Students get Lesson on Labour Laws from Multinational Brunel

19.10.2019

Students get Lesson on Labour Laws from Multinational Brunel

Wittenborg students were treated to an inside look on labour relations the world over, courtesy of Arno Bracco Gartner, manager of strategic client organisation at Dutch multinational Brunel International NV, which provides personnel services in specialist markets such as the oil and gas industry.

Gartner, who has worked at Brunel for 23 years, of which 14 were spent abroad, was a guest speaker on international labour relations at Wittenborg recently. His company has 117 offices in 44 countries around the world and Gartner himself has worked in the US and Singapore.

Gartner said while many governments are smart and facilitate different treaties to accommodate foreign workers, elsewhere labour laws and regulations actually work against closing the skills-shortage gap. He gave a run-down of the different situations in Texas (US), Brazil, southern Europe, Qatar and Australia. “Don’t underestimate the relationship between a country’s labour laws and its economic growth,” he told students.

In Australia, for instance, Gartner said that lots of jobs are highly unionised. That means foreign companies can only bring in skeleton international crews when working, for example, in the oil and gas industry, of which the country has huge resources. “Unions have actually destroyed the construction industry there,” Gartner said.

He also cited the Philippines, whose biggest export is people – it was estimated in 2016 that more than 2.3 million Filipinos are working abroad.