Anti-austerity protests outside the Greek Syntagma (Parliament) in Athens. Photo by Mehran Khalili (www.mehrankhalili.com).
by Mark Phillips
IT is time for unions around the world to step up to the plate and reclaim economic policy from an orthodoxy that has caused immeasurable damage, says global union leader Sharan Burrow.
The Australian-born
General Secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation believes that despite clear evidence that the extreme market based policies of the past few decades have been a failure, governments around the world remain gripped by a gospel of reducing public services and social security, and attacking workplace rights.
During a brief recent visit to Australia, Burrow said the highest numbers of world unemployed on record demanded a fresh way of thinking. The alternative was massive social unrest spreading from developing countries to advanced economies, she said.
“There’s no doubt we’ve got the highest unemployment on record and in addition to the 210 million unemployed you’ve got about 45 million young people entering the workforce every year to economies that certainly can’t accommodate them,” Burrow said in an interview with
This Working Life.
“Some parts of Europe, we’ve got 50-60% youth unemployed. That’s a social and economic time bomb. . . Unless governments take a different path and invest in job centred growth, you’re looking at a decade before you see any kind of recovery. Meanwhile, you’ve got a decade of marginalised young people.”
Burrow said the only way for countries like Greece and Spain to recover from their dire state was government investment in jobs and decent wages to fuel consumer demand.
But instead, strait-jacketed by free market economics and a crisis of political leadership, governments are doing the opposite and consequently digging an even bigger hole.
Burrow said an unelected “troika” of the International Monetary Fund, European Central Bank and European Commission is bullying governments into cutting back on public spending and workplace rights, against the will of the people.
A
global poll commissioned by the ITUC last year found that only seven per cent of people believe that as voters they can have any serious influence over the economic decisions of the governments they elect.
“This is the challenge for unions because what it tells you is the orthodoxy of failed policies is winning the day,” Burrow said. “That just says the democracy contract is broken.
“We’ve got to build workers’ power that becomes then the basis of democratic authority such that politicians won’t ignore the ambitions of the people.
“So our ambitions are centred around driving a consciousness around secure jobs and secure income and the investment that requires, but also around organising industrially and politically in terms of community values and community ambitions to redress the imbalance of power of unelected folk.”
Burrow draws as inspiration for how to organise globally around these ambitions the successful Your Rights At Work campaign she helped to steer as ACTU President between 2000 and 2010, until her election as ITUC General Secretary.
“It’s not about supporting a politician or a political party. It’s about the Your Rights at Work equivalent where there’s a set of ideas and values that people demand from any politician,” she said.
“We’ve got to build workers’ power that becomes then the basis of democratic authority such that politicians won’t ignore the ambitions of the people,” says Sharan Burrow.
A disturbing development alongside the damaging austerity economics has been a renewed attack on workers’ rights around the world, particularly collective bargaining.
Burrow said much of this appears to be opportunism by powerful business interests seeking to take advantage of a global crisis.
“There’s no logic,” she said. “Workers have become victims of a crisis they didn’t create, and rather than be seen as solutions because the power of their purchasing power has to be at the heart of stable demand, you’ve got this total illogical approach to destroying collective bargaining.”
Parallel with this attack on collective bargaining is a growing informal and unregulated workforce.
“The informal economy is 40% of the global economy and growing, and it’s withering secure jobs and sustainable businesses.”
In 2011, the International Labour Organisation passed
a convention to extend basic workplace rights to domestic workers, and the ITUC is now campaigning to have nations like Australia ratify that treaty.
The Gulf States and their employment model, which Burrow describes as “21st century enslavement of workers” are a particular geographic focus for ITUC activities.
Burrow says that it is “evil” that these immensely wealthy, oil-rich nations are exploiting vulnerable migrant workers and prohibiting them from organising collectively for their rights.
“We’ve picked a fight with Qatar and FIFA around the building of the stadiums in Qatar for the [2022 soccer] World Cup but more broadly the whole issue of 21st century slavery… This is not about poverty which can break your heart or conflict which can make you angry, the sheer stupidity of violence. This is evil.
“This is about the richest government in the world simply treating workers building their wealthy society as less than human and there’s no need for it, absolutely no need.”
Whether it’s advocating a jobs led recovery in Europe or attempting to build an independent union movement in the fledgling democracies of Libya, Egypt and Tunisia, Burrow admits the challenges for never stop coming.
“It’s a pretty big world,” she says. But as anyone who has encountered Sharan Burrow during her long service to the Australian union movement can attest, she has never been one to back away from a fight.
Mark Phillips is editor of the This Working Life blog. He is on twitter at @read_about_it
This Working Life
is a forum for news, analysis and commentary about rights at work and related issues. The opinions presented in This Working Life
are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent policies or views of the ACTU.