Yaoundé’s thin harvest: WTO ministers meeting delivers little gains for Africa
WTO reform, e-commerce, fisheries subsidies, agriculture, and the least-developed countries package was deferred back to Geneva, Switzerland, for further work.
The outcome disappointed trade unions and civil society organizations, who had their own parallel meetings, and hoped that the meeting would deliver real progress on long-standing development concerns. Instead, it exposed sharp differences over policy space for developing countries, the future of digital trade, and the balance between multilateral interests and national sovereignty.
Deadlock over digital duties
The most visible stalemate concerned the long-standing moratorium on customs duties on electronic transmissions. The moratorium, in place since 1998, prevents members from taxing cross-border digital products such as software, music or e-books. Traditionally renewed every two years, the moratorium lapsed after ministers, who are the WTO’s highest decision-making body, failed to agree on an extension.
The United States initially pushed for a permanent ban, later offering a five-year renewal. Brazil insisted on sticking to the two-year norm, arguing that a longer freeze would limit developing countries’ ability to generate revenue and shape digital policy. The related moratorium on non-violation and situation complaints under the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement also expired without renewal.
Trade unions including ITUC, IndustriALL Global Union, Public Services International, and African civil society organisations including the Africa Trade Network, viewed the failure as a reflection of deeper imbalances in the WTO frameworks. Most argued that a permanent or extended moratorium would disproportionately benefit large digital exporters while limiting options in economies still building their digital infrastructure.
Missed opportunity for agriculture
Agriculture, a priority for African and other developing members, again yielded no concrete advances. No decisions were reached on domestic support, market access, public food security or the special safeguard mechanism. The long-standing demands of the Cotton-4 countries (Benin, Burkina Faso, Chad, and Mali) on subsidies also went unaddressed. The United States had blocked progress on agriculture earlier in the conference, calling for a fundamental reset of the negotiations.
Another flashpoint was on the proposed incorporation of the Investment Facilitation for Development Agreement into the WTO rulebook. Trade unions and civil society warned that formal adoption risked undermining the consensus-based nature of the organisation.
Trade union and civil society representatives pointed to the African Continental Free Trade Area Investment Protocol as a more suitable regional framework, arguing that it avoids adversarial international arbitration and better protects domestic investors.
Paule-France Ndessomin, IndustriALL regional secretary for Sub Saharan Africa said the meeting is a missed opportunity to expand industrial policy space for decent job creation, particularly for Africa’s youthful population in line with the Marrakech Agreement which established the WTO.
“Fairer and more equitable trade rules that create jobs and prioritize African workers and communities are needed as pathways going forward,”
she said.
Due diligence needs trade union participation
The meeting underscored the importance of the ongoing shift from voluntary approaches to binding obligations. Laws such as the EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive require companies to identify risks, prevent violations and provide remedy. This creates space for unions to intervene across supply chains. Organizing around compliance can improve transparency, strengthen bargaining and expose violations early.
Atle Høie, general secretary of IndustriALL emphasized:
“We have many instruments available, but we are tired of tools that have no teeth. Binding laws are opening new doors, but workers must walk through them.”
Worker participation and real oversight
A key message was that due diligence is meaningless without trade union participation. Workers must be involved in risk assessments, monitoring and remediation.
Participants noted that companies often bypass unions or present false compliance narratives. Independent, worker-led assessments are essential to reflect conditions in informal units, subcontracted factories and home-based work.
Participants identified access to information, protection from retaliation and stronger social dialogue as critical.
Ground realities and gaps
Interventions highlighted serious challenges. Workers in energy, mining, textile and home-based sectors face high risks with limited protection. Unsafe conditions, lack of protective equipment and repeated accidents show the urgency of preventive action.
Concerns raised included precarious employment in the supply chain with very low union density, exclusion from inspections and employer-controlled unions. Language barriers further limit access to information.
Cases of denied compensation, retaliation and weak enforcement show how companies evade accountability.
With growing pressures from climate change, industrial policy and trade shifts, unions stressed the need to ensure worker voices shape these transitions. The meeting reaffirmed that due diligence is a pathway to accountability and stronger worker power.
Ashutosh Bhattacharya IndustriALL South Asia regional secretary, said:
“Accountability begins where workers can speak without fear. Real change will only come when workers are including in shaping industrial and climate policy.”
Roxanne Brown on power, solidarity and a new era for women in the labour movement
“That moment wasn’t about me. It was about us.”
On 1 March 2026, Roxanne D. Brown became the 10th international president of the United Steelworkers (USW), the first woman, and the first Black woman, to lead one of North America’s most powerful unions. She is clear about what it means. Not a personal milestone. A collective one. A moment that captured, as she put it, “so many hopes, dreams, silent struggles and prayers” and belonged to every sister who had ever been told the top was not for her.
One month on, speaking to IndustriALL at the USW International Women’s Conference in Toronto, the weight of that moment was still landing. For retirees who said they never thought they would live to see it. For young women still working out whether there is a place for them at the top. For Roxanne Brown herself, still occasionally catching herself saying “vice president” out of habit.
“Sisters can do anything. There is no job, no role, no thing that is insurmountable for our sisters all around the globe.”
Built for this moment
Roxanne Brown did not arrive at the presidency by accident. Born in Kingston, Jamaica, and raised in White Plains, New York, she came to the labour movement through lived experience, her mother and aunt worked union jobs that allowed them to buy homes and break into the middle class. That transformation shaped everything that followed.
She joined the USW 27 years ago and spent nearly three decades fighting for workers on health care, trade, manufacturing and workplace safety. Throughout it all, she held to one conviction: the workers themselves are the most powerful thing in any room.
Know who you are
Standing before a room packed with union sisters, Roxanne Brown delivered the lesson she has shared with her own daughter and that she now carries to women across the movement.
“At some point, the world is going to try to tell you who they think you are. So it’s really important that you know who you are. So that when that moment comes, you stand in the power of the knowledge of who you are.”
She speaks from experience. In the years before her election, she heard it herself, the doubts, the limitations others tried to place on her. She had already decided who she was.
For Roxanne Brown, knowing who you are is not a passive thing. It means knowing what makes you powerful, and being intentional about protecting that knowledge. She connects with people through conversation, through listening, through the stories she gathers and carries into her work.
She speaks openly about imposter syndrome, naming it not as a personal failure but as something structural, something women navigate constantly in spaces not built for them.
“Even when you do know who you are, that confidence shakes a little bit, and the imposter syndrome steps back in,” she said. “Knowing who you are from the front end and taking the steps to remind yourself, even in small ways, that is really important.”
Pointing to her eight-year-old daughter, who was in the room at the conference. She has more confidence at her age than Roxanne Brown ever did at the same stage. Why? Because she has grown up surrounded by strong women, in her family and in her union family, who have shown her what power looks like in practice.
“That’s what this is about,” Roxanne Brown said. “Showing what is possible.”
Building women’s leadership: the Women of Steel model
Roxanne Brown’s presidency did not emerge from nowhere. It was prepared over decades by a powerful model for women’s leadership development in the global trade union movement.
Women of Steel, the USW’s dedicated programme for women’s organizing and leadership, predates female representation on the union’s executive board. When it was founded, every leader at the top of the USW was a man. The first woman would not join the executive board until 2008. Yet former international president Leo Gerard made a commitment, to the programme, to the sisters in the union, to the idea that women needed a structure where they could learn, be trained and understand how to exercise power.
The results are clear. In 2008, one woman on the executive board. Today, three. The majority of USW department heads are women. And for the first time in the union’s history, the international president is a woman.
“If we didn’t have that programme, I don’t know that we would have had a system to talk to sisters about their power,” Roxanne Brown said. “About what they bring into the union and how that power serves the union.”
Under the leadership of Randie Pearson, director of Women of Steel, the programme has been fully revamped for 2026. The training, the language, the issues addressed, all updated to reflect what women need today. That includes explicit recognition of domestic violence as a union issue, something sisters were once uncertain the union would even care about.
“There were things sisters were dealing with back then they didn’t even know the union would care about,” Roxanne Brown said. “And that is something that is embedded within the programme we have today.”
For affiliates around the world who are at the beginning of this journey, Roxanne Brown’s message is direct: it starts with leadership. The commitment has to come from the top. And the programme has to be built to last, not just for the sisters who are there today, but for the ones still finding their way.
“This is the beginning,”
she said.
“And the goal is to make sure that other sisters see what’s possible. Because we have more coming.”
Global solidarity in a moment of pressure
As IndustriALL Global Union’s regional vice president for North America, Roxanne Brown brings the weight of USW members to a global coalition of workers across 130 countries.
At a moment when U.S. trade policy, attacks on workers’ rights and the rollback of workplace protections are sending shockwaves through labour markets worldwide, that connection has rarely mattered more.
“When the United States sneezes, the world catches a cold,” she said. “The workers of the United States are not the government. We too are feeling the pain and the pressure, and we rely on the solidarity of our union family all around the world.”
She is equally direct about the threat at home. The current political environment, the dismantling of diversity, equity and inclusion protections, the scaling back of workplace safety regulations, the chaos of tariff policy that has upended supply chains globally, is not just political noise. It is material harm to workers.
“In the last year, so many protections for workers in safety and health have been scaled back,” she told the conference. “We may not see the immediate impacts of these cuts. But we will see them.”
Her response to those trying to make workers forget their power is fierce and unambiguous. Workers built these economies. No one else can go into the mines, the smelters, the pulp and paper facilities and do what union members do every day. That, she insists, is where the power actually lies.
“We outnumber them. We provide the power. And that is something we need to remember in this moment.”
She describes IndustriALL as exactly the platform the movement needs right now. A space to bring that solidarity together, to be honest about what this moment demands, and to remind workers everywhere that they are not fighting alone.
“The only way through this period is with us knowing that we’re not in this fight alone,” she said. “That the workers of the world stand with us.”
“Somebody say new era”
Roxanne Brown addresses delegates at the opening plenary of the USW Women of Steel conference in Toronto, March 2026. Photo: IndustriALL Global Union
Before she left the stage in Toronto, Roxanne Brown looked out at the room, more than half of whom were attending a Women of Steel conference for the first time, and named what she saw.
“That’s leadership,” she said. “Sisters who raise their hands, wanting to come, wanting to get educated, get some additional tools for their toolbox. That is the kind of leadership we expect as a union.”
She spoke about the sister who told her the night before that she had been nominated to run for local president and that seeing Roxanne Brown made her know she could do it. She spoke about the young woman who said she was ready to get more involved because she had seen not one but three sisters on the International Executive Board.
That moment on 1 March 2026, she said, was never just about her.
“It captured so many hopes. Dreams. Silent struggles. Prayers. And so much more. And we did it all together. And we will continue to do this together.”
Shipbreaking workers in Bangladesh to benefit from new injury insurance scheme
Shipbreaking is often called the most dangerous work in the world. Workers face daily risks from toxic materials, heavy machinery and falls. Most of the time workers have little or no recourse when injured or falling ill on the job.
The new EIS pilot has been developed in partnership with the International Labour Organization (ILO). It establishes a fund providing pensions and financial support to workers and their families unable to work due to job-related injury or illness.
BIMCO, the world’s largest international shipping association, is calling on its members to sign a letter of intent to contribute to the EIS fund.
IndustriALL Global Union is calling on shipowners to contribute fifty cents per ton to the EIS fund.
Social protection for the world’s most dangerous job
Walton Pantland, IndustriALL’s director of organising and campaigns and shipbuilding and shipbreaking, said:
“Shipbreaking is difficult and dangerous work. It has left a terrible toll of death, injury and occupational illnesses for the workers involved. Those workers who were often abandoned if injured or too ill to work. Just as the Hong Kong Convention makes shipbreaking safer, the EIS scheme provides social protection. This means that workers and their families will receive a pension if they are unable to work. This is the right thing for the industry at the right time. We urge shipowners to contribute fifty cents per ton to the EIS fund to transform the lives of shipbreaking workers and their families.”
The shipbreaking EIS builds on the success of a similar scheme in Bangladesh’s ready-made garment sector. It is the first national employment injury insurance programme for the country’s four million RMG workers, providing lifelong payouts to injured workers and the families of those killed on the job.
BP locks out nearly 1,000 refinery workers in illegal labour dispute
The lockout, which disrupts the livelihoods of hundreds of skilled workers and their families, comes amid ongoing contract negotiations. Now entering its sixth day, no new bargaining dates have been scheduled and the union says BP has chosen intimidation and confrontation over good-faith bargaining.
A lockout that was planned from the start
USW national oil bargaining chair Mike Smith says the writing was on the wall from the moment negotiations began.
“From the start of the negotiations, it felt like that was their plan. They did it both nationally with not offering the national pattern set with Marathon, but also at the local level trying to gut the collective bargaining agreement.”
USW international president, Roxanne Brown, was unequivocal in her condemnation of BP’s actions.
“BP’s decision to lock out these skilled workers is unacceptable and unlawful. Generations of union members have kept this refinery running safely and efficiently and they deserve a contract that reflects their value, not intimidation tactics designed to force concessions.”
Union demands end to intimidation tactics
USW District 7 director Mike Millsap warned that the consequences extend beyond the workers directly affected, posing a risk to the wider community.
“In its drive to lower staffing levels and implement wage cuts, BP is choosing confrontation and gambling the community’s safety on inexperienced replacement workers. This lockout is a direct attack on workers’ rights and an attempt to weaken the bargaining power of the very people who make this facility successful.”
Safety and job security at the heart of negotiations
Smith emphasised that the union’s bargaining committee has remained ready and willing to engage throughout the dispute and called on BP to return to the table without delay.
“Our bargaining committee has been at the table and prepared to engage. BP needs to end this lockout immediately and return to serious negotiations. A fair contract is within reach if the company is willing to negotiate in good faith.”
The union’s key demands centre on safety, job security and fair wages.
Action planned as pressure mounts on BP
With no bargaining dates on the horizon, the USW is stepping up its public campaign. Actions are being planned, including possible mobilisation around BP’s shareholder meeting on 23 April outside of London, a moment that could bring international attention to the dispute.
The USW is coordinating its strategic campaign efforts and is calling on affiliates and allies to stand with the locked-out workers. Any expressions of solidarity and support are welcomed as the union prepares its next steps.
Solidarity with locked-out workers
The USW is calling on BP to immediately end its unfair labour practices, reinstate all locked-out workers and resume meaningful negotiations that respect workers’ dignity and contributions.
The USW represents 850,000 workers across metals, mining, energy, chemicals, rubber, glass and a growing number of sectors including health care, education and public services.
“IndustriALL Global Union stands in full solidarity with the nearly 1,000 USW members locked out at BP’s Whiting Refinery. For generations, these workers have kept this refinery running safely and efficiently, their contribution is invaluable and must be respected. This lockout is not negotiation; it is coercion and it raises serious concerns under internationally recognised labour standards, including the ILO’s conventions on freedom of association and collective bargaining. We call on BP to immediately end the lockout, reinstate all locked-out workers and return to the table to reach a fair agreement that ensures job security, safe staffing levels and equitable wages,”
said Atle Høie, IndustriALL general secretary.
Rebuild Ukraine — but not without its workers
Draft legislation currently before the Ukrainian parliament has alarmed trade unions across the country. The proposed laws, affiliates say, reproduce and entrench the worst restrictions imposed under martial law: weakened union representation thresholds, removed protections for pregnant women and workers in hazardous conditions and the effective exclusion of trade unions from collective bargaining processes.
Most troubling to union leaders is the way the drafts have been developed.
“We were never given the text of this law,”
said Mykhailo Volynets, chairman of the Confederation of Free Trade Unions of Ukraine. Social dialogue, already fragile in Ukraine, with the national tripartite council having not met since 2018, has been bypassed entirely. For affiliates already struggling to hold together union structures amid industrial devastation, the exclusion is not just a procedural failure. It is an existential threat.
IndustriALL assistant general secretary, Kemal Özkan, was direct about what is at stake:
“We call for an immediate end to Russian aggression, the right to social dialogue and the right for workers.”
IndustriALL general secretary, Atle Høie, echoed the concern, warning that the window to get this right is narrow:
“International companies will want to buy what is left of Ukraine. Ukraine has ambition to join the European Union (EU) and it must comply with standards, including labour legislation”.
We have to make sure that the EU is clear to Ukraine on what is necessary.”
The European Commission and the ILO have both been unequivocal: the draft legislation must be brought into full alignment with EU and ILO standards. For Ukraine, this is not just a matter of workers’ rights, it is a condition of EU accession.
“We expect Ukraine to abide by these standards,”
said Laura Corrado from the European Commission’s directorate-general for employment.
Magnus Berge of the ILO was equally direct:
“The war does not absolve the government of its international commitments.”
Devastation on the ground
Behind the legislative battle lies a picture of profound industrial destruction. Across coal, metal, chemical, energy, oil and gas, machine-building and aerospace sectors, affiliates describe the same pattern: enterprises destroyed or suspended, membership in freefall and unions struggling to maintain basic structures. The metal and mining sectors have lost six of its fourteen enterprises.
The machine-building sector reports a decline in membership not because workers are leaving, but because the workplaces themselves no longer exist. The chemical sector has seen entire facilities go silent due to shelling. In the hardest-hit regions, affiliates say rebuilding destroyed enterprises is not economically viable and they are not convinced anyone will invest in doing so.
In this environment, collective bargaining has largely stalled. Affiliates across sectors report that negotiating new or improved collective agreements is simply not possible in current conditions. Instead, unions are focused on a single, more modest objective: holding on to what was agreed before the war.
“We are fighting not to lose what we already have,”
said another representative from the aerospace sector.
Industrial agreements that should be updated and strengthened are being left unchanged, not out of choice but necessity. Where salary increases have been achieved, it is collective bargaining, however constrained that has made the difference, with wage growth in some sectors outpacing inflation.
Social dialogue at the national level has effectively collapsed. At the enterprise and industry level, affiliates describe a pattern of employers and government structures failing to fulfil existing agreements, with unions having little leverage to enforce compliance.
“If these draft laws pass, trade unions will be excluded from reconstruction,”
another affiliate warned. The concern is widely shared: that international investors, attracted by weakened labour protections, will dictate the terms of Ukraine’s economic recovery while Ukrainian workers bear the costs.
Reconstruction must work for workers
If reconstruction is to be built on democratic and sustainable foundations, trade unions insist they must have a seat at the table and that seat must be secured now, before the terms of recovery are set. That means not only defending existing collective agreements, but ensuring that new industrial and energy models, including the transition away from coal and toward renewables, are shaped with worker participation from the outset.
“As trade unions we have to prepare for workers to have their fair share of resources and what comes after the war,”
said Atle Høie.
“We have to be prepared for the day the war ends.”
Kemal Özkan reinforced the point: “Our mission is to have strong unions present in the reconstruction.”
“If you want to invite six million displaced people back, you have to look at working conditions,”
said Magnus Berge.
“If working conditions are not good, you will not have the workers and you need them to rebuild.”
IndustriALL Global Union, together with its Swedish solidarity partners Union to Union (UtoU) and IF Metall and IndustriALL Europe, has committed to a sustained three-year programme supporting Ukrainian affiliates to rebuild their capacity, strengthen social dialogue and ensure workers’ voices are central to Ukraine’s recovery. The message from union leaders is clear: reconstruction is not just about bricks and concrete. It is a question of power and Ukrainian workers intend to be part of it.
IndustriALL files ILO complaint against Malaysia over systemic union busting
The complaint, submitted on 10 March 2026 together with five Malaysian affiliate unions, accuses the government of failing to ensure adequate protection against employer interference in workers’ right to organize and bargain collectively in direct violation of ILO Convention No. 98, which Malaysia has ratified.
A systemic pattern of violations
The 12 cases involve Flextronics Technology (Penang), Molex (Malaysia), Renesas Semiconductor KL, Texas Instruments Malaysia, XSD International Paper, General Aluminium Works, Hicom Automotive Manufacturers, Valeo Malaysia, Boeing Composites Malaysia, Nexperia Malaysia, Lumileds Malaysia and Wiwynn Technology Service Malaysia.
Across these cases, workers and unions faced a strikingly consistent set of tactics designed to undermine their freedom of association:
Employers threatened workers with loss of bonuses, salary increments and benefits if they voted for a union. Workers were warned of factory closures and mass layoffs if unions were established. Migrant workers, among the most vulnerable, were specifically targeted with threats of deportation and non-renewal of work permits. Company buses were deliberately delayed on voting days. Polling stations were made physically inaccessible. Workers were blocked from checking their names on voter lists. Union activists were dismissed, suspended and subjected to disciplinary proceedings following successful ballot results.
In some cases, companies weaponized the judicial system, filing challenge after challenge before the High Court, Court of Appeal and Federal Court, to delay recognition processes by years and in one case more than a decade.
Workers fought back and won but justice remained elusive
Despite relentless interference, workers in several companies demonstrated extraordinary resolve. At Nexperia, workers voted for their union with 95.92 per cent support. At Boeing Composites Malaysia, 85.2 per cent of eligible workers voted in favour of NUTEAIW. At Lumileds, the union won with nearly 70 per cent support despite management threatening migrant workers with deportation, denying bathroom breaks to union supporters and falsely accusing union leaders of personal misconduct.
Yet winning the ballot was rarely the end of the struggle. At Lumileds, a worksite committee member who spoke out against post-ballot intimidation was dismissed and forced to sleep in his car after being evicted from company accommodation. Migrant workers were deported.
At XSD International Paper, 20 union activists were dismissed weeks after the union won recognition with 63.71 per cent of the vote, only reinstated months later after a protest at the Malaysian parliament.
At Renesas Semiconductor, despite courts ruling multiple times in the union’s favour and confirming the company had engaged in union busting, no one has been prosecuted or penalized under the law six years after a formal complaint was lodged.
Authorities failed to act
The complaint documents a consistent failure by Malaysian authorities to take effective action. Complaints lodged with the Industrial Relations Department went unanswered or resulted in no concrete measures. Investigations were launched but never concluded with dissuasive penalties. Authorities relied on conciliation rather than enforcement. In the Flextronics case, an urgent complaint was lodged with Industrial Relations Department officers on-site during the ballot and nothing was done.
The ILO’s own committee of experts (CEACR), in its 2024 observations, had already flagged Malaysia’s ineffective remedies, lengthy procedures and insufficiently dissuasive sanctions in anti-union discrimination cases, expressing regret that the government had failed to provide requested information and had made no changes to the relevant provision of the Industrial Relations Act that blocks workers from accessing courts directly.
IndustriALL demands
IndustriALL and its affiliates are calling on the ILO CFA to recommend that the Malaysian government take urgent measures, including:
Ensuring that secret ballot and recognition procedures are conducted free from employer interference, with active monitoring and immediate intervention by the authorities.
Guaranteeing prompt, impartial investigations into anti-union discrimination with clear timelines and reasoned outcomes. Imposing effective, proportionate and dissuasive sanctions including meaningful application of Section 59 of the Industrial Relations Act. Providing rapid remedies for affected workers, including reinstatement and compensation. Taking specific measures to protect migrant workers, who face unique and heightened vulnerability to coercion. Preventing excessive judicial delays from becoming a tool to deny collective bargaining rights.
IndustriALL general secretary, Atle Høie, said:
“The cases in this complaint are not isolated incidents they are evidence of a structural failure to protect workers’ fundamental rights in Malaysia. Workers are winning ballots with overwhelming majorities and still being dismissed, intimidated and denied the right to bargain. The Malaysian government must act and the ILO must hold it to account.”
The complaint was filed jointly with the Electronics Industry Employees’ Union Northern, Southern and Western Regions (EIEUNR, EIEUSR and EIEUWR), the Paper and Paper Products Manufacturing Employees Union (PPPMEU) and the National Union of Transport Equipment & Allied Industries Workers (NUTEAIW) unions together representing tens of thousands of workers across peninsular Malaysia.
Image: Shutterstock
Turning due diligence laws into real results for workers
The Competence Centre for Human Rights Due Diligence was established by IndustriALL Global Union, UNI Global Union, the German Trade Union Confederation (DGB) and the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung. It is a non-profit foundation registered in the Netherlands, backed by initial funding from the German federal ministry for economic cooperation and development.
The Competence Centre will support a fundamental shift: from voluntary approaches to binding legal frameworks. This shift creates new opportunities for workers worldwide to access accountability and remedy. The launch event, hosted by FES, opened with a clear statement of purpose. Only by putting human rights at the centre of business life can the world become a more just place.
Kelly Fay Rodríguez, head of the centre, opened with a call to visualize the workers these laws are meant to protect — garment workers in Bangladesh, miners in Zambia extracting cobalt for electric vehicle batteries, warehouse workers in countries where organising can cost you your job, content moderators reviewing harrowing material for as little as two US dollars an hour.
“For too long, when their rights were violated, companies could walk away. Distance was a shield. That era is ending.”
During the day, three panels explored how to put that principle into practice. They covered the legal landscape, union recognition in global supply chains and the specific realities facing workers in critical minerals and tech. Speakers from Zimbabwe, Kenya, Brazil, Côte d’Ivoire and Romania gave first-hand accounts of what it takes to organize, bargain and secure remedy. The message across all three was consistent: laws create leverage, but only if workers have a voice at the table.
“As IndustriALL we have tools; global framework agreements, the Accord, the OECD guidelines. But even the best tools have limits. Workers need remedy and they cannot wait years for it,”
said IndustriALL general secretary Atle Høie.
Putting human rights due diligence to work
The discussion made clear that laws alone are not enough. Without meaningful union involvement, due diligence risks becoming a box-ticking exercise. With workers at the table, these laws can become powerful instruments for accountability.
Closing the day, IndustriALL assistant general secretary Kemal Özkan put it plainly:
“Voluntary initiatives are not enough to change the situation for workers — or for the environment. We need binding regulation. We need to make companies accountable and workers’ voices heard.”
The centre will support unions through a help desk providing advice, guidance and referrals. It will help unions identify which laws apply, where leverage exists and how to access enforcement mechanisms and remedy pathways. There will also be a legal impact lab bringing together HRDD legal experts, practitioners and union specialists. Its purpose is to map those pathways and identify barriers to enforcement.
IG Metall challenges Tesla works council election over intimidation and threats
The motion is based on Section 19 of Germany’s Works Constitution Act, which prohibits obstruction of elections through threats or adverse consequences.
A pattern of intimidation
IG Metall points to a sustained campaign of intimidation against workers and candidates who supported the union list. For months, workers were told that voting for IG Metall was tantamount to voting against Tesla and would have consequences for the future of the plant and their jobs.
The intimidation came predominantly from supervisors and plant managers, who hold a special position within the company, which they have used to influence the election in an improper manner. Illuminated advertising on the factory façade was permitted for the pro-management list but immediately blocked for the IG Metall list. Managers distributed badges bearing the slogan “Giga Yes, Trade Union No,” warned workers that voting for IG Metall would mean lower pay and, in some cases, issued direct instructions such as: “I can only advise you not to vote for the red list.”
IG Metall and IndustriALL president Christiane Benner said:
“The impression that the election at Tesla was influenced by threats is too serious not to be resolved in court. Our colleagues at the plant, as well as the candidates for the works council, deserve fair elections without the feeling that they might subsequently be punished for their decisions. In a German constitutional state, this must not only be possible but a matter of course – and, in our view, this was not the case in the recent works council elections at Tesla. Democratic principles must apply to these vitally important democratic elections in this country.”
Jan Otto, IG Metall regional director for Berlin-Brandenburg-Saxony, described the situation as unprecedented:
“As a trade unionist, I have never experienced such an attack on democratic co-determination as at Tesla. Elon Musk and the German Tesla management have used all their power to steer this works council election in their favour. We will defend ourselves against this by every means necessary. But legal disputes are not our priority, we are focusing all our efforts on working with our members to secure better working conditions at Grünheide.”
If the challenge succeeds, the current works council would be dissolved and a new election held.
The case has broader implications for German labour law. The German Trade Union Confederation (DGB) has long called for a strict duty of employer neutrality in works council elections, arguing the Tesla case demonstrates the urgent need for stronger legal protections.
Who runs the world? Not workers. It’s time that changed.
By Kemal Ozkan, assistant general secretary, IndustriALL Global Union
The interest rates that determine whether a government can afford hospitals or must cut them. The debt frameworks that shape whether a country invests in its people or services its creditors. The labour market prescriptions that tell governments whether to protect workers or deregulate them.
I was in those rooms in early March. What I witnessed made me angry. But anger, for those of us who lead workers’ organizations, is not enough. Our job is to understand, to challenge, and to organize.
So let me tell you what I saw, and why it matters to every worker, from a garment factory in Bangladesh to a mine in South Africa.
The world is run in towers disconnected from workers
The decisions made in Washington’s grand institutions flow outward into the real world with extraordinary force, yet the people most affected by those decisions have almost no voice in making them. That is why organizations like IndustriALL are there, to carry the ground realities of workers from the Global South and Global North into rooms where they would otherwise never be heard.
And what we heard in those rooms this year was troubling. What we are witnessing is not just a failure of policy. It is a regression.
Those of us old enough to remember the 1980s will recognize the language, deregulation, austerity, the primacy of markets over people. That ideology never went away. It is back, redesigned and more aggressive, reshaping global governance in ways that are shrinking the space for democracy at every level.
The numbers tell the story, and they are damning
The evidence is not in dispute. The G20 Extraordinary Committee report on global inequality, led by Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and commissioned under South Africa’s G20 presidency, found that 83 per cent of countries have high income inequality. Between 2000 and 2024, the richest 1 per cent captured 41 per cent of all new wealth created globally, while the bottom half of humanity captured just 1 per cent. The richest 1 per cent saw their average wealth grow by US$1.3 million over that period. Someone in the poorest half of humanity saw their wealth grow by an average of US$585.
The labour share of national income, the share of what an economy produces that goes to workers rather than capital, has fallen in 56 per cent of countries since 1990. Between 2019 and 2024, average global CEO pay increased by 50 per cent, while average worker pay rose by less than 1 per cent. (ILO Global Wage Report 2024-25)
These are not abstract statistics. They describe a world in which the system is working exactly as designed, and it is not designed for workers.
The debt trap and what it means on the factory floor
One of the most powerful moments in Washington came from Zambian trade unionists. Zambia was the first African nation to default on its sovereign debt in 2020. But Zambia is not alone. More than 70 countries, particularly in the Global South, are caught in a debt crisis that is suffocating their economies and their workers.
How did so many countries end up here? In large part, by following the prescriptions of the very institutions that now manage their debt. And when the crisis comes, those institutions return, not with new thinking, but with the same conditions: austerity, spending cuts, guarantees that debts to large financial institutions and rich creditor nations are serviced first. The result is not prosperity. It is the hollowing out of public services, the collapse of investment, and, on the factory floor and in the mine, job losses, worsening conditions and wages that cannot cover the cost of living.
Today, 3.4 billion people live in countries that spend more on interest repayments than on education or health. (UNCTAD, 2025) That is not a financing problem. It is a justice problem.
Measuring jobs, and why it matters who counts
In our discussions with the World Bank, we challenged their approach to measuring job quality. The Bank uses average earnings as a headline indicator of progress. We pushed back hard.
Here is why this matters. When a government is told its economy is creating jobs and average earnings are rising, it sounds like success. But averages hide everything. They obscure the explosion of precarious, informal and platform work. They say nothing about whether a wage is a living wage, whether it is enough to feed a family, pay rent, afford healthcare. They say nothing about whether workers have the right to organize, to bargain collectively, to refuse unsafe conditions.
There is a wage crisis in the world today. In many countries, wages do not cover basic needs. The bottom of the human needs pyramid, food, shelter, safety, is out of reach for millions of people who work full time. When the institutions that shape global economic policy measure success by indicators that cannot see this reality, the reality never changes.
We are demanding that the World Bank change its methodology. We are demanding an end to austerity prescriptions that cut public sector wages and dismantle the social services workers depend on. Decent work, with fundamental rights, social protection and social dialogue at its centre, must be the measure of economic progress, not a footnote to it.
Taxation and the theft of the future
The labour share is falling. Wealth is concentrating at the top. And the tax system, which should be the mechanism for returning some of that wealth to society, is failing, deliberately.
This is not a technical adjustment. It is a political choice that tells workers in Indonesia, Zambia and Brazil that the rules of the global economy will continue to be written by and for the powerful. Every dollar that flows untaxed into the accounts of corporations and billionaires is a dollar not spent on schools, hospitals, infrastructure and the public services that workers depend on.
Wealth inequality is now worse than income inequality, and if the global tax regime does not change, the inequality figures will never change either.
Democracy is the thread that connects everything
AI, debt, taxation, social protection, these look like separate issues. They are not. They are all symptoms of the same underlying failure: a global governance system that is not democratic, that does not represent the majority of the world’s people, and that has been captured by interests that are not theirs.
We see this most clearly in this year’s G20. The Trump administration’s US presidency has removed labour, employment and inequality from the G20 agenda entirely. South Africa, which drove genuine progress for workers during its 2025 presidency, has been disinvited. The Labour 20 has not been recognized. Only the Business 20 remains at the table.
This is not a procedural matter. It is an attack on democratic institutions and on the basic principle that those affected by decisions should have a voice in making them.
The deregulation agenda being pushed through the G20 is not about freeing economies. It is about removing the protections that workers fought for over generations, safety standards, labour rights, environmental rules, to benefit a small elite.
This is shameful. And it will not stand.
What we will do
What I heard in Washington made me angry. What I saw made me outraged. But as leaders of the union movement, our job is not to cry or simply to speak out. Our job is to understand, to educate and to mobilize.
The global union movement will not wait for an invitation from a G20 presidency that has made clear workers are not welcome. We will mobilize our forces. We will build our alliances with civil society. We will carry the labour and social agenda, already established through years of work under previous G20 presidencies, into every platform and every future presidency that will listen.
The United Kingdom’s G20 presidency in 2027 must hear us clearly.
At IndustriALL’s last Congress, we adopted a slogan: organizing for a just future. That slogan was not chosen for a moment. It was chosen for a struggle that will not end. A new generation of workers will carry it forward.
Hope is our capital
We never lose hope. Hope is our capital. But hope alone is not enough. It must be combined with knowledge, energy, solidarity and organized power. That is what IndustriALL brings to those rooms in Washington. That is what we will bring everywhere the decisions are made that shape the lives of working people around the world.
