Reuters | January 28, 2002 | by Robert Evans
GENEVA - The world's major labour union grouping is breaking new ground by sending a senior delegation to a conference of anti-globalisation movements in Brazil next month, officials said on Friday.
The Brussels-based International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) said 19 representatives would go to the "World Social Forum" in Porto Alegre from January 31 to February 5.
ICFTU officials said the decision to attend the gathering reflected growing concern among mainstream unions that governments were ignoring workers' rights in the global advance towards free trade and economic liberalisation.
"We have to look for allies where we can find them," an official of one labour body told Reuters in Geneva.
The Port Alegre gathering will bring together a wide range of anti-globalisation groups, from hard-line Marxist and neo-communist and anarchist groups seeking the overthrow of capitalism to environmentalists and human rights activists.
Also there will be bodies campaigning for Third World development, and radical peasant and worker movements from developing countries, unusual companions for the formerly strongly anti-communist ICFTU.
The Port Alegre forum was first convened last year to counter the impact of the annual meetings of global business and political leaders organised by the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland.
ICFTU General Secretary Bill Jordan said in Doha in November that the failure of World Trade Organisation (WTO) countries to put labour conditions on the agenda for new free trade talks was a "bitter blow" for workers.
He was speaking after developed and developing countries in the 144-member WTO agreed in the Qatari capital to start a "Doha Round" of liberalisation negotiations, to be launched next Monday.
ICFTU KEPT ALOOF
In the past the ICFTU and affiliated bodies like the U.S. AFL-CIO, while mounting parallel protests over jobs, have kept aloof from the anti-globalisation movement, some elements of which have staged violent protests at international meetings.
Jordan himself has been a regular speaker at the Davos Forum in past years, and the ICFTU said he would again attend the January 31-February 5 WEF talks this year. The gathering has been switched to New York after two years of violent protests by radicals in and around Davos.
But his assistant general secretary, Mamounata Cisse, will go to Porto Alegre along with the head of its Women's Committee, Nancy Riche, who is a top official of Canada's Labour Congress, and regional leaders from Africa, Asia and Latin America.
Poorer countries - whose workers the ICFTU says it aims to protect as much as those in the richer states - have been the most virulent opponents of efforts by the United States and some European states to get a "social clause" into WTO rules. Countries like India and Malaysia argue that expressed concern for their workers is a cover for a desire to pass WTO rules that would make it easier to keep cheaper goods from low labour-cost states out of Western markets.
The ICFTU, which says it represents 157 million workers in 148 countries, was created in the late 1940s when an earlier global labour grouping split into communist and anti-communist bodies at the start of the Cold War.
Among its major affiliates are the U.S. AFL-CIO labour confederation, Britain's Trades Union Congress, the Canadian Labour Congress and union bodies in most EU countries and Japan.Reuters:
