Supporters
So far the following unions/groups/syndicates/initiaitves joined the Global May Day and therefore agree with the self-conception:
What is the name of your organization and where is it located?
Anti-Racist Action-Los Angeles/People Against Racist Terror (California/USA)
What’s the ideological background of your organization?
Direct action, anti-racist/anti-fascist org; anti-imperialist and anti-authoritarian. Non-sectarian; ARA has historically always included both anarchists and socialists.
How are you organized? And how many members do you have?
Operate mostly in network and coalition formats; current membership very small locally.
What struggles/ topics are you currently focusing on?
Police/prison abolition, solidarity with anti-colonial and indigenous sovereignty struggles, also part of ongoing “Peoples Strike” coalition that developed around May Day initiated by Cooperation Jackson, Black/New Afrikan led movement in Mississippi.
Where can interested people find more information about your organization? And what’s the best way of contacting you?
Website: antiracist.org
Social media: @ara_losangeles (twitter)
E-mail: antiracistaction_la[ät]yahoo.com
What is the name of your organization and where is it located?
Forum for IT & ITes Employees (FITE), Tamilnadu – It is located in Chennai, Tamil Nadu State, India.
As well as FITE Kolkata.
What’s the ideological background of your organization?
Basically the leading forces of the organizations are from marxist leninst ideology background.
How are you organized? And how many members do you have?
FITE is all India forum to address the IT and ITes workers problems and organize them as union. FITE, Tamilnadu is Tamilnadu state level govt registered union. We have around 200 members.
FITE Kolkata has around 1000 members.
What struggles/ topics are you currently focusing on?
We are currently focusing on the job cuts, pay cuts, long working hours and other issues of IT workers across India.
Where can interested people find more information about your organization? And what’s the best way of contacting you?
FITE Tamilnadu: fb.com/fitehome (facebook), @Forum4ITEmp (twitter) | E-mail: fiteorganization[ät]gmail.com
FITE Kolkata: fb.com/AwakeningI.T.Society (facebook) | E-Mail: awakening.it.society@gmail.com
What is the name of your organization and where is it located?
Free Workers’ Union (Freie Arbeiter*innen-Union, FAU), Germany
What’s the ideological background of your organization?
Anarcho-Syndicalist
(Though each local syndicate is autonomous and thereofore there are also different ideological differences to some extend. Statutes agreed on by all syndicates define the common framework of the federation.)
How are you organized? And how many members do you have?
The FAU consists of syndicates in 25 cities across Germany. Those syndicates act autonomously and are united through the federation on the national level. At the same time there are regional FAU structures used by the syndicates to support each other. Decisions are always made bottom up. Mandates are defined by the members in the syndicates.
Currently the FAU has around 1,200 paying members.
What struggles/ topics are you currently focusing on?
Members at each syndicate have different backgrounds and work within different economic sectors. Therefore they decide their focus locally. Usually the focus depends on current struggles members experience at work or are going on in the region. It can be smaller fights, like most recently the struggle of a member still waiting for outstanding wages of a temporary employment agency in the city of Jena. Or bigger ones: In May this year FAU Bonn with the help of other syndicates supported 150 field workers – mostly from Romania – after a wildcat strike. They were fighting for missing wages and against working conditions.
Where can interested people find more information about your organization? And what’s the best way of contacting you?
Unfortunately details on the FAU homepage are only available in German: fau.org
But the FAU is also part of the International Confederation of Labor (ICL), which has some info available in English: icl-cit.org
E-mail: geko[ät]fau.org, fauhh12[ät]fau.org
What is the name of your organization and where is it located?
Garments Workers Trade Union Center based in Bangladesh
What’s the ideological background of your organization?
We are a class conscious, mass-oriented trade union with an emphasis on building international working class solidarity.
How are you organized? And how many members do you have?
We are a trade union of garments workers in Bangladesh. We currently have more than 125,000 members.
What struggles/ topics are you currently focusing on?
We organize garments workers in Bangladesh. Our committees work in factories and industrial areas holding union elections, demonstrations, strikes and other forms of collective bargaining.
Where can interested people find more information about your organization? And what’s the best way of contacting you?
You can contact us at gwtucbd[ät]gmail.com or gwtucint[ät]gmail.com
You can learn more about us on our facebook page at fb.com/gwtucbd
What is the name of your organization and where is it located?
Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), Bristol UK
What’s the ideological background of your organization?
We are a grassroots radical union. We organise workers industrially in all areas of the economy. Our goals are to abolish the wage system and live in harmony with the Earth.
How are you organized? And how many members do you have?
We are a local branch of the IWW, a member led union. We have no paid organisers or bureaucrats and utilise a strategy of solidarity unionism. We have just under 300 members in our branch.
What struggles/ topics are you currently focusing on?
We are currently engaged in struggles in support of couriers working in the gig economy, casual staff in universities, care workers and warehouse workers. Most of our current organising efforts are directed around Covid-19 and the safety of working conditions.
Where can interested people find more information about your organization? And what’s the best way of contacting you?
Website: bristoliww.org.uk
Social media: fb.com/BristolIWW
E-mail: bristol[ät]iww.org.uk
What is the name of your organization and where is it located?
Confederación General del Trabajo (CGT). It operates on the national level of the Spanish state.
What’s the ideological background of your organization?
The CGT is an anarcho-syndicalist organisation of workers, and thus a working-class, autonomous, federalist, self-managed, internationalist, and libertarian organisation.
How are you organized? And how many members do you have?
The core unit of CGT are the sector unions. It has two parallel structures.
One is territorially based and underpins the organisation’s sovereignty and its internal decision-making processes. The other one is articulated around industrial sectors and underpins the development and coordination of industrial actions at the company and sector levels. We have around 100,000 members and 7,000 union delegates in works councils in the private and public sectors. We are present in all territories and industrial sectors in the Spanish state.
What struggles/ topics are you currently focusing on?
They are countless. Most immediately we are focusing on the closure of two companies, Nissan and Alcoa. We are also struggling to defend public services (health care, education, pensions, care for dependent persons, basic income, transport…), against labour reforms – which have cut back the workers’ rights and wages –, to attain equality for women and against male violence, against the environmental crisis and for a healthy environment, against precarity and social exclusion, for the rights of the migrants, against police and judicial repression, for the recuperation of historical memory… Ultimately, we struggle against all social inequalities.
Where can interested people find more information about your organization? And what’s the best way of contacting you?
Websites: cgt.org.es, rojoynegro.info, rojoynegrotv.org | Twitter: @CGT | Facebook: @CGTConf | Email: spcc.cgt[ät]cgt.org.es
What is the name of your organization and where is it located?
Sveriges Arbetares Centralorganisation (SAC), or the Central Organization of Workers in Sweden.
What’s the ideological background of your organization?
Syndicalist.
How are you organized? And how many members do you have?
We’re a federation of locals (LS in Swedish), with a total of about 3000 members.
What struggles/ topics are you currently focusing on?
Organizing migrant workers.
Where can interested people find more information about your organization? And what’s the best way of contacting you?
www.sac.se; the website contains a contact page.
Sri Lanka
To be added to the list leave a comment below or drop a line at the Global May Day mailing list.
Having made inquiries, I have got reply emails from IWW branches, especially in Europe, that some collaboration with the youth climate strikers and with Extinction Rebellion is getting started. It is clear that the youth strikers is a new mass movement, with more than a million strikers worldwide out on March 15. Extinction Rebellion is also showing signs it may go big, but it is too early to tell.
I advocate that IWW and ICL officially and unofficially and on all continents fully involve ourselves with these new movements. Of course we should bring our IWW/ICL perspective and do what we can to evolve the demands of these movements in a direction we think best. I recognize that some IWW/ICL members may have good criticisms of some of the demands these groups have put out. BUT I would hope that we all agree that few issues can be more important or have greater priority for the worldwide working class than the real chance of our extinction within not many more decades. If IWW and ICL does not act consciously as an international to be a part of this new wave, and to grow it and deepen it, then perhaps we have all lost our way as revolutionaries.
Certainly whatever we all do on May Day this year, it needs to be with looming and expanding mass extinctions in mind.
One Big Union NOW!
Monty Kroopkin,
IWW San Diego General Membership Branch Secretary
(speaking here as an individual. title for identification only)