While chief executives seem to manage to get huge sums of compensation when they are sacked or resign after screwing up, us lesser mortals have only been able to look on with envy. However when we are sacked unfairly we have at least been able to rely on our unions and, as a last resort, an Employment Tribunal. The government wants to either stop that or make it more expensive. As well as changing the time you have to have been working for your employer to be able to make a claim to an Employment Tribunal from one year to two years they plan to charge us for the pleasure of seeking any form of justice.  Applicants will be obliged to pay the costs of an unfair dismissal claim which will only be refunded if the employee wins.

The government is proposing to charge £200 to lodge a claim and £1000 for a  hearing, They have given another option of an upfront fee of £500 to access the Tribunal that can rise to £1750 if the employee is claiming more than £30,000 in compensation. The fees will be even higher if a worker believed they were sacked because of their sex, race, disability, age, sexual orientation or religion and belief.

At the same time they are trying to prevent us claiming compensation if we are injured or made ill through work caused by the employers’ negligence.

Under proposals going through Parliament at the moment, union members will be among the millions who are deprived of the ability to claim compensation, or who will lose damages.  As many as 25% of injury claims will not be brought.  Those that proceed might lose up to 25% of damages for the success fee and further substantial reductions for required legal expense insurance.

Many people will no longer be able to obtain representation, particularly for low value/complex cases. However although a claim of £3,000 or £4,000 may be considered to be low value by the Government, it is not low value to a cleaner who earns £6 an hour and represents four months wages.

Finally they are proposing to slash the payments that you can get under the criminal injuries compensation scheme. These payments are certainly not huge – often around a thousand pounds, but they can go to shop workers or security staff who are assaulted. Tube workers who have had to cope with the trauma of a suicide jumping in front of their train have also benefited.

That is now to change. In a consultation document issued this week the Government says it wants to remove around 17,000 victims of violence crime every year from the scheme including those with injuries like a smashed hand or an injury to the knee that is serious enough to require surgery.  In addition many of those who still qualify will find the compensation cut, so even people with minor brain damage face a cut in their payments.

It is not a coincidence that all these proposals are coming together. The government has been wound up about a non-existent compensation culture by insurance companies who are happy to take insurance premiums but have taken a series of court cases to try to stop them paying out when things go wrong, including several aimed at asbestos victims. The coalition government is also hell-bent of removing as many employment rights as it can, so expect more to come.

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.