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World Conference of Workers
In Defense of Trade Union Independence & Democratic Rights
Introduction to June 16 2002 ILC Conference Report Back Bulletin
We wish to use this issue of the Bulletin of the International Liaison
Committee of Workers and Peoples to provide information to our
correspondents, to all the working class activists world-wide, about two
meetings that have just been convened in Geneva, in Mid-June.
Together with the Follow-up Committee of the San Francisco Conference that
took place in February 2000, and the Organising Committee of the Berlin
Conference in February 2002, the International Liaison Committee of
Workers and Peoples helped organise those meetings.
You will find several documents attached that were presented for
endorsement during the 9th meeting in defence of ILO conventions and of
trade union independence that took place on June 16th 2002.
That meeting occurred while the 90th yearly session of the ILO was being
convened. Some 140 rank-and-file, shop stewards and trade-union leaders
from 27 countries participated in that meeting. We wish one and all to be
able to read the documents.
We would like to underscore some aspects which we think meet the
preoccupations and questions workers and activists have to address in
every country across the globe.
Let us observe first that during its 90 year-long existence, the ILO set a
code of norms and conventions that, internationally as well as in each
country provided the working class movement with a rock-bed on which it
could anchor its fight. Today and for some years, those norms and
conventions have been targeted by deregulation; the result is that in each
country, in the framework of each nation, each state, the guarantees that
used to be enshrined in the law and in the national collective bargaining
agreements, in the public services are being smashed.
The meeting we convened enabled us to assess the correlation between the
shattering process undergone by the working class and people's social and
democratic rights and the threat looming over the very existence of
nations. In that respect, it is no chance that we were able to give its
full meaning to the common appeal of Indian and Pakistani activists for
peace and defence of rights.
On a different level, the campaign in defence of the Liaoyang Chinese
trade-union activists meets the international struggle of the working
class faced with - in the case of China- the consequences of the agreement
between the Chinese government and the WTO.
And if indeed a continent is especially concerned, it is Africa where the
last dam against the shattering of nations and the fury of so-called
ethnic wars is to keep the Labour Codes up and standing.
During the week before our meeting, a delegation of the International
Liaison Committee and of its working women sub-committee was received in
the offices of Chairman Somavia on the basis of defending conventions 3
and 103 protecting maternity rights, conventions 4, 41 and 89 banning
women's night work and convention 138 banning child labour.
We underscore how important that delegation was as well as the follow-up
work after the interview with the agreement secured on sending a detailed
questionnaire to the ILO on those elements; its representatives have
committed themselves to giving answers.
The bulk of the delegates' interventions at the 16th of June meeting with
be published in a bulletin which, from now on, will be published every
three months the better to track the fight in defence of ILO norms and
conventions and to reconquer the revised conventions. The present one
should be available by mid-July.
On the 15th of June a forum of European worker activists took place. After
discussion, they decided to promote a European Alliance of Workers; to
realise it, they decided to convene a European conference by the end of
2003; in the same time as is unleashed the onslaught of European
institutions which are planning a complete overhaul of the institutions of
European states heading towards all-out shattering of existing national
frameworks.
The demand that rights and guarantees conquered over year-long struggles,
defending the working class' own organisations, their capacity to act
independently from the capital's financial and military institutions such
as the IMF, the WTO, the European Union is what links the fight of
European workers to the fight of workers on every continent.
We decided that this bulletin would inform on the campaign on the
liberation of Miron Cozma leader of the Rumanian miners trade-union as it
is urgent. The Workers European Alliance will publish a bulletin together
with the documents on this meeting of European delegates.