Friday 29th July 2005
Public meeting - 'Corpocracy vs the global commons'

Sharan Burrow

President, Australian Council of Trade Unions, (ACTU) and International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU)

Labour is not a commodity and the challenge of the 21st century is to establish a global rule of law that guarantees respect for the rights of working people without whom the global economy would collapse. The violations of human and trade union rights at the hands of multi-national enterprises (MNEs) either directly or indirectly through their supply chains, in too many countries, amounts to crimes against humanity. Despite this, the world’s governments, our governments, are either complicit or at best attuned to turning a blind eye to the plight of their own citizens.

As the global economy grows we should have cause for celebration for the advances that this should deliver for workers and their families all over the world. But the reality is that corporate greed is driving profit share at the expense of wages, safe workplaces, conditions and entitlements for workers.

There is a war going on and, not content with the raid on secure jobs and families lives they have already made through casualisation, short term contracts, labour hire and other forms of precarious employment, the corporate world is now going after overtime, shift allowances, rostering arrangements and a myriad of other established conditions and entitlements right up to and including the right to collective bargaining. The ugly side of the North American, anti-union/anti-worker corporate model is pitted against the European social model. Increasingly, we witness the compliance of governments who stand willing to do the bidding of such corporate dictators.

Nowhere is this more stark for me than in Australia. With the control of both houses of parliament, the Australian Government, pushed and prodded by business leaders, has blood in its sights - workers blood! “Every Australian worker deserves an individual contract!” is their battle cry.
Collective bargaining is ‘old economy’ they argue, anti-productive and the antithesis of productivity and should only happen where the boss agrees. Penalty rates for overtime and shift work, compensation for those family unfriendly hours, is so passé that the 38 hour week should span Monday to Sunday. As for holidays and paid sick leave, well, why not cash them out and while we are at it, dismantle unfair dismissal protections for 99% of corporate workplaces in Australia. Union organising - lets restrict that, and lets set up the Orwellian named “Fair Pay Commission” to drive down those rises in the minimum wage. Our Prime Minister, John Howard, makes no excuse for whose side he is on - Trust Business, business knows what’s best!

Well, we say trust which business… James Hardie, Enron, Walmart? Not on our watch!
Labour is not a commodity and yet part, or all, of this agenda can be found in too many places around the world. The challenge is to fight back – to adopt a strategy that allows us to act locally and globally. Corporate reach must be our reach and collusive governments acting against the interests of their people must be turfed out as we put in place concrete plans to build union power and political power across the globe. The power to act in the interest of working people everywhere. A common interest to end corporate greed and build a just globalisation where workers rights and environmental standards underpin a fair system of trade. Where the social dividend is a guarantee of quality public services beginning with education and health.

Corporate greed is out of control. They are not content to raid the tax base necessary for services by demanding both lower taxes and more corporate subsidies. CEO salaries are so obscene that they have reached a level of moral depravity. Company management that pays less than $2 dollars a day to the poorest of workers in their supply chains or, in their own countries, campaigns against a minimum wage on which a family can live with dignity, pay themselves salaries and bonuses that are off the Richter scale of decency. In Australia at least, even for middle ranking companies, CEO salaries can now exceed three times in one week the total annual minimum wage for an employee.
With more than 2 billion living on less that $2 US a day, 187 million unemployed, 80 million of them young people and around 2.2 million dying at, or from work every year, the corporate world is not contributing to the growth that we care about – decent work everywhere.

Capital has a global reach but without global rules. Without a global governance architecture that protects the rights of workers and their communities, the corporate law of the jungle grows and so does the dislocation of jobs and the consequent divide between the rich and the poor within and across countries. This requires both union and political action from all of us. Unions have been instrumental in the fight to build legal entitlements nationally and we now need to do it globally.
It is therefore critical that unions act to organise workers everywhere, to bargain collectively across the global reach of the MNE’s and to include demands for respect of labour rights through the supply chains.

Increasingly our fate is interdependent and the challenge to shape a new globalisation requires us to realise a capacity for doing the things we do nationally and internationally. The link between national and international work is much more than a rhetorical sense of solidarity. It is now a reality and we must give practical effect to it. To bargain with a MNE in one country must be to bargain with that company everywhere. That requires organising within and across borders; it requires union recognition rights, built on the foundation of global framework agreements and bargaining on a global scale. Workers capital and shareholder campaigns must be brought into the fight in a more systematic way.

We must also be more creative and bargain where we can across unions for certainty for both employers and employees.

Companies that want certainty of production, of transport, packaging, warehousing and supply will see that respect for workers rights, for bargaining a fair deal and for dispute settling mechanisms are in their interests. Unions operating together can achieve security for workers. I was immensely heartened by the strength of commitment at a recent Pacific Rim conference hosted by US unions in California where rank and file members and union leaders - miners, steelworkers, manufacturing workers, transport workers and maritime workers - put strategic plans in place for these kind of joint union ventures across borders. The trust and commitment there, commitment to action that we also see in the work of Global Unions is a reflection of a courage to be both creative and as necessary, militant, as we build an organising and bargaining capacity worldwide.

This is where solidarity becomes self interest for all employees of a MNE irrespective of global location and where the only global architecture we can rely on at this point is our own values and our capacity to mobilise.

Union action must work for union members and thus our strength must also hold politicians accountable for the rights that their citizens are entitled to. Governments who fail to stand up for workers rights and moderate corporate behaviour through law don’t deserve the votes of working people.

A framework for fair trade also requires reform of the global institutions including the UN, the IMF, the World Bank and of course the WTO. Global rules and governance are necessary for fair trade. This is the case in our own nations and without an equivalent global rule of law, workers are more easily victimised. Global architecture that requires respect for the rights of workers and within which the ILO can receive complaints and prosecute abuses is essential if we are serious about justice. This of course requires a stronger role for the ILO. The nature and role of global institutions including the ILO, institutions we can respect, deserves serious debate amongst us with a view to developing broad consensus throughout the movement so we can all can get on with the political job to make it happen.

Unions are vitally interested in economic growth and sustainability. Industry policy or industrial development strategies, skills, research and development, intellectual property and services are all critical areas where, in the face of global trade, nations must be free to drive capacity for growth. This is necessary within a multilateral approach to trade but even more so as we face the distortion of bi-lateral trade arrangements and the increasing stalemate of global negotiations. The challenge for fair trade, a trading system that drives employment everywhere and guarantees that human rights and core labour standards are respected is greater and yet more obvious than ever.

The fact is that to win these ambitions we must re-build union strength but we must also hold elected leaders accountable for political action.

In regard to political action, the international union movement and broader civil society’s commitment to the Millennium Development Goals and the “Global Call to Action Against Poverty” is simply the beginning. While we must build alliances with appropriate NGO's, we need to recognise that at the heart of these efforts is the very serious drive for political influence. With a few exceptions, the governments of the world have moved to the right, are easily seduced by corporate board rooms, are intimidated by the dominant financial policies of the WB, the IMF and the OECD. Where they are not creating it they are timid in opposition to the rise in racism and xenophobia.
Only when unions and civil society stand together against the might of the corporate world and in defence of good political leaders will we send the pendulum swinging back the other way.

The challenge of the “Global Call to Action Against Poverty” represents a serious test for all of us, just as it provides great optimism. If unions and civil society can hold governments to account for poverty, if we can provide space for progressive politicians to stand with us for debt reduction, increased aid and fair trade and can condemn those who don’t, then we might just win the debt war. Initial gains were made through the recent G8, qualified though they might be. If we can drive these commitments further, if we succeed then we have a global political force able to be mobilised to drive home other ambitions.

Imagine a world where there is a job for everyone, where our children live in peace and go to school, where HIV/AIDS is defeated, where women have genuine equality; these ambitions and others are not dreams for us, they are key objectives.

We face great challenges and we cannot ignore the unequal impact that globalisation has already had, but if we are serious about putting people, everywhere, at the heart of our economies then we must re-build global union and political power. Power that guarantees, that in this century, everyone, inclusive of women and migrant workers will get to share and build together a fairer future.
In the words of Margo Kingston, we say to our Prime Minister, and by extension to all his mates, “NOT HAPPY JOHN”.

Further resources

UnionsNSW – www.council.labor.net.au

Unions ACT – www.unionsact.org.au

Queensland Council of Unions www.qcu.asn.au

SA Unions – www.utlc.org.au

Unions Tasmania – www.unionstas.com.au

Victorian Trades Hall Council – www.vthc.org.au

Unions WA – www.tlcwa.org.au

International Labour Organisation – www.ilo.org

Australian Council of Trade Unions Rights at Work Campaign – www.actu.asn.au

International Confederation of Free Trade Unions – www.icftu.org

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