3rd Regional Conference - PRECARIOUS WORK

In this resolution, the 3rd ITUC Asia Pacific Conference expresses serious concern about the drastic surge in precarious work across the Asia and Pacific region, regardless of the level of economic development due to the flexible labour market policy. The conference denounces that national laws do not adequately protect workers in precarious employment; existing legal frameworks have proven incapable of preventing and addressing the rise in precarious work, in particular it fails to prevent employers from using various types of employment as a means of shifting the risks and costs associated with work from the employer to the worker.

The Conference specifically stresses that precarious work is used in business operations as an instrument to exclude union activists from organising and collective bargaining, or exercise of fundamental workers’ rights and to undermine the existing strength of trade unions by simply not renewing their contracts.

The Conference commits the ITUC-AP, working with affiliates and GUFs to conduct extensive organising campaigns for atypical workers to bring them to the union fold,  continue campaigns to limit or eliminate any forms of employment that create “precarity” in the workplace including outsourcing, casual, short-term contracting, strengthen legal protections for all workers in terms of working conditions employment security and exercise of fundamental workers’ rights, etc.