A New Tool Is Born – The Social Protection Floor Index

Cäcilie Schildberg

Mohamed Attaallah

In 2012, the international community adopted Recommendation 202, concerning national floors of social protection, in the International Labour Conference (ILC) in Geneva. The recommendation calls on the 184 member states to implement nationally defined guarantees of income security from childhood through economically active age to old age, as well as access to essential health care. The need for universal social protection policies was acknowledged and reinforced by heads of states in the Sustainable Development Goals adopted in September 2015 in New York.

But moving governments from easy promises at the global level to real policy action at the national level only happens, in many cases, under pressure. How can implementation of social protection policies be supported?

The Global Coalition for Social Protection Floors, founded in March 2012, played an important role in pushing for a strong recommendation at the ILC in 2012 (Global Coalition, n.d.). The coalition is a network of more than 90 civil society and trade union umbrella organisations committed to supporting social protection floors as key instruments to realise the human right to social security and the advancement of social justice. The Global Coalition represents millions of people organised in or affiliated to the umbrella organisations that are members of the Global Coalition.

Interview with German prisoners union GG/BO about the recent prison strike in December 2015

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.

Switzerland-China Free Trade Agreement and Labour Rights

Zoltan Doka

Vasco Pedrina

After four years of negotiations, Switzerland has become the second European country to sign a free trade agreement (FTA) with China[1]. The importance of the FTA rests in the fact that China regards it as a significant trial run for further FTAs with industrialised countries and the European Union (EU). This has led to political controversies accompanying the negotiation process.

Right from the start, the Non-governmental Organisations (NGOs) and the trade unions successfully committed the Swiss negotiating party to the inclusion of a “durability chapter” in this FTA, which emphasis human rights and labour rights as well as environmental standards. Swiss officialdom had long upheld a taboo on mixing trade issues with commitments to such standards by building them into an FTA; changing course in 2010 – mainly due to an international trend[2].

Human Rights and the Freedom of Association in Eastern Europe: The Challenges of Zhanaozen and the Hopes of the Maidan

Kirill Buketov

The outcome of the current confrontation between Ukraine and Russia is yet unclear, but already it has become evident that the social and economic system of the region’s two largest countries will change. This article is about emerging threats and opportunities in the area of labour relations in terms of workers’ ability to realize their collective rights. 

Post-Soviet Legal Context
Workers’ right to organise and bargain collectively has been recognised by the United Nations as fundamental and is enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. These are the rights that empower any worker to participate in economy and ensure a balanced distribution of profit created by labour. Recognition of these rights is one of the main features that make a modern civilised state distinct from despotic, authoritarian and totalitarian regimes. 

The Eastern European nations of the former Soviet Union are going through a painful and paradoxical transformation. The Soviet system of labour relations did formally recognise the right to organise freely and bargain collectively, although these rights were never realised in practice. Trade unions were a built-in part of the State machinery, dealing with the distribution of social benefits and workers’ edification in the spirit of love for the leaders of the one and only ruling political party.

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.