By Todd Tollefson

EVERETT, Wash. - The newest constituency group of the AFL-CIO, National Pride At Work (PAW), held its 4th Biennial Convention and Labor Conference here June 21-24 with delegates from around the country.

The purpose of PAW, affiliated with the AFL-CIO since 1997, is to mobilize mutual support between the organized labor movement and the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community around organizing for social and economic justice.

Their struggle includes full equality for LGBT workers in their workplaces and unions and an environment that ensures safety and dignity for all workers.

Also, their aim is to educate the LBGT community about the benefits of union membership and to build support for the union movement in the LGBT community.

PAW is doing this in the spirit of the union movement's historic motto, "An injury to one is an injury to all." They oppose all forms of discrimination based on sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, national or ethnic origin, age, disability, religion or political views.

A memo issued in February by AFL-CIO President John Sweeney to union leaders at all levels declares, "The AFL-CIO has for many years been on record, in both policy and action, in opposition to discrimination based on sexual orientation … I would like to urge you to help make the 2001 [PAW] convention a success by assigning staff to assist with planning and implementation, by providing support to members who wish to attend, by publicizing the meeting throughout your organization, and by providing financial support to the convention."

Ivette Garcia and Juan Carlos Paniagua, both of the National Association of Public and Private Employees (ANEP), were a two-member delegation from Costa Rica.

Their sponsoring organization is called the April 5th Movement, named for the first collective action taken for LGBT rights in Costa Rica in 1987.

That action was to call upon President Oscar Arias to live up to his Nobel Peace Prize by publicly denouncing the attacks on the LGBT community by his government and the Catholic Church. Only after activists wrote Arias threatening to contact the Nobel Committee in Oslo to report on his complicity with the harassment did he reverse his stance.

A few workshop highlights: hiring organizers to reflect the growing diversity of the workplace in the United States; saving benefits for domestic partners; organizing contingent, contractual and underpaid labor; building union membership though job actions, such as strikes; sweatshop organizing; third world debt, the IMF and the World Bank; globalization and organizing in Brazil, led by Miciel Nascimento a member of the labor federation CUT from Sao Paulo; globalization and women, led by Saranel Benjamin of the College of Trade Union Women in Durban, South Africa; and race, labor and LGBT communities.