The rules of the game should be changed

Text / Alex Ivanou

Trade union activist Yolanda Morín, 33, is the international secretary at the Confederación Sindical de Comisiones Obreras (CC.OO), one of IMF's affiliates in Spain, and currently a substitute member of the IMF Executive Committee. In this capacity Yolanda Morín will attend her first IMF Executive Committee meeting in Frankfurt on June 10 and 11, 2010.

Yolanda joined the CC.OO national headquarters only two years ago. However she is not new to the trade union movement. Graduated as a teacher at the age of 21 in Madrid, Yolanda moved to Catalan-speaking Barcelona, where she started her career as a teacher. Soon she found that due to linguistic problems it was difficult to continue. Living in an industrial area Yolanda decided to change her work profile and embarked on a different job in small industrial metalworking enterprises. Notably it was here that she first faced the reality of precarious employment with poor working conditions and a bad system of protection of health and safety.

In a bid to change this reality Yolanda joined a union and made contact with the union world. In the beginning, she worked in the morning at the factory and on free afternoons at the local union, where she volunteered to work with the training department. Soon after that Yolanda was offered a permanent job in the union as a technical assistant responsible for studies of the labour market and workers' inclusion programs. Yolanda's activism and interest in participating in collective bargaining led to her becoming a member of the Bosch works council and member of its negotiating team. Later, based on her experience, Yolanda was contacted by Comisiones Obreras and offered a job in Madrid first with responsibility for industrial relations observatories and now as the international secretary.

In her daily work Yolanda is involved in union cooperation projects, she maintains contacts with European works councils and with colleagues in different companies, both in Europe and globally.

In terms of her expectations from her current and future activities with the IMF, Yolanda believes one should be ambitious about what can be done in conjunction with the IMF, while at the same time finding a balance between the available human and financial resources.

Yolanda believes that IMF, together with its affiliates, should fight to oblige companies to implement socially responsible practices, since she is assured they do have responsibilities vis-à-vis their workers and society; companies have significant influence on finances, economic systems and also on governments and their policies.

Yolanda believes that, "the aim should be to change the rules of the game, it is clear that the IMF cannot do that alone, nevertheless we should put pressure on governments and different institutions where unions are involved to seek to change the rules of the game. The present rules have given us the financial and economic crisis. And the brunt of this has been paid by workers and has translated into a loss of basic rights for workers in collective bargaining and negotiations. It has also resulted in an increase of industrial accidents due to the lack of respect by the companies of health and safety regulations."

"Companies do design and evaluate their strategies by communicating within and between themselves; therefore union cooperation is also key. Unions should be in a position to communicate, to set up and evaluate their own strategies," she argues, adding, "therefore there is a clear need to set up global workers' and trade union networks."

NB: The IMF Working Group on Trade Union Networks in TNCs, met in Geneva in May and will report to the IMF Executive Committee in June 2010.