The international trade union landscape is often difficult to navigate and understand for those not familiar with it. Between the International Labour Organization (ILO), the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), Public Services International (PSI), UNI Global Union, and many others, it can be unclear what specific roles these organizations play and what they do beyond issuing statements or convening conferences.
Alan Sable is Head of UNI Global Care.
At their best, they function not merely as forums for dialogue, but as infrastructure for transnational coordination, strategic planning, and material gains for workers. UNI Global Union is a prime example of that role. The international union confederation has over 50 global agreements with multinational corporations and protects over 20 million workers across borders and sectors, particularly where corporate power is globalized and national labour protections are weak.
To get a better understanding of UNI’s globe-spanning work, Aaron Niederman sat down with Alan Sable, Head of UNI Global Care, during the UNI Europa Conference in Belfast in late March. They spoke about how UNI builds strategic partnerships with organizations like the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, translates campaign strategies across regional and sectoral contexts, and leverages power in one part of the world to drive change in another.
From care worker victories in Southeastern Europe to confrontations with multinational healthcare providers in Latin America, Sable outlined how UNI uses global structures to defend — and expand — labour rights in some of the most challenging contexts.
We’re speaking on the fringes of the UNI Europa Conference in Belfast, but before we get into the conference itself, I’d like to get a bit of context. You’ve been with UNI Global for almost 11 years now and head of UNI Care for one year. Can you tell us what your organization does and why a conference like this is important?
UNI is a global union federation of the services sector. We bring together over 20 million workers from over 150 countries in diverse service sectors, from care to retail to private cleaning and security to telecommunications and IT, with the idea that in an increasingly global world, workers need to have global strategies and global coordination to build power. These conferences are one part of the power-building work that we do.
So, what exactly happens at these conferences?
They’re a key part of the democratic structure of UNI. Every four to five years, our affiliate unions in Europe and other regions come together to debate and adopt strategic plans for the next period, to elect the leadership that will drive those plans, share victories, talk about challenges, exchange ideas, and ultimately come out stronger and more united around the work that we have to do over the next years.
We need to think even bigger about how we organize and how we build the type of structures that can resist this push to undermine fundamental rights.
Today’s the last day of the conference. Could you share some highlights from the last few days?
For me, the stories of organizing challenges and victories are always the most inspiring. Our unions know that if we’re not organizing and continuing to grow, then we’re not winning. And seeing how unions are coming together to organize new workers in very difficult anti-union companies like Amazon is really inspiring.
On top of that, I’ve been moved by the healthcare workers who fought for their and their patients’ rights in nursing homes and dialysis clinics within large multinational companies. We are facing an increasingly global oligarchy trying to take away those rights, but those inspiring stories show that when we’re united and organized, we can win.
Labour movement renewal and organizing have been big topics at the conference. Can you explain why?
Going back over a decade, UNI’s unions recognized that we needed to be organizing — that we needed to work together on joint strategies against multinational companies. Through these strategies, we’ve successfully signed global agreements with companies for them not to fight unionization — these agreements have helped to organize thousands and thousands of workers.
However, in this particular geopolitical moment, we’re seeing a rise of extremely anti-union governments and companies working together to erode fundamental rights that were fought for and won over generations. So, now we need to think even bigger about how we organize and how we build the type of structures that can resist this push to undermine fundamental rights. It’s incumbent upon us as global union federations and our affiliates as unions to harness that energy and build structures that not just resist, but win better working conditions, more rights, and defend collective bargaining across Europe and the globe.
Aside from your organizing experience with SEIU and UNI, you’ve worked with Organizing for Power (O4P), and you’ll be attending the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation’s upcoming Strike Conference in May to talk about that work. Can you tell us about your experiences with O4P and UNI’s connection to it?
I started working with O4P when I was the organizing director for our Americas office and leading organizing campaigns across Latin America. This was also during the pandemic when there was a huge sense of urgency among workers to take collective action and protect themselves, and urgency within union leadership to push back, especially to ensure essential workers had protective equipment and proper protocols. All of that required organizing.
There was a hunger for more training, and O4P was launching at about the same time. It provided another set of training experiences that our affiliates could access, and helped them realize that a lot of UNI’s organizing fundamentals are not something we invented, but are the same concepts we see unions and progressive organizations using across the world.
A lot of German companies that go to other countries where there are weaker unions or weaker labour systems to avoid confronting German unions.
Back then, participating in an O4P training with over 2,000 workers sharing experiences and best practices was particularly important in Brazil. The trade unions there had just suffered from reforms that decimated their financing. On top of this, many had become complacent and stopped organizing. Organizing for Power was an opportunity for the leadership of these unions to think about what practices they needed to re-implement.
Because of the programme, they had more exposure to and buy-in on some of the key fundamentals, which made it easier for us to put together a plan to rebuild the labour movement. We’ve had over a thousand union leaders from across Brazil from a number of different UNI sectors participate in the programme, and I think it’s been an important contributor to the union growth that we’ve been leading there.
Given the upcoming conference, let’s talk about Germany. There have been a variety of union revitalization efforts there, especially around collective bargaining for hospital workers. Can you tell us about the campaigns against Helios and Fresenius that you’re working on as head of UNI Global Care?
For a lot of unions around the world, the strength of the German labour movement is an inspiration, and we’ve seen the way German unions have been able to build that strength and win for workers. Unfortunately, there are a lot of German companies that go to other countries where there are weaker unions or weaker labour systems to avoid confronting these German unions.
Helios is part of a German multinational called Fresenius SE, and they’re the largest private hospital company in the world. While they mostly respect workers’ rights in Germany, when they started buying up private hospitals in Colombia, they took a different approach. They were fined by the government for anti-union activity. In many cases, they refused to collectively bargain with the unions, and there was a high level of fear among workers, especially when two union leaders received death threats during negotiations with the company. We don’t know who was behind those threats, but when you’re working in a country like Colombia with a long history of anti-union violence, we believe that multinational companies have a responsibility to not just respond to problems when they happen, but proactively work with trade unions to make sure that workers’ rights are respected.
At first, the company refused to even denounce publicly that workers were under threat — in our experience, that would’ve been the best way to make sure the threats stopped. So, with support from the German trade unions, we brought the story to the press in one of the country’s largest newspapers and put the company on the record. Although it had been almost a year of unions in Colombia demanding they take a stand with no response, once they were put on the record, the death threats stopped.
On top of that, we’ve seen huge membership growth. What started as a small union of 35 women at one hospital now has almost 1,000 members across four different hospitals and, despite a lot of resistance, won collective bargaining agreements in each of those hospitals. We are continuing the struggle by working together with not just the German unions, but unions from around the world that represent Fresenius workers, to hold the company accountable and make sure that the same rights that workers have in Germany are respected throughout the world.
UNI has done similar work in the healthcare sector in Southeastern Europe in partnership with the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. Can you tell us more about that?
Southeastern Europe is a great example where UNI worked with our affiliates and also with partner organizations of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation to tackle a growing number of expanding Western European multinational companies. Oftentimes, they’re turning healthcare into a business at the expense not only of workers but also of patients and residents of nursing homes.
In Slovenia, for example, with the large German dialysis company Fresenius, we held organizing trainings with support from the foundation and ultimately won collective bargaining for the first time for those dialysis workers. They won 30 percent raises in their first contract, which meant a huge change in their quality of life.
We need to reimagine our health and care systems, and nobody knows better what is needed than the people who work tirelessly every day to take care of our family members.
In Croatia, we built on the same partnership configuration and created the first-ever private nursing home union there, which won a collective bargaining agreement with Emeis (previously Orpea), the largest private nursing home company in the world. That historic victory never would have happened without the partnership between the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation and UNI, and I think it just goes to show that when we work together, we can accomplish a lot.
There’s a massive push to turn healthcare into a business, and the people paying the cost of that are healthcare workers, who are increasingly being driven out of the sector due to poor working conditions, as well as patients who suffer the consequences of short-staffed and overworked care systems. But by working together, we can build power for healthcare workers, which not only improves working conditions but defends publicly funded healthcare systems throughout the world.
To wrap things up, can you tell us about UNI’s broader vision following these wins?
I think ultimately, we need to reimagine our health and care systems, and nobody knows better what is needed than the people who work tirelessly every day to take care of our family members.
We need to build power not just to win improvements in working conditions, but for care workers to have a seat at the table when employers, governments, and policymakers are deciding what these systems should look like. I feel confident that by building collective power, care workers can win these seats, and in turn, we will see a revolution in healthcare that centres caregivers and care receivers rather than profit.