Media Highlights

“While governmental institutions in Zimbabwe are complicit in these [wage theft] violations, top managers continue to receive high salaries and generous benefits,” said the report, which was carried out in collaboration with the United States-based Solidarity Center.​

“Workers around the world are confronting serious challenges to whether they can exercise their rights and work with dignity. Among them are labor markets and systems that generate, rather than alleviate, poverty; and governments that fail to protect workers​,” says Solidarity Center Executive Director Shawna Bader-Blau.

William Conklin said fashion brands are partly to blame for poor wages in factories producing their clothing. “What we see now is that brands squeeze factories and therefore workers,” he said. “If you a pay a low price per piece of clothing, that dribbles down to the workers. Workers are now being seen as disposable.”​​

Throughout the Solidarity Center’s recent conference, “Achieving Fair Migration: Roles of African Trade Unions and Their Partners,” union leaders and migrant rights advocates explored the xenophobia, racism and sexism migrant workers face, and sought to increase vital connections between unions and civil society organisations to campaign for laws and policies to level the playing field for migrant workers.

“You don’t leave your human rights in one country when you cross into another. You don’t check your human rights at a border; you keep them with you”—Solidarity Center Executive Director Shawna Bader-Blau in interview with International Catalan Institute for Peace.

Starting in mid-December, the Solidarity Center, which works closely with workers and unions, documented instances in which 14 national union federations were either forced by police to shut their offices in Ashulia, Gazipur, and Chittagong, or closed them because of police harassment.​​​

The factories reopened in late December, but a “really intense” security presence is everywhere, Jennifer Kuhlman from the Dhaka office of the Solidarity Center, an AFL-CIO allied organization, told me: not just in Ashulia, but also in other industrial areas across the country. She said the arrests, the mass firings and the continuing heavy surveillance by police have created a climate of fear among workers and labor organizers.