GTWA Upcoming GMM: Feb 24
Coming this month, Gautam Mody, an organizer of the exciting new union in India, will discuss the New Trade Union Initiative, which has built a democratic organization that now represents more than 1 million workers with a special emphasis on informal workers.
Join the Greater Toronto Workers’ Assembly on
Sunday, February 24, 2 - 4 PM,
at the Steelworkers’ Hall, 25 Cecil St., and please bring friends.
We will also be discussing the GTWA's Public Sector Committee and its project to develop workplace and community power right here in Toronto.
You can read a delegates’ report on their founding convention here, and an excerpt from an interview with Gautam Mody:
"Challenges of organizing workers working in conditions of informality are enormous. Capital even in its most advanced forms continues to exploit the primordial divisions in society – the divisions of gender, religion and, in a society like India, also caste. The left parties have only very partially been able to address these divisions. As a result a large number of identity based groups have emerged, articulating agendas and demands based on their identity. We need to recognize that identity issues would not have appeared paramount if the progressive trade union had been able to deal with and respond to these divisions. The fact is that these divisions of gender, religion, ethnicity and caste not just persist under and get exploited to divide the working class by capital but, they can be found to some extent mirrored in our own organizations. New trade unionism means addressing these divisions both against capital and within our own organizations. If we are to build materially different bargaining power within the trade union we have to learn to work in non-hierarchical relationships with the progressive women’s movement, the movement against caste oppression and others. Only then will we be able to build truly united, democratic and militant union power."
The full interview can be read at:
www.amrc.org.hk