Unhappy with her employer of five years, Chikako Harada, 34, quit three months ago and has just started on a new job with a large Internet sales company. 

“My English language capabilities give me an advantage in Japan’s difficult job market,” she explained. 

Harada may not represent the norm among female workers, but experts say she reflects the new determination of young Japanese women to make their way in a difficult job market through flexibility. 

“Women in their twenties and thirties are redefining the old labour model that worshipped lifetime employment in the male-dominated corporate world,” says Midori Ito, head of Action Centre for Working Women, an organisation that supports females in the labour market. 

“By being able to handle different jobs women are ushering fresh ideas into a bleak job market,” says Ito. 

As Japan grapples with growing unemployment, with companies preferring  part-time hiring to beat the economic recession, women are emerging as important role models, say labour experts. 

Prof. Fumio Ohtake, researcher on labour issues at the prestigious Osaka University, explained to IPS that the employment crunch has turned attention on conventional female work profiles marked by the sort of flexibility that can beat shrinking job opportunities. 

“In the male-dominated corporate world, female workers have commonly been relegated to the sidelines. It’s time to review the old image and take a lesson from the way women juggle their careers to survive,” Ohtake said. 

Japan’s 1985 equal opportunity law is rarely invoked and companies have  continued discriminatory practices with impunity. As a result, Japan has consistently ranked as the most unequal of the world’s rich countries, according to the United Nations Development Programme’s “gender empowerment measure.” 

Japan’s lifelong employment system, viewed as the lynchpin in Japan’s postwar economic miracle, favoured men based on their traditional role as family breadwinners. 

But, as companies cut back against a long economic recession the traditional job market is steadily being replaced by part-time or contract jobs, where women may stand a better chance. 

Indeed, new job opportunities over the past few years have mostly been part-time, and contract jobs now account for almost 34 percent of Japan’s 63 million labour force, including unemployed people. 

Women now comprise 70 percent of part-time employees, working mostly in the welfare and service sectors as homecare providers and in the restaurant business where salaries are on an hourly basis with few benefits. 

Aware of rising public anxiety over jobs, the government in August pledged to examine the status of part-timers and non-regular workers with a view to getting companies to offer full-time employment status for employees on the rolls for more than five years. 

In October, Japan will also raise the minimum wage to seven dollars per hour in a bid to raise the income of part-time workers. 

But experts are critical of the new measures as being piecemeal and not supporting long-term changes in the job market. 

Ito has long campaigned for ‘decent work’, an international concept that calls for employment that respects the rights of workers. Ito beleives that the job crisis can become a catalyst for both male and female workers to lead stable and content lives. 

“Younger women such as Harada, with her determination to find new jobs, reflect the desire among single women – and now an increasing number of younger men – to cope with the risk of joblessness by developing new work ethics and standards,” she told IPS. 

Yoshiko Otsu, head of the Society of Working Women, an established organisation that provides support for female part-time workers, acknowledged to IPS the need for such changes to cope with the increasing hardships. 

“The current situation is difficult for women workers whose status makes them vulnerable. The government must support women who want to break free of traditional shackles, but the new laws that promise to force companies to give them full-time jobs are unreal,” she said. 

Otsu’s organisation fields hundreds of inquiries each day from female contract employees who complain of unpaid salaries and sexual and power harassment from their male bosses. 

She is critical of new regulations by the government, saying that companies could easily resort to terminating the services of their female workers before they complete five years – making women even more insecure in the job market. 

While concrete statistics for new opportunities for women have not been recorded, existing data by researchers indicate that females are becoming leaders in the niche for opportunities in community work. 

Miki Hara, owner of ‘Drop’, a non-profit company based in Yokohama that offers services to mothers with young children, agrees. “My own experience has shown that it is possible to be financially independent by being innovative,” she explained to IPS. 

“The idea of starting a company that provides space for new mothers and their children to do things together came to me after rising public debt led to new official policies that recognised that bureaucrats alone cannot solve community issues,” she said. “We have to learn to support ourselves.”   

Drop now employs five fulltime workers and more than 30 part-timers. The going is not easy but Hara says her company has a pioneering role in community work.

Shumi attends school and does shifts at a brick factory. Credit: Naimul Haq/IPS

By Naimul Haq
DHAKA, Jul 3 2012 (IPS)

At first glance the smart young women in white overcoats, black rubber boots and protective face masks seem out of place in impoverished Bangladesh’s dirtiest industry – brick making. 

But this factory in Savar, 35 km outside Dhaka, is no ordinary brick kiln. It is a Hybrid Hoffman Kiln (HHK) which uses modified German technology that drastically cuts down the smoke and soot associated with firing blocks of clay into bricks.    

HHKs also use semi-automatic machines that do away with heavy manual labour, allowing women to be employed in brick-making in large numbers.   

Since production started at this demonstration unit last year, many of the women in nearby villages  have switched from being low-paid farm labourers to skilled brick makers. 

Says Salma Begum, 34, from the nearby Bhatiakandi village: “I used to toil nine hours at a stretch daily on a potato farm just to earn about 1,400 Bangladeshi taka (17 dollars) a month. 

“Now, working six hours daily as a supervisor at the loading section of this modern brick factory, I earn 64 dollars as monthly salary.” 

Rehana Begum, 42, a former labourer at a nearby vegetable farm, says her life changed after she took a five-month training stint at the same brick field. 

About six months ago, Rehana and her husband, Motin, signed on as regular workers. “My husband and I together make about 120 dollars a month, enough for my family of six that includes my mother-in-law,” she tells IPS. 

It was in 2010 that the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Bangladesh introduced new brick making technologies to replace the polluting fixed chimney kilns (FCK) that release large  amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. 

Traditionally, the brick industry in Bangladesh was unregulated, ran  during the six dry months of the year and depended heavily on male bonded labour. 

Md Hisham Uddin Chisty, research officer of Clean Energy Alternatives (CEA), consultants for HHK technology, told IPS: “The new design allows women to participate in production as the heavy work is mechanised.”   

The women are happy to learn new skills. “I joined as an apprentice three months ago after five days of training at the factory. I learnt how to operate some of latest machines and make good quality bricks,” says Shahera Begum, 27. 

Md Murtoja Ali, marketing manager of CEA, told IPS: “Women are preferred in certain sections where heavy work is not involved and where they perform far better than their males because they have more patience. 

“We give opportunities to all the women living in the nearby villages so that they get some experience. About 82 of the women are on short-term contracts which allow them to take time off to attend to family matters and return when they can.” 

“Because I get a one-hour lunch break I can go to my home in nearby Ganakpara village to cook for the family and be back at work on time,” she tells IPS.  

Shumi, 16, a school girl from Ganakpara village, says she works at the production line and attend school between shifts. The youngest worker at the factory, Shumi earns 56 dollars a month and plans to continue with her education.

“My supervisors have been very generous. Because of such worker-friendly atmosphere we enjoy working here,” she says. 

The factory, built at a cost of 841,575 dollars, has modern facilities like changing rooms, clean toilets and rest rooms. 

“All workers are required to take a shower after completing their shifts, and those who work near the hot oven chamber are also required to drink oral rehydration solutions,” says Kabir Hossain, a manager. 

“The idea of short-term employment is to have pool of trained workers available in the surrounding villages at all times,” Hossain explains. 

Also, when the project ends in 2014 and it is handed over to the owner he will not face any shortage of workers, says Khondker Neaz Rahman, project manager of ‘Improving Kiln Efficiency in the Brick Making Industry, to IPS. 

The UNDP-funded pilot project currently has four such factories in operation, two in Savar and one each in Natore and Gazipur districts, all of them designed to transfer the technology and produce skilled manpower. 

“There is tremendous enthusiasm among the workers to learn how to operate the machines and earn money,” says Neaz adding that there is a proposal to open a formal training centre. 

The new factories have provisions to allow women to breastfeed infants and run routine health checks of the workers. Fire drills are carried out every month and attention paid to safety. 

Mosammet Khadiza, 35, from Ganakpara, is appreciative of the discipline. “We are not allowed to gossip during production but we have tea breaks to relax and freshen up.” 

Kabir said, “Any worker feeling sick can always seek permission to take rest or go home. We can always replace him/her with extra hands who are usually prepared to work on short notice.” 

Mizan ur Rahman, president of Bangladesh Brick Manufacturing Owners’ Association, told IPS that the new system of recruitment and the modern equipment are welcome because they greatly improve productivity. 

“We prefer skilled women workers because they tend to be more efficient and far easier to manage than male workers,” Mizan said. 

Monwar Islam, director-general of department of environment, told IPS, “We want to see more women working in this industry. In fact, we are in the process of formulating a policy to encourage women to find jobs in brick making.” 

Things are expected to improve further after the government stops renewing existing licenses on factories that have not adapted to the new technology by September and implements a complete ban on all FCK brick factories a year later.

By Mathilde Bagneres
UNITED NATIONS, Feb 22 2012 (IPS)

The phrase “financing for gender equality” may sound dry, but it lies at the heart of some of the most intractable problems faced by women around the world today – and whether the political will exists to allocate real resources to solving them or simply pay lip service.

Beginning next week, from Feb. 27 to Mar. 9, ministers and civil society delegates will meet at the United Nations for the 56th session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW).

This year’s meeting is especially critical because it will assess how governments have made good on promises at the 52nd session in 2008 to boost financing for gender equality and the empowerment of women.

Stephanie Seguino. Credit: Courtesy of Stephanie Seguino

The topic covers everything from broader macroeconomic policies, to public finance and gender responsive budgeting, the mobilisation of international resources and aid, and finding new and innovative sources of funding.

Stephanie Seguino, an economics professor at the University of Vermont in the United States, will take part in the CSW discussions as a member of a panel on “national experiences in implementing the agreed conclusions of CSW 2008”.

IPS Correspondent Mathilde Bagneres talked with Seguino about how women are particularly affected by the current economic crisis, and the role of government in crafting policies that promote not only women’s equality but sustainable development for society as a whole. Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: Low wages and underemployment of women have been a persistent problem around the world, long before the latest financial crisis. How can financing for gender equality address these issues?

A: Some of the problems of women’s lower wages and underemployment can be addressed through gender-aware targeting of public expenditures as well as anti-discrimination policies. Clearly, policies to promote girls’ education, including publicly funded education, are key.

However, more than that, policies to reduce women’s care burden and policies to promote men’s participation in unpaid caring labour – such as paternity leave – free up women’s time to engage in paid work.

Also, public investment in infrastructure that improves women’s access to health care – rural health clinics, skilled health personnel – and reduces the time they spend fetching water and fuel, or moving goods to market helps them engage in productive activities.

Training programmes that target women, especially for non-traditional “male” jobs, are important. In agricultural economies, governments can offer loan guarantees where women lack title to land in order to leverage their access to credit.

(But) even these steps will be insufficient to undermine pay inequality. Governments need to assertively develop and enforce anti-discrimination legislation, AND affirmative action programmes. Governments can serve as role models by ensuring that some minimum level of leadership positions is filled by women – 30 percent or more.

Q: The 2008 CSW Declaration expressed concern about “the growing feminisation of poverty”. Is this a trend that is likely to continue in the near future?

A: The forces of globalisation continue to push down the wages of workers, and result in a squeeze on public sector budgets (because of the declining corporate tax burden and reductions in tariff revenues).

As a result, women are likely to fare poorly, especially in the context of high unemployment. This is because men tend to be seen as more deserving of jobs when jobs are scarce.

Until we resolve these negative macroeconomic pressures that result in slow growth, job shortages, and growing inequality, it will be difficult to resolve the problem of women’s poverty and that of the children they care for.

Q: You have written that “This crisis provides the opportunity to rethink the role of government in the economy”. Can you briefly elaborate on that idea?

A: This crisis has its roots in the global deregulation of economies, leading to market failures, the growth of inequality, along with increased economic insecurity.

Firms have pursued profits often at the expense of broadly shared well-being. This is not to condemn corporations for their behaviour. Firms seek to maximise their profits in the context of societal rules that regulate their actions.

This poses two challenges for governments. First, they must identify and enforce a set of rules and regulations that are sufficiently flexible to permit firms to innovate while also requiring firms to align their profit motives with social well-being. To give an example, firms try to reduce their costs to raise profits.

They can do this by lowering wages or by innovating and thus raising their productivity. Their choice about which path to cost reduction to take will depend on the set of incentives that governments set.

If a government sets and enforces a minimum wage, firms will be constrained to innovate as a way to compete, which is a good thing for the firm, workers, and society as a whole.

Second, governments have an important role to play in investing in key areas to “crowd in” private investment. For example, investment in infrastructure and education is good for business because it reduces their costs. It is also good for citizens as a whole. The challenge is to carefully target those expenditures so that they do succeed in stimulating business investment that leads to higher incomes.

A related challenge is to identify gender-enabling investments. As I noted above, some public spending that had previously been thought of as social welfare is in reality social infrastructure investment – e.g., education, health, and conditional cash transfer programmes.

They are investments because they improve the productive capacity of the economy, yielding a stream of benefits into the future, which can be used to pay down the debt incurred to finance these expenditures.

The concept of social infrastructure is not well developed. It is an important one, and is an important avenue for promoting gender equality in ways that are financially sustainable.

Excerpt:

An Indian migrant worker. The World Bank says money sent home by migrant workers has increased for the first time since the economic crisis. Credit: Sumeet Malhotra/ CC by 2.0

By Amanda Wilson
WASHINGTON, Dec 1 2011 (IPS)

Despite a global economic crisis, worsening employment prospects for immigrants and hardening views on immigration in the U.S. and Europe, migrant workers are sending more money home, according to a World Bank report on global remittances released Wednesday.

An Indian migrant worker. The World Bank says money sent home by migrant workers has increased for the first time since the economic crisis. Credit: Sumeet Malhotra/ CC by 2.0

Countries receiving top remittances this year are India, China, Mexico and the Philippines. Other top recipients include Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Vietnam, Egypt and Lebanon.

“Remittance flows to developing countries have remained resilient,” said Hans Timmer, director of the Bank’s Development Prospects Group. “Remittance flows to all developing regions have grown this year, for the first time since the financial crisis.”

The World Bank also cited “higher-than-expected” growth in remittances to four out of six World Bank-designated developing regions. Part of that growth can be attributed to exchange rates, it said.

When foreign currencies weaken against the currency in worker destination countries – against U.S. dollars, for example – workers such as those working in the U.S. can send more money home, Merrell Tuck-Primdahl, a communications officer with the World Bank, told IPS. “That is certainly one of the factors behind the flows and why they picked up.”

The report also noted that remittance flows to Latin America and the Caribbean grew this year for the first time since the financial crisis began, although that growth was lower than the World Bank expected because of “continuing weaknesses in the U.S. economy”.

The report underscored that “persistent unemployment in Europe and the U.S. is affecting employment prospects of existing migrants and hardening political attitudes toward new immigration”.

Destination countries: Sources of remittances

According to the report, the growth in remittances can also be attributed to the fact that some countries are sending migrant workers to a diversifying group of destinations to work.

For example, while the U.S. and Europe saw a decline in Filipino workers, more Filipino workers went to the Middle East, mainly to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, to Asian countries like Hong Kong and Singapore, and to Africa.

In the U.S., a steep fall in new housing construction, a sector that has traditionally employed Latin American migrants, in 2006 “appears to have stabilised”, but migrant employment in construction “remains well below pre-financial crisis levels”, according to the report.

The U.S. and Spain are the main sources of remittances for developing countries in Latin America, while six Gulf countries account for a significant portion of remittances to South Asia and one third of remittances for Europe and Central Asia originate in developing countries such as Russia.

The report also noted that the so-called Arab Spring has had an effect on migrant workers and remittances – migrant workers in Libya have returned home, but “migrants from many other Sub-Saharan African countries, often unskilled and illegal, have been stuck and vulnerable to abuse in Libya”.

Development aid uncertain

Remittances have a variety of positive effects, the report said. They can reduce poverty, help people accumulate wealth, lead to more spending on health and education and reduce child labour, to name a few.

But Elaine Zuckerman, executive director of Gender Action, an organisation that promotes women’s rights and gender equality, pointed out that while remittances do often go to support individual families, there is no guarantee that remittances will be channeled to projects that have broader public benefit.

She said that while it is possible for remittances to be allocated to building schools or clinics, most remittances directly support migrants’ family members, who then might use that money to improve their own housing or buy consumer products such as electronics.

“Remittances lack social and economic development goals, and they certainly lack a focus on women’s rights and promoting sustainable, equitable development of countries and their populations,” Zuckerman told IPS.

She said that while remittances reached 351 billion dollars this year, total development aid dispersed by the major multilateral development banks, excluding the International Monetary Fund, totalled slightly over 100 billion dollars.

Zuckerman believes the gap between remittances and aid will only increase in the future. The World Bank’s budget had been bumped up by richer countries on a temporary basis over the last several years but will eventually decrease.

The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, which is supported mostly by the U.S. and European countries, is also facing a major economic crisis, Zuckerman said. Contributions from rich donor countries to the Fund, which pays for over 70 percent of antiretroviral drugs for HIV/AIDS in the developing world, are down.

“Remittances are great in that they help individual families, but they don’t have larger social goals like combating HIV in a country, or improving social services, or giving women gender equality,” Zuckerman concluded.

By Marcela Valente and - -
BUENOS AIRES, Nov 23 2011 (IPS)

Forged in the 2001-2002 social and economic crisis, cooperatives in Argentina are becoming a fast track to women’s participation in what were traditionally regarded as male spheres.

“At first it was difficult for men to accept women as co-workers on building sites, but now that we have joined cooperatives, they are getting used to us being there,” Roxana Jiménez told IPS.

Jiménez is the president of the Federation of Worker Cooperatives in the province of Santiago del Estero, in the northeast of the country, which has more than 800 members. She also belongs to a construction cooperative made up of 10 men and six women.

“Now women’s presence is seen as normal; people have seen that women are fast learners, not only for construction but also electricity, plumbing, laying ceramic tiles and anything else that’s needed,” Jiménez said.

Her cooperative is hired by local governments in the province for infrastructure works, as well as for private sector projects.

Workers’ cooperatives were promoted by the Argentine government in 2003 in response to the soaring levels of poverty and unemployment resulting from the 2001-2002 severe social and economic crisis, which followed three years of recession.

To start with, the state encouraged the formation of 50 cooperatives with 16 members each, to give unemployed people training and jobs. As many of the men who joined them did not know the trades, they learned them alongside women.

Cristián Miño, president of the Florencio Varela Federation of Worker Cooperatives (FECOOTRAUN), was unemployed in 2003. Now he not only has work but leads a movement of 600 members, a “social enterprise” as he calls it.

Miño told IPS that in the 3,000 cooperatives that have come together in the National Confederation of Workers’ Cooperatives (CNCT), between 35 and 40 percent of the members are women, who are playing an increasingly prominent role in the movement.

IPS carried out these interviews at the CNCT’s First National Meeting of Women Cooperativists, held in Buenos Aires Nov. 18-19 to share experiences on gender issues and women’s participation in cooperatives.

According to Miño, there are women-only cooperatives in at least four of the country’s provinces, but most are mixed, even when the type of work has historically been done by men, as in the case of construction.

“At first, men were reluctant to accept women, until they saw the women’s dedication. Now they have begun to include women as a key feature of the cooperatives,” he said.

“Because of the ‘machista’ attitude that so many of us have, we thought women would not be strong enough to do the same work as men, but in time, when we saw women carrying 50 kg bags of cement, we realised that indeed they were,” he said.

Cooperativism received a further boost in 2009 when the Social Development Ministry under centre-left President Cristina Fernández launched Argentina Trabaja (Argentina Works), a plan for forming 60-member cooperatives involving a total of 100,000 people.

The cooperatives work in areas like the textile, restaurant, horticultural, construction materials, food and printing industries, and their members earn a minimum income of 300 dollars a month.

The workers also receive the universal child benefit, amounting to 64 dollars a month for each child under 18 who stays in school, in addition to health care and social security contributions to ensure a future pension.

According to a 2010 study by the ministry, half of the cooperative members are women, and they all previously had difficulty getting jobs. A total of 79 percent had not completed their primary and secondary education, and 77 percent had no trade or job training.

The cooperative movement has also provided job opportunities to sexual minorities traditionally excluded from the labour market, such as transvestites and transsexuals, who were also present at the meeting.

Lohana Berkins, a transvestite, is the head of the Nadia Echazú textile cooperative and school, operated and managed by transvestites and transsexuals. She told IPS that they started a transgender organisation five years ago, and their group now has 60 members. There are also another four cooperatives doing different kinds of work.

“We have trouble getting jobs, but not for the same reasons as people who become unemployed and then can’t get work again. In our case it is because of issues of discrimination and exclusion,” Berkins said.

In 2006 they formed the Nadia Echazú cooperative and applied to the government for training and tools. “We don’t assess our results in economic terms, because that isn’t what is most important to us,” she said.

“What we value is the impact this has on our community, because we transvestites do not see prostitution as proper work; we want to generate debate with the state and society and show that we can have a real job,” she said.

Excerpt:

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Aug 23 2011 (IPS)

Since the 1960s, maquiladoras or export assembly plants have been the cornerstone of Mexico’s strategy to attract foreign direct investment and boost exports. But the environmental and social costs have been high.

Maquiladoras, which in Mexico mainly produce clothing, cars and electronic equipment, consume huge volumes of water, generate hazardous waste products like alcohols, benzene, acetone, acids and plastic and metal debris, and emit polluting gases.

The plants, which take advantage of Mexico’s low wages, tax exemptions, and flexible labour laws while in return providing jobs, cause significant environmental damages.

“Government oversight is poor. There aren’t enough inspectors. There is no obligatory inspection scheme, only a voluntary one, and inspections are arranged in advance, with no surprise visits,” Magdalena Cerda, the Tijuana representative for the Environmental Health Coalition (EHC), told IPS. “We have seen gradual deterioration in the urban communities where the factories are located.”

About 3,000 maquiladoras operate in free trade zones in Mexico, employing some 1.5 million people, according to the National Council of the Maquiladora Export Industry (CNIMME). Most are located in the northern cities of Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez, on the U.S. border.

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which entered into force between Canada, Mexico and the United States in 1994, prompted the installation of dozens of maquiladoras in Mexico to supply the U.S. market and profit from the Latin American country’s low labour costs.

Average monthly wages in maquiladoras in the border zone are between 500 and 600 dollars.

NAFTA includes provisions on labour conditions and environmental protection, but these have not been enforced with sufficient rigour to correct harmful employment and environmental practices, experts say.

In 1983, the Mexican and U.S. governments signed the Border Environment Cooperation Agreement (BECA) on the management of toxic substances, with provisions for monitoring and preventing pollution in the border area.

But NAFTA eliminated the BECA requirement that foreign companies return toxic waste to their countries of origin, because Mexican environmental law permitted companies to store their hazardous waste material.

The maquiladora sector, however, is willing to change its practices if it can continue to turn a profit, Francisco López, the head of Valle Verde Ecoempresas, a consultancy advising companies on environmental responsibility, told IPS.

The Valle Verde consultancy emerged from a process that began in 2009 and involved academics, business executives and government officials working together to come up with measures the manufacturing sector could use to save electricity and boost energy efficiency.

In March, Valle Verde launched a programme based on environmental education and energy efficiency, and promoted it among some 50 electronic assembly factories.

Maquiladoras have been criticised for their use of dangerous substances. For instance, in order to increase smoothness and strength in fabrics for making clothes, they are treated with chemicals such as formaldehyde, caustic soda, sulphuric acid, bromine and sulphamide, all of which are health hazards, according the U.S. Organic Consumers Association.

The industrial processes of cleaning, spinning, weaving or knitting and finishing an item of apparel generate an average of 1.4 kg of carbon dioxide (CO2), one of the main greenhouse gases responsible for global warming, according to The Story of Stuff Project, developed by U.S. author and web host Annie Leonard.

Producing one computer chip takes 20 litres of water, 45 grams of chemicals and 1.8 kilowatt-hours of electricity, and spews out 17 kg of liquid residues and 7.8 kg of solid waste, according to the United Nations University.

Computers contain dangerous heavy metals and other elements, including barium, lead, mercury, beryllium and cadmium.

“Mexico cannot afford to regulate this sector adequately; we lack methods for solving these issues. Investment in clean technology reduces the profit margin, but we know that it is more expensive to remediate pollution,” said EHC’s Cerda.

The EHC and the citizens of Tijuana notched up a success in 2004, when they forced the Mexican government to clean up an abandoned factory called Metales y Derivados, where over 23,000 tons of waste were warehoused. The remediation work lasted until 2008, when the results of a final inspection satisfied environmentalists.

Many companies already recycle materials and treat their liquid waste, but these measures have not completely achieved the greening of the maquiladoras.

Silvia Balderas, a student at the state Colegio de la Frontera Norte (North Border College), recommends the design and implementation of energy saving and waste reduction programmes and better waste management practices, in her thesis for a master’s degree in comprehensive environmental administration.

“The actions that can be taken immediately are those requiring the fewest resources, particularly in terms of funding,” she says in her 2010 thesis titled “Diseño de un modelo de producción limpia para la industria de ensamble de electrónicos” (Design of a Clean Production Model for the Electronic Assembly Industry).

“In the first place, a starting-point is energy savings and waste management programmes, since their implementation depends only on a decision by the company administrator or owner,” Balderas says.

The Tijuana Maquiladora and Export Industry Association has an agreement with PROFEPA, Mexico’s federal agency for environmental protection, to promote clean industry certification. This year, only eight certifications have been issued.

“We are trying to persuade the maquiladora sector that sustainability can be achieved through education and efficiency savings, and the savings themselves can pay for sustainability measures. The first steps could be taken this year,” said Valle Verde’s López.

The Pollutant Release and Transfer Registry (RETC), a department of Mexico’s environment ministry, reported in 2007 that 212 million tons of pollutants were released into the environment, 99 percent of them into the atmosphere.

This year the RETC aims to monitor 267 pollutants.

As an outcome of the 1983 BECA agreement, the Mexican and U.S. governments drew up a collaborative environmental health programme known as Border 2012, aimed at reducing soil, air and water pollution, improving environmental health and ensuring emergency preparedness along the Mexico-U.S. border.

Excerpt:

By Simba Shani Kamaria Russeau
CAIRO, Jul 11 2011 (IPS)

In dire need of money to assist her family back home, 27-year-old Makeda from Ethiopia was forced to return to the Middle East as a domestic worker.

As the world marks the Global Population Day Jul. 11, the plight of many like her is increasingly in focus.

Instead of taking the legal route, Makeda opted to seek out assistance from another Ethiopian woman who had been employed in the Middle East for more than ten years, and was known for helping women find sponsors.

Some five years later Makeda ran into difficulties when she took on work with an expat family that wanted to sponsor her. But her passport was with the female trafficker who had brought her in.

“The initial sponsorship that the trafficker brought me under had expired, and the local man who allowed us to use his name for a fee wasn’t paid, so he placed a claim with the authorities that I had run away,” Makeda told IPS.

“The woman demanded more money for me to relinquish my passport, so we sought legal counseling. A migration lawyer contacted the woman, and threatened to inform her employer. But in the end it was discovered that the woman’s employer was a well-known lawyer in the country who was helping her traffic women into the region,” Makeda said.

“It took me years to pay off the fees she charged to bring me in. Although I paid the extra money and obtained my passport, the process took so long that the expat family left and I ended up illegal.”

“For many, the simplicity of the transaction when dealing with illegal recruiters is more attractive,” Pardis Mahdavi, author of ‘Gridlock: Labour, Migration and Human Trafficking’ told IPS. “If governments could put into place a system that allows the legal channels for migration to be easier, it could limit the number of workers migrating under informal middlemen.”

Slavery, which is a system where people are treated as property and forced to work, is very much a part of today’s global economy. It rivals and in some regions eclipses the international drug trade.

There are nearly 27 million slaves worldwide, generating 1.3 billion dollars in annual profits, according to conservative estimates. Some estimates show a world slave population as high as 200 million, with the majority held under debt bondage.

Considered a new form of slavery, human trafficking is one of the fastest growing criminal industries in the world. The United Nations (UN) estimates that nearly three million people are trafficked annually.

“Global human trafficking is fueled by the insatiable demand for unmediated access to other human beings – to their labour, their personhood, to all that makes each of us unique, and all of us generic,” Eileen Scully, author of ‘Pre-Cold War Traffic in Sex Labor’ told IPS.

“The demand in EU countries for ‘exotic women’, for example, is not merely a demand for non-local women, or for women from cultures that supposedly do not stigmatise prostitution. This demand is, rather, for ‘trafficked women’ and ‘trafficked children’, meaning individuals who have been manoeuvered into untenable, inescapable situations, where having once said yes to the general proposition, they are unable to say no to the particulars when later presented.”

The new International Labour Organisation’s (ILO) Convention on Domestic Workers adopted in June aims to ensure that women – who constitute nearly 50 percent of the global migrant population – are treated as human beings.

“When male migrant workers come to work in construction or other service and industry sectors in Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states, they are protected under the labour law. Even if they don’t have full rights their work is recognised as work under the law, which is not the case for domestic workers (in the Arab region),” Simel Esim, gender specialist at the ILO’s Regional Office for the Arab States told IPS.

“Jordan and Lebanon are the only countries where ministries of labour are in charge of a significant number of the institutional responsibilities regarding migrant domestic workers,” adds Esim.

“In the case of the GCC countries the oversight of domestic workers is under the jurisdiction of the ministries of interior instead of the ministries of labour, which leaves domestic workers outside the purview of the labour law. The emphasis on domestic workers is, therefore about their recognition as workers, with equal rights to workers in other sectors.”

Lacking legal protection, domestic workers are among the most exploited and abused workers in the world. Rights advocates have long argued that exclusion from labour laws and recruitment-related abuses has left domestic workers in the Middle East vulnerable to exploitation, sexual abuse, forced labour, debt bondage, trafficking and conditions akin to slavery.

The new convention requires governments to regulate private employment agencies that impose heavy debt burdens or misinform migrant domestic workers about their jobs, prohibit the practice of deducting domestic workers’ salaries to pay recruitment fees, investigate complaints, and labour inspection in private homes.

“Policies relating to trafficking need to fall more in line with the reality of forced migration globally because most migrant workers are not the stereotypical sex worker chained to a bed,” adds Mahdavi.

“In fact they are men and women that are tied to metaphorical chains like debt and poverty that forces these workers to migrate and remain in poor working conditions.”

Excerpt:

By Elizabeth Whitman
NEW YORK, Jun 21 2011 (IPS)

Labour and women’s rights groups are strongly criticising the Supreme Court’s rejection of a class action suit brought by current and former female employees of Walmart who sought to represent 1.5 million female employees who claim that the company discriminated against women.

The largest retailer in the world, Walmart raked in over 405 billion dollars in sales last year and employs 2.1 million associates around the world.

Employees who want to sue Walmart for sexual discrimination will now have to proceed individually, or in smaller class action suits.

In ‘Dukes vs. Walmart Stores Inc.’, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that the plaintiffs lacked the common ground by which to proceed as a class in further legal action – overturning previous decisions made by lower courts.

In 2004, the San Francisco District Court authorised six individual plaintiffs to represent 1.5 million female employees of Walmart in a national sexual discrimination lawsuit. After Walmart appealed, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld the federal district court’s decision.

Nevertheless, in August 2010, Walmart filed a petition to the U.S. Supreme Court requesting it to review the Ninth Circuit’s upholding of the federal court’s ruling.

The Supreme Court decision did not determine that Walmart does or did not discriminate against women, although Justice Antonin Scalia did write as part of the justification for the Court’s decision that the evidence presented lacked “significant proof” that Walmart “operated under a general policy of discrimination”.

According to the official website for the class action suit (www.walmartclass.com), when the women originally filed the motion for class action, they supported it with 110 detailed sworn statements from women who worked in 184 Walmart stores in 30 states, along with over 1,200,000 pages from Walmart’s corporate files and other testimonies from Walmart executives.

They sought to sue Walmart for sexual discrimination that displayed itself in unequal pay and promotion opportunities, job assignments, and other aspects of the Walmart workplace.

Girshriela Green has been an employee at a Walmart store in Los Angeles for nearly three years. She told IPS that hearing the Supreme Court’s decision was “saddening”. She is not part of the lawsuit, but said she certainly would be part of a future lawsuit.

“I don’t understand why we don’t get the same respect as the male associates” when male and female employees do “equal work,” she stated. Green has experienced firsthand the pay discrimination that plaintiffs in the case referenced.

When Green was promoted to being a department manager, her pay raise was 45 cents per hour. Men who were promoted to department manager, however, received an 80 cent per hour raise.

Although Green cited those grievances, she also noted that Walmart “could be a wonderful workplace”, there are “changes and adjustments that should be made that are fair to everybody”.

A “Deeply Disturbing” Decision

Jennifer Stapleton, assistant director of ‘Making Change at Walmart’, told IPS that the Supreme Court’s decision was “a blow to justice”. Making Change at Walmart is a campaign run by the labour union United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW).

The average employee at Walmart makes 15,000 dollars a year, Stapleton said, and “the idea that a woman making below poverty-level wages is going to sue” an enormous corporation like Walmart “by herself is not realistic”.

“This situation is exactly why class action suits were created,” Stapleton added.

And now the highest court in the nation has rejected this class action suit.

In a statement released Monday, UFCW International President Joe Hansen called the ruling “deeply disturbing”, because “the highest court in our nation has turned its back on collective remedy for workers facing widespread injustices”.

The National Organisation for Women (NOW) also unequivocally expressed its disapproval in a statement Monday declaring that in this case, the Supreme Court majority had “ruled against women by siding with the country’s largest employment discriminator”.

Numerous other non-profit, nongovernmental, and labour groups responded similarly to the ruling.

Walmart, however, said in a statement Monday, “Every female associate and every customer can feel even better about the company as a result of today’s decision.” It said it was pleased with the ruling, believing that the Supreme Court had made the right decision and cited the fact that Walmart “has had strong policies against discrimination for many years”.

All companies are required to have anti-discrimination policies; not to have them is illegal.

Walmart’s History of Discrimination and Labour Violations

Walmart has long denied claims that it discriminates against women in pay and promotion opportunities, job assignments, and in general in the workplace.

In 2007, New York-based group Human Rights Watch published a report, ‘Discounting Rights’, about labour conditions at Walmart. Among other conclusions drawn, it found “significant proof of a corporate policy of discrimination” and that “female employees nationwide were subjected to a common pattern and practice of discrimination”.

According to plaintiffs in the case – whose claims were used as evidence in the report – at Walmart gender stereotypes were used as a basis for making decisions, including ones regarding job assignments and pay. Walmart gives managers leeway to make these decisions, and plaintiffs argued that the result was that male workers benefited disproportionately from this leeway, in both pay and leadership positions.

Encountering highly discriminatory comments was not uncommon either. One female employee shared that a Florida store manager said men were paid more because “men are here to make a career and women aren’t. Retail is for housewives who just need to earn extra money”.

‘Discounting Rights’ also found evidence of wage and hour violations in addition to sexual discrimination at Walmart. By the year of the report’s publication, three class actions suits against Walmart claiming wage and hour violations had succeeded, and the company has awarded workers over two million dollars in damages, attorney fees, and costs.

Excerpt:

By Danilo Valladares
GUATEMALA CITY, Apr 6 2011 (IPS)

“My brother was murdered, and we’re still the victims of threats and harassment, which is why we filed the petition” under the free trade agreement signed with the United States by Central America and the Dominican Republic, (DR-CAFTA), said Guatemalan trade unionist Noé Ramírez.

Ramírez, a member of the Union of Banana Workers of the northeastern province of Izabal, is seeking justice for the September 2007 killing of his brother Marco Tulio, who also belonged to the union. “No progress has been made” in the investigation of the murder,” he told IPS.

He added that the petition is also aimed at securing respect for labour rights in Guatemala, where “many companies do not fulfil their obligations, like social security contributions.

“They deduct the money from our pay, but they don’t make the payments into the system,” he complained.

The Central American countries involved in CAFTA, which went into effect in most of the signatory nations in 2006, are Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua.

DR-CAFTA has a chapter on labour rights in which its members undertake a commitment to “respect, promote and realise” core workers’ rights, enforce their own national labour laws, and provide adequate access to legal redress for workers.

But Guatemala has failed to live up to the free trade agreement’s labour provisions, trade unionists say.

In April 2008, six Guatemalan unions, including the banana workers’ union, denounced several labour abuses before the DR-CAFTA Office of Trade and Labour Affairs (OTLA), including the murders of Ramírez and another trade unionist. The complaint was filed on behalf of the Guatemalan unions by the American Federation of Labour and Congress of Industrial Organisations (AFL-CIO).

According to the AFL-CIO, “This petition demonstrates that, in certain important respects, labour conditions in the country have remained unchanged or have worsened since the trade agreement was ratified. The level of physical violence against trade unionists increased markedly in 2006-2008. Violations of freedom of association and collective bargaining continue apace, and access to fair and efficient administrative or judicial tribunals remains elusive.”

With respect to Ramírez’s murder, the complaint notes that it took police several hours to arrive at the crime scene when he was killed, although there is a police station just two kilometres away.

“To date, the authorities have shown little interest in carrying out a serious investigation,” the petition adds.

The AFL-CIO complaint was even referred to by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. When she testified in early March before the Senate Appropriations Committee, she said the administration of Barack Obama was considering taking the matter to CAFTA’s dispute settlement system.

The Guatemalan government is hastily taking steps to prevent that from happening, as it could be fined 15 million dollars for violating CAFTA provisions.

Francisco Villagrán, Guatemala’s ambassador in Washington, announced on Mar. 18 that the General Labour Inspection office would be strengthened, compliance with court orders would be overseen, and employees in foreign-owned maquila export assembly plants that operate in tax-free zones would be protected, among other measures.

“It’s not that important for us for Guatemala to be fined for 15 million dollars; what is important is for it to be obligated to enforce the country’s labour laws,” David Morales, with the Union of Food, Agroindustry and Related Industry Workers of Guatemala (FESTRAS), told IPS.

The trade unionist said “in this country, as in the rest of Central America, unions continue to face repression,” which is why the local unions had to file the complaint through the AFL-CIO.

The cases mentioned by the petition include the murders of the two trade unionists, as well as three other cases of abuses such as unlawful dismissal of trade unionists, poor labour conditions, refusal to bargain with the legally recognised union, the blacklisting of labour activists, and the failure to contribute to the social security system by Guatemalan companies that export to the United States.

“Guatemala committed itself to making justice available to workers, in order for the free trade deal to be approved, so the country should take positives steps in that direction and with regard to respect for the freedom to organise and collective bargaining,” Morales said.

He accused the authorities of lacking the political will to enforce the country’s labour laws. “The Labour Ministry has the power of coercion, but there is a pile of fines and other sanctions in the labour courts that have not been applied,” he said.

The consequences of the impunity enjoyed by companies are obvious. Rosa Mazariegos told IPS that in 2005, when a union in the frozen foods company she worked for, INPROCSA, had recently been organised, they were harassed by the owners.

“They forced us to overwork, in poor conditions, and then the dismissals started,” she said.

Mazariegos, a mother of five, was laid off and had to find another job. “No one cares about workers, even if they don’t have enough to eat – workers are just sacked, to break up the unions,” she complained.

But Rolando Figueroa, legal counsel to the garment and textile industry association, told IPS that “The country has responded, one way or another, to each and every criticism voiced by the United States.”

The creation of more labour courts and of an office to monitor and oversee enforcement of and compliance with court orders, and the closure of garment and textile firms in 2011 were some of the advances mentioned by the industry lawyer.

Figueroa said that, for now, “there is no lawsuit against the state of Guatemala under DR-CAFTA. What we have is a process of cooperative labour consultations between the governments of the United States and Guatemala, which has arisen from a complaint.”

But he did not rule out the possibility that the incident could be taken to the next level, the dispute resolution mechanism, if Guatemala fails to adequately respond to the “consultations” or doubts raised by the United States.

“That would be the start of legal action in which an arbitration committee would be named and deadlines would be set for resolving the question, and fines might be levied,” Figueroa said.

Excerpt:

By Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, Apr 1 2011 (IPS)

Despite the fast growth of the Argentine economy, unemployment remains a tough nut to crack. While many areas face a dearth of skilled workers, a large number of unskilled workers find it impossible to land a job.

According to official figures, GDP grew 9.2 percent last year after the impact of the global financial crisis in 2009 cut short the high rate of economic growth – averaging more than seven percent a year since 2003 – in this South American country of 40 million.

In 2009, GDP grew just 0.9 percent. And while substantial improvement was forecast for 2010, last year’s growth ended up to be double the rate projected by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).

However, the labour market seems to be lagging, says an article on “the poor performance of the labour market in the face of economic recovery” published by the Centre for National Studies on Alternative Development (CENDA).

At the end of 2010, the National Institute of Statistics and Census (INDEC) reported that unemployment stood at 7.3 percent, nearly the same level as in late 2008, prior to the impact of the international crisis that broke out in the United States in mid-2008.

In 2010, official figures showed significant recovery of the Argentine economy after the effects of the global crisis had been felt, the CENDA article says. However, the dynamic growth had a weak impact on the labour market, it adds.

The analysts consulted by IPS said unemployment has declined steadily since late 2002, after Argentina’s economic and social meltdown, when unemployment climbed to 24 percent.

But they also expressed concern that the government’s economic policies are having a hard time bringing the unemployment rate down further and reaching the aim of full employment – the target set by the centre-left governments of the late Néstor Kirchner (2003-2007) and his widow and successor, President Cristina Fernández.

Economist Ernesto Kritz, director of SEL Consultores, a labour consultancy group, explained to IPS that while there is unmet demand for skilled labour, there is a large segment of the labour market that can’t find jobs.

“Most of the unemployed come from the informal economy and, even if employment were available, they would be unlikely to be hired,” he pointed out. “This has been the situation, without significant changes, since 2007.”

Kritz said the problem has become more acute in the last four years due to the increase in labour costs, which was not offset by rising productivity. His firm’s March bulletin reports that while wages are recovering, job creation is declining.

Wages have recovered since 2007 with respect to the rise in prices, but at the same time labour costs have gone up and the gap between pay and productivity is growing, which raises questions about the sustainability of wages, he said.

The expert said he worries that in order to confront the rise in costs, companies are restricting hiring. “You can see this not only in industry but everywhere: companies are getting by with the employees they have,” he said.

Claudio Flores, head of the human resources firm Agein, holds a similar view. “Unemployment has undoubtedly been going down since 2002, but not at the pace at which the economy is growing,” he said in an interview with IPS.

Requests from companies seeking skilled workers in chemistry, the oil industry, metal-working, mining, engineering and software development are piling up in Agein, but “there is no one available” to fill the posts, he said.

“In the area of computer systems alone, there are an estimated 50,000 available jobs, while at the same time there are a large number of unemployed people who don’t have the necessary skills, which is why there is no correlation between economic growth and unemployment levels,” he said.

The software industry is just one illustration of the situation in the labour market. There is basically zero unemployment in the sector, while a large pool of workers without training or skills is looking for jobs.

In the last six years, production in the software industry has grown nearly 280 percent and exports have increased, but there is a shortage of workers and companies are offering students work contracts even before they have completed their studies.

Excerpt:

By Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, Mar 16 2011 (IPS)

Crowded into precarious mud-floored dorms or sheet-metal trailers or forced to live in tents of plastic sheeting, with neither piped water nor electricity, after working 14-hour days: these are the harsh conditions faced by hundreds of thousands of rural workers in Argentina despite bumper crops and record earnings for agribusiness.

Rural worker in Argentina harvesting the crop. Credit: Courtesy of Estudios y Proyectos Asociación Civil

The conditions faced by casual farm workers have remained exploitative while industrial-scale plantations have grown in size and number, harvests have reached nearly 100 million tons, and more than 30 million hectares – 11 percent of the total land area in Argentina – are farmed.

Santiago del Estero, whose capital of the same name is located 1,150 km northwest of Buenos Aires, is one of the main sources of seasonal rural labourers who clear land, weed, manually spray or harvest crops for big agricultural corporations.

Nearly all of the members of the Unión Solidaria de Comunidades del Pueblo Diaguita Cacano depend on temporary farm work to survive, said Ledesma, who described the conditions they work in as “servitude.”

The seasonal migration of farm workers is a centuries-old phenomenon in Argentina, one of the world’s major agricultural producers. But in recent years it has taken on new characteristics, with global human resources firms operating as intermediaries for agribusiness corporations.

The recruiters offer the workers a contract for a fixed amount. But later they learn that the payment is conditioned on the entire group of workers earning a certain amount of arbitrarily set “points” based on performance and behaviour.

“The entire team has to work between 10 and 14 hours a day, Monday to Monday, even when it’s raining, and without complaining because if someone protests, points are docked for every member of the group,” Ledesma said.

In addition, the contractors discount the cost of transportation, clothing, work tools and food – at higher than market prices – from the worker’s pay.

Ledesma said it is difficult for unions to advocate on behalf of migrant labourers, because although the workers are often organised in their hometowns, they are widely dispersed when they find work in the fields.

The worst jobs are the potato, asparagus, blueberry and olive harvests, he said, along with clearing out stumps and roots with picks, shovels and bare hands after the bulldozer has knocked down the trees and brush.

“They sleep on the ground under plastic roofs,” he said. Most of the camps have no running water, electricity, toilets or showers. And in some cases, the workers are not allowed to leave the compound, under the threat of losing points.

This was found to be the case in most of the camps visited in different provinces by inspectors in recent months as part of a new government offensive.

One of the companies whose workers are housed in these conditions is the local unit of Netherlands-based agribusiness company Nidera, one of the world’s largest grain dealers. The labourers were found to be packed into trailers, sheds or plastic tents, where they sometimes slept next to pesticide containers.

But the Dutch grain exporter, which is also a leading seed producer and distributor, is not the only company implicated. The Argentine agribusiness firms Southern Seeds Production and Status Ager and global employment agencies like the U.S.-based Manpower and the Switzerland-based Adecco have also been accused of labour exploitation.

“The same companies that push peasants and native people off their land to expand monoculture plantations later employ them as slave labour,” Ledesma complained.

According to the Labour Ministry, 50 percent of rural workers are not enrolled in the social security system.

Labour and living conditions are especially harsh among unregistered migrant farm workers from impoverished northern provinces like Santiago del Estero and Tucumán, and from the neighbouring country of Bolivia, who find seasonal work in provinces such as Sante Fe, Misiones, Buenos Aires, Córdoba, Mendoza and Río Negro.

But the situation of registered workers is not much better. The great majority earn less than the minimum wage, according to the report “Rentabilidad, empleo y condiciones de trabajo en el sector agropecuario” (profitability, employment and working conditions in agriculture) released in February.

The study, by the Centre of Research and Training of the Argentine Republic (CIFRA), reports that in the last decade, agriculture has enjoyed “extraordinarily high profit levels, in historic terms.”

Not only have international agricultural prices soared, but production costs have gone down and the value of land has risen 4.5 times in the most fertile land in central and northern Argentina, the authors report.

The study notes that during the 2002-2010 period, the primary agriculture sector accounted for 8.7 percent of GDP, while industry directly linked to agriculture contributed another 6.4 percent.

Nevertheless, the creation of jobs was fairly insignificant in that same period due to the growing mechanisation of agriculture, says the report, which also points to the high proportion of unregistered workers.

In this country of 40 million people, with a population that is 92 percent urban and an economically active population of 17.8 million, permanent or temporary rural workers total one million according to official figures, and 1.5 million according to rural trade unions.

CIFRA economist Mariana González stressed to IPS that farm workers employed in modern-day slavery conditions do not work for small companies but for transnational corporations that rake in billions in profits.

“Unregistered employment is common in this sector,” she said. “That is partly because of the difficulties of oversight and monitoring due to the huge extensions of land, in isolated areas. But it has also come to be seen as something normal.”

González said that in the economy in general, informal or black market employment has gone down, as it has in the countryside. But in rural areas it remains an especially serious problem.

The CIFRA report states that while unregistered employment stands at 36.5 percent in the economy at large, the proportion climbs to 60 percent in agriculture, and to as high as 94 percent in some specific sectors.

Sociologist Guillermo Neiman at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO) told IPS that seasonal work in precarious conditions is a longstanding problem in Argentina.

Monitoring and inspection are difficult not only due to the distances involved and the spread-out nature of the rural workforce. “In the countryside, when an inspector shows up, it’s easier to hide a worker than in a factory or a closed facility,” he said.

But he noted that the problem has taken on a new visibility in the last few months, and said the workers themselves – many of whom are young people from cities, not just small towns – are daring to speak out.

Neiman, whose expertise is in the area of rural employment, also emphasised the government’s greater commitment to improving oversight and the determination of the courts to crack down on rural servitude and human trafficking, through cases that have been filed.

President Cristina Fernández acknowledged that there is “illegal slave labour in subhuman conditions” in Argentina, when she launched a government programme on “digital registered work; real-time monitoring” in February.

Through the programme, the labour ministry and the tax collection agency, AFIP, are carrying out inspections of urban and rural establishments, using laptops with wireless connection that enable the agents to visit camps in remote areas and verify, in real time, working and housing conditions and whether or not workers are registered.

But the work has just begun, and it will not be a simple task. Neiman pointed out that hiring unregistered workers is a widespread practice among agribusiness companies in Argentina. “Some have up to 400 unregistered labourers working for three months at a time,” he said.

Excerpt:

By Feizal Samath
COLOMBO, Feb 5 2011 (IPS)

Sri Lanka has raised the age requirement for women wanting to leave the country to work as domestics abroad, but recruitment agents say this won’t prevent younger women from joining the exodus.

And not even the fate that befell Rizana Nafeek, a Sri Lankan domestic facing the death penalty in Saudi Arabia, is enough of a deterrent.

Last week, the government announced it was revising the rule to allow only women over 21 years of age to work abroad as domestics. The limit was previously 18 years. Officials say lack of experience is likely to get younger women into trouble.

“When we send young women, often just out of school, they have many problems and run away after three months to the Sri Lankan embassy unable to cope with the situation,” said R.K. Ruhunuge, additional general manager at the state-owned Sri Lanka Bureau of Foreign Employment (SLFBE).

“This (new age bar) will reduce the number of runaways,” he added.

But the new rule doesn’t prevent 18-year-olds from seeking other employment overseas as either skilled or semi-skilled workers. Domestic work is considered an unskilled profession.

Recruitment agents, however, say young girls – whose only prospects abroad are jobs as maids – will merely resort to falsifying papers showing they are much older than they really are.

Newspapers have persistently blamed recruitment agents for securing passports with bogus information on behalf of their clients, a charge agents have repeatedly rejected.

“It is the individual who brings such a passport and presents it to the agent. For all purposes it is a genuine and legal passport, as it’s issued by the Immigration and Emigration Department, but on bogus documents like birth certificates. So how can we be blamed for this?” asked Faizer Mackeen, secretary of the Association of Licensed Foreign Employment Agents (ALFEA).

Mackeen believes young women like Rizana Nafeek will continue to lie about their age and provide bogus documents to get a passport.

In June 2007, Nafeek was sentenced to death by a Saudi court after she was found guilty of murdering a four-month-old infant in her care.

Nafeek confessed to the crime but later said she was forced to do so by the police and that the infant had accidentally choked. Nafeek was 17 when she first entered Saudi Arabia but her passport showed she was six years older.

In December, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia suspended the death sentence following a request for amnesty by Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa. The appeal against the verdict continues in court.

At least 1.8 million Sri Lankans work abroad, more than half of them women employed as domestics in the Middle East, quite a few aged around 18, or just older.

SLFBE’s Ruhunuge says the government is encouraging the migration of professional and skilled workers, rather than unskilled workers like domestics. “Professional and skilled workers earn more and the foreign exchange component to the country is also much higher,” he said.

Foreign exchange earnings from migrant workers are expected to reach 4 billion dollars for 2010 from 3.3 billion in 2009. The migrant workers sector is Sri Lanka’s highest foreign exchange earner, followed by garments.

But migrant workers’ rights groups are calling for better safeguards and protection of workers abroad rather than depriving them a chance to earn a living. “Our position is that you can’t stop women from traveling abroad on the job. That’s a human right. But we have for many years urged the government to provide better training and have bilateral agreements with labour-receiving countries to ensure better working standards,” said Viola Perera, convener of Sri Lanka’s Action Network for Migrant Workers (ACTFORM).

Common problems domestic workers face abroad include non-payment of contracted wages, and physical and sexual harassment.

She said they were hoping to persuade the authorities to enforce the Sri Lanka Labour Migration Policy introduced in October 2008. This policy, prepared by all stakeholders, says the state is responsible for protecting migrant workers and their families under the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and their Families.

“This is a policy with good intentions but there is no legal obligation on the government to enforce it,” Perera said, adding that if such a policy has legal authority, cases like Nafeek’s would not have happened.

Rights groups have repeatedly blamed recruitment agents for helping migrant workers prepare bogus birth certificates to secure a passport. But recruitment agents say they are often blamed whenever workers have problems, when victims themselves must accept responsibility.

Wijeya Undupitiya, a former computer systems analyst who set up a recruiting office 20 years ago, says he often sees women coming into his office saying “happily” that they had gotten their passports using forged papers.

“They don’t think it is wrong and illegal,” he said.

Undupitiya cited the recent case of an 18-year-old boy who was arrested for possessing a forged passport. It was the boy’s mother who got him a job at a garments factory in Mauritius where she had worked for many years. But since the recruitment age was 20 years, the boy resorted to bribing an officer at the Immigration Department to falsify his date of birth, getting the job processing done through Undupitiya’s agency.

“I didn’t know it was a passport obtained under false pretences. In fact I have written to the Immigration Commissioner-General to clarify what a forged passport is because the passport is genuine as it’s issued by the department,” he said. “There are many cases where migrant workers produce passports which are legally valid but secured by bribing someone at the department to insert a false date of birth.”

Excerpt:

By Daniela Estrada
SANTIAGO, Dec 17 2010 (IPS)

Programmes to reduce the unemployment rate among young people in Latin America and the Caribbean should be a priority for countries in the region, said experts, trade unionists and government representatives meeting in the Chilean capital.

ILO 17th American Regional Meeting Credit: ILO/Inostroza

In Latin America, young people between the ages of 15 and 24 will number 104.2 million this year. “There have never been so many young people in the region, and never again will they make up such a large proportion of the population. The demographic bonus is coming to an end,” said the Spanish expert, at the 17th American Regional Meeting of the ILO, concluding this Friday in Santiago.

Unemployment among young men and women is 2.5 times that of adults in the region. Some 6.7 million young people are looking fruitlessly for jobs.

Most of those who do find work have low-paying precarious jobs in the informal sector or on temporary contracts, without social security coverage.

Monthly incomes for the young average 424 dollars, compared to 788 for adults, according to the report Decent Work and Youth in Latin America 2010, published in October by the ILO, a tripartite agency made up of governments, employers and workers.

Another cause for concern is that 18 million young people, nearly 20 percent of the total, are neither studying nor working, the report says. Most of them are women who do domestic chores at home, reflecting the region’s high rate of teenage pregnancy, most commonly among poor families.

But at the same time, young people in the region have achieved a record number of years of schooling and their professional qualifications are better than ever.

“Before the global economic crisis broke out in 2008, young people already had a hard time finding decent work, and with the crisis the situation is shocking,” Amanda Villatoro of El Salvador, who is in charge of gender and youth issues for the Trade Union Confederation of the Americas (TUCA-CSA), told IPS at the meeting.

“No country in the region lacks a programme for youth ‘employability’. But experience shows that a single programme is not enough,” Dema said.

“We need to move from youth programmes with limited coverage to national policies,” he said. These should combine, for instance, policies for training, job creation and social protection for the most vulnerable, he added.

The ILO’s Agenda for the Hemisphere 2006-2015 proposes within this period to halve the proportion of 15- to 24-year-olds who are neither studying nor gainfully employed. But the prospects so far are discouraging, as between 2005 and 2008 the proportion fell by only 1.1 percent.

Stakeholders agree that the main challenge is to improve the quality and relevance of education, with reference to labour market needs. Keeping young people in classrooms longer is another important need.

“If the market for lawyers is saturated, why carry on training lawyers? It only frustrates the young, and gives the generation that will manage the region in coming decades the message that education is not an instrument for social mobility and the key to a decent life, when in fact the reverse is true,” said Villatoro, calling for public policies to take action on education.

Incentives to hire young people include laws encouraging companies to hire youngsters without experience, although these have stirred up controversy because of their possible effect on adult employment. In this area, “balance and social dialogue are needed,” Dema remarked.

The Colombian legislature passed a “first job” law Wednesday designed to stimulate hiring of young people.

Colombian Vice President Angelino Garzón told IPS that the new law represents “a step forward for decent work.”

Youth unemployment in Colombia stands at 22.3 percent, compared to an overall unemployment rate of 10.5 percent, he said.

The ILO also recommends supporting youth enterprise: Latin America has at least 5.1 million young entrepreneurs. But this is not the only way to go, Dema said.

Villatoro said, “We are very concerned about ‘first job’ programmes in several Latin American countries that are basically focused on enterprise.”

Dema praised Chile’s subsidies for hiring vulnerable 18- to 25-year-olds, implemented in 2009, and the “ProJoven” job-training programme in Peru. Brazil has a similar national policy.

“Companies vary, and so do their situations,” Dagoberto Lima Godoy, who represents the Brazilian business community on the ILO governing body, told IPS, referring to criticism of unfair or harmful labour practices that are especially aimed at small and medium enterprises.

In Lima’s view, the temporary contracts that affect mainly young workers are only justified when economic conditions are unstable.

“Companies that make a habit of employing temporary workers will never have really well-trained, capable staff, and they will never be competitive,” he said.

“Just as the quality of employment defines the quality of a society, the future of a society is determined by the employment of its young workers,” the ILO General Director, Juan Somavía, said this week.

Excerpt:

By Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, Nov 8 2010 (IPS)

After the late 2001 financial and political meltdown in Argentina, thousands of companies were abandoned by their owners in a sea of debt. But some of them were taken over and reopened by their employees. Today, as the economy continues to grow, these worker-run factories are still going strong.

There are now 205 “recovered” companies, with a total of 9,362 workers — up from 161 companies with 6,900 workers in 2004, according to a study published in October.

“How has a phenomenon that emerged as a kind of life raft after the 2001 economic collapse grown rather than faded away during a period of economic boom?” asks the lead author of the study, Andrés Ruggeri.

“The workers learned that running a company by themselves is a viable alternative, to keep a company operating,” he tells IPS. “That was unthinkable before.”

The study, “Las Empresas Recuperadas en la Argentina. 2010” (“Recovered Companies in Argentina 2010”), was carried out by a large team of student volunteers with the Open Faculty Programme at the University of Buenos Aires.

The aim was to provide data to help design policies to strengthen and improve the self-management of companies, says the study, which is based on an in-depth survey of the companies. Although there are some earlier precedents in Argentine history of bankrupt businesses that were reopened by their workers, they were isolated cases.

But as a result of the severe 2002-2003 economic crisis, worker-run companies began to mushroom in a broad range of areas, including the food industry, steel, textile, footwear and plastic factories, meat-packing plants, ceramic, glass and rubber manufacturers, graphic design companies, transport firms, restaurants, health businesses and even a five-star hotel.

The companies were reclaimed by their workers after the owners disappeared overnight, leaving behind jobless employees, piles of debt, factories stripped of everything not bolted down — and, often, charges of tax evasion or fraud.

Many of the companies are producing and even exporting again, after they were taken over by the workers, who were owed months and sometimes years of back wages.

Most of the workers formed cooperatives, and decisions are reached in assemblies, while they receive advice and support from other worker-owned companies and from government institutions as well.

A similar phenomenon has occurred in other countries of Latin America. According to the Open Faculty Programme report, there are 69 “recovered” companies in Brazil, around 30 in Uruguay, 20 in Paraguay and a growing number in Venezuela. Cases are also starting to be seen in Spain, says Ruggeri.

Many believed that as the economy boomed — it grew an average of 8.5 percent a year from 2003 to 2008 — the companies had gradually shrunk in number, and only a few survived as testimony to an era, the study says. But “nothing could be further from the truth,” Ruggeri says.

Even during times of economic growth, numerous companies fall into bankruptcy, sometimes as part of a strategy aimed at enabling the owner to start over again elsewhere. But the employees are left high and dry, and many of them are no longer young enough to be reabsorbed by the labour market, he points out.

“Recovered companies are a labour, economic and social reality that has taken root; they are here to stay and they will continue growing,” the study says. Although they face their own difficulties, they have enormous potential, it adds.

One illustrative case not related to the 2002-2003 crisis is that of Global, a firm that produced latex products — mainly balloons — that declared bankruptcy in 2004.

One Monday morning the workers showed up and found the sign “closed until further notice.” Neighbours told them that trucks had been hauling things away over the weekend — the owners had taken all the machinery.

The company’s dozens of employees were left without a job. But they managed to overcome many difficulties and reopen the business, and by 2005, Global had been transformed into “La Nueva Esperanza” (The New Hope), a cooperative with 32 members.

One of them is Domingo Palomeque, who has worked for 26 of his 50 years of life in the balloon factory on the outskirts of the Argentine capital. But now he does so as an equal partner in the cooperative.

“First we set up the cooperative, and then we recovered the machines they had stolen,” Palomeque explains to IPS.

In the survey by the team of university researchers, the problem mentioned most frequently by the companies is the lack of financing to purchase raw materials and machinery or to hire specialised workers. They also cited problems making headway in the market.

La Nueva Esperanza is no exception. “Credit,” Palomeque says without hesitation when asked what the company needs most. “We have to buy automated machines, not to replace people but to be more competitive.”

The cooperative’s products compete at a disadvantage in the local market today with cheap imports from Malaysia or Singapore. “Our products used to be cheaper, but that’s not true any more,” he says.

Despite the difficulties, they have managed to continue selling on the domestic market, and they even export their products. According to the report, 15 percent of the recovered firms export part of their output, and another 60 percent have the potential to do so.

The La Nueva Esperanza cooperative found its own way around certain hurdles. “It’s something we invented ourselves — we sell to Brazil, Paraguay, Chile and Uruguay, but we don’t export the products ourselves: our customers register at an address in Argentine provinces bordering their countries,” Palomeque explains.

He says there is no turning back. On the contrary, he has ambitions for the cooperative. “Our goal is to get new machines, hire new workers, and continue growing.”

Recovered companies vary in size. Seventy-five percent employ less than 50 workers, only a few have more than 100 employees, and just 2.3 percent have more than 200 workers.

The study calls for coherent public policies to support the firms. “The state should take a more active role, but it acts in an erratic manner because it has an erroneous conception that this is a transitory phenomenon,” Ruggeri says.

“It should strengthen these businesses because they are productive units that are growing sources of genuine jobs, which are neither precarious nor informal,” he adds. “These are workers who have got back on their feet on their own.”

In the last few years, the government has taken some steps that have given the businesses a boost. Through the Labour Ministry, it distributed more than one million dollars in subsidies. But it was a one-off arrangement. Without steady access to financing, the recovered companies “are condemned to teeter on the threshold of survival,” the report concludes.

Excerpt:

By Emilio Godoy
ATLAUTLA, Mexico, Oct 21 2010 (IPS)

Every year since 1975, Castro Solano has left his home in the town of Tlapa de Comonfort, in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero, to work in other parts of the country as a seasonal farm labourer.

“They treat us badly. We’re not allowed to take a break to eat during working hours and the boss is always on our backs to load the trucks faster,” Solano, who usually takes a job picking tomatoes in the municipality of Atlautla, Mexico state, in the centre of the country, told IPS.

On his frequent journeys, Solano, a 50-year-old member of the Tlapanec, or Me’phaa, indigenous group, endures the precarious conditions of day labourers who leave Tlapa de Comonfort, 460 kilometres south of Mexico City, to pick tomatoes, chili peppers and cucumbers.

Between September 2009 and January 2010, 8,213 Tlapanec indigenous people left Guerrero to sell their labour. In this year’s harvest season which began in September, the total number of migrant workers from the state could be as high as 10,000, according to the Tlachinollan Mountain Human Rights Centre, a non-governmental organisation that monitors migration from the mountainous part of Guerrero.

Their main destinations are the northern states of Sinaloa, Sonora, and Baja California Sur, and the central state of Morelos, adjacent to the town of Atlautla, population 24,110, located 140 kilometres southeast of the Mexican capital.

Guerrero state is in the lead for domestic migration, and ranks fifth for emigration abroad, mainly to the United States, according to the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI).

In the last decade, 380,000 labourers have migrated to northern states, Ministry of Social Development figures indicate.

“They (migrant workers) are entirely unprotected and defenceless. The government does not inspect or monitor working conditions in the fields,” Margarita Nemecio of the Tlachinollan Human Rights Centre told IPS.

At Guadalupe Hidalgo, a village in the municipality of Atlautla, day labourers get up at 5:00 AM to offer their services to local farmers in the main square, known as “the people market.”

Wages for a working day lasting from 7:00 AM to 1:00 PM are 10 dollars. The national minimum daily wage is four dollars.

Day labourers are often recruited by middlemen who organise transport to the fields and make contact with farm bosses. In other cases the migrant workers organise their own transport, chartering a bus or truck to take them to where crops need harvesting.

In Guadalupe Hidalgo, the workers sleep in tiny rented rooms and share toilets. Water is scarce. Solano pays four dollars a week for his humble lodgings.

Seasonal labourers “are highly vulnerable to human rights abuses,” Jorge Bustamante, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the human rights of migrants, told IPS.

This is because of “their minimal participation as a group in electoral processes, and their lack of representation on legislative bodies that are supposed to represent agricultural labourers,” he said.

One of the worst facets of day labouring is the employment of children aged six to 14, although it is forbidden by the constitution.

Out of some four million people who work as migrant labourers picking fruit and vegetables, over one million are under 14, according to the Child Rights Network in Mexico (REDIM), an umbrella group of 63 NGOs.

A 2006 report, “Diagnóstico sobre la condición social de las niñas y niños migrantes internos, hijos de jornaleros agrícolas” (Social Conditions among Children of Migrant Farm Workers in Mexico), concludes that the Mexican government must develop comprehensive public policies to address the situation of migrant day labourers and especially that of their children.

The report is by the Ministry of Social Development and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

“There are no records. We have been reporting cases of child labour to the authorities for three years, but oversight is weak,” Nemecio complained. Since 2007, at least eight children have died, from accidents or illness, on the farms where they or their parents worked.

One recent case is that of Flora Jacinta, a four-year-old girl who died in July from drinking polluted water in a migrants’ camp in Sonora.

Silvia Toribio, six months old, was run over by a truck Oct. 8 on a tomato farm near Guadalupe Hidalgo. The daughter of indigenous labourers Pascual Toribio and Zoila Cano was sleeping in a small crate at the time. The truck driver fled and is still at large.

The Ministry of Social Development’s Programme for Agricultural Day Labourers provides financial support for infrastructure, school grants, food aid, health care and other extra benefits. This year the programme’s budget of 23 million dollars has been used to help 600,000 people.

Since 2007 the Ministry has implemented a pilot project, titled “Monarca, contigo en tu camino” (roughly, On the Road With the Monarch Butterfly), named for the annual migration of the famous butterflies. The goal of the project is to combat child labour on farms, and it also provides scholarships and health and food benefits for children working in the fields.

The labour reform bill sent to Congress in March by the conservative government of President Felipe Calderón makes it a crime to hire children under 14 from outside the family, and empowers the Federal Labour Inspectorate to order an immediate stop to children’s work.

According to Bustamante, the lack of effective policies to ban child labour brings no political costs “because of the low level of public awareness about the problem.”

The day labourers from Guerrero will head home to celebrate the holidays of All Saints and the Day of the Dead, Nov. 1 and 2. Then they will pack up their things and hit the road again for the two-day journey to pick crops in Sinaloa.

Excerpt:

By Daniela Estrada
SANTIAGO, Oct 13 2010 (IPS)

“This country has to understand that changes must be made,” said Mario Sepúlveda, the second Chilean miner — of the group of 33 trapped 700 metres underground for over two months — rescued in the early hours of Wednesday morning.

But what changes? What lessons has the mining accident in the northern region of Atacama left Chile, the world’s largest producer of copper?

In the media frenzy surrounding the rescue operation that started Tuesday night, no one has bothered to mention that there were more than 191,000 workplace accidents in this South American country of 17 million people in 2009, including 443 deaths, and 155 deaths in the first quarter of this year alone.

“The miners are not heroes,” as they have been called around the world for surviving underground for over two months; “they are victims,” Néstor Jorquera, president of the CONFEMIN mining union, told IPS.

“After our compañeros are rescued, we’re going to do everything we can to hold the people who were responsible for this accountable,” said the leader of CONFEMIN, which represents more than 18,000 miners who work at small, medium-size and large privately-owned mines — including the 33 miners at the San Jose mine in Copiapó, Atacama.

In an unprecedented rescue operation that has thrilled television viewers around the world while it is broadcast live and covered by hundreds of Chilean and foreign journalists, the government of rightwing President Sebastián Piñera is bringing up the 32 Chileans and one Bolivian trapped in the mine since an Aug. 5 collapse.

The first miner, Florencio Ávalos, came up in the capsule named Phoenix after midnight and was welcomed by the rescuers and by Piñera and several cabinet ministers. By the time this article came out, 16 miners had been rescued, and the last miner may be brought up earlier than expected, by Wednesday night.

Critics say Camp Hope, where relatives of the miners have been staying near the mine, has turned into the set of a reality show where the private lives of the miners and their families and the details of the spectacular rescue have trumped concerns about the poor safety conditions that caused the accident.

Television programmes that plan to follow the rescued San Esteban mining company workers over the next few months have already been announced, as well as books and films about their ordeal.

There has also been criticism of the government for making political mileage out of the case, given Piñera’s continuous presence at the mine and his frequent references to the strength of the miners in his speeches, as symbols “of the Chilean spirit of struggle against adversity.”

In the eyes of the world, “Chile has come off very well because of the rescue effort, and the responsibility assumed by the state,” Kirsten Sehnbruch, a professor at the University of Chile’s Institute of Public Affairs, told IPS. But at the same time, the accident “has caused tremendous damage to the country’s image, because everyone is wondering why it happened.”

She said the accident was the result of negligence on the part of both the mining company and the government.

According to Sehnbruch, “in any developed country, the owners of the mine would be in jail.”

The two Chileans who own the mine located in the desert 800 km north of the capital are facing criminal charges for serious bodily injury in connection with an earlier accident, in which a miner lost a leg. They are under court order not to leave the country.

“The joy over the near epic rescue that has been the result of the strength and wisdom of the miners of Atacama makes it necessary for us not to forget that situations like this one are absolutely avoidable,” María Ester Feres, director of the private Central University of Chile’s centre on labour relations, research and advice, told IPS.

Feres pointed out that “last year alone, according to partial figures (provided by companies affiliated with private insurance providers), more than 191,000 work-related accidents were counted” in this country.

In a speech after the first miner was rescued, Piñera said “we are carrying out a complete review of safety standards,” not only in the mining industry but in other sectors as well.

A national policy needed

According to Feres, Chile does not have “coherent, efficient public policies or a national structure in the area of work safety and health.”

“To judge by what is happening in agribusiness, salmon farming, the ports, construction and other industries, it is clear that decent work is not a strategic objective of this country’s model for economic growth,” the expert said.

The problems include long workdays, insufficient breaks, low pay, high turnover, and high levels of informal employment, she said.

A commission set up in August by Piñera is drafting a report on workplace safety, to be delivered on Nov. 22.

The president also announced the creation of a mining superintendency to regulate and enforce safety standards, a restructuring of the National Geology and Mining Service, increased funds for inspections, and the establishment of another advisory committee, to review mining safety regulations.

CONFEMIN president Jorquera called for the ratification of International Labour Organisation (ILO) Convention 176 on Safety and Health in Mines, which was adopted in 1995 and went into force in 1998. But he complained that “the government isn’t interested in this, because it believes it won’t solve the problem.”

Feres said “the government’s actions are not pointing in the right direction,” because it set up “a commission that is only focused on labour safety, without including an analysis of overall working conditions in its objectives.” Nor did it include labour unions and other key actors, she added.

She also criticised the business community’s attempt to blame the problem “only on small companies.”

Mining unions complain that the government has gone after the weakest link, closing down small, dangerous mines that operate on a semi-informal basis in Atacama, without offering any support to help them improve conditions.

Although CONFEMIN and the Central Workers Union (CUT) — Chile’s largest trade union — will deliver a petition to the government, and other unions are organising as well, Jorquera is not optimistic with regard to the prospect of significant changes in working conditions, because of deeper underlying problems like outsourcing.

In addition, trends like outsourcing “externalise labour costs and risks, and fragment and hinder the labour movement and the organised participation of workers in setting and overseeing working conditions,” said Feres.

“Tackling labour problems as a key dimension of economic and social development, and workplace safety and health as a state policy, with a national structure and an integral and participative focus is an urgent challenge, in order to make the leap to true social and economic development,” she added.

For his part, Jorquera said the “business community’s regrettable irresponsibility” has provided “a great opportunity” for workers “to protest and reveal everything that is hidden in this country,” now that the eyes of the world are on Chile.

Excerpt:

By Daniela Pastrana
MEXICO CITY, May 26 2010 (IPS)

“Our male coworkers have had to acknowledge it: we have worked side by side in this struggle,” says Emilia Peña, describing the role of women in driving forward the battle waged by thousands of workers to reopen a state power company in Mexico.

Ten former LFC workers on hunger strike. Credit: Daniela Pastrana/IPS

But that has not discouraged her from spending hours holding up a protest banner in all kinds of weather over the last few months.

“We electrical workers have suffered a 180 degree turnaround in our lives, because we felt untouchable, or touched by God,” Peña said, while painting the emblem of the Mexican Electrical Workers Union (SME) red and black, on the day that IPS spent with a small group of women workers engaged in the struggle.

“We are starting to understand what our grandparents always told us: that the struggle was for social transformation. And ours is a two-pronged battle: to defend the labour rights won over the past century, and for our identity as women workers,” Peña said at the headquarters of the movement, a protest camp set up in Mexico City’s main square, the Zócalo.

LFC supplied electrical power to 20 million people in Mexico City and surrounding areas and employed 44,000 workers who belonged to SME, a combative, independent union.

Some 5,000, or 11 percent, of the workers were women, and nine out of 10 of these were heads of households, according to union figures.

The government of conservative President Felipe Calderón justified the shutdown, which was criticised by the opposition and has triggered an ongoing protest for the right to work that has few precedents in Mexico, by saying LFC was wasteful and was providing poor service with an overly large workforce, and that big customers were tardy in paying their power bills.

The SME and other critics, meanwhile, say the measure was aimed at weakening the union and paving the way for the privatisation of power utilities.

Another state-owned company, the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE), took over operation of central Mexico’s power grid from the SME.

One-quarter of all households in this Latin American country of 107 million people are headed by women, who make up 37 percent of the labour force. But only half of all women in the workforce are in the formal economy, and women earn 37 percent less than men on average for the same jobs.

Seven months after the liquidation of LFC, 20,000 workers — including 1,500 women –continue their protest, refusing to accept severance pay and demanding reinstatement in their jobs.

The workers, who take turns staying at the protest camp, where they hand out literature, hold talks, paint signs and banners and lead demonstrations, have also taken their struggle to universities and trade unions.

In December, they met with First Lady Margarita Zavala. And starting in April, they have held a rotating hunger strike to demand that the government engage in talks.

The women “are the heart of the movement,” said Octavio Arenas, the former head of the LFC drafting department, who has designed more than 1,300 metres of banners and signs since the protest began. “The women are working just as hard as the rest. It’s not easy; it involves hours of work that leaves you with aching knees and wrists.”

Peña said her participation in the movement was hard for her daughters to accept. “They hadn’t realised how much the household depended on what I earned until the blow came.”

Her savings kept them going for a couple of months, but after that, her four-year-old granddaughter’s private day care centre “was no longer a priority,” and the family had to start eating in soup kitchens run by the city government.

“At first they were mad because of the economic difficulties,” she said. “They urged me to accept the severance pay. My granddaughter would hug my legs and say ‘Tita, are they going to give you work soon? Will you have money to take me to school?’ These are things that really get to you as a woman, and that made me think how inhumane this system is.

“But we talked, and I told them we had to stick together, because out there things are really tough for women. Now they support me in this,” she said.

In its campaign to justify the shutdown, the government portrayed the workers as inefficient and overly privileged and demanding, and few employers will now hire former LFC employees.

That means the workers, especially the women, have had to be creative in finding new sources of income.

Like Blanca Velázquez, who cooks quesadillas — tortillas stuffed with various ingredients — and sells them at a stand in front of her home in a poor neighbourhood on the east side of Mexico City. Or Elena Esquivel, who sells homemade ice cream outside of a child care centre.

“The participation of women in this struggle has many faces: we are workers, mothers, wives, daughters,” said Cecilia Figueroa, head of Radio SME. “This was our only possible response: to defend what our parents did before us.”

Her improvised sound booth in the Zócalo operates a few metres from the tent where 10 women have been fasting since May 3, after joining the hunger strike declared a week earlier by 80 other workers.

“This is a new generation of struggle, in which men and women participate equally,” said Celia Jiménez, the youngest of the women in the group.

Their protest tent is decorated with flowers, stuffed animals, a few religious images and a large cardboard heart reading “Congratulations Mama” — a present from a male colleague on May 10, Mother’s Day in Mexico.

For Rocío Higuera, the oldest, family is a painful subject. Her four children disapproved of her participation in the hunger strike. Although her two sons have more or less come around, her daughters still refuse to accept it, she says between tears. “But I have to defend my right to make my own decisions.

“I always had to fight for that in Luz y Fuerza, but it’s different in the union. When this struggle started, we women didn’t stay on the sidelines, and we weren’t sidelined by the men either. To the contrary, they themselves have said we are more daring,” said Higuera, who was an office manager at LFC, where she worked for 20 years.

Her smile lights up her face again: “We have a slogan: when a woman forges ahead, there’s not a man who can stop her.”

Excerpt:

By Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, May 23 2010 (IPS)

Textile cooperatives founded by former slave labourers from Argentina and Thailand will jointly launch a new brand of clothing in June to raise awareness about exploitation and promote decent jobs in the garment industry.

On Jun. 4, La Alameda from Argentina and Dignity Returns from Thailand will start selling thousands of T-shirts bearing several different designs under the “No Chains” trademark. They ultimately plan to produce additional clothing items in association with other cooperatives.

“It’s a cry of support for decent work and a way to prove that high quality clothing can be produced without having to enslave workers,” one of the initiative’s promoters, Gustavo Vera of La Alameda, told IPS.

La Alameda first emerged as a community kitchen in 2001, during Argentina’s severe economic crisis. It served many undocumented Bolivian workers who had escaped the garment industry sweatshops that had mushroomed in Buenos Aires.

La Alameda’s repeated complaints about the dismal working conditions, in addition to a tragic accident at one of the sweatshops in which six people died — five of them children –, finally focussed public attention on slave labour, which in Argentina largely involves undocumented immigrants.

The workers spend long days toiling without rest, crowded into spaces where they also live with their families. They lack documents and money, and have little freedom to venture outside the premises.

The clandestine factories provide products for major clothing brands, like Puma, Bensimon, Lecoq, Soho and Kosiuko, according to the complaints that former workers filed in the courts. Justice authorities have seized the machinery from some of the workshops, but have yet to sentence those responsible.

Some of the workers joined together to set up a textile cooperative that sells its own brand, Mundo Alameda, and has the backing of the non-governmental AVINA Foundation.

Meanwhile, halfway across the world in Thailand, a group of women laid off without compensation by the Bed and Bath company when their factory shut down founded the Solidarity Factory cooperative, which later became Dignity Returns.

The members of Dignity Returns say that the factory made clothing for brands including Nike, Gap and Reebok, and that they were forced to work extremely long hours. To add insult to injury, their wages were docked if they complained about fatigue.

The two groups, who met in 2009 at an international conference hosted by the Hong Kong-based Asia Monitor Resource Centre, resolved to join forces to make their voices heard around the globe.

The new clothing brand will be launched simultaneously in Buenos Aires and Bangkok.

On the No Chains website, their position is clear: “The clothes produced in typical garment factories trap workers in chains — in chains of debt, chains of control by bosses who care about money and not workers — chains of global production, where many parties grab profits that come from the blood of the workers.”

That is why it is not just about launching a brand or a new self-managed venture, but also about calling attention to the need for industrial production that respects the dignity of workers, without exploitation or slavery, according to the promoters.

“Through purposeful action we are denouncing the persistence of slave labour, which has global markets and which leads major brands to take advantage of vulnerable groups and of lax legislation in order to impose forced labour in various parts of the world,” Vera said.

The cooperatives held an international contest for T-shirt designs, and of the six winning motifs, two came from Argentina, and one each from Hong Kong, Indonesia, South Korea and the United States.

The cooperatives began production in time to meet the launch date, and the idea is to distribute the clothing by consignment through various non-governmental organisations and trade unions.

The next goal, said Vera, is to expand the network to include cooperatives and society at large in the anti-slave labour campaign. There are talks under way to incorporate two more cooperatives, from the Philippines and Indonesia.

“Within a few years we want to have 20 to 30 cooperatives from different countries in the developing world,” he said. There are also plans to diversify the brand to other types of garments.

According to the organisers, the project is not without precedent. The “Clean Clothes Campaign,” led by consumer organisations, promotes sales of clothing that is not produced by slave labour.

But No Chains is the first led by independent cooperatives: “This is the first time that workers coming from the world of slavery are coming together to denounce exploitation and prove that it’s possible to produce clothing under decent working conditions,” said Vera.

Excerpt:

By Franz Chávez
LA PAZ, May 5 2010 (IPS)

Strikes and demonstrations against the Bolivian government’s wage policy have marked the end of a honeymoon period between workers and leftwing President Evo Morales.

The government capped general wage hikes at five percent, and at three percent for the police and armed forces. It also raised the national minimum wage by five percent to 679 Bolivian pesos (96 dollars) a month, 32 pesos higher than in 2009.

Tuesday’s demonstration by industrial workers in La Paz was accompanied by a 24-hour strike by teachers, public health workers and miners, while the wives of rank and file policemen went on hunger strike in protest at the meagre wage increase which, they say, does not compensate for lost purchasing power.

Peaceful marches were held, simultaneously, in other cities.

The strikes and demonstrations, organised by a dissident group of leaders of the Central Obrera Boliviana (COB), the chief trade union federation in Bolivia, is the first such protest against Morales since he began his first presidential term in January 2006.

It has brought to light a split in the main union federation as well as a rejection of the authority of COB executive secretary Pedro Montes, a miner, accused by one faction in the union of betraying the workers’ struggle by aligning himself with the government.

When factory workers protesting the wage policy surrounded the seat of government, one person was injured by a dynamite charge set off at the doors of the Labour Ministry, and at least 15 people were arrested in the disturbances.

From his office, Economy and Finance Minister Luis Arce defended the wage increase, which is the lowest since Morales became president. He argued that it is well above the 2009 inflation rate, which was 0.26 percent according to the state National Institute of Statistics.

Arce said health workers’ demands are excessive: they want wage increases of up to 26 percent to offset the hike in food prices.

Morales raised wages by 13.7 percent in 2006, his first year as president, and maintained an annual average wage increase of 8.7 percent until last year, when the raise was 14 percent, according to the non-governmental Centre for Labour and Agrarian Development Studies (CEDLA).

“Workers are profoundly disenchanted because their expectations of change have not been met, the more so when labour organisations have negotiatied agreements over pensions, job creation and worker protection that have not been fulfilled (by the government),” CEDLA analyst Bruno Rojas told IPS.

“No changes have occurred in the last four years. The promised revival of production has not happened, so tax revenue has not risen and new jobs have not been created in the natural gas, mining, agriculture or forestry industries. We cannot remain silent,” the executive secretary of the Bolivian miners’ union federation, Guido Midma, told IPS.

Sixty percent of workers earn wages below the cost of the basic basket of goods for a family of five, estimated at 1,288 Bolivian pesos (182 dollars) for food alone, not including health care, transport, housing and other expenses, said Rojas.

CEDLA’s statistics distinguish between nominal wage increases, expressed in cash terms, and real wage increases, which reflect purchasing power by comparing wage hikes with price increases.

Between 2006 and 2009, the average increase in the real minimum wage was barely 1.4 percent, and the government proposal of a nominal increase of five percent in the minimum wage in 2010 means a real average annual increase in the minimum wage of only 2.3 percent, according to a CEDLA study published May 1.

“The wage increase is miserable, even more so when the government is siding with the business community at a time when international mineral prices are on the rise. The government is forcing workers into exploitation and slavery,” said Midma.

But the government has decided to set aside nearly 1.8 billion dollars for public spending, a sizeable sum for a country with a GDP of 17 billion dollars a year.

The police are also in conflict with the government over wages. A score of wives of low-ranking police officers are holding a hunger strike to protest the three percent increase announced by the government for police and military wages.

Police patrolmen earn 1,000 Bolivian pesos (142 dollars) a month, and many are posted a long distance from their homes, which causes family break-up and forces police officers to live in conditions of extreme poverty, the hunger strikers said.

Interior Minister Sacha Llorenti, a former human rights activist, warned about possible protests and strikes, although police and troops are forbidden to take such action.

Excerpt:

By Daniela Estrada
SANTIAGO, Apr 6 2010 (IPS)

Trade with the European Union has not significantly improved the situation of workers in Latin America, in spite of its volume having doubled between 1990 and 2007, according to a study by two Chilean academics.

The EU is the biggest investor in the region, with Spanish corporations leading the field, and is also Latin America’s second largest trading partner, after the United States, although China is rapidly catching up with the European bloc.

Latin America basically sells commodities to the EU, while a number of European companies participate in banking and privatised services such as electricity and gas, as well as the mining industry and other export sectors.

The first Latin American country to sign an Economic Partnership, Political Coordination and Cooperation Agreement with the European bloc was Mexico, in 1997, followed by Chile in 2002.

Negotiations with Mercosur (the Southern Common Market, made up of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay, with Venezuela in the process of joining) began in 1999, but are currently stalled pending the outcome of the Doha Round of World Trade Organisation (WTO) talks.

The European bloc is also holding talks with Peru, Colombia and Central America.

The volume of trade between the two regions doubled over the period studied; however it grew more slowly than in the rest of the world, and the trend could in no way be described as a steadily rising line, says the book titled “Las relaciones económicas entre la Unión Europea y América Latina: Sus impactos en los mercados laborales (1990-2007)” (Economic Relations between the European Union and Latin America: Impacts on Labour Markets – 1990-2007), by Claudio Lara and Consuelo Silva.

The value of trade rose from 86 billion euros (116 billion dollars) in 2003 to over 157 billion euros (213 billion dollars) in 2007, according to the study, which was undertaken at the request of the Trade Union Confederation of the Americas (TUCA-CSA) and presented Apr. 1 in Santiago.

The EU’s main trading partners in Latin America are, in descending order, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Chile and Colombia, which together account for 80 percent of the total trade between the regions.

In spite of the growth in trade, Lara and Silva told IPS that the frequently repeated promises that more and better jobs would be brought about by the opening of the economy and the influx of foreign direct investment, have not been fulfilled.

Although it was not easy for the authors to identify specific labour impacts arising from ties with the EU, as opposed to relations with other economic blocs, they did arrive at several negative conclusions.

First, during the period analysed, employment fell significantly in industries like farming, forestry, fisheries, mining and manufacturing, in spite of considerable European investment in export sectors.

In contrast, there was a marked expansion of jobs in services and subcontracted industries, which provide less stable employment with fewer labour benefits and which tend to weaken the labour movement.

The book’s authors cite reports that European companies like Endesa, Edelnor and Unión Fenosa (all energy utilities) have engaged in anti-union practices.

Foreign investment enters the region mainly through company mergers or acquisitions, said Lara, the academic director of the master’s degree course in economics at the Latin American School of Postgraduate Studies in the private Universidad Arcis.

“When we looked at a country’s investment and savings rates, we found that the contribution of foreign investment was nearly zero, and was sometimes even negative,” he said.

The influx of European capital has encouraged a massive expansion in the region’s financial sector. This “financialisation” process threatens both the development of the real economy and job creation, Lara stressed.

Because of their interest in speculative gains, “these companies are carrying out constant readjustments, and they tend to go in for a great deal of outsourcing or subcontracting, resulting in labour flexibilisation and job insecurity,” he said.

European transnational corporations “operate like conglomerates,” with activities in different areas of the economy, and “a large proportion of their investments are funneled through tax havens in the Caribbean,” the economist said.

During the period studied, Latin American workers suffered losses in their real wages, which grew less than GDP and productivity.

Between 1995 and 2006, average real wages declined in five out of 11 countries studied. These were Argentina, Brazil, Panama, Paraguay and Uruguay, according to 2008 statistics from the International Labour Organisation (ILO) quoted in the book. In the other countries, wages stagnated or rose only slightly.

“In general, what the European companies do is set up shop in a country and adapt their policies to local realities,” without concerning themselves with whether or not labour conditions are precarious, Roberto Morales, the executive secretary of the Labour Studies Institute (FIEL) of the United Workers Federation of Chile, told IPS.

A March report by the non-governmental Observatory on Corporate Social Responsibility in Spain, based on opinion polls, concluded that “Spanish companies in Latin America should behave in a more socially responsible way, and have more respect for workers.”

The sixth biannual European Union-Latin America summit is slated for May in Spain.

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
MONTEVIDEO, Mar 26 2010 (IPS)

“The time will come when 80 percent of the raw material used by industry in Uruguay will be recycled waste products,” Marcelo Conde, a 40-year-old garbage sorter who has been digging through trash for recyclables “for as long as I can remember,” says with some pride.

Conde, vice president of the Union of Urban Solid Waste Sorters (UCRUS), works at the Felipe Cardozo Cooperative (COFECA), the biggest of the waste picker cooperatives that operate in the Felipe Cardozo recycling plant, the largest of its kind in the capital of this small South American country between Argentina and Brazil.

At the plant, the members of some 60 cooperatives sort through the rubbish dumped by around 30 trucks, of the 540 that dispose of 2,000 tons of urban waste a day in dumps around the capital, Montevideo.

An estimated 800 tons of household waste are processed daily by about 5,000 families in the capital, according to the latest official count in 2008.

But authorities say the real number is up to twice that, if non-registered waste pickers are included, while a similar number of informal garbage collectors work in the rest of the country, classifying and selling recyclables. (Montevideo is home to roughly half of the population of 3.3 million.)

Efforts to overcome the stigma of working as informal garbage sorters are a recent phenomenon in Uruguay, as in other countries around the world.

During the 1973-1985 military dictatorship, “hurgadores”, as they were called, had to sneak into the municipal garbage dumps to dig for recyclable materials, and many ended up spending a night behind bars as a result.

But things are changing. The ministries of social development (MIDES) and education and culture drafted a manual on the rights of garbage sorters, with the aim of protecting their ability to work and earn a living, while carrying out such an important task as recycling.

In addition, many have grouped together in the UCRUS union and, with the support of MIDES, have set up cooperatives that are improving working conditions.

Shortly after the country’s first left-wing government took office in March 2005, socialist President Tabaré Vázquez created MIDES, whose main focus was the National Plan to Address the Social Emergency (PANES), an anti-poverty initiative.

MIDES supposed that a large portion of waste pickers would sign up for PANES, which included an income transfer programme for extremely poor households, a temporary workfare scheme with a training component, microcredit, a food purchase card and other benefits.

But it turned out that a significant number of families who sorted garbage for a living actually earned enough to put them above the official poverty line, which made them ineligible for PANES.

Conde told IPS that a member of the cooperative where he works earns between 1,600 and 1,700 pesos a week, which works out to around 400 dollars a month.

He said that not only does the work pay more than some other jobs, but sorters like being self-employed and not having a boss or a set schedule.

Many of them also sell scavenged home appliances and clothes, shoes and furniture, often in good condition, at neighbourhood street markets throughout Montevideo

To foment labour, social and cultural inclusion of people who make a living by collecting and classifying garbage, government officials designed the programme Uruguay Clasifica (Uruguay Sorts).

“The first thing we found is that the severe economic crisis of 2002 (one of the worst in the country’s history) did not actually lead to an increase in the number of sorters,” Nicolás Minetti, the head of Uruguay Clasifica, told IPS.

“They just became more visible because of the new distribution of trash dumpsters” in several cities, which replaced the traditional system of setting trash bags out on the sidewalk when the garbage truck was set to come by, he added.

“Before, sorters knew the schedules of the garbage trucks, and just had to go through the bags of rubbish for recyclable materials shortly before the truck came by to pick up the trash. But now, they have to sort through the dumpsters all day long, at any time. That has made them more visible,” he said.

The programme has also had a special focus on children, because since the dumpsters were set on each block, more youngsters can be seen riding the horse-drawn carts used by most trash pickers. Although garbage sorting was already a family occupation, as in the case of Conde, who began to work with his stepfather when he was just a little boy, it is easier for small children than adults to “dumpster dive.”

The children begin working at the age of eight on average, and half of the women working in the trade are already mothers by the age of 15, Minetti said.

In this country, which has the highest literacy rate in Latin America – 97 percent – most waste pickers have never finished school: 25 percent have three years or less of formal schooling, while 80 percent have six years or less.

One of Uruguay Clasifica’s aims is to generate conditions to keep children and adolescents in school, or help dropouts return to the educational system, by providing a small cash stipend for families whose children attend school.

Some waste recyclers have also signed up for programmes run by the government of Montevideo or the ministry of labour and social security. The classes for adults, in gardening and green spaces, construction, and mechanics training, begin in April, Minetti said.

Ecological work

Uruguay Clasifica is also focusing on training and on improving working conditions, as well as carrying out an awareness-raising campaign. It has begun handing out uniforms to garbage sorters, and distributing pamphlets that explain the work that they do and how to separate household trash.

A pilot project was carried out in Ciudad de la Costa (City of the Coast), made up of a series of small beach resorts stretching east of the capital along the coast of the Río de la Plata (River Plate), where waste pickers have replaced their horses with bicycles to pull their carts.

These men and women, who now wear uniforms, hand out stickers and informational pamphlets to urge people to separate their trash for recycling.

The results have been encouraging. “At the same house where they used to glare at me and call the police when I was looking at their garbage, now when I go by in my uniform the owners of the house say ‘here, come through this way, the bottles and cans are stored out back’,” said one of the sorters taking part in the project, Minetti recalled.

In 2008, MIDES helped set up 10 cooperatives in Montevideo and the central department (province) of Florida, as part of another pilot plan.

The idea, a long-time goal of the garbage sorters’ union, was to get the workers to pay into social security, as members of microenterprises and cooperatives, and leave behind their status as informal sector workers, said Conde and Minetti.

In 2009, thanks to agreements signed with the governments of the 19 departments into which Uruguay is divided, the plan was extended, and today there are 40 cooperatives or groups that are in the process of registering as such.

In COFECA, the cooperative where Conde works, the members were given rain gear last year, and when he spoke to IPS, they were about to receive uniforms.

“Now we have another pending goal: a warehouse, so the materials like newspapers, paper and cardboard are under a roof and won’t get wet when it rains,” the trade unionist explained.

“Although it might not seem like it, garbage is a huge, multibillion dollar business, and it’s about time that the weakest link in the chain, the sorters, have a decent life and are respected for our silent contribution to the environment,” Conde said.

Excerpt:

By Cam McGrath
CAIRO, Feb 4 2010 (IPS)

A stalemate between labour unions and business associations is preventing Egyptian authorities from setting a minimum wage that could improve the lot of millions of citizens living in poverty.

Egypt’s minimum wage has been 35 Egyptian pounds (6.50 dollars) per month since 1984. When bonuses, incentives and annual increases are included, the minimum monthly salary of government employees and public sector workers reaches 289 Egyptian pounds (53 dollars). Some private sector employees earn much less.

“Our salaries have not kept pace with inflation,” says Mohamed Bayoumi, a department store clerk who supports his family on just 300 Egyptian pounds (55 dollars) per month. “When we complain, our managers say we are lucky to have jobs.”

Studies have determined that Egypt’s minimum wage – even with all incentives and bonuses included – is too low to meet basic living expenses. Economists point to a sharp deterioration in real pay over the past two decades that has driven many families below the two dollars per day median poverty line.

“When minimum wage is related to per capita GNP (gross national product), it appears that this rate has decreased from nearly 60 percent in 1984 to 19.4 percent in 1991/92 and further to 13 percent in 2007,” a study issued last June by the Egyptian Centre for Economic Studies (ECES) concluded. “When the ratio of minimum wage to per capita GNP is compared to other countries, it appears amongst the lowest.”

Egypt’s minimum wage is just 13 percent of per capita GNP, the study said. By comparison, the rate is 26 percent in Spain, 51 percent in France and 78 percent in Turkey.

Egypt established the National Council for Wages (NCW) in 2003 to ensure that salaries are aligned with the cost of living. The council has the power to set a minimum wage, but has been rendered toothless by internal divisions and the lack of political will.

“There is a big problem in reaching a consensus on the issue,” says council member Abdel Fatah El-Gebali. “The trade unions want to set the minimum wage around 1,200 Egyptian pounds (222 dollars) per month, while business associations want a maximum of 400 Egyptian pounds (74 dollars).”

The authors of the ECES study recommended setting the minimum wage at 733.2 Egyptian pounds (136 dollars) per month. They argue that in most countries the minimum wage represents about 25 percent of per capita GNP. Their proposed wage factors in Egypt’s per capita GNP, average household size, percentage of household members employed and ratio of dependents.

Analysts say the NCW’s foot-dragging in setting a minimum wage is to the advantage of employers, who some have accused of exploiting cheap labour and weak enforcement of workers’ rights to maximise their profits.

Mohamed Hussein, a career counselor and resident of a low-income neighbourhood in Cairo, hopes the NCW will agree on a figure soon, but fears a revised minimum wage could result in higher unemployment. He says employers accustomed to cheap labour would have to decide between raising workers’ salaries and hiring off the books.

“A minimum wage will help workers in the formal sector, but it could also create a larger informal sector,” Hussein says. “Business owners will find ways to work around the law.”

Economist Samir Radwan agrees that some business owners might seek to circumvent the minimum wage to cut operating costs. But the primary employer affected, the Egyptian government, would be under close scrutiny. Over five million Egyptians work for the government, and 1.3 million in the public sector, in a population of 82 million.

Radwan says establishing a fair minimum wage would improve the lives of Egyptian workers, especially unskilled labourers and low-level civil servants.

“There is no doubt that it should improve income distribution,” he tells IPS. “If (the minimum wage is) increased, there will be an immediate impact to the lowest level of wages – the poorest of the poor. This will create a ripple effect, as the brackets above the minimum will increase as well.”

Opponents, including some of Egypt’s most prominent businessmen and economists, have charged that raising the minimum wage will create inflation. Radwan doubts that.

“Egypt’s share of wages in GNP is low, just 36 percent, and the share of those who would receive the minimum wage is not significant enough to have a dent on inflation,” he says.

“Some employers also claim it would increase the cost of production and reduce their competitiveness,” Radwan continues. “But depressing wages in the long run is counter-productive. If you increase the wage then it results in a productivity increase, one would expect, in which case the competitiveness argument does not hold.”

Rights groups are pressing for the NCW to set a minimum wage, but warn that unless accompanied by real economic reform, the mandated wage threshold will be insufficient to offset rising prices.

“Simply raising the minimum wage is not enough. It must be linked to reform of market management mechanisms, since an increase in the minimum wage could trigger a wave of inflation,” the Egyptian Organisation for Human Rights (EOHR) said in a report released last June. “What is needed is a monitoring of prices, reduction of imports, reform of agricultural policy and increased productivity.”

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
LONDON, Jan 26 2010 (IPS)

The agreed, if dubious, solution to the financial crisis was to get people and governments – in the richer countries – to borrow more in order to spend more. What is not in doubt is the growing numbers of people who will be able to neither borrow nor spend.

A report from the International Labour Organisation (ILO) released Wednesday points to dramatic levels of unemployment in the developed countries.

The unemployment rate in industrialised economies jumped to 8.4 percent in 2009, up from 6.0 percent in 2008 and 5.7 per cent in 2007, the report says.

“The number of unemployed in the (developed economies and European Union) region is estimated to have surged by more than 13.7 million between 2007 and 2009, with an increase of nearly 12 million unemployed in 2009 alone.”

Despite comprising less than 16 percent of the global workforce, “the developed economies and European Union region accounted for more than 40 percent of the increase in global unemployment since 2007,” the report says. “Unemployment in the developed economies and European Union is expected to remain elevated, with a projected increase in the regional unemployment rate to 8.9 percent in 2010.”

“These are dramatic figures,” Jeff Johnson, chief of the ILO employment trends unit told IPS in an interview from Geneva. “But we are also saying that it is not only about unemployment. Of the six billion people on the planet, three billion are engaged in economic activity. So when we say that of these, 212 million are unemployed, it does not sound like a lot. But 1.5 billion of them, about half, are among the ranks of the vulnerably employed.

“Unemployment is the tip of the iceberg. The long-term issue is a massive decent work deficit throughout the world.”

Essentially, the report is also saying that the poor countries may appear to have lost less, because they had less to lose in the first place. They are included in what the report refers to as the working poor and the vulnerably employed.

It might seem, almost, that unemployment in the developed countries is, relatively speaking, a privilege.

“Most workers in developed countries have a social protection mechanism, in terms of unemployment insurance schemes, whereas in the developing world they oftentimes do not,” Johnson says. “They can go down and apply for unemployment protection, so they have an income substitution mechanism.

“If you have a person in Ethiopia in a manufacturing plant that closes, there is no income protection, they have to be able to provide a livelihood for themselves and their family, and so they take up any job. They may set up something like a small food stall, but they will work. In the developed world they transition to unemployment; in the developing world they transition into vulnerable employment.”

The headline figure may be just that; and the ILO report seeks to look beyond it to a collection of factors. And where the fall comes from: in many developed countries salaried work “may be as high as 90 percent; whereas in many developing countries it can be as low as 20 percent or even 10 percent,” Johnson says.

But there are other ways in which the statistics may conceal more than they reveal. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labour Statistics (BLS), the unemployed in the U.S. now make up 10 percent of the potential workforce, or 15.4 million people. However, the real number might actually be a good deal higher.

The figure does not include individuals who have given up looking for work, says Heather Boushey, senior economist at the Centre for American Progress, a Washington-based think tank.

“The 10 percent is based on a household survey conducted by the BLS every month, asking ‘Were you available for work last week and were you actively seeking a job?'” Boushey tells IPS. “When there are more than six workers for every job available, there are a lot of folks who quite frankly have given up.”

The likely figure is around 17.2 percent, said Boushey. “Most economists think the unemployment rate will remain high through 2010 and is likely to continue to rise for some months.

“Given that growth was only 2.2 percent in the third quarter, and that all economists say that was due to the recovery package primarily, there’s a lot of concern that economic growth will be slow through 2010. If that’s true, it will be hard to get the unemployment rate to come back down,” Boushey said.

Fewer jobs mean less buying. “Seventy percent of the U.S. economy is driven by consumer demand, by consumption,” says Boushey. “You can’t have a robust recovery if you’ve got record high shares of folks out of work.”

And for that reason the dip in consumption in the U.S. – due partly also to a rise in savings – is going to hurt the economy and jobs in the rest of the world, which looks to the U.S. as a big market.

Similarly with Western Europe, where unemployment is worsening as official economists boast green shoots of recovery – rather weedy shoots as a commentator called them. In France too unemployment has risen to 10 percent. “Among youth under 25 years of age, unemployment is much worse, and affects almost 25 percent of the population,” Philippe Frémeaux, former director of the Agency for Economic Research and Forecast, and now chief editor of the monthly magazine Alternative Economiques, tells IPS.

“The crisis will continue destroying jobs, which in turn will affect domestic demand,” Xavier Timbeau, director of the French Economic Observatory (OFCE), tells IPS. “In addition, banks and insurance companies suffered losses of well over 1,000 billion euros, and are facing very obscure prospects.”

The statistics themselves are often uncertain, even official ones. In Germany, the Federal Employment Agency reported it expects the number of unemployed to rise to 4.1 million this year. In December it reported a total of 3.3 million jobless, about 8.1 percent of the workforce.

But the Federal Labour Office says unemployment has been declining these past months, and that the number may stop short of four million, though a rise in unemployment is expected this year.

In Britain, meanwhile, a continued rise in unemployment is forecast until at least the middle of the year, to 2.8 million.

Some figures speak of 4.3 percent unemployment in China, but the more likely accepted figure for urban areas is between 8 and 10 percent. And again, these figures may refer to explicit unemployment rather than to large-scale underemployment.

Add that figure to the official unemployment figures in countries as large as China and India, and the number of people counted as unemployed, along with those in vulnerable employment and working poverty, is gigantic, and a very large part of the 1.5 billion that the ILO says are without decent work.

The unemployment rate in India stands officially at 7.32 percent. As with China, the real figures are likely a good deal higher. And in both cases, given the size of the population, that means the real numbers are huge.

*In this set of three reports, IPS correspondents look at the impact of recession by way of unemployment, the push for more people-friendly government, and moves within developing countries to reduce reliance on the industrialised world.

Excerpt:

“After work, when I’m on my own, I’m bored to death. If you want amenities, you have to bring them yourself,” says young forestry worker Alejandro de Leiva, who works on a tree plantation in the western Uruguayan province of Paysandú, where he lives and works for 10 to 12 days in a row, with just two days off.

When he goes to the city of Paysandú, the provincial capital, he visits his son, who lives with his ex-wife. He also visits his girlfriend, who he hopes to start a family with soon, he tells IPS.

De Leiva works near the town of Gallinal, 490 km northwest of Montevideo, the capital of this small South American country wedged between Brazil and Argentina.

Forestal Oriental SA, a subsidiary of the Finnish forestry industry company Botnia, has one of its many forest plantations outside of Gallinal.

De Leiva is housed nearby, and works with roughly 300 other workers, only seven of whom are directly employed by the company, while the rest are hired by subcontractors.

The construction of Botnia’s enormous pulp mill in the Uruguayan town of Fray Bentos on the banks of the Uruguay river, which has the capacity to produce one million tons of pulp a year, has had major economic and social impacts.

Construction of the plant in 2006 involved an investment of 1.2 billion dollars, the largest in Uruguayan history. The company has also provided a significant number of jobs in this country of 3.3 million people.

But it was the environmental aspect that drew the most attention at the national and international levels. Residents of the Argentine city of Gualeguaychú, located 22 km away from the plant along a tributary of the Uruguay river, have been holding protests since 2006, worried about the risk of pollution posed by the mill and the potential impact on tourism and fishing.

Another issue that has come up is that the plant’s smokestack can be seen from Gualeguaychú’s most picturesque beach resort, Ñandubaysal, across the Uruguay river.

Although the Gualegaychú movement against the pulp mill has waned, smaller groups of protesters continue to sporadically block one of the three international bridges that connect Argentina and Uruguay over the Uruguay river every summer, causing major problems for the tourism industry in this country and hassles for the large numbers of people who cross the border in the summer months.

The two governments are waiting for the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague to hand down within the next few months a ruling on the legal action brought by Argentina accusing Uruguay of violating the bilateral treaty governing the use of the border river.

But the Gualeguaychú activists say they are not interested in the ICJ decision and will continue their protests and roadblocks.

In the meantime, Stora Enso, a Finnish–Swedish pulp and paper manufacturer, set off a media bomb when it recently announced that its planned pulp mill would be built near the Botnia plant.

However, president-elect José Mujica told business leaders that the plant would not be built there, and later said he had received a call from Stora Enso officials who assured him that the pulp mill would not be built in Fray Bentos, and that they had other sites in mind.

But there have been various other business moves afoot in the forestry industry in Uruguay. A few weeks ago, UPM, a Finnish paper company, acquired Botnia’s pulp production and forestry operations in this country. It now owns a 91 percent share in the Fray Bentos plant and a 100 percent share in Forestal Oriental SA’s forestry operations.

The Forestal Oriental workers who spoke to IPS are optimistic about the latest development. “They’re going to buy more fields, and we’re expecting more jobs and work, and maybe they’ll pay us more. Perhaps they’ll even let us leave on the weekends…” one said with resigned sarcasm.

Botnia is currently the sixth largest exporter in Uruguay, and with its transfer to UPM, it is expected to move up in the ranking.

Economic authorities in Uruguay expect exports to surpass 4.5 million cubic metres of wood this year.

The forestry industry has had a major impact on Uruguay, which has a territory of 176,000 sq km. Prior to the 1987 passage of a law promoting investment in the sector, there were only 100,000 hectares of plantation forests. That total had soared to nearly one million hectares in 2009, of the 3.3 million hectares approved for forest plantations by the Agriculture Ministry. Protected native forests, meanwhile, cover 750,000 hectares.

But the growth of the industry and the influx of foreign investment, especially encouraged by the left-wing government of incumbent President Tabaré Vázquez, have been criticised by local environmentalists, who point to damages to the soil and depletion of water reserves caused by large monoculture plantations of fast-growing eucalyptus and pine trees.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, the industry also drew fire from trade unions, when it was revealed that many forest plantation workers were subject to violations of their labour and human rights and poor working conditions – problems that have been successfully combated by stricter new laws and improved government oversight and inspections, according to the workers who spoke to IPS.

Labour unionists told IPS that the arrival of the left-wing Broad Front to the government for the first time in 2005 paved the way for the fulfillment of longstanding demands for improved conditions for forestry workers. But they say greater controls for subcontractor firms are still needed, especially for plantation operations located far from towns and cities, where violations of workers’ rights still occur.

The industry already employs some 6,000 workers in the western border provinces alone. But within the next four years, another 2,000 jobs are expected to be generated – a significant number in a country this size. And new investment projects are in the pipeline, so the prospects are for steady growth.

Progress on the labour front

The government of conservative President Julio María Sanguinetti established labour, security and occupational health standards in a 1999 decree, but they only began to be enforced at all rigorously in 2004. Companies, government agencies, workers and NGOs took part in drafting the decree.

In July 2004, a “good forestry practices” code was approved, described by experts as a tool for the “transformation and modernisation of labour relations in the area.” But trade unionists say the real improvement arrived in December 2008 with a new law that set an eight-hour workday, with a 30-minute break, for all rural workers.

De Leiva said conditions for forestry workers have improved significantly in the last few years. But he added that there are still problems in terms of getting days off. Many workers, like de Leiva, work 12 days in a row, with just two off. They also have the option of working for an entire month, with four days off. Their supervisors, on the other hand, work Monday through Friday, with weekends off.

At least the workers no longer live in tents in the middle of the countryside, in subhuman conditions, as they did until a few years ago.

Outsourcing

Despite the improvements in their working conditions, forestry workers have suffered the problem of the mushrooming of outsourcing firms, which often fail to respect the law, or stand in the way of unionisation by threatening to cut jobs, for example.

Workers in tree nurseries, sawmills and utility poll manufacturing plants are represented by the Union of Wood Industry Workers, while pulp and paper mill factory workers are grouped in the Paper Federation. Both form part of Uruguay’s sole labour federation, the PIT-CNT.

The forestry industry generates one job for every 30 to 35 hectares. By comparison, agriculture and livestock raising – traditionally the main engines of the Uruguayan economy – employ one person for every 500 hectares.

Transnational corporations typically outsource to subcontractors, which are required to make the obligatory social security payments for their employees.

The firm doing the outsourcing pays the subcontractors for each specific task, such as planting trees, pesticide spraying, fertilisation or fence building, as well as 2.5 percent of production. The workers who stay on the tree plantations are given room and board in installations equipped with electricity and running water.

The latest case of labour irregularities that was detected was in the central province of Tacuarembó, where forestry workers were living in tents in the middle of the countryside in semi-slavery conditions, were not enrolled in the social security system, and were receiving no social benefits.

“If the forestry company finds out that in the outsourcing firm there are workers in the black economy (not on the payroll), they fire the subcontractor, period,” because under the new law, the company doing the outsourcing is also held accountable for irregularities, one of the workers told IPS.

He also said that is one of the reasons the workers themselves often do not report the situation, to avoid losing their jobs.

Workers are paid according to their specialty. For example, a plantation worker earns 500 Uruguayan pesos (25 dollars) a day, while the person who applies the fertiliser earns twice that – a considerable sum compared to the minimum wage of eight dollars a day. But although forestry industry workers earn better on average than other agricultural labourers, most of the work is seasonal, mainly in autumn and spring.

Continued growth

In the western provinces alone, future investment in the industry is expected to be higher than 2.5 billion dollars, besides spending on infrastructure like roads, railways and ports, as announced by president-elect Mujica, who also belongs to the left-wing Broad Front.

After cancelling plans to build a pulp mill similar to Botnia’s in Fray Bentos, Spanish pulp, paper and energy group Ence sold its 120,000 hectares of forest plantations to Stora Enso and the Chilean firm Forestal Arauco, which are partners in the investment.

Although continued growth of forest plantations is projected, non-timber forestry products, like tourism, biodiversity reserves and carbon sinks, are also steadily developing as part of an integral use of native and plantation forests, according to a study on the strategic plan for the development of Paysandú up to 2015, carried out by the local government in conjunction with social and educational organisations and production associations from the province.

By Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, Dec 16 2009 (IPS)

A study on young people and human development in South America’s Mercosur trade bloc indicates that while in Brazil, the country’s longstanding social inequality is the focus of at least somewhat successful efforts to combat it, in Argentina the vision of an equitable society is fading away.

The study, carried out in Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay, the four full member countries of Mercosur (the Southern Common Market), was published by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) with the support of the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID) and presented in Montevideo last week.

“Argentine society has changed with respect to its past self-image, which was largely a myth,” says the 2009-2010 Mercosur Human Development Report, titled “Innovating for Inclusion: Youth and Human Development”.

The study concludes that in Argentina, in spite of its relatively high level of human development compared to its neighbours, young people between the ages of 15 and 29 suffer from “unfavourable social inclusion,” with precarious jobs, high school drop-out rates, and newer challenges like urban violence and discrimination.

In a section headed “Argentina: the country that is no more and the end of the egalitarian myth,” the report says “the traditional vision of a society ‘with a passion for equality’ is contradicted by increasing inequality, with signs indicating increased distance between classes that are separated by fear, stigma and discrimination.”

This conclusion is based less on quantitative data, which show variable progress and backsliding in recent years, than on qualitative interviews with young people, which show that “the sustained increase in inequality generates fear of the different, and gives rise to conflicts and discrimination in relationships.”

Among upper and middle class youth, the interviews show “a tendency to blame the poor for their situation,” while among low-income sectors there is great concern about “police harassment and violence from private security guards at night clubs.”

“The police are the main source of insecurity for vulnerable and excluded sectors of the population,” the study says.

Attitudes “are not entirely linear,” the researchers say. In upper and middle income sectors there is a certain amount of “modernity” in terms of diversity of sexual orientation, religion and other differences viewed as “non-threatening.” However, social differences do tend to carry “stigma,” they say.

In an interview with IPS, Argentine sociologist Sergio Balardini, a researcher on youth issues at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences and an adviser to the UNDP study, said that “present-day Argentina is a segmented society, in which upward social mobility has stagnated.”

“The myth of the egalitarian society, based on inclusive public education and access to work in a full employment society, is no longer tenable, and young people are well aware of it, having experienced educational services of low quality, difficulties in getting jobs, and the precarious nature of the jobs they do get,” he said.

The downfall of the myth of equality in Argentina contrasts with the advances made in Brazil in recent years. The Mercosur giant has always been affected by structural inequality, but social differences have diminished lately because of social policies in favour of the poorest, within a framework of economic growth which made them possible.

“Brazil is changing,” the report says, praising the fact that now racial and socioeconomic inequality has not only been reduced but is increasingly “challenged and criticised.”

In her introduction to the report, Rebeca Grynspan, UNDP regional director for Latin America and the Caribbean, celebrated the finding that young people in Mercosur perceive themselves “as subjects of rights who aspire to empowerment, individually as well as collectively,” and represent “an enormous social capital for the region.”

However, she pointed out that the younger generation are affected by “structural limitations that negatively influence their future expectations.”

Grynspan recommends government action to favour young people’s participation and expand their opportunities, especially in fields like information and communication technology which can be “a useful tool for training and socialisation.”

Argentina is highlighted as having the lowest poverty rate in the Mercosur bloc, along with Uruguay. The Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) puts it at 21 percent, while the official national figure for 2006 was 26.9 percent, the report says.

But Balardini said that the majority of the population living below the poverty line are children and young people. “If they can’t get a quality education, and also have to take on responsibilities prematurely, there is an inter-generational reproduction of poverty,” he warned.

“The discrimination experienced by young people who are poor is one manifestation of inequality. They live in a consumer society where ‘to be’ is ‘to consume,’ and this abruptly dispossesses them at a time when they need to make great efforts to construct their identity,” the sociologist said.

Since 2007, poverty and inequality levels have increased in Argentina. However, it is the Mercosur country with the highest percentage of students completing university studies: one out of every eight young people aged 25 to 29, according to the study.

But it also found that the population below the age of 30 represents almost 60 percent of the unemployed in Argentina, as well as in Brazil and Uruguay.

The report describes the incorporation into the labour market on particularly disadvantageous terms as “unfavourable inclusion,” a trend that is on the rise. Similarly, it says that in some cases the unemployed youngsters are “the third generation of unemployed, which weakens inter-generational transmission of the culture of work.”

Drop-out rates from secondary schools are also high, the report says. The main reason for this, it says, is the need to work to earn a minimal income.

The UNDP study was completed before the launch of the universal child allowance, a grant of 47 dollars a month for each child under 18 in families where the head of household has no job or is working in the informal sector without social security coverage, instituted this month by the government of President Cristina Fernández.

In Balardini’s view, the allowance “is an important step which in the immediate term will lift many families out of the worst poverty, although the concept of poverty is complex and is not restricted to income,” he said.

“An active and intelligent state, and public policies for children and adolescents, are needed,” the expert said.

Excerpt:

By Natalia Ruiz Diaz
ASUNCIÓN, Dec 3 2009 (IPS)

Freddy Garcete, a 50-year-old painter who works in the construction industry, travelled to Spain in search of better wages two years ago, becoming one of the 500,000 Paraguayans forced to seek work abroad because of the conditions at home.

But the impact of migration was double in the case of the Garcete family. Freddy’s wife Rosa María had already left for Spain before her husband. Their aim was to pay off a mortgage that was a heavy burden for the family, and pay for the education of their two daughters.

But the early effects in Spain of the global economic crisis made it impossible for Garcete to land a steady job in the construction industry. “Just after I left, my dad died, and I had to come home,” he told IPS. “But the fact that I had no steady work in Spain made me decide to stay in my country, mainly to be close to my daughters.”

The impact of migration in this landlocked South American country of 6.3 million people was the focus of a report released this week by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), produced in conjunction with the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA), the U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the U.N. Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), with support from the International Organisation for Migration (IOM).

The human development 2009 report, titled “Ampliando Horizontes” (Broadening Horizons), says that of the 500,000 Paraguayans living abroad, more than 250,000 left the country in the last five years.

Argentina to the south is still the main destination, accounting for six out of 10 Paraguayan migrants, with Spain in second place – three out of 10 – while the United States and Brazil received fewer Paraguayan migrants in the last few years.

The study says that more than half of those who leave are between the ages of 15 and 24, countering the widespread impression here that most of those seeking work abroad are heads of households, generally over 30 years old.

More than three-quarters – 77 percent – of Paraguayans in Spain are undocumented migrants, which makes them especially vulnerable to abuse and exploitation.

“We’re talking about more than 50,000 people in that situation (in Spain) as of January 2008: 18,000 men and over 35,000 women,” Jorge Méndez, the coordinator of the study, told IPS.

The report also says that at the time they left the country, 70 percent of the migrants only spoke Guaraní, which along with Spanish is an official language in Paraguay, and is spoken by 94 percent of the population.

Méndez pointed out that the language barrier is a major hurdle when it comes to finding work abroad.

With regard to educational level, Paraguayans who migrate to the United States or Spain have more years of schooling, generally up to secondary or tertiary studies. By contrast, most Paraguayans who seek work in Argentina or Brazil have just a primary school education.

The study also found that more than 182,000 of Paraguay’s 1.4 million households have at least one family member living abroad.

The provinces with the highest levels of migration are Central (the most populous) and San Pedro (the poorest), both of which are in the central part of the country, Alto Paraná in the southeast, which borders both Brazil and Argentina, and Caaguazú in the south.

Households in the capital, Asunción, receive the largest monthly cash transfers, although the income is not steady. In provinces like San Pedro, on the other hand, the amounts are smaller but more reliable.

“The largest amounts of remittances come from the United States and Spain,” said Méndez. On average, the cash transfers received per household in Asunción are around 460 dollars, compared to just over 120 dollars in San Pedro and about 200 dollars nationwide.

Annual remittances to Paraguay increased fourfold between 2004 and 2008, says the report, which also notes that once the migrant’s travel expenses are paid off, cash sent home from abroad helps reduce extreme poverty – defined as an inability to meet basic needs – which affects 37 percent of people in this country, according to the latest official statistics, released this year.

In Méndez’s view, the data shows that while the money sent home by migrants reduces poverty in the short term, the fact that so many of Paraguay’s workers are forced to go abroad to seek employment will inexorably lead to further deterioration of social and economic conditions in the country.

Remittances grew from 6.3 million dollars to 21 million dollars between 2001 and 2008.

Licensed nurses, who go overseas with legal work contracts, differ from most migrants, who are undocumented.

Over the last three years, many Paraguayan nurses have been recruited to work in Europe, mainly Italy.

More than 300 nurses have travelled overseas so far with three-year contracts and salaries of up to 3,000 euros (4,520 dollars) a month. And another 150 are packing their bags, according to the Paraguayan nursing association.

The report’s recommendations include the design of a national policy on migration that would provide guarantees for those who are interested in working abroad, as well as for those who want to return home.

But above all, said Méndez, the efforts should be aimed at ensuring that many of those who have left return to work in Paraguay, to create a stronger country.

However, there is no denial that remittances are a lifeline for many families like the Garcetes, who are now completely dependent on the monthly remittances sent home by Rosa María, because Freddy has still not found steady work in Paraguay.

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By IPS Correspondents
LIMA, Dec 2 2009 (IPS)

In Peru, 51 percent of all jobs are generated by the informal economy, a sector that has a female face, as more than 60 percent of the women workers in the country are forced into informality, with only 15 percent having health coverage and a mere four percent enjoying retirement benefits.

Street vendors hawking their wares in Lima. Credit: Courtesy of the Community Development Association

Bastidas – who is also president of the NGO Community Development Association, and in May 2008 published a study on the subject entitled “Informal Women Workers in Peru” – said that the leading reasons for the predominant presence of women in the informal economy is the gap between labour laws and actual working conditions, the shortage of formal employment, the low levels of investment, and the lingering effects of the crises of the 1980s and 1990s, which prompted the emergence of so-called “survival economies.”

This is compounded by the constant flow of rural migrants into the cities and a cultural and educational problem that prevents women from participating fully in modern economic activities, said this expert with the ILO, whose Latin American regional headquarters are located in the Peruvian capital.

This South American country has had longs periods without significant investment in production and, consequently, a negligible demand for new workers, while during times of increased investment, formal employment did not accompany that growth, due to the type of activities that attracted capital.

The negative impacts of this structural model were aggravated in the 1980s with an economic crisis that left tens of thousands of workers out of a job, forced many companies to close down and pushed more and more Peruvians into informal labour.

Peru, a country of 28.7 million people, has an economically active population of 10.6 million, 35.4 percent of which are women, according to the latest figures.

“Twenty years ago, I was working at a hospital, but I had two little girls and nobody to leave them with. So I had to quit and because of my two kids, I couldn’t even find work as a domestic,” Gloria Solórzano, in charge of women’s issues at the Unified Workers’ Confederation (CUT), told IPS.

“Now I say proudly that I’m a street vendor: I’ve been working for 15 years in La Victoria, outside the wholesale market” in Lima, she said.

“Because they have a larger share of family responsibilities, it’s not easy for women to find employment. Which is why they turn to informal work. They pick through trash, drive a taxi or motorcycle taxi, or do all sort of odd jobs, and they work as domestics,” the trade unionist said.

One of the informal occupations is as street vendors, where women of all ages work, she said – from elderly women to young mothers working with their children at their sides. “They’re not in the street because they like it. There’s just no work and they have to feed their children and give them an education,” Solórzano said.

Raising awareness for change

For Solórzano, it is essential to raise public awareness – in society, the government, the media and state and non-governmental organisations – about the urgent changes that need to be made in the labour market if the country truly aims to guarantee decent work.

“The government must act firmly to create more jobs, but not just any jobs – decent jobs,” she underlined, suggesting that this may only be possible with a new constitution, because the one in force, inherited from the rightwing government of Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000), is a barrier to changes in the labour market.

Besides the lack of jobs, women are also turning to informal labour because many companies force them to work 12-hour or even longer days, and they often pay less than minimum wage. In the informal sector, women have more opportunities and greater flexibility to reconcile work and family responsibilities.

“If their labour rights were respected, many of us women would choose to work in the formal sector. But even if we did want a formal job, there aren’t any, because this country has violated labour laws, which are ignored,” Solórzano said.

A study by the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) released in October backs Solórzano’s position: in Peru the wage gap between men and women of the same age and identical educational level stands at 19.4 percent, more than two percentage points above the Latin American average of 17.2 percent.

“Decent work for women doesn’t exist, and this is especially true in Peru. Women’s work is invisible, they still think we don’t exist as workers,” Solórzano said.

The CUT leader said formalising informality also requires training so that women can establish small enterprises and obtain support to market their products.

According to economist Edgar Galván, former general director of the Production Ministry’s Bureau of SMEs and Cooperatives, “more and more women are heading SMEs, because they have the right characteristics, such as management skills and creditworthiness. Women have an edge that gives them greater access to micro-loans.”

He said that 70 percent of Peru’s SMEs are informal and, as a result, the sector has the same percentage of informality in employment. These are companies with a great number of unpaid family workers, most of them women.

SMEs headed by women are concentrated in the services and commerce sectors (60 percent), and there are few in transformation and industry sectors.

According to Galván, it is vital to train the women who head these economic units so that they can turn them into real businesses, because they weren’t conceived as a business opportunity, but rather as a way to save their families from hunger.

“They’re a response to the lack of formal jobs, but they also evidence a problem in our education, because we’re educated to become employees, not businesspersons; that’s why we lack business savvy,” Galván said.

“Women who are entrepreneurs or direct SMEs have to realise that they need to open up spaces for training and technical assistance, and become more business savvy,” she concluded.

From dominated to leaders

If there’s a female-dominated economic sector in Peru, that’s the informal trade sector, 80 percent of which is in the hands of women. Although there’s a great variety of women working in this sector, the majority of them are heads of household, regardless of their age or marital status.

This discovery led Solórzano six years ago to get together with 11 other women vendors from various districts of Lima and form a Network of Women Street Vendors, which includes traders who sell their wares in city markets, bus stops and country fairs.

Today, it has spawned 16 different networks in the capital and surrounding areas, and another four in different provinces outside the capital. And it’s still growing.

The network began in Lima’s industrial district, and some of the members started to lead the area’s labour associations. One of these women is Rita Maguiña, who is currently president of the confederation of street vendors and the Network’s organisation secretary.

“I didn’t set out to become a leader, but when I saw how women were harassed by authorities and even by union leaders, I decided to get involved, give my support and change things. I said to myself, if women are the majority, then, why is it that men are in charge?” Solórzano said.

“Our conscience leads us to want to change the way things are. There are so many women selling in the streets that I know I need to fight for change in this country. Not for us – who may not live to see it – but for our children,” she said.

“Behind every woman there’s a home. We want to have a home with a decent job, a home where our children can grow up in peace, for our country’s future. We need to do something to end hunger in this country,” Solórzano said.

Excerpt:

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Nov 26 2009 (IPS)

A group of workers in Honduras managed to prevent the closure of an assembly plant manufacturing sportswear for the U.S.-based sports apparel maker Russell Athletic, thereby saving 1,200 jobs.

But workers at the Vaqueros Navarra firm in the southern Mexican state of Puebla, which produces garments for several U.S. labels, were not so lucky: the owners decided to close the factory when the employees tried to form an independent union.

These cases represent the warp and weft of the textile sector in Mexico and Central America, which has been hit hard by the economic recession in the United States, the source of its largest orders for clothing. The frontline victims here, however, are women workers.

“Disregard for labour rights has worsened in the economic crisis. The companies take advantage of young people, by taking them on without contracts and without social security for an initial trial period, and when that time is up they fire them,” Rosa Galicia, of the Guatemalan Association of Employed and Unemployed Women United against Violence, told IPS.

Galicia and a group of other women from Mexico and Central America participated in the “Women, Labour Rights and Democracy in a Time of Crisis” workshop this week in Mexico City, organised by the Maquila Solidarity Network, the Mexican Society for Women’s Rights and the Central American Women’s Fund, to share their experiences and strengthen contacts between the NGO.

Some 590,000 women work in garment-making maquiladoras in Mexico, and another 400,000 in Central America. Maquiladoras are tax-exempt factories with subsidised water and electricity that assemble goods for the export market.

Because of the economic crisis, Mexico has lost 300,000 jobs in this sector, while in the Central American region over 99,000 jobs have been done away with. Women workers have born the brunt of the layoffs in both cases.

Honduras was the worst hit, with 36,000 jobs lost in 2008-2009, followed by Nicaragua which has lost 30,000 jobs since 2006.

“Because of the crisis, some factories have temporarily suspended production, put personnel on part-time work, or fired people unfairly,” Beatriz Luján, a leader of the Mexican Authentic Labour Front, an independent federation of unions, cooperatives and community organisations, reported at the workshop.

Enormous growth in textile maquiladoras took place in northern Mexico in the 1970s, encouraged by plentiful cheap labour and the proximity of the United States, the principal market. But as labour shortages began to bite and costs to rise, the industry moved south to states like Puebla, Chiapas and Yucatán, with links to southern U.S. ports in Texas and Florida.

The garment industry perked up again when the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA, the trade pact between Mexico, the United States and Canada) came into force in 1994.

But after 2000, dozens of maquiladoras closed down, moved to Central America, or relocated half a world away in countries like China, attracted by even lower costs, efficient logistics and secure markets.

As the Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA) with the United States came into effect in different countries from 2006 on, maquiladoras in Central America received the same tariff exemptions as their Mexican counterparts.

DR-CAFTA member countries can import cloth and thread from North America, tariff-free, to manufacture garments that are then exported back to the country of origin of the materials.

Mexican textile exports to the U.S. market contracted by nearly 19 percent between September 2008 and the same month in 2009, according to the Office of Textiles and Apparel at the U.S. Department of Commerce.

Central American exports shrank by 21 percent, while those of its main competitor, China, decreased by only four percent.

“The government is in total denial about what is happening. All it has done is finance trade unions that are aligned with it,” said Carla López of Nicaragua, head of the Central American Women’s Fund, about the textile sector in her country.

In Mexico, maquiladoras pay a daily wage of at least eight dollars, nearly twice the official minimum wage. In Central America, monthly pay may reach between 118 and 400 dollars, for example at a Costa Rican electronics assembly factory for the U.S. microprocessor maker Intel.

Mexico and Central American countries are the object of several investigations by the International Labour Organisation’s (ILO) Committee on Freedom of Association (CFA), but only one of these is related to the textile sector.

In May 2003, the “Heroes and Martyrs” National Federation of Trade Unions of the Textile, Clothing, Leather and Footwear Industry (FNSHM) in Nicaragua filed a complaint with the CFA against a maquiladora, alleging management had excluded an independent union from collective bargaining, a basic union right.

In Honduras, the labour rights situation appears to have deteriorated since the Jun. 28 coup d’état against President Manuel Zelaya.

“We haven’t got concrete details yet, but we have received complaints from women who have been made to work weekends to make up for days they arrived late for work because of the mass protests,” the head of the Honduran Women’s Rights Centre (CDM), Yadira Minero, told IPS.

“This crisis will pass, and unless we insist now on retraining the workforce for technology-based jobs, the maquiladoras will be back,” said Sandra Ramos, head of the Nicaraguan “María Elena Cuadra” Working and Unemployed Women’s Movement, which has fought for women’s labour rights for 20 years.

Alternatives to the exploitative practices of the maquiladoras have sprung up, like the Dignidad y Justicia (Dignity and Justice) factory in Piedras Negras, in the northern Mexican state of Coahuila. This cooperative was founded in 2004 by a group of women who had been fired from maquiladoras in the area.

The business is jointly owned by its workers, the non-governmental Border Committee of Women Workers, and the U.S. distribution company North Country Fair Trade, which takes orders and handles sales in the United States.

Meanwhile, the Nueva Vida International Women’s Sewing Cooperative has been operating in Nicaragua since 1999. It is managed by the Fair Trade Zone company, with support from the Jubilee House Community, a U.S. non-profit organisation.

Excerpt:

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Nov 2 2009 (IPS)

More than 1,500 representatives of waste recyclers from 13 countries, and thousands of other visitors, including the host country Brazil’s left-wing President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, met last week in São Paulo, demonstrating that they are no longer pariahs in our throw-away society.

“Today I feel proud of being a ‘catadora’ (garbage sorter), although there is still prejudice against this kind of work,” Lilian Nascimento, a member of the Brazilian National Movement of Recyclable Materials Collectors and part of the team that organised the international event, titled “Reviravolta Expocatadores 2009”, told IPS.

The Oct 28-30 event, bringing together the Latin American Recyclers’ Network, was an opportunity for dialogue with governments, businesses and social organisations, and for exhibiting projects, technologies and private sector initiatives aimed at improving street collection of reusable waste.

The Portuguese term “reviravolta” means to overturn, or a swift and drastic transformation, and “catadores” is the local Brazilian term for garbage sorters. “Catar” is to collect, in the sense of selecting items one by one from the ground.

“‘Catador’ is a good name and should be kept as the general term in Latin America,” but “recycler” has emerged as the common identifier as it is more formal and “is in harmony with current environmental issues and the climate crisis,” said Marisol Álvarez, a member of the Chilean delegation who came in the company of two of her colleagues and two technical staff from non-governmental organisations.

Expocatadores 2009 is the first such meeting of its size, promoted by the Brazilian movement and the Latin American Network.

Lula announced that the state development bank would open a line of credit for recyclers’ cooperatives to purchase electric vehicles, made by Itaipú, the company that runs the hydroelectric power station shared between Brazil and Paraguay. He said the “catadores” would be exempt from vehicle registration fees.

Cities Minister Marcio Fortes, who was with Lula’s entourage, talked about the resources his ministry devotes to infrastructure for recyclers’ cooperatives, especially warehouses for separating the materials they collect.

“The pride of the recyclers” in organising such a huge event, and their “capacity to autonomously engage the federal government, ministers, development banks, public and private companies and foundations, is the most powerful and important achievement of this event,” said Valdemar de Oliveira, head of institutional relations for the Avina Foundation, which sponsored Expocatadores 2009.

The Avina Foundation and the Brazilian Recyclable Materials Collectors’ Movement, together with the Social Development Ministry and international institutions, launched a programme called Cata Ação for training recyclers and incorporating them into the production chain in five Brazilian cities, including the capital, Brasilia.

In Brazil an estimated 800,000 people work sorting through garbage to salvage recyclable materials. Close to 600,000 of them belong to the Movement and are organised in cooperatives and associations, said 29-year-old Nascimento, who has been a garbage sorter for eight years.

“I began to do it out of necessity,” after having worked in bars and as a domestic worker, cleaning houses. “I earn a bit less, but I work for myself,” she said, with the self-esteem she acquired when she learned about “the importance of this work,” as a member of the United for the Environment Recycling Cooperative (CRUMA) in Sao Paulo.

But she is still treated with prejudice, especially at government offices when she declares her profession, and officials reject “catadora” as a valid category.

Meetings for recyclers are important for discussing and learning about public policies related to urban waste, and to fight for their rights, according to Nascimento. Expocatadores has strengthened the links between recyclers’ organisations in 23 of the country’s 27 states, she said.

Some local governments recognise the public service they provide through reducing pollution in streets and rivers, and making landfill sites and open-air garbage dumps last longer, all of which are challenges faced by city management. Climate change is adding even more value to the activity, and the recyclers expect to benefit from carbon credits.

Avina, a foundation that supports sustainable development in Latin America, foments “recycling with social inclusion and solidarity,” promoting organisation, training and investment, in recognition of the environmental problem posed by waste, the increasing cost of raw materials, and the millions of jobs created by recycling.

The Foundation reckons the number of recyclers in Latin America at an estimated two million people, with national movements organised in six countries. At Expocatadores, in addition to the Brazilians, there were more than 30 representatives of the other 11 countries belonging to the Latin American Recyclers Network, as well as a delegation from India.

Roberto Laureano da Rocha, a leader among the organisers of Expocatadores 2009, was born in an impoverished neighbourhood in Greater Sao Paulo.

A garbage sorter ever since he was a teenager, Rocha’s story, told to Avina, recalls the humiliation he felt at the beginning, when “we thought that sorting garbage was the lowest possible occupation, for those who aren’t good enough for anything else.”

Local residents would sometimes “throw water at us when we sat on the pavement,” and would tell their children that the garbage sorters were monsters who would attack them, he said. Among themselves they tended to think “that we ourselves were part of the trash.”

Forming the CRUMA cooperative changed the recyclers’ lives, self-esteem and understanding, as well as their relationship with the authorities and society.

Rocha went back to school, finished his secondary education, and gives talks on recycling. Now he takes pride in earning enough to support his pregnant wife and their two children, and they are building their own home.

Thirty-nine-year-old Marisol Alvarez, from Chile, also began sorting garbage “out of necessity,” when she found it hard to get a factory job in Santiago.

Now, in addition to earning higher wages, she is her own boss and manages her own time, working according to her needs, “from morning to night if necessary” or just a few hours if she has enough money to go on with.

Conditions for recyclers have improved a great deal because the National Movement supported smaller organisations and fomented projects, she said. Her function in the movement is to liaise with the municipalities to organise the recyclers’ work, create registers and obtain support.

“The population is more aware now, and they separate (recyclable) waste in bags and give them to us.” They have meetings with the neighbourhood councils, and all this makes collecting more productive, and improves working conditions, Álvarez told IPS.

Among the experiences Álvarez will take home from Expocatador 2009 are encouragement from Lula’s acknowledgment and support for the recyclers’ work, more recognition from the Latin American Network, and “the quality of the people” she met, in spite of the language difficulty with Portuguese, she concluded.

Excerpt:

By Franz Chávez
LA PAZ, Oct 8 2009 (IPS)

Bolivia is the world’s leading exporter of the shelled Brazil nut, a nutritious food source that grows abundantly in the country’s Amazon rainforest region. But in this tropical paradise, many of the nut-gatherers live in hellish conditions.

Shelled Brazil nuts Credit: Photo Stock

It is a food rich in selenium and other minerals, as well as proteins, carbohydrates and oils, and represents 30 percent of the Amazon forest revenues in the northern Bolivian provinces of Pando and Beni, bordering Brazil. In fact, nut-gathering is the main local economic activity, following the decline of natural latex extraction from the jungle’s rubber trees in the mid-1980s.

But the competitive price of Brazil nuts from Bolivia brings with it a heavy component of exploitation of poor families, including children and adolescents, warns a study by the Centre for Labour and Agrarian Development Studies (CEDLA), sponsored by the Ministry of Labour, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), and the Dutch development organisation Hivos.

Families who work gathering nuts are in a situation of extreme vulnerability, according to the study.

Poverty, exclusion from labour rights and “cruel” exploitation are the norm in the collection of nuts in the northern Bolivian Amazon, according to CEDLA researcher Bruno Rojas.

In the 2008 season, which lasts from November to March, nut gathering mobilised some 17,000 people in Pando, Rojas told Tierramérica.

Nut exports in that period represented 75 percent of the region’s economic movement. Data from Bolivia’s foreign trade institute indicate that exports reached 80 million dollars and created jobs for 30,000 people, including work in nut processing and transport.

Under the “piecework” mode, workers are paid 11 to 17 dollars per 23-kg box of nuts, which takes 12 to 14 hours to gather. Not only is the work poorly-paid, but workers, and often the entire family, put in much more than eight hours a day, the limit stipulated by the country’s labour laws.

In last year’s harvest, the nut company owners and landholders caused an artificial drop in the price of the 23-kg box from 17 dollars to just three dollars, according to María Saravia, communications secretary of the Confederation of Indigenous Peoples of Bolivia.

This practice is common among landowners and wholesalers, in order to drive down wages and then avoid paying back wages for the harvest, she said in a Tierramérica interview.

Some indigenous communities who have obtained formal title to their land can get better prices and deliver their products to whoever they choose, but workers and their dependents who come from other regions are subject to the whims of the wholesalers, Saravia added.

“This is an ongoing fight for a change in the lives of the nut-gathering families,” said the indigenous activist.

According to Rojas, “the more that is produced, the more the country’s labour laws are broken.” Entire families make their way through the dense forest, left to their fate among the dangers of the jungle, the threat of disease and the long distances they must cover while carrying their harvest on their backs.

“They have no medical or accident insurance, they do not pay into the social security system, and they are unprotected by labour laws and by a weak government that lacks the ability to make the company owners obey the law,” the researcher said.

Silvia Escóbar, the lead author of the CEDLA study, told Tierramérica that “often the law is negotiated, when it should really just be obeyed. We need a government that enforces the law.”

Sixty percent of the people employed in nut-harvesting and processing come from urban areas, and the other 40 percent are from rural areas of Beni, Pando and the far north of the province of La Paz.

The nut-growing area is rainforest, situated at an average altitude of 300 metres above sea level and temperatures of 30 to 38 degrees Celsius. The trees, which grow to 50 metres tall, cover an area crisscrossed by rivers, study co-author Wilson Rojas told Tierramérica.

Because of its topography and soil conditions, the area is not suitable for raising cattle or for growing rice or root crops, he added.

Today’s nut-gatherers are the successors of the labourers who worked in nut, cotton and latex extraction, the Amazon products of greatest international demand in the early 20th century.

Harvesters of these products in the 1920s and 1930s often worked in conditions of servitude and semi-slavery. In addition to gathering latex and nuts, the labourers were required to work without pay in the homes and ranches of the large landowners, said Bruno Rojas.

In the country’s Amazon jungle region, a pre-capitalist economy reigned. Today, so many years later, the labour rights of nut-gatherers are still not protected.

According to the Ministry of Labour, in 2007 there were 2,600 children and 2,000 adolescents involved in nut-gathering, and 450 children and 1,400 adolescents working in nut processing.

In the cracking, shelling and selection of Brazil nuts, two out of three children in the area work five days a week between 2:00 and 7:00 in the morning, “and the lucky ones go to school at 8:00, without sleeping or eating, and they fall asleep in class,” said UNICEF representative in Bolivia, Gordon Jonathan Lewis.

“We have to do something. It is an obligation and a duty,” he said as a challenge to the Bolivian government when the study was presented in mid-September.

According to Escóbar, decisions must be taken to eradicate child labour in the forests and in the warehouses where the nuts are selected. Bolivia consumes just two percent of the nut harvest, while 98 percent is exported to Europe, the United States and Asia.

The manual labour involved in nut-gathering has not changed in decades. It requires the use of a machete and a box to carry the nuts, he said.

Labour Minister Calixto Chipana promised to take the report into consideration in drafting the National Plan for the Progressive Eradication of Child Labour, which is part of the ongoing process of reforming the country’s labour laws.

Approximately 116,000 of Bolivia’s 1.5 million children between the ages of seven and 13 work in various activities. The government wants to create a “list of jobs prohibited for children,” said Chipana.

(*This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank.)

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In the last few years, several Latin American countries have attempted to improve labour conditions for rural workers and domestics, whose labour rights have long been ignored. But the new laws, even those with limited scope, are not always enforced.

Farmworker in Sinaloa, Mexico. Credit: Mauricio Ramos/IPS

The work of domestics and rural labourers is poorly paid and less visible than many other jobs, as it is done in the privacy of the home or the solitude of the countryside.

“Domestic service is the gateway to the labour market for the poorest women, especially indigenous and black women,” María Elena Valenzuela, a regional expert on gender issues and employment at the International Labour Organisation (ILO), told IPS.

In Latin America, paid domestic labour is basically done by women, who number 14 million and represent 14 percent of the region’s female workers, said Valenzuela.

The countries with the largest proportions of women in domestic service are Paraguay, Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina.

While the number of domestic workers has grown since 1990, the number of live-in maids has shrunk, as hiring “daily help” has become more common. But alongside this trend, unacceptable forms of semi-slavery and child labour persist. Lack of regulation of domestic workers’ rights has also traditionally been widespread in the region.

In nearly every Latin American country there is a minimum wage for paid domestic workers, but it tends to be lower than the minimum wage for other workers, Valenzuela said. Domestic employees also lose out on coverage for health, retirement and unemployment benefits, owing to gaps or loopholes in the law or non-compliance by employers.

Domestics tend to work longer hours than other workers. Some countries only stipulate minimum rest periods, while others do not regulate annual vacations or maternity leave.

According to Valenzuela, Uruguay currently has the most advanced legislation on domestic employment in Latin America. The law, passed in 2006, puts domestic workers’ rights on an equal footing with those of the rest of the country’s labour force.

Thanks to the new law and the revival of their union, which had basically stopped functioning for years, Uruguayan domestics were able to negotiate wage increases and improvements in working conditions and rights at the tripartite wage councils, made up of the government, employers and unions.

In Paraguay, meanwhile, a regulation that came into force on Sept. 14 extends social security health coverage to domestic employees around the nation, a benefit that previously applied only in the capital, Asunción. The measure will potentially benefit some 290,000 domestic workers (93 percent of whom are women), although most employers have not registered their employees with the social security system.

The package includes insurance coverage for sickness (whether work-related or not), maternity, accidents at work, medical, surgical and dental care, medicines, hospitalisation and a cash grant to compensate for lost wages.

In July, Guatemala created a special programme (PRECAPI) to protect women employed in private homes, providing maternity services, health care for children up to the age of five, and hospital care in the case of accidents.

But domestic workers in that Central American country are still not eligible for invalidity, old age and widows’ pensions, nor ordinary health insurance covering routine visits to the doctor.

In Chile a law was approved last year stipulating that domestic workers’ wages must be gradually increased to equal the national minimum wage. In 2008 their pay rose to 75 percent of the national minimum wage; this year it increased to 83 percent; and it is due to rise again in 2010 and 2011 to 92 percent and 100 percent of the minimum wage, respectively.

An additional law passed this year requires that domestics be given the day off on national holidays.

A Peruvian law in force since March forbids requiring a domestic worker to wear a uniform, or any other apparel identifying her as such, in public areas. The intention is to prevent discrimination.

Valenzuela also highlighted campaigns by the Argentine and Brazilian governments to encourage formal registration of domestic employees. Argentina even offered tax breaks to employers who fulfil this legal obligation.

But many legal and cultural challenges still remain. “As well as ensuring that domestics have equal rights to those of other workers, their occupation needs to be more highly valued,” said Valenzuela.

Sandra Castilla, head of the Fundación Ciudad Colombia-Ama de Llaves a Domicilio, a company providing housekeeping services, told IPS “there are still many people in this country who think that by employing a woman for domestic work, they are doing her a big favour.”

“And if they pay her what the law requires, it’s out of the goodness of their hearts,” according to domestics in Colombia, where there is no special legislation on domestic work.

In March 2008, the ILO agreed to develop an international convention on decent work for domestic workers that would establish minimum standards for this type of employment.

Governments, unions and employers’ organisations had until Aug. 31, 2009 to answer an ILO questionnaire. The issue is on the agenda of the ILO’s next International Labour Conference in June 2010, where a decision is expected to be taken.

Marginalised workers in rural areas

According to the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), 120 million people, or 22 percent of the regional population, live in the countryside, where poverty and extreme poverty rates are higher than in urban areas.

Agriculture is the main source of employment, in spite of the growth of other paid occupations among the rural population.

In a study published this year on labour conditions and rural poverty in Latin America (Condicionantes laborales de la pobreza rural en América Latina), United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) consultant Emilio Klein warns there is a general tendency in the region to pay informal sector workers less than the national minimum wage.

He also reported that the proportion of unionised workers in rural areas is low, and that child labour continues to be seen. In addition, a lower percentage of rural workers are registered in social security systems.

In Argentina, a country of 40 million, there are around 1.5 million rural workers, whose main achievement was a 2001 law that created a register of rural employers and workers.

Now all rural workers must be registered, which gives them a booklet containing his or her personal details: wages, family members, deductions for retirement pensions, health insurance and family allowances. Nevertheless, rural workers still have the highest rates of informal employment without social security coverage.

Only in January was an eight-hour working day established in the countryside, when a law passed in 2008 came into force. “Previously it was customary to work from sun-up to sun-down,” Carlos Figueroa, national secretary for institutional relations for the Argentine Union of Rural Workers and Stevedores (UATRE), told IPS.

Now the legal workday is eight hours from Monday to Friday and half a day on Saturday, and if an employer wants a worker to work extra hours, or on Sundays or holidays, he or she must pay overtime.

A law was also passed in Uruguay late last year, stipulating an eight-hour workday – and 48-hour week – for agricultural labourers, with a rest period in the middle of the day. Anything beyond that requires overtime pay at twice the normal rate.

However, rural workers’ organisations, which represent 180,000 members, say that it will be difficult to apply the new legislation, as some agricultural labourers have not even heard of the law, and have even less idea of what it says and how it will be enforced.

In Chile, the Mesa Laboral Agrícola, the rural labour negotiating body made up of the government, union organisations and employers’ associations, signed an agreement in August to draw up a labour code for seasonal workers, and implement other benefits, like vouchers for crêches for the children of women seasonal labourers. The government promised to coordinate oversight of its provisions.

The preliminary draft of the code, which should be completed in October, will recognise the special nature of seasonal agricultural work and regulate contracts, daily working hours and overtime, and rights such as collective bargaining and unionisation.

In Brazil, a national commitment to better labour practices in the sugarcane sector was signed in June. Antonio Lucas of the National Confederation of Agricultural Workers (CONTAG) told IPS it was “a moral commitment” to “more humane labour relations.”

According to CONTAG, the 18-point tripartite agreement between the government, agricultural unions and agribusiness will benefit some 600,000 sugarcane cutters who work in precarious conditions, sometimes in semi-slavery.

Lucas highlighted the commitment for direct hiring of workers by agribusiness companies, thus avoiding sub-contracting through intermediaries, which lends itself to countless abuses and illegal manoeuvres, especially in the case of foreign migrant workers.

Advances have also been made in terms of wage negotiations and job security. Among the challenges for farmworkers, Lucas mentioned the low levels of unionisation and collective bargaining, the lack of childcare facilities, and inadequate oversight of compliance with regulations.

*With additional reporting by Marcela Valente (Buenos Aires), Helda Martínez (Bogotá). Fabiana Frayssinet (Rio de Janeiro) and Raúl Pierri (Montevideo).

By Natalia Ruiz Diaz
ASUNCION, Sep 17 2009 (IPS)

It took 42 years for social security health care coverage for domestics to extend beyond the limits of the Paraguayan capital.

The measure adopted by the social security institute, the Instituto de Previsión Social, could potentially benefit some 290,000 people – mainly women – working in domestic service throughout this impoverished landlocked South American country of 6.1 million, as well as their families.

“This is a huge stride forward which will help improve the living conditions of domestics in Paraguay,” the president of the Association of Domestic Service Workers (AESD), Solana Meza, told IPS.

The challenge now is to get employers to register their domestics with the social security system, which very few have done.

Although health care coverage is obligatory for formal sector workers under Paraguay’s labour code, only as of this week do all domestic workers have a right to health insurance – 42 years after the inclusion of that stipulation in the social security institute’s charter in 1967.

Domestic workers were not covered when the Instituto de Previsión Social was established in 1943. That situation began to change when a special system for health insurance for domestics went into effect in Asunción in 1967. The aim was to gradually expand it to the whole country. But that never happened.

The social security institute’s health care insurance covers maternity, non work-related illness, work-related illness and accidents, surgery, dental care, medication, hospitalisation and a disability subsidy.

A 1987 law expanded health coverage to the worker’s family for maternity, illness and accidents.

“But although this was already in force in Asunción, people didn’t know about it – especially not women from rural areas, who make up a majority of domestics here,” said Meza. Most employers do not register their domestics with the social security institute and pay the monthly contribution of around 10 dollars, and the domestics, for their part, are largely unaware of their rights.

Domestics account for roughly 10 percent of the economically active population of 2.9 million in Paraguay, and 93 percent of them – 213,000 – are women. (Male domestic workers are mainly gardeners and drivers.)

But only three percent – 6,000 – are registered with the social security institute, and only 2,500 actually make use of its services.

Domestic work is the leading occupation of women in Paraguay, accounting for one out of five women who are employed. Fifty-seven percent of domestics are between the ages of 15 and 29, while 70 percent have only partial primary school education or no formal schooling at all, according to the General Statistics, Surveys and Census Office.

Most domestics are young, impoverished Guaraní-speaking women from rural areas with little to no education.

In Paraguay, around 95 percent of the population is of mixed indigenous and Spanish descent, and both Spanish and Guaraní are official languages. But Guaraní-speakers with a limited education often suffer discrimination.

Carmen Frutos, the director of the Instituto de Previsión Social, said the expansion of health insurance to all domestics is a major step towards reducing inequalities in this country.

“Paraguay has the lowest rate of health and social security coverage in the Americas, but we mean to start changing that with measures like the ones we have adopted for domestic workers,” she told IPS. That is one of the aims of the government of centre-left President Fernando Lugo, who took office in August 2008.

“With the expansion of the system, a large part of the health care for domestics will be subsidised, and they will have access to medical attention above and beyond the bare minimum. But they will not have access to a retirement pension or to coverage for complex medical cases,” she explained.

Complete social security coverage for domestics would require a modification of the current legislation, because domestic employment is deemed to have special characteristics, and is thus regulated differently than other kinds of jobs.

The minimum monthly salary for domestics – most of whom are live-in, and thus receive room and board – is set at 40 percent of the minimum wage for other workers, which stands at around 285 dollars today.

And although they have the right to the “aguinaldo” – a month’s bonus salary paid to all workers – they do not receive the family allowances that the governments pays to the rest of the country’s registered workers.

The family allowance is five percent of the minimum monthly salary for each dependent child under the age of 17 living with the beneficiary.

Meza said that achieving the same minimum wage as other workers is one of the AESD’s main goals, along with paid vacation time and maternity leave for the women who do much of the cooking, cleaning and child-rearing for so many middle-class and wealthy Paraguayan families.

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By Vesna Peric Zimonjic
BELGRADE, Aug 28 2009 (IPS)

A very hot summer of workers’ discontent has taken over Serbia. Some 33,000 people go on strike daily in 40 to 45 firms, according to union statistics. They are mostly employees of privatised companies who have not been paid salaries or social and health security benefits for months now.

Since mid-August, protesters have been blocking traffic for hours outside the offices of the Serbian Privatisation Agency and other government buildings in Belgrade.

Earlier this month, in central Serbia, police were called in to remove hundreds of workers who lay down day after day on railway tracks near Lapovo town 150 km south of Belgrade. The now private owner of the company manufacturing spare parts for automobiles and electricity generation has not paid them for months.

In a dramatic case, a worker from the southern Serbian textile factory Raska, 254 km south of Belgrade, cut his finger off in public to protest against a new business owner.

“We are desperate, afraid for our future, betrayed by our new owner,” says Stevan Sreckovic from the Ikarbus bus factory in Zemun. “Ours is one of a thousand factories throughout Serbia that have been ruined by privatisation,” he told IPS at a protest last week outside the offices of the Serbian Privatisation Agency.

Since the ousting of former leader Slobodan Milosevic in 2000, the Serbian government has relied heavily on privatisation to revitalise the economy. The state has received some 2.9 billion euros (3.7 billion dollars) through privatisation since 2002.

The government has sold 1,828 public firms, and now only 300 remain to be privatised. That is due by the end of 2009.

The protests this summer point to what workers call “the ugly face of privatisation”. They come after the Privatisation Agency admitted in mid- August that of the 1,828 privatisation contracts, 472 – almost 25 percent – have been annulled because the new owners failed to honour the deals.

According to the law on privatisation, the new owners are obliged to pay the government for their newly acquired companies in up to five instalments. They are also obliged to compensate workers they cannot keep in line with an agreement with the Privatisation Agency. The sum mostly ranges from 100 to 800 dollars.

The agency is obliged to monitor developments in newly privatised companies for two years.

“After that, we practically have no further obligations,” head of the Privatisation Agency Vladislav Cvetkovic told IPS. “Our task is to prepare privatisation, announce tenders and collect necessary documentation, and to make this part completely transparent.”

Analysts say that the state sold many assets hastily because of an urgent need for fresh funds. Most sales were done by early 2006.

“The climate for such sales was very good, and the state filled its coffers with badly needed money,” economics professor Milojko Arsic told IPS. “The money was supposed to go to pension fund, further investment in Serbian industry, and bring new jobs.”

But things have been going wrong over the past year after the end of supervision by the agency.

In March, machinery from the privatised textile factory Clothing in Leskovac, 282 km south of Belgrade, was taken by its Cypriot owner to Romania earlier this year.

In May, workers from the textile factory 7. Juli in the southern town Kursumlija learnt that their machinery was gone. The Serbian owner apparently sold it abroad as scrap.

“New owners refraining from fulfilling their obligations, such as revitalising production, paying regular salaries and health insurance to workers is surfacing now,” analyst Slobodan Kostic told IPS. “This is bringing people to the streets and is leading to strikes.”

International consortiums from tax paradises are often involved in purchases. Kostic says many assets were sold to people with a murky past and with murky money.

Several heavy industry machinery and textile factories have been sold to consortiums located in Cayman Islands, Cyprus or Virgin Islands, only later to be made sites for luxurious apartment blocks or shopping malls.

The agency says merely that new owners did not meet their obligations. “It is not our job to control financial resources,” says Cvetkovic.

A major tycoon sought earlier this year to buy the industrial zone of Belgrade harbour and turn it into a marina to be surrounded by lavish apartment blocks and high rises. Public outcry stopped the sale.

Amidst mounting speculation that privatisation was not regular in many cases, Serbian Prime Minister Mirko Cvetkovic (not related to Vladislav Cvetkovic), who was head of the Privatisation Agency in 2003 and 2004, admitted to reporters last week that “by the end of that period we became aware that something was wrong.” He did not elaborate.

“I will personally insist that all the contracts that have been annulled be checked,” he added. But to many workers this is not enough.

The striking workers have their critics. “What we hear more often now among workers’ demands in strikes is calls for the state to take over their companies,” Miroslav Prokopijevic from the Free Market Centre told IPS. The Centre is one of the leading Serbian NGOs backing a free market economy.

“That sounds like the times of socialism (the Serbian and former Yugoslav version of communism), when the state took care of everything, and provided lifelong guarantee of employment, but those times cannot come back,” he said.

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By Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, Aug 26 2009 (IPS)

In her 48 years, Natividad Obeso has already lived several different lives. There was the time when she lived in her native Peru as a successful businesswoman and mother of four. Then there was the time when she spent her days wandering the streets of the Argentine capital, penniless and alone, a fugitive of political persecution that she never understood.

Migrant advocate Natividad Obeso Credit: Marcela Valente/IPS

According to several international bodies, in recent years the number of women who migrate has been growing more than that of men. In the 1990s, Argentina received a wave of Bolivian, Paraguayan and Peruvian migrants, the majority of whom were women who came alone.

Interviewed by IPS at a coffee shop in Buenos Aires, Obeso apologised for the interruptions as other women came up to speak to her. They come from Peru, Colombia, Paraguay, Venezuela. Far behind her now is the loneliness of the early days away from her home country, when she combed the streets selling candy and dreaming about being reunited with her children.

In 1993, Obeso lived with her four young children in the region of Cajamarca, in northern Peru. She owned a beer distributing company and ran for mayor of her city. It was the early years of Alberto Fujimori’s decade in power (1990-2000) and his hard-line policy against guerrilla groups like Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path). One day, out of the blue, Obeso was surprised with the news that an order for her arrest had been issued by the police.

Even though she was a victim of Sendero Luminoso, which extorted monthly payments from her and had even kidnapped her at one point, the government accused her of being a terrorist and forced her to flee the country. Within hours she had to pack her children off to her mother’s and leave for Argentina, which she believed to be “the Europe of Latin America.”

“It all turned out to be so different than what I imagined,” she recalls now. She worked as a street vendor and as a domestic. She lived in boarding houses and shared rooms. It would be five years before she would see her children again. Now they are all grown up and studying at the public university in Argentina thanks to a law that she pressed for.

In 2004, Obeso founded the NGO Association of United Migrant and Refugee Women in Argentina (AMUMRA), which she currently presides, focusing on the prevention of discrimination against migrants and refugees and providing health, social and legal assistance to migrants, refugees and trafficked women.

Her advocacy work has taken her to at least twenty different countries, representing these women who are forced to leave their homes in search of “a better life for their families,” and making their voices heard.

IPS: How did you end up in Argentina? NATIVIDAD OBESO: I’m originally from Cajabamba, a province in the northern mountainous region of Cajamarca. I came to Argentina as a refugee, fleeing from Peru where I had been accused of being a terrorist. Argentina didn’t require a visa and it was considered the Europe of Latin America, so I came here. But what I found was so different from what I’d imagined.

IPS: What had you left behind? NO: Everything. I travelled alone. I left my mother. My four children. My siblings. I was a single mom, so I had to leave my children with my mother. The youngest was four and the eldest 11. I was a businesswoman and ran my own beer distributing company, Pilsen Trujillo. We had a good life.

IPS: What was the worst you suffered during your first years here? NO: The void. Having nobody. Migrants are the most vulnerable beings on earth. But I refused to become a victim and I drew strength from where I thought I had none.

IPS: What did you do when you arrived? NO: I came by bus, with other Peruvians. I thought that we were going to be dropped off at the Sheraton (Hotel). But they left us at an occupied factory. Migrants back then were a wretched lot. I came here with money in my pocket, enough to get settled, but as I had no information and no friends to lend me a hand, I quickly fell into poverty.

I was a street vendor. I sold chocolates on the street. And I worked as a domestic, paid by the hour. I wasn’t a live-in maid. That’s one of the things I fight for: so that no domestics will be forced to be live-in workers.

After that I opened a telephone booth centre and every time a Peruvian came in to talk to her children back home it would be like a knife piercing my heart. I was one of them. I had wandered through the streets, daydreaming that I was holding my children close to me.

IPS: How was your experience as a domestic worker? NO: I worked for a woman who claimed to see me as a daughter. Then, one year, on May 25 (a national holiday), I didn’t go in to work. The next day, she asked me harshly why I hadn’t shown up for work and I replied that it was because it was a holiday. And she told me: “Domestics don’t have holidays.”

That really got to me. I decided right then and there that I was never going to work as a domestic again. Then my brother came over and I opened the telephone booth centre. A lot of Peruvian and Paraguayan women who worked in private homes came here to use the phones. I don’t like to use the term ‘domestic’ anymore.

IPS: Has migration become an essentially female phenomenon? NO: Migration is not a phenomenon. It’s an experience. A reality that migrants experience every day. We don’t like to speak of a ‘phenomenon’ as if it were a natural disaster or something like that. We left our countries looking for a better life for our families, a better education for our children. And what we found were inhuman, xenophobic migration policies.

IPS: And do you think women are playing a major role in that experience? NO: Yes. Starting in 1990, there was a feminisation of migration. Men are afraid to leave their homes and not find work, so women have taken over that role. Women will do whatever they have to do to earn money for the family. Men won’t. They get overwhelmed by loneliness and sadness…

IPS: Are women more committed to sending back money? NO: Of course. We women feel a responsibility that they’re never going to take away from us: our children. We may leave our husbands, but we’ll never leave our children. Nobody touches them. Especially if we’re migrants. They can do whatever they want to us, we can put up with any abuse, discrimination, loneliness, but if they touch our pups, we’ll defend them with all our might.

IPS: When were you reunited with your children? NO: Five years after I left Peru. And that’s when the difficulties in giving them an education began. Not so much in elementary school, which is more flexible, but it was impossible for them to enrol in secondary school and the university. My 16-year-old son would cry because after so many years we were finally back together but he couldn’t study like he would have wanted.

So I turned to all the bodies that worked with migrants, without any success. I had to fight with congresspersons and senators until we obtained a law that gives migrants access to education. When we achieved our goal, many migrant women came to see me. I told them “perfect, but I’m not going to work alone.” In 2003, we got the first 41 young migrants into the university. And we founded AMUMRA.

IPS: What are the greatest problems that women migrants have had to face? NO: Abuse from consular authorities and mistreatment by many employers.

IPS: What sectors are these women employed in? NO: They’ve gained greater autonomy now. There are not so many women working as live-ins anymore. They work by the hour cleaning houses and then sell goods in the streets, for example.

IPS: And they still send money back home? NO: Yes, they only keep enough to get by on. But since 2001, many have brought their families here, so they don’t need to send money anymore.

IPS: What have you drawn from your experience as a migrant? NO: It changed me completely as a person. Thanks to many teachers here who supported me. When they saw what my struggle was, they helped me by pointing out my mistakes. I thank God for not having been elected mayor in Peru, because you have to leave to realise what is happening in your own country.

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