The union publishes a work which retraces, in the form of an abécédaire, the great moments of its history.
There are a thousand ways to evoke the existence of an institution like Unia, to bring up the debates and the struggles carried year after year in the public square, to celebrate its victories and to also remember its few setbacks. While the largest union in Switzerland definitively enters adulthood – 20 small candles on his cake – nothing is probably more appropriate than the publication of a work specially devoted to the event. The one that these days appear these days displays opulent forms and generous content. We enter it a bit as if we sneaned in a millefeuille. Organized in the mode of discount, “Unia: 20 years of force” offers readers a double experience. By leafing through it, we can reconnect with a sometimes distant past, we will undoubtedly think back with a nostalgia zest to the struggles and remarkable mobilizations that have dotted the union annals. But at the same time we will be solidly anchored in the present and the nearby future, through the evocation of current issues relating to the world of work and, more broadly, to the issues linked to social justice.
The challenges of the 1990s
Unia is revealed and celebrated in more than 300 pages! We are dealing with a beautiful pavement, therefore, with his editorial – “a tribute to all of us” – signed by President Vania Alva. And its long historical introduction, which refreshes the memories and refers to the first steps of the union and to all that preceded this birth. This is then, in these lines and these photos, the resurgence of an era, that of the 1990s, marked by changes and crises, deep questions and political and economic scenarios which open to all possibilities. The industrial sector in Switzerland loses its power while that of services experiences a meteoric ascent, and this at the same time as neoliberal doctrine spreads everywhere in a capillary manner. Faced with a moving context, the union world must meet new challenges. Thus, in 1992 was born in the Industry and Building Syndicate (SIB), a “union for difficult times”, said its president Vasco Pedrina. Four years later, faced with the threat of a generalized dismantling of the social state, the two most powerful organizations in the country, Sib and FTMH, give life to what we called “Petit Unia”. It was in 1996, the breach for the creation of a single large union was open.
This project, barely believable between rivals and sometimes enemies, will materialize on October 16, 2004, during a historic congress which will be held in Basel: SIB and FTMH, joined by FCTA, abandon their respective acronyms and are placed under a single flag. Paul Rechsteiner, then president of the USS, will have a sentence that will humorously summarize the scope of the case: “Many believed more to a reconciliation of Catholics and Protestants than a merger of the FTMH and SIB!”
Admirable figures
In the process, follow nineteen letters, from A like Alleva-a biographical account of a “second” which lived in its skin the ambient xenophobia of the 1970s-in Z like Zivag, the identity and the action of Unia are dying in a bright red. Here with the big strike on the Baregg tunnel construction site, which made it possible to retire at 60 for the construction branch; There with the hatching of the feminist struggle. Further in this fight for schedules and days of opening shops or for regulating the economy of platforms. So many deeds to which multiple crucial questions are added such as climate change, issues related to migration or relationships with Europe. In the folds of this range, we still come across amazing or admirable figures due to their stubborn commitment to the law of workers. These are portraits of activists and union secretaries. And everyone, with his trajectory, says in filigree the importance of a union, he recalls his raison d’être, which is essential for the smooth running of democracy.
“Unia: 20 years of strength”, Conception and writing: Marie-Josée Kuhn, 306 p. Available here
