Protokoll 2003 - Seko

mobile phones, how you can organize in call centers, and we hope that
you, along with our other unions, will be part of that campaign. We are
making global agreements with companies such as Telephonica, Carrefour
in the retail industri, and ISS in the cleaning security industry, which will
give workers the right to build unions wherever those companies operate.
Sometimes we are just building unions from scratch. One of the things of
which we are most proud, and of which you in SEKO can also be proud,
is the program that we have started to organize information technology
workers in India. In India they produce through universities hundreds of
thousands of extremely well qualified IT-workers every year. There is a
real fear in some countries that an enormous amount of work is being
outsourced to India. The quality of the work in India is extremely good,
and companies are finding that they can give work, whether it is call
centers, whether it is the development of software, to houses in India
which will be much less expensive than in Western Europe or North
America. They are talking of some 250 000 jobs leaving my home country
of the UK in the next five years, to go to India.
I think there are ways in which we have to tackle this problem. We cannot
put ourselves in a situation where we look as if we are merely condemning
Indian workers, saying: You take this work at cheap rates, and so on. We
have to be very careful not to go down that path.
One of our unions just last week made an agreement with British Telecom
about outsourcing where it is agreed there will be no remote outsourcing
to India or anywhere else without consultation with the unions, where
there will be no redundancies as a result of this remote outsourcing, and
where the trade union rights of the people in the country that the work
goes to will be fully respected: they will be allowed to form trade unions,
and they will be allowed the right to collect a bargain.
You have been helping us through programs in India to try and organize in
this new industry. We have now set up, with your help, what we call ITforum
in about six different cities in India. We hope that they will be selffinancing
organizations of workers which can defend their rights and give
them conditions comparable to other parts of the world. And that we have
done with your help through the LO, through SEKO.
That is a very important part of our work. Although we perhaps are quite
rightly concerned with the conditions of our members every day, and the
problems which we face in this difficult liberalized atmosphere in which
we work, I think it is very important that we remember that the trade
union movement is an international movement based on the idea of international
solidarity. Much of our work, and much of the work of UNI, is
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