Over 50 trade union leaders from FIA and UNI MEI gathered in November in Mexico City for a joint regional capacity building seminar. The event was organized as part of a 2 year project, funded with the support of the Swedish union Teaterförbundet and Union to Union, and aimed at increasing the capacity of union leaders in Latin America to make unions more powerful and sustainable.
The capacity building seminar focused on a series of issues which are of key concern to unions and workers in the audiovisual sector, including how to address sexual harassment, how to increase gender equality in the workplace, and how to enhance collective bargaining in the audiovisual sector. FIA members from Teaterförbundet, Sweden, and ANDA, Mexico, actively took part in the meetings by providing specific expertise.
In a global context of increased awareness that unions and employers need to address this issue in a systematic way, the seminar was opened with an in-depth training on how to tackle sexual harassment in the audiovisual industry. Veronica Fernandes Mendez, Head of the UNI Global Union Equal Opportunities Department, and union leaders from Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, the USA, and Sweden provided a set of resourceful examples and on how unions can detect, prevent and address cases of sexual harassment, and how they can counsel and support victims.
Increasing gender equality in the workplace was the focus of a second full-day training session, providing union leaders with concrete tools and good practices, such as checklists, charters, and collective bargaining mechanisms which can significantly improve gender equality in key areas including equal pay, work-life balance, gender stereotypes, and women in decision making positions.
Finally, union leaders focused on how to intensify and relaunch collective bargaining in the audiovisual sector across the region. Several good practices of collective bargaining at enterprise and sector level were show-cased and triggered a region-wide debate on how unions can effectively relaunch collective bargaining to achieve agreements which are inclusive of all workers in the sector and tackle some of the most burning issues for workers in sector, including outsourcing, improved working conditions, health and safety at work, up-skilling, and pay rise.
Right after the seminar, the Latin-American group of FIA, FIA-LA, also met separately to discuss issues of common interest and regional strategies for performer unions. The regional groups issued 3 joint Declarations available for download here under (only in Spanish).
– Declaracion sobre Brasil _ Mexico 2019
