Germany: six million potential members

German unions run the risk of losing 24% of their members, but may also be possible to organise six million new members, among them many young women, part-time workers and workers with precarious jobs. This is the outcome of a survey among 5,000 workers commissioned by German trade union federation DGB.
About one in four members is dissatisfied with the union and might leave. They think that unions are not sufficiently aware of what goes on at the workplace; that they do not do enough to protect jobs and represent the interests of workers and that communication needs improvement.
On the other hand, over six million non-members have a positive attitude towards unions. According to DGB Chairman Michael Sommer (photo), the reason they have not joined yet is that there is no union representation at their workplace. He says the survey shows that unions are doing the right thing by strengthening their workplace presence.
Source: Labournet.de

‘Create union of welfare recipients’

In order to defend the interests of welfare recipients, they should be organised into a separate union, says Krijn Hamelink, Secretary of the The Hague Welfare Recipients Group of Dutch public sector union ABVAKABO FNV.
Hamelink says the decision of senior citizens’ union ANBO to affiliate to the FNV on 1 January 2009 might be a first step in that direction. “In the long run, it should be possible to transform the ANBO into a union of welfare recipients with separate sectors, just like the industrial sectors of the current unions”.
In Hamelink’s view, a union of welfare recipients should fight poverty and campaign for higher benefits, support other unions’ campaigns and mobilise support from other unions for its own campaigns at the local level.
ABVAKABO FNV. Photo: FNV Chairwoman Agnes Jongerius interviews welfare recipient as part of FNV quality survey

First trade union successes at Wal-Mart

[Contribution by Fons Tuinstra] - The All China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU), China's only allowed trade union, started to organize two years ago branches at the US retailer Wal-Mart, and the international trade union movevement has been watching the process with excitement. It was a collision between the fiercely anti-union retailer, who had rather left Germany and South Korea in stead of giving in to union demands, and a state-run trade union who suddenly organized grass-root activities against a stubborn employer.
China Labor News Translations has published in May 2008 a first analysis of trade union activity at Wal-Mart, mainly based on online research.
In the first phase 17 branches were organized: "These efforts had culminated in democratic elections of trade union committees and trade union chairs by workers willing to take the risk to put themselves forward as candidates. Such elections often took place in the early hours of the morning without Wal-Mart's knowledge. When these unions sprang up one after another for the two weeks Wal-Mart was taken aback and refused to recognize them."
Later Wal-Mart and the ACFTU signed an agreement and since then union branches have been established with the permission of the management in in total 60 stores. The report assumes that now all of 100+ Wal-Mart stores have an ACFTU-branch.
The report signals, rather optimistically that at at least one store real negotiations between management and the elected union representatives took place. More often local Wal-Mart managers, party or trade union officials have been trying to control the process.
The report gives four case studies and zooms in at the most positive example: "The Nanchang Bayi trade union was clandestinely set up on 14 August 2006. The chair, Gao Haitao, was elected by popular vote. Since then he had fought against Wal-Mart management over one issue after another. It is significant that he had studied law on his own while supporting himself by working at Wal-Mart part-time. In 2005 he passed a nation-wide examine in law and decided to stay on in Wal-Mart as a full-timer. His legal knowledge became his main weapon to fight against Wal-Mart."
It shows that local branches of the ACFTU can work as real trade union, although it does not seem to happen overnight.
Photo: jeffreybeam / Flickr

Cleaners’ campaign yields new coalitions

[Contribution by Marijke Bijl] - In the margin of the cleaners’ campaign, we gained promising experiences in the Hague. The union organisers focused on the workers, the cleaners themselves. We wanted to see if we would find solidarity, or be able to organise solidarity, by going to people’s home bases -their places of continuity- in the neighbourhoods, associations and churches.
Everywhere there was recognition, stories were told; in a broader sense as well: about other professions, unemployment, workloads. And often people said they would like to do something.
This enabled us to form delegations of people with different backgrounds who were willing to accompany the cleaners to talk to the clients of cleaning companies.
It had not been determined beforehand what people would say. It was good to see how the stories complemented each other. The cleaner says: we have to do more work per hour, our working hours become ever more fragmented, the wages are inadequate. The Nigerian volunteer continues: do you know how humiliating it is to be seen only as a tool that can be taken out of the tool box and be put back at will. The Moroccan community worker: we meet people who are busy all day running from one job to the other, without having earned a minimum income by the end of the month, while hardly having time for their families. The clergyman adds: if you contract the cheapest cleaning company, then this wil have an impact, an inhumane impact.
These visits resulted in a follow-up in the Hague. General practitioners (GPs) started creating ‘GPs support cleaners’. They were followed by ‘Teachers support cleaners’ and ‘Clergymen support cleaners’. Secretaries wanted to join. The first poet who was asked immediately said that he wanted to mobilise more poets into ‘Poets support cleaners’.
The collective agreement was reached earlier than expected, but the experiences gained were encouraging.
A few days after the cleaning agreement, we organised a meeting with all the people we had met during the campaign. It became very clear how developments in all sectors point in the same direction: contracting out; short-term contracts; more work in fewer hours; fragmented lives and increasing income insecurity.
There was a discussion about what should be understood by the term ‘living wage’. Responses went beyond minimum wages: uninterrupted working hours; recognition. Interestingly, issues were raised as well that are mainly relevant to undocumented domestic workers, including housing, security and self-defence.
Certainly, there will be debates. On the details; on money issues. This is not going to happen overnight. But still. It offers a perspective to new connections, in the city, through chains of work and life. And it puts fresh heart into anyone involved.
Marijke Bijl works at the Illegal Workers’ Support Committee (OKIA) and was involved in the cleaners’ campaign in the Hague. A longer version of the above article was published in Dutch on the Solidariteit website.

Leadership from the heart

Former Vice President of In Flight Services Sharon Wibben looks intensely into the camera. “I owe that to you. It’s called leadership from the heart. From my heart”.
Indeed, Wibben only wants the best for her employees. But she has to warn them: “Take the time to consider the important decision you’re about the make for your future, your career, and your company. [...] A union in In Flight Services would affect the relationship we currently have. Beacuse someone would be between us”.
Meanwhile, flight attendants ask themselves why Delta is spending so much on an anti-union campaign when it denied them a promised raise. They compiled a video to expose Delta’s propaganda.
A majority of flight attendants want to be in a union, but Delta has launched an aggressive anti-union campaign, involving mandatory staff meetings in movie theatres, spreading misinformation and the occasional illegal activity.

China's trade union ACFTU starts campaign for collective bargaining

[Contribution by Fons Tuinstra] - The All China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU), the only allowed trade union in China, has started a campaign to start collective bargaining in its country. The campaign started last month in Hangzhou, an industrial center west of Shanghai, writes the state news agency Xinhua. The news agency suggest that this might be the beginning of a set of wage increases in China.
Officially collective bargaining was already allowed since the year 2000, but all kind of barriers had stopped effectively the use of this negotiation tool. But as the tensions on the labor market increase, caused by its unprecedented economic growth, the central government in Beijing has been pushing the official trade union to take action, where it was in the past almost exclusively a management tool. Starting nationwide efforts to introduce collective bargaining is the latest of a whole rang of changes.
Two years ago the ACFTU took everybody by surprise by organizing the US-company Wal-Mart, a company that has a worldwide reputation for keeping trade union out of its operations. For the first time, the Chinese trade union organized workers against the will of the employer. The ACFTU was also one of the forces behind new labor regulations like the Labor Contract Law, that is in force since January 1 and the Labor Arbitration Law that is in force as of May 1.
While it is too early to see whether those changes are the beginning of a structural change of labor relations in China or merely window dressing, the ITUC decided during its December 2007 meeting in Washington to divert from its longstanding boycott of the state-run ACFTU, but will engage the Chinese federation in an effort to support the changes. One of the major challenges will be to turn around a massive trade union organization that has never really worked like a trade union. Explaining its cadres what "collective bargaining" actually mean is one of those challenges.
Another proposed change will be experiments with the right to strike in a few dedicated areas. At the Wage Indicator conference those zones were already called "Special Striking Zones" in analogy with the "Special Economic Zones" that spearheaded China's economic development in the 1980s and 1990s.

Seniors join FNV

As of 1 January 2009, senior citizens’ union ANBO will become the 17th union affiliated to the Dutch union federation FNV. The 190,000 ANBO members will raise the total number of FNV members to 1.4 million. The affiliation was preceded by joint campaigns for people with cut state pensions and against higher rents (photo).
Since both the FNV and the ANBO offer their members assistance in filling in tax forms and both have local structures, collaboration can increase efficiency. The ANBO hopes to gain more influence on pension funds through the FNV.
Critics say that the affiliation will harm the FNV’s attempts to become more attractive to young people. However, board member Leo Hartveld says that the organisation will become more powerful and that in the future, more resources can be put into reaching young people.