This session was also held on the same day as session one i.e. Sunday 7^th, 1999 at PILER ’s office.

We discussed the reports from Australia, Korea, Philippines India and the moderator’s comments. All participants agreed that the worker’s experience of changes at workplace from all the participating countries was quite similar. It was decided that at this point when we are already a session late we should not put any questions forward to any of the countries and we can start that with the third session.

Responses to the queries from the first session

1. Australia

1. The Govt./Public Sector is the major employer (10% of the total labour force in the urban areas) Privatization is taking place fast under the SAP to meet the conditionalities of the IMF/World Bank. Because of the widespread corruption, selling of govt. assets on much lower prices than their actual value as a way of political patronage is a common practice
2. Union membership is less than 3%. We don’t have any sector by sector data available.
3. Not necessarily, the larger companies treat their workers better than the smaller enterprises but they always are better equipped to deal with the unions. Whether British, European or any other, all TNCs recognize unions but only at plant level and joining of national level federations is strictly watched over and extremely discouraged.
4. The workers do have a legal right to organize but implementation of the law is very poor.
5. The major causes of stress for workers are the insecurity of job, a progressive decrease in benefits and social securities and dissatisfaction in work.
6. Worker are very reluctant to fight for their right in the court because of a very slow judicial process and a corrupt judicial system.

2. Philippines

1+2+3. In the recent years, the downsizing, forced early retirements and retrenchments, and hiring of temporary and subcontracted labour has played a major role in weakening the trade unions. Another tactic employed by the govt. has been introduction of contradictory and anti labour laws. For instance a lot of factories are reclassified under a newly enacted law "Essential Services Act" which has taken the worker’s right to organize away from them. On the other hand, the workers have started realizing the need to form larger national level federations. For instance in Pakistan Railways, a very large public sector employer spread all over the country, all the 30 unions came together and formed a federation to fight its privatization and succeeded in stopping it (at least for the next couple of years).

In the private business another example is the Lever Brothers, the largest consumer goods multinational which established a very big unit of Walls Ice cream. The older local brand, which was quite popular, was Polka Ice Cream based in another city with a substantial market share. Since walls has set up a unit which had the capacity to produce Ice Cream for the whole country, they bought the Polka and decided to sell off its assets and shut down the factory. The Polka workers met Walls workers and later on all the Lever brothers unions which threatened the management that if the Polka factories were closed down, the Lever Brothers unions will go on an indefinite strike. This brought the management (which earlier had refused to even meet the Polka workers) on table with the Polka union where they were able to bargain a better deal for their workers.

4. Please wait for the second session report which discusses it at length.
5. I hope our session one report answers this question already.
6. Please refer to response1

3. Korea

1. The social and political influence of the union movement is very weak in Pakistan.
2. Officially the unemployment rate is 5.37% but actually much high and there is no protection at all for the unemployed.
3. The daily activity of industrial union is to tackle the day to day problems of the workers.
4. We have an enterprise level union system.
5. There is a provision for lay-off in the labour law since 1969.
6. So far we only know about the Daewo, where they almost crushed the union and did not let them organize.

What is globalization?

The Urdu translation of the paper was read out.

Because of a desperate economic condition and a mounting political pressure on every government that came into power in the last one decade, Pakistan opened its economy to globalization in a very big way. Dictated by the World Bank and IMF it decided to deregulate and liberalize the economy. The new policy jargon is ‘Flexibility in Employment Framework’, ‘Decentralized Production’, ‘Downsizing’, ‘Golden Handshake’ and so on. So far as the participants observed that the real experience of the Golden Handshake has been more like ‘Iron Kickouts’. There was a section of the public, which supported it saying that the large public sector corporations had turned into a white elephant because they were overstaffed and extremely inefficient which was not altogether wrong. But they had a very vague idea of what is privatization going to be like in Pakistan and what did the Structural Adjustment Program meant to their lives.

A privatization commission was established to sell out the govt. and semi govt. corporations and todate 82 industrial units have been privatized. Many of these units were sold at prices much lower than their real value and the new owners sold the assets on huge prices and shut these units permanently and their workers rendered completely jobless. The units that are still running have done major downsizing by way of retrenchments, and forced early retirements while hiring temporary workers or subcontracting. Another tactic that the businesses have started using is to decentralize production. On one hand it divides the number of workers concentrated in one unit into smaller groups thus depriving them of many benefits that the large establishments have to provide to their employees under the law. On the other it cuts costs through sub-contracting the major parts of production to small home units where women and children work under very bad working conditions.

The big companies are turning to trading and getting goods from all over the world because of the lowered import tariff which has also contributed to the complete destruction of local industry. There has been a huge rise in the prices of utilities because incentives and subsidiaries have been withdrawn which has further aggravated the difficulties of the ordinary man as well as the local industries and production houses thus ultimately effecting the lives of the workers.

On one hand the govt. is privatizing the most basic of public utilities and services and on the other it is nit ensuring any safety nets for workers that they were entitled to in the past. The participants opined that it seems as if the government does not represent Pakistan and its people but rather safeguarding the interests of international capital in Pakistan. Among many other, one political problem that the casualization/ contractulaization of workers is aggravating in Pakistan is the conflict between the local and migrant workers, be it the rural migrant workers or the migrant workers from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Burma.

The participants felt that there was no hope that the govt. would do anything for the rights of the working people of Pakistan and the only lessons they had learnt was that they need to unite, build linkages and form national, regional and international federations.

Q. What are your unions doing to fight against the temporary / contractual hiring and subcontracting?

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