My father, Dan Gallin, who has died aged 94, was an outstanding figure in the international trade union movement over many decades. As general secretary of the International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant, Tobacco and Allied Workers’ Associations (IUF) from 1968 to 1997, Dan worked to build the organisation into a global force.
Under his leadership, the IUF underwent a significant expansion and organised the first international trade union campaign against a transnational company. Workers at the Coca-Cola company’s franchised bottler in Guatemala City seeking to form a union were being systematically murdered, and corporate headquarters were proving reluctant to address the matter.
From 1979 until 1984, the IUF organised a campaign, including boycotts and work stoppages in support of the Guatemalan workers. The company ultimately agreed to replace the franchise holder, recognise and bargain with the union, and indemnify families of the murdered workers.
The IUF pioneered the negotiation of agreements between international union organisations and transnational companies to secure trade union rights, beginning with the French-based BSN (later to become Danone) in 1988.
Dan understood that the trade union movement had to expand to encompass the millions of workers active in the informal economy, but who were excluded from legal recognition as workers and outside the formal structures of the trade union movement. The IUF brought India’s Self Employed Women’s Association into the international labour movement through affiliation to the IUF in the early 1980s.
The son of Romanian parents, Ana (nee Kuharczik) and Trajan Gallin, Dan was born in Lvov, then in Poland and is now Lviv in Ukraine. His father was in the Romanian diplomatic service, serving as pro-consul in Lvov, and was later transferred to Hamburg, then in 1940 to Berlin, where Dan attended the French Gymnasium. In 1943 he was sent to safety in Switzerland. In Rolle he attended the Institut Le Rosey and finished his French baccalauréat at the Ecole Lemania in Lausanne in 1949.
After studies in the US at the University of Kansas, he returned to Switzerland with his companion Elizabeth Focht, whom he married in 1953 and with whom he had two daughters, Julia and me.
After a master’s in sociology at the University of Geneva and a spell at the United Nations office in Geneva, he was hired in 1960 to work for Juul Poulsen, then IUF general secretary. The IUF now has more than 400 member organisations, including the BFAWU, Unite, Usdaw and the GMB in the UK, and aims to stop international strike-breaking through the importation of foreign workers.
Following his retirement from the IUF, in 1997 Dan established the Global Labour Institute in Geneva as a labour movement resource committed to helping trade unionists think critically and boldly, and was actively engaged in the setting up of similar organisations elsewhere.
He visited Britain regularly to meet friends, comrades, and colleagues from across the British trade union movement. As well as the UK Global Labour Institute in Manchester, he made annual visits between 2012 and 2016 to Northern College in Barnsley, where he helped to organise a series of GLI international summer schools for trade unionists. Dan’s extensive library will soon be housed at the Working-Class Movement Library in Manchester.
His marriage to Elizabeth ended in divorce. He is survived by his second wife, Joëlle Kuntz, a journalist, whom he married in 1984, and by Julia and me.
