December 17, 2002
"Poverty and violence" are today the tragic reasons pushing thousands of people to leave their home countries in search of a better future. Economic globalisation and the development disparities it has produced in the southern hemisphere and in Eastern European transition countries are every day pushing thousands of people to leave their home countries to find a form of subsistence in wealthier lands.
In all there are 150 million migrants, who make up 2% of the world's population. And 50 million of them live in Africa alone. According to the ILO over 100 million of them are workers, including a very large proportion of women (47.5%). To this estimate must be added a growing number of clandestine migrants, i.e. those without official papers (30 to 40 million). And unless inequalities are tackled at their roots the trend is likely to grow in the years ahead.
Whilst migrant workers are one of the main driving forces of economic globalisation they are all too often subjected to all kinds of discrimination and scandalous exploitation. And this is despite the fact, as ICFTU General Secretary Guy Ryder emphasised, that "equal rights and treatment at work are a fundamental right of all".
The trade unions, which view migrant workers as fully-fledged workers with the same rights as others, are fighting at both national and international levels to promote and ensure the proper application of the legal instruments recognising these rights. The ICFTU, which has been campaigning for several years with human and migrants' rights associations to obtain the ratification of the international conventions providing for equal treatment for migrant workers in terms of jobs, wages, social security and union rights (ILO Conventions 97 and 143), welcomed the signature by East Timor last week of the Convention on the Protection of the Rights of all Migrant Workers and Members of their Families, that had originally been adopted by the United Nations in 1990. Thanks to that 20th signature this legal instrument will finally come into force, thereby providing better prospects for migrant workers around the world.
Information, training, legal advice and recruitment are the main focus of the campaign by the ICFTU and its affiliates to combat the worldwide discrimination against migrant workers.
The ICFTU was also closely involved in another event that helped push matters forward on this issue- the UN World Conference against Racism, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance held in Durban from 31 August to 7 September 2001. The unions are strictly opposed to racism on principle, since racism and xenophobia undermine their struggle to obtain freedom and social justice for all. Accordingly the international trade union movement adopted a specific action plan, "No to Racism and Xenophobia", geared to advancing the battle against racism and xenophobia in workplaces, within its own ranks and also in the community as a whole.
In conjunction with International Migrants Day, the ICFTU will be publishing a special dossier on female domestic workers, showing how the unions are helping this particularly vulnerable group of migrant workers. The ICFTU will also be providing its online subscribers with an interview with a Filipino domestic worker who migrated to Belgium and with an ICTU member involved in combating racism in Ireland.
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