Effect given to the recommendations of the committee and the Governing Body - Report No 325, June 2001

Case No 1987 (El Salvador) - Complaint date: 26-AUG-98 - Closed

Effect given to the recommendations of the Committee and the Governing Body

1. 22. The Committee last examined this case, relating to the refusal to recognize and to grant legal personality to various trade unions, at its November 2000 meeting [see 323rd Report, paras. 61-62]. On that occasion the Committee requested the Government to keep it informed with regard to the process of reform of the Labour Code and expressed the hope that full account would be taken of its recommendations in that process.
2. 23. In a communication of 7 February 2001, the Government informs the Committee that on 20 October 2000 the Ministry of Labour and Social Welfare of El Salvador, in accordance with a decision handed down by the administrative litigation division of the Honourable Supreme Court of Justice, decided to grant legal personality to the Trade Union of the El Salvador Telecommunications Company (SUTTEL), whose credentials were issued on 14 November 2000 as the trade union elected its General Executive Committee on 29 October 2000, which will exercise its functions until 23 May 2001.
3. 24. The Government stresses that if the Ministry of Labour has not encouraged negotiations between the employer and the trade union it is because the Labour Code establishes that in order for an employer to be obliged to recognize a trade union as representative of workers’ interests for the purposes of negotiation and collective bargaining, that trade union must represent the majority of the enterprise’s workers, which is not the case. The Government adds that in the company in question, there is already a trade union organization with legal personality granted by the Secretary of State, called the Trade Union of the El Salvador Telecommunications Enterprise (SUTTEL). The complainant organization later informed the ILO that the company formally committed itself, under an agreement, to bargain with the SUTTEL.
4. 25. The Committee notes this information, and once again requests the Government to keep it informed with regard to the reform of the Labour Code in the light of the recommendations it has made in previous examinations of the case.