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| Kari Tapiola |
Last year June marked the third consecutive year where serious divergences concerning the right to strike affected the International Labour Conference. In turn this resulted in the Conference Committee on the Application of Standards only being able to partially conclude its work. Historically it is worth recalling that, since the 19th Century, the fear of strikes had been the main reason for limiting workers’ organising rights. Conversely, the gradual permission of organising – or “combining”, as it was previously known – was accompanied by recognising the right to strike.
A Comparative Analysis on Freedom of Association was published by the ILO in 1927 and at that time there was no formal agreement on the standards regarding freedom of association. The Analysis concluded that it was seemingly impossible to make a distinction between the right to strike and the right to organise. Limitations of the right to strike also translated into limitations of the right to organise. The right to limit both, in certain conditions or for specific categories of workers, was recognised. Yet the two rights were, and still are, indivisible.
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| Eddie Cottle |
The recently Chinese-built African Union (AU) headquarters, in Addis Ababa, is a bold symbol of China's rapidly changing role in Africa. China-African relations run as far deep as China being the biggest supporter of Africa’s anti-colonial struggle and the first to assist reconstruction efforts for the newly formed African States. The most famous example is the 1,800 kilometre Tanzania-Zambia Railway (Tazara) that was built in the 1970’s by some 50,000 Chinese engineers and workers, during which 64 of these workers died. China had provided a US $400m interest free loan to build the railway; even at a time when it was poorer than most African countries.
Chinese investment boosts African economic growth and infrastructure
China’s rapidly growing economy has resulted in the need to secure energy resources for stable development in the future. In this regard, Africa's importance to China's overseas investment agenda would still remain significant. In July 2012, President Hu Jintao pledged $20bn in credit for Africa for lucrative investment and infrastructure - critical and to the annoyance of the West is China’s no-strings attached loans. Two years previous to that, in 2010, China and Ghana signed an agreement for a 20 year loan of $13,1bn with an interest payment of only 2%. There is increasing fear over this arrangement that it might lead African countries to opt-out of International Monetary Fund -World Bank loans and other forms of dependence on Europe and the US.
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| 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:
- The employer has to pay compensation;
- An increasing number of ODs diagnosed lead workers to demand higher wages;
- 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.
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| Stéphanie Barral |
This article documents the labor issues in Indonesian plantations focusing on how changes in agrarian capitalism and state regulation have affected plantation workers. Plantation-based capitalism in Indonesia dates back to the 1860s, when European and American companies opened up the province of North Sumatra, mainly in order to produce tobacco, rubber and palm oil. This system continued long into the post-colonial period, alongside an expansion of the plantation system elsewhere from the 1960s. The 1980s saw a boom in large private estates, especially oil palm plantations, which also spread to other Indonesian islands where forested land was available. Big oil palm plantations now cover more than five million hectares. Each production unit consists of approximately 20 000 to 30 000 hectares; harvesting, the main technical operation, currently requires between two and four thousand permanent laborers per unit.
The first decades of the plantation system in North Sumatra
From 1863 into the 1930s, private concessions expanded to cover around 10,000 square kilometers. From a 250 km stretch of coast to 50 to 70 km inland, 265 companies occupied 700,000 acres of farmland. The planters had great power during the 19th century and in the first decade of the 20th century, due to the weak presence of government representatives, political pressure from the Netherlands and the colonial government to meet the economic interests of the plantations (notably through Coolie Ordinance Acts, starting from 1880).
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| Kees van der Waal |
Profits made by landowners through real estate development in the Cape Winelands have social costs for workers on this land despite measures to mitigate the consequences. A group of researchers in social anthropology, history, psychology and planning, based at the University of Stellenbosch or associated with the Solms-Delta farm project has come to this conclusion in a research project they have completed on social transformation in the Stellenbosch wine-farming area[1]. The researchers argue that the financial gains of converting agricultural land into lifestyle benefits were offset by social disruption and costly adaptations experienced by the working class.
The Cape Winelands region is well known for the economic value derived from producing export wines. It is a landscape of exquisite beauty, with towering mountain ranges protected by conservation management and valleys treasured as agricultural land. Heritage is a rich resource here, evidenced by the Cape Dutch architecture of Boschendal and a recorded history going back to the 1680s. The Cape Winelands area is presently strongly associated with elite tourism and a wealthy lifestyle, embedded in viticulture and deciduous fruit production. However, the obvious visual importance of landscape and heritage hide the mundane relations of production experienced by agricultural workers. Relations between workers and owners in the wine industry were extremely exploitative during the slave era and have remained paternalistic to this day. Farm labour unrest in the Western Cape in 2012 attests to the tension generated by extreme inequalities.
