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DGB President,
Dieter Schulte
Greetings to UNI's World Congress from Dieter Schulte, President of the German Trade Union Federation - the DGB
The founding of Union Network International (UNI) on 1 January 2000 was an important symbol for the international trade union movement.
A trade union organisation with 15.5 million members in over 950 unions from 150 countries is a major player on the international scene.
It can speak out in defence of the interests of workers in the certainty that its voice will be heard. That is exactly my hope for the first UNI World Congress in Berlin.
Globalisation and digital-isation have profoundly changed the world economy, and thus also the world of labour.
In the area of new technologies in particular there are a few large "global players" who are the driving force behind technological innovation and who are carving up the markets among
themselves.
Workers' concerns are of little importance to them.
Hundreds and thousands of jobs have been eliminated or are threatened by mergers and take-overs; cost reduction through cutbacks in staff has become the maxim of shareholder value
thinking.
Employees are thus subject to a twofold strain. On the one hand they are worried about their jobs, and on the other they realise that they need to adapt to new types of work organisation
and new work processes.
For the trade unions this constitutes both a challenge and an opportunity. I think that we have demonstrated our willingness to take up the challenge - the founding of UNI is just one
example.
But we also want to use the opportunity and show that unions have a future as organisations - and the same applies to the ideas they stand for.
We have moved with the times.
Campaigns via e-mail have become as natural as organising pickets outside factory gates. We are fully committed to the new communication technol-ogies and use them for our purposes.
However our success does not just depend on how we present ourselves. What is far more important is that we convince workers that our goals and values are as topical today as they
were in the past.
This is why we champion the cause of better protection for workers affected by corporate take-overs.
And we also want to see the concept of co-determination and worker participation firmly established in the globalised economy.
Co-determination and involvement form the basis of the social market economy that we want to help other countries in the world to adopt.
In Europe, for example, we succeeded in obtaining employee participation in the European company directive.
Solidarity and justice are the goals which we intend to fight for in our globalised and digitalised world.
We will combat the trend towards the relocation of manufacturing sites when the choice is dictated by cheap labour costs and low levels of social protection.
We want to ensure that the global players, too, recognise trade union rights and will do everything we can to make this happen.
We also want to expand those rights.
This is why I hope that at the UNI World Congress we will be sending out a strong and clear signal that we, the trade unions, are important players on the international stage and that we will
use all means at our disposal to defend the interests of workers.
With these words I wish us all a successful Congress.
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