A Must-Read for President Obama: families face more insecurity

Economic insecurity appears more the rule than the exception for American families, and that trend has worsened in the last few years. So says a new study, “Economic Security Index,” just published by the Rockefeller Foundation.

Other highlights of the study, covering the period of 1985-2007, include:

-- The majority of Americans had no safety net of savings.
-- Economic insecurity has risen across all demographic groups in America, with African-Americans faring the worst of all.
-- About 28,000,000 Americans were economically insecure in 1985. They numbered 46,000,000 in 2007.
-- The rising prevalence of two-earner families does not appear to have provided a big income cushion to families, because of rising prices, especially for health care.
-- Projections to 2009 suggest that in the last few years the level of economic security experienced by Americans was greater than any other time over the past quarter century.

The July report is part of an effort to develop a coherent measure of economic insecurity, called the Economic Security Index (ESI), based on the joint occurrence of three major risks to economic well-being: 1) a major loss in income; 2) large out-of-pocket medical expenses; and 3) inadequate savings to buffer the first two risks.

The ESI, as defined in the 24-page July report, will be updated on a regular basis to include new data and specific risks not covered. It is designed to provide hard data to policymakers.

I learned of this study from a New York Times op-ed column by Bob Herbert. Though technically “opinion,” the July 17 column has more facts than you’ll find in news reported by some parts of the media. Read more!

Vietnam’s dissidents –are they absent from the American mind?

In my small voice as a blogger, I’ve been guilty of the same failing as the louder media -- I’ve been ignoring how Vietnam’s Communist Party/state apparatus has cracked down on the small but persistent pro-democracy movement in the country.

In its summer issue, Dissent magazine, published in New Yoirk, breaks the silence with an article titled “Vietnamese Dissidents: Absent from the Western Mind.” Dustin Roasa, a free lance writer based in Cambodia, describes the most recent chapter in the history of Vietnamese dissidents, which began on April 8, 2006, when a group of activists posted on-line a “Manifesto 2006 on Freedom and Democracy.”

More than 2,000 Vietnamese – lawyers, Buddhist monks, Catholic priests, ex-Party members, writers, and intellectuals from all parts of the country – signed the document. They became known as Bloc 8406, after the date it was posted.

In a visit to Vietnam in the winter of 2007, Roasa talked with several Bloc 8406 members and found their mood pessimistic. The movement was under siege and losing members to prison. It was not gaining the attention of the foreign media.

“The dissidents I know hope for foreign involvement in their cause,” Doasa writes . The hope was that media interest would pressure the Party to listen to dissidents like Nguyen Dan Que, who after 20 years in prison is under house arrest in Saigon and has refused offers of exile to the United States.

In the summer of 2008, the government quietly gave a multibillion-dollar land concession in the Central Highlands to a bauxite mining company in China, which brought in thousands of “guest workers” from China. General Vo Nguyen Gap, 98, criticized the concession. So did some bloggers. “Few issues unite Vietnamese than suspicion of their large neighbor to the North,” Doasa points out.

A new wave of repression followed. At least 60 pro-democracy activists have been arrested since last October. One was a 41-year-old lawyer and graduate of Tulane, Le Cong Dinh, who gained fame for representing the Socialist Republic of Vietnam in a trade dispute with the United State (over catfish dumping) and winning it. He also took on the job of defending dissidents in court, and began blogging about the bauxite mine and other government concessions to the People’s Republic of China.

On January 30, 2010, Le Cong Dinh was sentenced to five years in prison on a charge of conducting propaganda against the state.

Roasa writes: “As more Vietnamese become aware of the pro-democracy movement through the China issue, and as the crackdown against the dissidents continue to internsify, international support for the pro-democracy cause in Vietnam is crucial now more than ever.” He concludes:

“Imagine...if Solzhenitsyn’s accounts of the gulag had fallen on deaf ears. Or if Charter 77 had never been read beyond the borders of Czechoslovia. There are Solzhenitsyns and Havels in Vietnam right now. Will anyone listen?”

On July 22 U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton stopped in Hanoi to celebrate the 15th anniversary of U.S.-Vietnam relations. In a relatively brief talk, she said: “And the United States will continue to urge Vietnam to strengthen its commitment to human rights, and give its people say over the direction of their own lives. But this is not a relationship fixed upon our differences.”

Print Page Read more!

Hong Kong for shared prosperity

The minimum wage law that Hong Kong adopted on July 17 won’t give anyone a pay increase until next year, but it’s already a clear defeat for what Milton Friedman once described as the world’s greatest experiment in laissez-faire capitalism.

Lee Cheuk-Yan, head of the Hong Kong Federation of Trade Unions (HKFTU) and a member of the city-state’s legislative council, conceded that the law has short-comings, but said: “This means goodbye to unfettered capitalism.”

Under Hong Kong’s status as a special region of the People’s Republic of China, its non-elected chief executive, Donald Tsang, has much discretion on how the new law is implemented. A commission, appointed by Tsang, will come up with figure setting the wage floor, which a HKFTU campaign has demanded to be HK$33 (US$4) an hour. The minimum to be approved is reportedly closer to US$3 an hour. No ceiling on hours is involved.

For these and other initiatives, the Wall Street Journal accused Mr. Tsang of “misguided populism.” In truth, his initiatives could be small steps toward shared prosperity. Read more!

Soaring job losses, trade deficit: is it time to increase tariffs on China’s imports?

The U.S.-China economic relationship is so greatly unbalanced in China’s favor that the United States needs to initiate a system of tariffs against China’s export machine. So says Steven Pearlstein, business columnist of the Washington Posr.

“Getting this economic relationship back into balance,” Pearlstein writes in his June 30 column, “is the single biggest challenge to the global economy, not just because of its direct effects on China and the United States, but the indirect effects it has on the rest of the world.“

China received a free pass into the World Trade Organization without having in place the fundamentals of a market system, Pearlstein points out. “Its business sector continues to de dominated by state-owned companies financed by state-owned banks within the context of what remains largely a state-planned economy.”

The result, as Pearlstein describes it, is a business sector difficult if not impossible for foreigners to penetrate, and “those outsiders who manage to break through invariably find that they have few protections from a system that is larded with corruption and largely unconstrained by the rule of law.”

Administration after administration in the United States has refused to challenge China’s mercantilism, in the hope that as the relationship deepened China would “make the inevitable transition to democratic capitalism.” But China’s view of business remains thoroughly mercantilist, and “to try to convince [it] otherwise is folly.”

Pearlstein contends it is urgent that the United States take the lead toward a solution by establishing a tariff regime that will increase the cost of imports not just from China, but also from ”other counties that keep their currencies artificially low, restrict the flow of capital or maintain significant barriers to imports of goods and services.”

How would such system work? Would it comply with WTO rules? Pearlstein declined to get into such details. “That’s why God created trade lawyers.”

Nor does he counter the arguments made against increasing tariffs. That would take a book. As it happens, the U.S. Business & Industry Council has just published a volume that buttresses Pearlstein’s position: “Free Trade Doesn’t Work: Why America Needs a Tariff.” Its author, Ian Fletcher, makes a strong case for “a flat tax on all imported good and services.”

Controversies over tariffs go back to the beginning of the nation. In a classic volume, “Opening America’s Market: U.S. Foreign Trade Policy since 1776,” Alfred. E Eckes Jr. describes how, at crucial times, “U.S. officials unilaterally opened the American market without gaining commensurate advantages in foreign markets for the products of American workers and American factories.”

Hence a merchandise trade deficit that this year in a single month, April, totaled $52,500,000,000, reaching $19,300,000,000 for China alone. According to a report earlier this year by the Economic Policy Institute, the growing overall trade deficit with China eliminated or displaced an estimated 2,400,000 U.S. jobs between 2001 and 2008.

A new EPI report illustrates how China’s export-driven policies work. Its paper and paper products industry is now the largest in the world, thanks to WTO-illegal government subsidies of more than $32,100,000,000 since 2002. Paper imports to the United States are now rising faster than those from any other country. According to industry sources, an estimated 400,000 jobs are at risk, even though the U.S. industry is highly competitive.


Print Page Read more!

Inequality: how it may foment instability of many varieties

To heal the grievous rift exposed during recent violent demonstrations in Bangkok, Thailand must address the country’s social inequality, according to a leading Thai, Finance Minister Korn Chatikavanij.

In an interview with Tim Johnston of the Financial Times of London, Korn said: “There have been far too much focus through various governments…on short-term relief measures as opposed to measures that genuinely address the issue of equal access to opportunity in the long term.”

Although governmental efforts to create jobs through fiscal stimulus are important, “they cannot be expected to create job opportunities of the kind that people aspire to in the long term,” Korn said, adding that a widespread view among the people is that access to opportunities and resources is “not fair and transparent.”

Apparently Johnson shares that view. In an opinion column published June 28, he wrote:

“While the protesters’ main demand was the resignation of the government, that discontent was rooted in the belief that the country’s traditional aristocratic and bureaucratic elites have used their power to usurp political and economic rights by manipulating parliament and the courts.”

That discontent is not limited to Thailand. Nor are its roots.

Another columnist, Paul Krugman, a Nobel prizewinner in economics, is also exploring the societal repercussions of inequality. He does so in a paper, “Inequality and crises: coincidence or causation?” that he presented in Luxembourg to the Luxembourg Income Study, an on-going project that collects and analyzes income and expenditure data of nearly 40 countries.

As of this writing, Krugman has made available only a series of statistical data slides and a few related notes of his presentation. In his opening note, he explains:

“Pre-2008: When I would talk to lay audiences about inequality, I would mention that we were reaching levels not seen since 1929, and that would inevitably lead to questions about whether we would soon have another Depression. No, I’d say – there really isn’t a clear reason why high inequality should lead to macroeconomic crisis.

“And then…” Data captured in a series of charts follow, as well as this note, among others:

“Sharp rightward shift in politics in U.S. and to lesser extent UK circa 1980. Reflected in polarization, and also in policies, including financial deregulation. Also, strong correlation between political shifts and inequality.”

Among the economists he quotes is Robert Frank, author of “Falling Behind: How Rising Inequality Harms the Middle Class.” He puts Frank among those with “Modern Ideas (on the basic issue): over-consumption (and over-indebtedness), not under-consumption,” as in this quote:

“The wealthy are spending more now simply because they have more money. But their spending has led others to spend more as well, including middle-income families. If the real incomes of middle-class families have grown only slightly, how have they financed this additional consumption? In part by working longer hours, but mainly by saving less and borrowing more.”

In his final slide, he draws two-way causal lines between politics and inequality, but he qualifies the link between inequality and fragility with a question mark.

Meanwhile, in his June 27 New York Times column, Krugman wrote: “We are now, I fear, in the early stages of a third depression….The cost – to the world economy and, above all, to the millions of lives blighted by the absence of jobs – will…be immense.”
Print Page Read more!

Very rich becoming even richer

The sizes of income gaps between the very rich and everyone else in the United States have more than tripled in the last three decades. The result is that income concentration at the very top of the income scale is greater than at any time since 1928.

So says the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) in a report based on new data issued by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) combined with prior research.

The authors, Arloc Sherman and Chad Stone, point out that the recession that began in December 2007 likely shank the gap between rich and poor households, but that a similar development during the 2001 recession turned out to be just a speed bump. Incomes at the top later more than made up lost ground.

The new CBO data show how middle-income Americans were affected by trends in after-tax income during the 1979 – 2007 period:

-- The share going to the top 1 percent hit its highest level (17.1 percent) while the share going to the middle one-fifth of Americans shrank to its lowest level (14.1 percent).

-- Average after-tax incomes for the top 1 percent rose by 281 percent after adjusting for inflation – an increase of $973,100 per household – compared to increases of 25 percent ($11,200 per household) for the middle fifth.

The CBO data, according to the CBPP report. are the most comprehensive data available on incomes and taxes for different income groups, capturing trends at the very top of the scale that the Census data miss. For example, Census income data do not include capital gains or earnings above $1,000,000. If someone makes $10,000,000 a year, the Census reports these earnings as $1,000,000.
Print Page Read more!

Apple's i-Pad made under military discipline: Taiwanese petition

The cluster of ten suicides at the Taiwan-owned factory in Shenzhen, China, “is a bitter accusation made with 10 young lives against the inhumane, exploitative labor regime.” The responsibility for the tragedy, and for making amends, lies with four parties:

-- the owners of the factory, Hon Hai Precision Industry and its subsidiary, Foxconn Technology Inc.., which operates the Shenzhen plant.
-- the government of China, “which favors employers and fails to assure basic labor rights in China.”
-- multinational corporations, such as Apple Computer Inc., which outsoure products, such as iPad, to companies like Foxconn that “minimize their costs by transferring the price pressure onto their workers in forms of low pay, military discipline, and ruthless working conditions.”
-- the government of Taiwan, which is “an accessory to the wrongdoings of international conglomerates.”

So says a petition originated by a group of Taiwanese academicians and now signed by more than 200 colleagues, plus labor and environmental activists. Previously, in my blog posted yesterday, I referred to it as a letter, not a petition. This morning, an anonymous email sent me an English translation of the petition, http://sites.google.com/site/laborgogo2010eng/.

Its additional details and insights include:

1. “The concentration camp-styled controlling system, the means of supervision over employees, and repeated labor for more than a dozen hours a day on production lines are main reasons for physical and mental exhaustion and alienation of the workers.”

2. “The wage in Foxonn is relatively high compared to the other OEM [original equipment manufacturer] factories in Shenzhen….Pay raise is not the answer.”

3. “The representative of the [government] labor union of Foxconn, ironically, is the assistant of chairman Terry Guo” of Hon Hai.

All Taiwan-funded enterprises abroad, including Foxonn/Hon Hai, must end “military discipline in the factory as well as in the dormitory, the petition says. It also asks all others involved to initiate reforms. Among them: “a reform in the existing labor union system toward the guarantee of shop-floor worker representaton.”

Consumers are asked to boycott Apple’s new iPhone 4G “until the working conditions of its manufacturing factories are genuinely improved.”

The petition identifies two sociologists, Thung-Hong Lin of Academia Sinica and You-ren Yang of Tunghai University, as its “promoters.”
Print Page Read more!

Taiwan profs shame Taiwanese corporation for suicides in China

A Taiwan-owned multinational’s behavior in China has sparked unexpected controversy in Taiwan, thanks in part to the protests of 150 Taiwanese academicians.

The controversy, headline news on TV last Sunday, June 13, and front page headlines in most newspapers on Monday, pits the academicians and other critics against the mighty Foxconn Technology Inc., key assembler of Apple i-Phones, whose Shenzen plant suffered a series of worker suicides this year.

After a suicide in April. two young sociologists drafted a letter calling attention to the intense pressures faced by the Foxconn workers to work illegally excessive overtime, and asked the company to stop blaming the latest victims as copycats. Widely circulated in the academic community, the letter gradually gained the signatures of 150 professors of sociology, psychology, public health, gender studies, and law, among others.

The day after the letter was publicized at a press conference, the universities of the academic signers were flooded with phone calls and emails: the academics knew nothing about work and were overpaid fat cats that Taiwan can do without.

More important, the prime minister, Wul Den-Yih, called the academics unfair and politically motivated. Public sentiment generally had a nationalist reaction, as though any criticism of Foxconn and Terry Guo, president of its parent company, were an attack on Taiwan.

Nor did the 150 academics gain popularity with one of their key demands, as described by Hsin-Hsing Chen, associate professor of the Graduate Institute for Social Transformation Studies: that “the public pension funds divest themselves of any Foxconn stocks until the company shows substantial improvement in its compliance with China’s labor laws.”

This week, China Times, one of the biggest newspapers in Taiwan, chimed in with a different note for the media. It editorially criticized Guo’s attitude toward the 150 professors, and had the following analysis of a widely publicized pay raise that Foxconn granted at the Shenzhen plant:

“Just as Foxconn announced the enormous pay raise in his [Guo’s] Shenzhen plants, they also announced massive relocation of production out of Shenzhen into the low-wage inland provinces. They can do that because their products like iPods are less bulky and the transportation costs are low. But other foreign-owned manufacturers in the high-wage coastal areas in China with bulkier products such as food or cars cannot do that. Guo is scheming against his competitors while trying to win his PR campaign.”

Meantime, some other foreign-invested plants in China, faced with strikes or a labor shortage, were boosting wages. These management concessions may test whether money alone will satisfy the workers, or whether their discontent runs much deeper. Might the workers even be seeking some form of social transformation?

Print Page Read more!

UN quizzes nations on CSR policies

“Has your national government… adopted a corporate social responsibility (CSR) policy or policies?”

That was the first of 16 questions in a survey that the UN sent last year to all 192 UN member countries. A report on the survey, prepared for John Ruggie, the UN Special Representative for business and human rights, was issued early this month under the title “Survey of State Corporate Social Responsibility Policies: Summary of Key Trends.”

During the five months after the survey’s distribution in April last year, only 29 States responded, and of these, only 10 indicated that they had, or were drafting, some form of national CSR policy. Two others said they had no intention to adopt such a policy.

It was a “low overall response rate,” the report conceded. Yet there was enough substance in the 10 responses to produce a 10-page report summarizing key trends, which do not necessarily reflect practices around the world.

Without divulging whether they had responded to the survey, the report notes that six States – Canada, China, Denmark, India, the Netherlands, and Norway – have recently adopted some specific form of CSR policy. Here are a few CSR details on three of them.

Canada, a world leader in mining at home and abroad, in 2009 released a strategy paper for the country’s international extractive sector. A CSR Counselor for that sector, reporting directly to the Minister of International Trade, monitors the practices of Canadian companies operating outside Canada and advises stakeholders on corporate performance.

China issued guidance in 2008 for its state-owned enterprises recommending a system of CSR reporting and protecting labor rights. The government has similar guidelines in the works for foreign-invested firms.

Norway last year adopted a White Paper on the government’s expectation that Norwegian companies operating abroad will respect human rights.

More than half of the report describes the many ways that the 10 nations (unnamed) responded to the survey’s specific questions. Examples:

Does the CSR policy:
-- cover the subsidiaries of corporations? Five do.
-- provide guidance on how companies integrate CSR into their operations? Six do.
-- refer to any binding legal operations on companies? Three do.

The survey provides only a partial snapshot of how the UN’s framework on business and human rights has penetrated the culture of its Member States. Second, it serves as a reminder to States of the specific CSR duties that the Human Rights Council’s 47 member States embraced two years ago. (For background on that event, see “Multinationals, Human Rights, and UN” at
http://humanrightsforworkers.blogspot.com/2008/04/multinationals-human-rights-and-un.html.)
Print Page Read more!

Spread of precarious work undermines human rights, especially for women

You’re an employer who finds a formula to cut wages, pay no benefits at all, and prevent your work force from trying to unionize. Under the formula, you change the status of a half of your workers from stable employment to a radically different arrangement, such as independent contractor.

The workers have no change in job content or in workplace. The only changes are in smaller paychecks and in the loss of sick leave, vacations, pensions, and paid overtime, among other benefits, including the basic one, job security. From stable employment they fall into the general category called precarious work.

Precarious work, in a frightening variety of exploitative forms, has become so prevalent in the global economy that two global unions last month submitted reports to John Ruggie, the UN Special Representative for Business and Human Rights, alerting him to the trend. Both global unions – the International Metalworkers Federation (IMF) and the Food, Agricultural, Hotel, and Restaurant Workers International (IUF) – emphasize that precarious work is systematically undermining human rights.

The IMF report singles out a country where precarious employment is rampant and victimizes women especially:

“In Korea, 70 per cent of women workers are precariously employed, earning only 43 per cent of the salaries of regular male workers. In one of the factories cited in the [ILO complaint] against the Korean government, only 5 per cent of the workers are permanent employees and they are all male. Nearly all the precarious workers are women, earning 47 per cent less than their male colleagues.”

The IUF report points out that, apart from the World Bank’s promotion of labor market “flexibility,” there are numerous misleading ways to package precarious work. In South Africa, it is called “black economic empowerment” by Coca-Cola’s bottler, which turned its delivery drivers into “independent owner-operators,“ whose earnings were reduced down to as much as a fifth of what they formerly were. In Pakistan it is called “fighting child labor” for an industrial giant that has a payroll dominated by workers in a precarious status.

Both the IMF and the IUF called upon Ruggie, as part of his program to integrate human rights into corporate practice, to study how the trend toward precarious work undermines human rights, particularly the human rights of workers.

In his June 3 remarks to the International Labor Conference in Geneva, Ruggie said that in carrying out his mandate, he looks to the ILO for guidance, with precarious work as one issue and citing the contribution made by the IMF and IUF submissions.
Print Page Read more!

Toward protecting girls and boys laboring on U.S. farms

-- The United States has failed to meet its obligations to implement International Labor Organization (ILO) convention against the worst forms of child labor.

-- It is a “matter of urgency” that the U.S. do so by updating its law and regulations on child labor.

That the central message of a report issued this month by the International Labor Rights Forum (ILRF), a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group.

Last November the U.S. government restated its “strong commitment’ to the convention, # 182, ratified and signed in 1999, but, according to the ILRF, the evidence of non-compliance has four dimensions.

1. Regulations listing particularly hazardous jobs have not been updated in 30 years.
2. Current labor law exempts various categories of children from protection against employment in hazardous agricultural jobs.
3. Current law does not prevent children from working long hours in agriculture.
4. Laws that do give child agricultural laborers some protection are not well enforced.

ILRF’s recommendation as a “first step” toward compliance with the convention is directed toward Congress: swift passage of the Children’s Act for Responsible Employment (CARE), which would raise the standards protecting children in agriculture. For more information, click http://www.opencongress.org/bill/111-h3564/show/.
Print Page Read more!

Towards a ‘win-win’ situation on globalization and human rights

Corporations generally are in a “lose-lose situation” regarding human rights. They “are not adequately monetizing and aggregating the costs of conflicts with communities in which they operate, typically involving environmental and human rights concerns.” The result: harm to human rights and to the company itself.

That‘s a key finding discussed in a report to the UN Human Rights Council on June 1 by Professor John Ruggie, special representative for the UN Secretary General for business and human rights.

From his own studies and those of other experts, Ruggie has found that the harm to the corporation included revenue losses due to delays and disruptions; higher costs of financing, insurance, and security; and possible project cancellation.

Governments, through judicial and non-judicial mechanisms, “should form the foundation of a system of remedy for corporate-related system human rights abuse,” Ruggie writes, but these mechanisms all “remain underdeveloped – and too many judicial systems are inaccessible to those who need them most.”

Ruggie, whose day job is professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, has another year to go on a UN mandate that began in 2005. In the next 12 months, he and the team he assembled will put the finishing touches on a UN Framework for business and human rights -- essentially a paradigm to integrate human rights and globalization. As he recognizes in this report, however, “the international community is still in the early stags of adapting the human rights regime to provide more effective protection to individual and communities against corporate-related harm.” Print Page Read more!

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.

Read more!

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.

Print Page Read more!

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.)
Print Page Read more!

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.

Print Page Read more!

‘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’.”
Print Page Read more!

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!