As we look ahead to the IUF’s 28th Congress in just a few weeks, our Congress slogan could not be more apt: Fighting for our future!
There are considerable challenges to winning the future we want for ourselves and the generations to come. Putin’s war on Ukraine is destroying lives, and dictatorships from Algeria to Belarus to Myanmar rob people of their freedom. Attacks on democracy and equality are growing around the world. The climate crisis is accelerating with extreme weather events wreaking havoc on communities and workers’ health and safety. New technologies including digitalization and artificial intelligence arrive without any government regulation and bring serious risks without accountability. Employers like NagaWorld and Starbucks openly break the law and deny workers their rights to organize and collectively bargain.
Now more than ever the IUF and our affiliates must fight for our future! From the workplace to governments to the UN system, we are fighting each and every day to ensure that workers’ rights are respected. Whether humanitarian aid provided to our sisters and brothers in Ukraine thanks to the incredible generosity of IUF affiliates around the world, support for organizing efforts in the most despotic of regimes, international campaigns to support fights against powerful transnational companies’ trampling of workers’ rights, trainings and materials to connect workers’ rights and the climate crisis, awareness-raising about the importance of equal rights for all workers including women workers, LGBTI workers, young workers and migrant workers, or creating space for debate across our sectors and divisions about our futures, the IUF is committed to a future where people and planet flourish, where profits serve the people and the planet, not the reverse.
Since 2017 when the IUF held its 27th Congress, we have endured Trump and Bolsonaro and Putin, the deaths of millions from COVID-19, more global warming and more repression, and the imprisonment of our leaders Lee Cheuk-yan and Aliaksandr Yarashuk and Chhim Sithar among so many others. And yet, beginning on June 13, 2023, we will gather together to open the IUF’s 28th Congress, resolute in our commitment to build the trade union movement, confident in our vision of peace, democracy and human rights, and focused on our solidarity as the source of our power.
On this May Day, we remember all those who have built the movement we celebrate today, and we give thanks for each other as we fight for a future that the next generation can celebrate and build upon!
