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Al-Ahram Weekly 16 - 22 December 1999 Issue No. 460 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 16 - 22 December 1999 Issue No. 460
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Debate Focus Profile Living Travel Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Labour under globalisation
By Faiza RadyOver these last years of our fading millennium, trade union busting has been on the rise worldwide, reports the 1999 Annual Survey of Trade Union Rights, published by the Brussels-based International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU). Exposing severe violations of various International Labour Organisation (ILO) Conventions, to which all of the 119 surveyed countries are signatories, the report denounces concerted government and corporate onslaughts on essential labour rights. First and foremost among these are the workers' right to collective bargaining -- to determine their terms of employment -- and protecting labour against anti-union discrimination. The latter has become the norm in the export-processing zones of Central America, where workers are routinely fired -- and sometimes severely injured and killed -- for attempting to organise.
The labour situation in Africa is especially desperate because of the continent's high indebtedness to the North. African workers are paying the high cost of a debt crisis incurred by their economic and political elite. Unemployment levels continue to soar as public sector industries are privatised and workers face massive lay-offs, while structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) -- required by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund as a loan conditionality -- impose wage freezes on already impoverished workers.
Last year in Zambia, the government slapped public sector workers with a wage freeze and planned to fire tens of thousands of workers. When the Zambian Confederation of Trade Unions (ZCTU) demanded to negotiate, the government threatened to revoke the union's registration. In Niger, where public workers went on strike to protest the non-payment of wage arrears, the government retorted that their priority was to implement SAPs rather than disburse a backlog of salaries. "Never mind that the workers needed to eat," commented the report.
Although single government-controlled unions have largely been dismantled continent-wide, independent trade unions are still banned in Libya, Sudan, Egypt and Equatorial Guinea. In other countries, where independent unions are nominally allowed to function, union busting is part of a wider system of political repression. In Malawi, for example, the government justified a clamp down on unions by claiming that they were being infiltrated and used by radical political organisations to cause civil unrest.
In Zimbabwe, a country with a militant and powerful trade union movement, union rights are being progressively eroded. In 1998, the government accused the Zimbabwean Confederation of Trade Unions (ZCTU) of being in league with the white community of landowners and, by the end of the year, the security forces were investigating the union for allegedly receiving foreign funding. In Ethiopia, the government has systematically harassed and repressed the teachers' union, whose leader Taye Woldesmiate, remains imprisoned for the third year running.
In many countries, the right to organise is severely limited in the public and private sectors. Collective bargaining is especially undermined in the public sector, where the state unilaterally imposes wage scales, while corporate employers oftentimes refuse to negotiate with labour representatives. Public sector workers are also largely prohibited from going on strike.
Strikes and protest marches commonly meet with state repression and police brutality. Last year in Kenya, the police used clubs and tear gas against 400 nurses, striking bank workers and a teachers' demonstration. In Swaziland, the wheelchair-bound former treasurer of the Swaziland Confederation of Trade Unions, Mxolisi Mbata, died in 1997 as a result of being severely beaten by security forces.
Armed police were also unleashed against strikers in Burundi, Djibouti, Lesotho and Zimbabwe -- where some workers were shot dead for demanding their rights. "All they wanted was the payment of their salaries," notes the report.
Attacks on workers' right to organise are not confined to the impoverished South, however. In the United States, labour surveys show that one in ten union supporters campaigning to form a union is illegally fired. And at least one worker will lose his job in 25 per cent of all union-organising campaigns. A 1994 poll found that 79 per cent of Americans believe workers are likely to get sacked if they attempt to unionise their work-place.
Upon losing their jobs, American workers have no effective legal recourse. The body which governs industrial relations in most of the private sector, the National Labour Relations Board (NLRB), does not provide workers with acceptable redress. To date, the NLRB has accumulated an estimated backlog of some 25,000 cases involving corporate discrimination against workers committed to trade union activity. While the NLRB takes an average of 557 days to process and resolve a case, some cases remain locked in litigation for years on end. A case in point: in 1998, 62 workers who were illegally fired by their employer during a union-organising campaign in 1979 received compensation 19 years after the fact.
In addition to lengthy litigation lock-outs, prohibitive court costs effectively deny a large segment of the US workforce the right to organise. Nevertheless, even when workers are able to raise sufficient funds to cover litigation expenses against corporate anti-union practices and establish their right to unionise, employers systematically draw out an already lengthy, cumbersome and costly process by appealing the verdict.
Backing big business against the workers, the government may then spend months -- and sometimes years -- reviewing minor, irrelevant and often trumped-up charges. Throughout 1998, 5,000 workers at the Avondale Shipyard in New Orleans were denied their right to collective bargaining, while management successfully used the court system to dodge a 1993 NLRB ruling ordering the shipyard to unionise. Since 1997, the NLRB has lodged some 400 complaints against the company including charges of discriminatory lay-offs, demotions and transfers, in addition to claims of illegal surveillance and intimidation of union supporters. Despite the NLRB's long list of loaded charges, management continues its concerted onslaught against the shipyard workers.
Exhibiting an evident bias towards the corporate establishment, US law grants companies the upper hand in collective bargaining by allowing for worker lock-outs and work-place relocation during strikes. Last year, the American Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) locked out a group of technicians who had walked out for a one-day strike. In an attempt to intimidate the workers and prevent further strikes, the company then attempted to shift production of some of its news programmes from the US to Britain.
Heavily impeded by an ineffective labour relation board that is ill-equipped to enforce penalties against corporate violations of collective bargaining rights, American workers remain largely unprotected. "This, together with the failure of US law to protect trade union rights, has led to an increasing number of instances of extreme exploitation," explains the report.
In this context, American workers -- like their African counterparts -- face a dramatic deterioration of their working conditions.
