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The UNI-Asia Pacific Executive re-affirmed at its first ever meeting in Hanoi, Vietnam that its first priority is growing unions in the region.

Sectors are being pressed to draw up strategic plans to boost recruitment and organisation - to raise the voice of workers in Asia Pacific and to build influence and credibility with employers and governments.



Philip Jennings

“We have to be about growing unions,” UNI General Secretary Philip Jennings told the Executive. “And we need more global agreements that guarantee labour rights with multinational companies in this region.”

UNI has launched unions in India to help organise workers in IT and IT enabled services, in commerce and in mobile telephony. UNI is involved in projects to boost union membership among security workers in India and Hong Kong and is involved with German affiliate Verdi to organise the DHL airport hub and with unions around the world to boost union membership in Disney World in Hong Kong.

Executive members reported on initiatives in their own countries - including a broad drive to double union membership in Singapore, a new union to organise commerce workers in Malaysia, a national drive to recruit part time workers in Japan and new unions launched in Nepal where the trade union movement played a key role in the transition to democracy.

A decline in union membership has been halted in Australia and a united labour movement recently helped bring down the Howard government and its labour laws that were undermining conditions and job security.



UNI-Asia Pacific Regional Secretary Christopher Ng addresses postal union reps in Hanoi

Millions of the workers in the region are in casual work - a broad category of work that includes labour hire, employment agencies and insecure working contracts.

Focusing work to improve the conditions of causal workers is to be the subject of comprehensive research next year in the region with focused campaigns being launched in 2010.

“We are finding not just one class of worker but different categories traveling at different speeds to different destinations,” said Philip Jennings.

UNI is building contacts with some of the biggest employment agencies with a view to signing a global agreement that will commit the agencies to respecting labour rights wherever they operate.

But work is needed in the region with companies often outsourcing almost all their labour force and changing the employment relationship. “This is a back door way to cutting conditions,” warned Philip.

“We will continue to work with the global unions to tackle the challenges of the multinationals and the informal economy that is often excluded from labour laws,” said Noriyuki Suzuki, who is General Secretary of the Asia Pacific region of global union ITUC.



The Post and Telecom union is UNI's first Vietnamese affiliate

Another UNI-Asia Pacific aim is to sign ten global agreements in the region by the time of UNI’s Nagasaki Congress in November 2010. A direct appeal is being made to the individual UNI Liaison Councils in countries in the region to campaign actively for these agreements with multinationals.

As well as covering basic labour rights the agreements help build regional and global dialogues between unions and trans-nationals that have a great influence on labour markets and working conditions in the countries in which they operate.

“We are in the midst of a dramatic upheaval - at no time in history have we seen such a transfer of wealth in just a few years and such economic changes in this region where 60% of the world’s workforce will be located in the near future,” said Philip. “They need a union voice and strength to improve their share of the wealth they are helping to create.”