How Spanish Unions support Unionisation in Turkey

Emre Eren Korkmaz 

Introduction
International Framework Agreements (IFAs) have become an increasingly important tool for the international solidarity of workers. Global Union Federations (GUFs) may convince Transnational Corporations (TNCs) together with the home country unions of these TNCs to recognise their responsibilities over the labour rights in other countries within their supply chains. Inditex[1] IFA has taken a step further and Spanish textile corporation Inditex has agreed to recognise local unions as their official partners in their supply chain.

IFAs are non-binding agreements signed between monopolistic TNCs and GUFs. They present new opportunities for the global labour movement to intensify solidarity. Global Unions apply pressure over TNCs via organising, campaigning and negotiating to sign IFAs which would suggest a base for continuous negotiations with TNCs and an opportunity to overcome the shortcomings of voluntary one sided Code of Conducts (Hammer, 2005).

What could be done about the continued Human Rights Violations of Workers in the Electronics Sector?

Martina Hooper

This article looks into the issue of labour rights violations in the electronics industry, using the example of a recent report on Dell production in Shenzhen factories in China. After some background information on the sector itself, it briefly introduces the report, the research methodology, and key findings, before going on to highlight how these make a mockery of local and international laws, ILO standards, Dell’s own Code of Conduct and that of the Electronic Industry Citizen Coalition (EICC). These initiatives are failing. If however there is collaboration between large public buyers, sufficient leverage could be created to encourage industry to act. The proposed solution, Electronics Watch, plans to establish a sound local monitoring system, with supply chain reform elements built into public contractual procedures, in order for this to happen.

Light in Our Minds – Fire in Our Hearts!

Vasco Pedrina[1]

Since the 1980s, we have witnessed the political breakthrough of neoliberalism with its massive wave of privatisations, deregulation of the financial sector and of employment relations, as well as the partial dismantling of social security systems. That wave was followed by the enormous expansion of financial markets, along with their speculative excesses. All of that was a result of severe economic crises; resulting in a catastrophic social impact and very ominous political consequences, marked by the upsurge of extreme right-wing populist parties. As a result, the European Union whose social model has suffered hitherto unimaginable blows is on the edge of collapsing. As predicted a few years ago, by the great historian Eric Hobsbawm before his death, we are going through a long cycle of world economic crisis. The consequence would be a great danger of a renationalisation of policy aims, leading to the extremes of the last century, which was deeply scarred by two terrible world wars and their human and social destruction.

Outcomes of the 19th ICLS on Work Statistics: What counts as a Job?

Grant Belchamber

Sylvain Schetagne

A few months back, we raised issues regarding the revision by the International Conference of Labour Statisticians (ICLS) - organised by the ILO - on what counts as a job and the re-consideration and reset of guidelines to measure work and the labour force[1]. This debate came about because of the need to better provide policy makers with accurate information on the state of work and the labour markets. This debate was further fueled by the stagnant key labour market indicators. 

Thirty years ago, the main objective of employment statistics was to measure labour inputs in production, to calculate GDP and measure economic growth. The lens for measuring employment and unemployment was constructed to meet the needs of producing the National Accounts. Today, policy makers want to know about labour market trends, the effectiveness of labour market programs, labour underutilization, the participation of different sub-groups of the population and the engagement with the market economy.

Better Work or ‘Ethical Fix’? Lessons from Cambodia’s Apparel Industry

Dennis Arnold

The global apparel industry is characterised by low wages, poor occupational health and safety, and restrictions on freedom of association. These problems persist in spite of numerous corporate social responsibility initiatives, consumer campaigning for improved labour rights, and trade union organising in industrialising countries. In the wake of the Rana Plaza collapse in Bangladesh on April 24, debates over the ‘race to the bottom’ for cheap and flexible labour have re-emerged. For example, Disney corporate representatives, who terminated sourcing to Bangladesh in late 2012 in response to a spate of factory fires, were quoted in a recent article saying the company would consider allowing its licensees to produce in Bangladesh if the country implemented the ILO’s Better Work programme, which uses ILO monitoring of factories in Cambodia as its model (Greenhouse 2013). Dan Rees, director of Better Work, is quoted in the same article saying before his organisation would get involved in Bangladesh, the country needed to enact stronger labour protection and stop suppressing trade unions.

Brazilian Protests and their Effect on Labour

Kjeld Jakobsen

Introduction
At the beginning of June, some Brazilian municipalities and local state governments decided upon a change in prices of public transport, with an approximate increase ranging between 5% and 10%, depending on the city or state. Minimal issues were expected as a result of this change because on average, the inflation rate sat on approximately 6% a year and, there was at least a two year gap since the previous increase in price. However, the motion put forward has triggered protests in many Brazilian cities, with a youth movement reiterating demands for free transport for students.

Brazilians experience new forms of political participation
The initial protests comprised of small opportunist groups who went to the extent of smashing windows and the entrances of some metro stations; provoking harsh reactions from local state police. Far worse, some rioters in São Paulo surrounded a policeman and assaulted him. Two days later a new march was organized, with approximately two thousand participants. It is alleged that police came out to avenge the attack on their colleague and subsequently reacted with extreme violence. Unfortunately, this confrontation also came to affect some people who were not actively involved in the protest, with an extreme incident of a journalist who lost her eye due to a rubber bullet being shot and another incident where people inside cafés were allegedly beaten with riot police sticks.

A Lesson from South Africa: Are Construction Cartels dramatically increasing Brazil's 2014 FIFA World Cup Infrastructure Costs?

André Furlan Meirinho

Paulo Capela

Eddie Cottle

Introduction

The 2008 report of the competition committee of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) into the construction sector found that, ‘Unfortunately the construction industry has tended to suffer from cartel activity, as shown by the spate of well-publicised recent matters around the world’. There were 19 countries included in this OECD roundtable from Europe, Asia, North America and notably South Africa that participated. South Africa presented its report on the massive cost overruns in relation to the 2010 FIFA World Cup stadiums which it, at the time, suspected of bid-rigging.[i]  

Through the collusive practice of bid rigging and excessive overpricing, construction companies extract or attain huge financial gains for themselves at the expense of workers and the tax payers of host countries. By implication this means the development goals that governments set themselves when hosting the World Cup are offset in part by massive transfers of wealth to private companies at the expense of job creation and income redistribution, thus stifling the economic multiplier that is intended. It is in this context that nationwide discontent emerged in Brazil involving over one million people.

Zero-hours Contracts

Steve Davies

Introduction
This summer in the United Kingdom (UK), ‘zero-hours contracts’ grabbed the headlines and dominated discussion about changes to working life. Zero-hours contracts are those in which a worker agrees to be available for work with a particular employer but without any guaranteed hours or times of work and therefore usually no guaranteed pay either. Under these contracts employers only need to pay for work when they need it. These contracts are not a new phenomenon, although the scale of their current use in the UK is unprecedented. This is seen by employers and ministers as part of the ‘necessary’ flexible labour market.

Who benefits from flexibility?
The Conservative-dominated British government boasts the UK is on the road to economic recovery and that, even at the worst point of the crisis, the private sector created hundreds of thousands of jobs which compensated for the impact of austerity on public sector employment. What ministers never explain is the nature of these new private sector jobs or how the crisis has been used to restructure the labour market. The increase in forms of ‘flexible’ work is closely related to the attacks on workers’ rights and trade unions. Thatcher began the process of weakening the position of workers, through legislative change to the labour markets and through laws which made it more difficult for unions to engage in legal strikes. This assault continued under the Blair and Brown ‘new Labour’ governments (Blair boasted that the UK had the least regulated labour market of any major industrialised country). The current British government has pushed even harder to remove legal protections for workers and to discourage the use of remaining legal protections by increasing the costs of bringing a case.

Why asbestos should be banned

Jan Cremers

There has been an outburst of public anger after the ‘discovery’ of asbestos polluted social housing, despite there being several other topical asbestos related incidents. This coupled with the spectacular Turin trial against some captains of industry who were sentenced for knowingly exposing their workforce for decades to the killing fibre and the alarming reports of annual death rates among teachers who were working in asbestos containing public schools. In turn, the driving thoughts behind recent research by a group of outstanding international experts were of a more pragmatic nature. The aim was to document that asbestos is still carried around the globe and that there is no reason to retreat from the fight against the trend and its effects. Unfortunately, the European Union (EU)-wide ban is not the end of the hazardous story; it is only one of the necessary steps to protecting workers and citizens against the fatal consequences of the use of a mineral fibre that started as the eternal, global insulation champion. The fairy tale of 'safe handling' that still leads to import and use in large parts of the world has to stop. In the following sections we summaries major developments that led to a slow phasing-out in Europe and a turn to other continents by the industry.

State Funding of Research and the Narrowing of Economics in the United Kingdom

Frederic S. Lee

In 1986, the United Kingdom instituted an exercise through which the allocation of state research funds to universities and their departments was based on the quality of the research they produced. While the official justification for the exercise was the need to be selective in the allocation of limited research funds, the non-talked about agenda behind the exercise was to reduce the number of research universities to a manageable number and to ensure that these elite universities conducted research and carried out teaching that was consistent with the interests of the economic and political elite which control the state. Consequently the ensuing research selectivity exercise known as the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) was and is popular with the Tories, New Labour, and anybody else who believes that the State should have quasi-direct and complete control over the thinking and research activities of its citizens.

Most academics initially thought the exercise would be a fair way of allocating state research funding when the state decided to reduce its commitment to higher education. However, in some disciplines, such as economics, it became evident by the mid-1990s that the exercise was also being used to cleanse economic departments of heterodox economic ideas that did not conform to mainstream (neoclassical) economic theory and with the neoliberal, pro-market policies based on the theory and which the state approved of. But the precise manner through which the cleansing process operated was not clearly understood. The rest of the article deals with the cleansing process, its consequences for UK economics, and what can be done about it.

The New Union Movement in Myanmar

Ross Wilson

The past year has seen the birth of a new union movement in Myanmar, after 50 years of brutal suppression of labour rights. More than 670 labour organisations have now been registered under the Labour Organisation Law, mostly small unions at enterprise level and concentrated in the agricultural, manufacturing and transport sectors, and with an estimated total membership of close to 200,000 workers. 

Given the history of oppression and the continuing hostility from many employers, this is a remarkable achievement, and reflects the determination of workers to exercise their new rights to associate, organise and negotiate. Many of them are young factory workers struggling to improve their wages and conditions of employment which, for many, are at exploitative levels.

The International Labour Organisation (ILO) quickly developed a programme to promote and support the new freedom of association rights which includes an awareness raising campaign with education and advice for workers, government officials and employers. However, the core of the programme has been bi-partite training workshops for the leaders of the new unions and their employers.

The new union leaders have taken up the opportunity to learn with enthusiasm, from the first major workshop in July last year attended by almost 300 people. To date more than 2,000 people have attended ILO workshops, with the two key leaders from each union being provided with the opportunity to attend the two-day basic training workshop.

Trade Unions in Western Europe: Hard Times, Hard Choices

Rebecca Gumbrell-
McCormick

Richard Hyman

The Challenges Facing European Trade Unions
For several decades, trade unions in Europe – long among the most powerful in the world – have been on the defensive. They have lost membership, sometimes drastically. Their collective bargaining power has declined, as has their influence on government and, in some countries, their public respect. Unions in Western Europe achieved their greatest socio-economic status half a century ago, in the context of large-scale industrial production (‘Fordism’) and the rise of the Keynesian welfare state. Leading employers were ‘national champions’, and national governments self-evidently shaped social and economic policy; it seemed obvious unions were crucial actors in a triangular relationship.

Today the landscape has changed irrevocably. Governments profess their inability to resist the dictates of global economic forces; major companies are almost universally transnational in their ownership and production strategies; trade unions are often disoriented. Many show obvious uncertainty as to their role in the 21st century, giving rise to internal conflicts. Some observers ask whether unions remain relevant socio-economic actors. But hard times can stimulate new thinking and hence provide new opportunities; the challenge is to review unions’ purposes and priorities and to devise new ways of achieving these. This can involve hard choices: not all objectives can receive the same priority, particularly when resources are scarcer.

Challenges facing the Argentinean labour movement in the 21st Century

Luis Campos

Being the “best student”: the legacy of neoliberalism in Argentina
Argentina faced a huge crisis at the end of the ’90s. After years of being the “best student” of international economic institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, its economy went into a recession in 1998 that led the country to a political and social crisis that reached a boiling point in 2001. During this crisis thousands of people protested daily against the government. Some of the protests were organized by unions, some by other civil society organizations and others were spontaneous.

The last chapter of this story is well known. The government repressed the protests, allegedly killing more than 30 people in December of 2001. However, the president was forced to resign and Argentina experienced a period of political and economic instability, which included five different presidents in a few weeks, and the declaration to default on its external debt.

For the workers and the unions the outcome of this process was devastating. Its origins lay in the military government that ruled the country between 1976 and 1983, setting ground for the implementation of neoliberal policies during the following decades. The average real wage in 2001 was 43% less than the 1975 real wage and after the devaluation of the currency in 2002 the unemployment rate reached almost 25% (against an average rate of 5%-6% during the ’80s) and the non-registered workers by that time were 49%[1]. At the same time, the Argentinean economy suffered a huge transformation, with an increase in the importance of finance, and the virtual extinction of “big industry”.

What counts as a Job?

Grant Belchamber

Sylvain Schetagne

When key labour market indicators barely move while millions suffer from the deepest economic crisis in decades, it is time to revise them.

Poor indicators make for poor public policy. The global crisis highlights the compelling need to set clear and relevant international standards to collect labour statistics and measure labour market trends.

This job falls to the International Conference of Labour Statisticians (ICLS), which is convened by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) every five years in Geneva. In October this year the 19th ICLS will re-consider and re-set the guidelines for measurement of Work and the Labour Force.

Different times, different needs
Today’s standards date from the 13th ICLS in 1982[1]. Thirty years ago the main objective of statistics on employment was to measure labour inputs in production, to calculate GDP and measure economic growth, and the lens for measuring employment and unemployment was constructed to meet the needs of producing the National Accounts.

The Crisis, Structural Reform and the Fortification of Neoliberalism in Europe

Christoph Hermann

The European Commission President, Jose Manuel Barroso, recently made the recommendation that fiscal consolidation (read “austerity”!) must continue in Europe, and that the European Union (EU) member states “should now intensify their efforts on structural reforms for competitiveness”. He specifically highlighted the need for comprehensive labour market reforms as “the best way to kick-start job creation”.[1] The call for structural reform to supplement austerity policies is not new. A number of EU member states have introduced far-reaching institutional reforms during the crisis – several of them under pressure from the European Central Bank, the European Commission and the International Monetary Fund. Structural reforms differ from regular austerity measures since their main goal is to change the country’s institutional framework to allegedly boost economic growth.

In the following paragraphs we summaries major structural reforms that we have found in eleven EU member states that were strongly affected by the crisis.[2]

On Labour Organisations in Myanmar

Stephen Campbell

When Myanmar's new Labour Organisation Law was promulgated in October 2011 it brought to an end a period of nearly 50 years during which independent workers' organisations had been effectively prohibited. Amidst the more open political climate of reform-era Myanmar, labour-related organisations and workers' unions have proliferated. The result is that some 500 organisations took part in the recent ILO-organised Labour Organisations Conference held in Yangon from 30 April to 1 May 2013.

Some rather chaotic events at the conference highlight a new set of challenges to workers in Myanmar as the liberalisation process has opened space for various actors seeking to shape the direction of the country's labour movement. On the first day of the conference, The Myanmar Times reported that some of the organisations in attendance raised concerns over what appeared to be a large number of unfamiliar faces in the room. Notably, these concerns were raised by members of the influential 88 Generation Students, a prominent group of Myanmar activists and ex-political prisoners. According to an article in the Myanmar Times:

Rana Plaza: Private Governance and Corporate Power in Global Supply Chains

Tandiwe Gross

With a death toll of over 1,120 people and more than 2,500 people injured, the collapse of the Rana Plaza building in Bangladesh on 24 April 2013 is one of the worst industrial accidents in world history. The 11-storey building accommodated shops and a bank on the ground floor and five textile factories with more than 3,000 workers on the upper floors. A day prior to the accident, workers identified major cracks in the building, which prompted the issuing of an evacuation order by the police. Despite this, on 24 April 2013 the workers were forced by the management to enter the building. The textile factories in Rana Plaza were suppliers to a number of popular international brands, including Primark, Bon Marche, Joe Fresh, El Corte Ingles, KiK and Mango. The building had been authorised by local authorities to be 8-storeys high. However, three additional storeys were illegally constructed. The reasons for the collapse are similar to those for the 2005 collapse of the Spectrum factory in Bangladesh which left 64 garment workers dead. There has been a series of fatal accidents in the country’s garment industry ever since. The last major factory fire, which resulted in 112 deaths in the Tazreen Fashion factory, occurred only a few months before the Rana Plaza building collapsed. In total, more than 700 workers have died in the industry since 2005, not including the victims of the Rana Plaza tragedy.[i] More than 8 years after the Spectrum factory collapse, the collapse of Rana Plaza shows that the structural causes of unsafe working conditions in Bangladesh’s garment industry have not changed.

Austerity and Resistance: The Politics of Labour in the Eurozone Crisis

Andreas Bieler[1]

Europe is haunted by austerity. Public sectors across the European Union (EU) have been cut back and working class gains from the post-war period seriously undermined. In this article, I will assess the causes of the crisis, its implications for workers and discuss the politics of labour in response to the Eurozone crisis. 

The underlying dynamics of the Eurozone crisis

Current problems go right back to the global financial crisis starting in 2007 with the run on the Northern Rock bank in the United Kingdom (UK) and reaching a first high point with the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in 2008. Two major consequences of the crisis can be identified. First, states indebted themselves significantly as a result of bailing out failing banks and propping up the financial system. Second, against the background of high levels of uncertainty financial markets froze. Banks and financial institutions ceased lending to each other as well as industrial companies. Countries too found it increasingly difficult to re-finance their national debts. The Eurozone crisis, also known as the sovereign debt crisis, commenced. 

Swiss Referendums on Top Salaries and Minimum Pay

Andreas Rieger

On 2 March 2013 a referendum in Switzerland came out in favour of tougher rules on the setting of managers’ remuneration. 68% of the voters wanted to put limits on “rip-offs” – in other words, the millions handed out in bonuses and severance payments (golden parachutes) to top managers. Coming up are further referendums on limiting top incomes and setting a legal minimum wage.

Since the turn of this century, remuneration packages for top managers in Switzerland have soared to several million francs. The CEOs and Chairmen of public companies, particularly the major banks and pharmaceuticals firms, have been pulling in sums that are really only comparable with those in the USA. Ten years ago, this was already causing strong public discussion. The debates grew even fiercer when the million-franc payouts continued through 2009, despite the financial crash and the collapse of previously good business results.

Membership-Leadership Conflict within a Trade Union on a South African Gold Mine: A Worker Perspective and Reflection on Marikana

Sizwe Timothy Phakathi

Worker agency – the idea that workers are active, creative and resilient reactors to capitalist and managerially defined work structures – is a fundamental part of the sociology of work and organisational psychology. Labour process studies have shown the significance of individual and collective human agency in capitalist production systems. The ability of workers to socially organise work in ways that make sense to them long manifested itself during the scientific management movement despite Taylorism’s failure to recognise the worker as a significant social actor within the workplace – the notion that was reasserted by the human relations movement theory.

Worker agency proved instrumental for workers in fighting racially repressive labour practices in colonial and apartheid mining workplace regimes. The agency of underground workers to resist the despotic management system was a boon to the formation of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) in the 1980s. In reflecting on the views of the NUM rank-and-file members solicited in a South African gold mine long before the eruption of the Marikana tragedy, this article seeks to pose a question: if workers can exercise their agency to restrict or expand output at the point of production, can they use their agency to withdraw or extend their union membership? The article seeks to highlight that membership-leadership conflict within the NUM was brewing in the gold mines long before the Marikana tragedy in the Rustenburg platinum belt.

The Troika and Multi-Employer Bargaining

Thorsten Schulten

How European pressure is destroying national collective bargaining systems
Collective agreements that extend beyond the immediate workplace or company level are rightly seen as one of the unique institutional features of the European social model. No other world region has any comparably well-developed system of multi-employer collective bargaining in which agreements cover not only entire industries but in some cases apply even nationally. The existence of collective agreements with such extensive coverage is one of the reasons why a clear majority of employees continue to be covered by collective bargaining in Europe. By contrast, in countries and regions in which the predominant level of bargaining is at the workplace or company, only a minority of employees have their employment conditions secured by collective agreement.

Although the past two decades have seen a shift to a greater decentralisation of collective bargaining in Europe, the core features of multi-employer collective agreements have remained remarkably stable in most European countries. In Western Europe, only the UK, beginning in the 1980s under Margaret Thatcher, has undergone a fundamental change from a system in which industry level bargaining played a major part to one that is overwhelmingly characterised by workplace bargaining. After 1990, the UK was joined by a number of Eastern European countries in which it has not been possible to construct a system of industry or national level bargaining. However, aside from these cases, multi-employer collective agreements, embracing a number of workplaces or even sectors, have remained the dominant constitutive feature of collective bargaining in Europe.

Gender and TU database – a Basis for Change?

Carol Jess

The Gender and Trade Unions Research Group (RG) was established in 2009 as a grassroots-driven alliance between trade unionists, practitioners in the broader labour movement, and academics. The focus of this RG is to broaden academic contributions relating to the positioning of women in trade unions. Its unique strength lies in the depth of experiences member researchers bring to its academic endeavours. As argued elsewhere “...the researchers are both ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’... [and] ...are actively engaged in labour movements... This unique combination of seemingly contradictory positions provides...a uniquely valuable vantage point as participant observers.” (Britwum, Douglas and Ledwith, 2012: 42)

The group is interested in the positioning of women in trade unions for a number of reasons. Of particular importance to the RG is the fact that, although increasing numbers of women are joining trade unions around the globe, this membership increase is not reflected in trade union leadership positions. The group has conceived, developed, and is implementing a database that is specifically designed to track the positioning of women in trade union leadership and other positions of authority within the labour movement. A driving force is to develop trade union consciousness about gender democracy deficits and to consider further action to close the gender gap.