Workers to meet in Caracas and Bogotá

The word is spreading about the changes going on in South America.

Even in the Bronx and Boston, low-income workers can feel it directly as they start to receive heating oil at reduced prices from Citgo Oil Co. of Venezuela. On campuses across the country students are forcing universities to stop using Coca-Cola products in solidarity with workers in Colombia.

Now there is a special opportunity to see these changes through the experiences of workers themselves in these two countries. People from the U.S. will see firsthand Latin America’s workers in action to bring a just society—in Venezuela, where the government is supporting and legislating in favor of the workers, and in Colombia, where the workers are organizing despite terrible repression at the hands of their own government.

As 2006 dawns, U.S. workers are confronted with plant closings, layoffs and pay and benefit cuts, together with out-of-sight fuel and water bills. The experiences of workers in Venezuela, who are transforming their workplaces and society, and the struggles in Colombia can give us a fresh new view.

Join the U.S./Cuba Labor Exchange deleg ation to Caracas, Venezuela, and Bogotá, Colombia. Not only will participants attend the sixth World Social Forum in Caracas, but they’ll visit work sites there, too, as guests of the Venezuelan Trade Union Federation (UNT).

In Colombia, the SINALTRAINAL union, representing Coca-Cola and Nestlé workers, will host meetings with workers from those transnational corporations and with Untraflores—MPF, the union of the flower industry. Colombia is the second-largest flower exporter in the world after Holland. Its workforce, 70 percent poor and migrant women who work under extremely hazardous conditions, produces 78 percent of the flowers imported by the United States.

There will also be exchanges with the African-Colombian organization Negri tudes and the Indigenous organization Kankuama OIK—Codacoop.

No other World Social Forum delegation offers this opportunity to engage and discuss with workers in these two countries. The trip leaves New York on Sat urday, Jan. 21, and returns Sunday, Feb. 5. A nine-day option for only the World Social Forum is also available.

Contact the U.S./Cuba Labor Exchange at [email protected]
or (313) 561-8330.