Labor activists and union leaders in Asia have joined forces to campaign
for wage rises for workers in the region’s garment industry.

The umbrella organisation, Asia Floor Wage, says garment workers are
routinely paid too little to afford the cost of living in their home
countries. And the campaign to get workers a fair minimum wage is being
taken directly to factories and producers, rather than government.

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DESMOND ANG: Unlike most countries, Indonesia has a government-legislated
minimum wage. The problem, for garment workers, is that that’s also become
the maximum they can expect to be paid.

Anannya Bhattacharjee is the campaign coordinator for Asia Floor Wage. She
says clothes manufacturers in Asia have benefited enormously from paying
workers very little… and selling their products on to wealthy customers
at a hefty profit margin.

She’s working directly with garment factories in India to get a fairer
deal… and she’s co-ordinating a regional drive to bring minimum wages
more in line with the cost of living across the region.

ANANNYA BHATTACHARJEE: We want to organise ourselves into a platform,
which we have done, to demand a certain minimum living wage and we are
also saying that the revenue for this wage should come out of the
humongous profits that are accruing with the buyers.

ANG: She says a co-ordinated push to get more factory profits into the
hands of their workers is necessary to prevent Asian nations playing off
against eachother in the so-called “race to the bottom”.

BHATTACHARJEE: It has to be regional decision however because one thing
that we want to avoid as we formulated the wage. It was done in a way that
it was regional that takes care of the fact that countries within Asia do
compete, and we wanted to factor that into Asia Floor Wage.

ANG: Ms Bhattacharjee says India’s garment workers are among the lowest
paid in the world, and says they need six times the average wage to
survive. And she says they should also be compensated for the hours they
spend on overtime.

BHATTACHARJEE: What typically happens is that workers work an enormous
amount of overtime for which they are not paid their legal dues, but they
do get paid some extra money and they work huge amounts of overtime ofter
seven days a week, sometimes two three shifts, altogether, and all of this
to bring up their income to somewhere around five to six thousand so that
they can just survive as in put food in the stomach, go to work and have a
shirt to wear. Nothing more than that.

ANG: It’s a similar story in Indonesia, where Rita Tambunan from
Indonesia’s Trade Union Rights Centre says factory workers often have to
work a second job to make ends meet.

RITA TAMBUNAN: Some other remote areas, female workers, sometimes they
have to go take another work, in very hideous situations, they also are
forced to do some prostitution work, that happen in some area, this is
especially the situation in manufacture and garment sectors.

ANG: The campaign has been welcomed in Bangkok, where Lucia Victor
JAYASEELAN from the Committee of Asian Women says workers at individual
factories find it hard to organise and lobby for change.

LUCIA VICTOR JAYASEELAN: We cannot control wages, it is very difficult to
organise unions within the garment industry, there is a huge repression of
labor activism in Thailand, especially when you’re organising within the
free trade zone with industries that has got international connections.

ANG: Ms JAYASEELAN says a co-ordinated approach will also help bring wage
parity to the rest of the region, noting Thailand’s workers are by no
means the poorest in Asia.

JAYASEELAN: Wages are very very low in Thailand, however, it may be on the
higher end in relation to other Asian countries for instance, Bangladesh
is one of the lowest. And one of the ways to calculate against the whole
of Asia is to use a process of parity.

ANG: Asia Floor Wage recommends workers take home four hundred and seventy
five US dollars [PPP] a month – an amount that experts says is sufficient
to pay for bare necessities.

It might seem overly optimistic to target industry rather than get minimum
wage laws passed in more countries. But coordinator Anannya Bhattacharjee
says she’s had a positive response from some garment firms – who know
their habit of underpaying workers damages their image with overseas
customers.

BHATTACHARJEE: Yes I am optimistic, first of all the demands is reasonable
from the emails that i’m getting. People want to have a dialogue and i
believe that the brands are also getting to a point that they are
understanding this. that the level of impoverishment and exploitation of
workers that takes is not just bad for labor rite, its actually bad for
business practice.

http://www.radioaustralia.net.au/connectasia/stories/200910/s2709441.htm