Innovative campaigns to assert worker rights are being evolved. Alternatives to Japanese styled workplace restructuring are being formulated. Notions of south and north are no longer divisive, but seen as expressive of necessary responses to the shifts and contours of global economic change, where northern and southern unions work together in exposing and resisting the logic of global companies constantly chasing cheaper labour. New Global union Agenda Unions everywhere have been enticed into new roles by the language of globalisation. Restructure, change, become competitive, adopt world s best practice, build the nation, save jobs.
Free trade equals opportunity for all.
Grow the global economy and wealth will abound for all. The experience of workers through this change process has generally, with few exceptions, been devastating. Jobs are continuously being lost before the chainsaw of downsizing, outsourcing, casualising transformation. Basic union rights are challenged in all but a few countries. Material conditions diminish for the majority, whilst a minority revels in unimaginable wealth.