Strike wave among workers in Myanmar

The Irrawaddy reports on the spreading strike wave among workers in Myanmar, particularly at the Hlaing Thar Yar industrial zone:

More than 5,000 workers in five different factories at Rangoon’s Hlaing Tharyar Industrial Zone have been striking for better pay for two weeks... All the Hlaing Tharyar striking factories are close to one another with industrial action spreading to each over the course of a week. Since the middle of May, there has been a series of walk-outs in HI Mo wig factory, Sapae Pwint, Myanmar Pearl, Nay Min Aung, YJ and Tokyo garment factories, as well as Nawaday and Sunflower factories at different times.Employees of the three garment factories—Sapae Pwint, Pearl and Nay Min Aung—gathered at the Labor Affairs Office in Rangoon’s Mayangone Township on May 16. The following day, government authorities, including Lower House MP Aung Thein Lin from Rangoon’s South Oakkalarpa Township, met to negotiate with the factory owners. However, despite their involvement no progress has yet been made. Ohmar Nyein, a female worker at Sapae Pwint garment factory, told The Irrawaddy on Tuesday that, “the authorities just favor the employers, we are told what their offer is but they are not listening to our demands.”

These strikes were also reported in the Myanmar Times:

THE owners of two factories in Hlaing Tharyar Industrial Zone have set a May 21 deadline for some 1300 striking employees to return to work. Daw Su Sandar, the manager of garment factory Myanma Pearl, said the factory’s owner, Daw Sandar Aung, had agreed to most of the striking workers’ demands and those that did not stop demonstrating by May 21 would be fired. Myanmar Pearl employs 1090 workers, while Sabei Pwint, owned by her sister, Daw Thandar Aung, employs 600. About 1300 workers from the two factories began striking on May 15, calling for better pay and conditions.

In addition, The Irrawaddy reports that 25 workers at a steel factory in Hmawbi began a hunger strike on Friday, May 25:

Around 25 workers at a Chinese-owned steel factory in Rangoon Division announced on Friday that they will begin a hunger strike in response to the company’s refusal to raise wages. The workers are among a group of 400 who have been on strike at the Yangon Crown Steel Factory in Hmawbi, Rangoon Division, since May 20. The factory is located in the Myantakar Industrial Zone... Meanwhile, strikes at factories in Rangoon’s Hlaing Tharyar Industrial Zone continue weeks after workers first walked off the job. “Today, workers at nine factories continued their strikes,” U Htay, a lawyer who is acting a legal consultant to the striking workers, told The Irrawaddy on Friday. He added that a total of more than 7,000 workers from these factories are on strike... Workers at the factory allege that Korean managers at the factory were abusive to their Burmese staff, in some cases physically assaulting female workers. Although the factory’s management and workers reached an agreement to end the strike earlier this month after labor officials became involved in negotiations, the company’s owners have since refused to pay the agreed-to wage increase.
Workers at the factory say that in addition to a lack of food, they haven’t had water or electricity in their dormitories since yesterday.

 Regarding this strike wage, ABC Radio (Australia) has an interview with Sean Turnell.

Myanmar workers embrace new power to strike

AFP reports on the wave of strikes among workers in Myanmar, particularly in the Hlaing Thar Yar industrial zone on the outskirts of Yangon:

YANGON — Silenced for decades under military rule, Myanmar's workers are now daring to speak out to demand better pay and conditions after a new law gave them the right to strike.

Workers in the country formerly known as Burma are already testing their new-found power with a string of walkouts, emboldened by legislation that is considered among the most progressive in the region.

Hundreds of employees from three garment factories at Yangon's Hlaing Thar Yar Industrial Zone went on strike last week demanding improved working conditions, picketing outside the plants.

Clapping and chanting, they showed none of the fear that would have accompanied such open defiance in the past, when businesses held all the cards in a system defined by cronyism and intolerance of opposition.

"If they want to sack us, they will have to fire all 800 workers" at her factory, said one 26-year-old employee who told AFP she was not afraid of losing her job, although she was reluctant to give her name.

"If they don't increase the money, we will continue protesting," she added, saying she was paid around $60 a month.

The new legislation, approved by the country's reformist President Thein Sein to replace the repressive 1962 Trade Unions Act, was prepared with the help of the International Labour Organisation (ILO).

It gives workers the right to strike when employers have been given advance notice, and to form unions with a minimum of 30 members.

The new rules represent a challenge to both workers and employers in a country where dissent was routinely crushed by a military regime for nearly half a century until a new quasi-civilian government took power last year.

"It's the very early days of a new industrial environment. People are coming to grips with it, understanding new rights and responsibilities," said Steve Marshall, the ILO's liaison officer in Myanmar.

He said people may become aware that they now have the right to strike but have little understanding of how to negotiate with employers, who are also adjusting to the new rules.
"We will likely see some industrial disruption and that is part of the learning process," he said.

A foreign diplomat told AFP the new legislation was considered as possibly "the best such law in Asia".

But he added: "The question is how to implement it in the current state of Myanmar society, which is not quite ready yet."

Myanmar is one of the poorest countries in the world and despite hopes of an economic revival as it opens up to foreign investment, job opportunities are still scarce and people face rising consumer prices.

The protester at Hlaing Thar Yar said workers wanted a cost of living allowance of 30,000 kyats (about $37) a month, which would bring her total monthly salary to around $100, including overtime.

Her employer had agreed to a $12 allowance, but "we are not satisfied with that", she said.
The firm said in a statement that workers who had not agreed to its offer by May 18 would be considered to have "resigned by their own will" -- a deadline ignored by the strikers.
It is just one in a number of recent cases of labour unrest at factories in Myanmar, whose low-cost workforce is a major attraction for foreign manufacturers hoping to set up operations there.

Earlier this month around 300 workers at a wig factory in the same industrial zone went on strike, demanding that their basic salaries be raised from around $12 a month to roughly $38.

"We have faced this problem for a long time but we couldn't stand it any longer," said 23-year-old Thingyan Moe. The South Korean employer granted all of the staff requests.
"Many protests are occurring in factories at industrial zones these days," said a lawyer acting for the garment workers, Htay, who goes by one name.

The reforms have not yet filtered through to employers or rank-and-file labour ministry bureaucrats, he added, so that "workers have no other option than to protest to get what they want".

"If these issues are not solved, it might cause instability. It might become the beginning of a labour uprising. We can't guess how far it will go."

But most recent disputes have been small in scale, with workers opting to walk out in the early stage of negotiations and agreeing a resolution within days.

Ye Naing Win, of the Committee for Establishing Independent Labour Unions, a local activist group, said there had been more than 20 strikes this year and more were expected.
"The protests are occurring because the basic salary they get is so poor and their lives get harder," he said. "These factories are like prisons."

Factory refuses to allow striking workers to return to work

RFA reports that the employer at the Grand Royal liquor factory has refused to allow approximately 300 workers who went on strike demanding a wage increase in April 2012 to return to work:

Grand Royal အရက္ခ်က္စက္ရုံက လုပ္ခလစာ တုိးေပးဖုိ႔ ေတာင္းဆုိေနတဲ့ အလုပ္သမားေတြကုိ အလုပ္ရွင္က အျပည့္အ၀ လုိက္ေလ်ာျခင္းမရွိသလုိ၊ အလုပ္ျပန္ဆင္းတာကုိလည္း လက္မခံဘူးလုိ႔ သိရပါတယ္။

Grand Royal အရက္ခ်က္စက္ရုံက လုပ္ခလစာ တုိးေပးဖုိ႔ ေတာင္းဆုိေနတဲ့ အလုပ္သမားေတြကုိ အလုပ္ရွင္က အျပည့္အ၀ လုိက္ေလ်ာျခင္းမရွိသလုိ၊ အလုပ္ျပန္ဆင္းတာကုိလည္း လက္မခံဘူးလုိ႔ သိရပါတယ္။

အေျခခံလုပ္ခလစာ တုိးေပးဖုိ႔ အလုပ္သမား ၃၀၀ ေလာက္က ေတာင္းဆုိထားတာကုိ ၿပီးခဲ့တဲ့ ဧၿပီလ ၂၈ ရက္ေန႔ ကတည္းက အလုပ္ရွင္၊ အလုပ္သမားနဲ႔ အလုပ္သမား၀န္ႀကီးဌာန တာ၀န္ရွိသူေတြ ညႇိႏႈိင္းေဆြးေႏြးခဲ့ေပမယ့္ ေျပလည္မႈ မရရွိခဲ့ဘူးလုိ႔ အလုပ္သမားေခါင္းေဆာင္ေတြက ေျပာပါတယ္။
မေန႔က တတိယအႀကိမ္အျဖစ္ ေနျပည္ေတာ္ အလုပ္သမား၀န္ႀကီးဌာနက ဗုိလ္မွဴးႀကီး ယုလြင္ေအာင္နဲ႔ စက္ရုံတာ၀န္ရွိသူ ေဒၚေအးသီတာသန္႔တုိ႔ ညႇိႏႈိင္းၿပီး ေနာက္လုပ္ခလစာကုိ ေျခာက္ေထာင္တုိးေပးဖုိ႔ ဆုံးျဖတ္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။

အလုပ္သမားေတြရဲ႕ ေတာင္းဆုိခ်က္နဲ႔ အလြန္ကြာဟေနတယ္လုိ႔ အလုပ္သမားေခါင္းေဆာင္တစ္ဦးက အခုလို ေျပာပါတယ္။

"ကြ်န္ေတာ္တို႔လစာ အနည္းဆံုးလစာက ယခင္လစာ ၄၃၀၀၀ ရပါတယ္ခင္ဗ်။ အမ်ားဆံုးက ၅၁၀၀၀ ရပါတယ္ခင္ဗ်။ အဲဒီလို လစာကေနျပီးေတာ့ ကြ်န္ေတာ္တို႔က ေတာင္းဆိုလိုက္တဲ့ လစာက အေျခခံလစာ ခုႏွစ္ေသာင္းပါခင္ဗ်။ ႏွစ္အလိုက္ တစ္ႏွစ္ကို ၃၀၀၀ စီထည့္ေပးရမယ္လို႔ ကြ်န္ေတာ္တို႔က ေတာင္းဆိုထားပါတယ္။ ဥပမာ စုစုေပါင္း သူတို႔တိုးေပးတာ အရင္က ၅၁၀၀၀ ဆိုရင္ အခုက ေလာေလာဆယ္မွာ ေျခာက္ေထာင္ပဲ တိုးေပးပါတယ္ခင္ဗ်"

အလုပ္သမား၀န္ႀကီးဌာနက တာ၀န္ရွိသူ ဗုိလ္မွဴးႀကီး ယုလြင္ေအာင္က အလုပ္သမားေတြ အလုပ္ျပန္ဆင္းဖုိ႔ တုိက္တြန္းတဲ့အတြက္ ဒီကေန႔ အလုပ္သြားျပန္ဆင္းေပမယ့္ ဆႏၵျပရာမွာ ပါ၀င္ခဲ့တဲ့ အလုပ္သမားေတြကုိ အလုပ္ရုံေတြထဲ ၀င္ခြင့္မေပးဘူးလုိ႔ အလုပ္သမားတစ္ဦးက ေျပာပါတယ္။

ဂရင္းရြိင္ရယ္ အရက္ခ်က္စက္ရုံဟာ ေရႊျပည္သာစက္မႈဇုန္၊ ဇုန္အမွတ္ ၃ မွာရွိၿပီး၊ စုစုေပါင္း အလုပ္သမား ေလးေထာင္နီးပါး ရွိတယ္လုိ႔ သိရပါတယ္။ ဒီအရက္ခ်က္စက္ရုံကုိ ICDC လုပ္ငန္းအုပ္စုက ပုိင္ဆုိင္ၿပီး ကုမၸဏီရဲ႕ ဥကၠ႒ကေတာ့ ဦးေအာင္မုိးေက်ာ္ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။

အလုပ္သမားေတြဘက္ကေတာ့ ဆက္လက္ ေဆြးေႏြးညႇိႏႈိင္းမႈေတြ ျပဳလုပ္ဖုိ႔ လုိလားတယ္လုိ႔ ေျပာဆုိခဲ့ပါတယ္။

From The Irrawaddy, 19 May, 2012:

The sun has already set on a rundown apartment building down a quiet narrow alley near the Mae Sot-Myawaddy border. A large group of Burmese migrant workers congregate outside.

They have been waiting for the Thai agency to process their visas since the early afternoon. They already spent hours queuing up, in the hot summer sun, on the Friendship Bridge to get day passes to enter Thailand. The agency charged them 400 baht (US $12.70) for the pass, even though it officially only costs 20 baht.

The agency is just one of dozens which have sprung up along the border in recent months, cashing on the looming June 14 deadline for National Verification. The new Thai law requires foreign workers from Burma, Cambodia and Laos to be legally registered to work in the country.

Answering the call of a Thai labor crisis, thousands of Burmese workers cross into Mae Sot every day, hoping to earn a salary several times higher than in their native Burma.

Along the highway leading to the Friendship Bridge, larger crowds of migrant workers wait outside other agencies. With bags in toe, scores of mini-buses wait to transport them to Bangkok and with them their dreams of making money.

The scene is reminiscent of a gold rush. However in this scenario, where migrant workers can expect to pay 10 times the official fee (500 baht) for a one-year visa, it’s obvious who the prospectors are and who is getting mined.

Several years ago, the Thai government announced that all foreign workers must be registered or risk deportation. The deadline was extended several times after rights groups complained about the impracticalities of registering millions of migrant workers throughout the country.

There are an estimated 2-3 million Burmese migrant workers in Thailand, making up about 5 percent of the total Thai work force.

The annual remittance from Burmese nationals working overseas is more than $3.6 billion, Burma’s Deputy Labour Minister Myint Thein told Thai press in April, following a meeting with Thai ministers to iron out the details for the implementation of the National Verification process, according to a Bangkok Post article.

Ironically, he praised the significant contributions Burmese migrant workers had made to the country’s economic growth.

Some people wonder if the real reason Naypyidaw is supporting the National Verification process is to collect taxes from the millions of Burmese working abroad.

Others, from ethnic areas where corruption by local authorities is still rampant, worry that the personal information they are required to provide to get a passport will be exploited to extort money from relatives back home.

Sam Win is from Karen state. He used to work on a garbage truck in Bangkok, earning 150 baht ($4.77) a day. When heavy flooding ravaged Thailand’s largest city causing a mass exodus of migrant workers, he had to leave without collecting his salary.

Unfortunately, Sam Win was one of the thousands of migrant workers who got caught in a Thai police net on the way back to the border.

Immigration officers delivered him to the Border Guard Force on the Thai side of the Myawaddy River, where he had to pay a 2,500-baht ($80) bribe or risk being sold to human traffickers.

Nearly one year later, Sam Win finds himself sitting on a curb in Mae Sot, waiting three days for an agency to process his Thai visa. He is only a five-minute drive, by detention center truck, from the spot where the Thai police deported him.

The Thai visa and Burmese passport cost him 10,000 baht, money he had to borrow to pay. Although Sam Win doesn’t have a confirmed job in Bangkok, he hopes to return to his municipal employment.

Before coming back to Thailand, he tried to make money in his village farming, but gave up because the earnings were too low.

His relative, Tin Aung, who is also waiting for a Thai visa, does not have a job either. But he still paid 16,000 baht (over $500) for his Burmese passport and Thai visa because he was in a hurry.

For the last eight years, Tin Aung worked on boats in Pattaya. Last month, with the National Verification deadline approaching, he decided to return to Burma to get his passport.

“I didn’t want to pay the human smugglers to travel back home so I turned myself in to Thai immigration, who deported me to the border,” said Tin Aung.

Now a month later, he is anxious to return to bangkok where his wife and daughter are waiting. Tin Aung couldn’t afford to pay for their documents, which means after June 14, only he will able to legal in the family.

Despite all the money he had to borrow to obtain his visa and passport, Tin Aung says he is “happy” to finally have legal status in Thailand.

“The last time I worked here, I was always felt afraid of the police. Now I can go wherever I want. For the first time [in Thailand] I feel freedom,” said Tin Aung.

Burmese ‘Slaves’ Rescued from Thai Factory

From The Irrawaddy, 17 May, 2012:

Nearly 150 Burmese migrant workers, who for up to two years had been locked inside a shrimp factory in Mahachai near Bangkok, were rescued on Tuesday by Thai police and social organizations.

Kyaw Thaung, a spokesperson for the Burmese Association in Thailand (BAT), told The Irrawaddy that his organization found out about the workers through an employee who had escaped.

“There are 146 workers altogether. They were placed in the basement underneath the factory and forced to work like slaves,” said Kyaw Thaung.
He said the BAT staff informed local authorities about the conditions in the factory and the plight of the desperate workers, but were told they would have to produce stronger evidence, such as photographs or videos, before the authorities could take further action.

The staffer, who asked to remain anonymous, told The Irrawaddy that he had to risk his life to obtain such evidence.

“I had to shoot photos and videos secretly, and I was afraid of being found out by the factory thugs or the police. I don’t have any documents to stay in Thailand,” he said.

After his evidence was submitted to local Thai police and a UN agency, the factory owner, Burmese charge-hands and security guards were arrested, and the workers were finally freed from bondage.

The rescue effort also reportedly involved the BAT, the Anti-Human Trafficking Division of the Royal Thai Police (AHTD), United Nations Inter-Agency Project on Human Trafficking (UNIAP), the Foundation for Education and Development (FED) based in Thailand’s Phang Nga Province, and the Burmese embassy in Bangkok.

A male worker who escaped from virtual slavery told The Irrawaddy that some of the victims were trapped there for up to two years and that when unwell were not allowed to receive medical treatment. Everybody had to work approximately 20 hours a day without any days off, he said.

He also said that Kyaw Soe, the Burmese charge-hand who was arrested together with the factory owner, treated the workers cruelly and even slapped their faces sometimes.

“Once I got out of the factory, I felt I had gone from hell to heaven,” he said.
On May 15, Thai police in nearby Samut Prakan Province arrested more than 1,000 migrant workers, 386 of whom were from Burma, while the rest were from Laos and Cambodia. The arrest was carried out due to alleged drug dealing by some workers, Thai newspapers reported.

According to organizations assisting migrant workers in Thailand, there are about four million Burmese, only half of whom have official documents, currently working in the kingdom.

Strike at Buleh garment factory, Hlaing Thar Yar

According to Myanmar News Now workers from Buleh (Pearl) garment factory in Hlaing Thar Yar, Yangon went on strike on 15 May over low wages and wage deductions.

လႈိင္သာယာၿမိဳ႕နယ္စက္မႈဇံု (၃) ဘုရားလမ္းေပၚရွိ ပုလဲအထည္ခ်ဳပ္စက္ရံု အလုပ္သမားဆႏၵျပမႈအား ညွိႏိႈင္းေပးရာတြင္ အလုပ္ရံုႏွင့္ အလုပ္သမား ဥပေဒစစ္ေဆးေရးဦးစီးဌာန မွ ညြန္ၾကားေရးမႈးခ်ဳပ္ ဦး၀င္းရွိန္ႏွင့္ ဒုတိယညႊန္ၾကားေရးမႈးခ်ဳပ္ ဦးသန္းႏိုင္တို႔က အမ်ားျပည္သူေရွ႕ေမွာက္၌ ပထမဦးဆံုးအႀကိမ္အျဖစ္ ညွိႏိႈင္းေပးခဲ့သည္။

Strike at the Sabeh-Pwint garment factory

RFA reports that workers at the Sabeh-Pwint (Jasmine Blossom) garment factory have gone on strike starting 14 May, 2012.

လွိဳင္သာယာၿမိဳ႕နယ္ စက္မႈဇုန္ ၄ စပယ္ပြင့္ အထည္ခ်ဳပ္စက္ရုံက အလုပ္သမားေတြဟာ လုပ္ခလစာ တုိးျမွင့္ရရွိေရးအတြက္ ဒီကေန႔ ဆႏၵျပခဲ့ၾကပါတယ္။ အေျခခံလုပ္ခလစာဟာ က်ပ္တစ္ေသာင္းေက်ာ္ ႏွစ္ေသာင္း၀န္းက်င္ပဲ ရတဲ့အတြက္ လုပ္ခလစာ အေျခခံ သံုးေသာင္းေက်ာ္နဲ႔ အခ်ိန္ပိုေၾကးအပါအ၀င္ တစ္လကုိအနည္းဆုံး ၇ ေသာင္းေလာက္ ရလုိေၾကာင္း ဆႏၵျပအလုပ္သမားေတြက ေျပာပါတယ္။ ဒီစပယ္ပြင့္စက္ရုံဟာ တရုတ္ပုိင္စက္ရုံ ျဖစ္တယ္လုိ႔ အလုပ္သမားေတြက ေျပာပါတယ္။ ေလာေလာဆယ္ အလုပ္သမား ေခါင္းေဆာင္ ၅ ဦးကုိေခၚယူၿပီး အလုပ္သမားေရးရာဌာနနဲ႔ အလုပ္ရွင္တုိ႔က ညႇိႏႈိင္းေဆြးေႏြး ေနတယ္လုိ႔ သိရပါတယ္။ အဲဒီ အထည္ခ်ဳပ္စက္ရုံမွာ အလုပ္သမား ၅၀၀ ေလာက္ရွိၿပီး ဒီကေန႔ အလုပ္သမား အားလုံးနီးပါးက အခုလုိ အလုပ္မဆင္းဘဲ ဆႏၵျပေနၾကတာျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း ဆႏၵျပအလုပ္သမားေတြက ေျပာဆုိခဲ့ပါတယ္။