China's press is open to labor problems, especially those of foreign firms

Why is China’s Party/government currently allowing so much press coverage of all the labor troubles of foreign business'?

That question nagged at me often in the past few days as I followed the spate of suicides at Foxcomm, mass producer of iPads and other electronic gadgets for export. (See previous article.) Finally, I emailed my query to a friend of mine, Anita Chan, author, editor, and professor at the China Research Center in Sydney.

My email reached Dr. Chan in Guangzhou, China, where she is researching China's auto industry. Here is her reply:

About these media reports on China's labor troubles in foreign factories, I do not see this as particular new. It is just the development of a trend in news reporting that goes back to the 1990s. The press in China has always been much freer in reporting on the dark side of labor issues than the American press on its own problems. You have to recognize the fact that many newspapers today are not "the mouthpiece of the state". Many young reporters go into factories under cover to report on labor conditions.

You may not want to accept it, but the management styles of non-PRC Asian companies (like Taiwanease-owned Foxconn) can be worse than the Chinese's own management style. Indeed, there are more serious violations in such factories that supply the global production chain than exist in Chinese state enterprises or big domestic enterprises. The massive layoffs in the late 1990s were a different matter. Besides layoffs is a different issue from low wages, long work hours, and an abusive shop floor culture. As a result one should not be surprised that there are more reports on the problems of such factories' than on local factories.

Among the workers themselves, if you read the blogs, there are also very strong anti-foreign feelings with nationalistic overtones. This is unfortunate because nationalism overshadows class awareness. Chinese workers, the Chinese reporters, and the Chinese authorities share a very similar nationalistic outlook.

Also in the case of Foxconn, workers are seen as victims. Nothing wrong about exposing them being victims as long as they do not rise up in protest against the government and demand to have an independent trade union, which in reality these Foxconn workers are not asking for anyway.

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Dying young: making gadgets for Apple, Motorola, HP, Dell, Nokia

Suicide can be viewed as the tip of an iceberg, an indicator of the quality of life and of broader problems, according to the OECD Factbook. By that standard, a huge factory in southern China may be the epicenter of broader human problems yet to be exposed.

In the five months before May 25, nine workers – all between 18 and 25 – committed suicide at the Shenzen plant of a Taiwan-owned multinational, Foxconn Technology Inc., a leading supplier of electronic goods with leading brand names.

But even before this May, Foxconn was the scene of repeated tragedy. On June 18, 2007, a 19-year old Hunan worker, was found hung to death in the toilet of her dormitory room. On January 16, 2009, a 25-year old worker jumped to his death from a 14th floor window. On July 16, 2009, a 25-year-old office worker, accused of losing one of 16 prototypes of Apple’s fourth generation iPhone, jumped to death from the 12th floor of his apartment building.

That list of Foxconn’s death toll is from “Dying Young: Suicide & China’s booming economy,” published May 25 by a Hong Kong-based NGO, Students and Scholars against Corporate Misbehavior (SACOM), founded in 2005. From conversations outside Foxconn’s walls, the group found that most of the interviewed workers described the stress of work with examples like these:

-- They were not allowed to talk with others on the same production line, and so did not get to know their colleagues
-- Isolation from each other often extends even to those in the same dormitory, partly because of excessive overtime.
-- Even with overtime exceeding 100 hours a month, they could not afford to buy the products they make.

On the morning of May 25, representatives of SACOM and other NGOs staged a protest outside Foxconn’s headquarters in Hong Kong to express concerns over the suicides and to demand reforms, including payment of a living wage and permitting establishment of genuine worker organizations the factory.

Terry Guo, founder and chairman of Hon Hai, Foxconn’s parent company, rushed to Shenzen for a press conference on May 25. He urged the media not to misrepresent the situation at the factory.

“We are definitely not a sweatshop,” he insisted.

Maybe not in some legal definitions of the term. But it is a sweatshop in the sense experienced by Mr. Guo’s workers (and many millions of other working women and men around the world): a workplace that sweats the utmost out of its workers while giving them the very least in return, monetarily and otherwise. (GlobalPost has called them “silicon sweatshops.”)

SACOM’s Website documents that fact for Foxconn at http://sacom.hk/archives/640. An abbreviated version of “Dying Young” is available there, and contains the link to the full report, which runs 11 pages, including endnotes.

Foxconn is a member of the Electronic Industry Citizenship Coalition (EICC), whose members pledge to uphold high labor and social standards.

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My flawed Apple from China

I ordered an Apple iPod one day last week. It arrived in a neat package three and a half days later. It bore no mark of its geographic origin but Apple’s tracking chart told me it came from Shenzhen, China.

Shenzhen, a booming province near Hong Kong, is the home of a huge factory owned by a Taiwanese multinational, Foxconn Electronics Inc. Its workers, estimated to number 300,000, turn out products for the world’s leading phone and computer companies. Apple is among them.

About the time I was ordering the iPod, a 24-year-old worker surnamed Chu plunged to her death in a fall from a Foxconn dormitory. According to wire service reports, Chu became the seventh worker in the Foxconn Shenzhen plant to die in similar falls within a year. All apparently suicides, all driven by the extreme pressures of six- and seven-day workweeks.

As I get acquainted with my new acquisition, a refurbished Touch iPod, I marvel at its technology, but with a gnawing feeling of guilt for acquiring it.

Its cost, $149, made only a very tiny contribution to the $6,000,000,000 or so in merchandise that China is exporting to the United States every week. But how badly do I really need it? And how hard did the likes of Ms. Chu work to have a stock of refurbished iPods on hand so that I could have one in three and a half days? Read more!

‘The fight against child labor must be rekindled’

The concern about child labor has waned over the last six or seven years, and “must be rekindled.” That’s the judgment of Kailash Satyarti of India, chair of the Global March against Child Labor, which he founded in 1998.

Satyarti expressed his views in an interview published on-line by the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC). Here are excerprts from his answers to questions by Samuel Grumlau.

The Global March site in 2006 estimated the number of child workers in India at 65,000,000. Does that figure still apply?

I think it has fallen. I do not trust the government statistics claiming that there are “only” 10,000,000 to 12,000,000 Indian children not attending school. The truth is that no one has clear statistics, but the number has fallen, perhaps by 15 to 20%. This is largely thanks to a rapid change in mentality among the Indian population. The middle classes now see child labor in a negative light. There is a sense of guilt, for example, if someone uses a child domestic. There are, of course, people who exploit children in the worst forms of child labor, included in the middle classes, but there has been a significant change.

There is also a growing demand for quality education. Even the poorest of the poor have started to realize the value of education. In the past, they thought that education only served career interests, but now they realize that it also contributes to their development, their personal fulfillment.

One factor contributing to this change is the remarkable development of the information and communication technologies sector over the last 10 to 15 years in India. Even the poorest villagers have a mobile phone, as does their relative working as a rickshaw puller in a faraway city. They can keep in almost daily contact whereas before, correspondence by mail would take weeks. A person working in Mumbai or Delhi can therefore keep in touch with his family, tell them what he sees, the changes in India and in the cities. Little by little, they come to realize that if their children were educated, they would have a better chance at prosperity and personal growth.

There have also been major political changes, with the rise to power of the Dalits, the lowest caste. Many members of the lower castes are ministers, and no party can afford to ignore the problems facing these castes. This rise has created new aspirations, a desire among the members of these castes to have the same lifestyle as other Indians, and education is the key to reaching this goal. As a result, more and more poor people, Dalits, are sending their children to the schools in the villages, including their daughters, who used to be the most discriminated against.

Is the impact of taking children out of work as strong and as rapid as expected on adult employment or pay?

Adults do benefit in terms of employment in the long run. The carpet industry offers a good example. Fifteen years back, at least a million children in South Asia were employed full time in this sector: at least 300 to 350,000 in India, at least 250 to 300,000 in Nepal, and almost 400,000 in Pakistan. Now, all the research on the subject sets the figure at below 300,000 in the three countries. So, 700,000 children have been taken out of this sector.

It is the result of the raids led by [non-governmental] organizations to free children, the existence of the RugMark label, the growing demand for education among the Indian population, and the government's efforts in favor of schooling, and so forth.

The World Cup is starting on 11 June in South Africa. Is the Global March holding a campaign on this subject, as it did previously?

Yes. One of the big problems is the employment of children in the manufacture of hundreds of products used during this event: clothing, souvenirs, nets, drinks, etc. We demand guarantees against the use of child labor in these sectors. All lot of attention was given during previous World Cups to the manufacture of the footballs used during the matches, and FIFA made a number of commitments, but that is not enough: although child labor may not be used in the production of the footballs used during big games, there are still children making the footballs sold thanks to all the fervor stirred up by events such as the World Cup.

(Read the new eight-page “Union View” report on the trade union fight against child labor at http://www.ituc-csi.org/child-labour-enough.html.)
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Aiming for a trade agreement that breaks with the past

It’s time for the next trade agreement to be a “21st century agreement.” That’s the advice that top union leaders from seven Pacific rim nations have for seven trade ministers who have started negotiating an unusual trade pact called the Trans-Pacific Partnership Trade Agrement (TPPTA).

In their May 10 letter the labor leaders, including President Richard Trumka of the AFL-CIO, urged the seven trade ministers, including Ronald Kirk of the United States, “to break from past practice and negotiate in a more open, transparent, and participatory manner.”

Toward that end, the union leaders recommended the creation of a joint TPPTA Website that would convey a full range of information about the on-going negotiations, including “white papers, draft texts, offers and counter-offers, press statements, and declarations.”

Access to the Website, and posting on it, would not be limited to the government side, but would “allow civil society to post documents (analysis, proposals, etc.) relevant to the negotiations by topic or by country.”

Another proposal is to establish “side rooms” (apart from the negotiating venue) “where accredited civil society representatives could be briefed from time to time during negotiations’ and where those representatives could also present their views.

“Consultation must also be on-going,” the union letter emphasized. “Throughout the negotiation process, governments must establish regular channels to ensure [that] civil society, including unions and employers, are able to meaningfully engaged in the negotiating process.”

Generally, such consultations have been routinely granted only to employer representatives – a point that the letter did not make.

In its final paragraph, the letter warned: “Without implementing at least these measures, any final agreement cannot count on broad civil society support.” Translation: the agreement won’t fly if employers are its only supporters.

The first round of TPPTA talks took place in Melbourne, Australia, in mid-March. The next round is scheduled in June in the United States.

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‘Unseemly of me to go to China’: prominent Australian writer

In protesting against a new wave of repression in China. Frank Moorhouse (left), an acclaimed Australian journalist and writer, withdrew from an Australian government-sponsored tour of China

“Because I had been so vocal about freedom of expression in my own country, which involved no risk, and had been publicly recognized for it,” Moorhouse explained, “I felt it would be unseemly of me to go to China, to be feted and to remain silent while Chinese writers were being sent to jail.”

Moorhouse’s decision, made in January, was widely publicized in Australia. In the United States, Jeff Ballinger, noted for his “Press for Change” activism, circulated excerots frin Moorhouse’s letter by email on May 5, under the heading “all-too-rare individual – ‘unseemly of me to go to China’.”
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Danger: Children legally at work in American agriculture

“The United States is a developing country when it comes to child farmworkers,” says Zama Coursen-Neff, deputy director of the Children’s Rights Division of Human Rights Watch.

Boys and girls as young as 12 legally work for hire on U.S. farms for 10 or more hours a day, five to seven days a week, according to a new Human Rights Watch study, which Coursen-Neff co-authored.

Human Rights Watch has called upon Congress to amend the Fair Labor Standards Act to end discrimination against child farmworkers. In other occupations, the law prohibits the employment of children under 14, and limits children under 16 to three hours of work a day when school is in session.

Although agriculture is the most dangerous work open to children in the United States, federal law allows 16 and 17-year-olds to work under hazardous conditions in agriculture; in all other occupations the minimum age for hazardous work is 18.

In September last year Congresswoman Lucille Roybal-Allard of California introduced Children’s Act for Responsible Employment. It has gained more than 60 co-sponsored, as well as the endorsement of the AFL-CIO and other organizations, but remains bogged down in Congress.

The May 5 Human Rights Watch report sparked an unusual amount of media interest. The AP story on it was picked up by 189 outlets within two days.

On May 10 to ll the United States joins 80 other countries at a global child labor conference hosted by the Dutch government in the Hague. A goal of the conference is to improve enforcement of the ILO Worst Forms of Child Labor convention, which the U.S. government sponsored and ratified.

Will the Obama administration take on the corporate agriculture lobby to end a glaring contradiction in U.S. policy?"Print Page Read more!

Judges and their role in human rights violations by global firms

Governments need to improve the access that the judiciary gives to victims of corporate-related human rights abuses in the global economy. That was a key message of a new report by John Ruggie, UN Special Representative on Business and Human Rights.

Ruggie has a mandate to “operationalize” the human rights principles for business approved unanimously by the UN Human Rights Council two years ago. In the 126 paragraphs of his latest report, dated April 9, the 10 paragraphs devoted to “Judicial Mechanisms” for access to remedies are one of the two longest sections.

Essential to improving access to judicial remedy, Ruggie emphasizes, is that “both States and companies act in a manner supportive of the independence and integrity of judicial systems.

Three practical obstacles can “make it almost impossible for victims to access” even an effective judiciary:

-- Costs of legal advice and of the case itself should the claimant prove unsuccessful.
-- Limitations on “standing” (on who can bring a suit) and on the ability to bring group claims for compensation. Many instances of corporate-related harm involve a large number of indiidual claims that are grounded on the same underlying set of facts, each of which are too costly for a single claimant to pursue.
-- Disincentives – financial, social, and political – for lawyers to represent claimants in this area.

In the paragraph that concludes this section, Ruggie writes: “Governments often point to the mere existence of judicial systems as proof that they are fulfilling their duty to protect. But, as the above discussion demonstrates, much more is needed.”

Then, in summing up all the types of “mechanisms” – State-based, judicial and non-judicial, company-based, as well as collaborative and international -- for obtaining remedies, Ruggie points out:

“Reality falls far short of constituting a comprehensive and inclusive system of remedy for victims of corporate-related human rights abuse.”

Read the full report at
http://www.reports-and-materials.org/Ruggie-report-2010.pdf Read more!

Judaism’s stand on wage theft and all oppression of workers

In a statement issued by the Chicago-based Interfaith Worker Justice, a New York rabbi, Michael Feinberg, condemned unethical employment practices that have become “epidemic in scope” – wage theft, including pay below the legal minimum wage, misclassifying workers as independent contractors so as to deny them benefits, failure to pay overtime, or failure to pay anything at all.

From his own experience as executive director of the New York Labor-Religion Coalition, Rabbi Feinberg found that the victims of wage theft in its various forms were garment workers, city park workers, janitors, greengrocery workers, cemetery workers, farm workers, doormen, delivery people, “to name a few.”

“These workers need and deserve all the support they can get from the religious community and from the law in pursuit of justice,” he wrote.

In support of his position, Rabbi Feinberg cited some of Judaism’s most important principles. Among them:

• The Dignity of all Creation -- K'vod Habriot
• The role of humanity to be responsible stewards to the Earth and all its resources, shared equitably
• The ultimate value and worth of every human being, each one created in the image of God -- B'tselem Elohim
• The dignity of labor/work as human partnership with God in the ongoing act of Creation
• The right of all workers to fair treatment, including a living wage, timely payment, and the right to form a union
• Concern for the most economically vulnerable in society -- the widow, the orphan and the stranger -- and the ethical imperative to meet their need

For Rabbi Feinberg’s full statement, click on
http://www.iwj.org/index.cfm/judaism-and-the-imperative-of-ending-wage-theft

Interfaith Worker Justice, under Kim Bobo, has for years run effective national and local campaigns to stimulate action against wage thievery. She is the author of “Wage Theft in America: Why Millions of Working Americans Are Not Getting Paid-And What We Can Do About It “(2009). Read more!

Identifying that 800 pound gorilla in U.S. trade with China

Why have American companies shifted most of their production for the American market to China? And why do they continue to do so?

The overriding reason is the huge advantage they gain from China’s absolute control of Chinese workers, not from China’s rigid control of its currency. That truth is worth revisiting in light to the exaggerated hope being placed in the benefits that the U.S. would gain if Beijing abandoned its currency manipulation.

The issue came to the fore on business pages last month because the Obama administration decided to postpone the scheduled April 15 announcement to declare the People’s Republic a currency manipulator. In a teleconferenced briefing for some 65 activists, the Citizens Trade Campaign labeled China’s exchange rate policy as “the 800-pound dragon in the room.”

“Currency manipulation is just one of Chinese governments many unfair trade advantages, but it also the largest one,” the Citizens Trade Campaign (CTC) said in summarizing the teleconference.

In acknowledging the unfair advantage (and attractions for foreign companies) in China’s labor market, one CTC briefer mentioned China’s low wages and its government’s labor federation as causes.

That understates the plight of China’s working men and women. The iron fist of the country’s neo-Communist rule deprives them of all rights and makes them vulnerable to a wide range of exploitation, individually and collectively. Ironically, they are deprived of freedoms enjoyed by American business people in China.

It is an arrangement so obviously discriminatory, so immoral, that it should not survive one day longer. However, American business, to its eternal shame, will try to hold on it as long as possible, given the support of the U.S. government through its unfree trade and other policies.

Even some insiders now understand the folly of these policies. Robert B. Cassidy, a former Assistant Trade Representative, recently wrote:

“I now understand why so many of the trade agreements we negotiated never delivered the promises that were made and, if continued, never will.”

Cassidy wrote that as a blurb for a new book by Ian Fletcher, “Free Trade Doesn’t Work: What Should Replace It and Why.” See an article by Fletcher in Truthout titled “Uncle Sam, Global Trade Sucker.”

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Tiger Woods' complicity with Nike

After reading my article on the anti-sweatshop victory against Nike at the Unversty of Wisconsin (see posting below), a friend, Harry Kamberis, writes: “Never owned any Nike products and never will. What does [his endorsement of Nike] say about Tiger Woods?”

Good question. It is amazing how Tiger Woods has been shamed for his “private” life but has escapes opprobrium for his endorsement of Nike and his lucrative complicity with Nike in exploiting millions of men and women in sweatshops.

Woods seems insensitive to everything except golf and the millions it brings in endorsements. A total cad in private life but also in public life.

Another friend, Dan Turnquist, warns against a hasty proclamation of victory against Nike’s policies. He reminds that Nike can and does play “hardball with [universities] in terms of all the support it gives the athletic programs, free uniforms and all that. Not to mention buying off the coaches with lavish payments for endorsements. Nike does not give up easily.”


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A tipping point in long struggle against Nike and its policies?

After a worker rights activist, Jeff Ballinger, started targeting Nike in 1992 for its anti-labor policies, a prominent union leader advised him to forget it: Nike was just too big to expect to make a dent in it. That negative view long seemed accurate, but student leaders by the hundreds, some encouraged by Jeff himself and his publication, “Press for Change,” refused to believe it.

On April 9 the University of Wisconsin-Madison announced that it is severing its ties with Nike – the first to do so in a national campaign coordinated by the United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS). That followed a significant breakthrough in which two Dominican Republic factories have started making sweat-free products for U.S. university bookstores (see the April 8 issue of Human Rights for Workers).

Could this be the tipping in a campaign long deemed hopeless?

The Wisconsin university’s decision came after its monitoring agent, the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC), found and publicized grievous violations of the university’s code of conduct by two of Nike supplier factories in Honduras, including a refusal to pay $2,200,000 in benefits and severance pay.

“It’s a major victory national,” Jonah Zinn, 19, a sophomore at Wisconsin, who was part of a student campaign urging the contract cancellation, as the university’s own Labor Licensing Policy Committee had recommended.

Not stopping there, USAS and its affiliates nation-wide are in the midst of a multi-campus “NIKE: Pay for It” tour. It includes a demonstration Sunday, April 12, at Niketown, off Central Park in New York City. Speakers include Rod Palmquist, USAS national organizer, and two former workers at the Honduras factories.

What can you do?

For one thing, check the USAS Website at for news, background, and action ideas.

In my view, the Nike Swoosh is a symbol of shame. I’d suggest, at the minimum, removing it from anything you might own.

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Different anti-sweatshop strategy wins breakthrough

A factory in the Dominican Republic has begun production on sweatfree goods for delivery to university bookstores starting this fall or earlier. It is a breakthrough for a new strategy pioneered by the United Students against Sweatshops (USAS) and its partner, the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC).

Under an arrangement that took two years of dialogue, Knights Apparel, one of the largest vendors of apparel bearing university logos, and the DR factory management have committed to pay workers a living wage, as defined by a study conducted by the WRC. Knights will pay its supplier factory a price designed to make this possible.

Both Knights and the factory management have also made a commitment to respect the right of workers to organize and to recognize any union chosen by the workers. The WRC will be responsible for verifying these and other standards.

A noted health and safety expert, Garret Brown, and a colleague have already made an inspection of the factory, and will work on health and safety issues in cooperation with worker representatives in the factory.

To meet expected demand for no-sweat goods, Knights has launched a new brand, Alta Garcia, which for now will be sold only to campus stores, beginning with those that have already declared their intention to carry the product.

Says Scott Nova, WRC director: “It is a pilot project, not a comprehensive solution, to the challenges we face, but it is an exciting step forward.”

The project puts into practice key elements of the WRC’s innovative Designated Suppliers Program (DSP). Its aim is to enhance the enforcement of university codes of conduct, which as stand-alone documents have proveen pretty much useless without the institutional and incentive framework to make them effective.

The WRC is a Washington- based research and investigative non-governmental group funded by more than 170 U.S. colleges and universities. Its 15-member governing board comprises five persons from each of the three WRC constituencies – the universities, the United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS), and independent labor rights experts comprising the WRC advisory council.

Illustrating the universities’ basic interest in the endeavor is the desire not to have their names smirched by complicity with sweatshops. Duke University’s “trademark licensing policy” affirms “a policy of protecting the symbols that are associated with its name and reputation as one of the finest universities in the country.”

Once resistant to any such policy, Duke in the spring of 1998 adopted one of the first comprehensive codes of conduct against sweatshops. Months later its officials joined Duke Students Against Sweatshops in signing an agreement committing the school to seek disclosure of all licensing factory locations, and it later had contracts with 409 licensees renegotiated to require such disclosure.

In the fiercely competitive global marketplace, however, this approach made little impact.

Duke’s director of trademark licensing, Jim Wilkerson, supported the founding of WRC in 2001, and went on to become a key officer of its board and of its 36-member DSP working group. It took an arduous decade of discussion, planning, negotiating, getting legal advice, writing and rewriting DSP – plus the pressure of USAS chapters on hesitant universities – for the WRC to come this far.

It still has a long way to go, as a phone conversation with Wilkerson, a fan of this blog, made me realize.

For a report by the Maquiladora Health & Safety Network, see “Network Assists Start-up of Real ‘no sweat’ garment factory.”

Note: The WRC is a joint initiative aimed at the procurement policies of universities. A parallel movement, the SweatFree Consortiium, is a joint initiative aimed at the procurement policies of governments, local, state, and national. See my December 14, 2009, posting on SweatFree Communities and the Sweatfree Purchasing Consortium.

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U.S. cities establish plague-like record in population loss

A pandemic of destruction has struck a “nation within a nation -- the entire Great Lakes Nation,” says Hunter Morrison, director of Youngstown State University’s Office of Planning and Partnership.

Dozens of American cities in that area – places like Cleveland, Youngstown, Detroit, Warren, and Buffalo -- have lost half of their populations over the course of one generation. This is the first time that so many cities have lost so many people in such a short time since the Plague struck Europe in 1348, according to Morrison’s study of the health of global cities over the century.

America is more interested in building Baghdad and Kabul than it is in assuring the vitality of its own cities, writes Richard A. McCormick in a Manufacturing & Technology News article on Morrison’s study.

Morrison, former director of the Cleveland City planning department for 20 years, looked for trends worldwide in which a large number of cities have fallen into disrepair, including:

-- Great Britain, when deindustrialization struck places like Newcastle, Glasgow, Birmingham, Sheffield, and Belfast.

-- Eastern Europe after the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, leading to expectations that millions of people would abandon dilapidated Eastern European cities.

None of these areas experienced the U.S passivity toward devastation in the U.S. Midwest, McCormack writes. “Other countries understood how vital it was for their cities to remain healthy. They committed themselves and the resources required to keep their old cities vibrant. No such attitude prevailed in the United States.”

What needs to be done to turn the situation around?

“A way to address a problem is to recognize that you have one," says Morrison. "It's not Cleveland's problem or Elyria's problem. It's not saving Cleveland. It's the way we operate as a nation -- a nation of places. What has been brought to the table is that deindustrialization is something that is good because it is cleaner. But it is nothing of the sort. It is a diminution of wealth creation.

“If deindustrialization was such a good thing, then why is China industrializing? The reason you do manufacturing is to create wealth by adding value. It's real simple. We've gone away from that."

In another article in the same issue, a California industrialist worries that it may not be long before Silicon Valley resembles the once-thriving area of the Shenango River Valley in deindustrialized western Pennsylvania.

American failure to deal with the obsolescence of its major inner cities creates many cruelties. One is to blame the unhappy results on the blacks and other minorities left behind.

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Battling Floating Sweatshops

Left stranded in the Philippines since their ship ran aground on New Year’s Day, 22 North Koreans finally started their way home on March 19, thanks to the intervention of the International Transportworkers Federation (ITF). The rescue was part of a day’s work for the ITF, a global union which represents 4,500,000 transport workers in 148 countries, with its own inspectors in the ports of 48 countries.

It was the ITF port inspector in Manila, Rodrigo Aguinaldo, who took the key role in solving the complicated case of the 22 North Koreans. North Korea has no Embassy or consulate in the Philippines. Among other things, he found food and lodging for the crew, and most of all handled negotiations with the Chinese Embassy to release their passports and allow them to fly home via China.

The ITF came to the crew’s aid even though North Korea’s maritime flag is a “flag of convenience” that allows ships’ owners to evade the national laws, taxes, and unionization of their home countries. The ITF and its seafarers and dock workers sections have long fought this dodge as a floating form of sweatshops.

Even so, at latest count, 40 percent of the world’s big merchant vessels flew flags different from their home countries. In fact, the custom is so deep-seated in maritime culture that the world’s top five shipowning countries (Japan, Germany, the United States, Greece, and China) have “flagged out” their maritime fleets to countries like Vamuatu. Belize, and Cyprus.

Instead of just battling improper flags, the ITF adopted a strategy of also battling the sweatshops that millions of seafarers must endure. As a result, of the remaining FOC vessels in the world, 48 percent have signed an ITF-approved agreement that guarantees seafarers minimal standards of pay and working conditions. ITF inspectors inspect ships visiting their port city, and in cooperation with local authorities, “arrest” a vessel until its sweatshop conditions are corrected.

Last year seafarers collected nearly $40,000,000 in back wages and underpayments, thanks to the ITF, whose inspectors visited 9,562 vessels, most of them flying flags of convenience.

The ITF scored a new breakthrough in 2006, when the UN International Labor Conference adopted the Maritime Labor Convention, which among other things requires large ships operating in international waters to have a maritime labor certificate reinforcing the rights of seafarers. Uniquely among ILO conventions, this one, when ratified, will apply to all states, even those that do not ratify it.

So far, eight states, not yet including the United States, have ratified the convention, with 22 more needed for the convention to go into force.

For more information, see the current issue of The ITF Seafarers Bulletin at http://www.itfseafarers.org/.


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Emergency care needed for U.S.’ sick trade deficit with China

How much more time will pass before the Obama administration takes action on our toxic trade with the People’s Republic of China?

As a result of our burgeoning trade deficit with China since 2001, when China joined the World Trade Organization:

-- About 2,400,000 jobs have been lost or displaced in the United States.
-- The computer, electronic equipment, and parts industries led, with 627,000 jobs displaced, more than in any other sector of the economy.
-- Every Congressional district, including the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, has been affected, with California and Texas as the biggest losers among states.

Those are among the facts documented in a new report by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) issued March 23 in conjunction with the Alliance for American Manufacturing (AAM).

The impact of the China trade deficit – which reached a record high of $270,000,000 in 2008 – is not limited to the hemorrhaging of jobs. Workers still employed are affected too, by decreased wages. A typical full-time, median wage earner lost an estimated $1,400 in 2006.

Currency manipulation is a major cause of the huge trade surplus enjoyed by China, according to the report’s author, Robert E. Scott of EPI. This intervention “makes the yuan artificially cheap and provides an effective subsidy on Chinese exports.”

As a result, China’s goods cost up to 40 percent less, according to the AAM, which brings together a select group of America’s leading manufacturers and the United Steelworkers.

The AAM supports the newly introduced Senate legislation designed to halt the misalignment of currencies by China and other countries. The group also urges the U.S. Treasury Department to list China as a currency manipulator in its semi-annual report on currency exchange, due by April 15.

Extensive background information can be found on the AAM Website at http://manufacturethis.org/

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Joining forces against sweatshops

After more than a decade of campaigns, why haven’t anti-sweatshop organizations made much more progress? When I put that a question to a friend who is a veteran of those campaigns, he replied: “Because the movement is Balkanized.”

In that light, a March 10 public letter of two anti-sweatshop organizations, the International Labor Rights Forum (ILRF) and the Sweatfree Communities (SFC) is especially good news. Barma Arthrea, ILRF executive director, and Bjorn Claeson, SFC director, wrote that they are “pleased to announce that SFC and ILR will be joining forces in a new collaboration that we hope will stengthen our advocacy efforts to create a sweatfree world.”

Among the benefits expected from working together:

• Expansion of “our work to encourage federal, local, and state government entities to use their purchasing power to promote and enforce strong labor rights standards.”
• “Strengthen our efforts to build a grassroots international labor solidarity movement in the U.S.”

The two groups have already been working together informally, especially in the past year. Now they are doings so more actively “during a one-year transition period followed by an evaluation at which time a final decision will be made on whether to fully merge into one organization.”

Sweatfree Communities, headquarterd in Bangor, Maine, was founded in 2003 by anti-sweatshop activists, including local labor leaders, in Maine, Minnesota, New York, Wisconsin, and elsewhere. Their working together since then has led 39 cities, 15 counties, and eight states to adopt “sweat-free” procurement policies, starting with uniforms for police officers, firefighters, and others, including prisoners.

The International Labor Rights Forum, headquartered in Washington, was founded in1986 by leaders in human rights, labor, academic, and faith-based organizations, to promote global labor standards, especially through trade and aid policies. (Personal disclosure: I’ve been a member of ILRF since the ealy 1990s.)

Both organizations have excellent Websites that inform members and the public on developments affecting the human rights of working men and women.
IRLR: http://www.laborrights.org
SFC: http://www.sweatfree.org

For a copy of 2010 Shopping with a Conscience Guide, see http://www.sweatfree.org/shoppingguide

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Businness, human rights, and due diligence

You’re an employer, and want to avoid any unnecessary risks in your global production business. You certainly don’t want to become liable for failing to exercise due diligence in your human rights practices.

But what is due diligence?

An authoritative answer to that question has come from John Ruggie, the UN Secretary General’s special representative on human rights and business. Ruggie gave the keynote address to a conference sponsored on February 25 in Atlanta by the U.S. Council for International Business, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the International Organization of Employers.

Ruggie identifies four components of human rights due diligence for companies:

1. A statement of policy articulating the company’s commitment to respect human rights;
2. Periodic assessments of actual and potential human rights impacts of company activities and relationships;
3. Integrating those commitments and assessments into internal control and oversight systems; and
4. Tracking as well as reporting performance.

The process “has to go beyond simply identifying and managing material risks to the company itself, to include the risks a company’s activities and associated relationships may pose to the rights of affected individuals and companies,” Ruggie points out, adding:

“In a world of 80,000 multinationals, ten times as many subsidiaries, and countless national firms,…[the process] necessarily will vary with circumstances.”

Ruggie offers several reasons why following a meaningful process of due diligence is well worth the effort it requires. One advantage is that it offers a corporate board “strong protection against mismanagement claims by shareholders, [which in the context of lawsuits]…can only count in its favor.”

In carrying out his mandate from the UN Human Rights Council, Ruggie will in the coming months be working with a number of organizations, including:

• The OECD as it updates its "Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises."
• The International Finance Corporation as it revises its Performance Standards.
• The European Commission, as it explores new approaches to ensuring responsible behavior overseas by European firms.

For the full text of Ruggie’s address, click
http://www.business-humanrights.org/Links/Repository/153835/

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Public procurement with a conscience

Although efforts to adopt decent labor standards through free trade agreements are stymied on the international level, activists in the United States are quietly making progress on the local level. At last count, 39 cities, 15 counties, and eight states have adopted policies expressed under a common banner: No taxpayer dollars for sweatshop goods!

These policies are promoted by a nongovernmental network, Sweatfree Communities, founded in 2003 by anti-sweatshop activists who had been working separately in Maine, Minnesota, New York, Wisconsin, and elsewhere. They now work together with a three-prong strategy:

Those are the first two paragraphs of an article of mine just published in Policy Innovations, the Carnegie Council’s on-line magazine for a fairer globalization.

For more than a decade now, I’ve studied the various levers available to advance the human rights of workers in the 21st century’s global economy. The Policy Innovations article is one result of those studies. As I say in the closing paragraph;

“New trade legislation – necessary as it is to safeguard worker rights globally – will not do the job alone. A combination of governmental and nongovernmental levers is needed. One of those key levers is public procurement with a conscience.”

For the full article, click
http://www.policyinnovations.org/ideas/innovations/data/000159

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How many more will have to die…?

…before the world’s business and political leaders start to rid the globe of sweatshops?

At least 21 workers died and dozens of other workers were injured on February 26 when a fire swept through a sweater factory near the capital city of Dhaka in Bangladesh. Most of the victims, at least 14 of the dead, were women.

Since the year 2000 alone, 143 garment workers, almost all women, were killed in Bangladesh’s factory fires.

How many more women will die in sweatshops, in Bangladesh and elsewhere, before a pundit like Nicholas Kristof stops writing that sweatshops are good for women?

Moreover, “why does the garment sector in Bangladesh continue to grow despite the fires and despite the abusive working conditions that nobody denies – not even the brands themselves?”

Bjorn Claeson, director of Sweatfree Communities, adds that and other pointed questions, in an article published in “Labor is Not a Commodity,” a blog jointly operated with the International Labor Rights Forum and other groups dedicated to global labor solidarity.

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