Communicating labour rights

Bangkok—How do you communicate to ‘a world gone flat’, as Thomas Friedman said, the right of a woman—working at a Bangladesh garments factory—to have maternity leave?


What should the Philippine government say, or do, to ensure that its increasing number of urban informal workers who have, at the height of the global financial crisis, transformed their homes into small business shops providing specific types of services, such as styling hair or Internet access, have a right to adequate social protection?

The People’s Republic of China, which as of this writing has over 280 million rural migrants looking for work in China’s urban corridors, have the right to find decent work and should not be prejudiced and discriminated against. How should that message be delivered?

Or what should be done to some countries that yearly trek to Geneva to attend the ritual of the International Labour Conference, but after exiting the global stage gathering of labour ministers go home and turn a blind eye to the oppression of migrant workers providing the sinews of their respective economies?

These, and many others, are the fundamental questions that the International Labour Organization (ILO) sought to answer as it convened on Monday 23 journalists, including myself, from 13 countries for a five-day training at the ILO’s regional office for Asia and the Pacific here in Bangkok.

Communicating Labour Rights, a training course for media professionals, is the first such training to be held here in Asia.

Organized by the ILO’s International Training Centre in Turin, Italy, the training aims to equip journalists, reporters, editors, publishers, PR professionals, and press officers working in all types of media with knowledge about ILO and the work of its supervisory bodies, as well as international labor standards and how these are applied.

The course also aims to equip participants with skills which they could use in writing a wide range of stories that could inform national and regional debates on social and economic development. Part of the skills the course aims to teach is how to extract and use appropriate ILO data and information, such as international labor standards, that the participants could use in their coverage of labor and social affairs.

On the first day, judging from the participants’ enthusiasm to ask questions, as journalists are wont to, I readily surmised the training course would serve a very useful purpose.

I said this because the questions and observations indicate a glaring divide between the ILO—a UN body steeped in the tradition of polite debates, contemplative and meticulous study, and diplomacy—and the participants whose preponderance of daily life is dictated by a newsroom culture that requires constant struggle and immediacy.

To me, to bridge this divide is welcome, but it is a tall order.

And it showed when Jamela Alindogan, producer of Al Jazeera Television’s Manila bureau frankly said her network does not consider it news a gathering of executives in suites and ties who merely talk.

To this, Sophy Fisher, ILO’s regional information officer, calmly replied that the challenge for journalists is to discover what in the gathering was said, or decided, and reporting this because this could shape and influence public opinion or a national policy. In a larger sense, both were right.

It showed when Aoun Abbas, a reporter from Pakistan’s The News on Sunday, said that the ILO report saying hundreds of thousands of Pakistanis would lose jobs because of the recent devastating floods in that country never even made it to the front pages of Pakistani newspapers.

“Journalists and media professionals play a leading role in shaping the public debate about social and economic development,” said the ILO in its introduction to the course.

It explained: “The conditions under which we work—and the standards that govern them—concern all levels and all kinds of societies . . . Work related issues include immediate practical questions—wages, safety and health, discrimination, gender, social safety nets, child and forced labour—and broader issues, such as building competitiveness and productivity, creating employment-friendly laws and policies, labour migration, linking education and employment, and the right to organize and express opinions.”

In Asia and the rest of the world, ILO’s ‘practical questions’ are fundamental issues. Going local, in the Philippines, these are certainly essential. And therefore, Ms. Fisher’s challenge, which is ILO’s, is universal: how should we, as journalists, communicate these to our peoples?

How should we—in the light of our perspectives narrowed down by our own reporting environments and, as the ILO rightly pointed out, “pressurized by limited time and resources”—report and analyze these “complex issues in a way that draws audiences back, again and again”?

In the face of many of today’s world bodies, such as the ILO, refusing to play the “police officer” of the day, I am afraid only journalists could answer the question, merely because they are the most impatient and the “angrier” group of people who would like to see that these issues—these “rights”—are immediately enjoyed by all.

This is not to say that journalists don’t need help. They do, and the ILO, with its rich experience, its tripartite structure, and its hard-earned respect and enviable reputation as the global arbiter of labour and employment standards and issues, is very well situated and qualified to point the way.

And this course is the kind of engagement that could jumpstart the process of communication, of bridging the divide. Neither should now abdicate each other’s roles in the engagement, for much is at stake.