2022 New Year’s message – Forward through Collective Bargaining

Oliver Roethig, Regional Secretary of UNI Europa, outlines the ambition for the coming year.

Dear Colleagues,

Happy 2022 to all of you!

We are starting the year with hope and dread about Covid-19. The pandemic continues to challenge us all: at home, in the workplace and in society. Yet, it also has brought out solidarity and the feeling that we are in it together.

This, too, is why “Forward through Collective Bargaining”, the motto of our 5th Conference last April, guides our work. Only when people can shape their working lives collectively can we achieve democratic societies and social progress.

UNI Europa is in the first place about reinforcing the collective bargaining power of our unions at home – dealing with all those factors that origin outside a country. Every worker throughout our sectors must be covered by collective agreements. This is our mission!

Our three strategic priorities to strengthen the collective bargaining power of our affiliates are:

1. bottom up, organising: building a strong membership basis that engages in trade union activities.
2. top down, influencing EU politics, in particular to provide an enabling framework for collective bargaining.
3. engaging with multinational companies to create a negotiating environment for our affiliates.

With your support, the support of our unions, we ended 2021 with a high: Our campaign “No public contract without collective agreement” rallied EU decision-makers. By December, we passed the mark of 100 MEPs signing up. In 2022, we will push further to build our coalition as well as engage with national governments. We will make public contracts a tool to reinforce workers’ fundamental right to bargain collectively across Europe.

Another positive: we are changing Amazon. From dodging any negotiations with workers wherever they operated, we now have a nation-wide agreement in Italy. And we are moving to bring that about throughout Europe. The Make Amazon Pay coalition is going from strength to strength. The coordinated actions around the world for Black Friday in November showed the determination to end the Amazon’s model of exploitation and unaccountability.

EPOC, our Power and Organising Centre, has brought our affiliates together to build trade union power. This culminated in 3 EPOC strategic sessions in the autumn exploring how to develop an organising and collective bargaining strategy, how to get buy-in across a union for a strategy and how to roll it out. With our on-the-ground activities, we are now in 7 countries and the aim for 2022 is reaching out more to Southern Europe.

Collective bargaining is a public good – a key tool for embedding and defending democracy and combatting inequality. Together, UNI Europa – its sectors, groups and affiliates – will defend, expand and (re)build collective bargaining. Together, we will make 2022 a breakthrough year for building workers’ power.