Comrade SankarSaha, General Secretary, AIUTUC attended the Conference and addressed the Plenary Session as follows calling for social Justice in real sense :
“Dear Mr. Chair and delegates.
I SankarSaha represent Indian workers.
While we talk about ILO Standards, Indian workers firmly believe that under globalization, the world has been facing the deepest crisis, deeper than the crisis of the 1930s that culminated in World War II for the division and re-division of the markets.We all find in the admission of UN family that said- “about 5.1 billion people, 75 percent of worlds population are not covered by adequate social security and 1.4 billion people live on less than US Dollor1.25 a day, 38 percent of the global population i.e. 2.6 billion people do not have access to adequate sanitation,884 million people lack access to adequate sources of drinking water, 9.25 million people suffer from chronic hunger, merely 9 million children under the age of 5 die every year from preventable diseases.”
Capitalist globalisation has also gifted acute joblessness and insecurity of jobs and job cuts, youth unemployment to more than 50 percent. Systematic withdrawal of existing rights and benefits including right to minimum wages, old age pension, health services, housing, education, drinking water etc. is reducing them to commodities in the present day market and you have to buy them if you have means to buy. Otherwise, you are destined to live a life of or die a death of an animal. This society where you are born will hardly care.
Again, the ILO ExpertCommittee has rightly submitted its report showing violations of core conventions in many cases where workers are victims.
In the given situation when workers of all countries including the US are on the streets, not only in Wall Street but in all streets of the world for securing human life and livelihood with dignity and honour, the employers in the present ILO session have raised voice to deny right to strike, the fundamental and basic human right of the workers who in one voice have refused to barter their right againstanything in the world and are determined to gofor global strike to retain their right to strike.
Friends, ILO conventions were once aimed at imparting social justice to the working people, but the present social order or the state machinery only produces injustice and exploitation; the system which is already suffering from multi-organ failure in the ICCU and heading towards ventilator is no longer capable of giving any right not to speak of the right to strike.
Different people have different approaches to the problems of injustice and exploitation.Some advocate change of hearts and minds, while some appeal to the innate goodness of man and his compassion and love for the less privileged. But, Marx, a great thinker and philosopher of the modern era showed for the first time through scientific and rational analysis as to where the root of injustice lies. In all the different stages of class divided society, the root of social injustice is in the social and economic condition of that particular phase of society. He further showed that emergence of private property with the emergence of class division lies at the root of social injustice. The cause of accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few is the private appropriation of the surplus value that comes from the capitalist mode of production and production relations. It is the reality and we must have the courage to accept it.
Friends, I believe, we should not allow ourselves to be deceived by the slogan of human face or fairness of globalisation. Let us join forces to bring forward a coercion-free world where working people have full access to what their labour produces for sustenance of the entire society. This alone can ensure social justice in real sense and protect the real value of ILO standards.”
Thank you for giving me a patient hearing.”