One in Two Engaged in Agriculture

The global labour force includes half of the world's population, numbering about three billion people.

• Half of all jobs are in agriculture. A significant proportion of these jobs are seasonal in the developing countries.
• Almost one third of those employed work in the service industries.
• 40 per cent of working people are women.

Women are in the majority in subcontracting and temporary jobs, part-time and temporary employment and in the informal sector.

250 million children are involved in working life. Of these, 110 million are girls aged 5 to 14 years.

A majority of the labour force in the developing countries work in the informal or grey sector of the economy, in which employment is not regulated by collective agreements and even legislation has little impact.

One Billion People
Suffer from Lack of Work

The labour supply greatly exceeds its demand. There are 150 million unemployed and about 750 to 900 million underemployed worldwide. A situation in which roughly one third of the global labour force suffer from lack of work perpetuates a serious imbalance in the labour market. For the employers this offers an effective means to pressure employees to accept substandard working conditions.

The lack of work is greatest in the developing countries. Very high unemployment rates are common all over the third world. In the European Union the general unemployment rate was just under ten per cent at the beginning of the year 2000, while in the USA and Japan it was four to five per cent.

Of the unemployed 60 million are aged 15 to 24 years.

Unskilled Workers Disadvantaged

Highly skilled jobs are concentrated in the industrialised countries, while those demanding fewer skills are in the developing countries. This gap is not narrowing. The demand for unskilled labour is continuously decreasing in the affluent countries as the emphasis moves ever more towards production demanding highly skilled labour. In the 1980s and 1990s the parallel change in the developing countries was slower than in the economically developed countries. In some developing countries vocational skills barely developed at all.

Demands made
of Employees are too Exacting

People in working life have noticed the increased competition in the form of growing demands made by employers. Often these demands are inordinate. According to a report published in Helsingin Sanomat in June 2000, Finnish President Tarja Halonen described the consequences of excessive demands made by employers at a seminar organised by the Social Insurance Institution – KELA in the following terms: "There are rather many burned out or overburdened people at workplaces nowadays, and in many ways work exceeds its frame of reference to affect leisure time and family life so that people lose the ability to cope with working life".

This stress has been augmented by a loss of job security and, especially in the public sector, by the increased prevalence of temporary jobs. Employers apply pressure on their employees by threatening to transfer their work to subcontractors or to other corporations offering services for hire.

Efforts to protect individual employment in Finland have led to uncompensated overtime work in many industries. In the 1990s this phenomena also became more common in the municipal sector. It represents an exacerbated example of how fiercer competition increases the pressure to undermine working conditions. The more employee groups concede in the face of such pressure, the more difficult it is for others to defend their working conditions, and the race to the bottom accelerates.

The Finns Know
the Strength of Collective Bargaining

The system of collective bargaining gives the best protection to wage and salary earners. Collective agreements offer the most effective means of preventing "the race to the bottom".

The Finnish public are well aware of this, as was clear from a survey made by the SAK organisation in late winter 2000. 73 per cent of those interviewed considered that employees are in a weak position when wages, salaries and other working conditions are entirely negotiated at the workplace. 79 per cent of wage earners and 78 per cent of salaried employees concur with this view. 63 per cent of those in managerial positions are of a similar opinion.

54 per cent of entrepreneurs consider it important to settle working conditions by collective bargaining. However, one third of the Finns are of the opinion that employers must have the right to employ people at whatever conditions job applicants agree to.

Municipal Sector Collective
Agreements not Generally Binding

There are no collective agreements of generally binding character in the municipal sector. In school cleaning, for example, two different agreements may be applied if part of the work is commissioned from a private company. The pay and the other benefits for the same work may differ substantially, which tempts employers to choose the cheaper alternative regardless of the outcome of the work. This is a hard challenge for municipal staff.

The arrangement has been exacerbated by an increase in the number of bids made by unorganised employers and of those who hire out labour in competitive tendering for public services. This limits the prospects for defending appropriate pay levels and decent working conditions.

The Basic Rights of Wage
and Salary Earners must be
Written into the EU Charter

The European Union trade union movement is calling for the inclusion of the basic rights of wage and salary earners in the EU charter. In the first half of the year 2000 the trade union organisations stepped up their lobbying of EU policymakers in this area.

Core Standards for Working Life
must be the Starting Point Everywhere

Defending core labour standards is a fundamental principle in the strategy of the international trade union movement. In 1998 the Member States of the International Labour Organisation – ILO specified what they meant by core labour standards. Their goal is:

• to secure the right to organise and the right to collective bargaining,
• to prevent discrimination based on gender, race or religion in recruiting and pay,
• to limit the participation in working life of minors and completely stop child labour in the worst jobs, and
• to bring an end to forced labour.

At the beginning of the year 2000 Finland was one of the few countries that had ratified all eight ILO agreements.

Although the ILO has stepped up its supervision of compliance with these agreements since the late 1990s, the realities of working life in dozens of developing countries are far from the commitments made by their policymakers. Crude examples of this include the extensive use of forced labour in Burma and China where the leadership uses heavy-handed methods to prevent the formation of an independent trade union movement.

Easier and with Greater Difficulty

"The demand for adherence everywhere to international core labour standards is a good one. Implementing this demand will improve the status of employees in dozens of developing countries without jeopardising the benefits achieved in other countries. It is always more difficult if one's benefit are won at somebody else’s expense." argues Irma Rajantie, shop steward in the City of Kotka and member of the Board of the Trade Union for the Municipal Sector - KTV.

Merciless Working Conditions in
the Export Processing Zones of the South

One striking example of the race to the bottom is offered by the Export Processing Zones (EPZ) established in dozens of countries. China, Mexico, Indonesia, Kenya and many other developing countries have attracted foreign enterprises with bids that often entirely deny trade union rights.

At the turn of the millennium there were almost one thousand EPZs harbouring 27 million jobs.

Reports from the closely guarded EPZs tell of extreme exploitation. Characteristic of these conditions are excessive working hours, dumped wages, unhealthy production halls, poor job security, discipline enforced by violence and sexual harassment of female employees.

The authorities condone all of this in order to satisfy the employers that provide jobs to the people and foreign currency to the country. These enterprises seldom pay taxes to the host countries.

Multinational Enterprise
Jobs in Demand

While the pay and the other working conditions in multinational enterprise workplaces in the developing countries are modest, local people compete fiercely for these jobs. This is due to mass unemployment and the almost non-existent unemployment insurance in the developing countries. Moreover, the working conditions offered by foreign enterprises are often better than those of local enterprises in the developing countries, and for the most gifted employees an international enterprise may offer good career opportunities.

Thin Pay Packets in India

The economy and labour market of India are internationally significant, as one sixth of the world's population live in this country. Its cautious integration, since the 1980s, with the world economy emphasises India's significance. In the 1990s the momentum of this integration increased.

In the 1990s India accelerated its economic growth to record levels. Over the period from 1990 to 1997 the gross national product of the country grew by 40 per cent. According to the magazine Trade Union World this rise was, however, not reflected in wages and salaries. In real terms they rose by an average of only a few per cent over this decade. The disorganised trade union movement of the country was unable to win a fair share of this economic growth for employees.

The average monthly wage in Indian industry is about EUR 270. With their salaries of EUR 500 the water, gas and electricity utility employees are in the top earnings group of Indian workers.

Trade Union World notes that in the informal sector, where a significant proportion of wage and salary earners work, monthly earning of EUR 40 to 50 are common.

Competition for Employees

In Finland 130,000 municipal and joint municipal authority employees are due to retire by 2010. To compensate for these workers a large number of secretaries, cooks, cleaners, home assistants, nurses, cashiers, accountants and workers in dozens of other trades will be needed. At the same time over 200,000 employees in the private sector will become old age pensioners.

The retirement of the baby-boom generation will increase competition for a qualified labour force. The decisive factors in this competition will be working conditions and terms of employment.

The wages and salaries of municipal employees rose more slowly than those of workers in the private sector in the last few years of the 1990s. A rapid increase in the proportion of temporary jobs has also reduced public interest in applying for local authority jobs. Unless policymakers change this trend, the municipalities will encounter increasing difficulties in competition for skilled labour.

In March 2000 Tuire Santamäki-Vuori, the Vice-President of the Trade Union for the Municipal Sector - KTV, called on the municipalities to take a more long-term approach in their staffing policy. "… however in many municipalities the employees are in a continuous state of insecurity and under pressure to change. This cannot help but affect their motivation and thus the productivity of their work", she argued. "… it is ironic that the municipalities constantly stress the productivity of service provision, but at the same time exhaust their most important productive factor: the staff."

The Labour Shortage
and the Welfare at Work Programme

In spring 2000 one local authority in two had encountered difficulties in finding employees. There was shortage of social workers, care staff and information technology experts, speech therapists, locum tenentes farmers, teachers and doctors. The situation was revealed in a survey made by the Commission for Local Authority Employers.

The City of Helsinki is engaged in a welfare at work programme as a pilot project until the year 2004. This project seeks to increase the average age of retirement by two years and reduce days lost due to illness by one fifth. This will require improved fostering of the working capacity, motivation and skills of employees. A further goal of the programme is to forestall the labour shortage that threatens the City of Helsinki.

Shorter Working Hours

The central development objective of the European Federation of Public Service Unions (EPSU) is the shift to a 35-hour working week. The organisation emphasises that as working hours are cut new jobs must be created so that the reform does not add to the workload of an already overburdened staff. The organisation is also calling for shorter working hours with no loss of incomes so that the quality of life and purchasing power of employees are not impaired.

Drivers have been made
the Dupes of Working Life

In winter 2000 Tuire Santamäki-Vuori, Vice-President of the Trade Union for the Municipal Sector – KTV, commented that bus line tendering has made drivers the dupes of working life. "In public procurement legislation no attention has been given to the needs of the user, the local authority, or the employees of the sector. Insecurity, changing employers and working conditions and tightening of schedules have led to a severe deterioration in the atmosphere at work." This situation has prevailed even though the Lonka agreement, reached following industrial action, requires the transport company that wins the tender to employ the drivers of the unsuccessful party if additional staff are needed.

Discrimination against Women
Hampers Progress

There is no country where women are not victims of discriminated in the labour market. The extreme case is Afghanistan. Appealing to the Koran, its hard-line Islamic leadership has forbidden women from participating in working life.

In July 2000 the International Confederation of Free Trade Union (ICFTU) published a survey, according to which women are also discriminated against in the labour market of all of the European Union Member States.

As far as business enterprises are concerned, discrimination in recruiting and promotion is an oddity, as it means under-utilisation of the skills and know-how of women. As such, this also hampers the development of society as a whole.

In all cases discrimination against women has been inherited from the past when women were responsible for work in the home, while men worked outside the home. In the last decades of the 20^th century, however, female participation in working life increased at an accelerating pace so that by the beginning of the new millennium 40 per cent of the global labour force was female. Many growth industries have a female majority in the labour force.

Although the Nordic countries have made further progress in women's participation than other countries, even here discrimination has not ceased. In the Nordic countries nowadays the pay differential between women and men is mainly due to a concentration of the female labour force in low-paid jobs and industries. To secure promotion more is demanded of women than of men. This is a severe impediment to any levelling out of pay differentials.

Sexual harassment is also a serious working life problem around the world.

Public Sector Cuts
Hit Women Hardest

Cuts in public sector provision undermine the labour market position of women more seriously than that of men. This is the conclusion of an International Labour Organisation (ILO) study from the late 1990s.

In many countries the State and municipalities are the largest employers of women in the formal sector.

The survey includes the following general observation: "Especially serious consequences are suffered by women in privatisation, as their average pay and working conditions in the public sector are better than in the private sector".

A Step by Step
Knockout Competition

As a result of gender based elimination, the participation of women has the following structure:

• 40 per cent of the global labour force,
• 20 per cent of enterprise leadership positions
• and 2 to 3 per cent of large enterprise leadership positions.

The globalisation of business life has not appreciably changed this distribution.

Justice for All

Who benefits from working life discrimination against women, the disabled, those over 45 years of age and sexual minorities? In the long-term nobody does, because it engenders harmful tensions in society as a whole and means a waste of resources.

As a community based on solidarity, the trade union movement condemns discrimination in any form, both in working life and outside of it.

Women in Positions of Trust
in the Trade Unions

By increasing the proportion of women in its leading bodies the trade union movement will become stronger and its ability to promote organisation will improve. This has been stressed in several official decisions of trade union committees. In spite of this, women have remained under-represented in these committees. The reasons for this lie in the backward attitudes of men, the focus on work in the home as the responsibility of women and the fact that trade union activity often demands participation at times badly suited for women.

The trade union movement in Finland believes that it can solve this problem by analysing the consequences of the alternatives for the position of women when it prepares its decisions. Trade union organisations in several other countries have adopted a similar approach. However this method of mainstreaming has not been fully applied in any country.

The Trade Union
for the Municipal Sector - KTV
Supports Organisation and Training
of Women in Asia

In trade union courses supported by the Finnish trade union movement in the developing countries care is taken to ensure that the participants include a high proportion of women. The goal is to increase the proportion of women in the leading bodies and work of trade union organisations.

In 1999-2001 the Trade Union for the Municipal Sector - KTV is financing a project in the Asia-Pacific region targeted at the women of the region. The aim of this training and campaigning is to raise the organising rate of women and to increase the number of female activists. The project is being implemented by Public Services International – PSI, which represents almost 1.5 million members in its affiliated unions in the Asia-Pacific region. Of these more than a quarter are women.

Chairperson Ana-Maria Rios