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

Cross-border social dialogue and agreements
This comes as no surprise since, in some cases, companies adopted codes
as part of a union-avoidance strategy by pre-emption, preferring to unilaterally
offer a paternalistic package than have a recognized negotiating
body to deal with. As the ICFTU has pointed out, “many of the US-based
companies that were the first to adopt codes were, in both principle and
practice, opposed to trade unions”…. For example, the Caterpillar code
states that the company seeks to “operate the business in such a way that
employees don’t feel a need for representation by unions or other third parties”
and the Sara Lee Knit Products code states that the company “believes
in a union-free environment except where law and cultures require (SKP)
to do otherwise”. The DuPont code reads: “employees shall be encouraged
by lawful expression of management opinion to continue an existing nounion
status, but where employees have chosen to be represented by a
union, management shall deal with the union in good faith. …
A second problem has been monitoring of compliance. Most codes
do not provide for a credible independent monitoring procedure, or for
strong enforcement and complaints mechanisms. Unions have argued
that the existence of independent trade unions throughout the operations
of transnational corporations are the most efficient monitoring system.
… Many companies have gone to great length — and expense — to
resort to other monitoring systems (creating their own, contracting out
to commercial monitoring enterprises or to compliant NGOs) with dubious
results (Gallin, 2000).
After a detailed analysis of the differences between IFAs and corporate
social responsibility (CSR) initiatives, most commonly expressed in
the form of codes of conduct, Gibb observed:
When considering the argument that IFAs are no different than other CSR
initiatives, or that IFAs are one form of CSR, it must be recognized that if
the contribution of IFAs was limited to improving the public image or
providing a marketing boost to companies, there would be as many IFAs
signed as there are CSR initiatives. This is not the case (Gibb, 2005).
In a document for the 2006 IUF Executive Committee meeting,
the IUF secretariat makes the same point:
Whilst some may say that IFAs are little more than agreed “codes of conduct”
they are clearly significantly better. Unlike codes their very existence
as signed agreements means they are explicitly built on union recognition
at international level and therefore do not pose the danger of being used
as an alternative to unions in the same way that many codes and CSR initiatives
do (even those where unions somehow “sign on”) (IUF, 2006).
Although the one obvious difference between codes and IFAs is
that most codes are unilateral company statements whereas IFAs are
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