42 C-‐9 Resolutions ITF 42nd Congress Mexico City 5–12 August 2010
Resolution 3: Responding to Globalisation after the Global Financial Crisis 1.
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The ITF 42nd Congress, meeting in Mexico City from 5-‐12 August 2010, NOTES the continuing trend of economic globalisation – despite the impact of the global financial crisis (GFC) from 2007 to 2009 – which is characterised by increased global competition for industrial raw materials and fuel, the globalisation of production, markets and ownership and intense pressure for the creation of a more liberalised global transport system; NOTES THEREFORE that the process of privatisation and commercialisation continues to affect transport and logistics services everywhere, and that even where transport employers have not yet been fully privatised, their transformation into structures which can easily be opened to private capital is the first step in a continuing process of liberalisation; BELIEVES that the consequences of transport privatisation, liberalisation and fragmentation are attacks on safety, pay, conditions, pensions, trade union organisation and collective bargaining, that the abandonment of social transport in favour of transport systems run solely in the interests of big business leads to less democratic accountability and the growth of private transport monopolies and to more expensive, less efficient transport, where profit comes before the needs of the community; FURTHER NOTES that the World Trade Organisation (WTO) is playing a central role in the process of liberalisation. Although its services agreement, the General Agreement on Trade in Services (Gats), has as yet played a relatively minor direct role in the liberalisation of transport services, there is increasing pressure from global transport companies for this to change, which could result in a further opening up of domestic urban passenger transport, port, aviation and shipping markets to competition; EXPRESSES CONCERN that the international financial institutions persist in pursuing a neo-‐liberal ideological agenda in relation to the restructuring of transport. Under pressure from the IMF, the World Bank and regional development banks continue to have serious negative impacts both on the quality of transport services and on the employment and working conditions of transport workers; NOTES that some progress has been made by Global Unions in engaging in dialogue with the World Bank, that a programme of secondments of trade union officials within the Bank's offices has included a representative from an ITF affiliate, and that some officials within the Bank appear to have acknowledged the failures of their restructuring projects and have expressed interest in establishing closer working relations with transport unions; STATES the need for international institutions and governments to recognise the limitations of free trade and to develop trade rules that recognise fairness and the need to protect social and environmental standards; IS CONCERNED that economic blocs such as the EU, Mercosur, Asean, the Nafta countries and SADC are also promoting regional liberalised markets and that the trend towards bilateral free trade agreements at the expense of multilateral trade arrangements is severely undermining trade union and ILO efforts to promote decent work; NOTES ALSO that cooperation between different regional blocs is likely to be an expanding route for global liberalisation, with US-‐EU negotiations increasing in importance, as well as initiatives such as APEC linking Asia/Pacific with the Americas;
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