Sometimes you have to admit that there's a big wide world out there, and you are just a small part of it. In terms of world trade unionism, nothing could have made this clearer than a recent progress report from Union Network International (UNI), published just before it celebrates its second birthday.
After only two years in existence, it boasts more than 11 million members globally - exactly 1.49% of them in the Media and Entertainment Sector that BECTU belongs to. Nothing to be embarrassed about of course - we may claim to organise some of the sexiest industries in the world, but we've never said they were the biggest.
UNI's report shows clearly the benefits of belonging to an international organisation which is big enough to do all the things that a single union might think worthy and desirable, but would never have the resources to tackle.
In Africa, for example, UNI has set three priorities to achieve in cooperation with its local union affiliates - poverty reduction, the fight against AIDS, and closing the digital divide. The organisation has joined groups like Jubilee 2000 to lobby for Africa's mountain of foreign debt to be reduced or waived completely.
While incoming foreign aid to the region is measured in millions of dollars, Africa's overall debt to western banks is counted in billions - £300bn to date. Foreign debt is not making the fight against AIDS any easier in countries where interest payments to the banks often outweigh public health budgets.
The scale of this insidious, but now treatable disease, is apocalyptic - 24% of South Africa's economically active population are thought to be infected for instance - and UNI is at the forefront of a campaign to encourage employers to help pay for the anti-retroviral drugs that can transform the lives of sufferers.
As for the digital divide - the gap between information-rich and information-poor citizens - Africa's problems make ours in Europe pale into insignificance. In a continent where less than half the population has ever used a telephone, it isn't surprising that they are short of computers. However, it's salutory to discover that among UNI's affiliated unions in the region, most of them big serious concerns, only one in five acually possesses even one personal computer.
E-mail facilities, which we take for granted, are accessed (if at all) by the other four fifths via internet cafes or friendly NGOs who are sometimes willing to lend a hand. Thanks to financial support from European unions, mostly in Belgium, UNI has now begun a project to equip every African affiliate with a PC by 2005.
Elsewhere UNI is tackling organisations like the International Monetary Fund, and World Bank, by challenging the painfully strict conditions they attach to rescue loans in areas like Latin America and Asia. Two thirds of the world's poor live in Asia, yet since the region's financial collapse in the late 90s, most countries have had to cut public budgets for health, welfare, and public services, as a condition of being baled out by the international bankiing community.
On top of this financial hardship comes the repression of human rights in countries from Colombia, where thousands of trade unionists have been murdered, to South Korea, where an entire generation of union leaders has spent more time in jail than in the office.
Again, UNI has been using its clout and influence to force lenders and other governments to curb the excesses of regimes which are desperate to quell unrest caused by poverty. On that note, UNI scored a victory earlier this year when, after a major campaign, Korean trade unionist Lee Yonk Deuk was released from Seoul Detention Centre where he had been jailed after committing an offence officially described as "business interference". I visited him there last year, and can confirm that it wasn't a fun place.
Our own activity within UNI is mostly confined to the practial business of sharing information and lobbying expertise with other similar unions, particularly in Europe, in a way that directly benefits our own members.
However it's good to know that in a small, 1.49%, kind of way we are also helping underpriveleged fellow workers across the world through activities that we would never afford on our own.
Website: www.union-network.org
Tony Lennon
November 2002
