Dear Colleagues, Brothers and Sisters,

Welcome to the Website of the Bureau for Workers' Activities (ACTRAV) of the International Labour Office!

This site is conceived as a working tool to serve trade union organizations, their members and working women and men. It will help to provide information to meet the enormous challenges in our fast-changing world:   globalization of economy, trade and industrial relations. 

We want to introduce you to our site and hope that it will allow you to "navigate" more easily through the immensity of all kinds of information that overwhelms us today. The way the ACTRAV site is arranged should allow you to get valuable documentation and information in a quick and comprehensive manner. 

But let's see together what we can really offer to you.

First and foremost, the site puts at your fingertips extensive information on workers' activities and our expertise in a variety of fields:

    International labor standards, fundamental principles and rights at work
    Employment
    Social protection
    Freedom of Association and Social Dialogue
    Child Labour
    Environment Protection
    Gender promotion
    Youth issues
    Workers' education
    Research work and
    Publications on workers issues

On the other hand, the site of ACTRAV can take you, if you wish, to all regions of the world where ILO structures work for you. It will open up for you new horizons and provide you with perspectives you might be not well familiar with. It will allow you to meet new friends and to find new solidarity in hundreds of national, regional and international trade union organizations. 

Moreover, this working tool will guide you to the majority of other elements of our ILO structures. In fact, other ILO Web pages contain invaluable contributions to the issues that are covered on our ACTRAV's own site pages. We, in ACTRAV, do believe that the best results can, and should, be achieved through a holistic approach and creative synergies, both within and outside the ILO.

So, you may consider this site as one of the gateways to a tremendous wealth of knowledge and expertise embodied in the ILO as a whole, and in other members of the big UN family.

The Bureau for Workers' Activities gives support to the Workers' group of the Governing Body of the ILO. Because of this important mandate, you will find on our site special pages dealing with the work of the Governing Body and with major positions that members of the Group take on important questions. In the same way, these pages supply members of the Workers' group with basic useful data for the activities in which they are involved.

Workers' education is another ACTRAV priority. The page dedicated to it will take you to the ILO International Training Center in Turin (Italy), where ACTRAV carries out an important program of education activities for trade union officials. This program includes Distance Learning elements. Without leaving your chair, you can attend interesting and useful courses in order to upgrade your knowledge in a number of fields of trade union work.

And, of course, our site would not be complete without the possibility of hearing from you and taking your comments and suggestions into consideration. Please, visit Your Voice page and the Discussion Corner and share with us your ideas, experience, critical remarks etc.

In this way, with your assistance and cooperation, all members of the Bureau will keep trying to improve our site further in order to keep on serving workers' organizations better and better and to help promote the ratification and implementation of ILO Conventions for the benefit of social justice.

So, very cordially, I invite you to keep in touch with us.

     Jim Baker
     Director of the Bureau for Workers' Activities of the ILO