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8
Greeting from the UK, we are looking forward to tasting Peruvien cuisine. What would help would be a bottle of South African Cape rum. And we are sorry to hear that the Estonians are knee deep in snow. We wish a speedy recovery to Jose Luis in Spain.
Options for dealing with TNC's
Identifying common ideas about international solidarity:
We agree with the Estonian group when they say "everybody understands the important role of international solidarity"
We discussed how to define international solidarity:
In our experience in the past any international contact between trade unions in different countries was at National level and or through the International Trade Secretariats.
Bob who as one of group is Vice-Chair of the European Dialogue Committee for Herberts (Voluntary Works Council) is living proof that international contact is happening at grass roots level, and certainly within the European Union this is likely to continue. An example of using this International Study Circle site is: the request from Bulgaria for the Nestlé EWC agreement, which were able to supply.
We agree with the sentiments of the Swedish group and we have been debating this issue for many years, the difficulty, is to put into practice.
The South African position on the establishment of a "International Shop Stewards Council" whilst not disagree with this in principle how would such a group operate in practice eg finance, and who would they be accountable to? Our view is that anything like this must come through the official movement.
As a country that was heavily criticised by the International Labour Office during the Conservative government for not confirming with ILO conventions 87/98 on freedom of association, it was not until the present Labour government was elected which re- established the right for trade unions to be allowed to organise in GCHQ, so our conclusion from this was that if a government is determined to attack trade unions voluntary codes are of little use.
Trade Unions
We feel that we can draw an optimistic conclusion from the way that the British Airways dispute was conducted in appealing for international solidarity, in this particular case the ITF was able with the use of the internat galvanise support worldwide and perhaps more importantly able to prevent misleading information being used to undermine the dispute.
Community activists
Greenpeace was able to successfully show what can be done when its possible to control the images of an issue by controlling the media coverage.What in fact Greenpeace was able to do around the sinking of Brent Spar and prevent this sinking and force Shell to look for more sound ecological alternatives.
Alliances of communities and unions.
The Nestlé Baby Milk campaign is a good example of this kind of alliance, where a campaign has been organised around a TNC selling a formula to developing countries and advertising it as being better than mothers milk.
Links Conserning this summary
Study Circles other summaries
[Session 1]/ [Session 2]/ [Session 3]/ [Session 4]
[Session 5]/ [Session 6]/ [Session 7]/ [Session 8]
[Evaluation]
Summaries of session 6
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