International Workers Association (IWA-AIT)

October 12-18 is the International Workers' Association Week Against Unpaid Wages. The fight against unpaid wages is a permanent campaign of the IWA and the week is when we encourage the unions and other organizations to make some noise about this topic.

We point out that unpaid wages can take various forms:

- complete lack of payment for work performed
- underpayment of different kinds including forcing people to work overtime without extra payment, paying less than the agreed rate, paying less than the legal rate or less than required by a collective agreement, etc.
- forcing people to work on the wrong kind of contract so they are ineligible for statutory benefits, such as paid vacation or sick leave
- unjustified deductions from the salary
- illegal unpaid probationary periods, training periods and internships

… just to name a few of the ways that bosses rob the workers of the money they have earned.

You can participate in this Week in different ways – ranging from republishing our articles, to writing one of your own, from taking direct against a business where problems have occured to contacting workers in such a place and encouraging them to take action.

In early September there was a visit from a member of the IWA Secretariat to Pakistan. A member of ZSP also attended. Meetings were held with members of Workers' Solidarity Federation from Karachi, Hyderabad and Peshawar, including several public meetings, visits to other activist centers and a few internal meetings and discussions. The public meetings were reported widely in the local press.

Workers' Solidarity Federation is growing in different cities in Pakistan and is the first IWA affiliate in the region. It became a Friend of the IWA several years ago and a full Section at the last IWA Congress in 2025. As part of the IWA's committment to promote the spread of our ideas and practices in new areas of the world, it was decided that the next Plenary and Extraordinary Congress would be held in Pakistan in 2027. Discussions about the planning and logistics of the event where held during internal meetings.

We also discussed the challenges for anarcho-syndicalist organizing in the region and possible areas for campaign.

We'd like to thank the members of WSF for their hospitality during this visit and look forward to continued cooperation and hearing more about their future success!

Earlier this month, the Spanish branch of the International Confederation of Labour (ICL or CIT in Spanish), an international organization that supports integration with Marxist-Leninist and vertical trade unions, published false information claiming that: “The ICL was born from a refounding of the historic International Workers' Association (IWA), following the expulsion of several of its member unions in 2016.” We refute this information as it is deliberately misleading. The IWA has never voted in favor of its refounding, and such a proposal has never been presented to an IWA Congress for debate. As an international organization based on the principles of horizontalism—that is, decision-making by its members at their Congresses—no decision of this kind could be adopted without going through the IWA's established procedures.

The IWA has clarified this matter on numerous occasions, despite the Spanish branch of the ICL's insistence on perpetuating this falsehood.