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8
Hi Everybody from the International Study Circle!
First of all, nice to meet all of You! Estonian study circle would like to send for each member of ISC our special regards!
Some comments about the reports of the study cirles:
Hi friends from Barbados!
We are glad to share our experiences with your group. In addition, we are curious to know more about your country too, because we have
heard a lot of nice words about your country, but no-one from our group never been in Barbados.
Dear friends from Bulgaria!
We feel more closed to your study circle group (one reason of that is the similar historical background of the countries). We stay in the same
level in the theme of the TNCs. One member of our group, Mrs. Riina Nei said: the Bulgarians think in the same way as in our trade union - it's
incrediable! We would like to know what is the European Works Council?
Hola friends from Peru!
Nice to see that the topic of TNCs is so popular in Peruu - wonderful!
It was very impressed to know that you have the members coming together so far from Lima!
We saw some similarities of our groups - the expectations of the project were the same in both of our study circles and we have more than 10
study circle members from different organisations (TU, NGO) - we support your recruitment of the participants.
Dear friends from Spain!
We liked your report, especially your comment-question, which generate the discussions. The conclusion of our discussion about positive and
negative aspects of TNCs is to find out not only about negative impact but also talk about the positive side of TNCs.
Hi friends from South Africa!
We saw that your group have more experiences with TNCs and you are ready to do serious work about fighting with TNCs, really. We are
interested in your help with supporting the struggles of TU. Concerning this matter, we would like to ask you to explain what exactly you
proposel and also to know more about the idea to establishing the international shopstewards council - we didn't know about this idea? We
hope to learn from your study circle a lot of about TNCs!
Hei Sweden!
You start the activities with 3 study circle members and as we understand in your group will be more members in next sessions. We hope to
meet them.
SEKO has long traditions and has some very good experiences in the running of study circles and we hope to get a lot of useful information from
your group in the field of method of the study circle and of course about TNCs in Sweden.
We are glad to communicate and to share the experiences with all of you through Internet using the sotfware from Microsoft, from TNC.
We would like to make one proposal.
| The Germany and maybe Taiwan (we are not sure what's happend in Taiwan) organisations were not able to organise the study circles. We'd like to suggest to allow the financial support to send to Peruu for organising the second study circle. The Project Management should support the people, who could not participate in study circle group what is active now, but who is very interested in this project. |
Terminology
| In Estonia using Multinationals is more popular than Transnationals. We faced the problem what name is right to use and why some of
organisations or institutions use only the Multinationals. We would like to know what name is popular in your country? The answer is important for us, because then we can do the proposal for the Institute of Estonian Language and to spread this knowledge through media. |
TNCs in Estonia
| The main foreign investors in Estonia come first of all from Finland, Sweden, Danmark and from Germany, Singapur, Russia, Italia,
USA. We can mention some of the main important TNCs: Coca-Cola Com., Paulig, Shell, Neste, ABB, Borĺs Ind., Maersk Air etc.
Mainly they operate in manufacturing, services, banking, transport, communication. We don't know the exact number of the workers in the TNCs, but we have to mention that the number of workers is falling, in spite of new coming enterprises. Generally the TNCs respect of trade union rights, but it depends of the enterprise. The members of trade unions mentioned the positive attitude of TNCs towards the TU activities, only one example was about problem between of Metalworkers TU and ABB. Consider relatively high level corruption among Estonian state and local officials sometimes TNCs used illegial ways to get prefferable decisions for them. In Estonia we have a lot of TNCs based in Estonia, but they are not so big and famous in the all world, like Kalev (producing the sweets, chocolate etc.), Hansapank (banking), Eesti Kindlustus (insurance), Baltika (Light industry), Tallinna Kaubamaja (services), Norma (manufacturing). Estonians TNCs mainly go to the Baltic States, Russia, Finland, Ukraina. The number of workers in abroad is rising. TheTNCs based in Estonia lobby our Government in the field of agricultural and food manufacturing. In the opinion of our study circle the Estonian Government facilitate the foreign investments, but we have not the special incentives mentioned in the questionnaire to attract the investors. Also the Government support the export of capital, the TNCs based in our country. The members of study circle see the positive effect of coming TNCs to Estonia - come to be the competition, the wages in TNCs are higher than in Estonian enterprises. It is complicated to found the organisations of TU in TNCs and one of the problems of TU is the collective barganing in the TNCs. Unfortunately TU and NGOs didn't lobby government on the issues of TNCs in the reason of lack of the knowledge and information about the TNCs. |
Evaluation
| The members of study circle gave the positive evaluation on the seminar and the study materials. Our big problem was the timelimit and therefore the seminar had only three part of activities:
More interesting for the study circle were to listen to the point of view of other group- members and the groupwork. From the study materials were mentioned TOP 50 and The Rise and Rise of TNCs as more interesting materials. |
With best wishes,
Members of Estonian study circle
Links Conserning this summary
Study Circles other summaries
[Session 1]/ [Session 2]/ [Session 3]/ [Session 4]
[Session 5]/ [Session 6]/ [Session 7]/ [Session 8]
Summaries of session 2
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