African Trade Unions Hail Okonjo-Iweala, Insist Trade Rules Respect Workers’ Rights

African trade unionists have tasked the new Director-General of World Trade Organisation (WTO), Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala to ensure that global trade agreements promote workers’ rights, eradicate poverty and guarantee sustainable industrial development in the world.

In a congratulatory statement signed by the Vice President, Industriall Global Union Africa, Comrade Issa Aremu and Comrade Joseph Montisetse of South Africa’s National Union of Mine Workers (NUM), who is the co- chairman, the African council of the global union said given her impeccable credentials as finance and foreign Minister and record performance at the World Bank, her appointment was earned and deserved, beyond gender.

The continental workers’ movement said it was time for what it calls “alternative trade policies that must take into account the needs of working people around the world, inclusive of economic growth and sustainable development”.

Industriall Global Union advised that the seventh Director General must be guided by the history of WTO in Africa which has “in many respects fostered de-industrialisation and job losses” through “uncritical wholesale dismantling of protection for domestic industries.”

The unionists noted that the emergence of Okonjo-Iweala was “significant and fullest of time” when the African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA) involving 54 African countries with a combined population of more than one billion people and combined gross domestic product of more than $3.4 trillion had become a reality.

The global union however added that WTO under the leadership of an African must make a difference by ensuring that trade serves the purpose of wider growth, as well as advance industrialisation and create mass jobs on the basis of respect for workers and their rights.

WTO, it said, must partner International Labour Organisation ( ILO), to ensure the dismantling of institutional constraints against workers exercising their fundamental right to freedom of association and collective bargaining in member countries of WTO.

The organised labour observed that “trade facilitation must go hand in hand with workers’ rights to form free trade unions to represent labour, to collectively bargain on wages and working conditions”.

Meanwhile the African council of the global Industriall Union has also called on the military regime in Myanmar to immediately step down and respect the election results of last year, where NLD won a crushing majority over the military-led Union Solidarity and Development Party’s (USDP).

The union strongly condemned the coup d’etat by the military in Myanmar and the detention of democratically elected leaders of National League for Democracy (NLD) Win Myint and Aung San Suu Kyi.