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Chair Elizabeth Shuler President, AFL-CIO Secretary Treasurer Fred Redmond Secretary Treasurer, AFL-CIO Members Gabrielle Carteris President, International Federation of Actors (FIA) Thomas M. Conway President, United Steelworkers (USW) Ray Curry President, United...
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Informal Economy
The decline in formal jobs is a global trend. Working women and men in the informal economy—among them, day laborers, domestic workers, kindergarten teachers, sugarcane cutters and call center workers—now comprise the majority of the workforce in many countries....
Solidarity Center Year in Photos
A look back at some of the brave and inspirational women and men with whom we worked in 2014—among them garment workers and their trade unions fighting for safe factories, domestic workers seeking recognition, agricultural workers calling for fair wages and informal...
Sign & Share Petition to End Child Labor
An estimated 5.5 million children labor in factories, brick kilns, farm fields and as domestic workers, exposed to dangerous and deadly working conditions and unable to attend school. And 5.5 million is the number of signatures the nonprofit coalition End Child...
U.S. Delegation to Honduras: ‘Overwhelmed’ by Rights Violations
In a recent Solidarity Center delegation to Honduras, Metropolitan Washington, D.C., Labor Council President Josyln Williams, a Solidarity Center Executive Board member, and Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), the leading Democratic member of the House Education and the...
Building & Wood Workers Win Meany-Kirkland Award
The Building and Wood Workers’ International (BWI) and its affiliates received the 2014 AFL-CIO George Meany-Lane Kirkland Human Rights Award in a ceremony last night in Washington, D.C., where they were honored for their work in bringing justice to construction...
Kailash Satyarthi, Solidarity Center Ally, Wins Nobel
Labor and human rights activist and long-time Solidarity Center ally Kailash Satyarthi won the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize, the Nobel committee announced this morning. He shares the prestigious award with Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani girl who survived a brutal 2012...
Gender Equality at the Heart of Decent Work
Unions worldwide are mobilizing around World Day for Decent Work, held annually on October 7 to raise public and official awareness of the critical need for labor rights for the vast numbers of workers who toil in unsafe, unhealthy conditions; receive wages that...
Migrant Workers ‘Shouldn’t Have to Be Tortured to Have Work’
Three times each month, dozens of women gather in dusty courtyards in rural towns in Manikganj, Dinazpur or other districts across Bangladesh to learn all they can about the only means by which they can support their families: migrating to another country for work. In...
Bangladesh Garment Union Leaders Making Change Together
Some 600 factory-level garment union leaders and workers from 35 factories met during the recent Bangladesh Garments and Industrial Workers Federation (BGIWF) Convention in Dhaka, the Bangladesh capital. Joining together under the convention theme, “Together we can...
‘The Key to Development in Africa Is Empowering Women’
Up to 80 percent of workers across Africa labor in the informal economy, many as street vendors, taxi drivers and domestic workers. With few legal rights, most informal-sector workers make low wages and have no health care or other social protections. Because women...
Dominican Republic Plan for Migrants Rife with Irregularities
The Dominican Republic’s “regularization” plan—created to provide legal status to migrants with documents—is rife with “irregularities,” according to Alexis Roselie, spokeswoman for the National Coordinator for Immigration Justice and Human Rights and an organizer for...
July 30: First-Ever World Day against Human Trafficking
The United Nations today marks the first-ever World Day against Trafficking in Persons, created to raise awareness and highlight the plight of the millions of women, men and children who are trafficked and exploited, as well as to encourage people to take action to...
Report: Tunisia’s Informal Sector Workers Lack Decent Conditions
Tunisia is among many countries around the world seeing rapid growth in their informal economies. In 2013, Tunisia’s informal economy accounted for 38 percent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP), up from 30 percent in 2010. A new study by the Tunisian...
Former Child Domestic Worker: ‘No Where to Run and Get Help’
At age 9, Evelyn Chumbow was trafficked overseas from Cameroon to become a domestic worker for a family in Maryland. She worked from 6 a.m. to midnight, seven days a week, was forced to sleep on the floor without a room of her own and regularly beaten. Each day, she...
UN Convention on Economic Rights a Powerful Tool for Workers
Worker rights advocates have lots of tools available to them to help foster safe and healthy workplaces, family-supporting wages and social protections. One item in the toolbox is rule of law—and a recent Solidarity Center analysis of Mexican laws and policies through...
21 Million in Forced Labor Create $150 Billion in Global Profit
Some 21 million women, men and children are in forced labor, trafficked, held in debt bondage or work in slave-like conditions worldwide, and their toil generates an estimated $150 billion in illegal profits in the private global economy, according to a new...
Women’s Day 2014: Unionists Around the World Educate, Mobilize
Hundreds of workers from multiple garment factories rallied in recent days at the National Press Club in Dhaka, Bangladesh, where they formed a human chain and demanded equal wages, equal rights and equal dignity for woman workers in the ready-made-garment (RMG)...
Dominican Unions Rally to Oppose Proposed Labor Code
Chanting, “No to Labor Code rollbacks, no to human rights rollbacks,”100 workers today marched on the Business Tower in Santo Domingo, the Dominican Republic capital, to oppose corporate-backed attempts to weaken labor code protections for working women and men. The...
Global Union Movement: Making Equality for Women a Reality
As International Women’s Day approaches, the global labor movement is mobilizing to put teeth into the celebration’s 2014 theme, “Equality for women is progress for all.” Solidarity Center allies around the world also are getting set to highlight the struggles of...