A U.S. Seal of Approval to Malaysia’s Union Busts

“A great day for the Polish people and for freedom,” the White House spokesman said in welcoming the April Warsaw accord recognizing Solidarity. The United States and other Western governments immediately began considering how they could reward Poland with debt relief and credits that were withheld after Warsaw crushed Solidarity in 1981.

Does this strong influence on Poland, useful as it is for the growth of democracy there, apply elsewhere? Local equivalents of Walesa and Solidarity are valiantly fighting for human rights in many corners of the globe. Their struggles, too, deserve wide recognition and support. That’s especially so when multinational corporations join forces with the local government in repressing them. Malaysia provides a leading example.

Malaysia is not Poland, but Malaysian working men, and especially working women, suffer from severe violations of their right to free association. The most glaring abuse exists in the country’s vast electronics industry, where U.S. and other foreign companies in concert with the government have long denied its workers the right to form their own organizations.

About 90% of Malaysia’s 85,000 electronic workers are young women, many only 16 years old. Management’s preference for young women, according to an International Labor Organization study, is based not only on their purported manual dexterity but also on the docility and submissiveness to male authority that usually marks unmarried female teenagers recruited from rural areas. Without an effective union, these youngsters are unable to protect themselves against gender discrimination on a grand scale, as well as sexual harassment.

The seriousness of the situation was documented in a petition the AFL-CIO filed last June with the U.S. government. The petition urged our government to implement a human-rights provision of U.S. trade law and to withdraw the duty-free privileges of Malaysian exports to the United States unless Malaysia took corrective action.

Four months later, after first reacting in fury, the Malaysian government announced the end of its 15-year ban on unions in the electronics industry. Electronics firms, the labor minister said at a press conference, were now “strong and stable” enough to have a union, and he even invited the Malaysian Trades Union Congress to help set it up. Delighted, the congress promptly went into action. A meeting of 250 electronic workers from 12 companies drew up a constitution for a new national union, and within a few days their leaders filed a formal application for registration with the Registrar of Trade Unions.

Meanwhile some employers harassed union activists and spread fear of plant closings if the workers form a union. A Japanese firm promised to triple the annual bonus of all workers who renounced the union in writing. At the national level, the Malaysian-American electronics industry association (headed by a Texas Instruments executive), whose 14 corporate members enjoy the right to self-organization that they deny to their workers, put the heat on the government, warning of possible dire consequences, including its pullout from Malaysia.

A month after lifting its ban on unionization, the government reimposed it. The labor minister announced that the government would not allow an electronic industry union after all, but would only permit workers in individual plants to form their own “in-house” unions. In-house unions generally are under the direct or indirect control of employers, and are about as effective as Malaysian employer organizations would be if limited to one plant.

The Malaysian government’s partnership in this and other repression violates internationally recognized workers’ rights specified in the U.S. Trade and Tariff Act of 1984. That law authorizes the President to withhold duty-free treatment of the products of countries that persistently repress the freedom or association of workers.

Malaysia was the world’s ninth-largest exporter of duty-free products to the United States in 1987. Because of the exemption from paying normal tariffs under the so-called Generalized System of Preferences, the U.S. taxpayer in effect subsidizes human exploitation by multinational corporations operating in Malaysia.

Unfortunately, on April 13, the Bush Administration announced the continuation of that subsidy by rejecting the AFL-CIO petition on Malaysia. Meanwhile, the Malaysian government, confident of continuing support from Washington, is sharpening new legislative measures to clip the wings of Malaysia’s unions and their leaders.

Lucky for Solidarity that there were no American electronics companies in Poland.