College for all: its disappointments

Is it wise for the vast majority of high school students to plan to attend college? No, say experts in the fall issue of American Eductor, a professional quarterly published by the American Federation of Teachers.

For one thing, fewer than half of high school seniors who seek a bachelor’s degree succeed in their goal.

“We must find a way of being honest with our youth without crushing their dreams,” say the experts in a long critique of what they call the “college-for-all movement.”

They charge the movement with “idealizing” the four-year bachelor of arts (BA) degree by promoting false assumptions, chiefly that a BA guarantees higher earnings and that higher earnings guarantee better jobs. Consequently, many students do not consider non-BA options, plentifully offered by community colleges and even regular colleges with certificates and applied associate (AA) degrees that can lead to well paying and satisfying careers.

“We all know that many people with jobs that require a BA (e.g., teachers social workers, etc.) are paid less than some people with jobs that require an AA (e.g., computer specialists, engineering technicians, mechanics, heating/air conditioning repairers, dental and medical assistants, insurance appraisers, and funeral directors,” write the authors of one article, James E. Rosenbaum, Jennifer L. Stephan, and Janet E. Rosenbaum.

“As a nation, “ writes Chris Myers Asch in another article, “we need young people to become skilled carpenters, electricians, lab technicians, nurse practitioners, and drill sergeants. By pushing college to the exclusion of other options, we indulge in what might be called the inadvertent bigotry of inappropriate expectations.”

For practical guidance to hundreds of different jobs, order the Bureau of Labor Statistics' “Occupational Outlook Handbook” at http://www.bls.OCO.
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Sssshhh! China is a Communist Country

The greatest innovation of China’s Communist Party is building a hybrid market economy, a pragmatic and profitable blend of capitalism and socialism that keeps the Party’s own dominant role “off the front stage of public life in China and out of sight of the rest of the world.” In his fascinating new book, “The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers.” Richard McGregor describes how the Party achieved this remarkable success in organized duplicity.

As a journalist in the People’s Republic for more than a decade, he observes: “Foreigners in China can be forgiven for thinking they are not in a Communist state.” Yet a Communist state it is indeed.

“Like communism in its heyday elsewhere,” he writes, “the Party in China has eradicated or emasculated political rivals; eliminated the autonomy of the courts and press; restricted religion and civil society; denigrated rival versions of nationhood; centralized political power; established extensive networks of security police; and dispatched dissidents to labor camps.”

Nowadays, the Party has deliberately relaxed its hold on the daily lives of ordinary people, the better to keep “a lock hold on the state and three pillars of its survival strategy: control of personnel, propaganda, and the People’s Liberation Army.” Vladimir Lenin, who devised the prototype, would recognize it immediately in the People’s Republic, McGregor shows, because the necessary Leninist institutional and behavior patterns have endured, “generally masked or dressed up in other guises.”

Foreigners have helped. Before, during, and after his historic trip to China in 1972, Richard Nixon made sure that “Communist” did not embarrass him with his base at home. Mao Zedong was simply the Chairman, not the Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party. The State Department’s record of the trip, including the speeches, toasts, and press conferences did not mention the word “Communist” even once.

Although most Westerners are well informed about the growth of China’s economy, they know much less about the Party’s powerful role in that economy. At all major state enterprises, for example. Party meetings are held regularly before board meetings, which leave personnel matters in the hands of the Party.

One day in November 2004 the Central Organization Department announced without warning that the top executives of three big state-owned telecom companies had been reshuffled. McGregor makes this striking comparison: “It was the equivalent of the CEO of AT&T being moved without notice to head its domestic U.S. competitor, Verizon, to run Sprint, at a time when the three companies are locked in a bruising battle on pricing and industry standards….The deliberate element of surprise…serves the Party’s purposes perfectly, by reminding them who’s boss.”

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Viewing the trade deficit with China as a form of subversion

Entitled “Chinese Water Torture: Subversion Through Development,” the Heritage Foundation in 1992 published a lecture on how open trade would open up the Peoples Republic of China and bring the downfall of its Communist regime.

Because the Heritage paper was so certain about how “subversive” trade can be, I saved it. I found it only the other day.

The author, Andrew B. Brick, then Heritage’s Senior Policy Analyst for Chinese studies, first delivered the lecture at Florida State University on January 22, 1992, He described how his strategy would work – using outside influences such as trade to “open up a Communist society” would create “political grievances that undermine the extant regime.”

Eighteen-plus years seems like enough time to assess the consequence of Brick’s formula, especially because the United States followed it in a bipartisan way supported by people who had never read his lecture.

The biggest clue for an assessment is found in the U.S. Commerce Department data on U.S. merchandise trade. All last year the United States

-- Imported $296,373,900,000,000 in goods from China
-- Exported $ 69,496,700,000,000 in goods to China, a deficit of $226,877,300,000,000, compared to $18,309,000,000,000 the year when Brick was delivering his lecture.

The U.S. trade deficit since 2001, when China joined the World Trade Organization, has caused direct pain especially to American workers. Between 2001 and 2008, according to the Economic Policy Institute, the deficit with China caused a loss of 2,400,000 U.S. jobs.

Meanwhile, U.S. officials are putting pressure (i.e., getting down on their knees) for China to stop manipulating its currency in a way that bolsters China’s trade advantage and puts a dent in the U.S. GNP. Moreover, Washington has repeatedly declined to name China a currency manipulator out of fear that China would take retaliatory action.

So who is applying Chinese water torture against whom? Who is subverting whom?

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Obama ‘weak, cautious’ on trade

In an article titled “Obama’s Big Failure,” Susan Ariel Aaronson, associate research professor of George Washington University, criticizes the President’s trade policy as “cautious and vague.”

“Because they have not put forward an alternative model,” she writes in International Economy magazine, “by default, Obama Administration officials have accepted the Bush paradigm for trade liberalization.”

Dr. Aaronson identifies the chief mark of this “timidity” as going along with the Bush switch of trade negotiations from the multilateral forum to the bilateral and regional, which pursue “preferential” rather than free trade agreements. This reorientation “undermines both the effectiveness of the World Trade Organization and its fundamental principle of most favored nation (nondiscrimination among nations).”

“The result has been a mish-mash of global trade governance,” she points out, as the various preferential agreements include differences in some key rules. She strongly recommends returning the focus of trade policy to the WTO.

To gain public support for such a move (and trade generally, I would add), Dr. Aaronson urges policymakers to publicize the links between trade and employment., with the UN International Labor Organization having a role in this assessment.

Dr. Aaronson latest book is “Trade Imbalance: the Struggle to Weigh Human Rights in Trade Policy Making.”

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Blaming us, the victims, for our crippling trade deficit

“Economic growth slowed by trade gap” was a page one headline in the August 27 Washington Post. The article so irked me that I sounded off in a letter to the editor the same day. Here’s what I wrote.

Yes, our nation’s huge trade deficits are continuing to take their toll. I’m delighted that, at long last, the Washington Post is awakened to a grim reality of economic life.

But you repeat an old mistake. Although you put the blame on several factors, the only one you mention is “overconsumption.” You think, for example, that we, the consumers, are the villains for our trade deficit with China. Really.

Have you ever tried to buy anything made in the U.S.A.? If so, you see how we have been deprived of choice – by a trading system credited, wrongly, for increasing consumer choice.

The continuing total merchandise trade deficit – nearly $50,000,000,000 for June alone -- is basically a mechanism to redistribute the wealth and income of the American middle class to further enrich the upper 10 percent of Americans and Asians. Your story failed to mention that the deficit with China was $26,200,000,000 for June alone.

What is really an overlooked “factor” in this tragedy? Take a look at corporations based in the U.S., American and foreign, and examine the volume of their intra-firm trade – that is, trade between two arms of the same company, also called related-party trade. As the Census Bureau reported on May 12, last year related-party trade accounted for $740,500,000,000 in U.S. goods imports – nearly 48 percent.

* * *
As I expected, the free-trade-obsessed Post did not print my letter.

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New GM CEO praises unions

On his second day in his new job, Daniel Akerson, CEO of General Motors, sent a Labor Day message to GM’s 80,000 employees in the United States and Canada. After wishing them a happy holiday weekend, he wrote:

“I also ask that we pause for a moment of reflection on what this day means as we celebrate on what this day means as we celebrate labor’s contribution labor’s many contributions here and around the world.

“Of course, labor’s role in building up this nation and others is well recognized and rightly so. And coming from a union family, I know on a very personal level the good things that unions can do.

“I met recently with UAW President Bob King and Vice President-GM Department Joe Ashton at Solidarity House [UAW headquarters], and we agreed that, while we will not always see eye to eye on everything, GM will succeed to the extent that management and labor work together. I believe very deeply in that.”

(Akerson's note was an internal communication. The text was published later in Automotive News.)

GM and the UAW are scheduled to negotiate a contract that expires in September next year. King has said the UAW expect to win back some of the concessions it made as part of the GM governmental bailout last year.

Akerson, who holds a master’s degree in economics from the London School of Economics, has spent much of his career as an executive in communications multinationals. In July 2009, he was named to the GM board of directives as a representative of the U.S. Treasury, which owns a majority stake in GM.

In an address last month, newly elected UAW president King outlined the major changes the union is making to become a “21st century UAW.” See HRFW’s “A union’s ‘make-over’ for 21st century globalization" of August 11.

In what is probably a unique combination outside the building trades, Akerson comes from a union family, and King is the son of a former Ford management official.
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European Corporate Hypocrisy in the United States

Some leading European corporations that embrace worker rights at home violate those rights aggressively in their U.S. operations, Human Rights Watch charged in a report issued September 2.

The failure to “walk their talk” is documented in the 128-page report titled “A Strange Case: Violations of Workers’ Freedom of Association in the United States by European Multinational Corporations.”

Among the violations cited in the report are:

-- forcing workers into ‘captive audience’ meetings to hear anti-union harangues while prohibiting pro-union voices.
-- threatening dire consequences if workers form unions.
-- threatening to permanent replace workers who exercise the right to strike.
-- spying on union organizers.
-- even firing workers who support organizing efforts at companies.

Companies cited include Germany-based Deutsche Telekom's T-Mobile USA and Deutsche Post's DHL, UK-based Tesco's Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Markets and G4S Wackenhut security, France-based Sodexo food services and Saint-Gobain industrial equipment, Norway-based Kongsberg Automotive, and the Dutch firm Gamma Holding.

Violations found in these companies “call into question the efficacy of corporate social responsibility mechanisms, “ the report states, and makes a series of recommendations to all parties involved: European multinationals operating in the U.S., the U.S. government, the European Commission, European governments, and the OECD.
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Bishop calls for a ‘new social contract,’ one that honors work and workers

“A new social contract, which begins by honoring work and workers, must be forged that ultimately focuses on the common good of the entire human family,“ Bishop William F. Murphy of Rockville Centre says in a Labor Day statement issued in his role as chairman of a committee of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

“This Labor Day,” he writes, “we must seek to protect the life and dignity of each worker in a renewed and robust economy. Workers need to have a real voice and effective protections in economic life.”

Bishop Murphy emphasizes the role of civil society, which he calls “perhaps the most undervalued and overlooked” compared to the state and the market. He asks, “Could a reawakening and new development of the roles of intermediary institutions, including voluntary associations and unions, be a force to call the market to a greater understanding of the centrality of the worker?”

The statement, titled “A New ‘Social Contract’ for Today’s ‘New Things’.”draws heavily on Pope Benedict’s teaching in his encyclical, Charity in Truth. On a central point, Murphy quotes these words of the Pope: “I would like to remind everyone, especially governments engaged in boosting the world’s economic and social assets, that the primary capital to be safeguarded and valued is man, the human person in his or her integrity.” (Emphasis in the original.)

Bishop Murphy, as chair of the Catholic conference’s committee on domestic justice and human development, has taken the lead in describing the need for a “new social contract.” What’s next?
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A union’s ‘make-over’ for 21st century globaliztion

One of America’s largest unions, the United Auto Workers (UAW), is undergoing a complete make-over, according to its newly elected president, Bob King.

The make-over is from a 20th century union to one geared to the 21st century, King said in a lengthy address on August 2 to ta conference of the Center for Automotive Research. As he sees it, a 21st century UAW is becoming “fundamentally and radically different.” Among the differences he mentioned were these:

• Embraces as its own the mission of producing the highest quality, best-value product for its customers, vs. joining with companies in “the mindset that it was the company’s job to worry about profits and the union’s job to worry about getting the workers their fair share.”

• Makes consumer safety, energy efficiency, and environmental protect a priority, vs. “failing to champion forcefully or effectively enough the goals of preserving our environment for future generations through green manufacturing.”

• Welcomes the openness, collaboration, and creative problem-solving that it has forged with Chrysler, GM, and Ford, vs. the mutual distrust that produced lengthy and complicated contracts “with work rules and narrow job classifications that hindered flexibility, hindered the full use of the talents of our members and promoted a litigious and time-consuming grievance culture.”

• Knows that the only true path to job security is by producing the best quality, safest, and most durable product, vs. relying on ways, such as job banks, that “in the end did not achieve the results that we were seeking”

King stressed that the 20th century UAW “grew in an era of national rather than global economics, in which “employers did not face the intense pressure of global competition,” whereas the global marketplace now makes flexibility, innovation, lean manufacturing, and continuous cost-improvement paramount.

Michigan Governor Jennifer M. Granholm praised this transformation in her August 10 posting titled “Not Your Father’s UAW” on Huffington Post.. “Instead of being blamed for chasing investment away from industrial states, the UAW may be the place to turn to ensure a company’s success,” she wrote.

More to come: the UAW is developing a set of guidelines called the UAW Principles for Fair Elections, which it will present to the managements of Japanese-owned and other non-union auto and vehicle-parts factories.
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We wuz robbed!

A study of how corporate America treated its workers during the 2007-2009 recession concludes that the workers could justifiably say “We wuz robbed!”

In the study, published in July, its two authors charge that the latest recession is really a Great Recession for Workers because corporations pocketed unprecedented profits while slashing employment, working hours, and hourly pay.

“I’ve never seen anything like this before,” Andrew Sum, director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston, told New York Times columnist Bob Herbert. Sum has published research on labor market trends for at least 20 years.

His latest study, conducted with senior research associate Joseph McLaughlin, is titled “How the U.S. Economic Output Recession of 2007-2009 Led to the Great Recession in Labor Markets.”

“The economic recovery in the U.S. over the past 15 months has seen the most lopsided gains in corporate profits relative to real wages and salaries in our history,” the study says.

Also especially noteworthy: “The greatest deterioration in the U.S. unemployment rate took place among men, largely as a result of the great depression in blue-collar jobs.” The U.S. jobless rate, 10.3 percent in 2009, was the highest of ten leading industrial countries.

Herbert, in his column titled “A Sin and a Shame,” commented:

“It doesn’t have to be this way. Germany and Japan, because of a combination of government and corporate policies, suffered far less worker dislocation than the U.S. Until we begin to value our workers, and understand the crucial importance of employment to a thriving economy, we will continue to see our standards of living decline.”

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‘Making it in America’

-- 63 percent of voters feel that working people who make things are being forgotten while Wall Street and banks get bailouts.
-- 57 percent believe that manufacturing is more central to our economic strength than high-tech, knowledge, or financial service sectors.
-- 78 percent favor “a national manufacturing strategy to make sure that economic, tax, labor, and trade policy in the country work together to help support manufacturing in the United States.”

Those and other results of a recent poll of likely voters are fortifying Democratic leaders' plans to give priority to a pro-manufacturing jobs agenda in Congress prior to the November mid-term elections. The poll and sessions with six focus groups confirm that the electorate is indeed deeply unhappy but unified in the conviction that Congress should take action on a pro-manufacturing agenda.

In reaction, the Wall Street Journal belittled the government’s ability to choose “winners and losers,” apparently wanting a monopoly for Wall Street itself.

From another perspective, President Reagan’s budget director, David Stockman, published a New York Times article on July 31 on the four “destructive changes” responsible for the economic crisis. On one of them “the hollowing out” of the American economy, he wrote:

“Having lived beyond our means for decades by borrowing heavily from abroad, we have steadily sent jobs and production offshore. In the past decade, the number of high-value jobs in goods production and in service categories like trade, transportation, information technology and the professions has shrunk by 12 percent, to 68 million from 77 million. The only reason we have not experienced a severe reduction in non-farm payrolls since 2000 is that there has been a gain in low-paying, often part-time positions in places like bars, hotels and nursing homes.

“It is not surprising, then, that during the last bubble (from 2002 to 2006) the top 1 percent of Americans — paid mainly from the Wall Street casino — received two-thirds of the gain in national income, while the bottom 90 percent — mainly dependent on Main Street’s shrinking economy — got only 12 percent. This growing wealth gap is not the market’s fault. It’s the decaying fruit of bad economic policy.”

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Blog continues, email lists do not

Over the years I have added 481 persons to my Yahoo mailing list. Among these are people who have a special interest in this blog, whom I grouped into four categories of people. I would send out an “alert” email when I published a new issue.

Suddenly the other day, all the names listed under those categories mysteriously disappeared. The categories are still there, but no names. So far no help from Yahoo on correcting the malfunction.

I will continue to write and post articles for Human Rights for Workers even as I work on reconstructing my Blog mailing lists under Yahoo or perhaps some other system. Hint: bookmarks are useful.
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Campaigning against Korea FTA

South Korea is emerging as the test of whether trade policy under President Obama will be much different from that established by previous administrations, Democratic and Republican.

At issue is the Free Trade Agreement that President George Bush signed with South Korea three years ago. President Obama says he will send it to Congress for approval after negotiating changes with the Seoul government.

A coalition of unions, environmental, family farm, and other civil society organizations is circulating the text of a letter to Obama urging him to seize the opportunity to adopt “new trade rules that create American jobs.” Among the specific changes needed to gain support of a new FTA are removal of these existing objectionable features:
-- the explicit ban on reference to the core conventions of the UN International Labor Organization, which are “the fundamental platform of international labor rights.”
-- the “extreme foreign investor rights and their private investor-state enforcement that you rightly criticized during your campaign” for posing special threats to attack U.S. environmental, financial, health, and other policies in foreign tribunals.
-- the trade barriers harming numerous U.S. industries such as the auto and beef sectors, which undermine the goal of creating two million new American jobs through export expansion.

Instead of approving another trade pact patterned after the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the letter encourages the President to correct the most problematic features of the Korean FTA by using this U.S. proposed law as a guide: the Trade Reform, Accountability, Development, and Employment (TRADE) Act now pending in Congress.

For information about the Korea FTA check http://www.citizenstrade.org/ and http://wwww.aflcio.org.

More than 100 local, state, and national organizations have signed on to the letter expressing opposition to the 2007 deal. To add your organization’s name to the letter, contact agussert@citizenstrade.org.
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‘Doubling exports’ would be a big loser as a U.S. jobs policy

The Obama administration’s commitment to doubling U.S. exports in five years is woefully inadequate: it aims to create 2,000,000 American jobs when 22,000,000 are needed. That’s the criticism of by a former CEO, Leo Hindery, writing a guest editorial in the current issue of Manufacturing & Technology News.

A major problem with this export-reliant pledge, says Hindrey, is President Obama’s plan to ratify three free trade agreements negotiated by President Bush – with South Korea, Panama, and Colombia. All “are very poorly negotiated and will cause even more American jobs to be lost overseas.”

He singles out the South Korea FTA as “simply awful,” so much so that, if approved without major changes, “the Obama administration will be giving a major unwarranted victory to America’s multinational corporations and Korean workers at the expense of America’s workers.”

Korean negotiators bested the United States in 2007 and later negotiations, according to Hindery, “especially in automobiles, where the FTA would lock in Hyundai Motor Corp.’s dominance of the South Korean market while locking out American manufactured vehicles, and in beef, where the U.S. would largely be excluded from exporting all but young carcasses.”

In Hindery’s view, President Obama must undertake a series of initiatives in addition to radically amending the three pending FTAs:

-- Decide that job creation is the number-one object of his administration’s economic policy, with domestic manufacturing as the top priority.

-- Line up his entire administration behind that policy. At present, some top officials voice positions that are “complete BS.”

-- Especially level the trade playing field between U.S. and China.

-- Emphasize the primary (not secondary) role of “big business” in creating the bulk of the millions of new jobs, and stop fixating on the ability of small business to do so.

Hindery is the former CEO of Tele-Communications Inc. (TCI) and chairs the U.S. Economy/Smart Globalization Initiative of the New America Foundation.
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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.”

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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.


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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
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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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