Canada Signs Key International Bargaining and Organising Treaty
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Canada signs key international bargaining and organising treaty On 14 June 2017 Canada ratified ILO Convention 98, the key international treaty promoting collective bargaining and the right to organise. “ After 60 years, Canada has ratified ILO Convention 98. Canada now recognises why strong unions matter in creating a fair and inclusive country. We thank all those who have been fighting for this moment ” Larry Brown, President of the National Union of Public and General Employees (NUPGE). The Convention calls for: ● protection against acts of anti-union discrimination ● protection for unions against interference by employers ● machinery to develop and promote collective bargaining Convention 98 has now been ratified by 165 countries, including Canada www.nupge.ca INTERNATIONAL Volume 25 Issue 3 2018 union Contents Editorial 2 Work Will Not Disappear. 3 rights So We Should Make It Better JIM STANFORD Journal of the International Centre for Trade Union Rights ● Centro Internacional para los Derechos Sindicales More Robots, Fewer Rights: 5 ● Labour Trends in Electronics Manufacturing Centre International pour les Droits Syndicaux KAN MATSUZAKI Editor Ciaran Cross When Algorithms Hire and Fire 6 DR CHRISTINA COLCLOUGH Editorial Board David Bacon, Lance Compa, Reynaud Daniels, Two Perspectives on Platform Work 8 John Hendy QC, Carolyn Jones (Chair), Eric Lee, SEBASTIEN FLAIS and MICHAEL “SIX” SILBERMAN Pascal Lokiec, Sindhu Menon, Jill Murray, Rory O’Neill, John Odah, Tom Sibley, Rita Olivia Tambunan, Worthless Promises in Silicon Valley 10 DAVID BACON Charles Woolfson Death by Overwork: 12 Legal Editor President Beyond Industry 4.0 in Japan Professor Keith Ewing John Hendy QC KIYOHIKO OKA Vice Presidents The Future Will Be Made of Copper… 13 Jamshid Ahmadi, Kurshid Ahmad, Jan Buelens, CIARAN CROSS Anita Chan, Ericson Crivelli, Fathi El-Fadl, Professor Keith Ewing, Avalon Kent, Esther Lynch, ICTUR in Action: Interventions 14 Lortns Naglehus, Yoshikazu Odagawa, Jeffrey Sack QC, Argentina, China, Colombia, eSwatini, Iran, Jitendra Sharma, Surya Tjandra, Ozlem Yildirim Italy, Philippines, Spain, UK, Zimbabwe The Lure of the Quick Technological Fix: 16 ICTUR International Blockchain and the Case of Cobalt E [email protected] W www.ictur.org GLEN MPUFANE and BRIAN KOHLER Director Daniel Blackburn FIM-CISL vs. Industry 4.0 18 GIANNI ALIOTI Researcher Ciaran Cross The Future of Work is Ours 20 MARC HOLLIN Subscriptions Four issues: £25 Work and Technology: 22 Student and Trade Union Perceptions in Portugal ISSN 1018-5909 HERMES AUGUSTO COSTA Digital Solidarity or Complacent Clicktivism? 24 ERIC LEE Worldwide 26 Focus 28 Continued from pages 11 and 13 25/3 | International Union Rights | 1 EDITORIAL Editorial: In the 1770s, a chess-playing automaton known as under the sun will be automated: workers in the ‘Mechanical Turk’ began touring Europe and factories and call centres, lawyers, civil servants and Ciaran Cross, North America, winning matches and the awe of poets too. As tensions between labour and spectators. Te deception, revealed afer decades of technology become increasingly difcult to ignore, Editor speculation, could not have been simpler: there was even the 19th Century Luddites – once reductively a man hiding inside the machine. Without any trace maligned as machine-breaking technophobes – have of irony, in 2005 Amazon adopted the name enjoyed a minor resurgence. Mechanical Turk for its new crowdsourcing Contributors to this issue of IUR weigh up these platform. On the website, workers (or ‘Turkers’) bid challenges in diferent ways. Perspectives from to perform an array of ‘Human Intelligence Tasks’ diferent regions and sectors lead to diferent for as little as one US cent in remuneration. Te prognoses. Tere is a shared awareness of the need company’s brazen adoption of a name synonymous to critically question deterministic approaches to with the obscuring of the human at work beneath technological development, as well as any further the facade of a machine says quite a lot about the weakening of workers’ collective power. predicament of labour in a world on the precipice of Technological development is steered by human ever-deeper integration with artifcial intelligence, choices. An overarching concern is therefore how automation and digital capitalism. organised labour is able to shif the parameters of Coinciding with the ILO’s centenary initiative on debate to put technology and (in)equality in the the Future of Work, there has been a proliferation of spotlight. As Jim Stanford notes here, it does not concepts attempting to predict the impacts of seem likely that technological progress will make advances in new and sophisticated ‘smart’ work disappear. Rather it is workers’ labour that is technologies. Buzzwords like ‘Industry 4.0’ (frst being rendered increasingly invisible. Te developed by German policymakers), the ‘fourth Mechanical Turk could hardly be a better metaphor. industrial revolution’, or the ‘Internet of Tings It is little wonder then that organised workers (IoT)’ refer to a range of industrial applications of across the globe are increasingly turning to digital cyber-physical systems, digital, algorithmic and communication – ofen tipped as the cyber-silver advanced automation technologies, with the lining of hyper-globalisation – to make their struggles potential to connect data and processes that are more visible and build global networks of solidarity. highly complex and geographically remote. But as LabourStart’s Eric Lee warns, competing for Apocalyptic predictions for the labour market digital attention in an increasingly swamped global abound. According to some accounts, every job network of information is no substitute for organised workers acting collectively. And as new forms of algorithmic management emerge, workers also need to be diligent about their data privacy. No one is keener to sell us a quick technological fx Next issue of IUR than big-tech and electronics companies themselves – Articles between 850 and 1800 words should be sent by email ([email protected]) and who perhaps stand to proft most from the ‘fourth accompanied by a photograph and short biographical note of the author. Please send by industrial revolution’. Whether the ‘fx’ is an online 20 November 2018' if they are to be considered for publication in the next issue of IUR. campaign or ‘block-chain provenance’, a multi-million dollar industry that claims to solve the issue of supply Subscriptions: Print only £25 (individual rate), Print and electronic £75 chain certifcation, these digital technologies raise a (individual or institutional), Electronic only £55 (individual or institutional). number of questions about the control of information. Affiliations: (includes print and electronic access, and more, see www.ictur.org) And if we look at the sectors upon which ‘Industry 4.0’ Individual £50, Branch / local union £75 (includes 3 subscriptions), is being built (big-tech, electronics manufacturing, and National (contact ICTUR for details). mineral extraction) we fnd a catalogue of labour Name/Organisation abuses and anti-union practices. Taking the hype Address around Industry 4.0’s all-encompassing vision of the future at face value, it would seem like the optimal moment to bring such issues in these sectors frmly Email into the spotlight. If we are asked to believe that ‘smart’ Payment on invoice / Payment enclosed technologies will improve our future conditions of For discounted rates please contact IUR’s Editor Daniel Blackburn on [email protected]. work, the fact that conditions of systemic barbarity All subscription services are available via our website: www.ictur.org/affiliation.htm prevail in the production of many of these Subscribe to IUR / Affiliate ICTUR technologies leaves some room for doubt. 2 | International Union Rights | 25/3 FOCUS | INDUSTRY 4.0 Work Will Not Disappear. So We Should Make It Better Workers everywhere worry about the future of their Tese twin disruptions – changing technology and jobs. Afer all, for the vast majority, income from changing working relationships – have led some paid employment (in one form or another) is the observers to conclude that work, broadly defned, can dominant means to provide for the necessities of life. no longer be the fnancial and social foundation of Te availability, stability, and earning potential of households and society. People will need to fnd other The barrier to paid work are essential to our well-being. ways to support themselves, and/or fall back on better treatment Te world of work is being transformed by income supports delivered by the state (perhaps technology: machines and computers can perform through a guaranteed annual income). Tis vision of a is not technology, ever-more complex tasks (including those involving workless future can be described positively (as a world but the imbalance judgment and learning), reigniting age-old fears that in which humans have ample leisure time to pursue a of power in workers will be replaced by machines. Of course, range of interests) or negatively (as a dystopia in which workers have worried about machines taking their wealth becomes concentrated amongst a narrow modern jobs since the dawn of capitalism. In historical property-owning elite, while most people huddle at economies experience, technological change by itself does not the margins seeking a way to survive). Both scenarios produce long-lasting unemployment: unemployment assume that paid work is diminishing in importance. certainly does exist, but usually for other