TNCs, in their pursuit of profits, exert enormous pressure on workers with little regard for democratic, labour and social rights. Employers, supported by many governments and institutions of international governance, seek to shift business risks onto workers and reduce their social, economic, and environmental obligations.

To date trade unions have struggled to act as a counterweight to the enormous economic power and sophistication of TNCs. Cost reductions sought by TNCs frequently include a shift from secure to insecure forms of employment, fragmentation of collective bargaining, corporate restructuring, and abuse of human and workers’ rights. This serves to heighten competition between workers and communities within and across nations and triggers a race to the bottom in standards.

There is an urgent need for more effective international solidarity and cooperation among metalworkers in TNC and along the TNC supply chains to reverse these trends. The IMF has considerable scope to challenge this situation and a range of experiences to draw on, including strategies and activities to strengthen the solidarity between workers across sectors and TNCs. Nevertheless, better tools, a better exchange of information, and more mutual trust between workers need to be promoted by the IMF and its affiliates. This must be built on a critical analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of union organisation and corresponding networks, councils, and the resources available in each of the major TNCs. This analysis will be undertaken by the IMF Executive Committee, informed by the IMF regional and sectoral structures.

Every year more than two million people die from occupational accidents or work-related diseases. The safety of work varies enormously between countries, economic sectors and social groups. Deaths and injuries take a particularly heavy toll in developing nations.  Downsizing, outsourcing, sub-contracting and temporary labour create bad working conditions. Although the physical workplace environment has improved considerably during the course of the last decades, millions of men and women around the world are still working in hazardous conditions.  Therefore, based on the primacy of prevention, defending and promoting health and safety at work is a fundamental trade union task that all IMF affiliates should prioritise.

Alongside the difficulties to ban well-known hazards, such as asbestos, the introduction of new chemicals and new technologies, without sufficient research, constitutes new threats to the health and well-being of workers.  The precautionary principle should also apply to nanomaterials, the hazardous nature of which has become more apparent in the light of many recent studies. Such precaution is all the more urgent because of the fact that these materials are used in many products, including clothes, cosmetics, composites, automobiles, spectacles, paint etc.

Occupational cancer is by far the most common work-related cause of death. It is a problem that does not ring alarm bells for corporate executives who only answer to shareholders at annual general meetings. Causes are covered up, bodies are buried, companies evade legal liabilities, and the killing continues as a result of preventable and predictable work-place exposures.

The IMF and affiliates must increase efforts to stop this from happening. It is essential to have effective health and safety committees in every workplace with knowledge of the workplace-specific hazards. Preventive actions must be based on research, evidence and strong health and safety laws that are properly promoted and enforced.  Health and safety is a very important issue for trade unions.  In general, organized workplaces are safer workplaces with better working conditions.

The international trade union movement must work in order to ensure that ILO conventions and codes of practice are incorporated into national legislation and collective bargaining agreements, and are respected in practice.

The IMF will encourage affiliates to develop organising strategies around safer and better workplaces. Such strategies can be linked to the campaign for decent work. The campaign for decent work should be extended to include the pursuit of fixed wages and permanent employment contracts, healthy and family-friendly working hours, protection against excessive demands on performance, the preservation of the workers’ employability, preventive and participatory health and safety, and training and development.

The IMF will:

• Co-operate with ITUC, TUAC and GUFs to ensure that the ILO assists governments, employers and trade unions to improve knowledge and information about existing legislation on health and safety at work;
• Address occupational health and safety at regional, sectoral and company meetings;
• Continue to build the campaign for Zero Occupational Cancer;
• Keep campaigning for an international ban on the production, import, export and use of asbestos; and
• Continue to put pressure on national governments to implement transition programmes for workers displaced by the banning of asbestos, and to ensure that the treatment and compensation costs of workers suffering from asbestos-related diseases are borne by employers.

The IMF will assist the affiliates to:

• Inform and educate instructors on basic workplace health and safety, who will then teach and train stewards at plant level;
• Ensure that effective health and safety committees are set up in all workplaces;
• Use health and safety as a tool for organising workers and building strong unions; and
• Develop strategies around HIV/Aids and other new epidemics.

All workers should enjoy equal rights irrespective of their sex, age, nationality, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation or religion.  Yet metal industry employers in many countries, including highly industrialised ones, continue to discriminate with impunity against workers precisely on those grounds. The IMF will work with its affiliates to eliminate discrimination in the workplace in all its forms. Many workers throughout the world are subjected to discrimination that deprives them of their rights to freedom of association and collective bargain.  That is why IMF will focus its efforts on assisting affiliates to develop specific organising strategies, e.g. to improve unionisation rates among women, migrant and young workers, particularly in EPZs, where labour rights continue to be abused and trade unionism is repressed. There is a clear and urgent need for unions to assess whether new approaches must be adopted to meet the needs and aspirations of women, young people, and migrant workers –  groups that are underrepresented in metal unions, but that are entering the industry at an increasing rate.  Changes need to be made to union structures, cultures and practices that discourage such workers from becoming union members to ensure that equal rights are extended to all workers.

According to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, discrimination occurs if persons with disabilities cannot participate as fully-fledged members in society and if their human and workers’ rights are violated.  In particular, with respect to elderly workers, many countries need to intensify their struggle against discrimination and social exclusion of older, disabled and health-impaired workers from the labour market and further training.

Discrimination also means that women, migrant and young workers are over-represented in precarious employment. This reaches extreme levels in the case of migrant workers, particularly when dramatic poverty leaves them without protection against unprincipled and sometimes criminal organisations that exploit their vulnerability. The IMF will encourage affiliates to share strategies for making contact with and organising migrant workers, and improving their working conditions by including them in collective bargaining.

The double burden of domestic work that is placed on women can force them into precarious employment situations, with adverse consequences for themselves, their families and communities.  The IMF will give priority to highlighting the disproportionate impact precarious work has on women workers and to encouraging measures to address it, focusing in particular on the gender pay gap and the gender segmentation that leads to women being denied access to better jobs.

Women’s representation at all levels of trade union organisation is still too low. Efforts by unions to organise women workers are hampered by structures that do not include women as leaders.  The IMF will continue to work with its affiliates to redress this imbalance and assist them to remove barriers to women’s representation in their union structures and electoral processes. An emphasis will be put on the need to encourage greater participation by young workers in union structures.

The IMF will:

• Assist its affiliates in leading the fight in the workplace against discrimination in all its forms;
• Support organising activities of affiliates in EPZs and encourage the exchange of successful experiences between them;
• Cooperate with ITUC and other GUFs, particularly International Textile, Garment & Leather Workers Federation (ITGLWF), in addressing the lack of union organisation  in EPZs;
• Assist its affiliates in eliminating constraints that hinder persons with disabilities to get equal opportunities at the workplace.  The IMF will also support programs that focus on issues concerning people with disabilities in all trade union and ILO activities;
• Assist affiliates to identify and remove barriers to women’s equal participation and representation in their unions;
• Monitor and report on the impact of precarious work on women, migrant and young workers including encouraging affiliates to do their own gender analysis of precarious work and to take action to reduce the double burden of domestic work on women;
• Ensure that measures taken to improve conditions for precarious workers take particular account of the needs of women, migrant, and young workers;
• Provide opportunities for affiliates to share experiences and strategies for making contact with and organising both internal and external migrant workers; and
• Raise awareness of the difficulties faced by young people in finding secure employment with good pay and working conditions, and support efforts by affiliates to respond.

The universal and fundamental right of workers to form and join independent trade unions and to bargain collectively with their employers is the basis of trade union organisation. The IMF has always given the highest priority to fighting against the repression of trade unions and the violations of workers’ and human rights. Binding intergovernmental rules in order to implement the core labour standards remain a fundamental demand of the IMF.  The core labour standards of the ILO must be integrated both into the agreements of the WTO and in bi- and multilateral trade and investment agreements.  In order to monitor the ILO standards in the WTO agreements, the existing ILO monitoring mechanisms need to be strengthened and extended, as demanded in 2008 in the ILO Declaration on Social Justice in a Globalized World.  These demands will require stronger efforts from the IMF and its affiliates, together with other GUFs, the ITUC and TUAC. We have to become more visible, particularly in voicing our support of trade unionists who face grave risks including intimidation, assault, abduction, imprisonment, and even murder.

It is the main responsibility of the community of states and national governments to finally put into practice binding and sanctionable intergovernmental rules in order to enforce and implement a social dimension of globalization.  Commitment of companies, such as IFAs, may represent an additional protection for workers.

In the age of globalisation, not only has the opportunity for international solidarity action increased, but its role in the fight for the advancement of  trade union rights has become much more critical. Solidarity action is only as powerful as the collective force behind it. To be effective, it requires a two-pronged strategy, on one hand to put pressure on governments that systematically violate trade union and human rights, and on the other to take action against the anti-union behaviour of companies. For this purpose, it is particularly important to put pressure on employers along the companies’ supply chain.

Furthermore, employers must not be allowed to profit from labour laws that render them immune from prosecution for violations of fundamental rights, as is the case in the Republic of Korea, where the criminal code also allows companies to sue unions and seek incarceration of union leaders under the charge of "obstruction of business". Such situations require carefully designed actions based on a systematic and close collaboration between the IMF, its affiliates, the other GUFs, TUAC and ITUC. Most important, however, is international workers’ solidarity with a strongly committed organisation at the local level, failing which, no international solidarity action can be effective.

The IMF and its affiliates must go beyond mere coordination. Campaigns to effectively respond to violations of workers’ rights by TNCs or certain countries and regions must be promoted and led by the IMF. To make this possible, affiliates must be fully committed to mobilising their members and be capable of implementing common strategies in the context of their respective countries, which includes ensuring a communication flow to their members to support their mobilisation efforts. We can only respond to rights violations as soon as they arise if we have an effective system and membership support and understanding.

IMF will collaborate with its affiliates and with other GUFs, TUAC, ITUC and Non-governmental Organisations (NGOs) to:

• Enforce the protection of worker and trade union rights through IFAs, OECD guidelines, ILO instruments, and trade agreements that include the ILO core labour standards and social minimum standards as well as sanctions in case of non-compliance to complement mobilisation efforts on the ground;
• Develop strategies and promote joint actions to achieve binding intergovernmental regulations on the enforcement of minimum social standards. This will include mobilizing and additional efforts at international and national levels to promote the universal respect in law and practice of the ILO’s fundamental Conventions;
• Expose governments and companies that exploit workers and violate trade union rights, and develop issue-specific solidarity actions to reduce precarious work, subcontracting, two-tier wage systems, and legislative initiatives that seek to undermine workers’ rights;
• Disseminate information about trade union rights abuses immediately and effectively through a rapid response system;
• Establish solidarity networks locally, regionally and internationally;
• Establish a solidarity page on the IMF website to serve as a resource for solidarity action and information, including ILO complaint guidelines and campaign status updates, news and other materials; and
• Provide affiliates and partners with information on actions, outcomes, evaluations of achievements, and strategies for future work regarding the advancement of trade union rights.

IMF will assist its affiliates to ensure that:

• Rapid response is organised to any TNC attack on workers’ rights through information and mobilisation of the employees of the same company in all its countries of operations, and united action is taken while also pursuing cooperation among the IMF affiliates in these countries.

IMF affiliates will:

• Mobilise their members in support of unions fighting company-sponsored unions, anti-union legislation, union-busting tactics and industrial relations disputes;
• Ensure that immediate information on rights violations is fed into the IMF’s rapid response system, and that there are timely updates on developments and local actions;
• Commit themselves to actively participate in campaigns developed by the IMF and take joint actions with other national unions and other like-minded social actors;
• Include rights issues in training and educational materials to ensure that solidarity actions and rights awareness reach the shop-floor;
• Publicize rights abuses, solidarity efforts and action taken internationally; and
• Ensure that no benefit guaranteed to the employees of a TNC in one country is based on an attack on the rights of its employees in another country.

Achieving and strengthening collective bargaining is the core activity of trade unions and remains the best instrument for improving wages and conditions, regulating the relationship between employers and workers and solving problems at the workplace. Its impact goes beyond the workplace and affects the living conditions and development prospects of communities. Collective bargaining should be increasingly used as a tool for trade unions to engage with communities and promote the broader interests of workers as citizens and consumers.

Over the past decade the trade union movement has been attacked by employers, governments and their allies who are determined to weaken collective bargaining, thereby weakening the union movement. In particular, employers are eager to eradicate national, sectoral, and sometimes even enterprise-wide collective bargaining. Using the threat of outsourcing production and services, they push for more flexibility and other concessions. New forms of employment and work practices are imposed on employees, increasing stress and insecurity. In developing countries, foreign investors in particular demand deregulation of labour law and other regulatory changes, which have negative impacts on the development opportunities for these countries.  The IMF will work with affiliates to ensure that collective agreements continue to provide a framework for intervening on all work issues including decent wages and working conditions, including working time, work organisation, pace of work and health and safety.

In the long-term, and as companies increasingly operate globally, collective bargaining at the international level, while respecting the rights of national unions, must be the goal of the IMF.  As a first step, an information and coordination system should be established.

To develop and strengthen global and national collective bargaining efforts, the IMF will:

• Develop ways to exchange information on collective bargaining that build on the experiences gained at the regional level in Europe and elsewhere;
• Build commonality for bargaining among affiliates at the global level, e.g. by developing global union positions on issues such as precarious employment and training;
• Conduct cross-border negotiations with TNC with the involvement of functioning global union networks and an IMF coordinator, based on clear case by case mandates from affiliates.  In order to have a framework of action for these cross-border negotiations, the IMF Executive Committee will develop IMF guidelines with the support of the Secretariat, which will also describe the roles of the IMF coordinators.  Not only may IFAs be negotiated, but also topics such as health and safety and training;  access to information and other issues of common interest; and
• Assist affiliates in building collective bargaining capacity at the national level.

IMF affiliates shall:

• Provide information on collective bargaining experiences to others; and
• Strive to remove legal obstacles to collective bargaining at the national and sectoral level.

Training and Education

Where appropriate, the IMF will cooperate with the ITUC, TUAC, the ILO and union-friendly partner organisations to organise and provide education and training aimed at building strong national unions. The IMF Secretariat, with advice from the Executive Committee and the Regions, will prioritise this work to best meet the Action Programme objectives. Where there is cooperation with donor organisations, the primacy of the IMF objectives and the independence of the IMF will always be maintained.

Education and training for union building will include topics such as:

• Globalisation, the rise of corporate power and challenging neoliberalism;
• Organising;
• Collective bargaining policies and effective collective bargaining skills and structures;
• Health and safety issues;
• Equal rights;
• Introduction of new technologies;
• Skills development and life long learning;
• Internal and external communication strategies;
• Financial union management (including effective collection of membership dues and appropriate and transparent expenditures);
• Implementation, monitoring and enforcement of IFAs; and
• Other trade union topics that are of interest and concern.

Consistent with the principles outlined above in sections 3.1.1 and 3.1.2, the IMF will provide resources for union building projects on the condition that they:

• Build organisations independent of employer and government control;
• Enhance democracy within the organisation and encourage and enable members, particularly youth and women, to take part in the activities of the organisation. Projects should contribute to eliminating political, racial and gender discrimination;
• Increase the capacity of the organisation to carry out its own core union activities, building self-reliance, particularly in the area of education;
• Strengthen solidarity within the organisation, among unions in the country and/or region, and inside the IMF; and
• Support independent trade unions confronting and fighting repressive governments.

Information

• Information on the work of the IMF and its affiliates needs to be more systematically communicated. This information can help affiliates in the different regions to learn from one another and build up their strength.

The IMF will:

• Work towards establishing a more effective internal information system, using the IMF website, newsletters, the quarterly journal and other means of communication.

IMF affiliates will:

• Inform the secretariat about what type of information they are interested in; and,
• Provide the IMF with information about their activities.

In countries where national unions are vulnerable or enterprise unions predominate, the IMF will work with affiliates to promote national unity and strengthened national structures.  This includes developing strategies to prevent workers’ organisations from being played off against one another or becoming dependent on management. Using tools such as Country Councils, the IMF will work to avoid competition and encourage co-operation and solidarity between workers.

Given that strong national unions are often born out of different historical backgrounds, it is necessary to seek unity of action even when unification into a single national union is not realistic. The IMF will focus its attention on ensuring that the unions we support have the capacity to organise, bargain and prioritise work on a national level, and that different unions within a country work in concert in the interests of all metalworkers.

In countries where labour legislation does not permit national unions, the IMF will work with national centres, other global unions, and the ITUC to assist workers and their unions in overturning laws that prevent workers from forming national unions.

To assist affiliates in achieving unity at the national level, the IMF will:

• Utilise IMF Country Council structures to build greater unity and solidarity in action; and
• Focus its union building activities in countries where affiliates are predominantly enterprise-level unions in TNC’s on the strengthening of national structures, and on building unity among unions by encouraging changes in union structures.

IMF affiliates will:

• Work with other affiliates at the national level to build common positions and platforms on issues affecting metalworkers, particularly collective bargaining.

Given the enormous challenges working people face in today’s globalised economy, organising remains a basic task for all trade unions and organising drives should be carried out by IMF affiliates themselves.

The shift from secure to insecure forms of employment, the attacks on trade union rights and the fragmentation of collective bargaining systems has seriously eroded our capacity to organise and effectively represent the interests of workers.  In addition to that the structural change in employment, in particular in the developed countries has resulted in a decline in the proportion of blue-collar workers who are traditionally well organized and an increase in the proportion of highly educated and non-manual workers.  The trade unions have found it more difficult to organise these workers.

To win and defend metalworkers’ rights, we need strong, national unions in all countries. Therefore, one of the key objectives of the IMF is to encourage workers to build independent, democratic and representative national unions that are autonomous from employers, political parties and governments. This includes overcoming weaknesses in existing unions and, where required, building new unions capable of tackling the challenges of today.

However, it is not only a question of what unions do. In some countries, such as Belarus, Colombia, Thailand and the Philippines, governments and companies actively work to eliminate trade union structures, murder and intimidate activists or alternatively to fragment union structures and encourage enterprise level unionism, which seriously undermines the possibility for trade union strength.  All workers, regardless of their status, must have the right to organize.  The IMF and its affiliates must fight for legislation that allows workers to make their own decisions regarding their representative structures, and will pressure companies to always respect workers’ decisions instead of hiding behind national laws when these do not conform to internationally recognized labour rights.

IMF affiliates will:

• Prioritise organising as a key means of building union strength at the national level;
• Utilise organising strategies at the sectoral level and in key TNCs;
• Provide practical solidarity support to unions attempting to organise workers anywhere, particularly along the supply chain of TNCs, and including in the affiliate’s home country;
• Fight to remove legal barriers which prevent precarious workers from joining national unions;
• Step-up organising of non-manual workers, who account for a growing part of the workforce, to build greater solidarity and bargaining strength; and
• Push for the elimination of legal restrictions on the right to organise for non-manual workers.

To assist affiliates in organising, the IMF will:

• Support unions in developing their own organising campaigns and strategies, particularly for organising women, migrants, youth, and workers in precarious employment;
• Strengthen its efforts to raise awareness about organising non-manual workers’ in all regions, promote the exchange of information and experiences on organising tools and policies, and address topics of special relevance to non-manual workers;
• Identify and develop union organising opportunities with affiliates, especially where TNC investments create new or growing concentrations of workers. The IMF Executive Committee, informed by the Regions, will prioritise the countries which should be the focus of this work. This will include countries such as China where the IMF currently has no affiliates;
• Utilise IFAs or other means to develop cross-border organising campaigns;
• Co-ordinate organising activities:
• throughout supply chains by targetting contractors and workers in different forms of precarious employment;
• in EPZs, where workers’ rights are ignored and exploited; and
• wherever multi-company, or multi-plant organising campaigns could be co-ordinated;
• Provide forums for the exchange of information and experiences;
• Provide training on issues relevant for organising and keeping members; and
• Support national efforts to bring about changes in legislation to protect the right to organise and bargaining collectively by working together with other GUFs, the ITUC, the TUAC, and the ILO.

IMF will provide assistance to trade unions that:

• are committed to activities leading to self-reliance;
• have established their own priorities and identified their needs;
• are working in accordance with the IMF Action Programme;
• are building union structures that respond to workers’ needs locally and internationally and that include women at all levels;
• are able to organise activities or are prepared to closely co-operate with the appropriate IMF regional office;
• are building union structures that are democratic, and independent of political parties and employers;
• are ready to co-operate with other IMF affiliates at local, national and international level; and
• are confronting and fighting repressive governments.

The IMF will only be as strong as its affiliates and will only have the power its affiliates give to it. Therefore, our priority is building strong national trade unions that, in a permanent democratic relationship with workers, are capable of achieving real gains through collective bargaining, by organising the unorganised, striving for trade union unity at the national level and building unions through training, education and effective exchange of information.

Throughout the world, people are meeting and mobilising against the destructive effect of unbridled capitalism, all-out deregulation and corporate abuses; they call for the promotion of democracy, human rights, and social justice.  Various social and political movements have rejected the neo-liberal consensus and are following a different path. The World Social Forum process that started in 2001 in Porto Alegre, Brazil is still the largest and most inclusive space where alliances can be built and joint initiatives taken with different social actors. In the last decade, real political change has taken place in some countries, most notably in Latin America, where democratic and progressive governments have come to power and have challenged the neo-liberal economic model by renationalizing their key natural resources and using its profits to benefit the many and not just the few. Numerous movements and networks that play an important role in local and global politics have emerged, creating spaces of dialogue and common action, and building broad-based coalitions.

There is now a window of opportunity for the world’s progressive social forces to get together and come up with alternatives to neo-liberal policies.  Alternatives dedicated to sustainable development, human rights, gender equity and the protection of individual and collective rights in the economy offer opportunities for solidarity and alliances for working people everywhere.