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Page context: Home > Transport International Magazine > Issue 35 - April 2009 > Book review
If you ever look at ITF historical papers you will quickly notice the masthead of the old ITF Journal produced in the 1940s and 50s. In curling type its confident slogan proclaims, “Transport workers link the world!”. This new book – whose writing and production was coordinated by the Nordic Transport Workers’ Federation (NTF) – focuses on how the world is linked and how the discrepancies in the world of work might be fixed. In the course of doing that it looks at what role transport workers play.
Social dumping
This book’s main thrust is to examine the problem of social dumping, where cheap labour supply from lower-wage economies or sectors floods the jobs market and drives down decent pay. This pattern has affected transport workers since the middle of the 20th century and was first experienced in the maritime sector but it is now familiar across the industry. Combating the negative effects of social dumping – exploitation, discrimination and the emergence of a low-wage service sector – can be done though trade union membership and solidarity, this 10-chapter work argues. Specifically, the book addresses the impact for transport workers of supranational European Union deregulation and of a globalised economy where China threatens to dominate. Having analysed each of the transport sectors, the measures it proposes are labour movement ones, based on the “Nordic model” of trade union recognition, equality principles and collective bargaining.
National trade unions need information exchange, which can develop into cooperation and even cross-border action, the authors argue. Transport unions should be prepared to use industrial action as a tool. At the same time, they should develop allies. Unions also need to implement strategies to recruit both sets of worker involved in the social dumping divide – those whose jobs are threatened by the influx of a cheaper labour force as well as those who are likely to see opportunities by taking up such positions. This means a strong role for communications and language learning, as well as education and training.
All of this raises questions for the international labour movement, the authors warn. Until now, decision-making in trade union confederations, including in the NTF, has been consensus-based and respectful of the individual autonomy of each member organisation. Does this need to change, asks the book – and does the NTF need a wider remit? Are affiliates prepared to let the NTF make decisions? Could they stump up financial support for a more active decision-making body, one that would prepare transport policy debates and intervene on issues like climate change? Could supranational collective bargaining work across the Nordic countries? And could the NTF coordinate action that would help unions in the Baltic countries as well as in the EU and more widely, at the level of the International Labour Organisation?
In reality, this book does not provide straightforward solutions – but then it was never intended to. Its purpose is to stimulate debate and, in excellent trade union tradition, its conclusion calls for an action plan to be developed. There is little to disagree with in its contents – they offer a level-headed and inclusive world vision for transport trade unions. For a non-Nordic, however, it will seem Nordic-centric.
Nordic vision
ITF general secretary David Cockroft has observed: “The book is about social dumping mainly from the Baltic states in the Nordic countries, with increasing numbers of Nordic companies setting up subsidiaries in the Baltics and in Russia and then employing foreign drivers on lower conditions competing against Finns” – and it is generally true that the book and the examples it contains reflect a Nordic perspective. Indeed, it is strange to envisage the NTF coordinating action at the EU or the ILO. (If this is to be the case, then what is the ETF or the ITF for?)
But then again, many of the questions posed here are the same questions being asked across the trade union movement, culminating in the bigger question of how global, regional and national unions deal with global, regional and national dilemmas. In holding these debates, we too should have no boundaries.
Although for some readers there may not be much that is radically new in this book, what it successfully does is put together many of the unresolved questions and perspectives of today’s transport union movement in Europe and further afield. If “The Worth of Work” can lead to action in many of the areas that it proposes, then the NTF will have done the trade union world a service.
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Issue 35 - April 2009
Other pages for Issue 35 - April 2009:
On track for equality | Gaza relief effort | Climate change | Hebei Two campaign | Murder at sea | Young workers | European Works Council | Power to the workers | Leading by example | Working life | In this issue
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