Jul 26, 2013
Women working in garment factories and similar jobs in the light manufacturing industry face many challenges—low pay, uncertain hours, unsafe working conditions and even age discrimination. For instance, in Honduran maquilas, the upper age limit for employment recently was lowered from 35 to 28, throwing many women out of their jobs.
Employers in light manufacturing also discriminate against women who seek to improve their working conditions. Evangelina Argüeta Chinchilla began work at 15 in a Honduran maquila before being fired nine years later, likely for her work in a union. Since then, she has sought to educate workers, who are primarily women, about their rights on the job and has helped them form unions so that collectively, they have the strength to bargain for improved working conditions.
Argüeta will discuss strategies for overcoming the challenges to worker empowerment in the light manufacturing industry at the Solidarity Center conference, “Women’s Empowerment, Gender Equality and Labor Rights: Transforming the Terrain.” More than 100 union and community activists from 20 countries are taking part in the July 30–31 conference in São Paulo, Brazil.
Millions of women around the world struggle to earn a living in light manufacturing, an industry characterized by labor-intensive operations. Women comprise up to 90 percent of all workers in export processing zones (EPZs), where many light manufacturing plants are located and labor protections are weakest. Workers are vulnerable to random dismissal or long hours with no overtime and manufacturing plants, often unsure of how long their contract with an overseas company will last, are unlikely to hire permanent workers.
Argüeta, now the coordinator of organizing maquila workers in the northern Choloma region for the General Workers Confederation (CGT), sees leadership training as an important key to achieving gender equality and getting women’s issues on the table. She holds leadership workshops with assistance from women’s rights organizations and the Solidarity Center—in one factory alone, 43 women have participated in an entire education and leadership course.
Leadership training not only can enable women to take on more responsibility as union members and leaders, but also help them see when employers are deliberately trying to deceive them and keep them vulnerable—for instance, by requiring workers to sign a blank form before they can begin their employment. Later, even if the worker has a contract, the employer can convert the blank form into a resignation letter in order to get rid of the employee without any legal hassles.
The ultimate goal, says Argüeta, is for women to exercise “power proportional to the numbers we represent in the world, in the labor movement.”
Other labor leaders at the conference who will share their best practices in empowering workers in light manufacturing include Morium Sheuli, general secretary of the Bangladesh Industrial Garment Workers Federation (BIGUF); Münica Veloso, president of the Brazilian metalworkers union, Confederação Nacional dos Trabalhaldores Metalúrgicos (CNTM) and Lynda Yanz, executive director of the Maquila Solidarity Network.
Stop back here for more as the conference takes place for updates
Jul 26, 2013
Public-sector workers in Peru are challenging a new civil service law that eliminates the right of more than 500,000 public administration workers to collectively negotiate salaries, narrows the definition of the type of unions they may establish and prevents “essential service” unions from striking (without defining essential services). The law also sets up a punitive annual evaluation process and provides government agencies with numerous justifications for downsizing, which public employees fear could lead to mass layoffs.
Congress passed Law 30057 earlier this month amid a flurry of last-minute action, surprising union leaders and progressive legislators who had crafted a compromise bill that never made it to a full vote.
When union members and their allies called for repeal of the law during peaceful marches across the country, police tear-gassed crowds, including those in Arequipa, the seat of Peru’s constitutional court. Union members are now collecting signatures to reopen congressional debate on the law and are preparing a complaint for the International Labor Organization (ILO). They also will march in July 27 rallies commemorating Peruvian independence. (Take action: Tell the president of Peru you won’t stand for the erosion of worker rights!)
In addition, public administration unions are engaging with consumer activist groups and other civil society organizations to build a shared understanding of how the law adversely impacts access to quality public services. Peruvian unions are sharing with the public how privatizing public services not only undermines quality and affordability, but also destroys public employees’ fundamental rights on the job, including access to a career path based on training opportunities.
Legislators, including a majority of the governing party, voted for the law despite concerns raised by their colleagues and public-sector unions, and the findings of an ILO technical report. The ILO found that the law suffers from an assumption that the exercise of collective rights is inherently against the public’s interest.
Peru’s public administration union federations affiliated with the Central General de Trabajadores del Peru (CGTP), along with other public-sector unions, sought dialogue with the newly formed public sector labor agency, SERVIR, after discussions about the new law began last year. Union federations affiliated with CGTP include the Intersectoral Confederation of State Workers (CITE), the Confederation of State Employees (CTE) and the National Association of State Sector Unions (UNASSE).
In coordination with global union federation, Public Service International (PSI), and the Solidarity Center, public administration workers from across Peru held forums in December 2012 to generate proposals for the law and have met regularly since, generating awareness and activism, particularly as the debates in Congress have heated up.
Jul 25, 2013
In Feburary, Tunisians accompanied the body of slain lawmaker, Chokri Belaid. Credit: Sarah Mersch
The Tunisian Labor Federation (Union Générale Tunisienne du Travail, UGTT) is calling for a general strike on July 26 to protest the assassination today of Mohammed Brahmi, a deputy in the National Constituent Assembly.
The action is a “political strike in defense of Tunisia and a protest against this new political assassination,”according to UGTT spokesman, Sami Tahri. The UGTT reinforced its stance with a declaration against this latest act of violence.
This is the second assassination of an opposition leader in Tunisia in the past few months. In February, Chokri Belaid, coordinator of a Tunisian left-wing political party, was gunned down in front of his home on his way to work. The murder sparked national outrage and Tunisians remain angry at the government’s perceived indifference to Belaid’s murder
Jul 25, 2013
As commercial farms increasingly dominate the world’s cash-crop market, women’s mass migration into commercial agriculture has become a global phenomenon. In Peru, women take jobs in asparagus-processing plants. Colombian women rely on their wages at flower farms to survive, and women in Zambia toil in vegetable production to feed their families. Rural women now contribute roughly half of the world’s food and women in developing countries generate between 60 percent and 80 percent of the labor needed to produce food crops in developing countries.
Yet enabling women farmworkers to gain a voice on the job so they can improve their working conditions is made harder by their isolation and the discrimination they face as women. Union and community leaders from more than 20 countries meeting next week at a Solidarity Center conference in Brazil will share successful strategies for organizing and empowering some of the millions of women toiling in agriculture. Agriculture is one of three themes at July 30–31 conference, “Women’s Empowerment, Gender Equality and Labor Rights: Transforming the Terrain.”
Agricultural remains one of the most dangerous industries and the precariousness of this work is compounded by informal employment arrangements driven by the seasons when cash crops are planted and harvested. This plight is more common for women farmworkers because they comprise between 50 percent and 70 percent of the informal workforce in commercial agriculture.
Women farmworkers also face gender-specific work-related dangers. They often labor alone in fields, where they are vulnerable to sexual harassment, physical abuse and rape. Women workers are offered less training in handling harmful chemical substances, and commercial farm owners prefer to hire women for repetitive, labor intensive tasks that require greater dexterity.
In addition to enduring physical danger, workers are denied decent wages. Higher skilled, permanent positions that require operating heavy farming machinery often are reserved for men. Even when women have comparable positions with men, their wages lag significantly—up to 50 percent less than their male co-workers. Some employers even require a male family member to collect a woman’s paycheck.
Despite these difficulties, women have joined together and improved their workplaces, while winning recognition for the importance of their rights by often male-dominated unions and worker groups.
One such example is Sikhula Sonke, a woman-led social movement and trade union that seeks to address social and labor concerns of those living and working on fruit and wine farms in South Africa. At the conference, labor scholar Nina Benjamin will discuss how South Africa’s first women-led agricultural trade union demonstrates womens’ ability to lead and organize on their own behalf in a union movement whose leadership is predominantly male.
Jul 24, 2013
As Zimbabwe’s July 31 presidential elections approach, the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU), one of the country’s only nonpolitical, mass-based movements, plans to actively promote free and fair elections and, equally important, hold lawmakers accountable after elections.
“Politicians must be made accountable. We must make it easy for politicians to lose their positions if they don’t deliver,” said Japhet Moyo, ZCTU secretary general, in an interview this week at the Solidarity Center in Washington, D.C. On Tuesday, Moyo was among speakers at an all-day conference, “Beyond the Elections in Zimbabwe,” sponsored in part by the Washington-based National Endowment for Democracy. The conference brought together Zimbabwean officials, civil society activists, political analysts and U.S. government representatives to focus on strengthening democracy in Zimbabwe. (Watch the conference.)
President Robert Mugabe, a member of the Zimbabwe African Nation Union–Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) party who has ruled Zimbabwe for 33 years, is facing off against Morgan Tsvangirai from the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) party. In previous presidential elections in 2008, Tsvangirai won a plurality of first round votes but backed out of presidential run-off after ZANU-PF loyalists brutally attacked citizens and communities to suppress voting.
In addition to encouraging union members to vote and even to run for office, Moyo says the ZCTU is educating them on the issues important to their lives: affordable health care, quality education and good jobs. The union is well-placed to offer an alternative to the government’s failed economic policies. ZCTU recognized the need for a pro-poor economic model in 1991, the year the government began implementing an economic structural adjustment program without consultation with key stakeholders, including workers.
In 2003, the ZCTU’s economic office became an independent think tank, the progressive Labor and Economic Development Research Institute of Zimbabwe (LEDRIZ). Today, it is the leading voice on socioeconomic rights and development. In 2011, LEDRIZ co-authored Beyond the Enclave: Towards a Pro-Poor and Inclusive Development Strategy for Zimbabwe. The lengthy study—based on detailed economic data and analysis—looks at the contradiction of how a resource-rich country like Zimbabwe can suffer from endemic poverty. Its authors propose development policies formulated with broad-based stakeholder participation.
When Beyond the Enclave was released nationally, representatives from both the ZANU-PF and the MDC parties attended the event. Moyo says that economic the programs put in place over the past three decades not only have not created jobs, “they have destroyed jobs.” Yet while politicians now use popular phrases like “pro-poor,” says Moyo, they so far have only picked bits and pieces from Beyond the Enclave’s recommendations.
So one of ZCTU’s key post-election moves will continue to center on worker education. As part of its efforts to raise citizens’ awareness of their democratic rights, LEDRIZ in 2012 published a popular version of Beyond the Enclave designed for worker-based trainings. LEDRIZ recognizes that an educated workforce is essential for an engaged workforce, and that empowering and involving working people and the poor is fundamental to achieving progress in alleviating poverty. Through the training, LEDRIZ explores with workers how they should hold the government accountable for providing a return on their tax dollars by providing, at a minimum, clean water and sanitation, stable electricity, food security, basic health care, education, public transportation, housing and sound infrastructure. Workers learn to recognize the connection between democracy and good governance.
Politicians on all sides are “telling people how to live their lives rather than asking them how they can sustain themselves,” says Moyo. Asking the people “is the best way to do it.”
For more information, check out the new report, “LEDRIZ: Unions Create Democratic Space in Zimbabwe,” part of the Solidarity Center’s ongoing Catalysts for Change series. The series looks at where working people, their unions and civil society activists are advancing worker rights and greater equity in their societies, often under trying circumstances.
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