South Africa
South Africa, worker rights, Solidarity Center

The Solidarity Center program in South Africa aims to improve the lives of working people, particularly the most vulnerable—farm workers, domestic workers, migrant workers and women workers. Credit: COSATU

  In South Africa, the Solidarity Center aims to improve the lives of working people, particularly the most vulnerable—farm workers, domestic workers, migrant workers and women workers—who face long-standing barriers to sharing the country’s economic prosperity. The Solidarity Center works closely with the 2 million-member Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and the Federation of South Africa Trade Unions (FEDUSA). With its union and worker organization partners, the Solidarity Center conducts gender equality training to help counter gender-based violence and harassment at work and enable workers, especially women workers, achieve their rights to maternity protection and workplaces free of sexual harassment and other forms of gender-based violence. To help build stronger legal and social representation for the more than 1 million domestic workers in South Africa, the Solidarity Center works with the South African Domestic Service and Allied Workers Union (SADSAWU). The Solidarity Center helps SADSAWU improve its organizing outreach and holds exchanges between SADSAWU and U.S. domestic workers’ organizations. Working with the Food and Allied Workers Union (FAWU), the Solidarity Center bolsters the union’s efforts to represent and assist migrant farm workers, whose jobs involve long hours, low pay and little room to assert their workplace rights.

Media Contact

Kate Conradt
Communications Director
(+1) 202-974 -8369

 

South Africa: Survey Flags Domestic Worker Human Rights Violations, Solutions

“The dignity of people’s very being is at stake,” said IZWI Domestic Worker Alliance’s founder and lead researcher Amy Tekie in opening remarks at a recent webinar focused on a new qualitative survey of human rights violations against live-in domestic workers in South...

South Africa: Domestic Workers Celebrate Compensation Wins

On June 16 International Domestic Workers Day, domestic workers are celebrating a landmark legal win by South Africa’s domestic workers for colleagues who die or are injured in their employers’ homes. For the first time, starting this year, domestic workers who suffer...

Report: Risks to Women Workers Pervasive in South African Mines

Women working in South African mines “at times confront danger, violence and indignity in their work environments,” where gender-based violence and harassment (GBVH) appears both widespread and normalized, according to a new report from the Solidarity Center and South...
Health and Safety: South African Domestic Workers No Longer Invisible

Health and Safety: South African Domestic Workers No Longer Invisible

In an historic judgment, the South African Constitutional Court in mid-November recognized that injury and illness arising from work as a domestic worker in a private home is no different to that occurring in other workplaces and equally deserving of compensation....

Stepping into the Breach: Unions Provide Key Aid in COVID-19

Stepping into the Breach: Unions Provide Key Aid in COVID-19

More than four out of five people (81 percent) in the global workforce of 3.3 billion are currently affected by full or partial workplace closures due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Some 1.25 billion workers are employed in the sectors identified as being at high risk of...

Pin It on Pinterest