The Workers' Organizing Resource Centre Needs Your Support
The Workers' Organizing Resource Centre (WORC) in Winnipeg is an ambitious project pioneered by the Canadian Union of Postal Workers over three years ago with the support of many community groups and political activists. It is an attempt to provide some of the benefits of a trade union to those who remain unorganized, acting as a centre of consultancy, advocacy referral and information for people experiencing a broad range of problems in their places of work or in their lives.
However, it is also much more than that. By providing free space for people to meet and discuss, it has also become a centre in which people come together to organize to solve their mutual problems. In many respects it has become the focal point for the entire movement for social change in the city of Winnipeg.
WORC has reached a point in its existence at which it must begin to stand on its own feet and find alternate sources of financing for what was initially envisioned as only a one-year pilot project. It has clearly demonstrated the need for such a centre by the crucial role it plays in the life of many organizations, especially those struggling against poverty, for the rights of working people and those working for alternatives to capitalism.
Unfortunately, appeals to other trade unions to assist in funding the Centre have been unsuccessful. So the responsibility for funding the Centre will have to fall on the movement, itself. Creative solutions will have to be found to this problem, as the Centre has proven many times over that it is indispensable. One of the creative solutions chosen to begin solving the problem of finances is a fund-raising social entitled: "Keep the Dream Alive" which will be held on March 22nd at 8:00 p.m. at the Broadway Neighbourhood Centre. We urge all progressive and democratic people to come out and support this social, as well as to propose other methods to help keep WORC open.