Show Notes
Formalise It! Rights for All Workers
How can we expand rights to all garment workers, no matter where they work – in factories or their own homes, or as refugees or migrants far from their country of origin?
In this episode:
- How workers from Myanmar fought for the pay they were owed, from a factory in Mae Sot, Thailand (Brahm Press, MAP Foundation)
- Some of the challenges faced by migrant workers in Thailand, and what support is needed (Reiko Harima, Mekong Migration Network)
- The story of Hussain, a refugee garment worker in Turkey
- How home-based workers – mostly working in the garment sector – have got organised over several decades, and some of their wins (Janhavi Deva, HomeNet International; Zehra Khan, Home Based Women Workers Federation; Poonsap Tulaphan, Foundation for Labour and Employment Promotion)
- Building collaboration between home-based worker and other worker rights supporters (Marlese von Broembsen, WIEGO)
Please tell us what inspired you about this show, and share your feedback, comments and questions, by emailing: podcast@cleanclothes.org
Speakers:
- Brahm Press, MAP Foundation, Thailand
- Reiko Harima, Mekong Migration Network, Japan
- Hussain, Turkey
- Mariam Danishjo, Turkey
- Janhavi Deva, HomeNet International, India
- Zehra Khan, Home Based Women Workers Federation, Pakisan
- Poonsap Tulaphan, Foundation for Labour and Employment Promotion
- Marlese von Broembsen, Women in Informal Employment Globalising and Organising
Host: Febriana Firdaus (
febrianafirdaus.com)
Field Reporters: Petra Ivsic and Aca Vragolovic
Sound Engineering Support: Steve Adam (
www.spectrosonics.com.au)
Producer: Matthew Abud
Clean Clothes Podcast Team: Anne Dekker, Johnson Ching-Yin Yeung, Liz Parker, Tanne de Goei
Full Transcript
HOST:
Welcome to the show, in our second instalment of the Clean Clothes Podcast.
I’m Febriana Firdaus.
Today we’re talking about rights for all workers – meaning migrant workers. Refugee workers. Home-based workers.
Workers who might not have all the right documents, or who might be hidden from view.
Sometimes governments and employers, don’t see them as workers at all.
But they still demand their rights.
Mae Sot is in Thailand near the Myanmar border.
Refugees and migrant workers from Myanmar, have lived there for decades.
Now it has hundreds of garment factories that depend on migrant workers.
They’re often underpaid to an extreme degree.
The Kanlayanee factory there made clothes for famous brands: Starbucks, Disney, NBC Universal, and Tesco.
In 2019 the workers demanded their proper pay.
Brahm Press takes up the story.
And just a note: Kanlayanee is the name of the factory, and the name of the factory owner as well.
BRAHM:
My name’s Brahm Press, the Director of MAP Foundation. MAP Foundation started in 1996, and one of the things we do is we have a process of developing peer leaders, and other migrant worker leaders, identify people who are potential leaders, give them training, and eventually even have passed some through paralegal training. So these workers are able to organise other workers, so that they can collectively bargain with employers for improved working conditions.
In 2019, we invited a reporter from Reuters to Mae Sot to look at the issue of underpayment of wages to migrant workers in factories, and found workers from the Kanlayanee factory. Everyone was being underpaid and there were massive labour rights violations going on. And this developed into a story mainly because these factories were producing for American brands.
Soon after that, the factory closed once Starbucks withdrew its order. So out of the 50 workers around half decided they wanted to take their case for redress, they wanted to make claims for unpaid back wages, unpaid overtime including working on days off and holidays. This group as it turns out, had also passed through some paralegal trainings that MAP had provided so they were very active and very aware of their rights.
Kanlayanee wanted to negotiate with the workers, and so she started negotiations at around half a million Baht, and there were a couple of rounds of negotiation but it was unsatisfactory. So that was around the time that we decided that maybe we should look at the brands. MAP, CCC and WRC, Worker Rights Consortium, worked together along with our community partner CBO, known as Arakan Workers Organisation.
The factory owner actually put up pictures of all the workers who were part of the claims, and said do not hire these people, basically put out a blacklist and everywhere they went they found that they were not accepted even though they have obviously extensive experience in garment factories. A lot of them stayed together and they were sharing food which included foraging for like bamboo shoots and morning glory and other things that were just available in the jungle or on the roadside and then eat that with the rice. So it was difficult.
So finally in August or September the court ordered Kanlayanee to pay thirty per cent of the total, or around one point one million Baht. She was able to pay that pretty much right there and then, and so from that, we then turned around and asked the brands to simply pay a portion of the remainder divided between the four brands. Reuters was covering the situation and giving updates on who was paying and who was not, so again that media back-strategy was really helpful.
That left Universal as the last company not to pay any compensation. Three companies paid, including Starbucks. In order to pressure Universal, we decided to focus on their character the Minions from the Despicable Me cartoon, which I think was what was being produced there. And so there were videos and photos of workers dressed as Minions doing the same things to survive as the workers. It was rather cute and creative but at the same time very meaningful.
Later in February NBC approached us and Clean Clothes Campaign saying they would pay, kind of out of the blue. The workers are amazing because besides taking care of their debts and remitting back to their families, mostly they’ve also decided to use funds to help improve the workers’ centre by the CBO that I mentioned, Arakan Workers Organisation, and that centre will help receive similar complaints, and they also put together funds to purchase dry foods to assist other workers in the area who are out of work due to COVID. So that’s our story.
HOST:
That was Brahm Press from MAP Foundation.
The situation for migrant workers is often complicated.
It depends on labour law, but also migration laws. The details are different, in different countries.
Mae Sot is just one example. But it shows many common challenges.
Reiko Harima is Regional Coordinator at Mekong Migration Network, based in Japan.
Their work includes Mae Sot and Thailand.
REIKO:
A lot of policies in relation to labour rights and migration have to a certain extent improved, or have been clarified. So for example migrant workers in garment industry are protected for their labour rights, they are entitled to minimum wage protection, they’re entitled to overtime arrangement, and they’re entitled to social security system enrolment, just as example. But in reality if the migrant workers complain when they’re not receiving minimum wage, they would be, they would lose jobs, they would be blacklisted from the industry, they would not be able to find any other job, and so on. So this lack of enforcement of existing legislation, this has not been improved very much for the past decades.
One of the unfortunately common challenge for migrant women garment factory workers, is the lack of maternity protection. Again it’s the issue of lack of enforcement of law, because in Thailand even if migrant women get pregnant they’re entitled to maternity protection, they shouldn’t be losing a job because of they’re getting pregnant, they should be entitled to paid maternity leave, but in reality, most of the migrant women we have talked to are even thankful if they could keep jobs unpaid. Why are they not enforcing it, I think that comes from several reasons. One is that there is less pressure, especially in case of migrant women, because as you know in Thailand, migrant workers are not allowed to start the trade union of their own. They’re allowed to join but they cannot start their own trade union. In border areas like Mae Sot where all the workers are migrant workers, how do you start the union, how do you join the union because there are no local workers there who can start the union. So without this kind of collective pressure the government, again, or employers, have less pressure to actually implement the law.
Despite the fact that migrant workers are not allowed to form a trade union there have been a number of actually cases where migrant workers in garment factories did come together and use their collective bargaining power or jointly filed a case, launched a complaint, against their employer through the labour office. And there have been actually several landmark victory cases where the court declared that the employers must pay the unpaid wages to these workers. But in reality, employers did not pay. Nothing changed. And all this workers unfortunately lost the jobs and they could not find any other job in the area or in the same industry because of blacklist. What we probably need to probably strengthen the support, is what happens to workers after they actually win the cases. Because quite often we celebrate the victory but not necessarily being able to follow up thoroughly over the threats and really difficult conditions that these workers face after they win the cases.
HOST:
Reiko Harima from Mekong Migration Network.
Migrants and refugees work in the garment industry in many parts of the world –
In Turkey their role is enormous.
As well as Syrian refugees, others from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and former Soviet Union states can all be found, in garment factories.
Hussain is a twenty-five year old refugee worker there.
He tells his story here, with interpretation by Mariam Danisjo.
HUSSAIN:
[Original in Dari]
MARIAM:
I just arrived, and I’m starting my work.
That’s Hussain. He’s lived in Istanbul, Turkey for the past year. I first met Hussain when I was working for a refugee organization here -- He’s from Afghanistan, like me. I’m interpreting for him here. My name’s Mariam.
HUSSAIN:
[Original in Dari]
MARIAM:
He tells me that he’s from the city of Bamyan.
HUSSAIN:
[Original in Dari]
MARIAM:
It’s a very peaceful place. I can say it’s the safest city in Afghanistan. I spent my whole life in Bamyan. Those are my best memories. Since then, I’ve faced so many problems.
HUSSAIN:
[Original in Dari]
MARIAM:
My parents passed away. I joined the military. The government sent me to Logar Province. // But visiting my family was dangerous, because the Taliban had informants along the way. Many of my friends were found this way and beheaded by the Taliban. That’s why my family asked me to leave the country. It was difficult for me to leave. I was a little bit young. I wasn’t ready. But I had to accept.
HUSSAIN:
[Original in Dari]
MARIAM:
From Kabul, I got a passport with a visa for Iran. From Iran I walked to the border. It took us five or six days. I was scared. If the Iranian police saw, they would shoot. We would run at night. During the day, we would hide in old houses, in the mountains.. I hardly dared to hope we would reach Turkey alive
HUSSAIN
[Original in Dari]
MARIAM:
But when I arrived in Ankara, I lost my hope. I was expecting UNHCR – the United Nations Refugee Agency – to help me get registered as a refugee. Or at least find a good job. But the Turkish government and UNHCR never helped us. The first place where I started working, I wasn’t a garment worker. I didn’t have any experience sewing clothes. So at first, I worked as a cleaner. But it wasn’t enough. I was sending money to my family as well. We had a lunch break between 1 and 2 o’clock. That’s when I tried to learn how to use the machines. I’d ask others to teach me. I learned how to work the machine in a month.
HUSSAIN:
[Original in Dari]
MARIAM:
My shift starts at 8:30. Every two or three weeks, the designs are different. Right now we’re sewing clothes for five or six year old boys. The clothes are being sent to Germany. I don’t know the name of the brand. We work until 7 o’clock in the evening. If I mess up the clothes, my boss shouts at me. I work hard, I’m not paid well. And I still get yelled at. I come home very tired. I’m not working legally, so I don’t have sick days.
Hussain tells me how much he makes. He says he is paid 12 Turkish lira an hour -- Which makes 1 euro, 33 cents. In a month he makes 2 thousand, 500 Turkish lira … That’s only 277 euros. It is a little bit more than half of minimum wage in Turkey.
HUSSAIN:
[Original in Dari]
MARIAM:
I spend a thousand liras a month on rent and groceries. There are five of us in a three room flat. On the weekends, before the coronavirus lockdowns, I used to go outside. Now, on Saturdays and Sundays, I read books. Inspiring books, on how to develop myself. How to have a better life. When I’m older, I’m planning to open my own business. I’m learning how to build websites, so I can help people set up an online business. I want to make my own future.
HOST:
That’s Hussain. This piece was produced by Durrie Bouscaren.
Around two million people work without legal status in Turkey – mostly refugees or migrants.
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You don’t have to be a migrant or a refugee to face extra exploitation at work.
It can find you right in your own home.
Home-based work has been described as ‘invisible labour’.
But home-based workers across the world have been getting organised.
Matthew Abud has this report.
REPORTER:
Last February saw the launch of HomeNet International
That’s a new global network of home-based worker organisations.
Janhavi Dave is its international coordinator, based in Delhi.
She’s been part of India’s home-based worker movement / for several years now.
JANHAVI:
You know whenever I meet home-based workers especially in garment sector, I always ask them why do they work as home-based workers. And you know what we’ve found is generally three key reasons which they provide. One is the unfair burden of care work, and this is quite big. You know they have to take care of their children, families, cooking, cleaning, and many developing countries they spend a lot of time fetching water. So there is no other option for them to do any other form of remunerative work apart from home-based work. The second reason is also lack of mobility. They don’t have affordable and safe you know or accessible transportation systems to go for example to factories. Or the other part is also, you know due to the patriarchal system women are not allowed to go to the factories or outside their own homes and work. The third key reason you know why they work from home is that there is no other form of work, so this is the only option that they have.
Home based workers as a category of labour is not recognised. Not recognised by and I feel mostly by the primary employer which are the brands. Once they’re not recognised, you know there’s this entire space where everybody has the capacity to exploit them. You know if they’re recognised at the top, and say they have a policy for home-based workers a lot of exploitation can be reduced.
REPORTER:
HomeNet International might be new.
But in India – as well as elsewhere – organising home-based workers has a long history.
JANHAVI:
It started somewhere in the 1970s and it was started by Self-Employed Women’s Association, and with the garment workers.. The first time when they went for one of the registrations, with the Labour Department, they asked them what is the category of worker, and because you know they had to come up with something quickly, one of the leaders said home-based workers. From 1970s you know, of course SEWA was organising a lot of women home-based workers in India, they also were closely working with ILO, and they got in touch with other organisations in Europe, and Asia, and realised that they were not the only ones organising home based workers, there were many other organisations across the world.
That is the time when they received support and solidarity from three global unions, as far as I remember. One is IUF, second is FNV, and the third is ITGLWF. Now this comes to the early 90s, and when all of them got together and pushed for ILO Convention 177…
REPORTER:
C-177 is the ILO Convention on Home Work
JANHAVI:
…ILO Convention 177, in 1996 this Convention was adopted. You can imagine, you know, there are these big companies, they don’t want a Convention for home workers. The brands also, these big companies went back to their countries and ensured it was never adopted.
REPORTER:
Only ten countries have ratified Convention 177 so far, with the last being the Netherlands in 2012.
But organising home-based workers hasn’t stopped. The path this follows, is different in each country.
In Pakistan for example, home based work is an enormous part of the labour force – but just how big, nobody knows.
Zehra Khan says the best estimate is that the country has around twelve million home-based workers, with eighty percent women.
She’s the General Secretary of the Home Based Women Workers Federation – the first union for these workers.
ZEHRA:
So there’s no fixed wage for them, working in a very low wage, having health issues, not considered part of the economy. Previously this issue was raised on the basis of gender, and most civil society organisations saw it as an issue of the poor women. But we took home based worker issue purely as a working class issue, not just a gender issue, and we said home based workers was being exploited as both a women and the labour. So home based workers get work in their home and it is thinking in the society that the woman was getting the job by staying at home so she don’t have any problem.
REPORTER:
Zehra and others started to organise home-based workers over ten years ago – the union was first registered in 2009.
Because workers are in their own homes, this organising perhaps looks a little more like community development, rather than conventional industrial union work.
ZEHRA:
We started meeting and study circles with these women workers, and made these women realise that they are working and have some rights. This was a difficult stage.
So we formed union at provincial level and then at federal level, and it was first ever trade union of home based workers in Pakistan and led by all the women from the working class and were themselves engaged with the home-based sector. Majority of these home based workers were not literate one but consciously they were far ahead.
REPORTER:
They had a union, but home-based workers were still not recognised in the law – so changing this, became the next objective.
The Federation first targeted the government in the province of Sindh.
ZEHRA:
We have participated in draft of policy and even in act as well. And along with this we were building pressure by rallies and demonstrations, and finally by May 2018, the Act of Home Based Workers was passed in provincial assembly. So after passing this law in 2018, the whole workers in Sindh, the first thing is they become legally recognised as worker in Pakistan. The main thing is that now their wages have been fixed, they will be calculated as the minimum wage or you can say the living wage.
And the more important thing is that any issue with the employer, middle man or their contractor, they can now sue them in the arbitrary committee. Any cases, in terms of wages, in terms of any harassment, in terms of anything from their contractor or from their employer, they can go to sue the employer.
REPORTER:
Meantime, in Southeast Asia, Thailand has around three point seven million home based workers. That’s out of around twenty million informal workers in total.
The mobilisation and campaigning story there, is a little different.
Poonsap Tulaphan is Director of the Foundation for Labour and Employment Promotion.
POONSAP
Since 2000, we try to mobilise and organise home based workers. We need to develop the understanding, because normally the home based worker they not consider themselves as a worker. Most of them are women so they consider themselves as a house wife, not a worker. We have to draw the supply chain, that the finished product will go back to the factories and factory export to other country, and they also support the economic growth of the country. That is how we explain to our members
REPORTER:
Thailand didn’t have a formal organisation for home-based workers until 2013 – that’s HomeNet Thailand. This is an NGO rather than a trade union.
But even before then, after ten years of organising by Poonsap and many others, the country passed the HomeWorker Protection Act in 2011.
POONSAP:
The main message in the bill is that it’s like, if the worker produce the same product as the factory, they should get the same income, or the same piece rate the factory pay for them. And at the same time there is no law on occupational health and safety. So under the homeworker protection act it state that the employer shouldn’t sub-contract the work that are not safe, and if the sub-contract they should educate or training in terms of occupational health and safety, and they have to provide the PPE, the personal protection equipment.
REPORTER:
Poonsap says the HomeWorker Protection Act still hasn’t had enough impact on the ground.
It took the government three years to even set up the HomeWorkers Committee, as required by the law – so more work is needed.
But that’s not the only legislative advance they achieved.
Thailand’s social security scheme was set up in the 1990s, and relies on contributions from workers, employers, and government.
For a long time, home-based workers and other informal workers, were supposed to pay for all three – which was impossible.
POONSAP:
Informal worker we also contribute for the economic growth of the country, so the government have to take responsible on this. So we advocate and we success in 2011, that the government will co-pay. But the government co-pay only from their side, only about one part of the contribution fee. So if you pay one hundred baht for the contribution fee, the government will co-pay thirty baht and we have to pay seventy baht.
REPORTER:
In South and Southeast Asia, home-based workers have been getting organised.
Regional networks were also established.
Here’s Janhavi again.
JANHAVI:
So in 1998 HomeNet South East Asia was formed, and in 2000 HomeNet South Asia was formed. Over the years these organisations strengthened in numbers, but in the early 2010, there was a need felt to actually go beyond Asia and start organising home based workers. This is when WIEGO came into support…
REPORTER:
WIEGO is an NGO – the name stands for Women in Informal Employment, Globalizing and Organizing
JANHAVI
…WIEGO came into support, they did a lot of mapping work, supported local organisations, and in 2013 we had HomeNet Eastern Europe and Central Asia, and now a lot of organising efforts are happening in Africa and in Latin America.
REPORTER:
After many decades of organising, and building regional networks, it was time for a global network – and that’s HomeNet International.
JANHAVI:
And WIEGO coordinated this effort as a central organisation. And we were hoping to have a first congress, launch congress in the year 2020. We couldn’t have it because of the pandemic, but very recently in February we had the launch congress of course virtually, but now there exists a global network of home-based workers.
HomeNet International currently has thirty six affiliates, and collectively we represent over six hundred thousand home-based workers from over eighteen countries. And a first step is actually going to be solidarity building between all our affiliates. While everybody’s a home-based worker they’re also very different, because you know they work in very different political climates, economic situations, they come from different class, ethnicity, and we have a big, big task of building solidarity between all our affiliates. So that’s going to be our first step.
And the third is, which is going to be big for us, is building partnerships with other trade unions, which is ITUCs and SNVs and IUF. And when we say these trade unions, we also want to build partnerships with other organisations which can support the cause of home-based workers, the campaign organisations, Clean Clothes Campaign, Asia Floor Wage Alliance, and ETI. So we’re on the lookout what are the other global partnerships that we can build for our network.
HOST:
All workers deserve to have their rights defended.
That means greater collaboration, across different worker rights organisations.
Marlese von Broembsen, is Law Programme Director at WIEGO – Women in Informal Employment, Globalising and Organising.
MARLESE:
It’s not helpful to from a solidarity perspective and from a political perspective to distinguish between workers inside the factory and workers outside the factory. I mean we know for example from an ILO study done in 2017 that approximately fifty per cent of these factories are taking orders below cost, and so they have to seek mechanisms to download costs and risks onto workers. So typically the workers inside the factory, the pressure on them is unpaid overtime. But the other way of doing that is to outsource further down. They download a range of production costs. So that’s the cost of space, it’s the cost of electricity, it’s the cost of equipment, the sewing machine, the needles. And they can pay them so much less. It’s totally unregulated and therefore you know factories can pay nothing. I think it’s endemic in the model and unless the procurement terms change it’s here to stay.
When we’ve approached brands, we being WIEGO but also HomeNet Southeast Asia and HomeNet Southasia, when they’ve approached the brands to say can we track, we know there are home workers in your supply chains, can we trace the supply chain. Sometimes the brands have been quite keen and when we ask them well what would you do, well they’ll ban homework then. And I think that’s a particular concern for us as we enter this period of the EU mandatory due diligence, because unless we explicitly say it covers the entire chain, and unless we explicitly say all workers should be covered and homeworkers are legitimate workers, the concern for us is that brands will simply say we don’t authorise home work. And then it goes further underground and will have further implications for, particularly for wages.
So I think that the point that I’m wanting to make is that you know, do we want to be having first class, second class, third class, some are protected, some are not, some are, only formal ones are protected, and in a sense we really should be transcending the sort of labour law categories of employment and what should be protected and that in fact all workers, whether they’re formal or informal, standard, non-standard, should be entitled to labour rights.
HOST:
That’s Marlese von Broembson, and that’s the end of our show.
We have three more shows to go in this series.
Like always – we want your feedback!
Matthew Abud produced this episode, with Anne Dekker, and the Clean Clothes Podcast team.
Liz Parker, Tanne de Goei, and Johnson Chin-Yin Yeung.
Sound engineering support is by Steve Adam
I’m Febriana Firdaus.