Manila Strikers Seek Support From Wal-Mart

From the Financial Times:

Hermenigilda Comia, a 46-year-old mother of three who sews sleeves to T-shirts in a factory outside Manila, has never been to a Wal-Mart store but she talks about the world’s biggest retailer as if it were her next-door neighbour.

Ms Comia and more than 200 of her colleagues at Chong Won Fashion, which makes T-shirts for the US retailer, went on strike last September to press the company’s Korean owner to negotiate a labour agreement with the union.

The dispute has caused the sort of unflatteringglobal attention that multinationals using developing world suppliers have grown used to in recent years. The Worker Rights Consortium, a group backed by leading US universities, this month accused Wal-Mart of failing to respond to anti-unionviolence at Chong Wonand the intimidation of workers.

But Chong Won workers such as Ms Comia take a different view of Wal-Mart. Famous as it and founder Sam Walton may be for their anti-union views, the workers say Wal-Mart may be doing more to solve the dispute than anyone else.

“Wal-Mart has managed to bring Chong Won owners to a meeting with the union, something that the government department of labour and employment has not been able to do,” says Resurreccion Ravelo, the union president.

Ms Comia, who has worked at Chong Won for 15 years and joined the strike in the hope of securing some sort of retirement benefits, says Wal-Mart is the key to resolving the dispute.

A majority of Chong Won’s workers voted to unionise in August 2004 but the company refused to negotiate and tried to block government recognition of the union. In October, it dismissed 116 striking union members and encouraged the formation of a rival union more friendly to management. Chong Won has not responded to a request for an interview.

Wal-Mart has hosted at least two meetings between Chong Won’s owners and union leaders at its offices in Manila, offering to continue buying from Chong Won for at least five years provided the owners reinstate the dismissed workers and negotiate with the union.

Escolastica Segovia, a consultant who helps garments companies improve operations to comply with international buyers’ increasingly stringent codes of conduct, says the Wal-Mart action is rare. “I have never heard of a buyer trying to get in between a company’s owners and union amid a strike.” That unsettles many garments company owners who already view the buyers’ codes of conduct and labour audits as encouraging worker militancy, she said.

Wal-Mart’s procurement staff in Manila say the company has never been involved to this extent in a labour dispute. “When there was a report that security guards were forcibly dismantling the picket line, I immediately rushed to the site” to make sure the picket line remained untouched, one told the Financial Times.

The Chong Won workers fear Wal-Mart may be easing the pressure on their employer. “We haven’t heard anything from Wal-Mart since December, except that it has engaged an NGO to conduct another audit of Chong Won’s labour practices,” said Ms Ravelo. “In the meantime, it continues to benefit from the impasse because its orders are being fulfilled by Chong Won using subcontractors.”

Wal-Mart says criticism from international labour support groups such as the Workers Rights Consortium is unfair. A Manila-based Wal-Mart executive said: “These problems have been there since the 1990s and our business with them began only in 2003.” Wal-Mart says it will spell out soon what it intends to do further about the labour dispute.

• Click here (PDF) to read the Worker Rights Consortium’s report.
• Click here to learn more about Wal-Mart’s supplier relationships.
• Click here to learn more about Wal-Mart in the Philippines.

Posted by Russ Fagaly on Monday, March 12, 2007

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