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US May Press Countries Over Labour Rights
Financial Times
May 16, 2002
by Edward Alden in Washington
The US is considering the first revision in almost 20 years to the list of workers' rights that African and other developing countries must respect in order to sell their goods duty-free into the US
market.
The US Senate is likely to approve next week a revision to the 25-year-old Generalised System of Preferences that will for the first time require beneficiary countries to prohibit discrimination with respect to employment and occupation.
The International Labour Organisation adopted that language in 1998 as part of its core labour standards, but it has not been reflected yet in any US trade preference schemes.
The GSP permits about $16bn (£11bn, E17.5bn) in goods from developing countries to enter the US duty-free every year.
Int ernational trade unions are hoping the Senate action will be the first step in a broader campaign to discourage what they say is the most serious form of discrimination overlooked in current labour rights standards - the sexual abuse and harassment of women in export-oriented industries.
The International Labour Rights Fund will release on Friday a detailed study of harassment in Kenya, which indicates that women in the coffee, tea and textile sectors are victims of widespread sexual abuse.
Women form the majority of employees in all three industries.
The study, based on interviews with more than 400 women, found that more than 90 percent of workplaces had seen serious sexual abuse.
Most of the cases involved women who said they had been raped, forced to have sex with their managers in order to gain improved working conditions, or forced to have sex in order to retain their jobs.
Eighty two per cent of those interviewed said women would not be promoted unless they submitted to sexual favours for their supervisors.
The study is the first in a larger ILRF project that will study working conditions for women in half a dozen other countries including Haiti, Thailand, Mexico, the Dominican Republic and Indonesia.
Bama Athreya, deputy director of the ILRF, said that trade union activists were hoping to see an expanded definition of sexual harassment added to the ILO's core labour standards at the ILO annual meeting in 2003, where the issue will be up for discussion.
The current ILO prohibition on discrimination does not specifically outlaw sexual harassment in the workplace.
The ILRF argues that an expanded definition is critical because many trade agreements and voluntary labour codes adopted by multinational companies are based on ILO-defined core labour rights.
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