'Buy my beer?'  In a hip-hugging uniform with a high hemline and the familiar logo of a famous German beer brand, Chanthal invites the customers to drink the brand of beer she is promoting. Working in some of the toughest working conditions with low pay, no job security and facing sexual harassment almost every day, here is the new face of exploitation, where the global supply chain has managed in new ways to entrap and exploit the most vulnerable workers from the villages of Cambodia. Chantal’s work promoting beer sales reflects many dimensions of service sector work in Asia: reliance on women, mobilizing women’s appearance/emotional work to boost sales, dispersed workplaces, job growth in a non-unionized part of the workforce, and final profits to multinational corporations. Organizing workers in the expanding service sector in Asia strongly merits closer attention. This issue shares instances of service worker organizing in Asia.

Asia is perceived as the manufacturing base for the world, especially China; yet in the past ten years, both as a portion of GDP and of the workforce, the service sector has been growing. Asian countries, having embraced the ‘export-led’ model of growth, in general have followed the ‘theory of progression’ by building their economies from basic agriculture and mining to manufacturing and finally evolving to the service sector – with some exceptions like India, which seems to be moving into the service sector aggressively, almost skipping the ‘manufacturing phase’.

The service sector is often referred to as the tertiary sector (layered above the primary, agriculture and mining; and secondary, manufacturing) and involves the transport, distribution and sales of goods from producers to consumers, as well as the provision of services. The service sector also covers the essential services that nations provide to their citizens like health care, education, transportation, etc. The work in the service sector tends to be polarized into high-skill, high-pay (professional) work, such as medicine, law or information technology, and low-skill, low-pay work – for example, cleaning, domestic work, sales promotion, or security – with low-pay work often being assigned in large scale to a migrant workforce with limited civil and labour rights. At times of economic crisis or industrial restructuring, workers who get laid off (of whom women tend to be the first) are often relegated to low-wage service work; they form the large pool of ‘ready-to-be-disposed workers’. The low-pay workers tend to remain invisible, while the more visible high-status service workers who are professional or securely employed in the public sector tend to represent the sector as a whole, in the public. This contributes to the situation that blue collar (manual, manufacturing) workers are targets of organizing, but white collar (non-manual, office/intellectual work) workers are perceived as having little to complain about and less need for organizing. This perception holds true in Asia also, and is one reason why service sector workers in Asian economies are often neglected by the labour movement; manufacturing and other sectors still attract most of the labour organizations in organizing work in the region.

The service sector now actually forms the major part of economy in most industrialized countries, both in terms of percentage share of GDP (more than 70%) and employment share (more than 50%).  In Asia, also it already accounts for the major share of the GDP for the industrialized countries like Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea and Singapore, and also employs the majority of their workforces. The ILO estimates that by 2015 the service sector will not only be the main source of job creation in Asia, but will also become the largest sector, representing about 40.7% of the region’s total employment. 

Fueled by the search for higher profits than the manufacturing sector has been providing, companies see the service sector as a ‘gold mine’, especially in the developing countries, and are eager to ‘exploit’ this untapped market and exert their control. Some countries that have protected the service sector, especially the ‘essential services’ (e.g., provision of water, electricity, gas and medical care) have been urged to open it up to allow free trade under the WTO (GATS). Governments withdraw from formerly public sector services including utilities and medical care, and in the name of growth and efficiency, often also to pay external national debt, governments privatize and outsource more and more of what used to be public sector work. Subsidies to public facilities such as education and housing are also attacked, and people must pay more from their pockets, not supported by the government, for the ‘privilege’ of education, and wages must pay for more costs of living which used to be publicly supported. In the education sector, this means students become compelled to work in order to be able to afford their education. This also leads to the formation of a bulk reserve of cheap irregular young workers to be employed in the service sector such as the retail and fast food industry; this is clearly seen in many Asian countries already. This slashing of public sector jobs also has directly impacted the level of unionization in Asia as a majority of service sector unions had significant membership from the public sector.

While government industrial policy plays a factor in Asian countries’ swing to focus on services, as well as privatization, the sector’s growth is also fueled by aggressive entry by multinational companies and agencies into formerly ‘local-only’ services, such as domestic work, health care and security guard services. G4S, the private security company, has more than 600,000 workers worldwide in 100 countries, and is itself the second largest global employer and largest private security firm in the world. Such ‘globalization’ of local services is also often accompanied by commodification and Taylorization of the work. 

In this issue we focus on the organizing work of service sector workers. In the East Asian countries and regions of Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea and Japan, the phenomenon of young workers with rapid turnover in the retail, sales and promotion sectors, leads to a need for organizing that in approach is far different from what traditional unions in those countries have used. Furthermore, as in the case of Cambodian beer promotion women and Japanese cabaret hostesses, the workers may have separate workplaces and different employers, and be unable to exercise the traditional concept of collective bargaining. In Hong Kong, sex workers also organize around their rights, but the issues that unite them are, for the women sex workers, safety from attacks, and for both male and female sex workers, creating or amending laws, to make their business easier and safer and less stigmatized. As one can expect while the Asian economies are aiming for service-led growth, the bargaining power of workers continues to decline as public sector unions get demolished by privatization, the new restricted workforce that is growing in the service sector is not organized, and laws are structured to maintain worker precariousness (‘flexibility’) while companies attain more power and wealth. In India and the Philippines, the call centre industry is a major job growth sector yet labour organizers face great difficulty in making inroads in organizing, as is reflected in the articles in this issue. On the other hand, with the decline in manufacturing jobs, the mobility of productive capital, and governments’ involvement also in attempts to keep workplaces union-free, union power has also been dramatically repressed in the manufacturing sector. These all point to the critical importance of organizing in the newly emerging service jobs.

We hope this issue can highlight the important cases of organizing in this sector happening across Asia, and encourage increased sharing and exchange of precious organizing strategies across Asia. It needs greater exploration, as the sector has become the expanding ‘catch-all’ for migrant, female and casualized workers everywhere, and strengthening the consciousness and collective power of service sector workers is a critical element in putting a stop to corporate domination in every sphere of our lives.