Jun 25, 2012
In a historic step for global labor solidarity, three global union federations came together this week to form IndustriALL Global Union, uniting 50 million workers across the supply chain. IndustriALL combines affiliates of the International Metalworkers’ Federation (IMF), the International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mine and General Workers’ Unions (ICEM), and the International Textile, Garment and Leather Workers’ Federation (ITGLWF).
IndustriALL General Secretary Jyrki Raina, who was the general secretary of the IMF, told the 1,400 delegates to the founding congress in Copenhagen, Denmark, that they were joining “an extraordinary new family of heroes.” He outlined a 10-point plan—later passed as a resolution—aimed at ensuring IndustriALL support for affiliates, especially those in the front line of human rights and worker rights struggles.
Raina saluted the many Arab sisters and brothers at the congress who participated in the Arab Spring. In particular he pointed to Hashmeya Muhsin Hussein, the leader of the Iraqi Electricity Utility Workers Union, a longtime Solidarity Center partner.
Raina also recognized the repression and struggle of Los Mineros, the Mexican mine workers union and Solidarity Center partner whose president, Napoleón Gómez Urrutia, was elected to the IndustriALL executive committee. Gómez Urrutia congratulated the delegates on IndustriALL’s founding via video from Canada, where has been exiled since 2006 because of persecution by the Mexican government.
Recognizing that precarious work is on the rise across all sectors, affiliates resolved to support a global campaign to STOP Precarious Work, which draws upon existing campaigns led by ITGLWF, ICEM, and IMF with the aim of promoting equal treatment for precarious workers. Delegates also passed resolutions in support of the Fijian labor movement and Spanish miners.
Raina told the delegates that the creation of IndustriALL comes at a crucial time. “IndustriALL is a recognition of the increasing integration of global capital,” he said. “The increasingly related supply chains across different industries means union members need a stronger global voice.”
Jun 21, 2012
In Liberia, unions are working to ensure worker rights are preserved and protected in the country’s rubber industry and beyond. Edwin Cisco, general secretary of the Firestone Agricultural Workers Union of Liberia (FAWUL), says his union is focused on three specific remedies for issues facing Liberian rubber and other workers.
During a lunchtime briefing last Thursday at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C., Cisco said that he and FAWUL are pressing for enactment of labor law reform and, for Firestone rubber workers, reduction of latex production quotas and motorization of the transport system for bringing latex in from the far reaches of the plantation.
FAWUL has made significant gains in promoting decent work and eliminating child labor at Firestone. As Cisco noted, “Today the plantation is completely rid of child labor.” In addition to working to enact a zero-tolerance child labor policy at Firestone, FAWUL has secured education for the children of plant workers. “[FAWUL] pressed the company to build schools for the workers’ children,” said Cisco. “These schools are now the educational standard.”
Despite these gains in the rubber industry, the labor movement in Liberia is still nascent. The proposed labor law reform effort, called the Decent Work Bill, is supported by President Ellen Sirleaf Johnson’s administration and by Liberian unions and would help strengthen worker rights and the local labor movement. However, Cisco said, parliament has left the legislation to stagnate, failing to enact the measure. The Decent Work Bill addresses issues such as a minimum wage and precarious work. “Without this law it is very difficult for unions to improve the lives of working people,” Cisco said.
For rubber workers at Firestone, Cisco is pushing for the full implementation of a motorized transportation system for raw latex, a provision in FAWUL’s most recent collective bargaining agreement that should have ended decades of backbreaking labor. Though an experimental system has been in place for the past 15 months, it is not being used throughout the 200-square-mile plantation. Rubber workers must still lug full buckets of latex to weigh stations. An effective transportation system would both reduce injury and increase productivity, said Cisco. “Workers must no longer carry 150 pounds of latex on their shoulders,” he said.
Reducing production quotas and hiring more employees also are key to protecting worker rights at the plantation, said Cisco. By reducing the latex quota to a manageable amount and hiring more workers, each employee would be able to work more efficiently with fewer accidents while maintaining productivity. Reducing quotas would also help to ensure child labor does not return to Firestone and could aid in reducing child labor at rubber supply operations elsewhere.
With so much interest by foreign companies to invest in Liberia, unions have an opportunity to cement fair labor practices from the outset. As one of the largest and strongest unions in Liberia, FAWUL is working tirelessly to see these recommendations come to fruition. “Whatever we do at Firestone,” said Cisco, “will spread to all workers.”
Jun 20, 2012
A year after the adoption of International Labor Organization (ILO) Convention 189, Decent Work for Domestic Workers, domestic workers declared June 16 International Domestic Workers Day. Domestic workers worldwide celebrated this historic victory. The Solidarity Center along with 50 other migrant worker advocacy groups signed a letter calling on countries to ratify C189.
The International Domestic Workers Network (IWDN) mobilized domestic worker organizations, unions, and other allies. In addition, IDWN organized an event at the ILO during the Annual International Labor Conference to honor governments that have ratified C189 and to remind the rest of their domestic duty to ratify it as soon as possible so that they can deliver real gains to domestic workers.
IDWN was founded by a group of domestic workers’ unions together with support organizations, including the Solidarity Center. The International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco, and Allied Workers’ Associations (IUF) led the establishment of the network and has a representative on its steering committee. IDWN’s objectives are to help organize domestic workers, to serve as an information clearinghouse, to mobilize support for common political aims such as international standards and national legislation, and to secure the support of the international labor movement. The network counts more than 30 member groups in Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe. The adoption of C189 was the culmination of years of grassroots organizing and campaigning.
Jun 20, 2012
Bangladesh’s longstanding abuse of worker rights, failure to enforce labor laws, and increasing violence against labor activists, including threats and murder, were the focus of a human rights hearing yesterday on Capitol Hill, where a senior Solidarity Center staffer and other regional and rights experts provided testimony.
Tim Ryan, Solidarity Center Asia Regional Program Director, told members of the U.S. House of Representatives’ Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission that Bangladeshis toil at some of the lowest paid and most dangerous jobs in Asia. Despite a labor code that addresses pay, working hours, and on-the-job conditions, many Bangladeshi workers still face inadequate health and safety protections at work and receive less than the minimum wage, among other violations of their rights.
Because their attempts to organize have been thwarted, Ryan said, workers have no channel through which to voice their grievances and negotiate with management in order to improve their rights and working conditions. Strikes and worker actions are their only weapons in the fight for decent jobs that can support them and their families.
“Over the past three years, hundreds of garment workers have been injured, and some killed, in clashes with police while demonstrating or on strike for worker rights, most often higher wages,” said Ryan, who has been involved with worker rights in Bangladesh for the past 15 years. “Several prominent labor activists have been arrested and taken to trial on trumped-up charges associated with these demonstrations.”
Ryan cited the most recent, egregious example of violence against labor activists—the murder in early April of Aminul Islam, an organizer for the Bangladesh Garment and Industrial Workers Federation (BGIWF) whose body bearing signs of torture was found more than 60 miles away from where he had disappeared four days earlier. Aminul was a longtime friend and colleague of the Solidarity Center.
“Aminul trained, recruited, and organized workers in the RMG sector and the export processing zones,” said Ryan. “Due to his activities, Aminul was threatened by gangsters working for garment factory owners, was continuously under police surveillance, and was detained and beaten by the National Security Intelligence in June 2010. False criminal charges were filed against Aminul along with his colleagues in BGIWF and the Bangladesh Center for Worker Solidarity for supposedly causing unrest during the minimum wage campaign by garment workers during the summer of 2010.”
Ryan said that although Bangladesh authorities are following up, observers in-country and throughout the world are concerned that no credible, transparent, and accountable investigation of the murder will actually take place. During a May visit to Bangladesh, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said that an independent investigation would be “a real test for the government and for the society to make sure you don’t say that anyone can have impunity.”
Ryan cited some “incremental” progress in achieving worker rights. For example, he said, child labor has been all but eliminated in Bangladesh’s ready-made garment (RMG) factories, but more than 7 million children still work in agriculture, manufacturing, mining, domestic service, and the hotel and restaurant industry. According to Solidarity Center reports published in 2008 and 2012 child labor persists in shrimp- and seafood-processing plants.
Ryan offered several recommendations for improving worker rights in Bangladesh:
- National and global worker and human rights organizations must continue to press for real freedom of association in Bangladesh.
- The Bangladesh business community must recognize that its actions to repress workers have consequences, in terms of not only impoverishing its own workforce, but also injuring the industry’s reputation in the eyes of other governments and the Western brands upon which they depend for business.
- The Bangladesh government must live up to its obligation as a member of the International Labor Organization (ILO) to protect and promote fundamental worker rights and should face punitive action by the ILO Governing Body if it fails to do so.
“The Bangladesh government has choices about development policy and how to best bring its people out of poverty,” Ryan concluded. “The strikes, violence, and continuing worker dissatisfaction with the status quo demonstrate that the low-wage, low-rights model is not its best option—and U.S. government, ILO, and NGO pressure can help the government to change course and support its workers as they attempt to better their own lives.”
Ryan shared the podium with Robert Blake, Assistant Secretary, Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs, U.S. Department of State; Eric Biel, Acting Associate Deputy Undersecretary, Bureau of International Labor Affairs, U.S. Department of Labor; and John Sifton, Asia Advocacy Director, Human Rights Watch. The commission is named in honor of the late Rep. Thomas Peter Lantos (D-CA), who co-founded and co-chaired its predecessor, the Human Rights Caucus. Lantos was the only Holocaust survivor to ever serve in the U.S. Congress, from 1980 until his death in 2008.
Jun 14, 2012
Solidarity Center staff joined family and colleagues of Aminul Islam at a press conference last week to call for justice in Aminul’s murder. Aminul, a union organizer and president of the Bangladesh Garment and Industrial Workers’ Federation (BGIWF)’s local committee in the Savar and Ashulia areas of Dhaka,
Aminul, a longtime friend of the Solidarity Center, was a well-respected labor leader among workers at Savar- and Ashulia-area garment factories and export processing zones. Although he was not a national figure in Bangladesh’s labor movement, his death has shocked human and worker rights champions all over the world. During a town meeting in Dhaka, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called for an independent investigation into his murder. U.S. Ambassador Dan Mozena warned garment manufacturers that Bangladesh’s economic well-being hinges on ensuring worker rights.
The group of friends and colleagues, including the Solidarity Center and BGIWF, has formed the Committee for Justice for Aminul Islam (CJAI). At the press conference, held June 7 in Dhaka, CJAI called on the government of Bangladesh to conduct a comprehensive and impartial investigation into Aminul’s death and to prosecute those responsible regardless of their position and status. As long as Aminul’s case is not resolved, said CJAI, other union leaders risk facing the same fate, and Bangladesh’s garment export industry is in jeopardy.
Although the government of Bangladesh has pledged its full cooperation and law enforcement agencies are investigating the murder “with utmost sincerity,” there has been “no visible or measurable progress” in the nearly two months since Aminul was found dead, CJAI reported. CJAI added that it would continue to focus on the ongoing investigation and would provide regular updates.
Participants at the press conference expressed their solidarity by signing a petition, to be sent to the government of Bangladesh. CJAI urged participants to attend update events and asked for donations to support both the work of CJAI in the pursuit of justice and the welfare of Aminul’s family.
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