ECONOMICS AND DATA ANAYLSIS FOR NEGOTIATION AND COLLECTIVE BARGAINING

Trade unions have been challenged through decades. Memberships and sectoral coverage, for the most part, have declined. Nevertheless, collective bargaining and advocacy have sustained unions and their standing, although the challenges have multiplied with COVID-19, the conflict in Ukraine and elsewhere and climate change. Research suggests the importance of social dialogue and bargaining, particularly during pandemic and crisis situations. The multiple crises require more intense engagements in pursuing the ILO’s four pillars of human-centred recovery. First, by considering continuing trends in costs, interest rates, borrowing, slowing economies, challenged enterprises, and disadvantaged workers. Second, considering COVID-19 impact on inequalities, living needs and wages, inflation, productivity imperatives and limited resources. This course builds on workers’ learning from the five-week course Economics at Work: Trade Unions Building Forward Better implemented from 23 May to 17 June 2022 via the ITCILO eCampus online learning platform. The course will cull experience and expertise from resource persons in the Japan International Labour Foundation (JILAF), ILO ACTRAV, the ITCILO and elsewhere in Asia and the Pacific, highlighting good practices in bargaining and advocacy, including their impact on employment and industrial relations. It includes trainers’ training approaches to enable the participants to implement similarly themed capacity development programmes at the country and enterprise levels. This will help participants to make use of economic and labour data to plan, prepare and implement practical actions for negotiations and collective bargaining for their respective organizations in the area of economic and non-economic benefits for workers. OBJECTIVES The course contributes to trade union capacity in maximizing negotiations and bargaining towards building forward better with inclusive, sustainable and human-centred recovery. After completion of this face-to-face course, participants were expected to have: o been enabled to view the bigger world picture conditioned by COVID-19, country-level crises, COVID-19 and climate change; o strengthened their skills in bargaining and advocacy in conjunction with pursuing the four pillars for human-centred recovery; o deepened their understanding of relationships between economics and trade union actions, particularly bargaining and advocacy. It would have helped fill gaps in the appreciation of the needful role of trade unions in economic policies and trade unions, particularly incomes and social protection policies as influenced by monetary and fiscal policies; o improved their competence in statistics as economic and labour market trends and prospects are presented and discussed with the hands-on exercises on preparations for bargaining; o identified resources in their countries to be applied towards funding amounts to meet the needs of collective agreements, general wage increases and additional social protection; and o ascertained the importance of negotiation and bargaining for better employment and sound industrial relations. CONTENT The training allows an intensive and broader space for participants’ engagement and interaction, with input sessions by experts and specialists, kept to the minimum. The sessions cover the following major themes: A. Context: COVID-19, conflicts and crises, and country responses B. Living needs, nominal vs real wages and consumer price index. What is it? Why is it? C. Inequalities: Economic, social, democratic dimensions of inequality. What can unions do? D. Living wages | Country capacity to pay living wages | Enterprise capacity to pay CBA increases | Productivity pays APPLICATION OF LEARNING AND POST-TRAINING FOLLOW UP Post-training, ACTRAV Turin will organize webinars on regular intervals to provide continuing education to the course participants. These webinars will also serve as an opportunity to sustain conversations, follow up on participants’ application of learning, knowledge and current events-sharing, and strengthen regional union networking. Regular sharing of relevant ILO publications –new policy briefs, newsletters, etc. –will supplement the course's post-training component.