At the panel on sustainable work, at the hui in October 2018 on What an Alternative and Progressive Trade Strategy for New Zealand, Dennis Maga talked about the issues for migrant workers.
Dennis is the General Secretary of First Union and well known for his advocacy and work on migrant employment matters.
Michael Whaites (chair): If free trade agreements aren’t that great for workers, how are they for migrant workers? It is hard to discuss the connection between free trade agreements and labour migration without discussing the effect in terms of the perspective of sending countries.
Dennis: One thing I would like to establish is that since the neoliberal inception, free trade agreements did not establish sustainable jobs in sending countries. In fact, migration was because of de-industrialisation, the backwardness of their agriculture, the costs of massive unemployment.
When you discuss migration and free trade agreements it’s all about remittances. Would you believe remittances now outweigh the sending country’s overseas development assistance? There are many sending countries now that are heavily dependent on remittances. 2014 was the highest number of remittances recorded by the World Bank, $8.6 billion dollars. If you look from that perspective, there are 4 countries that are benefitting from this: India, about $60-69 billion; China $60 billion, despite their domestic development; Philippines $24 billion; and Mexico. These countries, instead of creating sustainable jobs, strengthen their labour institutions to export their labour force.
NZ and Australia are countries in the Pacific where we benefit from that but we don’t ask questions. If we employ nurses in NZ, what does that mean for the health system in the Philippines, for example. The same with India, will there be a shortage there? We never ask those questions. That is a problem in terms of the labour migration aspect in the free trade agreements.
Second, you need to look from the perspective of how the developed and sending countries correlate on this. Some of them are arguing, ‘hey a free trade agreement will increase productivity’. If you go to NAFTA, for 8 years of its existence, yes it increased the productivity by 50% but there was a massive decline in wages. If you look at the population of Mexicans now living in the US because of NAFTA, it hugely increased their proportion of the population. So a lot of companies right now are heavily relying on the cheap labour export policy of different countries. That’s a major problem for us.
The next question is how the government can protect those migrant workers in the host country, because there is a lack of understanding of their situation nowadays. It is very important for us to understand the free trade agreements, let alone the bilateral agreements, because they have shaped the migration policy.
Migration is actually a gate – how much do you open up the gate for those migrants. If you don’t ask questions about what is happening in the sending countries, you won’t be able to understand what is happening in the host country.
Michael: Some people do ask those questions about the movement of migrant nurses! The rhetorical question for you has to be: if the free trade agreements are really about sustainable development, shouldn’t that mean the migrant workforce would dry up? If we had true development in every country, why would you need to flee to another country to get better wages and conditions?
Question. We heard earlier that global structures are in crisis because the multinationals break and/or ignore our rules for their own purposes. So should workers and communities in defence of our livelihoods argue for a return to the old world order and a seat at that table, or should we also break existing bad laws in order to establish community focused new world order?
Dennis: First and foremost in the age of global recession I don’t think we can go back to the old rules. That’s a big problem now. Coming from a trade union background, I don’t speak on behalf of trade unions, but the way trade unions are responding right now is quite reactive. That’s why, for example, some civil society organisations are taking over some space in terms of holding those transnational companies accountable. In the last 5-10 years there are now some discussions about what we can do in order to make these free trade agreements and transnational companies accountable. There are discussions about global framework agreements that global union federations are using. There is also discussion about supply chain agreements, where we can be part of those free trade agreement discussions. The problem is that these supply chain agreements are being discussed separately. But it can be a useful tool for us in order to arrest some of the problems created by the free trade agreements. For example, there are some free trade agreements that address anti-modern day slavery. That supply chain agreement is aside from government and trade unions, there’s a big part that civil society organisations play in that. So there’s a template and a platform. We need to think of how we can maximise that and convince the stakeholder, the government, to advocate for those rules in terms of free trade agreement negotiations.
Question. How do we make sure the work in China and other countries also benefit from our progressive improvements? A few months ago the Indian PM and Chinese Premier said we are all for globalisation. They see the short-term benefits. They don’t see the long-term price that they are going to pay. Taiwan, where I come from, is now a ruined environment. The same as China. Is that part of the price we have to accept because we want cheap labour and they keep moving production around from China to Vietnam or another country? How do we actually keep the balance. Chinese people say “do you realise how polluted it is to produce all the solar panels for the developed countries”. How do we get rid of this kind of dilemma?
Dennis – The free trade agreement is easing the transnational companies’ ability to offshore jobs overseas. Some companies are now shifting from China to Vietnam because the average minimum wage in Vietnam is only one third of the average minimum wage in China. That’s why China is now circumventing the free trade agreement by engaging in a bilateral public-private partnership agreements, as well as spending money and giving some aid and loans. As part of those contracts China says I am going to build your road or your rail, but I am going to bring my own people, to the point that they undermine the existing immigration policy. It’s happened to Samoa. It’s happening now in the Philippines, where they have 15% unemployment but there are growing numbers of Chinese workers on visa. It’s interesting that doesn’t matter which impoverished country you do to in the world, you find migrant workers who are working for even cheaper wages. So something has to break that cycle.
Some unions, and Unite Union in particular, have been very slow to understand and support the issue of migrant exploitation in New Zealand because they did not know how to do that effectively without looking to be supporting anti-immigration measures.
Unite Union have been trying but still confused and somewhat halfhearted in their advocacy of migrant workers rights, e.g., see that organization’s recent “Migrant Worker Picnic” to which almost no migrant workers or even “POC” went to.
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