Apr 14, 1998

 

LABOUR: ASIAN, US GROUPS PRESS MIGRANT WORKERS' RIGHTS

 

Washington, Apr 8 (IPS/Abid Aslam) -- Migrant workers worldwide risk being overlooked even as unions campaign to include basic labour protection in the rules of global commerce, according to labour and immigration experts.

Separated from home and family, despised in foreign lands and discriminated against in the workplace, migrant workers span the occupational spectrum - from professionals on fixed-term contracts to labourers who do work too dirty, dangerous, or difficult for locals. But they all suffer abuses of their rights compared to native workers.

These abuses include the freedom of association, the right to safe working conditions, and the right to have their families with them. Migrants have suffered, largely because the societies to which they have been sent - and the governments which sent them - failed to recognise those rights fundamentally as human rights, according to Rex Varona, executive director of the Hong Kong-based Asian Migrant Centre.

That attitude, however, could be changing. Labour and immigration activists here have renewed efforts to activate the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families, said Cathi Tactaquin of the California-based National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights. 

Approved by the UN General Assembly in December, 1990, the Convention has remained dormant because only nine countries have signed on, the first step toward official ratification. Twenty nations must ratify the document for it to enter into force.

For the effort to succeed, activists must persuade their compatriots, governments, and international agencies on two key points, argued Irene Fernandez, director of Tenanganita, a Malaysian non-governmental organisation:

* To expand their understanding of 'human rights' to include economic and social - not just civil and political - rights, and to uphold those rights when negotiating and conducting international trade and economics.

"The 'social clause' debate has to be seen in terms of linking trade and human rights," said Fernandez, referring to proposals to include basic worker rights in the rules of the World Trade Organisation, Multilateral Agreement on Investment, and regional blocs.  

'Receiving' countries, including the United States, should reconsider farm subsidies and other measures that are forbidden by donors in the developing world and that fuel the demand for cheap migrant labour in areas such as California, according to labour analysts at a recent meeting in Washington.

Other 'pull' factors in the United States included "low-pay, no-rights jobs ideal for exploitative employers," said Muzaffar Chishti, a lawyer and immigration project director at the Union of Needletrades, Industrial, and Textile Employees (UNITE). Little could be done for workers in such jobs, because many are undocumented.

 

"Illegal immigration is vastly related to globalisation and the demand for cheap labour. But because it is illegal to hire an undocumented migrant, it's impossible to unionise them," Chishti said. "Whatever your stand on illegal immigration, you must make a distinction between that question and the issue of the rights of immigrant workers. These rights are indivisible."  

He added that if some groups were denied their rights, all groups effectively lost protection. "Migratory work is driven not only by people's need for jobs and employers' drive to exploit them, but also governments' need to generate foreign exchange earnings, for example to service foreign debt," Fernandez told IPS.

The Philippines, for example, relied heavily on overseas workers' remittances to service loans from the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and others, dating back to the 1960s and 1970s when the country embarked on ambitious efforts to expand infrastructure and industrial capacity.

Philippines workers overseas continued to pump more capital into the economy than do foreign investors, Varona noted. The country's 2.7 million overseas labourers sent home $4.6 billion last year, compared with $2.6 billion in direct foreign investment.  

Some 60% of those workers were women and the discrimination and abuse to which they have been subjected has earned them international headlines, but little else, said Fernandez. She also highlighted reports that Bangladeshi women, left behind by husbands sent to work overseas, had been attacked with acid by male relatives to whom they had been entrusted - many because they had refused to have sex with the men. 

Development agencies' discussion of the 'push' factors that send workers and families across national borders largely has focused on population growth and the lack of economic opportunity in 'sending' countries. The agencies had yet to accept that the 'push' factors included what Fernandez called "maldevelopment."

"Boatloads of women and children came from Lombok and Madura (in Indonesia) to join male relatives working in Malaysia. Some fled repression and a non-inclusive political system, maybe, but they also came from places where the 'green revolution' created highly drought-vulnerable monocultures (or single-crop agricultural systems).

So they also were fleeing bad development programmes," she explained.

For their part, 'sending' governments were not likely to act decisively to protect overseas workers until they began to see them "as something other than a 'relative advantage' factor of production...a cheap export," according to Varona. The Philippine government had agreed to protect migrant workers' rights "but they will only enforce these commitments to an extent that permits them to still export workers," the Filipino added.

Manila had provided funding for the 'safe return' of overseas workers who fell on hard times or fell foul of their employers, he acknowledged, "but two times a day what is returned safely is a (dead) body."

Asian governments also offered 'pre-departure orientation' for workers going abroad. Instead of being informed of their rights, "Filipino workers are briefed not to argue with their employers," said Varona, who had participated in the sessions.  

Indonesian authorities, stung by unfair complaints that their workers were lazy, sent would-be migrant labourers to military boot camp in hopes that discipline and efficiency could be drilled into them. 

International labour groups had begun to mobilise but it had yet to be seen what role unions would play at local level, Fernandez cautioned. Malaysian labour organisations, fearing for their members' jobs, so far have supported government moves to deport migrant workers. Of Malaysia's eight million workers, three million are believed to be foreigners and as many as half may be undocumented migrants, according to official and private estimates.