9:41 AM Jun 7, 1996
LABOUR: UNCERTAINTY OVER HOME WORK CONVENTION
Geneva 6 Jun (Chakravarthi Raghavan) -- A Committee of the International Labour Conference (ILC) is continuing its detailed consideration of a draft Convention and Recommendations on Home Work after defeating an employers' amendment that would have killed the move for a Convention and have only a Recommendation. In line with the ILO standard setting practices, the Conference had a first discussion on the issue of 'home work' last year and is due to adopt a Convention and Recommendation this year on this issue. The details of the draft Convention and Recommendation are first discussed in the tripartite committee -- where all amendments etc to the draft are discussed and decided. The draft as adopted and recommended by the Committee will then come up before the Conference where it needs a two-thirds majority to be adopted. In terms of the schedule of the 83rd session of the ILC, the final vote on the Committee's report at the Conference plenary is set for 21 June (the final day of the Conference). The employers' group has been vehemently opposed to any ILO action to protect 'home workers' a term that embraces a large range: informal and self-employed persons to those working at home under contract and sub-contracts of large Transnational Corporations in their current socalled 'globalized' production and distribution operations. At the meeting of the Committee which is considering in detail the draft instrument (Convention and Recommendation), drawn up by the ILO office in the light of the discussions and conclusions of the consideration of the issue last year, the employers moved an amendment to replace the term "Convention" in the instrument by "recommendation". In the non-recorded vote that followed, employers as a group voted for the amendment and the workers as a group voted against. And with nine governments for the amendment and 30 against, with all other governments abstaining, the amendment was defeated. The employers' representative however took the floor and said that there was no conceivable convention that the employers could endorse and hence they would not participate in any discussion concerning the Convention, but that they would participate constructively in the discussions concerning a Recommendation. The ILO's legal advisor, Mr. Francis Maupain, in explaining the ILO rules, said the employers' position was regrettable and against the spirit of tripartism. But there was nothing in the rules that forced any of the groups to participate or vote. All that the rules required in the Committee that a minimum of two-fifths of those entitled to vote should participate in the vote for it to be valid. The employers hope, with the help of some governments, to kill the Convention when it comes to a vote in the plenary at the final stage where a two-thirds majority is needed. In the plenary, as in committees, in line with the tripartite structure, each government has one vote, and the corresponding worker and employer representatives half a vote each. The majority itself is calculated in a complicated way on the basis of the attendance on that day of the delegates. In a news conference on Thursday, representatives of the workers organizations noted the problems of definition, and the very loosely worded obligations, but still pressed for a Convention for its declaratory benefit and creating pressures on governments to formulate policies and defend these workers from exploitation. Home work is defined in the draft Convention, as work carried out by a person (the homeworker) in his or her home or other premises of choice, other than the workplace of the employer, for remuneration, and which results in a product or service as specified by the employer, irrespective of who provides the equipment, materials or other inputs used, as long as the person does not have the degree of autonomy or economic independence necessary to be considered an independent worker under national laws, regulations or court decisions. The terms of the convention, and the obligations it casts on the governments that accept and ratify it ultimately, in terms of a growing problem in developing and the industrialized world, is much less than the vehemence of the employers' opposition to the Convention, and the strong endorsement of it by the workers' would convey. The push for ILO norm-setting for home workers was begun by the Indian Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA), a group led by Mrs. Ela Bhatt, to further the cause of the mostly self-employed women working in the informal sector in their homes. Sewa's own activities have ranged over a wide field, including measures for these women to get credit for their activities, marketing facilities etc. In the initial stages, international organizations of workers, dominated and led by the Unions of the industrialized market-economy countries were cool to this issue, as that of informal sector workers. Their view initially was against such work, favouring rather more organized formal sector work and employment there. But gradually, as activities of TNCs (manufacturing and trade) have increased, and as labour-intensive work in the North began shifting to the South, particularly in the textiles, clothing and footwear industries, and more recently in computers and electronics, the Northern Unions have begun to take an interest in the problems of the informal sector and homeworkers. While some of the 'competition' from the developing world, via trade in these sectors of labour-intensive work comes from domestic capital and enterprises of these countries, the newer forms are those arising from the northern TNCs, marketing goods under brandnames, shifting some of the production overseas, through contracts and subcontracts. This problem, at least seen as being responsible for job losses in the unskilled and semi-skilled categories of workers in the North, has forced the Northern dominated international workers organizations (whose own membership in the North is dwindling, but with their core membership coming from public services and public sector) to take up these problems. They have thus taken up in earnest an issue that social workers in the South have been attempting to tackle namely of workers in the informal sector and the 'home-workers' producing goods for which they get piece-rate wages, and the issues of 'contract labour' (which is coming up next year at the ILC for norm-setting), and the wider issue of trade-labour standards or social clause in the WTO. However, the Northern unions have been unable to see that the real driving force for this 'globalization' is not the real or perceived lower labour standards, but the guaranteed advantages (for e.g. in tax treatment etc) that the TNCs get in the home countries, for e.g. for 'outward processing' in clothing and footwear industries. But the ICFTU and other such Northern dominated central organizations of workers who have now taken up the long-neglected social problems of the workers in the South, including those in the informal sectors, however also support the 'investment rights' of Northern capital. At UNCTAD-IX, the ICFTU came out in favour of a Multilateral Investment Agreement at the OECD and the WTO, but with the addition of the TNC code of conduct. This last, before it was 'buried' during its consideration at the UN General Assembly in New York had virtually become, from a code of obligations for TNCs to one of code of obligations for host countries to the TNCs. In a mirror-image position, employers, as owners of capital are for investment rights to be safeguarded through an international treaty including one in the WTO that would have enforcement. But they oppose conventions like that on homework or social clause in trade accords that could limit the TNC activities and their profit maximisation through contracting and sub-contracting the jobs and thus escaping obligations for their workers. If the draft Convention under consideration at the ILC, survives the process and is adopted by the Conference, it will only obligate each country that ratifies it to "adopt, implement and periodically review a national policy on home work aimed at improving the situation of home-workers" in consultation with the most representative organizations of employers and workers and, where they exist, with organizations concerned with homeworkers and those of employers of homeworkers. In particular, the national policy shall promote equality of treatment between homeworkers and other wage earners, taking into account the special characteristics of homework and, where appropriate, conditions applicable to the same or similar types of work carried out in an enterprise." The equality of treatment to be promoted under national policy is in relation to a homeworkers' right to establish or join organizations of their own choosing, protection against discrimination in employment and occupation, protection in field of occupational safety and health, remuneration, statutory social security protection, access to training, minimum age for admission to work and maternity protection. An ILO Convention, when accepted and ratified by a member-State is binding on that member, and its implementation is monitored by the ILO Committee of Experts who report to the Conference. This has the paradoxical effect of those accepting facing the risk of being hauled over the coals over their failures, while those not accepting escape any scrutiny. The United States which is in the forefront of pressing for workers' rights and for a social clause in the WTO, has adhered to very few of even the socalled core conventions, and thus the labour policy and treatment of workers by the US, and its States, do not come up for scrutiny at the ILO. This is leading to a situation where many of the more recent conventions are attracting less and less adhesions.