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Landmark Agreement for Kenya’s Informal Workers

Landmark Agreement for Kenya’s Informal Workers

Oct 31, 2019

Three trade unions representing Kenya’s formal-sector workers in food, health, education and metals signed memoranda of understanding (MOUs) with informal worker associations in their respective sectors yesterday. The agreements formalize efforts by affiliates of the Central Organization of Trade Unions-Kenya (COTU-K) to organize workers in Kenya’s outsized and growing informal sector and make union representation of 5,600 newly organized informal workers official. With these agreements, for the first time, Kenya’s trade unions have brought informal-sector workers such as vendors, cleaners, autobody workers and mechanics under the union umbrella, giving them access to the country’s legal framework that protects formal workers.

“We are so excited. We have a dependable partner. Things will get better for us from now on,” said Grogon/Ngara Food Vendors Association Chairman Peter Ndirangu.

The agreements were signed during a public ceremony on October 29, 2019. Signatory organizations include the Kenya Union of Commercial, Food and Allied Workers (KUCFAW), Kenya Union of Domestic, Hotels, Educational Institutions, Hospitals and Allied Workers (KUDHEIHA) and the Amalgamated Union of Kenya Metal Workers (AUKMW) together with their respective informal worker associations.

“We will walk together; we will fight together; we will learn together,” said AUKMW General Secretary and COTU-K Women’s Committee National Chair Rose Omamo—who is also a former mechanic.

The Informal sector represented almost 84 percent of total employment in Kenya in 2018 and increased by more than 5 percent from 2014–2018, to 14.9 million people. In the financial year ending June 2018, more than 80 percent of new jobs were created in the informal sector while only 16.4 percent were created in the formal sector.

“The three unions are not waiting until they have no more members, they are aggressively organizing informal workers,” said United Domestic Workers of America AFSCME Local 3930 Executive Director Doug Moore, who attended the signing in a show of solidarity by his local’s 91,000 members. Moore is also a member of the Solidarity Center’s Board of Trustees.

Informal associations represented in the agreements include the Ambira Jua Kali Association, the Eastleigh Hawkers Association, Grogon/Ngara and Muthurwa food vendors, the Migingo Mechanics Self Help Group and the Nairobi Informal Sector Confederation (NISCOF).

Until now, working women and men in Kenya’s informal economy have been left outside the legal framework that protects formal workers, and so they have little power to advocate for themselves. Solidarity Center partner COTU-K has focused increasingly in recent years on organizing and formalizing workers in the informal sector with the goal of protecting all workers’ livelihoods and ensuring safe and secure work for all.

A decline in the number of formal jobs is a global trend. Working women and men in the informal economy—among them, day laborers, domestic workers, kindergarten teachers, sugarcane cutters and call center workers—now comprise the majority of the workforce in many countries. The International Labor Organization (ILO) estimates that two billion people hold jobs in the informal labor market, with the largest percentage of these jobs being in low-income countries.

The Solidarity Center is part of a broad-based movement to help workers come together to gain the knowledge and confidence to assert their rights and raise living standards. In 35 countries, we provide trainings and programs to help precarious workers better understand their rights, organize unions to mitigate job vulnerabilities, and learn to bargain for improved conditions and wages.

Ethiopia: Inclusive Labor Movement for Democratic Change

Ethiopia: Inclusive Labor Movement for Democratic Change

Apr 11, 2019

The democratization process that began after Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed took office in Ethiopia one year ago will run aground unless its citizens become increasingly rooted in inclusive civil society institutions, like trade unions, that are capable of overcoming deeply entrenched ethnic, cultural and geographic divisions, said Confederation of Ethiopian Trade Unions (CETU) President Kassahun Follo today in Washington, D.C.

Indeed, Ethiopia’s workers are already connected across regional and ethnic lines due to CETU’s countrywide reach and its inclusive approach to membership and worker rights. Follo, speaking at a National Endowment for Democracy (NED) panel discussion titled, “Ethiopia’s Democratic Opening One Year Later: Looking Back and Looking Ahead,” said organizations promoting inclusivity are crucial in a country where citizens from 80 ethnic groups are represented by more than 100 ethnically and regionally based political parties.

Taking advantage of an administrative structure that covers all nine regions of the country, CETU is uniquely positioned to take the democratization process beyond the capital, Addis Ababa, into lower levels of government across the country. “Change at the top is not enough,” said Follo.

CETU is Ethiopia’s largest multi-ethnic civil society organization, representing about 570,000 workers organized into nine affiliated industrial federations and approximately 1,700 trade unions. The federation, with Solidarity Center support, is striving to improve its member outreach programs through regional centers—in part to continue organizing in construction, agriculture and textiles sectors—but also to ensure that worker interests and recommendations are adequately represented to officials at all levels of government as the political and economic reform process moves forward.

Ethiopia has been one of the African continent’s best economic performers, growing at a rate of 10 percent for the past 15 years under state-directed development by a government that permitted no political opposition, but invested heavily in infrastructure, agriculture, education and other sectors. Although Ethiopia is the fastest growing economy in the region, it is also one of the poorest, with a per capita income of $783.

The country needs an economic transformation that parallels its political transformation, said Follo. Workers in Ethiopia’s industrial parks—established by government to encourage foreign direct investment (FDI)—earn poverty wages of less than $30 per month. CETU is therefore advocating with government and employers for any new labor law to include an adequate minimum wage.

“Otherwise, how can [workers] eat?” Follo asked.

 

Report: Uzbek Teachers Clean Highways, Sweep Streets

Report: Uzbek Teachers Clean Highways, Sweep Streets

Feb 7, 2019

Although the government of Uzbekistan has made progress on ending child and adult forced labor in the cotton fields after more than a decade of international pressure, a new report finds that forced labor remains rampant in other arenas of Uzbek life, affecting public-sector workers in particular. This practice undermines the quality of public services and depletes workers’ earnings, as they must bear the costs of their own forced labor.

The report, “There Is No Work We Haven’t Done: Forced Labor of Public-Sector Employees in Uzbekistan,” released today by the Solidarity Center and Uzbek-German Forum for Human Rights (UGF), outlines the devastating toll forced labor has on workers and essential public services, particularly in health care and education, where trained specialists are taken out of work for hours, days or even weeks to perform manual labor at the whim of officials.

Last March, 23-year-old teacher Diana Enikeeva was struck and killed by a truck while she and other teachers were cleaning the highway in the Samarkand region in preparation for a visit by Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev. According to the report, although Enikeeva’s death raised a public outcry in popular and social media, prompting the president to order officials to stop using public-sector employees and students for “public” work such as street cleaning in May 2018, the work was not out of the ordinary for public-sector employees, including teachers, and did not stop.

Interviews conducted by a team of UGF monitors in nine regions in Uzbekistan over two months in spring 2018 with public employees and others affected by forced labor revealed that government officials were using public-sector employees under threat of penalty as a constant source of labor and funds to fulfill local needs or centrally imposed mandates. Some workers reported that their unions—which are weak and subordinate to government and/or employers—sometimes assisted in organizing or directing their forced labor.

Public-sector workers, among the lowest-paid professionals in the country, reported that they were forced to provide manual labor for community maintenance and beautification, street cleaning, wheat harvesting and collection of scrap metal and paper. Teachers, health care workers and employees of state agencies said they were routinely sent to clean streets, plant flowers, do construction work, dredge ditches and perform public maintenance for hours or days every week, without extra pay. Under the community maintenance program “Obod Kishlok” [Well-Maintained Village], announced by the president in March 2018, local officials forced public employees to bear full responsibility for repairing, painting and gardening, even at private houses. Workers reported often paying for costs associated with forced labor, including for food and transportation to forced labor assignments as well as for construction supplies, tools and flowers and seedlings for planting. Several children and farmers also reported that children and teachers were taken out of class to harvest silk cocoons under threat of penalty.

“Given that forced labor continues in Uzbekistan, even after the president and some other government officials have publicly condemned it, authorities must urgently and immediately address the systemic root causes of forced labor—the lack of independent and representative labor unions, absence of effective complaint and accountability mechanisms, rampant corruption, lack of accountability of local authorities, centrally imposed mandates and a punitive and exploitative agricultural system,” said Abby McGill, senior program officer for Eastern Europe and Central Asia at the Solidarity Center.

Read the report in Russian and Uzbek.

Nigeria: Workers Report Long-Term Toll of Violence

Nigeria: Workers Report Long-Term Toll of Violence

Mar 28, 2017

Even as an uneasy but relative peace takes hold in northeastern Nigeria, the death toll and violence of the past several years is having long-term effects on returning teachers, healthcare workers and civil servants in Borno state, according to a joint survey completed by public-sector unions last month.

The unions, with Solidarity Center support, documented hundreds of deaths by violent attacks—attacks in which many public-sector workers were specifically targeted.

The Nigeria Union of Teachers (NUT), Borno State Wing, estimates that it has lost more than 500 members, some to homemade bombs hurled at concrete classrooms. The Medical and Health Workers Union of Nigeria (MHWUN), Borno state, counted losses in the hundreds. The Borno state branch of the Nigeria Civil Service Union (NCSU) estimates more than 70 members were killed by gunshot or bomb blast.

Although many public-sector workers are now returning to their jobs, Mamman Bukar, Borno state NCSU Chairman, said almost 75 percent of civil servants represented by the union who are back on the job are struggling.

“People have started moving around, doing their normal jobs” he said, but, “some lost their senses because of the trauma of the situation.”

A male healthcare worker, for example, described a bloody armed assault on the hospital in which he was working on February, 11, 2014, when insurgents raided the pharmacy and murdered his supervising physician. Although the worker spoke on camera to record the eyewitness account, he asked for safety reasons that his interview and name not be publicly released.

Others described similar violent scenes at their workplace: “Then I saw half of a body on the ground,” said a civil servant with the Ministry of Agriculture, describing the aftermath of a bomb attack in May last year on the State Secretariat in the Borno state capital, Maiduguri. He also asked to remain anonymous.

Nurse-midwife Liyatu Haruma, who surveyed members of the National Association of Nigerian Nurses and Midwives, said she learned that the long-term impact on her colleagues is, “deep and close.” Many of them were injured, had their houses burned or witnessed people being killed, she said.

Borno state teacher Muhammad Kirala, who collected eyewitness accounts from his colleagues, said teachers he interviewed described watching colleagues “slaughtered like animals,“ with knives, run down by vehicles, or killed in bomb blasts as they attempted to escape gunmen.

Workers also reported serious economic consequences of the violence on them and their families, including the loss of income during long periods when their workplaces were too dangerous or damaged to access. Many who were injured said they did not receive compensation for medical expenses. Some said they could not pay for the health care they need to return to work successfully, and that the state is not providing support.

“[They] don’t have money to remove bullets from them,” said Yusuf Inuwa, head of the Borno state Medical and Health Workers Union of Nigeria (MHWUN).

Several workers showed interviewers remaining physical damage, including shrapnel still embedded under their skin.

A civil servant who spent almost four months in the hospital recovering from severe bomb-blast injuries to his leg and foot—and reporting anonymously for safety reasons—said he had received emergency funds from his union, but no salary for the time he was in the hospital nor government compensation for his injuries.

“Presently, I want my salary,” he said.

Missing workers were not counted in the unions’ surveys. An estimated 1.8 million people have been displaced in Borno State, including more than 19,000 teachers.

According to the International Labor Organization (ILO), the proper response of ILO member states in post-conflict situations within their borders is promotion of full employment and special action to assist all persons whose usual employment has been interrupted, per Recommendation No. 71– Employment (Transition from War to Peace), 1944. A revision of the Recommendation, which began last year, will include new post-conflict state responsibilities, including promoting employment, reinforcing state institutions, and fostering social protection, social dialogue and respect for fundamental rights.

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