FOCUS ❐ THE RIGHT TO STRIKE Workers’ case rests. It was clearly essential that such a document be prepared and it has informed and supported the Workers’ Group in their struggle within the ILO to repel the It was not the detail of a legal argument that caused this crisis at the ILO INTERNATIONAL union rights Page 12 Volume 21 Issue 4 2014 F or many decades the ILO system has enjoyed quiet consensus around the protected status of one of the most fundamental of all trade union rights, the right to strike. The system didn’t provide a total protection for strike action, and indeed numerous exceptions were permitted that allowed strike action to be delayed, limited, and even outright prohibited, in certain circumstances. But the basic notion that strike action constituted a protected aspect of freedom of association was endorsed by all parties . As has been discussed previously in this journal, during the Cold War era employers were happy to endorse the right to strike as a political freedom on which dissident labour activists could rely against Eastern Bloc governments (IUR 20.2, p19). fBut all this has changed. Employers are no longer forced into an alliance with labour as a bulwark against Eastern Bloc communism, and with the global financial crisis forcing up unemployment and driving down social protections – thus undermining workers - they are feeling increasingly strident in their willingness to exercise power against workers and their institutions. At the 2012 ILO Conference, a new Employer spokesperson in the Conference Committee on the Application of Standards (‘CCAS’) interrupted the normal rather formal ebb and flow of the Committee’s preliminary business to launch a blistering and unexpected attack. Out of the blue the Employers now insisted that ‘Convention 87 is silent on the right to strike and therefore it is not an issue upon which the Committee of Experts should express an opinion. Given the absence of any reference to a right to strike in the actual text of ILO Convention 87, the internationally accepted rules of interpretation require Convention 87 to be interpreted without a right to strike’. The surprise action halted the work of the Committee, and while Workers sought to find a compromise that would at least enable the Committee to carry out its core work Employers were adamant, holding their position and eventually leading a walk-out that shut down the Committee for the duration of the Conference. Clearly this was an emphatic statement, and it spoke volumes of the new paradigm and of resurgent confidence in employer power. Resolving the crisis? Following the Employer’s attack ITUC commissioned a forensic legal analysis and defence of the legal basis for the right to strike and a study of the role of the Committee of Experts. This document (to which members of ICTUR’s executive contributed) is the backbone of the Workers response to the employer challenge and it provides the clear firm ground on which the How do workers respond to an employers’ strike? DANIEL BLACKBURN, is Director of International Centre for Trade Union Rights in London A world without the right to strike? Few observers can have escaped the awful implications of a world without the right to strike when a clear illustration of what that world might look like suddenly unfolded before a horrified world just two months after the Employers’ stunt at the ILO. On 16 August, in South Africa, we saw what was possible when strike action was subjected to the most brutal form of repression. Those who sought to downplay the horror or to defend what the police had done attempted to hang their obscene arguments on the idea that workers had had no ‘right’ to stop work or to carry out their protests, seeking to further this idea that either at this time, or in this way, or perhaps even at all, the miners had had no right to strike. And driving home the message that seemingly distant technocratic developments in Geneva had a clear real world impact on the front lines of the global labour movement, we saw employers relaying this global technical message. Here, on 29 January, in the immediate aftermath of the violent and deadly...