WFTU GS Introductory speech in the 4th WWYC
Before I start my speech, I would like first of all to thank CGT-13 for hosting us today here in Marseille, and in the same vein, I want to welcome you all to the 4th World Congress of Working Youth of the Working Youth Committee; We have the ambition that this congress will expand the prestige, influence, and organizational power of our Federation and to make our intervention even more visible and essential in all fields related to the living and working conditions of modern working youth. The excellent conditions created by our French comrades are the guarantee that our congress will be successful and worthy of the expectations of the millions of workers represented by the WFTU around the world.
Dear comrades
The world is going through a period when the hypocrisy, cynicism, and inhuman nature of imperialism are once again revealed in all their majesty. The massacre and genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza are still going on unabated with the support and encouragement of the USA, the EU, and their allies.
From the very first moment, the WFTU has courageously highlighted the root cause of instability, violence, and unrest in Palestine and the Middle East in general. This root cause is none other than the Israeli occupation and settlement, the usurpation of the rights of the Palestinian people, which has been going on and intensifying for decades.
We are proud because, under the WFTU flag, millions of workers in dozens of countries all over the world, have mobilized in solidarity with the Palestinian people.
The WFTU emerged from the ashes of the most destructive war in the history of humanity. In a year from now, in 2025, we will celebrate 80 years since the foundation of our Federation;
80 years of continuous and uninterrupted struggle for workers’ rights, for justice and social progress, against all forms of discrimination, against wars and imperialist interventions.
80 years of solidarity and internationalism;
In the same spirit of class orientation and anti-imperialist consistency, we continue today.
The struggle for peace for us has a specific content. It means first and foremost a struggle for the dismantling of NATO and all military coalitions, a struggle to defend the right of every people to choose the path of their economic and social development without interventions, sanctions, blockades, and economic wars. Against the double-standards policy where international law ends up being in practice the law of the powerful.
We are living in a period when the rights and achievements of workers are under severe attack, which is characterized by the generalization and deepening of the capitalist crisis, the dramatic widening of social inequalities, and new harsh attacks on democratic and trade union freedoms.
The high cost of living and inflation are brutally undermining workers’ and pensioners living standards.
Individual contracts, privatizations, outsourcing, teleworking and “service leasing” are just some of the forms taken by this harsh neoliberal attack.
Major social achievements such as social security and public health care are being privatized while the authoritarian and arbitrary increase of the retirement age methodically continues.
Workers do not passively accept the neoliberal capitalist, anti-grass roots, and anti-workers attack. Despite the supremacy of capital and its political representatives in terms of means and mechanisms for manipulating public opinion, despite the blackmails and methods of intimidation that are openly or covertly implemented in all regions of the world, the workers refuse to pay the bill of the capitalist crisis and they are resisting. Under the guidance of class unions, they choose the path of struggle in defense of their trade union, social and political rights.
With militant mobilisations in all over the world, they demand work with rights, ensuring the satisfaction of their contemporary needs. Social security, health and safety conditions at work, free public education for all, dignified life for pensioners and the elderly, possibilities of creative and quality free time.
The sharpening of state repression and authoritarianism is the response of the bourgeois governments to the just popular demands; unfortunately, very often with the cooperation or tolerance of surrendered trade union leaders along with yellow unions.
It is obvious that employers and governments are attempting to manipulate the workers’ struggles by pinning their hopes and relying on the role of the yellow unions and the surrendered leaders.
For us, it was not a surprise that the case of Luca Visentini, the ITUC General Secretary arrested for the well-known bribery scandal, was treated so generously by the media in Europe, nor the way the ITUC itself handled his case. It simply confirms that the incorporation of the leadership of ITUC and ETUC to the neoliberal, anti-labor policies, the absence of a substantial reaction on its part, clearly coexists with the corruption and use of Trade Union positions for purposes alien to the class interests of the workers.
Dear comrades,
After a quite long period of enforced restriction of our activities due to the COVID-19 pandemic, there is no doubt that the 18th WFTU Congress in Rome gave a major impetus to all aspects of our action.
Through the Rome Declaration we not only reaffirmed the anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, and anti-fascist character of the WFTU, its commitment to the principles and values of the class struggle, and its non-negotiable commitment to the defense of the autonomous, democratic functioning of trade unions away from bureaucracy, careerism and corruption, but we put before us a clear framework of priorities which constitute a guideline for action for the World Class-oriented Trade Union Movement.
One of the most important directions given by the Rome Congress is the need to continue and intensify our action to come even closer to the needs and demands of the new generation of workers, to develop and reactivate the Committee and organize the 4th World Working Youth Congress to give new impetus to this effort.
Today and tomorrow here in Marseille we are implementing this direction. The committee that we will form at this congress will have the task of coordinating our action regarding the organization and participation of youngsters in the trade union struggles, specifying the directions of the WFTU within the young workers, and highlighting the specific problems and the special priorities of working youth.
The committee will have the task to work against the conceptualizations and direction of class collaboration, to strengthen the class orientation of the trade unions by exposing the role of the ITUC, the surrendered trade unionists, and the yellow unions who, instead of working for the emancipation of workers from exploitation, work to integrate the unions into the system and to beautify and cover up exploitation.
There is no doubt that young people are among the most vulnerable groups of workers facing harsh anti-worker and unpopular attacks;
Young workers are over-represented in long-term unemployment, leading to marginalization and social exclusion, impoverishment and job insecurity, and the overexploitation of so-called flexible forms of employment, which deprives young people of hope and prospects.
Nowadays young people have grown up in successive capitalist crises that have undermined not only their labour and social rights but also the value and moral background of the society in which we live.
Unsurprisingly, large segments of the younger generation are dominated and characterized by frustration, despair, and anger in a society devastated in recent decades by instability, austerity, and a disastrous regression in rights and living and working conditions.
Our task, the task of the class-oriented workers’ movement, is precisely not to allow the justified frustration, despair, and anger of young workers to turn into fatalism and social marginalization, and even more so not to turn into racism and social obscurantism, but to turn it into will and determination to organize and take action, which is objectively the only way to change things and overturn the existing realities of misery, exploitation, and social injustice.To support, strengthen, and create many new unions, to integrate young people into them, and to give them roles and room for active and essential participation.
We must express our appreciation for the fact that despite the great difficulties, the committee elected in Rome in 2017 has action and work to demonstrate. Of course, the difficult period of COVID-19 for all of us has created serious objective obstacles to the realization of this committee’s goals and action plan to the extent that we wished.
We can and must build on the action that has been realized so far and turn this conference into a new beginning that will give a new impetus to our work among young workers.
Through dialogue, the exchange of experiences, and conclusions arising from our struggles, equipped with the experiences of our actions, we can turn this congress into a new starting point for work and struggle in favor of the young workers and the class-oriented trade unions all over the world.
To train and educate young trade unionists, to assist them in becoming more aware of revolutionary ideas, to learn more about the history of the workers’ movement, to equip them with the tools and necessary skills to be more prepared and more effective in today’s struggles for the defense and expansion of workers’ rights.
This is the content of action we aspire to give to the Youth Commission that the WFTU has created.
Because the future of our movement, the future of class trade unionism and class struggle will inevitably fall on our young trade unionists’ shoulders.
Dear comrades
We struggle in very difficult and many times hard conditions. Against enemies who have unbelievable means, who don’t hesitate to have a fifth column in their service inside the trade union ranks.
But we are optimistic. We have confidence in the decisions and in the orientation of the working class. We have confidence in the decisions and the orientation of the new generation. When the working class realises its position and its role in the progress of society, when through its daily small and big struggles it realises its power and understands its historical mission, it becomes an invincible force.
The weapon of the working class is solidarity and internationalism.
With our united and organized struggles the system that generates crisis and reproduces exploitation can be defeated. A world free of wars and imperialist interventions, free of exploitation and discrimination; a world where work will be permanent and stable, regulated and safe, is achievable.
