Asia
Solidarity Center, India, women In Asia, the Solidarity Center helps workers build strong unions to defend their fundamental rights at home and abroad, escape abuse and forced labor and hold governments accountable for their economic security. As the developing Asia-Pacific region (Central Asia, East Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia and the Pacific) has modernized and transformed into a global manufacturing hub for multinational corporations, the Asian growth model has been promoted as a development paradigm for emerging economies. The region has seen soaring economic growth over the past 20 years, its gross domestic product (GDP) rising by 6.1 percent in 2013. The region also led the global recovery after the 2009 recession. Yet this model has created a system of vastly unequal outcomes. The workers who have fueled Asia’s extraordinary economic growth through their labor in factories and the informal economy have not shared in economic prosperity—specifically in the form of increased wages, better benefits or secure work. As a result, the Asian region has seen the world’s largest out-migration of workers, who are driven to leave their homes in desperation to support their families. Millions of workers from South and Southeast Asia travel to countries around the world, most to the Arabian Gulf, for jobs in fishing, construction and domestic service. Few migrant workers have rights on the job or in the countries where they work. As global consumer brands chase the lowest costs and highest profits around the globe, Southeast Asia has become a haven for export processing zones (EPZs). Millions of workers desperate for decent wages endure long workdays, forced unpaid overtime and sub-poverty wages. Garment workers, fish processors and others toiling in the EPZs for global manufacturing companies have few or no rights on the job and face daunting obstacles to forming unions. Factory-level union activists are fired and blacklisted, unable to find another job. Workers in Asia also often risk their lives in unsafe and unhealthy workplaces. Exposed to toxic chemicals or deadly asbestos, or toiling in dangerous garment factories or mines, more than 1.1 million people in Asia die each year from workplace hazards or accidents. Millions more workers are forced to make a living in the informal economy, where as street vendors, domestic workers and taxi drivers, they earn low wages in often unsafe conditions and have little or access to pensions or other social protections.

Media Contact

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

 

John Kerry Backs Bangladesh Workers in Forming Unions

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry met with leaders of Bangladesh garment unions recently in Dhaka, where he emphasized workers’ ability to freely form unions as key to workplace safety. “Enhancing worker safety has to be paired with strengthening workers’ rights,” he...

Building Alliances to End Gender-Based Violence at Work

Gender-based violence (GBV) is one of the most prevalent human rights violations in the world—and yet not enough is done to prevent it, especially at the workplace. “Without gender equality, we cannot have worker rights, and without worker rights, we cannot have...

Women’s Economic Empowerment and Workers Rights

Globally, women are paid 30 percent less than men—but “imagine instead of corporations making 30 percent more off women’s labor, imagine if that 30 percent were coming back to our communities in the form of wages,” says Shawna Bader-Blau, Solidarity Center executive...
Bangladesh Women Workers Take Steps to Gender Equality

Bangladesh Women Workers Take Steps to Gender Equality

Bangladesh women garment workers make 20 percent less than their male counterparts and are often physically and sexually harassed. Yet women comprise 80 percent of the country’s 4 million garment workers, and the garment industry accounts for more than 80 percent of...

Worker Rights Violations Rampant in Jaffna, Sri Lanka

Worker Rights Violations Rampant in Jaffna, Sri Lanka

The 2009 end of Sri Lanka’s civil war was an opportunity for workers to return to the security and protections of the formal economy, which had been destabilized by 26 years of violence. However, a new Solidarity Center survey finds that peace has yet to bring the...

Workers in Post-Civil War Jaffna

Workers in Post-Civil War Jaffna

Although Sri Lanka's labor code sets the minimum wage, the maximum number of work hours per day and work days per week, and establishes rules around overtime and benefits, many employers in Jaffna, the country’s northern province, are flaunting the statutes. The vast...

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