The ICT industry has grown by leaps and bounds. It has rapidly become a major export industry for developing countries. While the US and Japan are still major exporters, developing countries, mainly in Asia, already account for almost 50% of all electronics exports.

With exports worth US$ 62.5 billion, China is the leading engine of this growth. This sector employed a total of 18 million workers globally in the year 2004 and almost 6 million workers (about 33%) were employed in China. India is strong in ICT services and off shore business including software development. The other countries in Asia that have significant employment in this industry are Malaysia, Thailand, Taiwan, Korea and the Philippines

Yet while many Asian countries have developed on the basis of export-oriented growth, bringing a certain amount of prosperity to parts of the local population, it has not proven true that ‘a rising tide lifts all boats’. Foreign investment has become more and more conditional upon governments providing benefits and privileges in order to entice it to enter and remain. Among the primary conditions are low-cost labour—but also flexibility and controllability of labour. It has thus resulted that rather than easing people’s burden of work, for those employed for their cheap labour, conditions have worsened, and key instruments to help workers determine their own working conditions, i.e., the right to associate freely and to collectively bargain, have been severely undermined.

Export-oriented industries have long faced the above challenges, for example in the garment, shoe and toy industries. In this sense, some of the problems for organizing labour are similar, and lessons from the past could be learned and applied to workers in the ICT industry. Yet ICT also presents some unique challenges for labour.

The pace of technology change and product development is unrelenting, and as new markets expand and as quickly shut down, massive hiring and cutting down of jobs takes place, wreaking havoc and instability on the lives of workers.

High-tech materials used in manufacturing present myriad health hazards to workers, despite the image of ICT as a sterile and ‘clean’ industry. Further down the ‘life cycle’ of an electronic product, workers that dispose of or recycle used products and residents in electronic waste-importing countries, are exposed even more severely, to dangerous chemicals released in the air, water and land.

Supply chains in ICT production are notoriously complex and intransparent, and are not susceptible to the brand name pressures that garment and shoe company brands like Ralph Lauren or Nike have proven. The difficulty is exacerbated by ICT workers’ image of themselves, in some cases, as ‘professionals’ rather than manual workers, so that even apart from government and corporation anti-unionism, workers themselves feel resigned to their fates and unwilling to organize. This is referred to in this issue’s article on Indian call workers.

With increasing consciousness of both consumers and corporations of the environmental and labour-related impacts of manufacturing electronics, corporations have nimbly adopted codes of conduct for their factories and their industry, along the lines of those devised for the garment industry in previous times. Is this desirable learning that has taken place? Or history repeating itself for the worse? (See ALU Issue No. 60, Multi-Stakeholder Initiatives in China—Spotlight on Ethical Trading Initaitive.)

AMRC and many other labour organizations have experienced first-hand the results of cooperating with corporations towards their greater ‘corporate social responsibility’—easy rewards for corporations, who can then shrug off public criticism after having made token gestures; and little lasting results for workers’ ability to determine their own working conditions. Hence AMRC views with wariness the initiatives among ICT corporations and some labour groups to again rely on ‘codes of conduct’, as promoted by brand-based campaigns of the past. Corporations and well-meaning funding bodies offer substantial support, including financial, for labour and NGO participation in their schemes to ‘engage’ with them towards extraction of small, gradual and rarely industry-wide gains for labour. As unions and NGOs get co-opted into this ‘movement’, fewer soldiers and weapons remain on the battlefield to conduct direct, bottom-up organizing, and force industry- or society-wide changes. s Asian labour gets inexorably drawn into the global supply chain, activists in Asia are challenged to take stock of the ‘industrial relations’ situation and create new solutions, with new strategies, new alliances, and abandonment of old assumptions. A worker in Asia is fast becoming as disposable as a mobile phone in Hong Kong. The ICT industry is a truly great challenge to tackle. The industry has caused great harm to the world’s environment, indigenous peoples, as well as consumers and workers. Asian labour has allies within and without our movement; we need to avail of them, keeping sight of our common goals. It is hoped that this issue, regarding labour in the ICT industry, will bring greater understanding of this industry’s unique effects on Asian labour and on the aspects of it that we will need to focus on in the future.