CROSS-BORDER SOCIAL DIALOGUE AND AGREEMENTS: An ...

International framework agreements: A reassessment – Dan Gallin
As a parallel activity, the IUF also convened regional Nestlé meetings:
most recently, for Asia and the Pacific in Manila (1999) and Jakarta
(2002), for Eastern Europe in Lviv (2003) and for Africa in Cape Town
(2003). The seventh Nestlé conference for Latin America took place in
Buenos Aires in 2003. The director of corporate human relations
attended some of these recent regional meetings. Since 2004, the IUF has
established a network of regional Nestlé coordinators based in Bangkok,
Johannesburg, Montevideo and Moscow.
In 1998, Nestlé adopted the Corporate Business Principles, which
affirm, among other things, the “respect of the right of employees to join
legally recognized labour unions”. However, the establishment of formal
mechanisms of communication between the IUF and Nestlé did not
reduce the number of conflicts. In all parts of the world, including
Europe, unions have been in conflict with local Nestlé managements in
recent years over a wide variety of issues, including union rights.
Conclusions from experience
The main conclusion that can be drawn from the experience of the
ICF, IMF and IUF in the 1960s and 1970s is that their work in coordinating
international union activities at TNC level was in fact a basic trade
union response to a new development affecting the structure of their
employer counterparts: the concentration of capital and the shift of the
place where corporate power was exercised and decisions made from the
national to the international level.
This response was intended to be a strategy of trade union struggle
and it was motivated by the need to make this struggle more effective
under the new conditions, which affected industrial relations worldwide.
International coordination was viewed as a tool through which unions
could build up a countervailing power comparable to that of the TNCs
they were facing.
From that perspective, IFAs, although a logical outcome of international
negotiations, were not the principal objective. That was to build
union strength at TNC level to achieve any number of basic trade union
aims, such as successfully conducting solidarity actions. This is something
the ITSs would have had to do in any event, and it is still part of their
basic functions, whatever institutional form it may take.
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