In December 2019, the International Workers’ Association (IWA) at its Congress held in Melbourne, Australia, decided to promote an International Week against Unpaid Wages. The Sections of the IWA agreed to carry out different activities during the 3rd week of October to call attention to the widespread phenomenon of unpaid waged and to show which tools we can use to fight it. Because we, as workers, do jobs to be paid for them, not to voluntarily make employers richer and richer.
The whole world is watching the situation in Belarus with concern. The uprising of Belarusian society against the authoritarian government is growing and is manifested in different ways. We can observe not only mass demonstrations, but also strikes that unite workers from different professions, expressing the anger of the local working class against tyranny. We hope that the strikes will turn into a general strike, which will lead to the overthrow of the dictator Lukashenko.
Bangledesh Anarco-Syndicalist Federation, BASF, is a revolutionary organization that became a full-right member of the International Workers Association during the International Congress held in Melbourne, Australia, in December 2019.
Since the creation of the first anarco-syndicalist initiative in Bangladesh, the comrades from this country have been working on translation of the most prominent figures of the anarco-syndicalist theory.
We are happy to anounce that a new anarco-syndicalist iniciative has been started in the Asia-Pacific region. The Workers Solidarity Iniciative - WSI is a propaganda group recenly created in Pakistan. Their main activity is focused on translation of anarco-syndicalist and anarchist books into Urdu, Pashto and Farsi.
The unprecedented scope of the uprising this past week reflects widespread discontent on various levels – and widespread disdain and criticism for the racist and repressive role of the police as an institution in the USA. The immediate issue is yet another police murder of a black man — the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis cops. But the protests have often mentioned other recent police killings of black people.
We demand justice for George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and the many other hundreds of black people murdered by police in the past year. Since the point blank cop shooting of Oscar Grant in 2009, more than 200 people have been shot and killed by the police here in the Bay Area – Mario Woods, Alan Blueford, Kenneth Harding Jr and others. Just in the last few days Vallejo police shot and killed a young man on his knees with his hands raised. No cop in Vallejo has been disciplined for deadly force in the past decade despite the many shootings by police.
When we face a problem at work and think about how to solve it, more often than not we face difficulties. Sometimes we manage to work them out quickly, other times it can be really demanding or even more than we can handle. Still, it’s almost always true, that it is easier when there’s more of us and we act together. Therefore we reach out to you – to everyone who wants to actively solve problems in the workplace and share their experience. Let’s help each other.
Starting June 1, the function of IWA Secretariat will be performed by the CNT-AIT of Spain. The Vice-Secretariat function will remain with the ASF of Australia. The contact address of the IWA Secretariat remains the same: iwa-ait.org.
Information about the role of the Secretariat can be found in the IWA Statutes on this page.
The CNT-AIT from France has compiled some texts of a few of the IWA Sections related to the Coronavirus situation, their actions and responses and the situation of workers in the Health Care sector, including care workers. As they write: The Coronavirus pandemic affects all countries and will have an impact - direct or indirect - on the lives of billions of people. It is important despite the crises we are going through to keep our critical mind, to try to understand how we got into this situation, how to cope, and how to imagine solutions for after the crisis.
The bulletin can be downloaded from the IWA page or the blog listed below in different languages. Scroll down for the PDFs on this site.
Information Bulletin – Special Covid19 SRAS2 – Health and care Workers
(edited by CNT-AIT France)
The Coronavirus pandemic affects all countries and will have an impact - direct or indirect - on the lives of billions of people. It is important despite the crises we are going through to keep our critical mind, to try to understand how we got into this situation, how to cope, and how to imagine solutions for after the crisis.
The English broadcast of RTVS (national radio service) called Slovakia Today prepared a very good, more than 20 minutes long special dedicated to the First of May. It included an interview with a member of our union, who spoke about workers’ struggles during the COVID-19 crisis. She also mentioned activities of some of the Sections of the International Workers’ Association and our campaign We Are Not On The Same Boat! (minutes 10:15 to 12:45).
