Asian Heritage Month 2012

The Workers of Colour and the Asian-Canadian Alliance held the forum “Celebrating Asian Activism and Unity” in recognition of Asian Heritage Month. The forum brought together workers from diverse sectors and movements including workers from CAW, ATU-Transit Workers, World Journal and Korea Times Daily, USW-Taxi Drivers, Caregivers Action Center and much more.

The forum was an important opportunity to network, learn and share experiences. The major points of discussion included:

• Emerging organizing models, especially among precarious/migrant workers. These models have evolved in a way that creates greater solidarity between organized labour movement and migrant workers movement.

• Solidarity amongst these activists is propelled by a shared commitment to push back neo liberal globalization which undermines the interests of both unionized and non unionized workers, in the global north as well as in global south. Thus, these "new forms of workers solidarity" also unite workers in global north and south.

• As a result of this growing solidarity, the tensions we have seen in the past are now being addressed; nevertheless, there is still more work to be done.

• The examples of groups who attended the OPSEU/ACLA event were used to illustrate the key themes outlined above. The groups were: limo taxi drivers, domestic workers and caregivers, farm workers, laid off/displaced workers, and newspaper workers.

• Finally, the organizers culled "lessons learned" from these past struggles, to draw out key themes of solidarity to further strengthen this global, cross-sectoral (i.e. migrant and non migrant, temporary and permanent, employed and unemployed, urban and rural, etc.), and broad based movement for social justice.

• OPSEU's significant role in bringing together these voices was also acknowledged.