Trade Unions: An overlooked right?

 

- United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights Article 23.4

Anyone serious about ensuring workers get a living wage and decent working conditions cannot ignore the role of trade unions.  They offer the most effective and legitimate way to ensure that workers get a fair deal, by allowing them to stand together to defend their rights. 

 

Most efforts by fashion companies to ensure that workers' rights are respected in their supply chains are based on a top-down model referred to as 'compliance', which relies on a code of conduct and audits imposed on suppliers.  The compliance model fails time and time again to pick up serious abuses of workers' rights, because workers themselves do not have a real voice in the process.

 

In contrast, when workers are able to organise into trade unions and established systems of industrial relations are put in place, it is much easier to be confident that working conditions are decent.  Unions give workers a voice to say things collectively that they are too scared to say on their own.  Through collective bargaining, wages and working hours that workers themselves believe are decent can be negotiated with their managers.

What are trade union rights?

The ILO includes two central trade union rights in its core conventions, the internationally recognised minimum standards for workers' rights:

• Freedom of Association: the right of workers to form and join representative organisations of their own choosing in the workplace.
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• "Workers and employers, without distinction whatsoever, shall have the right to establish and, subject only to the rules of the organisation concerned, to join organisations of their own choosing without previous authorisation." - Convention 87, article 2.
  

• Collective bargaining: the right of workers to join trade unions without fear of discrimination, to have their union recognised as the representative of its members, and to have it negotiate the terms and conditions of their employment on their behalf.
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• "Workers shall enjoy adequate protection against acts of anti-union discrimination in respect of their employment [...] Measures appropriate to national conditions shall be taken, where necessary, to encourage and promote the full development and utilisation of machinery for voluntary negotiation between employers or employers' organisations and workers' organisations, with a view to the regulation of terms and conditions of employment by means of collective agreements." - Convention 98, articles 1 and 4