UNI marks 10th anniversary in Nyon by asking “What’s Next?”
UNI hosted the “What’s Next?” forum with the town of Nyon and Bilan magazine to mark its 10th anniversary in Nyon. A range of speakers from across the local and global business, political and NGO communities offered their ideas on building a more responsible world.
UNI General Secretary Philip Jennings and Nyon mayor Daniel Rosselat opened the forum, which featured speakers including Christian Levrat, President of the Swiss Social Democratic Party; Jean-Claude Biver from Hublot; Jean-Paul Turrian from UEFA; Stéphane Benoit-Godet from Bilan; Larry Elliott from the Guardian; Jean-Paul Jeanrenaud from the WWF; and Sharan Burrow, General Secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation.
Jennings said the events was conceived as part of UNI’s good neighbor policy.
“We see many visitors from all continents and we wanted to use this occasion to invite the public and the local students to find out more about UNI,” he said.
Union activists from Swiss affiliates were also present.
Jennings said that in looking back over the last decade, he realized how much UNI has changed and how much the world has changed.
“It’s a different world from the one we faced before and the financial crisis has shown us that business owners are too focused on short-term profit and bonus,” Jennings said. “We must push them to focus on their social responsibilities—both locally and globally—so that we all have a chance to live a good life.”
The speakers tackled topics ranging from how corporations can make social responsibility a reality to building a stable and just global economy to imagining the jobs of tomorrow.
Looking at the financial crisis, Swiss Socialist Party leader Levrat and Elliott from the Guardian called for more regulation of the banking industry and a need to diminish the systemic risks posed by the biggest, most powerful banks.
“Big finance has grown too big and too powerful and has called too many of the shots,” Elliott said. We need new regulations to get them to stop behaving in such an irresponsible away. If a bank is too big to fail, it’s probably too big.”
ITUC General Secretary Burrow said that workers of the future must have basic protections like a national minimum wage and the right to bargain collectively.
“How can you distribute wealth if [companies and workers] are not sitting at the bargaining table working out what’s affordable,” Burrow said. “What we really need is to put labour rights in place.”
She said that corporations should see this as their “long-term salvation” as workers with money will build demand for products.
During the forum, UNI launched its new professional sport global union UNI Sport PRO, which will bring together professional sports unions from around the world.
The celebrations of UNI’s 10th anniversary will extend to its World Congress in Nagasaki, Japan, in November. With a host city that is a key location for the global peace and nuclear disarmament movement, UNI has decided to make peace a major theme of the Congress.
With this in mind, UNI invited local high school students to compete in a contest to create an original piece of art that symbolises peace. At the forum, two winners, Niels Renard and Daniel Fyfe, were announced. Renard created a video tribute to Sakado Sasaki, a young girl from Hiroshima who died of leukaemia after exposure to radiation from the atomic bomb. Fyfe created a piece of original music.
About 50 local students came to the forum to see their classmates win the prizes as well as listen to the speakers.
Even as speakers on the jobs of tomorrow were quite frank in the challenges students will face in the coming years as they enter the job market, Xavier Comtesse of Avenir Suisse, told them that in fact there was a great opportunity to remake the world in a better way.
He also had a key piece of advice for them: “Don’t listen to old people.”
You can see some photos from the event on flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/uniglobalunion/sets/72157624798795389/