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Mobilising Solidarity Progress report

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Four years ago the ITF Congress unanimously approved a document called Mobilising Solidarity. Unlike most Congress documents, this did not concern industrial policies or relations with employers, or dealing with governments and union rights. Mobilising Solidarity focused on the relations between the ITF and its affiliates.

It called for a significant shift towards a more effective and deeper involvement of affiliates in the ITF and a deeper integration of ITF activities into the core work of affiliates. These proposals involved no constitutional or rule changes in the ITF. They involved looking at attitudes and ways of working. In particular they aimed to “flatten the pyramid” of communications so that the interaction between the ITF and its affiliates might become multi-layered, directly involving a wider range of union officials and activists in international union activity.

So did anything happen? In 2001 the ITF sent out a questionnaire to all affiliates. A third of all ITF affiliates replied – not a bad response rate. In a wide range of key areas it showed that Mobilising Solidarity appears to have had a significant impact.

Mobilising Solidarity identified a number of key areas for action, with a strong focus on education and information. The proposals argued that the ITF education programme should expand beyond union-building in developing countries, to focus on education work which concentrates on globalisation and on international solidarity issues that are relevant to all ITF affiliates.

As a result the ITF has started a whole range of relatively new education activities. These include working with some affiliates in developing new components to their education work which give a much more important place to globalisation in transport; producing ITF education resources to assist unions develop their education work; and arranging study visits for unions to come to the ITF offices and receive briefings on the work of the ITF.

The most ambitious innovation has been the setting up of ITF Summer Schools. The Summer School is a five-day residential course on transport and globalisation and international solidarity held every year. English language Summer Schools have been held in Oxford (1999), Berlin (2000), and Copenhagen (2001). Participants from 60 different unions from 43 different countries took part in these three courses. Two Summer Schools take place in 2002, a French language one in Lyons, France, and a Spanish language one in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Has this resulted in more union education work on international issues? It seems so. The ITF survey shows that, among unions which operate a formal membership education programme, 83 per cent increased their education work on international issues over the previous three years. This included 24 per cent who reported that this represented a sharp increase in this work.

Another major innovation prompted by Mobilising Solidarity was the launch of the ITF magazine Transport International. This aims to provide an ongoing resource of materials for affiliates about transport and globalisation. It has replaced the old ITF News with a more educational approach, containing information with a longer useful life. The articles are designed so that they can be easily adapted into leaflets, handouts or education materials. The magazine is produced in seven languages.

Mobilising Solidarity recognised that the ITF’s publications and materials only reach a very small number of people in our affiliates. While there are constraints on the number of copies the ITF can print (and the number of languages) there is still a need to look at a more effective distribution of ITF materials to a larger number of people in our affiliates.

Transport International is available and downloadable from the ITF web site, along with all other recent ITF publications. The ITF website provides a showcase on the ITF’s work and activities which is available to every union activist in every country (as well as anyone else with access to the internet). The site has been going through a process of reorganisation and improvement to make it more useful and relevant to affiliates. Large parts of the website are now produced in French, German, Spanish and Swedish. A related website in Russian is run by the ITF office in Moscow. The number of visits to the ITF website has increased by more than 400 per cent in three years.

All of this has aimed at increasing and improving the flow of information between the ITF and its affiliates. However, one of the principal barriers to communication identified in Mobilising Solidarity is the simple one of language. The system of “official” ITF languages has been made much more flexible. On the one hand, more working groups and documents are in one language only (usually English). On the other hand, some campaign materials such as for the International Road Transport Action Day have been produced in as many as 29 different languages. In our survey, 40 per cent of respondents said that over the last three years language has become less of a barrier to their participation in ITF activities, while only six per cent said that it has got worse.

Mobilising Solidarity proposed a major shift in the focus of ITF activities away from meetings and towards global campaigns. All the ITF’s industrial sections have been developing global campaigns. Some of these campaigns have involved impressive international mass actions, including demonstrations, lobbies of national parliaments etc. They have involved imaginative tactics from the giant inflatable “Air Rage” campaign mascot in Charles de Gaulle airport, Paris, to multi-country truck convoys. They have usually brought many thousands of trade union members into direct involvement in an ITF activity for the first time. The 2001 “Fatigue Kills” campaign involved a quarter of a million drivers around the world.

These campaigns require intensive preparation with guidelines and handbooks, often in several languages, plus regional preparatory meetings. In the ITF survey 91 per cent of respondents reported that they have participated in ITF campaign activities. 72.4 per cent of these reported that the campaigns have raised their members’ awareness about the ITF.

Campaigns were not the only change in ITF activities. ITF meetings and activities have to deliver real benefits to union leaders. The nature of many of these meetings has shifted to being more specialist and task-oriented. Increasingly the ITF Sections are developing networks of affiliates concerned with specific transnational operators, or pooling international information on specific technical issues such as health and safety. This inevitably needs the involvement of a wider range of representatives from within affiliates.

Clearly unions themselves increasingly believe that involvement in ITF meetings is no longer just for top union leaders. In the ITF survey 45.5 per cent of respondents said that their union now involves more union representatives from different levels in their union directly in ITF meetings. Seventy-seven per cent of unions reported that they have increased their participation in ITF activities over the past three years, including 28 per cent who said that involvement has increased a lot.

Mobilising Solidarity has been a highly ambitious programme designed to influence ways of working and attitudes in a period when the resources of many unions have been under intense pressure. Its specific target has been to deepen relations between the ITF and its affiliates. Our survey figures appear to indicate that at least some progress has been made. Not least was the response from 99.4 per cent of the respondents who said that the awareness of rank-and-file members of the ITF has increased in the last three years.

Nevertheless, it is also clear that in almost all areas of the programme there is still much more that can be done. Good progress has been made, and achieved without major additional resources, but the process of Mobilising Solidarity is certainly not completed. The ITF Congress will be looking at how to continue for the next four years.

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Issue 9 August 2002

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