Some advice on how to reflect the international dimension in trade union information

Here are put together some advice that the participants at a meeting in February 2008 shared with each other.

How to reflect the international dimension in trade union work

There are many ways to reflect the international dimension.

• Take advantage of the low prices when it comes to airflights. Then it's not that expensiv to send a reporter to India, for example, in order to make an article about high tech industries.

• You can apply for fundings for international information, from different development assistance organizations (in Sweden for example LO-TCO Secretariat of International Trade Unions Development Co-operation or SIDA).

• You mustn't always travel abroad your self if you are about to write about something outside of your own country. You can instead interview shop stewards and trade union officers who have been participating in international activities, for example in developing projects.

• You can engage freelance journalists in other countries. One of the Finnish participants did that when making a number of articles about the every day life of workers in different countries. He sent a questionnaire to Finnish freelance journalists located in other countries asking if they were willing to report from this starting point. The journalists who accepted also engaged a local photographer. It worked out very well.

• You can coordinate private travels with working trips, so that the trade union pays half of the travel costs and the reporter half.

• You can interview members that have been working abroad, as well as workers from others countries working in your own country.

• You can take advantage of the international knowledge at, for example, the trade union offices in Brussels, in order to describe what is happening in the international and European arena. One had an employee at FinUnions as a columnist in the members magazine, another one Jyrki Rain

How to make international information interesting

It is important to find an angle of the international information that makes it interesting for a member of the union. Some suggestions were

• To describe how issues that are debated intensely in your own country are seen upon in other countries that might have more experience in the matter. For example Flexicurity in Denmark and household services in Finland.

• To make surveys of salaries and other working conditions in some competing countries, in connection to the national collective bargainings.

• To describe the life of an ordinary worker, depending on in what country he or she is living - for exampel a Swedish, a Danish, a German or a French metalworker. Here you can also have some information from the global unions. IMF has for example a report on purchasing power/metalworkers income.

• You can describe international events in the perspective of how it will effect the every day life of a shopsteward or a member.

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