Uniting Asia-Pacific MNC unions across chemicals and pharmaceuticals

Despite Asia Pacific dominating chemical manufacturing and continues growing, trade unions face pertinent challenges such as unsatisfactory wage and collective bargaining agreements, job losses, contractualization, violation of workers' rights, weak enforcement of labour laws and safety and health regulations.

The participants call on governments to take steps to enhance skills, improve working conditions including wages and benefits. Trade unions must strengthen workers solidarity and union network and oversee implementation of human rights due diligence in the global supply chain.

Drawing on experiences from BASF, the participants agreed to strengthen company networks such as Syngenta and Unilever. They further agreed to conduct a mapping of working conditions of both unions and companies in the region and to develop an online database to consolidate and share this information.

They also reflected on the IndustriALL Congress debates held on 4-7 November, noting that several of the themes discussed at Congress closely align with the priorities of the chemical and pharmaceutical sector. Participants agreed that the outcomes of this meeting will help advance the follow-up actions identified during the Congress.

In a separate Asia Pacific BASF union network meeting, trade unionists from India, Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam followed-up on the progress and outcomes from the 2024 meeting.

The BASF unions united to push for a global framework agreement and proposed a social dialogue with employers in the Asia Pacific region for recognition. A communication platform will also be created for regular information-exchange. Other action points of the meeting included empowering and recruiting women to be more active in unions, organizing more BASF workers including those in the supply chain.

The network welcomes Nadya Miranti, a woman union leader, of BASF Indonesia as the subregional co-coordinator of the network to work hand in hand with Raghuram T.C. of BASF India. A meeting in Malaysia and a site-visit at the Kuantan plant is planned to be held next year.

Tom Grinter, IndustriALL director of chemicals, pharmaceuticals, pulp and paper, rubber sectors said:

Ashutosh Bhattacharya and Ramon Certeza, regional secretaries for South Asia and South East Asia, said:

The meetings were supported by Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung.