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Car production is increasing in Asia.

 

 

The relationship between companies and their workers, even now in Indonesia, is an unfair economic reality. Low wages, lack of social security, long working hours, as well as companies implementing inhumane practices are all problems that continue to arise in this relationship. It is because of this that a working class movement is a must, to strive for our rights and benefits as companies will never be kind enough to give these themselves; rather workers must struggle to attain them.

 

 

For the last two decades, foreign direct investment (FDI) has been regarded as one of the primary tools for national economic development.

 

 

The old approach

50 years ago Aotearoa/New Zealand’s employers and government launched an attack on one of the country’s strongest unions. Thousands of watersiders (dockworkers and stevedores) were locked out of employment, and police attacked their rallies. Using emergency laws, the government went so far as to make it an offence to give food to watersiders’ families.

 

 

Introduction

 

Union busting in its worst form continues in Sri Lanka’s Free Trade Zones (FTZ).

This is not new. 

Unions have never been encouraged to form in the tax free zones set up for the benefit of foreign investors, with little regard or the workers who provide their profits.

 

Following are a few typical situations that courageous Thai workers frequently face when attempting to organise a union, challenging the national and international legal frameworks.

 

• The Hong Kong-based May Choeng Toy Products company owns Master Toy Company in Thailand, which produces Maisto brand toys. In December 2000 Master Toy dismissed 173 workers because they were members of a union. The workers protested for half a year before achieving justice.

 

Thousands of families and dozens of communities in Australia are today living in poverty and despair as a result of government practices which endured for most of the twentieth century.

 

 

6 September 2000 was just another working day for Nib Bahadur Sunar in Hong Kong. He was happy with his job at the Tin-Wo-Engineering company that was subcontracted by the construction giant Paul Y-ITC Construction Holdings, a Hong Kong-based company that has construction projects in seven countries in the Asia Pacific region. Paul Y-ITC in turn was contracted by the Mass Transit Railway (MTR) that carries over two million persons every day.

 

Companies, often in collusion with governments, continuously develop techniques to sideline or smash independent representative unions. Wrecking methods vary from raw violence and intimidation to administrative measures, especially those backed by the law or lack of law.

 

Administrative busting

 

Acquired immuno deficiency syndrome (AIDS) has been in the news for years. Recently it was overshadowed by severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). In the case of SARS, the persons most at risk are health care workers. In the case of AIDS, health care workers are also at risk; workers in public hospitals are more at risk. These hospitals do not reject patients who contracted or who are suspected of contracting AIDS.

 

 

 

‘HIV/AIDS is not popularly connected with labour issues’. This statement was the heading for the Asian Labour Update invitation for contributions to this edition of the magazine – an invitation I gladly accepted.

 

 

There are many issues within the topic ‘HIV/AIDS in the workplace’ which are relevant to Vietnam today. This paper deals with the need for HIV/AIDS programming for mobile women in factories in Vietnam, because this need is mainly unrecognised even where HIV/AIDS programmes are available.

 

 

 

It would probably be a fair assessment to say that a sizable majority of Filipinos in this mainly Catholic nation believe in miracles. But even the most pious of believers might have a difficult time swallowing one particular miracle being peddled these days.

 

 

It is not fashionable to say it, but in the view of this writer, HIV/AIDS in China is highly unlikely to have the same kind of devastating economic impact that the disease has had in sub-Saharan Africa. Even in the worst case scenarios, which point to as many as 10 million people infected with HIV by 2010, the rate of infection as a proportion of the total working population comes nowhere near the 30 percent - and counting - that has blighted the African continent. 

 

 

Ivy first described her background. She is 40 years old, divorced (2001), has a nine-year-old son, and has been a full-time sex worker for one year in Hong Kong, working in a ‘one-woman flat’ (apartment - not her home).