Comisiones Obreras (CCOO) Lanzarote has announced the event Conquering Rights at the San Bartolomé Municipal Theater on February 28 at 10:00 a.m. The lawyer, judge and politician Manuela Carmena will attend the event.
The union's Secretary of Training, Equality and Women, Yolanda Casaldarnos Alonso, emphasizes that "it will be a very significant and emotional event, first because of the importance of its guests, since it will feature Senator Manuel Fajardo, a law graduate and native of Lanzarote, and Manuela Carmena, a lawyer, judge, politician, writer, social entrepreneur and tireless human rights activist, and secondly, because it will be Vanesa Frahija's last as General Secretary of CCOO Lanzarote."
CCOO Lanzarote has grown exponentially in membership and representation within companies. The countless mobilizations, demonstrations and rallies have undoubtedly positioned CCOO as the most assertive union. The numerous organized events have aroused great interest, the numbers prove it, in May 2024, the presence of Unai Sordo brought together more than 400 people in the auditorium of the Jameos del Agua.
Manuela Carmena's relationship with Comisiones Obreras "goes back a long way", since the former mayor of Madrid was co-founder, along with Cristina Almeida or Paca Sauquillo, among others, of the Atocha 55 labor law firm, sadly famous for the murder of five of its members in January 1977 at the hands of an ultra-right-wing commando.
Carmena left her work as a labor lawyer to begin her career as a judge in 1981, with Santa Cruz de La Palma as her first destination. A tireless worker, in 2015, at the age of 71, she was appointed mayor of Madrid, until 2019.
Frahija points out that, "we are immensely fortunate to have Manuela Carmena, a living memory of our country" and that it is a very necessary act", with the title Conquering Rights.
Frahija states that "the trade union struggle is the way, from CCOO we seek to empower the new generations, to show them that the rights we enjoy today do not come as a gift, that the power to express your ideas freely, that women can exercise the right to vote, that we have the right to enjoy, as a minimum, 30 days of paid vacation per year or the eight-hour working day, have been conquered after much struggle, great suffering and too much bloodshed."
From "a trade union organization that was repressed like CCOO, we cannot allow that due to the fragility of collective memory, all the struggle, suffering and deaths were in vain and fall into oblivion, therefore we must be the hippocampus and the revulsive of the new generations, remind them and teach them the path of struggle and suffering traveled by people like Carmena, who without fear of losing their freedom or life, contributed to making Spain the free and democratic country of today, we are indebted to the previous generations, to all the repressed and murdered, because we cannot repeat the mistakes of the past, we must continue to advance in rights, class consciousness and the workers' struggle are the way forward".
