🇬🇧 We want to tell you about another trip made possible thanks to the international solidarity campaign organized by UIT-CI. Our small Turkish-Catalan-Ukrainian group traveled the Kryvbas for a week meeting mining and railway union members. We passed to Kryvyi Rih and Zaporizhya workers military equipment, warm clothes and humanitarian aid, crucial due to the decreasing wages.

About 10% of workers have been mobilized at Kryvyi Rih industrial enterprises such as KZRK and ArcelorMittal. The situation is similar in Ukrzaliznytsia. Those are hundreds of independent union members which, according to union leaders, are being mobilized first. We passed them base layer clothes, winter uniform, tactical backpacks, warm gloves, power banks, camping gas canisters, and a military tent. Also, we’ve bought four Hytera bd615 digital walkie-talkies for railway workers in the army.

“Previously, I earned UAH 15 000 monthly. Now, there’s less work and I earn 8 000”, tells Serhiy, locomotive driver and head of the independent union in Zaporizhya. “And my wife gets even less, UAH 3400.” Serhiy’s wife Natalia spent the first three months of the full-scale war in Italy with kids but then came back. Now she works in the locomotive depot with her husband controlling the fuel issuance for trains.

The union asked to help with food parcels for 79 of its members due to a catastrophic decrease in income. We did just that.

We’re grateful to Sedat, Jose, and Esther who weren’t afraid to come to Ukraine, and to everybody who made this trip possible. Among others, to Argentinian railway workers who’ve helped immensely.