Episode #109: Working Class Hero
What is the historical role of the labor movement in Myanmar, and what impact has it had on the current revolution?
These are just some of the important questions that Stephen Campbell addresses in the discussion today. The author of “Along the Integral Margin: Uneven Development in a Myanmar Squatter Settlement,” and currently a professor at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, Campbell has spent the last twelve years studying labor movements in Myanmar and other Southeast Asian countries. Going back and forth across the history of the country’s labor movement, he describes something of a convoluted legacy of the role of labor in Myanmar, leading through the transition period and into the coup.
Campbell names the “the first identifiable, collective actions“ by wage earners in Myanmar as the strike in the oil fields in Magway in 1938, in which over 10,000 people participated. Although their bid to unionize was unsuccessful, “it was significant politically, because it really catalyzed much of the other anti-colonial struggles at that time, including student strikes and peasant uprisings.” Following Ne Win’s 1962 coup, however, unions were made illegal, and replaced by industrial dispute tribunals at which workers could voice their grievances, with varying degrees of success.
1988 represents the next watershed year for labor in Myanmar. In the wake of the emerging democracy movement, informal unions began to spring up by workers unhappy with the military regime. In prior years, the government had been nominally socialist, providing some degree of protection to workers. But when the new regime took over following the failure of the democratic revolution, the government quickly shifted towards “crony capitalism.”
Moreover, many labor leaders soon found themselves behind bars, like so many other activists at that time.
Change finally came in small doses under the Thein Sein administration in 2011, when workers were allowed to unionize legally. Then the following year, a labor dispute resolution law was passed that allowed for tripartite collective bargaining by workers. But that progress is diminished somewhat because Burmese laborers are more dependent than ever on their wages, due to large-scale military- and corporate-land grabs throughout much of the countryside, which stripped countless poor families of their homes—and for many, thus their livelihoods—without any legal recourse. And working conditions generally remain deplorable, with low pay, long hours, and unsafe conditions. Labor leaders, along with outside support from the International Labour Organization (ILO), tried to further improve working conditions during the ensuing democratic transition period, with varying degrees of success. And compared to the 1938 strike, labor did not have the same kind of broad, catalyzing political effect during the 2010s.
But the organizing that took place during this period became a clear catalyst for the early labor strikes that took place at the start of the coup. Just six days after the military took power, 4,000 factory women, mostly young women, took to the streets in downtown Yangon. This immediate show of resistance inspired other strikes in the coming weeks and months.
Campbell examines this transition period in the country’s labor history to paint a broad picture of the political dynamics at play. “There is this undercurrent of the sense of legitimacy of the workers’ movement and workers’ struggles, and a leftist peasant politics, that… when people go to Myanmar, often this is not what comes across. Because, of course, in the official politics… that foreigners saw when they went to Myanmar after 2010, was very much a sort of standard neoliberal politics, that downplays the significance of significance of workers’ movements. But nonetheless, a lot of the activists that I've talked to still look back on the influence of the 20th century leftist movement as an important part of their own heritage. So it's led to a contradictory situation where people often look at the Burmese Socialist Program Party as a very discredited political party, and as representing a politics that nobody wants to go back to. But at the same time, there is a sense that there is a leftist politics and a history of leftist politics in Myanmar, that is very important and venerable, and worthy of returning to and remembering and rethinking for its relevance in the present.”
Campbell addresses the pressing question of whether the large influx of multinational corporations brought opportunity or exploitation to Myanmar’s poorer classes during the transition years. He explains that usually that question is framed in isolation from other factors; for example, “Isn’t it better for this factory to be here and at least offer all these jobs, versus having people stay unemployed?” But such a question ignores, in his words, “the mass land dispossession of rural smallholders,” so Campbell proposes that a more appropriate question would be, “Would you want a development agenda that simultaneously robs people of their rural livelihoods while offering them in exchange, low wage precarious, urban-wage labor?” Moreover, he adds that this fundamental question was never legitimately asked of rural workers themselves, those most affected by development policies, but instead the agenda was set by large, wealthy and more powerful stakeholders.
Since the coup, workers have found themselves in a precarious situation. There are growing fears that the relative gains by labor over the past ten years will be erased should the military retain control. Campbell’s recent interviews confirm that factory owners have already taken advantage of the current crisis and lack of oversight, paying a lower minimum wage (now just 3600 kyat, or $2.70, for 8 hours work), which is compounded by many factories only paying for the limited hours they choose to operate. The military has also cracked down on workers’ attempts to organize, particularly after the infamous and brutal attack on Hlaing Thaya on March 14, 2021, in which 65 protesters were murdered. Following that incident, authorities declared martial law, and to Campbell, such a response was not accidental.
“This definitely seems to me that it's a response to the efficacy of these industrial workers in their organizing of anti-coup protests. And the concern of the junta that this is a serious catalytic constituency in the protest movement, that if the workers are able to organize, they can actually have a significant impact on the military, and the military's ability to run the country.”
In short, Campbell explains that if Burmese workers find a way to achieve greater solidarity, they can effectively shut the country down, a power that few other groups in the country can claim. And were able to do that, Campbell doesn’t see how the military would be able to fill their positions with replacement workers. This potential was already witnessed to a smaller degree when workers at the Yangon dock recently went on strike, effectively shutting down the country’s trade. “That seems to me extremely important for thinking strategically about how the uprising in Myanmar is going forward,” he says. “And the kinds of strategic decisions that people make, and areas that are focused on. Of course, there's a lot of people doing incredible, engaging struggles around the entire country. But the workers in these industries are strategically located, such that they can create a different kind of threat to the military. So going forward, that would be a really impressive development.”
Yet for that to happen, workers would need substantial outside support; many are living in dire economic conditions, and some compelled to return to their factory jobs to support their families. Campbell observes that this degree of solidarity did occur the initial weeks of the protest movement: “There was a way in which the workers were embedded in communities, not isolated in their workplaces… When the general strikes happened after the coup, there were people in the communities who were sharing food and water with striking workers. And that sort of practical solidarity was really crucial for sustaining the general strikes in the months immediately after the coup.”
Beyond the current movement, Campbell has his eye on the future, hoping that if democracy does come to Myanmar, that workers would continue the momentum they saw during the transition years. “If we imagine that the revolution has succeeded, then, well, first I would hope that there's a government that's more committed to the emancipation of workers and smallholders and the majority of people in the country.”