The World Federation of Trade Unions and the International Workers’ Institute
organize the Conference
Women: struggles, resistance and war
Friday 29 November 4 p.m. (Athens time)
KEY SPEAKERS
SUZAN ABDEL SALAM (PALESTINE)
DANIA LEYVA CREAGH (CUBA)
The historical phase we are going through is terrible for workers, peoples and for us class-oriented trade unions who fight every day against war, defending workers’ rights and building a society without exploitation of man on man and the environment.
War, the economic crisis and inter-imperialist competition are opening up increasingly dramatic scenarios. Israel’s unpunished genocide in Palestine, the military missions in the Red Sea, the war in Ukraine, the massacres in Congo and Sudan, the coups in the Sahel, the tensions around Taiwan, are the clearest manifestation of the centrality of war in the historical phase we are living through.
The unspeakable tragedy unfolding in Palestine tells us of a will to exterminate that makes other mass destructions that characterized regimes of the last century pale. In just one year, the Israeli army has killed at least 6,000 women and 11,000 children in the Gaza Strip, a number that represents the highest toll ever recorded in a conflict in recent history. This already dramatic figure does not include the approximately 20,000 unidentified, missing or still buried under rubble.
Only after the Russian invasion of Ukraine the world talked about this war but it is a war that since 2014 has seen, in no particular order, a systematic ethnic cleansing of the pro-Russian regions of Donbass and Novorossija, with various persecutions of the civilian population, the storming of several Labour Chambers (such as the one in Odessa in 2014 in which 48 people died), the banning of the Ukrainian Communist Party and other progressive parties and the rehabilitation of the worst Nazi and collaborationist scum who – under the ‘democratic’ umbrella of NATO perpetrated a coup against the legitimately voted government in Ukraine to replace it with a puppet one.
The economic and social costs of this new phase of harsh international confrontation are falling heavily on the workers especially on women who pay for these choices in terms of welfare cuts, attacks on wages, high inflation, and a sharp rise in the cost of living. The shifting of huge resources by the governments of the various states from welfare and social needs to spending on armaments is determining the increasingly urgent need to organize trade union and social protest.
The women of WFTU are in the front line in the struggles against this barbaric system, everyday but we need to be more and stronger!!
The strong resumption of conflicts, struggles, strikes in response to these political choices, against the war and in support of the Palestinian and Lebanese people is the only possible response. The organizations affiliated to the WFTU, are in all countries at the head of the struggles and strikes that involve millions of workers, blocking production and services and advancing not only strictly trade union demands but also the clash with the capitalist mode of production and the need for a profound social transformation.
War has once again become the main instrument with which the Euro-Atlantic imperialist pole and its military instrument, NATO, attempt to resolve an unprecedented systemic crisis of capitalism. against war and for the full liberation of all oppressed peoples, yesterday as today at the side of the Syrian, Lebanese and Donbass peoples, with the Cuban people and government.
Today, the urgency of the genocide perpetrated by the Zionist Israeli army requires us to focus our energies alongside Palestine, for the affirmation of its right to its own sovereign, democratic and independent state.
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/81983789436?pwd=dAIbRyhWaYtgL1GacZW2RtpVdOCszj.1
Meeting ID: 819 8378 9436
Passcode: 567875
