The AICCTU held its Fourth Delhi State Conference on 28 November against privatisation, contractualisation and the assault on trade union rights, and with a call to intensify the struggle for minimum wages, social security and dignity. The Conference was held at Comrade Ram Naresh Ram Hall (the BSNL Employees Hall at Janpath), and 175 delegates from among building workers, security workers, rickshaw pullers, street vendors and other organised sector workers, DTC transport workers, government hospital workers, and MTNL employees participated in the Conference.
The Conference began with hoisting of the AICCTU flag and two minutes silence for the departed and martyred comrades and workers killed on Delhi construction sites and the Laxminagar building collapse.
Inaugurating the Conference, AICCTU General Secretary Comrade Swapan Mukherjee said the Congress-UPA Government, mired in scams to the tune of thousands of crores, was intensifying the assault of pro-corporate, pro-rich economic policies and unleashing repression on workers. Workers' resistance too was on the rise as demonstrated by the 7th September All India General Strike. On 23th February in the coming year, workers are once again preparing, on the call of the trade unions, to bring Delhi to a standstill. He called upon to AICCTU to face the challenge of coming to the forefront of the workers' movement in Delhi.
The delegate session discussed the draft document presented by the outgoing Secretary Comrade Santosh Roy and reflected on various aspects of AICCTU's work in Delhi. The document, adopted after discussion and debate, stressed the need to develop mass struggles on workers' issues to bring them to the centre stage of Delhi's politics, the need to organise the workers of the city's vast unorganised sector by raising the issues of minimum wages and rights as well as the range of their social-economic issues, the need to increase AICCTU membership with emphasis on the transport sector, construction sector, industrial workers, health workers, domestic workers, women workers, street vendors and rickshaw pullers, and to set an example of revolutionary trade union movement, fighting against all trends of formalism and legalism.
The Conference elected a 59-member State Council, a 29-member working committee and a 11-member office bearers' team with Comrades N M Thomas as Honorary President, V K S Gautam as Working President and Santosh Roy as General Secretary.
The Conference was also addressed by CPI(ML) Delhi State Secretary Sanjay Sharma, CPI(ML) CC member Prabhat Kumar, and AISA General Secretary Ravi Rai. The concluding speech was given by CPI(ML) CC member Kavita Krishnan.
In the end, the Conference proposed resolutions on pressing issues of the time which were passed unanimously by the house. The Conference, expressing deep shock and grief at the killing of 70 members of the unorganised workers in Delhi’s Lakshmi Nagar building collapse, resolved to bring to book all the culprits whose omissions and commissions caused the killings; granting of compensations with dignity to the surviving family members of those killed; providing social security, accepting the right of existence, housing and other basic amenities along with secure and dignified living conditions for all the Delhi’s poor and immigrant working class on a priority basis. The Conference also resolved to intensify struggles against– (i) displacement and excessive harassment of workers during the run-up to Commonwealth Games, (ii) the repulsive and cruel act of Allied Nippon’s management in which it opened fire on the workers, (iii) continuing repression of the working class in Delhi and NCR, (iv) privatisation, contractorization, casualisation, workers’ displacement, insecure livelihood, all round attack on social and civic amenities and blatant violation of the basic human and working rights of migrant labourers in the name of making Delhi a world-class city.
