Formalise It! Rights for All Workers

Formalise It! Rights for All Workers

How can we expand rights to all garment workers, no matter where they work – in factories or their own homes, or as refugees or migrants far from their country of origin? 

In this episode:

• How workers from Myanmar fought for the pay they were owed, from a factory in Mae Sot, Thailand (Brahm Press, MAP Foundation)
• Some of the challenges faced by migrant workers in Thailand, and what support is needed (Reiko Harima, Mekong Migration Network)
• The story of Hussain, a refugee garment worker in Turkey
• How home-based workers – mostly working in the garment sector – have got organised over several decades, and some of their wins (Janhavi Deva, HomeNet International; Zehra Khan, Home Based Women Workers Federation; Poonsap Tulaphan, Foundation for Labour and Employment Promotion)
• Building collaboration between home-based worker and other worker rights supporters (Marlese von Broembsen, WIEGO)

 Please tell us what inspired you about this show, and share your feedback, comments and questions, by emailing: podcast@cleanclothes.org 

Speakers:

• Brahm Press, MAP Foundation, Thailand
• Reiko Harima, Mekong Migration Network, Japan
• Hussain, Turkey
• Mariam Danishjo, Turkey
• Janhavi Deva, HomeNet International, India
• Zehra Khan, Home Based Women Workers Federation, Pakisan
• Poonsap Tulaphan, Foundation for Labour and Employment Promotion
• Marlese von Broembsen, Women in Informal Employment Globalising and Organising 

Host: Febriana Firdaus (febrianafirdaus.com)
Field Reporters: Petra Ivsic and Aca Vragolovic
Sound Engineering Support: Steve Adam (www.spectrosonics.com.au) 
Producer: Matthew Abud 
Clean Clothes Podcast Team: Anne Dekker, Johnson Ching-Yin Yeung, Liz Parker, Tanne de Goei

Full Transcript

HOST:

Welcome to the show, in our second instalment of the Clean Clothes Podcast. 

I’m Febriana Firdaus. 

Today we’re talking about rights for all workers – meaning migrant workers. Refugee workers. Home-based workers. 

Workers who might not have all the right documents, or who might be hidden from view. 

Sometimes governments and employers, don’t see them as workers at all. 

But they still demand their rights. 

Mae Sot is in Thailand near the Myanmar border. 

Refugees and migrant workers from Myanmar, have lived there for decades. 

Now it has hundreds of garment factories that depend on migrant workers. 

They’re often underpaid to an extreme degree. 

The Kanlayanee factory there made clothes for famous brands: Starbucks, Disney, NBC Universal, and Tesco.

In 2019 the workers demanded their proper pay. 

Brahm Press takes up the story.

And just a note: Kanlayanee is the name of the factory, and the name of the factory owner as well. 

BRAHM:

My name’s Brahm Press, the Director of MAP Foundation. MAP Foundation started in 1996, and one of the things we do is we have a process of developing peer leaders, and other migrant worker leaders, identify people who are potential leaders, give them training, and eventually even have passed some through paralegal training. So these workers are able to organise other workers, so that they can collectively bargain with employers for improved working conditions. 

In 2019, we invited a reporter from Reuters to Mae Sot to look at the issue of underpayment of wages to migrant workers in factories, and found workers from the Kanlayanee factory. Everyone was being underpaid and there were massive labour rights violations going on. And this developed into a story mainly because these factories were producing for American brands. 

Soon after that, the factory closed once Starbucks withdrew its order. So out of the 50 workers around half decided they wanted to take their case for redress, they wanted to make claims for unpaid back wages, unpaid overtime including working on days off and holidays. This group as it turns out, had also passed through some paralegal trainings that MAP had provided so they were very active and very aware of their rights. 

Kanlayanee wanted to negotiate with the workers, and so she started negotiations at around half a million Baht, and there were a couple of rounds of negotiation but it was unsatisfactory. So that was around the time that we decided that maybe we should look at the brands. MAP, CCC and WRC, Worker Rights Consortium, worked together along with our community partner CBO, known as Arakan Workers Organisation. 

The factory owner actually put up pictures of all the workers who were part of the claims, and said do not hire these people, basically put out a blacklist and everywhere they went they found that they were not accepted even though they have obviously extensive experience in garment factories. A lot of them stayed together and they were sharing food which included foraging for like bamboo shoots and morning glory and other things that were just available in the jungle or on the roadside and then eat that with the rice. So it was difficult. 

So finally in August or September the court ordered Kanlayanee to pay thirty per cent of the total, or around one point one million Baht. She was able to pay that pretty much right there and then, and so from that, we then turned around and asked the brands to simply pay a portion of the remainder divided between the four brands. Reuters was covering the situation and giving updates on who was paying and who was not, so again that media back-strategy was really helpful. 

That left Universal as the last company not to pay any compensation. Three companies paid, including Starbucks. In order to pressure Universal, we decided to focus on their character the Minions from the Despicable Me cartoon, which I think was what was being produced there. And so there were videos and photos of workers dressed as Minions doing the same things to survive as the workers. It was rather cute and creative but at the same time very meaningful. 

Later in February NBC approached us and Clean Clothes Campaign saying they would pay, kind of out of the blue. The workers are amazing because besides taking care of their debts and remitting back to their families, mostly they’ve also decided to use funds to help improve the workers’ centre by the CBO that I mentioned, Arakan Workers Organisation, and that centre will help receive similar complaints, and they also put together funds to purchase dry foods to assist other workers in the area who are out of work due to COVID. So that’s our story.

HOST:

That was Brahm Press from MAP Foundation. 

The situation for migrant workers is often complicated. 

It depends on labour law, but also migration laws. The details are different, in different countries. 

Mae Sot is just one example....