Trade Unions

In commemoration of the first of May – a day of workers struggle and international solidarity – the first Palestinian trade union BDS conference was held in Ramallah on 30 April 2011, organized by almost the entirety of the Palestinian trade union movement, including federations, professional unions, and trade union blocks representing the entire spectrum of Palestinian political parties. The conference hosted the formation of the Palestinian Trade Union Coalition for BDS (PTUC-BDS) as the largest coalition of the Palestinian trade union movement.

All of the major Palestinian trade unions, federations and factions are signatories to the 2005 call for BDS and members of the Palestinian BDS National Committee.

Trade unions have endorsed BDS and organise consumer boycott or divestment campaigns within the labour movement or use their position as large and important civil society organisations to call for sanctions against Israel.

Dockworkers have been especially proactive in their support for Palestinian rights. In the wake of the murderous Israeli attack on the Freedom Flotilla in summer 2010, and in response to an appeal from the Palestinian trade union movement, the Swedish Dockworkers union blocked more than 500 containers weighing approximately 500 tons during a week-long blockade of exports to Israel and Israeli goods and dockworkers in Oakland, California respected a labour and community picket by refusing to unload an Israeli cargo ship for twenty-four hours. These actions followed those of the South African Transport and Allied Workers’ Union which pioneered the boycott against Israeli maritime trade in Febuary 2009 by refusing to offload a ship in Durban in protest of Israel’s war of aggression on the Gaza Strip. The South African Municipal Workers Union (SAMWU) promoted the “Israeli Apartheid Free Zone” to ensure their municipalities have no commercial, academic, cultural, sporting or other linkages whatsoever with the Israeli regime. Similar campaigns led by trade union activists have sprung across the world including in Ireland and Australia.

Palestinian trade unions have also called for their international colleagues to sever relations with the racist Israeli trade union, the Histadrut. Scores of individual unions and the national congresses of trade unions in Scotland and South Africa have either severed relations or debated doing so.