International solidarity connects us with workers across borders who share a common struggle for accessible public services, decent work, and safety and security in their lives. CUPE’s international solidarity report highlights important international struggles and the ways we are building and strengthening relationships with labour and social movements in other countries. In this report, you will learn about the Global Justice Fund as well as examples of CUPE’s worker-to-worker solidarity over the past year.
CUPE’s international solidarity work in 2017-2018 expanded to include new relationships in Guatemala, Haiti, Iran, and with migrant workers in Canada. We continued to strengthen worker-to-worker solidarity with our long-standing trade union and social movement partners in Colombia, Cuba, Honduras, Nicaragua, and the Philippines.
Peoples’ movements in Colombia, Honduras, Iran, and the Philippines, among others, are growing and organizing to build the power needed to challenge repressive corporate and political leadership. Over the past year, we looked at how the Canadian Government and our corporate sector may be complicit in some of the repression these movements are experiencing.
Oxfam reported in January 2018 that “eighty-two per cent of global wealth generated last year went to the richest one per cent, while the 3.7 billion people who make up the poorest half of the world saw no increase.” As the gap between the rich and the poor grows, people’s economic and social conditions are declining. The conditions are ripe for resistance, here in Canada, and globally.
As workers around the globe are challenging privatization, poverty, austerity, corruption and war, CUPE is making every effort to unite and to support these workers wherever they are in the world.
