Seattle 99 • Volume 3 • Number 46 • 24th November 1999
International Workers Forum Sponsored By The Workers’ Voices Coalition
Some 70 women worker around the world were invited by the International Workers’ Forum to share their experiences and opinions against the “imperialism”.
The Workers’ Forum opposes the World Trade Organization because it represents “the new economic imperialism which has been exploiting women around the world”. Several experiences were brought from the Philippines, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Brazil and Bangladesh. The interventions stressed the importance of publicizing their cases and building an international network to defend their rights and oppose to Trade Agreements like NAFTA and the Multilateral Agreement on Investment such as MAI, and the effects of international and transnational corporations around the world that are based in free trade zones and use ‘maquila’ intensively in detriment of quality of life of women who have to work more than 12 hours a day and who are mostly head of the family.
Other minority groups such as the gypsies were also represented and brought up the cruelty they are suffering in Eastern Europe specially in the Czech Republic, Macedonia and Albany. They defined themselves against any kind of capitalism such as the one patronized by the WTO, and mantain a strong anti-consumerism position, as well as fight strongly the concept of land ownership due to what they are “the universal immigrants”.