The Hook

In Vancouver to address a global labour conference this week, Greenpeace International's newly chosen executive director Kumi Naidoo explained why his powerful organization hasn't urged a boycott of BP in response to the devastating oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

"We don't want to let the other companies off the hook," he told his audience. "We need a unified response to the damage they are all doing."

Naidoo emphasized the connection between protecting workers and protecting the environment, saying that it was too often forgotten that the BP oil well blow out and spill in the Gulf began with the deaths of 11 workers.

"It was not just a crisis of the environment," he said. "It was also a crisis of worker safety."

In a quick interview with Tyee before he caught a plane to the Alberta tar sands, Naidoo talked about the tension often perceived between his group's agenda for environmental protection and the union movement's drive to protect good paying jobs.

"The tar sands devastate workers' lives too," he said. "We have to focus on creating alternative jobs that don't destroy the environment, and fund worker transition when operations like the tar sands are shut down."

Naidoo is a South African anti-apartheid veteran who worked with Greenpeace in Africa for a number of years before being chosen as its international leader. From 1998 to 2008, he was secretary general and chief executive officer of CIVICUS: World Alliance for Citizen Participation, and helped found the Global Call to Action Against Poverty. He also served as a board member of the Association for Women's Rights in Development.

Some of the 1200 delegates attending the weeklong gathering of the world congress of the International Trade Union Confederation heard Naidoo and other distinguished panel members discuss the role of labour in fixing the global economy.

Amsatou Sow Sidibé, a prominent feminist organizer and academic from the Cheik Anta Diop University in Senegal, urged more union activity to organize women in the informal sector, where 90 per cent of African women work.

"I'm demanding that unions act to respect our social protections," she said, "especially for women in the informal sector of the economy."

Sidibé, the founder of the African Network of Women Workers, emphasized how crucial it was for the future success of union efforts that issues of gender equality be addressed. "Trade unionists must take on a culture of human rights," she said.

Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, president of the Party of European Socialists and former head of the Danish government, called himself "an old trade unionist" and said that the current world economic crisis was created by financial greed, not lazy workers.

Striking a note that repeated throughout the panel discussion, the Danish leader said that organized labour had "lost on the way into the crisis," with many governments using it as an excuse to cut social services and labour rights. "To win on the way out, we need to convince people to support a tax on financial transactions to make finance pay back for the crisis it created."

The panel moderator, ITUC secretary Guy Ryder, told Naidoo that his 17-year-old daughter thought Greenpeace was "pretty cool" but was not so entranced with her father's labour movement.

Rassmussen picked up on that theme, telling the delegates, "You are on the right track, but you need to find ways to be more attractive, especially to the young."

Tom Sandborn covers labour and health policy issues for the Tyee. He welcomes your feedback and story tips at tos@infinet.net