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Why Are Workers’ Rights in Jordan Important? |
George W. Bush and the unfettered trade crowd are fond of saying trade will benefit workers. Jordan disproves that fantasy.
After Jordan signed a trade deal with the United States in the final days of the Clinton administration—the first such U.S. trade pact that included a provision supporting workers’ rights—Jordan has ignored its responsibility under the treaty. And under the Bush administration, the United States has done little to nothing to enforce that part of the agreement, according to a new report, Justice for All: The Struggle for Worker Rights in Jordan, the latest in a series of reports on workers’ rights in various countries by the AFL-CIO’s Solidarity Center.
Migrant workers, especially, are treated like slaves. As the report says:
Men and women in the QIZs (Qualified Industrial Zones) are forced to work long and arduous shifts or below-poverty wages…bosses withhold their paychecks and passports.. the workers become virtual prisoners far from home.
Migrant women often end up in the informal economy as domestic servants, a condition one scholar calls “contract slavery:”
…they often work under employment contracts that are not respected [because the face a combination of abuse and violence, denial of freedom to move and communicate. Employers often imprison domestic workers…call upon them to work at any time of the day or night. They may starve, beat, and rape workers or even falsely accuse them of crimes.
The AFL-CIO and the union movement continue to push for free trade that includes enforceable workers’ rights clauses because corporations—many of them American—seek to move jobs to countries with the lowest possible labor costs and weakest worker protections. Even if the jobs are not shipped overseas, corporate executives use the threat of moving to coerce concessions from their U.S. workers.
Although Jordanian women are provided with free on-the-job child care under the nation’s law, workers’ freedom to form unions is so restricted, only a select few workers are allowed to join unions—and those who can join can’t go out on strike. In fact, workers can sentenced to hard labor for engaging in “individual or collective action with intent to change the economic or social of the state or basic conditions of the society.”
You cannot join a union in Jordan if you are a civil servant, domestic worker, gardener, cook or agricultural worker—that’s a whopping 87.5 percent of all workers. And by law, the number of unions is restricted to 17 in the entire country.
Surrounded by Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Israel, Jordan has very little land and no oil resources. It is home of the glamorous Queen Rania whose media appearances—including “The Oprah Winfrey Show”—pushing for the rights of women and the poor haven’t included the freedom to form unions.
Some things are changing for the better. The International Finance Corp. (IFC), the part of the World Bank that makes loans to companies with projects in developing countries, adopted new rules Feb. 21 that require any company that borrows from the IFC follow labor rules that ban forced labor, child labor and recognize workers’ freedom to form unions. If it is enforced, this rule could mean something to workers since the IFC is funding more than 236 projects in 67 countries worth $6.45 billion.
The Solidarity Center previously has released reports on workers’ rights in Sri Lanka, Mexico and China.
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