The National International Committee met on Thursday 19th September; it was an online only meeting due to works being carried out at UNISON Centre.
We received various reports back from National staff on the unions international work. Palestine
There was a lengthy report on Palestine as this continues to be a devastating situation and public services in Gaza have been decimated. There is no formal education, water and sanitation are badly affected and healthcare has been reduced to 17 partially functioning hospitals, 58 partially functioning health centres and extremely limited access to basic medical supplies. Along with limited access to clean water and food. 885 health care workers have been killed.
The significant deterioration of the situation in the West Bank was also noted.
On 29 May, the Israeli authorities transferred administrative powers relating to land and settlements from military to Israeli civilian control. On 27 June the Israeli cabinet agreed to establish five new settlements. Settlers have also established 25 new outposts. In addition to these actions, which constitute a grave violation of international law, on 17 July 2024 the Israeli Knesset (parliament) overwhelmingly supported a resolution opposing the establishment of a Palestinian Statt.
Shortly after the election the UK Government made a statement at the United Nations, recognising the importance of UNRWA’s mandate. On 19 July the Foreign Secretary announced that funding would be resumed and committed to an initial release of £21 million. The previous Government had suspended funding to the agency, pending the outcome of two inquiries, one of which had been published.
Whilst all of these steps, which we raised with Labour in opposition and continue to raise with Labour in government, are welcome, we continue to call on the Government to:
- Recognise the state of Palestine
- Suspend the arms trade with Isreal and the UK-Israel trade and partnership agreement
- Increase funding to UNRWA
- Ban trade with the settlements
Recognition of Palestine
UNISON has long called for recognition of the State of Palestine as a critical contribution to a two state solution. This position was reaffirmed in the Palestine composite at National Delegate Conference and the UNISON amendment to the Palestine motion at TUC Congress.
We have been calling on Labour to implement their manifesto commits to recognising the state of Palestine, including by organising a meeting of general secretaries from Labour affiliated unions with the Palestinian Ambassador to discuss this and other shared demands on Palestine.
Council of Global Unions Delegation to Palestine
Christina McAnea joined leaders of the ITUC and Global Union Federations for the first trade union delegation to the West Bank since the beginning of the conflict, from 2631 May.
An article about the delegation can be found here: https://www.unison.org.uk/news/article/2024/06/christina–mcanea–joins–solidaritymission–to–palestine/
UNISON has provided speakers for every national demonstration organised by PSC since the last meeting:
- 18 May
- 8 June
- 6 July
- 3 August
- 7 September
- 11 September
We also heard reports on other countries across the globe:
Turkey
The next hearing in the trial of eight leading members of the heath unions SES will be held at the Heavy Penal Court on the morning of 19 September. International observers have not been requested on this occasion as no substantive decision is expected. The eight were arrested in May 2021 and charged with membership and/or leadership of an armed terrorist organisation. Whilst all the accused remain under strict bail conditions, Gonul Erden and Selma Atabey have spent periods in prison and Gonul remains under city arrest. We are sending a solidarity letter from Christina to SES and a letter to the Ambassador copied to the Minister for Europe, ahead of the hearing.
Osman Isci, International Officer for the public service federation KESK was a guest at National Delegate Conference. He addressed the international rally and spoke at a fringe meeting on Turkey, alongside Solidarity with the People of Turkey.
UNISON continues to support KESK on their application to the UIDF, which focuses on the trade union call for peace. It’s anticipated that the final application will come to the committee in November.
Colombia
As a member of the Justice for Colombia committee Nick Crook has been engaged in resolving some staffing issues in the JfC office which has taken quite some time to deal with.
Justice for Colombia North West organised a delegation to Colombia over the summer which included UNISON reps, including Micaela Tracey-Ramos from this committee.
Business and Human Rights
When the General Election was called, Baroness Young’s Private Members Bill, the
Commercial Organisations and Public Authorities Duty (Human Rights and
Environment) Bill [HL] fell. However, before that, Lord Dave Prentis intervened during the bill’s second reading and the Lord Iain McNicol the then Shadow Minister reiterated the National Policy Forum 2023 report commitment and that he believed this would happen sooner rather than later to put the principles into action. Further, at the end of August, in response to a question in the Lords about what assessment Labour has made in this area, Department for Business and Trade Minister Baroness Jones (exUNISON head of policy) responded “The Government will assess the best ways to prevent environmental harms, modern slavery and human and labour rights abuses in both private and public sector supply chains including effective due diligence rules”. UNISON and CJC are now pushing for the Government to announce a timetable for the assessment and realistically hope this will be in the next Parliament in 2025/6.
In the meantime, Baroness Young convened a roundtable of sustainable public procurement practitioners and others to examine what needed to happen to improve practice. Tony Wright, Chair of PDCC and Karen Amber, Branch Secretary of East Kent Health who both have relevant substantive roles joined, as did Jason Copell KC on behalf of UNISON, Lord Prentis and several Electronics Watch affiliates. Much motivation to continue these discussions exists and UNISON intends to convene another session to assist with formulating draft policy for the union and CJC. In the meantime, UNISON is expecting the first part of Jason Copell KC’s advise to be sent just before the Committee meets.
Electronics Watches (EW) Governance review continues in order to ensure that its affiliates in the UK and Europe are not falling foul of procurement laws. This is likely to lead to some significant changes in the structure of the Board and organisation. A further webinar of EW’s self-organised Freedom of Association (FoA) affiliate group was held, this focused on contract clauses containing either social dialogue or FoA clauses used by Swedish and Norwegian public authorities, their effectiveness, learning lessons and what they need to support their work in this area. The work of the group will be presented at EW’s annual meeting in November in Brussels. Gemma has been contributing towards the development of a draft worker-centric guide to EW’s ‘principles for worker driven remedy’ and will travel to Malaysia in October to assist with facilitating the workshop that the UIDF is funding and to check UIDF Malaysia electronics factory organising project progress.
Public Services in the Global South
Scoping of UNISON’s new priority Public Services in the Global South has concluded. The initial suggested focal areas remain the most relevant and the committee was requested to approve the strategy (this will still go to a full NEC meeting after approval from the committee)
Climate Change
Tony Wright, chair of PDCC, will be attending COP 29 in Azerbaijan as one of the two TUC delegates within the ITUC delegation.
Trade
Christina McAnea has written to the new Secretary for Business and Trade Jonathan
Reynolds setting out UNISON’s position on the current trade negotiations between the UK and a number of countries including India, the Gulf Co-operation Council, Turkey and Israel. UNISON opposes trade agreements with these countries. She also asked that the UK seek “side letters” excluding the UK from the controversial Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) mechanism, which gives privileged rights to multinational companies to sue countries in private and secretive trade courts and which is part of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership which the UK has already joined. Both New Zealand and Australia, which have been subject to hostile ISDS cases in the past, have negotiated such side letters a part of their CPTTP membership and UNISON believes the UK should do the same.
Leadership in the Global and European Trade Union Movement
The 11th EPSU Congress took place in Bucharest, Romania from 18-20 June 2024, clashing unfortunately with our own national delegate conference. UNISON’s delegation was made up of representatives the self-organised groups: National Women’s Committee, National Black Members’ Committee, National LGBT+ Committee, National Disabled Members’ Committee and the Young Members’ National Committee and were supported by head of international, Nick Crook.
The congress adopted EPSU’s Programme of Action 2024-29 as well as resolutions on:
Palestine, high quality public services, the rise of the far-right, the results of the 2024 European Parliament elections and financing. All the adopted resolutions are available on the EPSU website https://www.epsu.org/article/programme–action–and–documentsadopted
International Labour Conference June 2024
The social care economy was one of the main themes of this year’s International Labour Conference, the annual meeting of the ILO. The TUC represents UK workers at the ILC and PSI has observer status. The international team worked to ensure that UNISON’s work on a national care service were properly reflected by both the TUC and PSI during the debates at the ILC and in the ILO statement that was agreed.
https://www.ilo.org/resource/record–proceedings/ilc/112/outcome–general–discussioncommittee–decent–work–and–care–economy–2024
Bangladesh
During the summer, continuous peaceful student protests across the country took place against attempts by the government to reinstate quotas (back to 30% from a court ruling of 5%) in civil service jobs for relatives of veterans from the country’s war for independence from Pakistan in 1971 for more than three weeks. The protesters were met with brutal, sustained violence by the police. A UN preliminary report has suggested that the number of people massacred by the authorities at 600 but admits it is probably an under-estimate. Among those murdered include many trade unionists. The unrest led to the Prime Minister fleeing the country to India and the installing of an interim Prime Minister, Muhammad Yunus, a Nobel Peace Prize winner. A letter has been sent to Catherine West MP, FCDO Minister with responsibility for Asia/Pacific. It sets out several demands by UNISON’s partner, the National Garment Workers Union and the ITUC.
Hong Kong
With the aim of developing a package of resources that can be used for recruiting
Hong Kongers into the union, the first of three (recorded) national webinars for Hong Kongers was held on 12th September. With over 70 people registered, the majority likely to be non-members, it focused on health and safety rights in the public sector and encouraged them to get involved by joining UNISON. The webinar’s promotional material was translated into Cantonese, as has the Migrant Workers’ Network leaflet. A second webinar for women Hong Kongers is organised for later in the year. Finally, Gemma has worked with the Equalities Unit to submit a Campaign Fund Proposal to contract the Runnymede Trust to conduct research and write an activists and branches briefing on countering East/South East Asian hate crime.
The Philippines
After a new national centre for public services was created by a few public service unions and the TUC’s renewed interest in the Philippines at the request of some affiliates, Gemma will undertake a scoping visit, guided by PSI, to the Philippines in
October. Further, Gemma will travel to Mindanao, an island in the South of the
Philippines to scope a potential Community Health Workers (CHW project with PSI.
Community Health Workers across the global South are predominately women. On-call all hours of the day and night, they are tasked a very large and wide number of different responsibilities, ranging from basic healthcare services to maintaining social harmony within their communities. Despite their indispensable contributions, they face severe exploitation: they work without specific hours or adequate compensation (akin to wage theft). And they are not classified as ‘workers’ and so do not receive social protection or other benefits regularised workers receive.
Ukraine
Motion 95, Solidarity with Ukraine and its Labour Movement 95, was passed at NDC:
Following that motion being passed the international committee was asked to agree the affiliation to Ukraine Solidarity Campaign, along with sending a fact finding delegation to meet with the two Ukrainian trade union centres the FPU and the KVPU and their EPSU/PSI affiliates, to agree in principle looking at UIDF projects with the Ukrainian trade union movement (a proposal is hoped to be coming to the next international meeting) and promote support for fundraising for humanitarian projects in Ukraine such as for medical equipment in hospitals.
There was the mention of a possible race issue with regards to sending a delegation to Ukraine, due to the feeling from a member of the committee on the racism in the country and safety. We were assured safety will be looked at before sending a delegation.
ACTSA
A service to celebrate the 30th anniversary of a democratic South Africa was held at Westminster Abbey on 16 May. Christina McAnea gave an address at the service about the role of the Anti Apartheid Movement. Ronald Lamola, South African Minister for International Affairs and Cooperation and Lord Paul Boateng also spoke. The service was organised by the South African High Commission and ACTSA: https://actsa.org/westminster–abbey–service/
Zimbabwe, South Africa and Eswatini/Swaziland
Mark Beacon, international officer, travelled to Zimbabwe, South Africa and Eswatini/Swaziland from 6-14 July to meet with trade union partners. The main purpose of the visit was to meet with the political committee of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions to discuss the ongoing UIDF project, but the visit also provided an opportunity to meet with other partner unions in southern Africa to discuss their priorities and identify potential areas for solidarity work.
Nigeria
On 7 August armed police raided the headquarters of the Nigeria Labour Congress in Abuja. This followed a meeting of the executive at which they were discussing the police response to the End Bad Governance protests. On 19 August the NLC President Joseph Ajaero, received a letter threatening arrest if he did not attend an interview the following day. On the morning of 9 September 2024, as he was travelling to the UK to attend the TUC Congress in Brighton, Joseph Ajaero was detained at Abuja airport without legal warrant and the NLC were for some time unaware of his whereabouts. He was on conditional bail late that evening. These latest events take place in the context of increasing attacks on trade unions and wider civil society in Nigeria, particularly since the elections in February 2023.
Christina McAnea wrote to the General Secretary of the NLC on 2 September offering our solidarity. She also wrote the Nigerian High Commissioner and the Minister for Africa on 10 September, raising our concerns. We are in discussion with the TUC and ITUC Africa about how best to support the NLC and met with the general secretary of ITUC Africa at TUC Congress to discuss this.
SEIU
Christina McAnea attended the 28th convention of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) from 20-22 May 2024 in Philadelphia, USA as an international guest. The convention elected a new leadership team and April Verrett was elected as the first black woman to lead a major US union. Christina will report back to the international committee at a future meeting.
Canada
Assistant General Secretary Jon Richards has been talking to colleagues in the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) after the new Chancellor Rachel Reeves announced that she wanted to look at merging the Local Government Pension Funds into a few large funds to act as investment vehicles for major infrastructure projects. Reeves specifically cited the Canadian example of using public sector funds in this way and we reached out to CUPE to share their experience. It should be noted that one of the major Canadian pension funds, the Ontaria Public Employees Fund is a major shareholder in the failing Thames Water.
CUPE have also asked permission to reproduce for their members the joint guidance that UNISON and Hope Not Hate issued on Antisemitism and Islamophobia. We agreed to this request.
Communication with UNISON Members
At the meeting we received confirmation that the international team still does not have admin support, which has had a regrettable impact on the teams capacity and communications.
Working with SOG’s
International is supporting the National LGBT+ Committee to enable them to send delegations to the ILGA Europe congress in Bucharest in October and the ILGA World congress in Cape Town in November.
