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Turkish has been added as the eighth language on the ICEM website. By clicking <a href="/tr">/tr</a>, Turkish-speaking and Turkish-reading trade unionists around the world can now follow the topical developments from the world of work, as reported on the ICEM site. 
 
This came about because of the work and assistance of ICEM&rsquo;s Turkish affiliates, particularly Petrol-İş. Many existing web-pages were translated into Turkish over the past several months, as well as the interface, including basic information on the ICEM, pages with information on ICEM activities, such as Contract and Agency Labour, Global Framework Agreements, HIV/AIDS, as well as many recent ICEM industry reports. 
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Through its Turkish homepage, the ICEM aims to continue updating the world&rsquo;s Turkish-speaking audience &ndash; in Turkey and beyond &ndash; on ICEM developments, as well as on relevant and useful news from ICEM&rsquo;s sectors. This new communication channel will also be used for updates on specific issues that are important to ICEM Turkish affiliates. Welcome, Turkish brothers and sisters!

ICEM Introduces Turkish Language News, Content to Its Website

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The ICEM is asking trade unionists to write protest letters to Unilever&rsquo;s vice president for Global External Affairs, drawing attention to trade union rights violations in Pakistan and India. The ICEM is assisting its sister Global Union Federation, the International Union of Food Workers&rsquo; Association (IUF), in protests to the company over its conduct at food and beverage plants. 
 
In November 2007, Unilever management at a factory in Rahim Yar Khan, Pakistan, fired all but five of the plant&rsquo;s temporary workers, following a Pakistani union&rsquo;s announcement that it would allow membership to the workers and fight to secure permanent status for them. 
 
The fired workers were replaced by staff from a labour agency. The sacked workers were forced to sign termination letters in front of armed police and Elite Troops forces, who were called into the plant by local management.
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This latest incident coincides with an IUF complaint to the UK contact point over violations of the OECD&rsquo;s Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises. 
 
Additionally, Unilever managers at a plant in Assam, India, have actively undermined trade union leaders in that factory. Management has sponsored creation of a yellow union there in the course of a long lockout aimed at supplanting the legitimate trade union. 
 
A model letter can be found <a href="/index.php?id=7&amp;doc=2576&amp;la=EN">here</a>, that includes the name, address, and fax number of Unilever&rsquo;s Global External Affairs vice president. Please send a copy of your letter to ICEM&rsquo;s Chemicals Officer, Kemal &Ouml;zkan, at <a href="mailto:kemal.ozkan@icem.org">kemal.ozkan@icem.org</a>.

ICEM Encourages Unilever Protest Letters on Company’s Pakistan, India Conduct

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BHP Billiton&rsquo;s hostile bid for mining rival Rio Tinto escalated last week, just prior to a 6 February deadline by the UK Takeover Panel to either increase a November 2007 bid or walk away from the takeover for a period of six months. BHP Billiton increased its share-swap offer by 13%, offering 3.4 shares of BHP stock for one Rio Tinto share. 
 
In November, BHP offered a three-to-one share swap, meaning the price of the takeover would be US$120 billion. This latest unsolicited bid raised that price to US$147 billion. If successful, the combined company would dominate world production and sales of bauxite, coal, copper, diamonds, lead, silver, titanium, and uranium. It would also rank a high second, behind Brazilian Vale, in iron ore output, but would control vital markets of Australian ore destined for China. 
<img height="50" src="" width="100" alt="" />&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp; <img height="51" src="" width="102" alt="" />
The proposed takeover would represent the world&rsquo;s second biggest corporate takeover. Only Vodafones&rsquo;s US$172 billion buy-up of Mannesmann in the year 2000 surpasses BHP&rsquo;s current bid to Rio Tinto shareholders. Rio Tinto executives said the latest offer still undervalues the assets of the Australian- and UK-based company. 
BHP was pressed to increase its offer following a 1 February purchase of some US$14 billion of Rio&rsquo;s London-traded shares by Aluminium Corp. of China (Chinalco), a state-run mining company. Chinalco put up US$12.8 billion, while US-based Alcoa put in US$1.2 billion. Together, they now own 9% of Rio Tinto, and the share price paid increased the valuation of Rio Tinto by 23%. The premium share purchase was seen as a blocking move by Chinalco that is sure to complicate a further, enhanced bid by BHP Billiton. 
 
According to Sweden&rsquo;s Raw Materials Group, a combined BHP Billiton/Rio Tinto would control a full 17% of world production of mined resources. If constituted under the latest bid, Rio Tinto shareholders would hold 44% of the combined company, an increase from the 36% under terms of the offer posed in early November.

BHP Billiton Raises Stakes in Pursuit of Rio Tinto

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The British labour movement came together last week to push a Private Member&rsquo;s Bill into committee stage of the House of Commons. That bill, authored by Labour MP Andrew Miller, would give labour agency workers the same rights and benefits as full-time, permanent workers. 
 
On 6 February, labour unions, led by the Trades Union Congress (TUC), held a mass day of lobby at Westminster, spotlighting a second hearing of Miller&rsquo;s bill that saw trade unions produce gruesome testimonies of abuse by agency workers themselves. British work sectors &ndash; from service to foods to industrial &ndash; have been flooded by labour agency firms offering low-wage, no-strings-attached workers to employers.
<img height="50" alt="" src="" width="100" />
&nbsp;Last week&rsquo;s turnout moved the Private Member&rsquo;s Bill to a House hearing, which will occur on 22 February. The day of lobby also came six days after the Labour Party&rsquo;s Executive Committee voted to endorse it, an action that Labour Party Prime Minister Gordon Brown cannot ignore without serious fall-out from trade unions. 
 
&ldquo;The Labour Party committed to introduce UK legislation to protect agency workers before the last election,&rdquo; said Chairman Tony Dubbins of the Trade Unions for Labour Organisation, &ldquo;and now we and 1.4 million agency workers in the UK&rdquo; have been promised it again. &ldquo;Now we need the government to act on that promise by backing Andrew Miller&rsquo;s bill.&rdquo; 
 
But that may not come easy, just like it didn&rsquo;t during the Blair government, despite a Labour Party commitment for equal rights to all workers contained in the 2004 Warwick Agreement. British business groups are opposing the measure, claiming it would hold back achieving flexible labour markets, and often, serve as a means for gaining a full-time job. 

TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber said, &ldquo;Far from providing a bridge to permanent work, this runs the risk of creating a whole underclass of temporary workers who cannot get permanent work. Many employers are using agencies to replace secure jobs with reasonable terms and conditions with insecure, badly paid agency staff.&rdquo; 
The TUC points out that employer&rsquo; interests will advance when temporary workers gain equal workplace rights, at the same time as receiving fair pay and social benefits. The union federation said there is a disturbing lack of awareness among employers on how maximizing experience and skills of workers out of labour agencies can benefit their enterprises. 
Besides Barber, the day of lobby also featured Tony Woodley, Joint General Secretary of Unite, and Bill Hayes, General Secretary of the Communications Workers&rsquo; Union. Woodley called passage of the agency worker bill a &ldquo;defining moment&rdquo; for the British government &ldquo;because people are looking for equal treatment.&rdquo;
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In Ireland, trade unions are pressuring their government to stop acting as a barrier to a European Directive for equal treatment for contract and agency workers. Blair Horan, representing the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, said trade unions will withhold affirmative support to the Irish government for passage of the Lisbon Treaty referendum until the government reverses its agency-worker stand in Brussels. Ireland, Germany, Poland, and the UK have blocked a European Directive on Agency Workers.

UK Push for Law Granting Equal Rights to Temp Workers

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In August 2007, 13 ICEM affiliates created an ICEM Turkish Coordination Committee. At that time, Contract and Agency Labour (CAL) was defined as one of the priorities on which joint activities would occur. 
 
In cooperation with Germany&rsquo;s Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES), a Turkish national conference of those affiliates was held on 31 January &ndash; 1 February, 2008, in İstanbul on CAL. Some 80 trade unionists, journalists, and university professors attended. 
The conference opened with a speech by Mustafa Kumlu, an ICEM Executive Committee member and President of the Turkish Electricity, Water, and Gas Workers&rsquo; Union, Tes-Iş. He is also the current president of the country&rsquo;s biggest national labour centre, T&uuml;rk-Iş. The meeting also saw the active participation of ICEM General Secretary Manfred Warda, and FES&rsquo;s İstanbul representative, Bettina Luise R&uuml;rup. 
<img height="212" alt="" src="" width="350" />
ICEM's Kemal &Ouml;zkan and Manfred Warda, EMCEF's Reinhard Reibsch
After presentations by ICEM Chemicals and Rubber Officer Kemal &Ouml;zkan on the the Global Union Federation&rsquo;s CAL Project, by the ILO&rsquo;s Slava Egorov on ILO actions on contract labour, the employment relationship, and agency work, and by EMCEF General Secretary Reinhard Reibsch on the European situation, the conference heard national experiences from Germany, Sweden, and The Netherlands. 
 
In Germany, IGBCE&rsquo;s Michael Wolters reported there are now 630,000 agency workers employed by 19,000 labour agencies in the country. This constitutes 10-15 % of the total workers in industries in which the German union operates. Agency workers earn 30 % less than permanent workers. 
 
According to Hans Palmqvist of Swedish IF Metall, there is an Authorisation Board in Sweden that controls 450 private agencies, employing 43,000 workers. A Swedish trade union has managed to reach a collective agreement with one such agency, C&amp;L. 
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The agency labour issue is also a burning issue inside The Netherlands. Celil Coban and Osman Elmaci from FNV Bondgenoten, both Turkish-originated trade union officials for the union, reported that only 1,200 agencies out of 12,000 are operating with official certification. Even when FNV Bondgenoten negotiates with employment agencies for collective agreements, wages remain low and working conditions are sub-standard for agency workers. 
 
The three examples from Germany, Sweden, and Holland clearly shows that the unionisation rates for agency workers are far less than those for permanent workers. 
 
The conference also heard detailed reports and analyses on Contract and Agency Labour in Turkey. During the conference, a major explosion at an unregistered factory operating in the black economy resulted in 23 deaths. 
 
According to statistics, the number of workers employed in the informal economy in Turkey is 4.7 million, according to Mustafa &Ouml;ztaskin of ICEM affiliate Petrol-Iş. Dating to the 1980s, the problem in Turkey is that new owners in privatised sectors have used subcontracting in order to eliminate union representation. 
 
Metin Bozkurt, Organising Secretary of Cement Workers Union, &Ccedil;imse-Iş, reported that multinational companies in the cement industry use subcontractors in all facets of production. Privatisation has also caused problems in energy, reported Murat Aytemiz, Vice-President of Tes-Iş. According to Aytemiz, some 50% of the workforce in the energy sector is employed by subcontracting firms. 
 
The situation in the mining sector was defined as thus by Dr. Fikret Sazak, Director of Education Department of Mine Workers Union, Maden-Iş: &ldquo;Our mining areas have become mole holes after privatisation and subcontracting.&rdquo; He reported that contract labour in pits is overwhelming, for example, in a main coal mining area, 2,750 out of 10,500 miners are subcontractors.&nbsp;
<img height="285" src="" width="380" alt="" />
In public services as well, subcontracting and agency labour is a major factor in lowering salaries and weakening the working environment. Ismail Hakki Kurt of Belediye-Iş pointed out that &ldquo;trade unions have real difficulties in bargaining because permanent workers are the minority, while agency workers are not unionised.&rdquo; 
In the glass industry, according to Can Safak, Director of the Collective Bargaining Department at Kristal-Iş, subcontracting first appeared in nonqualified and side jobs. Kristal-Iş tried to tackle the problem through reclassification of positions. The union also managed to get language in the sectoral level collective glass agreement, stating that no subcontractor can be employed at the production level. 
 
At the end of the discussions, it was agreed that a series of joint activities on organising, in general, would be undertaken. And then, specifically, the issue of Contract and Agency Labour in Turkey will now come under the ICEM&rsquo;s global project. 
 
<a href="/index.php?id=73&amp;doc=2593&amp;la=EN">To access presentations at the Conference, click here</a>.

ICEM Turkish Affiliates Gather to Discuss Contract and Agency Labour

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As reported by the ICEM in its newsletter on 28 January 2008 (<a href="/en/?id=78&amp;doc=2564&amp;la=EN">click here</a>), private-sector strikes slated for 6 February across Slovenia were cancelled when agreement over wages was initialled between employers and the nation&rsquo;s largest labour federation, Zveza Svobodnih Sindikatoc Slovenije (ZSSS), on 25 January. 
 
The ICEM has been informed by its affiliate, KNG Chemical, Non-Metallic, Rubber Union, a ZSSS affiliate, that when it came time to sign the social agreement on 1 February, Slovenia&rsquo;s Chamber of Commerce and industry associations backed away from the pact that called for across-the-board increases of 5.6%, nearly equalling the inflation rate of the Central European country.
In calling for European Union and global trade union support toward renewal of a general strike, ZSSS President Du&scaron;an Semolič stated: &ldquo;Although the social dialogue has reached a dead end, the employers&rsquo; associations continue with manipulation in companies and are trying to enforce the agreements on pay adjustments in which a very low percentage of adjustment is offered to workers.&rdquo; Employers are also implementing no-strike agreements within these individual companies. 
<img height="50" alt="" src="" width="100" border="1" />
The 6 February statement by ZSSS can be found <a href="/wp-content/migration/icem/0802Slovenia.pdf">here</a>. 
 
Since mid-2007, trade unions and employers&rsquo; groups have been working on an agreement to raise base wages in order to counter Slovenia&rsquo;s spiralling inflation rate, as well as agreement on holiday bonuses and other remuneration issues. That agreement was nearly reached on 25 January, averting a mass strike that likely would have eclipsed the one on 17 November 2007, in which 70,000 workers marched through the streets of Ljubljana. 
 
But that agreement was broken by employers in a serious social breach. The ICEM stands supportively behind Slovenia&rsquo;s workers in all sectors at a time when their pay has not kept pace with rising prices brought on by the nation&rsquo;s entry into the European Union. 
 
Also in Slovenia, the ICEM, together with a dozen Central European affiliates, took action to support KNG-affiliated workers at glass plants, brave workers of the company Steklarna Hrastnik.

Strike Threat Renewed in Slovenia as Employers Renege on Deal

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Opposition coalition parliamentarians last week threatened to derail the elimination of Australian Work Agreements (AWAs), a cornerstone to former Prime Minister John Howard&rsquo;s draconian WorkChoices laws, adopted in 2005. Members of Parliament from the Liberal and National Parties caucused on 7 February and decided on a strategy to separate individual work contracts signed with employers from repeal of WorkChoices. 
 
The Labour Party government of Kevin Rudd is expected to present&nbsp;a sweeping industrial relations rollback bill to the House of Representatives on Wednesday, 13 February. That bill would repeal WorkChoices and also replace AWAs with interim arrangements for new individual employment contracts until a fairer industrial relations system is operational in 2010.
<img height="92" alt="" src="" width="180" />
The transition bill to be introduced this week would outlaw&nbsp;creation of new AWAs, and replace the fairness test of individual agreements contained in WorkChoices with a more suitable&nbsp;no-disadvantage test. 
The effort to preserve AWAs is led by Julie Bishop, the Liberal Party&rsquo;s deputy leader and industrial relations spokesperson. Bishop comes from Western Australia, a state in which major mining houses have used AWAs to circumvent collective bargaining agreements. 
 
The separation of AWAs from Labour&rsquo;s rollback bill could delay progressive reform of the country&rsquo;s industrial relations statutes. Australia&rsquo;s Senate is still controlled by opposition parliamentarians until 30 June 2008. Delays to the Labour Party agenda could mean thousands more workers will be subjected to AWAs in 2008. 
 
Australian trade unions have demanded that all Members of Parliament adhere to voters wishes made in November 2007, when the Howard government was crushed in national elections. Howard&rsquo;s enactment of WorkChoices was the number one issue by voters in forcing his ouster. 
<img height="51" src="" width="137" alt="" />
&ldquo;The Liberal Party&rsquo;s decision to support AWAs is an insult to the Australian people who voted overwhelmingly to reject WorkChoices at last year&rsquo;s election,&rdquo; said Sharon Burrow, President of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU). &ldquo;AWAs were the centrepiece and cruel heart of the Howard government&rsquo;s unfair WorkChoices laws. 
 
&ldquo;With the Liberals planning to oppose the Labour government&rsquo;s clear mandate to scrap WorkChoices,&rdquo; she added, &ldquo;many more Australian families risk being hurt by AWA individual contracts.&rdquo; 
 
Research presented recently in Australia reveals that employers with fewer workers tend to use AWAs to cut labour costs, while larger employers use them to reduce the influence of trade unions. The research paper, commissioned by Industrial Relations Victoria and presented at an early February conference hosted by LaTrobe University, found that the average wage of a worker on an AWA is 7.3% less than a worker covered by a collective agreement.

Australia’s Opposition Plots to Preserve Individual Work Agreements

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This week, a deadline will expire for multinational oil and gas companies operating in Nigeria&rsquo;s downstream sector. By Thursday, 14 February, Mobil Oil Nigeria Plc. and a handful of other companies must cease and desist on a range of anti-union activities, or face industrial action from senior staff. 
 
PENGASSAN, ICEM&rsquo;s white-collar oil and gas affiliate in Nigeria, issued the ultimatum at its National Executive Council (NEC) meeting late in January in Kaduna. It singled out Mobil Oil Nigeria, Oando, Chevron, and African Petroleum Plc. as targets. The union&rsquo;s communiqu&eacute; stated it would &ldquo;vehemently oppose the attempt to extinguish unions in these companies.&rdquo;
<img height="50" alt="" src="" width="100" />
At Mobil Oil Nigeria, wholly owned by the world&rsquo;s largest oil company, US-based ExxonMobil, the union-busting may be the most blatant. Despite bargaining with PENGASSAN through much of 2007 over retrenchments and reaching some agreements with the union, Mobil Oil Nigeria has reneged on those agreements. It has changed terms of lump-sum payments contained in a separation plan with PENGASSAN, and it is denying state-mandated pension benefits to less senior workers who are getting the sack. 
 
And so far this year, in a data systems restructuring, which PENGASSAN and the company agreed would cost 42 jobs, ExxonMobil has unilaterally raised the count to 50 to include trade union activists. 
 
PENGASSAN General Secretary Bayo Olowoshile said the company serves as the leader in the Niger Delta in undermining social standards, in violating the rule of law, and &ldquo;with indiscriminate firings ostensibly to weaken or destroy the labour union.&rdquo; He added the company has also failed to adhere to Nigeria&rsquo;s Pension Reform Act, which mandates a level of benefits to staff made redundant who have less than ten years service and are under age 45. 
<img height="101" alt="" src="" width="220" />
&ldquo;Mobil management is essentially holding the union ransom,&rdquo; Olowoshile said, referring to a company strategy to drain the union financially. &ldquo;They prefer matters go to the industrial court rather than find a mutually acceptable win-win resolution in the interest of industrial peace.&rdquo;
In July 2007, Mobil Oil Nigeria violated best practice social code by contacting and coercing PENGASSAN members individually over separation terms. At the same time, the company was in social talks with PENGASSAN over redundancies. The voluntary termination letters that were offered to individual workers was a ploy to reduce the statutory amount of separation benefits. 
 
PENGASSAN has also warned to Royal Dutch Shell, which currently has a plan to reduce its Nigerian workforce by combining business functions of three subsidiaries operating in the country. The union said industrial action could occur against Shell&rsquo;s upstream companies if the company does not adequately complete talks. 
 
In other action taken at PENGASSAN&rsquo;s NEC meeting in January, the union condemned the non-existent security practices at Nigerian National Petroleum Corp.&rsquo;s (NNPC) Okrika Jetty in Rivers State. On 19 December at the NNPC loading bay near its Port Harcourt refinery, dynamite used by people disguised as militants killed eight persons, including a policeman and a PENGASSAN member. The criminals were bunkering oil. 
<img height="115" alt="" src="" width="113" />
&nbsp;PENGASSAN President Peter Esele 

PENGASSAN said &ldquo;porous surveillance&rdquo; and lack of any &ldquo;security network and intelligence operations at the loading and discharging facility leaves much to be desired. We are seriously grieved that a criminally minded group could gain easy access without proper challenge,&rdquo; said the union. 
Meanwhile, PENGASSAN President Peter Esele has called on the Nigerian National Assembly to pass tougher laws against unfair labour practices committed by oil and gas companies. In an interview with a Nigerian newspaper, Esele said punitive measures must be imposed on companies engaged in contract staffing, casualisation, and violation of expatriate quotas.
&ldquo;We are sounding a note of warning for companies to desist from it, or risk being sanctioned by a committee that would be empowered by appropriate laws to checkmate violators,&rdquo; he told This Day publication. Esele last month was named by President Umaru Musa Yar&rsquo;Adua to sit on the seven-member government board of the Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, a panel mandated through a 2007 law.

ExxonMobil Pack Leader in Breeching Social Code in Nigeria’s Oil Patch

Mr. Miguel Pestana 
VP Global Affairs, Unilverer Plc
By Fax: 44-20-78.22.59.51 
By e-mail: <a href="mailto:miguel.pestana@unilever.com">miguel.pestana@unilever.com</a>
 
Dear Mr. Pestana,
The (name of union), representing Unilever employees in (places/countries), wishes to convey our concern over ongoing violations of international labour standards and trade union rights by Unilever in Asia. 
 
We have followed the progress of the IUF's submission to the UK National Contact Point of the OECD concerning the closure of the company's Sewri factory in Mumbai, India and the attempts to achieve a negotiated solution with the trade union representing the 700 dismissed employees. 
Following the intervention of the NCP, the company had committed to finding a negotiated solution, yet has repeatedly postponed meetings with the union. Two months have passed since the last meeting (November 27) and the company has yet to propose a date for the next meeting. Since the Mumbai workers have received no compensation to date following their many years of service, we find this footdragging intolerable and unconscionable - and an offense against Unilever employees everywhere. 
 
In Assam, India, the company locked out the entire workforce at its Doom Dooma plant last year, and as a condition of resuming employment forced the workers to sign statements renouncing their union membership and seeking membership in the company-sponsored union. 
While Assam Unilever management has denied this in response to the IUF's OECD submission, local management continues to use these unlawful documents in support of its claims to the authorities that the &quot;union&quot; it sponsors represents a majority, It is also using these documents obtained under coercion in support of its deductions of membership fees in the organization it sponsors. 
We find this particularly cynical in view of the fact that management in our country would presumably not engage in such practices. Does Unilever have varying approaches to complying with international labour standards, depending on the country it is operating in? Our members are increasingly asking this question. 
 
We are also shocked to learn that brutal anti-union practices continue at the Unilever factory in Rahim Yar Khan, Pakistan, which are also the subject of an IUF submission to the UK National Contact Point for the OECD. 
The union at the plant sought to open its membership to temporary workers and support their efforts to be reclassified as permanent employees after nine months of continuous service, in accordance with the law. Management's response was to fire all temporary workers at the plant and replace them immediately with agency workers, who have no legal possibility to ever qualify for permanent status. 
Following these mass firings, management continues to harass union members and officers. Union officers, shop stewards and activist members have been frequently transferred from one post to another and management is now threatening them with replacement by agency workers. 
The union president is being denied access to his members, and union members received lower salary adjustments at the beginning of 2008. Again, we note that such practices would presumably not be tolerated by Unilever in our country - why then are they being pursued in India and Pakistan? Is it because the law is weaker? Because they take place away from the spotlight of those scrutinizing the company's corporate social responsibility practices? 
We are watching, and call upon you to act to ensure that these practices are halted. In all three cases, Unilever management should enter into good faith negotiations with the unions representing employees in order to achieve negotiated solutions to all outstanding problems. We will, for our part, continue to closely follow these developments and keep our own members informed. 
Yours sincerely,

Model support letter Unilever Pakistan

<img height="40" alt="" src="" width="100" />
On 15-16 January, some 40 global trade union leaders met in Brussels for the 2nd meeting of the Council of Global Unions (CGU), the structure established last year by the Global Unions Federations (GUFs), the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), and the Trade Union Advisory Committee (TUAC) to the OECD. 
On the agenda of the meeting, which was held at ICEM headquarters, was a series of wide-ranging national and international labour issues, ranging from the need to increase global support for organising and bargaining, scrutiny over non-transparent private and public investment funds, and attention to precarious employment practices. 
 
Focal points at the start were the lessons from the creative and successful &ldquo;Organising and Recognition Conference,&rdquo; organised by the CGU in Washington, D.C., in December 2007, and how to continue that work. 
The Washington Conference, which primarily dealt with how international work can assist national unions in their union organising efforts, generated a fair amount of enthusiasm and optimism. At the same time, however, it also highlighted a number of difficulties or barriers. The example of Australia, where a massive trade union campaign lead to a change in government, was particularly inspiring for many.
<img height="200" alt="" src="" width="300" />
ICEM President Senzeni Zokwana and 
ICEM General Secretary Manfred Warda signing the CGU's founding document last year
One obvious conclusion from this earlier Conference is the strong link between collective bargaining coverage, on the one hand, and the fairness of income distribution, on the other. The situation in the U.S. is a clear &ndash; and negative &ndash; example of this. 
 
Building on the work done in Washington, the Brussels meeting looked for a number of concrete items that the international union movement could work on jointly. One such priority is the need to take action at the international level to support workers and their unions in the U.S., and to improve the U.S. labour situation in general. 
ICEM General Secretary Manfred Warda explicitly supported this notion. He said that &ldquo;in countries such as China, the U.S. labour model is the one that is being looked at for copying.&rdquo; It was agreed that discussions would take place with U.S. unions in order to examine how the global trade union movement can be most helpful in supporting their efforts to change U.S. labour law so that freedom of association is respected. 
 
Other priorities taken under consideration include an international strategy to support unions in selected countries, in which international union pressure might improve the national labour situation; the continued sharing of much needed global economic data that support trade union claims; to undertake action on the 60th anniversary of ILO Conventions 87 and 98, on freedom of association and collective bargaining; and Global Unions&rsquo; work on Export Processing Zones.
Joint CGU action is also planned in the area of communication, where more - and possibly other and different - work needs to be done. This was also a conclusion from the Washington conference, citing the fact that the international union message is not always reaching workers at national level. 
<img height="100" alt="" src="" width="100" />
Different options were looked at to improve communications, including making increased use of IT tools. At the same time, it was acknowledged that this can only be helpful for certain parts of the world. In Africa, for example, emphasis needs to go to other means of communication, such as radio or mobile phones. Yet other methods are needed to reach out to, for instance, migrant communities. 
 
The international unions also decided to continue to expand their joint work on precarious work, which includes the ICEM priority of Contract and Agency Labour. ICEM will continue to take the lead on this, including through a multi-GUF working group on the subject. Temporary agencies, an area where UNI is already doing considerable work, might become a focus on work relationships, and may offer opportunities for productive co-operation among the GUFs. 
 
Equally highlighted at the 15-16 January meetings was the work &ndash; and successes &ndash; by several GUFs, the ITUC and TUAC, on private equity. Linked to that is the effort by the international union movement&rsquo;s Committee on Workers&rsquo; Capital, which works on such areas as pension trustee education, corporate and financial market governance, shareholder activism and economically targeted investments. 
 
Other items discussed in Brussels were the call for a strong public sector; the upcoming World Day of Action on Decent Work (7 October 2008); the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises; and ongoing action towards the World Bank and its private investment arm, the International Finance Corporation (IFC). Also discussed were labour-related issues inside a number of countries, such as Burma, Bangladesh, and the Philippines. Guy Ryder, ITUC General Secretary, reported on the organisation&rsquo;s intense debate on China at its last General Council meeting in December, also in Washington. 
 
The international trade union leaders decided to continue their strong support for a number of joint offices, including, for example, the highly acclaimed ITUC/Global Unions Washington office. They also agreed on a budget for the work of the CGU. Fred van Leeuwen, General Secretary of Education International (EI), remains the CGU&rsquo;s chair for another year. Anita Normark, General Secretary of the Building and Woodworkers International (BWI), continues as the Vice-Chair, and Guy Ryder as the CGU&rsquo;s Secretary. 
 
In addition to Manfred Warda, the ICEM was represented at the meeting by its President, Senzeni Zokwana, and by its Vice-President, Liv Undheim.

Council of Global Unions Meets at ICEM in Brussels

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