Workers' rights hit by markets, labor bodies say

Workers' rights hit by markets, labor bodies say

GENEVA (Reuter): The world's largest labor group said
yesterday workers' rights were under fierce assault around the
world as employers drive to exploit free markets and economic
globalization to push up profits.

Although a report from the International Confederation of Free
Trade Unions (ICFTU) pointed to China, Colombia and Indonesia as
among the worst offenders, it also asserted that abuse was
frequent in the United States.

And the annual survey, issued by the Brussels-based ICFTU at
the conference of the United Nations' International Labor
Organization (ILO), said women in particular were suffering from
an assault on unions by governments and big companies.

"Governments' thirst for investment is compounded by the
insatiable appetite of employers for new markets and a
'competitive' labor force, by which they mean cheap and endlessly
exploitable," an introduction to the report said.

"This combination of governments seeking to shed their powers
of intervention in the economy, and employers and the business
world seeking to increase theirs, is one of the root causes of
anti-union repression," wrote ICFTU General Secretary Bill
Jordan, a former British union leader.

"As governments dismantle their public services and
multinational companies look for the cheapest workers, women are
increasingly in the front line of anti-union repression," the
ICFTU said.

The strictures were identical to those in a similar report
issued on Wednesday by the smaller, but also Brussels-based World
Confederation of Labor (WCL), and were echoed in a major U.N.
survey on Thursday.

Under globalization -- trade liberalization, free investment
flows and integration of world financial markets -- the market
was the only regulator and "everything is sacrificed to the cause
of competitiveness" to maximize profits, the WCL said.

This was widening the gap between rich and poor in North and
South, while workers were being forced to abandon rights they had
won to social protection and decent working conditions.

And in its annual report issued on Thursday, the UN's
Development Program (UNDP) also drew a stark picture of poor
countries -- and poor people in rich countries -- dropping deeper
into poverty under globalization.

The report by the ICFTU, which links 124 million workers in
195 organization across 137 countries, said the onslaught on
labor rights took institutional as well as violent forms.

Women especially suffered, it said, because under global
market reforms public sector enterprises, where many employees
are female, were being decimated "and because sweatshops and
export processing zones are being set up in countries where
multinational companies can find cheap, non-unionized workers."

Hundreds of trade unionists, mainly in Latin America, "die
fighting for union rights," it said. At least 264 were murdered
last year, including 98 in Colombia and 24 in Brazil.

"The key statistical tool for assessing the state of
industrial relations in Latin America is still the body count,"
the report declared.

China, it said, "has one of the worst records of trade union
repression," keeping its workers "on a tight rein, harassing and
persecuting independent trade unionists with the blessing of the
(official) All-China Federation of Trade Unions."

Elsewhere in Asia, it said, many governments still viewed
trade unions "as an alien institution bent on frustrating
economic progress". Myanmar, Vietnam and North Korea simply
placed officials in control of "fake unions."

In the United States, the report declared, "the right to
strike and the right of workers to organize trade unions are not
adequately protected in the labor legislation.

"The law is unable to protect workers when the employer is
determined to destroy or prevent trade union representation... At
least one in 10 union supporters campaigning to form a union is
illegally fired by the employer."