That was the opening line from ITF Asia Pacific regional secretary Mahendra Sharma as training on a new dockers’ organising, bargaining and negotiating tool kicked off in Indonesia last week.
Participants from six countries across South and South East Asia, including several ITF inspectors, were among the group being skilled up on the dockers’ port intelligence (DPI) database.
They are the first to be trained on the reworked system which is a space to house information on GNT (global network terminal) ports around the world. This centralised information source allows unions to compare working conditions, collective bargaining agreement terms or wage provisions when they are preparing for bargaining talks or negotiations. They can also use information taken from the database as organising issues.
DPI is a foundation stone of the ITF four lever priorities set out at congress in Sofia in 2014, one of which was organising in hubs and corridors. Mapping and organising in ports has been identified as critical because of their position as hubs, bringing together dockers, truckers, seafarers and railway workers.
Porjead Dangchod, a DPI training participant from the Thai workers’ union, said: “DPI is going to open up the scope of what we can do as a union, particularly around collective bargaining and improving safety standards for workers. We can see what’s going on in ports around the world via this database. This training has been really informative and now we’re going to inform our members about what we’ve been doing and what it means for them. DPI is going to be a powerful tool for us.”
Three more regional training sessions are planned for 2015 with the aim to have 20 percent of ITF dockers’ unions using the database by the end of the year.
