Spectacular ceremony launches UNI Congress
UNI’s third World Congress got under way today with a stunning opening ceremony, which combined impressive displays of Japanese culture with a call to action to the 2000+ delegates and participants and the launch of the Congress theme, Breaking Through.
An energetic demonstration of the art of playing traditional Japanese taiko (drums) was mixed with a superb rendition of two choruses from Puccini’s opera Madame Butterfly and a performance from the Junshin Senior Girls’ High School choir, who perform each year at the commemoration of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Nagasaki on 9 August 1945.
Nobuaki Koga, President of the Japanese trade union federation RENGO, welcomed Congress participants to a city which takes the lead internationally in campaigning for peace. He was followed Mr Hodo Nakamura, Governor of Nagasaki prefecture, who urged the world to ensure that Nagasaki was the last ever place in earth the horrors of a nuclear bomb.
Sharan Burrow, General Secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation, also urged the trade union movement to fight for peace for workers and their families everywhere. She congratulated UNI on its first ten years of action. “Our message is simple: corporate bullies beware,” she said, announcing that ITUC would identify one corporation for particular attention in 2011. “We will decide who Is our number one target in January at an organizing forum in Washington and we will pool our determination and our resources to ensure that this company respects workers rights,” she said.
UNI’s President Joe Hansen called for renewed pressure on Walmart to negotiate a global framework agreement with UNI. Companies like Walmart which aspire to be global leaders needed to understand their responsibilities to their workers, he said. Corporate responsibility, workers’ rights and environmental sustainability went hand in hand.
A high point of the opening ceremony was a personal account by postal worker Mai Sasaki from Osaka, who was celebrating her 23rd birthday today. She described how she, and other young post office colleagues, were becoming actively engaged in the life of her union the JPGU.
Follow the Congress on our blog: http://www.uniglobalunion.org/Blogs/Nagasaki.nsf/