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Unions want workers' rights on Cancun
agenda
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON
- Labor unions are complaining loudly that workers'
rights have been excluded from the agenda of a key round
of negotiations under the World Trade Organization (WTO)
to be held in Cancun, Mexico, this week.
Trade
ministers from around the world are gathering to discuss
how to advance stalled negotiations on a series of
issues - led by the agricultural subsidies of rich
nations and developing countries' access to expensive
drugs - that in many cases pit Northern against Southern
nations. But labor rights, particularly the plight of
workers in export processing zones (EPZs) mushrooming
worldwide, will be far from their minds, according to
the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions
(ICFTU).
Some 43 million people work in EPZs,
areas established by governments to produce or finish
goods that contribute directly to global commerce,
according to the Brussels-based ICFTU, whose members
represent some 158 million workers in 150 countries.
EPZs, whose numbers have grown from just 79 in
25 countries in 1975 to some 3,000 in 116 nations in
2002, have become a "symbol of some of the exploitative
nature of today's [economic] globalization", according
to a report released by the ICFTU on Monday. It urged
the WTO to work closely with the International Labor
Organization (ILO) to ensure that core labor rights,
including the right to organize independent unions, are
respected in the zones.
"Globalization has the
potential to bring prosperity to people across the
world, but today's crude free-market globalization is
pushing standards down and leading to massive
exploitation," said ICFTU general secretary Guy Ryder,
who will observe the Cancun meeting.
"The absence
of effective multilateral trade rules to support the
standards set by the ILO cannot be allowed to continue,
yet governments are refusing to even allow the WTO and
the ILO to work together on the problem."
Critics of economic globalization, including
unions and scores of non-governmental organizations
(NGOs), which will also converge on Cancun this week,
have long argued that, in the absence of enforceable
global standards for environmental protection and human
rights, multinational corporations will tend to invest
in countries with less regulation in these areas in
order to reduce costs.
The result is the
so-called "race to the bottom" as governments compete
for foreign investment from these multinationals by, for
example, repressing labor unions, failing to enforce
environmental laws, or offering far-reaching tax breaks
or other incentives to foreign investors that make it
more difficult for them to afford essential social and
health services.
Because much of foreign
investment in developing countries is controlled by
multinational corporations, which have created a kind of
"global assembly line" so that different parts of a
final product can be produced, manufactured, and
assembled in different countries, NGOs and unions insist
that the WTO, which oversees the global trading system,
should play a key role in enforcing international
standards.
"In the absence of effective
multilateral trade rules to support the standards set by
the ILO," says the 25-page ICFTU report "Export
Processing Zones: Symbols of Exploitation and a
Development Dead-End", "the negative downward spiral of
lower standards will continue, as governments compete
against each other for foreign investment by offering
cheaper labor, tax breaks and other concessions."
According to the unions and the NGOs, this is
particularly true of the EPZs, sometimes referred to as
free zones or maquilas, whose "workers are made
to take amphetamines to get them to work harder and
faster, where violence and abuse are a daily reality for
thousands upon thousands of workers, and where attempts
to form unions and bargain collectively for a fair deal
are often met with reprisals, sackings and even death
threats".
EPZs have existed since the early part
of the last century but took off during the 1970s -
particularly in East Asia - and the 1980s, when they
spread throughout Central America and the Caribbean as a
result of a US initiative to promote foreign investment
in a region where Washington's national security was
seen as increasingly threatened by anti-poverty and
left-wing social movements.
EPZs typically
feature factories or plants whose principal purpose is
to assemble goods - usually textiles, garments, and
shoes but, in some cases, more sophisticated products,
such as electronic components and computer parts - for
export rather than for domestic consumption. As labor
"platforms," they are often exempted from provisions in
national labor codes affecting the right to organize or
to be paid for overtime.
Governments that
support EPZs may be reluctant to enforce local laws, let
alone international standards, in EPZs, lest they
discourage investment. Women account for a
disproportionate amount of the workforce in many EPZs -
up to 90 percent in some countries - in part because
they are "considered to be disciplined, meticulous, and
more compliant than men, and therefore less likely to
join a union", says the report.
Discrimination
and abuses are common in many EPZs, adds the ICFTU,
citing, for example, pregnancy tests imposed by some
employers in Mexican maquilas. In the
Philippines, employers have forced their workers to take
amphetamines to meet tight production deadlines imposed
by their contractors, including well-known multinational
clothing and footwear brands, the report says.
Physical violence against workers who try to
organize unions is also not unknown, according to the
report, which cited an employer in the Dominican
Republic, Grupo M, which allegedly hired thugs to detain
and beat workers. The report noted that the company has
applied for a US$23 million loan from the World Bank's
International Finance Corp (IFC).
While
governments have used EPZs to attract investment, create
employment and gain hard currency and technology,
critics have argued that they often turn out as a
"development dead-end".
"By its very nature, EPZ
investment is precarious, and likely to leave the
country at a moment's notice if a cheaper, more
compliant workforce is on offer somewhere else,"
according to the report.
Indonesia, for example,
which became a magnet for the footwear multinationals in
the 1990s, has had a difficult time retaining plants in
the face of recent competition from Vietnam, where wages
are lower. Similarly, China's economic zones, where
independent unions are actively repressed, have drawn
tens of billions of dollars in investment in recent
years because of a relatively well-educated workforce
that toils for as little as $1.20 a day.
As the
report notes, the emergence of China as an increasingly
dominant player in the competition for foreign
investment not only has come at the expense of assembly
industries in the rest of Asia, but is also responsible
for the closings of maquilas as far away as the
Caribbean Basin and Mexico.
"The Cancun
meeting," according to the ICFTU, "must take a decision
that human rights, including fundamental workers'
rights, [must] take priority over trade rules, and
should start working on this without delay."
(Inter Press Service)
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