Labor Group Says Markets Take Toll on Workers

Friday June 13 4:48 PM EDT
By Robert Evans

GENEVA (Reuter) - The world's largest labor group said Friday that workers' rights are under fierce assault around the world as employers drive to exploit free markets and economic globalization to push up profits.

Although a report from the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) pointed to China, Colombia and Indonesia as among the worst offenders, it also asserted that abuse was frequent in the United States.

The annual survey, issued by the Brussels-based ICFTU at the conference of the United Nations' International Labor Organization (ILO), said women in particular were suffering from an assault on unions by governments and big companies.

"Governments' thirst for investment is compounded by the insatiable appetite of employers for new markets and a 'competitive' labor force, by which they mean cheap and endlessly exploitable," an introduction to the report said.

"This combination of governments seeking to shed their powers of intervention in the economy, and employers and the business world seeking to increase theirs, is one of the root causes of anti-union repression," wrote ICFTU General Secretary Bill Jordan, a former British union leader.

"As governments dismantle their public services and multinational companies look for the cheapest workers, women are increasingly in the front line of anti-union repression," the ICFTU said.

The strictures were identical to those in a similar report issued on Wednesday by the smaller, but also Brussels-based World Confederation of Labor (WCL), and were echoed in a major U.N. survey on Thursday.

Under globalization -- trade liberalization, free investment flows and integration of world financial markets -- the market was the only regulator and "everything is sacrificed to the cause of competitiveness" to maximize profits, the WCL said.

This was widening the gap between rich and poor in North and South, while workers were being forced to abandon rights they had won to social protection and decent working conditions.

In its annual report issued on Thursday, the U.N.'s Development Program (UNDP) also drew a stark picture of poor countries -- and poor people in rich countries -- dropping deeper into poverty under globalization.

The report by the ICFTU, which links 124 million workers in 195 organizations across 137 countries, said the onslaught on labor rights took institutional as well as violent forms.

Women especially suffered, it said, because under global market reforms public sector enterprises, where many employees are female, were being decimated "and because sweatshops and export processing zones are being set up in countries where multinational companies can find cheap, non-unionized workers."

Hundreds of trade unionists, mainly in Latin America, "die fighting for union rights," it said. At least 264 were murdered last year, including 98 in Colombia and 24 in Brazil.

"The key statistical tool for assessing the state of industrial relations in Latin America is still the body count," the report declared.

China, it said, "has one of the worst records of trade union repression," keeping its workers "on a tight rein, harassing and persecuting independent trade unionists with the blessing of the (official) All-China Federation of Trade Unions."

Elsewhere in Asia, it said, many governments still viewed trade unions "as an alien institution bent on frustrating economic progress." Burma, Vietnam and North Korea simply placed officials in control of "fake unions."

In Indonesia, an independent union federation was under constant harassment, and employers often used their links with police and military to break up strikes.

In the United States, the report declared, "the right to strike and the right of workers to organize trade unions are not adequately protected in the labor legislation.

"The law is unable to protect workers when the employer is determined to destroy or prevent trade union representation... At least one in 10 union supporters campaigning to form a union is illegally fired by the employer."

In Africa, governments still frequently repressed unions, using legal procedures to make it hard for them to operate. In Lesotho, 15 construction workers were shot dead in a protest on wages and conditions.