Human and trade union rights: challenges for the new international
Janek Kuczkiewicz, Director of the Department of Trade Union Rights, ICFTU
Sara Hammerton, Editor, ICFTU Annual Survey of Violations of Trade Union Rights

From International Union Rights, volume 13.3.

The creation of the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) at the beginning of November this year will be an opportunity to renew the commitment of the international trade union movement to defending human and trade union rights (HTUR). The ITUC’s founding congress in Vienna is expected to assert that the full respect of trade union rights constitutes a key objective of the ITUC, just as it was for its founding organisations, and to pledge that the ITUC will combat trade union rights violations wherever they occur. The last meeting of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions’ (ICFTU) Executive Board, in June 2006, recommended that the ITUC establish a body similar to the former ICFTU Human and Trade Union Rights Committee to take responsibility for guiding and coordinating this work.

The ICFTU and the World Confederation of Labour (WCL) have always sought to intervene in cases of trade union rights violations, mobilising international trade union solidarity, notably through protest letters to governments, as well as coordinating international days of action, campaigning intensively in selected countries where workers’ rights are most at risk (Colombia, China, Burma, Belarus, Zimbabwe, Iran…) and using the international machinery designed to protect workers’ rights, particularly the supervisory mechanisms of the International Labour Organisation (ILO). Working together, ITUC member organisations, both the former members of the ICFTU, the WCL and those who had no previous international affiliation, will have to ensure that the new organisation further develops and rationalises this work.

Big challenges lay ahead. One of these will be to increase the participation of developing countries’ trade unions in HTUR work. The ITUC will need to help strengthen the capacity of these organisations, recognising that strong national centres are the first and best guarantee of the respect of trade union rights. It will need to assist in the development of their ability to defend their rights nationally, to strengthen tripartism, to promote the conclusion of collective bargaining agreements, and fight for the adoption of strong and effective national legislation.

Protesting against violations
Mobilising international solidarity will remain a key task, and the fact that the new organisation will have more national affiliates than the ICFTU and the WCL combined will provide an unprecedented opportunity. The ITUC must become a central point of enquiry, information, communication, cooperation and mobilisation of unions around the world, for the promotion of trade union rights and the defence of the victims of anti-union repression. This may, where appropriate, include material support and solidarity action. One example that should be emulated in future was the Global Unions International Day of Trade Union Action on Iran which took place on 15 February 2006. Trade unionists in 45 countries on all five continents took part, meeting the Iranian Ambassador in their country or demonstrating outside the embassy to demonstrate their solidarity with workers from the Trade Union of Bus Drivers of the Tehran and Suburbs Bus Company. Union members had been arrested, beaten and imprisoned following demonstrations on 28 January to protest at the repression of the union and the detention of the union’s President, Mansoor Osanloo. His imprisonment followed a protest in December 2005 by his union’s members against the non-payment of wages, poor working conditions and the company’s refusal to recognise the union. The Day of Action led to mounting pressure on the authorities, and Mansoor Osanloo was finally released on 9 August, just days after a formal complaint was submitted by the ICFTU and the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF) to the ILO. At the time of writing this article, another International Day of Action was being planned, for September 22, in response to the arrest, beating and prosecution of leaders and members of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU).

Monitoring and compliance
Another area of HTUR work to be continued by the ITUC is the database of companies that have business links with Burma. By investing in and trading with the country, these 468 companies - mostly small multinational companies – provide direct or indirect support, primarily financial, to the military junta, which is one of the worst violators of human and trade union rights in the world. The ITUC will also look at compiling data bases on other issues, such as trade union prisoners.

Both the International Days of Trade Union Action and the Burma Companies Database are initiatives by the Global Unions, which is an alliance of the Global Union Federations, the ICFTU and the Trade Union Advisory Committee to the OECD. Similarly, the ITUC will need to work in close cooperation with the sectoral international trade union structures associated with the ICFTU and the WCL. Cooperation at the international level is well developed, and particular attention now needs to be paid to cooperation with these sectoral bodies at the regional and sub-regional level.

A publication similar to the ICFTU’s ‘Annual Survey of Violations of Trade Union Rights’ will almost certainly be produced by the ITUC. This annual report has proved highly successful as a lobbying, campaigning and educational tool for trade unions and institutions with links to the trade union movement around the world. The ITUC will need to mobilise national trade union centres and their member organisations to provide useful and timely information to the ITUC for the Survey, as well as to use and publicise it afterwards.

Participation in international forums
The ICTU will continue the ICFTU’s and WCL’s participation in relevant UN bodies such as the newly formed UN Human Rights Council, ECOSOC and the General Assembly. Equally, it will continue to promote rights in trade, investment and development agreements, by pressing for the inclusion of provisions for the defence and promotion of trade union rights in those agreements.

As a natural concomitant to this, the ITUC should also promote international policy coherence, holding all relevant international organisations to their responsibilities and stated commitments to promote the respect of trade union rights. In doing so it will need to continue the work of the ICFTU and the WCL of building alliances with appropriate human rights advocates in civil society, as well as encouraging its affiliates to develop complementary actions with human rights advocates.

But the biggest challenge facing the new international is the use of ILO mechanisms. The ICFTU, together with the WCL, has worked hard in recent years in improving both the quantity and the quality of comments submitted by trade unions to the ILO’s Committee of Experts on the Application of Conventions and Recommendations (CEACR) concerning Member States’ performance in respecting the ILO Conventions they have ratified. The ITUC must continue this work, and ensure that national trade union centres themselves play a greater role, particularly in the developing countries, by preparing their own submissions.

Capacity building is therefore important, and it is hoped that a training programme just begun by the ICFTU will be continued by the ITUC. The aim will be to train a network of trade union rights experts to monitor and report on the respect of fundamental ILO Conventions, using the ILO mechanisms. The training programme will begin with a core group of grass roots trade unionists from developing countries on three continents, which will in turn train others to create an ever widening web. The challenge of the ITUC will be to coordinate and maintain this network, and ensure the quality of its work.

The ILO supervisory mechanism most directly concerned with the specific issue of trade union rights is of course the Committee on Freedom of Association (CFA), which deals specifically with Convention 87 on the freedom of association and the right to organise, and Convention 98 on the right to organise and collective bargaining. The ITUC and its member organisations will have to act quickly and decisively within the Workers’ Group to protect the CFA against the mounting offensive by employers, particularly on the right to strike, which they point out is not explicitly recognised in Conventions 87 and 98. Recommendations calling for the reinstatement of unfairly dismissed strikers are routinely rejected by the Employers’ Group, who will at best agree to compensation. Certain governments, particularly the so-called group of non-aligned countries, also known as the Like-Minded Group (LMG), and others who have no desire to see their performance on trade union rights scrutinised so thoroughly and so publicly, are also trying to undermine the work of the CFA. In the Committee of Experts on the Application of Conventions and Recommendations (CEACR), the LMG governments are leading the attack, and are demanding a say in the appointment of experts. They also want to have their say in the list of CEACR cases that are presented for examination the Committee on the Application of Standards at the International Labour Conference, and to play a significant role in the selection of CEACR members. Much therefore needs to be done in terms of lobbying, and speaking out in favour of these key supervisory mechanisms, notably in the ILO Governing Body. But the best way to defend the CFA and the CEACR is to use them fully and properly. Cases will have to be carefully selected, and hard hitting. The ITUC has a crucial role to play in helping guide this process, ensuring the continued quality of submissions from the international trade union movement and, again, further developing the capacity of member organisations to make their own submissions.

In all of this work the ITUC will need to build or strengthen alliances with organisations sharing similar concerns and objectives, such as major international human rights NGOs and others, including of course the ICTUR.