Union organizations from Africa, America, Asia and Europe meet in Paris

22-24 March 2013

The Confederación 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. [Castellano]

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Union organizations from Africa, America, Asia and Europe meet in Paris

The Confederación 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