Can you tell me about the main issues facing women workers and unionists in the Netherlands?

The main issue is still equal pay. We have had equal pay legislation for 25 years, but the wage gap is still 20 per cent. The higher you go, the higher the wage gap is. Migrant women and ethnic minorities earn even less than their white sisters.

One of the other main issues is the reconciliation between the work and family care. We still need a lot more childcare facilities. Hopefully new legislation will be implemented soon. The advice to the government is a joint financial contribution, from the worker, the state, and employers.

What organising strategies have your organisation has found to be most successful, especially among women?

Some of the more innovative strategies we’ve used have involved working with different organisations, like sex workers, and giving them whatever assistance we can offer; giving them legal assistance, training in organising. They are connected to the unions, but we think it’s better that they do the organising themselves.

A few years ago, we had a part-time work campaign. This had three aims: organising part-time workers, improving labour conditions for part-time workers, but also encouraging men to take up part-time work. This is because men are also responsible for unpaid work at home. So we even had a billboard campaign with ads like “hello daddy, I’m your daughter”, and telling them to think about part-time work. And when you have men taking up part-time work, it also opens up more full-time positions for women.

Holland is viewed as having one of the stronger and more successful labour movements around the world. What can other countries learn from the Dutch experience?

Part-time work used to be a quite a hot subject in the trade union movement in Holland. A lot of unions in other countries think part-time work is bad for women, because they earn less and have little access to promotions. Their strategy is to combat part-time work. Our strategy is that part-time work is a reality. If you improve the conditions of part-time work, then you will help women more than you will with some ideological stance.

It is the same with undocumented workers. There are unions who say undocumented workers are illegal, so unions shouldn’t do anything. We say every worker has the right to organise - whether they are documented or undocumented, and unions should take up these issues.

And finally, what do you hope to achieve through this conference?

I want to bring home a lot of strategies that have been implemented successfully elsewhere in the world. But of course you have to adapt it to your own national situation.

This morning I went to a workshop on migrant and indigenous workers and I heard some ideas that we will try when I get home. One was from the UK, where unions asked the government to commission some research about the profits and the costs of migrant work. In the UK, migrant workers are 4 per cent of the labour force, but contribute 8 per cent to the Gross Domestic Product. That kind of instrument can be quite useful to combat racism.