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Summary of Session 5

Study Circle EST1 (Tiia Kask)

Many greetings from Estonia!

SOME WORDS ABOUT OUR STUDY CIRCLE AND ESTONIA:

Now it is cold in Estonia and we have got some snow that reminds us about the coming Christmas time, which means a lot of preparations, gifts, bric-a-brac... Snow is not the only thing making us anxious, but also the political situation in Estonia - at the moment the main political issue is the joining of Estonia to European Union. I have to mention that this is the major issue in the present political era and therefore the members of our study circle held a part of the discussion upon the theme mentioned above. They can certainly not be blamed for that because of the actuality and importance of that issue, which connects to every single theme for discussion one can come up to in the contemporary society of Estonia.

Unfortunately two members of the circle were in Vilnius in Lithuania taking part in a training session about EU and two others had the important meetings with foreign cooperation partners, what means that our group lost one part of the home-work.

SOME POINTS OF DISCUSSION:

After short summary of last session and presentation of the summaries of other study circles (S.Africa, Bulgaria, Sweden), the study circle had the discussion about the contents of these summaries. In the following you can see the main points of the discussion:

• the nessecity of the discussion about global issues in different level, especially on an international level, which helps to see and to understand the issues widely. Our group was satisfied with the current activities of ISC and they liked the interesting discussions between study circles. We have reached the point where our discussions have become more fruitful due to the fact that we have learned so many interesting things about other study-circles and therefore discussion themes can be approached from many different angles;

• the members of our study circle supported the idea to establish the international shopstewards council, mentioned by the colleagues from S.Africa, which should be one part of the international solidarity;

• study circle gave different opinion about the productivity and intensivity of labour in Estonia and in our neighbour countries. There was gave as an exsample one interesting case, when one emplyer asks for union to help to motivate workers to do the job effectively and productively;

• S.Africa study circle asked us what happens with workers, when they loose the job. The members of our group gave the same answere - the workers, who loose their jobs, usually will go to the retraining. In Estonia the official per cent of unemployment is 2-3%. The employment is not the main problem in the society of Estonia. Our major problem is the standard of living, how to manage in our society.

We have a right to information about company in our labour act, in the constitution and some TU have disclosure clause in their agreement. Some of Estonian TNCs are public, which have to publish annual reports.

RESULTS OF THE HOME -WORK:

Our study circle got some experiences about gathering the information about TNCs.

Coca-Cola was the object of our study case. For the conclusion we can say that it is not so difficult to find a general information about TNCs and some confidencial specifications if you have so called "good friends", who work in different kind of institutions and organisatsions, but in opposite there are the difficulties with the information, what we need really.

We would like to note some interesting (for us) facts about Coca-Cola in Baltic countries and Russia:

• the Coca-Coca's Office of Baltic countries is situated in Tallinn in Estonia, the regional sales offices are in Latvia and in Lithuania. In Tallinn there is Coca-Cola productin plant, where work about 200 people, and which sell their production in Estonia and Latvia;

• total number of workers employed by Coca-Cola is six hundred in Baltic countries and above 1 million workes all over the world;

• there are more than 20 production plants in Russia.

Certainly you can surf in the Internet and to find the web-site of Coca-Cola :

http:// www.coca-cola.com/

INTERNATIONAL SOLIDARITY

Naturally, everybody understand the important role of International Solidarity (of course it depends what they mean under the solidarity). Although, in other hand, we have to think about how to build and realize the international solidarity (IS), which is not so easy task for us. Our study group would like to suggest to ask yourself - Are you ready for IS and is your organisation ready to contribute to IS?

The members of study circle are satisfied with interesting study materials, which gave a lot of information for them.

We look forward to meet in next session,

With best wishes,

the members of Estonian study circle

Links Conserning this summary

• Coca-cola

Study Circles other summaries

[Session 1]/ [Session 2]/ [Session 3]/ [Session 4]
[Session 5]/ [Session 6]/ [Session 7]/ [Session 8]

Summaries of session 5

• BUL1 (Plamen Dimitrov)
• EST1 (Tiia Kask)
• GBR1 (Les Ford)
• PER1 (Juan Carlos Vargas)
• RSA1 (Martin Jansen)
• SPA1 (José Luis Ferrándiz)
• SWE1 (Ola Niclason)

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