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Great Britain 1 (Anne McCall) |
| Report: Session 4 |
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Report from the Study Circle in the North West Region
of the United Kingdom
Session 4. Workers' Rights and Democratic Control
Activity One: Organising in transnational corporations
We read the reports which had been sent in by the other Study
Circles and make the following comments:
- There was concern regarding the translation of the reports
since some of the text did not make sense to us and we found it difficult to follow the
contents/context.
- There was also concern about a lack of focus and that the
questions following the case studies exercise were too general and that maybe we should
look at one or two quite specific questions in future.
- That there was some suprise that EWCs were not heard of by the
Belgian Study Group and we are not sure if this is the fault of translation. However, Alan
Featherstone and Steve Dawber from Heinz say that their Company are just in the middle of
setting up a EWC and that they are more than happy to get involved in discussions on the
effect of EWCs. They started off by using the Discussion Page at this session.
Activity 2: Strategies to protect workers' rights in
transnational corporations
We all read the resources and case studies on codes of
conduct and following a general discussion we make the following points:
- That the codes of conduct are very good as they stand, but we
all identified the biggest problem as being that of montitoring the code. It's like asking
companies to police the code themselves, and the result would be that the code would be
ineffective.
- Steve Grieves from Octel says that he knows he would have no
problem getting his company to sign up to most of the code on a national basis - they
would see it as a good public relations exercise in a similar way as when they signed up
to the chemical industry's "Responsible Care Programme" This programme included
the community's right to know on environmental issues etc. But Steve says that there is no
way could he get Octel to sign up on a transnational level
- We thought that the biggest problem we would have in
convincing employers to adopt the code of practice would be those listed on page 7 of the
resource pack - mainly that relating to contractors, since contractors operate in a big
way in the UK.
- We also thought that pressure needs to be aimed at the parent
company to adopt and implement codes of conduct.
- We considered what we would like to see included in a code of
conduct and we agreed that two main areas need to be considered and those were:
(a) the rights to information from the company - (although we
have a legal right to information in the UK, it is limited to information for collective
bargaining purposes and only to recognised unions). We think that this is an issue which
needs more discussion.
(b) environmental issues - (like the chemical industry's
'responsible care programme'). This is also a serious issue which should be considered and
debated
This concludes the report from the UK Study Group for Session
Four.
