Two different approaches that fail to protect Brazilian or British agricultural workers

Vitor Filgueiras

Brazil and the United Kingdom are very different regarding the levels of working conditions achieved historically, but both have faced the same strategies to undermine public regulation lately. The failure of different approaches provides clues about the solutions for similar problems.

Many cases of labour exploitation have been uncovered, including slave-like conditions, in both countries. These exploitative conditions are typically found in the agricultural sector, and most of them are associated with outsourcing/subcontracting arrangements.

In Brazil, almost 90% (44) of the 50 largest cases of slave-like conditions uncovered by public institutions between 2010 and 2014 involved workers hired by main companies through intermediaries. These cases cover different regions, company sizes, and intermediaries’ appearance, ranging from gatos (‘cats’, as labour suppliers are called in the Brazilian rural area) to formal contractors. In the UK, labour exploitation and regulation of labour in rural areas are strongly linked to outsourcing, which is predominantly arranged through so-called gangmasters. Between 2013 and 2015, 900 victims of labour exploitation were assisted by the Gangmasters’ Licensing Authority (GLA) (GLA CEO 2015).

The Insufficient protection of Vietnamese domestic workers in Saudi Arabia

Ly Trinh Khanh

Recently the Vietnamese media has reported many cases of Vietnamese female domestic workers being maltreated in Saudi Arabia. They were required to work between 16 and 20 hours without breaks in a day. Ms. Ha Thi Thu Trang, a 36 years old domestic worker from Thai Nguyen province, reported that some of her friends were either provided insufficient food by the employers or had to eat the food left over from the tables of the employers’ families. Other female domestic workers were sexually abused, such as Ms. Oanh from Nghe An and Ms. K. from Ho Chi Minh City. The domestic workers reported that they were treated like slaves, being forced to work until exhausted (Dai, 2015). 

However the labour sending companies require workers who want to terminate the employment contract before the expiry date to pay a compensation of approximately VN$60 million (around US$2770) (Dai, 2015). It is reported that 30 Vietnamese domestic workers who were rescued from their employers’ maltreatment are residing in the labour camps in Saudi Arabia to wait to return home. Some of them have been waiting for more than one year without the intervention of the Vietnamese authority bodies (PVH, 2016).

Using the CETA to move towards a social and environment-friendly globalisation

Reiner Hoffman

Economic globalisation has accelerated enormously. With the advances in information technology and international trade policies, it now permeates almost every sector of the economy as well as our whole way of life. At the same time, tariffs and technical trade barriers have been massively dismantled through wide-ranging market liberalisation, and worldwide competition has been ratcheted up. This has resulted in tenfold increase in global trade and investment flows since the end of the 1980s.

The positive benefits of global linkages have infiltrated so much of our everyday economic and cultural lives that we cannot imagine the world without them. The gains in prosperity are enormous. The downside of it, however, is that stronger competition has massively increased the pressure on pay and working conditions. This applies to Germany and the other member states of the European Union (EU); this does not exclude the disastrous working conditions in the Third World countries and the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) states. More and more, the workers are bearing the brunt of the increased competition and social standards are coming under growing pressure. Unimpressively, the increased prosperity has been most unevenly distributed. While the wealthiest one per cent of the world population is clearly profiting from globalisation, the incomes of large portions of the middle class in the industrialised countries are stagnating and the poorest of the world population are seeing their real incomes decline.

Want to improve crowdwork? Regulate it

Valerio De Stefano

Janine Berg

Crowdwork is the casual work of the 21st century. Like other forms of casual work, crowd work is characterized by lack of job security and few, if any, labour protections. But with day labourers, dockworkers, and agricultural hands – probably the types of casual work that most readily come to mind – work is at least for the day. In the on-demand economy, it is for the task at hand. This can be as short as a few kilometers’ drive or ten minutes spent tagging photos on the internet. Lucas Biewald, the CEO of the micro-task platform Crowdflower, once quipped that ‘before the Internet it would be really difficult to find someone, sit them down for ten minutes and get them to work for you, and then fire them after those ten minutes’. Now instead, ‘you can actually find them, pay them the tiny amount of money, and then get rid of them when you don’t need them anymore’ (quoted in Marvit, 2014).

The ‘Turker’, the Uber driver, or the graphic artist working on an online design platform must continuously search for work, monitoring their computer screens or phones for work opportunities. Indeed, in a recent ILO survey on employment and working conditions in two leading micro-task crowdwork platforms, it was found that workers averaged 18 minutes looking for work for every hour working (Berg, 2016). As an Amazon Mechanical Turk worker from the United States put it, 

The toughest part of turking for a living is actually finding the jobs. For every hour I spend working I most likely spend 2 hours monitoring the various scripts I have running to see what jobs show up (Quoted in Berg, 2016:14)

Uber: do not take us for a ride!

Claire Clarke

Mac Urata

The ‘sharing economy’ is changing the landscape of work by promoting a model that provides easy access to work but further casualises the workforce. Work has evolved from long-term employment to a series of jobs, and has now again been reduced to the delivery of unique tasks.

Transportation network companies (TNCs) such as Uber are driving the growth of less formal work in passenger transport via a business model that challenges the traditional approach to the supply and demand of passenger transport as well as the way in which value is created, distributed and controlled. These companies promote themselves as electronic marketplaces that connect customers with drivers. They claim they are not taxi operators, and therefore operate outside existing industry regulations on licensing requirements, insurance, and driver screening.

Uber claims to offer flexibility for its ‘partners’ (users and drivers), but driving for Uber can be tough. Many media reports suggest that Uber drivers are not earning the legally required minimum wage. In some cases, drivers make no money at all from some shifts.

Crowd Work: Shame, Secrets, and an Imminent Threat to Employment

Kristy Milland

You may have no idea what crowd work is, and that is understandable. Most people do not. Crowd work is not a job that many aspire to, nor is it one that workers are necessarily proud of. It may not carry as much shame as some other jobs, but due to the low pay and unfair treatment workers often experience, it is not a job to boast about.

Crowd work comes in a variety of forms, but I define it as any paid work which is offered to or completed by a large group of people. Crowd work is the dirty secret of major corporations. It is a rising threat to economies and governments around the world, and it could be a future for many people as they try to make a living. In this article I wish to reveal the exploitation of crowd work, the pressing threat it has become when paired with automation, and some possible avenues of resistance that we can use to protect ourselves and our loved ones in a future where this is the only option left for income generation. I want to show the reality of crowd work and how harmful it could become.

An Introduction to the Platforms
A few major forms of crowd work are found today. The first are macro-task platforms such as Upwork, Uber, and Fiverr, where work is offered to a large group of people, but only one completes it. Competition is fierce, so pay declines over time, and worker reputation, which is key to accessing more work, is totally in the hands of the work requester.

The lowest part of the working class: refugee struggles and the trade unions in Germany

Oskar Fischer

More than one million refugees came to Germany in 2015, the majority fleeing from Syria’s civil war and others coming from the Balkan states, Afghanistan, Iraq and northern Africa. How should the trade unions respond to the ‘refugee crisis’ amidst a swing to the right in the public debate?

The current debate in Germany

The public debate is mainly concerned with the so-called ‘refugee crisis’, an expression which suggests that refugees are to blame for the economic crisis and the rising social inequality in Germany and Europe. The ‘Iron Chancellor’ Angela Merkel has now come under serious attack, from the right wing within her own government coalition, although she is herself responsible for tightening the asylum laws. The Federal Ministry of the Interior reports that fewer than half of asylum seekers have been awarded political asylum (Bundesministerium des Innern, 2016).

Pegida, a right wing political movement whose name translates as Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamification of the West, has organised weekly rallies all over Germany for more than a year. Among other things, they call for Germany’s borders to be closed and for asylum seekers to be deported. Meanwhile, a wave of right-wing terror swept across Germany last year, involving hundreds of arson attacks against refugee facilities and countless assaults on migrants.

ILO is the sole shield for millions of workers: Interview with Bernard Thibault

Bernard Thibault

This is a shortened version of an interview by David Eloy that first appeared in the French magazine Altermondes.

On 25 February 2015, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) emerged from a crisis that had blocked it from functioning properly for three years. The cause of that crisis was that the employers’ organisations called into question the right to strike. Could you talk us through that dispute?

Bernard Thibault: The ILO was born in the aftermath of the First World War, in response to the simple observation that the origins of war are to be found in social precarity and poverty. So the nations agreed to create a body of worldwide labour law, including basic texts on freedom of association and the right to strike. Established a little later, the Committee of Experts on the Application of Conventions and Recommendations is tasked with examining how states implement these standards and with issuing opinions. So in case of violations, states can find themselves in the hot seat. But from 2012 onwards, the employers’ organisations contested the fact that these experts could recognise a right to strike in countries where this right is not provided for in the constitution.

Interview with German prisoners union GG/BO about the recent prison strike in December 2015

Jörg Nowak

The prison population in Germany has not been a focus of trade unions in the past, but it is an emerging site of industrial labour. Out of 60.000 prisoners in Germany, around 40 000 are workers and the rest are either retired or sick. In 11 out of 16 federal states, prison labour is forced labour. All major automobile producers in Germany are subcontracting assembly work to prisons, as well as white-goods producers and solar-energy companies.

Prisoners earn between € (Euro) 1.50 and €2 an hour while the German minimum wage is €8.50, and they do not have a right to strike. Prison workers are covered by unemployment insurance but excluded from old-age insurance. A law for old-age insurance was planned in 1977, but never legislated. The companies that outsource work to prisons are exempt from contributions to social insurance funds. Thus the unemployment insurance is covered by tax-payers.

While prison guards have long been organised in two different trade unions, prisoners were not organised until 2014. Two prisoners in Berlin-Tegel created the prisoners’ union GG/BO (Gefangenengewerkschaft/Bundesweite Organisation) in May 2014, and it now has around 800 members in more than 40 German prisons. A section was founded in Austria in late 2015.

The Bangladesh Accord - a model to secure workers rights in global supply chains?

Frauke Banse

After the collapse of the Rana Plaza Building in Bangladesh in April 2013, there was massive public outrage on retailers and brands in Europe. It was under these conditions that a coalition of Bangladeshi unions, workers’ rights organisations such as the Clean Clothes Campaign (CCC) and the Workers’ Rights Consortium (WRC), and the global union federations IndustriALL and UNI Global Union was able to establish the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh. This agreement, known as the Accord, was to be signed by brands and retailers sourcing from Bangladesh. It is legally binding and has high standards of transparency. Labour and ca­pital are represented equally in the governing body of the Accord, and workers´ health and safety committees, with at least 50% of re­presentatives drawn from labour, have to be established in the factories covered by the Accord. The Accord provides the chance to reduce the incidence of deadly accidents in Bangladesh´s garment industry. Due to heavy public pressure, more than 200 companies have so far signed the Accord. It now covers more than 1 600 of nearly 6 000 Ready Made Garment (RMG) factories in Bangla­desh (BGMEA, 2014; Accord, 2015).

IndustriALL (2013a and 2013b) sees the success story of the Accord as a potential model for new forms of global industrial relations.[1] Similar sentiments were raised by the International Trade Union Conference (ITUC) and the German retailer KiK (ITUC, 2014; KiK, 2013). However these sentiments tend to overlook, first, the specific circumstances under which the Accord came into being and, second, the problems of practical implementation.

At What Level Should a National Minimum Wage in South Africa be Fixed?

Eddie Cottle

The struggle for a National Minimum Wage (NMW) in South Africa has a long history, having been waged, largely by organised worker formations, since the 1930s. These efforts have taken various forms from open class conflict, to more subdued trade union representations, to the various governments of the day. Most of these representations by the labour movement to government were made for the introduction of a NMW system that would enforce a minimum wage across all industries in the country.

To date, no NMW has been set. It is only after the Marikana Massacre and the farm workers’ revolt of 2012, that the post-apartheid African National Congress (ANC)-led government has decided to the introduction of a NMW, initially through agreeing to an investigation. The content of the various reports of the task teams involved in the investigation have not been made public, and the rank-and-file members of the trade unions have not been involved in democratic processes to decide where the NMW should be set.

After Rana Plaza: Multi-Stakeholder Governance of the RMG Industry in Bangladesh

Mohd Raisul Islam Khan

Christa Wichterich

In April 2013, the collapse of the Rana Plaza building in Bangladesh that killed 1,129 garment workers and left more than 2,500 seriously wounded generated a huge public outcry at the national and international level. The tragedy broadened earlier demands from trade unions and rights-based campaigns for regulation of labour relations in transnational apparel production chains and for improvement of workplace safety in the Readymade Garment (RMG) industry in Bangladesh. Public pressure led to the adoption of a range of action plans and agreements. The most notable is The Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh (Accord), the first legally binding multi-stakeholder agreement signed by over 180 apparel corporations, two global union federations IndustriALL and UNI Global Union, labor rights campaign groups and Bangladeshi trade unions. The Accord stipulates comprehensive inspection of the fire and building safety status of the factories, which should result in Corrective Action Plans (CAPs) to ensure remediation of safety hazards, a fire and building safety training and empowerment measures for workers. Thus the agreement acknowledges that workers’ participation has to play a significant role in improving workplace safety.

In parallel, the Government of Bangladesh has adopted the National Tripartite Plan of Action on Fire Safety and Structural Integrity (NTPA) which stipulates to accomplish 23 activities related to legislation and policies, administrative and institutional upgrading, as well as practical activities along with factory level safety inspections. The adoption of these regulatory tools was welcomed as a “breakthrough” for the RMG sector in Bangladesh.

Freedom of Association and the Right to Strike

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva

It is a fact that technological innovations and changes in the organization of work have caused alterations in the labour market, making certain international labour standards obsolete and, at the same time, giving rise to demands for new rights. However, this does not justify the pressure that the International Labour Organization (ILO) has been put under to reduce its character as an International Organization (IO) to that of an agency of the United Nations system, nor indeed the questioning about whether the right to strike is part of Convention 87, on freedom of association, although the ILO has been fostering this concept for more than sixty years now. 

The ILO is one of the oldest and most important organizations in the UN system. It is also the only one to be run on a tripartite basis – governments, employers and workers. It has standard-setting and supervisory powers, as well as mechanisms for annulling obsolete standards, for updating incomplete standards and for enabling member countries to denounce Conventions that they consider unsuitable. So the instruments for perfecting the standards system do exist.

Turkey seen through the Prism of Occupational Diseases: Success Story or Hidden Disaster?

Ahmet Tellioglu

It is hard to diagnose and recognise an occupational disease (OD) because the diagnosis must prove the occupational factors which caused it. The diagnosis of ODs in a workplace has important consequences for employees and employers:

1. The employer has to pay compensation; 
2. An increasing number of ODs diagnosed lead workers to demand higher wages;
3. The workplace will be inspected more frequently and more carefully. 

While the process of diagnosing and recognising ODs requires close collaboration of many parties in and around the workplaces (employers, employees, occupational health and safety (OHS) professionals and state institutions), employers try to avoid OD diagnoses because of the financial costs they may incur as a result. Regulations about OD issues should be aware of these issues.

The first row in Table 1 shows the number of ODs recognised in Turkey in the past nine years. The second row shows the expected number of ODs, if Turkey has on average the same incidence as in EU member states. According to official data, the incidence of ODs in Turkey is 30 times lower than in the EU. Since it is unlikely that this is a true reflection of reality, we can infer that only one of 30 OD cases is reported in Turkey.

I want Council Houses in my Neighbourhood

Frank Hoffer

Sitting in nice wine bars or cosy restaurants in superbly gentrified inner city areas, the chattering liberal middle class expresses its disgust about the xenophobic under-classes turning against migrants and voting for right-wing populist parties. Being a member of the chattering class myself I fully share these feelings. The populist migrant bashing makes me furious. A Portuguese lady comes once a week cleaning our house, a Moroccan craftsman does all repair work at our place, a French lady does the ironing, the Bangladeshi dish washer helps to keep prices down in the local Italian restaurant, the coffee at work is served by migrants from Africa, and workers from Eastern Europe clean my office. Thanks to the housing bubble only well-to-do middle class people can afford to live in our neighbourhood, our kids go to a private school and, being a well-paid civil servant at the UN, cheap migrant workers do not compete for my job. Indeed, I have the great pleasure to work in a diverse multicultural and multiracial environment of similarly well-paid and privileged people. Actually I am an “elite migrant” myself who left his own country out of choice to take on exciting jobs in other countries. In short it is easy and cheap for me to be the nice and tolerant cosmopolitan criticising dumb xenophobia as I have all the benefits and none of the disadvantages of mass immigration.

The Right to Strike

Jeffrey Vogt

Background
At the commencement of the 2012 International Labour Conference (ILC), the spokespersons of the Employers’ Group and the Workers’ Group met to finalize a “short list” of 25 cases drawn from the Annual Report of the ILO Committee of Experts which would be discussed by the tripartite constituents the following week in the Conference Committee on the Application of Standards (CAS). Without warning, the Employers’ Group refused to agree to a negotiated final short list that included any case where the Committee of Experts’ Report contained observations regarding the right to strike. The Employers’ Group (EG) also sought a “disclaimer” on the Committee of Experts’ General Survey.[1] The purpose of this disclaimer was two–fold – to diminish the persuasive authority of the Committee of Experts’ observations outside of the ILO and to attempt to establish a (non-existent) hierarchy of the political, tripartite body - the CAS - over the independent Committee of Experts.

The Employers’ Group makes three central claims. First, the mandate of the Committee of Experts is limited to commenting on the application of conventions, not to “interpret” them. They also argue that the General Survey and the Annual Report of the Committee of Experts are not agreed or authoritative texts of the ILO tripartite constituents. Specifically, they argue that the Committee of Experts does not supervise labour standards but rather the ILO tripartite constituents and thus the tripartite constituents ultimately decide upon the meaning of the ILO conventions. Finally, they argue that given the absence of any reference to a right to strike in the actual text of ILO Convention 87, the internationally accepted rules of interpretation require Convention 87 to be interpreted without a right to strike. As such, the right to strike is not an issue upon which the Committee of Experts should express an opinion.

Yes, we did it! Domestic Workers Launch an International Federation

Chris Bonner

Barbro Budin

Karin Pape

“Yes we did it!”[1], a statement that best captures the jubilant mood on the last day of the Founding Congress of the International Domestic Workers Federation (IDWF) in 2013. It is also the title of a new book launched at that Congress, which tells the story of how domestic workers organised to win the Domestic Workers Convention, C189, at the International Labour Conference (ILC) of the ILO on 16 June 2011. 

Just over two years later, domestic workers have done it again. Another milestone has been achieved through the formation of a fully constituted, democratic federation of 48 membership-based domestic workers’ organisations representing around 300 000 domestic workers globally. This will ensure that the Convention is not forgotten, and that the struggle for “decent work for domestic workers’ continues in a coordinated and sustained manner.

The launching of the IDWF has wider implications because it marks an important moment in the history of the Labour Movement. For the first time a global union organisation has been formed by women from the poorest sections of society, with an all-women elected leadership. The transformation from a network to a global federation was decided upon by representatives of 48 domestic workers’ organisations, from 42 countries.

Better Work or ‘Ethical Fix’? Lessons from Cambodia’s Apparel Industry

Dennis Arnold

The global apparel industry is characterised by low wages, poor occupational health and safety, and restrictions on freedom of association. These problems persist in spite of numerous corporate social responsibility initiatives, consumer campaigning for improved labour rights, and trade union organising in industrialising countries. In the wake of the Rana Plaza collapse in Bangladesh on April 24, debates over the ‘race to the bottom’ for cheap and flexible labour have re-emerged. For example, Disney corporate representatives, who terminated sourcing to Bangladesh in late 2012 in response to a spate of factory fires, were quoted in a recent article saying the company would consider allowing its licensees to produce in Bangladesh if the country implemented the ILO’s Better Work programme, which uses ILO monitoring of factories in Cambodia as its model (Greenhouse 2013). Dan Rees, director of Better Work, is quoted in the same article saying before his organisation would get involved in Bangladesh, the country needed to enact stronger labour protection and stop suppressing trade unions.

Zero-hours Contracts

Steve Davies

Introduction
This summer in the United Kingdom (UK), ‘zero-hours contracts’ grabbed the headlines and dominated discussion about changes to working life. Zero-hours contracts are those in which a worker agrees to be available for work with a particular employer but without any guaranteed hours or times of work and therefore usually no guaranteed pay either. Under these contracts employers only need to pay for work when they need it. These contracts are not a new phenomenon, although the scale of their current use in the UK is unprecedented. This is seen by employers and ministers as part of the ‘necessary’ flexible labour market.

Who benefits from flexibility?
The Conservative-dominated British government boasts the UK is on the road to economic recovery and that, even at the worst point of the crisis, the private sector created hundreds of thousands of jobs which compensated for the impact of austerity on public sector employment. What ministers never explain is the nature of these new private sector jobs or how the crisis has been used to restructure the labour market. The increase in forms of ‘flexible’ work is closely related to the attacks on workers’ rights and trade unions. Thatcher began the process of weakening the position of workers, through legislative change to the labour markets and through laws which made it more difficult for unions to engage in legal strikes. This assault continued under the Blair and Brown ‘new Labour’ governments (Blair boasted that the UK had the least regulated labour market of any major industrialised country). The current British government has pushed even harder to remove legal protections for workers and to discourage the use of remaining legal protections by increasing the costs of bringing a case.

Why asbestos should be banned

Jan Cremers

There has been an outburst of public anger after the ‘discovery’ of asbestos polluted social housing, despite there being several other topical asbestos related incidents. This coupled with the spectacular Turin trial against some captains of industry who were sentenced for knowingly exposing their workforce for decades to the killing fibre and the alarming reports of annual death rates among teachers who were working in asbestos containing public schools. In turn, the driving thoughts behind recent research by a group of outstanding international experts were of a more pragmatic nature. The aim was to document that asbestos is still carried around the globe and that there is no reason to retreat from the fight against the trend and its effects. Unfortunately, the European Union (EU)-wide ban is not the end of the hazardous story; it is only one of the necessary steps to protecting workers and citizens against the fatal consequences of the use of a mineral fibre that started as the eternal, global insulation champion. The fairy tale of 'safe handling' that still leads to import and use in large parts of the world has to stop. In the following sections we summaries major developments that led to a slow phasing-out in Europe and a turn to other continents by the industry.