Mar 9, 2015
A new Solidarity Center project in Georgia to strengthen respect for worker rights through union, government and employer engagement will ensure the voice of workers is “a critical part of policymaking” so that “the benefits of economic growth are shared,” says Solidarity Center Executive Director Shawna Bader-Blau.
The Georgian Minister of Labor, U.S. and Georgian government officials, diplomats, nongovernmental organization (NGO) representatives and leaders of the Georgian Trade Union Confederation (GTUC) launched the three-year venture, Strengthening Worker Organizations in Georgia, on March 4 in Tbilisi, the country’s capital. The project is funded by the U.S. Department of Labor and will be implemented by the Solidarity Center in cooperation with the GTUC.
The project focuses on improving worker occupational safety and health. Some 273 workers have been killed on the job in the past six years, and many more seriously injured, likely draining Georgia’s ability to boost its stagnant gross domestic product (GDP). Key elements of the project include increasing GTUC job safety and health inspectors and expanding the number of joint union-management occupational safety and health committees.
In addition, the project involves training workers in negotiating contracts and broadening unions’ ability to promote effective labor law enforcement.
Speaking at the launch, GTUC President Irakli Petriashvili said, “It is very important that the international community keep an eye on any violations aimed at employees.”
“Ultimately, the project, which will build on recent improvements in Georgian labor law, will lead to greater compliance with national labor law and internationally recognized norms and standards,” including the right to form unions, says Stanislaw Cieniuch, Solidarity Center Georgia program director. “Over time, these and other measures will contribute to building a modern, cooperative system of labor-management relations.”
The city’s metro transportation hub, the site of the launch event, was chosen because it is a workplace “where workers and employers have come together in a commitment to decent, safe and productive employment—through collective bargaining,” says Bader-Blau.
Apr 2, 2012
Irakli Petriashvili has trade unionism in his blood. “It’s like a genetic trait,” said Petriashvili, 42, president of the Georgian Trade Union Confederation (GTUC). “Since I was a child, I have had it in my heart to help those who were victims of oppression and unfair treatment.”
Petriashvili began his union activism shortly after he joined the Tbilisi-based energy distribution company Telasi right out of college, his electrical engineering degree in hand. He soon found working conditions less than ideal.
“The administration delayed workers’ wages but led a fashionable life,” he said wryly. “The director was in charge of the unions.”
Without a clear idea of worker rights, Petriashvili led a strike for 64 dispatchers. “It was not organized, and we did not know whether it was legal,” he said. “We just knew that Tbilisi would be dark if we did not work.”
He was detained as punishment for initiating the strike but faced down the company director as 20 strikers watched. After that, he said, his co-workers started to bring their issues to him, and he became a worker rights activist. “I was diagnosed with the ‘disease’ of trade unionism—a good poison.”
In 1999, Petriashvili attended a course for young trade unionists, organized jointly by the Solidarity Center, the AFL-CIO, and the International Labor Organization. In 2000, he was elected to head the union at Telasi. Under his leadership, the union became a more vocal advocate for its members’ interests, extraordinary in a country where unions were largely vehicles of the state. During his continuing fight for worker rights at the company, he led a groundbreaking hunger strike that led to a collective agreement securing many of the unions’ demands.
Petriashvili continued to rise through the ranks of union leadership. In 2005, he was elected president of the GTUC and began the democratization of the union movement. “We were taking the trade union movement to a whole new level,” he said. “We believed unions must be built from the bottom up, not the top down. We put an end to the practice of appointing union leaders. Now members democratically elect their leaders.”
Today the independent trade union movement in Georgia is under attack. President Mikheil Saakashvili’s administration has launched an array of anti-union legal maneuvers that are choking off fledgling union organizations. The 2006 Labor Code, crafted and implemented by the Georgian government without union input, violates international worker rights standards. For example, it enables employers to hire and fire without reason, promoting discrimination in the workplace and putting the burden of proof on workers who challenge an employer’s action.
The government also denied two of the country’s largest unions the right to collect dues through payroll deductions (a method called a dues check-off system), flouting the terms of valid collective bargaining agreements and bringing the unions to near-bankruptcy. As a result of the government’s attacks, GTUC affiliates now comprise 219,000 dues-paying members—a loss of 100,000 over a five-year period.
The GTUC is fighting back, and Petriashvili says that there have been small victories: an unprecedented wave of strikes in multiple sectors, which proves the GTUC unions are now independent from employer control, and a handful of reinstated workers. But as long as 22 percent of Georgia’s population lives below the poverty line and the unemployment rate tops 16 percent, “there can be no major victories.”
Petriashvili values ongoing cooperation with the Solidarity Center and other international labor organizations. In a country where the only faces seen on government-controlled television belong to those who applaud the government’s actions, he wants the voices of “ordinary Georgians” to be heard. “Workers all over the world must join in solidarity. Otherwise the notion of democracy will fade away in the eyes of Georgians.”
Jan 31, 2012
With a labor code that disadvantages workers and an increasingly hostile attitude toward the rights of working people, the Republic of Georgia is no easy place to join or persist in a union. This is particularly true for people trying to eke out a living in the informal economy.
Still, the Trade Union of Self-Employed Commercial and Independent Sector Workers of Georgia, begun in August 2011, has established roots and is working to protect the rights of its 200 members, primarily market workers, according to Miranda Mandaria, the union’s acting president.
“In Georgia, 60 percent of workers are in the informal economy, the majority of them in Tbilisi (the capital). They have no social protections or benefits. They are precarious workers and, while they are very hard to reach, they have rights and deserve protection,” said Mandaria, a lawyer by training who also works for the Georgian Trade Union Confederation (GTUC).
All of the union’s members today have contracts with their employers. In Georgia, Mandaria added, it is normal for permanent employees to have a contract, which establishes work hours and conditions, but the concept is new for people working in market stalls. In some cases, the Georgian legal code acts against workers, either because of its lack of recognition (i.e., in the case of domestic workers) or because of its draconian treatment (i.e., of street vendors).
“It is good the market workers have a contract, though the working conditions are not always good. At least it offers them some protection,” she said.
The union has faced intimidation by employers. Its biggest difficulty, however, is reaching workers who, like domestic workers, work alone or who cannot count on a fixed location as their workplace.
“It is very difficult to organize street vendors,” she said. “They do not have regular workplaces, and there is no law regulating their rights. They have no paid leave, no insurance, no social protections. They get nothing from the government.”
Exacerbating street vendors’ day-to-day struggles is a law enacted in 2006 that mandates street vendors move to a single location to sell their wares. “And the law makes them pay a tax for that privilege,” Mandaria said. “The fine for violators is the confiscation of their products.”
In 2010, the GTUC drafted a labor code aimed at protecting street vendors. It proposed that street vendors be exempt from taxes until 2012, Mandaria said. The government did not respond to the proposal.
“Street vendors cannot afford taxes, but the government is not interested in social dialogue,” she said. “So I am thinking all the time about what I can do for street vendors, for domestic workers. They need social guarantees to protect their rights.”
