The United Corporations and Mercantile Union (UCMU) is a Sri Lankan trade union which brings together workers in the public sector.
The UCMU was founded in 1968. Dr N.M. Perera became its President and Anil Moonesinghe became its General Secretary. Moonesinghe travelled the country from factory to factory building up a union of several tens of thousands of members. One of his lieutenants in this task was Vasudeva Nanayakkara, who became an MP in 1970. At the 1970 general election, the UCMU also sponsored the candidature of the Chairman of its Vidyodaya University branch, Mahinda Rajapaksa who was later to become Prime Minister and then President of Sri Lanka.
In 1970, when Anil Moonesinghe went to the Ceylon Transport Board as Chairman, he was succeeded as General Secretary by Percy Wickremasekera. After the death of Dr N.M. Perera in 1979, Anil Moonesinghe became President.
Famous quotes containing the words united, corporations, mercantile and/or union:
“I thought it altogether proper that I should take a brief furlough from official duties at Washington to mingle with you here to-day as a comrade, because every President of the United States must realize that the strength of the Government, its defence in war, the army that is to muster under its banner when our Nation is assailed, is to be found here in the masses of our people.”
—Benjamin Harrison (1833–1901)
“The greater speed and success that distinguish the planting of the human race in this country, over all other plantations in history, owe themselves mainly to the new subdivisions of the State into small corporations of land and power.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“What should I have known or written had I been a quiet, mercantile politician or a lord in waiting? A man must travel, and turmoil, or there is no existence.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“The monk in hiding himself from the world becomes not less than himself, not less of a person, but more of a person, more truly and perfectly himself: for his personality and individuality are perfected in their true order, the spiritual, interior order, of union with God, the principle of all perfection.”
—Thomas Merton (1915–1968)