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| Paul Rechsteiner |
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| Renzo Ambrosetti |
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| Andreas Rieger |
On 9 February a narrow majority of Swiss voters voted in favour of an initiative by the Swiss People's Party (SVP) calling for the reintroduction of quotas for immigrants from the EU. This decision is a huge setback for immigrants to Switzerland, for trade unions and for all progressive forces, and leads Switzerland unavoidably up a blind alley.
The background
Switzerland has been a country of immigration since the beginning of the 20th century. Already in the 1970s, people with other passports accounted for more than 20% of the population. At that time, immigration was governed by a system of quotas and special statuses which left migrants completely without rights: Seasonal workers were only entitled to fixed-term residence permits which in addition were valid only for a specific employer. Moreover, migrants’ families were not permitted to join them under any circumstances. In the late 1980s, however, the statute governing seasonal workers came under increased pressure from Swiss trade unions that succeeded in organising a very large number of migrant workers.
In 1992 Switzerland's accession to the European Economic Area (EEA) came up for discussion. The aim was to introduce free movement of people as defined by the European Community at that time, i.e. to abolish quotas and discriminating regulations. Swiss trade unions supported this. But in 1992 50.3% of Swiss voters voted against the EEA. One of the main reasons behind this was the desire of national conservative right-wing parties to keep their distance from the European Community. But another reason was the fact that blue- and white-collar workers feared that free movement of workers would undermine the Swiss wages and labour standards.
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| Chris Bonner |
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| Barbro Budin |
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| Karin Pape |
“Yes we did it!”[1], a statement that best captures the jubilant mood on the last day of the Founding Congress of the International Domestic Workers Federation (IDWF) in 2013. It is also the title of a new book launched at that Congress, which tells the story of how domestic workers organised to win the Domestic Workers Convention, C189, at the International Labour Conference (ILC) of the ILO on 16 June 2011.
Just over two years later, domestic workers have done it again. Another milestone has been achieved through the formation of a fully constituted, democratic federation of 48 membership-based domestic workers’ organisations representing around 300 000 domestic workers globally. This will ensure that the Convention is not forgotten, and that the struggle for “decent work for domestic workers’ continues in a coordinated and sustained manner.
The launching of the IDWF has wider implications because it marks an important moment in the history of the Labour Movement. For the first time a global union organisation has been formed by women from the poorest sections of society, with an all-women elected leadership. The transformation from a network to a global federation was decided upon by representatives of 48 domestic workers’ organisations, from 42 countries.
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| Joyce Abebrese |
The rise of globalisation and economic growth, evolving throughout the last decades, brought about several forms of inequality and injustice among and within the different countries of the world. Not all economic growth can be assigned to decent and productive employment for the people, since it has not led to a reduction of poverty and informal labour (International Labour Organisation (ILO) 1999). Developing countries, in particular, struggle because they often lack efficient social security and social protection systems to care for the unemployed, diseased and vulnerable parts of society. Jütting and de Laiglesia (2009, 9) find that “informal employment is the norm, rather than the exception, in most developing countries”. Poverty reduction and creation of decent employment need to be followed by national strategies to achieve better economic and social development.
Informal workers show a high risk for poverty
The ILO finds that in many African countries, farmers and informal workers are the groups which are affected most by poverty (ILO 2004). In sub-Saharan Africa, countries show infor-mal non-agricultural work proportions of more than 80% (Jütting/ de Laiglesia 2009, 18). As opposed to the formal economy, informal workers have little or no social security, battle with lower incomes, and deal with precarious work. Most of the newly created employment in the informal economy inserts people into a “vicious circle of low pay, high risks and limited mobility” (ibid. 18).
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| Ben Selwyn |
The question of Decent Work (DW) – employment under conditions of freedom, equity, security and dignity – is, fundamentally, a question of human development. The Decent Work Agenda (DWA) has become part of the Millennium Development Goals, many of the world’s governments have signed its core conventions, and international institutions have incorporated the DWA into their development discourses. Despite these achievements the possibilities of achieving Really Decent Work (RDW) for the world’s labouring class appears distant. There are several reasons for this, but one is the limited and conservative nature of the DWA and the ILO’s conceptual inability to link RDW to broader processes of human development. DW’s conceptual weakness stems from its authors’ inability to see beyond labour’s subordinate relation to states and capital. DW does not generate a vision of a fundamentally different world, but an ameliorated version of the present. This accommodation to the present leads to a deep theoretical and conceptual weakness at the heart of the DW concept, so much so that it undermines its own immediate objectives. Put differently, the ILO’s efforts to promote DW are valuable, but their inability to adopt theoretical categories that explain reasons for indecent work undermine their objective and hamstring the efforts of labouring classes as they attempt to ameliorate their conditions.
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| Heikki Patomäki |
In a global world, the question of solidarity is acquiring new dimensions. Transnational solidarity seems an adequate response to the power of multinational corporations and global finance. A number of analysts have depicted how activists are now working across state boundaries and forming transnational networks, campaigns and organisations. The problem is that more often than not, the new forms of solidarity have been limited to resisting privatisation, deregulation flexibility, and welfare cutbacks. At the same time the emerging field of transnational labour regulation has been mostly confined to the private, voluntary sphere. A wider and deeper conception of solidarity seems to be missing.
Meanings of solidarity
Solidarity is a modern concept. It is tightly bound with the juridical concept of equality and the political concept of democracy. Although legal in its origins and commonly used for many purposes, in the workers’ movement the concept of solidarity has essentially been also a way to overcome the dilemmas of organising collective actions. The concept of political equality in the bourgeois democracy of 1792 turned into a guiding concept of the social emancipation of workers just half a century later. Since 1848 activists have often envisaged a common debt or solidarity obligation and, by acting upon it, sometimes have made it at least partially true. In the contemporary global world, it is this moral and future-oriented application that should characterise attempts to create and sustain various transformative social and political movements and to globalise labour unions.
