Can the future of work be uncoupled from productive development?

Guillermo Zuccotti

As the International Labour Organisation (ILO) prepares to celebrate its 100th anniversary, the debate is underway as to the future of work.

When we, the workers, are called on to discuss this issue in light of the current global context, our minds turn to the social value of a return to work as a driver of upward social mobility, something that must be advocated on the world stage.

The crisis of the Welfare State
The crisis in social welfare of the 1970s, which was marked by changes in production patterns, gave rise to explanations of the crisis in work – and in particular waged work (Gorz 1982, Fitoussi and Rosanvallon 1997) – that at the extreme predicted the end of work (Rifkin 1996), arguments that guided the thinking of international organisations such as the IMF and World Bank on this subject.

And so the world continued its relentless march towards a second best in terms of the quality of human work and the associated labour rights standards. Evidence of this can be found in the institutionalisation of informal labour as a form of production and source of labour. This informality was also responsible for the phenomenal increase and concentration of profits in the hands of a few, oligopolising the structure of the markets in our countries.

Greece under the Troika

Wolfgang Däubler

An interview with Professor Wolfgang Däubler, conducted by Ciaran Cross, researcher for the International Centre for Trade Union Rights (ICTUR).

Professor Däubler, could you first explain a little about the situation faced by the Greek economy after the 2008 financial crisis?

The crisis made the problems already existing in Greece even more urgent. And, due to the competition between the different countries in the Eurozone, Greece had limited options. When Greece had its own currency, the drachma, there was a possibility of devaluation – one could devaluate the currency if the country was unable to face the competition. But this possibility no longer exists if you are a member of the Eurozone. And therefore Greece had to look for another form of devaluation – internal devaluation. That means they were economically forced to reduce wage costs.

This was done in a very brutal way. Of course, Greece did not choose this of its own will, but under the influence of the so-called Troika [the European Commission, the IMF and the European Central Bank]. By 2012, they had demolished the whole system of collective bargaining and reduced the minimum wage. Today wages are at 75% of the level before 2010, and unemployment is around 24% to 25%. Among young people under the age of 25, unemployment is 50%. That's a catastrophe. 

Labour rights indicators: a new resource for better understanding of labour rights in the world

by Mark Anner, David Kucera, Dora Sari

Is compliance with international labour standards good for economic development, or does non-compliance give countries a competitive advantage? Are we faced with a ‘race to the bottom’ with respect to labour standards? And how might the answers depend on a country’s level of development as well as on the particular industries and labour standards in question? In the absence of clear-cut answers, debates about the impact of labour standards on economic development have only intensified with the rapid expansion of preferential trade agreements including labour provisions as well as debates over such contested mega-regional trade agreements as the now defunct Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), which have generated heated discussions in a number of high-level policy forums.

As old as these questions are, we still lack anything like definitive answers to them. Knowing the answers should not call into question the objective of improving compliance with international labour standards, but rather inform the strategy by which this is pursued. In spite of there being a fair amount of research, a key bottleneck in moving forward is adequate measures for many international labour standards, particularly for freedom of association and collective bargaining (FACB) rights which are intrinsically difficult to measure. To address this gap, new labour rights indicators and an accompanying dataset, both focusing on FACB rights, have been launched by the Center for Global Workers’ Rights at Penn State University together with the Global Labour University.

The right to strike under attack: Recent patterns and trends of violations

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.

What is at stake with the coup in Brazil?

Antonio de Lisboa Amancio Vale

Brazil's current political crisis was stirred up from the day after President Dilma Rousseff was re-elected with more than 54 million votes in October 2014. It was the fourth consecutive victory of progressive forces in the country's presidential elections.

First the national right wing, again defeated, asked for a recount. Then they tried to question the budgetary accounts of the re-elected president’s campaign and sponsored several other maneuvers aimed at impeachment. Since 2015, fabricated scandals were widely publicised by the media, giving truth to hundreds of lies. The architecture of the coup was drawn, therefore, from the daily action of the media oligopoly (in Brazil, six families control 80% of the media – TV, newspapers, magazines, radio, news agencies, and web sites) with financial support from industry, the finance sector, and agribusiness.

The right wing that conspired openly against an elected president’s mandate is the result of centuries of slavery and resistance against slavery which mark Brazil’s history. It is the legitimate heir of the social and economic forces historically responsible for that regime. When they reached the country, these elites stormed our land and wealth. Captured Africans were brought by force to Portuguese America, and initially became the fundamental labour force in sugarcane, tobacco and cotton plantations. Later this was repeated in villages and towns, mines, and cattle ranches. The socially dominant class, consisting of a white minority, justified this condition by pseudo-religious and racist ideas that legitimised their alleged superiority and their privileges. 

Antonio Gramsci and Britain’s Corbyn moment

Camila Bassi

Introduction

From the mid-1990s, the British Labour Party explicitly oriented to free market capitalism and adopted a new version of Clause IV of the Party constitution, which decisively turned away from the original promise to ‘secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry’ (cited in Gani, 2015). New Labour, as it was branded, pushed politically conservative discourse and policy on social justice (in contrast to redressing poverty and inequality), on workfare (as opposed to welfare), and on crime and immigration, and it implemented public-private partnerships and private finance initiatives to dismantle the public sector and welfare state. New Labour’s landslide electoral successes in 1997 and 2001 indicated its firm hegemony of the Party and the labour movement base: a swing in the Party’s basic contradiction, as a bourgeois-workers’ party, to its right-wing pole.

A majority on the British Left regarded such changes as irreversible. No one predicted that in the Labour Party leadership race of 2015 the socialist candidate of Jeremy Corbyn would win, and with a huge mandate. Corbyn’s election manifesto included demands for growth not austerity, public ownership of the railways and the energy sector, a large-scale public and private house-building programme and rent controls, reinvestment in the welfare state, the abolition of zero hours contracts, and the right of trade unions to organise collectively to redress workplace injustice. While arguably not going far enough, notably, in failing to promise that Labour Party MPs will not implement existing Conservative Government funding cuts to the public sector, Corbyn nonetheless stands in stark opposition to unbridled capitalism.

Sex Workers’ Struggles: Trade Unions must accept Workers’ Realities

Thierry Schaffauser

While Amnesty International adopted a policy favouring full decriminalisation of sex work earlier this year, the labour movement remains divided: should it see sex work as violence against women, to be abolished (Bindel 2003), or as a legitimate occupation needing to be unionised (Hardy 2010)? Sex workers have organised for their rights since at least the 1970s, even forming or joining trade unions in some cases, but the labour movement tends to ignore these efforts.

Sex workers do matter! 
The debate around decriminalising sex work often focuses on questions such as whether or not we like the job, if we have been forced to engage in it, or if we have been raped as children. These questions are never asked about other workers before defending their rights. As sex workers, we accept that work is, most of the time, not a choice but an economic constraint, and we are able to distinguish between slavery, forced labour, and the consented exploitation of our work.

The conflation of sex work with trafficking conceals much about the reality of sex work. For instance, peep shows, bars, or massage parlours have to hide the fact that sex work happens. As a result, neither condoms nor information about safe sex are available in those workplaces. In some clubs, employers refuse to pay for heating while workers are almost naked. In others, sex workers now have to pay fees to enter when they used to be paid for their presence. Legal constraints on sex work allow websites and newspapers to censor our adverts as they please, making us pay again for new ones.

The Bangladesh Accord - a model to secure workers rights in global supply chains?

Frauke Banse

After the collapse of the Rana Plaza Building in Bangladesh in April 2013, there was massive public outrage on retailers and brands in Europe. It was under these conditions that a coalition of Bangladeshi unions, workers’ rights organisations such as the Clean Clothes Campaign (CCC) and the Workers’ Rights Consortium (WRC), and the global union federations IndustriALL and UNI Global Union was able to establish the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh. This agreement, known as the Accord, was to be signed by brands and retailers sourcing from Bangladesh. It is legally binding and has high standards of transparency. Labour and ca­pital are represented equally in the governing body of the Accord, and workers´ health and safety committees, with at least 50% of re­presentatives drawn from labour, have to be established in the factories covered by the Accord. The Accord provides the chance to reduce the incidence of deadly accidents in Bangladesh´s garment industry. Due to heavy public pressure, more than 200 companies have so far signed the Accord. It now covers more than 1 600 of nearly 6 000 Ready Made Garment (RMG) factories in Bangla­desh (BGMEA, 2014; Accord, 2015).

IndustriALL (2013a and 2013b) sees the success story of the Accord as a potential model for new forms of global industrial relations.[1] Similar sentiments were raised by the International Trade Union Conference (ITUC) and the German retailer KiK (ITUC, 2014; KiK, 2013). However these sentiments tend to overlook, first, the specific circumstances under which the Accord came into being and, second, the problems of practical implementation.

Portugal’s new social and political context

Elísio Estanque

Hermes Augusto Costa

The elections on 4 October 2015 ushered in a changed parliamentary scenario which seems to herald a major political shift. After four years of austerity, which have affected every aspect of Portuguese life but particularly labour, the election outcome proved contradictory right from the start. The victory of the right-wing alliance between the Social Democratic Party, the PSD, and the Social Democratic Centre, the CDS, opened up the possibility for an alliance of the left.

The election results
There was a high rate of abstention – 44.14 % - from the parliamentary elections. The PSD-CDS coalition, which had been in government since 2011, received the most votes (36.86 % of the votes), followed by the Socialist Party (32.31 %), the Left Bloc (10.19 %) and the Portuguese Communist Party (8.25 %). In our view, this electoral outcome was not because the Portuguese people like austerity. Rather, the following factors must be considered:

UK Trade Union Bill: Latest in line of global attacks on right to strike

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.

After Rana Plaza: Multi-Stakeholder Governance of the RMG Industry in Bangladesh

Mohd Raisul Islam Khan

Christa Wichterich

In April 2013, the collapse of the Rana Plaza building in Bangladesh that killed 1,129 garment workers and left more than 2,500 seriously wounded generated a huge public outcry at the national and international level. The tragedy broadened earlier demands from trade unions and rights-based campaigns for regulation of labour relations in transnational apparel production chains and for improvement of workplace safety in the Readymade Garment (RMG) industry in Bangladesh. Public pressure led to the adoption of a range of action plans and agreements. The most notable is The Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh (Accord), the first legally binding multi-stakeholder agreement signed by over 180 apparel corporations, two global union federations IndustriALL and UNI Global Union, labor rights campaign groups and Bangladeshi trade unions. The Accord stipulates comprehensive inspection of the fire and building safety status of the factories, which should result in Corrective Action Plans (CAPs) to ensure remediation of safety hazards, a fire and building safety training and empowerment measures for workers. Thus the agreement acknowledges that workers’ participation has to play a significant role in improving workplace safety.

In parallel, the Government of Bangladesh has adopted the National Tripartite Plan of Action on Fire Safety and Structural Integrity (NTPA) which stipulates to accomplish 23 activities related to legislation and policies, administrative and institutional upgrading, as well as practical activities along with factory level safety inspections. The adoption of these regulatory tools was welcomed as a “breakthrough” for the RMG sector in Bangladesh.

Reflections on the Fair Food Agreement between the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and retail multinational Ahold

Karin Astrid Siegmann

Ahold signs on to a programme for farmworkers’ labour rights
On the 29th of July 2015, the Dutch retailer Ahold announced a historic agreement with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), a migrant farmworkers’ organisation in Florida’s tomato fields. Being signatory of the CIW’s Fair Food Program (FFP) implies the following: Ahold-USA commits to a wage premium in its supply chain in the form of a ‘penny per pound’ of harvested tomatoes, compliance with the Fair Food Code of Conduct, the provision of worker-to-worker education sessions, a worker-triggered complaint resolution mechanism, as well as the establishment of health and safety committees on every participating farm.

The retailer’s participation represents a quantum leap towards decent work for workers who are disadvantaged relative to most other US wage and salary workers on the basis of their poverty, occupational hazards, their vulnerability to unemployment and their irregular immigration status (Kandel 2008). 

The agreement marks a U-turn for Ahold. Since 2010, the company had responded to the CIW’s Campaign for Fair Food with a ‘slow NO’. During shareholder meetings and in public statements, the retailer had denied responsibility for farmworker wages in their suppliers’ fields, arguing that enforcement of labour standards is the duty of US public bodies. In addition, it maintained that its own Standards of Engagement for suppliers were sufficient to guarantee fair and dignified working conditions in its supply chain, and that it already sources from growers who participate in the FFP - without disclosing, though, who those tomato growers are.

The Labour Code on Industrial Relations Bill 2015: Tough times ahead for labour in India

Sharit Bhowmik

Headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, as of May 2014, the right-wing government has been in talks of increasing jobs by restricting workers’ rights. The government has categorically stated that, in the past, too much protection was given to workers in the formal sector. Subsequently, this is the main hurdle for expanding employment. If job protection is removed, job creation (it was argued) will peak when the employers have the power of hiring and firing. In keeping with its objectives, the government has decided to amend and amalgamate the existing laws that provide protection to labour. The Factories Act has been redefined to exclude all manufacturing units that employ less than 40 workers. In other words, nearly 75% of factories in the country will be exempted from regulating working conditions. Similarly four acts relating to wages and bonuses have been merged in one code. However the approval of parliament will be required before they become laws.

Freedom of Association and the Right to Strike

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva

It is a fact that technological innovations and changes in the organization of work have caused alterations in the labour market, making certain international labour standards obsolete and, at the same time, giving rise to demands for new rights. However, this does not justify the pressure that the International Labour Organization (ILO) has been put under to reduce its character as an International Organization (IO) to that of an agency of the United Nations system, nor indeed the questioning about whether the right to strike is part of Convention 87, on freedom of association, although the ILO has been fostering this concept for more than sixty years now. 

The ILO is one of the oldest and most important organizations in the UN system. It is also the only one to be run on a tripartite basis – governments, employers and workers. It has standard-setting and supervisory powers, as well as mechanisms for annulling obsolete standards, for updating incomplete standards and for enabling member countries to denounce Conventions that they consider unsuitable. So the instruments for perfecting the standards system do exist.

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].