South Africa: Probe into labour standards at Zakumi makers

The Global Brands Group (GBG) has launched an ethical and social compliance investigation into the Chinese company manufacturing the Soccer World Cup mascot, Zakumi, it said yesterday. “GBG has taken appropriate steps to contract Intertek (the world’s largest independent testing, inspection and certification organisation) to conduct an immediate ethical and social compliance audit and inspection of this facility,” the company said.

Tears of African migrants

For 37 days, the Nigerian journalist Emmanuel Mayah travelled a total of 4,318 kilometres across seven countries and the Sahara desert in the company of illegal African migrants on their way to Europe. From Nigeria to Benin Republic, Togo, Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger and finally Libya, he survived to tell the story of human traffickers, sex slavery in transit camps, starvation, desert bandits, arduous toil in a salt mine, cruel thirst and deaths in the hot desert. The writer was a participant of the ITC-ILO Communicating labour rights’ course 2009.

Philippines: random inspection for all enterprises, unions tell Department of Labour

Union leaders from Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao urged the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE) to conduct random inspection of companies to strengthen compliance with core labor standards in all enterprises — micro, small, medium or large. Random inspections will keep enterprises on guard against labour standards violations, as management would not know whether, or when, their enterprises would be checked.

China: a resumption of tripartism and collective bargaining

By China Labour bulletin

Last month a magazine article exposed the extent to which labour relations in China had deteriorated over the last year, with enterprises deliberately taking advantage of the government’s leniency during the global financial crisis to exploit their workforce. The writer called on the government and trade unions to take concerted measures according to the ILO tripartite system and including the introduction of collective bargaining, to alleviate the growing conflict between workers and management. The article was published in Liaowang (瞭望), the magazine of the official Xinhua News Agency, which is widely read by senior government officials and policy makers. It seems that many policy advisors are now realizing that, as the Chinese economy recovers, there is an increasingly urgent need to restore the rights of workers that were systematically stripped away by government officials seeking to protect local enterprises during the financial crisis. The scholars and officials interviewed by Liaowang all agreed that enterprises had got away with too much, and that unless some balance was restored to labour relations, the conflict would only increase.

Tripartism in the times of neoliberalism

For much of the 1990s and the first half of the present decade, many developing countries seeking integration into the global economy adopted the type of market-oriented measures pushed forward by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Much has been written about the impact of these measures (known as the Washington Consensus) on governments, employers and workers in the developing world. Now a new book published by the International Labour Office (ILO) takes this issue forward and looks at how the process of consultation and negotiation between these three social partners – in other words, tripartism – altered the pace, sequence and content of these reforms. ILO Online spoke to the editor of “Blunting neoliberalism: Tripartism and economic reform in the developing world”, Lydia Fraile.

Bangladesh, Land commission for indigenous people soon

State Minister for Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) Affairs, Dipankar Talukder, yesterday said the government has taken steps to form a separate land commission for resolving land dispute for indigenous people of plain land of the country. He was addressing a roundtable on ‘ILO Convention 169: Indigenous people and Bangladesh Jatiya Sangsad’ in a city hotel.

Old age catching up in Sri Lanka

By Dilshani Samaraweera

After 30 years spent on war, now old age is catching up with Sri Lanka. Economists and ILO analysts are ringing warning bells that Sri Lanka’s post-war economic growth may decelerate because of aging population.

Asia, Human rights for migrant domestic workers

As the world marks International Human Rights Day on the 10th of December, CARAM Asia launches an online petition campaign seeking crucial support and commitment from every employer of households to grant a weekly paid day off to their migrant domestic worker (MDW). On this occasion, CARAM Asia, a regional network of 34 NGOs and trade unions across 17 countries in Asia, makes the call to governments across the globe to respect the rights and dignity of migrant workers especially domestic workers.

ILO warns “early exit” from stimulus measures could prolong jobs crisis

An “early exit” from support measures adopted in response to the global economic crisis could postpone a jobs recovery for years and render the fledgling economic upturn “fragile and incomplete”, a new report by the research arm of the International Labour Organization (ILO) says.

Nigeria, discrimination against workers with HIV

By Chukwuma Muanya and Collins Olayinka

AS the country joins the rest of the world to mark the 2009 World AIDS Day today, the country has recorded a 46.7 per cent drop in Human Immuno-deficiency Virus (HIV)/Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) infection in seven years.