Social Dialogue for Solutions: Mechanisms and Strategies to Guarantee Workers’ Voices in Asia and the Pacific

The COVID-19 pandemic underscores the urgency of human-centred, inclusive and resilient social and economic policies and programmes in dealing with present and future challenges affecting workers and society. The precondition for this is the effective participation of all stakeholders in formulating policy responses to the pandemic and all other crises. Social dialogue is a universally-recognized process and mechanism for effective participation, with unions as an indispensable social partner. As such, unions must have the ability to effectively use this process, speak up for workers, and to ensure that their voice is taken into account in policy decisions. This course, “Social dialogue for solutions”, is the ILO’s response to training needs identified by Trade Unions themselves in Asia and the Pacific, resulting from the Training Need Assessment events in 2021. The programme focused on roles that trade unions’ role in combatting and transitioning the challenges of the pandemic and other crises and ensuring human-centred recovery. It explored concrete opportunities for the revitalisation of the labour movement. His online course was implemented under the ILO ACTRAV ACFTU South-South Cooperation Project to enhance the institutional capacities of Trade Unions in Asia and the Pacific. OBJECTIVES The training aimed to enable trade unions to recognize the enabling conditions, norms and values and the power of social dialogue to identify opportunities within their contexts to influence policy and work strategically on solutions that offer greater resilience and recovery to their members during and post-crises. Specifically, it aimed to support trade unions to (a) gain improved knowledge and appreciation of the concept of social dialogue, as well as the principles and legal instruments or standards related to it; (b) increase appreciation of the value and importance of social dialogue in promoting decent work and in solving specific problems, particularly from the perspective of unions; (c) share and gain insights from the exchange of South-South experiences in social dialogue and similar mechanisms; (d) identify and analyse national and regional legislation, practices, and mechanisms of social and workers’ participation; (e) analyse and assess the state of in-country social dialogue institutions and determine strengths and areas for improvement; and (f) prepare a country-level union action plan to address challenges, including towards an inclusive, sustainable and resilient recovery from the COVID-19 crisis through social dialogue. CONTENT The course covered four learning modules: 1. Introduction to social dialogue, 2. Assessing social dialogue institutions, 3. Making social dialogue work for unions and workers, and 4. Planning to strengthen unions’ voice in tripartite social dialogue institutions and various decision-making mechanisms. The course consisted of an estimated 30 hours of synchronous and asynchronous online learning, which included 21 tasks such as participation in webinars, completion of self-guided learning modules, online interaction and collaboration, submission of assignments, and ‘application of learning plans’, among others. ECAMPUS The activity was delivered via the E-campus, the education platform of the International Training Centre of the ILO. The platform was used for the distribution of course information, training material, learning tasks, exchanges of good practices and experiences, feedback and multimedia content.