Administrative Council of the International Centre for Trade Union Rights: 22nd Session

On Saturday 3 June ICTUR hosted its annual Administrative Council discussions in Geneva, Switzerland. The high profile annual event brings together trade unions, lawyers, academics and human rights organisations to make recommendations on strategies and action for ICTUR’s work on trade union rights in the the year ahead.

65 delegates attended, including representatives of major international organisations, national trade union centres, and international NGOs.

Interpretation was provided in English and Spanish.

There were a number of important contributions to the meeting, including the following:

Australia: a wave of anti-union labour law reforms

Alison Tate of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (deputising for ICTUR President Sharan Burrow) introduced the main topic of the meeting to explain how the rights and conditions of Australian workers are under serious attack by an ideologically driven process of labour law reforms. The government has claimed to be simplifying the law and has argued that the changes will provide gains in terms of economic efficiency. But the Australian unions have challenged these arguments and have discovered that there is no economic analysis to back up these claims.

The list of changes to the Australian system includes the removal of unfair dismissal protection from the majority of workers, pushing workers onto individual contracts, cutting back the role of collective negotiation and stripping away terms and conditions previously granted by awards from the Industrial Relations Commission.

Under the new workplace agreements Ms Tate warned that Australian workers will have no right to collective bargaining. Employers will have the unilateral right to refuse to bargain collectively, even if a majority of workers in the workplace want collective bargaining. For this reason the ACTU believes that the situation now being imposed upon them is worse than the hostile organising climate of the USA.

ICTUR Vice President Hassaan Sunmonu, General Secretary of the African regional organisation OATUU, described the situation in Australia as the worst manifestation of neo-liberalism and questioned how the government could proceed when a similar experiment had been shown to fail in neighbouring New Zealand. The OATUU leader argued that even Colonial Africa had not experienced such laws, but warned that unions around the world needed to protect their labour codes against similar attacks.

Trade Union Rights Centres: providing critical legal capacity

Lawyer and ICTUR project coordinator Miguel Puerto introduced a new ICTUR project that aims to provide technical legal capacity to three public sector trade unions in Colombia: ANTHOC, ASPU and SINTRAUNICOL. The new Trade Union Rights Unit, based at the lawyers’ collective CAJAR, has now taken on cases including defence work for trade unionists subjected to arbitrary detentions, private prosecutions, and compensation claims for victims of human rights abuses. The Unit has held an education course on human rights and a workshop examining the work of the international criminal court, both of which were attended by union officers. Mr Puerto took the opportunity to thank project donors including the UNISON International Trade Union Development Fund, Amnesty International UK Section Charitable Trust and LO Norway.

Carlos Rodriguez, the General Secretary of the trade union centre CUT welcomed the TURC initiative and thanked ICTUR for its work around Colombia. Rodriguez warned that “no country in the world has a more terrifying level of impunity” than Colombia, but emphasised the significance of a ‘historic’ tripartite agreement between the government, worker and employer members of the Colombian delegations to the ILO. The agreement, he believed, represented an opportunity to pursue the implementation by the authorities of recent ILO recommendations.

ICTUR Vice President Fathi El-Fadl reported back from his recent mission to Baghdad in support of ICTUR’s project to create an independent legal resource centre in Iraq.

The ICTUR visit discovered that women’s organisations are involved in really strong projects, which Dr El-Fadl argued were of key importance. The TURC will be emphasising the need for cooperation and exchange between the trade unions and womens’ NGOs.

One problem which interviewees described was that the government is trying to build its own organisations. This, Dr El-Fadl concluded, makes it particularly important to support the struggle to build strong and independent trade unions and civil society. Dr El-Fadl reported that every organisation he spoke with in Iraq all welcomed the TURC project.

Hassan Sunmonu congratulated ICTUR for its project work in Iraq, arguing that the TURC project will support the capacity of Iraqi unions to decide their own fate and to dictate their own path.

ICTUR’s activities

The Council approved the report of Daniel Blackburn, Director of ICTUR (copies on request), and the proposals for future activities, which included continuing to promote the ICTUR world map, extending the Trade Union Rights Centres project, and organising a conference to examine the status of ILO conventions in labour courts.

In closing the 22nd Session of the Administrative Council Jorge Gamboa of the Colombian oil workers’ union USO drew parallels between the experiences of his members and the situations in Iraq and Australia. He argued that globalisation and neo-liberalism were driving these problems in all countries and insisted that unions would need to work together around the world to defend their rights.