Sustainable Development: A Trade Union Perspective

Sustainable development has become an important issue for trade unions around the world, but progress on sustainable development has been slow. Agenda 21, which came out of the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro, called on workers and trade unions to assume an active role. The International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) and the Trade Union Advisory Committee (TUAC) to the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) became influential players who represent more than 155 million members in 148 countries and territories. The implementation of Agenda 21 has been hampered by bureaucratic gridlock—a situation that trade unions propose to overcome through innovative strategies on workplaces and workers. They realize that sustainable development cannot take place without radical changes in production and consumption. Globalization is creating opulence on the one hand and grinding poverty on the other. ICFTU and TUAC propose a new “world order” that includes democratic decision-making, popular accountability, transparency, and local control. They have proposed priorities, outlined in this article, for an international approach to sustainable development.