One question that continues to baffle us in the Asian labour movement is why any talk about occupational safety and health always seems to meet with a muted response in Asia. One would think there is something wrong in the manner that governments in Asia works, when about 1.1 million deaths, out of a global death toll of 2.3 million remain surprisingly un-noticed, except for their ritualistic mention in ILO reports.1
The Philippines is Southeast Asia’s industrial sick man (barely any transformation since the 1970s) and agricultural failure (a major net importer of agricultural products since 1995). The country’s weak agro-industrial growth is the primary reason for the rapid expansion of the informal economy (employing as much as 2/3 of the labour force) and the country’s continuing dependence on the remittances of its 10 million or so migrant workers, roughly a tenth of the population.
The ‘labour movement’ may be something unfamiliar or weird for the majority of Taiwanese people in their everyday life, especially for the young people. If we would like to have a ‘youth labour movement’, what is to be done?
The worldwide financial crisis has caused huge damage to Cambodia’s tourism, garment manufacturing and construction sectors. Those sectors comprise three of the Southeast Asian kingdom’s four economic pillars (besides agriculture) and the bulk of its economic growth over the past decade. Tens of thousands of people have lost their jobs in the past 16 months or are earning less than before.