Presentation by Esther Lynch, Deputy General Secretary
UNI Europa Conference "Forward through Collective Bargaining" - 28 April 2021
Thank you President.
What a great Conference!
Your message has been loud and clear every worker deserves the choice to join a union and bargain for fair pay and conditions.
The valuable reports prepared for this Conference show a full power recovery needs full power collective bargaining.
Thats why the fight against union busting belongs to and is the duty of everyone.
There are no independent bystanders. When governments ignore attacks on workers that is not a neutral act.
The only way to bust a union is to lie, distort, manipulate, threaten, and always, always attack. Each ‘union prevention’ campaign, as the attacks on workers are called, relies on a combined strategy of disinformation and personal assault.
Union busting is a field populated by bullies who often very publically attack the workers leading the organising - the strategy is to make an example, here is what will happen if you organise,.
These employers never miss a chance to call upon their rights and the full force of the police to enforce those rights as a way to legally justify preventing unions from entering workplace or talking with workers.
The EU is not without blame. The EU single market and EU laws have been mobilised to deny the ight to organise, bargain and strike.
There is no more important struggle for us as a movement than making sure that every worker can join a union without fear.
Thats why the ETUC is working to ensure that EU laws never again work against workers organising and bargaining in their trade union. I am here today to ask your help with that work.
You heard from the European Parliamentarians their proposals to protect the right to organise and collective bargaining. We must actively back politicians who are on our side.
The next 6 months will be crucial.
Action by everyone is needed.
We need to expose those politicians and governments who make wonderful speeches about leaving no one behind BUT at the same time are doing exactly that by actively working to remove from the Directive on Adequate Minimum Wages any meaningful provisions that protect workers by requiring Member States to have an environment that supports collective bargaining, including a guarantee for unions to access workplaces and information and guarantee real time protection of workers who want to unionise.
We need your help to put real pressure on your government to support the amendments in that Directive to ensure that public procurement supports companies that have a collective agreement - I congratulate Oliver Roethig your Regional Secretary for his leadership on this. Its time to make sure that companies that respect their workers right to collectively bargain are no longer at a disadvantage.
Lets step up our work together, if we stay strong, stick together we will win.
Thats why the ETUC is working to ensure that EU laws never again work against workers organising and bargaining in their trade union. I am here today to ask your help with that work.