Owen TudorAs predicted in this blog, the Iranian regime has indeed used the holiday season to crack down on Iranian trade unionists. Just days after labour writer Mohsen Hakimi was seized, bus worker union leader Ebrahim Madadi was arrested too. Meanwhile Channel 4 in the UK chose to broadcast a ‘Christmas message’ from Iranian President Ahmadinejad. My colleague Nigel Stanley, writing on the TUC Touchstone blog, described their decision to do so as wrong, and an Iranian blogger was ruder.
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Here’s a story you don’t hear very often. On 16 December, global private services union federation UNI and one of their UK affiliates, the GMB, signed an ‘International Framework Agreement’ with the global multinational security firm G4S. G4S has 570,000 employees around the world, which makes it a big player in global employment terms. And all of its members now have the right to join a union.
The agreement was struck after several years of campaigning – some of it aggressive and involving NGOs, some of it painstaking negotiation by unions, and also a case taken to the British contact point for the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises which set out ethical behaviour standards for multinationals – the TUC explained its role here.
Of course, this negotiating victory won’t change much for British workers – G4S already has very good relations with the GMB in the UK. But it will make a major difference in the global south – countries like Malawi and Nepal – and even in the USA. The involvement of the GMB, with their good relations with G4S, was a crucial element to securing the IFA.
Our history is obviously based in local negotiating, shopfloor strength and daily membership involvement, and none of that should ever be lost. But if we’re going to tackle global multinationals, we need to get better at using tools like International Framework Agreements and OECD Multinational Guidelines.
If you work for a multinational, is there an International Framework Agreement covering the company? Are you in touch with other unions representing members in the company’s overseas operations? And is the company breaching the OECD Multinational Guidelines? Find out and you might be able to do something special for colleagues all over the world.
Finally, after two depressing posts this week on trade union represssion in Iran and the coup in Guinea, the news of this victory may mean it’s at last appropriate for me to write ”Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!”
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It’s Christmas Day, so I really shouldn’t be writing this. But not all trade unionists will be having the day off – emergency services workers, for instance. And in some parts of the world, they have it even tougher than that. Like Guinea, on the West coast of Africa, where three days ago on 22 December the hated old President, Lansana Conte, died and the army staged a coup the day afterwards. One of the first things they did was to suspend political parties … and, of course, trade unions (it’s always us, isn’t it?)
The reason trade union activity was banned was because the Guinean trade union movement – led by some of the bravest of our colleagues you could find – have been particularly active in campaigning for democracy. Last year, they led the general strikes and demonstrations which forced the President to appoint a Prime Minister for the first time. Several trade unionists were killed in those demonstrations, and the army raided all the union offices they could find, including those of ITUC Women’s Committee Vice Chair Rabiatou Diallo, who runs the largest trade union confederation in Guinea.
The ITUC has already called for democracy to be maintained in Guinea, and the TUC has been in touch with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office which like France and Germany maintains an Embassy in the capital, Conakry (with more trade unionists working this Christmas Day to deal with the UK citizens currently in Guinea).
Our thoughts are with Rabiatou and her brave colleagues, who are facing an uncertain future in the world centre of Bauxite production (one reason why people scrap over who rules Guinea). Guinea is rich in natural resources but her people are poor and the main industry is the informal sector. And if things turn sour, they will need our solidarity. If you’ve got any money spare after the Christmas festivities, why not make a donation to TUC Aid, and help trade unionists around the world develop the same sort of strength that gave most of us in Britain a day off every Christmas?
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For most union activists, Christmas is a welcome break – time, thanks to union campaigns over the decades, to spend on you and whatever you want to do. And unfortunately, some regimes around the world know that, and do terrible things over Christmas in the hope that trade unionists won’t be around to protest. This Christmas, as we have for several years, the TUC will be watching the anti-union regime in Iran – because they are past masters at this. And this year, we’ll be concentrating on making sure they don’t carry out a death sentence on teacher trade unionist and Kurdish community activist Farzad Kamangar. And we’ll be doing it with our good friends at Amnesty International. If you just want to take action now, do it. If you want to find out more ….
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Here’s wishing you all a very Merry Xmas and a Happy New Year!
Image courtesy of the wondeful Eclectech
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We have been told by our good friend Rory O’Neil, Editor of Hazards magazine, of a major union recognition victory in the Deep South state of North Carolina, USA, where employer antogonism to trade unions runs deepest.
In what unions are hailing as a crucial victory in the South, United Food and Commercial Workers Union prevailed in their 16-year campaign to organize the world’s largest pork slaughterhouse.
By a vote of 2,041 to 1,879, workers at Smithfield Foods’ massive hog plant in Tar Heel, N.C. voted to unionize the plant in what had become one of the most closely-watched labor battles in the country.
http://www.southernstudies.org/2008/12/union-victory-at-smithfield-a-big-win-for-southern-labor.html
Health and safety issues were a major problem at the plant. Workers at the remote, rural plant, which opened in 1992, do repetitive and often grueling jobs. Some pull pigs off trucks and usher them to a gas chamber. Others work in a cavernous room where freshly killed hogs are wrestled onto hooks, decapitated and sliced in half. Some spend all day pulling out internal organs or yanking out sheets of fat. Many wield knives, and slice and debone pork as it moves along conveyor belts. Some stand for hours placing stickers on wrapped pieces of pork.
This is the kind of work that many meat processing workers will recognise in this country but the North Carolina plant is of a scale not known in this country. Also, we have health and safety legislation, which UK unions campaign to maintain and improve, and a network of trade union safety reps,far better than in the US where enforcement by the US Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) is almost neglible.
OSHA has instituted a system called Voluntary Protection Programmes where employers, which have acheived a certain standard of health and safety management, regulate themselves. Employee involvement and commitment is one of the standards OSHA assesses against. That does not mean union involvement. No wonder particpating companies can reach the standard of no ‘recorded’ injuries through workplace accidents.
Pilot VPP projects were set up about five years ago in the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland. Fortunately these have collapsed and have been replaced by stronger health and safety legislation.
Why do I raise this here in the blog? – well, we need to be wary. US employers, with the help of OSHA, are still seeking to export the idea of VPP to Europe particularly through US trans-global companies. This has already occured in parts of Germany. It also gives us an insight on how US employers really view health and safety. We need active unionists and and a fully staffed Inspectorate to ensure that health and safety standards are maintained, improved and enforced.
You can keep up-to-date with what’s going on around the world and the health and safety and organising campaigns being waged by trade unions by registering for the TUC’s weekly Risks emagazine and by subscribing to Hazards magazine, edited by Rory O’Neil.
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It seems that no campaign is complete these days without someone setting up the ubiquitous accompanying Facebook group. Some of these have been really successful, some really haven’t. I’m a big fan of anything that can help unions organising but I think there are a couple of potential pitfalls in using Facebook so liberally.
The first is that Facebook isn’t a substitute for doing all the other things you need to do if you want to run a successful campaign. Getting loads of people to sign up to a Facebook group to show their support for your campaign is good, but in and of itself its of limited value. Few employers are likely to buckle because a couple of thousand (in most cases actually a couple of hundred or dozen) sign up to a Facebook group calling on them to give union recognition/treat their workers fairly/honour the agreement they have with the union etc. Facebook may be a ‘sexy’ element of most campaigns these days, but I’m not sure how effective it’s really been in the majority of cases.
The second big drawback is the lack of control that users have over the information that is gathered via Facebook, and how you can use that information. Eric Lee has explained this, and some of the other potential pitfalls of using Facebook and other proprietary social networking sites, very succinctly here.
All of which is not to say that Facebook doesn’t hold any value for unions, but its important that we are aware of its limitations.
This all a bit of preamble to welcoming the development of unionbook- a social networking site for trade unionists – which I’d encourage readers of this blog to sign up to. Eric explains the rationale behind unionbook here.
Paul Nowak
Tom Mellish
