Azlan Awang, who is deputy chairman of Bantah-TPPA and a founder of Blindspot, a socio-economic interest group, said workers worldwide are suffering because of various trends in globalisation — one of them being bilateral free-trade agreements.
He said such agreements often resulted in wealthier countries taking advantage of cheaper resources and labour in poorer countries, including Malaysia.
“Globalisation and free trade sound innocent but the form of globalisation that is going on is not the form that is expected,” he told an audience during the Malaysian Trades Union Congress (MTUC) International Workshop on “Changing World and Developing Trade Union Rights: Effective Trade Unionism”.
He added that free trade agreements so far had not resulted in the poorer participating countries levelling economically with more advanced countries.
“There is a ‘convergence theory’. Supposedly, poor countries participating in free trade agreements eventually would converge with other advanced countries. However, that has not happened.”
He argued that judging from current trends, convergence with more advanced countries would not happen. Instead, such countries would diverge further from their wealthier counterparts.
Azlan argued that this was a result of the existing economic model, whereby poorer countries sold national commodities and labour at cheaper prices, while importing capital goods at a very high price.
“We have created a situation where we have impoverished ourselves.”
He added that Malaysia’s economy was very “hollow” because it largely depended on exports, in which a big part of them were assembled products.
“We import billions and billions of components and then we assemble them in Malaysia.
“We provide cheap labour, cheap electricity and cheap gas. We provide tax holidays to manufacturing companies for 10 years, sometimes 20 years, and we export at low prices as well.”
Azlan cited a report by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (Unctad) in 2013 which suggested that such “export-led growth” was no longer viable.
It concluded that GDP growth based on exports had resulted in poor countries competing with each other to provide the cheapest labour, among others.
“Basically, it suggested that countries like Malaysia are competing with the likes of Vietnam, Thailand and the Philippines — competing on who can provide looser, more liberal labour laws and environment laws.”
He said this was against the interest of workers.
“That is the situation. I think the trade unions — especially in Malaysia — are fighting a losing battle because of the world economy, which is not working in our favour.”
However, he said trade unions still had a role to play to spearhead the economy in the right path.
“The economic doctrine we have adopted is flawed. We have to correct it. We (trade unions) have a bigger role to play now.
“We have to go beyond the normal industrial relations and human resources issues.”