A Living Wage for All

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: [email protected]

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 w...