News

On Wednesday, 1 July and on Thursday 2 July 2015, WikiLeaks released two sets of documents including the secret Core Text for the largest 'trade deal' in history, the TiSA (Trade In Services Agreement, click here), whose 52 nations together comprise two-thirds of global GDP. The negotiating parties are the United States, the 28 members of the European Union and 23 other countries, including Turkey, Mexico, Canada, Australia, Pakistan, Taiwan and Israel, forming a new economic bloc which excludes China and other BRICS countries. The next round of negotiations will start on Monday, 6 July and focus on financial services, telecommunications amd the movement of natural persons.

UNI Global Union would like to express its deepest concern regarding the expected consequences of this deal which would further jeopardize the capacity of democratically elected governments to decide about public interest regulation. Behind the scene, TiSA is seen as being mainly driven by large corporate interests which have been lobbyling governments to ensure greater profits at the expense of workers, farmers, consumers, health and the environment. The Annex on the "Movement of Natural Persons" makes it clear that immigration policies could become a part of TiSA, which would put migrant workers in a difficult situation as they need the status of  worker/employee to be protected by domestic labor laws as well as ILO Conventions.

The leaked document on financial services also shows that large banks are trying to curb the attempt by many governments to regulate the financial sector. The risk is that we may end up with another financial crisis.

The lack of transparency is also a great concern to the global labour movement and civil society as the TiSA documents are supposed to  remain secret for five years.

UNI is calling on its union affiliates around the world to contact their national governments and ask them these questions: Why the secrecy? In whose interest? Why shall we accept back door deregulation without dialogue?

UNI Global Union General Secretary, Philip Jennings said this is a "deal for the consolidation of the interests of the richest 1% of the planet."