TUC relations with UGTT Tunisia: Sally Hunt speech

Draft speaking note for

SALLY HUNT

TUC International Spokesperson

General Secretary, UCU

Joint UGTT/TUC/FCO Seminar

Building Partnerships with the Private Sector and Government to improve workforce skills and investment potential

Thursday 19 July 2007, Tunis, Tunisia

Introductory Remarks (09:00-09:30)

Other speakers:

• Mr Abdessalam Jerad, Secretary General of UGTT
• His Excellency Alan Goulty, British Ambassador to Tunisia

Colleagues, it gives me enormous pleasure to speak in the opening session of this seminar today.

I would like to thank both the UGTT and the British Embassy in particular for the wonderful hospitality and hugely interesting schedule of meetings and visits that I, and my colleagues from the TUC, are engaged in this week.

I am the TUC's international spokesperson, although my day job is to be General Secretary of the Universities and Colleges Union, formed last year out of two separate lecturers' unions.

So I have a particular interest in the topics for discussion today - firstly because they are at the heart of the work that the TUC, like the UGTT and, I guess, most national trade union confederations face today.

And secondly because the whole issue of lifelong learning, education and skills, research and development are the bread and butter of my members' working lives. It's what they do, basically.

The TUC and the UGTT have been friends for a long time. The TUC has the greatest respect for the UGTT and its leaders - you are one of the leading trade union movements in the world.

But we have often been friends at a distance - meeting at other people's events or on other people's delegations, and I hope that while our joint international engagement won't diminish, our direct links will become stronger.

We are, of course, both leading organisations in the International Trade Union Confederation that was formed just last November.

We are also leading members of our own regional bodies - the European Trade Union Confederation on our part and the International Confederation of Arab Trade Unions on yours.

I hope that the visit we are undertaking this week, and the visit that senior UGTT officials made to Britain in January, will lead to a much closer bilateral relationship between our organisations.

Together, in forums like EuroMed, our two regions are becoming ever more intertwined, and although we must be careful not to lose our national identities, that process could be good for both of us, if we manage it correctly.

That could, indeed, be said of globalisation as a whole. The TUC is emphatically not part of what some humourists call « the worldwide campaign against globalisation », but we have serious concerns about the impact of globalisation on employment, on society, and on the environment.

Those impacts need to be managed, and trade unions are a key partner in the process of ensuring that there is a social dimension to globalisation.

We represent the people who have most to lose, and we have decades of experience in making sure that the people who have most to lose either don't, or are compensated for their loss.

Trade unions need to be involved in decisions about restructuring enterprises to meet the challenges of globalisation because we will be able to remind the managers and the consultants that you can restructure a business, but you can't re-engineer the people who work in it.

We will speak up for their training needs, and we will make sure that their voice is heard about the changes that are taking place around them.

Without our involvement, the workers are likely to be an obstacle to change, resentful and unco-operative.

Get us on board and we can engage the workforce, help you tap their creativity, and make sure the benefits are shared fairly so that the wider society doesn't bear the brunt.

You are going to hear today about several important elements of the struggle to tame globalisation and make it our servant, rather than our master.

Those efforts will be most successful where we can work in partnership: unions, employers and governments all with the same aim of decent work and a better life.

But I hope you will allow me to finish on a distinctly trade union note.

The most important element, for me, in the cause of taming globalisation, is the basic message of all trade unionism.

If we allow globalisation to divide us, to set us against each other, to separate us, then we face a future of the race to the bottom - economically, socially and morally.

We will begin by competing in the marketplace, and we will end up by fighting in the gutter.

Trade wars and protectionism will be accompanied by terrorism and militarism.

Instead, we must use occasions like this to build international solidarity, trade union unity, and social security.

In my own sector, a global academic community has always been possible. Now, it is a necessity.

I hope that the TUC and the UGTT will continue to strengthen our friendship and our practical engagement in the issues which matter to our members and to workers all over the world.