Business First, Freedom Second

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Even without White House guidance from the top, some corporations are feeling enough pressure from below, sparked by advocacy groups, to put codes of their own into effect. Reebok's guidelines for its suppliers in Indonesia and elsewhere support the right of workers to organize and bargain collectively. American employees of Nike conduct weekly inspections of suppliers' factories in Indonesia to check on working conditions. Such measures are not foolproof, but they represent a major effort to make a difference. Levi Strauss dealt with the question of labor rights by pulling out of China altogether in 1992; Timberland did likewise this year. But many U.S. corporations doing business in Asia have not even thought about the need for a code.

The issues involved are not easy to resolve. In most of Asia, factory workers have traditionally put in long hours for low wages and that, in fact, is why American enterprises have moved in. There is no consensus on what a fair wage might be (base pay runs as low as $1.75 a day in Indonesia), nor on the degree to which U.S. firms should challenge their host governments or support their workers in seeking political freedoms and the right to form unions. "Wages are only a small part of it," says a trade unionist in Jakarta. "What's important is that the workers have their dignity, and they'll only have that if they have the right to organize." The challenge is toughest in China, where the only legal organizer is the Communist Party, and workers can land in jail simply for complaining. "We can't have a code that requires American companies to break host country laws," insists a business lobbyist in Washington.

This is not good enough for human-rights advocates in the U.S. Deborah Leipziger, of the Council on Economic Priorities in New York City, rejects the argument often heard in Asia that Americans are trying to impose Western standards in order to make Asian products less competitive. "I don't buy it," she says, "because there are universal standards of human rights." < Child labor should be banned, and there should be an international standard for calculating fair wages, she says. More specifically, Sidney Jones of Human Rights Watch/Asia insists American executives ought to protest to the Indonesian government about the sentencing of Pakpahan and other union leaders.

The most important question is how to make Asian governments more responsive. To this the Administration has an answer: engagement over the long term. "We'll stay engaged," says a State Department official, "and keep articulating our view of what would represent progress for us." A White House official argues that economic growth and prosperity pave the way for better social and political conditions. "Coming into the mainstream ((of nations)) and shifting to markets," he says, "does in fact create trends that favor human rights."

Behind the diplo-speak are the bargaining levers available to superpowers. The Chinese government is almost desperately trying to arrange a full-dress visit by Clinton to Beijing and is quietly being told it will have to pay something for it. The U.S. message is that Clinton cannot make the trip if it might look like a failure, and it cannot succeed unless China improves its human-rights performance. This approach has two virtues: it forces the two governments to discuss the issue directly, and it just might work.