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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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| Sarah Godar |
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| Achim Truger |
Over the past decades, the redistributive effect of the tax system in most OECD countries has been substantially and deliberately weakened by tax policies which reduce the tax burden on wealth. Personal and corporate income tax rates have been massively reduced and special provisions privilege capital income. At the same time, rich individuals and corporations have increasingly used legal and illegal tax evasion by shifting income or profits to low tax countries. If this trend continues, the disparities in income distribution will continue to rise. In the long run the financing of the welfare state will be seriously threatened.
However the budgetary stress experienced since the Great Recession, together with substantial increases in disparities in the distribution of income and wealth, have put progressive tax reforms back on the agenda in many OECD countries. There are some signs that the downward trend in redistributive taxation may be coming to a halt (Godar/Paetz/Truger, 2014). A number of international institutions have also commented in a more or less progressive way on how to achieve fiscal consolidation through a socially acceptable tax reform.
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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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| 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.
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| 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.
