The Commonwealth Trade Union Group (CTUG), part of the International Trade Union Confederation, will hold its annual meeting in Geneva on Sunday 8 June, during the International Labour Conference, and review the progress which was made towards the CTUG Goals, adopted last year, at the Commonwealth People’s Forum in Kampala, Uganda last November. Vijay Krishnarayan, Deputy Director of the Commonwealth Foundation, which organised the Forum, will be the guest speaker.

Representatives of national trade union centres in all fifty three Commonwealth countries are being invited to attend, to receive a report of the CTUG’s involvement in the Commonwealth People’s Forum, and discuss how the CTUG Goals can be taken forward through lobbying individual Commonwealth governments, working with civil society organisations and through the International Day for Action on Decent Work, which will take place on Monday 7 October.

ITUC General Secretary Guy Ryder said:
“Last year’s Commonwealth People’s Forum was the most successful Forum ever, and the CTUG is proud of the contribution it made to the communiqué which was sent to the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting. Trade union goals were central to that communiqué, but like the rest of civil society, we need to raise our game in lobbying Commonwealth Governments so that their discussions and decisions reflect the views of their citizens.”

At the CTUG workshop on “Realising People’s Potential through Respect for Trade Union Rights”, which was a major element of the November 2007 Commonwealth People’s Forum in Kampala, the limited progress towards meeting the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) established by the United Nations was welcomed. But participants expressed serious concerns about the slow progress being made and emphasised that the key to future progress was investing in people, and their access to justice, labour protection, education, health care, and to clean water. Although ‘decent work’ had been recognised by the UN as critical to poverty reduction and as an indicator for the achievement of the MDGs, the concept of ‘decent work’ should be placed at the core of social and economic policy. The workshop concluded that decent work and job security were under threat in many Commonwealth countries and therefore governments must ensure workers’ rights are enforced.

At its 2007 annual meeting last June, the Commonwealth Trade Union Group adopted a series of objectives or goals, calling on the Commonwealth to:
 publish a stock-take of progress towards the eight UN Millennium Development Goals in poor Commonwealth countries every two years;
commit the Commonwealth’s industrialised countries (Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the UK) to meet the UN’s target for overseas aid of 0.7% of GDP, reviewing progress publicly every two years;
 create an ’observatory’ to analyse the effects of WTO trade agreements on Commonwealth countries, and develop a strategy to mitigate the negative effects of those agreements;
 establish a high level Commission to examine the challenges of climate change in the Commonwealth, establish structures to respond rapidly to natural disasters and to assist with the challenges of employment transition towards a more sustainable economy;
 set a target for universal ratification across the Commonwealth of all eight ILO core labour conventions by 2013 (currently only 32 of the 48 Commonwealth members of the ILO have ratified all eight, but 7 more have ratified seven of them) and conduct a public review of progress every two years;
 call on all Commonwealth countries to apply the ILO Code of Conduct on HIV/AIDS by 2013 (currently 22 of the 53 Commonwealth countries are doing so);
 hold annual Commonwealth Labour Ministers forums with employers and unions to encourage the spread of decent work in the Commonwealth;
 establish a fund to build the capacity of trade unions across the Commonwealth, especially to address the informal sector and export processing zones; and
 encourage Commonwealth countries to ratify the ILO convention on tripartite consultation about workplace issues by the next CHOGM in 2009 (in Trinidad and Tobago).

The Commonwealth Trade Union Group represents over 30 million trade unionists in 53 countries. The Commonwealth accounts for 1.8 billion of the world’s people – almost one in three.

The ITUC represents 168 million workers in 155 countries and territories and has 311 national affiliates.

For more information, please contact the ITUC Press Department on: +32 2 224 0204 or +32 476 621 018