Protokoll 2003 - Seko

And what do they say now, when we see the president of Vivendi suing
through a court in New York, saying that he is entitled to a 20 million
dollars payoff, because he was the president of that company when it was
going bust.
Where were they when we saw the debt crisis hit German Telecom, hit
France Telecom, hit British Telecom? All of these companies have been
forced to restructure where the pain of restructuring has been felt by
thousands of workers, where the pain has been felt by workers laidoff, by
jobs which no longer exist.
The European Union says that this is no harmful effect. We say: It is! And
we say: We will continue to fight for a more sensible and better regulated
service industry throughout Europe.
In UNI we want to be that voice for you, whether it is in the WTO, whether
it is in the European Union, whether it is in the corporations that now
straddle the world in all of our sectors, whether it is post, telecoms, commerce,
finance and so on. We want to make agreements with those companies
where they will recognize us, where they will recognize unions
wherever they go, and where they will operate a socially responsible policy.
We say to the Europan Union: Now is the time also to regulate the regulators.
We have seen too many examples in countries where independent
regulators have been established, where they are given a mandate to
liberalize the sectors, the industry with which they are concerned, and
where they themselves are not controlled in any way.
It is time for governments, for the European Union, to say to all of this regulators:
There will be ground rules, there will be objectives, there will be
things like universal service which you must guarantee. So now is the time
also to regulate the regulators!
Colleagues: These are our major concerns of UNI at the moment. We have
one more which I want to mention before I finish: In the unions, we have
suffered in the last decades. Wherever you look, except in some parts of
the Nordic area, trade unions have been losing membership. We have been
in a position with new industries which have been created, industries like
mobile phones, call centers, the new integrators in the postal services.
There are rarely well organized trade unions present in those types of new
companies, and we believe that if we are to operate in the future as an
effective trade union movement, then we must pay major attention to this
problem of how we organize in these new areas of industry of services.
In the month of October UNI is launching a campaign to raise awareness
of what we call these customer services. We are working with our unions
throughout the world to highlight examples of how people can organize in
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