10 June, 2010FES publishes "Networking and a Two-track Strategy" a new paper on the role of global networking and trade union interaction in the light of the current financial and economic crisis.
GERMANY: Within the framework of global trade union politics, the Friedrich Ebert Foundation (FES) recently published "Networking and Two-track Strategy: Perspectives of International Trade Union Activities", a paper that examines union action in the light of the current financial and economic crisis.
Effective representation of workers' interests in increasingly multi-dimensional and transnational social spaces is a key challenge for international trade union activities. The paper argues that the global jobs crisis calls for a two-track strategy on the part of the trade unions, on the one hand strengthening company-based structures through international cooperation and on the other playing an active part at the level of the international trade union movement in the formulation of a new vision of society based on global labour and employment standards.
The paper gives different examples, including Daimler in Sindelfingen and GM/Opel, and insists that the social inequality in the world cannot be explained only with the different levels of development of nation states.
The authors of the paper are Horst Mund, head of International Relations at IMF affiliated IG Metall; Manfred Wannöffel, managing director of the Joint Panel of Ruhr University Bochum (RUB) and IG Metall, and Sarah Ganter, trade union coordinator in the department for Latin America and the Caribbean at the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung
Full text of the paper is available at http://library.fes.de/pdf-files/iez/07279.pdf.