Ben Moxham
On the desert-battered outskirts of Cairo, in a kitsch marble convention centre, the Egyptian Federation of Independent Trade Unions (EFITU) has just announced to Egypt and the world that it has come of age. EFITU was born in the inspiration and chaos of Tahrir square, exactly 12 months to the day. Since then they have been organising, organising and organising. Today was a chance to show the results and I was blown away.
Ben Moxham's Archive
Ben Moxham
I’m a policy officer with the TUC’s snappily titled European Union and International Relations Department. I cover trade, decent work and international labour standards, as well as our work on priority countries such as Iraq Palestine/Israel and Burma. I’m also the TUC’s backstop on a range of complicated international meetings that begin with the letter “G”. I represent the TUC on the board of the Ethical Trading Initiative and as an alternate member on the even more snappily titled, Steering Board of the UK National Contact Point for the OECD Guidelines on Multinational Enterprises.
Before joining the TUC in 2007, I did a Masters in development studies at the LSE, masqueraded as an industrial relations lawyer in Melbourne, and worked as a policy officer for a Southeast Asian development NGO based in Thailand from 2002-2004. When pressed at immigration, I claim to be Australian.
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Burma has seen many dramatic moves toward democracy and respect for human rights over the past six months. Most political prisoners have been released, Aung San Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy are about to contest by-elections, and there’s been some progress in ending the government’s bloody repression of ethnic groups. But has Burma improved its terrible labour rights record? And should foreign investors – long discouraged or barred under sanctions – be booking their air tickets to Rangoon? Not yet, and not yet.
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The use of “non-union consultation” mechanisms is rising, both here in the UK and in the global supply chains that UK business sources from, as two recent reports show.Should we denounce these mechanisms as toothless alternatives to undermine trade unionism? Or should we work with them, to complement our work, or convert them into genuinely representative bodies?
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Air-traffic controllers, bus drivers, journalists, academics, and nurses, among thousands of others have been back on the streets of Egypt this week demanding that the interim military government deliver on the demands of their revolution. Help add your voice to theirs by signing the global petition calling on the Egyptian government to enact a labour law to finally give Egyptians their rights at work. -
The Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI) is an alliance of unions, companies and NGOs working to improve the labour rights of the 10 million workers in the global supply chains of ETI member companies. The TUC is a founding member, and I’ve just posted a blog on its website titled “What have the unions ever done for us?”- outlining the case for working with unions. So it’s only fair that I turn the question around for this blog and ask “What has the ETI ever done for us”? Quite a lot is the answer.
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I thought I’d start my first stronger unions blog by highlighting a union that is about to get a lot weaker if we don’t urgently speak up for them: the Bahraini Teachers’ Association (BTA).
The Bahraini government has left their leaders – Jalila al-Salman, and Mahdi ‘Issa Mahdi Abu – to rot in jail ever since arresting them, along with other union members back in March during the popular uprisings. Jalila began a hunger strike in protest at her continued incarceration on 3 August 2011.
Amnesty International concluded, after their usual forensic rigour, that Jalila and Mahdi:
are likely to be prisoners of conscience, detained solely for exercising their legitimate rights to freedom of expression, association and assembly as leading members of the BTA.
It is a tactic that the government have applied across the country, sacking some 2000 workers, jailing many and trying to dismantle the union movement.
Educational International have launched an urgent action appeal calling for their release. Signing it will probably be the best 20 seconds you spend all week. They are in serious trouble. And Bahrain is home one of the very few strong and independent union movements in the region, and one that unites workers across religious boundaries – at least for now.
We also need to speak up because others deliberately aren’t. While the UK Government is quick to attack Syria, and rightly so, it is painfully silent on Bahrain, presumably the price it is paying for securing the Saudi green light for its intervention into Libya (the Saudi’s have heavily back the Bahraini government). So time to spend those 20 seconds…
