Sure, I'd be happy to. Thank you.
Good afternoon.
I thank this committee for the invitation to testify before the Standing Committee on International Trade of the House of Commons on the subject of the proposed Canada-Jordan free trade agreement.
While there are many aspects of this agreement that deserve careful consideration, I will focus my remarks today on whether the Kingdom of Jordan currently complies with the commitments it has undertaken under the bilateral agreement on labour cooperation. The simple answer to this question is no.
Article 1 of the Canada-Jordan Agreement on Labour Cooperation provides that each party shall ensure that its labour law and practices embody and provide protection for eight categories of principles and rights, the first four being the ILO core labour rights, as set forth in the ILO Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work, as well as four additional categories, including acceptable minimum employment standards, such as minimum wages and overtime, the prevention of occupational illnesses and injuries, and non-discrimination in respect of working conditions for migrant workers.
While the Kingdom of Jordan has recently instituted by cabinet decree important reforms, the labour code still falls short of the requirements of article 1. For example, importantly, the labour code provides that non-Jordanians cannot apply for membership in a trade union. This is a blatant violation of one of the core principles of freedom of association embedded in an ILO convention, number 87, namely that:
Workers...without distinction whatsoever, shall have the right to establish and, subject only to the rules of the organization concerned, to join organizations of their own choosing without previous authorization.
This exclusion leaves the multitude of migrant workers in Jordan, roughly 300,000, unable to bargain over the terms and conditions of their employment.
The labour code also requires a minimum of 50 workers to form a trade union. According to the ILO Committee on Freedom of Association, this minimum threshold is too high and it is suggested that a more appropriate minimum threshold could be somewhere around 20.
The labour code authorizes substantial intervention by the government in the operation of trade unions, particularly at the confederation level, but also with regard to certain federations.
The labour code also authorizes the government to define those industries in which workers may form trade unions and prohibits workers from forming more than one union in each of them, which makes it very difficult for independent trade unions to form where federations currently exist. This shows, obviously, a violation of convention 87 and the principles of freedom of association.
The labour code also requires workers to provide their employers with 14 days' notice of a strike, and can impose mandatory mediation and conciliation during which strikes are prohibited.
The ILO has also noted that a system of compulsory mediation and arbitration that prevents a calling of strikes infringes on the rights of freedom of association.
Those are by no means all, but those are some key inconsistencies between what the obligations are in the Canada-Jordan Agreement on Labour Cooperation and their current labour code.
Under article 3 of the agreement on labour cooperation, the Kingdom of Jordan also has an obligation to effectively enforce its labour laws, including those laws it enacts, to be consistent with article 1 of agreement on labour cooperation.
In the garment sector, we have seen conditions improve somewhat since the 2006 exposé by the national labour committee and an FTA complaint filed by the AFL-CIO brought attention to the truly horrendous working conditions in the factories, the qualified industrial zones that produce and export garments to the United States as well as other markets. Since that time, the ILO has established a better work program that will soon, by government decree, cover the entire garment industry; however, the ILO's first synthesis report for Jordan reveals several serious problems.
With regard to forced labour, the report notes that in two-thirds of the assessed factories the employers put a curfew of 8 p.m., meaning that workers cannot leave the factories and were confined to their dormitories. In 65% of the cases, they discovered non-compliance with occupational safety and health, largely having to do with poor living conditions in their dormitories.
The ILO also noted that the Jordanian labour law does not impose any general limit on the amount of total overtime hours or a maximum number of total hours per week, and therefore tolerates very excessive overtime hours. The ILO noted this as a particularly serious problem.
Again, with regard to freedom of association, the vast majority of workers in the garment industry are migrant workers, who, again, by law, are excluded from the ability to exercise their rights of freedom of association and collective bargaining. This obviously has an impact not only on those workers but also on Jordanian workers, both in the garment industry and outside.
Problems, of course, are not limited to the garment sector. In fact, outside the garment sector, where there isn't actually the presence of the ILO and this monitoring, we expect that the conditions would be worse. The 2010 U.S. Department of State human rights report on Jordan reported a number of violations of worker rights over the last year, from the use of excessive force by the police to break a peaceful sit-in by port workers to the continued forced labour of migrant workers employed as domestic servants--even though recent regulations are attempting to address this problem--and excessive overtime in the private sector outside of the qualifying industrial zones.
Jordan, both in law and in practice, currently does not comply with its agreement on labour cooperation with Canada. I urge the Canadian Parliament to take these matters into consideration before moving forward with ratification of the agreement.
Thank you.