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06.08.2024 / News /

NO PASARÁN! – UVW statement on racist violence

UVW expresses its total solidarity with our communities that continue to be targeted by ongoing racist violence against migrants, Muslims and other minorities across the country.

UVW is a trade union born out of the most diverse and under-represented sections of London’s labour market where the majority of workers are drawn from migrant backgrounds, many with migration controls. Our membership comes from over 100 countries around the world, and we are honoured to share a community together.

We work hard as cleaners, security guards, waiting staff, porters, seasonal fruit pickers, couriers, carers and in many other vital roles. And when we fight for dignity, respect and better pay and conditions, we fight for all workers to receive the same. Yet we are often disparaged, looked down on and treated and paid as second-class workers. Many of us often experience racism in overt and institutionalised forms.

Many of us have also often felt invisible. We have fought hard to be seen as equals with the same fears, hopes and needs as everyone else. We make valuable contributions to society not only in the work we do, but in the culture we bring and share in.

Now we are no longer invisible, but because of racist, anti-migrant and anti-Muslim rhetoric from the highest echelons of our society: from government and from our media institutions, we are no longer invisible for all the wrong reasons.

Our strength lies in solidarity and unity – a unity of those who work to keep the country moving, whilst barely making ends meet, regardless of where we’re originally from or what the colour of our skin is.

While never an excuse, poverty and despair provide fertile grounds for racism to flourish and for the messages of the far right to take hold. That’s why just as we have united and beaten the bosses, we must now unite and beat the racist upsurge in violence we are witnessing overwhelmingly in working class communities. These are communities which have suffered at the hands of the same powers that seek to impoverish and disempower us and the working class in general. Working class unity is the foundation on which we must seek to build a movement to root up and destroy racism at every level of society.

NO PASARÁN!

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