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The UNI Global's newly published joint Care and Commerce sector report, available in English and Spanish, examines how unions have risen to the challenges of Covid-19 and increased strength through organizing for occupational safety and health (OSH) improvements. It identifies five key strategies unions used in securing workers’ OSH wins.
The Executive Report states: This report demonstrates how OSH became a rallying point for workers fighting for their rights across the globe. We find that workers in Europe, Asia and the Americas used five successful approaches in this fight:
2 Pressuring government leaders to enact reforms, 3 Engaging in collaborative action with community organizations, 4 Turning OSH committees into organizing catalysts, and 5 Defining mental health issues as equal in value to physical health. Through these strategies, workers asserted their power in new ways, and unions took on even greater responsibility for negotiating improvements to rules, procedures and equipment designed to keep workers safe, especially in dangerous times. During 2020 and 2021, workers in care and commerce were in the vanguard of new approaches to organizing around safety and health issues, and through agreements with employers, research and safety guidelines, UNI supported affiliated unions’ efforts to rally workers around OSH issues—to not only gain safer workplaces, but as a path to greater union power and improvements in wages and working conditions. The pandemic’s long-term legacy is still unfolding, but we expect recent achievements in improving OSH during the health emergency to become the foundation of long-term commitments to improved conditions for all workers in a post-pandemic world. The English version of the full report entitled 'Safer Jobs, Stronger Unions' can be downloaded either from the Unionsafety E-Library using search category 'Trade Union Reports, or by clicking on the image above. Source: UNI Global
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