Unions have to confront issues of inequality at a global level if they are to protect members and create a fair society, the new ICTU president, Ms Inez McCormack, told the conference yesterday.
She said "the penny is dropping", even with "the World Bank and other organs of global capital, that the current dysfunctional global relationship between economic and social development is producing catastrophes whose damage cannot be limited to the poor.
"The challenge facing the ICTU is whether we can contribute to building an ethic and practice on this island and in the global debate which transforms the position of the economic and social have-nots."
She also said: "As president of congress I will actively lead the ICTU team in the partnership negotiations with the Irish Government and, hopefully, with the new North-South political institutions. "The challenge I bring is that equality, inclusion and human rights become central to any new partnerships with governments North and South."
She added: "If, in the most brutal of economic and political environments in the North, the most disadvantaged of both communities can work together to put such practices at the heart of the Good Friday agreement, then the ICTU can do no less."
On the need to create "social ground rules" to prevent the worst excesses by multinational companies, such as employing child labour, Ms McCormack said the World Trade Organisation would have to be involved. "If big business is serious about promoting an agenda of human rights then these have to be integrated into agreements on world trade and not given a residual role."
Later, a lecturer in racism and gender at UCD, Ms Shalini Sinha, told the conference her own contact with racism was "a daily and systematic experience". She described Irishness as "an exclusively white experience".
People born abroad of Irish decent were accepted as Irish, she said, but not black people born in Ireland. "It's not us - black, Traveller, Jewish or Muslim people - who have the problem, but the white settled Christian community in Ireland, which doesn't interact with us in any sort of normal way.
"It is you who are distant, mistrusting and awkward. You are not OK with our difference. You look at us like we are strange kinds of people. You talk to us like we are really different from you."
She asked: "What would be so bad about valuing the richness that comes from nomadic or non-Western culture. What great evil would happen if you were to trust us and consider us just as able to do the job, just as thoughtful and intelligent as you, just as human?"