Jyoti Macwan, General Secretary, SEWA India
Since its inception, SEWA has been organizing informal workers (although we called them self employed) and fighting for their rights. Our founder, Elaben, very soon realized the importance of being part of the international labour movement but internationally everyone was against the informal workers. They said they should be abolished, they said “they are not really workers as they have no employer.” Then Elaben met Dan in Geneva and explained how many workers there were, how vulnerable with no voice, and Dan immediately understood that all these homebased workers, vendors, agricultural workers etc may not have employer but they were workers, he understood the importance of organizing. He invited us to join IUF and so we were able to enter the international labour movement.
It was Dan and the IUF who supported us fully for the Home Work Convention….He guided us in the International Labour Conference and told us to keep fighting when we felt everything was lost. And because of his and IUF support we won the convention in 1996.
Pierre-Yves Maillard, president of the Swiss national trade union centre and a socialist member of the Swiss parliament’s upper house
Dan Gallin is a figure who influenced generations of trade union and socialist activists in Switzerland and far beyond our borders. We have lost a warm friend and comrade. We will particularly miss his smile and his affectionate outlook on our efforts to continue the fight.
Eric Lee, LabourStart
“A mentor, comrade and friend”
Dan detested the Stalinists and equally detested the right-wing, CIA-funded Cold Warriors who both played destructive roles in the international labour movement. But he would not have described himself as “third camp” socialist. As he once put it, “the fundamental line of cleavage in today’s world is not the vertical one separating the two blocs; it is the horizontal one separating the working class from its rulers, and that one runs across both blocs. We are not ‘East’ or ‘West’. We are ‘below’, where the workers are.
As Dan approached retirement age, having grown the IUF into a multi-million strong, militant organisation of the world’s food and agriculture trade unions…. In Dan’s view, the workers’ education movement was one of the surviving pillars of what was once a a vast labour movement including political parties, youth groups, cooperatives, and trade unions. He compared some of those to the ruins of a lost civilisation — which he intended to help revive.
Dan was elected president of the International Federation of Workers’ Education Associations (IFWEA) and he brought me in to produce — for the first time in the organisation’s 50-year history — a quarterly magazine, Workers’ Education, which appeared in three languages.
Read the full tribute here.
Ron Oswald, IUF General Secretary (1997-2017)
“We all know that Dan would not have wanted tears. What he would have wanted… is a renewed and reaffirmed commitment to the permanent struggle he often referred to. For me and for so many of us he will always be standing shoulder to shoulder next to us as we fight that never-ending class struggle. We leave today knowing that in our hearts and minds we will feel our comrade and friend Dan with us and that we will do so forever. So Dan – on to the next battle my friend and the next victory together.”
