Fired! Trade unions respond

New Internationalist, June, 1998 by Sara Chamberlain

While currencies collapsed and financial institutions filed for bankruptcy in East Asia, the world's press bemoaned massive stock-market losses. The people who lost their jobs were mentioned only occasionally.

Despite the Asian Tigers' `miracle economies', most people live in abject poverty. According to the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), over 950 million people in South East Asia struggle to survive on less than a dollar a day. Now the majority of East Asians are having to pay for the excesses and corruption of years of economic boom.

`My heart started beating faster when my boss invited me to lunch,' recalls Chae, an assistant director of a Korean advertising agency. `After lunch he told me reluctantly that I was being dismissed.'

There are millions of men and women like Chae. In Thailand a million job losses are expected during the next 12 months. The situation is similar in Indonesia, where two million job losses are probable.

According to the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU) an average of more than 200 companies have shut down each day since the beginning of the crisis, with a record 340 on 5 January 1998. An average 4,000 workers a day have been driven out onto the streets as unemployed.

Asian unions, with the assistance of the ICTFU and International Labor Organization, are now fighting to make indebted governments remember the welfare of working men and women. Despite the advocacy of international trade unions in South Korea, the KCTU has accepted legislation that will allow management to dismiss many workers for `operational' reasons. In exchange, KCTU's 600,000 members will receive some unemployment insurance, a national teachers' union will be legalized and unions will have the right to participate in politics.

The financial restructuring required by IMF aid packages for East Asian governments involves cuts in public expenditure, tax increases and other `austerity measures'. The International Federation of Commercial, Clinical, Professional and Technical Employees fears that this sort of `belt-tightening', when wages are falling and unemployment and basic commodity prices are rising, `will have significant social consequences'.

`Working people in South East Asia are angry and resentful that they are having to pay the heaviest price for the incompetence and corruption of a few very wealthy individuals and their international backers,' says the ICFTU, which expects `social tensions to mount as dismissals and pay cuts multiply over the coming months'. In an attempt to harness productively the anger and frustration of East Asia's unemployed millions, the ICFTU Asian and Pacific regional organization (APRO) held a `Forum on the Asian Economic Turmoil' in Singapore. Delegates from international trade unions, the ILO and even the World Bank and IMF attended. The statement adopted at the Forum calls for the payment of due wages and severance pay; the protection of viable jobs; company-level negotiations on social plans to accompany financial restructuring; the implementation of social and public works programs; a special focus on the impact of the crisis on women workers; and the review of laws and practices that hamper the organization of workers.

The KCTU and ICFTU agree that confidence will not be restored until `fundamental reforms are made to ensure democratic account-ability and transparency of both the international financial system and national institutions for the regulation of financial markets... Only then will the priorities of fighting unemployment and poverty have their rightful place before the protection of the interests of multinational companies and the fortunes of the narrow elite who have reaped the benefit of trade and financial liberalization.