PPI Special Report The following is a guest column from PPI
friend and sometime contributor Earl Brown, Labor and Employment
Law Counsel for the American Center for International Labor
Solidarity. If you want to see what a society without law or
civic space looks like, go to Burma. A half century of military
misrule has devastated this once fertile center of Asian
science, scholarship, law, commerce and civic debate. But in
this desert, Burmese activists are preparing to seize the
potential democratic space recently opened up by the new regime.
Last month, it issued a new labor law, the Labor Organization
Law, which appears to allow independent unions to register and
function legally for the first time in memory. The new law
allows the creation of new unions, with a minimum of 30 members.
Burmese trade union activists are now using this new labor law
and filing papers to establish free trade unions. In the past
few weeks, groups of woodworkers, garment workers, hatters,
shoemakers, seafarers and other trades,