On February 12, 2026, IWSAP spoke on the preparatory meeting for the upcoming Asia Pacific People’s Forum on Sustainable Development (APPFSD) and the Asia Pacific Forum on Sustainable Development (APFSD). The meeting was organized by the Asia Pacific Regional CSO Engagement Mechanism (APRCEM). The activity focused on the current structural challenges and crises confronting the world now, and the ways civil society organizations and grassroots communities fight inequality using the Development Justice framework.
Clarice Canonizado represented IWSAP in the session, tackling the systemic difficulties being faced by workers today. At the end of her speech, Clarice highlighted the collective actions of workers, trade unions, and workers’ associations in shifting the power.
Read her full speech below.
Good afternoon from Manila, everyone. Thank you for inviting the Initiatives for Workers Solidarity in Asia Pacific to speak in this important activity. IWS-AP is a regional organization working on supporting the struggle of workers in the Asia Pacific and the solidarity-building between formal and informal workers through contributing in campaigns, research, advocacy, and the forging of workers’ associations.
Workers in the Asia-Pacific region face persistent challenges in securing decent work. Informal work remains the dominant form of employment: approximately 66% of all workers in the region are informally employed, meaning they often lack contracts, social protection, and basic workplace rights. Informal jobs are especially prevalent in agriculture and small enterprises, where standardized wages, paid leaves, and safety protections are minimal or absent. With the rise of the gig economy, many are also informally employed in ride-hailing, delivery services, customer service, virtual assistance and other similar tracks. Under this scheme, many workers are confronted with labor rights abuses, primarily stemming from their lack of recognition as workers.
The growing use of unregulated algorithmic management in digital platforms poses new and significant risks to workers. Automated systems increasingly determine work allocation, performance ratings, pay levels, and even termination decisions, often without transparency, due process, or accountability – reinforcing labour as a commodity that has no say in conditions governing their work. Workers have little clarity on the ins and outs of gig work and are also exposed to heightened digital surveillance. This exacerbates precarity, undermines collective bargaining, and further weakens workers’ power to assert their rights in an already insecure form of employment.
Women workers are disproportionately affected by precarious labour conditions. Around three in five employed women in the region work in the informal economy, exposing them to lower pay, irregular hours, and limited access to social protections. Women also shoulder a heavy unpaid care burden — on average, they spend far more time on unpaid household and care work than men, constraining their participation in formal labour markets and contributing to persistent pay gaps.
Youth employment remains unstable. Young people (aged 15–24) are far more likely to be informally employed than adults, with around 86% of working youth in informal jobs in many parts of the region. Particularly and with their exposure to digitalization, the youth are often employed in gig work where they often experience having no written contracts or access to benefits, which limits their long-term earning potential and skills development. This cohort also faces high unemployment and underemployment.
Despite overall wage growth in the region, over 90% of low-wage workers are in informal employment, where wage levels tend to be low and volatile. And even in formal employment, corporations and business owners find ways to shortchange workers by denying them of living wages and benefits for faster outputs and higher profits. Amidst these realities, states are complicit in maintaining unequal power and economic structures that hinder mobility of millions of workers in Asia Pacific.
Labour rights are under attack and civic space is shrinking. Reports indicate widespread violations of basic rights to organise, bargain collectively, and strike across multiple countries, with the region ranking poorly in global rights indices. Weak enforcement of labour laws and neoliberal labour reforms that rollback hard-won labour rights, such as the promotion of contract and platform work, strip workers of their protections, rights and job security.
Amidst this context, multilateralism embodied in the United Nations and other international institutions have constantly failed to address concerns and demands of workers in Asia Pacific. The private sector, big corporations, and wealthier states continue to have a stronger say in the discourses being shaped inside policy spaces. Meanwhile, workers, especially informal and migrant workers, smaller trade unions, and grassroots workers’ organizations are left at the sideline or worse, are not able to participate at all due to lack of financial and logistical support.
Weak enforcement mechanisms of multilateral institutions also fail to make states and the private sector accountable for their historical negligence in protecting workers. On top of this, financial institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank take advantage of loose accountability mechanisms and the lack of political will to impose neoliberal policies in many countries, affecting economies and the working class each year. The power imbalance between Global North and South countries in the financing space have also resulted in policies that favour the interests of a handful of states and corporations. As a result, wealth becomes more concentrated in the hands of a few.
As it is, multilateralism is unresponsive to the lived realities of workers on the ground. However, with the current UN reforms and geopolitical tensions threatening multilateralism, will global governance become even less effective in protecting workers’ rights and advancing social justice at a time when they are needed most?
On Development Justice
But all hope is not lost because workers, trade unions, and workers associations are doing the bulk of the task to uphold development justice. Workers, both formal and informal, organize and consolidate their strength to address systemic power imbalances. They are involved in mutual aid initiatives and political education efforts to collectively uplift themselves and shift the power away from big businesses, state repression, and other exploiters.
Across countries, workers have waged strikes and defeated power imbalances in their own ways. They are in the streets, in courts, and in policy-making arenas, continuously asserting their rights and paving the path for social transformation. We have seen this in the general strikes in India (which is having a general strike today against regressive labour law reforms), in factory or firm-wide actions in the Philippines, in the organized actions of gig workers in Thailand and New Zealand, as well as in the small efforts to improve labor education in other parts of Asia Pacific. In platforms like APRCEM, workers and their organizations have been active in promoting alternative solutions that put their issues and demands at the forefront.
This is what development justice looks like – putting workers and all oppressed people at the center of decision-making, discourses on power, and transformative actions. Thank you.