 Okay, so now it should start. Okay, so why this session? When we prepared the session, we thought, okay, we want to discuss with you trade unionists with researchers from the formal and informal sector about the possibilities of trade union work, international trade union work, which fosters self-organization of workers and which includes an understanding that the trade union movement or being part of the trade union movement does not only mean to fight for better working conditions, but to be also part of a broader movement that aims for the transformation of society. So we wanted to discuss with activists, researchers, unionists alike, perspectives of their trade union work that tries to link both the concrete struggles with struggles for the transformation of society to overcome capitalism, patriarchy and racism. And we felt that in order to have that discussion, we need to share experiences from both research and from the trade union practice where workers, activists build solidarity along borders or cross borders and between companies, between countries, because from our understanding it is these movements that are able to transform societies and therefore we wanted to take a look at different experiences from different sectors to actually engage in such a discussion. So that is the general outline of today's debate and we want to have that debate given the four presentations that you had the chance to watch before and we want to engage in a more detailed discussion with our speakers about their experiences, about their work and of course want to give you the possibility to join that discussion, to share your experiences and your understandings of trade union work, of activist work and research that contributes to changing the society. Now I would give Tatjana and Janina a chance to introduce themselves and the speakers and then I would continue with like brief housekeeping issues about how we want to have the discussion. I'm Tatjana, nice to meet you all, happy to be here, happy to have organized the session. I'm a researcher currently in Berlin working on labor issues and value chains and the platform economy. I've had the luck to work with Tai for some years now. Yeah, hello from my side as well. I'm Janina. I'm also working with the Tai network in Germany for a couple of years. I also do a lot of work on health and digitalization at the moment, which is also big topics in the whole network globally. And beside that, I work at the University of Clyde Sciences in Frankfurt as a gender advisor. So now I'm very happy to introduce our four panelists that bring in very interesting topics for our question. So we first have Cynthia Machado. She's a PhD student at the moment at the Research Institute on Migration and Intercultural Studies in Osnabrück in Germany. She comes from Brazil. She was a teacher there before and studied history and law and did research doing her masters in Castle at the Global Labor University on Domestic Workers. And we're very happy to hear more about this topic in a little bit. So further we have Mara Lira, who is working with Tai Global in Brazil. She is active there in coordinating two networks with trade unions, different trade unions and networks in Brazil. The one is the Orange Juice Network and the second one is the Vida Viva Network that is focusing on health issues in different sectors. Welcome Mara. Then third we have Hendrik Simon. He's a lecturer at Goethe University in Frankfurt in Germany and the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt. And furthermore, he's a freelance researcher at the Ege Metall Headquarter. So like the big metal union in Germany. And he will also present on a topic of an international network within the metal union. Welcome to you as well. And last but not least, so we have Diti Bhattacharya. She is a trade union activist and researcher from India. She has been organizing and working with unions in the garment sector in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka for a decade and a half. And she's also the director of the Center of Workers Management, a trade union resource based center in Delhi. Welcome to you as well. So before we get to the interesting presentations, we have some little organizational details which Michael will tell you about. So I guess after two years of corona you are familiar with that, but just let me repeat it. So I can see you have already muted your phones. So if you want to speak just unmute, since we're not such a big group, I guess that will work. Otherwise you can raise your hands with the Zoom tool so that we know you have a question or alternatively you can write the question in the chat. There is a possibility to turn on subtitles, this closed caption in Zoom. If you need it, you can activate it like in the menu line below. In Germany it's called live transcript. I guess in English it's called closed caption. You can activate it and you will see an English subtitle. So that is the organizational issues from my side. And now we plan for about one and a half hours for discussion. So that's the time we have in mind. Okay. So yeah and before we start with the content, I will also give you a brief overview of how we want to structure the time. So we start with some short statements from all our panelists. We hope like some of you have already watched the video statements before, the little longer elaborations on the topics. So we would first like to ask to sum up a little bit so that we don't repeat everything but all get a little bit into the topics again. And then we will have a second round of questions. Then we will also ask our panelists if they have questions on each other. So we try to start a kind of dialogue. Then we will have a last question from our side. And then afterwards we will also invite everybody of the participants to ask questions. So you can raise your hand later on or you can also already write in the chat if you already think about questions beforehand. So we will keep them in mind for a little bit later. So I would like to ask you to start. You can also start with a little self presentation if you want to give some more context about your work and your connection to the topic. And then I would like to ask you to present your main argument again and also connect it with the question what are the challenges for trade unions and workers in your field. So we try to stay like on the ground level for the first round of questions and then we come more to the international level in the next round. So we said Cynthia would start I think. Yes. Hi. Thank you for the presentation. My name is Cynthia. I'm doing my PhD here in German about domestic workers now in Colombia. But what we are going to see is the results of my research from my master degree that I stood domestic workers in Brazil. My main point was a window of opportunity that happened in Brazil when we have like nationally higher demand for domestic workers. At the same time you be improved the social condition that less poor women find just the domestic worker as an option of job. So at the same time that we have increased in the demand you have a decrease in the supply of these workers and we have a history of mobilization and trade unions inside Brazil fighting for better conditions of work. So when this window of opportunity happened the domestic workers could improve to change the labor law in Brazil. What was this international level of this window of opportunity? The ILO Convention 189. So in 2011 the ILO created a convention to specify to limit some minimum rights for domestic workers all over the world. And this moment was really, really important for this sector. So let's talk a little bit about this sector in Brazil as mainly for women poor and black. Also it's an aging profession in Brazil. So it's really undervaluated young people don't want to be domestic workers. So you have this really stigma about this profession. At the same time our past of colonization and slavery make to have a domestic worker a status. You show that you are a good provider because you pay someone to do your cleaning work. So you have this value to have one domestic worker but you undervalued the work. When the international this international institute two happened the Brazilians domestic workers were well prepared. So we have trade unions in Brazil since the 1930s. They tried really hard to mobilize. They tried really hard to put the labor rights for domestic workers in our labor law. But they are really not well succeeded back then. And even when we have a new constitution in 1980 we have in the constitution 37 rights for workers in general. You have one article with rights for labor but they also prevent the domestic workers. Like these rights is for everyone but domestic workers. So from the 37 rights that all workers had before domestic workers have like six or seven. So they have we have like a really long history of trade unions about domestic work in Brazil. And when the convention start to to prepare we were really well connected prepare with demands specific demands to put inside the convention. It's important to state that back then we have a left wing government. So the workers the part in ILO that the workers were represented represented they choose to send domestic workers trade unions instead of be the big confederations or or stronger trade unions they choose to send domestic workers leaders there. And at the same time the government choose to send people connected with the trade unions movement. For example Benedita da Silva she was back then a federal deputy and she was a domestic worker herself. So when Brazil was in the convention we were really well prepared and took a good participation there. And what is what was important internationally the domestic workers also was trying to mobilize in an international level. We have a lot of trade unions old trade unions but connections between all the domestic workers in the world was really new. So when they start to be there in the in the convention they really will prepare countries help it they're not so well prepared. So the domestic workers and trade unions connect with the ones that have specific proposals have arguments and they were kind of together in a block. So my main yeah shortly we have one more minute for you and I don't know if it's easier for you when you talk if we say it otherwise Michael would raise this card like one minute before we ask you to get to an end so that everybody can speak. Okay just to finish it was really this participation in the convention make really united the domestic workers they create a better networking and after this convention they create an international federation of domestic workers and what I could see like when you mobilize internally you get strong to take part in an international movement and at the same time when you are in an international movement and used to sit there you can use this victory in your own country. So they in Brazil they use this participation they use this awareness they use this victory to like to say to the the population look the words agree with us the word agree that domestic workers need more rights. So now we should as Brazilians do something if the words agree we should do something as well. So that's why my main argument is this your national mobilization prepares you by international mobilization and the international mobilization give you more strength to your national backfield. So yes that's this. Thank you. Thank you very much. I hand over directly to Hendrik. Thank you so much Janina Tatjana and Michael and my fellow members here of this session for organizing this session and of course for having me my name is Hendrik Zimun I'm a postdoc researcher at the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt from first of May now. So it is a pleasure to engage with all of you today to engage with all of you today on the question how we could organize and build union power along global value chains and my contribution to the session mainly deals with the organizing along the global automotive where you chain and as an example I use the Iggy Metall international network initiative which I have been accompanying now scientifically for some years. But before I will introduce the international network and it's that you with the international network initiative of Iggy Metall. First I would like to ask you the question why automotive chains are social problem at all and to answer this question one has to know a bit about how these value chains developed and transformed during the last 30 years because just 30 years ago the entire automotive production process from development to marketing was generally organized within single companies but that has changed extremely we can say that we have seen a massive differentiation and transformation of value chains in the automotive sector on a global scale. So key words of course are the fragmentation of factories outsourcing, offshoring the global dissolution of labor boundaries and automotive value chains and their thousands of suppliers. So now the question is why is this a problem for trade unions and I think the most important answer is that for trade unions value chains are already a problem on the national level. That's also what we've heard in the previous two talks and the deeper you go into an automotive value chain the worse the working conditions normally become. So even in Germany that's the case so if conditions at an original equipment manufacturer and OEM like Volkswagen and Wolfsburg for instance are relatively good not only wages but also unionization at tier two or tier three supplies are significantly worse even in Germany. So this global transformation of value chains further exacerbates these problems and restructuring value chains has of course led to increasing competition between plants, workers and also unions in different countries and there you could say this competition may prevent the possibility of transnational solidarity. So this widely recognized that trade unions face major challenges in developing effective responses to the globalization of production processes and this is of course due to your fundamental incongruity. So while companies are globally positioned and now dominate 80% of world trade, trade unions, transnational strategies have so far been largely confined to the national framework. Nevertheless and we've already heard this in the previous two talks there are also positive examples of organizing along global value chains from below and this is also where my case comes into play. I think it's an interesting example in the automotive value chain sector it's the imitial international network initiative with the international network initiative and this international network initiative also points in a sense to a strategic reorientation of EgeMetals transnational trade union work. So the network initiative aims to achieve more intensive and lasting transnational cooperation between workers representatives in an international company. For more details you can also watch my interview with Jochen Schrot and Katrin Schäfers which I prepared for this conference but just to sum it up what is interesting about this international network initiative. From my perspective it's this special feature or the special feature is the focus on the plant to plant level in one global company. So the basic idea here in keeping with the name of the initiative is the transnational networking of workers representatives such as works councils or trade unionists. So in other words the focus is not so much on union officials but on the workers in the plants themselves. They are connected with each other in order to jointly develop counter whaling power against corporate strategies and to build trust and solidarity among themselves. They can exchange information about company plans and strategies organize themselves in bodies such as the European Works Council or exchange ideas on topics such as the transformation of work digitization outsourcing of shoring and so on. So to conclude at the moment the network initiative has several projects and companies in Germany and abroad currently for example in Mexico and South Africa and yeah I look forward to discuss the details with you now so thank you very much. Thank you for your introduction Hendrik and then I will hand over to Diti. Thank you Janina and thank you for inviting me to this interesting conference. Well mine is to do with the government supply chain and this is more to do with the government supply chain challenges that we face in organizing and even negotiating in the government supply chain. I've worked in this sector for over now 10 years plus and our experience is that this sector unlike the other sectors that we're talking about is plagued with too many northern actors who are intervening in how this sector should be organized, how working conditions in this sector should be determined, what is good for this sector, what is not good for this sector. There are too many players in this field and that's exactly what I would like to talk about in brief here and which is basically if you look at the government supply chain it's a sector which has been largely non-unionized in South Asia if you're looking at just South Asia. These were all first generation workers coming into work in factories for the first time. They were women workers, they were largely from agricultural backgrounds so they had no clue what a union looks like, what a union is and therefore it was easy to create a whole industrial workforce which was devoid of unionization. So when this was the case what we could see was in various places especially in Bangladesh there were spontaneous protests which kind of broke out when there were massive accidents or people were not able to survive with the kind of no wages that existed in that sector. So there was spontaneity in the protests that existed but there was nothing which was sustainable organizing that could happen. Even today if you look at the large number of unions in Bangladesh or especially in Bangladesh there are a large number of government workers unions where you would see it's only 5% of the workers of the total workforce which is unionized actually and in the case of India and Sri Lanka the number of unions are also less so even though we have a huge workforce the government workforce in India is almost three times that of Bangladesh but the unions are you can count it in your fingers. So in that sense this was a sector where people thought that others need to get involved to change the working conditions. There were sweatshop conditions and the global north from where the work was getting offshoreed with the restructuring of the supply chain. They realized that they needed to raise the question of sweatshop conditions in the global south and initially actually there were two dimensions to it. One was that when you're offshoring you're saying oh those are bad jobs don't take away our jobs from the north because our jobs in the north are better and capital is shifting to low cost low wage centers so don't take away our jobs so it started with that but then eventually when most of the jobs shifted to the global south it was like okay we need to we are responsible for the bad working conditions in the global south so we need to intervene. So several kinds of players came into the picture and if you want to broadly divide these several players we can see that there are three kinds of players. One are of course the NGOs and by NGOs I mean funded organizations it can even be corporate funding it can be just funding from other sources so that's one funded organization kind of category the other is the MSI so these are multi-stakeholder initiatives that were set up in more in the 2000s than earlier and these were set up by the companies along with bringing in other players like campaign organizations like social organizations of the global south, workers organizations, it may be trade unions, it may be support organizations which all became part of these multi-stakeholder initiatives and these multi-stakeholder initiatives were about resolving disputes in the supply chain so you could take a complaint that you have against a certain company into these multi-stakeholder initiatives and you could resolve a crime problem within these initiatives so that's the second category but the third category is actually the most problematic category it's the global unions themselves the global unions and the northern unions themselves so when it comes to so this is where the problem lies that when we talk about solidarity between the north and the south if if it is the northern unions and the global unions which are actually actively involved in the interventions in the global south with the trade unions the expectation is that it would be a relationship of equality but what we see is what we see is that most of these relationships kind of reflects the power imbalance that exists between the countries from where these northern actors come from and their partner organizations and the partner countries where you work in so if there is an imbalance between the north and the south it is reflected even within the solidarity and support functions that happen within these involvement I would end here and I guess we will get opportunity to talk about it as we go thank you thank you very much for your first statement Diti so I give over to Michael and we will go more in depth of course now so the next question for all of you I mean you spoke about challenges that workers in your presentations on your example phase and can you explain to us how do unions or workers organization respond to their challenges and how they organize workers at the local level and again my first question would go to Cynthia or the questions would go to Cynthia first and now it's four minutes for everyone so after three minutes I will show the card okay and so as trade unions the problem should try to organize domestic workers are there is a late so you have normally you have one or two domestic workers per house so have contact with them is hard because you cannot go to someone else a house and demand to speak with the domestic worker there you have also the problem of the informality normally the majority are informal they don't have any formal contracts so they they stay in a really precarious situation because they are afraid to be fired if the employers knows that they are talking about it we have problems also in the other side because you also do not have a big company you have small individuals that are the employers so the main problems with the mobile mobilization is this where to find them how to talk with them in and how to discuss with the employers so this is really complicated what I realized is they they try in really one by one to talk with each domestic workers they try to make events that invites them to go to this place in outside work hours and they try something connected with other organizations as something connect with feminists or racial problems who fight racism in Brazil so they try to make these connections sometimes you also can see using church like a place that you have a lot of Catholic and evangelicals in Brazil and they go to these places to try to talk with them and so yes it's complicated but they are creating methods as I saw as multi unions that also create apps to connect them what's up groups parties or religious events so they are using this and they also are working really well using the awareness in the society this past office slavery this past of colonization the society feel that they have they are in debt with this group and unfortunately we have many cases of violence like from in the last three months were fine found three different women that were in literally is late in the domestic work servitude and the the worst the worst case scenario the woman was for 72 years I slave so they she was working as a domestic worker for 72 years so yes they are using this mobilization with the the society and trying to do a this small get-togethers to have this to mobilize this group thank you thank you Cynthia yeah Hendrik how is you going to tell organizing workers in the network initiative how is organizing of workers happening thanks a lot so I would say one of the biggest challenges is of course the lack of transparency in these way of chains so workers in different plans even in German way it's this of course is even more the case in the international global way of chains another challenge is the great power of the transnational companies and the lack of strategies on the side of the trade unions which now hopefully chains changes a bit but in the concrete work of the network initiative sometimes of course it's also the different decrease of union organization and different plans and both in Germany and in the international cooperation so this also open oftenly depends on the position of the company in the hierarchy of the value chains and OEMs the decrease of union organization tends to be high in tier 2 or tier 3 suppliers yeah rather less but of course it also depends on the national context so in Germany we still have rather high decrease of union organization in the automotive industry whereas in countries like Mexico or South Africa we may have medium union organization but in countries like Morocco only very low union organization and this is of course also a problem for a initiative that tries to bring trade unions together on an eye-to-eye level and that also brings me back to the comment of Titi that it's really important to ask those sales how can we overcome these asymmetries also within the union corporations on a global scale so another challenge would be of course that corporations try to prevent the networking by trying to make transparency more difficult so there's one example the sub-project in the international network initiative in the Liege company which is also a best case practice in this project but here it was here the project was able to bring in workers from Serbia and from South Africa to the European Works Council and the Liege management reacted by leaving the European Works Council without a report so that was quite clear they're not willed to let this participation of non-EU countries happen and the story continues then and the workers were able to build counter power but still we see there's not the support of course for this networking from the side of the management and in one case we actually also have a small analysis right now Morocco we can also say it's pretty clear it will be really hard to find a corporation here because workers here often do not even dare to get into trade unions we have blacklists in the automotive industry here so if you get into a trade union you might get fired and won't even find another job in the industry so only very shortly what exactly is the network initiative doing they try to organize of course first of all the respective trade unions there in a way the gatekeepers for the local plants but the idea is really to connect the workers themselves on the plant to plant level and this of course is also a big challenge because you need intrinsic motivation you need the building of trust and solidarity in an interpersonal level and so the idea is here of the initiative to not only have the officials in the project but really the bottom-up workers in the plants yeah thank you Hendrik did you also spoke about the challenges in the garment industry for union organizing how do unions respond to that how do how do they organize workers well as I said initially that if you look at the unionization rate in the garment industry it's very very low it's not even up to 10 percent and if you're talking about the German experience that Hendrik was sharing and even the Brazilian experience of the orange juice network we're talking about a few corporations or one corporation that you're dealing with but when it comes to the question of the garment supply chain one factory is producing from multiple translational corporations so it's very difficult to even form a concrete or sustained strategy within a factory so the whole concept of organizing within a factory comes under question when you have multiple people sourcing from multiple corporations sourcing from one single factory so initially what the the strategy has been in the garment industry to organize industry level units as opposed to factory level units so which was one way the idea this was taken as a strategy because it was difficult to organize factory level unions given the legal structure given the attack on unions given the nature of the industry per se and of the workers itself so the idea was to first go for industry level organizing but eventually what we came to the understanding that factory level unions were also very necessary to actually come to concrete negotiations with both the management at the factory level as well as those who are sourcing from these factories so that was one of the things that came out of I would say the network that we are a part of which is the exchange network which is a network between the garment workers in South Asia which is India Bangladesh and Sri Lanka and German retail workers and here I think I will bring up this whole question of inequality that I was raising earlier that when we first started interacting with the German workers they would always tell us what can we do to help you what can we do to help and it was very interesting that you know it's we're all workers and we're all workers in the same retail as same supply chain and there are some workers who are really not better off in any way if you look at it in a larger scheme of things they are suddenly think that just because they are in the global north just because they are white skinned they think they can help those in the global south so we actually started with that discussion that it's about building equality within the solidarity networks that we need to come up with and we need to understand each other we need to understand each other's working conditions we need to understand each other how bad badly off we are along the supply chain and there is just one corporation which is responsible for our working conditions along the supply chain so if a retail worker in h&m is not able to pay the rent is not able to take care of their children it's the same for the garment workers who are producing for h&m in Bangladesh or in India so it's not very different it's just that you look different you stay in different working conditions so different countries so your conditions are a little looks a little better but it's not really as as much better as you think it is so i think that was a very critical understanding and from there we were able to look at and focus and we were able to get the unions to focus on transnational companies to build a network that we work on focus on certain companies where the german retail workers have certain kind of bargaining power we can relate to them so we negotiate along the supply chain or in those companies which is where a certain transnational company is sourcing from so it may not be the single sourcing company from a certain factory but it may be a major sourcing company and so the strategy moved from being an industrial level union organizing to focusing on factories to focusing on factory level organizing and building plant level leadership who could then bring up issues so the example that i've done in the video statement is one such example where one whole factory was unionized and hence the workers could ultimately the union could ultimately ensure the reinstatement of 1200 workers in the time of the pandemic which was quite a big victory given the supply chain in the government industry. Thank you Diti. So the next round of questions would be that we want to give you the possibility like Diti and Cynthia Mada and Hendrik to to discuss what you found interesting about each other's presentation so what would you like to learn more about or what surprised you and what the other said so Diti, Cynthia Mada, Hendrik who would like to to start with like a comment or what surprised you what you would like to learn more from the others? Diti, Cynthia, Hendrik do you have anything to add? I can so yes Brazilian domestic workers trade unions would be really interested I'm more a researcher but I believe that they are really interesting in this kind of partnership they are really active in the Latin America network and try to be part of the international network so yes I think that would be really important and for all of you this really more connected with this international supply chain the pandemic the war with Ukraine we kind of start to see many countries talking about you have to focus more in production in production nationally because something could happen and you are kind of you you can stay without your products so you have the problems with shipment with China you have problems with the pandemic we'll have problems now with the war and Germany realizing that are dependent in the from Russia so how can you how do you see this perspective for the labors like would be a chance to have more power nationally and by doing that in strength the internationally connections it would be a good time to do something now or you don't really see a difference happening in the supply chain can I ask a question? yeah sure sure so mine is actually Prasantia and I'm kind of curious in understanding how she said it when she made a presentation about how it was easier to get the laws into place and because it was a left government when the ILO convention was brought in India is not a signatory of the ILO convention on domestic work and we have a right wing government just like you do right now and we would like I would really like to know how things have changed or if it has at all changed with your government and how do unions there respond to that should I answer or wait for the others my suggestion would be let's that you answer and then we open the question for the plenary also exactly so Henry can also join in but it's also very convenient that we had a quite similar question on the condition of a right wing government in Brazil in the chat already so you're very welcome to talk about this topic since yeah so to be honest since the impeachment of Dilma the coop the stranger is really bad so in this sense it's not for domestic workers it's more for everyone all workers and looks like we are fighting every day for different calls because it's environment issues health issues labor law so you're always struggling in Brazil that we have one nice thing that the justice system tends to be more prone to workers so with the law normally you're kind of winning in the justice system but they are really trying to change the law so so far and the situation is really decreased is really bad but we still have the justice system to go but my problem is if Bolsonaro is elected or really do a coup I don't know after four years so so far everyone's kind more instead of increased rights we are trying to prevent to lose them so it's a struggle every day we lost a lot but so far many of the bad labor law changes we are preventing them to be a reality using the judiciary but I don't know for how long more and we are trying to fight in all fields organizing mobilization protests shows events at every place that we have a space to voice our concerns we are using but it's really critical situation and so far we could manage but I really don't know with more years of extremely right wing government what would happen thank you very much okay so we go on with the last question to understand it right so there was the question how does the E-Metal network work with workers in a chinese context or with chinese workers since there is no real independent unions there so I guess it's also a question do you work in this context but maybe you can also look a bit on repressive structures again thank you I think that's already the answer so we that is China's really yeah it's it's really like a tough nut and still open how to crack it and I also recently talked to someone from industry all and they are also pretty confused how in these times they will get into the field in China and it's the same with E-Metal one could say at least in the really advanced project of the international network initiative where we really need strong trade unions and if you don't have them on the counterpart it doesn't really make sense to get into contact because at least in this initiative because you need the equality of interest and this E-Metary should be avoided and that's what I really liked also and did these talk and I think one last point I wanted to raise is also the question where are disruptive points within the value chains because we heard a lot about challenges but we could also think about okay aren't there disruptive points in the value chains where also union organizing could help to really get companies under pressure and to foster unionizing. Thank you very much so I guess we're in the end of the session thank you very much for all your contributions Hendrik, Diti, Cynthia, Mara thanks everybody for listening and for the questions yeah I think we shared like interesting perspectives on organizing in different countries and different connections we see there's very different structures on the ground but there's also a lot of similarities of workers having hurdles to organize but also try to organize on the ground together with their unions and support of the unions but also as workers on the ground so if you haven't watched the longer video statements yet I put the link in the chat again so you can still yeah have some more information maybe and I guess there will be further possibilities of discussing more in depth since we saw that yeah there's a lot of strategic questions left I guess or that can be elaborated even more so thank you very much for today have a good morning midday evening depending on where you are at the moment and talk to you soon