(en) Anarkismo.net: Union organizations from Africa, America, Asia and Europe meet in Paris (ca)


The Confederaci?n General del Trabajo (Spain), the Union Syndicale Solidaires (France) and 
the Central Sindical e Popular Conlutas (Brazil) have extended an international invitation 
to all organizations that consider themselves part of the combative trade union movement 
and see the need for social transformation to an international trade union meeting to be 
held in Paris from 22 to 24 March in order to work towards the coordination of alternative 
trade-unionism on an international level. ---- The convening organizations believe that 
the crisis of the capitalist system has consequences across the globe. The economic, 
financial, environmental and social crises are mixed and mutually reinforce each other. 
This global capitalist crisis shows the impasse of a form of development based on the 
increasingly unequal distribution of the wealth produced, on financial deregulation, on 
widespread free trade and on disregard for ecological imperatives.

To save the profits of shareholders and bosses and to ensure the future of the banks, 
global institutions (the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, World Trade 
Organization, etc.), governments and employers are attacking the rights of workers with 
increasing force.

The type of trade-unionism that our organizations support have an impact because it does 
not endorse pacts with the powers that be which only validate anti-social measures. The 
trade-union organizations have a responsibility to organize the resistance on an 
international level in order to build, in the struggles, the necessary social 
transformation of society. To build a system based on the commons, on the re-distribution 
of wealth among all who contribute to its creation, on the rights of working people and on 
ecologically sustainable development.

The international meeting has set the following objectives:

To implement, over time, union solidarity actions focused on one or two countries.

To participate in a unified and coordinated manner in order to support existing 
international struggles and campaigns: support for the Palestinian people, recognition of 
independent trade unionism in North Africa and the Middle East, against the military 
occupation of Haiti, against the European treaties that impose austerity, for the right of 
all peoples to decide their future, etc.

To strengthen and expand international work in the various labour sectors (transportation, 
education, call centres, industry, commerce, healthcare, etc.) and inter-professional 
issues (women's rights, immigration, housing, ecology, health and work, etc.).

Decide together the materials necessary for the success of our joint projects.
The organizers declare that by holding this meeting they do not intend to declare the 
establishment of a new international organization. Rather, it seeks to strengthen, expand 
and streamline a network of combative, democratic, independent, alternative and 
internationalist trade-unionism.

Confederal Press Office of the CGT

Translation by FdCA - International Relations Office

Related Link: http://www.cgt.org.es