13 May, 2010
The Global Union Federation representing workers in the food, agriculture, and services sector, the International Union of Food and Allied Workers’ Association (IUF), has written to John Ruggie, UN Special Representative on Business and Human Rights, requesting that the relationship between precarious work and the effective realisation of human rights be incorporated into his investigations and recommendations as a matter of priority.
In June 2008, Ruggie proposed a policy framework which was unanimously welcomed by the Human Rights Council. The "Protect, Respect, Remedy" framework is made up of three pillars: the state duty to protect against human rights abuses by third parties, including business; the corporate responsibility to respect human rights, by avoiding infringing on the rights of others; and greater access by victims to effective remedy, judicial and non-judicial.
John Ruggie
In preparing to make operational the framework, Ruggie is currently consulting with a wide range of actors, including through an online consultation forum, that can be found here, the forum for which the IUF used for its submission.
In that submission, the IUF argues that a meaningful investigation of the relationship between business and human rights must address how the degeneration of traditional employment relationships has impacted on workers’ human rights. Non-traditional forms of working arrangements, such as agency work, contract work and bogus self-employment, are being used to undermine trade union organising and bargaining. Says the IUF, this is a “fundamental human rights issue demanding a strong response rooted in a comprehensive human rights framework.”
The IUF draw attention to the ILO’s 2008 report on industrial relations at Coca-Cola’s Colombia bottlers, which found that the company was systematically denying and restricting the ability to join a union by outsourcing many core jobs. In order to redress this and ensure that workers are capable of fully exercising their rights the global union calls for urgent, systematic action by governments and business to restrict the use of precarious work.