Over the past 20 years, the Solidarity Center has helped eliminate child labor in Liberian rubber plantations; assisted Iraqi trade unions in passing an unprecedented labor law that addresses sexual discrimination at work; campaigned to end workplace-based racism against Afro-Brazilians; and enabled the Burmese labor movement to flourish in a newly democratic Myanmar.

Over the past 20 years, the Solidarity Center has enabled workers like those in Bangladesh garment factories to achieve safer working conditions through thousands of occupational safety programs. With support and training for union organizers, the Solidarity Center has assisted union leaders like those in Georgia empower workers in a wide range of industries to achieve collective bargaining.

Over the past 20 years, the Solidarity Center has helped migrant workers in Moldova and other countries learn about their rights at work while seeking to prevent human trafficking. With a focus on achieving gender equality in the workplace, Solidarity Center programs have trained women workers to take leading roles at their workplaces, in their unions and in their communities.

Over the past 20 years, the Solidarity Center has consistently fought for worker rights—and over the next 20 years, we will expand our work to enable workers to assert their fundamental rights at work and build a better future for workers around the world. Here are a few highlights.

ERADICATING CHILD LABOR IN BANGLADESH

In Bangladesh, the Solidarity Center jump-started the process to eradicate child labor from the garment industry, laid the groundwork that nurtured young women leaders at major unions and associations, wrote the first labor law for export-processing zones and is a catalyst to the current resurgence in helping workers form unions.

ACHIEVING FIRST-EVER RIGHTS FOR DOMESTIC WORKERS

As part of worldwide campaign to enshrine labor rights for domestic workers, the Solidarity Center joined other global advocates in pushing for passage of the International Labor Organization (ILO) Domestic Workers Convention 189. Passed in 2011, Convention 189 marked a major milestone, signaling recognition that the 53 million mostly women workers who labor in households, often in isolation and at risk of exploitation and abuse, deserve full protection of labor laws.

SUPPORTING IRAQI TRADE UNIONS PASS AN HISTORIC LABOR LAW

The Solidarity Center was among the first organizations to support Iraq’s blossoming trade union movement and has consistently partnered with the Iraqi labor movement since 2004. It has carried out skills-building programs with dozens of unions and hundreds of their members in every province of the country, and helped Iraqi unions coalesce around and draft a labor law, passed in 2015, that provides for collective bargaining, further limits child labor, improves rights for migrant workers and is the country’s first legislation to address sexual harassment at work.

ENSURING SAFETY AND HEALTH AT WORKPLACES IN TBLISI, GEORGIA

The Georgian union movement withstood deep attacks on worker rights throughout the 2004–2013 regime of Mikheil Saakashvili. With consistent backing from the Solidarity Center, the Georgia Trade Union Confederation (GTUC) tapped into international mechanisms to protect worker rights, and unions fought back against a broad array of union-busting tactics instigated by the government. Now Solidarity Center programs are enabling Georgian workers to form unions in metal factories, coal mines, schools and hospitals and, through the three-year, “Strengthening Worker Organizations in Georgia,” program, helping transit and other workers address critical safety and health issues at work.

SUSTAINING BURMESE UNIONS THROUGHOUT A LONG DICTATORSHIP

The Solidarity Center’s nearly 30-year support of exiled leaders of the Federation of Trade Unions–Burma following a brutal crackdown by Burma’s military junta, enabled the union movement to return in 2012 to Myanmar. Today, the Confederation of Trade Unions–Myanmar has now helped more than 60,000 workers form unions.

ENSURING COLOMBIA PORT WORKERS HAVE A VOICE ON THE JOB

In Colombia, the Solidarity Center helped workers form the national port workers’ union and provides ongoing support for the union’s worker organizing efforts in a sector that is rife with rights violations. The union now has affiliated more than 10,000 workers and negotiated three collective bargaining agreements—the sector’s only contracts in the past 25 years. These contracts have improved wages and labor conditions for some 2,000 workers, the majority of whom are of Afro-Colombian descent.

LEADING INTERNATIONAL EFFORTS TO PROTECT BAHRAINI WORKERS

In Bahrain, the Solidarity Center played a key role in international efforts, and through a bilateral trade agreement, to defend the local activism of the General Federation of Bahrain Trade Unions, which advocated to protect workers from arbitrary dismissal and discrimination in the wake of the Arab uprising.

CHALLENGING RACISM AGAINST AFRO-BRAZILIANS AT THE WORKPLACE

The Solidarity Center, together with the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, worked in Brazil with the Inter-American Union Institute for Racial Equality (INSPIR) for the past 20 years to help eliminate racism against Afro-descendants in the workplace and throughout society.