Chicago, IL
We are living in a time of profound economic transformation. Multinational corporations and banks are driving us toward a global economy with booms and busts: growth and disruption, opportunity and insecurity, greater wealth and greater inequality, and basic workers' rights are under fierce institutional and ideological assault.
The denial of workplace rights and freedoms in one country affects workers in all countries. It is no accident that as standards erode in one country, standards erode in other countries
Corporations continue to compete by exploitation - playing nations against one another - lowering wages, scrapping regulations, loosening environmental restrictions and creating a race to the bottom. Workers are unable to buy the goods and services they produce.
History continues to show that where unions are repressed or absent, economic justice, human rights and democracy are at risk.
That is why the AFL-CIO launched the Campaign for Global Fairness: multi-track, multi-year, ongoing campaign to educate and mobilize and fight employers and governments who rob workers of their right to organize and bargain collectively, that employ children, that use forced labor or that discriminate in their workplaces.
Corporations must be held accountable for these anti-worker practices. They must not be allowed to drive artificial wedges between working families in our country and working families in other countries, especially those whose economic development is just beginning.
From the WTO meetings in Seattle to the march for children that began in Thailand, from Washington's World Bank meetings to the courageous struggles of workers in every region of the world, the issue of fairness and justice for working people is now at the center of worldwide political debate.
Now is the moment to press even harder to secure the fundamental rights of workers in all the international institutions and organizations.
These basic rights have long been defined by the International Labor Organization. In 1998, the ILO once again reaffirmed the core conventions in a new "Declaration of Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work."
The Declaration clearly affirms that all 175 member countries, employers and trade unions endorse these principles and rights and agree to respect, promote and realize:
- Freedom of Association and the Right to Collectively Bargain
- No Child Labor
- No Forced Labor
- No Discrimination
Despite the adoption of the new Declaration, millions of workers in the global economy continue to be systematically denied these rights by the very corporations and governments who have agreed to "respect, promote and realize" these principles.
Our challenge, then, is to help all working men and women understand and then exercise their rights—from farm workers in California to garment workers in Cambodia, from workers in industrialized countries to those in developing of nations.
What is needed is a program of unprecedented solidarity to educate and reaffirm to workers in every workplace and every nation of their fundamental rights at work.
At the annual conference of the ILO in June, Director General Juan Somavia stated that "to exercise their rights, people need to know what they are. Could we not post the message of the Declaration in every workplace of the world. It would be a very simple, practical step to make it known."
Working with the ICFTU, the Trade Secretariats, and National Unions in countries around the world, we will launch a worldwide campaign to "Post the Declaration." We must hold corporations and governments accountable to their commitment at the ILO and make the Declaration a reality for workers by publicizing, popularizing and posting the Declaration in every workplace, government building and trade union hall around the world.
We will reach out to the U.S. government to secure the commitment and resources to create a campaign at the ILO to design, develop and distribute "Declaration Posters" for public education and worksite posting.
At the AFL-CIO, we will make the distribution and posting of the Declaration a major part of our ongoing campaign to bring fairness to the global economy. We will demand all multinational corporations honor their obligation to promote the Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work by posting them in their offices, work sites and factories in their home-based operations and all subcontracting locations around the world.
Together, we must work as never before to make these principles a reality for working people all over the world-to make them tools to lift the lives of human beings, to bring about growth that is widely shared, to make real the goals of a civil society.