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Third UNI Apro Professionals and Managers Conference

2 - 3 December 2013, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Key Note Address by Christopher Ng UNI Apro Regional Secretary

Globalization and uncritical economic liberalization have benefited a few. This unevenness is reflected in the labour market.  There is a huge and growing decent work deficit, with big industries and transnational corporations using economic openness as an excuse to move in and out of a country and engage in a Race to the Bottom in the region, lowering labour standards in underdeveloped countries, avoiding workers' obligations in the developed countries and fighting unionism everywhere. 

Challenges in the service sector: Organizing at the low and high ends

The social and labour rules to shape a sustainable global and national economy, with a human face, a worker's face, are sadly missing.   The missing rules are most acutely felt in the globalizing service sector of Asia, the largest sector in nearly all economies.  

The problem is that like the economy as a whole, services reflect the unevenness in development under globalization.   In the labour market, this is easily seen in the fact that while the new economy such as the ICT industry has created high-paying prestigious jobs for a few. Even then, most of the service jobs are temporary in nature. This is manifested in the global call center an IT industry in India, the Philippines and other emerging sites for global service outsourcing.  

Except for the telecom, banking and postal industries, unionism is low in most of the service industries such as the sectors under UNI jurisdiction, particularly, retail, logistic, property maintenance and security services and so on.   As a result, workers usually work long hours for less pay because there is no union to protect or represent them. Furthermore, there is no career path or employment security for the large majority of these workers, because job tenures are often short-term or on a project-to-project basis.

However, we know that those who need protection are not only the rank-and-file staff, regular or non-regular but also the supervisory, managerial, technical, expert and professional staff that we in UNI dub as the P&M or the professionals and managers.  

The P&M can be found not only in the service sector but also in the industry sector because they are the ones coordinating and implementing business management plans, and they are the ones providing technical and expert solutions to problems arising from the business chain - anywhere from production and packaging to marketing and post-sales services.

But given the nature of accumulation and competition under globalization, employers and corporations try to extract maximum efforts and ‘value added' from every P&Ms   They log long hours of work and do overtime even on weekends and rest days just to meet deadlines, because work schedules are tight.   While some do get higher compensation rates and they can also be terminated anytime on the basis of loss of top management's confidence, which can be interpreted very broadly.  

Because they are not supposed to be ordinary workers, the P&Ms are often excluded from the coverage of labour laws and labour court's jurisdiction.   There is no established system of grievance procedure for their complaints. Evaluation of their performance is done in some companies in an almost daily basis. 

The MNCs, operating across countries, even conduct ‘organized competition' among P&Ms in different countries and do benchmarking on productivity, work attitude and the likes, tying tenure and benefits to a nerve-wracking system of scoring individual performances.

It is abundantly clear that the decision of UNI to give special attention to the professional and managers of Asia is timely and relevant.   This is a growing army of employees.  In some ICT, banking and service industries, the P&M especially the supervisors and technical-expert staff, outnumber the rank-and-file staff by a ratio of 3 or even 4 to 1.  

A major segment of the migrant labour force circulating in Asia and in the world consist of the P&Ms, who encounter varied problems such as visa obstacles, discrimination, human rights violations, poor term and condition of employment and so on.   They face the same age-old problems of job security, exploitation and lack of representation or a voice in co-determining the rules of work.

The problems of the P&M people clearly need to be addressed differently.   And so is the system of organizing them such as organizing in terms of skills, projects, assignments, etc.   However, the classic union demands for the employees to have a voice in the determination of the work conditions, a voice in the determination of industry rules affecting job and income security and a voice in shaping the directions of globalization and regional integration have remained the same.   What differs is the manner by which shall voice shall be affirmed.

Fleshing out the P&M organizing program in Asia means we have to study the P&M situation country by country even as we, at UNI Apro, try to come up with a regional P & M agenda and programs which can unite the P&M of the region and integrate them into the national and global trade union movement.

Securing a Balanced Life, Sharing a Hassle-Free Future

Stating the obvious, the P&Ms are the shapers of globalizing Asia. No modern business and production network, including government service, will operate without the dedicated work of the cadres of the 21st century - the professionals and the supervisory and managerial staff.  

And as technology continues to deepen the complexity of the economy in a thousand and one ways, the P&M ranks shall continue to grow in number.  It is estimated, for instance, that about one-fifth or more of the Singaporeans have become globally mobile, providing technology, business and market solutions in various corners of the globe.  These Singaporeans are mostly P&Ms.  On the other hand, Singapore itself has become a major destination country for P&Ms coming from the other ASEAN and Asian countries as well as those coming from Europe and America.

This is why we salute John de Payva and his colleagues at the National Trade Unions Congress (NTUC) for their initiative to organize workers and professionals of all categories, workers of all ages and workers of all nationalities.  With the globalization of business and work, unions have to become global too.  Unions should be the homes of all workers with different skills and cultural backgrounds.   

We also salute Brother Shafie Mammal, our organizer par exemplar.  He has shown to us all that trade union organizing need not be confined to the ranks of those who wear collars that are uniformly blue or uniformly white.  Today, collars at the workplace have different colours.  Of course, there are also workers without collars, the lowly-paid semi-skilled casuals and the undocumented migrants.  Brother Shafie organizes them all.

We commend Karthik, General Secretary of UNITE India for his pioneering roles in organizing IT PROFESSIONALS in India. His commitment have caused UNITE to be the voice for IT and IT Enabled professionals in India. In spite of the strong and persistence resistance of employers, UNITE is recognized as the organization for IT professionals.

Societies included are excluded

Why do we organize the P&Ms?  We have asked this question many times in the past.  The answer is not only getting clearer but getting more urgent. 

As we have mentioned, the P&Ms are the cadres of the 21st century.  They now constitute a significant segment of the workforce of every economy.  Like those who wear the blue and white collars, they need to have a voice at the workplace.

On the surface, the P&Ms appear as part of society's elite, the included.  Their pay and benefits are relatively high compared to other workers.  However, the intensity of the work they do is comparatively much, much higher.  Like in the old Industrial Revolution in Europe, the P&M work 10, 12 or more hours a day.  And work beyond eight hours is not compensated for the P&M are considered a separate class of workers.  As professionals, they are supposedly not covered by Labour laws and international Labour conventions.  In the absence of a union and collective bargaining agreement, they can easily be laid off if they are not able to deliver a level of output or performance that management keeps raising in the abstract name of global competition.

But aside from the long hours and high performance targets, there are two other factors that make the work of the P&M very intense.  One is the continuing effort of corporations to have leaner and meaner organizational set-up.  This means we can have a situation where we have managers and supervisors with no people to manage and supervise.  They retain the titles of managers and supervisors but they end up doing everything under a multi-tasking lean arrangement.  Another is the related issue of technology.  They have to continuously update themselves too with the latest technology which shapes not only the market but also the work organization.  A new technology tomorrow can make one's knowledge and skills obsolete.

Job insecurities

This brings us to another reality: many P&Ms have been experiencing pangs of insecurity in their jobs.  They can be displaced or replaced anytime because of changing technology and continuous reengineering of business and work.  For example, the latest innovation in human resource management today has a high displacement impact on P&M and other workers - the establishment or availment by corporations of what they call as "shared services", which are nothing but meaner work platforms unifying the work of several entities.   As it is, many P&M are generally viewed by the public as elite workers enjoying good pay and employment perks, way above those received by the ordinary workers.  What they do not see is the intensity and insecurity being experienced by many P&Ms and the hardships of the P&Ms who have become jobless.     

The long hours of work, the short breaks, the unreasonably high performance targets and the overall intensity of work and job insecurity that all these phenomena breed are all stressful to the body and to the family.  As many HR managers themselves put it, there is no work-life balance. 

This is why foremost among our demands for the P&M is work-life balance for the P&M through a productive work arrangement that is less stressful.  This, of course, can only be secured if the P&M are given a say on the work rules and how work should be managed.  With their skills and knowledge, they know how work can be made more productive without being stressful to the P&M and the other workers.  And yet, they are not able to articulate this because communication with top management is one-way, dialogue is one-way and routinized work is done one-way.   This one-way system has to stop.  This is why we are in this business of organizing P&M into unions so that we can have decency and dignity at work - for the P&M and all other workers.

We want P&M to be covered by labour laws and the system of unionism and collective bargaining, or a system where they can have a collective say about the work rules and job security as well as a system of redress for grievances, especially for disciplinary actions that are arbitrarily imposed in a one-sided manner. 

We also want full recognition of the rights of P&Ms wherever they go or wherever they are deployed.  We at UNI have been pushing for a "UNI Passport", a document that outlines the basic rights and entitlements of P&M and the legal and other resources they can avail of in the country where UNI is present. This is what universality of workers' rights is all about.  This is also workers' solidarity in action.

I must emphasized, that organizing and integrating the professionals and managers into the trade union movement is a task the trade union movement cannot avoid - as failing to do so will only jeopardize the future of the trade union movement.