Sisters and brothers, John, Richard, Linda: On behalf of the ICFTU greetings and solidarity from unions around the world with a special greeting from Australian unions who know and value the support and friendship you continue to extend so generously.

Union men and women, we have a shared mission. The greed of corporate globalisation must be tackled Your call, indeed our collective mandate to fight for security and dignity for working people all over the world will not be realised if we do not fight a corporate globalisation that increasingly treats people as just another disposable commodity.

Strong global unions organising and bargaining globally sit at the core of strategies to take on excessive corporate power now being wielded on a global scale. The fundamental union principle of “touch one touch all” has a whole new meaning as we seek to build a new internationalism that will deliver jobs, decent jobs and workers rights everywhere.

Unions have throughout history been central to democratic struggles and the quest for peace, bread and freedom. These values are as critical today as at any time in our history. While our brothers and sisters in countries such as Belarus, Burma, Columbia, Nepal and Zimbabwe, along with many others, struggle for political stability and fundamental rights others pay the price of corporate globalisation based on the mobility of capital and production.

Your membership knows this firsthand as you struggle against trade deals like CAFTA that wreck local jobs: yet you also hold strong the tradition of campaigning against the abuse of human rights and a deep commitment to solidarity which drives you to fight for peace and development for others.  The duality of this struggle is the heart of unionism and it demands both practical partnership and political action.

Labour is not a commodity and the challenge of the 21st century is to establish a global rule of law that guarantees respect for the rights of working people without whom the global economy would collapse. The violations of human and trade union rights at the hands of MNE’s either directly or indirectly through their supply chains, in too many countries, amounts to crimes against humanity. Despite this, the world’s governments, our governments, are either complicit or at best attuned to turning a blind eye to the plight of their own citizens.

As the global economy grows we should have cause for celebration for the advances that this should deliver for workers and their families all over the world but the reality is that corporate greed is driving profit share at the expense of wages, safe workplaces, conditions and entitlements for workers along with the necessary tax take for public services such as health and education.

There is a war going on and not content with the raid on secure jobs and families lives they have already made through casualisation, short term contracts, labour hire and other forms of precarious employment the corporate world is now going after overtime, shift allowances, rostering arrangements and a myriad of other established conditions and entitlements right up to and including the right to collective bargaining. The ugly side of the North American, anti-union/anti-worker corporate model you know so well is pitted against the European social model and increasingly we witness the compliance of governments who stand willing to do the bidding of such corporate dictators.

Nowhere is this more stark for me than in my own country. With the control of both houses of parliament in their grasp the Australian Government, pushed and prodded by business leaders, has blood in their sights - workers blood! Every Australian worker deserves an individual contract is their battle cry! 

Collective bargaining is ‘old economy’ they argue, anti-productive and the antithesis  of productivity and should only happen where the boss agrees. Penalty rates for overtime and shift work, compensation for those family unfriendly hours, is so passé that the 38 hour week should span Monday to Sunday. As for holidays and paid sick leave well why not cash them out and while we are at it dismantle unfair dismissal protections for 99% of corporate workplaces in Australia. Union organising, lets restrict that and lets set up the Orwellian named “Fair Pay” Commission to drive down those rises in the minimum wage. One of your Presidents’ best buddies is our Prime Minister, John Howard, and he makes no excuse for whose side he is on - Trust Business, business knows what’s best!

Well we say trust which business….Enron, James Hardie, Walmart? Not on our watch!

Labour is not a commodity and yet part, or all, of this agenda can be found in too many places around the world. The challenge is to fight back – to adopt strategy that allows us to act locally and globally. Corporate reach must be our reach and collusive governments acting against the interests of their people must be turfed out as we put in place concrete plans to build union power and political power across the globe; the power to act in the interest of working people everywhere: a common interest to end corporate greed and build a just globalisation where workers rights and environmental standards underpin a fair system of trade and where the social dividend is a guarantee of quality public services beginning with education and health.

Corporate greed is out of control. Not content to raid the tax base necessary for services by demanding both lower taxes and more corporate subsidies CEO salaries are so obscene that they have reached a level of moral depravity, which all but silences the critics. Company management that pays less that $2 dollars a day to the poorest of workers in their supply chains or, in their own countries, campaign against a minimum wage on which a family can live with dignity pay themselves salaries and bonuses that off the Richter scale of decency. In Australia at least, even for middle ranking companies, CEO salaries can now exceed three times in one week the total annual minimum wage for an employee.

With more than 2 billion living on less that $2 US a day, 187m unemployed, 80 million of them young people and around 2.2 million dying at or from work every year the corporate world is not contributing to the growth that we care about – decent work everywhere.

Capital has a global reach but without global rules. Without a global governance architecture that protects the rights of workers and their communities the corporate law of the jungle grows and so does the dislocation of jobs and the consequent divide between the rich and the poor within and across countries. This requires both union and political action from us.  Unions have been instrumental to the fight to build legal entitlements nationally and we now need to do it globally.

It is therefore critical that unions act through the ICFTU and Global Union Federations to organise workers everywhere, to bargain collectively across the global reach of the Men’s and to include demands for respect of labour rights through the supply chains.

This can only be done if we are united and committed to a new internationalism. Increasingly our fate is interdependent and the challenge to shape a new globalisation requires us to realise a capacity for doing the things we do nationally, internationally. The link between national and international work is much more than a rhetorical sense of solidarity. It is now a reality and we must give practical effect to it. To bargain with a MNE in one country must be to bargain with that company everywhere. That requires organising within and across borders; it requires union recognition rights, built on the foundation of global framework agreements and bargaining on a global scale.  Workers capital and shareholder campaigns must be brought into the fight in a more systematic way

We must also be more creative and bargain where we can across unions and GUFs for certainty for both employers and employees.

Companies that want certainty of production, of transport, packaging, warehousing and supply will see that respect for workers rights, for bargaining a fair deal and for dispute settling mechanisms are in their interests. Unions operating together can achieve security for workers. I was immensely heartened by the strength of commitment at a recent pacific rim conference hosted by US unions in California where rank add file members and union leaders - miners, steelworkers, manufacturing workers, transport workers and maritime workers put strategic plans in place for these kind of joint union ventures across borders. The trust and commitment there, commitment to action that we also see in the work of Global Unions is a reflection of a courage to be both creative and as necessary militant as we build an organising and bargaining capacity worldwide.   

This is where solidarity becomes self interest for all employees of a MNE irrespective of global location and where the only global architecture we can rely on at this point is our own values and our capacity to mobilise.

Union action must work for union members and thus our strength must also hold politicians accountable for the rights that their citizens are entitled to. Governments who fail to stand up for workers rights and moderate corporate behaviour through law don’t deserve the votes of working people. 

A framework for fair trade also requires reform of the global institutions including the UN, the IMF  the World Bank and of course the WTO.  Global rules and governance is necessary for fair trade. This is the case in our own nations and without an equivalent global rule of law workers are more easily victimised. Global architecture that requires respect for the rights of workers and within which the ILO can receive complaints and prosecute abuses is essential if we are serious about justice. This of course requires a stronger role for the ILO. The nature and role of global institutions including the ILO, institutions we can respect deserves serious debate amongst us with a view to developing  broad consensus throughout the movement so we can all can get on with the political job to make it happen. 

Unions are vitally interested in economic growth and sustainability. Industry policy or industrial development strategies, skills, research and development, intellectual property and services are all critical areas where, in the face of global trade, nations must be free to drive capacity for growth. This is necessary within a multilateral approach to trade but even more so as we face the distortion of bi-lateral trade arrangements and the increasing stalemate of global negotiations. The challenge for fair trade, a trading system that drives employment everywhere and guarantees that human rights and core labour standards are respected is greater and yet more obvious than ever.

Organising, labour laws, poverty: these and more priorities determined at the ICFTU Conference in Miyazaki last December can only be fulfilled if the drive is there for all of us to consider these priorities and how to act together to achieve our ambitions for a just globalisation.

This poses two questions:

-         How can we work seamlessly across GUF’s, national centres and unions with the ICFTU to tackle a small number of very large challenges? And

-         How do we bring together organising, corporate campaigning, shareholder activism, consumer power and political campaigns for improved labour and corporate law where it will count for all of us in the quest to build global governance and entrench labour rights?

In this context the ICFTU decided in June on just five special action programs.

-     a political project on globalisation

-          GCAP – the global call to action against poverty

-          EPZ’s – enterprise processing zones

-          Migrant workers, and

-          China

In addition, with the GUFs, we would hope to assist target a few of the worst companies guilty of anti union action and labour exploitation. You have made a significant start of Walmart his company and others must be in our sights.

The fact is that to win these ambitions we must re-build union strength but we must also hold elected leaders accountable for political action.

Our commitment to the Millennium Goals and the Call to Action Against Poverty is simply the beginning. While we must build alliances with appropriate NGO's we need to recognise that at the heart of these efforts is the very serious drive for political influence. With a few exceptions the governments of the world have moved to the right, are easily seduced by corporate board rooms, are intimidated by the dominant financial policies of the WB, the IMF and the OECD and where not creating it are timid in opposition to the rise in racism and xenophobia.

Only when unions and civil society stand together against the might of the corporate world and in defence of good political leaders will we send the pendulum swing back the other way.

The challenge of the Global Call to Action Against Poverty represents a serious test for unions just as it provides great optimism. If unions and civil society can hold governments to account for poverty, if we can provide space for progressive politicians to stand with us for debt reduction, increased aid and fair trade and can condemn those who don’t then we might just win the debt war. Initial gains were made through the recent G8, qualified though they might be. If we can drive these commitments further, if we succeed then we have a global political force able to be mobilised to drive home other ambitions.

Imagine a world where there is a job for everyone, where our children live in peace and go to school, where HIV/AIDS is defeated, where women have genuine equality; these ambitions and others are not dreams for us, they are key objectives.

Sisters and brothers, we face great challenges and we cannot ignore the impact that globalisation has already had on our membership but If we are serious about putting people, our people, everywhere, at the heart of their economies then we must re-build global union and political power; power that guarantees that in this century women and migrant workers will also take their place in leadership. Your plans for diversity in leadership passed yesterday are a great step forward and I congratulate you.

Those who know me know that I am a feisty feminist and a warrior for women. Our unions need strong women and women need unions.

Increasingly the same is true for migrant workers who prop up many of our economies without fundamental labour rights or in or in too many cases human rights. These are our sisters and brothers and our common humanity demands we fight for and with them.

Decent work sits at the core of our movement. Employment without exploitation is the only sustainable solution to poverty. We have a responsibility for workers and the lives of their families everywhere. Our struggle is a common one – standards and development in the developing world, respect and support for the continuing efforts of unions in countries in transition and the maintenance and strengthening of achievements in developed nations.

Workers around the world have common aspirations for a decent life – Peace, Bread and Freedom: democracy, employments and rights.

History must judge that the unions of the 21st century acted together in solidarity to build a just global world. In do so lets ensure that the historians write that we drove back the relentless corporate attack on the lives of working people.  Then the lessons of our history will continue to be clear for generations to come  - union power works!

Solidarity.

My International colleagues will take you through some of the practical challenges they are tackling and some real success stories. We begin with Jenny Chan, a remarkable labour activist working with production workers in Southern China, production workers exploited by global corporates like Walmart – Jenny.