Right to establish and join a trade union

In Morocco, certain categories of public employees were still denied the right to freedom of association, such as judges.

In Kuwait, Jullebee Ranara, a 35-year-old maid from the Philippines, was raped, killed, burnt, and buried by the 17-year-old son of her Kuwaiti employers on 21 January 2023. Authorities identified and arrested the perpetrator within 24 hours of finding Ranara’s body, which was buried in the Al-Salmi desert. Autopsy reports revealed Ranara had been four months pregnant at the time of her murder. During interrogations, the perpetrator admitted he had sexually assaulted Jullebee, and murdered her when he found out that she was pregnant.

The killing sent shockwaves through Kuwait and across the Philippines, sparking calls for a deployment ban pending a review of bilateral labour agreements. On 8 February 2023, the Filipino government suspended the accreditation of new recruitment agencies in the Gulf country and stopped first-time workers from seeking employment in Kuwait.

That same week, another abuse case emerged, when another domestic worker from the Philippines was paralysed after jumping from a window to escape her abusive employer.

There were more than 24,000 cases of violation and abuse of Filipino workers in Kuwait in 2022, according to Department of Migrant Workers data – a significant increase from 6,500 cases in 2016. More than 268,000 Filipinos live and work in Kuwait.

In the United Arab Emirates, foreign workers represented 89 per cent of the workforce. Under the kafala system, any attempt at escaping or fleeing an employer in the UAE was punishable by law. Runaway workers were imprisoned, deported, and faced significant financial costs, including paying back their employers for sponsorship fees without receiving salaries earned.

In Jordan, foreign workers did not have the right to establish trade unions. They could only join a trade union constituted in one of the 17 sectors strictly defined by the government. In practice, foreign workers were disproportionately represented in excluded sectors where no collective representation is allowed, including the domestic sector (where non-Jordanians accounted for almost all of the workforce) and the agricultural sector (where non-Jordanians represented 70 per cent of the workforce). Due to these legal restrictions, foreign workers in these sectors were effectively deprived of their right to establish and join trade unions.

In the education sector, almost 1,000 foreign workers were not allowed, by an Act of 2011, to join the Jordanian Teachers’ Association (JTA).

Palestinians’ access to work in Israel and the illegal settlements is tightly controlled through a repressive permit system, security checks and checkpoints. Only Palestinians with valid work permits can be ‘legally’ employed by Israeli businesses. Out of the estimated 133,000 Palestinian workers in Israel and the illegal settlements, roughly 94,000 had a work permit. The overwhelming majority (99 per cent) of permit holders are men, and most work in the construction sector.

Permits are issued for a duration of up to six months but can be arbitrarily annulled at any time by employers or Israel’s security services. Employers often used the threat of annulling permits to discipline workers who join unions, demand rights, or are involved in any form of political activity.

The legislation in Rwanda still prohibited political office holders and officers of the security services from establishing and joining trade unions.

In Uganda, workers in the informal sector faced enormous challenges in organising, due to the instability of enterprises in this sector and the small number of workers usually employed by each enterprise, as well as the casual nature of the work. Approximately 87 per cent of the working population in Africa is engaged in the informal economy, according to the latest ILO data. Globally, 6 in 10 workers, some 2 billion people, work in the informal economy.

In Burundi, the authorities refused to register trade unions formed by workers in the informal sector. According to the latest ILO data, informal employment reached 87 per cent of the active population in Africa. Globally, nearly 2 billion workers, representing 6 in 10 workers, work in the informal economy.

Laws in Pakistan did not guarantee a right to organise for agricultural workers, domestic workers, home-based workers or workers in the informal sector. Workers in agricultural establishments were covered by the laws in only two provinces, Sindh and Balochistan. This, therefore, excluded a large share of agricultural workers, both at the federal and provincial levels. In practice, only three unions of agricultural workers in one province have been established.

In India, it was very difficult for informal workers to register trade unions. According to the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), informality was increasing in the country and informal workers, including street vendors, were left unprotected by law, with no social security and no space to carry out their work in the continuing development of cities. Police often reprimanded trade union leaders when they raised issues regarding the labour protection of street vendors.

In Japan, the law still excluded firefighters, prison staff and the Japan Coast Guard from the right to establish and join trade unions. It also limited the right to strike of workers in electricity facilities and coal mining industries.

In the garment sector, which represents an overwhelming share of Bangladesh’s export economy, over 500,000 workers employed in export processing zones (EPZs) were not allowed to form or join unions, which left them without any real power to bargain for better working conditions. The situation worsened with the implementation of the 2019 Export Processing Zones Labour Act (ELA), which states that the workers can only join a workers’ welfare association (WWA), where they may not be given the full scope of collective bargaining. Workers were prohibited from organising any protest within the EPZ, and protests were often met with violent retaliation from the EPZ authorities.

In Haiti, domestic workers were excluded from the scope of labour protections leaving them open to employer abuse and exploitation.

In Haiti, attempts to organise in the export processing zones (EPZ) met with serious administrative and practical obstacles, leaving workers without representation. The zones are set up predominantly to attract foreign investment and the removal of labour laws for these districts accompanies their creation.

In the Bahamas, prison staff were excluded from the legislation on the right to organise.

Under Turkish law, senior public employees, magistrates and prison guards were excluded from the right to organise.

In Lebanon, it was very common for employers to interfere in social elections, including by deleting names from the lists of candidates.

In Israel, workers at the Gulf Port have been denied genuine representation by their employer. The port management cooperated with the National Labor Federation in Eretz-Israel (NLF) to intimidate and pressure port workers into signing up with NLF. Workers were given no choice, as most of them were Chinese citizens, and their management withheld their work permits. The Histadrut filed a lawsuit before the National Labour Court which invalidated the signatures of port workers in light of the inauthenticity of the representation and of the pressure exerted by the management for workers to join the NLF.

On 11 July 2021, the Ministry of Electricity in Iraq issued a directive banning trade union committees and instructing employees in public-owned companies not to engage in such committees under penalty of criminal prosecution. The directive was still in force in 2023.

In Egypt, employers often withheld union dues despite check-off agreements, as was the case at Pasta Regina, a food producer that employed over 1,500 workers in Cairo.

Ingwebu Breweries in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, dismissed all the members of its workers’ committee, who had been elected by the workers to represent them at the company level, between July and August 2022.

The United Food and Allied Workers Union of Zimbabwe (UFAWUZ), which represents 500 of the company’s 750 employees, said that Ingwebu Breweries had refused to honour the increments agreed to in the collective bargaining agreement for the brewing and distilling sub-sector of the food and allied industries.

Furthermore, workers had not been paid on time since January. When the workers committee demanded payment of the unpaid increments and wage arrears, they were dismissed.

Things did not improve afterwards. Workers were paid a partial salary in September and were not paid at all in October. Ingwebu then tried to force workers to form a new workers’ committee. The workers rejected all their employer’s attempts to force them to do so and instead demanded that the dismissed members of the workers’ committee be reinstated. UFAWUZ demanded that Ingwebu stop victimising workers, pay all outstanding wages at once, and pay termination benefits to all employees who were unfairly dismissed.

After a wage deadlock in early 2022, and while waiting for conciliation of the dispute, the National Railways of Zimbabwe illegally fired trade union leaders who had been appointed as negotiators under the pretext of retrenchment. The dismissed workers were Kamurai Moyo, President of the Zimbabwe Amalgamated Railway Workers Union (ZARWU), Farai Dambudzo, General Secretary of Railways Artisan Union (RAU) and Sikhumbuzo Moyo, President of the RAU.

The president of the Zimbabwe Professional Nurses Union (ZPNU), Robert Chiduku, was fired on 17 August 2022 for conducting union business at work without the consent of the employer. He was based at Gweru Provincial Hospital.

At least 200 nurses were also appearing before provincial disciplinary committees at that time, for taking part in strikes and conducting union activities at their workplaces. Nurses had taken strike action in June to demand that their salaries be paid in US dollars and to push the case for better working conditions.

To stop nurses and doctors from engaging in strikes for a long period, in 2021, the government had introduced the Health Services Amendment Bill, section 5 of which restricts industrial action by health workers. Health practitioners have widely condemned the Bill, describing it as a means to prevent health workers from voicing their grievances.

On 24 November 2022, members of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) marched to the offices of South Deep mine which is part of Gold Fields and is based in Westonaria. Union members were protesting the management’s active obstruction of the union being recognised.

Since NUMSA started recruiting members at South Deep, they have witnessed how the management of the mine has consistently resorted to anti-union practices to prevent NUMSA from possessing organisational rights.

The protestors handed over a memorandum of 10 demands, including that the company cease the bullying and intimidation of union members, and that it process union applications efficiently and fairly.

In Nigeria, employers in the chemical industry have prevented workers from forming or joining a union. In the electricity sector, workers were threatened with dismissals if they did so.

In several states in the country, the local authorities have interfered in trade union activities and in the Rivers state, the offices of the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) were arbitrarily closed by the state government. The offices have remained sealed since then.

In the education sector in Niger, the Ministry of Education created three unions of contract workers which it used to break the teachers’ strike in January 2023.The government also arbitrarily transferred union officials to remote areas and refused to remit union dues to the National Union of Primary Teachers (SNEB) as retaliatory measures after the strike.

In Niger, anti-union dismissals were frequent. Members of the Executive Bureau of the Union of Money Transfer Agents (SYNASTRA) were threatened after forming their union and two of them were dismissed.

The general secretary of the Syndicat des Contrôleurs aériens du Niger (SYCAN) was fired without motive in June 2022. Unions suspected anti-union discrimination. His dismissal was invalidated in court later in the year.

Fousseyni Coulibaly, general secretary of the union committee of the Point G university hospital center in Bamako, Mali, has been suspended from his functions at the hospital, and therefore impeded from exercising his union mandate, since 27 April 2021, pending a transfer to another location, outside of the district of Bamako. To his colleagues, the suspension and pending transfer are an arbitrary decision by the management of the hospital aimed at weakening the trade union. They organised a strike in December 2021 to demand Coulibaly’s return but, as of May 2022, the general secretary was still suspended.

Following a series of successes in 2021, Lesotho’s United Textiles Employees (UNITE) have been confronted throughout 2022 by anti-union measures taken by employers.

Companies have tried to establish yellow unions to weaken UNITE, as seen in the case of Precious Garments. Reasoning that UNITE was “causing an inhospitable business atmosphere and capital flight”, employers have petitioned for the deregistration of UNITE. Shop stewards have been dismissed for their involvement in the labour movement, and employers have denied UNITE representation in their workplaces.

Challenging these actions, UNITE won a court battle against Precious Garments in September 2022, which ruled that UNITE could not be suspended in the workplace, and that the company and its general manager had to pay the union’s outstanding dues.

In May 2022, Zheng Yong Swaziland, a garment factory, unilaterally decided to stop deducting union dues for 1,276 workers and remitting them to the union as retaliation after workers went on strike to demand a living wage.

It took six months for the Amalgamated Trade Union of Swaziland (ATUSWA) to obtain a court order instructing Zheng Yong to stop its obstructive practices. The court ruled on 31 October that by not paying the dues to the union, the employer was resorting to unlawful ‘self-help’ which violated the Industrial Relations Act.

In Cameroon, employers often resorted to union-busting practices to block the formation of independent trade unions. Such tactics included preventing trade unions from presenting candidates during the social elections, preventing trade union members from talking to the workers, and withholding union fees.

In Burundi, dismissed union representatives were prevented from meeting their affiliates within their companies.

In December 2022, NXP Manufacturing in Thailand fired 13 union leaders on false charges.

The NXP Manufacturing Workers’ Union’s congress in October 2019 passed a resolution assigning a representative to act on the company’s failure to respect the collective agreement. In August 2020, the union filed a lawsuit over NXP’s non-compliance with the collective agreement at the central labour court. In February 2022, the union’s case was dismissed and the court ruled that the union did not have the right to sue.

Focusing on improving the relationship with the employer, the union decided not to appeal the ruling. In return, NXP accused union members of having falsified the congress minutes, a serious violation of company regulations, and dismissed 13 of them.

The United Rank and File Employees of J&T Express-FFW (URFE-J&T-FFW) in Laguna, the Philippines, staged a three-day strike beginning on 4 June 2022 to protest the illegal suspension and subsequent dismissal of the union’s president, Jesher Fariñas, based on trumped-up charges. J&T Express is a global logistics company that provides personal delivery services.

Prior to the union president’s dismissal, workers at the enterprise had complained of the non-payment of overtime and the night differential, and a reduction in benefits. The union followed all legal procedures, including due notice and a strike vote, before staging the strike on 4 June in which 300 union members took part.

A heavy police presence and interference marred an otherwise peaceful strike. This was despite existing labour laws that prohibit the presence of state security forces within 50m of the strike area. The union leaders were also badgered by police, who demanded rally permits from the striking workers, even though these were not a legal requirement.

The country’s National Conciliation and Mediation Board (NCMB) eventually intervened and tried to mediate between the two parties.

On 6 June, after six hours of dialogue, the union and the company agreed to a speedy voluntary arbitration process to determine whether the union’s president was illegally dismissed. Both parties also agreed to technical assistance to settle the issues relating to unpaid overtime and the night differential, the reduction in benefits, and unpaid allowances.

Management agreed to welcome back all striking workers and to refrain from retaliatory action.

On 21 September 2022, within three days of starting his new job at Best Choice Garment Co. in Myanmar, a line worker was fired when the factory discovered that he had been a trade union leader. He was told that he had been blacklisted and would not be given work in any other garment factory in the Anawrahta Industrial Zone in Yangon.

At the end of March 2022, the Electronics Industry Employees’ Union, Northern Region (EIEUNR) exposed union busting at Molex Malaysia, an electronics components manufacturer, as workers were preparing for a secret ballot on joining EIEUNR.

Management organised a townhall meeting with workers, urging them not to vote for the union and threatening that they would risk losing bonuses and benefits if they were to do so.

The union lodged a complaint against Molex Malaysia with the Industrial Relations Department (IRD). It submitted a recording in which the human resources director was threatening to cut benefits if workers decided to vote for the union. The union had another recording with similar threats, where the HR director instructed managerial and supervisory staff to convince operators to vote against the union.

The Industrial Relations Department initiated an investigation and put the secret ballot on hold.

The matter had not been resolved by mid-September 2022 and EIEUNR launched an online petition to call on Molex to stop union busting and to respect the workers’ right to choose their own union and to bargain collectively with the employer.

In June 2022, the Korea Federation of Banks (KFB) suddenly dismissed three former officials from the Korean Finance Industry Union (KFIU).

The reason for the dismissals dates back to an incident in 2017, where the three officials led a visit to the KFB office to protest against the forced introduction of performance salary reforms by the Financial Services Commission for public corporations, and to demand the restoration of collective bargaining. There were clashes during the visit, and the three officials were later charged and given prison and probation sentences.

To avoid repeating similar incidents, the KFIU and the bankers’ association agreed not to press charges or retaliate further against the three union leaders. The association even assured the KFIU as recently as May 2022 that they would avoid any retaliation. It came as a shock, therefore, when the three former officials were issued the notice a month later.

PT Tainan Enterprises Indonesia consistently refused to reinstate union leaders fired in 2021 for forming a local union.

When the Garment and Textile Trade Union Federation (Garteks) formed a factory-level branch at the company’s factory in North Jakarta in August 2021, the union president Ahmad Faisal, vice-president Tulam, and vice secretary Hendra Radista were dismissed on the pretext of refusing to transfer to a different factory. The Indonesian Ministry of Manpower recommended on 24 December 2021 that the three Garteks union leaders should be reinstated. The recommendation was ignored however, and in February 2022 Ahmad Faisal, Tulam and Hendra Radista signed a settlement agreement with the company, accepting severance pay on the condition that the company stop union busting.

However, management ignored that agreement and continued to persecute union members. After the dismissal of the founding leaders, Rahmawati became local union president at PT Tainan in August 2021. In January 2022, the company started issuing warning letters to Rahmawati, claiming she was unable to achieve the production target. After three warning letters, Rahmawati was dismissed on 18 May. Garteks criticised the garment company for union busting and filed a complaint with the North Jakarta labour office.

In August 2022, the industrial relations mediator ruled that the company should reinstate Rahmawati in her original position with back pay.

Following interventions from IndustriALL, the company signed a settlement agreement with Garteks whereby Rahmawati was to be reinstated to her original position on 1 November 2022.

Over 350 workers, members of the Indian Yamaha Motors Labour Association (IYMLA), began a sit-in strike at the India Yamaha Motors factory in Sriperumbudur near Chennai, India on 11 October 2022, in protest at management’s consistent refusal to recognise their union.

IYMLA members were demanding management hold wage talks with their union. Instead, the company management organised with the State Labour Department to sign a wage agreement with the company-supported minority union.

On 14 April 2022, the Mumbai Labour Union (MLU) in India submitted a charter of demands on behalf of its 3,500 members to management at Viraj Steel Limited, but management refused to negotiate. Shortly afterwards, 52 security guards in plant No.1, all members of the MLU, were transferred to another plant.

At the beginning of May, the MLU announced a strike for 16 May, citing harassment of union members, reduction in salary, lack of basic facilities like drinking water, chairs, tables, canteen facilities and toilets, as well as physical assaults on union members by thugs employed by management.

On 7 May, management at Viraj Steel Limited tried to hire contract workers at plant No.1, where permanent workers had previously been employed. The permanent workers tried to stop the contractor and contract workers from entering the workplace. In response, the employer filed a complaint with the police against the union representatives. The general secretary of the MLU and 70 representatives were arrested, and were still in police custody more than two weeks later.

Seven workers had their contracts terminated at Eastcrown Footwear Industries in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, on 11 October 2022 after they tried to form a union.

Factory management denied the workers’ dismissals were related to union activity but would not elaborate.

The union was created in response to the bad working conditions imposed by the company. Workers were forced to work overtime, denied requests to take leave, and made to sit through meetings during break periods.

The factory first tried to get the unionists to join the factory’s own company union instead, but when the workers declined, their contracts were terminated.

The seven unionising workers who lost their contracts were Yousa, Sokna, Eam Sambath, Duong Soknang, Matt Vy, Sarem Tharim and Suong Sarin. Two more workers who had tried to help form the union, Duong Tola and Horn Srey Neang, received termination letters on 22 and 24 October respectively. Initially, 16 had joined to form the union, but six had withdrawn in the face of threats.

Three workers from the SYHJ Garment factory in Kandal’s Ang Snoul district, Cambodia, were fired without cause or notice on 20 April 2022. The dismissals came after they had formed a factory-level union in March.

The three workers filed a complaint with the Labour Ministry on the grounds that they were illegally fired for unionising and demanded their reinstatement.

In statements made in April 2022, the Bangladesh Apparel Workers Federation (BAWF) and the Bangladesh Garment and Industrial Workers Federation (BGIWF) denounced the overall anti-union climate in the garment sector. More than 50 per cent of the unions registered since the Rana Plaza incident were yellow unions and have remained inactive over the years. Independent trade unions were not being registered by the labour department, while unions backed by factory owners have proliferated in the sector.

In Bangladesh, factory owners were still largely against trade unions and they forced workers not to join any union. In many cases, factory owners hired external forces to threaten workers who joined a union and used the police to harass union members. When an active federation in a factory filed an application for registration, labour department officials often imposed conditions in addition to those specified by the labour laws and rejected the application.

As part of their Daily Download meetings, which all employees are expected to attend, Apple stores began to present anti-union briefings.

It is illegal in Australia to hold such ‘captive meetings’ to present anti-union messaging, so Apple claimed the anti-union part of the meeting was ‘voluntary’, and that staff could leave if they wished. However, as one employee pointed out, anyone who chose to walk out of the meeting at that point would make themselves a target.

Apple then tried to rush through a new enterprise agreement with below-inflation wage rises and clauses that could see workers work up to 60 hours a week without overtime. This led to the Australian Services Union (ASU) and the Shop Distributive and Allied Employees Association (SDA) taking Apple to the Fair Work Commission, on 26 August 2022, for breaching good faith bargaining principles.

The unions pointed out that staff were only made aware of the agreement on 3 August, and Apple refused requests to extend consultation with employees beyond 19 August. Apple also denied entry to union representatives at one of its stores.

On 7 September 2022, dairy industry workers in Uruguay carried out a 24-hour strike to protest union persecution and repression at the company Fritran, a distributor of ice cream. The company had suspended all workers affiliated with Sudec (Sindicato de Distribución de Helados Conaprole) for having participated in an assembly and had unjustly dismissed the union president, in addition to various violations of the sectoral agreement.

In the United States of America, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) demanded that Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz apologise personally to workers for union-busting tactics. The NLRB found in a complaint filed on 24 August 2022 that the company was unlawfully withholding benefits from employees in unionised or unionising stores. Starbucks’ CEO threatened employees and told them it would be “futile” to side with the union on several occasions, including during a video call to all US employees.

Since late 2021, more than 230 locations have joined Starbucks Workers United, in a massive wave of organising efforts across the country. The company has been accused of blatant union-busting tactics on multiple occasions, including in June 2022, when a Starbucks store in Ithaca was closed down less than two months after its staff voted to unionise.

In the United States of America, a group of workers at an Amazon air freight hub in San Bernardino, which has been pushing for a US$5/hour pay increase and more robust safety measures, filed a complaint for unfair labour practices with the National Labor Relations Board on 13 October 2022.

The group, which calls itself Inland Empire Amazon Workers United, indicated in its complaint that the company threatened an employee and ultimately terminated his employment in retaliation for activities including signing a petition for a wage increase, soliciting co-worker signatures, distributing literature, wearing a sticker in support of the wage increase, and participating in a walkout. Amazon has also interrogated employees about their union-related activities, issued write-ups to other employees in retaliation for wearing stickers in support of the wage increase, and surveilled workers engaged in organising.

Dozens of Amazon workers at the air freight hub walked off the job on 14 October to protest what they described in a statement as a “shameful” response by the company to their ongoing push for higher pay. The e-commerce giant had brought anti-union labour consultants into their facility in previous months, contributing to a perception among workers that they were being watched and could face retaliation for speaking out to improve workplace conditions.

On 14 October, the company scanned the badges of workers who were entering and exiting the facility around the time of the planned walkout, looking to collect names of workers who participated in the protest.

Earlier that same month, Amazon suspended at least 50 workers employed in one of its facilities in Staten Island.

On 19 July 2022, the Union of Entertainment, Casino and Allied Workers (SUTECA), officially filed its registration with the Peruvian Ministry of Labour. The following day, Cirsa and Dreams, two casino resorts, fired the nine members of the union’s board of directors. This dismissal occurred despite Cirsa’s earlier commitment to respect the right to unionise. Likewise, at least 22 workers from the casinos who had joined the new union were summarily dismissed.

Since August 2022, UNI Americas has tried to maintain a dialogue with Cirsa’s management for the reinstatement of the workers. However, no agreement has been reached. In November 2022, with the mediation of the Peruvian Ministry of Labour, Dreams agreed to reinstate the workers dismissed.

In Honduras, several employees of the maquiladora Gildan Mayan Textiles were dismissed after having formed a trade union.

Since 2016, Fyffes has repressed any attempt by the Agro-industrial and Similar Workers' Union (STAS) to organise melon plantation workers in southern Honduras.

In November 2022, José Espinal Maradiaga and Óscar Gadea Vásquez, two leaders of the STAS section at Melon Export SA (Melexsa), a Fyffes subsidiary, were arbitrarily dismissed, a week after notifying the employer of the formation of the trade union. Workers in Melexsa had decided to organise to demand permanent contracts. Some of them have been working for Melexsa under short-term contracts for more than two decades.

In Guatemala, Winners, a company owned by South Korean company SA-E Group, shut down its operations in May 2022 and dismissed a number of workers in an attempt to prevent unionisation. The dismissed workers then tried to get new jobs but discovered they had been blacklisted.

Winners management often used physical and psychological violence, intimidation, and threats against union members. The local union general secretary was harassed, received death threats and was forced to move to a safe location.

In the Dominican Republic, the Confederación Autonoma Sindical Clasista (CASC) has deplored that several employers have attempted to interfere in the formation of trade unions and in union elections.

In the Netherlands, members of the Federation of Dutch Trade Unions (FNV) have been threatened and intimidated on several occasions by representatives of the Tempo Team employment agency.

FNV members were standing on the public road at a PostNL location to talk to employees about their terms of employment and working conditions, in the framework of the ongoing negotiation of the PostNL and temporary employment collective agreement.

A Tempo Team representative approached them in an aggressive manner, forbidding any contact between FNV members and the Tempo Team employees and ordering the trade unionists to leave. He then called for backup from management. FNV attempted to approach the workers. However, every time they did, one representative of the Tempo Team management would come between them and would tell the temporary workers that Tempo Team did not allow them to talk to the FNV.

In Bursa, Turkey, 10 women workers were laid off in Barutçu Tekstil, a textile factory, after they joined trade union Öz İplik-İş in 2022. The company claimed the layoffs were part of a downsizing operation and not due to the workers’ union membership. However, the dismissals occurred only two days after the workers decided to join the trade union.

The vast majority of workers at Barutçu Tekstil are women. They are forced to do overtime and do not receive proper break times. Although the law prescribes the organisation to provide daycare at the factory, this obligation has never been met.

The dismissed workers immediately organised a sit-in to demand their reinstatement but after 111 days of protest, the management of the factory still refused to heed their request.

Around 180 members of the Turkish Paper and Wood Industry Workers Union (AGAC-IS) were illegally dismissed by ASD Laminat on 2 July 2022. The dismissals were carried out as part of a retaliatory measure implemented by the company, after the union won a recent court decision affirming its right to organise and bargain collectively.

In 2017, AGAC-IS organised an overwhelming majority of workers at the ASD Laminat factory in Düzce, Turkey. The union then successfully obtained legal authority from the Ministry of Labour to enter into collective bargaining with the company. ASD Laminat responded by filing a court case against the union.

After five years, the court issued a ruling confirming the union’s right to organise and bargain collectively. Instead of engaging in social dialogue, ASD Laminat resorted to harassing and illegally firing unionists to dissuade workers from supporting the union.

The workers went on strike on 27 October in protest of the years of union busting by ASD.

Workers at the Philip Morris factory in İzmir, Turkey, were paid less than the poverty threshold and suffered from discrimination between permanent and subcontracted workers, despite the fact that they performed the same tasks. As a result of these difficulties, almost all the company’s workers became members of the DİSK/Gıda-İş Union. Following the union meetings and actions, 124 workers were sacked. Workers organised picket lines in front of the factory. However, the company continued to refuse to negotiate.

DPD Switzerland engaged in union-busting practices. In 2022, the company prompted their subcontractor to fire five delivery workers, all members of Unia. Two of them had been elected by their colleagues to represent them at national and international level. The workers were told they were dismissed for poor performance. Yet one of them had been recognised as one of the company’s three best drivers 10 times in a row in 2021. By outsourcing to small companies and forcing intense competition amongst them, DPD pushed substandard working conditions while avoiding any responsibility. However, workers had to wear DPD uniforms, drive DPD vans, and deliver exclusively for DPD.

In Serbia, ever since 2019, when the three unions at the publicly owned Republic Geodetic Authority (RGA) jointly organised strike action, trade union members have experienced discrimination and intimidation by the management.

In mid-2022, when union leaders addressed a sudden stoppage of the RGA work and publicly blamed management, the RGA administration engaged in a direct attack on trade unions and their spokespersons. It suspended the three trade union presidents, and implemented transfers, disciplinary proceedings and other retaliatory measures against trade union activists.

In Serbia, employers have often dismissed, transferred, or demoted workers and trade union members (or used threats of such measures) to deter them from joining trade unions or engaging in trade union activities, as was the case at Yura Corporation, a cable and harnessing manufacturing company.

Employers also attempted to establish yellow unions in many public companies, including the Post Office.

The Union of Teachers of the North Region in Portugal discovered that their notice boards were removed without their consent or knowledge and their location changed to a less visible place, just as the sector unions was preparing for a national strike call on 2 November 2022. The illegal removal of union notice boards, and the resulting lack of access of workers to union information, had a clear impact on workers’ participation in the strike. For the Union of Teachers of the North Region, this violation was preceded by anti-union discrimination measures, leading to the removal of the union leaders from school facilities.

In Portugal, workers often did not disclose their union membership for fear of anti-union discrimination in their careers. The União Geral de Trabalhadores (UGT-P) reported increasing pressure from employers to discourage workers from joining trade unions, compounded by high levels of precarious employment and a large number of small enterprises.

On 28 November 2022, Dariusz Kawka, leader of NSZZ "Solidarność" in IKEA Industry Poland Ltd. and a member of IKEA European Works Council, was dismissed from his job on disciplinary grounds without a notice period, despite his union activity, which protects him from dismissal without prior approval of the company’s trade union organisation. After an inspection by the State Labour Inspectorate, it was reported that the employer had grossly violated labour law. Despite the union exchanging letters with the employer, including the corporation’s board of directors, and many other actions to protect Dariusz Kawka from dismissal, the employer refused to reinstate him.

This union-busting tactic was also observed in other companies, such as Nexteer Automotive Poland and KCP Ltd.

In North Macedonia, Stojce Jovanovski, the president of the KPU Zatvor-Skopje trade union, a prison facility, was victim of harassment and threats of dismissal by management in 2021 and 2022, until his unfair dismissal in May 2022. Since then, the Confederation of Free Trade Unions of Macedonia (KSS) has filed over 15 court cases seeking his reinstatement.

In Hungary, employers in the industrial sector misused the procedure for trade union leave, by which a trade union representative must first receive permission from his/her employer to take leave, and arbitrarily refused to grant time off for trade union activities. This practice was in clear violation of the laws that set detailed and restrictive conditions under which employers can reject the request.

On 31 May 2022, around 400 workers at IDS Borjomi, a mineral water plant in Georgia, began striking to protest wage cuts, the termination of 49 workers, including the union’s leader Tsotne Kiknadze and union committee members, and the company’s theft of union dues.

Management attempted to intimidate, threaten and blackmail the workers.

On 13 June, the Prime Minister of Georgia ordered the Ministers of Economy and Labour to facilitate negotiations between the workers and the employer.

On 21 June, after 22 days of strike action, the union reached an agreement with the management of IDS Borjomi, including reinstatement of the workers whose jobs had been illegally terminated.

In the private sector in Greece, employers dismissed, transferred and downgraded unionised workers, or used the threat of such measures against workers to discourage them from joining a union.

On 12 September 2022, a French court ruled in favour of unions FO, CFDT and CGT, recognising employer interference in the 2019 social elections held by the care home provider Orpea. The court overturned the election results and ruled that new elections must be held.

The case arose as the French unions denounced the rigged elections in favour of yellow union Arc-En-Ciel. Candidates of this yellow union had largely benefited from “financial and tactical support” from management.

In 2022, several representatives of the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) were victims of harassment and anti-union discrimination measures, including demotion, disciplinary sanctions, dismissals and filing of lawsuits for strike action.

In 2022, several representatives of the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) were victims of harassment and anti-union discrimination measures, including demotion, disciplinary sanctions, dismissals and filing of lawsuits for strike action.

In Bulgaria, workers faced obstacles to joining trade unions, as employers terminated unionised workers' contracts, harassed trade union leaders, established yellow unions and refused to collect union dues, despite check-off agreements.

Following a strike notice issued by the SETCa at a seniors’ residence in Belgium, the local and regional company directors tried to intimidate workers during a staff meeting to dissuade them from taking part in the action on 20 January 2023.

In Belgium, employers frequently attempted to dismiss union representatives without being able to justify serious misconduct or without respecting the prior authorisation procedure of the labour court, in order to undermine the work of the trade union delegation in the company. Some multinationals chose to illegally dismiss shop stewards and pay severance, rather than let them carry out union activities.

In the public sector in Armenia, trade unions were often subjected to illegal investigation of their books of accounts and financial documents by employers.