TUAC and national union centres significantly stepped up their engagement with the work of the OECD in Latin America this week.
The OECD is increasingly involved in Latin America and the Caribbean, one of the most unequal regions in the world. Almost one in three people in Latin America live in poverty and over half of all jobs in the region are informal. While poverty decreased significantly from 2000 to 2015, progress has stagnated, and the pandemic pushed many back towards poverty.
The aim of trade unions is to ensure that the OECD focuses on the need to tackle inequality and reduce poverty in Latin America and the Caribbean, including by ensuring that workers’ rights are respected, so that working people can organise in trade unions to negotiate fair pay rises and improvements in working conditions. Unions also expect the OECD to help governments in the region to bring more workers into formal employment, build stronger social protection systems and better public services such as education and health care.
To step up their work with the OECD in the region, TUAC and national union centres took part in the OECD Ministerial Summit on social inclusion in Bogotá, Colombia and organised a side-event of the Ministerial Summit on ‘Just transition for social inclusion’ with the Friedrich Ebert Foundation and the participation of trade unions from several countries of Latin America.
With the OECD increasingly involved in climate policy, unions took the opportunity to underline the need for a socially just transition to a greener economy and to adapting to climate change. The region is highly vulnerable to climate change – with the Amazon in the worst drought for half a century – although 30% of the energy production in Latin America and the Caribbean is from renewable sources, double the world average. It is home to 2/3s of the world’s lithium and one third of the world’s copper – metals crucial to the green transition and driving an expansion of mining.
Unions warned that if no appropriate measures are taken to share much more equally the costs and benefits of the transition, the economic consequences on already highly informal and unequal labour markets are likely to be dramatic.
The unions highlighted the role of multinational enterprises in reducing poverty and informal employment and the importance of enforcing OECD guidelines for responsible business conduct.
“Boosting workers’ rights and social protection is essential to tackle the unacceptable and unsustainable levels of inequality in Latin America and the Caribbean. It is equally important to strengthen democracy, accelerate climate action and boost development. TUAC is fully committed to work with trade unions in the region and together to make sure the OECD contributes to helping the countries of the region to achieve progress on all these fronts.”
The unions took the opportunity to express their solidarity with the Colombian unions who are demonstrating to defend democracy.
Three trade unionists spoke in the closed session of the Ministerial Summit – Veronica Nilsson, General Secretary of TUAC, Fanny Sequeira, General Secretary of CTRN Costa Rica and Paola Aliaga, General Secretary, CAT Peru – while many more trade unionists participated in the public session.
The TUAC-FES side-event gathered over 50 trade unions representatives from the region, including trade union leaders from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Honduras, Mexico, Peru and Uruguay. Representatives from the US and Colombian governments, and the OECD, also joined the discussions.
Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, and Mexico are already members of the OECD, while Brazil, Peru and Argentina are in the process of joining. Costa Rica is chairing next year’s OECD Ministerial Council meeting, the most important meeting of OECD member state governments.
