The defense of democratic rights, and the struggle to extend mechanisms of democratic control for workers and their unions, underpins every aspect of the IUF's work. The IUF will continue to:

  • Defend the trade union movement against all attempts by governments and employers to restrict union rights, including the right to strike, and compromise trade union independence

  • Build strategic alliances within the labour movement and wider civil society to defend and to advance the realization of the full range of human rights and democratic freedoms

  • Oppose and fight to reverse the erosion of sovereign and democratic control and the transfer of decision-making power from democratic institutions to transnational capital and unaccountable bodies which are at the core of the neo-liberal movement

  • Actively struggle at all levels, together with trade unions and civil society movements which share our goals, for the implementation of policies to reverse the growth of inequality, the concentration of wealth and power and the privatization and destruction of public goods and services which are everywhere feeding the rise of a nationalist, racit and xenophobic Right which is fundamentally hostile to the goals and values of the labour movement