German Federal Labour Court finds that third parties are not entitled to damages during a strike

Reingard Zimmer

Trade unions around the world are facing severe attacks from employers on the right to strike. In the ILO, employers challenged the findings of the CEACR (Committee of Experts on the Application of Conventions and Recommendations) that the right to strike should be part of Convention 87 on Freedom of Association. The recent decisions of the German Federal Labour Court (the BAG, in German) that third parties affected by a strike are not entitled to claim for damages,[1] is therefore tremendously important far beyond German borders. Accepting third parties’ compensation claims in Germany would have been a further limitation on the right to strike.

German air traffic controllers called for a limited strike at Stuttgart Airport in March 2009 against the airport operator. Flights were reduced during the strike. Several airlines claimed for damages, although they were only indirectly affected, on the basis of violation of property rights and infringement on their established and ongoing business. Furthermore, the claimants argued, air traffic controllers were not authorised to strike because they have a policing function. This became the first case in which the Federal Labour Court had to decide whether third parties who were not involved in collective bargaining could claim damages from the trade union if the strike was unlawful.

The court fortunately stated that third parties which have not been part of collective bargaining, but which suffered negative effects of a strike, do not have any claims against the striking union for compensation under common principles of tort law[2]. The court did not decide on the lawfulness of the strike because it had already denied the claim for reasons of tort law.

Using the CETA to move towards a social and environment-friendly globalisation

Reiner Hoffman

Economic globalisation has accelerated enormously. With the advances in information technology and international trade policies, it now permeates almost every sector of the economy as well as our whole way of life. At the same time, tariffs and technical trade barriers have been massively dismantled through wide-ranging market liberalisation, and worldwide competition has been ratcheted up. This has resulted in tenfold increase in global trade and investment flows since the end of the 1980s.

The positive benefits of global linkages have infiltrated so much of our everyday economic and cultural lives that we cannot imagine the world without them. The gains in prosperity are enormous. The downside of it, however, is that stronger competition has massively increased the pressure on pay and working conditions. This applies to Germany and the other member states of the European Union (EU); this does not exclude the disastrous working conditions in the Third World countries and the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) states. More and more, the workers are bearing the brunt of the increased competition and social standards are coming under growing pressure. Unimpressively, the increased prosperity has been most unevenly distributed. While the wealthiest one per cent of the world population is clearly profiting from globalisation, the incomes of large portions of the middle class in the industrialised countries are stagnating and the poorest of the world population are seeing their real incomes decline.

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. 

It is time for a global framework agreement in world sport

Walter Palmer

The labour and intellectual property rights of athletes are critical to the staging and marketing of international sporting events such as world championships and the Olympic Games, yet sports organisations have been slow to allow athletes any real power over the conditions of their participation. It’s time for athletes to take the initiative.

There has been progress representing workers’ interests around the field of competition, such as the agreement between the Trades Union Congress (TUC) and the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (LOCOG) at the 2012 Olympics (TUC 2011), but the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and international sports organisations have retained almost exclusive control of the athletic workplace that fuels a multi-billion dollar sport entertainment business.

As the potential corruption and large scale social consequences of outdated governance models in international sport have become more and more apparent, the conversation needs to shift from the academic discussion prevalent today to one about action. Nothing would provide a more positive jolt to the moribund governance of international sport than if elite athletes were recognised as workers and allowed to negotiate the terms and conditions of their participation. If sports organisations en-gaged in social dialogue with independent, well-resourced athletes’ associations with a stake in the success of the event or sport, the benefits to democracy, transparency and accountability would be lasting. Unfortunately, the past few years’ experience demonstrates that international sport, instead of holding itself to a higher standard, has not yet exhausted lobbying for special treatment – a ‘sporting exception’ – under the guise of specificity and autonomy. Instead of honoring and respecting the rights of athletes in their workplace, international sport organisations have become adept at a practice that is becoming more and more common in the wider world of work: avoiding an employment relationship with their key workers.

Illegal and criminalised: undocumented Zimbabwean migrant workers as unfree labour in Witbank, South Africa

Johannes Machinya

Restrictive immigration enforcement practices have seen an increasing convergence between immigration and criminal justice systems with undocumented (im)migration becoming more illegalised and criminalised. Criminalising migrant ‘illegality’ gives legal legitimacy to discrimination and exclusion of undocumented migrant workers. It creates legalised unfreedoms and produces undocumented migrant workers as a subordinate workforce without legal status – a palatable fodder for exploitative employers, particularly in the informal sector.

This paper is based on in-depth interviews conducted for my Doctoral research in Witbank, South Africa, with undocumented migrant workers from Zimbabwe from July 2015 to July 2016 on their experiences of ‘illegality’ in their everyday encounters with state power. Migrant ‘illegality’ is a mode of being-in-the-world which works as a powerful disciplining mechanism for undocumented migrants. It is a condition attributed to the unlawful entry, residing and/or working by foreigners in South Africa without official documentation authorising them to do so. However, De Genova (2004:161) argues that migrant ‘illegality’ should not be simplistically conceived as the “presumably transparent consequence of unauthorised border crossing or some other violation of immigration law”; rather, it needs to be analysed as a complex “juridical status and a socio-political condition” (Willen, 2007:9) experienced in the everyday lives of undocumented migrants.