Speech by TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber at founding conference of the International Trade Union Confederation
Speech by TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber at founding conference of the International Trade Union Confederation
Vienna, 2 November 2006 (check against delivery)
Congress, the TUC was proud to host the ICFTU's founding Congress in London 57 years ago.
I am equally proud that this week in Vienna we are taking a further decisive step forward.
The ITUC has the wholehearted support of the TUC because it asserts the fundamental values of trade unionism - that we can do more together than we can apart.
This week, at this historic Congress, we have remembered the sisters and brothers who have sacrificed so much for trade unionism. But we must also remember that such sacrifice is not just in the past. This very week, the Iraqi trade union movement has lost the leader of the further and higher education section of the Teachers' Union, Essam Khadmh; and the head of the GFIW in Baquba, Hekmet Zedan, both assassinated for their trade union activities. I pay tribute to them and to their colleagues in the Iraqi and Kurdish trade union movement.
In our new ITUC, we are building greater unity to strengthen our capacity to offer solidarity and to meet all the challenges of development and globalisation.
And the formation of the ITUC is providing a spur to greater unity too in many countries around the world where national centres have competed rather than co-operated.
Greater national unity is a precious prize.
I want to concentrate on the issue of organising, and the need for the world's trade unions to respond positively and purposefully to the challenge of unbalanced globalisation.
We need to pool our knowledge, our experiences and our resources to address the organising challenge.
We need to recruit and represent every sort of worker - white collar, managerial and professional; workers in the informal economy, in precarious employment, in so-called self-employment.
We need to recruit and represent all workers, regardless of gender, race, religion, sexual orientation, disability, age or youth, because unity is strength.
We need to build union strength across borders, along supply chains, among migrant workers, and in the vast transnational corporations that dominate the economic landscape.
To do that, we will need to marry our traditional values and our experience with new forms of organising, new ways of mobilising the power of workers' capital, new ways too to reach, engage and enthuse the people we speak for and who we must represent.
And the Global Unions Council - bringing together the Global Union Federations with the ITUC and TUAC - has to fashion the tangible mechanisms to deliver and strengthen solidarity in practice as well as in spirit to workers struggling to win the dignity that only comes with trade union organisation.
As we argue for changes in the world of work, and to remedy injustice and the imbalances of globalisation, we must not be afraid of the need to change ourselves.
This week we are taking an important step, and it has taken a long time to take that step. But soon, we must learn to run, moving as fast as the global capitalism that is shaping the challenges we face.
Let's get on with it!
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