Australia ranked alongside Chile, Ghana, UK on workers’ rights

The International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) has named Australia as a “country of concern” during the opening of its third congress in Berlin.

At the congress the ITUC released its first global ranking of rights – a scale which ranks countries from 1 (those with the best rights) through to 5 (those with the worst).

Australia gained a ranking of 3, indicating “regular violations of rights” and a regular interference in collective labour rights. The ranking places Australia alongside Ghana, the UK, Singapore and Chile.

Denmark was the only country to achieve a perfect score of 0.

The ITUC also released a poll during the conference, which found that in Australia 84% of respondents felt that ordinary citizens do not have enough influence in global decision making.

The poll, which was conducted across 14 countries, found 68% think their government is doing a bad job at tackling unemployment, 78% believe the economic system favours the wealthy rather than the majority and more than half rate the economic situation in their country as bad.

See the opening speech from ITUC general secretary and former ACTU president Sharan Burrow here.