* At the Education Centre in Concepcion, Chile in October were CIF communications director Sergio Gonzalez,
Garcia, CTF organizing director Juan Rivera, and I.W.A. Local 1000 president Joe da Costa.

J

1.W.A. communications director Norman

Unions kick off solidarity project
with education centre in Chile

n international trade

union education pro-

gram is starting to take

shape in Concepcion,

Chile. A multi-year ini-
tiative to establish and operate an
education centre in the southern
port city is moving ahead following
the visit of two I.W.A. CANADA
representatives to Chile in the lat-
ter half of October. .

Local 1000 President Joe da
Costa and Norman Garcia, the
union’s national communications
director, spent 13 days meeting
with officials and staff of the
National Confederation of Forest
Workers of Chile (CTF) to begin the
design and development of course
work for the first three years of the
project.

The initiative is a project of the
I.W.A. CANADA International Sol-
idarity Fund, to which all local
unions and the national union con-
tribute. The fund, which was estab-
lished in early 1998, has made soli-
darity and development work in
Chile a priority.

Starting in the Spring of next

ear, the education centre will

egin offering courses for CTF
members. The courses to be offered
in the first year are education of
leaders, education of activists and
the identification of organizers.

Tn the second year there will be an
intermediate course for organizers,
a course on forming demands and
collective bargaining and the train-

ing of occupational health and
safety committees. In the third
year, the courses to be developed
are a youth organizer course, new
member orientation, and union
communications.

“We have undertaken an ambi-
tious program in Chile,” says David
Tones, the union’s national third
vice president and officer responsi-
ble for international solidarity
activities. “The Chilean trade
unionists that we are working with
are a serious organization which is
struggling to make some basic gains
for forest workers.”

“Although we speak different lan-
guages, we share a common bond
and common ideals,” says Brother
da Costa. “What Chilean workers
want is not different from the
things that the I.W.A. has struggled
for over 60 years to obtain and safe-
guard — the freedom to join a union
of their choice, have safe work-
places with good wages, job secu-
rity, and the protection of both jobs
and the environment.”

During their visit to Chile, Broth-
ers da Costa and Garcia worked
with CTF education director Gus-
tavo Carrasco and communications
director Sergio Gonzalez to com-
plete outlines for five of the nine
courses and write a great deal of the
course work for the first two
courses.

The instruction and participants
manuals will be designed and
assembled at the union’s national

office in Vancouver and master
copies are to be shipped to Chile for
reproduction.

“We will working via electronic
mail with the CTF to write much of
the remaining pieces of the first two
courses and write large components
of the others,” says Brother Garcia.
“A lot of the educational materials
that we took down to Chile were
translated and plugged right in to
the course work for the CTF with
some essential changes to cus-
tomize them for their needs.”

Before the courses are delivered
in Concepcion, there has to be a
training course for instructors.

“We are considering putting on a
train the trainer course in Chile to
educate a group of CTF activists as
trainers which can then take any
course off the shelf and deliver
them to the membership,” says
Tones. The courses will be delivered
at the union’s national office in
downtown Concepcion where up to
25 students will attend classes at a
time.

As part of the budget for the cen-
tre, CTF members will be provided
with room and board, educational
materials and trans pOreSaon toand
from Concepcion. The solidarity
fund has already sent financial
resources to the CTF to pay for ren-
ovations which will include modest
sleeping quarters for 28-30 people.

CTF members work mostly in the
southern region of the country.

Brother da Costa points out that

the Chilean labour movement has
been reborn and that the CTF was
formed only in 1988, during the
ee years of a military dictator-
ship.

“The CTF is working very hard to
get individual plant local unions
together and reestablish a tradition
of training and education,” says da
Costa. “It is a tough, uphill strug-
gle, but they (the CTF) feel that we
can help them achieve these goals
over the longer-term.”

Today the CTF has about 5,500
members, down considerably from
the nearly 9,000 that it had ipetor to
the onset of the Asian and Latin
American economic crises which
began in early 1997.

The CTF is in rough economic
shape. In the forest region of Val-
divia, there is an unemployment
rate of 80% among forest workers,
due mainly to the are of mar-
kets in Asia and Brazil. In many
instances, the union is unable to
collect dues because layoffs, or due
to the right-to-work type laws that
exist in Chile.

“Just to get back what they had
prior to a few years ago will be a big
job,” says Brother da Costa. “The
rest of the country’s 100,000 forest
Tore don’t have any union at
all.”

The official unemployment rate
in the country is almost 15% with
hundreds of thousand of underem-

Continued on page thirty-seven

A
36/LUMBERWORKER/DECEMBER, 1999