Globalisation has created some new industries, destroyed others, and affected ways of working across the whole international transport economy. ITF Women's Officer Sarah Finke looks at the role of women, and the challenges they bring to trade unionism, in the industries most affected

• As globalisation continues apace, the borders between different multinational companies have disappeared, and the focus in many transport jobs is changing from traditional operational functions to logistics and the transport chain.
• While women’s participation in the workforce is increasing, this is mostly true of part-time and temporary jobs, where employees are more likely to be women. Union membership is also increasing, but less so in the private sector, where most workers within the scope of the ITF are located.
• If transport trade unions are to retain their strength and relevance, they have to organise women. This doesn’t mean just to recruit and retain them as members, but also to respond to their demands as members and to represent them at leadership level.
• What follows is a glance at how women’s roles are changing in the industries most affected by globalisation, and how they are bringing new challenges to trade unionism.

Warehousing, dispatch and packaging

In logistics and distribution in Europe the high-tech quality jobs are generally done by men. In office and dispatch work, the workforce is largely female. In warehousing and packaging, the workforce is gender-mixed but – at least in Europe – it is often made up of different nationality migrant workers who earn low wages, and who are generally not organised in trade unions.

At the same time, the discipline of supply chain management dictates that the transport function becomes only a part of an assembly and distribution chain between producer and consumer. This means that women workers who are in this chain, producing and supplying for a particular company, have common interests, which could be served by international trade union links.

Call centre workers

Call centres are hard to define as a sector – they are more a technology than an industry. However, almost all call centres are in private sector services. Passenger transport, tourism and express parcel delivery companies all use call centres to handle bookings, plan and track journeys. Call centres in themselves have a very strong growth potential and transport is one of the areas (along with communications, financial and business services) tipped for the steepest growth.

In Europe, 1.3 per cent of the total workforce (2 million people) was employed in call centres by the end of 2002. North European countries have the highest call centre concentration, with southern Europe falling far behind. The figures for eastern Asia and Australia are very similar, and in the US, more than five million new jobs have been created since 1990.

Call centre conditions have been characterised as low-wage, predominantly female workplaces, with a young workforce. Workplace stress, caused by unreasonable target setting, monitoring and lack of breaks is a major issue. Part-time work and short shifts are common. Depending on their business, some call centres require only limited educational qualifications – others make technical or language skill requirements.

In transport, call centres attached to airlines, railways and package delivery services have been unionised and are working successfully to improve conditions. But challenges remain, for example, in unionising workers in call centres that have been located outside the country where the company is based.

Competition to attract international call centres is fierce. Language and technical skills are a factor, but so are working conditions and wages. This kind of competition does not sit easily with union organisation. British Airways’ bookings operations for example, once relocated to India, were targeted for union organisation by ITF affiliates in India, but they were met with anti-union company policies.

Telework and homeworking

One of the advantages of call centres for trade union organisation is the concentration of many workers on one site.

Clearly this would not apply to workers at home. So far, we do not know of any instances of teleworkers in mainstream transport sector jobs making bookings from home.

However, in the UK, car rescue service workers are already working from home. It can only be a matter of time before passenger bookings, express parcel coordination and even freight, are handled in this way.

Many home-based workers are still men, working in areas like information technology, or with other professional or semi-professional skills. However recent increases in teleworking are more marked among women who work exclusively at home.

This is clearly a growth area that will need innovative trade union approaches, possibly based on local organising.

“Cherry-picking” in airlines

Cross-border recruitment and the development of alliances in aviation has led to a situation whereby workers of different nationalities are employed alongside each other, with different national-based working conditions – including maternity conditions.

Airlines have even tried to “cherry-pick” the conditions that apply to multinational workforces, irrespective of where they are based.

United Airlines, for example, has employed its workforce under US legislation.

As a result it has applied US maternity conditions to female employees who are based in Europe, and are thus subject to European tax regimes but who are not getting European maternity benefits.

Some legal findings in the UK and Germany have raised the issue of the workplace being in the air, and thus dependent on the – unresolved – question of where the legal jurisdiction of an aircraft lies.

Women at sea

Serious jurisdictional problems exist for all seafarers because of the nature of the flag of convenience system. For women seafarers there is an impact in terms of applying national maternity legislation to those working on vessels registered abroad, and thus under the national jurisdiction of the flag state. This question has not, as yet, been raised by any individual seafarers or ITF-affiliated unions, but is a clear loophole in the flag of convenience system.

Migrant workers

Economic slumps in the South are pushing more and more women to migrate overseas in search of work. Many of these women will end up in the least-protected and least organised margins of the transport industry. Tourism on cruise ships is one of the world’s growth industries and is recruiting more and more women economic migrants to its labour force. “There are six Peruvian women like me on my ship. None of us would be here if we could find good jobs at home,” said one cruise worker who had five years’ education in the United States and was now working as a waitress on the Carnival Fantasy. These women are often well educated. Their driving aim is to send money home, but conditions are so bad that many of them envisage leaving the industry after a few contracts.

Informal workers

In many parts of the world, deregulation has combined with commercial pressures to create an increase in “alternative” or informal collective transport, often to the detriment of public transport services where more workers are organised.

An increasing number of informal transport workers, who range from self-employed taxi workers to drivers of jeepneys to tourist guides, are women – many of them young women (and in some cases, children). Unauthorised, unregulated vending and hawking at the bus and railway stations and in trains go on in many part of the world. These are low-quality unorganised jobs, and present more challenges for the ITF and its unions.

Goals for 2003

At its Congress in Vancouver in August 2002, the ITF committed itself to the following, among other, priority areas for its work with women to improve their position in the globalised transport sector:

• Continue to support International Women’s Day on 8 March as a Global Unions campaign day.
• Use ITF campaigning opportunities to activate, recruit and organise women transport workers.
• Undertake work to combat intimidation and violence.
• Develop a gender analysis of the effects of globalisation on the employment of transport workers, to be used as a campaign tool.
• Push for gender equality to go to the top of the international trade union agenda in discussions about core labour standards.
• Collect data on transport companies that use blatantly discriminatory practices and mount publicity campaigns to expose these companies.
• Work with other global union federations to identify one or more multinational companies to run education and organising projects focused on women in the transport chain.
• Work with the other global union federations to set up a logistics group or conference which would prioritise gender issues.
• Join or set up a call centre group, focused on extending best-practice organising and code-of-conduct policies.
• Urgently research teleworking in transport.