Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) - Topics
- Discrimination against internal migrant workers: Improving employees' working conditions in China
- Sustainable Development: How to Tackle Climate Change?
Committee Chairs: Ilia Riaskoff, Ozren Kobsa
Contact: ecosoc@zagimun.org
Topic A
Discrimination against internal migrant workers:
Improving employees' working conditions in China
The right to equality is a key human right. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.” However, human rights in China are being heavily challenged by discrimination amidst the Chinese population and the extreme working conditions that characterize the lives of rural migrants.
China has the largest labor force in the world. China's capitalist miracle was made possible by cheap labor. According to Chinese official data, over 700 million people were employed by the end of 1990s. More than half of its labor force is engaged in agriculture, although that sector accounts for less than 20 percent of China's GDP.
In the 1990s, China's increasingly dynamic service sector employed more workers than industrial enterprises for each of the last 3 years. Sources from the State Statistics Bureau show that 6.4 percent of labor force in rural China shifted to the country's secondary and tertiary industries in 1999. There are an estimated number of 150-200 million rural-to-urban migrants who have moved to China's cities in search of work and better lives in what has been called “the world's largest ever peacetime migration”. According to one official survey, as many as 50 million people leave rural areas in search of urban jobs every year. Of this number, approximately 30 million people leave their home provinces. These “internal migrants” are treated as second class citizens within their own country. Their number has risen rapidly from just two million in the 1980s and is expected to grow even further, with some estimating 300 million by 2015.
Shifting labor forces experienced a big rise in disproportion on a provincial, regional, or municipal scale. While they have served as the back-bone labourers fuelling China's economic take-off, the majority of internal migrants never gain permanent reseidency in urban areas. Having built China's modern and gleaming metropolises, the majority eventually returns to the countryside, having served and then been sent away from urban centres of privilege. Tens of millions of migrants are denied rights to adequate health care and housing, and are exlcuded from the wide array of state benefits available to permanent urban residents. They experience discrimination in the workplace, and are routinely exposed to some of the most exploitative conditions of work. Internal migrants' insecure legal status, social isolation, sense of cultural inferiority and relative lack of knowledge of their rights leaves them particularly vulnerable, enabling employers to deny their rights with impunity. The children of internal migrants do not have equal access to free, compulsory education, and many of them have to be left behind in the countryside.
The right to equality does not mean that states must treat all persons in the same way at all times. It does mean that states can only treat persons differently where there are legitimate reasons for doing so. However, “social origin” is listed as an unlawful basis of discrimination.
The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) provides, among other things, for the right of workers to strike, the right of workers to organize independent unions, the right of trade unions to operate freely, including their right to form national federations or confederations which have the right to form or join international trade union organizations.
Despite these international obligations, the Chinese government maintains a system that has provided a regulatory and administrative foundation for discrimination against internal migrant workers on the basis of their distinct social origin. The hukou system took shape during the 1950s on the basis of a complex of regulations that sought to register and to tie all residents to specific localities, to strictly divide and differentiate the privileges of urban and rural society, to control and restrict migration between regions, and to serve as the key basis of a nation-wide system of public security.
Despite reforms of the hukou system since the 1990s which have facilitated the movement of rural residents to the cities – adapting both to the economic need for rural labourers to fuel China's economic growth and to the inevitability of urbanization, it continues to place restrictions on freedom of movement and residence through the demands it makes, particularly, on those seeking to move from a rural to an urban location, effectively making it extremely difficult for millions of internal migrants to be fully documented, and “legally” residing, in the cities.
The presence of denial of just and favourable conditions of work in China is evident. Internal migrants are experiencing:
- denial of labour contracts
- forced overtime and denial of holidays
- fines and unpaid wages
- financial penalties and obstruction of the right to leave employment
- poor housing conditions
- discrimination in the new urban health care schemes
- denial of the right to education for migrant children
The UN Economic and Social Council wishes to address this grave issue by multilateral approaches, originating improvement from several directions. The need to promote good governance and an improved rule of law was recognised as being crucial not only in creating an enabling environment needed for a sustained and/or accelerated development of the whole country, but also to improve social protection, promote equity and reduce marked disparities in access to basic social services.
- Government's perspective: How to thoroughly reform the hukou system according to international regulations? How to monitor working conditions within companies?
- Commercial perspective: How to encourage companies to keep to regulations? What role should Western importing companies play in this development?
- Commercial perspective: How to create alternatives for illegal but necessary price cartels? If all production companies do not keep to the standards, the ones who will, shall run out of business.
- International Society's perspective: How to enforce major internationally accepted standards upon a country's national traditional system? How to increase influence of international organizations promoting adoption of human rights?
Topic B
Sustainable Development: How to tackle climate change?
In December 1997 the Kyoto treaty was set-up to consider what can be done to reduce global warming. The treaty was established by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Almost one decade later, as climate change increases and global warming continues to worsen, a number of nations have approved an addition to the treaty the Kyoto Protocol, in order to standardise a number of more powerful and legally binding measures. This treaty expires in 2012, and international talks began in May 2007 on a future treaty to succeed the current one.
The Kyoto Protocol is an agreement made under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Countries that ratify this protocol commit to reduce their emissions of carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases, or engage in emissions trading if they maintain or increase emissions of these gases.The Kyoto Protocol now covers more than 160 countries globally and more than 60% of countries in terms of global greenhouse gas emissions. As of December 2006, a total of 169 countries and other governmental entities have ratified the agreement. Notable exceptions include the United States and Australia. Other countries, like India and China, which have ratified the protocol, are not required to reduce carbon emissions under the present agreement.
In May 2006 the Bonn Conference saw delegates from 165 countries meet to discuss how to further strengthen international cooperation to reduce emissions of heat-trapping gases and to respond to climate change impacts.
Much emphasis has been put on the promotion of economic incentives to promote action to reduce emissions - for both industrialized and developing countries. The wide-ranging presentations of possible approaches included incentives for developing countries to mitigate climate change, ensuring cooperation on research and development and the transfer of cleaner technologies. Delegates expressed strong support for the role of the carbon market and the need to find new ways to involve the private sector in climate protection. There are also issues faced by less industrialised countries who face problems related to climate change. In Canada's Arctic region, the changes - such as melting permafrost, changes in sea ice and the arrival of new migratory animal species - have raised the need to address adaptation measures. It is crucial that such measures are introduced if we are to cope with global warming. The evidence collated by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicts that the global average temperature will rise by between 1.5C and 4.5C if human activities double the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere.
In the non-binding 'Washington Declaration' agreed on February 16, 2007, Presidents or Prime Ministers from Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, United Kingdom, the United States, Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa agreed in principle on the outline of a successor to the Kyoto Protocol. They envisage a global cap-and-trade system that would apply to both industrialized nations and developing countries, and hoped that this would be in place by 2009.
On June 7, 2007, leaders at the 33rd G8 summit agreed that the G8 nations would 'aim to at least halve global CO2 emissions by 2050'. The details enabling this to be achieved would be negotiated by environment ministers within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in a process that would also include the major emerging economies. A round of climate change talks under the auspices of the UNFCCC, known as Vienna Climate Change Talks 2007, concluded in 31 August 2007 with agreement on key elements for an effective international response to climate change. The talks were meant to set the stage for a major international meeting to be held in Bali in December 2007.
In order to tackle climate change, the UN Economic and Social Council believes that a multilateral approach is needed to achieve significant improvement. The premises that the largest share of historical and current global emissions of greenhouse gases has originated in developed countries, that the emissions per capita in developing countries are still relatively low and that the share of global emissions originating in developing countries will grow to meet their social and development needs leads to the conclusion that the climate change is common but differentiated responsibility in between developed and developing countries. However, even without the commitment to reduce according to the Kyoto target, developing countries still do share the common responsibility that all countries have in reducing emissions.
Significant improvement is also needed because the high productive costs of incorporating environmental friendly systems, so enterprises worldwide are highly discouraged from sustainable production. Therefore, governments worldwide should think in multiple directions. On one hand, they should impose regulations in order to control emissions and other damaging activities. On the other hand, they should adopt legislative and economical measures to encourage enterprises to use sustainable production systems. The UN Economic and Social Council considers the task of the international institutions of crucial importance. It should be their aim to promote effective monitoring and provide creative alternatives to the measures and techniques that are at hand today.
Concluding, the UN Economic and Social Council wishes to adress the issue at hand with potential solutions from the following perspectives:
- Government's perspective: What effective regulations are to be imposed?
- International institutions' perspective: How to monitor all regulations more effectively?
- Commercial perspective: Encourage companies to use sustainable production processes.
