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

International framework agreements: A reassessment – Dan Gallin
The situation of the labour movement is that it is confronted not
only with the hostility of anti-union corporations and conservative governments
here and there, but also with a worldwide political and social
project, driven by transnational capital, which is fundamentally antidemocratic.
It is about power in society.
This system of power is codified and given enforcement authority
by the World Trade Organization and is reinforced through the international
financial institutions, which are also instruments of corporate
policy. It is about a new hierarchy of rights in which corporate rights outweigh
all others at the level of enforcement, in a world where other international
institutions, such as the ILO, or conventions on human rights,
have little or no enforcement capacity.
In this world, the objective of any meaningful international labour
strategy can only be to challenge and reverse the existing hierarchy of
rights by changing the existing power relationships through organization.
In this context, the role of IFAs has to be reassessed. In order to
become a useful part of a global labour strategy, IFAs must be primarily
understood and used as global organizing tools that can be evaluated by
measurable outcomes. Where rights such as freedom of association and
the right to collective bargaining are affirmed, IFAs should contain provisions
ensuring that such rights are actually exercised.
IFAs must confront the employment-destroying nature of the
system as a whole, which is not the same thing as fighting individual
plant closures. In negotiations for IFAs, the priority should be to put a
stop to outsourcing and casualization, which are now rampant throughout
the manufacturing and services industries. Unions must claim the
right to challenge management policies and decisions when these are
damaging to labour interests and to the general interests of society. In
other words, IFAs can — and should — become instruments of industrial
democracy.
We know that very few companies would today be prepared to sign
on to such a program. That is no reason to scale down the level of
ambition and to refuse to develop adequate responses to the crisis. In
conclusion, one cannot do better than quote from a speech of the IUF
communications director addressing the same issues:
We need to develop a political response to the corporate program, and we
need to link this program to our members’ day-to-day struggles in ways
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