A Strategy for Solidarity: Support in Struggle
The rise of the world economy, spluttering and uncertain in the pandemic, is creating the conditions for mass strike movements. A wave of industrial action called Striketober is hitting the USA; in South Africa the metal strike has just ended in victory; in Italy casualized workers in FEDEX are on strike; the Korean trade federation has launched a general strike to defend union rights.
Many of these strikes are spontaneous wildcat strikes, as workers take urgent defensive action. Workers are struggling to organize as never before: from skilled carpenters building houses to the most oppressed layers of immigrant workers, vulnerable but determined to take their place as essential unionised workers.
How can we win victory after victory by building the organizations of international solidarity? How do we raise funds, and move them to the point where they are most urgently needed? How can we organise on an open-ended and non-sectarian basis? What of the international trade unions?
Our aim is to unite workers internationally to organize casualised workers and to support each other’s struggles; to establish union-to-union and worker-to-worker communications to ensure effective solidarity; to learn from one another’s experiences and build international solidarity.
The following speakers lead off the discussion on these important questions:
Jacob (JV) Dube, Secretary of RETUSA, organising casualised stevedoring workers in Durban;
Roberto Luzzi, international representative of SI Corbus, which has organized FEDEX and Amazon workers in Italy;
Valerie Jefferson, victimised leader of the transit workers’ union in New Orleans, USA;
George Martin, victimized branch secretary of the Namibian Miners Union at the Rössing Uranium Mine;
Hanna Danilovich, international representative of REP, the Radio and Electrical Workers of Belarus.
At the start of the meeting a short video on rank and file construction workers in the UK was shown and can be viewed here - • "Can't beat the rank and file!" The future...