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| Edlira Xhafa |
The right to strike is under attack in many countries across the world. Pressure on the right to strike has also increased at the international level. It culminated at the 2012 International Labour Conference (ILC) where the Employers’ Group challenged the existence of an internationally recognised right to strike protected by the ILO Convention No. 87 and questioned the role of the supervising machinery of the International Labour Organisation (ILO). The controversy may have a serious impact on the exercise of this fundamental right, especially in the current context where economic and security arguments are increasingly used as an excuse for the violation of fundamental human and democratic rights. The Friedrich-Ebert Stiftung (FES) report, “The right to strike struck down?”[1], sheds light on recent patterns and trends of violations of the international principles[2] on the right to strike.
Main patterns of violations
The report shows that of the 119 countries covered by the report, 117 have adopted legal measures (in law and/or case-law) and/or practices which violate international standards on the right to strike. Many countries have enacted restrictive legal measures prior to the 2012 ILC controversy. Such restrictions pertained mainly to (a) exclusion of groups of workers from the right to strike; (b) compulsory arbitration accorded to strikes; and c) excessive prerequisites to strike.
This is a shortened version of an interview by David Eloy that first appeared in the French magazine Altermondes.
On 25 February 2015, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) emerged from a crisis that had blocked it from functioning properly for three years. The cause of that crisis was that the employers’ organisations called into question the right to strike. Could you talk us through that dispute?
Bernard Thibault: The ILO was born in the aftermath of the First World War, in response to the simple observation that the origins of war are to be found in social precarity and poverty. So the nations agreed to create a body of worldwide labour law, including basic texts on freedom of association and the right to strike. Established a little later, the Committee of Experts on the Application of Conventions and Recommendations is tasked with examining how states implement these standards and with issuing opinions. So in case of violations, states can find themselves in the hot seat. But from 2012 onwards, the employers’ organisations contested the fact that these experts could recognise a right to strike in countries where this right is not provided for in the constitution.
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| Jörg Nowak |
The prison population in Germany has not been a focus of trade unions in the past, but it is an emerging site of industrial labour. Out of 60.000 prisoners in Germany, around 40 000 are workers and the rest are either retired or sick. In 11 out of 16 federal states, prison labour is forced labour. All major automobile producers in Germany are subcontracting assembly work to prisons, as well as white-goods producers and solar-energy companies.
Prisoners earn between € (Euro) 1.50 and €2 an hour while the German minimum wage is €8.50, and they do not have a right to strike. Prison workers are covered by unemployment insurance but excluded from old-age insurance. A law for old-age insurance was planned in 1977, but never legislated. The companies that outsource work to prisons are exempt from contributions to social insurance funds. Thus the unemployment insurance is covered by tax-payers.
While prison guards have long been organised in two different trade unions, prisoners were not organised until 2014. Two prisoners in Berlin-Tegel created the prisoners’ union GG/BO (Gefangenengewerkschaft/Bundesweite Organisation) in May 2014, and it now has around 800 members in more than 40 German prisons. A section was founded in Austria in late 2015.
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| Helen Russell |
Across the globe trade unions are faced with increasing restrictions on their ability to take industrial action. Within days of being elected to power, the British Conservative government announced its intention to make it harder for trade unions to take industrial action and introduced the Trade Union Bill, describing it as a “legislation to reform trade unions and to protect essential public services against strikes” (Queen Elizabeth II 2015).
The Bill is an assault on British trade unions, containing a raft of draconian measures designed to stifle their ability to protect workers’ rights. Although a continuation of the anti-trade union legislation passed since the 1980s by Conservative governments, the Trade Union Bill goes further than anything that Margaret Thatcher introduced.
New thresholds on union balloting
The Bill contains new thresholds and minimum turnouts for any industrial action ballot. Currently in the UK there is no minimum threshold for turnouts and ballots only require a simple majority to take action. However, for a ballot to be accepted now, unions in all sectors have to ensure that 50 percent of members vote.
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| Conor Cradden |
The potential for private or non-state regulation to improve labour standards has been much canvassed in recent years. It has been argued that working conditions in developing economies can be upgraded by making supply or investment contracts conditional on labour standards compliance. Alternatively, this can be achieved by offering access to premium price markets through product labels that certify the successful completion of a social auditing process. Nevertheless, it remains in dispute whether this kind of private regulation is effective from the perspective of workers. Existing research has found that while firms are often prepared to make modest improvements to pay for working conditions in pursuit of some market advantage, they remain unwilling to accept any significant increase in the capacity of workers to influence management decisions about employment conditions and the organisation of work. The research we report here confirms that as long as private regulators do not see it as their role to address the power imbalance between workers and employers, they will have little durable impact on labour standards.
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| Karin A. Siegmann |
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| Peter Knorringa |
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| Jeroen Merk |
Globalisation of production has been accompanied by a rise of informal and insecure work across different regions of the world, even in formal establishments. Yet, the role of labour has received scant attention in both the governance and analyses of global production networks (GPNs). Therefore, activists and scholars have demanded a “sea-change in the international business model and the active participation of informed and empowered workers” (Brown 2013: 5) that needs to be flanked by an analytical framework that puts workers’ agency at the centre.
This has motivated us to analyse the Freedom of Association Protocol, a voluntary initiative (VI) that has been implemented in the Indonesian sportswear industry since 2011. In that year, Indonesian exports of leather and leather goods peaked, generating more than 230 million USD in revenues (Statistics Indonesia 2014: 107). Overall, more than 600,000 workers were employed in the footwear industry in the same year, including production for the domestic market (CCC 2014). In export factories manufacturing footwear for Nike alone, one of the largest foreign buyers, more than 128,000 workers are currently employed, the vast majority of which are women workers (Nike 2014).
