Time for legal reform and regulation on business and human rights

Abstract

16 | International Union Rights | 23/4 ICTUR IN ACTION | BUSINESS AND HUMAN RIGHTS Time for legal reform and regulation on business and human rights The ICTUR representatives opened their submissions by outlining concerns that the UK’s Good Business: Implementing the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (2016) action plan does not address the question of Business and Human Rights adequately, for three reasons. First, the government fails to acknowledge or to take seriously the full extent of its human rights responsibilities. Secondly, the government shows insufficient awareness of, or concern for, the shortcomings of British business overseas and little acknowledgement of its role in addressing these. And thirdly, the government offers no meaningful commitment proactively to embrace human rights obligations with a view to ensuring that tragedies on the scale of Rana Plaza are prevented in the future. Concerning British law at home, ICTUR observed that the ILO Committee of Experts (CEACR) has expressed reservations about new restrictions on industrial action in what was then the Trade Union Bill, highlighting the application of these restrictions to transport and education workers, but that the government appears to have ignored these reservations. The Trade Union Act 2016 includes transport and education workers within the scope of the term ‘important public services’ to whom the new restrictions apply, relevant for present purposes because transport is now delivered mainly by private corporations. ICTUR further observed that the European Social Charter was ratified by the United Kingdom in 1962 and is the most comprehensive social rights treaty anywhere in the world, but expressed regret that this instrument is not mentioned in Good Business. British law, ICTUR noted, had been repeatedly found in breach by the European Social Rights Committee, responsible for monitoring that instrument. In the main body of its submissions, ICTUR turned to serious cases of human rights violations overseas involving British companies. ICTUR concentrated on the cases of Rana Plaza in Bangladesh and the 2012 Marikana strike in South Africa. While recognising and welcoming the fact that a number of British companies have engaged with compensation schemes and follow-up work around industrial safety in the wake of Rana Plaza, ICTUR focused its attention on the situation prior to the factory collapse, outlining a list of violence, repression, murders and industrial disasters, and arguing that British companies knew about – or should have known about – these conditions, and yet tolerated them. ICTUR recalled the industrial relations background in the years leading up to the Rana Palza collapse: ● Trade unions were banned in the EPZs. ● Workers toiled under poor and dangerous conditions. ● Lacking avenues for the airing of industrial grievances, workers’ anger spilled out into street protests on several occasions, to which employers and police often responded violently. ● In 2003 police fired on a workers’ demonstration in the garment sector, killing one person. The previous day their leader had been arrested on his way to join negotiations. ● In 2006 the arrest of two strike leaders and the killing of a worker by police led to mass protests by more than 5000 workers, which ended violently, with damage to factories and injuries to workers. After this the 2006 labour law reform was passed but unions remained banned in the EPZs. ● Six workers were killed and dozens injured by police in 2009. ● In 2010 45 garment workers were killed in various workplace fires and 150 were injured. ● Four garment workers were shot and killed by police on 12 December 2011 when police opened fire on a demonstration in the Cittagoing EPZ. ● In 2012 four garment workers were shot dead in protests over low pay and poor safety standards. ● On 4 April 2012 Aminul Islam, President of the Bangladesh Garment and Industrial Workers Federation (‘BGIWF’) and Organiser with the Bangladesh Centre for Worker Solidarity (‘BCWS’), disappeared and was later tortured and murdered. For all the welcome actions taken by a number of British companies since the factory collapse, ICTUR argued that too little attention has been paid to the fact that this was the situation in which MNEs had chosen to source their clothing. ‘Even a cursory investigation’ of the industrial relations situation, the ICTUR team argued, ‘would have revealed that this was a very...