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15 December, 2008
Pulp and Paper trade union leaders of the ICEM concluded their World Conference on 10 December in Piriápolis, Uruguay, with delegates forging a clear and concise solidarity action plan. With that, ICEM’s Pulp/Paper Work Group activities will be extended and expanded to other leading affiliates.
The conference featured a work plan, built around collective bargaining and other important work, and it took on issues of debt collapse, global growth slowdowns in the south, and pricing and labour costs from region to region.
The conference heard a thorough and first-of-its-kind mapping of Mercosur unions in the pulp and paper sector and the companies that these unions are present at. The mapping came way of Brazil’s Instituto Observatório Social, through funding from Finland’s SASK, the global solidarity arm of the country’s national labour centre.
Delegates heard comments from Argentine trade union leader Blas Juan Alari, President of FOEIPCyQ, that a cold-war dispute between Argentina and Uruguay over a pulp mill did not take into account the sentiments of Argentine workers. The conference also heard moving presentations about workers’ rights in Uruguay from leaders of the national labour centre, PIT/CNT.
They also heard from Ilkka Hämälä, President and CEO of Metsa-Botniä Oy, whose pulp mill in Fray Bentos has brought controversy between Argentine and Uruguyan governments, and from Jeronimo Ruiz, Director of São Paulo State’s BRACELPA employers’ grouping, who also heads collective bargaining for Brazil’s pulp and paper employers.
Workers’ representatives queried the industry leaders on several things, including wood supply issues; pulping, delivery, and labour costs, and questions on social responsibility records, a sharp challenge that was put forward by ICEM Pulp and Paper Charman Jouko Ahonen, President of Paperiliitto of Finland. He said the precedence of profits to investors over society’s interests is the foremost affront to a company’s social responsibility record.
Trade Union leaders on panel, from left, Jan-Henrik Sandberg, Sweden; Blas Juan Alari, Argentina; and Fred Wilson, Canada
The conference also heard from Uruguay Industry and Energy Minister Daniel Martinez and Labour and Social Security Minister Eduardo Bonomi. Martinez, a former trade union leader in Uruguay, gave an impassionate speech on the need to uphold high labour and social standards in all industrial development. Bonomi gave a vivid account of a crumbling civilian government giving way to military in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as proclaiming that Uruguay’s cuurent plans for industrial growth will better integrate the Mercosur countries.
President of the host union, CUOPyC’s Walter Silva, reminded trade union guests that any financial crisis inevitably harms workers first and the hardest, and said the most recent economic collapse must be the call for deepening democratic trade unions, opening of workers’ channels to investment decisions, and an absolute end to “any type of social dumping.”
Silva also called the Argentine-Uruguay dispute – now in the World Court – regrettable, stating “our opinion wasn’t taken into account, although we had the ability to offer experience and knowledge” to calm the political difficulties of the Fray Bentos mill. The mill has now been operating for one year and produces 100,000 metric tonnes of pulp annually, 70% of which is bought by Metsa-Botniá’s three paper-making owners.
ICEM General Secretary Manfred Warda told delegates the neo-liberal model of economic structures has failed. “It is not a time to heal a system that has failed, but rather a time to forge a sustainable future built on justice and equality.”
He said Uruguay was the right place to hold this conference, considering the dark days of repression in the 1970s and 1980s, with the ICEM purposely scheduling the conference on the 60th Anniversary of signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The three-day ICEM forum was preceded by a two-day conference, 6-7 December, on forest certification programmes sponsored by the global union federation, Building and Woodworkers’ International (BWI). That forum proved highly successful and afforded.ICEM affiliates the opportunity to learn about forest certification programmes.