COMMENTATOR (COMM): Previously on Life
CHRIS MARTIN: Clothing manufacture in Pennsylvania has gone to the Far East...
LESTER THUROW: When businesses look at the world they scan the globe to find the most efficient place to put their factories.
JOHN FOX (UNITE): We don't mind competition but not Asia where people work 18 hours a day...
NOAM CHOMSKY: Capital can flow quite freely, labour can't.
ROBERT REICH: Unless we come up with a solution, we are going to see a backlash against globalisation that will hurt all of us...
COMM: It began in Seattle.
(Loudspeaker: "Please leave voluntarily")
But when the tear gas clears - are the protesters against globalisation doing more harm than good?
(Chant: "Listen to the voices of the people on the street")
COMM: Washington DC five months after Seattle.
The protesters are back on the streets for a meeting of the IMF and World Bank. The police cordon off the blocks around the Bank's headquarters. We stumbled across one skirmish as protesters tried to break through police lines.
'Get back, get back'
The demonstrators say they represent civil society and NGOs across the world.
But the usually peaceful street theatre of this protest movement has received mixed reviews.
PROF. ROBERT REICH (US Labor Secretary 1993-97): It is possible that the kids on the streets could end up doing more harm than good. But I have to be and I am essentially an optimist. I think that putting the spotlight of public opinion and public concern on globalization, raising the stakes and the issues for people so they actually see what the choices are - I think in a democracy is ultimately a good thing.
FRANCIS FUKUYAMA (Author 'The End of History'): One of the reasons we have formal democratic institutions is that we have to have rules, to show that when a government takes action it actually reflects the will of the people.
If ten NGOS show up and they demand a certain kind of action, well maybe they represent the will of the people maybe they don't.
Chant "Sweatshop labour got to go, hey hey, ho ho, sweatshop labour's got to go"
COMM: A few blocks away in fashionable Georgetown - a peaceful street protest on sweatshop labour. For this message, a different tactic.
VOXPOP Protester 1: People deserve wages to live by - I mean everyone needs enough to get by and they're not even getting that.
VOXPOP Protester 2: It's about a basic level of compassion that's missing in our world today.
I mean although we care about the people we know we have no concern for the repercussions of our actions outside our daily lives.
COMM: What these demonstrators want is to remind us of the conditions in which they claim the clothes we buy are produced.
Their best known spokesperson - Canadian writer Naomi Klein.
CROWD: "What we're seeing is a ideological clash"
COMM: She researched sweatshops in the export zones of Asia - and returned with a message that's hard to sum up in a single slogan.
NAOMI KLEIN: For instance in the Philippines in the export processing zone that I visited... I felt a tremendous sense of responsibility from the workers because they shared their stories with me.
They wanted so badly for me to take their stories home and tell the people who bought their Sassoon jeans and their Levi jean jackets and the Nike running shoes. They said to me over and over again - please tell people what it's like for us.
And at the same time their greatest fear was that I was going to go home and tell people to boycott these companies and that they were all going to lose their jobs so there was this tremendous uncertainty and confusion about what to do.
COMM: Gap declined to be interviewed but told us they are working against sweatshops and monitor the companies that manufacture their clothing to make sure workers are treated safely and fairly.
And it's not only the big brands who say the protesters' message is mistaken.
PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS (Director, Center for International Development, Harvard University): In many of these export zones it has been young women usually between the age of 17 and 25. And this has been true in the Philippines, it was true throughout East Asia, often true in China. And it's led to a remarkable social change of empowerment of young women. I think the mistake is to see that as exploitation without understanding what these younger girls' life chances would have been in the impoverished countryside.
COMM: But trying to escape from impoverished villages like Naik can be difficult. Naik is a quiet fishing village three hours along the coast from the Philippines capital Manila.
A ride home is about the only luxury Liezel can afford after an afternoon shift in a Korean-owned garment factory. She's not feeling empowered.
LIEZEL (ENGLISH TRANSLATION): After graduation it took some time before I got a job. I stayed home for a month before I got accepted at a factory in February. But there isn't enough work to go round and the pay is always delayed.
And we are always being screamed at by our Korean bosses and sometimes they insult and harass us. Even when our money does turn up they always make us wait before they hand it out.
COMM: At eighteen Liezel's already a breadwinner for her family. She makes about $15 a week sewing trainers for the American market. Their only other income - the few dollars worth of fish landed on good days by her father.
LIEZEL: I want to work for my living - I want to go abroad to work so I can help my parents. But we don't even have enough money to give to an employment agency that might be able to help me.
Going abroad's the only way to make things better - if I stay here I'll just go on working in a low paid factory job and nothing will ever change.
COMM: Many other families face the same plight. Naik is just the kind of village where many low paid workers come from. Not absolute poverty, but local activists insist, wages are almost always too low for decent civic services or education for the kids.
FATHER JOE DIZON: The wages of our workers are just enough for them to be able to go home in the evening, eat something and then rest and go back to the factory.
So it's not actually a decent wage where they can have their own living - it's a wage that is enough for them to be able to go back to work the next day and the other day and like that.
COMM: The Cavite Export Processing Zone where women like Liezel work. It's one of many export processing zones now being set up in developing countries. The idea is to encourage inward investment. Foreign companies are lured in by low tax regimes. And sometimes by no strike deals.
COMM: Though the permanent look of the picket lines here show they can be tough to enforce.
Beng used to work in a Taiwanese-owned garment factory till it closed down after the workers went on strike demanding higher pay and better conditions.
Her story shows why protesters in the West claim many factories in these free trade zones are simply sweatshops.
BENG (ENGLISH TRANSLATION): We were working for up to three days and nights - some of us were getting sick but they never let anyone go home until the work was finished. That was the worst we experienced. They only let the workers sleep for one hour at night and the break at noon was only thirty minutes from eleven to eleven thirty.
If somebody said he or she is not well they weren't given permission to leave - so unless they passed out that sick person had no choice but to stay and suffer until the time when everyone was allowed to go home.
COMM: They've been here for seven months now - still waiting in vain for back pay they say they're owed.
The strikers have become entrepreneurs themselves. Sympathetic cab drivers always calling by for cheap cigarettes. What keeps the strikers going is knowing how much the clothes they used to make sold for.
BENG: I think all these big brands we were making clothes for are popular in other countries and they sell for a lot of money here too.
It was when we made the price tags we realised they sell for so much in the shops. The prices tags were $40, $30, $50. We all know the dollar is very strong in this country. That's why we thought we ought to have been making more money whatever the profits our employers were making.
COMM: In the shopping malls of the Philippines only the lucky few can buy the goods made by workers in export zones. By the time they've reached these shops they're often sold under famous Western brand names at prices Filipino workers could never afford. And as labour campaigner Cecille Tuico once discovered they sell for even more abroad.
CECILLE TUICO(English): When I was in Toronto in Canada we went around the shops and I saw this kind of clothing which workers in the export processing zone are doing. And we were shocked to see the prices of these kind of clothes there's really a big difference in the wages and the prices of these products.
COMM: The problem for the workers is they are hardly ever employed directly by the big western brands. The big brands may design, commission and market the goods but the actual task of production is usually subcontracted to much smaller companies in the free trade zones.
NAOMI KLEIN: The global brands play this sort of phantom role in the free trade zones. They are the source of all the wealth and all the jobs but they are not tied directly, they don't own anything so they sort of hover over the economy. And if the workers organise too well and in fact genuinely get a raise and raise their conditions then the contracts can just be lifted. But it's not a messy factory closing in the way that we've come to think of these job exoduses - it's just a slip of the pen or a phone call pulling the contract from the Philippines moving it to another contractor who's already producing for you in Vietnam or China.
PART 2
COMM: In Cavite the one firm that did let our cameras inside was CS Garments. They've received international recognition for their labour standards. But in the new global economy there can be speedy retribution for those who pay workers too well. CS know they could easily join the growing ranks of companies that have lost business to still cheaper competitors abroad.
CLAUS SUDHOF (CEO CS Garments) We in the Philippines... have the second highest minimum wage in Asia behind Singapore. In the last five years over fifty per cent of the Philippine garment companies have closed shop - the garment industry is going to cheaper countries like Myanmar like Vietnam like China - the countries that pay only ten per cent of the minimum wage here. And I think that's a very big difference to establish a garment factory in the Philippines.
COMM: Ironically the main threat to the jobs and pay rates of these workers does not come from Asia's capitalist economies - as some NGOs here have recognized.
JOEL ROCAMORA (Director, Institute for Popular Democracy): The real competitors for the Philippines in fact has been former socialist countries - I guess they still call themselves Socialist - Vietnam and China especially China where labour is not only cheap, Socialism enables them to control labour much better than capitalist governments like the Philippines can control labour.
COMM: In this capitalist democracy labour remains free to push for higher pay and to voice its opinions. Today the unions are planning what they call a "noise barrage" against government plans to amend the labour laws.
Even as jobs go abroad, the unions insist it's their duty to try and organize against sweatshop labour.
CECILLE TUICO (Workers Assistance Center): Workers are very much abused by the companies because they work for long hours and they receive very low wages below the minimum wages and they suffer from other bad maltreatment from the owners of the companies.
COMM: And many NGOs also argue that strong trades unions are essential if the interests of workers are to be represented properly in the global economy.
JOEL ROCAMORA: Civil society cannot represent the voice of the workers because civil society represents a wide range of classes groups, interests in society - and workers should be represented by their own organisation, by unions.
There's talk about unions being a thing of the past, I don't think so, as long as they're workers no matter what kind of workers they should have their own organisations because without unions they're not going to be able to bargain for better wages- for better working conditions and things like that.
JUAN SOMAVIA (Director General International Labour Organization): I think that the main message is organise. There are no gimmick solutions to the world problems. The beginning of the change in one's own conditions is to defend whatever it is that you want to defend as a citizen. And I think that that's very important - sometimes these international debates give the image - don't worry don't do anything we're going to solve things globally - that's not the way it happens, make your voice heard.
COMM: But Janet did try to make her voice heard - and now she's working shifts in the union shop. She and her friends tried to unionise a garment factory - but no sooner had they succeeded than the company shut the plant down - and she believes moved production abroad.
JANET FUNCLARA (ENGLISH TRANSLATION): When we formed the union the management did a lot of things to try and stop us. First they got rid of the part-time workers and then they contacted the families of some of our full-time workers to take them back home to the provinces. Of course we didn't feel so good about the management then - and we got really upset after all we were just trying to organise a union. We wanted the management's policies to change so they would be fair for us and all the management did was to try and break up the union.
COMM: But could Filipino workers be better off with low paid jobs than no jobs at all?
After all, the fate that awaits the unemployed can be worse than going back to the provinces. It can be life on the Payatas garbage mountain scavenging for a living with the thousand families that live here.
Dina is just twenty and made her little home here after she lost her job and found she was pregnant. Now even water is a luxury item.
DINA (ENGLISH TRANSLATION): I left because our supervisor was very strict - we weren't allowed to take a short nap even when we were exhausted unless we finished our quota.
I was very young then - my mind was not really on working - besides it was my first time in a job.
COMM: Now Dina would give anything to take her child away from the garbage mountain.
DINA: If I had a choice I would go back to working in a factory.
Because I know I could give my baby a better future and we could get out of this place because I don't want my child to get sick.
COMM: Although few Filipinos live like this, millions do exist on less than a dollar a day.
So it is sometimes argued that a sweatshop economy may be the best way out of such Third World poverty.
NOAM CHOMSKY (Massachusetts Inst. of Technology, Author 'Manufacturing Consent'): There is an extremely cynical kind of support for this - it says, well look, if the alternative is to go back to the farm and starve to death or to be in a sweatshop, they'd prefer to be in a sweatshop.
Which is true, and you could also give a very good argument for slavery on that basis. I mean if the alternative is starvation or slavery I'm sure a lot of people would accept slavery.
But there are other options remember - for example one other option is that the super high profits of the corporations should be turned right back into improving working conditions and instituting labour rights so you wouldn't have these conditions.
COMM: In Manila - as in most capitals - suggestions for such global taxes have been brushed aside as impractical and disincentives to growth.
But critics of the globalised economy say there must be a viable alternative to the so-called Race to the Bottom over pay and conditions.
QUESTION: What's to stop wages just being screwed down further and further and employers just taking factories to the places they can employ people cheapest?
JAMES WOLFENSOHN (President of the World Bank): Well nothing is to stop it except that what we - I mean you will never stop people that are evil doing things.
My experience has been that more and more these days employers are looking at issues of social responsibility.
People who are evil?
Well I think there are people who rape forests and probably behave in a non-social way but what we are discovering...
And exploit workers?
Yes I think exploitation of workers is something that has occurred forever in history. But I think what you'd have to say is that if you've looked at exploitation or countries that have had at times exploitation where you start to get worker movements going you generally find that built on some early exploitation you have a development of a labour market practice.
QUESTION: A trans-national company shifts jobs to a country where wages are cheapest and takes them out of one where wages are not so cheap what can be done about that? Who can do anything about that?
JUAN SOMAVIA: Well look at Europe. I mean you could have asked me that question thirty years ago in relation to Spain, Greece and Portugal and the other countries of Europe. In Europe they realised that you, you know, everybody had to go up to a certain standard. And Europe organised itself in order to do it.
Are you saying that the Asian countries for example could do the same thing?
I'm saying that if we now have a global economy, we have to have a global policy that they meet some countries to go up and workers to go up in order to begin finding certain basic common denominators.
But who is going to enforce that against the power of the multinationals ?
Well we come back again, the... game is the focus. You know nobody's saying that today nobody's focusing on saying - why can't we deliver decent work for a lot of people in the world.
COMM: Nobody perhaps except the young people protesting at the World Bank meeting.
But there were also strong union contingents here in Washington and at Seattle. The unions want import controls on sweatshop goods. And this has led to fears of the Seattle Syndrome - concerns that well-intentioned protests against sweatshops could turn into a protectionist backlash.
INTERVIEWER; Do you want import controls - cheap foreign goods kept out of America?
UNION VOXPOP 1 To an extent yes, because it's at the cost of these people too because again they're not making a living wage they're making slave labour.
What people worry about is this could bring back the bad old Protectionist days of the Thirties.
UNION VOXPOP 2 I don't think that's possible - the economy has become a global economy. We've resigned the fact that its a global economy, you can't protect the borders anymore that's why workers need to stand together everywhere in the world.
COMM: It is the rhetoric is of solidarity - but there are still be those who claim the protests at Washington and Seattle were not just about caring for others - and could even cost others their jobs.
PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: We shouldn't have any doubt who leads a lot of this protest. It's people trying, of course, to save their jobs in the rich countries. But when I think about the morality of that and that inaccurate message that they're portraying then it, it really does annoy me tremendously. They do not speak in general for the poorest people.
Do you see any danger of an unholy alliance between the Seattle protest movement and a populist protectionist backlash?
NAOMI KLEIN: I think the danger is there and it is real. But the onus is on the people who were in Seattle and who were there not to fight for American jobs but to fight genuinely for raising the labour standards around the world to resist that.
And the only way to resist that is to stop just opposing the World Trade Organisation and start proposing an alternate vision for globalisation which answers these problems which does propose minimum labour standards, that's what we need to do.
COMM: We found the last of the protesters gathered in a Washington side street. They were negotiating with police over how some of them should be arrested.
They've got people behind...
The message may often be questioned - the quiet determination is not.
I can deal with that...
END
CHRIS MARTIN: Clothing manufacture in Pennsylvania has gone to the Far East...
LESTER THUROW: When businesses look at the world they scan the globe to find the most efficient place to put their factories.
JOHN FOX (UNITE): We don't mind competition but not Asia where people work 18 hours a day...
NOAM CHOMSKY: Capital can flow quite freely, labour can't.
ROBERT REICH: Unless we come up with a solution, we are going to see a backlash against globalisation that will hurt all of us...
COMM: It began in Seattle.
(Loudspeaker: "Please leave voluntarily")
But when the tear gas clears - are the protesters against globalisation doing more harm than good?
(Chant: "Listen to the voices of the people on the street")
COMM: Washington DC five months after Seattle.
The protesters are back on the streets for a meeting of the IMF and World Bank. The police cordon off the blocks around the Bank's headquarters. We stumbled across one skirmish as protesters tried to break through police lines.
'Get back, get back'
The demonstrators say they represent civil society and NGOs across the world.
But the usually peaceful street theatre of this protest movement has received mixed reviews.
PROF. ROBERT REICH (US Labor Secretary 1993-97): It is possible that the kids on the streets could end up doing more harm than good. But I have to be and I am essentially an optimist. I think that putting the spotlight of public opinion and public concern on globalization, raising the stakes and the issues for people so they actually see what the choices are - I think in a democracy is ultimately a good thing.
FRANCIS FUKUYAMA (Author 'The End of History'): One of the reasons we have formal democratic institutions is that we have to have rules, to show that when a government takes action it actually reflects the will of the people.
If ten NGOS show up and they demand a certain kind of action, well maybe they represent the will of the people maybe they don't.
Chant "Sweatshop labour got to go, hey hey, ho ho, sweatshop labour's got to go"
COMM: A few blocks away in fashionable Georgetown - a peaceful street protest on sweatshop labour. For this message, a different tactic.
VOXPOP Protester 1: People deserve wages to live by - I mean everyone needs enough to get by and they're not even getting that.
VOXPOP Protester 2: It's about a basic level of compassion that's missing in our world today.
I mean although we care about the people we know we have no concern for the repercussions of our actions outside our daily lives.
COMM: What these demonstrators want is to remind us of the conditions in which they claim the clothes we buy are produced.
Their best known spokesperson - Canadian writer Naomi Klein.
CROWD: "What we're seeing is a ideological clash"
COMM: She researched sweatshops in the export zones of Asia - and returned with a message that's hard to sum up in a single slogan.
NAOMI KLEIN: For instance in the Philippines in the export processing zone that I visited... I felt a tremendous sense of responsibility from the workers because they shared their stories with me.
They wanted so badly for me to take their stories home and tell the people who bought their Sassoon jeans and their Levi jean jackets and the Nike running shoes. They said to me over and over again - please tell people what it's like for us.
And at the same time their greatest fear was that I was going to go home and tell people to boycott these companies and that they were all going to lose their jobs so there was this tremendous uncertainty and confusion about what to do.
COMM: Gap declined to be interviewed but told us they are working against sweatshops and monitor the companies that manufacture their clothing to make sure workers are treated safely and fairly.
And it's not only the big brands who say the protesters' message is mistaken.
PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS (Director, Center for International Development, Harvard University): In many of these export zones it has been young women usually between the age of 17 and 25. And this has been true in the Philippines, it was true throughout East Asia, often true in China. And it's led to a remarkable social change of empowerment of young women. I think the mistake is to see that as exploitation without understanding what these younger girls' life chances would have been in the impoverished countryside.
COMM: But trying to escape from impoverished villages like Naik can be difficult. Naik is a quiet fishing village three hours along the coast from the Philippines capital Manila.
A ride home is about the only luxury Liezel can afford after an afternoon shift in a Korean-owned garment factory. She's not feeling empowered.
LIEZEL (ENGLISH TRANSLATION): After graduation it took some time before I got a job. I stayed home for a month before I got accepted at a factory in February. But there isn't enough work to go round and the pay is always delayed.
And we are always being screamed at by our Korean bosses and sometimes they insult and harass us. Even when our money does turn up they always make us wait before they hand it out.
COMM: At eighteen Liezel's already a breadwinner for her family. She makes about $15 a week sewing trainers for the American market. Their only other income - the few dollars worth of fish landed on good days by her father.
LIEZEL: I want to work for my living - I want to go abroad to work so I can help my parents. But we don't even have enough money to give to an employment agency that might be able to help me.
Going abroad's the only way to make things better - if I stay here I'll just go on working in a low paid factory job and nothing will ever change.
COMM: Many other families face the same plight. Naik is just the kind of village where many low paid workers come from. Not absolute poverty, but local activists insist, wages are almost always too low for decent civic services or education for the kids.
FATHER JOE DIZON: The wages of our workers are just enough for them to be able to go home in the evening, eat something and then rest and go back to the factory.
So it's not actually a decent wage where they can have their own living - it's a wage that is enough for them to be able to go back to work the next day and the other day and like that.
COMM: The Cavite Export Processing Zone where women like Liezel work. It's one of many export processing zones now being set up in developing countries. The idea is to encourage inward investment. Foreign companies are lured in by low tax regimes. And sometimes by no strike deals.
COMM: Though the permanent look of the picket lines here show they can be tough to enforce.
Beng used to work in a Taiwanese-owned garment factory till it closed down after the workers went on strike demanding higher pay and better conditions.
Her story shows why protesters in the West claim many factories in these free trade zones are simply sweatshops.
BENG (ENGLISH TRANSLATION): We were working for up to three days and nights - some of us were getting sick but they never let anyone go home until the work was finished. That was the worst we experienced. They only let the workers sleep for one hour at night and the break at noon was only thirty minutes from eleven to eleven thirty.
If somebody said he or she is not well they weren't given permission to leave - so unless they passed out that sick person had no choice but to stay and suffer until the time when everyone was allowed to go home.
COMM: They've been here for seven months now - still waiting in vain for back pay they say they're owed.
The strikers have become entrepreneurs themselves. Sympathetic cab drivers always calling by for cheap cigarettes. What keeps the strikers going is knowing how much the clothes they used to make sold for.
BENG: I think all these big brands we were making clothes for are popular in other countries and they sell for a lot of money here too.
It was when we made the price tags we realised they sell for so much in the shops. The prices tags were $40, $30, $50. We all know the dollar is very strong in this country. That's why we thought we ought to have been making more money whatever the profits our employers were making.
COMM: In the shopping malls of the Philippines only the lucky few can buy the goods made by workers in export zones. By the time they've reached these shops they're often sold under famous Western brand names at prices Filipino workers could never afford. And as labour campaigner Cecille Tuico once discovered they sell for even more abroad.
CECILLE TUICO(English): When I was in Toronto in Canada we went around the shops and I saw this kind of clothing which workers in the export processing zone are doing. And we were shocked to see the prices of these kind of clothes there's really a big difference in the wages and the prices of these products.
COMM: The problem for the workers is they are hardly ever employed directly by the big western brands. The big brands may design, commission and market the goods but the actual task of production is usually subcontracted to much smaller companies in the free trade zones.
NAOMI KLEIN: The global brands play this sort of phantom role in the free trade zones. They are the source of all the wealth and all the jobs but they are not tied directly, they don't own anything so they sort of hover over the economy. And if the workers organise too well and in fact genuinely get a raise and raise their conditions then the contracts can just be lifted. But it's not a messy factory closing in the way that we've come to think of these job exoduses - it's just a slip of the pen or a phone call pulling the contract from the Philippines moving it to another contractor who's already producing for you in Vietnam or China.
PART 2
COMM: In Cavite the one firm that did let our cameras inside was CS Garments. They've received international recognition for their labour standards. But in the new global economy there can be speedy retribution for those who pay workers too well. CS know they could easily join the growing ranks of companies that have lost business to still cheaper competitors abroad.
CLAUS SUDHOF (CEO CS Garments) We in the Philippines... have the second highest minimum wage in Asia behind Singapore. In the last five years over fifty per cent of the Philippine garment companies have closed shop - the garment industry is going to cheaper countries like Myanmar like Vietnam like China - the countries that pay only ten per cent of the minimum wage here. And I think that's a very big difference to establish a garment factory in the Philippines.
COMM: Ironically the main threat to the jobs and pay rates of these workers does not come from Asia's capitalist economies - as some NGOs here have recognized.
JOEL ROCAMORA (Director, Institute for Popular Democracy): The real competitors for the Philippines in fact has been former socialist countries - I guess they still call themselves Socialist - Vietnam and China especially China where labour is not only cheap, Socialism enables them to control labour much better than capitalist governments like the Philippines can control labour.
COMM: In this capitalist democracy labour remains free to push for higher pay and to voice its opinions. Today the unions are planning what they call a "noise barrage" against government plans to amend the labour laws.
Even as jobs go abroad, the unions insist it's their duty to try and organize against sweatshop labour.
CECILLE TUICO (Workers Assistance Center): Workers are very much abused by the companies because they work for long hours and they receive very low wages below the minimum wages and they suffer from other bad maltreatment from the owners of the companies.
COMM: And many NGOs also argue that strong trades unions are essential if the interests of workers are to be represented properly in the global economy.
JOEL ROCAMORA: Civil society cannot represent the voice of the workers because civil society represents a wide range of classes groups, interests in society - and workers should be represented by their own organisation, by unions.
There's talk about unions being a thing of the past, I don't think so, as long as they're workers no matter what kind of workers they should have their own organisations because without unions they're not going to be able to bargain for better wages- for better working conditions and things like that.
JUAN SOMAVIA (Director General International Labour Organization): I think that the main message is organise. There are no gimmick solutions to the world problems. The beginning of the change in one's own conditions is to defend whatever it is that you want to defend as a citizen. And I think that that's very important - sometimes these international debates give the image - don't worry don't do anything we're going to solve things globally - that's not the way it happens, make your voice heard.
COMM: But Janet did try to make her voice heard - and now she's working shifts in the union shop. She and her friends tried to unionise a garment factory - but no sooner had they succeeded than the company shut the plant down - and she believes moved production abroad.
JANET FUNCLARA (ENGLISH TRANSLATION): When we formed the union the management did a lot of things to try and stop us. First they got rid of the part-time workers and then they contacted the families of some of our full-time workers to take them back home to the provinces. Of course we didn't feel so good about the management then - and we got really upset after all we were just trying to organise a union. We wanted the management's policies to change so they would be fair for us and all the management did was to try and break up the union.
COMM: But could Filipino workers be better off with low paid jobs than no jobs at all?
After all, the fate that awaits the unemployed can be worse than going back to the provinces. It can be life on the Payatas garbage mountain scavenging for a living with the thousand families that live here.
Dina is just twenty and made her little home here after she lost her job and found she was pregnant. Now even water is a luxury item.
DINA (ENGLISH TRANSLATION): I left because our supervisor was very strict - we weren't allowed to take a short nap even when we were exhausted unless we finished our quota.
I was very young then - my mind was not really on working - besides it was my first time in a job.
COMM: Now Dina would give anything to take her child away from the garbage mountain.
DINA: If I had a choice I would go back to working in a factory.
Because I know I could give my baby a better future and we could get out of this place because I don't want my child to get sick.
COMM: Although few Filipinos live like this, millions do exist on less than a dollar a day.
So it is sometimes argued that a sweatshop economy may be the best way out of such Third World poverty.
NOAM CHOMSKY (Massachusetts Inst. of Technology, Author 'Manufacturing Consent'): There is an extremely cynical kind of support for this - it says, well look, if the alternative is to go back to the farm and starve to death or to be in a sweatshop, they'd prefer to be in a sweatshop.
Which is true, and you could also give a very good argument for slavery on that basis. I mean if the alternative is starvation or slavery I'm sure a lot of people would accept slavery.
But there are other options remember - for example one other option is that the super high profits of the corporations should be turned right back into improving working conditions and instituting labour rights so you wouldn't have these conditions.
COMM: In Manila - as in most capitals - suggestions for such global taxes have been brushed aside as impractical and disincentives to growth.
But critics of the globalised economy say there must be a viable alternative to the so-called Race to the Bottom over pay and conditions.
QUESTION: What's to stop wages just being screwed down further and further and employers just taking factories to the places they can employ people cheapest?
JAMES WOLFENSOHN (President of the World Bank): Well nothing is to stop it except that what we - I mean you will never stop people that are evil doing things.
My experience has been that more and more these days employers are looking at issues of social responsibility.
People who are evil?
Well I think there are people who rape forests and probably behave in a non-social way but what we are discovering...
And exploit workers?
Yes I think exploitation of workers is something that has occurred forever in history. But I think what you'd have to say is that if you've looked at exploitation or countries that have had at times exploitation where you start to get worker movements going you generally find that built on some early exploitation you have a development of a labour market practice.
QUESTION: A trans-national company shifts jobs to a country where wages are cheapest and takes them out of one where wages are not so cheap what can be done about that? Who can do anything about that?
JUAN SOMAVIA: Well look at Europe. I mean you could have asked me that question thirty years ago in relation to Spain, Greece and Portugal and the other countries of Europe. In Europe they realised that you, you know, everybody had to go up to a certain standard. And Europe organised itself in order to do it.
Are you saying that the Asian countries for example could do the same thing?
I'm saying that if we now have a global economy, we have to have a global policy that they meet some countries to go up and workers to go up in order to begin finding certain basic common denominators.
But who is going to enforce that against the power of the multinationals ?
Well we come back again, the... game is the focus. You know nobody's saying that today nobody's focusing on saying - why can't we deliver decent work for a lot of people in the world.
COMM: Nobody perhaps except the young people protesting at the World Bank meeting.
But there were also strong union contingents here in Washington and at Seattle. The unions want import controls on sweatshop goods. And this has led to fears of the Seattle Syndrome - concerns that well-intentioned protests against sweatshops could turn into a protectionist backlash.
INTERVIEWER; Do you want import controls - cheap foreign goods kept out of America?
UNION VOXPOP 1 To an extent yes, because it's at the cost of these people too because again they're not making a living wage they're making slave labour.
What people worry about is this could bring back the bad old Protectionist days of the Thirties.
UNION VOXPOP 2 I don't think that's possible - the economy has become a global economy. We've resigned the fact that its a global economy, you can't protect the borders anymore that's why workers need to stand together everywhere in the world.
COMM: It is the rhetoric is of solidarity - but there are still be those who claim the protests at Washington and Seattle were not just about caring for others - and could even cost others their jobs.
PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: We shouldn't have any doubt who leads a lot of this protest. It's people trying, of course, to save their jobs in the rich countries. But when I think about the morality of that and that inaccurate message that they're portraying then it, it really does annoy me tremendously. They do not speak in general for the poorest people.
Do you see any danger of an unholy alliance between the Seattle protest movement and a populist protectionist backlash?
NAOMI KLEIN: I think the danger is there and it is real. But the onus is on the people who were in Seattle and who were there not to fight for American jobs but to fight genuinely for raising the labour standards around the world to resist that.
And the only way to resist that is to stop just opposing the World Trade Organisation and start proposing an alternate vision for globalisation which answers these problems which does propose minimum labour standards, that's what we need to do.
COMM: We found the last of the protesters gathered in a Washington side street. They were negotiating with police over how some of them should be arrested.
They've got people behind...
The message may often be questioned - the quiet determination is not.
I can deal with that...
END