The past few weeks have offered a snapshot of the global labour movement at a defining moment. Across Europe and beyond, BWI affiliates have confronted familiar challenges, attacks on collective bargaining, precarious work, and the pressures of climate transition. Yet they have also demonstrated that workers are not merely reacting, they are organising to reshape reality.

In the United Kingdom, around 1,000 local government craftworkers represented by UNITE took strike action after years of declining real wages and employer attempts to weaken their national collective agreement. After more than a decade of pay restraint, workers rejected another below-inflation offer while resisting measures that would further undermine apprenticeships, wages, and working conditions. Their struggle is about far more than a pay increase. It is about defending collective bargaining itself against a model that seeks to make workers shoulder the costs of the economic crisis. BWI's solidarity with the strike sends a clear message that the attacks on one affiliate are attacks on all.

Meanwhile, BWI continues to expand its organising frontiers. Missions to Armenia and Georgia reflected a long-term strategy that goes beyond courtesy visits. They focused on strengthening independent unions, building organising capacity, promoting social dialogue, and preparing workers to shape the future of rapidly growing construction, forestry, and cement industries.

In Armenia, discussions centred on improving conditions in forestry and construction, strengthening labour inspections, and ensuring that workers benefit from major infrastructure investments and national climate programmes. The mission also opened new opportunities for international solidarity as Armenian unions expressed their intention to deepen cooperation with BWI.

In neighbouring Georgia, BWI engaged union leaders and management in one of the country's largest cement producers while discussing decent work, occupational health and safety, organising migrant and white-collar workers, and preparing for the construction boom expected ahead of the 2029 FIFA U-20 World Cup. Rather than waiting for mega-projects to arrive, BWI is helping affiliates organise before investment flows, ensuring that workers enter these projects with stronger unions and greater bargaining power.

At the same time, BWI is pushing labour's agenda into one of the defining political questions of our era, climate transition. The launch of the Green Infrastructure Network marks an important step in ensuring that workers are not treated as spectators while governments and corporations redesign cities and economies in the name of sustainability. Too often, green policies have been crafted without workers at the table, while private contractors capture public investment and working conditions deteriorate. BWI's message is clear: there can be no genuine green transition without decent work, strong unions, social dialogue, and workers exercising democratic power over the industries they build.

These developments may appear geographically diverse, but they tell one coherent political story.
Whether resisting attacks on collective agreements in Britain, organising workers in Armenia and Georgia, or redefining labour's role in climate policy, BWI affiliates are fighting back.

This is what international solidarity looks like, not simply statements of support, but practical organising, strategic alliances, and workers building power across borders.

The struggle for decent work is no longer confined to individual workplaces or even individual countries. It is increasingly a global contest over who shapes the future of work itself. BWI and its affiliates are making sure that workers are not just participants in that future, they are helping lead it.