APEC-LABOUR: Free Trade Can Erode Workers’ Rights, Warn Unionists

By Suvendrini Kakuchi Reprint | | Print |

Suvendrini Kakuchi

OSAKA, Nov 16 1995 (IPS) - Rather than help the cause of the worker, free trade could only set back the struggle for labour rights, say trade unionists observing the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit here this weekend.

“Free trade works contrary to our long fight for workers’ rights,” said Robert Reid, coordinator of the Asia-Pacific Workers Solidarity Links, a Bangkok-based trade union.

The past decade has seen foreign investment in the region increase 10-fold, raising the living standards in many countries.

But workers’ rights have failed to keep pace with the region’s rapid development. Foreign firms in search of cheap labour opened factories in Asia where a large number of single women — many of them still in their teens — work six days a week, receive low wages and are banned from forming unions to protect their rights.

In addition, these women are forced out of their jobs after around seven years due to work-related health problems such as weakening eye sight and a drop in production capacity brought on by prolonged work schedules.

Work safety standards have also largely been ignored in the pursuit of profits by Asia’s fast-growing economies.

Fires have often raged through overcrowded factories in the region, many of them garment manufacturing units strewn with flammable fabrics.

In Bangkok, Manila and Jakarta which are experiencing high-rise construction booms, unprotected workers are regularly killed by collapsing scaffoldings and foundations despite official warnings against substandard equipment and procedures.

“We are moving so fast the necessary protective measures are easily passed over,” said Vitit Muntaborn, a human rights activist and lecturer at Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University.

Reid, a New Zealander, says the development programmes now under way in the region offer attractive investment policies, such as a trade-union free labour system, in order to compete in the free trade market.

Most developing countries, despite being members of International Labour Organization, ban trade unions in their free trade zones in order to increase foreign investment.

Mainly Korean, Taiwanese and Chinese companies have set up operations in the region to cut down costs of producing goods for Western and Japanese multinational firms which make huge profits by selling the products for high prices in their own countries.

“The Asia-Pacific region has become the focus of our commercial activities. APEC economies account for 77 percent of our exports,” Taiwan’s economic minister, P K Chiang, told reporters in Osaka.

Labour-intensive industries, such as manufacturing of footwear, garments, textiles, plastic products, computer chips and toys, make up the bulk of foreign investments.

Wages are high in Korea — around three dollars an hour — in sharp contrast to Thailand where workers get three dollars a day for the same work.

Discussions currently taking place in Osaka have covered, among others, a Japanese proposal to provide 100 million dollars for a project called ‘Partners for Progress’ for the development of small- and medium-size companies in developing countries.

Reid said the proposal has, under intense pressure from Australia and the United States, been adopted under the name of technical training to promote free trade in developing countries.

“This is extremely worrying,” he said. “In light of the worsening conditions for workers, the new proposal will only mean workers are commodities for rich companies.”

Last year’s APEC summit in Bogor, Indonesia, set the year 2010 as the target date for total liberalisation of trade for rich APEC members and 2020 for developing countries.

An Action Agenda now being working out in Osaka outlines the need for each country to develop its own plan towards achieving liberalisation, the key to the success of the group that comprises 40 percent of the global population.

Reid says New Zealand, which has high unemployment rates, recently adopted a new resolution in parliament rejecting labour laws that promote trade unions, recommending instead individual agreements between employees and employers.

This type of alternative successfully cuts out collective bargaining by trade unions, a powerful tool for workers, and also does not specify a timeframe in which decisions must be taken by the employer on a contentious issue.

“We are afraid that this type of model is what New Zealand, Australia and the United States are pushing on APEC. The fact that there is no discussion on the rights of workers in APEC is also very disturbing,” said Reid.

Liberalisation of farm trade — another issue hotly debated in APEC — will increase unemployment, he added. Rural workers in search of jobs have been flooding into the region’s cities, worsening unemployment in developing countries.

“APEC must provide some basic standards,” said Reid. “They must talk about maintaining basic standards, non-discrimination, protection of the migrant workers rights and child labour.”