Labour Rights
The struggle to deal with the downside of globalisation is a challenge to journalists unions everywhere. Media staff, like the workforce in every other sector of the world economy, are under pressure from voracious employers who are cutting editorial budgets, slashing jobs and undermining trade union organisation.
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In Europe, the story is the same, but here there are different and distinct characteristics of the struggle. In the post-war period Europe embraced a set of market values that defined a particular model of democracy, based upon social and cultural imperatives. These were designed to minimise social conflict, to strengthen public engagement in democratic institutions, to set minimum standards of welfare, and to provide the public with guaranteed and universal access to essential services covering utilities, health, education and information.
The Labour Rights Expert Group, which focuses on Europe, but has lessons for journalists the world over, deals with trade union rights, cross-national assistance and industrial relations at European level in order to preserve the social model where existing and to promote it in Central and eastern Europe and other places where it is not functioning.
The EFJ has published a Best Practice Study on working time and a second one on working conditions for journalists in the newspaper sector, which are both available on the EFJ member section only and at the EFJ secretariat. The Expert Group supports member organisations specifically in the candidate countries in their efforts to create strong trade unions and to negotiate collective agreements.
Bilateral assistance between specifically the Nordic countries and Germany with Central and Eastern Europe has become a very important part of solidarity. The EFJ is promoting European Works Councils in the media sector and is particularly concerned about the widest possible participation of colleagues working for subsidiaries of media companies in the candidate countries.