Swiss UNIA Holds First Ordinary Congress Since 2004 Merger

The 200,000-member ICEM Swiss affiliated union UNIA held its first Congress since the October 2004 merger of five unions. The Congress, held in Lugano from 9-12 October, saw issuance of an important paper entitled “Collective Contracts for All.”

Switzerland’s largest union also declared itself “The Trade Union for Hard Times” at the Congress, and pledged to organise 5,000 workers per year until the next Congress in 2012.

The 400 delegates present adopted resolutions calling for a better economic order, integration of immigrants into Swiss work life, and support for a late November federal initiative regarding flexible retirement. The “Collective Contracts for All” paper includes a call for a higher minimum wage in Switzerland, and states that UNIA would consider calling for a Swiss federal initiative to make that increase happen.

The paper also calls for a short work week, a standard 13th month pay-check, or an automatic offset to such an increase, and better compatibility between the work-life environment.

The Swiss general workers’ union re-elected Co-Presidents Renzo Ambrosetti and Andreas Rieger, and pared an 11-member Executive Committee to nine. With that, the union elected, following a resolution adopted on 10 October, a strict call for a 33% gender balance in all its activities. That then occurred the next day in elections to the 38-member Central Committee.

In his remarks to the Congress, Rieger called for halt to an economic culture of enterprises maximizing profits to the detriment of an equitable socio-economic system. Ambrosetti, in referring to the Congress’s centrepiece paper, said UNIA, over the next four years, will “negotiate when possible but fight when necessary.”

Besides Ambrosetti and Rieger, the Central Committee now consists of newly-elected members Vania Alleva and Corrado Pardini; and Fabienne Blanc-Kühn, Jean-Claude Rennwald, Hansueli Scheidegger, Rita Schiavi, and Michael von Felten were re-elected.

ICEM General Secretary Manfred Warda, attending the Congress, congratulated the new team on their elections, as well as UNIA’s commitment inside the ICEM to further workers’ interests globally in the pharmaceutical, chemicals, and cement industries. He credited UNIA’s Roland Conus with leading those efforts.

The Congress also was marked by a half-day workshop entitled “UNIA: International Solidarity.” It focused on the union’s “Fair Play – Fair Games” pressure on the Swiss-based International Olympic Committee, the need for fair play and safe construction standards as South Africa prepares to host the 2010 FIFA World Cup, and ongoing cooperation projects in Central and Eastern Europe.