Introduction: Findings of a New United Nations Study

The best way to tackle rising inequality in Asia-Pacific countries is to implement a social protection program that is comprehensive and universal, with decent work and quality essential services as its key components, a new study of the United Nation’s Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UN-ESCAP) reveals. Social protection should be transformative as well. It’s aims should go beyond providing short-term safety nets and rescuing people from poverty and vulnerability. The way to make this program affordable, UN-ESCAP suggests strengthening the national tax system in the region. Furthermore, social protection is crucial to social cohesion, solidarity and sustainable growth, and its absence will lead to polarization, radicalization and even failure of the state.

These conclusions only validate the initiative of social movements that converged and formed the Network for Transformative Social Protection (NTSP) in 2008. The organization’s goal: target the adoption by peoples and leaders in the ASEAN, or Association of Southeast Asian Nations, of an action program called Agenda for a Life of Dignity for All. A central aim of this program is to bring about transformative social protection initiatives in the ASEAN which are also universal, rights-based, comprehensive, legislation-enhanced, state-driven, and with meaningful mechanisms for people participation and control.

Social protection is crucial at this historic juncture in the region now that booming economies, relentlessly pursuing accumulation and growth, have instead caused misery and destitution to the majority of the region’s inhabitants, especially those in vulnerable sectors

 Socio-Economic Context in Southeast Asia

ASEAN, for one, has attempted a regional economic integration through the ASEAN Economic Community (EC) in December 2015. Progressive think tanks — among others, Transnational Institute (Amsterdam), Focus on the Global South, Indonesia for Global Justice and Monitoring Sustainability of Globalization (Kuala Lumpur) — have established that this brand of regionalism, driven by transnational corporations and propped up by Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) call for liberalization, deregulation and privatization that adversely impact people’s lives — by removing protective regulations intended to safeguard workers, consumers and the environment.

Unfortunately, not too many peoples in the region are aware of the harmful outcomes of these
neo-liberal economic policies imposed on developing countries via the structural adjustment programs that started in the 80’s and enforced by the World Bank (WB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Such policies undermined the industrial and agricultural base of many countries, dismantled public utilities and services, eroded workers rights and their unions, and dispossessed millions of peasants of their lands and livelihoods. The think tanks have warned that neo-liberal economic integration will further devastate peoples’ lives at this critical juncture.

Currently the poor majority in the region faces a crisis of survival marked by rising social inequality, amidst massive joblessness and precarious informal work. More than 2/3 are trapped in hostile work conditions; most will have no chance of finding decent work in their lifetime. Moreover, at the core of these conditions, adequate social protection is absent and state interventions focus on targeting safety nets for the extreme poor. In an era of climate change, recurring calamities need to be factored in when social programs are created. State leadership and funding are essential to implement these programs such as the building of disaster-resilient homes and communities nation-wide.

The global financial crisis in 2007 should have marked the end of privatization and the adoption of more equitable economic policies. Instead it ushered in new offensives of privatization in the region, including large-scale commercialization of essential services and resources. The crisis raised social protection to the top of the agenda for states and international agencies. However, these governments and institutions also called for the creation of more markets in health and education, water and power, pensions and insurances. In reality, the WB- and IMF-sponsored Public-Private-Partnerships ensure monopolistic profits for private corporations with the risks of their ventures borne by states. In contrast, progressive scholars in the ASEAN push for Public-Public-Partnerships or state partnerships with non-profit organizations like workers’ cooperatives and community enterprises. Such partnerships foster the expanded provision of affordable essential services, and work guarantee programs for green jobs and public infra-structure and services.

 Aspirations and Demands of Social Movements in the Region

Against this background, the social movements in the Network for Transformative Social Protection (NTSP) introduced the Agenda for a Life of Dignity for All. This Agenda has been discussed at regional and national meetings of urban poor movements, trade unions and civil society networks, including organizations of senior citizens and people with disabilities, and scholars over the past years. A result of these exchanges is the formation of a Working Group composed of regional networks from the trade unions, migrants and non-government organizations (NGOs), as well as parliamentarians from the ASEAN Parliamentary Network for Human Rights. This Working Group is finalizing a People’s Agenda for a Social ASEAN that will be presented as an urgent demand to ASEAN leaders.

A life of dignity for all peoples in the region emphasize these major demands and aspirations:

*Social protection should be universal for all citizens, including migrants and refugees. The United Nations, for example, reports that globally only 20% of the people enjoy social protection; only 1% in developing countries and 19% in affluent countries.

*As stipulated in Human Rights Covenants, Agenda is rights-based. As human beings, people all over the globe have the following inalienable rights to social protection: the right to work, the right to food, the right to social services, and the right to social security.

*These rights are indivisible, which means that if people are to live a life of dignity, these rights need to be provided for in a comprehensive and not in a piecemeal way.

*Social protection programs need to be anchored in national legislation to guarantee that these rights are institutionalized and insulated from market forces and political patronage.

*Social protection is redistributive in the sense that the realization of the following basic rights reflect an effective implementation of economic and social justice:

1.Right to decent work and sustainable livelihood

The right to decent work includes living wages, guaranteed work, as well as ending contractualization and restoring the right to collective bargaining and joining unions.
The right to sustainable livelihood includes making accessible land and other resources to all tillers, and granting state subsidies and crop insurance to small farmers.

(The best form of social protection is the guarantee of decent work and livelihoods. With half of the world’s population still engaged in agriculture, land should be a common resource and accessible to all farmers.)

2.Right to safe and affordable food

This includes ensuring safe and affordable food for all produced from ecological and sustainable agriculture, controling the price of staple food items (like rice, sugar, cooking oil etc.), and subsidies to ecological agriculture being pursued by small farmers.

3.Right to essential services and resources

This refers to universal and quality health care, education, humane and low-cost housing, living requirements for water and energy, and affordable and safe transport.

4.Right to social security

The right includes living pensions for the elderly, child allowances, maternity benefits, income guarantee for the unemployed as well as people with disabilities and survivors of natural and man-made disasters.

(Non-contributory systems of social security subsidized by states have been proposed in the light of wide-spread unemployment and informalization of work. )

The social movements deem labor, land, food, essential services and social security, and indeed human rights themselves, as part of the commons of humanity. They are basic elements of life, and intimately linked to the meaningful survival, dignity and development of individuals, society and nature. Therefore they should be safeguarded, valued as sacrosanct and financed by the state.

Affordability of Comprehensive and Universal Social Protection

The social movements contend that comprehensive and universal social protection is affordable, as shown by costing studies of the International Labour Organization (ILO).
Funds can be generated through fiscal systems and progressive taxation that target big corporations, rich individuals and landowners; also the adoption of a financial transaction tax, closure of tax havens and the promotion of public banking to generate funds for social and environmental priorities. The setting up of a Regional Social Protection Fund has been proposed too, funded via the Global Fund for Social Protection that was recommended by UN Rapporteurs, to meet the basic costs of putting social protection systems in place in developing countries.

 Critical Role of People-centered States and Social Movements

The social movements also affirm the role of states as the principal duty bearers. They are accountable for making sure that the rights to social protection are respected, protected, and fulfilled. However this critical role necessitates people-centered states driven by the well-being of the people and guided by clear roadmaps for the realization of social protection systems. Again, such a participative and democratic approach totally fits within conceptualization of social protection as a common. The political will of states, backed by peoples movements from below, can generate the massive pressure needed to mobilize all democratic forces and institutions in society to seek a transformative type of social protection over and above poverty reduction. It also spontaneously leads to an alliance with environmental movements which need social justice to achieve their goals. Ultimately, the campaign for social protection is not an end in itself. It is an integral part of the struggle for a just, equitable and sustainable development paradigm that has the mechanisms for the democratic ownership and management of essential social services and goods, and mechanisms for a system of production and consumption structured for the satisfaction of the need of the people and community that are also benign to our finite planet.

 To Close

Humanity is at a dangerous and difficult crossroad as it confronts a multi-faceted crisis – social, economic, food, climate - with no end in sight. Nonetheless the crisis provides us with the opportunity for the convergence and working together of various struggles. For example in the Philippines, the broad Movement for a Life of Dignity for All — or in shortened form, Dignidad— is in partnership with the broad climate justice alliance. Dignidad has brought together the coalitions of urban poor organizations, farmers groups, trade unions, women and senior citizens networks, including campaign networks on food, land and human rights, as well as key scholars, journalists and church people. Their energies are unified, strengthened and focused to change national and global policies for comprehensive and universal social protection, and for system change.

There is the compelling need to promote stronger forms of organization and mobilizations, knowing that the survival of humanity and the planet is at stake. And knowing that those opposing peoples’ just demands are enormously powerful vested interests: transnational corporations, big businesses and oligarchs with their political and military allies. The necessity of forming dedicated and extensive coalitions of social movements becomes even more urgent across countries and across continents, coalitions that can generate the much-needed pressure from below to overcome the crisis and to put in place people’s alternatives. Alternatives that counter the logic of unlimited accumulation and growth, which is the basis of the world capitalist system. Alternatives such as a caring economy for a life of dignity, that will restore our solidarity with each other and our harmony with nature.

Tina Ebro

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