Monina Wong (LAC), Chang Dae-Oup (AMRC), Mani (CEC), Kaneko (YARC), Tsai (TLIEA), Iman, Dennis, Jini (CAW), Lek, Yong, Nom (TLC)

Discussion on the Issues of Organizing Informalised Labour in the Countries and Identifying Possible Research Approaches

Informalisation of labour is a loose concept having different definition by international institutions and national government. It is important that we also have a general but labour definition of it. The ILO categorization of informal labour is different from ours. The network understands informalisation as a process, the ILO’s official definition is more of a sociological classification starting from the informal economy in African countries as means of sustanence for the rural and urban poor. It then moves on to term informal labour as atypical employment as distinct from regular employment. Many national government and trade unions also started by understanding informal labour in terms of its being irregular from of employment. We have a deeper understanding of it as transformation of labour starting from the capitalist division of productive and un-productive labour not just an un-regulated form of employment. But debates within the ILO are moving toward the process as well.

Questioning the categorization of informal labour. The ILO or government definition of the subject of the informal economy are those people or waged workers that the government cant accommodate in the formal economy. But the Indonesian government for example is trying to reduce the size of the informal economy and integrate the informal workers into formal employment. The second weakness is about union organizing strategies. The trade union conception is problematic and weakens the strategies since they follow the labour law’s definition of workers only as productive labour between certain age and only as wage earners in the formal sector.

These weaknesses in the definition of the ILO and the movement weakens trade unions and labour organisations’ organizing in the ‘traditional’ informal economy. Both are often unwilling to move beyond their boundaries. Many unions have the concept of organizing factory labour only. We’re trying to formulate different pathways into informalization of contemporary labor and consider organizing from there. For national governments, Indonesia for example, the formal sector is being dissolved and they don’t actually want everyone in formal sector, but encourage informalization of the formal sector. The government issue is how to implement flexible labor market which is often not being conceptualized as informalization.

It is good for us to understand the different conceptions, from union and governments’ definition to better understand the grey areas around this issue.

The national government such as the Indonesian government might want to narrow the informal economy because workers in the informal economy are not contributing at all or enough to the national economy via taxes etc so they’re trying to move them to the formal sector which is being increasingly flexibilised so that they could be directly integrated into capital accumulation.

Two possibilies. One is re-work on the researches and materials on Burmese migrant workers in the garment factories in northern Thailand into the labour informalisation framework. The other is to compile previous researches done on Cambodia and help with the editing.

Kaneko, YARC *refer to handout*

Figures in handout are collected only from the officially registered labor agents. Rengo is Japan Confederation of Trade Unions established in the late 80s, which is biggest trade union in the country. Trade unions in Japan are normally organized as plant or company based unions and federations are formed from that basis. UI Zensen is different since it organizes across many different sectors based on region rather than industry/sector. So their members are increasing. The process of informalisation of labour in Japan started with the Japanese companies being faced with overseas competition and therefore they demanded that the government to ease restrictions on irregular workers. So it’s about how to cut labor costs in Japan.

Besides that there is also the factor of the integration of housewives into the labour market after the burst of the economic bubble in the 80s as the male formal workers’ income could not sustain the family living and the family needed two wage earners. Starting from the 70s to the 80s it became bigger and bigger issue. The turning point came in the late 80s and early 90s as the Japanese companies suffered from bad performance. In 1995 the employers’ organizations issued reports on how to regulate work conditions of contract workers, before that the labor system was based on permanent employment, but after that managers changed their mind and tried to find legitimate means to dismiss workers.

In Japan it is possible for irregular workers to join unions which is not so in other countries.

In recent years the government has been trying to initiate new laws one of which is the labour dispatch law. At the moment there is no law on it, even though there are more dispatch companies. In the labor movement the debate is whether to have the dispatch law or not. Some say labour dispatch already exists so there is need for some law to regulate or limit it, while others say if we have a law it will encourage labour dispatch further and so the labour movement should resist it. The debate is still going on. Dispatch is only one form of informalisation, there is also part timers, short term contract etc. If we want to pick an industry for research, the auto is relevant since the industry hires many informal workers. The bank/finance sector and the government employees sector are also options for research. The auto sector probably has more direct relevance to the sectors that the ATNC network has been working on. Our problem is that there are not that many examples of organizing the informal labor in the auto industry. The question is how to come up with good case studies in Taiwan. The unions in Taiwan accept members from informal workers but they don’t do much for them.

How does the organizing in the auto sector differ from the financial sector? In the finance sector, almost all the banks were previously national owned which were later privatized. There are unions in these banks which is not the situation in the private owned banks. We have contact with the public owned and unionized banks, but the situation there is already better.

We should try to open our eyes more when looking for research cases as there are many examples that we will overlook. Also there are forms of organizing that are different not following the traditional and therefore are invisible to us and is not recorded. For instance there are other forms of social organizing informal labour other than just bargaining for CBAs. The sector does not matter as informalisation covers too many industries and forms of work. We need to be more optimistic and look at the new creative ways of organizing in Taiwan, a case that would illustrate the narrow mindedness in the labour debates as well as new ways of organizing.

The case of organizing in the government employee sector in Taiwan can be a research option.

At the moment the Chinese government is drafting a labour contract law in which a large proportion is related to regulating the dispatched labour. The informalisation started much earlier as the open door policy was itself an informalisation project. The peak came in late 90s when the country experienced the climax of layoff of SOE workers and massive un-employment. But informalisation of labour in China is a parallel process. The laid off SOE workers were covered by a three-year transition giving them access to social insurance and government assistance while in the mean time they should be looking for jobs. SOE workers were previously tenure employees. The economic reform and the company law collapsed that allowing management to dismiss workers and to change employment to contract system with no limit. Parallel to this is the surge of rural migrant workers taking up manufacturing and service sector jobs who are in actuality excluded from legal labor protection and have no bargaining power. The pressure on the ACFTU is becoming higher and on paper they look very creative in claiming to devise new ways of organizing informalised workers. For instance they form building unions that include everyone working in a whole building, whether they are cleaners or office worker etc. They also form street unions and unions in single shopping malls. But in reality it doesn’t mean anything as the ACFTU just wants to solve problems by individualizing cases to courts or ministries rather than organizing workers. But for the domestic workers who are mostly middle aged women and former SOE workers, and the construction workers who have ceaseless cases of back wages and labour action, ACFTU has done quite a lot. But all in all, the Chinese government wants to increase flexibalization to absorb huge un-employment. And the ACFTU has pressure to increase membership due to losses of its base under privatization. Organizing efforts by labour organizations and ACFTU in the two sectors mentioned above are usually around issues like social insurance. The Chinese labour law is national that applies to all waged laborers with no regional difference. The laws however usually come late after problems have already been accelerated. The debates on informal labour in China are the same as in Taiwan and other countries about whether there should be a dispatch labour law or not.

What is the link between agriculture and informalizing? How prominent is agro business compared to small farmers? Can small farm collectives produce enough agric commodities for export? The agricultural system in China is dominated by small individualized farmers. The rural-urban migration was pushed by rural poverty. There is increasing commodification of agriculture and land disputes. There are recently a lot of land disputes happening in the rural and the fringe areas of the cities when developers and bureaucrats seized the land and removed people from the land. The root cause of the rural-urban migration also went back to the 80s when the open door policy was implemented allowing FDI in and manufacturing jobs were created.

There must be a rural urban relation. The agriculture, the domestic and the informal economy are very important sectors under in labour informalisation. The Chinese agricultural system allows only small farming households not large scale collectivized farms like the Soviet. The normal process of informalisation starts when agri-labour is forced to shift from self subsistence to plant commodity crops, faced with increasing price competition which further forced them to increase commodification of their farming, getting more and more integrated into the formal economy. In Korea the government kept the price of rice as low as possible to feed urban areas to prevent problems in urban areas. These are agricultural crises driving the informalisation of labour. In china, the huge size of un-productive, surplus rural labour under poverty is the driving factor to look for manufacturing jobs in the urban.

Government decrees on increasing the unionization in FIEs have been ongoing for years. But the Chinese unions are basically corporate unions formed to promote economic interests and assist management to achieve the economic target, a legacy of the socialist trade unions before the economic reform. The Wal-mart for example created 50 unions within a few months. When Wal-mart understands what Chinese trade unionism is about they will want unions because they no longer need HR department, since the union will do it for them. Chinese unions also formed by management to serve to qualify their CSR standards vis a vis western buyers especially in the case of OEM companies exporting to the west.

Just now the point was raised that we’re focusing too much on something visible or formalized. We have to be more open to other possibilities, particularly in China. The radical change for communist workers to become laid off, and from being laid off to become informalised workers, has caused many incidents of organizing that are worth looking into.

In the 50s industrialization policy started and was heavily regulated by the government particularly the private sector to achieve the goal of the socialist economy. The change came in the 70s and in the 80s with the de-licensing policy. Major reforms were introduced in 1991 due to the fiscal crisis, increased privatization and liberalization policy of the government. It spilled over into cutting various subsidies and loans to fertilizers and access to the distribution channels in the agric sector. These subsidies were reduced, as were loans to small scale agric producers. On the other side, various policies and restrictions were removed in the private sector. For instance the restriction of industrial buildings to be reserved for small scale enterprises like textile, auto parts and electronics from being dominated by large investment companies were removed in the 1990s. On top of that was the policies adopted to fit the WTO, IMF’s liberalization programmes. Now the agri sector accounts for about 40% of the national income which was used to be about 60-70%. Meanwhile the service sector is growing, as is the industrial sector. Small scale industries are acquired by large companies which dominated the market. 

The major push fro informalization comes from agriculture.People couldn’t depend solely on agriculture in rural areas due in part to the above policies. Thelocal agri sector was increasingly integrated into the international market such as cotton for example: TNCs like Monsato became the biggest player. In the crisis of price plunge in mid-90s, the cotton farmers couldn’t sell the product and that created a spiral effect and caused huge problems including farmers committing suicide etc. These and other factors pushed people to the urban areas leading to labour surplus in urban areas. If there is good situation in the agric sector there would not be as many problems and surplus labor. In Tiruppur there are huge numbers of migrant workers, and they’re kept as non-permanent for years on end. There is a weekly wage system which means workers cannot sustain without working every day. They cannot stay in the city if they miss work which creates a situation of workers moving from one company to another every Monday. It gives much mobility, and unions find it very problematic to organize at firm level. In Tiruppur unions are very strong. Every 3 years there are wage negotiations despite that they only have about 20,000 members in an area with 1 million workers. Yet they are still able to negotiate. One strategy of unions there is to link to those in Bangalore and to get informal workers to join existing unions rather than forming a new organization. In Bangalore in the textile sector NGOs are organizing unions.

The crisis in the tea industry started since late 90s. The tea produced is auctioned in auction centers run by government and there is no direct link between producers and consumers. When the international prices fall so do local prices which affects wage. The tea workers are ‘traditional’ workers who come from the local area and have families there. Since the 90s many plantation were closed leading people to commit suicides. The tea market was captured by the TNCs. Two companies have over 80 percent share in the Indian market. So the Indian and the international tea companies controlled the branding of tea. Plantations are often highly unionized but the big estates were cut into smaller units where there is lower overhead. In this way the total tea being produced is mostly being sold to brands. Restructuring of the plantations negatively affects the livelihood of workers and the unions aren’t able to do anything or much about this scale of changes. These changes are also taking place in agriculture, where corporations are promising to buy commodity at a certain price and becomes the sole buyer who can later dictate the price. This is the process of corporitization of agriculture which is also pushing more workers from the rural to the urban areas. Workers in the broken down plantations are now informalized. In the past workers were passed down through generations where fathers passed jobs to their sons while the whole family stayed in the plantation.

The corporatised and TNC dominated plantations were re-organized, so was the supply change. The owners used to be locals. But when they run out of money, they reduce wage, or lease the plantation to someone else who get workers from other areas to work for them. The old owners were pushed out and the contractors moved in.

In the case of Honda motor and scooters, it was the process of informalization that drove workers to organize.

There are many different cases of organizing woman workers in Asia. The more un-traditional ways of organizing is found in the organizing of sex workers and domestic workers. The woman’s trade unions demonstrate gender specific strategies that usually challenge male-dominated unionism. So is the experience of organizing migrant workers trade unions. In case of workers not being recognized as workers, the cases of cooperative organizations offer good examples of organizing informalised workers. These cooperatives usually would provide skills training to woman workers as in the case of the Philippines; while in India, there are trade unions helping workers to be registered at the welfare department so as to include them on getting access to basic benefits.

Orgnaising informalised labour is usually engulfed in polemic debates the typical of which are ‘ban or regulate’ ie should we ban dispatch labour or regulate it by giving worker rights protection. The ‘integrate or become independent’ debate meaning should informal workers be included into existing trade unions or form independent organizations of their own. And the ‘open or close’ debate which refers to whether the local labour market be open or closed to migrant workers. Research into existing debates would be interesting but for what as there are many groups and global unions researching and working on organizing informal labour and are we going to look into these debates and tell them how to organize?

These debates on organizing informalised labour may be related to existing regulations that limit trade union organizing, or frustration with the existing trade union structure. In other cases, the informal workers would think that the trade unions for formal workers are obsolete and the informalised work force is the genuine workers etc. We are not repeating or mapping all the existing debates. But rather look into concrete cases since informalised labour is a very loose concept, so is the various organizing experiences.

CAW is at the moment focusing on the research of organizing in relation to FTA and at the EPZs. Organising the informalised labour might be part of it. But we cannot commit at the moment to how much we can participate due to capacity question. But if we are participating in this research, the possible topics could be the organizing of woman domestic workers in different countries and at the regional level; and the challenges and changes brought by woman trade unions to the traditional trade unions. 

The planned projects of TLC include a writing project on the un-documented history of the labour movement after the popular uprising in Thailand in 1970s. This is an oral history project to look into the influence of foreign and local agents to the Thai labour movement that still has legacy to today’s labour movement. The second one is to continue the pressuring on Thailand’s ratification on freedom of association by documenting 50-60 cases of union busting and legal litigation cases. TLC will research into the capital mobility of the garment industry from EPZs in Bangkok to the north and border areas as well as how does that impact on the rural. We will do interviews in the rural villages to research labour mobility between the agri and industrial sector, and what is the whole recruitment process and the proliferation of the trafficking business. This research will cover the changes in the whole supply chain including home workers, migrant workers in the border areas due to capital mobility.

The interest is particularly for a comparative study on the general unions in Korea or with general union between Korea and another country. The insight into this aspect is to see how the strategy of the general union is shifted to social bargaining rather than traditional workplace bargaining meaning mobilizing different social forces to gain power to bargain with capital. The angle is how informal labour re-organises the union movement rather than how trade unions organize informal labour. The non-union nature of the general trade unions is the most distinguished feature of the organizing.

To avoid conceptual confusion, we better take the widest concept regarding informal labour in the sense that it includes both employment relations and quasi employment relations. And social bargaining would refer to the sum of the mobilizing of all social forces against the unclear/multiple employers along the line of producing/life circle which necessitates different kinds of solidarity between the social forces including triangular solidarity ie trade unions from capital exporting countries to negotiate together with informal workers/trade unions against the unclear employers/sector.

This research would be open to all sorts of organizing, or rather different ways of tackling informal labour. It is like a hot pot of organizing informal labour. We need to show the whole by presenting concrete cases although it is not necessary for all the articles to have same level of concretenss. Yet we should avoid having all articles remain at the level of general analysis only. Another idea is that we have conceptual chapters as well as case chapters. Just like in the code book.  

The Research Book Chapter by Chapter

Kaneko, Japan – community unions

Tsai, Taiwan – Govt contracted employees

Monina, China – laid off SOE workers organising, spontaneous migrant workers organizing, ACFTU’s creative strategy (such as building union, street union) vs reality. To illustrate the inadequacy of Chinese trade unionism vs workers’ activism and organizing

Jini, CAW – Option 1: domestic workers organizing, Asian domestic workers network (HK, India, Nepal. The process of regional network building by domestics workers). Opetion 2: experience of women union and the gender dimension of labour movement.    

Lek, Thailand – rural industrial relocation from Bangkok to northern border provinces, the Khon Kaen case

Dennis, Cambodia –The movement between the agri and industrial sectors, migrants, organizing informal workers of trade unions and NGOs.

Mani – The automotive parts industry, its restructuring toward informalisation, and possibility of organising along the whole chain from retailing, manufacturing to sub-contracting. Cases of orgnaising and interaction between organised workers and informal workers.

Dae-oup, Korea – General union/social bargaining in Korea, the non-union nature of general unions

HKCTU – General unions (to be confirmed by Monina)

Iman, Indonesia – urban poor consortium and the lessons learnt

Abstract of each chapter – outline sent by Jan 31

First draft out and send out to the paired up member for comment/feed back            

1^st draft – sent out to all by May 31

Comment / feedback from the commentator sent b June 15

Final draft integrating the comments submit in August (annual conference)

Final-final draft sent out by September 15

Publishing end of 2007

Internal Comments and Guidelines

The idea of having an internal proof-reading and comment is to promote incentives from within the researchers’ circle to monitor the quality and style of the articles. It is also to share the responsibility of editing and promote closer collective work. The researchers are paired up to have cross reading and comments according to the following principles.

• Does it contribute to the aims of the research: (1) show how informalisation of labour has been tackled in various way. (2) contribute to organizing informal labour
• Ration between analysis of informalisation to illustration of the tackling methods –minimum 70/30, maximum 30/70
• Coherence, consistency, readable, provokable within reason
• Word count plus minus 10%

Kaneko reads Monina, Monina reads Lek, Lek reads Iman,

Iman reads Jini, Jini reads Dae-oup, Dae-oup reads Dennis

Dennis reads Tsai, Tsai reads Mani, Mani reads Kaneko

The chapters could be structured a bit based on some affiliations shared in the issues that different articles are tackling. The East Asian articles (HK, Korea, Taiwan, and China) have similarity in addressing the transformation of traditional trade unions eg the general unions faced by the challenges of informalisation. The India, Thailand articles covers the re-structuring of production and allocation of investment accompanying labour informalisation vis a vis organizing. The articles on Cambodia and Indonesia will deal with the relations between agri/rural and the urban informal sector/economy. CAW’s article will touches on regional organizing.

There will be a short introduction written by Monina to the book to explain the objectives and aims of the research.

A conceptual chapter that clarifies the understanding of informalised labour and why we want the book to look into the different ways of tackling it while avoiding the feeling of imposing too detailed conceptual guideline. Dae-oup will revise the article on informalised labour published in the ALU as the last chapter of the book.

The last editing will be shared by Monina, Dae-oup and Dennis.

All the communication on all matters related to the research circle should be cc to everybody.

Monina will keep communication and remind members to keep the deadlines.