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| Thierry Schaffauser |
While Amnesty International adopted a policy favouring full decriminalisation of sex work earlier this year, the labour movement remains divided: should it see sex work as violence against women, to be abolished (Bindel 2003), or as a legitimate occupation needing to be unionised (Hardy 2010)? Sex workers have organised for their rights since at least the 1970s, even forming or joining trade unions in some cases, but the labour movement tends to ignore these efforts.
Sex workers do matter!
The debate around decriminalising sex work often focuses on questions such as whether or not we like the job, if we have been forced to engage in it, or if we have been raped as children. These questions are never asked about other workers before defending their rights. As sex workers, we accept that work is, most of the time, not a choice but an economic constraint, and we are able to distinguish between slavery, forced labour, and the consented exploitation of our work.
The conflation of sex work with trafficking conceals much about the reality of sex work. For instance, peep shows, bars, or massage parlours have to hide the fact that sex work happens. As a result, neither condoms nor information about safe sex are available in those workplaces. In some clubs, employers refuse to pay for heating while workers are almost naked. In others, sex workers now have to pay fees to enter when they used to be paid for their presence. Legal constraints on sex work allow websites and newspapers to censor our adverts as they please, making us pay again for new ones.
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| 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.
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| Sharit Bhowmik |
The issue of minimum wages in India has long been discussed but never resolved. It crops up during labour movements but dies out soon after. There was a nation-wide strike on 20 and 21 February 2013 (Bhowmik, 2013), and one of the ten demands submitted by the trade unions was to fix a national floor wage of Rs10 000 a month (roughly US$155). This is higher than the usual wage in agriculture; plantations and informal employment, but there was no real explanation for why this figure was chosen. Moreover, the trade unions did not take it up as a campaign issue after the strike.
When the new government led by BJP (Indian People’s Party) was voted into power in May 2014, it adopted a more aggressive attitude to labour, stressing the old World Bank stand that protective legislation would decrease employment. The government started to modify existing labour laws to be more employer friendly (Bhowmik, 2015).
Trade unions in the country then formed an alliance to oppose these anti-labour policies. The BMS (Bharatiya Mazdur Sangha, Indian Workers’ Union), which is the largest trade union federation with around 10 million members, was initially part of this alliance. BMS is closely affiliated with the government through a common mentor, the RSS (Rashtriya Swamsevak Sangh, National Volunteers Union), which is a Hindu fundamentalist body.
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| Maarten van Klaveren |
National and international debates concerning the establishment of a Statutory Minimum Wage (SMW) have hitherto tended to polarise around what we might term the ‘social justice’ arguments for a wage floor to tackle poverty level wages on one hand, and on the other, the ‘economic imperative’ to ensure a SMW does not depress demand in certain labour markets. Lately, as low or declining rates of economic growth have gripped many developed and developing nations, the negative macro-economic effects of low pay have begun to receive long overdue attention. As a result, the need to address low pay has increasingly been articulated as a labour market recalibration that combines both social justice and economic imperatives. Crudely speaking, where levels of household debt are already unsustainably high, possibly the quickest way to increase consumer demand is through wage growth. Moreover, improving life at the bottom of the national wage distribution has further attractions, not least for politicians under pressure to reduce income inequality. This fusion of social and economic interests has rejuvenated the interest of governmental policy makers in Europe in the setting of national minimum wages and, in some cases, has even prompted them to consider ‘living wages’ higher than minimum wages as a means of arresting increases in income inequality.
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| ElÃsio Estanque |
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| Hermes Augusto Costa |
The elections on 4 October 2015 ushered in a changed parliamentary scenario which seems to herald a major political shift. After four years of austerity, which have affected every aspect of Portuguese life but particularly labour, the election outcome proved contradictory right from the start. The victory of the right-wing alliance between the Social Democratic Party, the PSD, and the Social Democratic Centre, the CDS, opened up the possibility for an alliance of the left.
The election results
There was a high rate of abstention – 44.14 % - from the parliamentary elections. The PSD-CDS coalition, which had been in government since 2011, received the most votes (36.86 % of the votes), followed by the Socialist Party (32.31 %), the Left Bloc (10.19 %) and the Portuguese Communist Party (8.25 %). In our view, this electoral outcome was not because the Portuguese people like austerity. Rather, the following factors must be considered:
