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	UN experts urge ILO to back safe and healthy work conditions as a fundamental right by OHCHR, ILO, agencies   Sep. 2019   The UN Special Rapporteur on hazardous substances and wastes, Baskut Tuncak, has presented a report containing 15 principles to end the exploitation of workers through their exposure to hazardous substances.   In an address to the Human Rights Council, Tuncak urged States and businesses to implement the 15 principles intended to help governments, businesses and others to protect workers from toxic exposure in and around the workplace and to provide remedies for violations of their rights.   'For too long, workers have been exploited by relentless exposure to a toxic cocktail of substances. They are exposed to deadly and debilitating industrial chemicals and pesticides, among other hazardous substances', said Tuncak.   'Millions of workers continue to be forced to make the abhorrent choice between their health and their income, and millions more are poisoned without their knowledge or consent.   Legally permissible exposure levels for occupational exposure, if they exist, are often hundreds if not thousands of times higher than what is considered acceptable for the protection of health', said Tuncak.   'Risk assessments of exposure, when conducted, are often based on incomplete knowledge or false assumptions, resulting in misleading assurances of safety and widespread impact on workers health. Processes for improving standards of protection from exposure continue to be deliberately delayed for years, if not decades, resulting in countless premature deaths'.   According to the International Labour Organization (ILO), more than 2.7 million workers around the world die from unsafe or unhealthy working conditions each year. Over 80% of the deaths are from occupational diseases. Approximately half of this figure comes from exposure to toxic chemicals, pesticides, radiation and other hazardous substances, and this may be underestimated.   The Special Rapporteur noted the crisis facing workers most vulnerable to exploitation, including the poor, children and women, as well as migrant, temporary and informal workers. He highlighted cases illustrating the devastating impact on children born to women who were inadequately protected from chemicals that are toxic to development or reproduction.   'Everyone must be protected from exposure to toxic substances at work', he said.   The Special Rapporteur reiterated a previous call by UN experts for the ILO to urgently include occupational safety and health as one of its fundamental principles and rights at work. While the ILO has included many international human rights as those it considers 'fundamental', safety and health have not been included. Safe and healthy working conditions have been recognised globally by the UN as a human right since 1966. The issue should be considered by the ILO Governing Body in October 2019. http://bit.ly/2m98rOk   June 2019   UN experts urge ILO to back safe and healthy work conditions as a 'fundamental' right (OHCHR)   UN experts have urged the International Labour Organisation (ILO) to immediately recognise and adopt safe and healthy working conditions as one of its fundamental principles and rights at work.   "Millions of workers around the world suffer from diseases and disabilities due to unsafe and unhealthy conditions of work. It is estimated that over two million workers die prematurely each year because of an unsafe or unhealthy workplace," the experts said as the ILO held its centenary conference in Geneva.   "Safe and healthy working conditions have been explicitly recognised under the International Covenant on Economic Social and Cultural Rights since 1966 as a fundamental aspect of the right to just and favourable conditions of work. However, despite ILO Convention 155, the right to safe and healthy working conditions is not among the "Fundamental principles and rights at work" recognised by the ILO."   The draft "ILO Centenary outcome document," currently under discussion, proposes that ILO recognise occupational safety and health as a fundamental principle and right at work.   The independent experts said States and businesses had repeatedly expressed commitment to the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, which includes a duty and responsibility to protect the health and safety of workers.   "It is regrettable, however, that some employers and their representative organisations are attempting to block recognition of the right to safe and healthy working conditions as one of ILO's fundamental rights and principles, calling into question the depth of the private sector's commitment to respect human rights.   "It is long overdue that the ILO recognises the right to safe and healthy working conditions as one of its fundamental principles and rights at work. The ILO's recognition is essential to help end the exploitation of workers who are forced to choose between a paycheque and their health. It would be a fitting tribute to the millions who have lost their lives as a result of this abhorrent choice." http://bit.ly/2IA8vOE   June 2019   An unacceptable human cost, by Guy Ryder. (ILO)   According to this year's ILO report on 'Safety and Health at the heart of the Future of Work', almost 3 million workers (2.78 million to be exact) die each year from occupational accidents and work-related diseases. In addition, another 374 million workers suffer each year from non-fatal occupational accidents.   On top of this totally unacceptable human cost- and it is obviously the most important, the days lost at work globally represent almost 4 per cent of the world's GDP.   70 per cent of accidents are due to human factors, mainly a lack of knowledge or a negligence. This is one more argument in favour of prevention, information and training.   But what this shows is that deaths, injuries and diseases from work are certainly not inevitable. We can and we must reduce and eliminate them. Precisely for these reasons, safety and health have been at the heart of the ILO from the outset.   Today, nearly half of the ILO instruments in force relate directly or indirectly to Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) issues, and more than 40 standards specifically deal with occupational safety and health, and these are accompanied by over 40 Codes of Practice.   It's not only working conditions that have changed over time, it's the nature of health and safety hazards as well. And this will continue in the future.   With the transformative technological, demographic and environmental changes shaping a new world of work, it becomes more important than ever to anticipate new and emerging health and safety risks.   For example, the 2013 tragedy of Rana Plaza in Bangladesh, which killed over 1100 workers, served as a wake-up call to the OSH implications of working in global supply chains. Today, we see other emerging risks.   The ILO report on 'Safety and Health at the heart of the Future of Work', warns of the implications of new technologies such as artificial intelligence, bio- and nanotechnologies, and these need to be further investigated.   In the same way, the impact on workers health of new and diverse forms of employment such as in the digital and platform economy equally require further research. The report draws particular attention to mental health issues, in particular psychosocial risks, and the emergence of non-communicable diseases.   In this connection, the concept of well-being is meaningful, it encompasses all aspects of working life, not only safe and healthy conditions in the place of work, but also how workers feel about their work experience, the social interactions involved as well as the issues of work organization. We should not forget that the 1944 Philadelphia Declaration mandates our Organisation to help people to pursue 'both their material well-being and spiritual development'.   All these challenges have to be addressed with effective prevention strategies. Reinforcing the role of governments and social partners is essential in this regard.   Safety and health at work is also key to sustainable development and investment in OSH can contribute to the achievement of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, especially SDG-3 on ensuring healthy lives and well-being for all, and SDG-8 on decent work for all and inclusive and sustainable economic growth.   That is why the ILO Global Commission on the Future of Work called for all stakeholders to 'take responsibility' for building a just and equitable future of work. One aspect of this is the Commission's recommendation for the establishment of a Universal Labour Guarantee which would allow all workers, regardless of their employment status and contractual relationship, to enjoy a basic package of decent work protections, including safety and health at work.   Indeed, the Commission goes one step further: it recommends that a safe and healthy work environment should from now on be recognized as a fundamental principle and right at work as spelled out in the ILO 1998 Declaration.   Fifty years ago, upon receiving the Nobel Peace Prize for the ILO, then Director-General David Morse said that 'we are only at the beginning of our task'. On the eve of our Centenary Conference in June, let me say that the same holds true today, in the light of the many challenges ahead of us.   http://www.ilo.org/safework/events/safeday/lang--en/index.htm Visit the related web page
	Corruption costs $1 trillion in tax revenue globally reports IMF by Open Democracy, ICIJ, agencies   July 2019   Tax havens are a geopolitical nightmare, and transfer pricing is a legal accounting trick to get money into tax havens, writes Tanya Rawal-Jindia for Open Democracy.   Amazon.com Inc. was brought to court by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) in 2017 for transfer pricing discrepancies. In 2005 and 2006, the multinational tech company transferred $255 million in royalty payments to its tax haven in Luxembourg, but according to the IRS these royalty payments should have amounted to $3.5 billion. This transfer pricing adjustment would have increased Amazon's federal tax payments by more than $1 billion.   Even for the U.S., a country with decent (although waning) infrastructure, the loss of this much cash in federal tax revenue is substantial. Take for instance the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, if the city's estimated costs of $55 million to replace the pipes are accurate, then Amazon's tax payments could have saved the 100,000 residents from lead poisoning 18 times over.   Water supply is not the only infrastructural problem that arises when export countries suffer from a dramatic loss of tax revenue. Education, hospitals, telecommunications, and roads also decline. And in developing countries, the countries that endure the most severe backlashes of transfer and trade mispricing this infrastructure is often never properly constructed in the first place. The much-needed cash is, instead, sitting in a tax haven.   The anonymous whistleblower who, in 2015, leaked the 11.5 million documents that we now know as the Panama Papers shared in a manifesto that income inequality was their motivation in revealing the levels of financial abuse that tax havens create.   A key concern for the whistleblower is that tax havens are metastasizing across the earth; 214,000 offshore entities are cited in the Panama Papers. The metastasizing certainly continued after the release of the Panama Papers, just two years later, a U.S. PIRG study found that 73 percent of the Fortune 500 companies operated 9,755 tax haven subsidiaries.   The problem of tax havens did not form overnight; in fact, the whistleblower echoes Raymond C. Offenheiser, the former president of Oxfam America, in his 2006 description of tax havens as being the core of a global system that allows large corporations and wealthy individuals to avoid paying their fair share, depriving governments, rich and poor, of the resources they need to provide vital public services and tackle rising inequality.   Tax havens are a geopolitical nightmare, and transfer pricing is a legal accounting trick to get money into tax havens.   Transfer Mispricing, Defined   There's a wide range of these kinds of tax avoidance games played by multinationals: Transfer mispricing, abusive transfer pricing, trade misinvoicing, base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS), and re-invoicing; they all fall under the umbrella of trade mispricing, or the intentional falsification of transactions on an international level, and are the process that has allowed the old colonial relations of productions to continue. Arguably, the polynymity of this deceptive practice is evidence of its ubiquity, but 'thievery' could just as well replace any of these titles.   The short-term goals for mis or re-invoicing vary. In some cases the desired outcome is to dodge capital controls (a strategy commonly used in emerging markets to reduce rapid cash outflows). In other cases, the incentive for misinvoicing is to claim tax incentives or avoid paying duty.   Generally, the scheme is this: shift profits out of high tax countries and into low tax countries, or tax havens, while ensuring that the majority of the expenses are assigned to high tax countries.   In 2015, Global Financial Integrity (GFI) published a study revealing that in 2013 an astounding US$1.1 trillion was stolen annually or nearly $3 billion a day from developing countries due to trade mispricing. If you wonder why developing countries seem rather slow to develop, here's a big part of the answer. The head-spinning loss of $3 billion a day in taxable revenue begs the question: is corporate practice simply legal thievery?   Depleting the Tax Base, Perpetuating Poverty   Transfer pricing; the pricing of commodities traded between or within multinational enterprises is a legal practice and a key feature of cross-border and intra-firm transactions.   The United Nations prefers to use the broader phrase trade pricing in addressing this practice and defines it as a normal incident of the operations of multinational enterprises (MNEs). Because the word incident evokes concern, it should not go unnoticed.   One of the most disruptive consequences of transfer pricing is that international transactions are now governed by the common interests of the 'associated enterprises' of an MNE group. That is, market forces no longer control the transactions because with the allowance of transfer pricing, an increasing percentage of global trade (this includes the international transfer of goods and services, capital, and intangible goods, or intellectual property) now occurs as an internal practice between affiliated entities.   Theoretically, internal transfer pricing is supposed to follow the arm's length principle. This principle follows the idea that transfer prices should be controlled and recorded as if internal trades were happening amongst independent entities, or at arm's length.   But like the IRS case against Amazon.com reveals, proving arm's length is not so straightforward. So while the arm's length principle is very much written into place, even research from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the United Nations recognize that this principle is very much impossible to implement.   Unable to ignore the ease with which a company could engage in abusive transfer pricing, the OECD and the G20 countries first drafted the BEPS Action Plan in 2013 as part of a broader effort to enhance transparency for tax administrations to assess transfer pricing. At large, base erosion and profit shifting undermine the integrity of any tax system.   But the direct harm BEPS created for individual taxpayers and governments was only part of the motivation for implementing the 2013 action plan. The other motivating factor was the added risk to businesses, including the risk to an multinational enterprise's (MNE) reputation in the event its effective tax rate was viewed as being too low as it would impede, locally, fair competition for corporations functioning only in those domestic markets. With this latter motivation, little promise ought to be expected from the plan as it maintains a focus on risks brought to MNEs.   Setting potential reputation risks aside, the incentive for companies to strategically misprice trade or shift their profits is to avoid tax or duty payments. The incentive is to shield wealth. And while there is no single way to avoid tax payments and dues, there is one necessary component: tax haven subsidiaries.   Tax haven subsidiaries function as cash canals to transport taxable profits with the goal of lowering or, if you are Amazon Inc., entirely avoiding tax payments. But a company's subsidiary in a tax haven requires financial sleights of hand to get the cash safe.   Take for instance the Goldcrest method Amazon used in Luxembourg. It shifted its intellectual property rights (or intangibles) that were held by its U.S. parent company to its subsidiary, Amazon Lux. The subsidiary then collected royalties tax-free on international sales.   Google and Ikea, similarly, decided to play the Going Dutch move, using their subsidiaries in the Netherlands.   The Swiss Sidestep is another tax play, and rather than royalty payments, management service fees are the key element. By paying a value-added service fee to a sister company in a European tax haven, a company can side-step tax payments by converting profits into fees.   And, then, of course, there is the privacy and protection that a company gets on the island of Mauritius, with the Mauritius Maneuver a person can send their cash to Mauritius to avoid income tax and then bring it back without a trace as foreign investment.   Each of these fictional narratives that frame the legal movement of cash across borders has one theme in common: wealth protection and, therefore, poverty production.   It is not the case that some industries are more prone than others to transfer mispricing, or even that developed countries are immune to this manipulative business practice, the IRS case against Amazon is a great example of this.   But, it is the case that developing countries are more vulnerable to the impact of transfer mispricing. Suppose a company extracts 2 megatons (MT) of cobalt from Papua New Guinea (PNG) and then exports the 2 MT (or 1 million kilograms) at the price of US$5 per kilogram, but imports into Canada, by way of Mauritius or the Netherlands the same 2 MT of cobalt at the price of US$10.   The result for PNG is the loss of tax revenue on $5 million. Even at a mere 5 percent tax rate with these modest and imaginative figures, a loss of US$250,000 for PNG is significant.   The impact of trade and transfer mispricing on developing countries is not just monetary. There is a series of moral effects as well. In the hypothetical PNG scenario, for instance, one glaring concern that arises from this manipulative business practice is the implication that the people of PNG are somehow unaware of the value of their own resources.   Trade mispricing, then, alienates people from their own place, and in a manner similar to a worker's alienation from their product. A red flag must be raised to the psychological impact of pricing discrepancies that suggest cobalt, somehow, has a lesser value within the borders of PNG than within, say, Canada or Belgium.   The combination, or the intersection, of these two matters (these monetary and moral effects) is evidence that trade and transfer (mis)pricing, the crux of an MNE are symptoms of an ongoing colonial hangover. The antidote? Establish strict and enforceable regulations so that one nation's economic sovereignty does not come at the expense of another nation's resource sovereignty.   http://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/transfer-mispricing-the-jewel-in-every-multinational-enterprises-crown/ http://www.transparency.org/ http://www.taxjustice.net/ http://gfintegrity.org/issues/ http://www.ictd.ac/blog/tax-finance-sdgs-equity/ http://www.icij.org/investigations/panama-papers/ http://www.icij.org/investigations/ Visit the related web page
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