Workers, union organizers and leaders, and various official
dignitaries gathered together on the Aung Myae Tharyar Football field in Hlaing
Thayar Township to celebrate May Day 2014.
This was the second May Day celebration organized by the Federation of
Trade Unions Myanmar (FTUM) in Yangon since the passing of the country’s Organization of Labour Law in 2011.
The spirited
crowd of white t-shirt-wearing industrial workers and FTUM organizers was
joined by U Aung Min Union Minister of the President Office, U Htin Aung
Deputy Minister for the Labour, Employment and Social Security Department,
Shigeru Nakajima director of the ITUC Myanmar office, Daw Swe Zin Htike
Secretary of Myanmar Motion Picture Organization Foreign Affairs, Sectary Mr.
Hla Shwe of Myanmar Consumers Union (MCU) and ILO Liaison officer Mr. Steve
Marshall.
As distinguished guests sat under the same shaded canopy as
some of the thousands of other workers and union leaders present, FTUM General Secretary,
U Maung Maung gave his opening remarks about the importance of working in
solidarity and the need for cooperative and productive relations between
workers, employers and government officials. Basic unions and union leaders are
needed to help achieve real policy change within the country. The importance of
understanding laws, forming more unions and increasing membership were also
mentioned as key factors that can contribute to enjoying benefits, achieving
worker’s aims and creating change. Those celebrating together were also
reminded that International Worker’s day originated from the united struggle
for an 8-hour working day and decent working conditions, (some of the same
issues Myanmar’s working class is grappling with today).
In recent years, a number of reforms and policy changes have
had major effects on employment relations as well as trade union activities and
rights within the country.
Within the past year alone the number of FTUM unions has
increased from 100 to 385 and the number of basic unions within the country is
still growing. Regardless, there remain numerous problems facing worker
relations within both formal and informal economic sectors and workers are still
denied basic rights within many labour fields. As Steve Marshal mentioned
during his own address, there are changes happening within the country, however
some feel that these changes aren’t happening fast enough. Nonetheless, despite
the many struggles which Myanmar’s working class still face, the gathering in
Hlaing Thaya on May 1, as Marshal pointed out, also marked an opportunity to
take stalk of the changes that have occurred over the past few years as well a
chance to offer thanks for all the work which has been done.
The importance of the countries workforce regarding
Myanmar’s economic development, Gender Equality, the need
for female union leaders, consumer rights, social dialogue, and decent work
were some of the other topics mentioned during various speeches delivered
throughout the morning.
Song and dance performances where also given by
various union members in addition to the Hlaing Thaya Kayin don dance
troupe and a short play was produced by the students who have been attending
English classes at FTUM’s training center in Hlaing Thayar. Furthermore, dancers
and musicians from Kayan township entertained a cheering crowed with their
Elephant Dance and performance stunts.
During the late afternoon, those present at the
May Day event were given the chance to enjoy performances by popular
singers Eain Chit, Linn Nit, Mi Mi Keh, and Linn Linn. As the crowd happily
joined in to sing along to some of their favorite pop songs, it lead one to
hope that if we are collectively able to raise our voices in celebration, as
well as in protest, then we may also aspire to continue to raise more voices in
solidarity for the continued improvement of the lives and working conditions of
Myanmar’s people.
“အျပည္ျပည္ဆုိ္င္ရာ အလုပ္သမားေန႕ (၂၀၁၄)အထိမ္းအမွတ္”
ျမန္မာနိုင္ငံအလုပ္သမားသမဂၢမ်ားအဖြဲ႕ခ်ဳပ္ (FTUM) သည္ “အျပည္ျပည္ဆုိ္င္ရာ အလုပ္သမားေန႕ (၂၀၁၄)”အထိမ္းအမွတ္ အခမ္းအနားအား ၂၀၁၄ခုနစ္၊ ေမလ (၁)ရက္ တြင္ ေအာင္ေျမသာယာ ေဘာလံုးကြင္း၊ လိူင္သာယာျမိဳ႕နယ္၌ အဖြ႕ဲခ်ဳပ္အဖြဲ႕၀င္သမဂၢမ်ားႏွင့္ စုေပါင္းက်င္းပခဲ့ၾကသည္။ ထုိေန႕ နံနက္(၈)နာရီတြင္ အခမ္းအနား အစီအစဥ္ကို ေဖ်ာ္ေျဖေရးႏွင့္ စတင္ခဲ့ျပီး နံနက္ (၉) နာရီတိတိ တြင္
- အလုပ္သမား အလုပ္အကုိင္ႏွင့္ လူမႈဖူလံုေရး၀န္ၾကီးဌာန ဒုတိယ၀န္ၾကီး ဦးထင္ေအာင္၊
- FTUM အေထြေထြအတြင္းေရးမွဴး ဦးေမာင္ေမာင္၊
- အျပည္ျပည္ဆုိင္ရာ အလုပ္သမားေရးရာအဖဲြ႔ ILO ရန္ကုန္ ဆက္သြယ္ေရးအရာရွိ Mr.Steve Marshal
- အျပည္ျပည္ဆုိင္ရာ အလုပ္သမားသမဂၢမ်ားအဖဲြ႔ခ်ဳပ္ (ITUC) ျမန္မာရံုး ဒါရုိက္တာ Mr. Shigeru Nakajima အဖြင့္အမွာစကား ေျပာၾကားခဲ့သည္။ အထူးဧည့္သည္ေတာ္ အျဖစ္ နုိင္ငံေတာ္သမၼတရံုး ၀န္ၾကီးဌာန ျပည္ေထာင္စု၀န္ၾကီး ဦးေအာင္မင္း တက္ေရာက္သည္။ ျပီးေနာက္ပညာေပးေဟာေျပာပြဲအေနျဖင့္ ေဒၚေဆြဇင္ထုိက္(ျမန္မာနုိင္ငံ ရုပ္ရွင္အစည္းအရံုး)မွ Gender Equalityဆုိင္ရာ ေဟာေျပာခ်က္မ်ား၊ အတြင္းေရးမွဴး ဦးလွေရႊ (စားသံုးသူအခြင့္အေရးကာကြယ္ေရး သမဂၢ)မွ စားသံုးသူ အခြင့္အေရးဆိုင္ရာ အေၾကာင္းအရာမ်ားႏွင့္ အလုပ္သမားသမဂၢအဖြဲ႕၀င္မ်ားမွ သီဆိုေဖ်ာ္ေျဖမႈမ်ားပါ ထည့္သြင္းက်င္းပသည္။ ဆက္လက္၍ အႏုပညာရွင္ လင္းလင္း၊ မီးမီးခဲ၊ အိမ့္ခ်စ္၊ လင္းနစ္ တို႔၏ သီဆိုေဖ်ာ္ေျဖမူမ်ား၊ သမဂၢအဖြဲ႕မ်ား ရံပံုေငြအတြက္ ေစ်းဆုိင္ခန္းမ်ား ဖြင့္လွစ္ေရာင္းခ်ကာ ေမေဒးေန႕အထိမ္အမွတ္ အခမ္းအနားအား စည္းကားသုိက္ျမိက္ ျပဳလုပ္ က်င္းပခဲ့သည္။
The evening’s closing events included popular singers
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