The rise of corporate power and the decline in workers’ rights, wages and secure work are directly correlated. Governments are captured by corporations who dictate policy and regulation on nearly every aspect of our lives.
Labour is not a commodity: this principle is at the very heart of the ILO Constitution. Yet the global web of supply chains operates on this basis. Corporate power, profit and exploitation of labour and natural resources increasingly depend on this impoverished model of trade – global supply chains, a global trade which keeps millions of workers in poverty and precarious work.
More than 60 per cent of global trade is dependent on contracts in supply chains sourced from different parts of the world.
It is the real economy where working people are exploited through supply chains that are based on denial of human and labour rights, poverty wages and insecure or precarious work. It is a model that ruthlessly exploits the labour of women and migrants.
Under the umbrella of the logo ‘End Corporate Greed’, unions are organising for minimum living wages and collective bargaining, more secure and safe employment relationships, formalising informal work in supply chains, purging supply chains of slavery and universal social protection.