Tackling social exclusion post the Hong Kong Conference

I am delighted that there remains hope about new possible constructs that we can work on in terms of economics, health and sustainability. But in terms of social exclusion we need to recognise the costs that are already associated with the present human construct around development and the truly awful human costs associated with what we are doing.

In 2014 we need to recognise that the human dynamics of desire and greed, admiration and jealousy, love and hate play themselves out in all the systems, including those at the very top, and work with them, rather than being overwhelmed by them.

The comments we heard back from the migrant workers that we visited are that the powerful find it easier to ignore these human social issues and the profound damage they cause than acknowledge their existence.

We were told "They do not care, they do not care, and they do not care. They do not listen, they do not listen, and They do not listen." We were told this three times on three different and separate occasions. But I know we do care, so what is going on?

Looking at the situation in Hong Kong and the Guangzhou Province. Migrants are not only cut off from their families and open to the vagaries of the recipient host community but the children and grandparents left behind in the sending countries are left to look after each other in a diminished context. This is not a small issue. 

There are 200 million migrants in China alone. 30 thousand migrant workers reportedly lose all the fingers of one hand through accidents at work in the Hong Kong and Guangzhou alone. In Beijing 1,000 new cars are bought everyday and there is a popular phrase amongst the people, which translated says, “Let us get out of Beijing!”

This horror in human cost was mirrored by the rest of my colleagues exploring the social exclusion issue from their own contexts from around the globe.

In Korea the importation of foreign wives for men who are on average 15 years older leads to unbalanced family life. The mothers in law beat the foreign wives. The children born into these families are not taught their mother's tongue so the basic human need for attachment and belonging for human beings to grow and flourish is not being met.

In San Paulo there is a real issue of child labour rising by 50% annually despite a community development worker’s best efforts over his working lifetime to change this.

In Western Australia there are issues for families where the men alternately spend long periods of their time in mining and then in a domestic environment with no time for acclimatising or processing their feelings. They disappear to Bali pick up venereal disease and spread it to their wives. Domestic violence is increasing every year.

In Korea after 40 years of naming disability as issue and with one of our number dedicating her working life to address this issue still only 5% of disabled people are in employment.

In Macau, as well as in the UK, there are sex slave girls traded and trafficked from other countries so this is not about one society being any better or any worse than any other it is a common problem that neo liberalism has brought to both east and west.

In fact the word slave was mentioned on a number of occasions to describe the relationship between those who have and those who do the work for the haves. And I have to say the image of the Hebrew slaves came to mind and the Egyptian cities that they built; and I find myself asking how far have we really come as a human race, when one strips away the sophistication built up around our current context?

Migration is profoundly disturbing psychologically and cannot really prepare people for what they will face, nor the forces that will change their own values and behaviours as they begin to live in new worlds. Even amongst our group the majority of us are professional migrants and we struggle, and our families struggle, about who and what we really are and to whom we belong.

Few of our cities are truly multicultural.  Many cultures live in ghettoes, in silos. In Hong Kong alone there are 300,000 foreign domestic workers sent from the Philippines, Indonesia and Thailand. One Roman Catholic Priest told us that the Hong Kong policy is to “Keep them worried and then you can control them”.

They are happy for a few protests to take place as they can say: “There they have a voice!”

And the migrants real desires, surprise surprise, are to be creative, fulfilled working people, able to acquire the best education, like all of us, and not to kept in a slave relationship with other human beings. The word slave was mentioned several times.

What are we creating, by not working to this agenda of providing access to education for all, is a ticking time bomb of anger that will undermine the well being of us all.

The migrants and the excluded are not being sufficiently helped to engage meaningfully with the education, health and other significant government systems and during our visit I became aware of a powerful feeling of collusion.

I became aware of the feeling that we had been sent to visit the migrant workers union not so much as to understand their perspective but to reassure them that they were doing a good job in representing the migrant’s interests and so maintain the status quo.

But I disrupted the pleasantries by surfacing this feeling of collusion and said:

“During our Coffee break I was told that the migrant workers do not want to join the union because nothing changes. So I want in a spirit of curiosity to ask how effective your change methods are and whether in fact you yourselves are colluding by remaining in a silo conversation with just yourselves?

I have a sister in Hong Kong who heads up marketing for an International law firm and three weeks ago one her staff was blown up by an Indonesian terrorist bomb, leaving her in a critical medical condition.

My sister has also just e-mailed me to say tell them to show you the cages where the workers are housed. She and others are enlightened.

So given there are other people in finance and positions of influence who would be willing to support you, to what extent are you having conversations with people in other spheres of life to enrol them and help you change the present situation?

And whilst I am challenging the Union I need also to challenge our group of participants in this Conference, representing the wider group of ourselves as PASCAL. Are we not colluding with maintaining the status quo and not listening or really caring ourselves?

The evidence I have is that one of us has fallen asleep during the conversation with the migrant workers. The person designated to report back on social exclusion had left to attend the economics stream, and I was not really listening as I was typing up notes from the previous day’s meeting, as I had agreed to take over reporting back?”

This had the effect of mobilising a more meaningful conversation for a short while, but after lunch we were told that we had finished our work. So to be frank there was no real intention for us as a group to deepen and respond to the specific question asked of us: What does it mean for our home actions?

I have shared these notes with several of those who worked on this stream and one person commented that perhaps it was all too painful to go to their place of pain. She had noticed that one of the migrant workers had tears in her eyes when talking about the effects on children. But had not felt able to respond to her or ask what was going on, nor did any of us.

This perhaps mirrors the remarks of the morning session made three times that people do not really care.

But we do:  It is easy to be overwhelmed and to feel powerless in the face of being asked to be accountable for the situation that we have co-created. What can we do? I know some have asked “How do we make a difference? And I have replied that we can work with fractals. That is that the part of the context that we are living in with our own challenges.

And to do so in the certain knowledge that we are all interconnected and that by working on our part we are working for and on behalf of the whole. For there is a psychic energy in this new world that we are trying to construct, where others have gone before us and where others will come after us and it is into this new social field that we trust and pour out our commitment to make a difference. It is in this area that religions and spiritual resources can be released to aid in transformation and I have offwered ubuntu as one opprtunity with which we can work.

Ubuntu works from out of a different place that is not fearful and born out of overwhelming guilt but out of human delight and happiness and I summarised the findings about ubuntu written up in the paper.

I answered a question about how can those in the developing industrial countries recapture the happiness they have lost when compared the happiness of say people in India?

I linked this to an earlier remark made by an indigenous person from the oceanic islands. That the natural happiness of the free sea divers was also in danger of being overwhelmed by the neoliberalism replacing Palm Trees with Container Ships. And that western happiness was found for instance when two organisations who thought they had nothing to do with each other, Cocal Cola and the World Wild Life Fund, worked together as referenced in our paper “It takes a whole city to raise its citizens”.

What made the biggest impression on me at the Conference was how there is good in everything, if we but have the vision to see it. In other words in San Paulo organised criminal gangs had become so organised that they owned many of the public services, e.g. 80% of public transport, and were now the agency working for the interests and relief of the poor.

So here are some of the possible solutions and recommendations made by the Social Exclusion Work Stream from our work on the first day and from some informal conversations that took place amongst a few of us after the cancelled afternoon session.

1. We need to bring together private and public sector leaders so that they are included in the discussion and moved to work on whole system solutions.
2. Ask regional authorities to identify how they can measure improvements and transformation of our human and social capital life. Let us not make financial wealth the overwhelming indicator.
3. Lobbying is important within political, legal and justice frameworks, going beyond tokenism.
4. Developing Training for migrants in sending and host countries around health and safety, culture and language so that access to help and support and education and human rights is made available.
5. Challenging prejudice around gender, disability, ageism that prevents access to life long learning will enable the excluded to enjoy health and social benefits.
6. Avoiding Vanity projects.
7. Church is there on behalf of the poor. We have a Pope who nags about it and who wants the church to give a voice to the poor through people of faith who have access to places where journalism can't get into. Continue to encourage the faith communities to take up the advocate role.
8. Religion speaks to dignity of people, which is spiritual, so when people within their government and private sector roles deal with labour rights and lack of access to finance they are dealing with profoundly spiritual matters.
9. Confront misinformation, name and shame bad employers and recruiters. Take real notice of power relationships and provide a proper voice to those who are excluded.
10. Mobilise faith communities and release their resources. I.E. in Macau Roman Catholic sisters are transforming the despair of Chinese girls caught up in the sex trade. In the UK faith communities’ energies are being aligned to engage with local issues and provide solution in hard to answer issues.
11. Hold public universities to account for their research and contribution to issues that matter to the real world and local communities in which we all live. Be real and be relevant. Be accountable.
12. Consciously challenge students to move from understanding that their private funding of their degree is not just for individual capital gain but also for the common good.
13. Give unions a more powerful voice and enable networking between people of goodwill running support in developing cancer support agencies run by NGOs and religious orders.
14. Education is for all. And everything, everything and everyone, is connected.
15. Not to collude with unconscious undercurrent that this conference is about satisfying the unions and all of us are doing a good enough job. We have to get out of silo mentalities.
16. Nor to collude with unconscious undercurrent that there is no goodness in the health, legal financial systems to transform. Join and align these interests.
17. Introduce people to each other from the different parts of the whole system.
18. Group Relation Conferences will gave people a voice and profoundly change those leading significant systems to transform and reconfigure their systems to deliver services to those presently excluded .
19. Use whole system transformation systems such as the open mind and open-heart process of Peter Senge and Theory U by Otto Scharmer.