The idea of a Global Labor Charter Movement comes out of both desperation and hope.  The desperation is due to seeing the labor movement, in North, South, East or West, floundering under the multiple attacks delivered by contemporary capitalism, and by labor's lack of any such socially unifying and mobilizing vision as inspired it in the past.  The hope comes from seeing such energy and vision within the so-called global justice and solidarity movement (GJ&SM).

1. The idea of a GLCM is to develop a charter, declaration or manifesto on labor, relevant to all working people, under the conditions of a radically transformed and highly aggressive capitalism, neo-liberalized and globalized.
2. The idea of such a charter has been provoked by a couple of recent international labor declarations (Bamako Appeal 2006, Labor's Platform for the Americas 2006).  A common limitation of these otherwise very different documents is that each was produced and issued for acceptance or endorsement, by union leaderships or intellectual elites, without discussion by union members, shop-floor or community activists themselves.  The GLC notion is, however, also inspired by the Women's Global Charter for Humanity (2004), produced after worldwide discussion by a new mobilizing social movement.
3. In so far as this project is addressed to the emancipation of life from work (work here meaning labor for capital and state, empire and patriarchy), it implies articulating (both joining and expressing) labor struggles with those of other oppressed and exploited social categories, people and peoples -- particularly that majority of workers, women.  The existence of a growing global justice and solidarity movement (GJ&SM), best known through the World Social Forum (WSF) process, makes such articulation increasingly possible.
4. Its title could be the "Global Labor Charter Movement" (or GLCM21).  "Charter" reminds us of one of the earliest radical-democratic popular-popular movements of industrial capitalism, the British Chartists.  "Movement" reminds us that the development of such a declaration requires a process and the self-mobilization of workers.
5. Such a process needs to reveal its origins and debts.  These are to the new forms of labor self-organization (within and beyond unions), to the shop-floor, urban and rural labor networks (local, national, international), to the labor NGOs (labor service organizations), and to a growing wave of labor education, communication, and research responding to the crisis of the labor movement.
6. The novel principle of such a charter should be its conception as a "virtuous spiral" -- that it be conceived not as a single, correct, final declaration, which workers and other people simply endorse (though endorsement could be part of the process), as for its processal, dialogical, and developing nature.  This notion would allow for it to be begun, paused, and joined at any point.  Such a process would require at least the following elements: information/communication, education, dialogue, (re-)formulation, action, evaluation, information.
7. It is the existence of cyberspace (the internet, the web, computerized audio-visuals) that makes such a Global Labor Charter for the first time conceivable.  We have here not simply a new communications technology but the possibility for developing non-hierarchical, dialogical, equal relations worldwide.  The process will be computer-based because of the web's built-in characteristics of feedback, its worldwide reach, its low and decreasing cost.  An increasing number of workers and activists are in computerized work, are familiar with information and communication technology, and have web skills.  Given, however, uneven worker computer access, such a process must also be intensely local, imply and empower outreach, using the communication methods appropriate to particular kinds of labor and each specific locale.
8. Networking can and must ensure that any initiators or coordinators do not become permanent leaders or controllers.  There is a growing international body of fulltime organizers and volunteer activists, both within and beyond the traditional inter/national unions, experienced in the GJ&SM, who could provide the initial nodes in such a network.  Networking also, however, allows for there to be various such charters, in dialogue with each other.  Such dialogue should be considered a normal and even necessary part of the process and avoid the authority, dependency or passivity associated with traditional manifestos.
9. If this proposal assumes the crisis of the traditional trade unions, it should be clear that it simultaneously represents an opportunity for them.  This is for a reinvention of the form of labor self-articulation (again: organization and expression), as has occurred more than once in the history of capitalism (from guilds to craft unions, from craft to inter/national industrial unions).  By abandoning what is an increasingly imaginary power, centrality, or privilege, unions could simultaneously reinvent themselves and become a necessary and significant part of a movement for social emancipation worldwide.  The form or forms of such a reinvention will emerge precisely out of a continuing dialogue, the dialectic between organizational and networking activities.
10. Starting with the first edition(s) of any GLC, there could be a list of globally-agreed demands and campaigns, with these having emancipatory (demonstrably subversive, empowering, socially transformative) implications for those involved.  Rather than increasing their dependence on capital, state, patriarchy, empire, any GLC must increase their solidarity with other popular and radically-democratic sectors/movements.
11. Any such campaigns must, however, be seen as not carved in stone but as collective experiments, to be collectively evaluated.  They should therefore be dependent on collective self-activity, implying global solidarity, as with the 200-year-old (but never completed!) campaign for the eight-hour day.  There is a wide range of imaginable issues (of which the following are hypothetical examples, in no necessary order of priority):

• A Six Hour Day, A Five Day Week, A 48 Week Year, thus distributing available work more widely, reducing overwork;
• Global Labor Rights, including the right to strike and inter/national solidarity action, but first consulting workers -- including migrants, precarious workers, unpaid care-givers ("housewives"), the unemployed -- on their priorities; and secondly by prioritizing collective struggles and creative activity over leadership lobbying;
• A Global Basic Income Grant, in the interests of women, of the unemployed, etc.;
• A Centennial Reinvention of the ILO in 1919, raising labor representation from 25 to 50 percent, and simultaneously sharing the raised percentage with non-unionized workers;
• A  Global Campaign for Useful Work, reaching beyond conditions of or at work ("Decent Work") to deal with useful production, socially-responsible consumption, environmental sustainability;
• All in Common, a campaign for the defense and extension of forms of common ownership and control (thus challenging both the privatization process and capitalist ownership in general);
• A reinvention of Mayday as a Global Labor and Social Movements Solidarity Day (as being done by precarious workers in Europe and by immigrant labor in the USA);
• Support to the principle of Solidarity Economics and the practice of the Solidarity Economy, i.e. production, distribution, exchange, that surpasses the competitive, divisive, hierarchical, growth-fixated, wasteful, polluting, destructive principles of capitalism.
• A Global Labor Forum, as part of, or complementing, the World Social Forum, an assembly organized autonomously from the International Labour Organization (ILO), and the Global Unions, whilst open to all);
• This proposal is clearly marked by its origin, in terms of its author, place and language.  It is, however, issued under the principle of CopyLeft. It can therefore be adapted, replaced, challenged, rejected and, obviously, ignored.  Its only requirement or hope is that it be discussed.

References/resources:

Bamako Appeal. 2006. mrzine.monthlyreview.org/bamako.html

Labor's Platform for the Americas. 2006. www.gpn.org/research/orit2005/index.html.

Waterman, Peter. 2006. "Hacia un movimiento para una carta laboral global," Revista Cultura y Trabajo (Medellín), No. 69, October.

Women's Global Charter for Humanity. 2004. worldmarchofwomen.org/qui_nous_sommes/charte/en

^*  See South African Labour Bulletin, Vol. 30, No. 3, 2006.