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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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?

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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.)
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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.
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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/.
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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.

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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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Tooting my own horn: 14 years of Human Rights for Workers

I have no idea how many people read this Weblog, Human Rights for Workers, but I get enough positive reactions to energize me to go on. In the past few weeks, I received heartening emails from three people:

“Thank you for your tireless crusade to promote human rights for workers.” – G. Rajasekaran, secretary general, Malaysian Trades Union Congress, Subang Jaya, Malaysia, January 31.

“Always a pleasure to read you.” -- Marie-Claude Hessler, human rights activist, retired lawyer, Paris, February 11.

“Happy New Year and thanks for your admirable persistence in reminding us of some inconvenient truths.” – John Langan, S.J., professor of Catholic Social Thought at Georgetown University, January 2.

Each letter commented on a specific article. Father Langan, for example, had this to say about my posting titled ‘Economic suicide is not an option’: “This one-pager is, I think, exceptionally clear and helpful.”

Why am I basking in such shameless self-promotion today?

Blame it on my mood, which became exuberant when the sun broke through after days of blizzards. Or maybe I just couldn’t think of another way to introduce some news: Human Rights for Workers is now 14 years old, 14 years under the same one-person staff.

I launched HRFW on February 14, 1996, a cyberspace pioneer devoted to the question: “What’s happening to working men and women in this era of globalization?” After mutating into a Weblog with the same name two years ago, it still focuses on that basic question. So do many other sites and blogs now, each in its own way. There’s so much company that it’s impossible to keep up with it all.

Why don’t I, at long last, go into full retirement, and leave the field to all those newer and better staffed endeavors? There's one problem, if I did that. What on earth would I do for enjoyment?

We’ll have a party when HRFW turns l5. I’ll send you plenty advance notice.

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“Race-neutral” policies are not necessarily neutral

For the first time since he took office, President Obama met at the White House with a group of black civil rights leaders February 10. The meeting followed by a day a New York Times story headlined “Frustration at Obama’s Nuancd Style on Race.”

After the hour-long meeting, one participant, Benjamin Jealous, president of the NAACP, told New York Times reporter Helene Cooper: “In these times, it didn’t make sense to talk about race-based initiatives.”

Ms. Cooper reported that “as he did today, Mr. Obama has said that broader efforts to help the disadvantaged will also benefit blacks.” (She did not quote the President directly.)

In other words, the administration’s policy is “race neutral.” It’s a policy with some appeal. For the first black U.S. president, it deflects the charge that his very origins will cause him to favor persons of his own race.

But how neutral is neutrality on race?

Mr. Obama would be wise to read a book, “More Than Just Race,” by William Julius Wilson, a professor at the University of Chicago. Mr. Wilson, who is black, used to believe that public policy should always be color blind. His book explains why he no longer thinks so.

Take the implact of globalization, or “complex global economic transformation,” as Mr. Wilson calls it. Economic and political leaders did not make a decision to shape globalization so that, by the massive shift of manufacturing jobs abroad and other means, it would discriminate against many black Americans. But that indeed was and is one of its effects. Mr. Wilson documents the unintended racial consequences in detail. My summary does not do justice to the reality.

At the bottom end of the pay and skill scales, globalization’s increased demand for workers should have been a boon for inner-city blacks, who generally rank low in job skills. However, the urban manufacturing industries that once provided equal job opportunities by the millions have largely moved abroad, thanks to the combination of U.S. free trade and investment policies and the foreign attractions of low wages and weak labor protection laws weakly enforced.

Meanwhile, at the top end of the last century’s expanded U.S. labor market, many better-educated blacks landed good paying suburban jobs, as managers and professionals, for example, thanks to a decline in employment discrimination, They and their kin joined the general exodus of American urbanites into the suburbs.

The blacks who were left behind thereby became more concentrated than ever before in poor communities, more isolated from the rest of America, more embittered by their plight. Black women, who have traditionally held jobs in service industries, were more fortunate. Most service industries can’t escape to other countries.

“The economic predicament of low-skilled black men in the inner city has reached catastrophic proportions,” Mr. Wilson wrote a year ago. Their plight has not diminished since then. It needs to become a priority in the Obama administration.

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In fashion or not, students still campaign against sweatshops

The signs are everywhere, says Newsweek, that “the age of global human-rights advocacy” is over. Everywhere? Certainly not in the ranks of the United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) and its chapters in some 250 colleges and universities in the United States and Canada.

USAS, whose worker-rights advocacy reaches all across the world, is bringing together hundreds of student activists at a national conference at the University of Tennessee campus in Knoxville over the February 19-21 weekend. Among other things, they will celebrate a major victory for garment workers in Honduras.

“We are impressed by the social consciences of students in the United States,” a Honduran union president said after a 10-month nation-wide campaign in the United States ended in victory last month. Workers from Honduras will be at the University of Knoxville campus to describe how, against overwhelming odds, the student campaign caused Russell Athletic, a leading sportswear company, to reverse its anti-union position.

The final key to victory was the action of nearly 100 colleges and universities canceling or suspending licensing deals under which Russell Athletic makes clothing and sports equipment with colleges’ names and logos. The company’s decision came after a wide-ranging of USAS campaign that included picketing NBA finals at Orlando and Los Angeles, distributing flyers in retail outlets, and sending Twitter messages urging customers to boycott Russell products.

In the settlement, Russell agreed not only to reinstate 1,200 discharged workers but also to work with unions at its Honduran factories, eight in all. Russell’s reversal is a “giant breakthrough for labor rights in the region,” says Scott Nova, executive director of Worker Rights Consortium, USAS partner, which monitors compliance with standards adopted by dozens of colleges and universities.

As a writer and supporter of USAS since its very beginning, I am especially impressed by two things about this movement:

1. Despite the built-in annual turnover of members and leaders, USAS is pursuing the cause of worker rights with unremitting dedication.
2. It is struggling for the rights not of its own student members but of others -- workers, mostly women, whom they do not know personally and will never get to know. With a few exceptions.

Among the foreign guests at Knoxville, weather permitting, will be a delegation of unionists from Honduras. They will report on the succces of a coordinated effort and the work of repeating it throughout Central America.

(For an article of mine,"Freshmen Are Teaching Elders Lessons in Global Ethics," click on http://www.senser.com/biv-4.htm.)

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AFL-CIO offers a “just” trade policy for the 21st century

“We cannot afford another trade agreement that privileges substandard new opportunity for investors over good jobs for workers,” the AFL-CIO says in testimony for the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR).

In the 34-page document the AFL-CIO presents its views on crucial elements of the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership Trade Agreement (TPPTA), and says it is looking forward “to working with the Obama Administration to create a just trade policy for the 21st century.”

U.S. negotiations are set to begin in mid-March with TPPTA, involving at least seven Asia-Pacific governments. The United States already has bilateral free trade agreements (FTAs) with four of them: Australia, Chile, Peru, and Singapore.

A remarkable feature of the AFL-CIO position is that it deals with far more than strictly trade union issues, narrowly defined. For example, among “new issues for consideration,” it lists “valuation of currency” as an important trade union issue now ignored by existing agreements. “The U.S. cannot effectively export to countries that intervene systematically to keep their currency artificially low in relation to the dollar, as China, in particular, is doing.”

Only seven pages of the submission to USTR are devoted to improving the labor chapters of existing agreements. By contrast, the paper has 17 pages of non-labor chapters on issues that need to be improved. Among the most important are those that would fall in chapters on:

Investment. This seven-page section emphasizes that foreign investors in the U.S. can now “claim rights above and beyond those that our domestic investors enjoy,” and that this broad definition of investment should be narrowed to cover “only the kinds of property now protected by the U.S. constitution,” thereby excluding claims for losses from expected profits not met, for example.

Another examples of a recommended change in the investment template: a hostgovernment will be permitted to ensure that investment activity is conducted in a way sensitive to environmental and labor rights.

Procurement. A government will have the right “to require a supplier to comply with generally applicable laws regarding fundamental principles and rights at work.”

Intellectual property. “Our FTAs have provided excessive protection for the producers of brand-name pharmaceuticals,” thereby jeopardizing access to affordable medicines, particularly to developing countries.

Consumer protection. Both our domestic and trade policies must be crafted to prevent dangerous consumer and industrial goods from reaching our shores. Safety inspectors should get enhanced rights to inspect the facilities of a country exporting toxic products.

(The full text of the AFL-CIO submission is available at
http://www.regulations.gov/search/Regs/home.html#docketDetail?R=USTR-2009-0041
Scroll down to USTR2009-0041-0100.)

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Searching for ways to enlighten worker rights illiterates

How do you talk about worker rights to people who are illiterate about worker rights issues?

The question occurred to me because of a new survey that reveals what the New York Times calls “widespread political illiteracy” among Americans. The “News IQ Test,” conducted in early January by the Pew Research Center, found that only
-- 26% of the respondents knew that it takes 60 votes to break a filibuster in the Senate.
-- 36% knew that no Republican voted for the Senate health care bill on December 24.
-- 39% knew that the Majority Leader of the Senate is Harry Reid.

There may be a lesson here for those of us trying to convince the public that globalization, especially its trade system, needs a reform that incorporates the human rights of workers. How can we frame the issues so that the public understands what we’re talking about?

The old expression “social clause” – as in adding a “social clause” to trade agreements -- is inadequate and fortunately out of fashion. Yet we don’t have a phrase that captures the popular imagination. The goal of “decent work for everyone” comes closest.

It is a term embraced by the UN International Labor Organization in its strategy for a global coalition to support decent work. But what do you mean by “decent work”?

Here is a definition developed by Pope Benedict XVI in his encyclical, Caritas in Veritate:

“What is meant by the word ‘decent’ in regard to work? It means
• work that expresses the essential dignity of every man and woman in the context of their particular society:
• work that is freely chosen, effectively associating workers, both men and women, with the development of their community;
• work that enables the worker to be respected and free from any form of discrimination;
• work that makes it possible for families to meet their needs and provide schooling for their children, without the children themselves being forced into labor;
• work that permits the workers to organize themselves freely, and to make their voices heard;
• work that leaves enough room for rediscovering one's roots at a personal, familial and spiritual level;
• work that guarantees those who have retired a decent standard of living.”

With that comprehensive definition in mind, “decent work” is a great goal, but I’m afraid that, alone, it wouldn’t score very high in a Pew News IQ test.

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President's agenda for jobs: is it populist enough?

I didn’t watch or listen to President Obama’ State of the Union address. I read it the morning after. And I re-read large chunks of it, focusing on what he said about jobs.

“Jobs must be our number-one focus in 2010,” he declared. Here are his plans.

One way is to “put Americans to work today building the infrastructure of tomorrow” and “building clean energy facilities.” These steps, however, “won’t make up for the seven million jobs that we’ve lost over the past two years.”

So “it’s time to get serious about the problems that are hampering our growth.” One of a series of initiatives proposed by the President: “Double our exports over the next five years, an increase that will support two million jobs in America.”

In aggressively seeking new markets, the U.S. must make sure that other countries are playing by the rules. “And that’s why we’ll continue to shape a Doha trade agreement that opens global markets, and why we will strengthen our trade relations in Asia and with key partners like South Korea and Panama and Colombia.”

Some pundits attributed Obama’s new emphasis on jobs to a need to become more “populist” after a Republican won the U.S. Senate seat held by the late Senator Kennedy. But how populist is President Obama’s position?

A few weeks ago Gallup asked 1,017 Americans this open-ended question: “In your opinion, what would be the best way to create more jobs in the United States?”

The top prescription was “Keep manufacturing jobs here/Stop sending overseas,” favored by 18% of respondents. Another 4% chose “higher taxes on imports/Buy American.” So in effect 20% deemed globalization to be the chief obstacle to ending U.S. unemployment.

The Gallup poll findings were consistent with those in a recent survey by the Pew Research Center. Its respondents were asked to prioritize a prepared list of 11 long-range foreign policy goals. Surprisingly, “protecting the jobs of American workers” shared the top place with “taking measures to protect the U.S. from terrorist attacks.” Both were given 85% “top priority," and 13% “some priority."

If these findings do reflect public opinion, Obama’s jobs agenda may not turn out to be a winner on voting day. It could depend on the unemployment rate at that time.

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Is WTO softening its posture toward human rights or is it looking for a mission?

An unwritten policy of the World Trade Organization (WTO) – that trade and human rights don’t mix – may become outdated before too long. At least, that’s a tentative conclusion that you might draw from a January 13 speech by WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy.

The headline of the WT0 press release summarized Lamy’s remarks this way: “Lamy calls for mindset change to align trade and human rights.”
Lamy expressed the point in two sentences toward the end of his text:

“It is our responsibility to coordinate our actions in a meaningful and efficient manner to ensure that trade does not impair human rights, but rather strengthens them. I am aware of the challenge that this represents, of the change in mindset this requires.”

Lamy was not specific about the policy changes a new mindset would involve. Rather, he spoke in general about the ways trade can be “a positive vector for reinforcement of human rights.” For example:

“To be successful, the opening of markets require solid social policies to redistribute wealth or provide safeguards to the men and women whose living conditions have been disrupted by evolving trade rules and trade patterns.”

Lamy’s topic was “Toward Shared Responsibility and Greater Coherence: Human Rights, Trade, and Macroeconomic Policy” at a three-day colloquium sponsored by two Geneva-based organizations, the International Council on Human Rights Policy and Realizing Rights.
* * *

Actually, the WTO is already much more involved in human rights than Mr. Lamy acknowledges. For the details, read my blog article, “Imbedded in WTO: Human Rights for Some,” at
http://humanrightsforworkers.blogspot.com/2008/04/imbedded-in-wto-human-rights-for-some.html


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How globalization has turned against a best friend

“Manufacturing matters mightily to the wealth and power of the United States and to our ability to sustain the kind of open society we have come to take for granted.”

That was the opening sentence of “Manufacturing Matters” by two University of California/Berkley professors, Stephen Cohen and John Zysman, published in 1987. The co-authors, early critics of globalization, called “subcontracting production” to foreign countries “the fast track to disaster.”

Like other opinion-leaders, however, newspapers became cheerleaders for globalization and its major components, free trade and free investment. They argued that the growing decline in manufacturing in the United States didn’t matter much anymore.

In the past eight years that decline has meant the loss of 42,400 factories and more than 5,000,000 manufacturing jobs. Besides, 90,000 more factories are in peril, reports Richard McCormack, editor of Manufacturing and Technology News.

“When a factory closes, it creates a vortex that has far-reaching consequences,” McCormack points out.

Newspapers, too, have been caught in that vortex. Two months ago, the Washington Post headlined “The accelerating decline of newspapers.” How could it be otherwise?

Newspapers do not exist isolated from the communities they serve. When people in those communities hurt economically, so do newspapers. In December 15,300,000 Americans were officially counted as unemployed and 11,700,00 others were working part-time against their wishes or wanting a job but not seeking one during the past four weeks.

So in this depressing climate, newspapers, too, have joined the “sunset” industries, for a variety of reasons. A major one is that they have been so successful at preaching and practicing global free trade that the ideology has added them to its victims.

When will newspapers, from the New York Times and Washington Post on down, start learning from their own experience? Lesson number one: manufacturing matters.

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Poll: for Americans protecting jobs is highest foreign policy priority

From a list of 11 long-range foreign policy goals for the United States, which one do Americans rank as having the highest priority? A Pew Research Center poll just released has this significant pair of findings:

-- “Taking measures to protect the U.S. from terrorist attacks” has the highest rating: 98% of persons responding (85% “top priority,” 13% “some priority”).
-- Another goal, “protecting the jobs of American workers,” has exactly the same amount of support (85% top priority, 13% some).

Of the nine other listed goals, only “preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction” (with 94%) came close.

Oddly, pursuing free trade agreements was not on the prepared list of goals. Responses to other questions, however, showed continuing negative views of free trade agreements, because they

-- lower the wages of American workers (in the view of 49%).
-- lead to job losses in the U.S. (53%).
-- slow down the economy (42%)

The poll, on “America’s Place in the World 2009,” was conducted in cooperation with the Council on Foreign Relations. Public Citizen's “Eyes on Trade” points out:

“The survey also reveals quite a disconnect between the views of the foreign policy elite and the views of the public at large: 88 percent of the members of the Council on Foreign Relations believe that these trade agreements are a good thing for the United States, which is more than double the proportion of ordinary Americans who believe the same.

”
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Economic suicide is not an option

Almost everybody who is anybody seems to be scrambling to figure out how a Nigerian terrorist came so close to blasting a hole in a transatlantic airliner approaching Detroit. The concern is legitimate. But while concentrating on one peril, we are ignoring another – that the United States is blindly on the path to a major economic disaster.

The alarming signs are there aplenty, but policymakers are either not connecting the dots or not telling the public what the signs mean. Either way, it’s way past time to spread an alarm about the danger of national econicide.

Buried in his January 1 New York Times column, Paul Krugman makes this prediction: that China’s policies probably will reduce U.S. employment by 1,400,000 jobs over the next two years. That should be startling, except that it’s nothing new. China has been stealing jobs from American workers for years without causing corrective action by American leaders, Democrat or Republican.

The supposed cure, mindlessly repeated, is to make Americans more “competitive.” But American companies are among the most efficient in the world, Richard McCormack, editor of Manufacturing and Technology News, points out, and in an article published in the January-February issue of The American Prospect adds:

“The nation’s steel industry, for instance, produces one ton of steel using two man-hours. A comparable ton of steel in China is produced with 12 man-hours, and Chinese companies produce three times the amount of carbon emissions per ton of steel. The same kinds of comparisons are true for other industries.”

“China is blatantly protectionist,” Carolyn Bartholomew, chair of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review, writes in the same magazine. “The Beijing government manipulates its currency, showers subsidies on favored industries, provides low-interest loans from a state-owned banking system, tolerates and even encourages the theft of intellectual property, and ignores WTO rules.”

In his column, Krugman explains that China, now a major financial and trade power, “doesn’t act like other big economies. Instead, it follows a mercantilist policy, keeping its trade surplus artificially high. And in today’s depressed world, that policy is, to put it bluntly, predatory.”

Among the excuses given for why we can’t retaliate against China’s predatory actions is that protectionism is always a Bad Thing, always, even in response to the persistent protectionism of others. “If that’s what you believe, you learned Econ 101 from the wrong people,” Krugman writes, and goes on to explain that the usual rules don’t apply in times of high employment that are not solved by domestic measures.

For support, Krugman turns to the master, the late Paul Samuelson, to show how mercantilism (such as practiced by China) changes the situation. Here is his quote from a classic Samuelson paper, interspersed with Krugman’s defintion:

“With employment less than full… all the debunked mercantilistic arguments”—that is, claims that nations who subsidize their exports effectively steal jobs from other countries – “turn out to be valid.”

Krugman calls Chinese mercantilism such a serious problem that “the victims have little to lose from a trade confrontation.”

For detailed insights into what the U.S. government should do (“before it’s too late”), don’t miss the special report in The American Prospect at
http://www.prospect.org/cs/special_report.

Will Congress and the administration stand up to predatory China, or are our leaders paralyzed by what they mislearned in Econ 101?

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