evolve in our region, for in my opinion, this cannot be ignored. If you listen to the news, you will have heard what happened three days ago in Russia. An unknown group wanted to blow up the car of a well-known Russian oligarch, Choubais. There has been no declaration, go group has claimed to be responsible for this attempt, but all the experts have decided to announce that it was the work of a group of labourers who wanted to take vengeance on him, because of the reforms he has been putting into action. There are different ways in which we can interpret this event. On the one hand, you can consider that the fact that people in the ex-Soviet Union think that justice can be carried out by terrorist acts, that signifies a low level of class consciousness on their behalf, but on the other hand, that also demonstrates that people do not believe in the law, do not believe that they can get justice using legal forms of struggle, in Parliament, before courts of law, and this is a tendency which is becoming very strong because the law, in our countries, is associated with the law of the oligarchs, the law of criminality. Over these past two years, we have seen the political system get tougher and tougher, in all the countries of this region. It will suffice to remind you that in Byelorussia, where I come from, 75 newspapers were closed down last year, mainly left wing or trade-union newspapers. Why such massive political repression? We can understand why, if we examine the characteristics of the laws that have been adopted recently. They are almost all anti-social laws, new labour legislation, new laws on rent, etc. No doubt, the reason for that is that our region has entered a new phase of globalisation. In Europe, too, after the economic boom came to an end, the criteria of social protection are being brought down and our oligarchs are following suit, so as to remain competitive on the global market. But, in our country at least, it isn't possible to carry out social dumping without totally destroying all the democratic institutions, and as our elite are essentially Mafiosi, the process is carried out in an extremely brutal manner and thus, quite naturally, the workers of our country are claiming the need for more democracy. The problem is that the elite are trying to manipulation this desire. The "revolution" in Ukraine was a brilliant example of the way in which a clan of oligarchs made use of the social discontent of the population to get into the position of power, under cover of democratic slogans. It would be useful to compare the demonstrations in Russia against the replacement of benefits in kind by money and the orange revolution in Ukraine. It can be clearly shown that there cannot be any democracy unless social rights are guaranteed. This tendency to rethink the whole notion of democracy in our region is very important, for the first time it is not just an abstract model of society, but the struggle between social classes is at stake. I do hope that the participants in this conference will pay attention to what is going on in our countries, because it is very difficult to carry out this struggle without international solidarity. Thank you very much. ********** RALPH SCHOENMAN (USA) Co-Chair of Communications, Million Worker March Movement Comrades and Friends I come before you today in my capacity as Chair of Communications of the Million Worker March Movement, which my comrade and brother Clarence Thomas and I were involved in launching approximately one year ago. This is the second anniversary of the official war on the people of Iraq. I want to make clear to you, brothers and sisters, that this has, in fact, been an on-going war over the past fifty years, a continued onslaught since the execution of Abdul Karim Qassim in 1963 by Saddam Hussain, a Central Intelligence Agency operative at the time. Iraq is a country with 1/10,000th the military capacity of the United States and1/15th of its population. In a space of three months a greater amount of tonnage was dropped on that population than in all theaters of combat during the entirety of World War II. Brothers and sisters, on the first anniversary of the events of September 11, 2001, a cover story appeared in the New York Times on Paul Wolfowitz. He was called the "Sunshine Warrior." What is described in this article is a meeting that took place at the Army War College during which the Army Chief of Staff, General Eric Shinseki, intoned, with what the New York Times described as a virtual drumbeat, that Paul Wolfowitz had been involved since the mid-1970s in preparing a war on "terror" with its focus on the Middle-East. What we learned is that this so-called war on terror flowed from a particular strategy paper prepared by Oded Yinon of the Mossad during the late 1970s, a text called a "Strategy for the 1980s". What was projected in this document was the fragmentation of each Middle Eastern country in its turn into its ethnic and religious components, preparing the way for direct seizure of its resources, notably oil. The category of "terror" replaced- -- as a rationale for massive military appropriation and intervention by US imperialism -- the categories of "communist subversion" as the pretext for imperial adventure abroad, wars of predation that facilitate, as well, the deepening of exploitation and repression at home. Since 1964, brothers and sisters, every single American administration has prepared the direct seizure of resources, notably in the Middle East, with specific plans for the capture of Arab oil. Robert Tucker wrote in 1974 on behalf of the Pentagon: "Without intervention there is a distinct possibility of an economic and political disaster bearing more than a superficial resemblance to the Depression of the 1930's." In an assessment that would be taken up by the National Security Council in 1975, the area to be seized was described as "the Arab shoreline of the Gulf, a new Eldorado awaiting its conquistadores". By 1979, Lawrence Mosher formulated the plan "circulating in many Washington corridors: " ... what military people call the U.S. 100,000 man Quick Strike Force, which consists immediately of three divisions deployable anywhere by air." As one high-ranking Defense official described the requirements to sell this to the American people: "One needs a real bogeyman to come in and have to be stopped before you can talk of using the Quick Strike Force. It may turn out that this bogeyman will not be defined the same in Arabic as in English." (cited in Middle East International, January 19, 1979.) Every imperial adventure, brothers and sisters, every major undertaking on the part of US imperialism in its history has proceeded on the basis of such pretexts. When they wanted to seize Cuba and the Philippines from Spain at the beginning of the XXth century, they bombed a U.S. ship in Havana harbor, and then launched a call to arms: "Remember the Maine!" When Woodrow Wilson sought to intervene in World War I on behalf of U.S. capitalism to challenge the role of its competitors in Europe, what did they do? They provided the coordinates of the Lusitania to the German high command, preparing the pretext for that intervention with the sinking of that ocean liner and the cynical sacrifice of its hundreds of passengers. Every major such imperial adventure by U.S. rulers, brothers and sisters, including Pearl Harbor, has followed this model. In 1962, Lyman Lemnitzer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the United States. prepared a plan for the National Security Council in accordance with its mandate. Every single member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff signed off on this plan. It called for the flying of airplanes into buildings in Miami and Washington DC. It arranged for the assassination of U.S. citizens in cities across the United States and projected the shooting down of the rocket carrying astronaut John Glenn. All this was to be imputed to Fidel Castro and the Cuban revolution in order to provide the basis for immediate and massive U.S. intervention, for the overthrow of the Cuban revolution and the murder of Fidel - all this under the Presidency of John F. Kennedy. Brothers and sisters, in 1962, Operation Northwood, was exposed with full documentation in the book called "Body of Secrets" by James Bamford, co-producer with Peter Jennings of ABC Television's World News Tonight in the United States. Every major imperial adventure undertaken by U.S. rulers has proceeded on the basis of such elaborate and well-prepared pretexts. That is the content and the context of Condoleeza Rice's intervention in the National Security Council when she declared on the eve of September 11, 2001: "What we need," in order to carry out the requisite expansion of our power, "is a new Pearl Harbor." Mohammed Atta, for whom responsibility is attributed for the preparation of the attacks of 9/11 in the United States, is claimed by U.S. authorities to have completed these plans with associates in Tarragona, Spain, These very people were blamed for the train bombings in Madrid, of which this is the first anniversary. These associates had to be released at the time of the September 11 attacks because there was no evidence against them, but from that moment their every movement was monitored by U.S. and Spanish intelligence. In reality, as Newsweek would confirm, "Mohamed Atta was trained at the International Officer's School at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama. Abdul Aziz Alamari received his training at the Aerospace School at Brooks Force Base in San Antonio, Texas. Said Aghmadi was trained at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California." In fact, Newsweek, the Washington Post and Knight Ridder newspapers established that at least six of the accused "terrorists" were trained at high-level U.S. military facilities. On September 11, there was a man in Washington DC, meeting with the National Security Council, consummating discussions and communications of previous weeks. He met with Porter Goss, then a Congressman, and now the Director of the CIA. The meetings included Robert Graham, a leading Democratic Senator from Florida. The man participating in these meetings was General Mahmou. During these very meetings, General Mahmoud Ahmed, Director of the ISI, Pakistani intelligence services, wired $100 000 to the account of Mohamed Atta. Brothers and sisters, the category of terror is a contrivance that belongs to U.S. authorities, the indisputable authors of the events of 9/11. These are the constant and prepared pretexts not only for the criminal adventures that we are witnessing and experiencing today, but for the future occurrences that they promise us every day of the week, a new wave of such False Flag "terrorist" attacks, this time with biological weapons, the human cost of which will far surpass and dwarf those of 9/11. This is the conduct of a criminal ruling class. It reflects the profound criminalization of the State. The actual content of "terrorism" is the State terror of imperialism itself. It is directed against working people, against the peoples of the world. We must not buy into this. We must not bow down before the big lie, in reality the ideological rationale for our subjugation. For over 40 years, the Pentagon has sequestered ten trillion dollars. On September 10th, 2001, CBS news anchor Dan Rather disclosed on CBS Television that in the previous year, the Pentagon had "lost" 2,3 trillion dollars, gone without a trace. In the year previous to that, 1.4 trillion dollars of Pentagon funding had disappeared. Robert J. Lieberman, Assistant General Inspector for Auditing of the Department of Defense acknowledged that 7.2 trillion dollars of accumulated funds to the military and the Intelligence agencies had disappeared without a discernible paper trail. How do you "lose" sums of this magnitude? They disappeared into the offshore accounts of proprietary corporations, set up by the military and intelligence services together with multinational corporations and clandestine agencies that plan and implement elaborate programs of terror across the world. Brothers and sisters, what is a trillion dollars? Its a thousand dollars a minute since the birth of Jesus! What then is the role of the Democratic Party and the Republican Party respectively in relation to this plunder? John Kerry assured the Wall Street Journal on the eve of the Presidential election that the elections in actuality involved the selection of a new CEO. Kerry stated that election day would be a "National shareholders' meeting." The chief fundraiser for John Kerry was the Vice-President of City Bank. The chief fundraiser for George W. Bush was the President of City Bank, During the Presidential electoral debates, John Kerry pilloried George Bush for his failure to destroy Fallujah. He called for an additional 40 000 troops in Iraq. His brother, Cameron Kerry, declared in Jerusalem during meetings with Ariel Sharon. that it was necessary to carry out a pre-emptive missile strike on Teheran. He disclosed that James Baker would be John Kerry's "Special Envoy to the Middle East." Kerry was not merely Bush-lite. Kerry was George Bush on steroids. Brothers and sisters, the Democratic Party and the Social Democracy itself constitute the principal obstacle to the emancipation of working people. They are the source of our corruption, the means of delusion, the principal instrument and the major method devised to abort and derail a movement based upon class independence. In the United States, 1% of the population owns and controls more than 95% of the total wealth of the rest of the population combined. We have but 5 % of the world's population within our national frontiers. Thus 1 % of 5% controls over 70 % of the natural resources of the world. This is a greater disparity of wealth, a more grotesque and ominous concentration of power than that which existed at the time of the French Revolution or at the time of the American revolution. It is more concentrated and more devastating than the disparities of wealth and power at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution or the Chinese Revolution. We cannot appease these people. We cannot persuade them. We cannot influence them. We cannot contain them. We cannot change them. Our task is to remove them. The fundamental prerequisite for meeting this historic responsibility is the independence of our class. The International Liaison Committee, no less than the First International at the beginning of our movement, prepares the ground for the mobilization of our class internationally on the rock firm basis of class independence. Without this, brothers and sisters, the crisis of humanity, that comprises the decomposition of a dying order, will consume us all. It will atomize our class, devour our civilization, and reduce human existence to the barbarism that expanding capitalism has visited continuously on society, except that now, in its terminal decay, the murder and destruction threaten to unfold on a scale never before endured, engulfing all life on our planet. The challenge before us then is to begin this fight for class independence today, so that the American working class that originated May Day is integrated once again within the struggles of the working class internationally. The moment of trial is always, brothers and sisters; now is the appointed time. ******************* CHAN KA WAI (China — Hong Kong) Deputy Director, Hong Kong Christian Industrial Committee Ladies and Gentleman, It is a valuable opportunity to discuss how to grasp the characteristics of international workers movement under globalization and how to effectively guarantee and safeguard the rights of labors together with so many friends from different countries. It is my honor to attend this meeting because its topic for discussion is the working class of the whole world, an issue that all people with a sense of social justice pay much attention to. As a professor doing research on industrial relations and labor laws, I hope to give my ideas about this issue from a perspective of a scholar. Economic globalization, at present, not only is a trend, but has become reality. The problem here is not that whether globalization should exist, but that how it exists. The essence of current globalization is capital globalization or global capitalization. The capital flows unrestrictedly in the world and the model of capitalism market economy has been copied to the whole world. This not only promotes the development of global economy, but also brings the inherent contradiction of capitalism, that is, the industrial conflict, to the whole world. The capital, especially multinational capital, occupies the benefits of economic development while working class, the immediate producers of social wealth, goes down the drain before the strong international capital. The working class of developed and developing countries both faces the problems such as the increase of unemployment, decrease of salary, deterioration of working conditions and decrease of social welfare and social insurance. Therefore, I agree with the slogan of World Social Forum --- "Another World is Possible". We need to strive for a more equal and just globalization. Under this background, international working class faces an austere challenge. International capital has formed a global coalition under WTO. They compete with each other for the benefits of their own, but the capital of different countries takes action as a whole to manage workers. This is because their common goal is to safeguard the interests of capital. On the other hand, globalization does not bring coalition and solidarity to international working class. On the contrary, to get a job opportunity, workers compete with each other, not only within individual workers, but within different enterprises, regions and countries. They also intensely compete for their existence. This is a kind of "race to the bottom". Therefore, decentralization and isolation put workers of different countries in an unfavorable position in the struggle against international capital. Under such international background, we must recur to Marx and must again advocate the principle of Marxism --- Proletarians of all countries unite. Through this union, the competition within workers can be reduced so as to realize the competition with international capital. The coalition is not only a union of workers from developed countries, but to unite workers from developed and developing countries. We need make research on many new theories and practical issues about how to form the new coalition of workers of all countries under globalization. I am very glad to see that this meeting has put much emphasis on the Chinese industrial relations and the Chinese workers. As a very important part of capital globalization, China has entered WTO and now is implementing market economic reform. Many changes, with characteristics of marketization and internationalization, are also taking place in the field of Chinese industrial relations. Marketization is that the Chinese industrial relations has been an employed one and internationalization is that because of the influence of international economic chain, the Chinese industrial relations has closely related to international industrial relations. China, with more than 300 million workers, now has been a world factory and is the most important investment target of international capital. Like workers of other countries, the Chinese workers have common plights. In the market economic reform, it is a prevalent social problem that workers rights are violated so the protection of workers rights has been the most important issue for the Chinese economic and social development and stability. Fortunately, the Chinese government has paid attention to this problem and has advocated to cultivate harmonious society since last year. This is an active rectification for neglecting workers rights before. However, in China, great efforts are needed to realize the harmony of industrial relations and to guarantee workers rights. Now the problem is how to achieve the guarantee of workers rights and further realize the balance and harmony of industrial relations. The point I want to emphasize is that in current world, only within the structure of law, workers rights can be protected through the solidity and strive of working class. International Labor Treaty, with the main purpose of workers protection, is the most powerful law weapon to strive for workers rights. The Treaty is formulated by three parties, employees, employers and government. Workers can protect their rights through this powerful weapon according to law and can gain the attention, sympathy and support from all society. Therefore, I greatly appreciate that international labor standards can be the main issue of this meeting. I think that it will be a feature of international workers movement under globalization that workers of all countries use International Labor Treaty as a weapon to strive for their own rights. I believe, the struggle of international workers will change the status quo of economic globalization and another more equal and harmonious world will eventually come. Finally, I reiterate that in order to achieve this goal, the basic condition is that Proletarians of all countries unite. Thank you. **********
Concluding Statement by DANIEL GLUCKSTEIN, Coordinator of the International Liaison Committee of
Workers and Peoples The first remark I would like to make is that the comrades to whom we had said that if there were enough time left, they could also be included, we ask them to hand their contributions in to the platform, so that they can be published along with the full report of the Conference and thus be made known to everyone. The next introductory remark is to say that we have managed to give this conference a broad representation, despite the visa difficulties that we described at the beginning and also despite the existing financial barriers. We will also be publishing a comprehensive financial report. But right from the start, we must point out that what makes this conference completely different from all other international conferences, is not only its content, but also what is linked to that: its way of being financed, because this conference has been held without the slightest aid from any government, nor NGO, nor any sort of regional or international organisation. And I think that is its proof of independence. The third observation I wish to make is that the militant character of this conference is demonstrated not only by the origins of the participants, but by the fact that all the comrades who have contributed to organising it, those who have put together all the technical machinery, who have made possible the editing, printing and distribution of texts, who have taken care of our safety, our transport and of course I wish to mention in particular the comrades who have taken on the job of translation, which is always an extremely difficult exercise in a conference of this sort (and from what I was able to judge, carried it out in a highly professional manner) ... all these comrades have accomplished these tasks as militant workers, all of them as voluntary workers, none of them has received any sort of payment or compensation for carrying out their tasks. They have done it to serve the cause of the working class, our common cause. And it is not only on account of their efficiency, but also on account of their class conscience that we can thank them. Comrades, this is not the moment to reply to everything that has been discussed, neither the time available, nor the abundance of the debates make that possible, but with your agreement, I would like to bring up a certain number of the problems which have been tackled, so as to pursue their discussion among us. First of all, before speaking of the more directly political problems, I have been struck, as I imagine we all have here, by the extent to which the workers' and peoples' rights and conditions have been diminished on all the continents, even if not always in the same way, by the application of structural adjustment plans, of the policies of the IMF and the World Bank. There is not a single comrade here who did not mention the extent of these destructions. I took note of a few of these terrifying figures: a life expectation of 43 years in the Central African Republic, 10% of the population being contaminated by AIDS; I noted the collapse of the situation for pensioners in Russia, I noted the social collapse in Bangladesh, what was said about the Ivory Coast, about Chile. I noted the horrifying details concerning the health situation in Azania and, of course, all that the comrades have reported concerning the very existence of a working class being at stake in the United States, also at stake in Western Europe because of the European Union. But I did note two comments of comrades, concerning this situation. Our Czech comrade said: "In my country, the workers don't understand that it is all their social conquests that they are trying to take away from them again". That is not only true in the Czech Republic. For no matter which worker, throughout the world, there is something incomprehensible, absurd about seeing oneself confronted with a situation in which the social conquests, which they have in some cases had for decades now, can be decreed, from one day to the next, as suddenly being obsolete, impossible, unattainable. In my country, comrades, there is a system of social protection which exists since 1945 and which up to now protected, for everything essential, every worker and his/her family, in fact, the immense majority of the working population, against the risks of sickness and all that is linked with that. France had a reputation envied throughout the world, and not without reason: a country in which a worker could maybe have worries on many other subjects, but did not need to worry as to whether he would be able to get treatment if he fell ill. And I recall having discussed that with comrades, whether from India, the United States, Africa or other European countries, and they all said: that is a most enviable situation. American workers have to put aside huge amounts, to still get very uncertain health cover. And how many of them go without treatment? Or how many of them are ruined when sickness strikes? Well now, comrades, the French situation I have just described to you, to a large extent it no longer exists in our country. Parts of it are still there, but with all the counter-reforms we have ended up with a situation in which, with the "closed envelope", with all the measures of rationing of health care, the lack of recruitment of the necessary doctors, it will become more and more obvious that workers will also need to take up private cover, in addition, or be unable to cope if they fall ill. And what I would say to the Czech comrade is that the French workers, faced with this situation, are asking: "How is it possible? How come that our Social Security, which has been protecting all generations for sixty years, how can it suddenly become a luxury that we cannot afford, that absolutely must be destroyed?" And I know that our German comrades are confronted with the same unbelievable situation. Comrades, we must give as an answer to this question: the workers don't understand, because it is indeed incomprehensible, at least from the point of view of the needs of mankind. From the point of view of democracy, of social justice, it's incomprehensible, it's absurd, disgraceful, it's revolting. Now, from the OTHER point of view, that of a social system based more and more on the necessity to make profit by all means, then it is sure that this race to reduce labour costs brings with it this destruction, whose consequences for the population are absolutely unbearable. And that brings us back to the remark made by the Chinese comrade when he said: "In China, all the victories of the working class are threatened. It is one of the last fortresses that the Capital wants to conquer." We have all noted, in this context, at one and the same time the horror of the destruction forced upon the African continent and also the conclusions adopted by the tribunal, which rightly link the combat for the emancipation of the populations of Africa, purely and simply threatened to disappear, and the political combat of the Black people of the United States, the black element among the American working class, which brings up the whole question of their political representation, totally linked with the independence of the labour movement. And I think that what the comrade Paul Nkunzimana, the different African delegates said on this subject, but also Clarence Thomas and Ralph Schoenmann, about the importance of the Million Workers March in the United States, I think all that fits in together. We have also all taken note that, among the key words common to all these policies being implemented, the question of privatisation, like that of repression, like that of dismantling of the nations, finally they are present on all continents. Privatisation: what the comrade from Mexico explained, concerning what is happening in his country in matter of health and Social Security, or, in another form, what comrade Koulik described concerning the way things have developed recently in his country, Ukraine, where, under cover of a pretence of challenging privatisation, they are in fact just redistributing the pillage of national industry, and as he says - I fully agree with him - what is necessary is to bring back in the slogan not simply of stopping privatisation, but of re-nationalising. Privatisation, repression, dismantling of nations: we have taken a stand here concerning the situation of comrade Miron Cozma in Rumania and of comrade Cretan. But I would like to insist on an aspect which has already been mentioned, but which I think we must draw particular attention to: as far as I know, it is a most exceptional event for a trade-unionist who has been imprisoned to be liberated by the granting of a presidential pardon, brought out of prison and then put back into prison 21 hours later. That simple fact alone is one of which I have never seen the like. But this fact is all the more inconceivable, when it is established that this re-imprisonment resulted from the direct intervention of the United States government and the institutions of the European Union in Brussels. Each one of us, in our European countries, we find ourselves developing very sophisticated arguments, which we hope are as convincing as possible, about the antidemocratic character of the European Union. But ultimately, that could be established by this fact alone. You have, bordering on the European Union, a political regime which imprisons trade union delegates who have done no more than their job as such, and the European Union puts pressure on that regime, not to get the trade union delegates freed, but to insist on the sentence being served to the bitter end (a fifteen year sentence, in this case). I ask you: Is that accidental? Is it by pure chance that the American authorities and the European Union intervene together to have Cozma put back in prison? I don't believe it is pure chance. I believe that here, concerning one particular case, that of the miners' delegates in Rumania, it is the expression of a fundamental tendency of what the European Union really is, the fact that it can only accept trade unions if they are subsidiary, which can only accept unions which come under officials of the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) and that, from that point of view, the EU cannot force that upon the countries of "old Europe", because in those countries there is resistance, that at this point in time a struggle is taking place, that is obvious. A struggle is taking place between those who want to fully accomplish this integration and the resistance of the workers and their organisations. But that in the case of countries not yet incorporated in the European Union, it is a sort of prerequisite that Cozma must be in prison, that's to say that they won't allow into the European Union a country in which there is a trade union movement which organises strikes and demonstrations against privatisation, comrades, those who still have the slightest illusion concerning the European Union must make known, not only this case of repression against Cozma, but the leading role of the European Union in that repression. But the question of repression gives a broader idea of what globalisation means, as has been established here, that it means nothing other than a march towards totalitarianism, which of course has to be accompanied by repression. The position that we have adopted here and which most of the comrades here have countersigned, for the liberation of the Palestinian "deputy" (translator's note = elected representative of his people), is part of the necessary working class solidarity against repression, for as the comrade Benoît Essiga pointed out to us, the fact that the International Liaison Committee of Workers and Peoples took on the responsibility of a campaign, that contributed to the comrade Béatrice Mengue in Cameroon being freed. Repression, privatisation, destruction of nations: the comrade Blas Ortega mentioned here the regionalization of the health systems in Spain. But regionalization, whether in the context of Spain, of France or of other countries, is not simply a question of regionalization, not at all: it is a process of dismantling all the nations and all the institutions that create the cohesion of democracy, whatever the exact political form may be, differing from one country to another. And this dismantling of nations, which they try, whenever possible, to base on regional or national realities of the (sometimes long distant) past, or even to create such artificially, is a general law of the march towards dismantling everything, the march against democracy. You heard the comrade Nkunzimana mention the way in which the ethnic separation of groups in his country has been artificially invented, stirred up, and how, after the massacres, which have devastated both Rwanda and Burundi, they are now trying, in a Constitution, to make institutional the ethnic sharing out of all the leading roles. But in a different manner, the comrade Sénouvo from Togo, has shown us the risk of such processes, carried out in his own country, and we only need to take a look at what is happening in Iraq, in various countries of Asia or even in Europe, to see that such things can happen anywhere. Two other questions deserve to be treated, among what has been brought up here: one of them concerns war. A lot of comrades, among which Gene Bruskin, have referred to it now being the 2 year anniversary of the start of the war in Iraq, a war that is still going on, a war that is revealing what it really is: the dismantling of the Iraqi nation, the destruction of the people of Iraq. But let us also take good note that the number of military bases, in the world, is unceasingly growing. I believe there are over 150 American military bases. And although it is for reasons, which everybody can understand, that the largest number of these bases is American, in matters of war, it is the principle of subsidiarity that applies here just as much as in other fields: the European Union, the UNO, South Africa, on the subject of maintaining order in Africa, as was emphasised by Lybon Mabasa, are all asked to play their role as military forces, intervening as subsidiaries of the American troops and it is a fact that today, the march towards generalised war is on the agenda for all nations, all territories and that nobody can claim that the continent on which he lives will permanently not be involved in war. And then I noted another question that has been brought up, the problem of land and I believe it is right to declare, as several comrades have done (Lybon Mabasa, Marcela Maspero and others), that the labour movement, whose place is to remain independent from the government, cannot stay neutral, when faced with certain questions, which are vital for millions of workers and peasants. For example, whatever our opinion of these regimes may be in other matters, when President Mugabe in Zimbabwe promotes agrarian reform, which gives the land to the immense majority of black peasants, thereby harming the interests of the tiny minority of white owners, the action taken by him is an act of democracy. When Chavez, in Venezuela, in a few weeks, in agrarian reform, which harms the interests of a small number of financial holding companies, particularly British ones, hands over the land to approximately 200,000 peasant families - which is enormous for a country of that size - the action taken by him is an act of democracy. And the comrades have emphasised that when, in Brazil, a government, which was supposedly elected to defend the interests of its people, does not even carry out the agrarian reform, which was in its own program, not even the minimum of agrarian reform, which its own experts demand, and that, for these reasons, 100, 200 peasants are assassinated every year by the big owners of latifundia, I must say that that government is doing the opposite of what democracy demands. This question of land, brought up by different comrades, including the comrade Suresh from India, is a question which concerns the labour movement, insofar as it concerns, purely and simply, the capacity of societies to eat, to produce the food that they need to survive, in a situation in which malnutrition (insufficient food, whether in quantity or in quality) is killing one inhabitant out of six on this planet (1,000,000,000 human beings), according to the figures of the UNO. And the initiative suggested by the comrade Sokol from Brazil, of replying to the invitation sent by the rural workers, concerning the campaign taken up by the comrades Baldemar Velasquez and Alan Benjamin, addressed to Minister Rossetto and President Lula in Brazil, on the question of agrarian reform, in my opinion we must register that and carry it out. Now I would like to broach the subject of some of the political problems that were brought up during the discussion. The first one, in my opinion, is in fact a series of problems that the labour movement is facing, which have been brought up as apparently separate issues during the discussion, but which, finally, are all closely linked. For example, the restructuring that is taking place in the trade union organisations. In the introductory report, the significance of the merger of the ICFTU with the WCL was brought up, and undoubtedly in a near future to be joined by the TUF, or some sectors of the TUF and it was said that this restructuring, in our opinion, carries with it the risk of drawing the trade union movement away, far away, from its foundations, of taking it high above what is, or should be, its social basis and finally of integrating it into a sector which is definitely not its place, that of governance and corporatism. I was very interested in hearing, during the discussion, many comrades pointing out that the structural reforms going on in their own countries, despite appearances, are perhaps not only the result of internal, domestic debate, but are perhaps related to this context. As these questions are coming up in all countries, if in your country, it is proposed that trade union organisations should be merged - several unions, of which it is said that they are maybe treading on each others' toes, several federations - and if the argument is put forward, an argument that is more appropriate when used by company directors, but that is sometimes heard coming from trade union leaders, the argument of economies of scale: if we merger, there will be an economy of scale. That's what the bosses say; there will be less overheads_ I am not saying that you shouldn't take it into account, but before making any decision, meditate on what the German comrades said: when the merger of four national federations constituted the Ver.di union, the collective agreements, various agreements and statutes which were particular to each of those four unions entering the merger, it only took a few months, sometimes less, for them to evaporate into thin air, beginning with the statutory guarantees of the workers in the public sector, which were guaranteed as long as their specific union, the ÖTV existed, because they were written down in there, but once ÖTV merged into Ver.di, those guarantees purely and simply disappeared along with the ÖTV trade union. Maybe someone will say that that is just a specifically German problem? But I have heard the comrade Cholewka tell us that in Great Britain the programmed merger between TGWU and another union organisation is already threatening the statutory guarantees therein of the workers who are members of TGWU. I have also heard the comrade Alan Benjamin mention the merger that took place a few years ago between different trade unions, of which OCAW, in the Chemicals and Oil sector, in the United States, with some additional unions, so as to form this big union called PACE, and there, too, as with Ver.di, they have lost along the way a huge proportion of the members who were in the constituent unions before the merger (I believe that Ver.di, according to official figures, has lost a million members over a period of just a few years). But therefore it is in the same way in the United States as in Great Britain and in Germany, that these restructuring mergers have had as their consequence - perhaps it was even the motivation behind them - that the collective guarantees, which had been conquered with difficulty, in particular by the workers of the Oil, Nuclear and Chemicals industries, simply disappeared at the same time as their specific trade union disappeared, which was a trade union active in the class struggle for working class rights, called OCAW, and which gave in to the pressure, apparently as a means of efficiency, but which lead them to loose all the guarantees which had been conquered by their class struggle. One case, maybe it is an exception, but here we already have three cases. That needs thinking about. I am not trying to say that everything is the same everywhere. We need to think about it. And in this debate, I would like to mention something concerning the debate that the American comrades are having at the moment. Everyone has understood that a debate is going on at the moment among the American comrades as to the significance of this restructuring of the trade unions and that is a legitimate debate which is not easy, in particular because the United States is a country that is essentially violent in its social relationships, the class struggle has always brought about violence there and thus the discussions in the trade union organisations often take place in a less muffled, less refined, maybe also less hypocritical way than in other countries. In any case, I would like to tell you my own opinion on one aspect of the problem. A lot of things are debatable, there are no magical recipes, but I do think that one thing is certain: if the number of national trade unions is reduced from 60 to 20, if we concentrate the power of negotiating and contracting, putting that power into the hands of triumvirates at the head of each of these federations, trade union democracy will certainly not gain thereby. That is for sure. And from that point of view, we have something to help us get our bearings, for we know very well that trade union traditions can be very different from one country to another. What do the ILO conventions say about trade union freedom? They say something very simple: every right must be left to the workers to group together freely so as to defend their specific interests, to organise themselves in the way that seems best, to enable them to defend their interests, including those of contracting, negotiating, etc. That is what the ILO conventions say. In France, things took a form - which in my opinion is very democratic, but is at stake today - which is the law of 1884 on trade unions. The trade unions are free to form federations, confederations - that is the labour movement - but the trade union remains the trade union. If the trade union has stolen from it all its prerogatives, within each professional branch - if I have understood one of the propositions that has been made in the debate in the United States, by three leaders at the national conference, who hold in their hands all the power of negotiating and contracting - I am not sure that the worker down at the bottom will be able to make himself heard, as to the nature of the claims to be made and the contents of the contract, I am not sure that what he has to say will get all the way back up to the summit, at the point of time when the agreement will be signed. I think I have every reason to be very worried that the agreement will no longer take into account the rank and file member and that the trade union itself will lose all its substance. And that is all the more true if you consider that, in the United States, only a tiny portion of the collective rights depend on national legislation and that an overwhelming proportion of the agreements are either local or limited to just one company (the reasons for that stemming back from the social history of the United States). If that power of negotiating and contracting is stolen from the unions, then it is the death of trade unionism. Thus, I believe that this debate is very American in its form, but extremely universal in its content. I have heard the German comrades judging Schröder's politics, the British comrades judging Blair's, the Italian comrades worrying about their labour movement being subordinated to an electoral alliance of which the leader would be Prodi, also "leader" of the European Constitution. There is obviously a common element in these examples, for the subordination of the labour movement in a whole series of countries, whether directly or indirectly, to this or that government, whether the government in office or the previous one, has disastrous consequences from the point of view of the independence of the organisations. And without being German, I think we can fully understand why the German comrades link the need to safeguard the independence of their organisations, to preserve and regain the immense rights and gains, which the German proletariat had wrested in the past and which are undergoing the terrible risk of disappearing today, that they link that with the demand "Schröder must go". We can understand that these questions also come up in other countries, in other forms, including in some countries when it comes to deciding whether the organisations ought to openly declare themselves against the European Constitution or not. Some resistance to that is influenced by the pressure of one political party or another, that we know. That's a first group of questions, which we need to debate about, and there is a second group of questions, which in my opinion also need discussing, which focuses on new governance and social forums. I heard a comrade pick up the expression: "Another world is possible". As with all expressions, when they are bandied around by everybody, it's a good idea to question what is really meant by them. That another world is possible, I too am convinced of that, but which one? Another world of barbarity is possible, too and moreover, to some extent, we are watching it become more widespread. Thus, I think that the real problem of the labour movement, it seems to me, isn't to declare that another world is possible, but rather to answer the question: what should we do here and now? Because if the slogan "Another world is possible" links up with what the vice-president of ATTAC France is proposing, that's to say that in order to be able to build another world, it's necessary to start today by a phase of "un-building" (those are his words) and if in the name of another world possible, tomorrow, it is necessary (I am quoting what the vice-president of ATTAC France actually said) to un-build the political democracy which is imprisoned in the national framework, un-build the nations, well in that case, comrades, maybe I am lacking in imagination, but the other world possible, built on the un-building of political democracy and of nations, for my part, I don't want that. Because I believe there won't be any world possible for the labour and for democracy, if we don't defend every inch of the way the existing forms of labour and democratic rights, such as they have been conquered. I recognise that it isn't an easy debate, there is an enormous pressure being put on the labour movement, everywhere. And we sometimes hear comrades using such slogans, perhaps without knowing all that goes along with them. But in that case, an explanation is necessary. A little while ago, I had a brief discussion with a young comrade who said: "OK, we need to defend all that exists, but don't we need new rights for the working class?» Of course we do, comrades. But who can believe for one minute that the working class will be able to conquer any new rights, if it doesn't begin by proving itself capable of defending the existing rights, which, in all their forms, are already threatened with destruction? In another form, an expression was used earlier during the discussion: "Participative democracy". That expression, too, comrades, is often made to fit into very different situations. People use the expression for different reasons, but "participative democracy" has very precise contents. We had a discussion earlier with the comrades Marcella Maspero, Julio Turra and Alan Benjamin. Julio Turra took the opportunity to remind us what "participative democracy" is. It was invented in Porto Alegre and basically it works very simply, let me remind you: after the local government has paid the debt to reimburse the IMF, has in addition guaranteed what is called the "primary superavit", which is the financial margin of the budget, an extra 4%, to guarantee the IMF, that even if there is devaluation, the reimbursement of the debt will still take place, so once there is only a small share of the budget left, after having, as even the IMF says "faithfully carried out the FMI's decisions", once all that has been done, the town council of Porto Alegre convenes the representatives of the associations of the different sectors of the town and says to them: Ladies and gentlemen, we don't have the means to carry out all that you are demanding, but as we believe in participative democracy, you yourselves may now choose which of your demands we should satisfy. Thus, here they ask to build a school, there a day nursery, somewhere else to put in sewage. All the people claiming these things are workers and live in extreme poverty. They need the sewage system, the day nursery and the school. The participative democracy, instead of uniting them, brings about division, conflict, until at last there is one group which manages to win the round, in which case, if it's not your demand which has been selected, and if a couple of months later you go on strike or you demonstrate, to draw attention to your needs, they will tell you: dear fellow citizens, you participated, there was a vote, you lost, you can always try again next year, but in the meantime, there's nothing left to have. That's the way it takes place. That's what participative democracy boils down to. Now, I know that the comrade translators make themselves little glossaries, to have the equivalents of different terms. Well, I think we should say clearly that what is called participative democracy in Porto Alegre vocabulary, is called world governance and corporate governance, in the vocabulary of Davos, the IMF and the World Bank. Because that's what it really is. Participative democracy is no more nor less than governance, it is integration of workers' organisations and of workers themselves into conditioning and defining their own exploitation. It is a debate that will have to be pursued and that also branches out in other directions. For example, we had a very important discussion with the comrade Marcela, on the situation in Venezuela, which I would like to talk about now. It is a complex situation, as you have understood, and as you know, the government has taken under state control a company that had been abandoned by its bosses, Venepal. And at the moment, in Venezuela, a discussion is taking place as to how companies that have been taken under state control should be managed. This concerns four different companies and in one of them, they are proposing what is called co-management and they explain that the State was going to have 51% of the shares and the workers 49% - and even the Venezuelan Minister of Labour, who I met when we were over there, told me that the Venezuelan government thought that the workers should have an even greater share, a lesser one going to the State. It's a complicated matter to discuss, comrades, but everybody will have to think very hard. What is the role of the trade union in the management of the company? That is a debate which already took place in Russia, after 1917: the State being defined as being under the control of the working class, the companies supposedly being owned by the working class. Does that mean that the trade union must become an instrument of management of the company and of the State? Comrades, knowing how things turned out, and even for myself, belonging to a political movement that considers that the Russian revolution was perfectly legitimate, there is no choice but to say that in this case, if there is one lesson to be drawn from what took place in Russia, it is that even in a State in which the power is controlled by workers' representatives, it is essential that the union should remain independent, including with regard to the "workers' State", including with regard to the workers' management of the companies. And because work conflicts can exist, even in that framework, it is essential to be able to stand up for the specific demands of the workers, against the "general" interest", even when that is supposedly the interest of the working class as a whole. That is a guarantee of democracy. That is in the case where the working class is ruling. That is not yet the case in Venezuela. In the case of Venezuela, it's complicated. What will the union do? - I am not giving any lessons, for the Venezuelan comrades with whom we discussed the matter said themselves that it is complicated, there is no ready-made answer. The Chavez government has put the company under state control just so as the workers don't loose their jobs. That is a perfectly acceptable measure. But does that mean that the workers should no longer have the right to make any demands? Certainly not. Therefore, if the trade union manages the company, at some time, in the capitalist system, there is a market, competition, thus to be able to keep that market, there are choices to be made, work longer hours, increase competitiveness, lower the wages, give up some social guarantees. Therefore, the debate must be pursued. I say it again: there aren't any lessons to give. Moreover, we reached the decision with the Venezuelan comrades that we would be pursuing the discussion. It is one thing to have representatives of the workers' unions on the boards of direction - which exists in a certain number of countries, including France - that in itself is questionable, but it is quite another thing - and that doesn't have the same signification - to take charge of the management of the company. I repeat: there is no final conclusion to that question, except to say that there are dangers in the workers' movements and that discussion is necessary. But there are all sorts of dangers, comrades. We may well believe that we know things, but it isn't true. I have heard that in South Africa, some new structures have been set up by the government, to represent the workers, replacing their trade unions; I have heard that in Morocco a different form has been created, a sort of mechanism has been set up to substitute itself for the prerogatives of the trade union in the collective bargaining; I have heard what Julio Turra said about the reform of workers' rights in Brazil, what Vitaly Koulik said about the possibility in Ukraine of the existing labour legislation being replaced by the European Union's much-vaunted charter of fundamental social rights. We have heard many comrades mention the role of the European Trade Union Confederation. We are right in the midst of a situation in which the labour movement is being attacked constantly. And as we really are in the midst of it right now, we have to decide among ourselves what is the place of the International Liaison Committee of Workers and Peoples and what propositions we can make here. The comrade from China used the expression: "300 million workers are part of the world chain of production. The world labour movement cannot ignore the Chinese working class, otherwise it would just be an empty shell." I think he is absolutely right, given the importance of China in the global economy, given the way in which the situation in China is used to justify the attacks made against the workers throughout the world. He added: of course, the traditional labour movement has every reason to continue existing. We are no longer living in the period when Marx was writing. That is absolutely true. Many things have changed and moreover the problem for us is not to know whether what Marx wrote is true or not. Everyone can have his point of view and within the International Liaison Committee of Workers and Peoples, you can be Marxist, just as you can not be Marxist. But I think there is one point on which we will all agree, which is that the mechanisms of capitalist exploitation, analysed by Marx and others in the 19th century, have not yet disappeared. The extortion of the surplus value is still the raison d'être of the capitalist system. The increasing of the system of exploitation, that's to say the stealing of the labourer's work, remains the raison d'être of this system and that remains the principal resource of all the wealth accumulated by the capitalist class, at the expense of the working class. I think that all the comrades present will be in agreement with me, but you won't find any trace of what I have just said in one single document of one single Social Forum, whoever has organised it. You won't find a trace of my declaration among the "altermondialists" (those whose slogan is: "another world is possible"). Why? Because it remains true that the capitalist system is a system for exploiting the work force, the result of that, unavoidably, as much so today as yesterday, even if in different conditions, the struggle against being over-exploited, that's to say the struggle for the improvement of working conditions and wages, that struggle cannot be dissociated from the existence of independent labour organisations and those organisations need to be inserted in the internationalism of the working classes. And that is what is the basis of the labour movement. And in a way, we can draw the following conclusion: it is indeed right to declare that the labour movement is not dead, that it does have a future, but that is not enough. We must also say that it is threatened in an extremely dangerous way by all the forms of integration, and in the front line of those come the Social Forums and all the mechanisms of governance. In that sense, the defence of the independence of the labour movement can only be done by breaking away from governance and social forums. Saying breaking off, that does not mean that we should start accusing this or that person, but we should have this discussion, which is vital for the labour movement, in each one of our organisations, we must, step by step, clear up the lack of understanding, remove ambiguities, clarify misunderstandings. We must do that in such a way, as we have done here, that by letting each person speak freely, workers and militants learn to mistrust those false friends of the working class: Social Forums and other movements of governance, that they learn to remain firmly on the only safe ground: the independence of class of the organisations. The pressures are very strong, but if we understand that, then from there onwards the ILC can accomplish its work. We have spoken of the ILC's campaigns. They are modest. The ILC is not a vast international instrument, capable of doing extraordinary things. But let's note down, all the same, a few pieces of information: _ For Cozma, we have made some decisions, we have a calendar. The ILC's campaign has already had an important effect in Rumania: oppressed by the extremely brutal pressure of the Rumanian government and of quite a number of apparatus linked to the government, the Rumanian union movement was extremely hesitant to take up Cozma's defence. It's not that the comrades were not on Cozma's side, but they were terrified. When you are in a country where they imprison a trade unionist for fifteen years and where a campaign is elaborated saying that Cozma is a fascist, a terrorist, many comrades hesitate. As from the moment when there was an international campaign, the comrades felt encouraged and the Conference that took place a few weeks ago, of three hundred trade union leaders, for the liberation of Cozma in Rumania, it is first of all the product of the Rumanian working class movement, but we can say that the ILC's action had helped. _ Look at what has just happened in Venezuela. We have been carrying out this international campaign since February 3rd, directed at the ILO's workers' group, against the complaint lodged by the employers of Venezuela and supported by the employers of 22 countries against Venezuela and the UNT, for failure to permit trade union freedom. Before we started the campaign, the Venezuelan comrades were fighting, but on an international level the problem remained unknown, to such a point that a certain number of the trade union leaders were tending to think that maybe all that_ There's no smoke without fire, etc. The campaign was started up on February 3rd, it enabled, in quite a number of countries, groups of affiliated trade unions, and important ones at that (the CUT in Brazil, the CGT in Peru), to take a firm stand against the condemning of Venezuela. A certain number of leaders in the international trade union movement, particularly in the United States, fortunately not very numerous - we'll charitably not mention any names - thought that their duty was to carry out a counter-campaign, to counter the ILC's one, to say: yes, Venezuela and the UNT must be condemned. A few days ago, there was a meeting of the Commission of trade union freedom of the ILO and this committee asked: who supports the complaint lodged with the ILO? They counted. The only ones who said that they supported it, were the same 22 national employers' organisations as had supported it in the beginning: the MEDEF in France, the German employers' organisation, etc. and not one single other member of the ILO wanted to support the complaint. The Committee of Trade Union Freedom then said: in these circumstances, we cannot take a position and we will pass it on to the Board of Directors of the International Labour Office. That may seem very modest. But when I went to Venezuela at the beginning of February and we had discussions with the comrades, their first fear was that the Committee of Trade Union Freedom would condemn Venezuela and propose sanctions. We can say that the ILC's campaign helped them with the first step. There will be others. We came to an agreement with the comrades, you can note this in your calendars: next Wednesday, the Board of Directors of the International Labour Office will be meeting. Then we will know where we stand, either the complaint will be rejected once and for all and you will receive a committee of thanks and congratulations, or they will decide to forward the complaint to the General Assembly of the ILO, in which case we'll have until the month of June to deploy this international campaign for the defence of labour unionism in Venezuela. There are the campaigns already mentioned, there are others, too. But all this brings us back to what our vocation is. The comrade Alexandre Hébert concluded his contribution by saying: more than ever, the class struggle is the driving force of history. I don't think one can do otherwise than agree with him. As for countries about which we are sometimes less well informed, such as China, we learn that the Chinese government itself recognises an increase by 30% a year of social struggles. I read in the International Herald Tribune that, in 2004, 60,000 social incidents took place, some of which involved 50,000 or even 60,000 workers. The Chinese working class is not defeated. And I heard what the comrade Cholewka said about the biggest general strike to take place since the 1926 one, being prepared in Great Britain at the moment; I heard what Patrick Hébert said on the subject of the part played by the Confederations in the strikes and demonstrations of March 10th; on another front, I heard what the comrade Tafazzul Hussain brought up about the combat in unity which prevented the most important port of Bangladesh, in Chittagong, from being privatised by an American company, which was obliged to beat a retreat when confronted by the single front of all the workers and organisations, even including the Mayor of Chittagong. I have heard many other things that have been recounted here: the demonstrations that took place in Russia, etc. I believe there is one conclusion that can be drawn: the situation is extremely difficult, we have all recognised that. That situation demands - and it is in that role that the ILC can be useful - that we inform, clarify, point things out, that we encourage and take a lead in discussion, but we have not lost. The working class has not lost. It certainly hasn't won. But it hasn't lost. And I share Patrick Hébert's point of view, which concerns France, but is also true beyond France: even in a situation where pressure is exerted on the organisations to integrate them and where that pressure sometimes results in hesitation or even in taking the wrong route, there still exists the working class, the militants, the leaders, at various levels, there still exist those who do not want to enter into the framework of being accompanied, integrated. And there does exist in France, as also in all countries, a certain number of militants, not only the ones who are here, but others, too, who are capable of fighting at all cost so that the class organisations can carry out their mandate, so that they are not an instrument serving world governance, but an instrument serving the class struggle. Of course, nothing is completely black nor completely white. One trade union organisation in France, which refused to take part in the demonstration of the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC), nevertheless did not make the decision of making an open and massive appeal to vote NO; another one, which found itself forced to take position for voting NO, nevertheless did not abandon the idea of taking part in the ETUC's demonstration. Things are never as simple as all that. But we can prepare ourselves some springboards for future action, through our organised combat and just as we must not forget that no conquests can be made if we are not even capable of maintaining the rights and gains we conquered in the past, we must also remember that it is not possible to defend the independence of organisations, if we don't fight inch by inch with the whole of the working class to safeguard the independence of the existing organisations, to fight against the processes whose aim is their integration and to help the workers get a grasp on their own tools, the labour organisations. And it is possible to say that today, precisely because the class struggle remains the driving force of history, precisely because the class struggle remains the alpha and omega of the whole situation and because the mechanisms of exploitation, which are benefiting from the reinforcement they could never even have dreamed of, of all these processes of "accompanying", of "another world is possible", of social forums and whatever else, that no less inevitably all that is providing food for the processes of resisting exploitation, will bring about the class struggle, which will have to start by fighting to defend and save the labour organisations. That is the point on which I would like to conclude. Many comrades here have submitted requests to the International Liaison Committee of Workers and Peoples, and taken as such, those requests are legitimate. But that does not mean that the ILC is in a position, at the moment, to answer all those requests. I would rather say that the one strength of the ILC comes from its ability, since 1991, to promote debate and also action, each time that is possible, between militants, movements, organisations coming from all horizons of the labour movement, with their own history, their own physiognomy, their own references, but which all share a common base: the independence of the labour movement, which cannot be dissociated from labour internationalism and the defence of democracy. Several comrades made reference to the First International. Of course, the "model", the historic precedent serving as a base for the ILC is indeed the First International, which, finally, enabled the coexistence, with debates, controversies and even the most ferocious arguments, of all the different labour movements, in all their diversity of form of existence and organisation, no less varied than ours' today. However, we are forced to recognise that, with the extraordinary threat, which is hanging over the labour movement and its organisations, we are still only at the beginning of this process, despite 14 years having already gone past since Barcelona. Moreover, that was apparent in our discussions. It would be a mistake, which nobody is proposing to make, to try to crystallise things at a moment too premature, while there is still such diversity of viewpoints. And yet, we must go forward together, that's to say reinforce in each country the segments of independence of the labour movement, confronted with all that is threatening it. To do that, some campaigns are necessary - we have decided on a certain number - and something else is necessary - it is the only decision that will be submitted to you for approval - this final declaration, drawn up by those of us on the platform, which is now going to be distributed. You will see the signatories: Paul Nkunzimana from Burundi, Tafazzul Hussain from Bangladesh, Gotthard Krupp from Germany, Nambiath Vasudevan from India, Clarence Thomas from the United States, Erwin Salazar from Peru, Vitaly Koulik from Ukraine, Lybon Mabasa from South Africa, Nancy Wohlforth from the United States, Marcella Maspero from Venezuela and myself, comrades from different countries, from different continents, with different political pasts, belonging to different branches of the labour movement. What does this declaration say? It says: these are the principle dangers, such as we have noted them, to which the labour movement is exposed. This discussion, which we have held here, concerns all workers, in all countries, all the militants, all the organisations. We, here, participating in this conference, we commit ourselves to pursuing this discussion where we are, to have it debated in our organisations and to act in such a way as to bring more workers into the ranks of those who are not willing to watch the labour movement disappear within the framework of the so-called governance, which would mean letting them be integrated into the corporations. Increase the ranks of those for whom "class struggle" really means something, as does the independence of their organisations. Our intention is to reinforce what needs reinforcing, not by dictates, not by "take it or leave it" resolutions, but by developing discussion. What we propose to you, if you agree, is that all those of you who wish to, and of course we hope that will be everybody, should show your agreement quite simply, by filling in the part at that bottom, which enables you to indicate the title of your choice, your agreement to countersign this declaration and whether in addition you wish to be a correspondent of the ILC Newsletter, which would enable us to organise this discussion amongst us in a somewhat more collective manner than has been the case up to now, so that you, so that we, may constitute together the international chain of resistance and of defence of the independence of the labour movement. If we make this step forward, comrades, and if we organise the comprehensive report of our conference, in these conditions, we will have done our work. Thus, without committing yourselves to the text in detail, I would simply like to submit one proposition for you to vote, and that will be the only vote of this conference: Would the comrades, delegates to this conference, agree to saying that, on the basis of this discussion, we should prolong it and organise that discussion in the appropriate ways, within the organisations constituting the labour movement in each of our countries and, I repeat this, while respecting the prerogatives of the existing organisations? Which comrades are for this proposal, as a conclusion to our conference? The resolution is adopted unanimously. All the comrades are now holding the document: you will read it, once we have finished, and then you can hand in your signatures as you leave. Each one of you has received two documents, one to sign and hand in, if you so wish, the other one to keep. I would like to bring this conference to a close, simply saying this: I noted something said by our young comrade from Rumania, who said in her contribution: "What the youth in Rumania want, it's a world in which young people can live in their own country. Help us conquer that, help us build that world." I would like to add, comrades, that what the young people in Rumania want, that is also the desire of the young people in all countries. In all countries, the young people wish they could live in decent conditions in their own country, and in all countries, that longing becomes something less and less attainable because of the barbaric policies which are destroying the bases of civilisation and the bases of mankind. So, if you permit me, I would like to say, in the name of us all, to this young Rumanian comrade, to all the young people of Rumania and of the whole world, that that world in which it will be possible for the young people to build their own future, it is not up to us to help them to build it. It is up to us all to help ourselves to build it. Let's help ourselves to build a world in which labour rights are respected, in which the conquests of the previous generations are not destroyed, in which the bases of mankind and of civilisation can be restored and that, comrades, let's do it through labour internationalism, through the International Workingmen's Association. I declare closed the work of this Conference of the
International Liaison Committee of Workers and Peoples.
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Open World Conference of Workers