by Manfred Elfstrom, Program Officer, International Labor Rights Forum
With Mother’s Day and the less-well-known World Fair Trade Day approaching, it’s worth thinking about a sector that employs a large number of women and is singularly unfair. This is the electronics industry—not the industry of Silicon Valley creative types on bean bag chairs, but the industry that makes the actual MP3 players and laptops we use. While some jobs in the sector are skilled and pay reasonable wages, many require long days of repetitive, minute tasks, tasks that cramp backs and cause workers’ eyesight to wear out at an early age, all for low pay, sometimes lower than the local minimum wage.
A report by the Asia Monitor Resource Centre notes that 73 percent of workers in the Philippine electronics industry were women in 1999 and that workers who reach the age of 30 there are considered “old.” Many of these women are forced to work overtime but are given little job stability (27 percent are contract workers or probationary workers). Only one percent are covered by collective contracts, due to heavy government and corporate repression of unions.
Moreover, despite the cool, clean image of computers and cell phones, these electronics can be quite dirty when they are finally processed as “e-waste” in small towns, most of which are in China (see Michael Zhao’s online multimedia presentation, “e-Dump”). Women in these towns melt down circuit boards to recycle them, leading to high dioxin levels in the women and in their breast-fed infants, according to a 2007 report in Environmental Science & Technology. Columbite-tantalite or “coltan,” a highly dangerous ore used in electronics, meanwhile causes birth defects in the areas of the Democratic Republic of Congo where it is mined, often by child labor and forced labor.
But some women—and men—are fighting back. Since April 16, workers at PT Toshiba Consumer Products Indonesia have been on strike because the company refuses to recognize a collective labor agreement signed by the Federation of Indonesian Metalworkers and management. The striking workers have been attacked by police and hired thugs. Aghni Dhamayanti, vice president of the union, who recently visited Washington and had the chance to meet with ILRF staff, is calling for international support for the workers. For more details, including how to write to Toshiba, visit the site of the International Metalworkers Federation here.
Ms. Dhamayanti doesn’t need your pity. And neither do the countless other women and mothers in the electronics industry. They need your solidarity.
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