That’s exactly what happened to Mahdi Abu Dheeb, the head of the Bahraini Teacher’s Association (BTA), who did no more than lead his union during the Arab Spring uprisings in February and March 2011.

Originally sentenced back in September 2011, he lost his appeal over the weekend but was given a reduced sentence of five years behind bars. The BTA Vice President, Jalila Al Salman also got landed with a 6 months sentence. Both of them are innocent and both have been treated appallingly. Worse still, the British Government has been silent.

The Bahraini authorities’ claimed that the BTA leaders were inciting violence.  This is nonsense. Amnesty International concludes that it has “not seen any convincing evidence supporting such accusations, nor was there any such evidence presented at trial”, and have therefore adopted the leaders as prisoners of conscience.

The bitter irony is that one of the key reasons why the BTA called for strikes in the first place was to demand “accountability for security forces responsible for killing civilians”. The other irony is that they have been victims of state violence, as confirmed by the Bahraini Independent Commission of Inquiry late last year (see para 1695). As Patrick Roach of the NASUWT heard when he visited Bahrain as part of an international trade union delegation earlier this year:

Members of the BTA told us how they have been subjected to torture, sexual assault, abduction and severe violence by the authorities. We heard how Jalila had been taken from her home in the middle of the night by security forces, who raided her home in front of her terrified and screaming children. She was blindfolded, beaten, sexually assaulted and kept locked up in freezing temperatures. Mahdi’s daughter, Maryam, provided a moving and disturbing testimony of what had been happening to her father, including the many injuries he has sustained whilst in prison.

All of this deserved and deserves a tough response from the British Government, but we’ve mostly had silence despite the campaigning efforts of teachers, unions, doctors and human rights organisations.

There is the official stench of double standards about all of this. When it comes to Pussy Riot, the Foreign Office  was,“…deeply concerned by the sentencing of three members of the band Pussy Riot, which can only be considered a disproportionate response to an expression of political belief.  Reports about conditions of the detention of the women, and the conduct of the trial, are also concerning”. But when it comes to Mahdi and Jalila? The toughest language that William Hague could muster last week when the Bahraini Crown Prince was in town was to urge “more progress on political dialogue”.

Our Parliament agrees with us. The Foreign Affairs Committee has just recommended that Bahrain should have been put on the FCO’s list of countries of concern. Fiji and South Sudan joined the 28 member list in last years’ FCO Human Rights report, but not Bahrain. The Committee also challenged “the Government for being inconsistent in not taking a public stance on the Bahrain Grand Prix but boycotting group stage games at Euro 2012 in Ukraine”.

So why the double standards? Bahrain, along with Saudi Arabia are key government allies against Iran, major oil exporters and central to calculations on the crisis in Libya and Syria. Once the Foreign Office does its soulless number crunching it seems that teachers, health workers, and all Bahraini citizens calling out for democracy and decency in their lives lose out.

The IUF initially alleged that Eurest had refused to recognise a union in the workplace and had harassed and dismissed union members, among other claims. Compass denied all of them. Yet a deal was struck between the parties in mid-January in London after several rounds of mediation.

The final statement has typically sterile, legal settlement language. So let’s quote Ron Oswald, the IUF’s General Secretary, instead. He welcomed the deal, saying:

This conflict has lasted for over three years and our agreement with Compass should take us to a more constructive future. I now look forward to the challenge both sides to the agreement will face to ensure that the spirit and letter of the agreement is fully respected.

So what are the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises? And how did they help? The Guidelines are international standards of behaviour expected of multinational enterprises operating in or from the 42 states that have signed up to them. Here’s a previous blog I did summing up the language in the recently updated OECD Guidelines can help unions.

Under the Guidelines, each signatory government is required to set up a National Contact Point (NCP) – a government body hearing complaints and generally promoting the Guidelines. The UK’s own NCP has a decent track record in settling union cases against multinational companies, partly because it offers both professional mediation and a form of arbitration – a good combination for getting companies to the negotiating table (Unfortunately, many NCPs still seem to be little more than glorified in-trays on the desks of over-worked and low-level government officials).

But good results under the Guidelines also need a capable local union able to last the distance, and a Global Union Federation willing to support them. Most importantly, the Guidelines need to be seen as just one tool – an increasingly helpful tool – in a bigger organising campaign.

For more information on filing a complaint under the Guidelines just drop me a line or visit the website of the UK NCP.

The federation claims to have organised a phenomenal 2 million workers into 200 unions in barely a year. Of course, many of the new independent unions have their roots in the underground workers’ struggles throughout the past decade. And without clear ways to keep membership records, the total figure may be in doubt, but as an accurate figure emerges it will still be the single most impressive organising effort I’ve ever come across (And this is just one of the two new independent federations: the Egyptian Democratic Labour Congress (EDLC) claims to have signed up 214 unions with a seven figure combined membership also).

Legitimacy means everything to this nascent movement. So long denied a voice in the workplace and a voice in society, they are determined to be democratic and everywhere. “We bid farewell to land-lord run unions” of Mubarak, said Kamal Abou Aita, the acting President of EFITU.

And they did so in meticulous-style: each of the 264 delegates would vote, one-by-one, walking up onto the congress stage, showing their ID, filing out their ballot and putting it in a large glass box for the entire hall to see. “How powerful is that?” I thought after the first few votes. “How long will this take?” I thought after three hours and only 140 delegates in. More hours passed and I realised that these guys have pyramid-building patience and that I’d nodded off and drooled a bit.

But by then the party had set in. Us international guests filed some dead air time by firing off our best platitudes from the podium. I took the liberty to pass on your solidarity, and then joined in a few chants that I didn’t understand. By the time I left the congress in the wee hours the votes for the finance committee were only just rolling in.

What about the role of women in this new Egyptian union movement I hear you ask? Sure they were at the forefront of the revolution but early photos I saw of this new union movement showed a room full of men, straining the definition of middle-aged.

But today’s congress showed progress and promise. “It fills us with pride that the youth represent the vast majority of our union organisation, and that women play a pivotal role in our union,” said Abou Aita. And I could see that he wasn’t wrong.  Further, it was these delegates that moved an amendment to EFITU’s constitution to put in place a 25 per cent quota for women. No mean feat in this part of the world.

But the journey for women’s empowerment in Egypt will be a long one. Take this sobering passage from the ILO’s latest global employment trends report on Egypt, Libya and Tunisa (page 75):

The unemployment rate for young people in the region was 27.1 per cent in 2011, the rate for women stood at 19.0 per cent and young women faced an unemployment rate of 41.0 per cent.

Even where they have a job, “female workers and those in the private sector work in slave-like conditions”, concluded Kamal Abbass, the acting leader of the EDLC, after describing the extreme overtime, poverty wages and high levels of harassment they face. With British business sourcing from these export zones of “slave-like conditions”, we need to play our role.

The new unions are still very much workplace based, yet to make connections with those in the same sector, or region, but the links are emerging.  But workshop sessions throughout the week are pulling together key workers in the same sector, their respective global sectoral union federations helping with the speed-merger-dating.

And bizarrely, it got exciting: “We have formed 23 committees! And I’m on the fishing committee!”, yelled out one speaker to thunderous applause and more infectious chants that I didn’t understand. I wished I was on the fishing committee.

These workers are from workplaces across Egypt. I spoke with welders, justice ministry workers, bus drivers, teachers, farmers, postal workers, and nurses. Abou Aita also spoke proudly of the vulnerable – “peasants, casual workers, informal economy workers and street vendors” – swelling their ranks.

What impressed me greatly is that these folks aren’t waiting for some legislative silver bullet to deliver a union movement to them. They are going out there and making it under laws that haven’t changed since Hosni Mubarak owned the country.

And it’s tough. Most of them don’t have offices, and are barred from opening bank accounts. All of them face workplaces where the official stooge unions of the old regime are still collecting compulsory dues against the wishes of the workforce. To join a real union in Egypt you have to pay double.

Further, the new government may be dominated by Islamic parties that swept the recent elections, and a new law on trade union freedoms is yet to be enacted. But these won’t stop this chanting hall of workers whose time has come. They’ve already sunk their roots too deep.

Burma has long been a labour rights hellhole: rampant forced labour, banned unions and jails full of activists – all reasons why the EU has long maintained economic sanctions against the regime.

But things might be changing. A year ago, there were an estimated 54 trade unionist and labour activists behind bars. Now we think there are only half a dozen left.

Yet the tide of change has only reached so far. While it has been widely reported that the government has eased restrictions on trade unions, it hasn’t yet. Despite passing a Labour Organisations Law (And yes, let’s shorten that to “LOL”), in October last year, the government still hasn’t implemented it. Several unions have tried to register under the LOL but have been turned away by a government, that insiders say is desperately trying to form its own puppet unions.

The Federation of Trade Unions – Burma (FTUB), forced to operate in exile is still dubbed a terrorist organisation. For the new law to have any credibility this has to change.

According to the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), the LOL itself, written without any input from unions, is “…so ambiguously drafted in key places, so lacking in critical detail and so disconnected from surrounding law…” that its benefits to workers are in doubt. Further, the law gives government officials far too much power to decide which unions can register, what collective bargaining can actually occur and what strikes or other actions are permissible.

And even if the law was better drafted, it can easily be overridden by laws providing for “law and order, community peace and tranquillity,” according to the constitution drafted by the Generals. And old repressive decrees still remain in force. Nevertheless the law, if ever implemented, will be a positive step beyond the current blanket ban on trade union activity.

Yet the blackest mark on labour rights against the current government is it’s failure to end forced labour. The FTUB, and the Federation of Trade Unions – Kawthoolei (FTUK) have most recently documented in exhaustive detail, “the persistence of widespread forced labour practices by civil and military authorities in almost all of the country’s states and divisions” (see page 241). The government has faced decades of withering international criticism on this issue and knows exactly what it needs to do to eradicate it.

Without such action, the western businesses that are threatening to flood into Burma will almost certainly be benefitting from slave labour. And the TUC and our Burmese sister organisations will be the first to blow the whistle on them.

There are other areas urgently needing change. As the Burma Campaign UK have pointed out, a key test will be the upcoming budget of a government which spends “almost 20 times more on the military than it does on health.”

So there has been a some positive but limited progress on labour rights, and I personally think that this should be recognised. So let’s relax e.g. travel bans against those who have proven to be genuine reformers in the new government. But the key economic sanctions should stay in place until we have free and independent trade unions and the end of forced labour in the country.

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?

Our good friends at Labour Behind the Label have just realised their latest “Let’s clean up fashion” report. It contains an in-depth look at what some of the major high street brands are doing – or not doing, as is more often the case – on making sure workers making their clothes get a living wage.

It provides a thoughtful and technical look at the steps needed to deliver a decent wage – and fundamental to that is having a union in the workplace to bargain for it. But a key problem identified by the report is that companies are instead working with suppliers to set up “workers committees” – consultative workplace bodies usually under the thumb of management. As the report explains:

Most employers are instinctively hostile to trade union organising and to push for trade unions to be not just allowed but encouraged is a difficult task. Brands and retailers therefore view workers’ committees as an easier way of getting worker representation into their projects. The trouble is workers’ committees not only fall short of genuine attempts to organise, they carry the risk of actually undermining the setting up of independent and effective trade unions.

And this trend of “union-lite” is growing in the UK. As Chris Wright states on this blog: “unions face the reality of an increasing trend among employers to use non-union mechanisms for communicating with their workers.” (Chris goes into this in much more detail in his recent paper for ACAS see pages 4-5) .

As union activists, to what extent can we work with such mechanism, or transform them into genuine trade unions? Are there examples out there that we can draw upon? Or should we just give them the red card?

This is a key demand of the movement that was best put to me by Nawla Darwiche, from the New Woman Foundation in Cairo who was in London earlier in September as a guest of Amnesty International. Research carried out by her organisation found that most women garment workers have been getting poverty wages of $30 to $60 a month, and many have been the victim of sexual harassment.

These women were at the forefront of the January revolution and have successfully demanded a rise in the minimum wage to about $120 a month. But to deliver real dignity at work they are absolutely clear: employers and governments need to respect their rights at work, and to ensure that, they need to especially respect their right to form and join their own trade unions.

Yet these demands risk getting swept aside during Egypt’s fragile transition. The interim government, overseen by a military council has banned strikes, and is threatening to roll back hard won freedoms for women. And the upcoming elections might simply return another variety of Mubarak-era stooges hostile to workers’ rights.

So we need to apply maximum pressure right now. Today is the World Day for Decent Work. Please mark it by taking a moment to sign the global petition for an Egyptian labour law and spread the word. The petition has got a good response so far, but Egyptian workers need and deserve a brilliant response.

As an ETI member, companies from major supermarkets to high street fashion retailers commit to requiring their suppliers to comply with the ETI Base Code, – a set of nine fundamental labour rights – and where suppliers fall short, to work with them to lift their game. The Base Code now covers some 30,000 worksites across the globe, particularly in food and garments, including in the UK.

The evidence of ETI’s impact suggests that it is making a difference on issues like child labour, pay, working hours and addressing the more visible health and safety issues like blocked fire exits. But like all codes, they can really only tackle tough issues like discrimination, a living wage and freedom of association if workers themselves are acting together to identify and resolve breaches of the code and holding companies to account. A workplace without a union to monitor and enforce a company code of conduct is like the proverbial tree falling in the woods with no one to hear it.

Critically for unions, the ETI Base Code requires that employers (at 2.2) adopt: “an open attitude towards the activities of trade unions and their organisational activities.” This is arguably a stronger requirement on employers than UK labour law.

And Unite have been using it successfully. They brought a complaint to ETI that Cranberry Foods, a supplier of many ETI member supermarkets, had employed the infamous union-busting firm, the Burke Group, to wreck a recognition vote. As Unite reports:

The ETI has made it clear to leading retailers, including Tesco, ASDA and the Co-op, it views Cranberry Foods’ use of the Burke Group during the CAC process as a breach of the Base Code.

This is a great precedent that could be used to try to flush out union-busting organisations whenever they lurk. More generally, if, in your industrial work, you come across a workplace covered by the ETI Base Code that it shutting out an organiser or refusing to negotiate, then consider using the leverage of ETI, and drop us a line.

For more information see the TUC’s trade union guide to ethical trade, or visit the Ethical Trading Initiative. To learn more or get involved in the ETI trade union caucus contact Annie Watson (annie@eti.org.uk) the ETI trade union coordinator.

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…