21 November, 2011
The prelude to ICEM’s Fifth Statutory Congress in Buenos Aires, Argentina, this week will be a day-long conference on the successes and best practices achieved in the longstanding Contract and Agency Labour (CAL) campaign. The event will take place at the Congress venue, the Hilton Hotel Buenos Aires, on Wednesday, 23 November, the day before Congress opens.
With activities now in over 25 countries, the six-year-old ICEM campaign is now operating on all cylinders and has reached a level of maturity not only seen in tangible results, but has produced ICEM project coordinators who possess the skills and have honed the tools to make a difference for irregular workers the world over.
Several of those coordinators will highlight CAL campaign successes at the conference this week. For example, CAL Asian Coordinator Aranya Pakapath will tell how 1,500 contract workers in Chhattisgarh state, India, formed a cement workers’ union. She will describe how Indonesian outsource workers did the same in that country’s paper industry, as well as struggles cement workers in the Philippines face in building unions.
Joseph Toe, CAL Coordinator in Sub-Saharan Africa, will address ICEM campaigns in Guinea, Nigeria, Namibia, Sierra Leone and other countries where major shifts and successful organising have taken place regarding casual employment. Seyni Mbaye Ndiaye, General Secretary of ICEM affiliate SUTIDS in Senegal, will speak on how his union and the ICEM Sub-Saharan CAL project brought about a Presidential Decree in the west African nation for protection of rights of short-term contract workers.
A report will be given by Igor Díaz of ICEM affiliate Sintracarbón in Colombia on the hurdles that union encounters in organising and bringing collective agreements to workers of sub-contractors at the world’s biggest coal mine.
FNV Bondgenoten Message at Eemshaven, Netherlands, CAL Asian Coordinator Aranya Pakapath
And Sascha Meijer of FNV Bondgenoten in the Netherlands will show the tools used by that union in bringing dignity and wage justice to migrant workers from Europe’s east at energy plants in the Dutch port city of Eemshaven.
Jørgen Juul Rasmussen of Dansk El Förbund of Denmark will give an overview on the temporary and fixed-term employment situation in Europe, as well as progress on implementing the European Union directive on temporary work.
Sponsored by the German Freidrich Ebert Stiftung (FES), the conference promises to be a wellspring of strategies and best case studies aimed at combating the rampant growth of temporary and short-term employment that affects us all.
The day will conclude with a panel moderated by Council of Global Unions Coordinator Jim Baker that will include General Secretaries from the ICEM (Manfred Warda), the International Textile, Garment, and Leather Workers’ Federation (Klaus Priegnitz), and the International Metalworkers’ Federation (Jyrki Raina) that will look at future strategies of the campaign within the framework of integrating the three Global Union Federations.
ICEM Latin America/Caribbean Regional Vice President Sergio Novais will chair the day-long session.