May 1, 2024
This year, the working class around the world — particularly in the Arab region — commemorates International Workers’ Day amid mounting economic, financial, and climate crises, as well as escalating armed conflicts. These intertwined challenges have imposed complex social burdens on workers and vulnerable groups, creating space for the rise of anti-labor and anti-union rhetoric. The past year has witnessed widespread violations of trade union rights and freedoms.
The International Trade Union Confederation’s Rights Index and its annual report on trade union rights violations confirmed that most Arab trade unions have faced systematic legislative and procedural efforts aimed at undermining their role and restricting their ability to defend workers’ fundamental rights — all while allowing the implementation of economic policies that ignore the social entitlements of workers and vulnerable populations.
The Arab Trade Union Confederation (ATUC) salutes the resilience of Arab trade union organisations in the face of these violations. It expresses its solidarity and unwavering support for their struggle to uphold free, democratic, and independent unionism, as well as their right to social dialogue and collective bargaining, based on core international labour conventions.
The compounded crises afflicting most Arab countries are the inevitable result of narrow, unilateral policy approaches. These must be abandoned in favour of genuine engagement in dialogue with social partners and multiple stakeholders around sustainable economic and social reforms. Effective, consensus-based responses are needed to address economic reform, social recovery, climate change, unemployment, poverty, youth marginalisation, and gender discrimination — especially as women in the Arab region continue to face barriers and violations in the very same year the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has designated women as leaders in peacebuilding.
The trade union experience in the Arab region and globally has demonstrated a positive and proactive approach to dialogue and negotiation. Trade unions have made great sacrifices for the social and economic progress of their communities. Today, they are confronting sweeping rollbacks of hard-won rights, even as more than 70 countries prepare to hold general and presidential elections. For this reason, the ATUC calls on all its member organisations to join the ITUC’s For Democracy campaign by amplifying the union voice and its economic, social, developmental, and rights-based visions within workplaces and public spaces. Together, we must work for a New Social Contract as a framework for decent wages, universal social protection, job creation, trade union rights and freedoms, and gender equality.
The ATUC also renews its unwavering commitment to the principles of comprehensive justice and peace, and guarantees its solidarity with oppressed and colonised peoples. It strongly condemns the ongoing genocide and starvation inflicted upon the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip and the international community’s failure to enforce international law and resolutions on the occupying power. The ATUC calls on all trade union organisations and progressive forces in the world and the Arab region to continue supporting Palestinian workers and people until they achieve their right to self-determination and sovereignty, under United Nations General Assembly and Security Council resolutions.
Long live the working class everywhere! Long live the Arab working class — free, independent, and democratic!
Executive Secretary
Hind Benammar
English 
العربية