Thousands of people are mobilizing Thursday in Switzerland on the occasion of May 1, International day of Workers and Workers. Rare thing, UN employees were heard in Geneva, while many demonstrators took the street from midday in several cities, pleading solidarity and union in the face of the climbs of the extreme right.
While the drastic reduction in American international funding is particularly shaking in international Geneva, part of the UN staff – several hundred people – demonstrated at the end of the morning on the place of nations at the call of unions.
Under the slogan “The United Nations personnel is not a commodity, we defend humanity”, all and all denounce the budget cuts and the job cuts which would threaten the functioning of the UN and its agencies. We evoke tens of thousands of job cuts worldwide, which would particularly affect organizations active in health, such as WHO or UNAIDS.
Thousands of threatened positions
At the International Labor Organization (ILO), almost one in ten positions is deleted. UNICEF faces planned budget cuts of 20% while the world Food Program (PAM) is reduced to the workforce by 25-30% and the High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) of 30%.
Covered by televisions from around the world, the event leaves the usual reserve of the staff of the institution and testifies above all to the climate of anxiety that reigns in Geneva: in the uncertainty about the real scale of the cuts, many fear for their place of work. Thousands of positions could also be relocated, Geneva being one of the most expensive bases of the organization.
>> The explanations of 12:45 pm:
In total, around fifty gatherings are planned in Switzerland. Faced with the rise of the extreme right in several countries, the dictatorial and fanatical pushes and the wars, the president of the Swiss union union (USS) Pierre-Yves Maillard has praised the unifying solidarity of the world of work. In his May 1 speech at the path, in the Valley of Joux (VD), he pleaded to live it together and the collective resistance.
Unions and the workers’ movement cannot replace a deficient political offer. But we are responsible for weighing on politics
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“Our world seems to rock and the day of traditional mobilization of workers and workers takes on another dimension. We feel the need to be together, to show ourselves, to express resistance, an opposition to what comes and attacks us,” he said, citing the far-right electoral victories but also the “fanatics” in the United States, Germany, Italy, Argentina, Israel, Iran, Iran, Russia or in China.
The virulent PS towards the Federal Council
“For many people looking for hope in these troubled times, the world of organized and mobilized work becomes a resource, almost a refuge,” continued the socialist. “We therefore have a responsibility, all the more heavy as the democracies attacked from the inside do not see the emergence of the political forces of progress and solidarity which we would need (…) the unions and the workers’ movement cannot replace a deficient political offer. This is not our role. But we are responsible for weighing on politics.”
>> Read on the same subject: Stress at work would be responsible for 10,000 deaths per year in Europe
For his part, the co -president of the Socialist Party Cédric Wermuth attacked the Federal Council for its “irresponsible business policy”. The Government is included, including “with the worst types to go and scratch until the last franc,” he castigated in Lietal (BL). Present in Winterthour (ZH), the other co -president of the PS Mattea Meyer reproached the Federal Council for “making curbs” before Donald Trump. However, the American political alliance with capital “leads to submission”, she hammered, and the result is “an unbearable contempt for women, migrants, queers and those who think differently”.
“An increasingly neoliberal parliament”
In Locle, a demonstration started at 2 p.m. Questioned Thursday in the 12:30 p.m. newspaper, Unia regional secretary Silvia Locatelli has been enthusiastic, despite a unionization rate which is backwards in Switzerland in the past fifteen years.
According to her, the mobilization watchwords chosen this year are sufficiently evocative. “We have seen it with International Geneva that is mobilizing. Hatred is progressing. And that is also part of a more global context, with an UDC initiative on a” Swiss at 10 million “that we obviously fight and an increasingly neoliberal parliament which imposes working conditions that cannot be accepted,” she asserts.
>> His full interview in 12:30 p.m.
Pierrik Jordan with Ats
