Women and Labour Organizing in Asia

Diversity, Autonomy and Activism

Kaye Broadbent, Michele Ford

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• eBook ISBN: 9781134125265
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book investigates the role of women and labour activism in Asia, demonstrating that women have been active in union and non union based campaigns throughout the region. Although focusing primarily on women, the contributions to this book address issues that affect all workers. Chapters on China, India, Japan, Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, Sri La

1
Women and labour organizing in Asia

Diversity, autonomy and activism

Kaye Broadbent and Michele Ford

Chun Tae-il, a young Korean tailor, had spent many years trying to attract the attention of authorities and union officials to the inhumane and exploitative conditions experienced by young women employed in Seoul’s garment sweatshops. He was ignored and in desperation committed suicide in 1970 by self-immolation. As he died, he shouted ‘they are not machines’ (Chun 2003), referring to the young women who slaved to produce the goods which fuelled Korea’s economic development from the 1960s. His death gave life to a struggle led by women, which, despite brutal oppression by the ruling military dictatorship, challenged the state, employers and the management-friendly, male-dominated textile unions (Koo 2001; Chun 2003; Park 2005). The courage of workers and other activists at this time contributed to an upsurge in democratic unionism in the 1980s, the legacy of which survives in Korea today.

Women have become the new face of industrial labour – and of labour activism – not only in Korea but in all the most and least developed countries of Asia. Export-oriented industrialization strategies favoured throughout East and Southeast Asia, and more recently in parts of the subcontinent, brought with them a feminization first of factory labour and then of the diverse agglomeration of contract and home workers that now produce consumer goods for the world. The rapidly increasing economic importance of the Asian region in the global context highlights the need for detailed analysis of the institutions and practices which constitute civil society in Asia. Globalization, with its opening up of Asia’s economies, and the concomitant growth of feminized labour-intensive industries, has shone a spotlight on male-dominated union organizations in the region and their failure to protect women’s interests. The chapters in this volume explore women’s responses to unions’ shortcomings. They examine the strategies female labour activists have employed within and outside the organized labour movements in nine very different Asian contexts, the challenges they face, their frustrations and their successes.

Women and unions

In many ways, the fate of Asian female labour activists has been tied to that of national union movements as a whole. In her chapter on China in this volume, Fang Lee Cooke reminds us that Chinese unions are fundamentally different from western unions because they are part of the state apparatus rather than an independent vehicle for workers’ interests. Many countries in Asia have experienced a similar situation at some time in their post-colonial history. Indonesia’s unions were part of a system of authoritarian state corporatism under Suharto’s New Order (1967–98), and until the late 1980s Korea’s dominant trade union federation, the Federation of Korean Trade Unions, functioned as the personnel bureau of the military dictatorship. While unions in Malaysia are not as closely controlled as the state unions of Indonesia’s New Order period were, they too occupy a subordinate position within Malaysia’s state-dominated industrial relations system (Ford 2002). In contrast, in South Asia, unions are closely tied to political parties. This is the case in India, where the Left remains strongly represented in formal politics (Gillan 2004). Similarly, as Janaka Biyanwila notes in his contribution to this volume, affiliation with political parties has weakened unions in Sri Lanka. Shahidur Rahman observes in his chapter that in Bangladesh, too, the government required every political party to establish a union from 1977 and that this has had a negative effect on union organizing. Although unions’ ties to formal politics have proved helpful in some contexts, these contributions show that in others, such ties limit unions’ ability to independently mobilize and represent workers.

Unions are weak in many Asian countries as a result of their industrial trajectories and their political histories. However, repressive state structures and overly strong union ties to political parties in the region have not precluded, or even always contained, labour activism. In Korea, Thailand and Indonesia, periods of explosive labour activity have been followed by periods of re-domestication, where the state and capital have reasserted their control over labour. Pro-women unions, often located in the light manufacturing industries, are particularly vulnerable to this economic and political pressure. As Andrew Brown and Saowalak Chaytaweep demonstrate in their contribution to this volume, this has been the case in Thailand where 65 per cent of the manufacturing workers who lost their jobs during the Asian financial crisis of 1997–8 were women and where the pro-women Thai Kriang Textile Union (TKTU) was destroyed amidst capital restructuring and the slide towards authoritarianism that occurred under Thaksin Shinawatra and his Thai Rak Thai government.

Even when unions are strong, women’s issues are seldom on the agenda. The union movement worldwide has a deep tradition of anti-woman bias, and unionization has provided relatively few guarantees for women workers, who have been peripheral to union concerns and largely excluded from union hierarchies. Unions in many countries have been and are male dominated ‘numerically, culturally and hierarchically’ (Franzway 1997:129), and in discussions of unionism ‘worker’ has most often meant ‘male worker’. In this way, unions have been constructed in terms that ‘conjure up men and deny women’ (Pocock 1997:3). These claims are perhaps even more pertinent to Asian unions than in the European contexts in which unions first emerged. All the contributions to this collection highlight the small number of women in positions of leadership within mainstream unions and the structural barriers that women face in the union movement, including exclusion from unions on the basis of employment status or the provision of facilities to manage the competing demands of work, activism and family responsibilities. Many of the chapters in this volume point to women’s long-standing involvement in the organized labour movement. However, all emphasize the masculinist culture of mainstream unions and their failure to cater sufficiently for women, even where women occupy positions within the union leadership.

A number of chapters in this volume also raise the issue of religion, a theme seldom discussed in relation to western unions, despite the strong Christian presence in the right and centre-left of the international labour movement. Religious doctrines and cultural practices have not prevented Asian women from being active on labour issues, but they have created additional barriers to their activism. Janaka Biyanwila paints a fascinating picture of the Sri Lankan monk who heads an overwhelmingly female nurses’ union. The opportunities offered by what Biyanwila describes as a ‘moment of social movement unionism’ – when progressive monks, doctors, political leaders and the like supported striking nurses after the state enacted emergency regulations against them and froze the union’s accounts – were wasted as the nurses retreated to their middle-class role as carers, under the watchful eye of their leader, whose position is shored up by the patriarchal tenets of Buddhism. Meanwhile, Shahidur Rahman demonstrates how conservative Islamic doctrine worked to keep Bangladeshi women in the home before economic pressures forced them into the factories, and Michele Ford suggests that the growing popularity of orthodox Islam in Indonesia is beginning to affect the assumptions and everyday practices of even some secular unions. In China, Japan and Korea, patriarchal Confucian principles in many ways define gender relations and have therefore also influenced the organized labour movement. Ironically, as Cooke explains, progress made by China’s authoritarian government towards gender equity has been undermined by the emergence of the market economy. Similarly, Kyoung-Hee Moon and Kaye Broadbent note that Korea’s International Monetary Federation (IMF)-imposed economic ‘reforms’ have resulted in exacerbated gender discriminatory employment practices as more women than men are laid off. In Japan, the impact of the Confucian principle of ‘good wife, wise mother’ feeds into employers’ need for cheap labour, resulting in the gendered construction of part-time work, which excludes many from membership in mainstream unions (Broadbent 2003).

In recent years, the international labour movement has recognized the dangers of marginalizing women not only in Asia but across the globe. In 2003, the Eighth World Women’s conference of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU 2003) adopted as its theme ‘Unions for Women; Women for Unions’, in recognition of the importance of unions as a vehicle for mobilizing women workers and unions’ general neglect of women workers. The ICFTU’s aim was the development of ‘concrete and innovative strategies to (a) make trade unions relevant to working women today; and (b) enhance women’s key role in building and strengthening trade unions’ (ICFTU 2003: Introduction). Given that union density is declining internationally, and with it union influence, it is not surprising that union renewal is preoccupying union leaders, union members, activists and academics (Mantzios 1998; IIRA 2000; Fairbrother and Yates 2003; Yamashita 2005) – or that women’s increased participation is seen to be an important part of the solution.¹ In industrialized countries, including Japan, the ‘woman deficit’ is especially important when we consider the expansion of part-time work, where women are disproportionately represented (Bolle 1997) often with lower wages and conditions (Japan Institute for Labour Policy and Training 2006). In later- and less-developed Asian countries, it is of most concern in regard to the large numbers of women workers located outside the formal sector altogether. This is particularly so as the informal sector, which has always been dominant in many Asian countries, again expands in India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Indonesia and Korea as global corporations and local capital seek to shore up price-sensitive, labour-intensive industries in the face of fierce competition from China and the newly industrializing countries of mainland Southeast Asia.

The impact of the expansion of part-time and contract work, particularly where it occurs in the informal sector, is significant for both unions and women. Lambert and Webster (2004:140) argue that the growth and feminization of employment in the informal sector is negatively affecting unions. While this point is valuable, it fails to recognize that part of the problem may be the organizing strategies of unions themselves. Central to this is the role of the union movement as an avenue of collective representation for paid workers. Workers who do not have access to unions have little power to bargain with employers for better wages and conditions or to press governments for changes in labour policy. As mainstream unions have been spectacularly unsuccessful in organizing workers in part-time work, let alone the informal sector, the rapid growth of non-traditional forms of paid employment represents a now well-recognized threat to unions’ very existence. The resulting global decline in union density has created a ‘representation gap’ where the number of workers without access to a union is increasing, and women workers are less likely to belong to unions than male workers.

Women have not simply accepted this ‘representation gap’. As the chapters by Elizabeth Hill, Kyoung-hee Moon and Kaye Broadbent, and Kaye Broadbent demonstrate, women in India, Korea and Japan have organized women-only unions which have not affiliated with the mainstream union movement and show no indication of seeking affiliation in the future. As these chapters indicate, the success of women-only unions has been mixed. In contrast to the smaller and newly established women-only unions in Japan and Korea, India’s Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) organizes half a million women workers in a range of jobs as well as establishing childcare centres and co-operatives. Elsewhe...

Table of contents

• Asian studies association of Australia
• Contents
• Tables
• Contributors
• Series editor’s Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1 Women and labour organizing in Asia
• 2 Indonesia
• 3 China
• 4 Malaysia
• 5 Sri Lanka
• 6 Bangladesh
• 7 Thailand
• 8 India
• 9 Korea
• 10 Japan
• Index