Unions for Cuba: introduction - speech by Jeannie Drake

Speaking note for JEANNIE DRAKE

Saturday 6 November 2004

Cuba Solidarity Campaign/TUC conference

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Welcome to Congress House, the heart of the British trade union movement.

Welcome to all of you, but of course welcome in particular to our Cuban visitors, many of them here for the first time and certainly, I think, here in such numbers for the first time.

I want to set the scene for today's discussions, and perhaps give you some ideas about what might usefully be discussed today in the workshops and in the breaks when you get the chance to talk to each other.

My colleague Kay Carberry, the TUC's Assistant General Secretary, will be speaking later today about where we go next.

The TUC has a long history of involvement with the Cuban trade union movement, and as Ken Gill for one will recall, it hasn't always been an easy relationship. Indeed I think he would agree with me that relations are now better than they have ever been, and this conference is a testament to that.

So was the presence at our annual Congress a couple of months ago of the General Secretary of the CTC, the Cuban national trade union centre, Pedro Ross Leal. He spoke directly to Congress (and several times on the fringe) and was warmly received. His messages about the need to defend what has been achieved by Cubans was well taken, and his message of solidarity was welcomed and, I think, reciprocated.

The economic blockade and military intervention

His main message, of course, and mine too, today, is that the key issue facing Cuba continues to be the US economic blockade, and the threat of military intervention.

Let me say now, absolutely clearly and without conditions, that the TUC is completely and resolutely opposed to the blockade and to any form of military intervention in Cuba.

We have raised that issue with the Foreign Office here at home, and with the new British ambassador to Cuba who stopped by in Congress House last month for a briefing from the TUC.

We have made it absolutely clear to our government that we want them to take no part in any blockade or any intervention, and that we want them to help persuade the US to back off.

I have to say they were responsive on the first part of that, but weren't certain that they could deliver on the second part.

Instead, we need to pursue the issue with the European Union. EU-Cuban relations are obviously better than those between Cuba and the US, but the 'common position' which represents EU policy towards Cuba still needs reform.

With the Spanish socialists in power in Madrid, we see the real prospect for improving relations, and it will be our job as British trade unionists to make sure that our government works closely with the Spanish government to that end.

International trade unionism and Cuba

But of course as trade unionists, putting pressure on the British government isn't the only way we can affect world events.

We belong to the global trade union family, and we can do a lot through that to defend Cuba and assist Cuban workers.

The TUC is affiliated internationally to the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, and many of your individual unions will be affiliated to the industry-based Global Union Federations linked to the ICFTU.

The ICFTU is holding its annual Congress in Japan this December on the theme of globalising solidarity, and I want to announce today that the TUC will be proposing that, for the first time, the ICFTU formally adopt a position of opposition to the blockade, and opposition to any military intervention in Cuba's affairs.

At the level of the Global Union Federations, the TUC sees today as a historic event mostly because you will have the opportunity to make precisely the sort of links at sectoral level - with your equivalent unions in Cuba - that GUFs are all about.

So far, the only GUF that has made much progress in links with Cuba is ICEM, the International Chemical, Energy and Mining federation. We need to see more GUFs follow their example, and if British unions are putting the issue on their own GUF's agenda, that is much more likely to happen.

There are already strong links between some unions in Britain and their Cuban counterparts.

Unison, our largest affiliate has twinning arrangement with your healthworkers' union and helped establish Salud! to send material aid to Cuba.

Our transport workers' union, the TGWU, has raised funds to send buses.

One of our teachers' unions, the NUT, has raised funds for support for Cuban schools and for the language training needed by Cuban doctors going to South Africa.

Our construction workers' union, UCATT, has sent work clothes and equipment to counterparts here.

And the National Union of Mineworkers has raised funds for Cuban copper miners and organised delegations and twinning projects.

I hope I've missed out lots of other examples, and I hope that you will be able to add to that list today and over the coming months.

The TUC itself has a memorandum of understanding with the Cuban CTC, discussed when my predecessor as TUC President Roger Lyons visited Cuba for the May Day celebrations this year.

We need to develop those links, and I hope that today will give us that opportunity.

The content of those discussions, if I can make some suggestions, could include what unions can do in Britain to defend Cuba against the US, and what we can do to pressurise our government.

They could include discussing twinning arrangements, regular exchanges of people and ideas, about trade union organisation and industrial relations.

Cuba and the global economy

I say industrial relations because Cuban workers are facing, more and more, exactly the same challenges as we face in terms of competition at global level.

And if we succeed in raising the embargo, then one of the results will be that Cuba will get the benefits and the drawbacks of being integrated into the global economic system.

They need our assistance in dealing with that - they need to know more about industrial relations, collective bargaining and dealing with multinationals.

They also need to know more about how trade unions operate in countries which are not blockaded, not threatened with military intervention. They need to know what they can and can't do, or should and shouldn't do, drawing on our experiences, as they make that transition into the globalised world.

Of course, we aren't the experts, and Cuban workers can probably learn as much from our failures as our successes!

But they could certainly go to the people who are the experts and who we ourselves regularly call on - the International Labour Organisation, or ILO.

The TUC and the CTC meet regularly in the ILO (indeed the Governing Body gets under way in a week's time and I know that some of our Cuban guests will be going there).

We don't always see eye to eye, but the TUC has been forthright in defending Cuba against US government and employer attacks in that forum, and sometimes in explaining to our other trade union colleagues (I put it no stronger to that) why the Cuban situation is different.

We have, this year, resisted attempts to put Cuba in the dock at the ILO for alleged violations of workers' freedoms. I think that the CTC would acknowledge we were a key part of the group defending Cuba.

We also helped make sure that complaints about Cuba's records from bogus trade unions (one of them actually using a Florida postal address!) were ruled out.

But we won't compromise on those workers' freedoms, and we do have to have an honest debate with our friends in Cuba on those matters. Just as our defence of Cuba against the embargo and any military intervention is without conditions, so must be our support for ILO Conventions such as the freedom to organise trade unions without state sanction. We know that Cuba is under threat, but that shouldn't excuse the violation of basic trade union rights.

We would demand no less from our own government, and many people in this hall will remember that the British trade union movement has regularly sought ILO action on Britain's lack of trade union freedoms - notably throughout the eighties and nineties at GCHQ.

When people have tried to introduce state sanctioned trade unions in Britain - as the Tories did in the 1970s - we resisted it, and we reject it wherever it happens in the world, so if there's a case to answer in Cuba, we should not be frightened to raise it there too.

However, some of those discussions are ones we should only have among friends, in gatherings like this one. And our fire must be concentrated not on those countries such as Cuba (and Britain, let's not forget) who have ratified the core ILO conventions but who have implemented them imperfectly, but on countries like the USA and China who talk about workers' rights but haven't actually ratified the conventions that guarantee them in the first place.

Which brings me back to the beginning of my speech - the need to defend Cuba against the USA, while forging closer and deeper links between British and Cuban workers.

Today is the day when those links can be strengthened and deepened, when friendships can be renewed and created.

I hope that this is a successful day for everyone, and I hope that you all have fun this evening, too. Thank you.