Read this article in:
1 November, 2010
The ICEM Asia Social Dialogue Project, funded by FNV Mondiaal of The Netherlands and Sweden’s LO-TCO, with the support of Swedish affiliates IF Metall and Pappers, organizes some 50 seminars per year for trade unionists in the region. ICEM Project Officer Fons Vannieuwenhuyse participated in two recent seminars, on 13-15 October in Indonesia, and 20-21 October in India.
Two new project coordinators have joined the work, Indah Saptorini in Indonesia and Ashutosh Bhattacharya in India, both now country coordinators. Both Indah and Ashutosh are already valuable members of the team.
Workers in both countries reported that participation in ICEM project work was valued highly, with, in addition to the ICEM Asia Social Dialogue Project, also two other projects being very active: the ICEM HIV & AIDS project and its Contract and Agency Labour (CAL) programme. The CAL Project in India, for example, has led to a number of successful organising drives, and it also has uncovered some horrid working conditions.
New ICEM Project Coordinators, Ashutosh Bhattacharya, Indah Saptorini
At both seminars, contact details were exchanged and mini-networks set up, to be coordinated by the country coordinators.
Both seminars had a number of women participating, and a significant proportion of participants were young workers.
In both Indonesia and India, the problems of outsourcing and contracting were identified by all as a key issue. In Indonesia, virtually no CAL worker is unionised, while the organising rate of directly employed permanent workers inside companies represented was reasonably high. The situation is a little better in India, although it changes drastically from sector to sector. In the public sector, which includes mining, organising CAL workers is possible and is being done. In the private sector, it is much more difficult. Trade unions in both India and Indonesia also face major difficulties in bargaining with employers, as they receive little to no information from the company on anything.
ICEM General Project coordinator Yoon Hyowon, right
Korean Projects Coordinator Yoon Hyowon leads most of the seminars of the project, which runs in 6 different South-East and South-Asian Countries. In Indonesia, participants indicated that direct permanent workers get a “decent wage” (defined as “enough for a family to survive on”) in 16 out of the 23 companies present. On average, the direct permanent workers earn around 2.5 million Indonesian rupees (about €200). In contrast, a “decent wage” was paid to CAL workers in only one out of 23 companies.
These CAL workers, working for the same multinational companies, but through a subcontractor, get on average only 1.25 million Indonesian rupees (about €100), or about half for doing the same job. Judging from the figures quoted at the seminar in Indonesia, typically around 20-50% of the workforce is outsourced, depending on the company. Sometimes it is even more.
In India, unions indicated that the number of industrial disputes is low, but that, as in Indonesia, more and more core workers find their jobs outsourced. Once a job is outsourced, the same work is typically being done at much lower wages and much lower benefits. In the mining sector in India, CAL workers earn, on average, about 45% of what direct permanent workers earn.
Without exception, all average salaries quoted by outsourced workers in India, from Lafarge, BASF, Rhodia, Holcim, FAG, Goodyear, and others, were lower than the decent wage. Around 25-60% of all workers in the ICEM sectors are said to be outsourced. For these outsourced workers, an average wage is 4,000 to 6,000 Indian rupees (or €65-100), while the suggested needed living (“survival”) wage was said to be 15,000 Indian rupees (€250). A typical wage for a directly employed permanent worker in India in the ICEM sectors, doing the same job as the outsourced worker, is around 15,000 to 20,000 Indian rupees (€250-350).
The Indian National Mineworkers’ Federation (INMF) is organising CAL workers, bringing in over 30,000 CAL workers in the last two years. And the union is close to achieving an additional clause on contract workers in its national mining agreement for the first time. That provides a bonus for contract workers. The situation is worse in the cement, diamond, and chemical sectors, where virtually all CAL workers are dismissed as soon as they try to set up or join a union.