April 7, 2006
Protecting the environment is a fundamental need of working people; after all, workers must breathe the air, drink the water, depend on energy and other resources, and face the hurricanes, floods, and ecological destruction that result from global warming. But the specific policy objectives of labor movements struggling for jobs and organizational position have often come into conflict with environmental movements an policies. Now the changing political, economic, and social situation in Latin America and the Caribbean is creating an opening for a new synthesis of labor and environmental concerns.
This April, 60 unionists from 13 countries met in Sao Paulo for the first Union Conference on Labor and Environment in Latin America and the Caribbean. Brought together by the new International Labour Foundation for Sustainable Development (Sustainlabour) and ICFTU’s Regional Inter-American Organization of Workers (CIOSL-ORIT), they drew up the “Sao Paulo Declaration” designed to express the labor movement’s concern for environmental issues. As the Declaration states:
“Decent work is essential for people to enjoy a sustainable livelihood. However, it is only possible to create decent and secure jobs if environmental sustainability is attained.”
The Conference represents the intersection of two conflicting forces. On the one hand, since the 1980s and 1990s, “the region has been a privileged testing ground for neoliberal policies that promoted privatization and denationalization of companies, neoliberal restructuring of production, mass unemployment and precarious work situations.” These policies have followed the “paradigm of structural adjustment favored” by “large transnational corporations.” Current trade negotiations will have “direct consequences for water, public services, education, health, communications and other sectors.”
But in spite of this, “in recent years, large-scale struggles and social movements have been able to challenge neoliberal policies, transforming Latin America and the Caribbean into a point of reference for resistance to neoliberalism with the participation of unions, the peasand and indigenous movements.”
The declaration ties these movements directly to environmental issues. “Not by chance, some of these large struggles have developed around protecting natural resources, against water privatization, and protecting natural gas and other public goods in different countries in the region.”
Such movements have created the context in which “various governments, committed to popular struggles and social movements, have been elected and are now constructing a new socio-political milieu in the region.” These include “Alternativa Bolivariana par alas Americas – ALBA (Bolivarian Alternative for Latin America and the Caribean), the Comunidad Suramericana de Naciones – CSN (South American Community of Nations), and the Tratados de Comercio con los Pueblos – TCP (Trade Agreements with the Peoples).”
In this context, the Sao Paulo statement brings together a number of proposals to “strengthen the links between the environment, work, and poverty.” For example:
– “Mainstreaming and systematically addressing public policies that guarantee access to goods and services, sanitation, health, energy, housing, education, public transportation, social security as an indispensable element in overcoming poverty and protecting access to water as a human right.
– “To protect the fundamental rights of workers and their unions, such as the right to free association and collective negotiation so that they can participate in strategies in favor of sustainable development, which is understood as development that ensures decent work with clean technology and productive processes that do not harm the environment, workers, their families or society in general.”
– “To protect gender equity and the inclusion of women workers as a fundamental condition for advancing the realization of an environmentally and socially sustainable region.”
– “Just transitions” toward sustainable production and consumption, with policies that ensure that “workers who are negatively affected during restructuring processes have decent work alternatives.”
“To reject ‘double standard’ policies used by some multinational companies that ‘export’ to Latin America and the Caribbean production methods that negatively impact the environment and that are not legally or socially acceptable in their countries of origin.”
The Declaration calls for a specific set of convergences and alliances. For example, labor should “strengthen strategic relationships with other social movements and socio-environmental organizations and networks, particularly with the Alianza Social Continental” – known in the US as the Hemispheric Social Alliance (HSA) – “and its development of ‘Alternatives for the Americas,’ which includes an important section on the environment.” It should “establish water as a key issue for union work in the region, supporting the position of ISP and other social organizations in the Joint Declarations of Social Movements and Organizations on Water at the Social Forum of the Americas (Caracas, January 2006) and during the round of meetings on cities during the IV World Forum on Water (Mexico, March 2006).” And labor should “support actions undertaken by REL-UITA, COPROFAM and other organizations” to “combat the expansion of agrotoxins, transgenics and production models of intensive agriculture based on unsustainable production techniques.”
The Declaration also begins to sketch what labor-friendly sustainable development might entail. It proposes, for example, to “promote an agricultural production model based on principles of agroecology and family agriculture.” It sees this as “directly linked to the movement for agrarian reform and to demands for food security and sovereignty and justice in agriculture.”
Declarations can be nothing more than just that. But in this case, the participants in the Sao Paulo conference will return home to a context of broad social ferment, in which the possibilities for “another world” appear as more than a distant dream. The water, energy, and other struggles in the region have already begun to draw together environmental and social concerns. As they experiment with new ways to integrate environmental issues with more traditional labor social, those of us in the rest of the world should be watching closely to see what we can learn.
[Documents from the Conference are available at: http://www.sustainlabour.org/documents.php]
y.r.