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Regional commitment to sustainable industrial policy grows

16 October, 2013Following the discussion in Sub-Saharan Africa earlier this year, affiliates in South Asia and Latin America have met to develop their action plans to promote sustainable industrial policy.

Meeting in Montevideo, Uruguay on October 16-17, affiliates from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay discussed how IndustriALL affiliates can work together to influence governments and industry at national and regional level.

The meeting was joined by two representatives from the Uruguayan Ministry of Industry, Energy and Mines. Lucia Pitaluga, responsible for industry policy, emphasized the importance of union participation in the sector boards which discuss industry-specific plans while Alicia Torres, responsible for environmental issues, outlined the responsibilities of the different actors, workers, companies and governments and the need for involvement of ministries of environment and labour, not just industry ministries.

Participants discussed the need for greater regional integration of state policies, particularly on tax and social and environmental planning, and for further development of productive complementarity to add value locally and increase employment. There was agreement of the need to strengthen the role of IndustriALL in the region to influence governments and corporations and for IndustriALL to be a visible presence in delegations to governments to explain this work. Political will from governments is crucial and affiliates agreed to work together towards Mercosur and Unasur to secure this.

An IndustriALL strategic plan should be developed for the region, incorporating concrete actions plans for lobbying on sustainable industrial policy. Priority sectors were identified as mining, energy, pulp and paper, metal, steel, textiles, chemicals, and electronics. As a first step, the Chilean unions will hold a mining and metalworkers open forum  in December to which government and business will be invited.  The plan will be to host similar events in each country.

The South Asian workshop held in Delhi, India on September 26-27 was notable for being the first meeting of unions in India on industrial policy which was previously assumed to be prerogative of government and industry.

The workshop was mainly attended by affiliates from India with representatives also from Nepal and Sri Lanka. In recognition of the importance of working together with national centres, several Indian confederations also joined the meeting. IndustriALL Executive Committee member Sanjeeva Reddy emphasized the importance of the issue to the national centres and reported that the IndustriALL discussion paper had been circulated and discussed by 9,000 delegates at the INTUC congress.

He went on to state that the challenges involved go beyond ideological differences between unions and that industrial growth has no meaning without addressing unemployment, poverty, inequality. The next step will be to make sustainable industrial policy a joint demand of the national centres of India which have now been working together on common issues for several years. 

Inputs to the debate were also made by the Indian Minister of Coal, the ILO and a number of local experts, including Prof. Lawrence Surendra from The Sustainability Platform which seeks to bring together the 3 pillars of unions, government and industry in order to progress sustainability issues.

Participants concluded that there is significant scope for unions to work together in India to promote sustainable industrial policy to government and industry. They will continue to work closely with the IndustriALL regional office to develop concrete plans and strategies.