[bru-info] BRU Forum on Economic Human Rights!

[bru-info at lists.resist.ca]

The Bus Riders Union Presents:

Forum on Economic Human Rights 


Thursday September 16th, 2004

Vancouver Public Library, 7pm, Peter Kaye Room



On Thursday September 16th the Bus Riders Union presents a community Forum on Economic Human Rights in the lead-up to our annual March for Economic Rights on September 19th, Main Street SkyTrain station, 1pm. 

This forum features women leaders from working class communities, immigrant and refugee communities of colour, and Aboriginal communities speaking on the continual systematic denial of economic human rights and the impacts this has on the everyday lives of working class and marginalized people. This forum is an opportunity to share our experiences of and strategize to resist the intensified privatization and deregulation of essential public services and utilities, the ongoing theft of Indigenous lands, increasing forced migration, increasingly racist Canadian immigration policies and practices, and the continual super-exploitation of working class women, in particular women of colour. Women leaders will share concrete and current strategies to defend our communities' right to justice, dignity, and self-determination; facilitators will lead discussion on current struggles to achieve economic, social and environmental justice for all. 


At this forum, the Bus Riders Union Women in Transit Team will unveil our report Women in Transit: Organizing For Social Justice In Our Communities. Based on eight months of on-the-bus organizing, dozens of 'testimonials' from transit-dependent women, meetings with women throughout the region, and collective study, this document brings forth a clear and critical analysis of the role that fighting for local public services plays in a global struggle against imperialism and for economic human rights. Through the voices of transit dependent women, this ground-breaking document exposes that the lack of public transit in the GVRD compounds and perpetuates the ongoing exploitation and oppression of women. The document exposes the TransLink board as a local manifestation of neo-liberal capitalism, systematically divesting working class women of their economic human rights while increasing the profits of private business through increasing user fees, cuts to bus service, and public-private partnerships such as the Richmond-Airport-Vancouver rapid transit line (RAV). Finally, the document proposes concrete recommendations to achieve a just and woman-centred public transit system as one strategy to build the grassroots leadership of women, to expand community-based direct contact organizing, and to contribute to the worldwide movement for social justice. 

The need to develop collective strategies for economic justice has never been more urgent. The time to organize is now! Join the Bus Riders Union in the struggle for universal economic human rights! 

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