Conference urges international workers' unity
By Caroline Lund
SAN FRANCISCO — An important conference took place in mid-November: the Western Hemisphere Workers' Conference Against NAFTA and Privatisations. The nearly 400 participants came from 20 countries — mainly North, South and Central America and the Caribbean.
The struggles we heard about were amazingly similar — from the Hyundai workers, bus drivers and teachers in Mexico, the bank workers in Chile, airport workers in Haiti, oil workers and electrical workers in Ecuador, the UPS workers in the United States, to the truck drivers in France.
It seemed as if the whole world is being homogenised under the pressures of imperialist trade agreements and international financial institutions — the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the European Maastricht Treaty and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
Everywhere, governments and employers are tearing down social services, raping the environment, pursuing privatisation schemes that enrich the rich and do nothing for working people and introducing harsher laws against trade unions.
The conference was sponsored by the California Labor Federation (AFL-CIO) and the San Francisco Labor Council (AFL-CIO) and endorsed by national unions including the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, the United Farm Workers Union, the United Electrical Workers, the Farm Labor Organizing Committee and scores of local union bodies across the Americas, as well as many groups dedicated to democracy, labour and social rights.
Key activists building the conference were US supporters of the Paris-based International Liaison Committee for a Workers' International, whose important role was acknowledged by a number of speakers.
This event contrasted with the stance of much of the US labour officialdom, which demands that good "American jobs" be kept here in the US, while people in poor countries, who they claim "will work for next to nothing" are looked down upon.
"The answer to global capitalism is global unionism — there is no other way!", declared Jack Henning, former head of the California Labor Federation, in his speech to open the conference.
Julio Turra, representative of the United Federation of Workers of Brazil (CUT), said that the proposal to extend NAFTA to all of South America provides an opportunity to call for the unity of all workers in the hemisphere and to end all borders for workers.
Stan Gacek, a representative of the International Affairs Department of the AFL-CIO — the peak trade union body in the US — addressed the final session of the conference.
In introducing him, Baldemar Velasquez, president of the Farm Labor Organizing Committee, noted that the fact that the AFL-CIO decided to send a representative was significant. He said it was about time that the US labour movement showed concern for the workers of the world and dropped its nationalistic and provincial outlook.
Gacek brought greetings from John Sweeney, Rich Trumka and Linda Chavez-Thompson, top leaders of the AFL-CIO, and hailed "this very, very dynamic, impressive and historic gathering".
Answering a question from the floor about US government funding of the AFL-CIO's international department, Gacek said the union federation was no longer in the business of "importing Cold War ideology" into other countries, and that the reorganised international department was now called the Solidarity Center.
A high point of the conference was the remarks by John Riojas, international vice president and director of international affairs for the Teamsters Union. He spoke about the recent UPS strike, and the crucial role played by an involved and educated rank and file. If the UPS strike had continued, he said, the strike would have been supported by UPS workers in Europe.
Perhaps the most moving talk was by Hebe de Bonafini, president of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, a human rights organisation of relatives of the more than 30,000 people who were tortured and murdered without trial by the Argentine military dictatorship in the 1970s.
The Mothers have become a support group for struggles by workers, students, prisoners and youth. Hebe, whose two sons were murdered by the military, says that the project of the Mothers is now "to motivate young people to get involved in politics, because if they don't they will be transformed into morons, slaves or lambs for the slaughter".
"The political project that the Mothers have now is to show the youth that politics is the action of human possibility. What is corrupt are the politicians. Politics is not equal to corruption. If we don't do politics, we won't advance. We need to study, develop cadre — people who can think — and, at the same time, we need to act."
This went to the heart of the conference message: the need for working people to unite across borders in a political and economic struggle which is being made more and more common by the brutal, anti-human actions of international capitalism.
Three representatives of the Cuban Workers Federation were scheduled to participate in the conference, but were denied visas on a technicality. They sent a message hailing the San Francisco Labor Council for helping to promote better relations between the AFL-CIO and Cuban trade unions.<>><>41559MS>n<>255D>