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	When everything is a commodity, labour rights count little by Josiah Mortimer New Internationalist   There’s a war going on in Asia and it’s failing to make the headlines. It’s the war on workers that is taking place across much of the continent, according to the Director of the Asia Monitor Resources Center in Hong Kong, Sanjiv Pandita.   The geographer David Harvey has termed this process ‘accumulation by dispossession’. Across the continent, workers are being forced off their land to make way for plantations, mining, or even real estate. They’re resisting – but employers and police are using the age-old methods of repression.   The recent surge in attacks on citizens has been propelled by the expansion of neoliberal policies in Asia, including controversial ‘export processing zones’ which lack any labour or environmental standards. In such areas, ‘everything is a commodity,’ according to Pandita, particularly when inequality has soared in Asia – especially in China – over the last 20 years.   And the figures are astonishing: 300 million people – almost as many as the entire population of the US – are currently on the move in Asia, forced from rural land into the cities. This scale is ‘unprecedented at any time in the history of the industrial world,’ according to Pandita.   Of course, some end up in factories whose names have become infamous, such as the Yue Yuen factory in China, where 80,000 shoe workers recently went out on strike, or Foxconn, where your iPhone was probably made. Most workers, however, don’t end up there.   Vulnerable workers, dangerous work   Most will find themselves in an even more unregulated informal economy – picking shells, working on construction sites, gathering rubbish, and sex work. Informal work like this ‘employs’ up to a quarter of Asia’s total population – one billion people. That’s 70 per cent of total vulnerable employment in the world. It’s dangerous work, too. Over one million people die every year from work-related deaths in the region, according to conservative estimates.   These workers are not only dispossessed from their land and resources – forced out by transnationals with the help of the local state – but from their rights. And with very often no identifiable employer – whether because the supply chains are so long or because they are ‘self-employed’ – organizing for better conditions is hard. But it can be done.   Following the Rana Plaza garment factory collapse in Bangladesh, the past year has seen some of the largest strikes in Asia’s history. Again, the numbers are eye-watering: 100 million workers in India went on strike last year – in one day. Millions stopped work in Hong Kong, Indonesia and Bangladesh, the latter winning a 50-per-cent wage hike in the textiles sector. Cambodia similarly saw a major general strike last December, which was met with a violent crackdown. And in Korea, mostly informal workers took radical action, particularly bricklayers.   Within these struggles, the question of unity between ‘formal’ and informal work has to be addressed. ‘We have to believe all working people are one – no matter what they are doing,’ Pandita says. The question is how to bring all of them together. New ways of organizing are occurring – the challenge, with no or secretive employers, is how and where to bargain. Instead, the bargaining must be political.   Even where informal workers are organizing, however, it is often separately. For example home-based workers and street vendors are getting organized – but not as one.   In such situations, the question of leadership also emerges, somewhat problematically. Movements often draw external middle-class organizers who take over. Yet, says Pandita, ‘the agents of change have to be workers themselves. We have to just be catalysts.’ Perhaps the current situation is just a temporary phase while grassroots leadership develops.   From Western workers, solidarity has to be genuine – ‘it can’t be based on pity’. Movements against accumulation by dispossession are rising up, and the challenge for those in the Global North is to offer solidarity without co-opting them. One thing is certain, however – with living standards in the West being crushed by austerity, all of us are workers now. It’s time to start organizing like we believe it. Visit the related web page
	Pledges for Humanitarian Aid fall short of Deliveries by IPS, Reliefweb, agencies   When international donors pledge millions of dollars either for post-conflict reconstruction or for humanitarian aid, deliveries are rarely on schedule: they are either late, fall far below expectations or not delivered at all.   The under-payment or non-payment of promised aid has affected mostly civilian victims, including war-ravaged women and children in military hotspots such as Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and most recently Yemen.   But it also extends to earthquake-struck countries such as Haiti and Nepal, and at least three African countries devastated by the Ebola virus.   At an international Ebola recovery conference at the United Nations, the governments of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea requested more than 3.2 billion dollars in humanitarian aid to meet their recovery plan budgets. And donors readily pledged to meet the request.   But how much of this will be delivered and when?   At a question and answer press stakeout, Matthew Russell Lee, an investigative reporter for Inner City Press (ICP), asked Helen Clark, the Administrator of U.N. Development Programme (UNDP), what steps are being taken to ensure that the announced pledges are in fact paid.   According to Lee, she said UNDP will be contacting the pledgers. “But will they go public with the non-payers?” he asked.   Lee told the Inter Press Service news agency that even amid the troubling lack of follow-through on previous pledges in Haiti, Lebanon, Gaza and Yemen, “it does not seem the UNDP has in place any mechanism for reporting on compliance with the Ebola pledges” announced last week.   “If the U.N. system is going to announce such pledges, they should follow up on them,” he said.   Gregory Adams, Director of Aid Effectiveness at Oxfam International, which has been closely monitoring aid pledges, told IPS that in advance of the Ebola Recovery Conference held last week, Oxfam looked at three past crises to see how well donors followed through on recovery pledges.   “We found that on average, donors deliver less than half of what they pledged (47 percent). But, even that percentage might overstate the amount that actually arrives in recovering countries,” he said.   For example, in Busan, South Korea in 2011, donors pledged they would be publishing timely, accessible and detailed data on where their aid is going by the end of 2015.   But many donors still don’t publish complete information; information is only available for slightly more than half of overall ODA (Official Development Assistance).   As a consequence, said Adams, once aid reaches a recovery country, it is difficult to know exactly how much actually gets where it is most needed.   This lack of transparency makes it hard for communities to participate in planning and recovery efforts, and to hold donors, governments and service providers accountable for results, he noted.   One of the most important lessons of Ebola was that response and recovery efforts must be centered on community needs and incorporate their feedback, Adams said.   “If people do not know where aid is going, they can’t plan, they can’t provide feedback, and they can’t make sure that aid is working,” he declared.   Even Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon made a special appeal to donors last December when he announced 10 billion dollars in pledges as initial capitalisation for the 100 billion dollar Green Climate Fund (GCF).   Announcing the pledges, he called on “all countries to deliver on their pledges as soon as possible and for more governments to contribute to climate finance.”   Last April, Saudi Arabia announced a 274-million-dollar donation “for humanitarian operations in Yemen” – despite concerns over civilian causalities during the ongoing conflict there.   Responding to repeated questions at U.N. press briefings, U.N. spokesperson Stephane Dujarric told reporters last week: “I think it’s right now in the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) phase between the Saudis and the various U.N. agencies to which the money will be allocated. That process is ongoing. We hope it concludes soon. But those discussions are ongoing.”   He said a lot of the larger donors have standing MOUs with the U.N.   Asked if there was a conflict of interest given Saudi Arabia is one of the belligerents in the conflict, Dujarric said: “I wouldn’t say conflict of interest. We welcome the contributions from Saudi Arabia these contributions will be used by U.N. humanitarian agencies, which are free to use those resources in the way they best see fit to help the Yemeni people.”   Last March, at the third international pledging conference for humanitarian aid to Syria, which was hosted by Kuwait, donors pledged 3.8 billion dollars in humanitarian aid. The three major donors were: the European Commission (EC) and its member states (with a contribution of nearly one billion dollars), the United States (507 million dollars) and Kuwait (500 million dollars).   Several international non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and charities, including the Turkish Humanitarian Relief Foundation, the Qatar Red Crescent Society and the Islamic Charity Organisation of Kuwait, jointly pledged about 500 million dollars.   But, so far, there has been no full accounting of the deliveries.   Oxfam’s Adams told reporters in order to make sure that the three countries affected by Ebola can help their people and communities recover, donors need to publish timely, detailed, and comprehensive information on their aid, consistent with the priorities outlined in the recovery plans of the Governments of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.   Seek to direct aid through local entities wherever possible, including national and local governments and civil society organisations.   Support strong community engagement and the independent role of civil society in Ebola recovery, so that they can hold donors, governments and service providers accountable for results.   http://reliefweb.int/ http://www.publishwhatyoufund.org/ http://www.oxfam.org/ http://www.humanitarianresponse.info/ http://reliefweb.int/report/world/five-ways-aid-agencies-can-better-communicate-those-they-help Visit the related web page
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