.gif){kind=small}
BACK TO HOME
PAGE BACK TO HOME
PAGE EUROPEAN REVIEW
| Owen Tudor is Head of the TUC EU and International Relations Department. He is a substitute member of the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) executive and the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) executive board. He outlines below the TUC's work, both with migrant workers at home, and in Europe and beyond, to ensure rights and improve conditions. |
| |||||
The TUC now sets priorities a lot more clearly than it used to. This year, the General Council has agreed five top priorities: raising the quality of working life, promoting equality, boosting union organisation and recruitment, improving economic performance, and influencing social policy. It would be a mockery if our international priorities were any different. In terms of equality, for instance, we are prioritising the improvement of working conditions for migrant workers - an issue thrown into sharp relief by the Morecambe Bay tragedy, but one where the relevance of trade unions was proved by the immediacy of a TGWU-backed private members' bill on regulating gangmasters. But we are also engaged in a major global campaign with Oxfam and Labour Behind the Label to draw attention to the impact on women workers of the supply chains in the sportswear industry as the Olympics draw near.
The TUC will be promoting the core standards of the International Labour Organisation (ILO), and the demand for coherence between international institutions from the recent report on the social dimensions of globalisation. We will, for instance, be seeking a change of policy from the Government as it draws up its White Paper on trade. We want the Department for Trade and Industry to campaign in the World Trade Organisation for trade agreements that respect workers' rights.
Offshoring
In our approach to offshoring, the practice of sending jobs abroad, first in manufacturing, more recently in the services sector, we have stressed that offshoring can work for everyone if it's properly managed. Workers in Britain under threat should be entitled to full consultation and a fair assessment of the contribution they make. But if the jobs do go, the Government needs to be proactive about alternative job creation and training. Crucially, we don't want offshoring or globalisation to be a race to the bottom, with wage levels leapfrogging downwards. Just as we want migrant workers' safety and wages to be protected, we want workers abroad to get the right to join a union, decent pay and decent working conditions.
Core labour standards around the world reflect the European social model at home, and we are fighting to defend it against American-style deregulation and Asian-style wage cuts. The quality of life of British workers would be helped enormously if we could get rid of the Working Time Directive's opt out, and working conditions across the newly expanded European Union would be underpinned if we could unblock the Temporary and Agency Workers Directive. The election of a socialist government in Spain and the left's resurgence in the French regional elections have reversed a trend to the right over recent years, so there is still a lot to play for (not least because the European right is as split as the left over whether to aim for a deregulated labour market or not).
Recruitment and organisation
But all the changes that we campaign for at the global level will be of little value to workers if they are not organised, so perhaps our top priority is about recruitment and organising. That's a priority for every trade union movement around Europe and the world, and we want to stimulate an organising strategy through the ETUC and the ICFTU world congress in Japan in December.
At home, that means recruiting and organising migrant workers (including illegal workers), and demanding that they get the same terms and conditions as indigenous workers. It means working with colleagues in other European countries (such as for our Portuguese workers' project, or our contacts with countries like Poland and the Czech Republic) to ensure that union cards are recognised across Europe.
Trade unionism in Iraq, which flourished before Saddam, is the perfect example of our international work. It is about tackling grievances about pay, empowering women trade union activists, and getting information technology to work for unions. The more I find out about global trade unionism, the more I realise that there's no such thing as an international issue - just loads of trade union issues. A world's worth!
|
Back to |
Forward to |
Up to |
