WSF 2009: Final statement of the thematic assembly

Labor In The Global Crisis

2009-02-11 00:00:00

The global crisis we are living in, is the result of many crisis: social, economic, financial, energetic, and also it is a climate and food crisis. It is a systemic crisis, a crisis of the development model.

This crisis has a destructive impact on the social condition and on labor, and the same on environment.

There is a need for immediate responses, a resistance for social protection, against dismissals, for the environmental sustainability.

These responses have to be inscribed in a framework of radical change and alternatives, coherent with the common good of humanity. It is necessary to build up a solidary economic system, equitable and environmentally sustainable, able to produce decent work. The financial system must support this economy and be democratically controlled. Production and consumption system has to be changed. We have to reinvent the role of the State at national and international level with the democratic peoples' control. These strategies demand a change in the international commercial relationships and a new paradigm of justice in the interaction between north and south.

In order to achieve this radical change, it is urgent to build up plural and broad alliances of movements, associations, NGO, trade unions: an alliance of all the forms of labor, against racism and all kinds of discrimination. Our assembly reflected this need. And we need also a space for coordination and articulation, that already started to be implemented.

We stress the urgency of a popular mobilisation at all levels in order to achieve this change and we identified in the 28 of March, when the G20 will meet in London, the first day of mobilisation against the crisis. Moreover, the Alliance for a decent work and decent life called for an international day of action on the 7th October.

Finally, we express our will to continue working together and to build up solidarity in action.

WSF, Belem, 1st of February 2009