June 12th : World Day Against Child Labor

11 Jun 2020

Child labor is a negative global phenomenon, a hazardous situation that affects all continents, with less developed countries in the lead, but with no country being excluded.

It is no coincidence that out of the 218 million children aged 5-17 who work globally, 72.1 million come from Africa and 62.1 million from Asia, followed by the United States with 10.7 million and Arab states with 1.2 million, while in Europe and Central Asia more than 5.5 million children are victims of child labor.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the global crisis caused by quarantine imposed on all countries of the world, even more children were forced to child labor, being prey to the appetite of the big businesses, who use child labor to reduce the losses of their profits.

However, the inclusion of children in the workforce is not a phenomenon of recent years, not even of the current century. It is a problem that has arisen since the mid-19th century, when the industrial revolution needed even cheaper workforce. The more some multinationals that rule the whole world accumulate capital, the more urgent the need for cheap workforce becomes.

So today, at the beginning of the 21st century, with all the advance of technology and science that would allow all the children of the world to enjoy their childhood, go to school and have full health care, we are seeing the intensification of child labor and multiplication of children who fall victims of occupational accidents.

The elimination of this outrageous phenomenon cannot be left to the individual actions of some suspicious NGOs or to the proclamation of a World Day against Child Labor. An international observatory which will simply record the phenomenon and the statistics is not enough either. There must be coordinated action, decisive and militant movement, trade unions that will put pressure on the governments of their countries until they stop having minor children in the factories, in the mines, in the large rural areas of the multinationals, that is, until child slavery stops.

The World Federation of Trade Unions, with more than 100 million members from 130 countries, which this year celebrates 75 years of life and action, has a long-standing and permanent demand for the abolition of child labor. However, the class-oriented movement represented worldwide by the WFTU has no illusions that child labor can be completely eliminated without the elimination of the system that produces it: capitalism.

We are fighting for a system without exploitation of man by man, where children will live as children and not as young slaves. We urgently demand:

– Abolition of child labor by law in all countries of the world, with strict fines and closure of the company where a violation is found.

-Funding of Public Education so that all children have free access to the educational system.

-Universal and Free Health Care for all children in all countries of the world.

-Utilization of children’s free time with activities which develop their skills and abilities.

All of the above demands, which are permanent for the WFTU, are not just a wish-list, but a framework of action that its trade unions and friends have consistently served all the previous years and continue until the final overthrow of this inhumane and rotten system that causes all hardships of the working class and the popular strata.

The Secretariat

FREE SUSANA PRIETO TERRAZAS!

Labor Today / El Trabajo Diario (LT) denounces the arbitrary arrest and detention of labor lawyer and activist Susan Prieto Terrazas by authorities in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas. We demand her immediate release.

Susan Prieto Terrazas is a Mexican lawyer, with offices in Chihuahua and Tamaulipas, who has devoted her career to defending the interests of the workers in the Maquiladora factories of Northern Mexico. Maquilas are factories, mostly in Northern Mexico, that are controlled by foreign capital to take advantage of cheap labor, lax regulations, and tax breaks.

Susana Prieto Terrazas has, since obtaining her law degree, worked in courts and in the workers rights movement in the Northern states of Tamaulipas and Chihuahua. In 2028 and 2019 Susana was an important leader in a strike movement that won a 20% wage increase for workers in 48 export oriented factories in Matamoros, Mexico. It is not hard to imagine that this gain for the workers engendered much enmity towards Susana from people in power and from many corporate board rooms.

On June 8 ,2020 Susana was arrested by the Tamaulipas authorities for allegedly rioting and blocking the entrance to a building. All were activities related to a labor dispute. Any trade unionist, in any corner of the world, would recognize her arrest as retaliation for her labor activities. The motivation for her arrest is political and she remains a political prisoner.

Labor Today calls upon the Mexican authorities, both state and federal, to ensure Ms. Prieto Terrazas release and to allow union activities in Northern Mexico to continue unhindered by threats of prosecution.

USA: WFTU protest note to the UN and ILO over the US government repression

On June 3, the WFTU Secretariat issued the following statement of protest to the UN and the ILO against the repression exercised by the US government against protesters.

USA: WFTU protest over the US government repression against working people protests

The World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU), representing more than 100 million affiliates who live, toil and struggle in 130 countries of the whole world, expresses its strong protest over the brutal repression unleashed by the US state against the workers and the people of the country who have been taking the streets in order to protest against racism, repression and police violence during the last days.

These marches, which erupted as a righteous expression of the US workers and people’s outrage after the assassination of the 47-year-old African-American George Floyd by police officers, have been brutally suppressed by the US Federal and State authorities. At the same time, while the US employees, unemployed and pensioners have been suffering the COVID-19 pandemic consequences in a country with terrible shortages on medical supply, ventilators and public healthcare infrastructures, the US leaders prefer to intensify repression against the people who protest.

So far, there have been registered more that 5,600 arrests which took place in hundreds of protests organized in more than 80 major cities in two-thirds of the country’s states; at the same time, many complaints of international organizations report unprecedented militarized methods of repression, while police forces have been using heavy-duty riot gear and military-grade weapons which also include batons, tear gas, pepper spray and rubber bullets on protesters, bystanders or even journalists. Moreover, among the thousands of complaints regarding police departments’ conduct over the last days, it has even been reported that in New York some police officers drove their cars into the gathered protesters.

This unprecedented ferocity and brutal violence employed by the US repressive forces constitute a provocation against the international trade union movement affiliated to the WFTU; it is also a manifest breach of any notion of civil rights and democratic freedoms as the latter have been ratified and recognized through international conventions.

In this regard, the WFTU expresses its deep concern over the need to protect workers who protest, as well as over the violation of the US people right to assemble, hold public meetings and demonstrate, especially by taking into account many decisions of the ILO Committee on Freedom of Association as well as many milestone international documents, such as the 1948 UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

The WFTU calls upon the International Organizations to take direct action and initiatives in order to investigate phenomena of racist violence, repression against US workers and to substantially investigate the complaints of police arbitrariness. For our part, we pledge to internationalize the issue and to undertake any necessary initiative at institutional level in order to protect the life, health and the workers’ rights.

The WFTU Secretariat

Press Release: ATU Local 689 Statement on Black Lives Matter

Let us begin by saying Black Lives Matter. We say this without hesitation or apology. We demand justice for George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery. We demand justice for the untold numbers of black people who have died from police violence. 

We are a majority black union of over 12,000 members and retirees around the nation’s capital. ATU Local 689 has moved this region for over 100 years. We fought, through organizing and striking, to transform low-paying transit jobs into careers with wages that you could raise a family on. But even with these good union jobs our members still routinely suffer from systemic racism and law enforcement abuses. We know firsthand that police are often the first people to arrive on the picket line, hours before the press shows up. 

We follow in the footsteps of our International Union and fellow transit workers and pledge that our members will not put themselves in danger by transporting arrested protesters for the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) or any other law enforcement services. 

To our brothers, sisters, and friends in the labor movement, we must take this moment to look inward. On Sunday, May 31st, the lobby of the AFL-CIO was burnt. We can speculate on the motives, but the questions that we must answer are clear. 

• Why did young black and brown workers, frustrated with constant injustice, not view the AFL-CIO as their natural ally with over a century of experience in the struggle for equality? Why did they not recognize that act as burning their own house? 
• What are we doing over the next few weeks to ensure that these workers out in the streets understand that the labor movement stands with them? 
• What are we as a labor movement willing to do to help dismantle systemic racism in this country? 
• What can we do to help bring justice to George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery?

We at ATU Local 689 do not claim to have all the answers, but these are some of the thoughts we have during this moment. This is also not to excuse the reckless actions of a few, but to help focus our efforts during this crisis. Let us never forget that the conditions that built many of our unions (including: civil unrest, widespread unemployment, mass demonstrations) are not too different from today. Our unions weren’t given to us but were the result of incredible sacrifices. 

To the local and national politicians, we call on you to stop trying to redirect blame. This nationwide uprising is not the result of “outside agitators” though they may exist. This uprising is the result of repeated failures by leaders to take the problem seriously. This country has a 20% unemployment rate, a global pandemic, and racist police institutions. Ignoring these root causes of unrest won't make them go away. The concrete thing that elected officials can be doing right now to achieve peace is to take decisive action to address the demands of the movement. DC’s own budget proposal this year calls for cuts to the crucial violence interrupter program just to avoid raising taxes on the wealthy. 

We do not know what comes next, but we do know what we need to avoid. We can not afford another moment of inaction. We can not afford a few more years where black people are killed with impunity. We can not afford to wait and revisit these problems in the future. 

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Amalgamated Transit Union Local 689 is comprised of more than 13,000 members and retirees performing occupations within the many skilled transportation crafts for the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA), MetroAccess, DASH, and the DC Streetcar. A member of the Amalgamated Transit Union (AFL-CIO/CLC), the largest labor organization representing transit workers in the United States and Canada, Local 689 was established on January 19, 1916. For more information please visit our website at www.atulocal689.org.