About Thompsons

International Campaigns

We strive to use our experience to support and help workers worldwide. Our strong affiliation with UK unions has been crucial to our achievements internationally.

 

Union Solidarity International

Thompsons is pleased to support an initiative designed to connect trade union members and progressive people across the world. By using social media and technology we believe USI can play an invaluable role in building international solidarity on a daily basis.

Please select one of the links below to read more about our work on international campaigns.

• South Africa
• India & Bangladesh
• Cuba
• Colombia
• Palestine
• Venezuela

 

South Africa

Using our expertise and financial backing, South African miners and their families won a landmark £45 million settlement in 2003 from companies that had ruthlessly exploited their labour throughout the apartheid years. Despite knowledge of the lethal dangers of asbestos, mining companies continued to excavate the mineral exposing thousands of men, women and children and condemning them to long term illness and terminal cancer. Come the end of apartheid, the companies closed their mining operations and hoped to slip away with the profits. The litigation by Thompsons made them face up to some of their responsibilities.

Thompsons looked to pursue another mining company on behalf of miners and their families but the law has changed. Following the first settlements Thompsons helped South African lawyers (who they had worked with) to set up a law firm. The firm has offices in Johannesburg and the same guiding principles as Thompsons.

As well as processing claims to the trust funds set up as a result of the successful asbestos cases, the law firm established with Thompsons help continues to fight for justice for working people in South Africa.

India & Bangladesh

Thompsons has met or worked with Indian and Bangladeshi trade unionists and UK trade unions to look at the possibility of organising and representing the workforce in the shipbreaking industry.

Workers, who are paid a pittance, break ships without any protection and remove dangerous materials by hand. They are not given any safety equipment, despite the fact that the ships are full of asbestos and other hazardous chemicals.

In a country with massive poverty workers are prepared to gamble their health in return for a job, even for as little as a dollar a day. Unionisation of a transitory and hugely poor workforce is an uphill struggle.

To complicate matters further, it is very difficult for the unions to establish ownership of the vessels and of the companies who employ the workers because of the corporate practice of hiding behind a trail of "shell" companies. It can take the unions a long time to unravel this multilayered facade, by which stage the owners may well have sold on.

Thompsons has pledged to continue to offer advice on strategies which may be adopted to confront this callous exploitation of ship breaking workers.

Cuba

Thompsons has worked extensively with the trade union movement and the Cuba Solidarity Campaign in defence of the Cuban people's right to self determination, against the illegal US blockade, and for the freedom of the unjustly imprisoned Miami Five.

Despite its size, Cuba has established a model health service and education system, and is an inspiration in the way it protects its public sector. It offers international solidarity throughout Latin America and around the world, and is able to send doctors where they are needed.

When the Soviet Union collapsed and Cuba faced enormous difficulties, Thompsons worked with UNISON and other unions to deliver much needed supplies, and in particular ambulances, to the Cuban health service.

The links established then and since have been used to work with individual unions and the TUC to develop solidarity work with the CTC (the Cuban equivalent of the TUC), and with other Latin American countries who support Cuba.

Thompsons fully supports the campaign to secure the freedom of the Miami Five, and is involved with other human rights lawyers and with the trade union movement to highlight the plight of the five amongst the trade union and legal community.

A number of Thompsons' staff have been involved in fund raising activities including cycle rides across Cuba to raise funds for vital educational equipment for Cuba's schools.

Colombia

Colombia is the most dangerous place in the world to be a trade unionist. Partners and staff who have been to Colombia on delegations have spoken on platforms to highlight the plight of Colombian trade unionists.

Thompsons campaigns for the release of political prisoners in Colombia. Thompsons offices have adopted prisoners to campaign for by working with the NGO Justice for Colombia (JFC). This has resulted in the freeing of a number of trade union activists held unjustly, in appalling conditions.

Thompsons has worked with a number of UK trade unions on a number of specific projects:

1. With UNITE and JFC to strengthen the human rights department and set up a legal department for Fensuagro - Colombia's second largest trade union and one of the most persecuted.

2. With ATL, NASUWT AND NUT, to help Fecode the teachers' union, with a recruitment campaign, showing newly qualified teachers the importance of being in a trade union.

3. With CWU, NIPSA and GMB southern region in partnership with the Permanent Committee for the Defence of Human Rights, to link displaced people and their families, the victims of violence, with professional psychologists, post trauma therapists and social workers.

Palestine

Thompsons' partners took part in union delegations in 2008 and 2010 and will be attending again in 2010. The delegates went to the Occupied Palestinian Territories to see first hand what was going on in the West Bank cities of Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Ramallah, Nablus Hebron and Haifa, as well as other towns and villages. They met with Palestinian trade unions and Human Rights Groups.

They were harrowing trips: group members were forcibly ejected by settlers in Hebron and tear gassed in Bil'in. Delegation members reported that they were shocked at the extremes of human rights abuses, lawlessness, and cruelty inflicted on the Palestinian people.

As a consequence, Thompsons decided to affiliate to the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) and has since worked with unions to raise awareness of the desperate situation of the people in the occupied territories by speaking out about human rights abuses when it can.

This project has received significant support from Thompsons staff with many of them getting involved in local PSC groups and attending protests in London and elsewhere and getting involved in fundraising activities for PSC.

Venezuela

One of Thompsons' senior partners attended Caracas at the invitation of the President to act as a legal observer during the 2005 elections and the invitation has been extended again.

The firm works with the Venezuela Solidarity Campaign (a UK based campaign group) which seeks to highlight and correct inaccuracies and distortions made about Venezuela in the press and other media.

Thompsons has supported the Venezuela Under Threat campaign by speaking and chairing meetings and sponsored the launch of Oliver Stone's film, South of the Border.

 

Download a copy of this booklet - Published May 2011 [PDF, 262KB]

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