The Conference was attended by 120 delegates from 21 countries who, in a militant atmosphere, discussed the international situation and the role that class organizations affiliated to the WFTU should play. WFTU General Secretary Pambis Kyritsis and IWI President George Mavrikos were present.
A European context of a tendency to war, a historical phase in which the margins for a minimum of economic recovery can only be extorted with the contraction of wages and pensions, with further precariousness and welfare cuts, billionaire investments in arms production, and governments that clamp down on the repression of workers’ and popular struggles, especially if they are linked to liberation movements such as the Palestinian one, an example of resistance against imperialism and
Zionism, even under extreme conditions such as those experienced in 75 years of Zionist Apartheid.
Capital applies the same recipes of exploitation and attack on the living conditions and rights of working men and women in all European countries, and the struggles that our organizations put in place on a daily basis to organize the mass and class response were represented at the conference.
The conference also gave us a compact awareness of the need to continue on the path indicated by the glorious history of the WFTU and relaunched by the 18th Congress in Rome.
Organizations not affiliated to the WFTU also attended, which are very much in tune with our positions and our reading of the phase and reality. This gives us hope that they will definitively choose to join the WFTU, the international union that is welcoming and open to confrontation with anyone, even if firm in its profound convictions.
The responsibility of class unions in Europe is great, we live, we organize, we fight in the belly of the beast, in the capitalist citadel, in the garden besieged by the jungle that barricades itself and imposes its own law and harshly rejects, arrests and represses those who do not recognize themselves in its principles and laws in support of capital. It is up to us to organize the response, to indicate the perspective, to practice the class struggle.
Our conference gives us a strong signal of hope for the future, provided we can face it with political lucidity, a militant spirit and an organized structure suited to the new tasks.
The conference approved the preparatory document, the action plan contained therein and the introductory report, motions on militant solidarity with the Palestinian People, on Cuba socialist, on the struggle of Turkish workers against mass redundancies, for the protection of health and safety in the workplace, in solidarity with the CGT-FNIC Timothee Esprit leader sacked for publicly taking a stand in support of the Palestinian people who are victims of the ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank by the terrorist state of Israel.
Countless valuable ideas to relaunch the class initiative will strengthen our action plan and will be the subject of mobilizations and initiatives. Among these, we would like to mention the proposal, which we accept because it is strongly supported, to establish a day of struggle against precarity in work and life to be identified as soon as possible and to be shared with the Presidential Council WFTU at its meeting in Hanoi on 4-5 March 2025.
The conference took up the call for greater involvement of women in decision-making processes and to this end committed the Women’s Committee to identify forms of its definition.
Solidarity and support for the struggles that are carried out in each country must be a constant activity of the affiliated organizations.
The organization of unitary moments of mobilization also in connection with the TUI/UIS, which put our struggles and our general disputes at the center, identifying among the counterparts also the international institutional centers and bringing our militant presence also under the palaces of European power will be one of the activities of the coming months.
In conclusion, the conference mandates the secretariat to organize, propagandize and disseminate the 80th anniversary of the WFTU so that in every country, union and workplace it is celebrated not as a ritual, but by making its history and valuable contribution in defense of the working and popular masses known and as a new militant drive for anti-capitalist anti-fascist anti-imperialist anti-colonialist class union action.
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