Our Background

The AFL-CIO’s Solidarity Center is more than 90% funded by the federal government and only receives a fraction of its finances from union dues. Along with the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute, and the Center for International Private Enterprise, it constitutes one of the four core institutions of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). According to Alan Weinstein, an NED co-founder, “a lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.” The Solidarity Center operates with closed books and no accountability to AFL-CIO rank and file. While it is true the Solidarity Center does some useful work helping organize workers, it has also acted, again and again, to undermine democratic movements around the world, including:

• Funding leaders of CEO-called work stoppages and lockouts designed to cripple the Venezuelan economy;
• Funding leaders of the failed coup against Venezuela’s Pres. Hugo Chavez;
• Attempting to divert Haitian workers from defending their elected government against the US sponsored coup;
• Supporting the privatization of national resources,including the loss of jobs, in Eastern European countries;
• Collaborating with the U.S. occupation in Iraq.
  

In April, 2004, a coalition of labor and solidarity activists came together to support the Unity and Trust Among Workers Worldwide resolution. This historic resolution was passed by the California Labor Federation, and a number of other Labor Federations and Central Labor Councils. We lobbied for this resolution at the AFL-CIO convention in July, 2005, but it was defeated under dubious circumstances. The struggle and the coalition, however, live on. We are proud that many more rank and file union members have learned about these important issues. We are proud, but not satisfied: with the establishment of the Worker to Worker Solidarity Coalition, our fight is moving forward.

Our Commitment
The potential power of working people is a force so strong that it can determine every facet of our future. That is why the U.S. / corporate empire spends the bulk of its time and resources trying to divide us. With their spin machines, they confuse
us. With stolen elections, they defuse us. With attacks on our unions, they abuse us. With wars and prisons and poverty wages, they refuse us our dreams of peace, justice, and the joys of productive, useful, and meaningful work. But when workers stand united, community to community, and across the globe-no weapon can cut us down, nothing can stop us.


REAL - Our only interest is in building true working class unity. We don’t take money from the federal government nor from the Bush Administration, and we refuse to collaborate with the co-option of our labor movement.

INTERNATIONALIST -We seek to give and to receive solidarity with our working sisters and brothers, across, and even in spite of, national boundaries.

COMMUNITY INTEGRATED -Workers are the backbone and muscle of any community, and the community is the home of the workers, their families, and their friends. Worker solidarity needs, and is a part of, community solidarity.

WORKER TO WORKER -We seek genuine solidarity that is worker to worker, local to local, and community to community.
A popular phrase in the labor movement is that “an injury to one is an injury to all”. Certainly this is true. However, we have chosen a motto that is more positive, and less defensive. When workers unite, they are no longer simply defending their rights—they are making changes that will help create a new world. When the hand of solidarity is extended to one, it is extended to all. In this spirit, we borrow a phrase from the Australian labor movement: Touch one, touch all!

The Worker to Worker Solidarity Committee Call to Action

1. Direct exchanges and expressions of labor solidarity on an independent and grass roots level;
2. The Solidarity Center to immediately terminate all contact with the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), to immediately withdraw as one of the four core institutes of the NED, to refuse to re-enter into such relationships in the future, and to stop all collaboration with those who promote empire and corporate globalization.
3. The AFL-CIO to open its books about all projects, past, present, and future, undertaken by the Solidarity Center and its predecessors, including, but not limited to, its role in the coup against Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973, and its role in the attempted coup against Hugo Chavez in Venezuela in 2002;
4. The Change to Win Coalition to publicly adopt a policy refusing to collaborate with or be funded by the NED in its foreign affairs (to date, no such relationship exists to our knowledge—so let’s keep it that way!
5. International solidarity with our union and working sisters and brothers whenever and wherever they are under attack.