Quim Boix, Member of the Presidential Council contributes his intervention to the VI Presidential Council Meeting taking place in Johannesburg, South Africa from the 9-10th February 2012.
“BON DIA! “good morning” in Catalan, my language in Spain.
First I would like to greet everybody here and thank our South African comrades for their great work
for the success of this meeting.
I want to express my global agreement with the main address of the Secretariat. I think that it analyzes reality well; it is a synthesis of all the important issues for an effective intervention of WFTU, and it presents good work proposals which, all of us together will have to turn into a reality.
Also, I would like to greet the new and important memberships of new unions affiliated to WFTU, trusting that in Spain we are going to continue contributing with renewed unionist forces to our common international struggle. The success of the International Day of Action on October 3rd, when various activities were carried out in 16 cities throughout Spain, shows the leap forward taken lately around us.
I want to focus my necessarily brief address on the great international ideological struggle in which the WFTU is taking part. The document already refers to this in several of its sections. I am going to contribute with my almost 50 years of trade unionist experience in Spain and in Europe.
Capitalism, as the main enemy of the working class and of popular strata, and thus the main enemy of WFTU, does not quit on its ideological fight in any of its interventions (political, economic, unionist, cultural, sportive, etc.). In Spain, since WFTU exists, it was first Franco’s regime, and now his heirs, those who propagate capitalist ideas to perpetuate the exploitation of man by man.
They have at their disposal powerful economic means; they know that lies, when repeated a thousand times, can be taken as truths, and they use the money that they have stolen, exploiting employees, to deceive poorly-educated people. Most of the working class and of the popular layers are defeated in this ideological war.
Changing this reality is a task for all anti-capitalists, and not only for the FSM, but as WFTU we have to go even further into what is already proposed by the Secretariat’s document.
Information, which is usually controlled, deformed and manipulated by our class enemy, is an essential element for the creation of struggle consciousness. Today, information channels in our planet are totally controlled by the bourgeoisie and by multinationals.
Knowing reality, drawing from it positive experiences which allow us to promote struggle, is something with which the FSM has dealt and can deal with even more. We have already advanced on this, but the proposal that appears as point 18 of the program for 2012 seems to me of great importance and usefulness.
Creating a “working class-trade union news agency” is a great decision. It should spread the struggle of the working class, tell about our victories, small as they may seem to us, explain the alternatives that the working class offers as solutions to the serious problems that exist today in the world, and encourage internationalist solidarity.
For sure, as it happened to us in Spain in our struggle against the fascist dictatorship, well oriented news will become struggle and fight motivation, absolutely necessary and to combat successfully our class enemy and its allies.
Here, in the concept of capitalism’s allies, I include not only social-democrats, but also yellow unions, the unions of conciliation and social pact, the unions that accompany, day after day, the leaders of the transnationals and invite the leadership of the class enemy (IMF, WB, G-20, OECD, EU, etc.) to their events. The repeated public statements of the leaders of the ISC in the last months, supporting the anti-working-class measures, clearly confirm what I’ve just mentioned, and that’s why I have criticized them publicly many times.
Given that, I think that no militant union, no leftist union, can be neutral or independent from WFTU and ISC. Personally, I do not agree with those who say that they are independent. What does it mean “independent”? What do they mean by that? The only true international union independent from governments, from the IMF and from transnationals is the WFTU.
But there are also others who say that perhaps WFTU and ISC should merge. This is a grave error since these two international organizations reflect two very different worlds. For example, if they merged, what would they support regarding Cuba?, what would they support regarding IMF?, and what about regarding Libya and Palestine?
In Spain, this role of the bourgeois system’s unions is carried out by the large trade union organizations CCOO and UGT. The one that most hurts the ideological struggle to which I am referring is CCOO, since it still keeps, in our country and internationally, part of the image of its foundational reality, that of a struggler and class union. Today it no longer keeps anything from that anti-Francoist foundational stage, as I explained in my address to the 600 delegates of the 13th Congress of Peru’s CGT, which, afterwards, I expanded in my reply letter to the complaint that the leadership of CCOO sent to the WFTU’s headquarters. They are documents which are at your disposal in English, French, German, Spanish, and, soon, in Arabic.
I am going to deal briefly with other issues.
1- Supporting the proposal of creating a Pensioners’ ITUU. The idea appeared already in the debates carried out in the 16th Congress of WFTU. On the past January 21, in Madrid, in an important and very well-attended meeting of the Spanish class trade unions, we already approved to start the coordination of all unionist pensioners. There they chose me as the responsible for this task. I take advantage of this opportunity to say that we accept the proposal that the headquarters of this new ITUU be located in Spain.
2) I propose to improve the coordination of class unionism in Europe in accordance with the results of the work that is being promoted by PAME and the European Regional Office of WFTU. For that, since we have in all of Europe a coordinated employer class, I propose having a common claim-demanding trade union platform (which, in each country, we will adapt and complete based on the list that I will read at the end, if I have time). It will be the best way to facilitate a common and coordinated struggle to face the huge current unemployment, and to face the continued attacks against the labor conquests which we won during the past century, in Europe, with the help of WFTU and after the example of the existent labor conquests in the countries that built socialism.
3) I think that we could improve our communications if, virtually, that is to say, by communicating exclusively by internet, we built a team of translators (good professionals and also volunteers who support our cause and the WFTU aims) led from Athens, that unified all the translation efforts that we are doing now in a dispersed and often duplicated way (we translate again what is already translated). Besides, in this way, work will be prioritized according to centralized useful criteria for WFTU’s struggle.
4) I propose the centralized production, in the country with the lowest costs, of WFTU flags in different languages. In Spain we need a lot of them (in Spanish and in English), since WFTU has been known through the Spanish struggles in which it has participated, and workers wish to carry our flag in public actions. This centralization may imply new income, which we know it is necessary for WFTU funding. Besides, sending the flags from a country to another is cheap given their low weight.
5) We will have to prepare well the WFTU’s presence in the 101th ILO Conference, deciding what actions it is possible to carry out and to take to the streets, to denounce the monopoly still existent in its management.
Internationalist unionist greetings,
Quim Boix
Presidential Council of WFTU
LIST OF POSSIBLE EUROPEAN TRADE UNONIST CLAIMS:
LIST OF POSSIBLE EUROPEAN TRADE UNONIST CLAIMS:
– Against unemployment and for an indefinite monthly pay (equal to the minimum inter-professional salary) while unemployed.
– Against “flexible work”.
– Against job precariousness.
– Against subsidies to banks and private companies.
– For direct taxes and elimination of indirect ones.
– For collective bargaining articulated from down up.
– For a moving wage scale (with automatic increases at least equal to inflation, as calculated by trade unions).
– For a maximum of 35 hours of weekly work, without a wage cut.
– For the same minimum wage in all of Europe (to allow living in similar conditions).
– For job safety, holding employers responsible for accidents.
– For a retirement pension, from age 60, equal, at least, to the minimum wage.
– For free and high-quality public health care and education.
– For five annual paid vacation weeks.
– For greater trade union and labor rights.
– For decent housing costing less than 20 % of salary.
THESE CLAIMS ARE POSSIBLE TODAY. THERE IS SUFFICIENT WEALTH IN THE PLANET IF WE DO NOT SPEND IT IN IMPERIALIST WARS AND IT DOES NOT CONCENTRATE IN A FEW HANDS!”
