Last year, Carrefour opened its first hypermarket in Japan and could hardly cope with the huge rush of customers. With much lower prices than the local competitors, the French retail giant is set to succeed as consumers try to limit their spending in a shrinking economy.

Carrefour is just one of the huge commerce multinationals to make use of the opening up of Asia’s consumer markets. Protective legislation has disappeared as part of globalisation and countries like Japan, Korea, Indonesia and Malaysia are now wide open for foreign retailers and wholesalers. China continues to attract almost all large retailers and wholesalers as they hope to carve a share in the huge future market.

Also e-commerce is entering Asia. Korea is a particularly interesting country, as a large part of the population have Internet access. Tesco, which is the leading web trader of all commerce multinationals, will now build a countrywide Internet-based grocery distribution network in this country. In Japan 7-Eleven, the country’s strong convenience store chain, actively uses its store network for e-trading.

Commerce unions encounter new challenges

For the regions commerce trade unions, this is not an easy situation. Jobs will continue to be lost, whatever support is given to the more traditional parts of commerce. The transition of retail and wholesale trade is inevitable and the unions must focus on protecting the workers’ interest in this process.

With few exceptions, commercial workers in Asia are not well organised. The multinationals are no exception to this and most of them are newcomers anyway. It is therefore clear to the unions that their first priority must be to build up a presence in the leading companies.

Uni Commerce and its Asian and Pacific affiliates have launched an organising programme, which will target the global multinationals in this region. As a first step, the Japanese commerce unions will co-ordinate a research project, which seeks to find out the level of organising and labour relations in the different countries. This will be followed by a systematic approach to recruiting members and building union structures, drawing on the experiences from the new markets in central Europe.

Uni Commerce opens doors in companies

The role of Uni Commerce is to ensure that the companies respect the right of their workers to organise, but also that they see the benefit of having an organised workforce which can help smooth their way into the new markets. A good example is Carrefour, with which a global workers' rights agreement was signed earlier this year. Since then, Uni Commerce and the company management have worked actively and successfully to improve labour relations in South Korea, where the situation was very tense for many years.

The influx of multinationals to Asia is still in its early stages. In some countries, such as Korea and Thailand, the global players are already well established. In many other countries, only the first footholds have been created. Large populations and a growing purchasing power will make it certain that this process continues. Also regional multinationals follow suit and particularly the leading Japanese retailers will play an important role.