Assam tea pluckers

(This is the second of two posts regarding the recent industrial dispute on a tea plantation in India in which 1,000 tea workers set fire to their employer’s bungalow, killing both him and his wife.)

Why Weren’t MKB Tea Pluckers in the Union?

Chah Mazdoor Sangha (ACMS) is the largest tea workers union. Their general secretary Dileshwar Tanti also appeared briefly on the BBC World Have Your Say broadcast I mention in my last post. He reports the workers at MKB tea plantation weren’t unionized, though most tea workers are. I found the comment puzzling and felt it also deserved further scrutiny. Most of the reader commentary on the BBC Facebook site and elsewhere strongly condemns the women for resorting to violence, rather than going to the union or the authorities to resolve their back pay dispute.

A recent article for the Asia Monitor Resource Center by feminist political scientist Sujata Gothoskar paints an extremely bleak picture of trade union effectiveness in Assam state. Despite strong union penetration, Assam’s tea plantations still operate under a system that amounts to slave labor. All the most difficult work – including carryingmore than 40 kgs of green leaf on their backs every day – is performed by women. In addition over 90 per cent of the tea workers are either Scheduled Tribes or Scheduled Castes – the lowest in the caste hierarchy. According to Gothoskar, many of the workers families were forcibly or fraudulently brought to the tea gardens several generations ago. Injuries are common, as are respiratory and water-borne diseases.

Although India’s 1951 Plantation Labour Act 1951 requires owners to pay minimum wage and to provide basic medical care, clean drinking water, sanitation (toilets) and a “provident fund” for workers who become unemployed, none of these conditions are enforced despite decades of unionization. At present the average wage of the majority of tea pluckers is less than 55 rupees a day (US$2), as against Assam’s minimum wage of 100 rupees per day.

As Gothoskar also explains in her article, most unions in India, including those representing the tea estates, are affiliated with and controlled by political parties. Even though women workers constitute the majority of the tea plantation workforce, the top union leadership that sets policy and participates in collective bargaining consists almost entirely of non-tea worker, middle class men. She also notes that although physical and sexual violence against women are extremely common on tea plantations, union leaders refuse to recognize it as a union issue.

A Virtual Death Sentence

Although reports from UNICEF and other human rights organizations document the routine malnutrition and starvation-related deaths that occur on the Assam tea plantations, it’s impossible to justify what these women did – either morally or strategically. Killing the plantation owner will most certainly cost them their jobs (as well as landing some of them in prison). Fire setting and other extreme labor unrest has already led to the closure of several Assam tea estates, including Rani Tea Estate where Bhattacharya shot and killed the 15 year old. At the same time, there is no question their desperate actions arose from a sense of absolute powerless in the face of virtual serfdom, as well as the bribery, corruption, sexism and racism that plagues the Assam police, government authorities and even union officials.

It’s a pity the corporate media doesn’t tell us any of this. We frequently read and hear about similar “senseless” violence in Palestine, Afghanistan and Iraq – where desperate people who have exhausted all their options blow themselves up to strike a blow against the people who oppress them. The psychological profiles of gunmen involved in recent rage massacres suggest that here, too, we are dealing with profoundly desperate people who believe they have no other alternative – and, more importantly, that they have nothing to lose.

Society’s Pathological Response to Violence

In a rational world, community and political leaders would be more mindful of the lethal effect of desperation on human behavior. We would also be far less cavalier about ignoring human exploitation and oppression to fulfill corporate demands for ever increasing profit. Sadly with the global economic downturn and growing income inequality, we seem to be moving in the opposite direction. As the corporate elite rushes to dismantle all the federal and state regulations that used to soften the brutality of raw corporate capitalism, you get the sense they are pursuing some misguided scorched earth strategy to squeeze every last ounce of wealth out of the global economy before the whole house of cards collapses.

Meanwhile the corporate media prefers to sweep the industrial dispute at the Assam tea plantation under the rug, unlike Newtown and the other rage massacres they cover ad nauseum. With American union membership at an all time low, heaven forbid increasingly desperate US workers should get any ideas.

Spanish general strike Sept 2010

In my view, the failure of the Obama administration and Congress to prevent Republican states from stripping workers of all union protections – as well as their threats to repeal Medicare, Medicaid and Social – leave American workers no choice but to follow the example of their Egyptian brothers and form their own (illegal) unions. Relying on a pro-corporate federal government to address labor rights is never going to work. It’s time for the rank and file to reclaim the freedom to have mass pickets, slowdowns and wildcat and sit down strikes in response to management misbehavior, as they did in the 1930s. Historically these are the only tactics that have won real gains for unions and workers.

The Strength of European Unions

Surprisingly the US doesn’t have the lowest rate of union membership in the industrialized world. It would seem the ineffectiveness of American unions isn’t based on low membership, but on negative public opinion and the paralyzing effect of the Taft Hartley Act – which makes US unions de facto government unions.

At present the rate of union membership in the industrialized world is determined by two main factors: the size of the public sector work force (which tends to have high unionization rates everywhere) and the percent of the private sector represented by small business (as opposed to corporations), which tend to be extremely hard to unionize. Finland (at 74%) and Sweden (at 71%) have the highest rates of unionization owing to their large public sectors. Italy and Canada (both at 30%) and the UK (at 27%) have fairly high rates, as they still have large public sectors. Germany, where both the manufacturing and public sector are strong, is 27% unionized. Greece, despite its large public sector, has a relatively low rate of unionization (23%) as 93% of its private sector consists of businesses with fewer than 20 employees. (See http://www.worker-participation.eu/National-Industrial-Relations/Across-Europe/Trade-Unions2, http://www.hrsdc.gc.ca/eng/labour/labour_relations/info_analysis/union_membership/2010/pdf/unionmembership2010.pdf and http://www.fedee.com/tradeunions.html)

Because of recent general strikes in Spain and France, I was very surprised to see the small percentage of their workforce that is unionized. The US at 11.9% falls between Spain, at 16% and France, at 8%. European Union analysts attribute labor’s organizing success in Spain and France (and Greece) to the high public regard unions enjoy in both countries. The result is that most non-union workers will strike in solidarity with a general strike called by major unions.

Following the Egyptian Example

So long as American workers follow the dictates of the Taft Hartley Act, I see no hope of building a union movement strong enough to resist Wall Street and government efforts to reduce the US to a third world sweatshop. Trade unionists in New Zealand find it laughable that US workers have to get permission from the federal government (the National Labor Relations Board) to form a union. In their view that’s hardly different from having a government-run union, like they do in Egypt and other Middle East countries.

They believe, as I do, that American workers are doomed if they continue to rely on the strategy of begging the trade union bureaucracy to beg the Democratic Party to repeal the Taft Hartley Act. Even the AFL-CIO breakaway United to Win Federation fails to mention repealing the Taft Hartley Act in their demands. As Dr Bernard points out in her interview (http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?Itemid=74&id=31&jumival=3548&option=com_content&task=view), the increasingly pro-corporate Democrats have had ample opportunity (during numerous periods where they controlled both Congress and the White House) to repeal the Taft Hartley Act and have resisted doing so.

Facebook and Social Networking Aren’t the Answer

I recently checked out the “Repeal the Taft Hartley Act” Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Repeal-the-Taft-Hartley-Act/123394871061984 It has a grand total of five members (including me). The corporate-controlled media want us to believe Facebook and Twitter produced the revolution in Egypt, when in reality it resulted from years of sustained organizing by Egypt’s (illegal) union movement (see “Egypt’s Invisible Labor Movement” at http://stuartbramhall.aegauthorblogs.com/2011/02/23/egypts-invisible-labor-movement/).

The effect of the 1947 Taft Hartley Act on union membership was almost immediate. In 1946 the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) had 6.3 million members. By 1954, when it merged with the AFL, this number was 4.6 million. This steady drop continued. In 1954 34.7% of American workers belonged to a union. By 2010, this had dropped to 11.9% (http://www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.nr0.htm).

There are obviously multiple factors leading to the decline of unions in the US: the wholesale export of union manufacturing jobs, the expulsion of militant unionists (thanks to Taft Hartley’s red baiting clause), enabling union bureaucrats to identify more strongly with management than the rank and file; CIA infiltration of the AFL-CIO; Mafia involvement in the Teamsters and other unions with large pension funds; and the systematic Wall Street public relations campaign to demonize unions and the working class.

1. The export of American manufacturing jobs – the wholesale shutdown of US factories to relocate overseas was clearly a disaster for both the US economy and the trade union movement. Yet many on the Left argue, as I do, that a strong union movement would have stopped Ronald Reagan from repealing the tariff, quota and tax laws that, prior to 1980, would have prevented this massive dislocation. To make matters worse, as hundreds of thousands of workers left their good paying union jobs to take minimum wage jobs at MacDonald’s and Wal-Mart, the restrictions imposed by the Taft Hartley Act made it extremely difficult for unions to organize them in this new sector.

2. The expulsion of militant trade unionists – generous wages and benefits gave US workers a false sense of security during the economic boom of the fifties and sixties. Especially after the expulsion of more militant unionists, this allowed the conservative union leaders to identify more with corporate executives than with rank and file workers. Instead of lobbying to repeal Taft Hartley and relying on a well-organized rank and file and industrial action, union bosses became more focused on “sweetheart deals,”  in which they got special perks from management for guaranteeing labor discipline among the workers they were supposed to represent. Rank and file unionists fought back in the 1970s with the formation of Teamsters for a Democratic Union and similar reform groups who fought hard for the right to elect their union leadership. In 2005 the union reform movement led the Teamsters and Service Employees International Union (SEIU) to form the Change to Win Federation.

3. CIA infiltration of the AFL-CIO leadership – during the fifties and sixties, CIA infiltration clearly played a role in the AFL-CIO’s abandonment of rank and file workers. Former CIA officer Tom Braden bragged in a 1967 Saturday Evening Post article about the number of AFL-CIO officers he placed on the CIA payroll. See http://revitalisinglabour.blogspot.com/2009/04/lenny-brenner-on-tom-braden.html, http://www.laboreducator.org/darkpast2.htm and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Braden

4. Mafia and organized crime involvement – participation by Mafia figures such as Jimmy Hoffa in the Teamsters and other major unions (the millions of dollars the unions held in their pension funds were irresistible to organized crime) was a major factor in turning public opinion against unionism and organized labor. The refusal of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to recognize or fight organized crime clearly enabled the takeover of the Teamsters by the Mafia. Both the FBI and CIA have a history of collaborating with organized crime in drug trafficking, strike breaking and in “anti-Communist” campaigns targeting trade unions and leftist groups in the US and Europe (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucky_Luciano, http://www.converge.org.nz/pirm/cia.htm and http://tinyurl.com/6f6vms5 – an excerpt from Opium: Uncovering the Politics of the Poppy by Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy). The FBI and military intelligence also collaborated with senior organized crime figures in the JFK assassination (see the 1970 Torbitt Document, based on New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison’s grand jury investigation of the JFK Assassination http://www.newsmakingnews.com/torbitt.htm)

Jimmy Hoffa

5. Wall Street’s public relations campaign to demonize unions – I have written at length (see “Thinking Like Egyptians” http://stuartbramhall.aegauthorblogs.com/2011/03/01/thinking-like-egyptians/) about a systematic, seven decade corporate campaign to bombard the American public with anti-union, anti-worker and anti-working class messages. The late Australian psychologist Alex Carey was the first to document the extent of this campaign in his 1995 Taking the Risk Out of Democracy: Corporate Propaganda versus Freedom and Liberty.

Sit down strike

The US union movement was built during the last serious recession (the Great Depression, which started in 1929). Then, as now, employers took advantage of the economic downturn to cut wages, pile on work and force employees to work under sweatshop conditions. In the 1930s organized labor, largely led by the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations), fought back through sit down and wildcat strikes. A wildcat strike is an unofficial strike, usually called in response to mistreatment of a co-worker. In essence, workers refuse to return until management agrees to their demands.

Because slowdowns and wildcat and sit down strikes are illegal under the Taft Hartley Act, American unions face steep fines for engaging in them.  In 2011, if a worker is bullied, harassed or illegally fired by an employer, his only option is to file a grievance through the National Labor Relations Board, a process that can drag out for months or years. Because there are no real sanctions against employers, workplace bullying and harassment are incredibly common in the US. In my Seattle practice, I counseled numerous victims of workplace harassment while they waited for their grievance hearing. The stress of trying to work productively in a hostile environment is so enormous that most are forced to quit or take unpaid leave while waiting for their grievance to be heard.

Other Taft Hartley provisions that restrict labor rights:

• Taft Hartley authorizes states to enact right-to-work laws. These laws outlaw collective bargaining contracts (contracts agreed on between union and management) that make union membership a condition of employment. Such laws are virtually unheard of in other countries, as they permit “free-rider” workers to enjoy the hard won benefits of union membership (wages and benefits are always better in a union company) without joining the union or paying dues. In the 22 states (mostly in the South and Rocky Mountain region) that have them, they have reduced union membership to a level that it has virtually no effect on working conditions.
• Taft Hartley excludes supervisors and independent contractors (which includes most doctors) as employees for purposes of union membership. This has allowed companies to arbitrarily designate thousands of employees as independent contractors and/or supervisors and thus deprive them of union protection. As well greatly reducing potential union membership.
• Taft Hartley makes pass picketing illegal – a common tactic used during the 1930s to discourage scab labor from entering the worksite.
• Taft Hartley allows the President to obtain an 80 day court ordered injunction to halt a strike, allowing the employer sufficient time to recruit scabs to replace striking workers.
• Taft Hartley establishes the right of management to campaign against union membership (often incorporating coercive scare tactics) during a unionizing drive. This is in marked contrast to European countries, where employers (who always have an unfair advantage)  are required to maintain a neutral stance towards union organizing.
• Taft Hartley allows the employer to petition for a union certification election and/or decertification election. Similar laws are also unheard of in Europe. Management frequently uses this provision to force a premature certification vote, before workers have had a full discussion of the pros and cons of union membership.
• Taft Hartley prohibits secondary boycotts directed against neutral companies to pressure employers who are refusing to negotiate. Prior to 1947, this was one of organized labor’s most potent tools.
• Taft Hartley allows employers to delay union certification by demanding National Labor Relations Board hearings on key matters of dispute (such as what constitutes a bargaining unit). Management often uses the time to coerce individual workers to vote against the union.
• Taft Hartley establishes heavy penalties against unions who violate the Act and negligible penalties for employer violations. This tends to make employer violations of labor rights (e.g. illegal firing of labor supporters during organizing drives) routine.
• (Prior to 1965) Taft Hartley required all union leaders to sign an anti-communist pledge. Prior to its 1965 repeal, this led to massive red-baiting in the union movement, with the result that the most militant union members were either expelled or forced out.

To be continued.

Like the F-word, the U-word is largely taboo in polite society, especially among younger Americans. According to a recent survey 41% of Americans “disapprove” of unions (see http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2010/09/why-has-union-membership-declined.html). Generation X,Y and Z Americans are more likely to view unions as irrelevant, rather than negative. I find all this incredibly sad, as American workers owe the forty hour week (it used to be 70+ hours), workplace safety laws and the end of child labor to the union movement.

I myself come from a proud union family. My mother walked the picket line as a member of the Milwaukee Teachers Education Association. My father, a radio announcer, belonged to the American Federation of Television and Radio artists. AFTRA saved his career after his boss fired him for taking a sick day when a nut allergy caused him to suffer anaphylactic reaction. October 21, 2002 was a very proud day for me when I (at 54) joined my first union: the New Zealand Association of Salaried Medical Specialists. In the US, most salaried doctors are viewed as independent contractors and are prohibited under the Taft Hartley Act from unionizing. My proudest day was in 2006 when I voted to undertake industrial action (stop work meetings and, if need be, strike action), in response to management efforts to remove patient safety provisions from our contact.

America’s Toothless Trade Union Movement

Yet I can’t say I blame younger Americans for their dismissive attitude towards unions. Thanks to the repressive Taft Hartley Act the US passed in 1947, American unions essentially function as government unions, owing to stringent federal restrictions on their activities. This only struck home as I read about the essential role illegal Egyptian unions played in Egypt’s February revolution (see “Egypt’s Invisible Labor Movement” at http://stuartbramhall.aegauthorblogs.com/2011/02/23/egypts-invisible-labor-movement/).

In Egypt, all workers are required to join the government-run Egyptian Trade Union Federation, and independent trade unions are banned. Members of the Trade Union Federation are required to get government permission (which is rarely granted) to strike. However since 1998, nearly two million Egyptian workers have formed independent unions and have engaged in more than 3,000 strikes. Moreover it was the threat of a general strike (and the closure of the Suez Canal) that ultimately forced Mubarak to resign.

Should the US Repeal the Taft Hartley Act?

Hell, yes. Obviously there is no official government union in the US. Nevertheless, for all practical purposes, the Taft Hartley Act forces the American trade union movement to function as a de facto government union by repealing many of the labor rights guaranteed under the 1935 Wagner Act (for example it makes mass picketing, slowdowns and sit down and wildcat strikes illegal).

Progressive pundits scratch their heads wondering why American workers aren’t in the streets like their European counterparts – as Congress and many states roll back wages, pensions, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and every other gain they have won over the past 70 years. The 1947 Taft Hartley Act was passed by a Republican Congress over President Truman’s veto. Yet the increasingly pro-corporate Democrats, despite unwavering support from organized labor, have never attempted to repeal it – despite numerous opportunities when they controlled both Congress and the presidency (such as 2009-2010 under Obama).

Repealing Taft Hartley was part of Ralph Nader’s platform in the 2000, 2004 and 2008, which might explain why the so-called “alternative” media attacked him so viciously. In fact the only people talking about repealing Taft Hartley are Nader, a few socialist groups, and Dr Elaine Bernard, the Executive Director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School. Certainly no one in the trade union bureaucracy talks about it. Nevertheless so long as Taft Hartley remains in force, the “official” trade union movement is virtually paralyzed in fighting the all-out attack in many states against the right to unionize.

Click here to see an interview with Dr Bernard explaining the major role Taft Hartley Act and other anti-union laws have played in the decline of America’s union movement:

The War Against Unions

To be continued, with a discussion of the specific Taft Hartley provisions that suppress labor rights.

It’s extremely heartening to see Americans’ fascination with the popular uprisings in the Middle East, as well as speculation across the blogosphere about the potential to replicate them in the US. Massive turnout in Madison and other state capitals is very promising, as American workers realize that they are being punished for the Wall Street greed and criminality that caused the 2008 economic collapse. Many are beginning to believe, as I do, that Wall Street and their friends in government are deliberately using the “economic crisis” to justify a massive attack on the working class.

Wisconsin Protests

It seems a logical conclusion, given the soaring profits and stock prices of Wall Street banks and corporations, especially as they are the result of major cost cutting in the form of mass lay-offs and wage cuts. American workers would have to be pretty gullible not to question why they are being told to tighten their belts, while the banksters responsible for the collapse are rewarded with a $12.5 trillion secret bailout (see http://stuartbramhall.aegauthorblogs.com/2011/02/13/bernie-sanders-filibuster-and-the-secret-12-5-trillion-bailout/), billions of dollars of CEO bonuses and tax cuts. In addition to facing the likelihood that some of us (including many young people under 24) are now permanently unemployed and/or homeless, the rest of us face another round of lay-offs and home foreclosures, wage freezes/cuts, longer work hours, increased workloads, Social Security and Medicare cuts, a likely increase in the retirement age to 70 – and even more cuts in critical public services, including school, library and clinic closures; police and teacher lay-offs; and cutbacks in street lighting and road and bridge repairs.

The Way Forward

As we have seen in Europe, the Middle East and Europe, the only effective way to challenge these relentless attacks against working people is by banding together to fight them through industrial action and mass mobilization. As individuals waiting for politicians to do the right thing, we are relatively powerless. However, as we have seen in Egypt, Tunisia and elsewhere, when we join together in unions and grassroots organizations, we have the ability to bring society to a standstill.

Over the past three decades, such collective action has been rare in the US. Americans from all walks of life seem much more reluctant than their foreign counterparts to join any community groups or organizations, much less unions or political causes. This, I believe, relates mainly to constant bombardment (mainly via the media) with highly sophisticated political messaging prompting Americans to see themselves as “consumers” rather than engaged citizens in a participatory democracy. Wall Street has created an entire industry – the public relations industry – around creating such messages. Ironically, as the late Alex Carey describes in Taking the Risk Out of Democracy (http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/25/006.html), the original purpose of “pubic relations” was to discredit union organizing and strikes and simultaneously undermine strong pro-worker sentiment among the American public.

Below are five of the most paralyzing anti-organizing messages Americans are bombarded with on a daily basis:

1. Being labeled or associated with “workers,” “working class,” or “unions” equates with low social status. In the US, everyone with a full time job is automatically “middle class.” Because class differences have been abolished in the US, there is no need to join or form unions or to protest and/or strike.
2. The US and Americans are distinctly different (better) than the rest of the world. Living standards are (and will always be) much better for American workers than for their foreign counterparts.
3. The proper role of workers under fifty is supporting and/or looking after their families. If they strike or protest, their children will suffer.
4. There is no alternative – corporations, corporate controlled government and the corporate controlled media are all too powerful for ordinary people to bring about change. Organizing is pointless because we are helpless to change anything.
5. Politics and economics are too complicated for ordinary people to understand. We can only make things better by going shopping and taking care of our families while we wait for honest, wise political leaders to get us out of this mess.

To be continued.

Egyptian Police Demanding Higher Wages and Better Working Conditions

I get a very different picture of the Egyptian “revolution” from Al Jazeera and other international new sources than from the US media. The latter seems to focus exclusively on the massive street protests in Cairo and other Egyptian cities, ignoring the critical role of major strike actions across Egypt in the days before Mubarak’s resignation.

The US media also portrays the Egyptian revolution as a Facebook revolution, made possible by the miracle of the Internet, which overlooks four important facts:

1. Forty percent of Egyptians are illiterate (http://humanexperience.stanford.edu/beininegypt), and only the sons and daughters of the Egyptian elite have access to the Internet.
2. The April 6^th Youth Movement, the driving force behind the January 25^th Day of Anger, was born out of Egypt’s labor movement and named after the momentous April 6, 2008 Mahalla Strike.
3. Many foreign analysts believe that strike action by 200,000 workers across Egypt on February 8, 2011 was the final factor leading the military to pressure Mubarak to step down (owing to fears of an imminent general strike, and the resulting damage to Egypt’s economy).
4. Although middle class doctors, lawyers and managers eventually joined the protest in Tahrir Square, they were also the first to try to persuade the other demonstrators to go home and wait for elections.

The Role of World Bank/IMF Structural Adjustment

Also omitted from mainstream media coverage is the root cause of the massive labor unrest that accompanied the street protests, namely the role of draconian “structural adjustments” the World Bank and IMF imposed on Egypt in 1991. Twenty years of these neoliberal reforms (think Reaganomics on steroids) have created a society in which 44% of the population lives below the poverty line of $2 per day per person (http://humanexperience.stanford.edu/beininegypt). The average Egyptian worker makes $70 a month. With two parents working, the average Egyptian family of five struggles to get by on less than $1 per day per person. In Cairo, it’s not unusual for homeless families to take up residence in the cemetery (see http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/02/20112148356117884.html).

Three Thousand Strikes Since 1998

Although the only legal union in Egypt is the government-run Egyptian Trade Union Federation, approximately two million workers have engaged in over 3,000 illegal strikes (only two strikes were authorized by the government-run union) since 1998. These strikes are typically greeted with brutal government repression, consisting of extrajudicial assassination, beatings by paramilitary thugs and arrest and torture. The brutal repression, in turn, has led striking workers to make political demands (such as Mubarak’s resignation, democratic elections, legalization of non-government unions and an end to violent repression), in addition to demanding better pay and working conditions.

The strength of Egypt’s labor movement, which has grown by leaps and bounds since winning a few wage concessions in 2006, means that the Egyptian revolution is by no means over. Even though traffic has resumed flowing through Tahrir Square and despite the imposition of martial law (and a ban on strikes) by the military junta, widespread labor unrest continues. According to Al Jazeera English (http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2011/02/2011216141815340645.html), workers in banking, transport, oil tourism, textiles and state owned media were all on strike last week to demand higher wages and working conditions.

Even more significant is the February 19th declaration by Egyptian independent trade unionists (representing over 30 unions):

Demands of the workers in the revolution

O heroes of the 25 January revolution! We, workers and trade unionists from different workplaces which have seen strikes, occupations and demonstrations by hundreds of thousands of workers across Egypt during the current period, feel it is right to unite the demands of striking workers that they may become an integral part of the goals of our revolution, which the people of Egypt made, and for which the martyrs shed their blood. We present to you a workers’ program which brings together our just demands, in order to reaffirm the social aspect of this revolution and to prevent the revolution being taken away from at its base who should be its beneficiaries.”

For complete text go to http://www.arabawy.org/2011/02/21/jan25-egyworkers-egyptian-independent-trade-unionists%E2%80%99-declaration/

To be continued