ITUC Launches Global Inquiry in to Attacks on Workers’ Rights

Wages, pensions, social security and workers’ rights to union representation and collective bargaining are under new attack. The ITUC has launched a global panel of inquiry to hear first-hand testimony from workers in Bulgaria, Greece, Indonesia, Mexico, Portugal and Romania .

“Governments are failing working people by clinging to failed economies policies. The political contract between people and elected politicians has broken down.

“In a wide range of countries, finance and big business is increasingly dictating policies to governments as they weather the global economic crisis,” said Sharan Burrow.

The international union movement is mobilising to defend these basic rights in countries where the new frontlines in the attack on workers’ rights are opening up. Twenty countries have been identified by the ITUC where Labour Rights are under new attacks.

The conditions and rights of working people are threatened by:

- an unregulated financial system and global domination of the bond markets, exacerbated by the ratings agencies;
- a rush to austerity by European governments;
- the promotion of anti-worker ideology in particular through the American Chamber of Commerce;
- a legacy of the World Bank’s ‘Doing Business’ project and the OECD’s ‘Going for Growth’ report; and
- unchanging IMF orthodoxy in national level recommendations.

The global inquiry will demonstrate to politicians that people want to tackle global inequity, and will call on them to raise their ambitions and respond to the needs of working people.

The Global Inquiry Panel includes:

Michael Sommer, President of the ITUC
Sharan Burrow, General Secretary of the ITUC
Maria Helena Andre MP, Former Labour Minister of Portugal
Jay Naidoo, Founding General Secretary of COSATU, former Minister of Communications of South Africa
Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, Former Prime Minister of Denmark and President of European Socialists.

Hearings will be held in six countries in 2012, and the panel will report to the ITUC’s General Council in October.

Twenty countries have been identified by unions as being on a new frontline in Africa, Asia-Pacific, the Americas and Europe:
Angola, Bulgaria, Botswana, Croatia , Greece, Georgia, Hungary, Indonesia, Ireland, Kuwait, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, USA, Ukraine, United Kingdom.