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The following letter is from Kyungkyu Yang, KPTU Education Center ‘Wum’ Director and KPTU Advisor, to the members of CUPE Newfoundland Labrador. He was a special guest speaker at CUPE NL’s first-ever Global Justice Conference held in May 2019.
June 12, 2019
To: Sherry Hillier, President
CUPE Newfoundland and Labrador Division
Dear President Sherry Hillier,
I feel greatly fortunate and grateful to have been able to participate in the CUPE Newfoundland and Labrador Convention following our education exchange program. In particular, I was deeply inspired by watching you exercise amazing leadership in guiding your division’s work.
Due to our work to evaluate our exchange and begin implementing the things we learned, I was not able to convey my thanks to you right away.
It was a huge honour for me to come from a place so far away as Korea to a place as beautiful as Newfoundland to meet you and your delegates and share with you thoughts on the situation of the Korean labour movement and the subject of international solidarity.
Seeing the Newfoundland and Labrador Division’s sincere interest in international solidarity and your efforts to put this interest into practice made me feel a sense of new possibility. In particularly, seeing that you held a separate conference on international solidarity ahead of your Convention made me recognize the need for KPTU to expand our efforts in this area as well.
I was also deeply moved by many of the things I experienced at your Convention, including the opening performance by first aboriginal members, the reading of the equality statement and the ombusperson system. After returning to Korea I have been speaking about these practices to many people and stressing the need for us to create a new labor movement culture. All of this was possible due to your kind invited of me to your Convention.
I hope that I will have a chance to meet you again soon, talk in more depth and establish our international solidarity even more firmly.
In solidarity,
Kyungkyu Yang
KPTU Education Center ‘Woom’ Director and KPTU Advisor
Download a copy of the letter from KPTU.
Learn more about the Korean Public Service and Transport Workers’ Union at world-psi.org/en/country/korea-republic.
