Archive for the ‘Rights around the world’ Category

Fox con?

Posted: December 29, 2012 in China, Consumer campaigns
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iPhone6

The second-ever post on this blog was about Apple and Foxconn. I haven’t come back to them since, mainly because I figured that the story had been picked up by the mainstream media and an investigation was commenced. Then I came across this:

Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed. Everything else is public relations (George Orwell – via @FredrikGertten)

The so-called investigation into Foxconn which took place in 2012 has made me despair of the media who uncritically reported that lots of progress has been made. Anyone with a high school diploma who read the entire report could see that the main issues are not resolved at all, and wage levels are not even mentioned.

In response I have put together my own White Paper, highlighting the shortcomings of Apple and Foxconn’s remediation point by point, which you can download here:

I spoke with SACOM before publishing this. There is no democratic union at Foxconn so, as the people in touch with the workers, SACOM are probably the next best thing. They say the workers’ priorities are:

  1. A better system for scaling of production during peak times, and
  2. Worker input into selection of union reps.

As you’ll see in the Paper, neither of these issues have been addressed at all.

See also:

Not IKEA, surely?

Posted: December 26, 2012 in Rights around the world
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IKEA at Tempe near Sydney’s International Airport

As Western children play today amidst all those shreds of Christmas paper wrapping and, no doubt, many adults queue up to return or exchange unwanted gifts, I wonder how many of them pause to think that IKEA, that friendly, funky store would have so many labour rights issues?

Workers in IKEA Turkey for example, report being intimidated when they attempt to join the local union, Koop-Is Sendikasi especially after a union activist on the site was sacked.

Interestingly the countries where IKEA management play by the rules are mostly in Northern Europe while the reported problem locations are found in an arc through Southern and Eastern Europe. This is in line with the predictions of Geert Hofstede’s Power-Distance Index (PDI) as they are all countries with a high PDI score; in other words, where workers tend to believe management are inherently unjust and, conversely, where management tend to believe their role requires them to get their hands dirty (I provide this as a possible explanation, not as an excuse).

The problematic sites are:

  • Portugal
  • Spain
  • Italy
  • Greece
  • Turkey
  • Czech Republic
  • Russia

The retail global union federation, UNI, has made IKEA a focus company for a co-ordinated campaign amongst affiliates and in countries where there is no strong retail/warehouse union. UNI spokesman Alke Boessiger said:

To us it is clear that all workers at all IKEA workplaces are equal and have the right to the same good working conditions and the same rights to become a union member and negotiate a collective agreement

To its credit, IKEA appears to be heeding the “reputational challenge” that all of this presents and is in discussions with UNI about addressing them.

Here is UNI’s Research Brief and below is their video explaining the goals of the campaign:

You can follow the latest on this campaign at facebook.com/UnionAllianceIKEA

Related articles

New OSH issues emerge in Adidas supply chain

Posted: November 20, 2012 in China
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This business model was pioneered by Nike and adopted by others including Apple: companies ‘produce’ only their brand and people in lower-wage countries can do all the work. The brand companies shows themselves time and again to be disinterested in what happens on distant production lines until there’s a problem.

Adidas has been under pressure for some time for trying to dodge redundancy entitlements owed to workers in their Indonesian supply chain whose actual employer skipped out of the country. Their tight-fistedness earned them a spotlight at the London Olympic Games.

Now we have details of more problems. The information below details serious health and safety problems at one Chinese factory supplying Adidas.

From Rena Lau at Globalization Monitor:

One of TaylorMade-Adidas golf drivers’ suppliers – Dynamic Casting (Guangzhou) is responsible for the suffering of at least 69 workers, who have contracted Hand-Arm Vibration (HAV thereafter) disease. HAV is a non-curable disease which comes from the use of hand-held power tools and is the cause of significant health problems including painful and disabling disorders of the blood vessels, nerves and joints.

Victim's hands

After our investigation, we found that Dynamic Casting has several violations of China Laws and regulations.
I.            Dynamic Casting has been using substandard polishing machines which exceeded the maximum permitted level required by the National Standard on Occupational Health for a long period of time.
II.          Dynamic Casting failed to notice the hazardous factors of vibration units to workers.
III.        Dynamic Casting refused to send some workers for medical examinations.
IV.        Dynamic Casting forced workers to sign confidential agreement, which requires them to give up all their legal rights, before giving them compensation. Workers complained that the agreement is not a fair deal.
V.          Dynamic Casting unreasonably dismissed 4 affected workers and refused to reinstate two workers until today.
VI.        Dynamic Casting holds back part of the compensation of these 4 workers unless they agree to resign.

According to Adidas Group, they came to know the first cases of HAV disease in Dynamic Casting on late May 2010. Adidas only helped Dynamic Casting to up a timeline to provide medical examination and compensation in patches but not pushed Dynamic Casting to execute the plan.  Therefore, until today, still several workers were not sent to have medical examinations. This shows that Adidas Group does not take occupational and health issues seriously. It is shame for their statement on its website that “Every employee must have a safe working environment. Nothing less is acceptable.” Adidas Group claimed that Adidas SEA audits/ visited Dynamic Casting regularly. In fact, Adidas could not identify any HAV case through their audits. Thus workers working at Dynamic Casting have been always exposed in risky health condition. As the brand company of Dynamic Casting, Adidas Group has unavoidable responsibility to compensate the workers as it is negligent to protect workers from possible hazards.

Based on these facts, we demand:
I.            Adidas make sure all affected workers with HAV receive immediately comprehensive medical examination and compensation demanded by workers.
II.          Adidas set up an Occupational Hazards Victim Fund immediately to compensate all victims with HAV.
III.        Adidas launch a full and immediate investigation on tracking the full number of workers affected by HAV diseases along supply chain in China.

We sent out a full report on Dynamic Cast case to Adidas on 25th September and demanded a full reply from Adidas but until today, we have not received Adidas’s full explanation on the case. Thus we have reason to believe that Adidas may shirk its responsibility on solving the case immediately.

Therefore, we urge you to take action with us in order to support those HAV workers in China.

Suggested Action:
Sign the online petition addressed to the Adidas group expressing your concern about the 69 workers suffering from HAV disease.

Related posts:

But South Africa is so far away, right?

Posted: October 30, 2012 in Rights around the world, Natural Resources
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Description unavailable

Description unavailable (Photo credit: freestylee)

Nope.

You know the recent mining dispute in which 34 protesting workers were shot dead after demonstrating for higher wages? You may have heard that they were working in a platinum mine (the world’s largest).

South Africa is the world’s largest producer of platinum. Where does it go? Your car! Just under half of the world’s platinum is used in vehicle emission control technologies. The next biggest use is jewelry. Bit closer to home now perhaps.

The story was already the most horrible labour abuse this year, but it’s even worse than you might think.

It turns out that, prior to the August 16 incident, the miners appealed to their local union, the NUM, who asserted that they had no case against the mine’s operators and -wait for it- there are reports that union officials even fired shots to disperse the workers. Problem is, NUM is the only union recognised by the Council of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and affiliated to the ruling African National Congress political party. The NUM and ANC share offices.

Furthermore the former NUM Secretary, Cyril Ramaphosa, has substantial business interests and is now a Lonmin boardmember (conflict of interest, much?)

Many workers grew tired of having their issues soft-peddled and had joined the non-COSATU-affiliated AMCU which greatly exacerbated the tensions at the mine.

It’s no fun to report bad news about our heroes. Ramaphosa was one of the people who brought about the end of Apartheid and was there to welcome Mandela when he was freed from prison. However, as is usually the case, the new kids on the block aren’t angels either and should not enjoy uncritical endorsement.

The international community has not made this adjustment. No specific demands were made of South Africa in the aftermath. Sharan Burrow of ITUC called for the perpetrators “to be brought to justice” but that was about it. IndustriALL unsurprisingly backed the NUM, its affiliate. Amnesty was silent (actually they have their own problems right now). Human Rights Watch merely quibbled over the Enquiry’s terms of reference.

I might add that the miners weren’t entirely innocent in this either. In the confrontation that lead to the shooting, the crowd was armed.

I’m going to suggest that the entry of AMCU greatly inflamed the problem and that the miners would have done better to work for better representation within the NUM than to try to work around it. It’s almost a pointless observation though, made from the comfort of my broadband-connected middle-class dwelling on the other side of the Indian Ocean. No one is pointing a gun in my face.

The most ironic thing of all is that the impetus for change may come neither from the workers or from overseas do-gooders, but from investors who’ve now been spooked and will hold back. Of course, you can’t even write to your pension fund and ask them to pressure Lonmin Inc to listen to the workers’ demands (rather than simply withdrawing their money), the funds are obliged to follow the market’s signals. It really depends on South Africa’s political leaders to appreciate what is at stake.

Sources:

Visit of Vietnam’s official union stirs indignation in Sydney

Posted: October 16, 2012 in Rights around the world
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Memorial

Here’s where things start to get a bit delicate.

A few weeks ago there was an indecorous confrontation outside the New South Wales’ labour movement’s headquarters, brought about by the visit of a delegation of officials from the official Vietnamese trade union body, the VGCL.

The delegation was being welcomed in the office of Union Aid Abroad-APHEDA who have a number of rural development projects going on in Vietnam with the co-operation of the VGCL.

The protest was led by an all-star cast of senior unionists representing the Australian Workers Union, Unions NSW and the Textiles Clothing and Footwear Union of Australia, whose membership includes many Vietnamese.

  • You can read more about it on the VietWorkers blog over here.

Seriously though … how counterproductive can you get?

What’s at stake is that the VGCL clearly works closely with Vietnam’s Communist Party which at the same time suppresses any other forms of worker activism. Australia also has a large community of former Vietnamese refugees. The protesting groups found APHEDA’s co-operation with the VGCL objectionable.

They believe it is more in Vietnamese workers’ long-term interests to support dissident activists, many of whom are currently either jailed or in exile.

An analogous debate was had in the 1980s regarding South Africa, except the ideological positions were reversed. Many groups on the left believed a boycott was the appropriate response to Apartheid and eventually the U.S. Congress voted for a total trade ban. President Reagan however opposed this to the end, believing that dialogue was a better way to encourage reform (don’t forget that hindsight is a wonderful thing).

My point today is not to evaluate which is the correct approach, but to politely suggest that posturing in downtown Sydney is one thing that definitely won’t help the workers of Vietnam. All it accomplishes is to polarise a movement that can’t really afford the luxury of being divided.

At the end of the day, the AWU & TCFUA are striving to assist workers and so is APHEDA (they even share the same building for goodness sake!) If APHEDA has found a way to run projects to alleviate poverty in Vietnam then more power to them - I’m agog that their fellow unionists would want to tear them down for it.

Maybe humour is the best solution. I recommend that anyone thinking of holding such intra-movement protests should be required to view this scene from The Life of Brian so they can hear what they sound like:

Related:

More from the blogosphere:

Union members in the developed and developing world have different values … we need to work around this

Posted: September 9, 2012 in Rights around the world
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Telephone wires

Telephone wires (Photo credit: Stuart Barr)

I’m still working through Global Restructuring, Labour and the Challenges for Transnational Solidarity but one contribution merits attention of its own.

A chapter by Jonas Sjolander details the failed collaboration circa 1980 between Swedish and Colombian unions representing Ericsson workers. The latter were employed to build landline infrastructure.

The tale has “missed opportunity” written all over it. It sounded good in theory: The under-resourced Colombians could have advice from the long-established Swedish union Metall, which in turn could amplify the workers’ message right in Ericsson’s home nation, making it harder to ignore.

Alas, it fizzled out and the main impediment was the global union federation for manufacturing workers, the IMF, which ironically was established to facilitate cross-border co-operation between unions.

The Colombian workers considered the local IMF affiliate, Ultramicol, to be too close to the company and formed another, more radical union called Sintraericsson. Sweden’s Metall, however, was affiliated to the IMF and found it too awkward to promote the un-recognised Sintraericsson over their comrades in Ultramicol.

If you take a step back, this is no accident. Metall espoused values of company-union co-operation which make a lot more sense in the Scandanavian context than they do in Colombia which is about as unfriendly to unionists as they come. It’s no surprise that the radicalised Colombian workers didn’t feel at home with this model.

No one thought of a way to handle this. How different things might have been. In the decades since, the unionisation rate in Colombia has declined, Sintraericsson eventually died and Ericsson Colombia outsourced many jobs to third-party suppliers where they are held on short-term contracts. Now that people no longer work for the same company, the odds of fostering any form of transnational solidarity are even remoter.

The gorilla in the union movement’s room

This is not just a 30-year old case study but has relevance today.

The international trade union movement consists of 7 global union federations (including IndustriALL, the IMF’s successor) which collectively boast a membership of 175 million workers worldwide. They all talk, all co-operate and all work together.

Excluded from that count are the 193 million members of the All China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU). The ACFTU is shunned by the global movement principally because it is not by any means democratic.

Perhaps its time to look at whether this policy is hindering more than helping.

Think about it. China’s Communist leaders travel around the world and are greeted with warm handshakes and White House receptions etc, while Taiwan’s non-Communist leaders find themselves systematically pushed out of one forum after another. Money talks. No one boycotts Lenovo computers or Huawei mobile phones which are made by companies that are also, let’s face it, controlled by Beijing. Same goes for all those state-owned construction companies that BHP-Billiton and the like sell iron ore to.

So I find it odd that the ACFTU is still singled out and wonder for how much longer this will remain the case.

Perhaps these Chinese unionists could do more to improve their members’ working conditions if they weren’t so isolated and had more opportunity to learn what unions elsewhere are doing.

The Finnish peak union body SAK has decided to do just that, meeting with the ACFTU just a couple of weeks ago.

What people really fear is that giving the ACFTU a voting seat in international forums will allow the Chinese Government to use it as a means to promote their state agenda, yet it should still be possible to work around this and co-operate in some fashion.

Just imagine how different things might be if Foxconn workers’ stories were able to come to us directly instead of via SACOM’s heroic undercover efforts and Mike Daisey’s re-telling. Even now, we don’t know the real name of a single worker who makes iPhones.

Related posts:

Source:

  • Sjolander J Detours of solidarity: experiences from Ericsson in Colombia in Bieler A & Lindberg I (eds) Global Restructuring, Labour and the Challenges for Transnational Solidarity (2011) Routledge, London & New York, pp. 48-57

Fear and control in Korea’s universities

Posted: August 19, 2012 in Ethical decision-making, Rights around the world
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[This guest piece is by Kim Youngkon, President of Korea University Lecturer Union, about the long struggle against insecure work in higher education. I thought it provides a helpful backstory to my Samsung post, explaining the level of social conformity in South Korea. It is no wonder that unions have a hard time getting people to speak up if even the universities are places of control rather than free-thought.]

The University Lecturer Movement to Recover Status of Teachers in South Korea

By Kim Youngkon

Development dictatorship in Asian countries educated workers to be tamed to oppression & low-wages and trained technocrats to oppress workers and democracy.

Kim Dongay, before the Korean National Assembly

Recovering teacher status for university lecturers is one of three big challenges in Korea, along with the abolition of the National Security Law and the recognition of a labor union in Samsung [see earlier post].

University lecturers have staged a sit-in protest for roughly 1,800 days in front of the Korea National Assembly since September 7, 2007, to call for the revision of the Higher Education Act & restore their status as teachers.

Emergency measures still in place

Former President Park Chung Hee drove out the students and professors who criticized the dictatorship. He deprived faculty of the status of lecturer in 1977 (originally university faculty are professor, vice professor, assistant professor and lecturer). Then critical research, teaching and guidance of students was prohibited. Lecturers practiced self-censorship to maintain their lecturing jobs and to remain as full-time faculty.

Anyone who resisted would be suppressed or detained due to violating the National Security Law, the Anti-Communism Law and the Rebellion Law. More than 600 professors were fired from universities during the 1970s and 1980s. Their vacant positions were filled with conformist professors. Whistleblowing was impossible.

Meanwhile, students’ dreams were reduced to simply being full-time workers of large company. The number of students devoted to ecological sustainability, internationalism, democracy, peace, etc has dramatically fallen.

The power of lecturers, full-time professors and students to struggle were weakened; so the struggle of lecturers is prolonged. Over 36 years, the treatment of lecturers has become very poor.

The number of full-time faculty were 55,000 nationwide in 2011. Irregular professors who are adjunct professors, visiting professors, teaching faculty, lecturers, etc. were 135,000 people and lecturers were 85,000 people.

Irregular professors are two thirds of the number of all professors and are responsible for half of all lectures. They are lecturing 4.2 hours per week on average and wages are 6,000,000 KRW a year [$5,300 USD]. Full-time faculty receive a 100 million KRW per year [$88,000 USD] so the difference is tenfold or twentyfold.

The human cost

The lecturers have great difficulty showing resistance. 10 lecturers have committed suicide during the last 10 years.

  • Dr. Paek Junhui (34, Seoul National University, lecturer, Russian literature) likened his life in his suicide note that confined to project paper bondage as a life confined to glass box. He committed suicide by hanging at the rear side of Seoul National University in 2003.
  • Dr. Han Kyungsun(44, Konkuk University, lecturer, English) went to Texas Austin campus, USA and committed suicide in 2008. He earned a Ph.D. and raised a dream of professor and a sanctuary of the heart. His suicide note was able to opened to the public first time because he died at abroad.
  • Dr. Seo Jeongmin(45, Chosun University, Lecturer, Linguistics) wrote 54 articles for his advisor professor Cho during 10 years. Cho likely heir his faculty position to him when retired, but that was lying. Seo committed suicide in 2010. However, the police, an assistant professor at the ghostwriter of the practice teaching award has been cleared by the testimony of an instructor. However, the professor and lecturer testified the ghostwriting of articles is common practice. Cho was underwent clear from police.

Lecturers organized a lecturer union and have called for amending the Higher Education Act to restore status of teacher since 1988. They burned their doctor’s degree and began sit-in from 7 September 2007 in front of the National Assembly [pictured above]. Three months later the leading KIPU (KCTU, Korea Confederation of Trade Unions affiliate) abandoned the sit-in camp. Several militant lecturers have continued to protest and were expelled from the union. Lecturers, full-time professors, parent and students full-time faculty organized STIP (Center to Get Back Status of Teacher for Irregular Professor and Normalization of College Education) and KULU (Korea University Lecturer Union).

Korea University: sit-in tent before KU administration

Educational mass-production

The National Assembly amended the Higher Education Act and restored status of teacher to lecturer in 2011. However, this Act does not over-ride the Educational Public Service Law, the Private Schools Law or the Private School Teachers Pension Act. Lecturers are faculty in law, but not faculty in university.

The decree of amended Higher Education Act allows 20% of normal professors to be replaced with 1-year contract lecturer. This means the denormalization of regular faculty. The current University Established & Operating Regulations recommended 61% of legal normal professors employat 4-year colleges. If another 20% of normal professors are replaced with lecturers, the remainder will be only 41%.

This transformation will back the vision of Samsung-Sungkyunkwan University vision 2020: SKKU plans to replace all university professors with lecturers by 2020.

The number of students per classroom is already around 100. The number of students per professor in Korea is 37 people. The decree of University Established & Operating Regulations recommended a professor for 25 students in liberal arts & social science department, 20 in natural sciences/engineering/arts & sports department, 8 in medical department.

The OECD average is 15 students per professor.

Lecturers have no right to criticize and the numbers of students in a classroom are large. So lectures have tended towards “injection” lessons, not creative.

Student course evaluation is a relative assessment. President Chun Doowhan took power through the May 18 Gwangju Massacre and transfer evaluation of students from absolute assesment to comparative evaluation. He took this policy to make the students compete, not think democratically or cooperatively. Under this condition, professor and student are not able to discuss interactively.

Objectives of STIP and KULU

STIP recommend that the National Assembly revise the Higher Education Act and to apply the Educational Public Service Law, the Private Schools Law, the Private School Teachers Pension Act to Lecturers & to employ normal professor 100%. Lecturers who were ousted from KIPU organized KULU. There are Kookmin University and Korea University Branch.

KULU want to raise wage, pay during vacation, reduce class size and absolute evaluation in undergraduate course, employ full-time professor in graduate school in collective bargaining agreement with the University. KULU-Korea University Branch has had a sit-in protest in front of the main building since 15 Feb 2012. Korea University has suggested a raise of 3,000 KRW per hour. Current wage of per hour is only 51,800 KRW [USD 45] or 50,000,000 KRW per year [USD 44,000]. It is ranked 100th in Korea.

Kookmin University didn’t assign lectures to Dr. Hwang Hyoil for 2nd semester of 2012. He was laid-off twice. Lecturer wage of Kookmin is 40,000 KRW per hour and it was frozen during 2011-2012. Hwang resisted with a one-person protest.

Sungkyunkwan University (owned by Samsung) assigned lectures to Dr. Ryu Seungwan (45, Eastern philosophy) but canceled it some days later in 2011. He visited Dr. Seo Jeongmin’s funeral and was interviewed on the KBS program ‘Chase 60 Minutes’. His doctoral thesis “The Ideological Socialism” (2010, Sunin Publishing Co.) wrote of how the U.S. military hanged Kim Taejoon (president of Kyungsung University, former body of Seoul National University). For this reason Dr. Ryu was fired. He has been staging a personal resistance in front of SKKU main building since August 2011. He also opened a free street classroom and lecture.

Development dictatorship in Asian countries educated workers to be tamed to oppression & low-wage and trained technocrats who oppress the workers and democracy.

Similarly to South Korea, Indonesia under Suharto and the Philippines under Marcos stripped the status of teacher from lecturer. In Malaysia, academic freedom is constrained under the 1971 Universities and Universities Colleges Act, and a compulsory agreement signed between students, lecturers and universities/college administration, dubbed the ‘AkuJanji’ (I pledge).

Sit-in tent in winter

Global solidarity during the Olympics

Posted: August 9, 2012 in Consumer campaigns, Indonesia
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In an extraordinary month, embattled sportswear maker adidas has faced protests in both the developed and developing world.

Global solidarity at work! Co-ordination could be better though.

First up, in Jakarta, 2,000 employees of supplier PT Panarub Dwikarya initially went on strike over a number of issues including:

  • a forced labour system
  • unpaid wages
  • freedom of association

The manufacturer, in retaliation, sacked 1,300 of them who have been on picket since. You can read the full details of their story here.

Then, last Sunday night, UK group War on Want staged an impressive display of guerrilla activism, beaming a huge “exploitation – not ok anywhere” projection onto a building within the Olympic Park in London, right after the men’s 100m final.

It certainly got people’s attention but I do hope something comes of it. Last week BusinessWeek ran a feature titled ‘Why Chick-fil-A and Other Brands Aren’t Being Bullied’. in which a corporate “crisis management” specialist made the withering assessment that

People live in short attention span theater. They get upset and then they move on.

Granted she has a vested interest in saying so, but there is more than a little truth to it.

War on Want and others can counter this by keeping it personal. Rich world consumers might have trouble keeping their attention focused but the people sitting on that picket in Jakarta today aren’t going to “move on” so quickly. They will still be there tomorrow unless the company is forced to act. The more we hear of their stories, the more likely we are to act.

Support the ‘not ok anywhere’ campaign by signing their online petition.

Related post:

The ‘Not ok anywhere’ campaign video:

Samsung Galaxy: Made by Humans

Posted: July 10, 2012 in Books, Rights around the world
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Samsung Galaxy S III

Samsung Galaxy S III (Photo credit: John Biehler)

If ever there was a serious contender for the title “iPhone killer”, the Samsung Galaxy S III is the closest thing I’ve seen. It’s time to take a closer look at its maker.

Samsung already sells considerably more handsets than Apple, but they don’t get anything like the amount of attention that Apple does, at least in English-speaking media. It’s not surprising: Most of their sales are made outside the USA, their stock isn’t listed on the NYSE and their product launches are in the Korean language (and in Seoul).

Korea is a pretty big player. The population of North and South combined is nearing that of Japan. Samsung looms large in South Korea’s national identity. It generates nearly 20% of the country’s GDP, a proportion that hasn’t changed much in years (AMRC, p. 48). The company’s economic output of $250 billion is larger than most national economies. At the World Expo, currently underway in Korea’s port city of Yeosu, Samsung has its own pavilion.

Like other trans-national corporations, Samsung outsources production around the world, often to places where manufacturing has lower wage cost.

The rise of Samsung and its operations throughout Asia are the subject of the first half of the book Labour in Globalising Asian Corporations published by Asia Monitor Resource Center (the second half deals mostly with Toyota).

The chapters are written by different authors and are a little episodic so, other than the general theme, the book doesn’t have an over-arching narrative. Each chapter is a meticulously pieced-together portrait of the company’s workforce, particularly Chapter 1 which makes a sweeping tour through Korea’s economic history right back to the Japanese occupation in the 1930s, the time of Samsung’s formation. It that respect it is an invaluable resource for students and others interested in alternative economics.

The book carefully documents the company’s shortcomings, mostly with respect to wages. In its home country Samsung uses a strategy of providing reasonable pay but banking on its prestige as an employer to squeeze the workforce to work harder and sacking the bottom 5-7% of performers every year as a matter of course.

The company has a declared ‘no union’ policy which it promotes by various means:

  1. Historically when workers in Korea itself start agitating for better pay, the company has given raises, neutering any union message.
  2. Outsourcing to suppliers that are separate companies on paper but actually controlled by Samsung management.
  3. In Korea and South-east Asia the company has succeeded in registering paper unions so that activists can’t obtain official recognition, and/or having real unions dissolved over minor administrative impediments.
  4. In Malaysia it also got the cooperation of the government to prevent unionization as part of the package of sweeteners to bring investment. This sounds outrageous but is possible because Malaysia has not ratified the ILO Convention on freedom of association.

It’s strange that Korea’s corporations are so virulently anti-union when Japanese companies learned a long time ago to work with them.

Samsung, owned and operated from Korea, also presents a challenge unlike anything I’ve covered to date. Whilst it is a public company it is not like other global brands, in which the largest stockholders are pension funds and no single fund owns a substantial holding. Samsung is a chaebol, a colossal interlocking network of companies all controlled by Lee Kun-hee and his family. The national government has only taken timid steps to wind back the chaebol system, despite its weaknesses such as overproduction which became apparent during the 1997-1998 economic crisis.

With no unions, little regulation and not even a fig-leaf of shareholder accountability there aren’t a whole lot of options to counter the power of the Lee Family. Social movement activism seems to be on the rise though. Last month a large meeting of three dozen activist networks took place in Seoul, making ten years of the International Campaign for Responsible Technology and they had Samsung squarely in their sights, holding a large protest outside the company’s headquarters.

The focus of this protest is occupational deaths among Samsung employees resulting from leukemia. The company has taken no action to improve safety (oddly this issue is not covered in Labour in Globalising Asian Corporations, even though it was only published a couple of years ago).

Their campaign is making some headway: on June 21st the country’s National Human Rights Commission requested that the Ministry of Employment and Labor change the rules to make it easier to prove that workplace injury and disease is attributable to the employer.

Chaebols still have to negotiate just like anyone else when their workforce is organised (it’s getting to that point that is the problem in Samsung). Just over a week ago, truck drivers belonging to the Korean Transport Workers Union achieved a 9.9% pay rise after a week-long strike. Samsung doesn’t have magic powers to prevent unionisation, just good lawyers.

Labour in Globalising Asian Corporations is available in hard copy from Asian Monitor Resource Center. It’s also available on their website in PDF. The sections relating to Samsung are:

Related:

Brooding isn’t very constructive

Posted: July 5, 2012 in Rights around the world
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English: Loyalist Mural, Donegall Pass, Belfas...

About as helpful as this (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Last month a rare spat took place at the International Labour Organisation (ILO)’s annual conference.

The ILO is grounded in the notion of tripartite co-operation between employer organisations, employee organisations and governments.

Year after year, a moment has been taken to highlight the worst violations of trade union rights around the globe.

This year, the employer groups pulled the carpet, and got it taken off the agenda. Union federations reacted with great indignation at this affront to the co-operative process of the ILO.

I beg to differ.

The segment was the affront to the ILO process, in fact I’m amazed it had persisted this long. How are groups supposed to discuss things rationally if one group is forced to sit through a session specifically about how untrustworthy they are? How is that supposed to build trust and co-operation?

Imagine if the roles were reversed: Suppose employers got to play a video every year about the most egregious examples they could find of union misbehaviour.

Or translate the scenario to decisions in your own family. Imagine if, every time you sat down to discuss some major decision, your spouse/parent said ‘Hang on, before we talk about that, we’ll just have to stop for a minute and watch this slideshow about the time you were given decision-making responsibility and screwed it up royally.’ Well that’s pretty much what’s been happening.

The whole scene reminds me of the Orange Order in Northern Ireland, who thought it was critically important to hold annual marches to remind people of a military victory their ancestors won several centuries ago. As a result of their confrontationalism they have the distinction of being the last place on earth where Catholics and Protestants murdered each other over their religious differences. Most other European nations had discovered toleration by the 1700s.

So, far from being “an affront to the system”, last months’ agenda change may actually herald an approach more oriented towards results and less towards grandstanding. Let’s hope.

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