There continue to be serious concerns among trade unions and other civil society organizations about the impact of substances used in the manufacture of electrical and electronic products on workers’ health as well as on the environment.

Health problems experienced by workers from working with hazardous substances include respiratory problems, burns, eye irritation, skin diseases, damage to the nervous system, cancers, headaches, fatigue and drowsiness, lack of co-ordination or unconsciousness and liver and kidney failure. Women workers are at specific risk of damage to their reproductive health. Suspected cancer clusters have been reported among workers in the U.S., Scotland and, most recently, at Samsung in Korea.

Excessive working hours, which are endemic in parts of the industry where 10-12 hour days six days a week are typical, exacerbate the risk of health problems. Workers in high-volume production lines are at risk of repetitive strain injuries. ‘Standing operations’, an increasingly common practice that requires workers to work long hours in a standing position, causes workers to suffer from a range of health and stress related problems. There are many reports of pregnant workers being forced to continue standing at work.

The length and complexity of electrical and electronics supply chains necessarily mean that there are problems with monitoring the use of hazardous substances in the manufacturing process. Most alarmingly, repeated studies have found that workers in the factories do not know themselves what substances they are working with and what effect these could have on their health.

At even greater risk are workers involved in the recycling or ‘breaking’ of electrical and electronic products. The United Nations estimates that up to 50 million tonnes of e-waste may be generated in the world each year, but currently only 10 per cent of electronic products are recycled. The remainder is dumped as e-waste, often in developing countries in Asia and Africa, where men, women and even children who survive by scavenging garbage are exposed to the toxins they contain.

While some companies have taken significant steps to eliminate harmful chemicals from their products and to improve the energy efficiency of their products, most companies are still not giving this issue sufficient attention. Moreover, the electronics industry has a key role to play in addressing climate change by developing technologies that can assist other industries in reducing their carbon emissions.

The International Labour Organization potentially has a significant role to play in bringing companies, trade unions and governments together to bring about improvements to working conditions, starting with improving recognition of the right to freedom of association.

In March 2009 the ILO Governing Body decided to develop activities that build capacity of trade unions and employers to participate in social dialogue in the electronics industry at country level. It also agreed to encourage the tripartite constituents at country level to develop agreed mechanisms to reduce the amount of temporary and contract employment in the industry. Importantly, given their key role in promoting labour standards down their supply chains and their capacity to contribute to creating conditions for long-term employment relationships, the ILO is encouraging participation by brand-name companies in these activities which are scheduled to commence in 2010.

Speaking at the IMF conference, Anne Lindsay of CAFOD (Catholic Agency for Overseas Development), which along with IMF is one of the founding members of the GoodElectronics network (www.goodelectronics.org), stressed the importance of trade unions and Non-Governmental Organizations working together to compel companies to improve conditions in their supply chains. Through GoodElectronics, unions and NGOs concerned with labour rights in the industry can strengthen their relationship and put a consistent message to the companies that they need to improve their approach to freedom of association and enter into direct dialogue with trade unions.

The ensuing discussion identified several more principles for dealing with supply chain labour abuses. Responses must be speedy and specific to the particular circumstances. One potential danger to guard against is that multinationals do not sever the supply chain relationship, and thus put workers’ jobs at risk, without making all possible efforts first to remedy the situation. Trade unions in the multinational’s home country have a particular responsibility to hold the company to respecting labour standards in their own relationship.

An important strategy is to improve dialogue with companies, including discussions towards International Framework Agreements (IFAs). The IMF has entered into a number of IFAs with multinational companies, though none in the electronics sector. Such agreements commit companies to respecting at least the key ILO Conventions on freedom of association and the right to collective bargaining, discrimination, child labour and forced labour. Most importantly, in signing an IFA with the IMF, the multinational company undertakes to pressure its suppliers to uphold the same standards.

Such an agreement in the electronics industry, besides avoiding the pitfalls inherent in unilateral codes, would provide a useful tool for enabling dialogue between companies and trade unions at the international level that could eventually lead to workers participating in monitoring labour conditions in their own factories.

In concluding the conference, IMF General Secretary Jyrki Raina highlighted areas for future IMF work. This will include:

• Supporting organizing and union building in the Asia-Pacific, prioritizing Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, and the Philippines;
• Organizing in industrialized countries;
• Spreading good examples of organizing non-manual workers, women, young people and migrant workers;
• Cooperation with NGOs to create public pressure on governments, companies and investors;
• Working with NGOs, including continued participation in the GoodElectronics network;
• Taking action against precarious work; and
• Developing trade union networks in TNCs and supply chains.

There is entrenched resistance in the electronics industry to unionization. For some of the dominant U.S. brands, this dates back to their early days in Silicon Valley. Despite having an established presence in certain European-based companies such as Philips and Nokia, unions have never been able to gain sufficient toehold in the industry on which to build organizing efforts. Consequently, when electronics manufacturing went through its massive period of growth in the 1990s, unions were not in a position to be able to organize the hundreds of thousands of new electronics workers. Today, only a handful of contract manufacturing plants worldwide have any union presence.

Reports abound of workers losing their jobs and being put on an employment ‘black list’ for attempting to organize or being told not to join a union or engage in any union activity. In Mexico, employment agencies routinely screen jobseekers for family ties to trade unionists and companies expressly prohibit workers from joining trade unions.

Export Processing Zones or EPZs, where electronics manufacturing is increasingly located, are notorious for guaranteeing employers a union-free environment and enforcing it by preventing union organizers’ access to workers and creating a climate of fear that deters workers from unionizing. Governments contribute by failing to enforce labour laws in the EPZs, either through lack of resources or from a misguided assumption that union-free EPZs will attract more foreign investment.

Precarious temporary and agency contracts that proliferate in the sector are another obstacle to electronics workers forming unions: temporary workers have no guarantee of remaining in the workplace for an extended period (although many in fact do); agency workers have an indirect employment relationship with the company they work for; legislation or union statutes prevent contract workers from joining the same unions as the permanent workforce; unions find it hard to make contact with such workers who are likely to be on different pay and conditions from the permanent workforce; and, perhaps the biggest barrier of all, workers’ fear of losing their current or future employment.

A significant characteristic of electronics manufacturing, from an organizing perspective, is that it is increasingly being done by women and migrant workers. This presents a very large organizing challenge to metal unions that have historically catered to a predominantly male membership. The biggest obstacles to organizing migrant workers are that they may be afraid to join a union and may not be aware of their rights. Language and cultural barriers also need to be overcome. Non-manual workers, which in some parts of the sector make up a high proportion of the workforce, are likely to have their own specific demands of trade unions.

Far from being discouraged by these challenges, unions attending the IMF’s ICT, Electrical and Electronics conference determined that unions need to continue to develop specific strategies to organize different groups of workers, including women, young people, non-manual workers and precarious workers. Reasserting their commitment to organizing electronics workers, delegates declared that while unionization rates in the electronics industry remain so low, organizing must remain the top priority to improve wages and working conditions and restrict the ever increasing spread of precarious work.

Not surprisingly, the race to drive down labour costs has given rise to reports of widespread abuse of international labour standards, both in the CM companies themselves and further down the supply chain. Typical conditions include below subsistence wages, excessive working hours, forced overtime, temporary contracts, no job security, unsafe working conditions and degrading treatment.

The practice of contracting out manufacturing and workforces enables major brand-name companies to distance themselves from the substandard working conditions experienced by the people manufacturing their products. But these companies are coming under increasing pressure to clean up the abuses in their supply chains. A series of high-profile consumer campaigns coupled with pressure from shareholders via responsible investment groups has increased awareness of the vulnerability of high profile brands to negative public perceptions of working conditions in their supply chains.

Yet most companies respond only by encouraging, with differing levels of enthusiasm, their suppliers to abide by their own unilaterally developed codes of conduct. This company-driven CSR approach has proven inadequate both to raising standards and sustaining them. Workers have no involvement in monitoring or implementing labour standards as collective labour relations are virtually non-existent. Most significantly, there is no evidence of implementation of company codes successfully addressing breaches of freedom of association or promoting a climate that is less hostile to workers wanting to join a union.

There are strong arguments in favour of taking an industry approach to improving labour rights including freedom of association. Supply chains are complex with a high degree of overlap – in many cases a range of brand name companies are supplied by the same factory.

This makes it practically impossible for a single company to successfully implement its code of conduct in a factory supplying multiple companies. Accordingly, many of the major companies have joined the Electronic Industry Citizenship Coalition (EICC), which has improving social and environmental conditions across the supply chain as a goal. Unfortunately, the industry code agreed by EICC members does not meet the ILO standard on freedom of association, nor does it include any right to bargain collectively.

The ILO estimates total employment in the manufacture of electrical and electronic products worldwide at over 18 million. The majority of workers are highly concentrated in some 20 countries which together account for nearly 87 per cent of the world total. Employment growth this century has been led by China which in 2004 had a share of some 35 per cent of global employment. Conversely, between 1997 and 2004 employment in the United States declined by some 550,000 (30 per cent of the workforce), in Japan by 400,000 (20 per cent) and in Germany by 100,000 (14 per cent). Women’s share of employment in the sector has risen from 38.7 per cent in 1997 to over 40 per cent with the share in different countries and industry branches ranging from five per cent to 87 per cent.

In Europe and North America, new ICT jobs are primarily being created in the service parts of the sector, while in Asia employment is growing not only in lower wage production jobs, but in research and development and other highly skilled jobs. There is still a lot of movement in the sector, with a high rate of mergers, acquisitions and attendant plant closures.

Up to 75 per cent of global electronics production has now been outsourced from brand-name companies such as Hewlett Packard, Dell and Apple, to contract manufacturers (CMs). At this level there is significant market concentration, with five major CMs producing electronic products for all the major brands: Hon Hai (Foxconn), Flextronics, Sanmina SCI, Jabil Circuit and Celestica.

Despite being for the most part unknown to the general public, the largest CMs are themselves major multinational companies that have seen extraordinary growth. Flextronics increased its sales by a factor of ten between 1997 and 2005, while the largest CM, Hon Hai, employs over 486,000 workers, the majority of them in China. Its turnover for 2009 topped $56 billion.

Some of the rapid changes that are occurring in the sector can be seen in the table on page 21, which compares revenues and profits of the leading technology companies in 2009 with 2007.

A major element of the CM strategy to attract business from brand-name companies is to locate in countries where wage costs are lower: Flextronics claims to save its clients 75 per cent on labour costs. Consequently, the search for low cost manufacturing locations has led the CMs and other manufacturers away from North America and Western Europe, where there have been numerous plant closures and job losses, towards countries in Eastern Europe and Asia. In 2006, China overtook the European Union in hi-tech exports for the first time.

Text / Jenny Holdcroft, IMF Director, ICT, Electrical and Electronics, Aerospace

Impacts of the economic crisis

In its Information Economy Report 2009, UNCTAD notes a dramatic decline in exports of ICT goods. The fall in exports has been reflected in significant job losses across the sector, with major companies laying off thousands or even tens of thousands of workers. Other employment impacts have included pay freezes, cuts of social benefits and an increased shift from permanent to precarious jobs.

The impact of the crisis has been felt particularly in Asia where the trade in ICT goods has been down by 25 to 40 per cent, although countries such as Japan, Korea, Taiwan and China are now experiencing a more rapid upturn.

There is no doubt that a significant percentage of any new jobs growth will be through precarious work. The electronics industry already has the greatest percentage of precarious employment of all IMF sectors, according to responses by affiliates to an IMF survey conducted in 2007. During the economic crisis, many thousands of precarious workers lost their jobs and there is now a real risk that employers will increase their reliance on precarious employment as a means of reducing wage costs and avoiding severance payments in the future.

The persecution of unions in Russia gives little cause for optimism. Interference by the authorities in the activities of workers’ organizations is becoming more frequent and systematic. A particularly ominous trend has emerged of treating the unions as "extremist" groups, involving not only the procurator’s office and the Ministry of Internal Affairs, but even the intelligence agencies.

In this period of a financial crisis the state has been reducing rather than extending the protection of workers and union activists. While the employers have been increasingly aggressive in pushing for "flexible" employment relationships and deregulation of the labour market, the lower house of the Russian parliament, the Duma, and the Constitutional Court have repealed the provision of the Labour Code requiring the consent of the union for the dismissal of its leaders. That was one of the last legislative guarantees against discrimination which actually worked in court; with its elimination the unions have essentially lost their last defense against arbitrary action by the employers.

But even so, worker activists have not given up the struggle. First and foremost, they are conducting an active battle in the courts, sometimes winning substantial victories. There have been quite a few decisions in favour of reinstating workers illegally dismissed.

Another important area of activity is solidarity campaigns. Activists of the ITUA and other unions have organized mailings of protest letters through websites; they have been holding meetings and pickets, sometimes involving large numbers of participants, such as in Togliatti, where the ITUA union "Unity" managed to turn out 3,000 people.

Finally, international support is of tremendous importance. Two years ago the IMF began a global campaign of solidarity with ITUA activists who been victims of physical violence. The latest complaint by the All-Russian Confederation of Labour to the ILO was also supported by the IMF.

Despite everything, the protest movement in Russia is growing. According to official data, the number of mass actions rose to 4,900 in the first quarter of this year from 1,269 for the same period in 2009, that is an increase of 400 per cent. All totaled, almost 1.8 million people participated in them. The authorities themselves admit that the role of the unions in this action was by no means the least important.

"We never give up" is a phrase with which Alexei Etmanov often concludes his speeches and commentaries. May it serve as a guide for the action of all trade unions in Russia.

The punitive action against ITUA activists in Tver, as well as many other instances of persecution and discrimination against union members in Russia, have forced the All-Russian Confederation of Labour, the national union organization which includes the ITUA, to submit a complaint to the International Labour Organization. The violations reported in it are grouped into the following categories:

1. The right to life, security, physical and moral personal integrity;
2. The right to found organizations without prior authorization;
3. Violation of trade unions’ rights by state authorities;
4. Discrimination against workers for being union members;
5. Violation of trade unions’ rights by employers; and
6. Failure by law enforcement agencies to ensure the protection of trade unions’ rights.

The complaint documents a series of violations in Russia. For example, in 2008 two attacks were carried out on Alexei Etmanov, chairman of the local union at the Ford plant in Vsevolozhsk and one of the leaders of the ITUA. The first time three unknown persons tried to beat him up, but he managed to escape and began firing on them with a non-lethal weapon. The attackers fled. The next day the vice-chairman of the Ford local, Vladimir Lesik, received a telephone call from an unknown man who openly stated that the previous day’s attack was a punishment for Etmanov’s union activity.

The second time, an unknown person tried to attack Etmanov in his own apartment building, by lying in wait for him near the elevator. Etmanov again managed to escape, and a policeman even detained the attacker in hot pursuit, but after initial interrogation the latter disappeared.

Those guilty of these cowardly attacks have never been found or punished.

2008 also saw the beatings of Sergei Bryzgalov and Aleksei Gramm, ITUA local activists at the TagAZ plant in Taganrog.

The government has been doing everything in its power to obstruct or delay the registration of industrial and regional unions. For example, the registration procedure for the ITUA took seven months. In July 2009 the authorities refused to register the Inter-Regional Organization of the Union of Commercial and Service Workers of Saint Petersburg and Leningrad Oblast. That refusal to register has been appealed, but a decision on the appeal has still not been issued.

Government agencies systematically interfere in the activity of the unions. The situation involving intimidation of ITUA activists in Tver is quite typical. Events at Ford in Vsevolozhsk have followed the same scenario. In addition, Kozhnev and Etmanov have been intimidated by the FSB, and the chairman of the local at the GM Auto plant in Saint Petersburg, Evgeni Ivanov, was directly approached by officials of the E Center who tried to get him to "cooperate", that is to become an informer.

Of course, hostility on the part of employers toward unions is just as common as intimidation by the authorities. For example, the management of the GM Autovaz plant in Togliatti simply ignores the ITUA local. Despite the fact that management has been notified of the establishment of the local, it does not interact with the union in any way, does not answer its letters and declares to government inspection agencies that there are no unions at its enterprises. It has not been possible to prove the illegality of management’s acts in court.

Discrimination against workers due to their union membership is ubiquitous. At the auto assembly giant AutoVAZ in Togliatti there is an ITUA local whose members are subject to constant pressure by management: they are deprived of overtime work, transferred to hardship departments, refused permission to take unpaid leave (and that during the crisis, when the plant was working at half capacity), and they are subjected to intimidation. Despite numerous complaints, the procurator’s office has done nothing to defend the workers against discrimination.

The various forms of pressure include restricting access of union activists to workplaces (AutoVAZ, GM Autovaz), unjustified prohibition against taking part in collective bargaining (AutoVAZ), and dismissal (Tsentrosvarmash, GM Autovaz, TagAZ and others).

The facts set forth in the complaint concern only a few unions, but they clearly reflect the extent of the pressure being exerted against worker activists and their organizations in the Russian Federation. The situation is critical: if it gives up active work, the still young and weak independent labour movement in Russia may be crushed within a few years.

Not only activists of relatively small unions such as ITUA, but also members of large national unions fall victim to persecution. Recent examples include the local branch of the Miners & Metallurgical Workers’ Union of Russia (MMWU), an IMF affiliate, at "Alexandrinskaya Ore Mining Company" in Chelyabinsk. The local branch has been under pressure for months. Management employed all-too-familiar methods: dismissals, intimidation of union members, manipulating the wages. The deputy chair of the union committee Natalya Kniazkova was dismissed twice. Both times she was reinstated upon court orders.

The management of the plant promised to implement a wage rise of 10 per cent in January 2010, however in February the so-called coefficient of work participation was introduced. That’s when the union members were threatened that they "won’t get a dime". However those who decide to leave the union were promised a sum of money equivalent to two or three months’ wages.

Tsentrosvarmash: is defending labour rights extremism?

Tver is a typical post-Soviet town in central Russia: a small historic center, modern stores, ornately carved wooden window frames on privately built houses, decaying Soviet-era apartment blocks and, of course, the whole surrounded by a ring of industrial suburbs. Some of the Soviet-era plants closed in the 1990s, victims of privatization and rapid changes in the "effective owners", but the rest continue to operate, accounting for the lion’s share of employment in the town.

One such plant is Tsentrosvarmash. Founded in the 1970s, it makes swivel-trucks for railroad cars and welded frames for locomotives, and employs more than a thousand people.

During the current financial crisis, the average wage at the plant fell to 12 thousand rubles (US$410) per month. That sum consists of a small base pay supplemented by additional payments set arbitrarily by the department chiefs; this enables management to keep employees in a permanent state of insecurity, uncertainty and dependence.

Working conditions in the plant are unhealthy and dangerous: the roof leaks, water drips onto machines and high-voltage distribution cabinets (in workshops with metal floors!), and there is no ventilation.

"In winter the temperature never rises above +10°C, and we often have to work at +2 or 3°C," notes union activist Dmitri Kozhnev.

Dmitri started working at Tsentrosvarmash in 2006. Finding no support from the local branch of the Engineering Workers’ Union of Russia (Rosprofmash), he became one of the initiators of the local branch of the Inter-Regional Trade Union of Autoworkers (ITUA), a young and active Russian trade union, which is an IMF affiliate. In November 2007 an ITUA local was established at the plant. That was when Kozhnev and other activists of the new union began to suffer persecution.

During his first year and a half at the plant, Kozhnev was not given a single disciplinary penalty. But after the local union was founded, he received one reprimand after another. Among Kozhnev’s alleged offenses was that he "talked to workers of workshop no. 8 and distracted them from their work".

Finally, on January 19, 2009, Kozhnev was dismissed. The pretext was that on December 19, a month before the dismissal, he had left his workplace 20 minutes before the end of the shift. On that day the temperature in the workshop was only +6°C, and eleven other workers left early together with Kozhnev.

In May 2009 a court declared Kozhnev’s dismissal illegal and ordered management to reinstate him. Management complied with that decision only after the intervention of court enforcement officers – and almost immediately Kozhnev was laid off for many months. Throughout that period he was paid two thirds of his base pay, about four thousand rubles (US$138). With that money he was supposed to survive and feed a family.

On March 5 Kozhnev and another union activist, Alexander Adrianov, were again dismissed, and this time the documents used to justify their dismissal were simply forged. In February they were shown the order indicating the date of their return from layoff as February 12, but they were not allowed to sign the order. When they came to work on that date, they were again shown an order, but with a different date. It turned out they were supposed to have shown up at the plant not on the 12th, but on February 5. And that week of "unauthorized" absence was used as the pretext for dismissing them.

The plant management has spared no effort to get rid of an active and combative local which, despite its small membership and constant persecution, had achieved certain improvements in working conditions. Not only Kozhnev and Adrianov were dismissed – so were many other ITUA activists. Nevertheless, even having lost most of its members and leaders, the local is still operating.

By pressuring union members the plant management is flagrantly violating Russian and international labour legislation. But acrimonious as it may be, the conflict would have remained local if it had involved only the union and management. What makes it particularly significant is the intervention of the authorities.

Several times Kozhnev applied to the procurator’s office requesting it to intervene in the situation of horrific working conditions and low wages at the plant. But instead of investigating the employer’s conduct, the procurator’s office went after the union. All members of the ITUA local at Tsentrosvarmash were summoned for questioning; they were threatened with persecution and told to withdraw from the union.

Nevertheless, the most dramatic episode of the struggle at Tsentrosvarmash, and the most ominous symptom of the situation of union and civil rights in Russia today, was the indictment of the ITUA activists for extremism.

In 2008 and 2009 a full-scale campaign was initiated in Russia to combat extremism. Within the system of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, centers were created to work against extremism, so-called "E Centers" endowed with unclear authority and an extremely broad area of activity. The vague wording of the Federal Law "On Countering Extremist Activity" enables the authorities to attack independent organizations, intellectuals and activists by equating just social demands with manifestations of hatred and hostility. Under present conditions in Russia, the "E Centers" essentially play the role of a political police.

One form of combating extremism consists of compiling lists of forbidden literature. The decision to include materials on the list is made by the courts. Disseminating and even possessing extremist literature entails administrative and criminal penalties.

The list is regularly published in the official "Russian Gazette", and previously it consisted mostly of anti-Semitic pamphlets and ultra-right-wing and Islamist propaganda. But all that changed on August 28, 2009, when the Zavolzhsky district court of Tver declared ITUA leaflets such as "A new union has been created", "We demand the return of the night shift pay!", and "Against precarious employment" to be extremist.

A paradoxical situation has emerged in which the authorities have essentially declared defending labour rights tantamount to extremist activity. If they wanted to, they could indict the entire International Metalworkers’ Federation and its campaign against precarious employment – since that slogan has been declared extremist by a court of law.

During his years of union work, Dmitri Kozhnev has become a first-class expert in labour law. In talking with him, the conversation constantly turns to legal and procedural arguments and subtle issues in the Labour Code. As he says, "I had always placed my hope and faith in the law." And it is precisely this person and his organization that the authorities have accused of extremism. Evidently, from the regime’s viewpoint placing "too much" faith in the law is also a form of radicalism, and a dangerous one at that.

The attitude of the authorities themselves to the law is well illustrated by the episode with the court on August 28. The ITUA activists were simply not informed of it; moreover, when they requested a copy of the court decision several months later, their request was denied on the grounds that the union was "not a party to the case".

This already absurd situation becomes genuinely tragic when the ITUA, not being a "party to the case", cannot contest the court’s decision. In practice, there exist no legal means of removing the union’s leaflets from the list of forbidden literature.