Education Bulletin
This edition includes;
Campaigning for recognition in Colombia
At an ITF /SASK national seminar in Cartagena, Colombia, participants prepared a campaign aimed at making the new national union of transport workers (SNTT) more visible and obtaining registration from the government. The seminar was held from 19th -21st May with 28 participants, 5 of whom were women.
Participants represented all transport unions in Colombia including two ITF affiliates ANSEINVIAS and SINCONTAXCAR a taxi drivers’ union, which is supporting other taxi drivers in other cities to build unions and join the SNTT.
The campaign themes covered in the seminar included: organising taxi drivers country wide, making SNTT visible to get government recognition, and the ITF fatigue kills campaign. Other issues were discussed and agreed. These included the level of dues that will be paid by affiliates to SNTT, the submission of a formal complaint to the ILO and infrastructural needs of the new federation. Gabriel Mocho, ITF Americas Education Coordinator
Developing HIV/AIDS work in East and Central Europe
Participants at an ITF/FNV HIV/AIDS workshop for East and Central European affiliates committed themselves to develop workplace policies and education programmes on prevention and care.
The Trade Union of Railway Workers and Transport Constructers of Ukraine (TURWTCU) hosted the workshop in Kiev, from 12-15 May 2008, consisting of sixteen participants.
Like all other regional workshops which form part of the FNV supported Global HIV/AIDS project, the main objectives of the workshop was to assist affiliates to develop a trade union perspective on the epidemic, develop a workplace policy and to negotiate HIV clauses in collective bargaining agreements.
Topics covered included: HIV/AIDS and the workplace; the impact on workers, unions and enterprises; trade union action against HIV/AIDS; and the ILO Code on HIV/AIDS in the workplace.
This was an extremely important seminar as Eastern Europe is facing one of the fastest growing HIV epidemics in the world. Ukraine has the highest HIV prevalence rate in Europe. About 1.63 percent of Ukrainians or about 750,000 people are estimated to be living with the virus.
Representatives from ILOAIDS and UNAIDS, Labour and Health Social Initiatives (LHSI), an NGO implementing a joint HIV/AIDS prevention and care project with TURWTCU, also took part in the workshop.
Organising in East and Southern Africa
At an East and Southern Africa best practices seminar held in Dar es Salaam Tanzania, 12-14 May 2008, participants elaborated on their organising initiatives and passed a resolution recognising the contribution made by southern African unions in stopping the Chinese ship from unloading arms intended for Zimbabwe.
Fifteen participants, one of whom was a woman, from Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Namibia, South Africa and Mozambique participated in the seminar. Participants included both ITF affiliates, newly registered unions from Kenya and Zambia which are also in the process of affiliating as well as Drivers’ Associations which need to be included in organising initiatives along road transport corridors within both sub regions.
The main aim of the seminar was to share organising and collective bargaining experiences and tools that can be utilised in strengthening organising along the main transport corridors. The ITF also presented the experiences from Benin and the Philippines on organising informal transport workers extracted from a previous ITF research project. Many of the approaches were similar to those presented by the participants, particularly the importance of meeting workers where they congregate such as taxi parks, restaurants and bars.
The seminar also contributed to the coordination of organising work within the two sub regions through the mapping and communication sessions. The field visit enabled direct contact with unorganised long distance truck drivers and demonstrated the need to locate the right target when launching an organising campaign, so as not to jeopardise the employment of drivers.
The seminar formed part of an ITF/SASK road transport project for Africa.
ITF education planning meeting
The ITF convened an internal meeting to discuss the role of education in delivering the objectives of Organising Globally. Emphasis was placed upon education as a tool for empowerment, skills and organisational development.
The ITF General Secretary, section, department and regional representatives participated in the meeting held in London on 28 April 2008 at ITF house.
Some of the priority issues identified included the need to develop a better understanding of the impact of education on affiliates and monitoring the number of affiliates that have benefited from ITF education activities. Emphasis was also placed on the need to develop tools to ensure that affiliates are committed to the plans developed in education seminars.
A session was also dedicated to maritime education, so as to develop stronger coordination and collaboration on education activities, with inspectors and maritime unions.
Education Briefing:
World Bank transport strategy
No global institution has had more direct impact on the lives of transport workers in developing countries over the last two decades than the World Bank. So ITF has taken a keen interest in its transport strategy for the next five years, which was launched in May in a document called Safe, Clean and Affordable: Transport For Development.
Within hours of launching the document in Washington, the World Bank's new global transport chief, Marc Juhel, was on his way to London, where he presented it at the ITF. He stayed for the whole day to allow key affiliate leaders from Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East to question him about the Bank's plans and seek assurances about how transport workers will be treated as they are implemented.
The World Bank already invests more in transport than in any other sector -- transport projects account for about 20 per cent of all its lending -- and the new strategy suggests this is likely to increase further. The Bank also uses policy advice and "technical assistance" to influence laws, institutions and regulatory arrangements. For example, the Bank's new strategy revealed that it is currently advising the Iranian government about the future of Tehran's transport system.
At the ITF seminar, Juhel was challenged to take up the issue of the continued imprisonment of Mansour Osanloo, leader of the country's bus workers' union. He was told that it was inappropriate to support a government's transport reforms at a time when the same government is denying basic trade union rights to transport workers. He was also reminded that recipients of Bank investments are now supposed to comply with core labour standards.
Most of the discussion at the seminar centred, however, on the Bank's policy approach to transport restructuring, including its support for privatisation. For example, the Bank's new strategy continues to advocate the "landlord model" for ports and airports, under which governments retain ownership but privatise services such as stevedoring and ground handling.
Juhel defended these policies, and responded to vivid accounts of the impact of railway privatisation on workers and communities by pointing out how much public subsidy state-owned railways and ports had required. Julio Sosa, of 'La Fraternidad' Sociedad de Personal Ferroviario de Locomotoras, informed him that, following 85,000 retrenchments and the decimation of passenger services and much of his country's track network, Argentina's railway receives more public subsidy than it did before it was privatised.
The World Bank also favours private delivery of urban passenger transport services, although its new strategy moves away from the liberalisation approach that broke up integrated public transport systems in its previous generation of restructuring policies. That policy contributed to increasing problems such as traffic congestion and denial of basic services to poor people, which the new strategy is aiming to tackle. The Bank now concedes that governments have key roles in planning, financing and regulating public transport, and that publicly run mass transit is also an "acceptable policy option", albeit not its preferred one.
The new strategy also gives greater priority than before to road safety. Safe, Clean and Affordable points out that around 1,200,000 people are killed on the world's roads every year, with the toll increasing fastest among the poorest people. The strategy document points out that "low- and middle-income countries bear about 90 percent of the current burden of road deaths and injuries", and adds: "Bank projections indicate that between 2000 and 2020 road crash fatalities will increase by more than 80 percent in low- and middle-income countries, but will decrease by nearly 30 percent in high-income countries."
Like other global institutions, the Bank is also increasingly concerned about the impact of transport on the environment, through climate change and other effects of pollution. The new strategy outlines various ways in which the Bank is aiming to control and mitigate carbon emissions, but says nothing about the impact on global warming of the Bank's overall development model, which promotes international trade as the route to economic growth and poverty reduction.
Challenged about this at the London seminar, Juhel acknowledged that climate change and the rising price of oil could force governments and international institutions to rethink global production and distribution systems. He referred to the absurdity of the fact that bottles of Fijian mineral water can be bought in his local supermarket in Washington, but suggested that market pressures -- in the form of changing consumer choices and rising fuel costs -- would force change.
Washingtonians can certainly manage without Fijian mineral water, but, as we are already seeing with food price rises in developing countries, and the reaction to them of the people most badly affected, oil price rises also bring great hardship. Moreover, both the environmental and social impact of biofuels are coming under growing scrutiny.
It is here that we see most clearly the tensions at the heart of the World Bank's transport strategy. Indeed, the rapid rise of climate change up the political agenda, at the same time that pressure to tackle global poverty through the Millennium Development Goals is also intensifying, is the main reason for the elaborate revision of the new strategy since the first draft was published in February 2006.
The Bank is aiming to expand access to transport, which it points out is essential to enable people to reach jobs and public services, and for small producers to get their goods to market. But it also points out that the more transport there is, the more energy it consumes and the more emissions are produced. Therefore, among other things, policy makers must "consider how to alter the demand for and modal distribution of transport in economically efficient ways to reduce aggregate carbon intensity."
Pressure to reduce emissions will focus particularly on private road transport, which accounts for around 70 percent of them, and aviation, which accounts for 12 percent, says the document, adding: "These modes are in many circumstances (though not always) the most energy intensive per traffic unit; moreover, they are fastest growing in terms of traffic volumes. Sea and inland waterway transport are together 11 percent, and railways (freight and passenger) 2 percent of total emissions."
In addition to modal shifts, the strategy looks to increased public transport for some of the solutions, and to changes in people's travel behaviour, companies' logistics decisions and technology choices for others. The document adds:
"Within the policy mix, it seems likely that taxes on fuel will need to play a central role because carbon emissions are directly correlated with fuel consumption. Thus, pricing signals will affect both the immediate consumption and, if high fuel costs are expected to be permanent, the longer-term technological and behavioral responses to achieve greater energy efficiency. Moreover, revenues from such taxes can provide part of the source of public investment in less carbon-intensive transport.
"However, price mechanisms alone are unlikely to be politically or socially acceptable, nor sufficient for the challenge. It will take concerted and sustained long-term effort using a mix of policies, applied over decades and on an international scale, just to stabilize the level of transport-related greenhouse gas emissions. The good news is that many of the transport policy measures that can help reduce greenhouse gas emissions have other benefits."
In this context, the strategy promises "greater attention to railways and inland waterways for freight; better urban public transport services; urban road traffic demand management to reduce congestion and facilitate better performance of public transport; support of nonmotorized transport, management of vehicle emissions, safe driving behavior (which is also more fuel-efficient driving behavior), and so on."
However, if those measures and market shifts can indeed contribute to delivery of the "safe" and "clean" goals of the World Bank's strategy, the rising costs involved will also intensify pressure on transport providers to reduce other costs. This, together with the Bank's third policy objective -- to make transport more "affordable" -- suggests that ITF and its affiliates need to pay attention to the impact of the Bank's strategy on the jobs, pay and conditions of transport workers.
One ITF affiliate representative after another told Juhel at the London seminar that their members had already paid for the Bank's approach to transport restructuring with increased unemployment and insecurity, and that they would not tolerate more of the same. Although the Bank's strategy includes commitments to labour standards and consultation with unions, it does not explore how these should be applied in practice.
Juhel was told that ITF shares the goals of "safe, clean and affordable" transport, and that the Bank and its client governments should regard transport workers as rich sources of knowledge about how to achieve them in sustainable and equitable ways. But unions could not be partners in change unless their members' rights to secure employment, union representation and collective bargaining were given equal priority. Those considerations needed to be factored into the Bank's policy advice about legal, institutional and regulatory change, and into the way in which its transport projects were designed and implemented.
Brendan Martin is a consultant to ITF and can be reached on bmartin@publicworld.org
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