I think that this is the route that organized labor has to go.

Delhi, India— On October 7th, the ITUC-declared World Day of Decent Work, Asian workers’ organizations and representatives along with allies in the US, UK and throughout Europe are coming together to demand a Minimum Living Wage called the Asia Floor Wage.

As the protestors at G-20 recently urged the global platform of governments to realize the fallacy of the neoliberal “free trade” model of development, labor activists in Asia, US, UK and Europe have joined hands to pro-actively propose a new model for growth.

The Asia Floor Wage (AFW) Campaign is based on the premise that we need a new framework for the growth of the global economy; one that is based on labor rights and prioritizes the demand for a living wage.

It’s often been said that capital is extremely mobile while workers are not. Therefore, it is in the best interests of non-Asian labor organizations to start to work with organizations in Asia to help the workers over there. They are the ones that are truly being punished in this era of the new global marketplace. A marketplace where technology, and for now, fossil fuels ensure that one can get any product from anywhere in the world and hire people for many tasks from anywhere in the world. If we could get workers in Asia significant workplace protections and wages they could actually live off of—then that would negate the advantage of sociopathic mobile capital which simply sees these people as inputs, which see us all as inputs actually. Human beings are not a commodity.