The future is public transport

Abstract

6 | International Union Rights | 26/4 FOCUS | CLIMATE CHANGE & TRADE UNIONS The future is public transport How has the ITF’s approach to climate change and public transport developed? At the 2010 ITF Congress, a resolution was adopted on developing a trade union response to climate change in transport1. This set out a number of political principles around the issue and committed ITF to what we call a ‘Reduce – Shift – Improve’ framework: reducing the movement of goods and people, shifting the modes of transport, and improving the energy efficiency of the sector. The resolution contained really important commitments, for instance to take a science-based approach to emission reduction and to contribute to the scale of transformation in transport necessary in order to effectively reduce emissions and address the climate emergency. The ITF’s public transport policy fits within that political resolution. We’ve developed an alternative model of public transport, recognising that we cannot address environmental issues separately from the wider social and employment issues. The core demands of the policy concern public ownership, public financing, decent work, gender equality, more worker control of technology, and transport and energy democracy. We feel it is necessary for unions to go beyond traditional, bread-and-butter workplace issues, and address all of the different aspects of a new model of public transport. Just Transition is not only about reskilling, retraining, numbers of jobs - that’s all important, but it needs to be linked a long-term vision of transformative change in transport. The policy proposals provide a platform for linking current issues in public transport to that long-term vision of change, as well as a platform for building alliances with other organisations that might be able to support this kind of policy and these demands. There is sometimes an assumption – from unions but also outside the union movement – that public transport is an ‘easy’ sector, because it’s a sector that stands to benefit from progressive climate change policies. On one level that might be true, because it’s not controversial that there needs to be a massive expansion of public transport in order to reduce emissions in cities. But how that expansion takes place, what kind of employment it generates, what democratic participation and control it allows workers or citizens or passengers - all of that is heavily contested. The policy paper states that ‘trade unions must contest power not only in workplaces but also in the public sphere where decision-making takes place’. What challenges do public transport sector workers face in exercising collective bargaining rights to pursue this agenda? One of the biggest issues is that, globally, large parts of the public transport workforce are in the informal economy. In many developing countries, in many cities, up to 85 percent of the passenger transport workforce are informal, and are denied fundamental workplace rights: they are not defined as employees, they don’t have a clearly defined employment relationship, labour law doesn’t cover them, there are no clear collective bargaining rights, there are no contracts. One of our main concerns therefore is how to organise informal workers, how to win some of those workplace rights, and in the long-term how to formalise employment in public transport so that those rights are guaranteed through labour law and other institutions that formal workers would have access to. For example, ‘Bus Rapid Transit’ (BRT) systems are being introduced in Africa, Asia and Latin America. These are formalised public transport systems but are developed without consideration for the impacts they can have on the informal workers who rely on providing those services for their livelihoods. The ITF is beginning to look with unions at the labour impacts of these systems and to put together a platform of rights and demands that can be negotiated with local authorities, governments or employers – wherever the power lies. In Kenya and Senegal we’re beginning to see the impacts of this work. We are making visible a large section of the workforce that has been otherwise completely excluded from any formal labour protection or collective bargaining rights. A lot of the funding for these BRT programmes also comes from international financial institutions, and we’ve engaged...