Transport workers have great power in a global economy that relies on efficient supply chains, the South African Transport and Allied Workers’ Union’s (Satawu) national conference heard on Thursday.
While globalisation had destroyed jobs, the world’s ”highly sensitive” supply chains were at the worker’s mercy, said Stuart Howard, assistant general secretary of the International Transport Workers’ Federation.
”If transport and logistics are the world’s most strategic industry, then transport workers should be the most powerful,” he said.
He said this was only possible if workers organised themselves globally ”to seize the levers of power”.
Dock worker strikes, for example, now had a much more powerful knock-on effect on other industries. This was due to the large quantities of goods from various industries moving through ports.
There was, however, a decline in unionisation worldwide, said Howard.
”There’s a risk of unions disappearing altogether, [at present] we’re just managing decline. We have to organise.”
This decline was due to privatisation of the public sector and outsourcing of activities to countries without strong unionisation.
Many union structures in Europe were also still dominated by white males, which did not always reflect the composition of the work force. — Sapa