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International Trade Union History and Memory Network
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Intersectionality

Trade unions have been fighting to improve wages and working conditions for working people. In alliance with other political parties, cooperatives and a wide variety of progressive social movements, they have also contributed to a vision of a more democratic and socially just world, both in their own countries and internationally. Here we will showcase how such alliance-building with other movements have resulted in the production of shared memories, mutual realms of memory and common memorial practices across a very wide range of issues – from welfare to environmental protection, from housing to 2SLGTBQIA+ rights. The possible list of alliances and shared concerns is long and it is interesting to observe to what extent these alliances could make use of history and memory as a resource to support their common progressive agendas in the present.

Temporary Foreign Workers

In the Canadian Context

The Alberta Labour History Institute (Canada), in partnership with Migrante Alberta, have raised awareness of the injustices faced by temporary foreign workers who experience unsafe and illegal conditions in Canada's meat-packing industry. Their campaigns highlighted how temporary foreign workers in the health care industry experienced unequal access to health care and government benefits while they worked to protect Canadians from the worst impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Maria Dunn's song, "Essential", draws attention to both the strength and vulnerability of temporary foreign workers. 

Portuguese Poetry of the Working Class

Some militant Portuguese working-class poets in the 20th century

Portuguese workers' newspapers in the early decades of the 20th century often featured popular poetry extolling the struggles of workers and their desire for better living conditions. With a more refined artistic touch, the same was true of libertarian or culturally avant-garde magazines. We mention here just a few of these worker-poets, among the many whose names await the work of new researchers:

  • Joaquim Moreira da Silva (1886-1960), from Vilar, north of Porto, a carpenter by profession who resisted participating in the war in 1916. He went on to publish 34 small books of poems. As a pamphleteer, he wrote: "I am the natural son of the New Philosophy. For the love of creation, I had Mrs Rebellion. My homeland is the whole world, and my name is Anarchy."
  • From Porto, Aristides Ribeiro published in 1929, already under the military dictatorship, the poem Mais Alto (Higher), which ends as follows: "And may our Ideal, our profound dream, remain up there in the heights where the sun shines, like a standard of undying glory, like a lighthouse illuminating the world."
  • António Alves Pereira (1885-1954), also from Porto, was a renowned lithographer who edited the newspaper A Comuna, where, under the pseudonym Alfredo Guerra, he published several poems, edited the Almanaque de ‘A Aurora’ and translated Kropotkin. In 1935, in the pages of the newspaper Defesa de Espinho (where he then lived), he concluded one of his poems with the verses: "Hope, Hope, O redeeming force, O dazzling force... You fascinate the common people, you are an inspiration. And then, champion, you look like Aurora, with your rich turban."

After the restoration of democracy in 1974, Editora Sementeira published Alfarrábio Poético in 1984, a collection of poems by three of the surviving former libertarian trade unionists: José Francisco, from the mountains and a sea worker; Francisco Quintal, from the island of Madeira, a teacher and also a seafarer; and Artur Modesto, from Alentejo and a shoemaker by profession. From the latter, we quote: "Red carnation, the flower of illusions, of the people deceived by a thousand peddlers."

Contributed by João Freire
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