'Exploited' maids form trade union

[Thom Little]

Anti-globalisation protests in Hong Kong have brought to the fore a new radical force in Asian politics - the territory's 200,000-strong army of maids.

Fed up with abusive employers, restrictive immigration laws and cuts in their minimum wage since the Asian financial crisis, foreign domestic workers, as they are officially known, have begun to form their own trades union.

They achieved their most impressive turnout yet at rallies against the World Trade Organisation summit in Hong Kong this week, forming phalanxes of young south-east Asian women among the international socialists and well-drilled South Korean farmers.

"We are one of the exploited people of the world," said Eni Lestari, 25, a maid from Indonesia who has lived in Hong Kong for six years. Miss Lestari was 20 and had been out of Indonesia for only six months when she formed the Association of Indonesian Migrant Workers to help other women like herself.


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/12/17/wmaids17.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/12/17/ixworld.html

[rodeodance]

1. go maids go---good for you all.

[Peace Patriot]

2. And clearly the international trade union movement had it right.

We have to band together across borders and oceans, because the global corporate predators are playing one work force off against another. I think a good part of what has happened--and what was very planned--in the US over the last 5 years is the INTENTIONAL destruction of the US labor force, because of its once high standards, and not yet dead high expectations. We stood as a model for decent wages, benefits and workplace conditions. It started under Reagan with the busting of the Air Traffic Controllers union. It was masked under Clinton by the dot.com boom, but Clinton signing NAFTA, GATT, et al, sealed our fate. Now these corporate predators roam the world shopping for the cheapest, most unprotected labor. Virtual slave labor and indentured servitude, in places like Saipan and Cambodia. And, last but not least, now the high end jobs are going, going, gone--many to India--where the wages in the tech industry, for instance, are a quarter or a third of what would be expected here.

I am so very glad that the maids in Hong Kong are organizing. I hope they connect with maids here and elsewhere, to prevent the undermining of their unions, and of any gains they make in working conditions and wages, by importation of slave labor from some other country, where the young women are not so advanced in their social consciousness, are acquiescent to tyranny, and will be happy to receive a pittance. Clothing retailer sweatshops in Mexico, for instance, just pulled up stakes and moved to Asia, the moment the Mexicans started organizing. It is an absolutely brutal, uncivilized, fascist, capitalism-as-piracy, global system that has been created--called "free trade"--instigated by OUR own U.S. clothing retailers--US-based companies like Gap, whose founder, Donald Fisher, helped write the World Trade Organization textile rules under which sweatshops have proliferated. And I imagine that corporate hotels are also conspiring in the same vein.

Power to the maids!

[ret5hd]

3. One Big Union (nt)

[dennisnyc]

4. recommended--this is what we need more of!

[LostinVA]

5. Solidarity!

[lovuian]

6. Unions are formed when the worker is oppressed...

we will see more and more of these in China and India...

the worker is waking up ...