Krasnodar, 12 December – Yug Times. The participants of the 7th annual UN Forum on Business and Human Rights - public activists and lawyers, experts and CEOs of the world’s leading companies, trade unions leaders and human rights activists from dozens of countries throughout the globe - gathered in Geneva, Switzerland, on November 26-28 to discuss corporate responsibility of business and defence of employees’ interests.
We asked Gennadi Podlesny, President of Krasnodar’s Centre for Applied Social and Political Science, member of the Kuban Business Club, and a participant of the Forum, to share his impressions with readers of The Yug Times.
“For me, it wasn’t a stunning revelation to listen to the speeches of human rights activists from a number of Asian and African countries, where they recounted about the slave labour of 12-year-old kids at cocoa-nut plantations, or 14-olds at lead mines and toy factories, with a 12-hour-long working day. It’s a very cynic situation indeed! But for my colleagues who were taking part in the UN Forum for the first time, such information was a dramatic surprise.
“The human rights topic as it was didn’t occupy most of the time of the Forum - it was more of an accompanying problem of the issue of interaction between business circles and society.
“The problems of employees in European countries are very much alike - wage levels gap for men and women; abundancy of unskilled workforce due to the inflow of migrants from East Europe, and lack of highly qualified engineers; violation of labour safety rules by many employers, etc. The problem of migrants from Middle East and Africa was another, different issue for discussion.
“As for the Russian problems, they were raised by delegates from the UK, Denmark, Latvia and Lithuania. But the problems were worded in an extremely incorrect manner, without supporting them with any negative facts.”
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