Burmese Days: Corporate bottom-feeders like Walmart licking their chops over Myanmar and all those cheap workers

 

(Writer George Orwell's passport picture when he was in Burma in the 1920s)

Walmart publicly preached “Buy America” three decades ago, and the Arkansas-based retail giant imported less than 6 percent of the products it sold in the United States. By 2006 four-fifths of its suppliers were based in China.

Then China’s workers began protesting their conditions and eventually got the attention of the Communist Party leadership in Beijing, which feared rising worker militancy in the workers’ paradise. Over the past 10 years, blue-collar workers’ wages have risen some 400 percent.

So like other U.S.-based corporate bottom-feeders, Walmart looked beyond China for suppliers that could meet Walmart’s stringent cost demands through low wages and poor working conditions. They found their new partners in Bangladesh, home of the world’s lowest wages. The cost of those minimal conditions became clear last November with the Tazreen garment factory fire near Dhaka that killed 112 workers and again, even more so, in the Rana Plaza factory collapse in April that killed 1,129 workers.

A result of those tragedies has been a global spotlight on the U.S. companies fed low-priced products by suppliers in Bangladesh that could care less about safety conditions or workers’ livelihood. Even as major European companies responded by agreeing to a new, legally binding accord requiring independent inspections of supplier factories, Walmart, J.C. Penney, Sear’s, Macy’s, Target, Gap, and other U.S. firms resisted. American greed countenances little or nothing that stands in the way of its insatiable appetite. And neither do its defenders in Washington.

Expect Walmart and Co. to be looking even farther beyond China and beyond Bangladesh now in the “race to the bottom.” Cambodia has already been a beneficiary, but now workers are protesting there, too, and wages are rising. The New York Times recently reported that industrial wages in Cambodia have grown 65 percent in the last five years.

“The race to the bottom has hurt workers all over the world,” Hong Kong’s top independent labor leader and Labour Party chair Lee Cheuk-yan told me during an interview in Hong Kong in June. “The ability of capital of moving to the cheapest labor is very efficient from their point of view, but from our point of view it is a race to the bottom. Even Chinese labor now is seen as too expensive, and they are moving to Bangladesh, Cambodia. Myanmar will be next. When will it end? The ability of capital to move around so easily is hurting workers everywhere.”

Myanmar, also known as Burma, indeed will be next. With military rule in that long-tortured country now allowing greater democracy and outside investment to aide its disastrous economy, the corporate bottom-feeders are licking their chops. "Foreign governments and multinationals have converged on a country that occupies a unique geostrategic position between the new Asian superpowers of India to the west and China to the east," said The Economist in a special report in May. "Private companies are jostling to capture a share of an almost virginal consumer market of some 60 (million) people" - and, let us not forget, cheap, really cheap, workers.

Workers at the Japanese-owned Famoso garment factory in Yangon earn the equivalent of $100 a month, "a quarter of the going rate in China," The Economist reports. "The mix of low wages, a plentiful supply of labour and access to American and European markets should mean that many more Famosos will be set up in Myanmar."

Walmart probably doesn’t yet have an image problem in Yangon (Myanmar’s capital, once known as Rangoon). Not like it does here in the United States.

Back in May the retailer agreed to pay $82 million in fines after admitting guilt in the improper dumping of hazardous wastes in Missouri and California.  Walmart workers and warehouse workers for Walmart suppliers have staged walkouts and strikes in recent months to protest the litany of worker abuses that have made Sam Walton’s corporate creation infamous.

Adding insult to injury, the District of Columbia Council in Washington passed a “living wage” bill that would require Walmart to pay its employees a minimum of $12.50 an hour if the retailer opens the six stores it has planned there. Walmart was aghast, of course.

Can you blame the city’s leaders? Remember this multi-billion-dollar company has been so chintzy with its workers that 46 percent of their children had no health insurance or were dependent on Medicaid in 2006. A congressional report at the time showed that each Walmart store generated an average $420,750 in Medicaid, Food Stamps, and public housing costs to taxpayers.

Don’t know whether members of the Walton family--or other corporate leaders--are reading George Orwell’s Burmese Days (a book about Britain's colonial rule of that country) to prepare for their next adventure,  but folks in Yangon better get ready. The corporate colonialists and imperialists are planning a major comeback.

Students find their cause in the UAW for Nissan's Mississippi workers

(Hayat Mohamed)

CANTON, Miss. – Hayat Mohamed has a cause.

“We are different from other generations,” says the 19-year-old English major at nearby Tougaloo College. “We have such an individualistic ideal, how we see things. We have to get away from that and see other people’s problems.  … If we took our eyes off that narrow path and look at the person next to us, we could unify.”

Her cause? Doing everything she can to get the 5,000-plus workers at the Nissan plant in Canton membership cards with the United Auto Workers. “To be able to voice their opinions and their needs without being worried they are going to get fired. … (to) have the grounds to talk to someone about safety issues, health care benefits, temp workers, what happens to them if they get injured.”

I’m sitting across the table from Mohamed and fellow Tougaloo student Kimar Cain at the UAW office on Nissan Parkway, and I’m remembering my student days back in the ‘60s, protesting for civil rights and against the Vietnam War. Young people need a cause. They’ve got the energy, the courage, the idealism that tells them they can make a difference.

(To the right is Kimar Cain)

And they can.

Young people are a key reason things are happening on the UAW-Nissan front. The call from workers and community supporters for a fair union election at the Canton plant is getting louder.

The 150-plus members of the Mississippi Student Justice Alliance from Tougaloo and Jackson State University in Jackson, joined by supporters from other colleges in Georgia, Florida and Tennessee, are taking the issue into neighborhoods, car dealerships, auto shows, on-campus rallies, the Internet and YouTube.

They are part of a larger campaign that has seen Nissan-Canton workers speak to audiences in Brazil, Japan and South Africa as well as in U.S. cities such as Washington, D.C., Atlanta and Detroit. Brazilian labor leaders and students have come to Canton to show their support and study what veteran observers see as potentially the most important labor campaign in decades.

“We have a lot of talent on this team,” says Cain, a 23-year-old senior at Tougaloo majoring in history and African-American Studies. “From writers to videographers to photographers. Everything visual and that can be heard, we have those things, and we have the ability to get it out, and get it out quickly and let it be seen so people can really dig into what we are saying, and they’re like … `How can I get involved?’ ”

I can’t help but reminisce. What was missing back in my day was a real alliance with working-class people. Students were out there protesting in the 1960s, but few blue-collar workers joined them. Most were even hostile.

(Jeffrey Moore)

This cause is dramatically different. Students are on the frontlines side-by-side with workers, and the workers appreciate it. “I am very proud” of the students, says Jeffrey Moore, 35, an 11-year veteran Nissan employee. “They are doing something out of their time. You’ll never get a lot of play on that out of the media. They are doing a lot of hard work for us, trying to make this thing go down.”

They’re getting Nissan’s attention, too.

After a history of mixed relations with local political leaders who’ve been prohibited from annexing the plant and who’ve had little input into its expansion plans, Nissan’s bosses “all of a sudden are pillars of the community,” Moore says.

In recent months, Nissan announced a $500,000 education grant to Canton schools and a $100,000 gift to the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Institute, hosted a 10-year anniversary free festival featuring the R&B group Kool & the Gang, promised a pay raise to workers (after a seven-year hiatus since the last pay raise), and a new program to help temporary workers transition into fulltime workers.

Nissan’s $100,000 gift to the Evers Institute is a key reason, sources believe, why Hollywood celebrity Danny Glover, a vocal and active supporter of unionization at the Canton plant, did not speak at the annual Medgar Evers dinner last month even though he had been a speaker in the past and was expected to speak again this year.

(To the right is Anthony Wayne Walker)

“The barbarians are at the gates,” says Anthony Wayne Walker, 39, a metal finisher at Nissan’s Canton plant and union supporter. “You got to give them something to eat. It is one thing the corporation doesn’t like. It is bad publicity. That equates to sales, to dollar signs, so you counteract everything the union is doing. Throw ‘em a bone, and it looks good on TV. All of a sudden you come out with a checkbook.”

Of course, leading the applause for Nissan are Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant and the state’s other top pols, despite a recent report showing the state’s record $1.3 billion investment in Nissan has failed to reap the promised rewards and resulted in a $290,000 subsidy for each Nissan-Canton job.

Nissan worker Walker says he knows why, and a question to Gov. Bryant would explain it to the rest of us: “Who are you playing golf with?”

Southerners in N.C., Miss., La., and Georgia are in the streets, standing up to the right-wing corporate agenda

The lingering image of the happy-go-lucky Southerner, content with his lot, happy to get a pat on the head from the local patriarch, is being shaken to its core. Across the U.S. South, workers, activists and regular citizens are standing up to GOP right-wingers, the Koch Brothers and next-of-kin plutocrats like Art Pope, and privatizing, corporate-driven organizations like ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council).

Let’s take a look:

North Carolina:

The “Moral Monday” protests in North Carolina against the draconian, anti-poor and anti-worker actions of the GOP-controlled General Assembly and Republican governor have led to hundreds of arrests but also a growing national awareness of the right-wing coup d’etat in a state that historian V.O. Key called a “progressive plutocracy” back in 1949 in his classic Southern Politics.

In their 1976 political history of the South, The Transformation of Southern Politics, authors Jack Bass and Walter De Vries updated Key with a reality check on what they called the “progressive myth” of North Carolina. Yes, this is the state that gave us comparatively progressive pols like Terry Sanford, but it also gave us Jesse Helms, the original “Senator No” whose Neanderthal-like progeny now fill the halls of Congress and legislatures across the region.

Nevertheless, this has been a state looked to as a beacon of hope by progressives in the deeper South. That is until GOP leaders took over and began their assault on unemployment benefits, collective bargaining, voter rights, Medicaid and education.  

Progressive North Carolinians didn’t take it lying down. They took to the streets with their “Moral Monday” protests, weathering attacks and name-calling from the right, and bringing a public spotlight to what is happening.

On the frontlines covering the protests and the issues behind them, of course, are my friends at the North Carolina-based Institute for Southern Studies in their Web magazine, Facing South (http://www.southernstudies.org).

  

Mississippi and Louisiana

Voters in Jackson, Miss., last month elected a mayor who may be the most radical and left-wing elected politician in the South: Chokwe Lumumba, an admirer of Malcolm X and slain Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba, a founder of the Republic of New Afrika and once a defense attorney for rapper Tupac Shakur.

Chokwe Lumumba, who’d previously served on the city council, overcame a veteran incumbent and a Republican-backed African-American businessman to take leadership of Mississippi’s capital and largest city. In a city that’s 80 percent African-American and largely Democrat, Lumumba oversees a comparatively forward-thinking island in what seems to be a Republican-dominated sea, and, believe me, his election sent shock waves across that body of water.  However, his election may also point to a changing Mississippi where black and brown minorities, women, and young people are showing signs of increasing restlessness with the old ways.

Lumumba won election as a Democrat but he’s indicated no strong allegiance to the Democratic Party. That allegiance, instead, reaches beyond a two-party system where both parties often seem indistinguishable to the actual people themselves.  Sounds pretty radical, doesn’t it?

Meanwhile, members of Pipeliners Local 798 are continuing their protest of the Kinder Morgan company’s decision to award the non-union Loutex company a contract to build a pipeline stretching across south Mississippi into Louisiana.

The protest, reported in Labor South back in April, has involved hundreds of workers, and the center of it has now shifted from Columbia, Miss., to the new major warehouse location in Bogalusa, La., says Local 798 member Brian Anderson. “They’re still walking the picket line,” he says.

Georgia

Workers are definitely standing up their bosses in Georgia. In Savannah, port truck drivers, civil rights activists, faith advocates, and residents have joined a coalition that calls itself “Stand Up for Savannah” to protest what they consider unjust conditions at the Port of Savannah. A forum sponsored by Georgia Local 728 of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters several weeks ago attracted some 300 truckers who came and told their stories.

In Atlanta, both union leaders and UPS Freight got a wake-up call last month when the rank-and-file membership of the Teamsters’ union rejected a five-year contract proposal that the leadership and management had both approved. It was a 4,244-to-1,897 vote that left little doubt it was time to go back to the drawing board. The current contract expires July 31.

The vote also was indicative of divisions within the Teamsters’ union, where General President James P. Hoffa and the dissident Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) are often at odds.

Among the issues are the workers’ health care plan, pensions, and other benefits, and subcontracting by the company.

COMING SOON: A look at Walmart and its troubles in D.C., California, Missouri, and Bangladesh. Minimum wage versus living wage disputes, the illegal dumping of hazardous wastes, and the horrible conditions in subcontractors’ factories that have contributed to hundreds of deaths—these are among the issues haunting the Arkansas giant, and they don’t seem to be going away any time soon.

Hong Kong: Communists & capitalists versus workers in a neo-liberal city without collective bargaining laws

 

(Modern-day Hong Kong at night)

(This is my latest installment from my recent trip to China. Coming soon: a roundup of action closer to home, including the Moral Monday protests in North Carolina and UPS-Teamsters dispute)

HONG KONG – Chinese junks no longer dot Victoria Harbour. A foot-powered rickshaw is even harder to find. The stately colonial-era buildings at the heart of the old city are now dwarfed by skyscrapers.

Still, this is the same Hong Kong I visited as a young soldier on R&R from Vietnam four decades ago. Busy Nathan Road still teems with orange-robed Buddhist monks and bearded Sikhs, businessmen, women in mini-skirts and high heels, Indian hawkers peddling suits and watches, construction workers, and Westerners like me.

A frenetic energy is everywhere, and not only because of whistleblowing fugitive  Edward Snowden, holed up in some hotel here during my stay after exposing U.S. cyber-surveillance of practically everyone in the world, including U.S. citizens.

Seven million people are crowded into this tiny corner at the southeastern tip of China. It was a British colony the last time I was here. It’s theoretically part of Communist China now, but Mao ZeDong would roll over in his grave if he knew what the People’s Republic tolerates these days. No little Red Books in Hong Kong. No Red Guards shouting the Chairman’s famous dictum: “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun!”

Nope, this remains the citadel of capitalism that Imperial Britain created after extracting it from Imperial China in the aftermath of the Opium Wars. Of course, there’s an edge, an unanswerable question: Just how long and to what extent will Beijing allow autonomy? After all, Mao’s portrait still looms over Tiananmen Square, and his successors still pledge loyalty to his party.

“Hong Kong has always idolized the free market economy,” says Hong Kong Labour Party Chair Lee Cheuk-yan during my interview with him at his office in the city’s Legislative Council Complex. “We let the market rule everything and then we don’t intervene, and that’s it. That’s the model for Hong Kong.”

(To the right, Lee Cheuk-yan)

Not that Lee thinks that’s a wonderful thing. In fact, he’s arguably Hong Kong’s top critic of both its capital-worshiping neoliberalism and Beijing’s hidden hand in its politics and business practices. Lee is general secretary of the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions—the city’s largest independent labor organization—and he was key organizer of both the city’s recent 40-day dockworkers’ strike and the giant June 4 vigil marking the 24^th anniversary of the brutal crackdown of the 1989 pro-democracy rally in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.

Hong Kong’s wealth was built on the backs of its workers, and those workers deserve a fair share of it, Lee says.  “Workers rights should be entrenched everywhere in the world. We have to support independent unions. At the same time … democratic rights. We also need to support democracy in China. Unless there is democracy in China, it will be far more difficult for Hong Kong to have a real democracy.”

The recent strike on Hong Kong’s docks pitted workers against Asia’s richest man, billionaire Li Ka-shing, who controls more than 70 percent of the city’s port traffic. Workers hadn’t received a pay raise in more than a decade yet worked 12-hour or longer shifts with no breaks.

In a city without collective bargaining laws, the striking dock workers secured a 9.8 percent pay raise and a commitment to better working conditions. Public support for the strikers was widespread.

(Geoffrey Crothall)

“It touched a nerve with people,” says Geoffrey Crothall, communications director with the China Labour Bulletin in Hong Kong, a non-governmental organization that monitors and promotes labor rights in China. “Property prices are stratospheric. Just going to a local café or vegetable market is hurting ordinary people. People understand when dockworkers have not have a pay raise in 10 years. They can relate to that. They see it as an injustice, particularly when the employer is the richest man not only in Hong Kong but in all of Asia.”

The irony is that today labor-hostile billionaires are as tolerable to Hong Kong’s distant Communist overseers as they were to colonial-era British leaders. In fact, Lee says, Beijing believes the model of “colonial government really works well for them. As a one-party, authoritarian regime, they have no problem with that. … The capitalists support the Communist regime, and the Communist regime supports the capitalists in Hong Kong.”

The June 4 vigil Lee organized—attended by many thousands despite a thunderstorm and heavy rain—was the only such large-scale commemoration of the 1989 crackdown in all of China. In fact, Hong Kong reporters were detained in Beijing on June 4 during the daily flag-raising ceremony at Tiananmen Square.

Still, the strikers in Hong Kong did get a pay raise, and the fact that activists like Lee Cheuk-yan can speak as openly and as critically as he does is impressive. Perhaps even Mao would have to admit that political power today is as likely to come out of a stuffed wallet as the barrel of a gun.

             

Travels in China, plus a story: Hong Kong's foreign domestic workers struggle for an "ordinary" life while living as an "underclass"

(Hong Kong Labour Party chair and independent labor leader Lee Cheuk-yan)

My recent trip to Hong Kong and Beijing came at a time full of news for those cities and the region. During my visit in Hong Kong, whistleblowing fugitive Edward Snowden was staying in a hotel in the city after revealing to the world how the U.S. government is snooping on practically everyone in the world, including U.S. citizens. While Snowden was in Hong Kong, President Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping were meeting in California, talking about cyber-hacking, among other things.

While in Hong Kong, I went to the massive June 4 vigil commemorating the victims of the brutal crackdown of the 1989 pro-democracy rally in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. I interviewed the man who organized that vigil. Tens of thousands attended—it was the only such large-scale public acknowledgement of the 24^th anniversary of the 1989 crackdown in all of China.

A poultry plant fire in northern China killed at least 120, sparking yet more outrage after similar tragedies in Bangladesh and Cambodia. Some 300 Nike workers in Cambodia were fired after protesting their working conditions during my visit to Asia. In addition, a Chinese firm bought giant Smithfield Foods, the pork producer that fought unionization for so long in North Carolina, pitting black and Latino workers against each other. (Note Smithfield’s subsequent hypocrisy when it dropped TV chef Paula Deen as an endorser because of her admission to using racially insensitive language in the past.)

One of the reasons I came to Hong Kong—as part of this blog’s commitment to the Global South as well as the U.S. South--was to talk to workers and activists about the recent strike that pitted the city’s dock workers against Asia’s richest man, Li Ka-shing, whose holdings include 70 percent control of port activity in Hong Kong. I also wanted to talk to people there about the migrant worker issue and a recent high court decision denying foreign domestic workers any chance of permanent residency.

Among those I interviewed were: Lee Cheuk-yan, Hong Kong Labour Party chair, general secretary of the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions and thus the city’s top independent labor leader, and key organizer of both the dock workers’ strike and the June 4 pro-democracy vigil; Cynthia Ca Abdon-Tellez, general manager of the city’s Mission for Migrant Workers organization; and Geoffrey Crothall, communications director of the China Labour Bulletin, a non-governmental organization that monitors labor actions and rights in China. I also spoke with migrant workers from the Philippines as well as a Catholic priest whose ministry includes migrant workers.

It was a rich experience, both in Hong Kong and Beijing, and I’ll be reporting on it in various stories over the coming days and weeks. My first story follows below, an account of migrant workers in Hong Kong.

Hong Kong’s Foreign Domestic Workers struggle for an “ordinary” life while living as an “underclass”

HONG KONG - Mariane Carnate, on the steps of the Mariners’ Club after attending mass at St. Peter’s Catholic Church inside, considers herself lucky.

(To the right is Marian Carnate, a foreign domestic worker in Hong Kong)

The 30-year-old native of North Cotabato in The Philippines is a domestic worker for a Russian family in Hong Kong that treats her well and pays her “a little more” than minimum wage. She lives with the family—a requirement of foreign domestic workers here--and works 10 to 12 hours a day. She has been in Hong Kong for eight years.

Others aren’t as fortunate. “Sometimes it is hard,” says Carnate, an attractive woman with long hair, carrying a large brown bag and wearing a green blouse and orange pants during her Sunday break from work. “Hong Kong is full of regulations. … Sometimes families are not easy to get along with. (Expenses) are more than domestic workers earn. I’m lucky. Some of my friends, their employers are not good to them.”

Carnate is one of more than 300,000 foreign domestic workers in Hong Kong. Half of them are, like her, from The Philippines and they’re nearly all female. Others come from Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India. Indeed, life isn’t easy for many of them. Hong Kong laws require them to live with their employer—a law intended to keep them from taking second jobs and thus competing with local workers—and also prohibits them from ever becoming permanent residents and thus eligible for state-run health care services and other benefits.

The city’s Court of Final Appeal ruled in March that foreign domestic workers don’t qualify as “ordinarily resident” and thus can’t apply for permanent residence after seven years like other foreign workers in the city can. The decision overturned an earlier lower court ruling in the workers’ favor.

(Cynthia Ca Abdon-Tellez of the Mission for Migrant Workers)

“It is becoming more clear that we are creating an underclass unfortunately,” said Cynthia Ca Abdon-Tellez, general manager of the Mission for Migrant Workers, during an interview at her office in St. John’s Cathedral in Hong Kong’s Central District. “When you go down deeper into this worker migration … it is forced on the people. Their home countries do not provide their people decent pay jobs. Domestic workers’ salary here is equal to a junior executive’s in their home country.”

The Mission for Migrant Workers is one of several organizations in the city devoted to providing assistance to a vulnerable population that is easily exploited and yet blamed for societal ills.

The church, whether Catholic, Anglican, or non-Christian, is an important resource as well as a refuge for this population, said Father Valan Arockiaswamy, himself a native of India as well as priest at St. Peter’s Catholic Church. “There’s discrimination, racial abuse, exploitation. … They’re on call 24 hours a day. No proper facility to sleep. They may sleep in the living room or share a room with the children, with teenagers.”

(To the right is Father Valan Arockiaswamy)

Indeed, a 2013 study of Hong Kong’s so-called “live-in policy” conducted by the Mission for Migrant Workers showed that 30 percent of foreign domestic workers do not have a room of their own, 37 percent work 16 hours a day, and 9 percent said they worked 19 hours straight. More than half have suffered verbal abuse, and 18 percent reported physical abuse. Some 6 percent reported sexual abuse.

“It is important to support migrant workers,” said Lee Cheuk-yan, chair of Hong Kong’s Labour Party and general secretary of the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions, the city’s largest independent labor organization. “This is the part of solidarity that is very important. It is very important to make sure they have the same rights as the local workers. … They had to leave their home to come to Hong Kong to take care of our families, and they are very badly treated.”

Activists Lee and Ca Abdon-Tellez said the fight for domestic and other migrant workers continues despite the high court’s ruling. “Workers’ rights should be entrenched everywhere in the world,” Lee said.

Back in the USA after travels to Hong Kong and Beijing: From dock workers & migrant workers to a whistle-blower seeking refuge

Just a quick note to say that I'm back in the USA now after travels in Hong Kong and Beijing over the past three weeks.

In Hong Kong I interviewed Lee Cheuk-yan, chair of the Hong Kong Labour Party, organizer of the giant June 4 pro-democracy rally in remembrance of the Tiananmen crackdown in Beijing in 1989, and key player in the recent dock workers strike in Hong Kong. Lee Cheuk-yan is the top independent labor leader in Hong Kong.

I also met with migrant workers from the Philippines, activists on their behalf, and Geoffrey Crothall of the China Labour Bulletin, which monitors labor rights in China.

Later in Beijing, I traveled to Tiananmen Square as well as the neighboring Forbidden City and other sites in China's capital city.

It was all a rich experience, a good time to be in Asia. While I was in Hong Kong, of course, the story about whistle-blower Edward Snowden's leaked documents on U.S. cyber-surveillance of practically everyone broke wide open. Snowden was in Hong Kong himself, and the question was whether he would face extradition back to the United States.

How ironic that this story should break at a time when President Obama was meeting with Chinese President Li Jinping in California,  cyber-hacking being a key issue between the two nations.

Expect reports from this trip over the coming days as well as updates on ongoing stories here in the South and Global South, such as organizing efforts at the Nissan plant in Canton, Miss., and Walmart's actions in the aftermath of the tragic Bangladesh factory fire.

On the road to Hong Kong and China: Reliving old memories while tracking a rising labor activism

 

(To the right: Yours truly overlooking Hong Kong in 1972)

My Army buddy Bob Vanover sadly admired the Hong Kong skyline our final day there back in April 1972 and sighed, “Take 

a last look, Joe. We’ll never see this place again.”

Always the optimist, I shook my head and proclaimed: “You never know, Bob. We could be back someday.”

We were both soldiers based in Plantation, Vietnam, on a week-long R&R (Rest & Recreation) in Hong Kong, taking a needed break from Hueys, dusty villages, water buffalo, lambrettas and the occasional pajama-wearing Viet Cong. We were in one of free Asia’s biggest cities, a teeming anthill of skyscrapers and crowded markets, back alleys and waterfronts, rickshaws and Chinese junks. Hong Kong was Asian but to us it was also “The World,” which then meant any place other than Vietnam.

Hey, Bob, wherever you are, you were wrong and I was right.

(Yours truly--out of uniform--and Bob Vanover in Vietnam)

Yep, Bob, I’m going back to Hong Kong next week, and I’ll spend much of the next three weeks there and on the mainland in Beijing, Xi’an, and possibly Shanghai. I doubt the Suzie Wong Bar is still in Hong Kong, but surely Thieves’ Market—also known as Cat Street--is still clogged with humanity, including a few of the kind who gave it its name.

(A crowded street--possibly Cat Street--in Hong Kong in 1972)

This will likely be my last posting on Labor South until my return in mid-June. The trip will be part play, part work. The working end will take place in Hong Kong, where I’m hoping to talk to folks about the recent successful dockworkers’ strike there and about the migrant worker issue, a long-term project of mine.

Some 450 Hong Kong International Terminals (HIT) dockworkers struck for 40 days between March 28 and early May to demand better wages and working conditions. The strike at the world’s third-busiest port pitted the members of the Union of Hong Kong Dockers and Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions (HKCTU) against billionaire Li Ka-shing, Asia’s richest man. Li Ka-shing controls the HIT and 70 percent of all port traffic in Hong Kong.

The strikers won and went back to work after securing a 9.8 percent boost in wages. They received local and global support for their cause with many Hong Kong citizens as well as activists from the mainland contributing to their strike fund.

“Our union works from below persuading worker by worker to join and get organized, with the effect of enabling rank-and-file workers to make their voices heard,” dockworkers union secretary Wong Yu Loy told labor scholar and writer Stephen Philion in a recent interview (http://www.labornotes.org/2013/05/hong-kong-dockers-claim-victory).

Wong Yu Loy told Philion—whom I hope to see while I’m in Hong Kong—that dockworkers occupy a unique and crucial link in the global economy, serving as a “vital cog in the corporate supply chain.” This was seen in the historic labor action by dockworkers in Charleston, S.C., back in 2000 when they successfully forced back a union-busting effort by a Danish shipping line. They got international support and won the day, just as their counterparts in Hong Kong have now done.

It’s another promising sign—in this eternal optimist’s viewpoint—of a rising worker consciousness around the globe. Tracking that is one big reason for this trip to Hong Kong.

Look at Bangladesh, where the garment industry moved to take advantage of the least-paid and most vulnerable workers of the world. Six months after 112 workers died in a fire at the Tazreen factory near Dhaka, another 1,127 were killed when the building housing the Rana Plaza clothing factory, also near Dhaka, collapsed. Another 2,000 workers face lifelong physical injuries and impairment as a result.

But these tragedies may bring about change. The underpaid, vulnerable workers in Bangladesh are standing up for their rights and making demands. The Bangladesh government recently agreed to raise the minimum wage and allow workers to form trade unions without factory owners’ prior approval.

Still, some 20,000 workers continued their protests in the Bangladesh garment center of Ashulia this week and faced police forces firing rubber bullets at them. Dozens were injured.

European retailers have responded to the tragedies by agreeing to a plan to improve working conditions in Bangladesh. U.S. retailers like Walmart are balking, however, citing concerns about the legal implications. Protesters plan to be in Bentonville, Ark., at Walmart’s shareholders’ meeting on June 7 to bring home the message that even giant U.S. corporations have to recognize the basic rights and dignity of workers, no matter where they are. At the protest will be Bangladesh workers.