22 November, 2010Unions in Chile and Colombia explore building and unifying strong unions across industrial sectors during IMF evaluation and planning workshops in November.
CHILE & COLOMBIA: From November 15 to 19, the International Metalworkers' Federation (IMF) held in Santiago, Chile and Bogota, Colombia, two consecutive evaluation and planning workshops of its "Building National Unions Project" supported by IF Metall and Swedish LO-TCO.
In both countries, participants and coordinators from the three different regions participating in the intensive capacity building project carried out by Marino Vain from the IMF regional office in Latin America, analysed collectively the difficulties encountered, the achievements and constructed the political and educational proposals for the following year of activities.
Participants also heard and discussed the preliminary results of the sectoral and union mapping carried out in both countries. When finalized, these investigations will provide our members with valuable information regarding the transnational corporations and unions operating in our sectors, as well as the potential membership to target for organizing.
Rank and file members demanded that the functioning IMF National Councils give full political support to bringing IMF affiliates closer and to invite other unions to join in the creation of strong national industrial unions. Jorge Almeida, director of IMF regional office confirmed this as one of IMF's Action Programme priorities.
When the project started, the main objective was to create conditions to bring together in one national organization the existing IMF affiliates in each country, but as Fernando Lopes, IMF assistant general secretary explained, due to the existing discussions at international level between ICEM, ITGLWF and IMF, the projects now need to focus on building broader industrial unions and political alliances in the regions.
In Santiago, IMF invited the leadership of three sectoral unions without international affiliation, to join the workshop debates and participate in the upcoming 2011 activities. One of the main decisions approved was to expand project activities in order to allow rank and file members to participate in the debate on building national industrial unions and unifying the trade union movement, thus broad regional assemblies will be held immediately after each training activity.
ICEM affiliated participants who took part in the project activities this year, attended the evaluation and planning workshop in Bogota, Colombia and it was decided to significantly increase their participation in 2011. Carlos Bustos, ICEM's project coordinator in Colombia, invited IMF affiliates to participate in their current project activities and in several national meetings. An enlarged National Council including ICEM will also draw up a joint Action Plan to unify workers in 2011.
The project evaluations recognized the very important and positive advances achieved in terms of the participating affiliates' commitment to unify and build national unions in both countries.
The union building work in Chile was featured in Metal World No.2 2010 and can be viewed here.