Oct 24, 2013
Today marks the six-month anniversary of the Rana Plaza building collapse in Bangladesh, which killed more than 1,200 garment workers, primarily women, and injured 2,500 more.
In the wake of this catastrophe, several steps have been taken to address workplace safety at the country’s thousands of garment factories: Some 100 major corporations have signed on to the Bangladesh Accord on Building and Fire Safety, a binding agreement that commits brands and the companies they source from to addressing building and fire hazards and ensuring unions are a key part of this process; and the Bangladesh government has moved toward allowing registration of unions at garment factories.
But on the factory floor, garment workers are reporting a torrent of employer resistance when they seek to form a union to ensure they have a collective voice to fight for workplace rights like job safety and health. Workers who spoke recently with Solidarity Center staff in Gazipur, Bangladesh, described the difficulties they face when seeking a union, even though forming a union would allow them to address deadly working conditions, such as those that led to the Rana Plaza disaster, where a multistory building pancaked in on workers.
Workers are the best monitors of conditions in their factories because they are on the shop floor every day, and many of those at Rana Plaza factories have told the Solidarity Center that they were threatened with the loss of their meager wages if they did not go back to their machines. If they had had a union, they could have had the strength to resist being forced into a death trap.
Workers also told Solidarity Center staff that at the center of what they want from their employers boils down to this: “respectful treatment.”
They know that with respect, all the rest—clean drinking water, sufficient wages to support their families, unlocked fire escapes—will follow.
Oct 9, 2013
The Thai government agreed to ratify two key international worker rights standards this week, following a 3,000-strong rally made up of workers from all national federations, unions, networks of migrant workers and informal workers, and allied organizations.
Workers marched to the offices of the prime minister and cabinet ministers, demanding the government ratify International Labor Organization (ILO) Convention 87 on freedom of association and Convention 98 on the right to organize and bargain collectively. At the Government House, the deputy prime minister signed a memorandum of understanding with leaders of the Thai labor movement agreeing to ratify the two conventions by May 1, 2014.
The government also promised to discuss the issue in the cabinet meeting this month and to set up a working group of labor and government representatives to follow up on the ratification process within 60 days. Thai trade unionists say they plan to keep up efforts to ensure the government follows through, because plans for passage of the two worker rights laws have stalled in the past.
The Thai Labor Solidarity Committee (TLSC) and the State Enterprises Workers’ Relation Confederation (SERC) organized the rally, held as part of Oct. 7, World Day Decent Work, events.
Oct 7, 2013
At age 22, N. Naga Durga Bhavani left her small village in India for Bahrain, where she hoped a job as a domestic worker would help pay for her young daughter’s heart surgery. But when she arrived, after paying labor recruiters the equivalent of nearly two months’ wages, she says her passport and papers were taken and she was forced to work long hours, trapped in an abusive environment where she was beaten, her fingers broken.
After she escaped, the Indian Embassy could not help her leave the country because she had no identification. Only through the efforts of the Migrant Forum in Asia and the National Domestic Workers Movement in India, both Solidarity Center partners, did Bhavani’s employer relinquish her passport, allowing her to return home. Bhavani’s experience as a migrant domestic worker is not unique—nor can her employment be called “decent work.”
Today, millions of union members and their allies around the world are marking World Day for Decent Work 2013 to highlight the plight of workers like Bhavani and the millions who toil for poverty-level wages in exploitative working conditions that are unsafe, unhealthy and even life-threatening. Among them are Bangladesh garment factory workers who face locked doors when fires break out; female pineapple workers who experience sexual harassment on Honduran plantations; and Liberian rubber workers forced to carry hundreds of pounds of raw latex across plantations.
It took two months before Bhavani’s employer returned her passport, said Lissy Joseph, national coordinator of National Domestic Workers Movement. Joseph and eight other migrant worker activists, all of whose organizations are members of the Migrant Forum in Asia, were in the United States for the Oct. 3-4 United Nations High-level Dialogue on International Migration and Development. They traveled to Washington, D.C., last week and met with Solidarity Center staff, as well as U.S. government representatives.
Migrant workers, many of whom are domestic workers, are among the most exploited in the world. Yet, “we cannot stop people from migrating because that is the means to their livelihood,” says Joseph. So she and other members of the Migrant Forum in Asia, a regional network of trade unions, non-government organizations (NGOs) and associations, promote the rights and welfare of migrant workers by addressing discriminatory laws and policies, violence against women migrants, unjust living conditions, unemployment in the origin countries and other issues. In short, they are moving forward with the World Day for Decent Work imperative: Organize!
“Our concern in working together is the solidarity of workers around the world,” says Joseph.
The exorbitant and exploitative fees labor recruiters often charge migrant workers and the abusive conditions workers can face after arriving in destination countries are two of the biggest problems for those forced to leave their countries to make a living, the migrant activists told the Solidarity Center. In fact, roughly three migrant workers from Nepal die each day—from abuse, exposure to unfamiliar climates and even suicide, said Nilambar Badal, from the Asian Human Rights and Culture Development Forum Migrants Center in Nepal.
Although destination countries and origin countries may have solid laws for protecting labor rights, too-often they are not enforced. “There is still a big gap in terms of the reality on the ground,” said Ellene Sana, a policy advocate for the Center for Migrant Advocacy in the Philippines, a country that officially says 1.8 million of its citizens are migrant workers, mostly in the Middle East.
And while working conditions frequently are bad for migrant workers, when they return home, there are no jobs “so they re- migrate and the cycle of abuse continues,” said Sanjendra Vignaraja, Solidarity Center program officer in Sri Lanka. In India, there is now a “greater disparity between haves and have nots,” said Joseph.
But India is not unique. Across the globe, the increasing wealth gap often leaves workers with few options, many of which cannot be called decent work. Which is why organizations that bring workers together for a stronger voice are so critical.
Oct 1, 2013
Working with her family in Malawi’s agriculture fields, where she toils in the hot sun, 8-year-old Ethel says when she harvests produce, “I get headaches and pain in my stomach.”
Ethel is one of 168 million child laborers around the world, 85 million of whom work in hazardous conditions. The 12th annual Department of Labor report, “2012 Findings on the Worst Forms of Child Labor,” released yesterday, chronicles the progress of 143 governments in combating the worst forms of child labor, which includes working in agriculture like Ethel.
Forty-six governments received higher assessments, and nine governments received lower assessments for 2012 compared with 2011, while 113 governments made at least one meaningful effort in combatting the worst forms of child labor, according to the report. Of the 10 countries that received a rating of “Signifcant Advancement,”five are in South America. These countries—Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru—“made meaningful efforts to combat child labor that go beyond isolated improvements or initiatives,” the report found.
The worst forms of child labor include slavery or trafficking of children, compulsory labor, procuring or offering children for prostitution and other illicit activities and work that is likely to harm the health, safety or morals of children.
“Nations should not build their futures on the backs of children,” said Labor Secretary Thomas Perez in releasing the report. “That’s categorically wrong.”
Separately, the Labor Department removed three items from its list of good produced by child labor or forced labor, the first time items have been removed since the list was first compiled in 2001. The items are charcoal from Namibia, diamonds from Zimbabwe and tobacco from Kazakhstan.
Three of the 13 countries classified as not advancing received this assessment because of government complicity in forced child labor: the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Eritrea and Uzbekistan. The other 10 countries were placed in the “No Advancement” category because no meaningful actions were taken to advance efforts to eliminate the worst forms of child labor.
Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and former Labor Secretary Alexis Herman joined Perez in releasing the report. Harkin and Herman were key movers behind passage of the International Labor Organization Convention 182 on eliminating the worst forms of child labor and were instrumental in getting the U.S. Congress to ratify it.
On October 8–10, the 3rd Global Conference on Child Labor in Brazil will bring together governments, civil society and international organizations for an open dialogue about eliminating child labor. The ILO and its international allies set the goal of eliminating the worst forms of child labor by 2016, a goal that recent data show cannot be met.
Ethel was among three child laborers featured in a video shown during press conference.
Sep 30, 2013
Eteri Matureli, vice president of the Georgia Trade Union Confederation (GTUC), knows how difficult it is for women to rise through the ranks of union leadership.
Eteri Matureli knows how difficult it is for women to rise through the ranks of union leadership. Elected vice president of the Georgia Trade Union Confederation (GTUC) in 2009 and now director of the GTUC Women’s Committee, Matureli said she “had to build a long resume” before she could win the trust of national and local trade union leaders and activists and convince them that she was an active trade unionist who deeply believed in union values and would stand strong in the face of employer and government pressure.
Women make up 60 percent of GTUC but “unfortunately, this is not reflected in almost all of trade union decision-making bodies,” she said in a Solidarity Center interview during the recent conference, “Women’s Empowerment, Gender Equality and Labor Rights: Transforming the Terrain.”
Of the 26 GTUC board members, six are women. Three of 21 GTUC-affiliated unions are headed by women. Several union activists who spoke at the gender equality conference said gender parity clauses in their union constitutions had been key to women’s advancement to leadership positions, but Matureli said the GTUC has no gender parity clause. Further, the confederation also cannot mandate that its affiliates apply gender equality in leadership positions, although it can develop recommendations that they do so.
Women have made some strides since the election of the Georgian Dream coalition in October 2012. The government this year drafted amendments to its labor code to bring it closer in line with International Labor Organization (ILO) conventions and submitted them to Parliament for ratification. Working with the Solidarity Center, the GTUC analyzed the current law and offered changes to improve worker rights protections.
The new labor code, which passed Parliament and was signed into law this summer, makes it illegal for employers to fire pregnant women. Matureli said the GTUC is working with lawmakers in drafting a second batch of labor code amendments that will further bolster protections for working women.
The GTUC also is working on programs to address the wage gap between women and men in Georgia, where women do not have access to family-supporting jobs and where unemployment, officially at 16 percent, is realistically closer to 30 percent, according to Matureli. Desperate to support their families, “women are willing to work for lower pay and take any job,” she said.
Matureli, who became involved in union work in 1985, when she was elected chairperson of the City Committee of the Utility Service Workers Trade Union, started out as an employee at a jewelry factory in Tbilisi, Georgia’s capital. She says the gender equality conference has inspired her to dedicate 2014 Workers Memorial Day activities to the more than 1,200 Bangladeshi garment workers killed in the Rana Plaza building collapse in April—both to commemorate their lives and highlight the need for job safety and health measures to ensure such tragedy does not happen again.
“I think it’s very import to remember these workers. Very important,” she said. “Solidarity, solidarity, solidarity.”
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