From poverty to power - Oxfam-Québec

FROM POVERTY TO POWERand Palau have in common is that they are tiny Pacific island nationsthat have no labour code and are not members of the ILO. 115Infringing workers’ rights and limiting their compensation isincreasingly common in developed countries as well. For a short timein history, thanks largely to a vocal trade union movement, a fewprivileged workers won the right to be compensated for most of thecosts of maintaining the labour force and of caring for past and futureworkers: health care,a monthly salary (paying for rest time at weekends),compensation for injury and old age, and paid leave for illness, maternity/paternity, breast-feeding, funerals, religious events, and holidays. Insome cases, employers and the state also paid for training/retraining,job search, or removal costs when workers were transferred oreconomic restructuring took place. In both developed and developingcountries, that era now risks being consigned to history, degrading thequality of work and the lives of workers.Flexible labour policies entail costs to society in terms of the healthand education of future generations of workers, and even in the qualityand reliability of production. Without a stable income or access tosocial protection, workers, particularly women workers, are trappedin poverty and are vulnerable to shocks. When in addition the statecuts back social spending, the accumulated hidden costs (ill health,lack of training opportunities, short working life spans, and so on)become overwhelming. The result: greater inequality.A study of women factory workers in Lesotho, for example, foundthat long and inflexible work hours, between ten and 12 hours a dayduring the week and up to ten hours a day at weekends, constituted amajor obstacle to mothers caring for their children. 116 During periodswhen hours were even longer, women reported never seeing theirchildren awake. They were allowed no time off to care for, or get medicalcare for their children, and their wages were docked when they did.Some women therefore avoided both pre-natal and post-natal clinics,putting their own health at risk as well as that of their children.For any single country, the flexible labour policies encouragedby international financial institutions may seem necessary to staycompetitive with other cheap and ‘flexible’countries. But the advice to‘flexibilise’ has been given simultaneously to many developing156