The Uzbekistan government again forced more than 1 million teachers, nurses and others to pick cotton for weeks during last fall’s harvest. But this time, the government went to extreme measures—including jailing and physically abusing those independently monitoring the process—to cover up its actions, according to a new report.
“The government unleashed an unprecedented campaign of harassment and persecution against independent monitors to attempt to cover up its use of forced labor while taking pains to make widespread, massive forced mobilization appear voluntary,” according to The Cover-Up: Whitewashing Uzbekistan’s White Gold.
Further, Uzbek officials in some cases forced teachers, students and medical workers to sign statements attesting that they picked cotton of their own will and agreeing to disciplinary measures, including being fired or expelled, if they failed to pick cotton. It instructed people to lie to monitors saying they came to pick cotton of their own volition.
Roughly 1 million teachers, nurses and other workers are forced each year to toil in Uzbekistan’s cotton fields. Credit: Uzbek-German Foundation
Covering Up for Cash Uzbekistan, which gets an estimated $1 billion per year in revenue from cotton sales, faced high penalties for not addressing its ongoing forced labor. But rather than end the practice, the government sought to cover it up, according to the report, produced by the Uzbek-German Forum for Human Rights.
The World Bank has invested more than $500 million in Uzbekistan’s agricultural sector. Following a complaint from Uzbek civil society, the bank attached loan covenants stipulating that the loans could be stopped and subject to repayment if forced or child labor was detected in project areas by monitors from the International Labor Organization (ILO), contracted by the World Bank to carry out labor monitoring during the harvest.
Last week, the Cotton Campaign, a coalition of labor and human rights groups that includes the Solidarity Center, presented a petition signed by more than 140,000 people from around the world to World Bank President Dr. Jim Yong Kim, calling on the bank to suspend lending to the agriculture sector in Uzbekistan until the Uzbek government changes its policy of forced labor in the cotton industry.
Farmers and business owners also were coerced by the government, the report found. Farmers are forced to plant state-ordered acreage of cotton and wheat or face the loss of their land. In 2015 the government relied on law enforcement to monitor and control the agricultural process and instill fear in farmers. Police regularly patrolled cotton fields, inspected farms and monitored workers and the harvest progress.
Officials and business owners, under pressure to support the national cotton harvest plan, ordered 40 percent or more of their employees to pick cotton, often in written directives.
Elena Urlaeva (right), was arrested at least four times and physically abused in prison for her work monitoring forced labor practices in Uzbekistan. Credit: Uzbek-German Forum
Physically Abused in Prison Among independent monitors harassed by the Uzbek government, long-time human rights and civic activist, Elena Urlaeva, was arrested at least four times during the 2015 cotton harvest as well as twice during the spring planting and weeding season.
The head of the Tashkent-based Human Rights Alliance of Uzbekistan, Urlaeva reported that she was injected with sedatives, stripped searched and forced to go without sanitation facilities during one incarceration last year. Another time, Urlaeva, her husband, their 11-year-old son and a family friend and farmer who had invited them to stay on his land were arrested because Urlaeva “photographed the fields without permission.”
For years, the Uzbekistan government has forced health care workers, teachers and others to pick cotton for 15 to 40 days, working long hours and enduring abysmal living conditions, including overcrowding and insufficient access to safe drinking water and hygiene facilities.
Anju Begum, a garment worker and factory-level union leader in Bangladesh, describes how she became empowered through her union—and how she seeks to help other workers, especially women, advance their rights at work.
“I want everyone, here and abroad, all workers, especially women, to know their rights and bring them to the forefront.”
Union support goes beyond the workplace, as Anju explains in this video. When Anju was abused by her husband, her union stepped in to assist her. Gender-based violence is one of the most widespread human rights violations in the world and extends to the workplace, where gender-based violence often typifies unequal economic and social power relations between women and men.
The Solidarity Center is among many unions and other civil society organizations worldwide calling for the International Labor Organization to establish a standard covering gender-based violence at the workplace, an action that moved forward last fall when the ILO announced that a debate on the topic will be on its 2018 agenda.
Now president of a factory-level union affiliated with the Bangladesh Garment and Industrial Workers’ Federation (BGIWF), Anju says in factories where there is no union, “I want women workers like me to take a leadership role and try to become president of the union.”
Chumtoli Huq, created this video for unions to use in their meetings as part of a Law@theMargins documentary project and urges organizations and individuals to share it on Facebook. To help with the project, you can contribute to the project’s Gofund me campaign: https://www.gofundme.com/mzjx0w
From domestic workers in New York City to garment workers in Bangladesh, women coming together to organize, demand fair treatment and address gender discrimination is critical to realizing women’s rights and economic justice. A new report from the AFL-CIO, the Rutgers Center for Women’s Global Leadership and the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center, Transforming Women’s Work: Policies for an Inclusive Economic Agenda, discusses the critical need to create an enabling environment for worker and community organizing, including inclusive macroeconomic and trade policies that promote decent work in the market and realign gender inequities in unpaid work in the home.
Economic policy is a critical tool that can promote or hinder gender equality and broadly shared growth. Traditional macroeconomic and trade policies have ignored or reinforced the structural barriers that impact women’s ability to compete fairly in the labor market, including the gender wage gap, occupational segregation and the disproportionate burden of unpaid work. While gender inequality is linked to reduced, less sustainable growth in the long term, the myopic focus on short-term growth—and the assumption that human rights will naturally follow—carries an inherent gender bias, as certain forms of gender inequality, particularly wage gaps between men and women driven by stereotypes of women workers as a cheap, expendable labor force, can temporarily create higher growth.
In her life and in her death at the hands of assassins this week, Berta Cáceres, a leader in Honduran struggles for social justice, exemplifies the difficult choices that so many Central American communities have faced over the past 40 years. When the region was torn by Cold War struggles and civil war, Cáceres’ family gave shelter and support to those fleeing the violence in El Salvador. As a tenuous peace was achieved, and many Hondurans faced poverty and violations of their rights, she went on to study and emerged as a leader for the rights of the Lenca people to stay on their land and sustain their rural communities, rather than migrate to cities that have become some of the most violent in the world or to the United States seeking safety and opportunity for decent work and better lives for their children.
Cáceres chose to stay in Honduras and, for more than 20 years, led the Council of Indigenous and Popular Organizations of Honduras, the organization she and other students founded to defend the rights, land and interests of the Lenca. She also chose to stay with her family and raise her four children in their community. In the aftermath of the 2009 coup, she stood out as a leader of the massive movement of Hondurans who rejected the removal of their democratically elected president and the violent repression that has characterized the Honduran government since the coup. Some 200 social, environmental and labor activists, and organized opposition party members have been killed since the coup.
Every day, Honduran workers face violations of their rights and labor laws by employers and inaction by the government. Commitments made to defend these rights in the Dominican Republic-Central American Free Trade Agreement remain unfulfilled, nearly four years after Honduran workers filed a formal complaint, along with the AFL-CIO.
While Cáceres and COPINH were recognized for their work by the Goldman Environmental Prize in 2015, the danger they face also was recognized by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which granted her protective measures against the many threats Cáceres and her allies face in Honduras. In 2013, the IACHR denounced “the complete absence of the most basic measures to respond to grave violations of human rights” in Honduras.
The United States has a special responsibility to ensure the Honduran government fulfill its responsibilities. As part of its ongoing support to the post-coup governments, the United States must review the country’s compliance with human rights. As Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) noted this week, “The immediate question is what President [Juan Orlando] Hernández and his government—which has too often ignored or passively condoned attacks against Honduran social activists—will do to support an independent investigation, prosecution and punishment of those responsible for this despicable crime.”
The AFL-CIO joins many allied organizations in Honduras, elsewhere in Latin America and the United States, in sending our deepest condolences to the family, friends and community of Berta Cáceres, in denouncing her assassination and demanding a thorough investigation of those responsible for planning and executing her murder.
We also note that another leading activist, Gustavo Castro, was wounded during the assassination. As a key witness to the murder, he must be protected and given every opportunity to testify about this horrible crime.
Hundreds of thousands of public- and private-sector workers waged a massive national strike throughout Morocco yesterday to protest the government’s unilateral approach on pension reforms, including moves to increase the retirement age, and its unwillingness to engage in dialogue with unions. Nearly 85 percent of workers joined the strike, according to union federations whose members took part, with teachers, health care workers, local government employees and port workers turning out in force.
“The strike is a message to alert the government to the seriousness of the current social situation and to meet the demands of the working class,” says Mohamed Atif, communications officer for the Democratic Labor Confederation (CDT). The unions, whose members hold a sixth of the seats in parliament, say they will block a government draft bill making pension changes.
Workers took the action after repeated calls by unions to begin negotiations went unheeded. Unions say they want to draw attention to the deteriorating economic conditions of Morocco’s working class, made worse by government’s halt to fuel subsides and violations of worker rights, including the right to strike.
The 24-hour strike included banks; postal and telecommunications services; the energy, electricity and water sectors; agriculture and fisheries; ground transportation; construction; mining; hotels, restaurants, call centers and more.
Credit: Hicham Ahmadouch/UMT
Unions called on airport workers, emergency health workers and others in key sectors to stay on the job but to wear red armbands in a show of solidarity with strikers.
Moroccan workers received widespread international support for their walkout, with theInternational Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) calling on the government to have a meaningful dialogue with unions.
“The Moroccan government is refusing to listen to its own people—the women and men who create wealth and sustain society and the economy,” says ITUC General Secretary Sharan Burrow. “The ITUC calls on the government to step back from its anti-social and confrontational approach, and have a meaningful dialogue with the unions.”
The IUF, the global union for food workers, denounced the government’s lack of willingness to negotiate with workers and called for greater respect for basic democratic principles and the rights of unions.
In addition to the CDT, major federations calling the strike include the Moroccan Labor Union (UMT), the General Union of Workers of Morocco (UGTM) and the Democratic Labor Federation (FDT). The National Union of Higher Education (SNEsup) also played a big role.
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