17 May 2018: A trade union delegation led by Ambet Yuson, General Secretary of BWI and Chair of the Council of Global Unions Working Group on Migration met this morning with Juan Jose Gomez Camacho, Permanent Representative of Mexico, and Jurg Lauber, Permanent Representative of Switzerland, who are serving as the co-facilitators for negotiations on the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (GCM).
During the meeting Yuson outlined the key issues for the global trade union movement in the GCM discussions and negotiations. Specifically, he emphasized that:
all migrants regardless of their status should be guaranteed fundamental labour standards;
the ILO should be the lead U.N. agency on areas related to labour migration;
the ILO’s framework of social dialogue and tripartite process should be a central governance mechanism;
there should be a reference to international labour rights in the section on Guiding Principles, in addition to the Preamble;
there should be specific references to social dialogue in the implementation process; and
the CGU-Working Group on Migration supports the call made by the government of Switzerland for a separate objective on Decent Work that brings together labour migration and decent work provisions throughout the compact.
The meeting took place during the fourth intergovernmental negotiations of the GCM which is to be presented in the intergovernmental conference in December 2018 in Morocco.
Trade Union representatives present at the meeting included: Herbert Beck of Verdi (Germany) and PSI; Neha Misra of Solidarirty Center; Joel Odigie of ITUC-Africa; Kelly Fay Rodriguez of the Solidarity Center; Laxman Basnet of SARTUC; Rodrigo Borras of CTA-CSA (Argentina); Gemma Adaba, CGU Working Group on Migration and Solidarity Center Representative to the UN for the Global Compact on Migration Process; and Jin Sook Lee of BWI.
The official CGU statement is available in English and Spanish.