This piece is Part 2 in a three-part series focusing on
under-analysed aspects of the Dawei deep-sea port and industrial zone
project in southeastern Burma. See here
for Part 1, an analysis of the activities of Italian-Thai Development,
the project’s lead developer. Part 3, which will focus on women’s and
gender issues in Dawei, is forthcoming.
At first glance, a labour analysis of the Dawei deep-sea port and
industrial zone project may seem counterintuitive. To date, critical
readings of the project have focused mainly on environmental impacts,
displacement and relocation of local people, the marginalization of
local voices, and in a wider perspective, the concern that the majority
of project benefits will accrue to Thailand rather than Burma,
signalling Burma’s rather disadvantageous entry into regional and
sub-regional infrastructure networks. These lines of analysis are
fruitful and will remain as such. That labour has been absent from them
is not, per se, a problem thus far.
Further, early claims that the project would generate substantial job
opportunities seem to have faded. ‘We need tons of workers,’ said
Premchai Karnasuta in late 2010, when his company secured the project
concession. ‘We will mobilize millions of Burmese’ (IHT 2010). Premchai
is president of Italian-Thai Development (ITD), Thailand’s largest
construction company and the project’s lead developer. Yet almost two
years later, the project-specific labour force in Dawei does not
approach even the more moderate estimate of ‘tens of thousands’ of
workers said (in 2010) to be necessary for the project’s first five
years. Instead, Dawei-area activists and community leaders
[i]
say that the project’s current labour force consists mainly of a
relatively small number of migrant workers: about 800 Thai workers and
600 migrant workers from upper Burma. Even when (or if) the project
reaches projected capacity some ten to fifteen years from now, the
emphasis in the industrial zone is on heavy industry, not medium or
light manufacturing industries that would be more labour-intensive.
Though China’s much-vaunted Shenzhen special economic zone (SEZ) is
considered a model of sorts for the Dawei project, there are no plans
for the latter to involve manufacturing or export processing in a way
that would require the vast labour force of Shenzhen or other SEZs
elsewhere in Asia.
Thus labour analyses of the Dawei project have yet to gather momentum, despite some limited discussion in some circles.
[ii]
However, reading Dawei through a labour lens does enable some important
shifts in perspective, chief among them its ability to underline a
particular set of very tangible impacts – namely employment arrangements
– for people in and around the Dawei project area, including the road
link to Thailand. Following Tania Li’s work on the intersection of land
and labour issues, a labour perspective offers added analytical value at
two scales: locally, it ‘highlights the jobs generated, and the rewards
received’ by communities where large-scale investment takes place; and
more broadly, it ‘highlights the predicament of people whose labor is
not needed by the global capitalist system,’ as the ‘anticipated
transition from farm to factory’ has ceased to be a viable promise in
most parts of the global South (Li 2011: 281).
In and around the Dawei area, the labour profile of the project can be broken into at least four main strands:
a)
Migrant workers, currently said to consist of about 800 Thai workers and 600 workers from upper Burma
b)
Local workers, i.e. workers from the Dawei area,
working likely for project sub-contractors or on a temporary/casual
basis for specific tasks, e.g. clearing land for project facilities or
the road link
c)
Informal economy workers, who while not directly
attached to project contractors or sub-contractors, may supply secondary
services or goods such as selling basic consumption products at ITD
worker camps, or other forms of uncontracted labour that relates to the
project (e.g. waste collection and disposal)
d)
Rural farmers and villagers, whose work as
smallholder farmers, plantation workers, and landless peasants will
undergo changes with increasing investment in the area
There is, to be sure, considerable overlap between categories B, C,
and D, and to some degree A and C. For example, to the extent that rural
villagers have seen any employment opportunities generated by the
project thus far, they have been enlisted for basic labour-intensive
tasks like clearing land for the road link project and in the industrial
zone area. As for agricultural labour, traditional workforce statistics
tend to calculate labour forces – e.g. on a national scale – by
referring to ‘non-agricultural labour’. However, scholars and activists
have, in recent years, highlighted how changes in rural areas have
swelled the ranks of certain labour forces, especially in informal
economies, as agricultural investment trends have shifted towards
labour-shedding technologies that dispossess farmers of their land,
driving the creation of a landless peasant class and out-migration from
rural areas. As a result, the classical juxtaposition of workers and
farmers, as with the more fundamental opposition of the urban and the
rural as analytical categories, has become tenuous at best. Instead,
cross-sectoral alliances between different types of workers, urban and
rural as well as formal and informal, have become central to organizing
efforts. In its very explicit combination of road infrastructure through
remote highland areas and a large-scale waterfront industrial zone, the
Dawei project also highlights the need for an approach that brings
together agricultural and industrial labour perspectives.
Activists and community leaders in the Dawei area have emphasized the
centrality of migrant labour, both Thai and from upper Burma, to
current early-stage implementation activities. Living mostly in ITD
worker camps along the road link route and in and around the industrial
zone area, these workers are involved in labour-intensive tasks like
road construction, the building of the camps themselves, construction of
company and project facilities like the ITD project headquarters in the
industrial zone area, and relocation sites like the Bawah site on the
north end of the industrial zone area. Compared to workers from upper
Burma, Thai workers are said to have higher wages and more secure
contracts, and sensitive relationships with local communities –
especially in remote road link camps where Thai workers have uneasy
interactions with Karen villagers, to whose village centres and shops
Thai workers come for simple consumption goods, for food, and sometimes
for alcohol. Still, Thai workers’ wages are mostly lower than the new
Thai minimum wage, which has been a source of discontent, and Thai
workers have expressed dissatisfaction with their working and living
conditions in the project area, leading to some criticism of ITD in the
Thai press. Workers from upper Burma have also voiced dissatisfaction
over wages that are both lower than the Thai minimum, and lower than
normal wages in the Dawei area. In fact, contrary to expectations, local
activists say they have not seen the emergence of a clear project
labour hierarchy pitting Thai workers at the top and workers from Burma
(local and migrant) at the bottom. While a relatively small management
coterie does exist, and it does consist largely of Thai workers,
remaining project workers – that is, the vast majority of workers
associated with the project – apparently face similar conditions of
exploitation, regardless of where they come from.
While the situation of migrant worker communities appears reasonably
well known, it is difficult to say the same of local workers and
informal economy workers. Local workers from Dawei township itself
largely engage and disengage with project activities through the work of
the project’s many local sub-contractors, while local villagers are
brought in as casual and temporary workers to clear land for the road
link and the industrial zone site. This is a shifting workforce, varying
by site and from week to week, day to day. Less has been said thus far
of informal economy workers, though those who engage in work related to
the project are likely to increase as worker camps become better
established and larger. Meanwhile the wider question of informal labour
applies to almost all workers who interface with the project, insofar as
full-time, secure employment arrangements have been reserved only for a
relatively small group of management-level ITD employees. In addition,
as economic land concessions increase around the road link route and the
industrial zone area, more smallholder farmers will be forced to move
into largely insecure and precarious employment arrangements, either as
workers in the informal sector or as landless labourers on larger-scale
plantations and contract farms.
On the level of jobs generated and rewards received – that is, at the
first of Tania Li’s two scales – the Dawei project, even just from a
labour perspective, can be said to have brought few if any benefits to
workers involved (directly and indirectly) with the project. Instead,
the prevailing dynamic is a combination of outright expulsion and
adverse incorporation of local people and migrant labour. As a
reorganization of production, this situation is much in line with
high-modernist agrarian transition and industrialization processes
elsewhere. Ben White et al gloss the issue as follows: ‘Contemporary
forms of agrarian transition involve investments and dispossession that
expel people from agriculture without absorbing their labour in
manufactures or elsewhere in the economy, and create an “agrarian
question of labour” involving large “surplus populations” of the
dispossessed’ (White et al 2012: 624). Li’s second scale, regarding the
situation of people and communities whose labour power is
systematically foreclosed upon by dominant trends in global capitalism,
enters here.
In many ways the Dawei project represents a classical study in the
labour-shedding dynamics of large-scale SEZs and infrastructure
projects, which in expelling peasants from land and providing limited
and unfavourable employment prospects produce reserves, sometimes vast,
of under- or non-integrated labour –
de facto ‘surplus
populations’. In Dawei, estimates of displaced people often exceed
20,000, but little if any of this labour will be incorporated in the
industrial zone elements of the project, which focus on heavy and medium
industries, while employment prospects along the road link and in
plantations and/or contract farms are unlikely to absorb all of this
newly precarious labour force. Further, capital flows – such as those
gathering in Dawei – have been shown to move in search of flexible,
informalized labour, ‘leading to the systematic establishment of
anti-labour regimes to lock in comparative advantages based on cheaper,
more manageable labour’ (AMRC 2011: 3). So even that labour that is
absorbed through the project, directly or indirectly, is likely to be
highly unfavourable. Dawei, in this sense, reflects a broader erosion of
labour standards in Asia.
SEZs have been a key vehicle for this erosion process. In Dennis
Arnold’s useful four-phase narration of SEZ development in Asia, SEZs
have moved from being – through the provision of cheap and flexible
labour and various kinds of tax incentives – basic FDI-capturing
mechanisms for newly export-oriented Tiger economies in East Asia (in
the first and second phases), to being outright vehicles for territorial
consolidation and capital accumulation (in the third and fourth phases)
(Arnold 2010, cited in Wulandari n/d: 7-8). These latter stages involve
the state’s re-entry as a formidable actor in and against transnational
capital flows, with states using SEZs to concentrate production
activities and certain services, while setting up SEZs as nodes in wider
infrastructure networks. Dawei, although not providing for
labour-intensive production, nevertheless fits well as a latter-phase
SEZ, linking up coastal industrial and logistics activities with an
extensive overland trade network to Bangkok and beyond.
Dawei, of course, is not the only major industrial initiative in
Burma. With 23 industrial zones in and around Rangoon, 18 industrial
zones elsewhere (mostly in other central lowland and coastal areas), and
two other SEZs ‘proper’ (in Kyaukphyu and Thilawa) (cf. Zaw and Kudo
2011), Burma is much in line with the regional trend of using SEZs and
industrial zones as vehicles for capital accumulation. As strategies
through which state and capital produce ‘market-adjustable’ societies,
SEZs can be seen to represent two theories developed by David Harvey:
accumulation by dispossession, and the spatio-temporal fix (cf. Harvey
2003). In short, capitalism at the frontier tends to involve the seizure
of assets – notably land, labour, and natural resources – from
populations rendered surplus, while capital must be ‘fixed’ in time and
space – particularly through physical infrastructure like roads – in
order for accumulation at the periphery to be transferred to the core.
[iii]
These dynamics are alive and well in Burma. Dawei is one case among
many. Border trade zones, such as the long-discussed economic zone near
Myawaddy, link closely to these trends; the much-publicized land dispute
for the industrial park in Mingaladon fits in here as well; and to some
extent the Kyaukphyu and Thilawa SEZs could be good further case
studies. Moving beyond SEZs and industrial zones, the picture becomes
even more crowded. In Burma’s highlands, new land legislation renders
vast tracts of swidden-cultivated land ripe for land grabs, while the
National Human Rights Commission has said that, of the 30 or so
complaints they field daily, a majority are land-related. Or put
differently: at Tania Li’s second scale, it is clear that capital
accumulation trends in Burma are creating a critical situation for those
farmers and peasants whose labour, by the new rules of the game in
Burma, is no longer needed.
For many international NGOs and civil society actors in Burma, the
default response to challenges like this has been essentially top-down: a
combination of policy work, and engagement with the government and
private sector. Refreshingly, the response in Dawei has been far more
bottom-up, as local NGOs and related networks have understood, first,
the strategic value of local-level organizing; and then they have
brought the fruits of those organizing efforts, in the form of targeted
demands – backed by groundswells of community sentiment – to the
doorsteps of state and capital. This approach is the essence of
effective, multilevel community action. Organizations working elsewhere
in Burma, and indeed in many other countries as well, could learn a
great deal from the response in Dawei.
However, activists and community leaders in the Dawei area have yet
to seriously work on labour issues. And certainly, the obstacles are
many. Worker camps tend to be isolated and they’re often remote, there
are a number of languages in play, issues between local people and
migrant workers are sensitive (as is often the case), and the power
differential between capital and labour could hardly be higher. More
practically, labour rights work in Burma, despite a rich history
extending back to the colonial era and the early independence period,
has probably returned to a stage that could generously be called
nascent, despite a great deal of labour activity in Rangoon-area
industrial zones and among farmers and peasants in the countryside.
Given limited institutional experience in the relevant corners of
contemporary civil society, it is likely that little may happen unless
workers themselves begin turning their grievances into action.
Counterintuitively, perhaps, this latter possibility may be the most
encouraging: self-organized workers taking the situation into their own
hands. Imagine cross-sector alliances between dispossessed peasants and
exploited construction workers; imagine linkages between disaffected
Thai workers and migrant Burmese workers. The potential is less remote
than one might think. In recent years, many grassroots social movements
across Southeast Asia have begun to take seriously the need to organize
across sectoral divides from a labour perspective, in order to reimagine
collective bargaining in contexts where conventional trade union
approaches no longer apply (cf. AMRC 2012). Results have been mixed;
much progress remains to be made. In particular, there has been a great
deal of discussion around how to create spaces for cross- and
multi-sectoral organizing – through media, through community centres,
through mobile informal exchanges, etc. Opinions vary, but at a recent
conference in Bangkok, for example, participants stressed that work of
this kind is unlikely to be successful unless workers themselves are
already organizing on the ground. Indeed, experienced labour activists
argue that solidarity emerges in the course of workers’ struggles,
rather than being produced or imposed a priori through external
interventions (cf. Campbell 2012 [forthcoming]). In this context, the
role of civil society organizations becomes that of strengthening,
sustaining, and linking these struggles.
In other words, no shortcuts – just the daily hard work of
local-level organizing and alliance-building, with ears to the ground.
Thailand-based groups that work with migrant workers from Burma would do
well to assist in this work, in Dawei and elsewhere in the country, as
these organizations know what it means to open up spaces for organizing
in difficult conditions. Admittedly the need for a labour-based approach
in Dawei remains largely unrecognized; labour issues are considered
peripheral to other approaches thus far. But as a project that remains,
for now at least, something of a showpiece initiative for Burma’s
liberalization process, Dawei may well set standards for years to come.
It could also be read as a harbinger of sorts, a sign or symbol of
broader trends in the region. The processes that Dawei represents –
informalization of labour, expulsion of rural communities from their
land, degradation of labour standards, the production of new surplus
communities at the periphery of global capitalism – are signs of dark
days to come for working people, in Burma as elsewhere. While the
project is still relatively labour-intensive, now is the time for labour
mobilization. With the stature of the project still intact, the
repercussions could be tremendous.
Soe Lin Aung is a researcher and consultant based in Rangoon. He can be reached at thant.soelin@gmail.com.
Works Cited
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Arnold, D. (2010)
Administration, Border Zones, and Spatial Practices in the Mekong Region. PhD Dissertation. Department of Geography, University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill.
Arnold, D. and Aung, S.L. (2011) ‘Exclusion to Visibility,
Vulnerability to Voice: Informal Economy Workers in the Mekong
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Campbell, S. (Forthcoming) ‘Workplace struggles of precarious
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The New Imperialism. New York: Oxford University Press.
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[i]
I have not explicitly sought nor gained permission to give the names of
specific organizations or individuals in this series, so given
remaining sensitivities and security concerns for local activists and
organizations working in the Dawei area, here and elsewhere in this
series I will not reveal full names or titles of individuals and
organizations.
[ii]
One of the main Dawei-area activists has spoken of plans to bring in
Rangoon-based labour leaders to establish contact with workers in
project camps, but timing and details were unclear. The issue is clearly
seen as secondary at best to a host of other approaches: environmental,
economic, land-related, etc.
[iii]
Researchers and scholars have connected both theories to SEZ
initiatives and labour informalization in Southeast Asia. See, for
example, Arnold and Aung 2011, and Wulandari nd.
