Five years after the violent suppression of pro-democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square, abusive working conditions have spawned a new human rights movement in East Asia.
This time, though, idealistic students and intellectuals aren’t spearheading the movement. Workers, with little outside assistance, are leading the charge for workers’ rights.
The upsurge in labor activism has embarrassed a handful of leading U.S. corporations into rethinking their policies on investing in Asia. Long accustomed to chasing the cheapest labor possible, companies such as Sears, Nike, Reebok and Levi Strauss have adopted codes of conduct for their operations in this part of the world.
Over the past year, a massive wave of strikes against poor pay and abysmal working conditions has swept over the fastest-growing economies in the world.
In China, the government officially recorded 3,104 work stoppages in the first three months of the year, a 66 percent jump from a year earlier. The strikes fed mainly on discontent over soaring inflation, running at 25 percent a year, and fear of layoffs in the collapsing state sector, where millions of workers already have lost their jobs.
There also is a growing backlash against an epidemic of industrial fires, explosions and accidents in the coastal export zones that have cost thousands of workers their lives.
The prospect is for a massive increase in labor activism. Two-thirds of China’s huge workforce still is employed by state-owned enterprises, which are being forced to give up their government loans and subsidies.
The government fears labor unrest will escalate out of control when millions more workers lose their “iron rice bowl,” or cradle-to-grave job security in the state sector.
In Indonesia, tens of thousands of laborers went on strike last spring to demand their companies pay at least the government-mandated minimum wage. It was the biggest strike wave in Indonesian history. A strike in the export zone in Medan turned into a bloody riot after workers found a 22-year-old labor organizer beaten and drowned in a local river.
The wave of strikes did succeed in getting the minimum wage raised-to $1.75 a day from about $1.50-but the fact remains that attempts to create independent organizations to deal with rampant labor abuses have met with fierce repression in both countries.
The Indonesian government has jailed dozens of labor activists for leading the protests in Medan. Officials refuse to recognize a nationwide independent trade union launched two years ago to challenge the docile union that has official sanction. The union’s leader currently is on trial and faces a long prison term.
China’s government in recent months arrested at least a dozen labor activists who helped organize a private group pledged to protecting the rights of workers and peasants. Last spring, the organization petitioned the National People’s Congress for the right to set up independent unions.
The one-party regimes of nominally communist China and right-wing authoritarian Indonesia have reacted to the labor unrest in a similar fashion for similar reasons.
Both countries fear the emergence of Solidarity-type organizations that might threaten their iron-fisted rule. They also worry that foreign investment will dry up if they allow free and independent trade unions.
“The labor movement is becoming the major human rights movement all across East Asia,” said Sidney Jones, executive director of Human Rights Watch. “Economic development is the source of legitimacy for many of these governments. The labor movement forces the issue of who benefits from that development.”
The codes of conduct adopted by some U.S. corporations got back-handed support from President Clinton in July. When renewing China’s most-favored-nation trade status, which human rights activists had opposed strenuously, Clinton encouraged companies to adopt a voluntary “set of principles” for their operations in Asia.
Those principles-like the Sullivan principles once used to influence corporations doing business in South Africa-ask corporations doing business in Asia to meet minimum labor standards. The code requires companies to pay the local minimum wage, avoid child and prison labor, limit overtime hours and establish healthy and safe workplaces.
Some companies have started sending inspectors into their factories to improve local conditions. They’ve also begun advertising their labor rights policies to ensure the message reaches those American consumers who have been shocked by revelations that their Nikes come from southeast Asian sweatshops.
But the campaign has had mixed results at best, according to labor activists in the region. The rules usually are applied only to the largest factories either directly owned by the overseas investor or their major subcontractors.
They rarely cover the dozens of smaller subcontracting firms that manufacture components or do small operations in the manufacturing process.
“It’s a double standard,” said Apo Leung, executive director of the Hong Kong-based Asia Monitor Resource Center. “Besides the large factories, they have subcontractors and subcontractors to their subcontractors. Their inspectors only go to the main factories.”
Levi Strauss decided to pull out of China when it realized it couldn’t police the hundreds of small firms stitching its blue jeans and other apparel.
Corporate efforts to police labor violations are a poor substitute for government regulation and action. But the attempt is necessary because in most parts of developing Asia, government officials are part of the problem.
Before last spring’s strikes and riot in Medan, employers in the city’s special export zone flagrantly violated the government’s minimum wage law.
Local child welfare advocates accused food processing firms in the zone of hiring workers barely in their teens. Corporations from Japan, Singapore, Taiwan and native Indonesians of Chinese descent had used special tax breaks to set up 69 factories employing 23,000 workers in the zone.
“Before the demonstrations, they paid less than minimum wage,” said a local journalist. “Now the workers get the minimum but they stick to it. The owners will not pay them more.”
The independent Indonesian Prosperity Labor Union, or SBSI, organized the strikes, which succeeded in bringing local workers up to the regional minimum wage. SBSI claims a half-million members in 87 branches across the Indonesian archipelago.
The organization fights for higher wages and better working conditions for Indonesia’s fast-growing industrial workforce. Indonesia employs 6.9 million workers in industrial enterprises larger than 10 workers, up from 2.5 million a decade ago.
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SBSI was founded two years ago as a direct challenge to the government-backed All Indonesia Workers Union, or SPSI.
“The government union doesn’t solve the workers’ problems,” said Fauzi Abdullah, director of the non-profit Labor Information Center. “Union officials accept payoffs for dropping complaints. They also report who the troublemakers are and get them fired.”
The government union claims 11,414 factory units with 2.23 million members. A businessman belonging to President Suharto’s ruling party sits atop the organization.
It was unorganized workers who led the March-April strike wave in Medan, which to the government’s consternation focused international attention on Indonesia’s labor conditions.
Early in the strike, the local military police broke up a demonstration and chased striking workers through the streets. Two days later, friends found the body of a 22-year-old worker named Rusli floating in a nearby river. His head had been beaten with a blunt object.
When word of his death spread, nearly all the workers in the export zone stopped work and staged a series of mass demonstrations, which ran until mid-April.
According to Muchtar Pakpahan, chairman of SBSI, slick leaflets began circulating among the strikers encouraging them to “annihilate the Chinese.” The demonstrations turned into a riot.
Most of the local factory owners and managers for overseas firms are Indonesians of Chinese ancestry. One died in the riot. Union officials denied printing the leaflets.
In the wake of the riot, the military police cracked down on SBSI. Pakpahan, now on trial in Medan, faces 6 years in prison for inciting to riot. Dozens of local union leaders remain in jail. One of Pakpahan’s lieutenants was sentenced last Monday to 18 months in prison.
The government refuses to recognize Pakpahan’s union and remains touchy about its repression of SBSI, since the U.S. still could cut off $600 million in tariff preferences if Indonesia doesn’t improve its labor rights record.
The Clinton administration repeatedly has postponed a final determination, hoping the Suharto regime would improve its human rights record.
So far, things have only deteriorated during the delays. Besides attempting to crush the labor movement, Indonesia’s government shut down three weekly magazines that regularly printed articles questioning government policies.
“This crackdown will not succeed,” said the local journalist. Like most middle-class supporters of the workers’ movement in Indonesia, he didn’t want his name used, even in a foreign newspaper. Most of what he knows never appears in his paper.
“People now are very critical toward the government,” he said. “Maybe 10 years ago, they would have gotten away with it. But now we are more educated, there are many young intellectuals. And there is global communications. That is why the government will not succeed.”
The independent workers movement in the most populous Muslim country in the world also has picked up support from its largest Muslim clerics’ organization.
“I don’t believe Indonesian workers are biased toward the Chinese,” said Abdul Rachman Wahid, head of the Nahdlatul Ulama, which literally means “rise of the religious teachers.” His group claims a following of 30 million mostly poor Muslims. “The strikes were caused by the widening gap between the rich and the poor.”
Two years ago, Wahid threw his support behind SBSI, helping the independent union win instant credibility among Indonesia’s impoverished workers.
“The government, by putting the workers in one basket, puts them in the wrong one,” Wahid said. “There is a need for free unions not controlled by either the government or the employers.
“The U.S. emphasis on human rights has really helped. If it is dropped, we will have many more cases of murdered workers.”
In China, a similar crackdown against labor activists is under way. Pro-democracy campaigners petitioned the government in March to form a League for the Protection of the Rights of Working People, an implicit challenge to the official All China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU).
The new group’s program called for restoring workers’ right to strike, establishing trade unions in foreign and agricultural enterprises, protecting rural migrants who go to the cities to look for work, and disclosure by government officials of their private holdings to root out corruption.
Despite a law passed a year ago requiring that foreign enterprises establish unions, the government immediately began jailing ringleaders of the new group. Fewer than 25 percent of China’s 177,000 foreign businesses have branches of the Communist Party-controlled ACFTU, which activists accuse of doing little to protect workers.
“The government says there must be unions, but there’s no enforcement,” said Chan Ka Wai of the Hong Kong Christian Industrial Committee, which provides support for worker activists in south China. “And if you are an independent organizer, you are arrested.”
Communist Party officials, especially at the provincial and local levels, have moved to crush labor unrest because they fear an active labor movement will scare off foreign investors.
“Many local officials promised a non-union environment to attract investment,” said Leung of the Asia Monitor Resource Center in Hong Kong. “So when even the ACFTU comes around, they meet resistance from the local administrators and the investors.”
The largely non-union environment in booming South China allows hazardous work environments to flourish. Guangdong province last year recorded 8,700 deaths from its 45,000 industrial accidents.
The rash of fatal factory fires forced China’s President Jiang Zemin to pay a sympathy visit in July to survivors of a blaze that killed 76 workers. The same month the government unveiled a new labor law that will go into effect next year.
The law bans child labor; prohibits discrimination based on race, nationality, sex or religion; requires local governments to set and enforce a minimum wage; and establishes the eight-hour day and the 44-hour workweek.
Labor activists report that companies from Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea are the worst labor law violators. U.S. firms generally get higher marks because of their corporate codes of conduct.
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