Congress Daily News Archive
Organising globally: fighting for our rights
1 August 2006
Welcome to Durban, where the ITF is holding its biggest ever Congress from today until Wednesday 9 August. Already 1,107 people from 342 unions in 108 countries have registered to attend.
Congress sets the ITF’s agenda for the next four years and this year’s theme is “Organising globally: fighting for our rights”. This is the ITF’s 41st Congress, but it is the first ever to be held in Africa in the ITF’s 110-year history.
This Congress will also be the last to be chaired by Umraomal Purohit, who retires on 9 August eight years after being elected ITF President for the first time in 1998. He will deliver the keynote opening address to delegates this morning.
Other speakers in the opening session will include the Director General of the South African Ministry of Transport, Mpumi Nxumalo Mpofu, the General Secretary of the Congress of South African Trade Unions, Zwelenzima Vavi, and the President of the South African Transport and Allied Workers’ Union, Ezrom Mabyana, and the union’s General Secretary, Randall Howard. Also addressing the opening session will be Guy Ryder of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions.
Explaining the Congress theme of organising globally, ITF General Secretary David Cockroft points out that the last two congresses have affirmed the need to mobilise unions to face the new challenge of global employers. “We must now globalise our responses, building on a worldwide community of transport unions to develop new ways of organising.”
Meeting in Durban on the eve of Congress, the ITF Executive Board, in its capacity as the standing orders committee for Congress, agreed that four emergency motions would be tabled: on the crisis in the Middle East, on anti-union legislation in Australia, on the suppression of the Tehran bus workers’ union in Iran and on the need for global trade union unity in transport.
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